Irie Argensia (3)
The moment I stepped into the office, a heavy current of mana rose up to greet me.
Its owner was none other than Dalton Argensia—former master of the Red Magic Tower, and my grandfather.
Even past seventy, his back stood ramrod straight and his hair remained a stubborn, bottomless black, marking him unmistakably as a man far beyond the ordinary.
Though the man himself never once lifted his eyes from the metal type in his hand.
So this is what a 7-Circle mage is like.
It was the sort of pressure that would have sent the Irie of the past scrambling for the door. Of course, that hardly applied to the man I was now.
"You called for me."
I offered the greeting with perfect calm and stepped further inside. Only when I showed no reaction whatsoever to the crushing weight of his mana did Dalton's gaze finally turn my way.
Sharp eyes that called a northern wolf to mind. He swept them over me once, top to bottom, then added quietly,
"...You've learned some composure, at least."
"I'm afraid I don't follow."
"It's nothing."
At his gesture toward the seat, I settled into the empty sofa across from him.
"Do you know why I called you here?"
Dalton's voice was low, his eyes fixed on mine.
Even ransacking every memory of my past life, I'd never once had a proper conversation with the old man in front of me—which made guessing all the harder.
"I couldn't say."
"Well. I thought as much."
Dalton set down the documents he was holding, then reached behind him and passed me one of the ornamental swords displayed there.
Thunk.
"I can't vouch for how well it cuts, but take it in hand and see."
"...You mean this thing?"
One look told me it was no proper weapon. The blade was chipped, the balance a disaster—swinging it would be about all it was good for.
Why hand me this all of a sudden?
It hardly seemed like a gift. I stole a glance at Dalton, but his face gave nothing away, and his intent was beyond me.
With a small inward sigh, I curled my fingers lightly around the hilt.
And right at that moment—
Fwoosh!
Mana came flooding to Dalton's fingertips without a single word of chant. A perfect ambush, timed to the instant my attention was buried in the sword.
Had anyone ordinary been standing there, it was an attack that would have left a lump of charcoal before they could blink.
But—
Whoosh! Crack!
Without so much as loosening my stance, I gave the sword in my hand a light swing and cleaved through the empty air.
The flame, robbed of the core that composed it, withered away before it ever so much as brushed my face.
Watching, Dalton's pupils swelled for an instant—then shrank back to their usual size.
"...What exactly was that, if I may ask?"
"A kind of test. For the conversation we're about to have."
What a strange old man—hurling spells at you out of nowhere, then carrying on as if nothing had happened....
"I hear Ellen's spellcasting speed has improved by leaps and bounds. Word is, that's the fruit of him chasing at your heels so diligently."
"I didn't do anything special. Call it the boy's talent."
And I wasn't being modest—it was the plain truth. I'd spent that month busy recalibrating my own body, and all Ellen had done was steal glances at my strength training and movements and copy them in his own way.
The only thing I'd actually taken time to teach him was my breathing method. Though even I hadn't expected that single technique to send his casting speed skyrocketing the way it had.
"No need for false modesty. I don't know what's changed in you, but..."
Dalton unclasped his hands and got to the point.
"The headmaster of the academy is looking for someone."
"Someone, you say."
"That's right."
"And you'd have me go, I take it."
"Reluctant?"
I gave it a moment's honest thought. Twenty-three years old, to be frank about it.
Long past the age for a debut into high society—and manaless besides, staying on with the family would mean nothing but living under everyone's eye, treading carefully for the rest of my days.
Being the count's bastard didn't exactly help, either.
Truth be told, there was no seat in this family that belonged to me. Between a mansion this thick with watching eyes, where I couldn't so much as move freely, taking my ease at the academy might well be the better life.
"And what exactly would I be doing there?"
"You'll find out once you arrive."
We weren't playing twenty questions—why did the old man have to hoard so many secrets?
Judging by the way the conversation was drifting, whatever awaited me was bound to be a nuisance—but I had no intention of refusing. In exchange, though.
