Dawn of the Dead?

The moment she stepped into the professor's office, Euphemia quietly put a little distance between them, drew a letter from the fold of her clothes, and held it out to Perzen.

She had said from the start that it was ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠nothing urgent, and the contents bore that out: no more than a brief inquiry after his health.

"So. The reason you came all this way with a letter you could just as well have read after work was, you said, that you wanted to look around the Academy?"

"There's nothing wrong with seeing the place I'll be working ahead of time, is there?"

"You won't actually be starting until the fourth week, in any case."

"Not next week?"

What sort of gap was he leaving, drawn out like that? When Euphemia turned that puzzled look on him, Perzen reached out and laid a gentle hand over her belly.

"It will not do for you to mistake which of your duties comes first."

"Ha—don't..."

Of all places, he meant to do this here?

"Or had you grown bored of sharing a bed with me in the mansion? If that is what you mean, I will allow it. Hardly anyone comes here, so it should not matter. You are more wanton than I expected, Euphemia."

"Th-that's not it..."

His hand dropped, caught the hem of her skirt and drew it up, and at the touch stroking along her thigh Euphemia shook her head hard.

"Speak in a blur, and you will not be understood."

She knew perfectly well what a refusal meant in a moment like this, and his stubborn pretense of ignorance was past bearing. Yet as the teasing hand grew more naked still, Euphemia swallowed her shame and opened her mouth.

"...I want to."

"I can't hear you."

At that thin voice, which failed to carry, the hand that had been stroking her thigh rose in a single motion to her waist.

"Eek—!"

Euphemia startled, and something hot surged up in her. She bit down on her lip, reached out, seized Perzen's tie, and dragged his face down by force until his eyes were level with hers.

But the momentum died the instant those red eyes looked into her from a breath away. Her body, long since trained to him, curled in on itself with mortifying honesty.

Even so she found her courage—no, she forced herself to sound calm—and let the strange, obscene words fall.

"Your... seed... I w-want to take it... at h-home..."

"Wh-why are you doing that...! Th-this much is enough, isn't it!"

It was a line for which she might as well have thrown her shame out the window, and still, the moment Perzen's fingers caught the string of her underwear and made to draw them down, Euphemia twisted away in a panic.

The hand flung cleanly outward rose instead to set her disordered hair to rights.

"Well done."

Only then did she understand that he had held out for no reason but the pleasure of watching her react. She gave serious thought to pretending to stumble and planting a foot on his, and in the end she gave the thought up.

"I'm not... some toy of yours."

"I have never thought of you that way. In any case, we should go. If it is the Academy you wish to see, I will show you around."

"D-don't put your hand on my waist."

It ached, and she had no wish to make a shameful spectacle of herself in front of other people. Distaste crossed Euphemia's face.

"Then we will hold hands."

She wanted to ask whether they ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠couldn't simply walk, but she knew this was Perzen's idea of a compromise, and so she quietly took the hand he offered.

She felt it all over again. Truly, it was uselessly large... and warm.

A week had passed since Perzen's public lecture.

Laura, absent that day with an illness, bathed in the early morning, left the dormitory, and walked the streets. The midday sun had grown fierce of late, and Laura, whose skin was terribly delicate, had to go about in long clothes; a comparatively chilly morning was the best hour she had for being out.

While I'm out, should I buy a paper?

The capital of the Ernese Empire had the lowest rate of illiteracy anywhere. Most of the commoners here could read, and so newspapers were printed and sold.

It's in here, too...

Professor Perzen, splashed across the front page in enormous type. Well, even she was on her way to the Magic Society just now, meaning to try to read his paper.

"Um..."

"Would you like a copy?"

"Yes."

Deliberately letting her words trail off, so the other person would guess what she wanted and say it first—that was a small art of getting ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠by which Laura, a stutterer, had taught herself over the course of her life.

It probably won't be all that useful...

The age was showing signs of change, little by little. Education had always been the privilege of those who possessed, yet that privilege was slowly blurring, and commoners too had begun to receive learning. Once a shackle called ignorance had hung about their necks. The emperor loosed that shackle, and in its place meant to rule and govern the newly lettered through the newspapers.

The capital's papers were in fact published under the imperial household, so it was no exaggeration to say they controlled public opinion. How useful, then, could writing inspected and censored to the imperial taste really be said to be?

