The Mastermind Sparrow
Salinder's body itself was weak enough to get tossed around by a first-year sword student.
That was the trade-off for her absurdly broken magic resistance, though.
Even in the original story, her raw physical stats were low.
Chloe swings a sword well enough to take her down easily, but.
For Veronica, the one-trick lightning mage, tearing her apart limb by limb was the best she could manage.
But here's the thing.
Rucia ignores magic resistance.
Thanks to the Hidden Piece, her damage hadn't gotten chewed up one bit. In a sense, Rucia was Veronica's counter.
So yeah.
If you judged purely by a spell's raw firepower, Veronica was leagues superior. But Veronica didn't know that.
"This is strange. That's... what is that...?"
Apparently Rucia's magic had shaken her, because she kept muttering to herself.
Looks like we can head out now.
The black barrier blocking the exit had vanished, and whether it was the elite monster's doing or not, the mana traces were gone too.
So I made to head straight out, but...
Veronica, collapsed on the floor, caught my attention.
Naturally, I wasn't worried about her physical condition.
She saw my magic.
Veronica had watched me spread that barrier. I briefly considered what to do about it.
...She probably couldn't tell, right?
Someone like Lihel might manage it, but sensing the density of a barrier cast from far away was impossible. Veronica had probably just assumed it was a fairly wide, spread-out shield.
Still, a familiar being that strong is unnatural in itself.
So I'd sell it with a collapse — played out from having burned through all my power.
[Rucia. I'm going to act like I've used everything up.]
I let my whole body go limp and opened my beak.
"Cheep... chweeeaaak..."
Roll, roll.
My round little body tumbled right off of Rucia's body.
-Plop.
She caught the sparrow butt in her hand before I could even hit the ground.
Great acting, I thought — right up until the moment I realized something was off.
...Something's soft here.
The surface I'd landed my feet on was several times softer than her shoulder. The unmistakable sensation of reaching the Great Mountain Range of Squish.
Wondering what it was, I cracked my eyes open — and an enormous mountain range filled my vision.
"Are you okay?"
Rucia was performing her concerned act. Her expression was as calm as ever, but surely this much would fool Veronica.
Therefore, I decided to focus on the most important thing.
Hmm.
This time, I relaxed my head.
A pillowy softness wrapped around it. Seriously, what is this? I genuinely had no idea.
So this time I tried burrowing my entire body into it, when—
"...Cheep cheep."
I met Rucia's cold gaze.
There probably wasn't anything behind it. She was just continuing her worried routine, surely.
...Probably?
Since the sparrow knew nothing, I simply stayed put. I'd fainted, after all.
Can't move, no sirree.
Thankfully, Rucia turned her head away soon enough.
"...Veronica."
But what was she planning to say to her?
I figured there was nothing more to see, and then—
"I was never here. That would be best for you, too."
A sudden declaration of threat.
"...Is that a threat?"
"Close enough."
With a brisk turn, Rucia leapt through the broken wall.
We were on the fourth floor. Mages do harden their bodies as a rule, but dropping from this height would make quite the noise.
Soundproofing magic.
I timed it to her landing (fall) and muffled the sound.
And so, as we made our quiet way toward the dormitory—
[So why'd you threaten her?]
I couldn't help wondering about it.
"...Master, you always erase your traces. So I assumed you'd dislike leaving evidence behind. Was overstepping, perhaps?"
So that was her reasoning. A rather impressive bit of thinking, I had to admit.
[No, you did well.]
"Thank you. Knowing Veronica's personality, she won't tell a soul."
Rucia seemed to know the girl well.
Something going on there?
I considered it for a moment, but it didn't seem worth worrying over much. Rucia, following the guidance of Navigation ver. Sparrow, made it back to the dormitory without crossing paths with a single person.
By the time she reached the room, Rucia's body was soaked in sweat.
[Let's rest up now. Assignment period means free time.]