"I'll go. On one condition."
"Name it."
"I'd like you to release some Kolers leaves and Olerin roots from the family storage."
At my request, Dalton's face twisted into an expression of pure incomprehension.
"They're hardly rare treasures.... But taken together, the two of them become a lethal poison that burns a mage's circuits clean out. What in the world do you need them for?"
"They smell pleasant. I mean to use them as potpourri."
A lie, of course.
In my past life, back when I made my living scavenging in the wake of mages, there had been a stretch when no supplies ever came and I went four days on an empty stomach.
Starved blind with hunger, I'd chewed down whatever herbs I could get my hands on—and they happened to be exactly the pair he'd just named.
For close to a week it felt as though every blood vessel in my body were on fire, but in the end it bought me a monstrous surge of strength and agility.
And in this manaless body of mine, the side effects would be milder still.
Worth a try, at the very least.
I had trained every day for the past month, but for all my twenty-three years, stacked against the body of my past life this one was still hopelessly, pathetically weak.
I had no particular greed for power. But this sensation—my mind remembering every technique perfectly while my body lagged behind, fumbling through them—was maddening to the point of insanity.
And with the academy now decided, I needed to wring a far more dramatic transformation out of this frail shell of mine.
Dalton studied me for a long moment, then nodded, as if the matter had lost its novelty.
"No mana in your body, so I suppose it can't poison you. Do as you like."
"Thank you. When, roughly, should I plan to depart?"
"Sorting out your status will take some time, so roughly two weeks from now. Have your preparations finished by then."
Two weeks, then...
A tight fit, if I meant to endure the herbs' side effects and grow the body on top of that. Honestly, though, it was nothing I couldn't manage.
Already planning how to bundle up my spoils, I bowed with proper courtesy and left the office.
And so I arrived at the family treasury.
...
While the soldier in charge hunched over his paperwork, I slipped two glass bottles from the dusty corner where they'd been shoved into my pocket.
What I'd lifted were the Elixir of the Gale and the Elixir of Flexibility. Once, they'd commanded a respectable price; by now, with warriors outside the mage towers gone utterly extinct, nobody would take them even as a gift.
And what if I knocked these back together with the herbs I'd just been granted?
No telling what the side effects might be—but the efficiency, that much was certain, would be beyond imagining.
And that night—
"Ggh—gghaaaargh...!"
Regret took very little time to set in.
The herbs and elixirs I'd crammed into my mouth churned against each other in my gut, while every blood vessel and muscle in my body tore itself apart and rebuilt itself, over and over.
Damn it—this hurts twice as much as it did last time!
Apparently a body with no tolerance whatsoever took the medicine well—far too well.
But the greater the pain, the surer the results....
Only after a week adrift between life and death was my body finally mine to command again.
From there, it was an unbroken slog of simple, mindless conditioning. If the herbs and elixirs I'd suffered to absorb were to settle perfectly into place, I judged, working the body half to death was the only way.
Sandbags strung all over my body for leg work and push-ups. Flexibility drills that bent me every way a body wasn't meant to bend. Even mountain runs topping twenty kilometers a day.
And while I drove myself to the limit the way I had in my past life, the one actually dying was, absurdly, not me but Ellen.
"Haah... haah... B-Brother! I'm begging you, please just slow down a little!"
Faithfully keeping up with my training had made him somewhat serviceable, but even so, a mage's notoriously trash stamina remained exactly that.
I answered coldly, without so much as a glance back.
"I never told you to follow. If all you'll do is whine, drop dead."
"Wh-who's... tired...? Like... this could... beat me...!"
Dry-heaving the whole way and still stumbling after me—the boy had real grit, I'd give him that.
Though the grit didn't last either; somewhere around the mountain's midpoint his eyes rolled white and down he went.
For me, the result was deeply satisfying. Piggybacking a fainted boy down the mountain made for excellent lower-body training, after all.
And here I'd thought him nothing but a daily nuisance. Turns out he has his uses after all.
