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Summer Phantom – Part 01

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Translator: Kell

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A humid and scorching summer evening.

St. Marguerite Academy.

The yellow rays of the midsummer sun were falling on the huge, U-shaped school building. The colorful flowers in the flowerbeds, the white fountain, the green grass all swayed in the hot breeze under the evening sky.

High above the vast garden, white clouds towered like snow, casting black shadows on the lawn and school building.

It was the middle of summer at St. Marguerite, a nearly-deserted school where most of the students had gone on vacation with their families for the summer.

“Why won’t you come in?” the boy asked in a smooth, but slightly accented French.

The boy—Kazuya Kujou—peeked out the hallway from his room on the second floor of the boys’ dormitory, a grand, lavishly-decorated building made of oak, standing in a corner of the academy.

“That’s not a place to sit in,” he added. There was exasperation in his kind, jet-black eyes. “That’s the hallway, where people walk.”

An audible sniff came from the hallway, near the floor.

“Victorique.”

“Shut up, Kujou,” said a peculiar voice, low, melancholic, and husky like an old woman’s. “I like it here. Now leave me alone.”

“Man, you’re like a stubborn old lady. Ouch! Stop kicking me! Please, for the love of god, don’t kick me with your boots. It really hurts!”

The petite girl sitting on the floor just outside the door to Kazuya’s room, leaning against the wall with her chin lifted arrogantly, exhaled sharply.

Kazuya let out a sigh. “Fine. You never listen to anyone. You just do what you want to do.”

“Of course.”

“…”

The girl—Victorique de Blois—snorted again.

Today she was wearing a chic black-and-white plaid dress, a snow-white headdress on her head, and glossy enamel boots on her feet. For some reason, she was sitting in the cold corridor of the boys’ dormitory, reading a thick, brown leather-bound book, boredly but with incredible speed. Her long, magnificent golden hair hung down to the floor like a strand of fine silk threads, glistening around her tiny frame.

“I’m glad you came to hang out because you’re bored,” Kazuya said, “but why did you stop right outside my room and sit down in the hallway?”

“Because the hallway is colder.”

Kazuya looked back at his room. Luxurious oak furniture, a desk, cabinet, and a bed. Fancy gobelin curtains hung over the French windows facing the garden, and a long, high-quality fur carpet covered the floor.

He glanced at the soft carpet in his room and the cold, wooden floor in the hallway. He went back inside, took something out of the desk drawer, and returned with a small paulownia box. He brought it close to Victorique’s small, pretty nose, hitting her long, curly eyelashes.

“What?” Victorique growled, not even lifting her gaze.

“You’ll have to see for yourself.” Kazuya opened the lid of the box.

Victorique cast a tired glance at it and gasped. Her emerald eyes, filled with tedium, arrogance, and weariness, widened.

Inside the box were small, round candies of various colors—red, green, yellow. Delicately crafted, they looked like sparkling glass beads. Victorique’s glossy cherry lips were partly open as she marveled at the candies. Kazuya grinned. He picked one up with his fingers and popped it into Victorique’s mouth.

A faint smile appeared on Victorique’s expressionless face. Or at least it seemed like it. It could’ve just been his imagination.

“Sweet,” Victorique mumbled.

“Well, it’s candy, after all. Do you like it? Ruri… I mean, my sister sent these to me. You remember her, right? She gave you the light-blue kimono last spring. When I wrote to her that I had a little female friend, she thought you were actually a small child. So she sent some candies for kids…”

Victorique was vigorously, viciously, munching on the candy that Kazuya threw in her mouth. Whether she was listening to a word he was saying was a mystery. She moved her tiny, pudgy fingers to pick up candy balls from the small box and tossed them in her mouth, munching away. She licked and munched, licked and munched, finishing them in no time at all.

She looked up at the dumbfounded Kazuya. “Is there any more?”

“N-No, that’s it. Sorry.”

Victorique suddenly lost interest in Kazuya and returned to her book. Her behavior left him crestfallen.

