The Tower Extending Underground (5)
“Mjolnir—Shoot!!”
—Kwaaaaaang!
The arrow of lightning streaked across the clearing. The bolt that had only traveled a single meter dispersed instantly, scattering like persimmon vinegar poured into water. It felt as if it had vanished before it even flew. The thunderclap exploding right in front of me left my ears ringing for a moment.
What the hell?
Was that a success? No, but it felt completely different from the Ice Missile Tirsi had used. I sat there in my shooting stance, mouth hanging open like an idiot.
—Crackle!
The residual electricity in the air sparked once before vanishing. The aftermath of Lightning Arrow had erupted across a wide area like a psionic storm.
The lightning dispersed? Why? I didn’t even pour in that much mana?
In terms of Water Creation, it was barely enough mana to fill a single cup. Thunder was the sound of superheated lightning rupturing the air. There was no way my pathetic rat-tail amount of mana should have produced an explosion that loud.
“It failed,” Tirsi said.
I brushed the dirt off my knees and stood.
“Failed?”
“Yes. The arrow made a loud noise, but its actual power was weak. I told you before—this magic circle is a barrier designed to disperse electricity.”
“Ah, I kind of figured. So the barrier scattered all the arrow’s electricity and caused that?”
In other words, the barrier functioned like one giant lightning rod. Electricity scattered in every direction and got absorbed, which explained why even a tiny amount of mana created such a loud effect. That was also why it had exploded and disintegrated before traveling even three meters.
“You catch on quickly, as expected.”
Tirsi looked relieved she wouldn’t have to explain further. It seemed my genius-level ability to grasp two concepts from one explanation pleased her.
“As I explained, this training prevents the caster from injuring themselves by disrupting the arrow’s energy before it reaches the target. I prepared the barrier because I thought it would be perfect for practice.”
—Wink.
Tirsi wiggled her finger.
“If you can launch lightning five meters inside the barrier, you won’t hurt yourself from immature spellcasting or fall short on range in real combat.”
“You went this far just for me… Thank you.”
I bowed deeply. Magicians weren’t exactly common. I was the one who should have been begging her to join our party, yet here she was not only working with us but diligently helping. I was so moved that my heart almost overflowed—until Tirsi waved her hands dismissively.
“Not at all. I was the one surprised by how quickly you succeeded on your first try. Does Nord handle a bow well too, by any chance?”
“Heh. Sorry to disappoint, but no. I just happened to figure out the trick.”
“Fufufu. Maybe you have talent for magic as well?”
Tirsi offered the praise with a friendly smile. The real reason I had succeeded so quickly was slightly different, though.
Fuck. My military service actually came in handy in this life.
The experience of shooting training with the temperamental K-2 rifle that jammed constantly had paid off. Who could have guessed that the company commander’s half-assed decision to recruit volunteers just to burn through leftover training ammo would prove useful here?
Tirsi clapped her hands.
“Anyway, all that’s left is practice, practice, and more practice! Succeed with one, then two, then three! Fighting!”
She threw an awkward punch while cheering enthusiastically. Every time I saw it, I thought the same thing—the cold first impression given by her white hair and pale skin was completely at odds with her actual personality.
I bumped my fist against hers.
“I’ll work as hard as you’ve helped me. Please take care of me.”
“Huh? Ah, yes.”
Tirsi tilted her head curiously when I offered the fist bump. Ah, fuck. I’d slipped up. That kind of greeting didn’t exist in this world. I must have been possessed by some rapper’s hipster soul. If anyone asked, I’d just claim it was Kitai culture. Sorry, hometown whose exact location I can’t even remember.
“But won’t outdoor training like this become difficult if it rains?”
“The Mage Guild has an indoor practice hall. Since you’re treated as a quasi-guild member, you can rent it. I borrowed this spot today because I didn’t want to make you travel far.”
“I see. I’m learning everything from scratch.”
“Don’t say that. Still, if you feel uncomfortable with me constantly declining, you can treat me to a meal someday.”
“Sure. We’re party members now, so that chance will come.”
“Fufu. Please take care of me.”
Tirsi raised her fist again so I wouldn’t feel awkward. Grateful for the gesture, I lightly bumped it once more.
The magic practice had only begun an hour earlier.
“Steam—Iron!”
—Kwaaaaaaaaang!
While Larilura received instruction from Tirsi, I diligently practiced Lightning Arrow. The results?
Fucking nothing.
“It was there, but then it wasn’t.”
Gathering mana into a bullet-like form and firing it was easy. The difficult part came afterward. The cohesion of the mana—in cruder terms, its “solidity”—was lacking. I’d tried increasing the number of arrows, concentrating for three full minutes, and every other insane method I could think of, but I couldn’t cross the demonic one-meter line.
