The Arch-Wizard’s Little Sister

by Natsume Akatsuki

  Frankly, by this point, I wouldn’t be surprised no matter what they turned out to be hiding. I wished they would come out and tell me already.

  “I see. Yes, I suppose it would be best if you knew.” Maybe Megumin understood what I was thinking. She turned and looked at me seriously. “As a matter of fact, one of the many famous tourist destinations in Crimson Magic Village is an observatory from which the Demon King’s castle can be seen.”

  An observatory?

  “She’s right,” Funifura added, looking just as grim as Megumin. “On top of a mountain near the village, there is a powerful magical item. Some even say it can see all things.”

  Dodonko provided the conclusion: “Our people use the item to keep a constant watch on the Demon King and his castle. I guess his daughter must have found out what was happening. . .”

  I supposed I could understand how the Demon King’s army would find an observatory less than amusing. Information could mean the difference between victory and defeat in war. The Demon King’s daughter would obviously want to take out anything that let an enemy spy on them. . .

  “We never imagined she would discover the secret,” Funifura said. “The whole attraction of that observatory is that (they say) you can see directly into the bedroom of the Demon King’s daughter anytime.”

  “Yeah,” Dodonko agreed. “The Demon King’s intelligence network is nothing to sneeze at.”

  “What did you just say?” I demanded.

  “They are correct,” Megumin confirmed. “That building is crucial to us; it brings in considerable money as a tourist attraction. When it is not in use, it serves as a source of comfort for the village NEETs. To think of it now gone. . .”

  “Well, of course she would want to take that out. There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you guys for a while now—why’s the Demon King so fixated on destroying humanity? Is this whole endless war because of you and the Axis Church?” The three Crimson Magickers looked away from me. “Hey, you do know, don’t you?”

  “M-my goodness, Kazuma, you needn’t try to pin everything on us. . . All we do is have that picnic once every four years or so. . .”

  Aqua, who was busy giving Komekko some post-meal snacks, looked up curiously at Megumin. “Picnic?”

  Funifura explained, “Everyone in the village who can use Teleport gets together once every four years and has a picnic right by the Demon King’s castle. They have a nice barbecue; then they all cut loose with their magic against the barriers surrounding the castle. When the Demon King’s army comes out, they teleport back home.”

  “You guys are bad news—stop with the childish pranks already! . . .But okay, I think I understand the situation. Thanks for bringing Komekko here. We can just keep her with us at the house, right?”

  Funifura and Dodonko shared a sigh of relief at that. “That would be great. We couldn’t think of anywhere else to take her. Us, we have something we need to do now.”

  “Yeah, Crimson Magic Clansfolk never back down from a fight.”

  This sounded like trouble. The two of them stood up, and even Megumin looked ready to leap into the fray. “Then the first thing we must do is find out where the Demon King’s daughter is now! Leave it to me—I’ll throw the first punch! Funifura, Dodonko, let us go!”

  “How could you help us?! The Demon King’s daughter is still in the village. We’re going to link up with the rest of the clan and start a guerrilla war against her. Explosion isn’t going to do anyone any good, which means you’re not going to do anyone any good.”

  Funifura’s assessment caused Megumin’s eyebrow to twitch.

  “She’s right. We know Advanced Magic now, so they asked us to join the fight. You just sit here and suck your thumb and wait for us to get the job done.”

  Dodonko’s little addendum caused Megumin’s eyes to flash red.

  “Say, we heard Yunyun was around here—do you know where she is? They want her to join the battle, but we can’t find her anywhere.”

  “Yeah, she wrote us a letter saying she’d made some friends in town recently, and we thought we might see who they were. We wrote to her that we would be here today, but. . .”

  By “friends,” maybe Yunyun meant the masked demon and the street punk with whom I’d seen her recently. If they couldn’t find her, it probably meant that despite her bragging about finally having friends, she wasn’t eager for the likes of Funifura and Dodonko, of all people, to meet them. She was probably running all over town keeping out of sight.

