Regression (1)
“Aaaagh!”
With a scream tearing from his throat, Ellen snapped back to consciousness.
W-where…?
He was in a room. A room that felt somehow familiar.
Why am I here?
Leonard. The bastard’s face rose unbidden in his mind.
He had died. Leonard had silenced him to bury his own mistake and humiliation. The memory of the spell flying toward him set hatred blazing through Ellen’s chest.
But…
There had been nothing he could do. The man was a mage, and Ellen was nothing more than a Magic Assistant.
That was simply how the world worked. It was not the righteous who won, but the strong. The weak could never overcome the strong.
So this is how I die?
Calling it death felt strange. He had thrown himself off that place; he should have been dead beyond any doubt. Yet this was nothing like the afterlife he had imagined—or the one he had half expected to enter.
Ellen groped for the memories of his final moments. The first thing that surfaced was the mages charging ahead without a thought and triggering the trap. Then the way they had tried to kill him to cover up that blunder, and the way he had fled like a madman to escape them. The pain in his chest from the wound he had taken still felt vivid.
And then what happened?
A hole. For reasons he still did not understand, a vast pit had opened. And he had thrown himself into it, as if to say, so be it.
There was something more.
The fog of memory cleared a little further. The pit had been bottomless. He had fallen for what felt like forever without ever hitting the ground. In that absolute darkness, he had almost believed he was floating in midair.
“Ugh!”
A sudden headache slammed into him, but Ellen did not stop reaching for the memory.
I’m certain something else happened after that.
Vastness—and a black door. How he had even seen it in a space without up or down, he could not say, but he had definitely seen an enormous black door.
And when the black door opened…
“Kh!”
Ellen could not push the thought any further. His head felt as if it were about to split open.
Thud!
Clutching his skull and thrashing, he rolled right off the bed.
Clack.
A moment later, someone opened the door and stepped inside. The instant Ellen saw who it was, his eyes flew wide enough to tear.
That’s…
He could not make sense of what was happening. The person who had come through the door and was now looking at him with such worry was his mother—the mother who had passed away twenty years ago.
“Are you all right? You’re not hurt?”
That voice, so painfully longed for, nearly brought tears to his eyes.
So I really did die.
Having failed to become a mage, Ellen had never been able to bring himself to go home. Because of that, he had not even been there when his mother took her last breath. If dying was what it took to see her again, he was grateful.
Three members of a family sat at a long dining table, sharing a meal.
Clink.
A boy who still looked young finished eating and set down his utensils.
“Done already? You’ve been eating a lot more lately.”
A middle-aged man with a carefully groomed mustache spoke up.
“Must be because Mother’s cooking is so good.”
“Oh my, listen to him. Where did all this charm come from all of a sudden?”
The boy’s mother covered her mouth with a laugh and gave her husband’s shoulder a light pat. To any eye, they were the picture of a warm, happy family.
“Thank you for the meal. I’ll head up to my room.”
Once he was back in his room, Ellen sat in his chair and tried to sort through everything that had happened.
A week had passed since that day. At first he had believed he was dead. But the truth was that he had returned to the past with all his memories intact. The realization had left him reeling, yet after a few days he had begun to accept it: he had come back.
He still did not fully understand how, but throwing himself into that pit had clearly been the cause. Whatever the reason, what mattered was that he had been given a new chance. He could walk a path different from the one he had taken before.
He was fifteen now. Before long, he would have the opportunity to learn the extent of his magical talent. He could choose not to take the mage’s road this time. His gift had always been so meager that he was destined to die a Magic Assistant anyway. No one knew better than he did that effort alone would never be enough.
And yet some nameless feeling kept dragging him back toward magic.
Inferiority? Even knowing it won’t work…
Ellen frowned and settled into the familiar posture of meditation. First he checked how much mana he currently held.
Pathetic.
The amount he sensed was so small it was almost embarrassing to call it mana. Forming even a single Circle would be a struggle.
Wait. How many seconds was that?
The mana had registered far too quickly. For someone without a single Circle, simply sensing mana for the first time normally took about ten minutes of focus. Even those called geniuses needed five. But he had felt this faint trickle in less than ten seconds.
Have I gained talent?
A sliver of hope stirred. In his previous life, his mana affinity had been so wretched that it had taken him more than twenty minutes just to sense it. By then, everyone else would have known he had no gift and given up on meditating. Ellen, however, had kept going until he felt it—and he had, eventually, found his mana. For that same man to sense it in under ten seconds now was enough to kindle real expectation.
How high has my mana affinity become?
If his affinity was this overwhelming, a small mana pool could be more than compensated for. The theory was already locked in his head. If he had the talent to match, this second life was a chance to make a name for himself as a genius mage.
And talent isn’t all I have.
He remembered the major events of the next thirty years—hidden treasures waiting to be found, the outcomes of wars, which houses were destined to rise. That was information that turned into money. Even as a mage, he would be able to earn enough to fund his research with cash to spare.
And Leonard. I can crush that bastard, too.
He could take revenge on the loathsome man who had driven him to his death. Not just Leonard—he wanted every last mage beneath his feet. Twenty-five years of festering inferiority demanded an outlet.
This time will be different!
Ellen’s eyes lit up. At once he began drawing the surrounding mana into his body.
But…
Contrary to every hope, the amount of mana he could gather was pitifully small.
This can’t be.
His abysmal mana absorption was exactly as it had been. And as he worked, he realized something else: his affinity had not changed at all. He had simply mistaken twenty-five years of familiar handling of mana for genuine talent. Shame washed over him for the way a brief delusion had sent his imagination soaring all the way to the pinnacle of magehood. At the same time, the misery of his past life came crashing back in a single wave.
There had been two reasons Ellen had been forced to kneel, again and again, before the Magic Tower: mana absorption and mana affinity. Absorption was the ability to draw ambient mana into the body; affinity was how efficiently one could use that mana. The Ellen of the past, unfortunately, had possessed neither quantity nor efficiency.
With low absorption, forging new Circles had been agonizingly slow. From the 3rd Circle onward, creating further Circles had become all but impossible. And with such poor affinity, he could not even use the magic he had efficiently. Unable to form new Circles, he could pile up all the knowledge of high-Circle spells he wanted and still never cast them. That was the past in which he had failed the Magic Tower exam over and over, stuck in place forever.
I thought this time would be different. Is it going to be the same all over again?
Even as the torment churned through him, Ellen’s body kept meditating, kept drawing mana in. Perseverance had been driven into his bones; even in the middle of despair, he did not stop working.
By afternoon, he finally felt the mana inside him form a single ring. But the fact brought him no joy.
Nothing has changed at all.
In his previous life, he had begun meditating in the morning and reached the 1st Circle by afternoon. At this rate, he would once again become Magic Assistant Ellen—the man who only “knew” magic of the 7th Circle and beyond.
“At this level, I probably can’t manage more than a Light spell.”
Ellen muttered to himself in disappointment.
And in that very instant—
Fwaaah!
Without a single word of incantation, a Light spell bloomed into being above his palm.