France Needs Élan (2)
After the dinner was ruined, I also set Gustave Durand, the Paris branch manager, on the path of magic.
“Are you certain this is wise…? I worry that bestowing baptism on someone like me might instead be stealing Lady Bronska’s time and magic for no good reason…”
“It’s fine. I’m not the sort to be stingy about such things.”
To become a mage the hard way, one had to either beat astronomical odds or receive baptism from a mage of sufficient caliber who was already walking the path. The reason mages were so ridiculously few in number compared to the explosive population growth after the Industrial Revolution was precisely that.
Yet the old fossils who fancied themselves skilled in magic tended to recoil from giving baptisms at all. It stemmed from their peculiar supremacist belief that those born with magic in their blood or who awakened it naturally were inherently “superior.” They claimed that whether one could awaken magic was decided at birth, and that those artificially created through baptism were not true mages.
“Even so, if you weaken yourself for our sake, that would be unacceptable…” Durand added hesitantly.
Well, he wasn’t entirely wrong. Though the term “baptism” was used, from the perspective of those exalted mages it was something to be avoided.
Because mana transference chips away at one’s own realm.
To bring another into the path of magic, you had to surrender a portion of your own. In fact, I had felt it myself after bestowing hundreds of baptisms. But if you asked whether “those countless losses ultimately harmed me,” the answer was obviously no.
Just as I could dismantle this era’s standard defensive spells as if they were nothing, the magical community of the future had long since developed methods to minimize the amount of magic lost during baptism. Besides, it wasn’t as if my personal combat ability was stagnant.
If the issue was my slice of the pie shrinking, the solution was simply to make the whole pie larger. When the total was a positive-sum game, what was there to fear about giving baptism a thousand times or ten thousand times?
Moreover, baptism was no mere ritual. It was an act of repeatedly contemplating magic as a means of perceiving the origin of the world. That alone helped elevate one’s ability as a mage, so there was no conceivable downside. Especially since elevating someone outside the path required fundamentally tampering with their soul. In this era, few mages could surpass me in the art of toying with human souls.
Stalin, who had the chance to knead the souls of millions sent to Siberia, might be an exception.
Though I hadn’t planned it, an opportunity to display the magic I had honed had arrived all the same.
“Speaking of which, Durand, I’ve had a tail since earlier. Do you know anything about it? Two possibilities come to mind, but I can’t narrow it down further.”
When I asked, the answer came quickly: it was a spy planted by the traitors from Marseille, not the British Ministry of Magic. Since it wasn’t someone from the Ministry who didn’t know my identity, there was no need to hold back. Quite convenient, actually.
After handing over the vehicle and sending Durand back, I crossed the Seine and headed for the entrance to the Paris Catacombs.
“Still following?”
Pavel glanced at the side mirror and nodded. “Yes. One black BMW 3 Series. Shall I lose them?”
“Leave it. It’ll be their last drive, after all.”
After racing for thirty minutes, we reached the underground entrance to the catacombs. It was already close to closing time. The ticket clerk insisted they couldn’t sell tickets and told us to leave, but I used Charm to mesmerize him and successfully obtained two admissions.
Only an extremely small portion of the Paris Catacombs—created since Roman times and tangled like an ant nest—was known to the public. The unknown, access-restricted areas were true lawless zones. Sometimes petty thugs ran wild where the law couldn’t reach; sometimes, if you went deeper still, there was no law at all.
Consequently, every regular mapping survey turned up corpses. Judging by their clothes and belongings—for instance, mercury-battery flashlights—many of the dead were recent missing persons, not relics of some pre-modern era.
Today, that count was about to increase by one.
It wouldn’t be exactly the same, but judging from the sorry state he was about to fall into, the end result would be similar enough.
I deviated slightly from the tourist route and headed down an unknown passage. The complete absence of anyone trying to stop us gave me some idea why people kept disappearing.
Every few steps I created a faint magical light and left a trace. Though the illuminating light itself vanished, the magical mark remained, so the man following me had no trouble slowly trailing us into the deepest part of the ant nest.
An underground tomb where human skeletons were stacked in layers along the corridors. An ordinary person would have been frozen with terror, but I walked with light steps, chatting casually with Pavel while looking for a suitable spot.
