Class
Class
After Professor Rübis's class, an uneventful daily routine continued for about a week.
The only difference, if any, was that due to a sudden schedule change, I'd gotten to try out the first-year Practical Combat course but couldn't do the third-years. It wasn't just a third-year issue—there was some kind of curriculum adjustment involving the second-years too, but I never heard the specifics. I just heard it was something like a winter training camp. They called it a winter camp, but it was obviously going to be some brutal cold-weather military training, so I wanted to tease Sheryl relentlessly, but unfortunately, I never ran into her.
However, that was an uneventful daily routine only in the sense that no special incidents or accidents occurred—it didn't mean I spent it leisurely. Since Master had jumped in at an awkward time and had empty time until winter break, the moment his research lab was organized, he immediately called for Seneran. And she arrived showing an otherworldly level of high tension with a horse-drawn cart and porters loaded with an obscene amount of luggage, like she was moving house.
"Finally! I! Have arrived!"
"Ah... yes. It's been a while, Seneran. But what in the world is with the luggage cart behind you?"
"Research supplies!"
As Seneran began stuffing the research lab with the items she'd brought as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, I shifted my gaze from her to Master, but all I got back was a breezy shrug of the shoulders.
"She told me my equipment was too outdated. If the Golden Mage says so, I have no reason to stop her."
"Isn't Magic Power research equipment only obtainable in the Demonfolk Territory?"
"The brand-new stuff, yes."
She said the goods were imported via races and nations that conducted trade with the Demonfolk Territory, and because of that, the price had nearly doubled, but Seneran apparently paid it all upfront without a moment's hesitation. Indeed, that was the kind of drive you'd expect from a woman who started earning money for her own research.
I'd worried I might accidentally break something by moving objects whose purpose I couldn't fathom at all, but fortunately, the porters she'd brought finished setting everything up perfectly and vanished along with the cart. The research lab, which had initially seemed quite spacious, disappeared completely, and amid the sprawling chaos that looked like Seneran's Magic Library lab had been transplanted verbatim, she declared with a satisfied smile.
"Time to build a Magic Organ!"
Shouting out the goal all three of us in the room eagerly desired, she didn't give me a moment to agree before dragging over a blackboard and launching into an explanation of the Magic Organ's structure, general principles, and how Demonfolk perceived it. Contrary to my first impression that the deluge of specialized knowledge would mean only she and Master could understand each other without me, Seneran surprised me by breaking down almost everything step by step until I clearly understood.
"Why are you surprised by that? You're the core of this project, so isn't this a given?"
I upgraded my assessment of Seneran—who looked puzzled as if she genuinely couldn't understand my reaction—from strange person to strange-but-good person, then I threw myself into asking questions to repay her sincerity.
It was an extremely burdensome time even for me, who had resolved to live shamelessly. There wasn't just one or two things that couldn't be understood unless two mages of towering renown broke problems requiring advanced mathematics down into basic arithmetic and spoon-fed them to me. It was only after conversing at a level where one question popped out for every sentence spoken that I could vaguely grasp what form this Magic Organ took in practice.
"Goddamn."
And the moment I understood, I couldn't stop a curse from flying out reflexively.
"Suddenly swearing?"
Seneran voiced her confusion, but rather than correcting my slip, I had no choice but to ask about this reality I just couldn't believe.
"How the hell have you been holding out in a war against the Demonfolk for seven years?"
The structure of a Magic Organ could be said to be similar to Mana or aura. Since both were created in the first place by significantly downgrading Magic Power, it was an obvious statement if you thought about it.
Mana and aura, which absolutely must receive fuel through a process called 'refinement' in order to function, are, by analogy, closer to the engines in modern vehicles. That is why you can increase the purity of the fuel, continuously upgrade and adjust the engine to withstand that purity, and thereby become stronger.
In contrast, it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say a Magic Organ is like the nuclear reactor embedded in the chest of a famous billionaire superhero. Moreover, just breathing automatically supplies the necessary resources, so there's no risk of running out of fuel. The gap was so staggeringly enormous that I could now fully grasp why that Demonfolk bastard whose neck I'd twisted off like a bottle cap back in the Empire had lamented his own situation while spouting that abject bullshit.
