Magic Is Another Language
Fun things should be watched together, after all.
Birang had cast a spell no one else had managed, and she'd done it with ridiculous ease. The rankers stared at her in astonishment — but Birang, for her part, looked back at them with eyes full of incomprehension. After all, the Immortals, players who were considered fairly high-performing, hadn't been able to manage so much as a Fireball.
[Why can't they do it?]
[???]
[Seriously, they can't even cast Fireball?]
[LOLOLOLOLOL]
[Must be because they're NPCs]
[Well, that's shocking — they can't even reach the circle.]
Leo, who had managed a wobbling, barely-there circle, soon watched it collapse and pulled a face like she was about to cry. For someone who had always been out in front of the pack, it was quite the blow.
I told everyone to stop trying to use magic.
"Seven of you failed, and one of you succeeded. What do you suppose the difference between those two groups is?"
[NPC]
[Guess it's an NPC thing?]
[Rankers getting ratioed]
[Even Leo couldn't do it]
[Honestly, drawing a magic circle at all might be a bug]
[Isn't it because it's not skill-based? Mages don't draw their own circles either, y'know~]
"User or not user?"
"Correct. As I said before — you are users, outsiders, and the way you use your abilities is different from the people who live here."
The 'skills' the system had designed for convenience, versus 'magic' — a craft built up over a long, long history. The difference between the two was clear.
"From the very moment you started DeoEn, every action you took was shaped by skills. Naturally, you never once learned to do something like 'draw a magic sigil and summon fire.'"
"So if you don't know how to use it, you can't use it?"
"That's true as far as it goes, but the fundamental reason lies in the advantage of skills."
Users wielded tremendous power through skills with the greatest of ease. Mana and stamina, plus a few other resources, were consumed as the cost of using an ability — but honestly, that hardly qualified as a cost at all. If a great archmage of the past were to see today's user-mages, they would surely tear their robes and wail that it was witchcraft.
"Just as hidden classes and races come with penalties — every one of you was given a penalty from the start."
The penalty of ignorance: handed the convenient power of skills, they'd been made incapable of even *thinking* of another way. It wasn't strictly impossible, but anyone without the talent for it couldn't cast spells that even a small child could manage.
[My head hurts]
[Kind of feels like racial restrictions]
[whoa]
[I mean, they're not mages, so casting magic at all IS an error, technically]
[But Lily can do it easy as anything]
Gunner raised her hand.
"So does that mean we can't ever learn magic? We're blocked from the very start."
"Not necessarily. The penalty isn't absolute — it stops short of actually locking the door."
At the end of the day, they were merely ignorant. With talent and effort, the limit could absolutely be crossed. In fact, a few of them were already pushing past it.
"Put simply: using mana independently is a different language. Magic is a complex spell constructed in that language."
"...Aha?"
"It's difficult, yes — but not so difficult you can't understand it at all."
[So basically, it's quantum mechanics written in Arabic?]
[whoa??]
[LOLOLOLOL]
[Yeah, that'd be insanely hard]
[Then why does Lily use it like it's nothing]
[???]
[Lily NPC theory, holy crap]
[THE Lily]
[Lilyyyy]
[G-O-A-T Lily]
Gunner, who had raised her hand before, raised it again. And beyond her, except for a few, everyone wore expressions brimming with the very same curiosity.
"Then how do you use it, Lily-nim... no wait, how do you even *know* it?"
Something users could never know. An unexplored territory that the penalty of ignorance had sealed off from everyone — and she was the one who had thrown open its gates for the first time. Nearly four years of streaming, and not a single soul had ever learned this information.
"......"
Every eye in the room converged on me. Yena and Leo — the only ones who knew my true identity — kept darting sideways glances at me, checking my reaction.
Not that those two actually know the whole story.
"I learned it. It was a long time ago, but the memory is still vivid."
"Learned it from whom?"
"A professor who understood magic as I do. I didn't learn everything from her, but she's where I started."
[A long time ago?]
[???]
[Is this a class quest thing]
[What is she even talking about]
[Sounds like a class quest]
[Class lore?]
[Lore, I think]
[Sounds like a story thing]
["...Are you talking about a class quest?"]
"A story... something like that, I suppose. I gained knowledge of that 'different language' I mentioned. It just wasn't packaged into a skill."
"Why not?"
"Because it was never a skill to begin with."
Decades — no, perhaps far longer — spent wandering the world, gathering knowledge. Knowledge so vast it could never be trimmed down to a few lines of flavor text.
"Independent use of mana simply isn't a skill. Naturally, it can't be included as one. But if such an ability has a drawback..."
"A penalty?"
"A penalty! You change the more NPC abilities you acquire, right?!"
"That's right."
Leo, who had become a Nymph; Muel, transforming like the guardian of her tribe; even Candy Star, turned into a magical girl. The vast majority of top rankers, too, gained powerful abilities in exchange for being steadily consumed by penalties the more they used them. The phenomenon commonly known as "NPC-ification."
