The Magic Lecture (3)
There were a few people genuinely looking forward to Luid Christopher's magic lecture, but the reaction of most could be summed up in one sentence.
Isn't this just a kid brute-forcing everything with his innate mana pool?
To be fair, shattering the walls of the Colosseum was an impressive feat. No one had ever managed it before. But the whole point of a lecture was the sharing of knowledge — the honor of a great magician presenting a new ideal and contributing to the academic study of magic.
It was a position of immense prestige and glory. And the fact that such a stage was being hosted by a boy of barely twelve, genius or not, sat poorly with most of them. If he'd made some new discovery, they could have accepted it. But all Luid had done was wield a powerful spell thanks to a monstrous reserve of mana. Even if they learned exactly how he'd cast it, it seemed unlikely to help the field of magic in any meaningful way.
And so, Luid's magic lecture began under skeptical, unconvinced stares from the very start.
"Everything I cover in this lecture is strictly prohibited from being shared or recorded. With the exception of the people present here, and those who purchased the five crystal orbs."
For the record — that line was Clifford's handiwork. He'd drilled the script into Luid beforehand to sell those crystal orbs at the highest possible price.
After delivering the brief warning, Luid raised his wand. When he channeled mana to draw a line across the board, it glowed a vivid blue.
That's neat. Just like a whiteboard.
Cut the mana supply to a section, and it wiped cleanly away. The medieval era, of all things, had actually surpassed the modern world in at least this one respect.
Luid wrote the number 5 on the board.
"First of all, the spell I used was of roughly the 5th Tier."
The moment he finished speaking, the crowd began to murmur. Someone raised a hand.
"Yes, go ahead."
"Greetings. I am the eldest son of the Rexcton family, second-year student of the Magic Department, Allen—"
Sensing a long preamble, Luid cut him off.
"Please omit your status when asking questions from now on."
"Yes. Then I'll get straight to it. I understand the spell you used was Elemental Explosion — a spell of approximately the 4th Tier. Why, then, do you claim it was 5th Tier?"
Elemental Explosion was an existing spell — one that collided the elements to trigger a detonation.
Wow, it already existed? I had no idea.
He'd simply picked the name because it looked cool, nothing more.
Not only did it already exist, but its mechanism was nearly identical too.
Luid answered without hesitation.
"Because it is a different spell from the conventional one."
"...Different, you say?"
"Precisely speaking, it's a far more advanced form than the original. Let me say it once more, clearly. The Elemental Explosion I used was not 4th Tier. It was 5th Tier."
Honestly, it's better this way that an existing tier spell was the base — makes it much easier to explain.
The modern academic establishment had, on the grounds of various theoretical problems, abolished the old system of Tier Magic. Yet the tiers were still the go-to shorthand whenever mages compared spells. Even though the system was a relic of a bygone age, the criterion it was built on — difficulty — was simply too precise to abandon.
The 2nd-Tier spell Fireball was a textbook example. Its destructive power varied with the caster's mana output and personal optimization, but the fundamental difficulty of the spell itself never changed. No matter how devastatingly one threw a Fireball, its difficulty remained 2nd Tier.
The concept was absolute. Even now, ever since the supreme magician Delin — the archmage who had established the foundations of nearly all magical theory — first defined Tier Magic, there had never once been a shift of a spell between tiers. New spells were discovered from time to time, but an existing spell had never changed its tier.
It had been that way until now, and it would remain that way hereafter.
"...Then are you seriously claiming that you, young master, took the 4th-Tier spell Elemental Explosion and advanced it into a 5th-Tier spell?"
Impossible. Everyone listening to the student's question thought the same thing.
But Luid nodded without a flicker of doubt.
"Yes. At the 4th Tier, attempting a proper Elemental Explosion isn't even possible."
"That's absurd."
"He swapped the tiers?"
"This is... this is Delin-tier territory."
The magic lecture everyone had expected — a modest breakdown of how much mana was spent, how much optimization was performed — had, in that instant, become the presentation of an entirely new spell.
The eyes of the Magic Academic Society members seated in the front rows changed at once.
"Th-that's impossible. Young master — could you simply be mistaking an Elemental Explosion made stronger by your innate mana for a 5th-Tier spell?"
Luid gave a faint smirk.
"Hardly. I'll now explain the reason."
The questioner sank back into his seat with trembling pupils. Luid drew a magic circle on the board.
"This is the magic circle I used."
Four intricate magic circles were etched onto the board. Each one was the foundational circle of an elemental magic — the sort of basic construct that every practicing mage could draw in their sleep.
And none of them was the magic circle of Elemental Explosion.
In that instant, roughly ten hands shot up at once. The Chancellor's was among them. Their faces all wore the same desperate expression — dying to object.
They're probably all thinking, 'Why the hell are those the circles for Elemental Explosion, you brat?!'
Luid laughed inwardly. He could have answered right away, but he held back. Instead, he looked toward his trusty ally.
"Miss Hershey."
"Yes!"
Hershey rose with a bright, eager face.
"Could you manifest one for us?"
He pointed at the board. Hershey nodded quickly and swept her wand through the air.
One by one, motes of light blossomed out of the empty air — fire, water, wind, and earth.
"Now I'll manifest mine."
Fwoosh—
All four prime elements materialized at once.
"Wow..."
"How is that even possible?"
Low murmurs of awe rippled through the hall. Several more hands rose.
"A question! Question!"
The impatient Clifford barked, his features twisted into a scowl. His face made it plain: explain how four spells were cast simultaneously, right now.
Luid lifted his index finger to his lips.
