I'm a College Dropout, a High-School Idiot
While my master searched the inside of the container, I kept watch outside so no one would come wandering in. I took the chance to look around, and the place was a strange one.
A broad stretch of empty ground lay penned in by barbed wire, and men who looked like hired mages patrolled it with an absurd amount of self-importance. They fit this era's violent image of a mage perfectly — reeking of danger, magic-armament swords hung at their hips as if to show them off. Ordinary people would want nothing to do with them.
They seemed to find me just as curious. I could feel their eyes. Well, chances to lay eyes on something called a magical puppet don't come along often. I'd never seen one in my whole life, so how much less would they?
Standing watch by myself got dull, so I called in to the master.
"This is a weird place, by the way. What do you think these people are doing here?"
A logistics warehouse sitting in the middle of a refugee camp wasn't all that remarkable on its own. The mages guarding it like an iron fortress, though — they stood out.
At my question, the master, who had been running a hand along the floor, answered.
"Hired hands, most likely. Zamir's people, brought on so she can do business."
"Business works in a refugee camp?"
"Not in the slightest. What money do refugees have?"
"Then what kind of business is it?"
"Smuggling. Buying and selling drugs and illegal magic armaments to big foreign spenders dressed up as refugees or illegal entrants."
He said it flatly, as if he could see the whole of it without looking.
"More than half the drugs moving on Devis Street come from Zamir."
"And you took a job from a woman like that? What happened to a mage's honor?"
The jab slipped out before I could stop it, and I shut my mouth at once, half expecting violence to come flying. The master, though, didn't particularly anger. He answered just as calmly as before.
"Killing Zamir is simple. The problem is what comes after. Kill her, and her seat doesn't vanish. Someone else climbs into it, and meaningless blood gets spilled along the way."
"Couldn't you report her to the police?"
"You think the police don't know about Zamir? The upper ranks already have her on file."
"Then why don't they arrest her?"
"Society's structure doesn't change because one person disappears. So long as the demand exists, a second Zamir will come, and a third. They're simply leaving someone relatively easy to control in the chair."
He said it as he rose from the ground.
"This time, she may have crossed the line."
"The line?"
"Never mind that. Irok Dehaja. How well do you know the theory of magic?"
He didn't call me Capra, the name of my puppet. He used Irok Dehaja — my name from when I was alive. Hearing my real name after so long stirred something in me, and I answered.
"Not at all. I literally don't know the first thing."
"You made it through high school, as I recall. Doesn't the Azurik Free Federation's compulsory curriculum include magical theory?"
"They taught it, sure. But a doctor told me when I was five that I'd never be able to use magic, so of course I didn't listen to a word of it."
For me, knowledge of magical theory was about as useful as the proper mindset for a woman eight weeks pregnant. A man has no need of that sort of thing, and I had no need of magic.
"But aren't you the worst mage in history, and the strongest?"
"No. I've told you from the start, over and over — I can't use a single spell."
"Hm."
I protested with a deeply wronged heart. The master didn't so much as pretend to listen.
"At the root of what we call magic lies the mystery of the universe. In the beginning the universe was born in a vast explosion, and it is still expanding without end. Magic rests on that principle."
"Mm."
I started letting the lecture in one ear and out the other.
"The universe is expanding even at this moment. Across the whole of it, even a law that seems obvious — the conservation of energy — is not absolute."
"Right, right."
"Magic is the same. It plainly does not obey conservation. Something arising out of nothing — that is a miracle beyond understanding."
"I see."
Whether he cared that I was answering by rote, he pressed on, absorbed in the theory.
"The relation between that structure of the universe and magic was laid bare in 1782 by the physicist Georg. That is the energy inversion circuit."
"Mm."
"The heart of it is inversion. Literally: at the origin of this universe there exists a circuit in which the informational quantity of energy runs backward."
"I dropped out of college. I'm a high-school idiot, so I'm not really following. Inversion means something small gets big?"
"Yes. Simple information that originally possesses no energy runs backward into energy with actual substance."
A long-winded explanation followed. Boiled down, a special information-body called mana emerges from the brain of a living thing, and the art of giving that mana substance is magic.
The master drove a staff-sword, carved with antique work, into the ground. That was his magic-armament sword.
"The technique that gives mere concepts and information a body — that is magic."
A silver dragon's face was worked into the hilt. At a glance it looked like nothing more than a splendid staff, but a cold, gleaming blade lay hidden inside it.
