Visit to the Black Magic Tower
“What would be good?”
I muttered to myself.
One wall of the office was plastered thick with assignment listings—exactly like the quest boards you always see in fantasy games or anime set in adventurer guilds. For the record, this world had adventurer guilds too. Of course, with the sheer number of Academy students, it wasn’t a matter of a few request forms hanging on a board the way they did in a guild building. They filled every available stretch of wall in this large office.
Some of these requests had originally come into the adventurer guild and been screened by the Academy. They excluded anything too difficult or too easy, along with commissions from places too far from the Academy, then selected the ones that would be moderately useful for the students’ growth and evaluation. You might wonder whether the guild would resent the Academy skimming off their work, but Academy students were reliably competent, and the requests the Academy chose weren’t primarily about the rewards—building the students’ experience was the main goal. In other words, they barely overlapped with the commissions adventurers preferred. For the guild, having unpopular requests cleared was a welcome bonus. So some requests arrived by way of the guild, while others came directly to the Academy. Students had neither the means nor any need to tell the two apart.
I set aside missions like the nest exploration from last time and began looking over ones that required actual combat. After all, the whole point of taking an assignment this time was to get some practice working as a unit with the newly formed party.
“Disciple, how about this one?”
Perhaps she was trying to thaw the slightly chilly atmosphere. It might have been my imagination, but Master pointed to one of the request forms in a somewhat exaggerated voice. After a quick glance, though, I had no choice but to shake my head.
“It’s too much.”
“Why?!”
“The difficulty is too high.”
“What are you talking about? This level should be perfectly doable.”
She wasn’t wrong. Veronica was absent, but Felice had solid skill of her own, and I was far stronger than I had been in first year. Aine… well, I couldn’t expect any real growth from her until her event was finished. Most of all, we had Master with us. Even so, this wasn’t a question of ability but of the rules. With Veronica out, only four of us were participating, which limited the difficulty of the assignments we were allowed to take. I explained that fact to Master.
Wait. Come to think of it, doesn’t Master already know all of this?
The thought struck me, but after listening to my explanation she spoke again.
“Ah, I see. Now that you mention it, I think there was a regulation like that… It’s a bit fuzzy, though.”
Well, more than a decade had passed. It was easy enough to forget something this minor. Hearing me, Aine went over to one of the forms hanging in a corner of the wall. Or rather, she tried to. Being short, she stretched up on her tiptoes toward a request near the ceiling, straining and grunting. I held back a small laugh, stepped behind her, and took the form she had been reaching for.
“Ah! Thank you, Louis…”
Her face was a little flushed, as if she were embarrassed. I looked at the request she had been trying to grab.
“Hmm, goblin subjugation? Looks fine. What does everyone think?”
Goblins were weak monsters, so the difficulty fit. They were also roughly humanoid, which made them good practice for teamwork with the Dark Forest event in mind.
“It seems a bit dull, but I suppose it can’t be helped.”
Master said.
“I think it’s good too…”
Felice agreed as well.
“Then shall we go with this?”
I said to Aine, and we headed for the desk at one side of the office.
“Are you here to accept an assignment?”
“Yes.”
I’d heard the line a few times before, but it never changed. Sasha was hard to call kind even as empty flattery, but she had helped me during the duel last time, so I gave her a light greeting.
“It’s been a while.”
“Indeed it has. Just hand over the request form already.”
Was that her way of saying go away so she could get back to her book? Still, for her, it was a relatively gentle dismissal. I handed her the goblin subjugation request Aine had chosen.
“Second Year Class A, First Party. Veronica Eltwin will not be participating.”
She checked some documents, then said,
“Yes, application complete.”
Time flew by, and before anyone knew it the weekend had arrived.
