I'm the Arsonist!
I'm the arsonist!
The second day of Loop Two looked, for a while, like it might slip by without incident.
I showed off a little genius in class—ahem—ate dinner, and took a stroll. Once I got back to the dorm and sat through orientation with the seniors, the day's schedule would be done. There was still the chance that whoever had killed Olivia in Loop One, dark mage or heretic, might come calling in the night.
I'd think about that in a little while.
I was still sorting it all out on the way back to the dorm when—
"Ah—get down...!"
Olivia suddenly locked her arms around my waist, dropped, and shouted.
Shwik—
Something shapeless skimmed past my ear.
"S-show yourself...!"
Only after she scrambled up and planted herself in front of me could I make sense of what was happening.
A dark mage's ambush.
Oh, for fuck's sake. What. Why are you here already? It's still evening.
Wasn't assassination supposed to be a late-night business—slip in, slice, slip out? The dorm was right there. Were they really allowed to attack this openly?
I pulled myself together and spun through it as fast as I could.
Could we win? Probably not. Whoever was hiding in the dark, I couldn't even tell where they were. Olivia and I were freshmen who had barely started learning magic. The other side was a terrifying dark mage, or a heretic mage.
Everyone knew dark mages outclassed ordinary mages in the low-level range. Same principle as martial arts: when the realms were roughly even, an unorthodox fighter trained in external techniques beat an orthodox one who had learned the proper internal path. And if they'd come here to kill someone, their level was almost certainly far above ours, whether I could prove it or not.
In other words, no matter how I turned it over, this was a fight we could not win.
So what now?
The deliberation was short.
What else? Flip the board.
"Olivia, cover me for a second."
"Okay...!"
I whispered it to her while she stared into the dark, every nerve on edge. Then I shut my eyes and steadied my breathing.
Inhale. Exhale. Again, and again, drawing in the mana dissolved through the air. I'd done this once already. No point making it complicated now. What I needed was fire—hot, overwhelming, pure fire.
Now.
"Ignis!"
A huge tongue of flame bloomed in my grip. Fed on mana, it still burned a pure blue.
Good. The instant the fire rose, I swung my right arm hard and threw the fireball at a big roadside tree standing stiff nearby.
Fwoosh—
The moment it clung to the wood it devoured the carbon, and red flame, then yellow, went roaring up the trunk. The dark tore open all at once.
"Th-there...!"
The silhouette that had been hiding in the alley across the street finally showed itself: a pitch-black cloak, a hood pulled low. Suspicious to anyone with eyes.
Good. Step one, success. They'd lost the advantage of surprise.
But it wasn't over. If you were going to flip the board, nothing beat pure chaos.
I hauled in a breath like I meant to shout from the gut, and then I did.
"FIIRE! FIRE! SOMEBODY HEEELP!"
Olivia and the dark mage flinched at the same time.
Sorry, Olivia. Too loud? What else was I supposed to do? If I wanted to live, I had to try something.
While I was at it, I tapped her shoulder and whispered by her ear.
"What are you doing? You yell too."
"Uh... ah...?"
She turned to me with a blank look. A heartbeat later, confusion flooded her face.
"Hurry! FIIRE! SAVE US!"
"Ugh... f-f-fire...! Somebody save us... kyaaah!"
That seemed to rattle the dark mage. They started openly loosing that same invisible magic, and the two of us rolled across the ground in a heap again.
A few near misses and grazes later, I started to get a feel for it. That sticky, wicked sensation. Dark magic, no question. Get hit, and you were fucked.
Olivia wasn't only dodging. She thrust both hands forward and chanted.
"S-Scutum Venti!"
A fierce wall of wind surged up behind us and shoved the attack aside.
"Whoa! Wind Barrier!"
You know that one! Blocks every projectile for four seconds. So. Damn. Useful!
We held out for what felt like ten minutes and was maybe thirty seconds of real time, and the whole street started to stir. Lamps lit in the dorm buildings on either side. Footsteps came pounding down the stairs.
"Ignis!"
I called up another fireball and hurled it at the roadside tree on the dark mage's side.
"FIIRE! FIRE! IT'S AN ARSONIST—!"
Doors banged open, and students came bursting out.
"A fire, out of nowhere? Fuck. Aqua Eructa!"
"Columna Aquae!"
"Which bastard started this?"
