Dawn of the Dead?
"So…"
The wheelchair creaked.
"I'm telling you, that professor thinks the only lecture his students attend is his."
Another creak.
"In my dream I was out there with a shovel, trying to bury him."
Creak.
A staircase rose right beside them, and still the students insisted on taking the ramp. Behind them Lizzie held a corpse under her control and let it push the wheelchair, slowly.
She wanted to ask them to make way…
There was time enough before the lecture in any case, and she had no fondness for being accommodated merely because she was in a wheelchair.
"The four of you walking ahead."
"And… yes?"
A low, pleasant voice spread through the air, quiet as still water. But that quiet was the hush of a shore just before a great wave comes in, and the four students ahead of Lizzie felt a chill crawl over them and turned.
"So you do know how to look behind you. Your necks seemed so stiff I was wondering whether I ought to take you to a physician myself."
"Ah, we…"
They had been born on a high summit, and so they felt all the more keenly the weight and majesty of a peak that rose beyond sight. They offered no fumbling excuses. They opened the way at once.
"Don't trouble yourselves."
"Y-yes…"
Perzen passed them at an unhurried pace. Watching his back, Lizzie bit down hard on her trembling lip and drove the wheelchair on.
When the four who had blocked her peeled away toward the lecture rooms on the second floor, she stopped at the corner of the ramp leading up to the third and spoke.
"Don't… do that."
A footfall.
Perzen turned.
"I didn't step in because it was you. Helping a student who is being harassed is simply what a professor ought to do."
"It wasn't… harassment."
"There was time to spare anyway, and I didn't want to be given consideration as though it were my due, only because my legs don't work…"
"Lizzie."
"Out in the world, they call that self-justification. And yours runs in a particularly foolish direction."
Her hands closed. The skirt gathered into her fists and took on sharp, unmistakable creases.
"And who was it that made me live in this wretched, foolish way…"
"Do you like watching? Does it please you—me, broken by your hands, clawing my way through a life? Even so, don't use me as a means of handing out some paltry kindness and feeling that you stand on higher moral ground. I am not a tool, to be handled however it suits you."
Perzen, who had listened to the long speech in silence, straightened his tie and answered in that low voice of his.
"If I seemed a hypocrite in your eyes… you are mistaken. The man who broke your legs is still here."
"Time will not wear him away. I expect it will be the same from here on."
With that, he turned.
"I will let it pass this once. From now on, you will call me Professor—not you. A second time, and I will discipline you without mercy."
The man, Perzen, slowly left her sight. Lizzie remained where she was, and only after she had forced the tangled spill of feeling back into place could she move on toward the lecture hall.
"It will be posted on the boards in the education hall, the main building, and the dormitories as well, but… the assignment is due on the twelfth of April. About three weeks remain. See that you remember."
Attendance finished, I rolled my sleeves neat and stepped up to the blackboard to begin the third week's lecture.
"For the third week, I told you I would speak of Aura Knights."
Aura Knight. At the moment one reached the Extreme Realm, the mana flowing outward took on form, and bearing the nature of anti-magic, it unraveled any spell the instant it made contact.
Of course, there was more than that…
"An Aura Knight's mana differs from a mage's in one unmistakable respect. Does anyone know it?"
"Their mana cannot be moved at will."
I nodded and rapped the board.
"Correct. Unlike a mage, an Aura Knight cannot move their mana by will. Because of that… the training is so crude it might as well be called mindless, and a surprising number of them simply live ordinary lives."
"And so few people know how an Aura Knight trains, or how they grow. This week's lecture will give you that in detail. It will serve you later, when you come to enslave an Aura Knight's corpse."
I turned on Quantification and, with the chalk, drew a human figure upon the board.
"This mana sits fixed, like a block of ice shut inside a sealed room. How do you make it move?"
"Mana is drawn to other mana, so… would it not work for a mage to help from outside?"
"Wrong. If it did, no one from a wealthy house would abandon the Aura Knight's path and live as an ordinary person."
I looked over the room. They seemed to be thinking, but nothing fit was coming to them.
"Enough. Pay attention. I will explain."
I tapped the lectern lightly, gathered their eyes, and went on.
"A person takes in nutrients through meals and spends them as energy in order to live. But if you do not eat, and there is no nutrient left to burn as fuel, what does the body do?"
"…Ah."
"Beginning to see it?"
