Interlude: Academy Life Log (Willie)
"Another bust..."
A woman wandered the streets, dragging her feet—hair the deep violet of a night sky, a figure that could stop traffic, a face sharp enough to cut glass and yet somehow softened by eyes that looked almost gentle. She was the sort of beauty that seemed assembled from every lovely thing the world had ever produced.
Her name was Secri A. Garcia.
Formal heir to the Garcia school of black magic, and a woman already spoken of as a future Sage, she shredded the papers she had been reading and let the wind carry the scraps away.
Today's search for a disciple had ended, once again, with nothing to show for it.
"How is it that not a single one of them is even half decent?"
Two years—almost—of hunting for an apprentice. The candidate she had examined today brought the tally to one hundred. And of those hundred, not a single one had measured up in her eyes.
To any other mage, each of them would have been an uncut gem of talent. To Secri, they were rocks without a spark of promise. She herself was a diamond that threw light in every direction; the faint glint of lesser ore might as well have been darkness.
Today's child had been from some baronial house in the Alphaz Kingdom—someone who had, on their own, learned to convert mana into magical power, but still had no idea how to shape that power into actual spells. Discovering mana unaided was already talent enough, but talent of that caliber was something you could still dig up if you looked hard enough. One or two more, at least.
If she compromised a little, she could take such a child as her disciple. She simply did not want to compromise when it came to choosing one.
For a mage, the bond between master and disciple was not some ordinary teacher–student arrangement. You were entrusting the peak you had spent a lifetime climbing to the next generation; a disciple was family. In the Three Kingdoms and in Lyceum, a mage's disciple was recognized as family under the law. Accepting someone that important through compromise?
Secri would never allow it.
She wanted a child whose talent stood at least on her own level. Any other mage who overheard that demand would have called her arrogant and unloaded a stream of curses for good measure—but Secri was entirely serious.
"Haa..."
Given how young she still was, she had more than enough time to find a disciple—time to spare. Even so, watching the hundredth candidate fall short was starting to make her restless. She found herself half-seriously wishing some gifted child would just drop out of the sky.
"Ow!"
"Oh my—are you all right?"
Staring blankly at the heavens, Secri had walked straight into a child right outside the inn she had reserved.
A boy, gray hair visible under a hood pulled down to his eyes. Black dust clung to him from head to toe, and the arm that showed at his sleeve was painfully thin—proof enough that he had grown up somewhere hard. A child from the slums, or an orphan?
Even in Lyceum, slum districts and orphans wandering the streets were hardly unusual, so there was nothing strange about him. And yet Secri could not look away.
The moment they collided, her senses had registered a vast surge of mana. It was buried deep, hidden inside a shell—but the sheer quantity of it dwarfed her own by an absurd margin.
Could that mana... be his?
Secri studied the boy with a puzzled look and held out her hand to help him up. He slapped it away and bolted for the city gates without a single glance back—so fast that she found herself wondering where a body that skinny kept all that strength.
"Ah... did I frighten him?"
As a great mage and the formal heir of a magic lineage, Secri's clothes cost as much as anything a high noble wore. To ordinary people, she might as well have been a great aristocrat herself—and beggars and orphans had every reason to fear nobles and the rich. Getting tangled up with one rarely ended well. No matter how gently she reached out, a child of the poor had more than enough cause to panic; she understood the boy who had fled into the distance perfectly well.
The enormous mana she had felt from him still nagged at her, but she could check on that later. When he turned his back, she had quietly carved a tracking circle onto him.
Give it a day and he probably won't be so afraid of me. Just in case, I'll go find him with both hands full of food.
Mulling over tomorrow's plans, Secri pushed open the inn door.
It was the largest inn in the area—one that even lesser nobles were said to frequent. True to that reputation, the ground floor alone put ordinary inns to shame. Clean interiors, fine paintings on the walls, and food of unmistakably top quality on every table.
"I have a reservation. Secri A. Garcia."
"Ah, yes—confirmed. One night, meals and bath included? That will be two silver coins of the kingdom, prepaid."
"Yes, just a moment."
Steep for an inn, but it looked worth every coin. Secri reached into her pocket for her wallet—and found nothing. The wallet that had been there moments ago was simply gone.
Did I put it in my bag?
She dug through her bag in a rising panic. No wallet there either.
"Huh? That can't be right."
Had she dropped it in the street? No—impossible. Then what?
"Excuse me, miss. Did you happen to run into a gray-haired boy outside?"
"Yes... why?"
"Ahh. So you got hit too."
"...Excuse me?"
"Heheh! What a sucker!"
