Magic Scavenger Part 1 Chapter 2

 Chapter 2: Traces That Connect

"Today's one is... here, it's like this... Heh. What a weird shape..."

The night had deepened and Kanata lay wrapped in a sleeping bag stitched together from scraps of cloth while writing something onto a stone with a piece of charcoal. Relying on the crackling light of the campfire nearby, he peered closely at the Rubbish he'd picked up that day.

Kanata's hobby of collecting Rubbish had started two years ago, the same time when he began battlefield scavenging. His father was long gone and his whereabouts unknown. His mother had gone into town to shop one day and died shielding a noble's child, right in front of him. The people of his old village were all good, decent folk but naturally none of them had been wealthy enough to keep an orphaned child around for long. A little over a year later, Kanata found his way to the Karejasu Mercenary Company. He was eight years old at the time.

It wasn't as though he'd been dragged into some horrific tragedy. If anything, his parents had been good people and in the village where he grew up, he'd barely known adult malice — at most a few mean-spirited pranks from other children, nothing worth despairing over. No one had set out to make him miserable, either; Kanata had simply been left alone due to senseless, unreasonable misfortune. There was no one to blame. He didn't even know what he was supposed to resent. He couldn't exactly feel lucky to have been taken in and being told he was fortunate just to be alive never really resonate with him. Who could call themselves lucky after watching their parent die right in front of them? His surroundings kept changing dizzyingly fast for a child and in those days when he couldn't find anywhere to point all those feelings, what finally caught his interest was the Rubbish — the leftover residue of magic — he'd found during his very first battlefield scavenging run.

"I wonder if it's the same magic...? Lately I kept finding only fire-attribute ones..."

The discipline and training that the Karejasu Mercenary Company had drilled into him... He'd been able to take it all in stride partly because the company made a policy of patiently training its battlefield scavengers but the bigger reason was that he'd found something that interested him. At first things had been awkward with the other kids but these days that wasn't really true anymore, thanks to his reputation as the odd one out who collected Rubbish. Being able to say he liked working here was the honest truth for him. Even when people around him called him pitiable, Kanata never saw himself that way. He earned his keep through battlefield scavenging and at the same time got to indulge his hobby of collecting Rubbish. And with a captain who'd overlook him picking up worthless junk so long as he made his quota... this place really was comfortable for him.

"If I connect it with the one from three days ago... it looks like a circle."

From collecting Rubbish and staring at it around the clock until it vanished, Kanata had noticed there seemed to be a kind of pattern hidden inside it. Sometimes it looked like a horn, sometimes a circle, sometimes even an animal's paw print. Maybe that was why, somewhere along the way, he'd stopped thinking of Rubbish as leftover magical residue and started thinking of it as fragments of magic instead. Over these two years, through continous collecting and vanishing, he was happy enough to be able to find one with a strange pattern in it. The Rubbish he'd picked up three days ago had a pattern inside that looked like part of an oval and when he lined it up with today's three pieces, the shapes connected perfectly. It was just like a puzzle and Kanata, who didn't know much in the way of entertainment, grinned to himself, delighted.

"Ah, no! It's fading, it's fading away...!"

While he'd been grinning to himself, the Rubbish had started to fade away. Rubbish was nothing more than a clump of excess mana left over from a spell. Mana that had parted from its caster was fated to eventually vanish, dissolving back into the mana in the atmosphere. Maybe whoever had cast today's spell had been especially unskilled because the Rubbish Kanata picked up was already fading before the day was even out. He hurriedly copied the pattern he could see inside it onto his stone with the charcoal. Something that looked like writing was visible too but since Kanata had never learned his letters, he had no way of reading what it said.

"Mmm... Kanata... You're still up...?"

"Sorry, Roa! It's gonna disappear, I'll explain later!"

"Not later... *yawn*... just go to sleep already..."

Maybe because his voice had risen a little in surprise at the Rubbish disappearing, Roa, who'd been sleeping beside him, stirred groggily awake for a moment, then drifted straight back to sleep. Ignoring what she'd said, Kanata kept staring intently into the fading Rubbish. His grip tightened more and more, as if he could keep it from slipping away, but nothing could stop it from disappearing.

"Ah...! Ah... ahh... haah..."