When nothing remained to burn for energy, the body turned, as a second resort, to its fat. And when there was no fat left to burn—in an Aura Knight's case—only then, at the very end, did they melt that mana which would not move at will, ice-like as it was, and spread it through the whole body.
That was how an Aura Knight trained their mana.
"Of course, the method is dangerous. You may quite literally starve to death halfway through. But if the mana is abundant, and the process can be repeated without end, then in theory it is the fastest road to the Extreme Realm."
An Aura Knight's mana was not only frozen like ice and unwilling to move. It was also as if shut inside a sealed room, so that even after it was melted, a path still had to be opened for it. That path was to drive the flesh to its limit and slowly restore the damaged cells through mana. Into the places where cells had been restored by mana, the melted mana then flowed of its own accord.
In a word, an Aura Knight who had reached the Extreme Realm was a being who had rebuilt every cell of the body through recovery wrought by mana. Go that far, and the mana that had been like a block of ice was entirely melted. It still could not be moved at will, yet it circulated through the whole body naturally. Contract the muscles hard then, and the mana squeezed outward—like wringing a towel soaked with water—ran along the skin…
The moment it took on a definite shape, that was what they called aura.
"Um… then, to receive a complete Feedback of the memories tied to that training, would a person have had to starve to the very edge of death?"
"Yes. Only… this is nothing more than a shortcut. Most Aura Knights do not begin with a method so reckless."
I meant to go on with the lecture, then stopped.
If Ciel Midford had truly crossed the snow mountains of Ruerug and entered the royal capital, he would have passed through this process several times. Somewhere in those mountains I privately hoped his corpse lay, starved before he could finish it… I knew the hope was far too optimistic, and I shook it off.
"As a rule, an Aura Knight's training is to lift something heavy, deliberately destroy the muscle, and then leave it that way in order to draw the mana out. If the damage goes beyond what their mana can restore, they are left with a permanent disability."
"Even if, by luck, they complete both arms, both legs, and the abdomen, reaching the Extreme Realm still requires the process I have already described, and so…"
Yes. That was why.
Detailed knowledge of Aura Knights was scarce, and those who walked the path were rare.
"So if your house holds the corpse of an Aura Knight, or if someone in your family walks that path… take a sober measure of what their hardship must have been."
In a stillness where only breathing could be heard, I wet my throat. Then I set out what I could to deepen their grasp of an Aura Knight's corpse… and the lecture came, of itself, to an end.
"That will do. I'll see you next week. Ah… you were each to be issued a corpse today, but the schedule has slipped, and it will take another three or four days. The details will be posted on the board, so take note of that and nothing more."
A late distribution meant less time in which to raise their proficiency, but the condition was the same for everyone, and so no one much complained; they simply accepted it. If anything, with nearly a month already gone, most of them were still scowling and muttering, unable to grow used to the fixed desks…
I left the lecture hall, stopped by the department office, told Alphonse to post the additional notice on the board, and returned to my office in the main building.
Today…
Another night I was on duty. I had been watching, steadily, the hand mirror linked to the scene underground, and there had been no sign of anything. And so the chance that my guess was right kept rising.
If they moved, it would be without fail…
Tonight.
At first, for that very reason, I had suspected the professor who would stand duty with me. Then I saw that it was Uriel, and I shook my head. What remained, by elimination, was plain enough.
The professor on duty in the commoners' dormitory. The imperial knight order that guarded the Academy. Or the magic corps.
The culprit would be among them. Late at night, the only ones who could walk the Academy's interior without drawing the least suspicion were these.
The tug-of-war has gone on long enough…
It was about time the thing was settled.
"I don't want to be on duty…"
At lunch, Uriel sat across from Lizzie in a nearby restaurant and let the complaints come one after another. Lizzie, hearing them, answered only in passing, sunk deep in thought.
If what that man Perzen had taught today was true… then how much effort, enough to draw blood, had her eldest brother, Loer, poured out where no one could see?
No. Heard aloud, it was not effort. It was closer to a wager with his life on the table. High risk, high return.
Thinking back…
He had never been a man to keep anything like a diary. But the moment he began to write one was clear… the time he had gone up to Brutein, knelt, and apologized.
So her brother Loer, against the chance that he might die in the midst of training, had been preparing a selfish kind of care: to leave that process whole, so she could enslave him with her understanding already raised.
Had he not?
"Does it taste bad?"
"No. I'll eat."
If she ever met her brother, she felt she ought to say nothing at all, and only hold him, warmly.