Professor Ferzen
Even before the entrance ceremony began, the carriage park behind the main building of the Imperial Academy was packed tight with carriages. Had there been no space reserved for faculty and staff alone, he might have had to leave his carriage somewhere else and walk the rest of the way.
It was an entrance ceremony, so parents and other kin who had made time for the young lords and ladies had come along with them. Cross paths with any of them, and they would try to wring a greeting out of him before he could escape; he lengthened his stride toward the auditorium inside the education hall.
Even the entrance ceremony was held separately for nobles and for commoners. It might well feel like discrimination, and yet from the commoners' side the heart would rest far easier.
"Ah! You've come, Professor Ferzen."
He had no idea who it was.
Whoever they were, they were doubtless written down in the documents Jeremiah had handed him. If they had not remained in his memory, they were not a person he needed to trouble himself over.
"Yes. Let us be seated."
Within the Academy, forms of address were unified under the single title of professor. So he too set the title of professor upon each of the nobles seated on the platform as he greeted them, then settled quietly into his own place.
Down below, the noble children attending the entrance ceremony sat in demure order. The conditions under which a noble child might enter the Academy were numerous if one dug into the fine print, but in essence they came to three: everyone from fifteen to twenty who had not inherited a title, who was unmarried, and who held no present occupation. The ages of those who would become first-years were scattered every which way.
"Ahem…… The First Princess will shortly deliver her congratulatory address. Everyone, please remain silent."
Mana interfered with the air and heightened the vibration of the surrounding atmosphere, so that words merely spoken became a voice large enough to blanket the whole auditorium as they spread.
Click. Click. From the far side, the First Princess showed herself. Elizabeth.
Don't look.
Judging by the hairpin from that day, there was plainly something quite wrong with her sense of beauty.
"I am glad to meet you. The children of so many houses……"
A tedious stretch of time followed, like the principal's edifying remarks at morning assembly out on the schoolyard when he was small. Even so, during the portion that introduced the Academy, the boredom fled for a little while.
"Then we shall take a brief moment to introduce the professors who will have charge of your lectures."
Elizabeth drew back several steps and turned to look at the faculty where they sat. At that, they rose one by one from the left and came forward. Few of them had much to say, so it did not take long for the turn to reach him.
"I am Ferzen von Schweig Ruerug, and I shall have charge of the lectures in Black Magic. When you address me, attach no trifling flourishes. You will call me, simply, Professor Ferzen."
He finished far more briefly than the others and turned his back. In the first place, of all the students sitting out there, the children who would attend the black magic lectures numbered only fourteen. If those born bearing mana were not so rare, war would long ago have been carried by them alone.
And so the entrance ceremony, running some forty minutes, came to an end.
Twenty minutes before nine he entered his office, gathered the attendance roster, and made his way to a lecture room in Education Hall A.
He opened the door and stepped inside. It was still fifteen minutes early, yet the students were not talking among themselves. Every one of them sat in silence.
No. Not every one.
Exactly one seat was empty. And he knew whose it was.
Lizzie Paul Liana Claudia.
Unlike in childhood, her outward looks would have grown and changed, but that hair, red as red could be, would be the same. Yet among the students sitting there now, he could not see a single child with red hair.
As he swept his gaze from side to side, his eyes met Laura's, and she inclined her head in a small bow of greeting. Look a second time and she was still a girl of utter frailty, the sort who stirred an unaccountable instinct to protect. What pleased him in particular was that today, just as she had said then, her hair was not a side ponytail but simply long and straight.
Setting that aside, none of them seem to feel any great discomfort yet with the integrated desks.
Well, sitting perfectly still, they had no way of knowing the peculiar discomfort native to a desk and chair fixed together as one.
Is it time.
The moment the clock pointed exactly to nine, he fixed his eyes on the attendance roster and began to call the students' names in turn.
"Lizzie Paul Liana Claudia."
There was no answer.
"Three tardies shall count as one absence. And if the credit for my lecture is taken as one hundred percent in full, attendance occupies five percent of it. Bear that in mind."
