Luke Richter (1)
Inside the carriage bound from the imperial palace to Blackmore, Selena Lugrite let out one careful sigh after another, her face grave with an almost comical severity.
For some reason, she felt as though tears might spring to her eyes at any moment, and she bit down lightly on her lip to keep them in.
Unfortunately for her, this had come as an imperial decree from the palace itself; for any reason at all, it was not something she could refuse.
Why me, of all people...!
Luke Richter. There was no way she didn’t know him.
She had watched him for five years, back when she was still principal of the Academy.
Five whole years. Not long enough to know a man completely, perhaps, but more than enough to form a very clear impression of what kind of person he was.
And the conclusion she had reached about Luke Richter was simple.
That deranged bastard...!
He had turned the Academy upside down for five years, then simply wandered off to Blackmore—the most notorious demon realm in the Empire—as if nothing had happened, all while acting like he was going there to enjoy a quiet, comfortable life.
Selena had a rough idea of what was going on.
What on earth was he plotting now, by crawling all the way into that dreadful place called Blackmore?
Maybe becoming a civil official had been part of the plan from the very beginning, just so he could stir up trouble in the demon realm.
At the very least, the Luke Richter she knew was a mutant oddball who committed every kind of lunacy imaginable while pretending none of it meant a thing.
“Are you all right, Principal?”
“Do I look all right to you?”
“Come on, he’s only a lowly administrator, isn’t he? From what I found, there’s nothing particularly notable about him.”
“You’re missing the point. Why do you think those notoriously vicious bastards in the Internal Affairs Bureau look so offended at the mere thought of dragging in one administrator?”
“Maybe they just don’t want the hassle and are dumping it on someone else?”
“No, that can’t be it. They know it too. Luke Richter—getting mixed up with that lunatic makes your life miserable.”
Even when Derek Baldwin, the captain of the Special Task Force, had come looking for him, she had been surprised. Now the emperor himself was personally stepping in and ordering them to bring him back.
Selena shook her head, utterly at a loss.
What on earth had he been doing to end up this deep in the mud?
With a sigh, she reached back five years into her memory.
It was a memory she would rather not have revisited, but she would be facing him soon enough. There was no avoiding it; she would have to go over every scrap of the past connected to him, one by one.
The Academy’s colleges were broadly divided into the Swordsmanship Department and the Magic Department.
Of course, there were other fields as well—social studies, liberal arts, languages, and the like.
But the two primary departments were magic and swordsmanship, and students took additional subjects only if they applied for them separately to fill out their credits.
In this world, where monsters existed, where dangers lurked everywhere, and where a single superhuman could stand against an entire nation, what was the fastest and most efficient source of power?
The answer, naturally, was force.
The same was true of the noble houses that formed the center of power.
What, after all, was a noble?
There were countless answers to that common question, but at their core, nobles were warriors.
People who had stained their blades with blood to defend their country.
Legendary heroes who had cut down the heads of innumerable enemies.
It was the descendants of those monsters—those very monsters—who had inherited their bloodline and, generation after generation, built the noble houses of today.
The center of power had always been strength.
That was why the Academy was both a hall of learning and a field of opportunity.
Even commoners could seize power there.
That, too, was a product of the law of strength.
Talk of scholarship and research was, in the end, only a surface layer.
The true heart of the Academy was singular: the handling of mana, the source of power itself.
That was why one’s innate mana capacity became the basis of a student’s standing.
What could anyone with a pitiful amount of mana possibly do in the Academy?
Merely avoiding expulsion for failing to meet the standards was already cause for relief.
Of course, since most Academy entrants possessed extraordinary talent, such cases were rare. But if one did happen to be expelled, it was obvious that the entire family would become a laughingstock for generations.
That was why, before entering the Academy, it had become an unwritten rule to possess at least enough mana not to be looked down on.
And yet.
“Luke Richter?”
Selena read through the document with a faintly bewildered expression.
“The Richter earldom...”
The Richter earldom was an old and distinguished house, one of the great families of magical lineage.
Anyone born to that family would ordinarily be admired by the public by default.
But...
“An illegitimate son?”
He was an illegitimate son.
And not just any illegitimate son, but one born to an ordinary commoner woman.
Of course, there was a flaw in his birth, but that did not necessarily mean there had to be a flaw in his ability as well.
If he had inherited his father’s blood strongly enough, then surely there would be something hidden within him...
“Let’s see here, his rank is... Neophyte?”
When evaluating magic, there were three criteria: the speed of spell construction, its accuracy, and its power. Those were the formal standards, all three of them.
But in truth, they were little more than technical guidelines; the absolute standard that encompassed them all was mana quantity.
The more mana one possessed, the greater the power, the higher the accuracy, and the faster the casting speed.
The resulting ranks for mages were divided into five levels, and the very lowest among them was Neophyte.
“What a dud.”
Selena said it with obvious disappointment.
The reason was simple enough. She had expected something from the Richter name, but it turned out the boy inside was worthless too.
“Tch.”
And so she erased him from memory.
For Selena, who judged people purely by their ability, Luke Richter was not someone worth remembering.
Time passed, and then came the day of the entrance exam.
“Principal Selena! Over here!”