Was Louis’s party leaving today? Or tomorrow? Veronica wondered, but she left her dorm room without resolving the question. In her hand was a simply packed bag. The Academy was a fair distance from the Black Magic Tower, yet all she needed to do was go check on Sally, so she had packed the bare minimum—enough for a single night at an inn. In a somewhat dejected mood she passed through the Academy’s main gate and soon boarded the carriage she had reserved. As instructed in advance, the coachman set out for the Black Magic Tower.
Inside the quiet carriage, Veronica began thinking about Sally. The first time she had sensed something wrong was when she arrived at the Academy and no letter came from Sally. Just a missing letter. Others might have called it needless worry, but Veronica had written to her master, Scarlet Mars, and asked her to look into Sally. Scarlet Mars and Sally had originally been nothing more than the Tower Master and one of the mages under her, but through Veronica the two had grown fairly close. True to her nature as an aloof mage, Scarlet had thought something along the lines of “Surely nothing’s wrong,” yet even she had grown a little worried and sent a letter of her own. Still Veronica received no word from Sally. Sally, who used to write without fail, so Veronica’s anxiety only mounted. Eventually Scarlet, having received no reply either, realized something was amiss and told Veronica she would look into it herself.
Of course Veronica trusted her master, but to the orphaned Veronica, Master and Sally were like family. Sitting still and waiting until Master brought news was torment. So she had already reserved the carriage and contacted the Black Magic Tower in advance. And then Louis had brought up the party activity. She felt terribly sorry toward him. Afterward she had tried to explain the situation, but catching the right timing proved difficult. In the end the weekend arrived like this. In the original story Veronica never went to the Black Magic Tower at this time, so Louis knew nothing of it.
All sorts of thoughts occupied her—mostly worry for Sally and guilt toward Louis. With those thoughts turning in her head, Veronica arrived at the Black Magic Tower. She had set out fairly early, yet by the time she reached it the sun had already set. It wasn’t the dead of night yet, though. Impatient, she headed straight for the tower. A mage at the entrance blocked her path.
“What business do you have?”
“Veronica Eltwin, disciple of the Red Magic Tower Master. I believe I contacted you in advance.”
“Ah… please wait a moment.”
The mage who had been looking at her with open annoyance changed his attitude at once. The status of a Tower Master’s disciple carried weight even at other towers. In fact, mages understood the weight of that position better than people outside the towers. And the Red Magic Tower was one of the foremost in the Empire. An ordinary person would need a reservation and formal permission, but someone of Veronica’s standing would not be turned away at the door even without them. Besides, she had already made arrangements.
“Please come in. I’ll guide you.”
Soon another mage emerged from within to receive her—different from the one who had been guarding the door. Perhaps because of her preconceptions about the Black Magic Tower, Veronica found him rather gloomy, yet he gave her a surprisingly diligent explanation of the place. Most of it was basic, fundamental information, but once it roughly concluded he asked her,
“So, what brings a mage of the Red Magic Tower here?”
“One of the mages from our tower was dispatched here, but we’ve lost contact with her for some time. I’d like to see her…”
“A dispatched mage, you say. What’s her name?”
“Sally.”
“Sally, is it…”
The mage muttered the name once, then said,
“Would you wait here for a moment?”
“Yes.”
Leaving her in the tower lobby, he vanished into the darkness in an instant. While Veronica looked around and decided the place was quite sinister, just as expected of the Black Magic Tower—and while she quietly looked forward to seeing Sally soon—the mage returned alone, as if to dash her expectations. To the disappointed Veronica he said,
“It’s already late today, so could you come again tomorrow?”
“I don’t mind if it’s late…”
“The mage in charge of matters regarding dispatched mages has already left for the day.”
She didn’t like it, but Veronica eventually nodded. She wanted to argue that he could simply call Sally for her, yet even she knew that barging in late and demanding that was impolite. She wouldn’t have cared about such things before, but after everything with Louis she had become a little more careful in how she dealt with others.
The next day, however, Veronica heard something she could scarcely believe.
“What? She never arrived?”