Promotion Quest (4)
When she lifted her head, a sky drenched in red filled her vision. It wasn’t the gentle hue of a sunset. It was the color of blood violently splattered across the heavens. Murky clouds hung low, and beneath them a flock of black crows wheeled in endless circles over the same spot. The scene was bleak enough on its own, yet compared to the carnage below it almost seemed peaceful.
If the sky looked like someone had slopped red paint on with careless strokes, the ground resembled a dye sack hurled onto sand and then stomped with all one’s might. The plain stretched endlessly, and the blood leaking from a few dozen corpses was laughably insufficient to stain such a vast expanse. Even if you added the filth spilling from ruptured guts and the cerebrospinal fluid from crushed skulls, the result was the same. Ligret stared quietly at the face of a man whose head had been severed at the neck, his expression frozen in a mixture of despair, terror, and rage.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen this.
Not since she met Chrome. Not since she joined the Brown Wolf Mercenary Group. This memory came from far earlier. She couldn’t recall what battle it had been, or exactly when and where it happened. All she knew was that this landscape was the oldest memory she could summon.
I was somewhere else just a moment ago… where was it?
Well, it didn’t really matter. Ligret walked calmly through the scene of tangled corpses, broken swords, and crows. Rustle. Rustle.
It didn’t take long to find the person she expected. A scrawny, small frame. Cracked lips and dry skin. Frizzy brown hair. Hands covered in blisters and wounds. In a place where even the dead expressed emotion through their entire bodies, the child—who must still be alive—showed no feeling at all as she quietly rummaged through the corpses.
She found a rock-hard crust of bread, slipped it into her pocket, wrapped herself in a relatively clean scrap of cloth, and picked up a dagger small enough for her tiny fist to grip. Not bad, Ligret evaluated flatly. She felt no particular surprise at seeing her past self before her eyes. She simply accepted that this landscape wasn’t drawn solely from her own memories. After all, there was no way her memories would contain a third-person view of herself.
The smell of blood and sand was vivid, and the wind against her skin felt real, but that was all.
Dream? Hallucination? Must be because of that black sludge.
At first her memory of how she had arrived here had been hazy, but the more she looked around, the clearer her mind became. The question now was what she was supposed to do.
She didn’t ponder long.
Guess I’ll just smash everything I see.
If there had been rules she needed to follow, that professor would have mentioned them, or her damn employer would have given her a warning beforehand. The lack of instructions probably meant she could do whatever she wanted.
Ligret drew the sword at her waist—and let out a low murmur of admiration.
“Hoo.”
“……”
Where the frail child who had looked on the verge of collapse had been standing moments ago, a girl with the exact same appearance as the current Ligret now stood.
“Can you talk? Or is it just the outside?”
It was a rare note of excitement in Ligret’s voice. The answer came not in words but in action—an abrupt slash that an ordinary person couldn’t have reacted to. Even though the ancient weapon could slice through most trees like kindling, cutting down an identical sword in one blow proved impossible.
With a sharp clang, the decapitating strike was thwarted. Before the next blow could come, Ligret’s thrust shot toward the girl’s head. It stopped a mere centimeter short, slicing empty air. The girl, who had nearly lost an eye, didn’t even twitch an eyebrow as she launched a kick.
The moment the thrust was evaded, both Ligret and the girl had already released their blades and spun. Their legs collided as a matter of course. Their physical ability and sense of balance were identical, so neither held an advantage. Both mercenaries retreated at the same time.
Instead of retrieving the Ancient Guardian’s Greatsword rolling across the ground, Ligret drew a new weapon and grinned.
“This one’s pretty nice.”
“Aha. So this is the structure.”
It took Fiore Midas less than five seconds—by real-world standards—to fully grasp her situation. It wasn’t because her senses were exceptional or her mind exceptionally strong. She had simply predicted, from the very first explanation of Black Light, that a moment like this might come.
Black mana that influenced the mind itself. An ability demons were born with. For a human to acquire it later in life, what method would be necessary?