Led by the vice principal, Selena made her way to the examination grounds.
“Did you see the list of this year’s entrants, Principal?”
“I did. You’d think the Age of Gold had arrived.”
From the princess of a principality to the imperial princess herself, and even the children of the most illustrious noble families.
It was a lineup so dazzling that calling it an age of gold would not have been an exaggeration.
“Take these too. They’re the entrance exam papers submitted up until yesterday.”
“Why are there so many?”
“Of course there are a lot. If only you’d made the exam easier. Asking them to solve a drought? How are students supposed to do what even we can’t?”
“That was never meant to be a problem they were supposed to solve.”
The Academy was an educational institution under the imperial family.
It was only natural that the imperial court would have a hand in matters large and small, and this year’s ridiculous entrance exam was no exception.
To ask students to solve a continental drought that even she, despite reaching the Third Circle, could not fix—was that even remotely sensible?
That was why the true core of this exam was their way of thinking.
Wasn’t there a saying that the highest intelligence of all was collective intelligence?
The ideas born from the brightest minds gathered at the Academy would surely be of great use to the imperial family as well.
Selena slowly skimmed through the papers.
“There are a few genuinely usable ideas here, at least.”
“I told you there was a reason they’re called the golden generation.”
“Sort out the ones worth using and send them to the imperial family. Ah—before you send them there, make sure a copy goes to the Red Magic Tower.”
“Ugh, what a pain.”
Indeed, the children of educated families were different in all sorts of ways.
Unlike her own aging, stiffened mind, they produced a surprising number of unusual ideas.
Of course, they were still nowhere near enough to solve the drought across the entire Empire, but small ideas like these gathered and gathered until, one day, they became new discoveries.
“...Luke Richter?”
While skimming the papers, Selena suddenly stopped at a familiar name.
She recognized it from memory.
There was only one entrant from the Richter family this year.
“That illegitimate son?”
“The illegitimate son?”
“Yes. One Neophyte.”
“Oh my. What on earth has he been doing all this time to still be a Neophyte?”
“How should I know?”
...But why was his paper so thick all by itself?
There was always one of these types.
The kind who lacked actual ability and tried to paper over their shortcomings with theory.
“...What is this?”
Selena halted the hand that had been turning the pages and let out a dry laugh.
“A man-made sun in orbit at an altitude of three kilometers... raising the surface temperature of the Alard Sea behind the Academy to twenty-seven degrees... updrafts... using magic circles to activate a low-pressure amplification device to create a pressure differential... moisture supply to generate cumulonimbus clouds...?”
As Selena’s expression stiffened, the vice principal beside her stole a glance at the paper too.
She, too, understood none of it.
“Controlling plasma-state energy with a resonance stone... using mana crystals as the core to create an ultra-high-temperature, ultra-high-pressure environment...?”
“Hah, we’ve got ourselves a proper lunatic.”
“Reproducing a tokamak with magnetic field magic? What on earth is a tokamak? He says he’s going to make a sun with this.”
“And why are you reading that nonsense so seriously?”
Thwack.
Clicking her tongue, Selena snapped the paper shut as though she were crumpling it from irritation.
“Wasn’t the top-ranker’s special privilege automatic promotion?”
“Yes. Whether it’s practical or written, they advance to the next year as the top student, no exceptions.”
“Fine. If this bastard isn’t confident in the practical exam, he’s resorted to every trick in the book. If he spouts nonsense during the demonstration, just fail him on the spot. I’m already getting a headache.”
“Is that allowed? He’s still a student.”
“Then you can sit there and keep listening to that nonsense.”
“I’d rather not, honestly!”
It was a rather harsh response, but there was nothing especially problematic about it.
That utterly absurd paper could never have been realized in the first place, and failing him for spouting nonsense was within the principal’s discretion anyway.
And yet.
Selena would not be able to hold on to that thought for much longer.
“...Huh?”
A vast sphere of mana rose into the air, radiating heat as though it could melt iron.
It was Luke Richter’s artificial sun, or rather something close enough to be mistaken for one, assembled for the entrance exam out of five high-purity mana crystals for nuclear fusion, a resonance stone, an artifact for wind control, and a ceremonial stone for spell amplification.
It began to float higher and higher into the air, and the heat it gave off set the atmosphere trembling.
It warped the space around it, shimmering like the mirage over a road in the height of summer.
Then, as the prepared artifact released its wind power, the air currents began to shift, and an updraft formed like a swirling vortex.
Selena and the other professors stared upward, speechless.
Above their heads, clouds were slowly gathering.
How much time passed after that?
Rain began to fall.
No, really. Rain actually fell.
But then—
“...”
Selena felt a creeping unease at the violent pressure of the wind.
The clouds were gathering too quickly, and their mass was steadily growing.
“Wait, this is starting to feel like—”
Whooosh!
Before she could finish, a sudden gale swept over everything nearby, wrapping the entire area in its grasp.
In an instant, a massive whirlpool of wind had formed.
The test grounds were ravaged by a furious storm so powerful it might as well have been a small typhoon.
Trees were ripped out by the roots and hurled into the sky, and the nearby buildings lost their roofs as their windows shattered.
“Th-this fu—”
That had been her first meeting with him.