Voice thick with genuine disappointment, Kanata watched the Rubbish disappear to the very end. Where he'd been holding on so tightly, nothing remained now but his hand, blackened with charcoal. In these two years, this was the one thing he still could never quite get used to being sad about. Since it didn't even leave water behind, it felt lonelier than watching winter snow melt away. Even a snowball packed together carelessly would have left a little more trace behind than this. Rubbish really did just disappear and nothing more.

"Mana... huh..."

Kanata swung his hand through the air, trying to grab hold of something. Of course, no matter how much he tried to grasped, there was nothing in his blackened hand. Rubbish dissolved into the mana of the atmosphere and disappeared but Kanata had no ability to sense mana in the first place. The mercenaries of the company were apparently able to wield mana but even watching them, none of it had ever really clicked for him.

Kanata reached a hand into his pocket. The other three pieces of Rubbish he'd picked up today, perhaps all from the same caster, had vanished as well. He'd grown used to plenty of things over these two years but this was one thing he simply couldn't get used to, no matter what. No matter how many of his favorite little treasures he collected, they always disappeared in the end. Kanata didn't yet have the kind of sensibility to find any charm in that fleetingness; it was simply lonely and sad. That was exactly why he wrote the patterns he saw inside the Rubbish onto stones, in order to distract himself a little from the loneliness. Even if he couldn't read the writing, he could still copy it down as long as he recognized it as a pattern. He soothened the sadness of watching the Rubbish disappear by gazing at the pattern on the stone that he'd just finished copying it onto.

"At least today's turned out pretty good... yeah... Well, I guess that's just how it goes..."

Unlike Rubbish, the stones he collected didn't carry any attribute color of their own. They were just something to gaze at until he felt satisfied, something to pass the time with until his next job came along; even when held up against the light, he never once thought they looked beautiful. Kanata told himself that what he'd copied today, together with the last one, had turned out pretty well. A pattern like a half-circle, alongside characters he didn't recognize. Like they are all part of one single, larger shape. He had no idea what it meant but it brought to mind the sound of the explosion and the heat of the fire he'd sensed on the battlefield that day. Maybe the spell that had been cast somewhere off in the distance looked something like this. Just imagining that made him feel, somehow, like he'd brushed up against a fragment of real magic. Of course, in these two years he'd never once managed to use magic himself and just as the captain, Uval, always liked to tease him about it, he knew this was nothing but a dream.

"...Hm?"

That's right. It was supposed to be nothing but a dream.

"Wait, what...? I can't even read... so how...?"

The half-circle he'd copied down, together with the unfamiliar characters: an unfinished figure.

As he stared at it, words began rising up in his mind, almost as if he were actually reading the characters. What he'd been picturing while he stared was the heat of the fire and the sound of the explosion from the battlefield. And, as always, the image of himself casting magic. Then, cutting into the middle of that daydream, some word rose up in his mind.

"...「Select」?"

Kanata heard a faint click, as though something inside him had opened. Different characters appeared in his mind. It wasn't the replaying of a memory but just like a sudden flight of imagination. Together with the image of himself that appeared inside the fantasy.

"'Flamme... Beten...?'" (Prayer... to the Flame Spirit...?)

The moment he spoke the words that had risen in his mind aloud,

"Huh? Huh?! Huh?!"

The sleeping bag Kanata had been wrapped in burst into flame. With no time to even process what was happening, he tore it off and flung it aside. All he could do was stare, stunned, as it burned. The other scavenger children were used to sleeping close to the campfire, so the flames didn't stir them from their dreams, but for Kanata, what was happening right now felt far more like a dream than anything in their sleep.

"......Huh? Huh?"

Before long the sleeping bag burned itself out, reduced to ashes worse than the rags it had started as, and the wind tearing mercilessly across his now-bared skin felt strangely cold. In a night where everyone else had gone quiet and still, only the darkness heard Kanata's dazed voice, sounding so out of place.

"Kanata... y-you..."

"Griare... Vice-Captain...? Wh-what is this...?"

...Except nothing so convenient happened. The vice-captain, Griare, had noticed the unnatural fire and come rushing over right away and Kanata had been caught red-handed without a doubt. She stared at Kanata, eyes wide with shock, as if saying that was exactly the question she wanted to ask him instead.

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**Translator's Notes**

- 「選択セレクト」→ "Select": Hence the Title: The Magic Scavenger Selects

- Added the translation for the kanji as well as later this will appear again. "'Flamme... Beten...?'" (Prayer... to the Flame Spirit...?)