Chapter 99: Because I'm your student

Lawvine just looked down at Michel without a word, his face unreadable.

"Colored flames. The smell of gunpowder. You detonated them in the sky? What did you add to…?" Michel trailed off, racking his brains.

The devices Michel made were very precise and easy to understand, just as I thought they would be.

Rishe's time concern had been over the right moment to fire the bundles of gunpowder—her fireworks—up into the sky.

Once they found the devices, we were kind of gambling on whether Theodore's agents could rewire them. It's a testament to their design that people who had never seen them before could use them with just a brief set of instructions.

Nothing extraneous existed on the devices; you could tell a lot just by looking at them. They were simplified—made convenient for anyone who wanted to use them.

Rishe called the beautiful flames shooting into the sky "fireworks". Their splendor seemed to have been burned vividly into Michel's eyes. He was looking up like a boy marveling at the stars, in awe of the unknown.

The second round of fireworks soared upward. While Michel was distracted, Rishe told him, "My teacher once showed me an aurora."

Michel slowly turned toward her, his face wiped of all expression.

"At the time, I was trying to solve a problem. I wanted to know if it was possible to detect harmful substances in a lump of metals. When my teacher showed me those lights, they reminded me of something: the reaction that occurs when you throw certain substances into a fire."

"That's right. When you burn metal, the color of the flame changes based on the type. Blue and green flames do resemble an aurora…"

Rishe nodded at Michel's somewhat dazed words. For her fireworks, she'd used metal shavings a craftsman from Coyolles had given her. The dust was just a byproduct, so Kyle had sourced it easily.

"Seeing the aurora taught me how to tell different metals apart. And that's not all." Rishe drew in a short breath.

"It changed the way I looked at things, and it gave me a way to change the color of flames."

Michel's eyes widened.

"Are the small lights you see in the darkness wartime torches, or are they fireflies? By changing your perspective, a phenomenon takes on new meaning."

Rishe had realized that the night she'd talked with Arnold on his balcony. What should she do to stop Michel? How could she get Arnold to accept Coyolles?

Her answer was to show them the view from different angles—show them the value of the things they considered worthless.

"A single phenomenon can be interpreted in many different ways."

Rishe had finally reached a conclusion she was satisfied with. "Don't you think people and inventions are the same?"

All along, Michel believed his purpose in life was to bring misery to others. He'd denied Rishe's assertion that he could exist without a goal, but that was only natural.

He's an alchemist, after all.

Without proof, words were just predictions. A genius scientist like Michel would never believe someone else's hypothesis without anything to support it.

If I don't prove it to him with quantifiable evidence, nothing I say will get through to him!

So, Rishe offered her proof. "People and inventions do not produce one single effect. Something that exists only to bring unhappiness is an impossibility."

"You put all this together just to prove a point? Why would you go so far?"

The answer to Michel's question was obvious; "Because I'm your student."

Michel couldn't know what Rishe really meant when she said that. Still, her words were like a prayer. In a past life, Michel had spared no effort to teach Rishe everything she could possibly want to know.

Even if he doesn't know that…even if the world gets reset…that won't go away.

As long as Rishe still remembered it, the truth existed within her, nestled deep in her heart.

"You insist your existence and the things you create can only cause despair…"

A third flash of flame burned in a distant corner of the capital. Even Michel couldn't rig the devices to go off all at once. The third shot went off late, sailing into the sky with a tail of light behind it.

"..So I'll do everything I can to prove that you're wrong!"

For a split second, before the fireworks were set to explode, their lights winked out.

"See it with your own eyes. Watch as something that you brought into this world holds a value you never dreamed it could!"

Boom!

There was a heavy boom, and a huge flower bloomed in the night sky, its petals falling like shooting stars. Lights glittering blue and green spilled forth, mimicking a night sky. They dyed one section of the sky in colors as brilliant as the aurora, crackling as they floated down.

Michel looked up at the lights, squinting against the glare. "I didn't know…" He said softly. "I knew about flame tests and how gunpowder functioned, but this never occurred to me."

"I'm sure there are plenty of other applications. If you just change your perspective, every poisonous thing you've invented could be put to other uses."

"Heh heh. You might be right." Michel's smile was forlorn.

"You're amazing, Rishe."

"No, Professor."

Rishe shook her head. "You're amazing. You're an unparalleled genius, an alchemist who will go on to gift wonders to the world."

"You really say the strangest things." Michel said, shaking his head. He looked up at the sky again.

"I see… I can hardly believe it." Michel's expression was fragile, like he might start to cry at any moment. "To think I created the base for something so beautiful."

She took a step toward him. "Professor, I—"

"What's going on here, Lawvine?"

Rishe spun around. The air crackled with tension, the knights all taking a knee at once. At the entrance to the garden was someone she wasn't expecting.

Prince Arnold?!