Chapter 5
I Accidentally Got My Absolute Fave Involved

“Alba! Why on earth are you doing something like this…?!”

Brother pressed me with a fierceness I rarely saw in him.

Me and my Brother’s trousers were stained with dirt, because I had been tackled by him as we were teleported through the magic circle. I fell on my backside and he hovered over me as he shouted at me; seeing him from this angle was truly a feast to eyes—this could top all the still images from the popular scenes in the game. 

I was so overwhelmed by this moe that I had to desperately struggle to restrain myself from spurting out blood. No, that was not the issue at hand here!

I sharply stared back at him, who was wearing an impatient face. 

Whoa, this is really a nice angle!

“Just where is this…! Alba, what did you do?! You’re holding the magic paper from Father’s room, aren’t you?!? That’s not something you can just use for fun…!”

“Brother. I didn’t use the magic circle for fun.”

“Then, why on earth… are you doing this?”

“Because I don’t wanna die.”

At my words, my brother fell silent.

“You don’t wanna… die, yet you come to this sort of strange place…? This is a forest, there are monsters. Alba, if you come here alone and get attacked by a monster, it’s the end of the story.”

“But, I still have to come here.”

“Rather, this only made me think that you were leaving home alone in order to die…”

“I wouldn’t come here using something as expensive as Father’s magic circle to die, because I’ll die sooner or later at this rate.”

“Alba!”

For the first time, my brother shouted with an angry voice at me; startled, my movement stopped. I was shocked to look up at him and see tears in his eyes.

“You can’t ever say you’ll die sooner or later…! Father and Mother are doing everything they can to manage Alba’s illness…!”

“Uh, ah… y-yes, sorry…”

I was not expecting him to cry, so I wiped his cheeks with my dirt-stained hands as he wept over me.

Brother’s beautiful angelic face is going to be stained with dirt. 

Oblivious to what I was thinking, Brother looked over me sadly and let jewel-like drops spill from his beautiful eyes. After calming down, he helped me to stand up and removed the soil from my clothes.

“It’s dangerous here, let’s go home.”

“I cannot go home until I achieve my objective.”

“Alba, you know where this is?”

“This is the middle of the Agate Forest.”

“Agate Forest?! Why a place like that…?”

Perhaps knowing where this forest was, Brother muttered in astonishment.

That would be the case. The academy was an hour’s carriage ride from our house. From there, it was another three hours ride into the mountains in the opposite direction to our house, to the Agate Forest.

This forest had been used for survival training as part of the school’s annual event, as it was situated at a good distance from the school and there were no strong monsters.

“…Could it be that there’s something here that has something to do with Alba’s illness?”

“Yes.”

I answered my brother’s question confidently, but the truth was that I believed the odds were about 50-50, or even less.

Originally in the game, it was something discovered in Brother’s route when Brother was in his second year at the academy, so there was a seven year gap in between. There was no background data about when that herb grew or why it hadn’t been discovered until then; let alone being unsure about it, I felt like it purely was up to luck whether we could really find it this time.

I felt like I was being cornered too, and the fact that I was about to have a seizure and die just because my grandmother said something nasty to me was so frustrating and miserably pathetic. I thought at least it would be less pathetic if I were to prolong this no-good life of mine with my own power. 

I’m a man after all. I wanna show off my cool side to Brother at least once.

But it was a mistake to involve my brother in such a shallow idea, which even made him cry at that. I ended up with nothing but self-loathing.

Besides, even if I were to tell him that there was a cure for my disease here, I didn’t think Brother would believe something said by a little kid. Fortunately, there was still a magic circle to get home, so I could have him return. 

As I thought in that way, I took out the magic circle from my bag, “I have some things to do, so I will go on, but you must go home now, as it is dangerous for you.”

When I offered him the magic circle, he looked stern and refused to take it.

“Brother?”

“Does Alba think I’m a heartless big brother who would leave my little brother like this to go back to the manor alone?”

“Brother is not heartless! But my information is unreliable, it could probably be fake, there’s nothing believable about it… I couldn’t possibly involve my brother, the next Duke, in such a thing.”

“Alba, where does Alba want to go? Deep in these woods?”

“Eh, Brother?”

“Alba, you can’t use magic, can you? I’ve trained myself so well that I can kill a werewolf in the forest with a single blow, so I can protect Alba.”

“But, Brother—”

He squeezed my hand and looked over to me. I had been ready to go alone, but then I looked down at our joined hands in confusion. My hand was connected to his, the hand I felt most secure in at the moment.

The hand that held my life together.

“Brother…”

“If Alba has come out in such a reckless manner, then it means that Alba… doesn’t have much time left, am I wrong? That you don’t even have time to go back for once and consult with Father about this.”

“I’d like to think it’s not that bad, but I can’t… talk to Father about this. If I did, he’ll never allow me to come to this forest, will he?”

“Yeah. In fact, I’d like to take you home right now.”

“Brother.”

“But if Alba insists on going, I’ll go with you. I will still inform Father, though.”

He brought one hand in front of his chest and chanted an unknown chant. On the palm of his hand, ice cubes gathered and formed a bird. The ice bird shone very brightly in the sunlight through the trees. He raised his arm and the ice bird flew into the sky.

Wow! At the age of nine, he can do magic like that. Brother is the best. He is the strongest and the most angelic!

“Which way does Alba want to go?”

He asked me as he looked around carefully. This could only mean he earnestly wanted to go with me.