In a forest about an hour outside the city, inside a little cabin he had built in secret, Willie clutched a conspicuously luxurious wallet and practically glowed with delight.
He had lifted it off a woman who might as well have been wearing a sign that said I have money, and the haul inside did not disappoint. She looked rich enough that this much wouldn't hurt her. Besides—he was confident he would put the money to better use than she ever would. So this wasn't pickpocketing so much as coin finding its rightful owner, wasn't it?
Armed with that thoroughly rotten logic, Willie beamed as he lifted a floorboard. Gold and silver coins filled the space beneath until the sight of them made his eyes swim. This was more than enough to get him into Lyceum and keep him alive there.
First I'll grab a carriage in the next town and head for Lyceum. Then clothes and a place to live. My age might get in the way, but Lyceum is a city of mages, isn't it? Flash a little magic, claim I'm some mage's apprentice, and a house and a job should fall into place soon enough.
He had lived in this cabin for about a year now, and he felt a twinge of regret at leaving it. The way the flowers bloomed all around was genuinely pretty; he had liked that.
Well. I was always going to leave this forest someday. No point getting sentimental.
Willie took the bow down from the corner of the wall. His face was too well known in the city by now; even with money, he couldn't buy food there. So he had started feeding himself. He didn't know a thing about proper hunting, but with magic he could usually bag enough for a day. It was a bit late, but if he left now he could still put something on the table for tonight.
The moment he stepped outside—
"Found you."
"Wha—?"
A fist crashed into his face, and Willie blacked out.
"Mmph—mmph!"
"Aww, little guy—did you gather all this money just for big sis?"
Under a zelkova tree heavy with white blossoms, Willie was bound hand and foot to the trunk. He tried to shout, but the cloth stuffed in his mouth swallowed every sound. Ignoring him completely, Secri counted the various coins she had recovered from the cabin.
For a little brat, you sure piled up a fortune. Stolen money or not, the amount was almost impressive. How many people had this kid fleeced at his age? When the sprouts turned this yellow this early, was the Alphaz Kingdom's future even going to be all right?
"Mmmph!"
They said the notorious little terror of the city was a big enough catch that the knight orders had lost him more than once. Always targeting people with money, vanishing in a blink, impossible to track, home address unknown. Secri seriously wondered whether the Alphaz Kingdom could keep going like this if they couldn't even catch a brat like him. Getting toyed with by a kid who didn't even notice the magic stuck to his own back—forget the kingdom; the local knights were definitely idiots.
I'll hand over about half the money. Don't they say finders keep half of lost property? Taking half shouldn't be a problem. If it bothers you, you should have found it first.
Secri hummed to herself as she stuffed coins into her bag. Her reputation brought in a solid daily income, but Lyceum's endless stream of new magical tools ate through every coin. What she spent matched what she earned, which made day-to-day living tighter than it had any right to be—so this was pure windfall. She would probably blow it all on magical tools anyway, but as far as Secri was concerned, it was a gold nugget that had rolled straight to her feet.
"You've got talent, kid."
She dropped the last gold coin into her bag and spoke to Willie behind her. He had already worked free of the ropes and was inching away—but Secri was not so soft as to miss that. Eyes on the back of her head or not, she spoke without turning around, and Willie felt a chill of pure fear and shuffled back to where he had been.
"Mm-hm. That's a good boy."
I finally found a gifted child. I'm not losing him.
Eheheheheh.
"Huh?!"
In the free magical city-state of Lyceum, in a Sage's private chambers within the Magic Tower, Willie woke with a jolt of pain through his chest.
"Ugh..."
He was sure he had been having a nostalgic dream, but this damned pain had wiped every detail of it clean. Gritting his teeth against the ache, Willie hastily crammed the painkillers from his desk into his mouth.
"Man... what a life."
The medicine bought him a brief reprieve. He stood before the mirror and checked the wound on his chest.
Centered over his left breast and spreading across his upper body were purple scars that seemed almost alive, writhing in a way that made his skin crawl. They were the marks left when he had taken a Hydra's venomous miasma head-on while bringing down that ancient calamity.
Willie worked salve carefully into every corner of the scars, then glanced at the clock on the wall.
5:46 in the morning. Too awkward an hour to go back to sleep. He let out a long breath, sat down, and looked over the documents he had been reviewing the day before.
He hadn't become a teacher at Aegis because he particularly wanted to—but he was already on the faculty, so the least he could do was put in a minimum of effort.
"Haa. What a pain."
Willie scratched hard at his scalp and decided to check the papers over one more time for anything out of place.