First, the preparations for the picnic.
Seraphia rested her fingers lightly on the purse hanging at her waist. When she had put up for the night yesterday, sorting through her luggage, she had discovered that the church people had prepared money for her after all, and every one of the complaints she had privately levelled at the staff had been groundless slander—
"In any case, having money is a good thing."
Using assorted precious metals as currency in another world was an experience not to be missed, and the exceptionally heavy sense of substance to it was rather nice as well.
"I'll have this one, and this one, and that one, please."
Since it was not money earned by her own sweat, spending it carried no real weight either, so she made a circuit of the streets, bought a very great deal of food and drink, and then set off towards that patch of grass behind the clock tower the pair of human sisters had mentioned.
When she actually arrived, Seraphia was slightly taken aback—
Because she had not forgotten she was inside a city. She had assumed the grass behind the clock tower would at most be the sort of place partitioned off within some district of a city, a necessary bit of park greenery.
But at first glance she thought she had wandered out into the countryside.
Tall stone walls, ranks of anchor lamps and iron railings stamped with a trading company's insignia enclosed this stretch of grass together with the surrounding blocks. Several small windmills stood on rising ground a little further off, their white blades pushed around by the wind that never stopped inside Kaze City, giving off a slow and regular creaking.
There were even stock pens beneath the windmills.
A few head of livestock, not large, impossible to identify as horses or cattle, cropped the grass with lowered heads, brass tags stamped with numbers hanging at their necks. The haystacks had been pressed into neat order, and beside them people in grey uniforms walked their rounds holding ropes, short rods and bells at their belts, looking less like herdsmen than like municipal employees of some kind.
Seraphia watched for a while, and in the end could not help asking.
"Is this... a pasture?"
The worker in the grey uniform turned round, and perhaps because he saw that the cloth of her robe was of good quality, and the halo shining plainly above her head, his manner came out reasonably well.
"It counts as grazing land inside the city. The livestock, the windmills, the mill, the farmland, they count as property under the city-state government's management."
"Why would it be inside the city? It feels... slightly incongruous."
"Haha, you'll have come in from out of town by airship, I take it? I've actually never seen farmland or pasture far away from a city. By the thinking of us Kaze folk, these things ought to lean on a city. Probably we in the Kiden Federation are the only ones like this under the whole sky. In this cursed patch of ground we call Kiden, monsters are like weeds; you cut down one crop and another springs up.
"And the incidence rate of the Corruption Sickness is frighteningly high on top of that. An ordinary person walking out in the wilds even in broad daylight can be infected. So there are none of the little towns and villages you're used to. A dozen-odd cities, and that's the main gathering of population in our country."
Unexpectedly talkative, or perhaps rather, in the middle of tedious work, a chance to chat and relieve the boredom was hard to come by.
He paused, then went on.
"I've lived here since the day I was born. It was only after talking with people from outside that I learned the whole world isn't like this. If I get the chance in future I'd like to go and have a look outside... no, better still to move away with the whole family."
Seraphia thought of the airship journey she had taken. The price of one such trip would probably take the man in front of her a dozen or more years of labour to afford, once.
Still, Miss Angel sincerely wished this man might save up enough to emigrate with his whole family.
Pasture, windmills, grassland, a picnic.
By the common sense of her previous life, these things ought to appear somewhere more open, outside a city. But in Kaze they had been stuffed inside one, and this other world's preposterous premises were faithfully reflected in its human culture too.
The wind blew over from further off, and the blades of grass lay down in layer upon layer.
The clock tower's shadow fell across the edge of the grass, dividing sunlight from shade exactly.
This place was not bad.
Nephim could stay in the shadow, and still not be far from the sunlight.
Seraphia took her leave of the herdsman and walked slowly to the place where the clock tower's shadow was cast down.
There was no one else here just now, so the sisters' picnic time ought not to be disturbed.
A picnic was a first for Seraphia as well.
Seraphia found a spot close to the clock tower's shadow.
It sat precisely on the boundary between sunlight and shade.
Somewhat clumsily, she spread the picnic blanket out within the clock tower's shadow and began taking the things she had bought out of the paper bags one by one: pastries, fruit, smoked meat, cheese, and two bottles of a drink brewed from some fruit she could not identify.
Not long after she had spread the cloth out, with a great many things still not taken out and set down, the wind of Kaze City came sweeping across from the far side of the grass without the slightest regard for her dignity.
That checked cloth had one corner flipped up on the spot, and very nearly rolled the fruit on top of it away along with it.
"Oh, honestly..."
Seraphia's hand shot out and pinned one side of it down.
Almost at the same moment, the clock tower's shadow stirred, and slender fingers formed of shadow carefully pressed down the other corners of the cloth.
"I'm sorry... it seems I've taken it upon myself again... this sort of thing isn't necessary... but, for a first picnic, I wanted it to be as perfect as possible."
"Mm..."
By rights, the two of them ought to have been working towards the future of their race.
And Nephim ought absolutely not to be exposing her existence and her abilities on anything outside a mission.
'Enjoyment' was a somewhat sinful thing.
"It's fine... though Umbra really is practical."
"Eh?"
"It's nothing."
Seraphia did not let the words about preferring her magic out of her mouth.
Because it was the same for Nephim: set against her own magic, she preferred Seraphia's 【Corona】.
Contradictory, and well matched.
By tacit agreement, neither of them raised again the duties and the mission that rested on them both, and they sat down peacefully on the picnic blanket.
"You don't have to hide in the shadow completely."
Seraphia used her excellent powers of sight to sweep her gaze around, and having scanned the full range of both her mana perception and what the naked eye could see, she took off her cloak and said it mildly.
Nephim was silent, and after several seconds of hesitation her frail form slowly surfaced out of the shadow, those deformed wings pulled tight against her back as though they wanted absolutely not to be noticed.
"It's all right."
Seraphia spoke again, mildly.
Fear, tension, panic, and then... expectation.
In the end she chose to trust her big sister. Those deformed wings slowly spread, and she walked slowly from the place the shadow covered towards the place the sunlight covered.
The hand she put out, carrying a sickly pallor, passed through that dividing line, and the sensation of warmth spread up from the nerves of her hand.
As though to encourage her, Seraphia, sitting in the sunlight, smiled faintly.
Amid unease and the sound of an expectant heartbeat, she stepped, after so long, into the sunlight of the normal world.
Her pitch-black eyes went wide.
The wind of Kaze City rose again, and the white hair of them both swayed faintly in it.
【Illustration 1】
In the end Nephim did not sit fully out in the sunlight.
She stood at the edge of the shadow the clock tower cast, her damaged wings swaying lightly in the wind, her long white hair sweeping past her shoulder as though it might be carried off by the Kaze wind at any moment.
Seraphia sat on the cloth with her arms around her knees, watching her put out a hand and carefully touch an apple lying in the sun.
Just that much, and she was already well satisfied.
The wind before her, the grass, the food, and a little sister standing in the shadow.
Seraphia felt it would be very hard for her to forget this scene.