5. Mage Maya (8)
5. Mage Maya (8)
The next day, the leader of the Silver Screen Circus returned to the Illusion Demonstration Hall.
Just as he had the day before, he wandered the tent, surveying the works of the assembled mages.
Some had ignored his critiques and remained unchanged; others showed improvement.
Arno passed over the former without a second glance. To the latter, he offered a little more advice.
Only a handful of days remained until the opening ceremony.
If someone took his advice, made corrections, and showed genuine promise, he meant to extend them an invitation.
His footsteps eventually stopped at the same table as yesterday—the girl he had lashed with a torrent of harsh words.
Today, that spot was empty.
'Was I too harsh?'
She was the youngest mage in the tent.
And yet he had been far harder on her than on any of the other participants.
The illusions she produced were remarkable, but their limitations were just as stark.
Her talent had struck him as frustrating.
If only she would stop obsessing over Illusion Magic and take a path that could truly bring her abilities to life.
Though she had concealed her face, he knew who she was—the circumstances had been relayed to him.
The daughter of acquaintances.
He could have delivered his advice more gently.
But that would have rendered meaningless the very fact that she came here wearing a mask.
Harsher lashing—sharper goading—was the only proper tribute to her resolve.
If she wanted to walk a path for which she lacked natural talent, she had to overcome at least that much.
If she could not, it was better that she simply leave.
A day passed, and then the next.
Her spot stayed empty.
Had she fled for good?
Or was she somewhere, gritting her teeth and steeling her resolve?
Either choice demanded courage.
Whichever it was, Arno wanted to cheer her on.
And so the day after that passed.
And the day after that.
And the day after that.
She did not come.
Time slipped by, and the final day arrived.
Those worth choosing had long since been chosen.
Only the substandard mages remained.
Yet still he came here every day, waiting on the off-chance someone would appear.
But she did not come.
Had she truly given up?
He felt both regret and relief.
He was about to set the matter aside and leave when he saw a figure standing at the tent's entrance.
Hair and skin as white as snow.
Features as lovely as a porcelain doll.
An expression so devoid of warmth it looked emotionless, and a gaze just as cold.
It was the owner of the empty seat.
Arno looked at the girl who bore the traces of someone he had once loved and someone he had once envied.
"Ah, the unqualified one. What brings you here?"
He feigned ignorance.
But he already had a fair guess at her purpose.
Today was the final day of selection.
Revealing the face she had hidden behind a mask made her intentions unmistakable.
She had grasped the limits of her talent and meant to invoke her parents' names and beg to be accepted.
But the words that came from her lips were unexpected.
"I've come to demonstrate an illusion."
Her voice still carried no palpable emotion, but in her stance—standing squarely before him—Arno could feel her confidence.
Could it be?
Had she grasped the Mystic in that short span of time?
Had his harsh words acted as some kind of shock therapy?
Had they somehow unlocked her access to the Mystic?
"Show me."
But the anticipation he had let himself feel withered the instant he saw the faint glow emanating from her hands.
He had walked the path of Illusion Magic for forty years.
A single glance told him what sort of spell she was about to weave.
She meant to use light and computational power to attempt the same kind of magic as days before.
She had not awakened to the Mystic.
Clutching at a path she knew was wrong.
It was pitiful.
Disappointing.
He had been curious to see how a fallen genius might rise again.
Before he knew it, a crowd had gathered around them.
The illusion mages still lingering in this tent were, for all practical purposes, already eliminated.
Most were people who could not admit their own inadequacy—left with nothing but stubbornness and spite.
Their gazes upon Maya were far from kind.
"Isn't that the girl from last time?"
"The human Memory Disk? Hah."
"Looks like she came back for another public humiliation."
Their envious stares and mocking laughter fell on her all at once, but she did not tense up.
Arno's cold glare pierced her to the core, but she felt no fear.
She could feel, beyond the crowd, a single gaze watching her.
He was sending her an encouraging smile.
You can do this.
Maya drew a deep breath and recalled what she had practiced over the past several days.
***
Maya's foundational ability was magic that formed polyhedrons.
She placed points, connected them with lines, and created faces to construct shapes.
In TT1, this served only to solve puzzles or to function as bridges and walls.
But her abilities steadily evolved with each successive title in the series.
TT2 added a blueprint function.
She could pre-load a polyhedron's design data and materialize the shape in the moment it was needed.
That was also when her power, originally limited to non-combat situations, first began to see use in battle.
Once blueprints were introduced, a pastime called Polygon Art became widespread.
Players crafted elaborate polyhedron models in-game using hundreds or thousands of facets for fun.
Videos of players displaying the severed heads of past bosses at their campsites regularly topped the real-time charts.
TT3 went a step further, adding motion and mass to the polyhedrons.
Polygon Art evolved into Polygon Engineering.
