A Mage Is a 3D Job
What people call work is anything nobody wants to do, which is why you have to pay them to do it. Scrubbing toilets, hauling heavy loads, smashing tile with a hammer—those are the classic examples.
So what does my master, Pale, do for a living? He's a mage.
Say mage and the next question is always the same: what does that person actually do? A mage uses magic. That's the whole of it. In the modern age, though, the profession has narrowed a great deal.
Long ago mages were praised as noble beings and turned their hands to all sorts of work, because becoming one demanded inborn talent. Once magical theory was established and magic armaments were developed to assist in casting, magic became something anyone could use, gift or no. In an age when anyone who isn't as hopelessly talentless as I am can manage a simple spell, a mage is no longer a sacred creature.
Then two wars that drowned the whole continent in blood—the First Continental War and the Second—overturned the word entirely. Across those two great conflicts, magic committed mass slaughter the world over, and mage came away soaked in the blood of the countless dead. From then on it meant someone who harms people with magic.
Just as lancer, once a medieval cavalryman, came to mean mercenary, a mage these days is basically hired muscle or a sellsword—and sometimes even a criminal held in reserve. Even so, society still needs the trade. The spread of magic has multiplied magical crime, and twisted beasts remain a threat humanity cannot easily meet without mages. So mage power is supplied in a form that has newly taken root: the private magic office.
The Dragonheart Office, where my master belonged, was one such office, but unlike the rest it stood in remarkably high regard. The Dragonheart family is old. It existed before Fullerene was absorbed into the Azurik Free Federation—a noble house of mages that had guarded this whole region. They met invaders and twisted beasts alike and kept the city, and even after the aristocratic order was dismantled they went on protecting Fullerene. People here think very well of them.
Even I, who barely understand mages, had heard of the Dragonheart Office. Their most famous tale is the slaying of Balbaros, the Black Death Dragon, which attacked the city fifty years ago—a story handed down in my generation like legend. But those mages were wiped out in battle against the most atrocious sorcerer in history, the worst of the worst: Irok Dehaja. The only survivor was my master, Pale Dragonheart, who had been posted to another region at the time.
The problem is that Irok Dehaja is my name.
I don't believe a word of it. My master, without a shred of doubt, is convinced I slaughtered his colleagues. It makes our relationship exquisitely awkward.
Silence hung inside the car we were riding in.
The black SUV was a little roomy for two. It was the relic of my master's rose-colored family plan, drawn up with a child on the way. That plan had nothing to do with me, so I was sitting in the passenger seat—the seat that ought to have been his wife's. I'd wanted the back. He snarled and asked if I felt like being hit, so the passenger seat it was. I offered the perfectly reasonable objection that someone like me would be better off out of sight in the rear than planted up front beside him. He answered with a slap.
For the record, I don't have a license, so I can't drive. Even if I did, I doubt a magical puppet is allowed behind the wheel.
He hauled me out and started driving first thing in the morning. Maybe cutting his hair yesterday had shifted something in him. Unlike last time, when he'd thrown on a sweater and jeans, he was properly dressed: a dark gray coat against the January cold, and under it a crisply pressed shirt and dress trousers. A roaring dragon crest was worked into the coat. According to him it wasn't an ordinary coat at all, but the mage's uniform of the Dragonheart Office. A mage's coat, he said, isn't merely for show. It's built for real combat, the lining reinforced with some Kevlar-something fiber that will stop a bullet. When I asked him to spare me one if it was that good, all I got was that I was a monster who wouldn't take a bullet even bare-skinned, so I had no need of trash like that.
There was a reason he had dressed that solidly. Where we were going was extremely dangerous.
The Larks District, called the Fullerene Ghetto. You don't feel easy there unless you're wearing at least a vest. As I've said before, Larks is a trash bin crammed with refugees and illegal entrants trying to reach the Azurik Free Federation through Fullerene. A place like that sits about a million light-years from safe. It lies at the northern edge of the city, walled in by high ramparts and barbed wire, with soldiers patrolling the line on a regular schedule. A handful of checkpoints control entry. To get in, you have to pass one.
So when the soldier on duty questioned him, my master handed over the papers and, without so much as a change of expression, told a bald-faced lie: we had come for medical volunteer work.
"Medical volunteer work? That's laying it on a bit thick."
Once we were well clear of the checkpoint, I needled him. He answered with perfect innocence, as if he had no idea what I meant.
"It isn't a lie. I have a physician's license."
"If you've got a physician's license, why are you doing mage work?"
I wasn't mocking him. I was genuinely curious. A mage, after all, is the textbook 3D job—dirty, dangerous, and difficult.