Ever since the Velli incident, Rucia's homework had dwindled to a comical degree. Almost as if someone had been putting pressure on the professor behind the scenes.
Works for me.
It gave us spare time, at any rate.
She clearly wanted a shower right away, because she laid out a change of clothes and said,
"Master, I'm going to wash up."
Then she shut the bathroom door. The rustle of undressing came through almost immediately.
Hmm.
I did not imagine what was happening in there.
...Say, could I manage x-ray magic too?
Of course that was the exact moment a magic with tremendous combat applications crossed my mind. I felt the sudden urge to test this highly important spell at once.
I absolutely did not use it.
For reasons I couldn't quite articulate, I had a feeling that using it here would result in the immediate revocation of my human license.
-Shhhhhhhh.
After a short wait, I heard the sound of running water. She'd turned on the shower.
Showers existing in a medieval setting — surely some horrifying hybrid abomination, you might think, but with magic, anything was possible. There were even things more advanced than the modern world.
The Bluetooth shower, that eternal headache of modern science students? Wizards had been tinkering with those for centuries.
Maybe I should try one too.
To pass the time while Rucia washed, I decided to test out the alchemy magic I'd idly crafted yesterday. I'd meant to run the experiment in the room, but—
...Something about this feels like something.
I got nervous and headed outside instead. Just ten minutes of play, then back in.
I went to the forest near Central Plaza. It didn't look like I needed to go very deep — it wasn't a dangerous spell, after all.
All right, let's get set up.
The principle behind my alchemy magic was simple. Combine lower-numbered elements, and you produce a higher-numbered one.
Whoa!
My specialty metal, aluminum, has an atomic number of 13. Hydrogen, easy to come by, is number 1. In other words, grab thirteen hydrogen atoms floating in the air, and voilà — one aluminum, complete.
Naturally, making a Bluetooth shower would require a truly staggering amount of hydrogen, but—
Magic can gather it for me.
So I crafted a spell that collected nothing but hydrogen. Its raw power wasn't anything special, of course. With about thirty seconds of concentration, I could gather the hydrogen dispersed in an area of air the size of a pinky nail.
Peak inefficiency — but after a long stretch of focus, I finally cast my first alchemy.
Cultural invasion via modern metal.
Just as I was about to unfurl this, my second great dream—
-KWAAAAAAANG!
A colossal explosion went off, and my body went flying.
?
It was too fast to react to. By the time I came to my senses, I was dozens of meters away.
True to my title as Sword-Saint Sparrow, I wasn't injured, but I had no idea what had happened, so I turned my head — and beheld the blast site, a crater dozens of meters in radius.
The boundary between Central Plaza and the forest had simply ceased to exist.
Hmm.
Come to think of it, there was one thing I'd overlooked.
Combining elements to produce higher-numbered ones is, well...
This is literally nuclear fusion, isn't it.
The sparrow dusted itself off and headed back to the dormitory. I know nothing. Cheep cheep.
The scale of the incident was enormous, but there was no way the crime would be discovered. The explosion hadn't been caused by mana in the first place. Not a soul would ever identify the culprit.
The morning after the elite monster incident, Veronica opened her eyes and stared silently at the ceiling.
"...Haaah."
Normally she'd have been out of bed immediately, but today the mood just wasn't there.
Rucia.
She turned over that name — the very sound of it made her sick. She had cooperated with her yesterday out of necessity, but that didn't mean the taste in her mouth was any better.
Something is definitely going on.
Veronica kept turning the thought over and over.
Overwhelming barrier endurance. Mana bullets with power beyond all common sense. And on top of that, a sparrow familiar that had deployed a powerful protective shield, even if it had collapsed in the end.
The Rucia Veronica remembered hadn't been that strong.
Hadn't Rucia missed the top entrance exam spot precisely because of her lack of defensive magic?
And she got stronger in the meantime? Ridiculous.
Academy life wasn't even two weeks old. The entrance exam had been roughly two months ago — but even that pace was beyond extraordinary.
