Meeting Is Always Sudden
I was at a loss when Daeun asked me how strong I was.
Strength was always relative, so even if she asked me that, there wasn’t much I could say in reply.
Let me give you a quick example.
Say I were to fight that snake bastard coiled up in the empire, one on one.
It might sound arrogant, but if it were a straight duel, I wasn’t confident.
Confident I’d lose, that is.
But if it were a battlefield where armies clashed against armies, the result would end with my defeat.
He was adept at tearing armies apart with every trick and spell in the book, so even if my own body came through unharmed, the troops I led would not.
In truth, there had been more than one time I’d been thoroughly burned by his magic….
There was a reason I hadn’t been able to grab the snake bastard by the throat and kill him on the spot, no matter how badly I’d wanted to.
…If I’d been prepared to risk mutual destruction, maybe I could have done it. But back then, I had things to protect, so that wasn’t an option.
And it still wasn’t.
Anyway, I only used the most familiar snake bastard as an example, but how was I supposed to answer when I didn’t even know how many strong people were out there on the Ardeena Continent?
Usually, if I said, “Me. Master,” people accepted it and dropped the subject, but Daeun, who already knew my level, clearly wasn’t looking for that kind of answer.
Daeun wasn’t satisfied just seeing the gap between us, so she pressed me again.
“Then, have you ever fought with everything you had?”
“With everything I had….”
Of course I had.
When I resisted that drunk who’d dragged me off by the hand.
When I threw myself at some thug in a desperate gamble because one more beating might kill me.
When I was trying to escape the city, only to end up fighting a wolf monster and nearly die.
I always had to fight with everything I had.
If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t be standing here now.
“…Hngh!”
As I said it in a low voice, Daeun suddenly sniffled.
“N-not that kind of thing. Right, what about back in the knight order?”
She hurriedly changed the subject.
It was such an awkward transition that I noticed it immediately, of course.
But I didn’t call her on it.
Talking about those days wasn’t exactly pleasant for me either.
“Hmm….”
I pretended to think about it.
“A few times, I guess.”
Once in the war against the empire, and a couple of other times against different threats.
When Daeun heard that, her eyes sparkled.
“Canara going all out? That would be so cool…!”
“…?”
You’ve never even seen it.
“It’s not exactly a good thing.”
Going all out meant an opponent strong enough to force me to do it had shown up.
Even if I could win, fighting someone like that was exhausting, and I’d prefer to avoid it if I could.
Daeun’s face went blank with sudden realization.
“Oh, n-no, I don’t mean I want Kana to suffer or anything. I just thought it would look cool….”
“Yeah. I know.”
Knowing Daeun’s personality, that wasn’t an excuse. It was the truth.
Because I knew that, I didn’t find her words particularly irritating.
There were other reasons I didn’t want to fight all out, too.
“If I go all out, my body starts hurting, weird things cling to me….”
More than anything else,
“It’s noisy.”
“…Noisy?”
“Yeah.”
What I hated most was having to listen to useless chatter.
If I were fighting while hearing random noise that wouldn’t help my life one bit, I felt like my brain would just go numb.
I looked at Daeun, who was staring at me in confusion.
‘Come to think of it, maybe she’s a bit like Daeun.’
The details were different, but maybe at a larger scale they were alike.
Daeun was always listening to her viewers, after all.
Somehow, that made her seem even more impressive to me.
“…Huh? Huh? Noisy? What does that even mean…? Wait, you’re not talking about me, are you?”
Daeun still wore a completely lost expression.
* * *
There was more than one way to increase one’s resistance to Magi.
There was a reason wealthy people liked to wrap themselves head to toe in expensive magical tools.
A powerful magical tool increased your resistance to Magi just by being carried on your person.
To be more precise, it was basically a spare life of sorts, transferring the damage the owner would take onto the tool instead.
Of course, that wasn’t the only reason people piled on magical tools.
Still, that led to the question.
What, then, was the condition for a magical tool to be expensive?
“Me, me! I know the answer!”
My one and only student raised her hand enthusiastically.
“It’s inscribing a high-grade spell!”
“Hmm….”
Not wrong, exactly.
“Fifty points.”
“Wha—?!”
Only fifty?!
Daeun, who had just been handed a miserable report card, trembled.
“Why, Professor!”
“Inscribing a high-grade spell is part of the process, not the root cause.”
“…Not the root cause?”
“Right. Think about it. Why do mages know that magical tools with high-grade spells inscribed on them can sell for such high prices, and yet they don’t just make those? Why do they still make cheap ones too?”
“Uh… because they aren’t skilled enough?”
“That’s part of it.”
The maker’s ability was certainly important in making a good magical tool.
Just as a skilled artisan made a fine sword, a skilled magic engineer made a fine magical tool.
I held out my arm.
The bracelet on my wrist gave a clear little chime as it swayed.
“How much magic do you think could be inscribed into this bracelet?”
“I-I don’t know…?”
