Side Story — The Saintesses of Revelatio (4)
Two months had passed since I arrived at the Holy Court of the Holy Kingdom.
My daily routine was fairly simple.
First, when morning came, I would rise from my bed.
There was no particular reason to sleep anymore, but I drifted off for a short while all the same — a way to clear my head and start the day fresh.
My mother appeared in today's dream.
That would be Lily's mother, for the record.
I got out of bed, dressed lightly, and looked into the mirror.
At fifteen, I still had a distinctly youthful look about me, but lately I could feel myself growing up quite a bit.
Over the past week, I felt like I'd aged another year or two, almost overnight.
Before, I'd looked like a middle schooler; now I looked like a student just starting her first year of high school.
Had there been senior Saintesses around, I would have asked them, but there weren't, so I asked Cardinal Bonesri instead. He told me it was a perfectly natural phenomenon.
Each time I used the divinity dwelling within my body, he explained, my appearance changed to match it. He assured me it would never go past my early twenties, so I shouldn't worry.
Knock knock.
─Saintess Lily. It's Miya.
"Come in."
Miya the maid always visited my room at this hour of the morning.
She helped me into my Saintess's vestments, and the maids who followed behind her saw to my grooming.
...Honestly, with a face this pretty, I figured they could have just left it alone.
'Absolutely not. Saintess Lily is the only remaining Saintess, and as the face of the Holy Court, you must always appear at your most beautiful.'
For that reason, the grooming was mandatory.
"Did you sleep well, Saintess?"
"Very well, thanks to you. That book is still difficult, though."
"You'll grasp it soon enough."
On the table before the mirror lay an open book.
Divine Magic and Understanding — the one I'd read through several times before bed.
On the first day I'd wondered what on earth it was talking about, and the further in I went, the less sense it made.
I picked it up and continued from where I'd left off.
"By manifesting the divinity inherent within the body, one may restore—"
So what exactly is this Manifestation supposed to be?
It sounded plausible enough on the page, but the actual method of Manifestation was never spelled out in detail — for the most part, it was left entirely to the caster's imagination.
And it was a completely different format from the "healing magic" the professors at my old school had taught, too.
"That's enough."
All done? I looked into the mirror.
'...Pretty again today, I guess.'
I bowed my head slightly to Miya and the maids.
The Cardinal had given me instructions, so I couldn't bow too deeply, could I?
"Thank you."
"It's nothing. This is simply what we're here to do."
"That's right, Saintess!"
"You look absolutely lovely today too!"
"So beautiful!"
The maids squealed and heaped compliments on me.
This had been a bit uncomfortable at first, too, but after two months it seemed I was slowly getting used to it.
"Magic lessons come first today, I see."
"Yes. Shall we head over now?"
"Let's."
I opened the door of my room and led the way.
Miya fell in a step behind me, and three maids lined up neatly behind her.
Around day seven, I'd learned that Miya — and, for that matter, the maids — were apparently all formidable mana users in their own right.
People capable of taking on a squire holy knight one-on-one, at the very least.
Presumably they'd been assigned this way to protect a Saintess who was still growing into her role.
"I wonder when Saintess Angela will be back. I'm curious."
"The Ouger subjugation is running a bit longer than expected. But according to the crystal ball communication, she'll be returning shortly."
"They're not using the Gate of the Goddess?"
"Going somewhere may be urgent, but coming back rarely is. She'll return by carriage."
Made sense. If the Gate of the Goddess was such a limited resource, they couldn't be using it every time.
There weren't just one Saintess — there were three of them, after all.
'Four now, I suppose?'
I traded bits of small talk with Miya as we made our way to the lecture room.
Inside stood a woman with tightly coiled red hair and glasses, wearing what looked like a rather delighted expression.
Her robe was a touch too drab in color to be one of the Holy Court's own.
"Ah! Welcome! This is already our fifth lesson, isn't it?"
"Hello."
As her attire suggested, she wasn't Holy Court personnel.
She was an eighth-circle mage — or so I'd heard.
Apparently she was capable of summoning several balls of fire each the size of a small hill. An extremely impressive person, in other words.
She had originally been a brilliant professor at the Imperial Academy, but the moment word spread of a new Saintess's birth, she'd rushed over in a single step to assist with my instruction.
It wasn't even the middle of a semester.
The professor looked at me with a playful expression and smiled.
"You grow by leaps and bounds every single day, don't you?"
"Mm... my body is growing, sure."
"And your magical skill has surely grown with it, yes?"
"Ah, maybe...?"
"Good. I'll be looking forward to it."
Her eyes blazing, the professor fixed me with a hopeful gaze.
Somehow I had a feeling the road to hell was about to open up.
─Fighting!
Behind me, Miya and the trio of maids cheered me on before filing out of the lecture room.
