But although their choice of words seemed to indicate attitudes that were polar opposites, they were both just worried about me. I couldn’t thank them enough. A little while later, around the time our lunch break ended, my stomach had settled down a bit.

“Miss Campbell, please don’t give her any more sweets today. I expect it will upset her stomach again,” Sora said to Maria after seeing that I was all right. After forbidding me any more sweets that day, Sora took his leave.

No, my sweets!

I felt a little bit sad.

Since our break was over, Maria and I immediately got to work deciphering our respective covenants. Unless they were activated by magic, no text would appear on either covenant, and when that text did appear, only the covenantee could read it. In the past, before I could use any Dark Magic, I had needed to summon Pochi—my Dark Familiar—in order to activate the covenant, but since Raphael had started teaching me Dark Magic, I could do it myself. Even though my darkness was only the size of a tangerine, that was apparently enough.

First of all, I took out my wand, topped with a skull, and used it to produce a small ball of darkness. Once I did that, letters began to appear on the page. That being said, I couldn’t read them at all, so it was more like a mysterious design had emerged.

Maria had already managed to learn a few things about Light Magic from her covenant, but I was still stuck at the first hurdle—reading the warnings and most basic concepts for those who intended to use Dark Magic.

True, the warnings were long, but I was fully aware of the fact that I was deciphering the text at a rather slow pace. As for why, it was because I had to look up every character one by one in the dictionary. Even the meaning of a character I had previously looked up and thought I understood could change if another character followed or preceded it. The ancient text really was a tough nut to crack. I was finding it very, very chal