  “H-hey, that reminds me. Megumin, I’ve been wanting to ask you. . .” Funifura looked like she needed to be sure to get this off her chest before she went into battle with the Demon King’s daughter. “Yunyun wrote to us that at least one of the friends she made here in Axel was a guy. But. . .she doesn’t actually have any friends, does she? She’s just putting on for us, isn’t she?”

  “Y-yeah, I want to know, too. I mean, I can’t imagine Yunyun making friends besides us! Especially not. . .guy friends! It’s one thing for you to get ahead of us, but even her. . .?”

  As evenly as could be, Megumin answered, “I must assume that any male friends she mentions would include, first, Kazuma here. And perhaps. . .maybe Vanir, who is said to be popular among the neighborhood women. And perhaps the golden-haired adventurer whom you would have to be living under a rock not to know around here, Dust.”

  Funifura’s and Dodonko’s faces got sicker and sicker as Megumin counted off the possibilities on her fingers.

  “Ha. . . Ha-ha! G-gee, not bad. I guess there are a lot more people here than in Crimson Magic Village! We shouldn’t be surprised if she found one or two other weirdos to keep her company!”

  Funifura was desperate to spin this situation; Dodonko piled on, too. “Y-y-yeah, that’s right! And what about you, Megumin—you and your guy? You told us a lot of stories when you were at the village, but after you left, we started to think it sounded pretty fishy. You never talk about romance like that. Tell us the truth—all this stuff about bathing together and cuddling in bed—it was all basically by accident, right?”

  But this was a bad time for those questions. Aqua and Darkness had taken Komekko, who had just finished dessert, into the kitchen to brush her teeth. Only the four of us were left in the living room. Meaning. . .

  “Me and my. . .? I. . .” Megumin looked over at me, went red, and fell silent, staring at the ground. That was weird. She wasn’t usually this modest.

  “You’re kidding. . . Th-this is some kind of joke, right? That girlish reaction. . .!”

  “No. . . No, I don’t want to lose to you, Megumin. . . Not when love was always the furthest thing from your mind, the last thing you were interested in. . .!”

  The girls had gone as pale as if they had seen the end of the world, but Megumin merely gave an embarrassed scratch of her cheek. And then, a bit awkwardly, she said, “Please don’t tell my parents yet.”

  “Ahhhhhhhh, you haven’t—!”

  “—beaten uuuuuussssss!”

  I watched the two girls run away crying. Megumin gave a satisfied sniff.

  Funifura and Dodonko might have been gone, but they had left us Komekko to look after, so we went into town to grab everything a little girl might need. Then we settled back at home.

  Aqua practically threw herself onto “her” spot on the sofa the moment she came in. In her arms was Chomusuke, struggling to get loose. We hadn’t seen much of her, busy as we’d been with traveling and living at the castle and so on.

  “Now, then,” Megumin said. “Komekko, you can sleep with me in my room. It’s been a while since we saw each other, and I’m sure you’ve been lonely—we can sleep together again at long last.”

  “You get lonely so easily, Sis!”

  “K-Komekko!”

  Komekko dispensed this burn almost disinterestedly, fixing an intense stare on Chomusuke where she flailed in Aqua’s arms. “Looks tasty.”

  “Komekko, we have plenty of food in this house, so you
must not eat either Chomusuke or Emperor Zel, who lives in the chicken coop!” Megumin sounded vaguely anxious.

  Komekko wiped the drool from her mouth and nodded. “Yeah. We can’t eat them till they fatten up.”

  “No, Komekko, we aren’t going to eat them at all! They’re our pets!”

  Aqua held Chomusuke protectively and drew back a little in the face of Komekko’s bald ruthlessness.

  “Well, since you’ve come all this way, Komekko, how about a welcome party? Your big bro’ll make you all kinds of delicious stuff.”

  “You’re so cool, Big Bro!” Komekko exclaimed with innocent joy. Then she produced what looked like a notepad and started writing something down.

  “What are you writing there?” Megumin asked, coming over. “‘Month Such-and-Such, Day So-and-So. Sis’s man hand-fed me. Guess he likes me better than her now. . .’ Komekko! Where are you learning words like this?!” Megumin was awfully excited.