The lesson began.
"...Therefore, you must arrange your mana in a pattern that matches this spell's circle for the Manifestation to take proper form and—"
Difficult.
Impossibly difficult.
Magic in this world was extraordinarily hard.
If I had to sum up magic in a single sentence, it would be this:
'A discipline that mixes the formulas of mathematics with the artistry and creativity of painting.'
To wield magic well, you had to work through formulas of brutal difficulty, twist and modify them further on the fly — and at the same time, you needed genuine artistic sense and technique as well.
The very pinnacle of difficulty, in other words.
I confronted the reality of this bizarre discipline and sank into thought.
'Why does it have to be this complicated?'
Drawing the basic circle that formed the foundation of a magic circle, and inscribing the mana arrangement formula inside it — that much I could manage.
But everything after that — the countless ways of bending, warping, and revising the formula — was astonishingly convoluted.
It didn't feel right to just chalk it up to my own failure to understand, either.
This was only my fifth lesson. I was the one being taught, and she was a brilliant professor, so for now I had simply listened.
But something about that process seemed unnecessary.
Like... like...
"In conclusion, to increase a spell's power, you must draw five additional arrangement formulas... Yes. Go ahead, Saintess."
"Why do you have to draw five more formulas?"
"Well, to handle the load of the power increase and block out additional variables—"
"Then what if I do it like this?"
I drew a blue circle in the air.
The small amount of blue mana dwelling within my body.
It was so little — the same mana I'd first awakened on the day of my first lesson — that I doubted it could even take down a single orc.
I drew the circle to hold the spell.
Inside it, I inscribed the magic circle for Fireball.
Outside that, I drew the arrangement formula that increased Fireball's power.
As I sketched the circles into the air, the professor, just in case, quietly drew her own containment circle to suppress any explosion.
The more of the magic circle took shape, the prouder the professor looked — until, before long, she gave a faint smile and shook her head.
"Saintess, your penmanship is lovely, but won't you run out of room if you draw it that way?"
"Why would I run out of room?"
"Because the auxiliary formula naturally has to bear both the Fireball and the power amplification. If two spells occupy that much space, the room simply—"
"Can't I just do this?"
"No, if you draw it like that... huh?"
Swish. Swish.
I drew two lines cutting straight across the magic circle.
A shape that seemed to wrap the spell's circle up in the form of a cross.
For the record, the crossing lines weren't mere arrangement formulas — each was a complete magic circle in its own right.
The professor's jaw dropped open.
"B-but whether that's even possible is unproven—"
"Fireball."
"W-wait a moment!"
WHOOM!
The wrapped-up magic circle erupted with flame.
Startled, the professor readied herself to douse it with water at any second — but the fire, burning with even greater force than an ordinary Fireball, simply hovered serenely in front of me.
Flicker... flicker...
Perfectly calm, without a hint of runaway potential.
"...H-how?"
"It just works if you do it this way."
Glug. Glug. Glug.
Puhaa...
"Just... give me a moment," the professor said, draining a jug of water in one go before setting it back down.
Why, though?
"Now then, Saintess Lily?"
"Yes."
"Could you show me that spell from earlier one more time?"
I nodded and drew the spell once more.
My mana had been considerably depleted, but as long as I wasn't casting Manifestation, simply drawing it again was no problem.
As I'd thought — this was far easier than twisting, warping, and compressing everything.
The professor's expression grew graver.
"...There's a problem. No — let me call it an oddity, and tell you what I've observed."
"Please."
"You built it this way because you dislike complicated methods, correct, Saintess?"
"That's right."
"The truth is, it's not impossible to construct a spell this way. In fact, this approach really is the easier one. I use something similar myself."
The circle of a spell is a blank sheet of paper, and the magic circle is the blueprint drawn upon it.
The arrangement formulas and mana are merely the medium that helps that blueprint manifest into reality.
The problem is that the paper is not infinite.
"Most of the students I teach implement a spell within a single sheet. Using two sheets of paper as if they were one is something even a seasoned mage can't manage."
Simply put, it meant splicing one more sheet of paper onto the first.
It looked easy enough in words, but using two separate sheets for a single spell — not even two different spells — was all but impossible.
The professor called it a problem of space.
"It's hard to make your left hand and right hand do different things, isn't it? Paper is the same. Using sheets in two separate spaces as though they were one is an even harder problem than that."
"Like this?"
"Yes, exactly—"
In my left hand, I manifested Spark, the spell I'd learned yesterday.
In my right, Fireball, the one I'd learned today.
For the record, both spells had additional magic circles drawn onto them — six magic circles in total, all active at once.
"...?"
"?"
"Why?"
"Yes?"
"Why does that work?"
Hm...
"...I couldn't really say?"
It just did.