The Definition of Mana (3)
"Wow… I can still feel that scene from earlier so vividly."
"Right? The depth wasn't even that strong, but somehow it really felt like I was actually there."
"Professor Felix was this good…? Then why hasn't he ever shown us anything like this before?"
With Felix's curriculum finished, the students filed out of the lecture hall still wearing dazed expressions, murmuring as they replayed the moments they had just experienced.
Felix's magic had less physical presence than true illusion magic. Unlike what illusion magic displayed, it conveyed purely visual information — and if one paid careful attention to their senses, they would have realized that nothing about their situation of sitting in a classroom had changed at all.
But the students had accepted the vision they had just witnessed as something real.
That was how thoroughly Felix's mana-control ability had become an opportunity for them to reassess him entirely. Spellbound by a magical landscape utterly unlike anything he had shown them before, they left already harboring anticipation for what his major courses would look like once they began in earnest.
However.
"Oh? You're still here?"
Having wrapped up the curriculum and preparing to leave the lecture hall himself, Felix spotted Remillion still standing blankly at the back of the room — unlike the students — and called out to her.
"What did you think of my curriculum? I was hoping it left an impression on Professor Remillion. Or did it not?"
After hearing what she said yesterday, there's no way I'm letting this slide. I stayed up all night preparing that magic!
In truth, Felix had taken yesterday's criticism from Remillion very much to heart, and the magic he had poured every ounce of effort into creating had been meant to thoroughly flatten that proud nose of hers.
"…I can't."
"Pardon?"
"I can't accept it! It doesn't make any sense! How on earth is something like this even possible?"
At Felix's smug little performance, Remillion — who had kept her head bowed the entire time — snapped it up, scowling, and strode straight toward him.
"The magic you showed wasn't illusion magic. It was a landscape where you substituted every structure with mana one by one — a kind of illusion that still possessed substance!"
"And there's no way I can accept that the magic circle you used could manipulate a landscape like that! To cast magic on that scale, even covering this entire classroom wouldn't give you enough mana or enough computational strokes!"
It has to be a fraud. There's no other explanation!
Never mind how excellent the magic itself was — the fact that he had casually demonstrated a spell whose activation conditions were absurdly insufficient meant the very order of magic she had spent her life studying and researching was collapsing. Remillion pushed back hard, demanding answers.
"Ah, I can explain that."
Even faced with such questioning, Felix remained perfectly calm. He drew a notebook from his coat, flipped it open, and took out a fountain pen.
"The core problem with the magic circle used this time was how to naturally express the scenery composing the objects through mana. I calculated it like this."
"First, I cast illusion magic that produces an intangible illusion inside my own brain, then I designed a simulation code that records the landscape I'm looking at."
"In other words, I comprehensively analyze the illusion I'm seeing and feeling, then simply copy that entire process wholesale — so I don't have to manually work out every detail of grass swaying in the wind. That lightens the mana consumption considerably."
"Simul… what?"
As he pointed his pen at the magic circle drawn in his notebook and explained the principle, Remillion looked as though she had just heard a completely unfamiliar word and could not make sense of it.
"Think about it. When you use Fireball, for instance, you construct the coordinate settings and distance-proportional calculations in your head one by one to hit the target, right?"
"That's right."
"But why do you have to calculate everything manually?"
"Well… if you throw it without calculating, you won't hit the target?"
"But what if the magic circle automatically calculated the target's distance just from your gaze, and requested the appropriate amount of mana accordingly?"
"…Huh?"
"I conducted research to make that hypothesis a reality."
Scratch—scratch—
To demonstrate his hypothesis, Felix drew a single circle on a blank page of his notebook, then sketched out an incomplete Fireball magic circle.
Aside from the central stroke that converted mana into a burning mass, the circle was completely empty. Cast as-is, it would produce nothing more than a fireball that hung briefly in the air before vanishing in an instant.
"Into this remaining space, I first insert a formula that synchronizes the caster's field of vision with the magic circle. I took only the necessary components from the magic circle used in Clairvoyance magic."
"After all, it's the part that expands your vision through magic, so just peeling off this foundational piece is enough."
"Next, I add strokes from a spell that precisely marks a specific point. I was able to pull those from detection magic of a similar lineage to Clairvoyance as well."
"At this point, a basic Fireball circle can no longer handle the mana load, so I draw one more large circle on the inside like this. Still have space left, right? Then into this section I add strokes that report the distance to the target. Those I took from a mapping spell among the detection magics."
"Preparations complete, yes? Finally, I inscribe the mana computation that processes every one of these steps and designates the mana quantity. It's a computational formula that compounds the three added magical strokes and derives a result, so drawing it simply…"
When Felix's hand finally stopped, the completed magic circle appeared before Remillion's eyes.
"The number of strokes is definitely higher than a regular Fireball circle, but since you don't need to do the calculations yourself, casting speed becomes dramatically faster."
The once-simple magic circle of Fireball — a thoroughly basic fire-element attack spell — had transformed into something so complex it could practically be called an entirely different magic.
