A Maid's Most Important Virtue

"Wow. Joel, what is all this?"

Nina gasped, covering her mouth at the dazzling array of magitech devices lining the walls.

Truthfully, she couldn't even be sure they were magitech devices. She was only guessing from the blue circuitry and magic stone fragments worked into them together—she had no idea what any of them were actually for. Some looked like clocks, books, or small chandeliers, making the collection resemble the display case of a high-class salon.

"I've been cooped up at home, and my hands were itching, so these are things I made as a hobby."

"You make magitech devices as a hobby? Is that even possible?"

At Nina's incredulous reaction, Joel's expression turned grave.

"Of course it isn't. There are all sorts of riffraff peddling trashy books that claim magitech engineering makes a good side hustle—'Hey, you too could earn a hundred million a year making magitech devices!'—and anyone with that kind of mindset couldn't fold a paper crane properly. I see you know your stuff, Nina."

With that, he changed direction—not toward the upstairs he'd been guiding her to, but down.

"This way, please."

Seeing magitech devices displayed even along the staircase railing and walls, Nina let out one gasp of admiration after another.

"You made all of these yourself?"

"I did. It's what makes the research worthwhile."

"And the country just lets a genius of magitech engineering like you be?"

"I am indeed a genius, but alas, I'm sickly."

"If you were healthy, the royal palace would—oh, wait, this is a free state, isn't it. Some national agency would have been desperate to snap you up in secret."

Joel, who had been about to open a door in the basement, paused for a moment and gazed down at her. His eyes, dusted as if with gold powder, caught the soft lighting with an oddly luminous shimmer.

"Are you perceptive by nature, Nina?"

"I'd like to think I'm not exactly ordinary? Why do you ask? Are you planning to study me?"

At the joke Nina tossed out with a bright laugh, Joel's mouth stiffened into an expression of pure incomprehension.

"Study a human being. What a strange thing to say."

Then he turned the door handle with a click and opened it.

"This is my magitech fabrication studio."

"Oh my goodness!"

Nina gasped once more, hand to her mouth.

Magic stones lay piled in mountains in one corner of the studio, and a long table was lined edge to edge with disassembled machines. A blackboard was crammed with complicated equations, and beneath it a magic stone extractor hummed steadily as it spun.

A place where magitech devices were designed and built. She had never seen such a sight in her life.

"This is truly incredible. You did all of this alone?"

"Working alone is the most efficient. I do hire help when I need extra hands, but every last one of them has been unreliable."

Every single word carried such pride in his craft that Nina burst into a small laugh.

"And you called this a hobby? You were doing the work you were born to do."

"……Destiny?" Joel turned the word over. "I see. So this is what they call destiny. Destiny."

While Joel rolled the word around in his mouth a few times, Nina spotted a magic rifle hanging on one wall and brightened at once.

"Wow, a magic rifle!"

Unlike ordinary bullets loaded with gunpowder, a magic rifle fired condensed mana extracted from magic stones. The rifle itself was a type of magitech device, so its design and the method of refining its stones produced an endless variety of models.

Joel drew a magic magazine from a drawer and showed it to her.

"That one fires shockwaves. It can't punch through an enemy's hide, but it can slam them down anywhere it lands and pin them."

"I see."

Nina's eyes gleamed as she ran her gaze along the barrel. The magic stones studded into the matte dark-brown barrel looked exactly like blueberries resting on chocolate.

Just then, the studio lights all flared red at once and an alarm began to wail.

Even at the sudden turn of events, Joel showed no surprise and simply switched off the alarm. Checking the upper floor through a reconnaissance device, he counted four intruders.

Only Nina jumped in fright and stamped her feet.

"Good heavens! Intruders, of all things, in the home of a sickly young master? How heartless!"

"How tiresome."

Joel had a fair idea who the intruders were. The culprits would be among the intelligence agencies of four nations—the Kingdom of Ilite, Holich, Kibon, and Lujein. ……Or quite possibly, all four at once.

I've been uneasy ever since they started harassing the other Masters. So they've finally lost their temper.

His Master had been using the fact that Rikita's townhouse sat in Soltum as leverage to squeeze each nation's specialty goods and magic stones out of their foreign intelligence agencies.

They wouldn't be bleeding, but their pride will be badly bruised. They'll want to send a warning.

They wouldn't have come intending to kill. At worst they'd break a window or two, give everyone a good scare, and leave. Judging by how instantly the intruder alarm had gone off, these weren't assassination specialists either.

