The Merchant
The next day, Joseph packed his belongings and left the inn. Following Berit — the man who had introduced himself as Seymo's secretary — he made his way into a vacant house near the merchant company's building.
"Oh..."
The house he'd been shown was spacious and spotless. Unlike the inn, it didn't reek of anything, and the bedding looked brand new. Seymo had clearly gone out of his way on Joseph's account.
"I'll inform you as soon as the next caravan schedule is confirmed."
"Wasn't it a month from now?"
Berit offered a courteous explanation to Joseph's puzzled look.
"We intend to depart as soon as the goods from the south arrive, so the date may shift somewhat."
"It could run even later, then?"
"That's possible, yes."
"Understood."
Joseph nodded without fuss. As far as he was concerned, the longer he stayed in town, the better.
Once Berit had bowed and taken his leave, Joseph pulled the half-read spellbook from his pack and spread it open. It was one of the things he'd taken off the bandits.
He'd fooled Seymo well enough, but that didn't change the fact that he still couldn't properly use magic. He meant to spend the month buried in this book, building his strength.
He's not going to hand over a spellbook that easily.
Seymo's flustered face when Joseph had asked for one was still vivid. Just as Joseph had no real intention of joining the caravan, Seymo didn't look like a man who would part with a spellbook for nothing.
He might give it up once he's sure I'm actually going with them.
Which, to be fair, wasn't entirely wrong. If a proper spellbook landed in Joseph's hands and he used it to grow as strong as he could, he fully intended to run. Accompanying a caravan bound for a war zone was something he wanted to avoid at all costs.
Which means I need to build up the power of my magic — and I need to be able to cast Fire perfectly.
He couldn't keep playing the eccentric mage forever. Put on too much of a show and someone might plant a club in the back of his skull and put him in a very tight spot.
The deal with Seymo had gone through. He had the time, and he had the place. What remained was to practice his magic and push it further.
From that day on, Joseph threw himself into the spellbook without rest. The clumsy grimoire was still little more than a monument to its author's self-infatuation, but he read every last character, missing nothing.
Several days into his seclusion, he finally found a proper method for working magic.
It was a passage he might easily have skipped — buried under handwriting so messy it was barely readable, and under so much rambling nonsense he couldn't tell what half of it meant. But a nagging sense that something was off made him go back over it again and again, and sure enough, it was describing a new way of handling mana.
Joseph's face, worn dull from slogging through the text, lit up with something close to joy.
"Return, is it..."
...that is to say, by converting mana into physical form to intercept a direct incoming attack, then seizing the shattered mana and immediately re-deploying it, one may return the received impact unto the caster of said assault...
A defensive spell!
And not a simple shield, either — a spell that served as both offense and defense, turning the blow back on the attacker. Joseph nearly shouted. After the incident on his way out of the village, he had felt the need for a way to protect himself with a raw, bone-deep urgency.
He set the mana in his body circulating at once. Then, slowly, he moved it according to the method written in the spellbook and murmured the word of activation.
"Return."
Nothing changed. He waited a moment and recited it again. Still nothing.
What...?
He could feel the mana circulating. It simply refused to answer the incantation. Joseph formed a Mana Orb in his palm without delay. Unlike when he had spoken Return, the sphere rose into the air as naturally as breathing.
So it's not that I can't use magic.
He scratched his head and recited the word once more.
"Return."
⟨ Return ⟩
The orb floating above his hand unfurled in a burst of white light.
"Oh?"
He understood then. To use a spell, he had to form a Mana Orb first.
Come to think of it, Fire needed an orb too.
But the light didn't last. It flared once and scattered into empty air, and in the same instant he felt the mana gutter out.
"Huh...?"
The spell wouldn't hold. Joseph checked the grimoire again.
...this ingenious application of mana cannot fix an incomplete form in place, and thus one must take care to cast before receiving the blow, if one is to induce the effect in the measure the caster desires...
Joseph's brow furrowed at the rather vague wording.
Don't tell me...
He recited the incantation again at once.
"Return."
Just as before, a wash of white light spread out — and vanished just as quickly.
Joseph understood at last. He hadn't used the spell wrong. It wasn't a failure the way Fire had been, either.
This spell was designed to last this long from the start.
A magic that triggered in the instant before a blow landed, and knocked it aside. In other words, a counter.
High risk, high return...
Joseph groaned. They could call it offense and defense in one all they liked — a surprise attack would still blow his head clean off.
Why would anyone make it like this?
Would an ordinary defensive spell have been too much to ask? The kind you could just put up and leave running, something that would protect you whenever you needed it?
...Return is a great magic conceived by this master Irmaph, a spell worthy of being hailed as an essential virtue for any who would advance as a Combat Mage...
Joseph let out a long breath. Apparently the author of this spellbook had no interest whatsoever in introducing ordinary magic.
Combat Mage, my ass. Lunatic mages, the lot of them...
He sighed, cursing the author so freely he forgot that he himself was a mage.
Fine. Look on the bright side.
It was a headache, but he did have a defensive spell now. Having one was better than having none. He wasn't worse off.
And that wasn't the end of it. On the back of the page where Return was written, tossed in like an afterthought:
My dull-witted disciples could not grasp the necessity of original magic, and so I, in my magnanimity, personally taught them a most simple spell.
"Don't tell me there's more?!"