“Speaking of which,” Kazuya said, “my sister sent a very long letter along with the kimono. Apparently, she had a fight with my father and brothers because she wanted to become a teacher after graduating from school. My father was planning to marry her off to an Imperial Army officer, my oldest brother’s schoolmate, but they’re ten years apart. Plus the guy has a square face and a thick beard. My sister hates him.”

“…”

“It doesn’t look like you’re the least bit interested. Oh, she also mentioned a strange incident. Some Chinese vase suddenly disappeared from the roof of a department store.”

“Speak.”

“Uh, right away.”

Kazuya straightened himself. Noticing Victorique looking up and waiting impatiently, he scurried back to the room, searched through the drawers for his sister’s letter, and returned with a thick bundle of letters.

Victorique’s eyes widened. “We might be here for a while.”

“Yeah,” Kazuya agreed. “The first half is mostly just her bad-mouthing my father and brother. My sister is smart, strong-willed, and much more assertive than I am. All right. I’m reading it.”

“Go ahead.”

Standing near the door, Kazuya straightened his back, then began reading his sister’s letter swiftly to the little clump of frills that sat at his feet.

“Dear Kazuya. How are you? It’s me, your adorable sister. Get this. Father is so mean. And your brothers as well. How are they mean, you ask?”

Kazuya’s soft voice reverberated throughout the empty dormitory. Outside the window, the summer sun was shining brightly, illuminating the grass in the garden, the white fountain, the colorful flowerbeds. The water trickling down the fountain like melting ice were refreshing to the ears.

A small white bird soared into the summer sky.

It was a humid, hot summer in the mountains of Western Europe. Like two small dots in the landscape, Victorique and Kazuya were the only ones left in the academy.

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We turn the clock back a little to spring of the same year.

Across the ocean in the Orient Seas, far from the kingdom of Sauville tucked in a corner of Western Europe, was a small island nation nestled between the vast Pacific Ocean and the grand Chinese continent.

Spring had just recently arrived, driving away the cold winter that chilled the imperial capital, bathing the city in a warm sunlight.

In a room in an old, but well-maintained wooden school building at the Seian Girls’ School, a prestigious teaching institution in the suburbs of the city, third-year student Kujou Ruri was hanging her head.

She was a beautiful, eye-catching oriental girl with a graceful body, glossy black hair that cascaded down her back, and large, moist, jet-black eyes reminiscent of a black cat. Like the other female students around her, she was dressed in a hakama and a gorgeous pink-and-orange plaid kimono, but unlike the other girls who tied their hair in ribbons or wore them in fluffy, fashionable buns, she simply let her black hair hang down naturally, giving her a somewhat wild look.

Ruri, with her beautiful, mature features, was looking out the window with her elbow on the desk, while the glamorous girls around her—her entourage, it seemed—were brushing her hair with a red comb, stuffing sweets in her mouth, and dusting off her hakama.

Paying no heed to the girls, Ruri kept sighing.

The girls exchanged looks.

“I wonder what’s wrong with Lady Ruri,” one whispered. “She looks so down lately. It’s weird.”

“It’s like half of her soul is leaving her body.”

“I know what’s up. Her brother.”

Their pretty faces scrunched up all at once.

“That little…” one snarled.

“What was his name again? Kazuo? Kazushi?”

“It’s Kazuya. Kazuya Kujou. He’s two years younger than her. He went to a military academy. You know, the plain-looking one.”

“The one with the average looks, despite being Lady Ruri’s brother.”

“Curse you, Kazuya.”

“He had Lady Ruri all to himself for so long. She even made his lunches.”

“Curse you, Kazuya.”

“I think he suddenly left for a faraway country in Europe to study. Lady Ruri was crying as she begged him to stay, but he kicked her and left laughing. Men are so horrible!”

“Curse you, Kazuya.”

“Curse you, Kazuya.”

“I hate him so much.”

The girls’ chorus echoed throughout the wooden school building like some kind of malicious incantation. Not that they needed to lay a curse on him, when he was being treated like the Grim Reaper in a faraway land. They didn’t know that, of course.

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