  “Bukkororii.”

  “That worthless NEET! Are there no good NEETs in the world at all?!”

  That kind of touched a nerve—even though I guess, as an adventurer, I wasn’t a NEET, so she wasn’t technically talking about me.

  “Anyway, what is this?” Megumin went on. “A diary?”

  “Mom told me to write everything that happens between Sis and her man in this book.”

  So she was a spy in the house of Kazuma!

  3

  I got plenty of sleep the next day, by which I mean I got up around noon, and then I went downstairs for some breakfast/lunch.

  “Sis, more!”

  “Komekko, you can eat your fill anytime while you’re in this house. So there’s no need to gorge yourself at every meal, all right?”

  I came down to discover Komekko jumping exuberantly as if hoping to free up some space in her stomach and Megumin giving her a worried look.

  And then there were. . .

  “Hey, Darkness, lunch tastes a little salty today. . .”

  “Sniff. . . I can’t see through the tears. . .”

  . . .two women looking at Komekko and weeping copiously. I guess the sight of this poor, deprived child was more than they could bear.

  “But I never get to eat this much!”

  “That may be true, but as your older sister, I’m somewhat embarrassed. Look, there’s pudding for dessert.”

  “Yippee!”

  After a moment of fretting, Aqua slid her own plate of pudding toward Komekko. I could never have imagined this from someone who made such a big deal of being a gourmand.

  “Your big sister is full already,” Aqua said. “Maybe you can finish this for me.”

  “Can I? Pudding is a really fancy, really expensive dessert that I only ever get on my birthday—are you sure you aren’t going to eat it?” Despite her question, Komekko didn’t take her eyes off Aqua’s pudding. Darkness and Megumin, unable to sit idly by, both slid their desserts toward Komekko, too.

  “Komekko, our adventuring party is now one of the most famous in the nation. Money is no object for us, so you needn’t worry. I will treat you to a washbasin’s worth of pudding tomorrow, so for today, just say thank you to everyone and eat your dessert.”

  “Thank you.” Komekko held the pudding carefully as if it were a priceless treasure and bowed deeply, causing Aqua to wipe at her eyes again.

  That was when Megumin noticed me watching this touching scene. “Oh, so you are awake. Want something to eat, Kazuma?”

  “Yeah, please. . . Hey, Megumin, if you needed money, you’d let me know, right? I’ve been keeping the majority of your quest rewards like you asked. I know you only accept enough for food, small expenses, and some pocket change each month. I have everything you’ve earned set aside, okay?”

  Megumin showed a pretty minimal desire for money. Sometimes she would squawk about a nice robe or an awesome item she’d seen, but the most expensive thing she owned was the staff she’d bought with the reward from our long-ago cabbage hunt. Heck, when I’d seen Megumin’s wallet the other day, bursting with coupons, I’d experienced a sort of indescribable emotion.

  “I appreciate that,” she said. “But it is all right; even on my small stipend, I am able to send something home each month. More to the point, if I sent more than I do, I know my father would only blow it making magical items.”

  “That guy is surprisingly shiftless,” I said, getting my belated lunch.

  “Sis! Now that your man is finally up, are you going to go to the Adventurers Guild today?”

  “Ko—! Komekko! You must stop this ‘your man’ business!”

  Aqua was watching the jabbering sisters with a fond smile, sipping her after-lunch tea, but then she said, “I see—would you like to go to the Adventurers Guild, sweetheart? If you’re interested, who better to go with you than your very well-known ‘big sister’?”

  “Good point,” Darkness said. “The whole reason we came back here was supposedly to revisit the basics and accept some quests. Let’s take Komekko on a tour, and while we’re there, we can see if there are any good quests. But, Komekko, why do you want to go to the Guild? You know it’s not a playground, right?”

  Komekko turned to the two women, whom she evidently had wrapped around her little finger, and said: “I wanna go to the Adventurers Guild and see Sis being awesome.” As a reason to go, it didn’t make a lot of sense. It caused Megumin to flinch, though.

  “Sis told me in all her letters—she said how everyone at the Adventurers Guild loves her and how the moment she gets there, everyone starts bowing to her and being real polite.”