By assembling hundreds of component polyhedrons, people built outlandish contraptions.
Siege weapons, automobiles, even enormous mobile battle-robots.
Of course, none of this had much impact on the actual gameplay.
A single tail-sweep from an elite monster could topple such polyhedron assemblies like dominoes.
Still, every now and then, a clever application proved useful in a playthrough.
During escort quests involving a slow, burdensome helper character, someone would load the helper into a catapult and launch them clear across the city to save time—a play that drew huge laughs.
I was the best of the TTT YouTubers even in that niche.
That sort of thing was what made me famous in the first place.
I shot all kinds of special-feature videos with an inventiveness that pushed the system to its very limits.
The boss-head gallery and the catapult play I just mentioned were both my recordings.
Polygon Engineering was my specialty.
I taught her everything I knew.
And a genius was, indeed, a genius.
In a matter of days, she absorbed years' worth of mathematical knowledge and fabrication techniques that I had accumulated.
***
The new cube he had proposed.
It was an illusion composed of eight vertices, twelve edges, and six faces.
An illusion that realized only the outer surface.
Its interior was utterly empty.
That cube was a mockery.
It turned the mages' insistence that creating an illusion required one to picture its essence in the mind into a laughable joke.
Maya had been shackled by their methods.
Deceived by their doctrine, she had strained to mimic essence.
She had stacked grain after grain to mold a form.
That had been her Illusion Magic.
Arno had called it deception. A cheap trick.
He had been right.
But what about the new cube Wonderstein had shown her?
It was even more deceptive.
It outright ignored the very existence of essence.
It constructed nothing but outer shell, only exterior, as if the interior had never existed at all.
An iconoclastic concept that overturned the existing paradigm of Illusion Magic.
His approach was nothing short of genius.
"How do I handle the color?"
Maya stared at the cube floating before her eyes.
As it stood, it was merely a glowing die.
Birch wood.
Twelve annual rings.
Asymmetrical grain.
Seventeen grooves.
Four splinters.
What about the rest?
Wonderstein spoke in a casual tone.
"Miss Maya, you learned to paint from your father, didn't you? Paint it with whatever colors you want."
Ah.
With that, Maya awakened.
Mana erupted from her body.
A current so deep and vast it was hard to believe it came from a sixteen-year-old girl.
In the quality of her mana, its quantity, and its application, she already surpassed the level of an academy professor.
The people who had been sneering at her flinched.
They must have thought she had exploded in anger.
Maya did not waste a shred of mental energy on those trifling reactions.
She focused solely on painting the image she intended to create.
And on calculating the formulas that matched it.
The particles of light her mana generated moved without a hair's breadth of deviation according to the composition she had calculated.
Points connected to points,
lines met lines,
faces coalesced into form.
Inside the colorless, transparent illusion not yet realized.
Maya lifted her brush.
She remembered the days painting in the garden with her father.
Back then, she stood before the canvas and filled it with colors exactly as she saw them.
I don't know the essence of things?
I have no heart?
I'll never set foot in the realm of the Mystic?
She would no longer be bound by their way of seeing the world.
Maya swept her brush.
Color bloomed across colorless illusions.
Everything around her was saturated with her colors.
Conjure the image, calculate, release mana, mold the form, apply color.
The entire process, from start to finish, took only a few seconds.
The radiant brilliance erupting around her body subsided.
Maya opened her eyes.
A coastal cliff on some island, where the distant blue horizon expelled white clouds.
Waves shattered against honeycombed rocks below, flinging droplets into the air.
When she turned to look back, what filled her sight was an ocean of yellow.
A tide of rapeseed blossoms cascading down from the hills tickled her ankles and surged toward the sea.
Every petal drifting on the wind gave off a fragrance that could not possibly exist.
Bees and butterflies threading between the flower beds beat silent wings.
A breeze that could not be felt grazed past her cheek.
The landscape of an island's rapeseed field, her end-of-term project.
She had recreated it beyond perfection.
She lost herself in admiration for only a moment.
Her head briefly went blank, and then, one by one, the figures of people around her began to reappear.
She could hear their voices, too.
"Th-this is possible, at that age?"
"She rendered a landscape at this level?"
People stood amid the rapeseed blossoms, gazing around with expressions of disbelief.
Until just now, she must have been in the meditation space.
Expending that much concentration just to activate a single spell.
She had poured her entire heart and soul into this magic.
All that vast mana had run completely dry.
It was then that someone walked across the cliff toward her.
No matter how perfect, an illusion was still an illusion.
And that spot meant there was solid ground underfoot.
The man steadied her as she staggered, her mana depleted.
Normally, she would have recoiled from another person's touch, but this time she accepted it without resistance.
She was exhausted beyond measure, and besides, she could never have accomplished this magic without his help.
"You did well."
At those few words, Maya showed a smile so faint that most people would have called it barely perceptible.