Daeun, who was completely ignorant when it came to magic, dodged the question.
I didn’t know much about magic either, no more than she did, but this wasn’t something that required specialized magical knowledge.
“At most, probably a low-grade spell.”
“A low-grade spell? But I paid quite a bit for it….”
“Being valuable as jewelry doesn’t mean it’s a good material for magic engineering.”
It wasn’t that there were no truly expensive magical tools that were both beautiful and high-performing.
Rings, necklaces, bracelets, hairpins—things that were easy to wear and also let you decorate yourself.
As for what those cost…
“You can guess, right?”
“Mm, um….”
…Did she know or not?
I chose to believe she’d roughly understood and moved on to the next explanation.
“As spell rank goes up, the amount of mana needed to cast it goes up too. When you inscribe it into a magical tool, the spell gets compressed, so the requirement drops a bit.”
Even so, could ordinary people who couldn’t even feel mana really handle the amount required to cast a spell?
Of course not.
All magic cast through a magical tool was performed using the mana stored inside that tool.
What mattered were two things: the durability to withstand inscribing a high-grade spell, and the storage capacity to hold a large amount of mana.
Only when those two conditions were met could a high-grade spell be inscribed, and only then could the tool become an expensive one.
“…So people with lots of mana use magical tools made from materials that are very durable but have low storage capacity.”
“…Mm! I totally get it!”
“…You do understand, right?”
“Of course!”
Usually when people said that, it meant they didn’t understand at all.
Her face was so self-assured that it only made me uneasy, but it wasn’t a particularly important point, so I let it go.
“Professor!”
“Yeah?”
“I’m pretty sure I asked why we were heading north, so why are you suddenly giving a lecture on magical tools?”
Everything I’d said so far had just been buildup for answering that question.
“Celine’s with us, so under normal circumstances we’d be safe, but there’s always the possibility that something happens.”
If a situation came where Celine couldn’t stay by my side.
If something happened that Celine and I couldn’t solve.
To prepare for that possibility, I’d chosen magical tools as my insurance policy.
A magical tool made for the sole purpose of resisting Magi should be able to hold out to some extent even in Laxia, where Magi was everywhere.
If it were up to me, I’d have liked to grab something like a holy relic from the Edel Church instead of a magical tool, but unfortunately Edel had said that wasn’t allowed.
“For me?”
“…If you got hurt for no reason, that’d just be a pain.”
We were already busy enough with a long road ahead of us; if I got hit by Magi, we’d have to stop so I could be treated.
So that was why.
Really.
Staaare—
“….”
“….”
Staaaare…—
The warm gaze being directed at me was irritating, so I looked away.
Then, when I glanced sideways at Daeun again—
Swoosh!
“…Ghk?!”
“Awww, you’re so cute~~!”
Daeun launched an attack hug.
…This again?
It had happened more than once, so I let all the strength go out of my body and went limp.
“Mm-hm, mm-hm! I get it now, Kana was worried about her big sister~?”
“…Ughh.”
“Hmm? That’s right? I knew it!”
That was completely wrong.
Even if I said that, it wouldn’t come across properly anyway.
“You two are getting along well today, too.”
“Hehe, are we?”
“Yup. So much that I’m getting jealous just watching. Fufu.”
If you were going to talk with Celine, could you at least let me go first?
In the end, Daeun only released me after patting my arms a few times.
Freed from the devil’s grasp, I fanned my face with my hand to cool down the warmth there.
…Hot.
“The easiest place to get magical tools is the imperial capital.”
The empire, which held the hegemony of the continent, naturally drew all kinds of people and goods into its capital—the heart of the empire itself.
I’d never been to the imperial capital, so this was something I’d only heard from others.
“Oh? But Kana—”
“Yeah. That’s why we’re not going to the capital. We’re going somewhere else.”
If we’d been heading to the empire in the first place, I wouldn’t have set our direction north.
Magical tool materials were often ore.
And if you asked which race handled ore best on Ardeena, everyone would give the same answer.
“The land of dwarves. We’re going there.”
If elves had the Great Forest, dwarves had the Great Mountain Range.
Its official name wasn’t even the Great Mountain Range, and the country had a different name too.
According to rumor—
‘Humans call the forest where those knife-ears live the Great Forest? We can’t lose. Then we’ll call ours the Great Mountain Range!’
—this was how the name Great Mountain Range came about.
Everyone who heard it just laughed it off, saying, “No way they named it that for such a ridiculous reason.”
But having actually seen dwarves myself, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the rumor might be true.
Well, they weren’t calling some tiny hill a great mountain range or anything. It was a massive, majestic chain of mountains, so it wasn’t like the name was out of place….
Still, if you thought it had been named that way, it was only natural to feel a little unnerved.
“…The land of dwarves!”
As expected, Daeun reacted strongly.
Like a sparrow that never passed a mill without stopping by, Daeun seemed unable to contain her curiosity.
That was probably why she could roam around everywhere without ever seeming to get tired.