...That's the official lore, anyway.
For me, no such penalty existed — my mind was simply like this to begin with. Reality and I remained unchanged, one and the same. If I had any penalty at all, it would be the fallout from the Crown of Succession.
Though in the end, that's what calls me here in the first place.
[Lily's penalty is brutal too though]
[penalty, whoa]
[Sometimes I swear Lily doesn't seem like a user at all]
[Cheap-shot Lily]
[That one time she used that ring was legendary]
[Show sadistic Lily one more time please]
[Lily always seemed kind of NPC-ish anyway]
[Rankers are genuinely hopeless LOL]
[Make her prove she's a user, verification stream GO GO GO]
[What if Lily is actually an NPC? What if she doesn't even exist in real life?]
[gasp]
[VERIFICATION! VERIFICATION! VERIFICATION!]
"......"
This damn verification bait never dies down, does it. I'd braced myself to some extent, but they pounce the moment they see an opening — my managers must be having a rough time.
"Anyway, it's not an impossible field, so let's start by learning to draw the circle. Every one of you is perfectly capable of that."
"Yes, ma'am!"
"By the way, are the other classes all covering the same thing?"
"Some do, some don't. Old Man Inom's side doesn't use magic at all, so I imagine he's teaching something completely different."
"I see."
Rasty's class, meanwhile, was probably teaching the same material as mine. She might have already gotten started on it, in fact.
Fun things should be watched together, after all.
"What a shame."
"Sorry?"
"Nothing. Now — first, to draw the circle..."
Draw the circle.
The most basic magic circle design, engraved in her mind. She drew the mana flowing through her body upward and traced it into the empty air. End to end. Starlight riding the current of mana spun at high speed, forming a translucent pink circle.
A perfect circle, hovering in the air. Its owner swallowed hard and released the breath she'd been holding.
"...Got it."
Finally. Finally she'd done it — the foundation of this accursed magic circle!
Click. Click.
A sound unbearably familiar came from behind her. She turned her head on instinct, but the approaching girl simply waved her hand with a smile. Meaning: keep going.
For a moment her temper flared and she wanted to yell something, but she held it in. This cursed 'Professor' had her weaknesses in the palm of her hand, after all.
"Ohh? Not bad this time."
"...You're in the way. Go away."
"In the way? I'm helping. There's no one else casting magic at your level right now, you know?"
The Progenitor, Rasty Ervenus. Professor of one of the three subjects — 'Authorities and Powers' — and the sovereign of the blood nobles who commanded blood itself. Given the nature of her subject, the students who qualified were extremely few, so the Progenitor had leveraged her authority to teach each of them individually.
One-on-one lectures, and results to show for it. Not a bad arrangement.
"Hm? Magical girl."
"Don't call me that. I'm getting dizzy."
"Then how about 'Codename: Candy Star'?"
"....... "
That wasn't the problem, though.
Candy Star — the magical girl who had blown apart the leadership of the monster alliance and saved an entire world, the alt character of ChotaChokaChukaChip, current Rank 4 and champion of the DCK — clutched her head at the situation she found herself in.
The transformation...
The transformation won't come off!
No matter what she did, she couldn't return to her pre-transformation state. Her hair still glittered with starlight, her eyes still sparkled like gemstones, and her outfit was, to any observer, unmistakably a magical girl's getup. The silk ribbons at the hem were pretty — so, so infuriatingly pretty.
How on earth had it come to this?
It had all started the moment she challenged the third Progenitor during the entrance exam. At first, she'd thought she could win. So she'd swallowed her embarrassment, kept reciting those cringe-inducing transformation lines, and kept on challenging...
'Oh, you're back?'
'Yes. So this time, you'll face me with that ridiculous weapon again?'
'Hmm... no. You said you'd fire chains at me from there. That won't do.'
'Hm? Why are you releasing your transformation? You say it wears off when your power runs dry?'
'As if. That was never how your power was structured to begin with.'
'The transformation is the problem... Very well. Then come find me next time. I'll solve your little dilemma for you.'
She'd been tempted. But at the same time, she'd felt uneasy.
'I'll solve your little dilemma for you.'
...Profoundly, deeply uneasy. So she had stopped challenging after that.
When her major was assigned to the Progenitor track, she'd planned to read the room and bail the instant anything seemed off but...
"The moment we meet, and this is the crap you pull..."
"Isn't it nice?"
"Not even a little! Undo it! Because of you, I keep shouting my transformation line at complete strangers!"
It had been a while since she'd fired her transformation line at every single one of the four rankers taking Rasty's class. And this was barely an hour into this state. What would happen once she stepped outside... she didn't even want to imagine.
"Oh, that's nothing. Did you really think you could gain that much power without paying any price whatsoever?"
'Remember this, Rasty Ervenus. There is no power in this world without a price.'
"Unnie said it, didn't she? No power comes free of charge. Accept your fate, magical girl."
"......You crazy little devil spawn."
"The devil part's accurate."
Half of Rasty was demon, after all.