“Nightmares… In other words, they artificially create a situation that shocks the individual’s mind and force them to unconsciously resist it. There would be several additional conditions, but that’s the core. Hmm. Well, humans do tend to mess up even blinking or breathing if you tell them to do it consciously. It’s more efficient to put them to sleep and let instinct take over.”
The fact that Professor Psyche hadn’t given specific instructions after they drank the potion, and that the nightmare’s beginning looked no different from reality, stemmed from the same logic. The effect would be stronger if the subject didn’t realize it was a dream.
“Hmm.”
Fiore watched for a moment to see what changes would occur around her, but because she had understood the situation too quickly, nothing special happened. How boring.
As she had expected, Black Light wasn’t a power that necessarily grew stronger simply by awakening. At the same time, it held a vast array of possibilities. Above all, a force that reacted to the human mind—she couldn’t use something this fascinating? That would be far too unfair.
Should she have thought less? Because her reason was too clear, the dream couldn’t respond to her unconscious—
—Wait. Did it really have to be the unconscious?
Just because not realizing it was a dream was more effective, that didn’t mean noticing it wasn’t reality would cause failure. There was also lucid dreaming.
Right. Let’s check the materials around me. A classroom environment. People frozen like dolls. How could she reconstruct this into a nightmare?
She mustn’t be conscious of it, yet if it was completely unconscious she couldn’t control it. Something that belonged to the unconscious realm but could still be controlled to a degree?
She mustn’t try to recall it. The opposite, rather. She had to wish not to recall it. After all, the moment you’re told not to think about something, you think about it even more, don’t you?
“…Wow. It actually works?”
—Guoooooooor!
When she closed her eyes for a moment and opened them again, she was no longer in the classroom. A wide street. People collapsed on the ground. A towering red spire. Blood clots that devoured life. A giant moving its massive body as if to crush her where she stood alone without a single ally.
Right before its enormous foot came down, Fiore closed her eyes once more. The next instant she was riding atop the giant’s head, looking down at the ground. The scenery shifted from city to forest, sometimes becoming an ocean. The creatures living there changed without pause, and even the weather in the sky flickered capriciously.
Like a child who had received a new toy, Fiore’s eyes sparkled.
In the real world.
“Khhuaaargh!”
“Student Jin Sirius is having a seizure!”
“Quickly, to the infirmary—”
“Ah, just a moment. His condition looks poor, so let’s administer emergency treatment first.”
The white-haired boy who had been about to enter the classroom lightly waved his hand at the young man being carried away on a stretcher. A brilliant burst of pure white magic light flared, and the youth—who had been screaming moments ago—immediately relaxed into a peaceful expression and went limp.
To the academy staff who thanked him, Professor Emilio Lafer of the Support and White Light departments responded with an angelic smile.
Watching him, Professor Psyche spoke in a monotone.
“…So you can be kind to people other than women, after all?”
“I don’t know what the red and blue ones said, but those are groundless accusations. I genuinely cherish the academy’s students.”
Is that so? Psyche, who had observed many of the academy’s events, couldn’t quite believe Emilio’s words. Still, unlike the other professors, she didn’t coldly point it out.
“How are the results? Any decent harvest?”
“Out of the thirty-six who have finished the trial, six have awakened Black Light. The ratio was under ten percent for all of them, though.”
“Hmm. That’s good news for us, but somewhat disappointing for you, Professor.”
“There’s no need to worry about that. …I’ve already found a student whose ratio is likely to be high.”
When Psyche glanced sideways, Emilio followed her gaze and let out a dry laugh upon seeing the familiar silver hair with a blue tint.
“Well, that’s exactly as expected. Other than that… is that one going to be all right?”
While scanning the students’ conditions, Emilio’s expression hardened when he looked at one corner of the classroom. Even someone who had survived countless battles felt an instinctive threat from the enormous magical power surging there. It fluctuated so violently it seemed ready to explode at any moment.
That alone was dangerous enough, but the fact that the person at the center was the empire’s princess added an entirely different kind of anxiety beyond mere physical threat.
Psyche answered calmly.
“I’ll make sure it’s fine. That’s why I’m here.”