Feeling a little happy and reassured, I pulled out a piece of paper from my bag—a hand-drawn map of the Agate Forest.

I tried to write down as much as I could remember, but wow, I remembered a lot, didn’t I? I memorised almost all the places where my absolute fave had events. I had checked all three routes in detail.

I proudly showed it to Brother. But when he saw the map, he then looked at me with a surprised face, and I immediately snapped back to my senses.

Ah, naturally it was not good to show this map to him. He would be full of questions, like how a five-year-old could remember the paths in this forest, or what these events jotted down on this map were. The only relief was that I hadn’t written Brother’s name on it. Um, that wasn’t really a relief anyway.

“Alba… how do you know so much about this forest in such detail?”

Of course. It would appear very strange, wouldn’t it? Even I was amazed—at my ability to remember the events related to my absolute fave. If this was included in the route that belonged to the prince—the most popular capture target—my memory would certainly be fuzzy. I had only cleared his routes once or twice. 

Well, for the record, I cleared every single route in the game. This was because, in all of the routes, my absolute fave would make his appearance! It was nice to view my absolute fave from different perspectives, as they showed different cool sides of him. 

—Oops, that was not the point here. What should I do if this map made Brother think that I was dangerous or a sicko?

…It’ll hit me hard if this were to be the route where I’m hated by him.

I didn’t know how to respond to my brother’s question, so I quietly lowered my head; Brother’s hand that was holding mine squeezed it tighter.

“If it’s too hard to explain, I won’t ask. But if we have such a map, maybe we won’t get lost.”

Brother looked at my downcast face and smiled reassuringly.

Uh, uuuh, my heart hurts. But I just didn’t know how to explain this, okay?

“The place that Alba wants to go is here, right? It says Da locasyen wer da erb is faund‘1.”

“…Yup.”

“I wonder where we are now. There is a trail here but there are no landmarks, so it’s hard to tell. If we could only see the stars, we would know where we were going by the direction the celestial star was coming from.”

At my brother’s muttering, I hastily looked around. It was true that there was a trail close by, but I had no idea which way to go, or which trail was this one referring to on the map. This forest was not marked with any signs.

When exploring the forest in the game, there was no way to go wrong because I could just plunge into the forest from the starting point and follow the path, but if I came out in such a halfway place, it was natural that I wouldn’t know. The sun, our only hope, didn’t seem to go from east to west in a regular way in this world.

I hadn’t studied much about it, so I had no idea about these matters. The best way to find out the direction was to look for what my brother called the ‘celestial star’, which was always the brightest star in the northern sky. But you could only see it at night.

We were stuck.

I thought I had everything ready to go, but the sloppiness of this plan was giving me a headache. But before I set off, I believed it was perfect, didn’t I?

Could it be that, although I had all the knowledge, my thinking brain was that of a five-year-old…? Like how I would be jumping joy when I could eat my favourite snack; how my hands would refuse to reach towards the vegetable I hated when it appeared during my meals; how I viewed Brother who secretly ate them for me as a god, aaaah, I was totally a five-year-old kid.

Nope, even if I was not a five-year-old, I would still think that Brother was on the same level of god.

I wondered how it was in the game. I didn’t know what to do at all at this moment, because the background of the forest was the same no matter where I went. I subconsciously tightly clasped my brother’s hand and he gently stroked my head.

“Seems like it’s not a good idea to go ahead blindly.”

“Yes…”

But even if we stood still here, time would only pass in vain.

“Brother…”

“‘Don’t worry. Father will be here soon, and then we’ll discuss it.”

“Ehhh?!”

I looked up at my brother in surprise at his unexpected words.

“Alba, your eyes are so round. I’ve just sent the bird with our location to your father, so can you tell me a bit about this map before he comes?”

“…Will he take us home?”

“I’m sure Father will help us if we explain the situation.”

“…But Father is busy with his work.”

“‘But Father is not a heartless man who would leave Alba alone.”

“Brother…”

“It’s okay. Hey, it says here, Saev peepul haiding in tri’s burou, what does it mean?”

I guessed he was trying not to make me feel uneasy. Still linking his hand with mine, he smiled and peered at the map.

The fear of getting lost in the forest, the fear that my stepfather would come and take me back, the fear that I would get my brother hurt; all of these fears came flooding in me at this moment, but my brother’s smile seemed to melt them away little by little.

What a god.

“That was when mutant mountain wolves appeared, and here is where the first year students scrambled for cover inside the tree’s burrow.”

“Mutant mountain wolf?! Then, what’s this Brek monsuter’s trep at the middle of the road here?”

“This is where the remnants of the traps that were set during the monster outbreak were left, and it caused some students to be injured, but then ice magic was used to destroy the traps all together. Clang! Clang! So spectacular!”

“Whoa… Eh, ice magic…? Ice magic is a special attribute that has been in our bloodline for generations… Could it be Father?”

“It’s you, Brother! You were so cool!”

“Me…?”

As I was describing it, I was so excited by the scene I recalled in my head that I even gave an unnecessary explanation.

Ooops, I realised I just said something I shouldn’t have, so I tried to stay composed. Brother then looked down at me as if he was probing something.

“Alba’s attributes are… we can’t check it, right?”

“I was told that the attribution check would be life-threatening for me.”

“That’s right. The magic stone that checks the attributes will suck all the magic out of you once you touch it.”

My brother was staring at the map thoughtfully, but he looked up when he heard a voice calling for us. I turned around to see Father with an angry look on his face and some knights coming up behind him, running towards us.