1: (Before the Incident) It All Starts in the Salt-Damaged Lands
“Ahh! I smell fresh grass!” Dia, wearing my handmade scrunchie on her right front leg, leaped down from atop my head. With that comical scurrying gait unique to armadillos, she dashed down the slope.
The slope wasn’t quite sixty degrees, and I wouldn’t be rude enough to suggest rolling down curled up might be faster.
This place was a week’s ride on horseback from the Academy, but the Transfer Station, a public teleportation service, could get you here in just a few hours. So here we were, at the salt-damaged lands our class group had chosen as the theme for our graduation research project on restoration.
Up until yesterday, we’d been on a two-night, three-day field visit to a nearby orphanage. The trip had combined collecting research data with community service for the Academy. That part had been with my usual teammates, and we’d stayed in the orphanage. After enjoying breakfast with the orphans this morning, I was now on a leisurely stroll through the mountains with Dia.
My teammates, Kartika and Lauren, had returned to the capital with Prince Regulus, who’d been supervising us. They were probably both at their part-time jobs by now. Team Leader Ralph was probably having lunch at his family home, as they served as lords of the neighboring domain.
“Be careful over there! The slope drops off into a cliff!” I called out to Dia, just in case—though her shell should protect her in the event of a fall, as long as she curled up. Some said an armadillo’s shell could even deflect bullets... That was knowledge from my past life, though.
When she’d been a magical beast, Dia’s body had been white gray, but now that had changed to pale vermilion fur and a red shell with an iridescent sheen to it. That was the effect of inheriting power from the sacred beast Vamillia, who had looked like an illustration of a legendary phoenix I’d seen online in my past life. Those colors sure made for a super flashy armadillo. Thanks to that, though, I doubted I’d lose sight of her.
I believed Vamillia—Lia—would return and appear before me so