“So what you’re saying is… one can use magic even without being a mage?”
“Correct. It’s a common misconception. Whether you’re on the path or not, there’s essentially no fundamental difference.”
The topic was naturally magic. When else would I have the leisure to discuss it so freely with another mage? I was genuinely glad to have a subordinate capable of tolerating my warped sociability.
“Then what exactly is the difference? After you made me a mage, the very way I see the world changed.”
I thought for a moment, then answered with an analogy.
“The change in perception is the core of it. Think of it this way: just because humans can’t see infrared doesn’t mean the human body doesn’t emit it, does it?”
Pavel nodded with a slightly dubious expression. I continued.
“Becoming a mage is like attaching an infrared camera to your eyes. Or, since it can’t be removed, perhaps it’s more accurate to say undergoing modification surgery?”
Pavel picked up the thread as if he understood. “And whether or not that camera is attached, the amount of infrared the body emits would fluctuate depending on whether one is angry or calm.”
I had only said one thing, yet he had already inferred the rest.
“Of course a one-to-one comparison is difficult… but it’s similar. If you know the proper method, activating magic isn’t impossible.”
“The key issue would be being unable to sense whether you’re doing it correctly.”
“Exactly. Mages receive various forms of feedback. Non-mages don’t. Even if I say ‘like this,’ how would they know?”
Pavel pondered for a moment, then offered a surprisingly profound insight. “It’s like teaching language to someone born deaf. You can demonstrate pronunciations they’ve never heard, but the reconstructed speech of a deaf person can never be identical to the original.”
“That’s… a rather good analogy. I’ll have to use that from now on.”
At any rate, this was why it was practically impossible for those outside the path to activate magic. At best one could say it was “theoretically possible.”
However, a few exceptions possessed magically significant functions.
“Golems are an exception, though.”
“Golems… you mean?”
“Yes. They don’t possess autonomous souls, but they are still entities that activate magic, aren’t they?”
The mummy golems I had used at the British Museum were a perfect example. Although I had poured in the souls of traitors collected from across Britain, they did not possess the autonomous will to move their limbs as they had in life. Yet the fact that a several-thousand-year-old mummy had wriggled like a zombie was clearly the result of magic.
“The reason golems can activate magic is, as I said, because they know the proper method. More precisely, because the mage who created them ‘inputted’ the proper method.”
The reason magic had been able to escape the crude alchemy and human sacrifice of the Middle Ages was the introduction of scientific methodology that accompanied the Scientific Revolution. In other words, magic too belonged squarely within the category of scientific methodology.
Input A, output A'. Input B, output B'. No exceptions. Even relics—the aggregate of all mysteries—were simply cases where ‘we know something comes out, but we don’t know the mechanism or the input values.’
What kind of person was I? It was a self-evident axiom I had memorized so thoroughly I could recite it with my eyes closed.
“Therefore, with a little application, one could create a kind of relic factory. Turn a robotic arm into a golem, input the necessary manufacturing processes, and it would operate automatically even while I sleep.”
“All it would need is electricity.”
“Exactly! My burden would be greatly reduced, wouldn’t it?”
No matter how important relic production was, assigning high-value magical personnel to simple repetitive labor was extremely inefficient. Even though I could produce thousands of improved Rosetta Stones, that was largely why I didn’t.
Even as I said it, I thought it was a rather good idea.
But I couldn’t continue the pleasant chatter with my subordinate forever.
“This is perfect. Let’s wait here.”
A suitable open space had appeared, so it seemed like a good place to greet our stalker.
The space where I stopped was a naturally formed cavity. It had clearly seen human hands, however. Artificial partition walls and scattered pickaxes suggested it hadn’t originally been this wide.
Look at these filthy animals…
When I peeked behind the partition walls, I roughly understood what the space had been used for. A single mattress with distinct dried fluid stains sat abandoned, surrounded by torn condom wrappers. I had no desire to rummage through the trash.
Pavel offered a sneering quip. “They certainly went at it in a place with no ventilation.”
“There are people who prefer it that way. Still… I wonder if it’s worth going this far.”