"This special information-body we call mana is, astonishingly, produced in the brains of living creatures. Twisted Beasts in particular have bodies built for producing it. Humans require the aid of a magic armament."
As he spoke, red light began to pour from the dragon's eye at the head of the staff. Then he struck the ground with the opposite end, and something small and black started surging up out of the earth.
"There's an old saying, isn't there? Birds hear what you say by day, and rats hear what you say by night."
Summoning Magic — Third-Rank Formula
⟨ Shark ⟩
What burst from the floor was a swarm of black rats and crows. Like a black wave, the flock surged out of the ground and poured from the container. I snatched up one of the little rats crawling at my feet and lifted it. Small enough to sit in a palm, it was unmistakably a sewer rat.
"Magic can make living things?"
"Not real ones. Everything magic makes is an elaborate fake. A mirage that vanishes with time."
"But if you touch fire made by magic, you still get burned, don't you?"
All I could do was tilt my head. Call magic fake if you like — a blade made of it still draws blood. The sewer rat in my hand looked, no matter how I turned it, like nothing but a rat.
"Magic is a miracle that turns information into substance. But human beings do not perfectly understand this world. So between what magic realizes and what truly exists, error is inevitable."
"Error? How much?"
"It varies by mage. But even the finest of them, they say, cannot raise their concordance with reality above ninety-five percent."
"And if the concordance is too low?"
"It collapses. Given time, all magic fails to endure its error with reality and begins to crumble. It sheds its energy as heat, and in the end it vanishes without a trace."
"So the higher the concordance..."
"The longer it holds, and the more efficient it is. Too low, and it collapses at once. Forcing it to hold demands a vast amount of mana."
That, he said, was why a mage's skill was measured by the precision of their magic. I stared at the mouse in my hand.
"Then this one disappears too, after a while?"
"Yes. But it will last a day, and in that time it will bring me information."
"That's a relief. Means we don't have to go stirring up this refugee camp."
I let out a sigh at the thought of having less work to do.
"Master, there's one thing I'm curious about."
"Hm?"
He opened his eyes wide, as if the question itself surprised him.
"From what you said, the inversion circuit that made this world turns thoughts out of a living head into something real. Right?"
"You've skipped a great deal, but roughly, yes."
"Then where did the first will come from — the one that made this world?"
"That is a riddle no one knows. The devout believe with all their hearts that it was the will of God. I am not so faithful."
With that he stepped out of the container. I set the mouse down and followed.
Pale and Capra had to spend the night in the car. A full day would pass before the familiars born of Pale's magic finished gathering information.
Sleeping in the car turned out to be less uncomfortable than expected. It was a family car, built for four or more, so with only the two of them there was room enough to stretch out. Capra was in a particularly good mood because she didn't have to sleep with Pale. At home he tormented her every day under the name of revenge.
Becoming a woman and getting raped by a man was novel enough the first time. Honestly, I'm sick of it now.
All she hoped for was that her master would find a new lover or a wife soon, and that she might have her peaceful nights back.
Pale set out with Capra the next day, in the late afternoon after the sun had gone down. The days were still short; by seven in the evening a deep dark had already settled. Evenings in the ghetto were darker still. The power supply was unstable, so households struggled to keep a light burning, and even the streetlamps had never been properly laid.
Moving through that street-dark, they came to a factory of no clear purpose. Crude concrete and steel framing made up the place. Pale led Capra around to a hill with a clear view of it, and they hid there and watched.
"Did your sewer rats and crows tell you the thing we're looking for is in there?"
Pale shook his head.
"The opposite. My rats and crows got nothing from that factory. They couldn't even approach."
"Then why are we here?"
"Don't you find it strange that they couldn't even get close? As if someone were keeping them out."
"Ah... I suppose."
"I'm fairly confident in this magic. And yet a mage capable of seeing through it and shutting it out is hiding something here."
"You think that's what we're looking for?"
"If it is, that would be the best outcome."
Pale swept the factory grounds with cold eyes and began working out a plan. Several strategies rose in his mind: a hard charge straight through the front, a quiet infiltration, or the old feint — strike east to hit west — with Capra as the bait. He was weighing which would serve best when the whole question became useless.
BOOM!!!
A tremendous blast, and a pillar of fire shot up from the factory. One look, and Pale understood the situation at once.
"Damn it. Seems there are quite a few who want their hands on the iron sphere."
Pale was not the only one with his eye on the silver-white orb. Far from it.