Beside the name Lizzie Paul Liana Claudia, he marked one tardy. He had just set the roster down when, belatedly, the rear door of the lecture room opened slowly, and a girl of eye-catching red hair—
"I'm…… sorry."
Lizzie Paul Liana Claudia showed herself.
Creak. Creak. The slow sound of a wheel turning.
Yes. Lizzie Paul Liana Claudia. She was in a wheelchair.
……
To make the ankle opposite the sprained one into its match, Ferzen had trampled it underfoot. Had that violence truly brought about an end this wretched? But if it had, why had this part been missing from Jeremiah's report? Had he left it out, assuming Ferzen would already know?
He could not say. Had he known, he would at least have set out one ordinary desk, for her and for no one else.
Creak. Creak. Lizzie Paul Liana Claudia drew slowly toward the empty seat that remained, a faintly flustered look crossing her face. She turned a little toward him and bit her lip. Then, bracing on her crutches, she rose from the wheelchair and tried with difficulty to sit at the integrated desk—
Crash!
She went down as if she had simply collapsed.
"Lofen."
"Yes!"
"Help her……"
"Understood—!"
"I don't need it!"
A sharp voice, wrung out to its limit. Lizzie Paul Liana Claudia reached out both hands on her own, braced them against the seat of the integrated desk, hauled her body up, and barely managed to sit by herself.
Ha…… fuck.
After his selves had fully mingled, blunt cursing had come to feel deeply unnatural to him, yet this once the oath slipped out on its own.
An environment arranged so as to avoid a fit of compulsion. And a victim of his evil, who could not help but suffer inside it. Was this the fate a villain was bound to?
His head throbbed.
Laura de Charles Rosenberg, the girl who remembered her previous life, seemed on the surface to be listening attentively to Ferzen, but inwardly her thoughts were wandering. She had already decided the lecture would be worth little.
"Set magical prowess aside, and the Corpse Command of black magic is governed in great part by understanding and familiarity—by proficiency, and by bloodline."
Sure enough, he began laying out dull orthodoxy. The students who lacked the means to hire a renowned black magician for private lessons at their own expense did seem to be concentrating, but they numbered only about five.
"Here, I will lecture you chiefly on matters of understanding, and a number of practical excursions will accompany that."
Excursions?
"A few of you…… no. Most of you are doubtless nursing some puzzlement inwardly. Even so, this is without question something that will serve you."
Ferzen, dressed in a clean formal suit uncluttered by any plastering of ornaments, turned one cuff back and took up the chalk. On the blackboard he wrote two words.
Territorial War
War
"A long time has passed, and a black magician's caliber has come to be divided not by talent alone, but by how excellent a corpse one holds. That is not a false statement. Neither is it a true one."
No one spoke.
"Long ago, when war was at its height, infantry took up blunt weapons akin to maces, not swords or spears. Does anyone know why?"
"To increase the damage done to a corpse, and thereby lower the Implementation Rate when a black magician commands it."
Laura knew the answer as well, but she did not give it. She stuttered.
"Correct. Within the limit of the mana given them, corpses rise again without end—whether they belonged to the enemy or to one's own side—and set themselves to the killing, and so a black magician wields great influence upon a battlefield. But if one means to manage that, the crux is how many corpses one can command, and whether one can place them under Autonomous Control."
Autonomous control. It meant that even without the black magician splitting consciousness in order to direct them, the commanded corpses acted of their own accord through outside stimuli and the visual information given them. Naturally, the greatest share in that autonomous control belonged to understanding, for it rested on the habits, the quirks, the movements of a life.
"In those days the enemy's Elemental Magicians tried by every means to burn our corpses until not a shape remained, and the enemy's Aura Knights tried by every means to kill our black magicians before anyone else."
That agreeable, low voice came slowly to a stop. Ferzen's crimson eyes, carrying a faint contempt for how pathetic they all were, swept across the room.
