Fireworks on an Early Summer Night (3)

A window announcing that the quest had been completed popped up. That meant Trie had fully accepted the fact that her father, Gawain, was dead. She wasn’t just pretending to believe the lie.

But the problem was…

“I’m going to keep studying magic. After everything it took to get into the Imperial Academy, why would I give up on it? I want to become a magic knight like my father.”

Trie had no intention of abandoning magic. Why had things turned out this way? In the original story, she had cleanly dropped magic and walked the path of swordsmanship alone. I suspected this was a side effect of making her accept her father’s death too soon.

Damn it. This rendered everything pointless.

“A magic knight. Are you serious?”

“Yeah. I’m going to give it a try. There’s a good chance it won’t work out, though.”

A magic knight. The term literally combined magician and knight. For a long time, the two words had been seen as contradictory. Magicians inscribed formulas on the outside, while knights used formulas on the inside; they fought in completely different ways. The talents each required were polar opposites.

Yet the man who had given birth to the term “magic knight” was none other than Gawain von Schulzenburg. He was said to have reached the summit in both magic and swordsmanship. Plenty of pitiful students at the Imperial Academy tried to follow his example. The setting was that hundreds had already dropped out after attempting double majors.

In the end, no one after Gawain had ever deserved to be called a magic knight. If we were judging purely by ability, Henderson had probably come closest. The only problem was that he had operated from the shadows, so the title of “knight” never quite fit him.

Come to think of it, that bastard was already dead.

“If I’m being honest, I want to tell you to give up on magic.”

“……”

“But it’s your choice, isn’t it, Trie? I’ll support you. It would be nice if you earned recognition as a magic knight.”

“Schluss…!”

Trie’s voice sounded deeply moved. Support? Hardly. I only said it because I was certain she would fail quickly. I had no memory of ever writing that Trie possessed talent for magic. On the contrary, I had described how she would pull her hair out studying all year long without making any real progress.

Now that I could no longer stop her, the only thing left was to wait for her to fall into despair and quit on her own.

“I never expected to have this kind of conversation here.”

“Neither did I.”

“Haa! I feel so refreshed!”

I suppose she would. Now she could swing the sword she loved so much without any guilt. All that remained was for her to grow stronger each day until she reached the realm of the Sword Deity.

“But how are we supposed to get out of here?”

“……I’m thinking about it.”

She was right. I still hadn’t figured out how to escape the minefield.

The quest remained unchanged. The condition was to get out before dawn, but we didn’t have much time left.

“The Mana Energy will surge soon.”

“Ah! Really? Then we have to leave right now!”

The Mana Energy here flowed in and out at regular intervals like the tide. As the night grew deeper, it would soon be time for the energy to come rushing in. Even if we could endure the Mana Energy somehow, the monsters would be the bigger problem. The thicker the energy grew, the more monsters would start prowling nearby. We would be forced to fight off attacks from every direction while unable to move a single step.

“Got any ideas?”

“I’m thinking. Stop talking for a moment.”

The first method that came to mind was detecting each mine one by one, then either avoiding or disarming them as we advanced. The mines were a type of formula, after all—magic formulas triggered by external impact. They naturally underwent a concealment process to hide their shape, yet a faint trace of mana oscillation was bound to leak out.

The problem was that there was normally no way to detect it.

Selection and Concentration would solve that, though.

If I poured Selection and Concentration into computational power, I could instantly pick up those tiny waves, amplify them, and locate all the nearby mines. The real issue was how many I could find within the five-second limit. We had already ventured fairly deep into the minefield just to reach Trie. Even at full speed, escaping the mined zone in five seconds was impossible. Once the time ran out, I would be trapped again.

So that idea was discarded.

Memory of the True Body…?

Was there anything useful in Schluss’s memories? No matter how long I waited, the skill refused to trigger on its own. It seemed there were no relevant memories after all.

That left only one option.

Magic.

I would have to construct a detection formula. I remembered seeing something similar in an elemental magic textbook. The problem was that the formula I needed now had to operate on a far larger scale. It would need to cover a radius of at least a kilometer to let us escape.

And formulas were not as straightforward as they seemed. Doubling the effect did not mean simply doubling the size of the formula. The entire structure would change into something completely different. The core might stay the same, but the overall form would be unrecognizable.

This was really going to be a headache.

I dragged every scrap of knowledge from my mind—the textbooks I had devoured, Ludwig’s lectures, the books I had read in the library. I had no idea what might prove useful.

“Schluss?”

“……”

Think. The core remained fixed. Mana consumption scaled with the square of the detection radius.

“Hey, Schluss? Are you listening?”