If you wanted sex, you could simply rent a room aboveground. It was a world where consenting adults could fuck as much as they liked, and France didn’t criminalize prostitution. Doing it this secretly suggested there was something more to it.
At any rate, the space was currently empty and suitable enough. I found sitting on the mattress too repulsive, so I dragged over a simple folding chair instead.
Really, having been in a luxurious hotel restaurant just an hour ago and now standing in a place like this created an overwhelming sense of dissonance.
Not long after, a voice echoed from the passage we had come through.
“Why go so deep, Lady? I’d rather not see certain things, but don’t you think this is excessive?”
“Oh, that’s a title I particularly dislike hearing from you. You say it so naturally.”
A man emerged from the alley we had passed.
“Even if our relationship has soured, we share the same roots, don’t we? We’re not uncivilized thugs who know no laws. There should be a degree of mutual respect.”
“Ha. What do you mean, ‘we’?”
What a ridiculous man. I didn’t even know his face or name. It was probably in the organizational database, but I didn’t memorize every entry. And even if I had, the loyal subordinates still with the organization would have come first.
Still, he was clearly one of Marseille’s traitors. The standoff was one spark away from violence, yet both sides spoke with surprising calm.
“By the way, I’ve only seen you in photographs or from a distance while tailing you. Seeing you up close like this is a first. You’re far more beautiful than I expected, Lady.”
“Cut the crap. That lecherous gaze is disgusting too, so put it away.”
As we exchanged barbed words, Pavel stepped forward.
“Lady.”
Though the title was the same, the weight and loyalty behind it were on an entirely different level. I silently stopped him with a slight gesture of my hand. I would handle this myself.
I asked the traitor with a sneer. “You do realize this is a trap, yes? You must know that standing here quietly only leads to death. So why are you so calm?”
I had moved while openly leaving magical traces. He could have turned back at the catacombs entrance and called for reinforcements, yet he had followed us all the way here. That alone was unusual. I had half expected it, but hearing it from his own mouth would be more satisfying, so I had dangled the bait.
He answered, still using that irritating title. “Naturally, because I have insurance, Lady. My mission was simply to follow Yerina Bronska. Whether I was discovered or not didn’t matter.”
“And?”
“If everyone knows my mission, and I follow you into the catacombs and don’t come out… do you truly not understand what that means?”
If this bastard didn’t return, everyone in Marseille would know I had begun moving in earnest.
“Of course I understand. It would be a declaration of war. So what?”
The traitor’s face twisted. “Ha! It seems you really don’t know anything. The moment the Syndicate declares war on us, we will tell the British Ministry of Magic everything. That the Soviet ‘Yerina Bronska’ is the one who stole the Rosetta Stone from the British Museum.”
“Do I look like someone who would actually be living in Britain under that exact name?”
“That’s a trivial detail. They’d figure everything out in a week at most, wouldn’t they?”
I clicked my tongue. The problem I had feared had become reality. The faction that had split from the Syndicate naturally knew of my existence as my father’s cherished only daughter. They also had the ability to inform the Ministry of Magic about me and the organization, given enough time.
The only reason they hadn’t done so until now was the silent threat of “Let’s each go our own way.” It had been an implicit agreement not to interfere with each other and stay in our own territories.
But if I declared war, that unspoken pact would no longer need to be honored. They would pressure me however they could, even using the strategy of killing with a borrowed knife. That was why the traitor before me stood here with such confidence.
With the absolute conviction that he would not die.
I sighed and muttered under my breath, “We’re fucked…”
He immediately responded in kind. “I know exactly why you came to Paris. Just go back to that island nation. If we don’t touch each other, neither side needs to bleed.”
Having seized my ‘weakness,’ they planned to conquer France and use it as leverage to carve out every possible interest. I could not tolerate that.
What I enjoyed more than anything was shattering the confidence of someone who firmly believed they were safe.
Crack—!
My extended shadow—the blade of Schattenmaiden—sharpened to a razor edge and tore into human flesh.
“Uh…?”
A stupid scream rang out, filled with incomprehension.
Hadn’t I said it? An opportunity to display the magic I had polished through hundreds of baptisms had arrived.
I smiled and muttered once more, softly.
“You’re the one who’s fucked.”