How could I describe it? It felt like trying to throw a ball of thread rolled up between two pinkies.
But fuck, since when does a round ball of thread fly far?
The moment I fired the arrow, the mana couldn’t withstand the propulsion force that far exceeded expectations. It screamed “Deshiaaaat!!” and scattered.
“Mom, pass the grass.”
Why the hell wouldn’t my own mana listen to me?
I stared at the one-meter line I’d drawn on the ground and stamped my foot.
Combining formulas doesn’t help either.
What I needed was a technique to condense the mana. Increasing output wouldn’t solve the fundamental issue. Well, sure, increasing output would make it fly farther. But if the arrow grew larger, I’d end up inside the electrocution radius myself. It would be like ordering Squirtle to use Thunderbolt at a million volts. Instant electric yongbongtang soup.
If I mastered this magic later, I might be able to combine it with Summon Cloud and achieve a one-hundred-percent reproduction of a psionic storm, but that was still a distant dream.
The path of the High Templar is just as long and treacherous as the path of the macho man.
The reason I could combine formulas as easily as eating cake was because those had been ridiculously simple low-level spells.
The formula combination for Beast Regression was the same.
That had been a crude technique—nothing more than connecting a magic hose to the Beast Regression faucet. Even a kid dragged away from watching YouTube could have done it in ten seconds and gone back to his room.
In comparison, combining formulas for mid-level magic that required proper incantations was like fixing a broken water pipe. Fuck, how am I supposed to do that?
People tended to look down on technical professions, but plumbers were absolute legends. When pipes froze and burst in the middle of winter, nothing felt more reassuring than seeing them arrive. They lived in a completely different world from someone like me who screamed at backed-up toilet water.
Anyway, formula combination has high difficulty.
Because I had learned the trick, I was able to mix two spells when I proposed to Franc. Just because someone who learned 1+1 could now calculate 69+74 didn’t mean people would praise it as amazing.
Formula combination for low-level magic was the same. If she knew the method, even Larilura working hard over there would master it quickly.
…Fuck. I might have underestimated magic.
Since picking up low-level spells had been so easy, I thought I might actually have talent for it. That wasn’t particularly true.
So that’s why magicians are treated so well.
There were two types of jobs that looked easy but paid well: either a total blue ocean, or “you fucking try it then.” The magic industry was the latter. Half-assed idiots like me who entered with that mindset would spend twenty or thirty years reaching eight-star rank, live out their lives as guild members, and die.
It felt exactly like when I, who had won silver in an elementary math competition, had a mental breakdown seeing the alphabet on my middle-school entrance exam.
If Burning Hand plus Beast Regression was addition, then Lightning Arrow plus Summon Cloud was probably quadratic equations. Lightning Arrow itself felt like multiplication—multiplication table level at best.
“Five times one is five, five times two is ten, five times three is fifteen…”
I realized I was reciting the multiplication table like a monk facing a trial.
The nightmare from my elementary school days suddenly resurfaced.
It happened back when I was just a brat. Even though the teaching authority of my father’s generation—who took bribes—had collapsed, it was still the dark age of elementary education where people openly said kids needed to be beaten to listen.
We were called “elemglings,” following the Starcraft boom, and treated like senseless alien creatures. Teachers would smack the palms of little kids who had nowhere else to be hit, using whips harvested from the mountain behind the school or that fucking rock-hard traditional flute.
During those horrible childhood years when “concepts” were forcibly injected into our bloodstream daily, I received five smacks on the palm every single day from my damn homeroom teacher for failing to memorize the multiplication table.
Those fucking red glasses frames, vivid enough to appear in my dreams! The teacher who wielded that hard-to-play, annoyingly difficult flute as her main weapon and wore a headband across her forehead repeated the same thing over and over like a ramen-splattered cassette tape.
“Kang Bukho!! How many hits do you want!!”
It seemed like she was giving me a choice, but we had no right to choose our own future. If you picked a number you liked, you’d get two to five times as many hits.
“I’ll take ten hits……”
I submitted to the unspoken agreement and called out ten like everyone else. Ten was the appropriate line where that red-glasses bitch stained with the blood of elemglings wouldn’t think you were trying to be clever.
Funnily enough, five was the standard for the girls. Perhaps the feminism that would rampage across the twenty-first century had already begun signaling its arrival back then.
“Count the numbers each time you get hit.”
When I declared I would take ten hits, the red-glasses homeroom teacher would, depending on her mood that day, either deliver those ten blows lightly or ask for confirmation before smacking with double the force.