“……”

So I would upgrade the mana storage formula to high-capacity and reinforce the surrounding support structure for greater stability… No. What if I made it segmented instead of a single piece? Split it into a trigger section and an explosive section. I would handle the trigger, which required almost no mana, while Trie took the explosive part. With only my measly thousand mana points, that should be enough to activate the formula.

But then another problem appeared.

“Schluss! Are you even listening to me?!”

“Yeah! Trie, I’ve got an idea.”

“Really? What is it?”

“I’ll use detection magic to locate every mine around us and destroy them all.”

“Is that even possible?”

“It is—if you and I combine our power.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Trie, this is a segmented formula. You’ll have to draw the explosive section yourself.”

Trie, who knew next to nothing about magic, would have to draw the explosive portion of the formula. I couldn’t draw it for her. Even if I handed over the key code, the formula could not activate without complete understanding.

“Got it! Just leave it to me! How should I draw it?”

“Haa……”

A sigh slipped out before I could stop it. A formula was not something you could simply trace like a magic circle. You had to understand its structure before you could draw it.

The problem was that I would have to explain all of this in words. The difficulty kept piling up.

“The core is exactly like the one in our textbook……”

“Uh-huh!”

Still, I explained as thoroughly as I could. You never knew—maybe Trie would miraculously understand everything at once and complete the formula in a flash. I wasn’t holding my breath, of course. In the worst case, I could always pour Selection and Concentration into my own mana and activate it myself. For now, though, I wanted to conserve every last second of that skill. There was no telling how many monsters we would run into while retrieving the opportunity.

“Did you understand?”

“Yeah. I got it!”

Her voice sounded strangely confident. She had understood it immediately? My explanation had distilled four weeks of elemental magic lectures into their purest essence.

“Let me go over it one more time—”

“No, it’s fine! I’m already composing the formula!”

“……”

She was jumping straight into practice? I immediately began to doubt whether she was doing it correctly. Maybe she was getting it completely wrong.

Ha. I would trust her for now. If it looked like we would be stuck here until morning, I could always use my ability then.

About an hour passed while I waited in vain.

“Trie.”

“I’m concentrating!”

“Not going well?”

“Haa…… Yeah. It’s a little tricky.”

Even so, the explosive section was the simpler part. If I had assigned her the trigger, there would have been no hope at all.

“I believe I’ve explained everything.”

“Yeah. You only highlighted the important parts and made them really easy to understand……”

“So the only additional advice I can give is one small tip.”

“What is it?”

“Don’t try to understand it.”

“What does that even mean? How am I supposed to compose the formula if I don’t understand it?”

“It’s fine if you don’t understand. Just accept it. Don’t try to rationalize the theories I explained. Simply remember the facts and the causal relationships.”

Trying to understand only made it harder. Could anyone intuitively grasp that time slows and length contracts the closer you approach the speed of light? Most people simply accepted the compiled facts of relativity. The same principle applied here. No—magic was even worse. It was a world where far stranger phenomena occurred than lengths and times expanding or contracting. If you tried to understand and ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠accept every single thing, you would never learn magic.

“Don’t try to understand it. Just accept it…… Got it.”

The area beyond the bushes fell silent. Instead, the mana waves pouring out grew increasingly unusual.

What? Was an actual, proper formula… being completed?

“Don’t try to understand…… Just take it as it is……!”

“Ha.”

A dry laugh escaped me. I had only offered a piece of advice anyone could have given. Had it really transformed her this much? At this point I was starting to wonder if she had been pretending to be incapable all along.

“It’s finished, Schluss!”

It was true. The formula inscribed in the mana matched exactly what I had envisioned in my head. Every minute detail was identical to the one I had designed. With nothing but my crude explanation to go on, Trie had perfectly reproduced my formula.

Unbelievable.

“Good work.”

I overlaid the trigger section of the detection magic formula onto Trie’s work.

There was only one thing left.

“Trie. Inject your mana.”

“How much?”

“All of it!”

Trie’s mana capacity was twenty-five thousand. That would be more than enough.

“Mana injection complete!”

I sent a ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠light stream of mana into the trigger. The formula began to activate—

Boom!

With a sharp crack, the detection mana wave surged across the forest.

Now I could see them clearly. The mines inscribed everywhere.

“Whew.”

It was time for the finishing touch. I cut off my sight and hearing, focusing solely on the hundreds of mines spread in every direction. In an instant I connected to the core of every single one—

“Done.”

Boom!

Bang……!

I disarmed all the mines at once. Colorful lights erupted from every direction, painting the surroundings. The pitch-black forest brightened in a single moment, and for an instant I felt as if I were standing at the center of a fireworks display.

Only after taking a step forward could I finally see Trie. She stood with her mouth wide open, mesmerized by the beautiful sight. I, too, stared at her in a daze—at her, who was far more beautiful than any mere spectacle.