Volume 4 Chapter 8 Part 1 (2/2)

「Edi, how old are you?」

His hands stopped suddenly. He lifted his sunrise coloured eyes from the plate, looked towards me and put his spoon down at the plate’s edge with a clank.

「… 10 years old.」

「Is that so? Then approximately one year has passed since you’ve entered into the mage’s academy, right?」

The boy nodded silently. On the surface I continued to smile, but on the inside I was wrapping my arms around my head and writhing in pain. I’d know since last night but to actually hear it from the boy himself… The weight of those words was unthinkable. I see, 10 years old. 10 years old. What was I supposed to do?

Maybe he found my silence suspicious as he continued looking at me without eating. I managed to somehow smooth out my smile and tilted my head.

「Edi, you must also have a lot of questions you want to ask me, right? Go ahead. I’ll answer as long as it’s within my ability.」

The boy blinked. He looked at me with those sunrise coloured eyes which were exactly the same as that man’s, and opened his thin, lightly coloured, which couldn’t be called crimson.

「Filmina.」

「Yes?」

「Last night you said that I got smaller, but what did you mean?」

「That’s…」

I told the detailed story of how that man regressed both in terms of body and memory. As the story progressed, the boy’s already white face gradually turned ever whiter, or to be exact, paler. That was completely normal. The 10 year-old boy woke surrounded by unfamiliar adults and was told 「You aren’t the real you. Your adult self has just turned younger.」 Of course, it wasn’t phrased this directly, but if you summed it up, there was no difference. If I was told that… Just what would I have thought? I couldn’t even imagine. And that was exactly what I’d told this 10 year-old boy.

「Edi, umm…」

「I get the situation.」

His voice as he interrupted me was much calmer than I thought. His face, although pale, had a calm expression. From the beginning, his expressions never changed much, but inside he might be even more nervous than me. Even then, I was relieved at his reaction. If he hadn’t believed me, if he’d denied it or if he hadn’t believed I was Filmina… Just thinking about it made me unable to stop trembling. It was precisely a time when I should have kept myself together, but I let myself become so disheartened.

「Sorry…」

「… Huh?」

I heard something completely unexpected. I stiffened without thinking and the boy continued expressionlessly.

「I’ve caused you trouble.」

「But that’s not your fault.」

「I don’t know what my adult self was thinking, but I think that me becoming like this is the fault of my own carelessness.」

What a thing to say. I was at a loss of words at his straightforward gaze. It was a sense of responsibility beyond what a 10 year-old boy should possess. I wanted to let the adult man himself hear those words.

「And」 the boy continued.

「What is the relationship between my adult self and you?」

「Relationship?」

The boy nodded again. I was looking for the right words. It would be best to just say the truth. It’d be easy to say we were husband and wife. Since we’d gotten engaged at the age of 9, then for the 10 year-old boy it should be the obvious result. However what the boy was asking about, for him wasn’t a decided future. I felt a bit sad at this reality. But I understood that something like a decided future didn’t exist. And then there was the situation with our engagement. Taking into account that in the beginning I had no idea that we’d gotten engaged, what this boy was asking about, was it that natural?

I calmly judged, that I should keep quiet. One could say, that no matter how much younger he got, he was essentially the same man, but I didn’t want to impose a future on the boy who still had prospects ahead of him. However, I didn’t want to lie to this boy who had been watching me with those serious eyes and worried about me before worrying about himself.

「Well, um, we got married.」

I said in a muffled voice and the boy blinked.

「… Married?」

「Yes.」

「Me and you?」

「Yes.」

「….. I see.」

Oh my. His reaction wasn’t what I’d expected. That was all? I wanted to ask. No, instead of getting stupidly disappointed, I should have been happy with this reaction. And after I made up my resolve to say that we got married. I thought and got up from the chair.

「The soup has gotten cold. Please wait a bit while I reheat it.」

I had no way of knowing what expression the boy was making, as I took the plate of soup which was in front of him and turned away.