He had security magitech devices, of course, but disputes between intelligence agencies were a Master's business to settle. There was no need to provoke anyone with an unnecessary response.

The very moment he finished that thought, Nina jabbed him in the arm.

"Joel. Could you lend me this?"

Somehow, without his noticing, Nina had already slung the magic rifle over her shoulder.

"Where do you intend to use that? It's dangerous. Put it down."

"Oh my. I may not look it, but I was the maid in charge of cleanliness at the Countess's estate."

"What does that have to do with a magic rifle?"

When Joel reached out to take the rifle, Nina flashed a sly smile and hugged it tenderly to her chest.

"You wouldn't know, having no maid in the house? Handling a magic rifle is one of a maid's most important virtues."

Joel fell deep into thought, wondering whether he was the one who had misunderstood the meaning of the word "virtue."

It was the clack of a magazine locking into the rifle that broke him out of his reverie. No one had ever shown her how to operate it, yet Nina was smoothly seating the magazine and flicking off the safety.

"How did you……?"

"Let's go."

Nina hauled a bewildered Joel out of the studio.

"Basements are easy to trap yourself in, and with all these precious magitech devices around, it's dangerous. We need to deal with them before they claim the high ground."

Then she flattened herself low against the stairs leading up to the first floor.

Joel felt a strange dissonance watching Nina use the staircase as a trench cover as if it were the most natural thing in the world. According to everything his research had turned up, Nina had never formally trained in combat, nor ever taken part in it.

Something is very wrong here.

Joel observed her with an unsettled feeling. Even as the intruders' footsteps churned up the lobby below, she showed not a trace of fear.

"Don't worry. Nothing's going to happen."

She whispered to comfort him, of all things, and then—before he could stop her—she was gone.

What unfolded in the lobby afterward could only be called astonishing.

Nina moved as if the magic rifle were simply an extension of her body. Shouldering the stock and aligning her sights and the muzzle tip in a straight line with her target took less than an instant. The magic stones studded along the barrel glowed blue, as if proudly proclaiming the presence of the fully loaded magazine.

"Wh-what the—? Where's the owner of this house, and why are you skittering around—"

THOOM!

She pulled the trigger before the intruder could finish his sentence. The shockwave that burst from the muzzle slammed into his body with brutal force.

"Oof!"

As one of their comrades crashed into the wall and slumped unconscious, the intruders turned ferocious.

Nina pouted her full lips in a look of deep disappointment.

"Four of you, planning to take on one sickly young master? How utterly cowardly."

"Sickly? Does that look sickly to you?"

"If that counts as sickly, then I'm on my deathbed!"

The flow of her movements as she swiftly opened the distance from the intruders surging at her, then retrained her rifle on them again, was as natural and fast as water running downhill.

"Judging people by their looks. I'm truly disappointed in you."

THOOM! CRACK!

BANG! CRACK!

The intruders, battered by the magic rifle, slammed into walls and floor one after another, rolling where they fell. Even in the seconds it took her to toss an empty magazine and snap in a fresh one, she stomped an intruder's foot and jabbed him in the solar plexus with her stock. The discarded empty magazine she threw struck the head of an intruder who was staggering back to his feet—dead center.

Joel, watching all of it from the bottom of the stairs, suddenly felt his mind go blank, and the moment he'd been handed this operation rose up before him.

And so, after the Master had quietly lifted his foot off the magitech device, Joel had taken on this operation. Honestly, it had been a mission he neither wanted nor found anything but troublesome.

But Joel decided, right then, to tear that old assessment to pieces.

That flawless shoulder mount and grip. That perfect leap and landing. That perfect aim, and those perfect hands. The composed expression of someone simply doing what needed doing, and a gaze that never wavered. Movement stripped of every wasted motion—clean, efficient, as if it had been engineered.

If a perfectly designed magic rifle were ever incarnated as a human being, surely this is what it would look like.

"Ugh……. Who…… who are you……."

Thud.

The last intruder crumpled to the floor, and the whole affair ended in the space of a breath.

With the magic rifle slung over her shoulder, Nina turned around and beamed at him, radiant as a spring morning. Against the backdrop of the magic stones' blue waves and the intruders sprawled across the floor, her soft hair and the hem of her skirt swayed gently in the breeze.

"Joel, are you okay? It wasn't too frightening, was it?"

"……No."

Joel answered in a daze, feeling as though his heart were rattling like a machine with a gear come loose. And there, within Nina's translucent pink eyes, the most perfectly designed flower of spring was in full bloom.