"A little quiet, please, Chancellor."
"Y-you...!"
Clifford's face crumpled, but he couldn't very well interrupt the speaker, so he had no choice but to swallow his fury.
"Forget the simultaneous casting for a moment. Focus on my element and on Hershey's."
Compared to Hershey's, Luid's element was remarkably small.
"Hershey, can you tell what's different?"
Hershey concentrated on the ball of Luid's element. An element untouched by any interference was nothing more than a gathered shape of light.
"Ah."
She understood almost immediately.
"The mass. The mass is different. Yours looks small, but it contains far more energy than mine."
Luid nodded. His special lecture yesterday must have been quite effective.
"Correct. My element carries a far greater mass. And depending on how much it can be compressed, the power of Elemental Explosion changes."
Luid swirled his wand.
"Wh-what?"
"It vanished...?"
"No. It didn't vanish. Open your eyes wide and watch carefully."
It hadn't disappeared — it had been condensed. The element that had once been the size of two finger-joints now shrank to something no bigger than a pinpoint.
This time around thirty hands went up. It wasn't like the four-way simultaneous chanting, which no one would ever dare attempt — that sort of compression seemed doable by anyone who understood the operating principle.
Luid couldn't ignore this many. He pointed at someone at random.
"Go ahead."
"H-how did you do that? The magic circle looks identical."
"Ah, that..."
Gulp. The sound of the audience swallowing in unison was vividly audible.
"That's a trade secret."
"?"
"Well, today's lecture is on Elemental Explosion. It's not a lecture on simultaneous chanting or compression magic, after all."
"Aww, tsk tsk. Would you look at that stingy little—just one word! You could've just said you pushed it down with telekinesis!"
...That's my trade secret, you know.
He wanted to keep it hidden because admitting he'd solved it with simple telekinesis lacked a certain, well, cool factor.
Luid narrowed his eyes slyly and looked at Clifford.
"A little quiet, please."
Clifford clicked his tongue and gave a short nod — stop the nonsense and get on with it. Yet the crow's-feet around his eyes brimmed with pure, childlike fascination.
"The method itself doesn't matter. But keep this in mind: the higher the purity of the element, the greater the spell's explosive force. Now, we take only the core of these highly purified elements and separate it out, then layer them upon one another."
Luid swept his wand.
The summoned elements merged into one in an instant. The students flinched hard and scrambled backward. Among them, Clifford even threw up a barrier in a flash, shielding the entire student body.
But no explosion came.
"And this is why the spell is 5th Tier. Because you must establish a Magic Coordinate System. Precisely — at the exact same point."
The Magic Coordinate System referred to designating the point at which a spell manifests. Ordinary magic appeared relative to the caster. But if one could manipulate the coordinates, a spell could be made to materialize directly at any desired location — and that, exactly that, was the domain of the 5th Tier.
"This next part is the true heart of the spell."
Luid wrapped a translucent barrier around the element and slightly relaxed the force binding it in place.
Sss-szzt, szzt—
The elements fused together as if undergoing nuclear fission, triggering fierce chemical reactions among themselves.
"You hold it together without letting it detonate. The longer you can sustain it, the better. And then, from this state, you release the force—"
BOOM!
The element erupted, and the ground shuddered. It had been contained within the barrier, yet its sheer, tremendous power was obvious to everyone.
"And that's how it's done. I use telekinesis, but each of you should simply leverage your own individual strengths."
Every mage had a different specialty. Noble houses in particular passed down generations of magical grimoires, and methods even more effective than telekinesis were scattered among them everywhere. Hershey, for one, could hold the elements compressed with the power of wind.
"I'll now take your questions."
At that, Clifford in front thrust his hand high into the air.
Luid spoke through half-lidded eyes.
"I'll only take questions from students."
"You brat! What kind of nonsense rule is that?!"
Clifford exploded like a volcano. Beside him, the Master of the Magic Tower stroked his luxuriant beard and grumbled, looking thoroughly stifled.
"Hohoho... a whole bushel of things I'd like to ask."
"That's the rule of the Academy, freshly minted just now! Luid Christopher, who opened this magic lecture, is obligated to answer the Chancellor's questions!"
Luid scratched his head. That was a problem. Clifford was a former Archmage. The caliber of an Archmage's questions would be leagues beyond anything else.
I can't let too much information slip.
Luid disliked the thought of the world drifting too far from the original story. The concepts he'd just explained weren't especially difficult ones. To anyone raised in the modern era, what happens when a massive quantity of energy is compressed is simply common sense.
And yet, this was the reaction he got.
At present, Luid was a fusion of the original Lazy Luid's raw computational power and his past life's 21st-century knowledge. The latter was nothing more than superficial, half-remembered fact — but the former was simply broken. Even that shallow knowledge could be given concrete form, because Luid possessed the intellectual horsepower to actualize it through magic.
The problem was that he couldn't predict how an answer given to someone else's question would be applied, or what result it might produce. If he handed over a concept genuinely capable of reshaping the era, he'd be in real trouble. Progress would follow, and the story would change. His own advantage — the superiority of the knowledge he carried — would evaporate.
In the worst case, a war could even break out over magic developed too far, too fast. Technological transitions always dragged war along in their wake.
So Luid had no choice but to shut it down coldly.
"No. I will only take questions from the students."
"You damn loafer of a brat...! Where in the world is such discrimination allowed!"
Clifford seethed, his face flushed crimson. He was too old now to match the computational speed of his prime, but in his passion for magic alone, he was every bit the equal of any student at the Academy.