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Volume 7 Chapter 1 Part 8

And once you are captured in it, you’ll fall into a dream from which you will never wake up.

The chaos concentration was kept higher here than in other places in the university, making it difficult for the monsters to dissipate on their own.

「Your Highness, would you please come out for a moment? 」

Siluca calls out to her shadow.

「What do you require of me? 」

His Highness Balgary, the Cait Sith fairy from the world of Tir na Nog popped his head out of the shadows and looked around.

「It’s okay. I won’t allow anyone to take you away from me. 」

Siluca spoke out to His Highness, sensing his rising anxiety when her realized where they currently were.

「Okay… I trust you. 」

His Highness said that as he jumped into Siluca’s waist. However, the hair on his entire body were still standing on their ends.

(I cannot blame him for feeling like that, though.)

Siluca thought. His Highness was confined here as a teaching material for the students. The first time Siluca came to this Magical Beast Garden was during her field trip during her Magic Academy days. It was there that she met His Royal Highness Balgary.

Due to his adorable appearance, many female students gathered around this cat fairy’s container, while Siluca was more than content to watch from the distance.Then one girl reached out her hand to stroke His Highness, even though they had been strictly warned not to touch the demon beasts many times.

As soon as he saw the hand that was moving in to touch him, His Highness swung his arm through the gap between the bars in front of his cage. Then there was a scream, and in the next moment, the arm of the girl that tried to touch him was flying through the air, splashing blood everywhere.

There was a huge commotion afterwards. The girl whose arm was severed was immediately treated by her teacher with life magic, and she barely survived. Her missing arm was also attached. She had stopped crying and screaming, but her nerves were not connected properly and she was unable to move her wrist. Soon after that incident occurred, the girl disappeared from the Magic Academy entirely.

(Her parents decided that she needed to quit, and I don’t even know where she is and what she’s doing now).

During the commotion, Siluca was talking to Balgary.

「What are you so angry about? 」

She remembered asking him that question. His Highness was slow to answer. No, at that time I didn’t even know that this cat fairy could speak her language, so she didn’t even expect him to answer her in the first place.

However, as Siluca waited patiently:

「Because I don’t like to be made into a spectacle. 」

His Highness eventually answered as such. She could understand that feeling of his.

「In that case, I’m going to become your friend. That way, it won’t be strange for me to come here to see you, and you won’t be turned into a spectacle for others, right? 」

Since then, Siluca has been brought there several times by her adoptive father Aubest. And whenever she was being brough to the Magic University, Siluca was having audiences with His Highness without her adoptive father’s notice. After meeting several times, His Highness finally opened up to her. Siluca then decided to take her Highness out of his cage and free him, but since doing that during the day was out of the question, her only option was to sneak into the Magical Beast Garden during the night with the help of Aishela, whom she roped into this as well

Siluca and Aishela managed to get inside the garden itself after the patrolling guard was away from the door, but no matter what kind of magic she was trying to use on the lock of the cage, the simple magic she was capable of using back then was nowhere near enough to open it.

Faced with that problem, the only solution that was on Siluca’s mind was to try desperately manipulation the Chaos in the garden to try and send His Highness Balgary back home.

Of course, with the basic magic learned at Magic Academy, it was impossible for her to do so. That’s why she decided to use the last resort.

「Is that really the same Cait Sith from back then? 」

Sembros asked.

「Yes. 」

Siluca nodded her head.

「Even though his projection has returned back to his hometown more than a few times ever since then. 」

「Even though you felt sorry for it being trapped at that cage back then, have you ever thought that letting him out might not have been the best thing to do? That keeping his projection in this world for so long is essentially just another form of imprisoning him? 」

Sembros said calmly.
「Of course I’ve thought a lot about that, and I’ve worried about it more than once… 」

Siluca paused for a moment.

「However, even if a projector diverges and disappears from this world, it does not mean that it can return to its original world. It is nothing more than a shadow cast from another world created by the fluctuations of Chaos in our own world, and I realize that the Cait Sith that I befriended is not the real His Highness Balgary in the world of Tir na Nog, but only his projection in this world. Also… 」

Siluca made yet another pause and took a deep breath before continuing any further.

「To tell you the truth, I didn’t release him out of his cage that day. 」

Then, Sembros seemed to have realized everything, and his gray eyebrows twitched.

「I killed him. We couldn’t open the cage, and we couldn’t send him back through normal means… so that was the only option we had left. 」

Aishela said quietly.

「That’s what I wanted them to do. I just couldn’t bear to have them see me, a member of the royal family, bearing the humiliation of being turned into a lowly prisoner. 」

His Highness Balgary said so after he closed his eyes in Siluca’s arms.

「I imprinted His Highness’s image in my eyes and asked him to tell me his name. I made a promise with him that someday I would definitely summon him to my side… 」

Years later, after entering Magic University and learning Summoning Magic, Siluca was finally able to fulfill the promise she had made with the Caith Sith, and much to her surprise and delight, His Highness Balgary somehow managed to retain the memories of their meeting from all those years ago.
Every time she was summoning him, she always had suspicion if this was really the same His Highness Balgary or not, but even if he was not the same, she decided that she’d just share the memories that the two of them made with each other with him. She was well aware that she was doing that for her own self-satisfaction and irreverence

call him, there is always the suspicion that it is a different His Highness. Still, I decided to share her memories and think that it was important for her to be there. I am aware that this is both self-satisfaction and irreverence…

「It seems that I am just a projection of my real self, but even if that’s really the case, then I don’t care about it. All that’s important to me is that I continue to exist here and now, and I can share more memories with Siluca. And because my existence is an unstable one that can disappear at any moment, then as long as I can enjoy a delicious feast, I’ll be fully satisfied. 」

His Highness said so after clearing his throat.

「Don’t you also want to free the other magical beasts that are trapped here? 」

「No, I don’t think so… 」

Siluca answered firmly.

「The reason I saved His Highness was because we became friends. I don’t feel sympathy for other monsters in here. It’s not about logic, it’s about feelings. I know it’s not the right thing to do, but I don’t regret it, and I never will. 」

「Letting a magical beast escape is, of course, a serious violation of the rules. However, that’s not the reason why you were almost singled out at the Magic Academy. 」

「Now I understand that. 」

Mages can control great power. That’s why the Magic University rewards Mages who comply with the wishes of the Mages Association and expels those who go against them. Those who remain loyal to the Association will have its support and its benefits, while the others will become the target of hunts and persecutions, because the Mages Association is afraid of them turning into Dark Mages more than anything else.