With a load far heavier than any sandbag on my back, I could feel the elixir's power seeping evenly into my legs.
Buried in that bone-grinding routine, time poured through my fingers—
and before I knew it, the two weeks the family head had spoken of had flown past like an arrow.
The office, once more.
This time, the instant I opened the door and stepped in, Dalton's gaze was already on me—not on the type in his hand.
...
He combed over every inch of me with that unreadable face, cleared his throat once, and finally spoke.
"Are your preparations for departure complete?"
"Yes. Though come to think of it, no one ever actually told me the destination. Just where am I going?"
At my flat question, Dalton passed a document across and answered.
"You're going to Granz Academy."
"...Granz, you say?"
For a moment, I doubted my own ears. Granz—the largest magic academy on the continent, backed directly by the Greitz Imperial Family.
I'd braced myself to be dumped into some nameless school of magic on the frontier. Instead, I was being sent to a place where the continent's finest geniuses all gathered.
So that's why he wouldn't tell me properly before. Sly old snake of a man.
But really, what did it change, Granz or anywhere else?
It itched a little, having built up only the body without ever tasting real combat—but I'd crossed death's door getting ready, and my preparations were as complete as they could be.
Above all, in the empire's largest academy, the facilities alone were bound to be spectacular.
Once again I raised no argument, gave a nod, and left the office.
With the door closed and silence settling over the office, Dalton leaned quietly back in his chair.
The strange, unfamiliar fire he'd glimpsed in his grandson refused to leave his mind.
...The change over a single month had been astonishing enough.
In a mere two weeks, the boy had returned a completely different person. Shoulders that used to sag now stood squared and strong, and his stance alone left no opening to be found.
The pinnacle of a purely perfected body.
What magic could the boy have conjured to grow like that in two weeks?
Three hundred years had passed since the great Three Founding Mages settled the continent into peace. Dalton was an archmage who had believed, all his life, that no answer existed beyond magic. Yet today, staring at that freak of a grandson's back, for the first time in his life a doubt had taken root—that his conviction might be wrong.
...Theodore will be more than pleased.
The string of ugly disturbances stirring across the continent of late. And the one best suited to shield the academy from them should turn out to be that third son—the boy who'd lived on cold rice in his own house.
The ways of the world—just when you think you know them, they confound you.
With a small chuckle, Dalton turned his eyes back to the type in his hand.
Outside the mansion, a fair-sized crowd had gathered around the carriage.
Ellen, planted at the very front of it, worked his lips.
"So you're really leaving."
More of the family had come to see me off than I'd expected. If I'd known, perhaps I should have skipped the academy business altogether and stayed quietly holed up at home....
"Yeah. I am. Put everything you learned trailing after me to good use."
Whether that offhand remark was the trigger or not, the boy who'd been straining to look composed suddenly burst into tears.
"Sob... hic—waaah!"
And now he had a death grip on my trouser leg and no intention whatsoever of letting go.
I flicked his hand away like a man brushing off a fly, and said flatly,
"You're a boy—quit blubbering."
"But... if you go, who am I supposed to ask? Hic!"
Watching him cry with snot streaming down his face, a sigh escaped me of its own accord. And at the sight, without quite meaning to, I heard myself add words I didn't need to say.
"If something's got you curious, you can always come to the capital, can't you?"
At that, Ellen's wailing cut off dead—and then the red eyes began to shine, bright and clear.
"Huh...? R-really? I can really come?!"
Ah. Slip of the tongue.
Past life or this one, this useless soft heart of mine is the problem.
"...Well. Once, perhaps."
I hurried to smooth it over, but Ellen's mind was already lost to the fact that he'd gotten his permission. With his overwrought send-off leading the way, I left the family's modest hospitality behind me and boarded the carriage.
Whrrm! Clunk!
The mana-stone engine turned over, and a heavy vibration rolled out across the grounds. And to my ears, that noise sounded for all the world like a great signal flare—heralding the journey that awaited me at Granz.