"Good heavens."
And Remillion, who had watched the entire process from right beside him, stood with her mouth hanging open.
The single greatest time sink in casting magic was the need to calculate distance to the target, power, speed, and so on before the spell could be ordered. But with the theory Felix had developed, there was no need to calculate at all. Distance adjusted itself automatically, and power or speed could be regulated simply by pouring in more mana.
Knowing that a mage's greatest talent was casting speed born of computational ability, this fact alone was a discovery large enough to overturn the entire field of magicology.
"Well? Simple, right?"
"S-simple? This?"
But what was even more astonishing was Felix himself — explaining this monumental, extraordinary achievement as though it were nothing more than helping a classmate with homework.
"Do you have any idea how huge this discovery is?! No — good lord, how did you even think of this method?"
"What?"
"Don't give me that vacant look! It's not even that the magic itself is exceptional — the components you combined are just pieces pulled one by one from basic spells and assembled together. So… why has no one ever thought of this?"
Flipping back through Felix's notebook with an expression of utter disbelief, Remillion muttered under her breath, her rabbit ears twitching nonstop.
Felix's theory was something even Remillion could implement right now.
"Yes… this was it."
But in that magic circle, Remillion found the definitive clue as to why she and the rest of the Magic Tower had been incapable of this — and why only Felix could create such magic.
"This mana computation. What on earth is it?"
That was the clue: the mana computation formula that took those three magics and derived an answer from them.
"This is… it's no different from embedding an abacus inside a magic circle. You don't even need to calculate with your head — just input the problem and it spits out the answer on its own… How did you create this mana computation function?!"
To Remillion's eyes, that mana computation formula was the alpha and omega of the entire magic circle.
In a sense, it was like embedding a high-performance brain into a magic circle and making it do the calculations — bizarre, yet extraordinary and brilliant.
"Um… because doing it that way is way more convenient?"
But Felix could not find an answer that matched the intensity of Remillion's question.
To Felix, magic was no different from a computer language. The computer was this world, and the process of coding that world was magic itself.
Once he had figured out the theory — that when handed the problem of "create a fireball," you convert mana into the fire element, clump it to a fixed size, then calculate the appropriate angle, distance, power, and velocity before throwing it equals Fireball — it became his specialty field.
Which was why, when Felix first began studying magic in earnest, there had been a great many things he simply could not understand.
Why go through all that manual calculation? Couldn't you just create a kind of program that outputs an answer when given the right problem? That thought had occurred to him, and with Tene's (entirely one-sided) help, he had successfully formalized it into perfect equations.
"Ha… haha…"
Hearing Felix's sheepish reply, Remillion could manage no other reaction. She simply let out a hollow laugh.
Felix was a genius of magic.
And not just any genius — one capable of overturning the very rules of this world.
And she did not want to admit it.
She had worked herself half to death just to barely earn this position, while he had snatched it up through family prestige, flattery, and bribes — an ignorant, eccentric noble who hadn't known the first letter of the word "magic." And she had looked down on that noble with contempt and disgust, treating him as inferior.
Imagining what Felix must have thought yesterday, watching her show off so proudly in his laboratory, she wanted nothing more than to crawl into a hole and disappear.
That noble had actually been an incredible genius — so far beyond her that he made her level look like a child's arithmetic. How ridiculous must she have seemed, putting on airs in front of him?
And yet he had laid out this stage and done a tap dance on it to thoroughly humiliate her. The shame and horror of it were overwhelming.
The moment she realized this, Remillion's rabbit ears went rigid from base to tip, only the very ends twitching spasmodically, and her face flushed scarlet with humiliation.
She did not want to admit it.
That this Felix was better than her. That he had been handed everything, lived as dissolutely as he pleased, and then gone ta-da~ turns out I was a genius who thinks of you as complete garbage~ — it felt as though the entire world were playing a cruel joke on her alone.
Remillion was seized by the urge to flee this place at once, barricade herself in her laboratory, and cry for days on end.
But she could not.
"Th-that… even if you use this mana computation! How did you create that vast background?!"
No — she did not want to.
Instead of retreating and running away, Remillion chose to take a firm step forward and continue questioning Felix.
So what if it was humiliating? So what if it was embarrassing?
Right now, she was confirming knowledge that would bring about an enormous change in the world of magic that no one else had discovered — and she was seeing it before anyone else.
The spirit of a magicologist blazing in her chest burned as fiercely as the fire-attribute magic she so often wielded.
She wanted to know more. Just a little more. To overcome her own ignorance and reach further toward the truth of magic.
That was the path of the mage that had guided her and served as her compass all this time.
"…As for that part."
And when Felix saw those eyes of hers, blazing with thirst for knowledge, the corners of his mouth curved upward with genuine enjoyment as he continued his explanation.
In that place, the pretentious, disagreeable eldest son of a count family and the cute rabbit-eared elf no longer existed.
Only scholars in pursuit of knowledge remained, continuing their heated discussion.