"Then—even setting war itself aside—how many corpses could the lot of you, as you are now, command and hold under autonomous control in a territorial war?"
No one answered.
"Autonomous control is out of the question. If, by forcing your mana, you managed to command three or four, you ought to count that fortunate. Even then, unable to grant them autonomous control, you would have to divide your consciousness, and the odds of dying to a stray arrow would be high."
His words were a cutting rebuke of the black magicians of the present day, who poured their whole strength into studying a single corpse—an Elemental Magician's, or an Aura Knight's—so they might raise its implementation rate and command it.
"Ninety percent is the utmost to which the abilities of a life can be reproduced. Thus even if one commands the corpse of an Elemental Magician or an Aura Knight and draws its output as high as it will go, it still falls short of an Elemental Magician or an Aura Knight of the same rank. Which is why most black magicians today have declined considerably in worth as a fighting force."
"There seems to be…… a slight flaw in what you say, Professor Ferzen."
The eyes of all fifteen students, Laura among them, turned at once toward Lizzie Paul Liana Claudia, seated at the back.
"A flaw, was it."
Ferzen's brow creased, just slightly. Not because she had offered a rebuttal, but because of the ill-mannered habit of cutting in at the moment he meant to go on.
"Yes. In the past, when war was constant, the particular nature of that war placed black magicians in circumstances where their understanding of allied soldiers in life could not help but deepen, and so we as well……"
"Do you imagine I do not know that. Lizzie Paul Liana Claudia."
She said nothing.
"Answer."
"Yes……"
"Then you, who possess neither the experience of war nor the understanding that comes of it—do you mean to raise territorial war after territorial war, and drive the people of your domain onto the battlefield again and again, merely so you might obtain them?"
"That isn't what I——!"
"There is one contradiction in what you say. To speak of the particular nature of war is not wholly mistaken, but in the present, even if one piles up understanding and experience beforehand in that fashion, one cannot exert any great efficiency upon reaching a battlefield. In the past, war continued for a very long time, and so within the span of a single life the experience of war occupied an exceedingly great share."
Yes. And that was why. In those days, when black magicians commanded the corpses of soldiers, the implementation rate could not help but run high.
"Even if you were to master that experience and that understanding in advance this very moment, so long as the calamity of war does not persist for a long time, the efficiency is meager."
Finishing, Ferzen let out a sigh.
"A truly pathetic notion. You cut in midway without a scrap of manners, and I thought you might at least have a worthwhile question…… Are you drunk on yourself, merely because you show some chance of rising soon to the Euclid rank?"
"That is absolutely not——!"
"Then you are all the more pathetic. To think that rebuttal was a judgment reached after you had truly agonized over it……"
Lizzie was silent.
"Furthermore, when you wish to ask a question, you will wait until I have finished and raise your hand in silence. Wherever did you learn manners like that. I had assumed, of course, that you would already have such a thing by heart, and etiquette is not taught in Education Hall A……"
At the click of Ferzen's tongue, Lizzie bit her lip, ducked her head, and trembled where she sat.
Watching her, Ferzen judged that he had suppressed well enough the feeling surging up from one corner of his chest. It was only because he had held the reins. Had he not held them, he would have made Lizzie stand up from her seat, and then delivered a sermon thick with reprimand.
And from that fierce, icy face, Laura could tell that the way he had treated her on that day had been exceedingly gentle.
Anyway……
Her lower back had begun to ache a little. Meaning to set both arms on the desk and lean forward, Laura tried to draw the chair in, but the chair would not come, and for a moment she was caught short. It was an integrated desk. The chair could not be pulled in at all. If she wanted both arms on the desktop and her weight tipped forward, she had no choice but to perch at the very edge of the seat.
What the hell kind of garbage desk is this.
Did somebody lobby the imperial house?
She had not yet seen the other lecture rooms, so the thought came to her as a matter of course. If the desks in those rooms were the same as well, could this frail, pathetic body of her present life endure it?
All at once, that worry came over her.