There was. A new spell, written out in full.
And owing to those useless, talentless third-rate disciples, this great Irmaph was forced to squander time hundreds of times more precious than that of ordinary men...
"Forget that! What is it?!"
He dug through the pages and found it.
A spell that conjures blocks of ice.
Joseph figured this would be far more useful than Return, which was almost impossible to use except in the most extreme circumstances. The advantages of a single block of ice were nearly endless. Ice was water, after all — he could get drinking water out of it if he needed to, and it would take the edge off the heat. And a chunk of ice would be fairly solid. Used well, it could stand in for a bludgeon or a shield.
Isn't this far better than that half-baked defensive spell?
There were surely more uses depending on the situation, but even this much was plenty. In a world where you couldn't find so much as a speck of modern civilization's blessings, it would solve several problems at once.
And if I can just get this working, the merchant company won't have any reason to get suspicious.
Joseph checked the mana in his body and formed a Mana Orb at once.
"Iceberg."
⟨ Iceberg ⟩
At the incantation, the floating Mana Orb began to bleed a slow, creeping cold.
This feels a lot like Fire... wait a second.
And just as he'd expected, the orb scattered into empty air before it could produce any ice. He felt the mana drain away, wasted.
Joseph let out a long breath.
He couldn't even use Fire properly, and now the same thing was happening again. No — at least Fire had produced actual flame.
Why won't these elemental spells take shape?
A little deflated, Joseph went back over the passage on Iceberg. He didn't honestly expect much, but the man had called himself an Archmage. There had to be something more written down.
"Hm...?"
Though I can scarcely comprehend it, I had those imbeciles who failed to grasp this Irmaph's teachings handle ice all day long.
Yet not a single one among them properly accumulated it within. They merely contracted frostbite. And so I...
Make them handle ice? Accumulate something inside...?
Irmaph had made any disciple who couldn't produce Iceberg handle ice — and for so long they came down with frostbite.
Wait...
Joseph turned it over for a moment, then formed a hypothesis.
You didn't need any particular object to sense mana. And yet he had made the disciples who couldn't work ice magic handle ice.
...Because to use ice magic, you needed something that exists in ice?
Mana existed in all things — the water running through a valley, a flower blooming in the corner of an alley, even abandoned ruins. It followed that ice had mana too. And if that mana was the kind that existed only in ice?
The nature of the mana that makes each thing up could be different. Fire, water — anything.
That would also explain why Fire's success rate had been so inconsistent. Joseph had been gathering mana into himself and making it his own. He didn't have a great deal of it, but it was enough to cast a few spells. And yet Fire had failed on him more than once.
Because I never accumulated the mana that fire itself holds...
He was familiar with fire, that was all. He had never properly stacked fire-aspected mana inside himself.
Joseph found himself thinking of the Fire Mage said to be on the battlefield — a formidable caster who called down rains of fire from the sky. How much fire would a person have to have been around to reach that level? Maybe that mage had spent a lifetime living in something like a furnace. And in the same breath, he understood why the man was called a Fire Mage at all.
Most people probably only ever dig into a single affinity.
Stacking more than one attribute inside yourself couldn't be easy.
This is going to be more of a hassle than I thought...
Joseph laid the situation out. It was only a hypothesis, but to get good at Fire and Iceberg, it seemed he would have to accumulate the mana that fire and ice themselves possessed.
Return was a little different. It simply transformed a Mana Orb, in an instant, into a barrier that knocked an attack aside. The rebound was only as strong as the orb itself.
The barrier's hardness should be about the same as the orb's.
The more mana he poured in, the harder it would become.
Ice, though... that's going to be hard to come by right now.
This was a world where even cold water was scarce on a hot day. Unless he waited for winter or climbed into the mountains, even encountering ice-aspected mana would be difficult. Which meant Iceberg was off the table for the time being.
But it's not as if I've come away empty-handed.
Joseph kindled a fire in the hearth at once, then sat down in front of it and closed his eyes. Hot air crawled over his skin.
If... if this is right.
He breathed slowly and searched for mana, the way he had the first time he'd ever found it. An alien sensation crept in. His consciousness drifted, growing distant. And very slowly, he found the flow of mana in the hearth before him.
Unlike the rest, it was a red-tinged mana that carried an unusually fierce warmth. He laid his awareness against that current, and the heat came in through his fingertips and poured into him. He drew it inward. He could feel the fire blooming in the hearth — that mana — slowly taking up residence inside him.
A long while later, Joseph opened his eyes. Cold sweat had soaked through the back of his shirt, and his fingertips stung as if they'd been burned. He glanced out the window. It was already dark; he had no idea how much time had passed.
He drew a slow breath and floated three Mana Orbs in the air.
"Fire."
⟨ Fire ⟩
Two of the orbs bloomed into small flames with a hungry whoosh. The third scattered into empty air with a faint tick.
One of them had failed, but Joseph's face didn't darken. Two spells had taken shape properly — and they'd held, instead of vanishing on the spot.
I've got the knack of it now.
A half-finished defensive spell, and an ice spell he couldn't even attempt. He had learned new magic, but getting good at it was going to take time. Still, it wasn't a bad result. At the very least, he was no longer the fool who learned a spell and couldn't even use it.
From here, all he had to do was grow this power.
Start with getting used to Fire.
With that thought, Joseph closed his eyes again.