Even so, Laura had never once read a newspaper of the capital. She lowered her eyes to the page as she walked on toward the Magic Society.

This is fun...

A few pages on, the current-affairs section was full of rather sensational items, and there was a quiet pleasure in reading them. Even so, because the paper was published under the imperial household, it did not conceal a name even when the subject was a noble, and that had its chilling side. Of course, a noble powerful enough that his name ought to have been hidden would never have been printed in the first place.

I'm here.

When the Magic Society came into view ahead, Laura folded the newspaper neatly, crossed the last of the distance, and stepped inside.

"E-excuse me..."

Early in the morning, the interior of the Magic Society was, as one would expect, empty of people. That was how it ought to be, but it had been terribly crowded only last week, and so Laura set her feet down with care.

Perzen's paper on the recognition of compositional formulas was free to the public for a month, and finding where it had been posted was not difficult.

This is...

From the first line the dense text, and the diagrams set beside it by way of example, made her eyes ache. But once she began to read it through with care, she found herself lost in it, absorbed past the point of noticing.

The concept itself belonged to the difficult sort. Honestly, had it not been joined to the diagrams, Laura would have had no idea what it was saying. Even so, when she finished the whole of it and slowly went back over the information scattered through her head until she had it in order, the compositional formula of the magically wrought sculpture of ice posted beside the paper began to register in her sight as lines.

So this is why...

Was this why Perzen had gone out of his way to speak that fundamental word—magic itself? It was far more intuitive, and far faster, than recognizing a formula by turning it into equations.

And yet, even so. No—precisely because it was so. Laura could only lament that in this life she had no talent for Elemental Magic.

An Elemental Magician could, in practice, abandon mathematics and suffer nothing for it, but a black mage could not abandon mathematics here and now. Every corpse of an Elemental Magician in existence had recognized a spell's compositional formula through mathematical formulation. If a black mage wished to deepen his understanding and thereby affect the Implementation Rate, he had to grind at mathematics whether he liked it or not. Unless long years passed and the corpses themselves gave way to a new generation...

Hardly worth keeping, and impossible to throw away...

Laura sighed and pushed her lips into a pout.

Still, I ought to give credit where it's due. This paper is a foundation, at the very least.

She was not trying to cut it down. However simple it might look, what could matter more than foundations and first principles? Even the loveliest flower had to be sown as a seed before it could grow. Perzen's paper would become a foundation of magic and lead a great many mages down a more convenient road. And along that road he would gather in a tremendous sum of money.

He had opened it to the public for a month at no charge, yet to teach it to anyone else one would need his permission, and children born hereafter who walked the path of magic would have to read the paper as a matter of course. Seen over the long term, a frontier domain such as Ruerug could hope for no greater gain. If Perzen died, the whole of that sum would pass to the family head who inherited the domain of Ruerug.

Had he submitted the paper under the name Brutein rather than Luerg, the money would have returned to Brutein. Perzen had not done so. He had put it under Luerg.

Is this...

Because of love for his present wife? She had never seen in him so much as a hint of the devoted husband.

"...!"

A glance at the clock showed eight-forty. Barely twenty minutes remained until the lecture on Black Magic, and Laura went white and hurried out of the Magic Society.

"Hk! Hah—ha...!"

She ran as hard as she could on a body that was nothing if not frail, but before even five minutes had passed she stopped short, spilling out rough breaths.

"Charles!"

And then, at the voice of a woman passing by as she called her dog's name, Laura—who had been wiping the sweat from her brow with a handkerchief—

"Ah...?"

Without meaning to, she flopped onto the street on her back, belly up, the way a dog rolls over. For an instant she could not understand what had happened.

"Oh my!"

"Huff—huff!"

The moment the dog called Charles, belonging to the woman who had just gone by, lunged and pinned her as if to crush her flat, she scrambled up in a hurry.

"I-I-I-I, I'm...!"

The woman hauling on the leash frowned and looked down at her. Beside them, a middle-aged man opening his door to start the day's business clicked his tongue.

"World's gone straight to hell."

Her face burning crimson, Laura stuttered through several attempts, could not even manage a denial that she was neither a pervert nor some woman in heat, turned her back, and ran.

In that moment, Laura surpassed her limits.

The time it took her to reach the Academy was a mere six minutes.

A marvelous... speed.