Didn’t deciding the number without equalizing the damage per hit defeat the purpose? Even an unripe elementary student’s brain could understand that question, yet our homeroom teacher apparently could not. That damn red glasses must have been a cursed item that lowered intelligence.
Thinking about it now, the only vague speculation left is that the days when her danso swing carried a multiplication buff were the days of her menstrual cycle.
—Slap! Smack!
After getting my palms beaten and whimpering back to my seat, my daily routine was to wet the math textbook with tears while repeating the easiest multiplication table—fives—while cooling my stinging palms against the cold aluminum chair legs.
Shwaaaaaaaa!!
The mana spun.
The trauma of my youth melted into my mana and sublimated into a single realization.
People can only teach others in the way they themselves know.
That was my epiphany. Both my elementary homeroom teacher who had raised my youth through pain and Tirsi were the same. Their methods were polar opposites, and their appearances differed as much as deep-sea fish boiled in mixed coffee and an elegant swan, yet they shared one thing: their teachings were inevitably mixed with their own experiences and ideologies. Perhaps that was the fate of all educators.
And── how one digests another’s teaching also depends on that person’s view of life.
Even after receiving the same compulsory education, some become juvenile offenders who commit rape and murder in their teens, while others give up their seats to carry an elder’s burden on the subway.
The analogies and explanations of otherworlders don’t resonate with me.
I am not an otherworlder, and otherworlders are not Earthlings. How could the people of Britannia possibly understand the feeling of leading Marine Division 2 and seeing thorns fly in enemy territory?
For a wanderer who had crossed from another world, creating my own image was essential.
Even starting from the same martial school, the destination reached is different.
Nefertiti’s words echoed in my mind. Wasn’t it the same for both martial arts and magic? No matter whose influence you received, a true master had to create their own original style. Just like how Starcraft 1 had lasted ten years while players developed completely different tactics using the same units!
—Thud!
I raised a finger and manipulated my mana. It was a luxury for a pathetic fake magician like me to dream of creating new magic or modifying existing spells. As someone who was a scholar in name, I knew that. To develop original magic or add arrangements like Tirsi, I needed far more polishing.
So shouldn’t I fight as a twenty-first-century Earthling? If not now, when would I ever use the imagination I had gained from wasting my life on multimedia?
I entered maximum concentration mode.
Image. Image.
To me, this electric ball wasn’t an arrow. It was a bullet. A true lightning bullet!
What was the structure of a bullet? Largely propellant, projectile, and casing. The propellant could be omitted since I was firing it with my own mana. The projectile was the electricity. So all that remained was the casing.
Casing. Perfect.
The casing prevented the gunpowder’s propulsion from being wasted. It matched the exact problem I was facing.
—Click.
The moment that thought clicked, the image of the mana I poured into the formula completely transformed into a bullet. I chanted the spell again.
"Heavenly mana of lightning flowing through the sky."
"Become a single fingernail and pierce through."
⟨ Lightning Arrow ⟩
—Crackle.
The spherical electric ball appeared! I aimed it forward and fired.
—Crackle!
—Kwaaaaaang!
Unfortunately, the lightning scattered midway. Still, I didn’t feel discouraged. The position where the arrow produced the thunderclap was farther than the one-meter line I had drawn.
“This is it.”
I had figured out both the firing technique and the cohesion technique. From now on, it was just repeated practice.
—Drop. Drop.
That was when my ears caught the sound of raindrops falling outside the barrier.
“Ah! It’s raining, sunbae☆!”
Larilura, wrapped in billowing smoke, called out. I looked up at the sky. Black storm clouds were gathering.
“Storm clouds, huh.”
I crossed my arms, observing the majestic weather phenomenon. If supported by sufficient mana and technique, perhaps such powerful natural phenomena could be reproduced through magic. It would literally turn the caster into a living weather report.
“Sunbae~? It’s raining. Before you get all roasted like a villain receiving heavenly punishment while doing your zappy-zappy magic practice, let’s go~.”
“Yeah. Got it.”
At Larilura’s urging, I stopped thinking and headed back to the inn. There would be time to practice magic over the next few days anyway.
“……Huu.”
But that night, after finishing her research lab work, Dana returned with an incredibly awkward expression.
“What’s wrong, sis? Did something happen?”
Having known her for a long time, I immediately recognized that look. Dana only made that face when something troublesome had occurred.
“Yeah. Things just got annoying.”
As expected, to my question she answered in a voice that sounded exhausted by the world.
“The Audumla Guild found it too. The ‘ruins related to the dark magician’ I mentioned.”