  Now, this I had to know more about. In the ensuing silence, I let a single word drop:

  “Hey.”

  Megumin flinched even harder. “Komekko, I think you should go play outside for a bit! Emperor Zel is in the chicken coop there. And it’s been so long since you and Chomusuke had fun together—take her and go feed the emperor together!”

  “Okay! We’ll fatten him right up!”

  Megumin’s expression was pinched, and she showed no hesitation in sacrificing Chomusuke, who had been doing her best impression of a sunflower on the windowsill. But she got Komekko out of there.

  Megumin was being very careful not to look at me, so I repeated myself. “. . .Hey.”

  “It’s not true!” She turned, immediately assumed a formal sitting position, and began with a denial. I didn’t know exactly what wasn’t true, but if she wanted to try to make excuses, I figured I would hear her out. Once we were all sitting down, Megumin got a far-off look in her eye, like she was thinking about the past, and started in. “Please listen to me, for there are complicated circumstances at work here. . . Yes, it happened when I was still in Crimson Magic Village. . .”

  And then she told us the story.

  “That’s not complicated at all.”

  All that had happened was that she had exaggerated a little in her letters to her family. Partly, she had wanted to reassure her mom and dad, who had been worried about whether she could make her way in the world. Come to think of it, when we’d visited Crimson Magic Village, I seemed to remember her parents being given to exaggeration themselves.

  “I felt I had no choice. Just imagine if, out of an excess of worry, they decided to come here. Kazuma, it would be rather inconvenient to you if they dragged me back home, wouldn’t it?” Megumin stood up defiantly, tossing her cape out behind her.

  “I guess. . .? Wait, ‘drag you back home’?”

  Would that be a problem for me?

  “Hey,” Megumin said as I thought it over.

  “I’d be in trouble without you, Megumin! I would have to redo our entire chore chart, and I would have to do more chores! Plus, who would play my game with me, then?” Aqua was earnestly trying to comfort Megumin, but it only caused our wizard to put a hand on the carpet in defeat.

  Darkness gave her what was probably intended as a reassuring pat on the back. “W-well, look, forget about that. We’ll just have to tell Komekko the trut
h. She’s going to find out eventually—wouldn’t it feel better to tell her yourself?”

  Aqua and I nodded along, but Megumin said, “B-but. . .my authority as a big sister. . .! . . .No. Darkness, you are right. The whole reason I embellished my achievements was to make my parents feel better. I used to write them only the truth. But my mother got so worried. . . Yet now we live in a mansion, and I go on adventures and fight foes that need no exaggeration. They won’t drag me back home now, so I can be honest with Komekko.”

  A smile came over Megumin’s face; she looked totally relieved. . .

  “Komekko. I. . .have something important to tell you.”

  Komekko came back into the house covered in mud (she and Chomusuke must’ve had some real fun out there), and Megumin sat her down on the sofa before settling across from her with a serious look on her face.

  Komekko understood immediately that something big was afoot. “You mean. . .you’re not going to give me that washbasin of pudding you promised?”

  “Oh, there’ll be pudding, trust me! No, this is something much more important!” Komekko looked deeply relieved to know the dessert was still in the works but didn’t say anything, so Megumin went on. “Komekko. Remember how I wrote to you that we’re possibly the most awesome adventuring party in this entire town?” She sounded resolved, set on her course.

  “Yeah. You said you’re an awesome wizard who can destroy any monster with a single spell and that the whole town totally loves you.”

  Megumin nodded. “That’s right. About that. . .”

  But Komekko went on just as blithely: “And you said that Golden-Haired Sis never ran away from any monster ever and that she was a great, stalwart Crusader who could withstand any attack, and you said that Blue-Haired Sis is practically a goddess, that she can stand up against any demon or any undead and even bring people back to life! And. . .”

  Megumin jumped to her feet.

  “. . .you said that your man is an awesome guy who’s quick-witted and has defeated lots of strong bad guys, and he’s super nice, and even if he complains a lot, when his friends really need him, he comes through—”