"There were... many sacrifices."
Such an overwhelmingly vast gap. It wouldn't have been strange at all if the war had ended long before the erosion magic Master mentioned was invented, and before humanity's strength surged dramatically, as indicated by the Holy Light Cross Order documents. How do you take down Iron Man with a fucking car?
But they had pulled it off. Even a spearman who had trained for five thousand years and defeated a tank with a telekinetically controlled spear would not have been more astonishing than this. As I found myself genuinely admiring it, another question suddenly blazed up in my mind.
"Wait a minute. Then how on earth did people defeat the Demon King's armies in earlier eras and hold out against them?"
The conflict between a Hero and the Demon King wasn't the first in the continent's history. It was a time-honored tradition-like conflict, continuing for a considerably long time since ancient eras when records had vanished. In that process, nations fell, the Demonfolk Territory expanded or contracted, and there were various changes, but history never recorded the continent falling completely into the Demon King's hands.
I mean, not being able to unify the continent even once with specs where literally just an attack-move would win—isn't that too damn weird? At my natural question, Seneran shrugged her shoulders and answered indifferently.
"Demonfolk didn't have the concept of Magic Organs from the start, and in every era, figures called heroes emerge and play their part. Above all, there's the Hero, you know."
"But he was weak?"
Of course, he was a filthy talent freak who'd withstood my lifelong training with only a few months of his own, but I conveniently left that fact out and tried my hand at some good old-fashioned propaganda and fabrication.
"You're the abnormal one. Or the current Hero is abnormal. And looking at the records, a Hero's power isn't merely about personal martial strength."
"...What, do they have wide-range support skills like the priests' blessings or something?"
"Oh, yeah. They have something like that."
What a fucking amazing world. So Siegfried, who was tanking the students' morale at the academy, was an entity who could buff our allies on the battlefield. It was hard to fully grasp everything from just that, but since digging deeper wouldn't exactly help me create a Magic Organ, I decided to let it slide.
"As Seneran said, the Magic Organs of Demonfolk have also evolved. In the past, there were Demonfolk who pursued strength even at the cost of their lives by attempting reckless output, but in the present, Demonfolk Magic Organs thoroughly pursue stability."
Master was saying that since their output was already strong, they focused on making all sorts of safety devices with the idea of just enduring long enough. He jotted down some utterly incomprehensible Magic Organ safety device concepts on the blackboard—things like Gulreng's Magic Power Backflow Prevention Formula and Peneldroa's Compression Formula—then turned his gaze back to me and continued his explanation.
"There are over 15 safety devices that Demonfolk consider essential, just to avoid death by magic rampage. If you dig into the nitty-gritty, there are even more, and many methods of applying these to gain explosive power have also been researched. It's safe to assume that a powerful Demonfolk is one who has installed more of these safety devices on their Magic Organ. Just as we have differences in innate talent, they do too, but geniuses are always a minority. There's no need to keep such atypical edge cases in mind right now."
The five listed on the board weren't the end of it? Even the majority of aura users still trained in a slapdash manner, but that was baseline for Demonfolk? Was the Demonfolk Territory actually a place with a highly modernized education culture?
"For you, this is both good and bad news. The good news is that once the Magic Organ settles in your body, you'll be able to simultaneously learn how to combust Magic Power much more efficiently than you do now and extract potent force, and in that process, you'll have almost no worries about being endangered by a magic rampage. The bad news is that since Seneran and I can only assist you with theory through all these processes, you'll effectively have to break through this on your own."
Did an unknown territory always have to cause such a mindfuck? But I wasn't in a position to give up, so just as my vision was going dark, Seneran chimed in.
"Don't look so bleak. I've picked up a lot of this and that by asking the Demonfolk I know. It'll be helpful."
"Please, for the love of god, wipe that excited grin off your face first before you say that."
"Hey, you think I'm saying this so you'll die? You have to stay alive for my research to continue too, you know."
It was the moment her evaluation went from strange-but-good person to strange person who I couldn't tell was good or bad.