Which meant only one thing.
She was hiding her strength from the start.
Veronica arrived at that conclusion. It wasn't an unreasonable guess.
Right after the incident, Rucia had left her with a short warning — delivered as if something terrible would happen if she mentioned that she'd been there.
Something is going on.
When she'd given her statement in the early morning, she hadn't mentioned them either. Not out of fear of Rucia's warning.
But purely because she wanted to hold the girl by the back of the neck herself.
She's been tangled up in incidents for a while now.
Through her own information network, she knew that most of the recent incidents at the Academy had Rucia somewhere in the mix. The damaged dormitory wall. The mock dungeon accident.
When she'd even gone digging into one student's expulsion, wondering if there was something there—
That was connected to Rucia too.
Velli. Granted, the official grounds for expulsion had been threats and assault against a university TA. But that TA belonged to Basic Magic Theory, the class where Rucia did her self-directed study — and by pure coincidence, Rucia had received a warning for incomplete homework on the very day of the incident.
Velli was the one who tampered with that assignment.
Several coincidences piling up into suspicion. The suspicion kept swelling, and she was on the verge of certainty.
Without a doubt, Rucia is—
Then—
-Knock, knock.
Someone rapped on the door. No one should be calling at this early hour, so Veronica opened it cautiously.
"Cadet Veronica, I presume?"
A sharp-featured beauty with blue hair. Instructor Lihel stood there.
"Yes, that's me."
"Apologies for the early hour. I've been assigned to investigate the incident from last night. Would you be able to answer a few questions?"
It was a perfectly ordinary request — nothing she'd have thought twice about under normal circumstances. And yet Veronica felt an inexplicable chill.
"...If I can answer them."
"Of course. If a question is difficult, you may stay silent. Then, my first question..."
Lihel pressed on, expressionless. The questions were utterly mundane in content.
They were supposed to be, anyway.
Something's wrong.
An unease. From the moment she'd laid eyes on Instructor Lihel, it simply would not go away.
Several more questions passed, and then—
"Now for the last one. This is the most important part, so—"
Veronica's suspicion—
"—when Salinder was finished off, was there any other cadet present besides yourself?"
became certainty.
"...No. There wasn't."
"Is that the truth?"
Lihel pressed relentlessly. Veronica answered with a voice that trembled slightly.
"Yes. No one was there."
"...I see."
Lihel pulled a notebook from her pocket, jotted down a final note, and added,
"You would do well to be careful from here on. Whatever happens, do not involve yourself in incidents like this again."
She left without another word.
"Ah... aaah..."
Veronica sank to the floor where she stood. Goosebumps crawled across her entire body.
So they'd send someone just to check whether she'd leak information?
If I had said Rucia was there...
She had no idea how it would have ended. Even Instructor Lihel — that Lihel — was in the palm of Rucia's hand?
This was never my fight in the first place.
Now there was nothing left to trust. For all she knew, most of the Academy's faculty had already been turned to Rucia's side.
I never want to see her again.
This was no time to be sorting out her personal feelings toward the girl. Veronica wanted no part of them — and above all, she wanted to avoid another conversation with Instructor Lihel at all costs.
...
Meanwhile, walking down the dormitory corridor, Lihel let out a long, deep sigh.
"Haaah."
She'd come at dawn because of the faint aura of that existence she'd sensed at the scene. And now—
...As I thought. She manipulated their memories too.
The Outer God that had contracted with Rucia had twisted Veronica's mind.
And furthermore.
There had been fear in Veronica's eyes. At first, Lihel had assumed the emotion was directed at her.
No. That's not it.
She was certain now — it was the memory left buried in the girl's unconscious. It was said that some humans couldn't keep their sanity from merely facing an Outer God. The fear must have sprouted from instinct itself.
A truly pitiable child.
I'll have to check in on her often from now on.
Only she — the one who knew of the Outer God's existence — could help Veronica.