They swarmed the roaring flames and poured water-magic over them, fighting to knock the blaze down. Through all of it, Olivia and I never let the tension drop. Our eyes stayed locked on the dark mage across the street.
Well? What are you going to do?
Cast dark magic right in front of this many people? Think you can kill everyone here and run? Go on. Try it.
I glared at them with every ounce of bluffing confidence I had.
They hesitated. Then they turned, meaning to vanish back into the dark.
Not a chance. Chaos, thorough to the end.
"Ah—ah?! The arsonist's running! Over there, over there! That bastard! Grab that bastard!"
I pointed and shouted, and the sight of them bolting without a single glance back—patter-patter-patter—pulled a snort out of me.
"Hah... we're alive.... Fuck...."
I groaned and collapsed where I stood. Olivia staggered, then dropped onto the ground beside me.
"A-are you okay... Anastacia...? Are you hurt anywhere...?"
"Huh? Yeah, totally fine. You? You're not hurt?"
"Mm... just... my palm's a little scraped...."
"Ah."
Come to think of it, we had rolled pretty hard. I hiked the hem of my skirt just in case, and sure enough, the skin along one calf was badly abraded.
"Agh."
Special trait of injured limbs: perfectly fine until you notice them, at which point they hurt like hell. It was the kind of scrape that made you want to wash it clean and slap on some antiseptic. Olivia peered over my shoulder at the wound, and her face pinched on its own.
"W-we should go in... and at least shower...."
"Yeah. We should."
I looked up. The fire was nearly out, sinking into itself. Gray smoke curled off the blackened bark and climbed into the middle of the dark sky, and a little guilt crept in after it.
"Sorry, trees..."
I won't forget your sacrifice....
I hauled myself up and started for the dorm, and someone fell in beside me. I turned. It was the dark-circles senior from the dorm. They gave the two of us a quick once-over.
"Hey, you two okay? That yelling was you, right? What happened?"
"Ah, senior... so much happened... I'm seriously wiped.... Some lunatic just set a fire out of nowhere and attacked us..."
The whining came out on its own. I elbowed Olivia in the side, and she nodded in a hurry, backing me up.
"Th-that's right... an arsonist... they were throwing f-fire...."
Last loop I'd ended up in an underground cell, and this was obviously going to get complicated, so I deliberately never said dark magic. Olivia must have been thinking along the same lines. She didn't mention it either.
"Yeah, well. Stick around school long enough and you'll see it yourself. Once or twice a year, somebody loses it mid-research and pulls some insane stunt. If you run into a nutjob like that, the best move is to quietly get out of the way. Leave them to the seniors and the faculty."
"Yes."
"I-I see...."
Once we were inside the dorm, the dark-circles senior turned back toward us and yelped.
"Hey, what the hell happened to you two?"
"Sorry?"
I looked down, wondering what they meant, and the traces of the fight—invisible out in the dark—finally showed. Dirt. Mud. A torn hem. A run laddering Olivia's stockings. Under the bright lights, we were a complete spectacle.
"Ugh, damn it. This won't do. Orientation's supposed to start right now. You two go up first, shower, and change. Got it? I'll tell them. Hurry."
"Y-yes... thank you...."
"Thank you!!"
We bobbed our heads at the senior and hurried for the stairs. Shower... shower...!
I didn't even feel how tired I was. We climbed straight to the fourth floor in one go.
I opened the bedroom door to grab a change of clothes—and—
"Fuck. What."
The room was a wreck, things scattered everywhere. And the window stood wide open.
"...No. No, right? Fuck. Please!"
I rushed to the bedside and yanked the pillow up.
...Nothing.
My heart hammered. I flipped the bedspread. I checked under the bed, and the gap beside the mattress, all of it.
Still no trace of the dark grimoire.
So they'd come to the dorm first and taken the book before anything else?
"Fuck... this isn't fair...."
The difficulty was actually insane!
The dark mage who recovered the grimoire has safely escaped Oxenbridge.
Ha....
You have failed to resolve the Dark Grimoire Incident.
You have reached the end of the loop.
F...uck....
The world went black.
You have failed.
You have reached the end of the loop.
Dudududududududu... crash, bang!
Ba-bam!
Day 1, Sunday
"Hey, you there, little nun. Finally awake. You said you were headed for the academy of magic, didn't you? We're almost there, so get ready to get off."
Ugh....