The work is dangerous to begin with. As I said, their chief enemies are magical criminals and twisted beasts. A magical criminal is simply a criminal who uses magic, and whatever the offense, magic makes the sentence heavier. Even the death penalty, which the Continental Human Rights Treaty has been abolishing across the world, remains an exception where magical criminals are concerned. Catch the wrong charge and your life is gone. Which is why those people have nothing left behind them. They'll throw killing magic at a human being without blinking. Charge them on half-baked nerve and you become a corpse no one can recognize.
Twisted beasts, the second quarry, go without saying. They aren't ordinary animals or plants. Taxonomically they sit a whole kingdom apart—a gathering of alien life evolved specifically to wield magic. A human needs a magic armament and brutal training before magic comes easily. Twisted beasts evolved to use it as naturally as hands and feet, so their magical ability far surpasses ours. Bodies reinforced by that magic are a threat of their own. They possess strength and durability beyond the limits of living things, and even without a spell, raw physical power is enough to tear flesh from bone.
The one real mercy is that humanity, after long effort and a great deal of blood, drove them out of human territory. A civilian mage almost never has to face one.
I couldn't use magic in the first place, so becoming a mage was never a choice open to me. Even if I'd been brilliant at it, I still wouldn't have taken the job. Hauling bricks on a construction site would have been about a million times safer. Dangerous work ought to pay, but as far as I know, mages don't even earn that well. The sums that land in the account are supposedly large enough. The trouble is that staying in the profession means pouring money into gear and into patching up your own body. The stronger the magic, the harder it loads the flesh; chronic injury comes easy, and the better a mage's equipment performs, the more its price climbs—exponentially. Skimp on body and gear because the money hurts, and the odds of coming back from the next job as a cold corpse go up. So, as a rule, a mage is a trade that's dangerous and doesn't even pay.
If you hold a physician's license, you're better off having quit mage work ages ago and practicing medicine. Doctors have grievances of their own, I'm sure. At least they almost never die on the job.
My question seemed to sour his mood. He answered with something close to a growl.
"The work we do carries a noble value a criminal like you could never understand."
"Oh... is that so."
Honestly, the line was so absurd I nearly laughed. Saying so out loud would only get me hit again, so I kept quiet and started watching the scenery.
The Larks District is bleak, plain and simple. All you can see is blowing sand and gravel. The land was never much use to begin with, which is why they stuffed every troublesome refugee and illegal entrant into it. The soil looks too barren to farm, and the ground too hard to develop. The faces aren't much healthier either. Clothes and skin tones you rarely see if you've only lived in Fullerene, and not one of them looks lively. A few glared at our car with open hostility.
I didn't particularly care. If anything, I was a little excited, because I had never been to the Fullerene Ghetto. I like watching a fire. I don't like jumping into the pit. So I had never so much as set foot in this direction. Most citizens of Fullerene are the same. From childhood, adults teach you not to go near the place. The only people who come here on purpose are smugglers running businesses that look shady from every angle, and fools so pathologically kind they've lost their minds to charity.
That was the old me. The me I am now isn't likely to land in real danger over anything ordinary, so even here I don't feel much of a crisis. The buildings are uniformly desolate. Low-rise blocks have had their paint scoured off by sandstorms until the concrete guts show, cracked all over, looking ready to collapse at any moment. The ones still holding a building's shape are the fortunate ones. Plenty of people were huddled under tents full of holes.
My master ignored them and kept driving, and before long we reached an empty lot where several large shipping containers sat. The moment we arrived, rough-looking men in leather jackets appeared as if to surround the car. Every one of them was big. Scars or tattoos marked their faces, and magic armament swords hung at their waists. We got out, and a taut tension ran between my master and the ugly crew.
He stared at them for a moment, then spoke.
"Zamir sent me. What was stolen here?"
The name Zamir left his mouth, and the tension in the air eased a little. They led us into one of the container warehouses. The inside was a wreck. The walls were scorched black. Broken debris and bloodstains clung to the floor. Looking closer, one wall had a great hole punched clean through it—the ventilation, at least, was excellent. My master studied the scene.
"An attack by magic. What did they take?"
"A silver-white iron sphere."
"And the contents?"
"......"
At the question, the rough-faced man simply kept his mouth shut.
"Fine. I wasn't expecting you to tell me. I'll look around, so I'd like the place cleared."
"No, sir. We'll help you."
"Leaving is how you help me. I told you to get out."
Tension thickened again between Pale and the men. His presence must have carried, though, because the men occupying the place furrowed their brows and then filed out of the warehouse.