Bare Skin and Dual Casting
"Cali, wake up. If you don't get up now, you're skipping lunch too."
"Nngh... Did we really sleep that long?"
Then again, today was the final submission deadline, and the two of us had stayed up late practicing magic circles. By that measure, this counted as a perfectly normal wake-up time.
Nia lay in the spot beside me, staring straight at me with a smile, and something about it made my heart skip.
I really ought to be used to this by now.
Lately Nia had taken to crawling into my bed more and more often. What used to be her barging in just to wake me had turned into the two of us sleeping in the same bed and her rousing me from there.
In the beginning, the whole reason she got up early and prepared ahead of time was so I wouldn't find out she was a girl. These days, apparently, waking me up naked and wrapped around me was perfectly fine.
"If you keep going around without clothes and tempting me first thing in the morning, I might just eat you up and forget about lunch entirely."
"That might not be so bad. Of course, then we'd both starve until dinner."
There was a time when lines like that would at least make her look a little embarrassed. Now she didn't even pretend they landed.
It hadn't been that long, and yet I never expected her to adapt to this relationship so thoroughly. Honestly, even if it meant going hungry, wasting a day like that every once in a while didn't sound half bad.
Unfortunately, today was the last day Professor Londo would be available to evaluate us. That meant eating a proper lunch and showing her the results of yesterday's practice.
"You've got it rough."
"What do you mean?"
"Wearing that stuff all the time. Doesn't it feel stifling?"
"I told you — it's actually pretty comfortable. I think the guys have it worse."
"...Huh?"
"Your dick. Doesn't it get crushed inside your clothes every time it gets hard?"
Well... she wasn't wrong.
Still, enchanting your underwear with space-expansion magic would probably be even more awkward. Clothes weren't designed with erections in mind to begin with — but if you made them out of clingy fabric that just put everything on display, they wouldn't function as clothes either.
I was fine with girls walking around fully bare. Men doing the same? Absolutely not.
"Ah, but still. When you lose control and it gets big, and it snakes along the line of your clothes, long and twitching and pressed flat against you — I like that. Looking at it gets me a little turned on."
"Hey— hey!"
How the hell had our crown princess turned into someone who said shit like that without blinking?
Sure, she was a mage, so of course she'd been reading all my comics. But I never expected that once the leash came off, she'd start spouting dirty talk this brazenly.
Fuck. Thinking about it, maybe this is what she always wanted.
Most of the girls around us went around having filthy conversations among themselves constantly. The few male students had to sit there and take it raw, which was rough enough on its own. For Nia, who'd been hiding that she was a girl, that whole scene must have looked enviable. Now that there was someone who knew the truth — even if he was a guy — she probably just wanted the same kind of talk.
"Student council work is all wrapped up, right?"
"The upperclassmen are still busy, but they said it wasn't anything for a first-year to handle."
With the semester winding down, life in general had gotten a lot looser. Plenty of lectures had already ended, and it was an awkward time to start new club projects, so everything had a vacation feel to it.
"Thanks for the meal."
"Heading straight over?"
"No need to practice more, right?"
"I don't know. She said if you mess up you can retry."
Even if we failed and didn't get credit for the demonstration, an A was already locked in, so there was no real reason to stress. We'd only locked ourselves in a room and prepared this hard because doing exactly what we were told felt too boring.
Honestly, I wanted to learn magic — I didn't obsess over grades. That didn't mean I ignored them entirely. I just wasn't the type to stake my life on them. Having good grades never hurt, though.
"The line's shorter than I expected."
"I figured it'd be packed since it's the last day, but if you think about it, you only need to succeed once. Most people already finished and blocked out today as free time so they could go play."
Fair enough. The only ones who'd stayed up late practicing something extra and weird were probably us. Everyone else still waiting was just here because they kept making mistakes.
"Ah, Cali and Nia. I've been waiting for you two, honestly. I was starting to wonder if your grades were already high enough that you simply wouldn't come..."
"You didn't need to wait for us..."
"I still remember the magic circle you showed on the very first day of class with perfect clarity, Cali."
"Please just forget that."
Hearing that story over and over was getting embarrassing. I let out a long sigh, then Nia and I looked at each other and nodded. At the same time, we began drawing our circles and started the demonstration.
Except we weren't drawing ordinary circles.
We channeled roughly equal mana into both hands and drew half-circles from either side, letting the ends meet to complete the full ring. It was the same principle as dotted-line characters — a method for shortening the time spent drawing a magic circle that the professor had never mentioned.
"...Oh?"
After that, just as she'd taught us, we imbued each hand with a different type of mana and wrote out the magical characters. We'd failed at it sometimes before, but maybe all the practice before falling asleep last night had paid off — both Nia and I successfully activated the spell without a single flaw.
"...Did you two read the paper?"
"No. Is this method of drawing the circle in the paper too?"
"It is... though I deliberately didn't mention it. I thought it would only confuse people. And yet you immediately grasped why it was necessary and even incorporated it. How very like the two of you."
"It's Dual Casting. If there's a stretch where you can't cut the time, you're just taking a loss."
Dual Casting's whole advantage was abandoning raw power and stability to focus purely on speed. Of course the circle itself had to be drawn as fast as possible too. Once I realized that equal mana ratios meant the lines would be treated as the same stroke, it seemed natural that you could draw a circle the same way.
"You never stop surprising me. So this is what delayed you?"
"Yes, that's right."
"I'll record it as a success and reflect it in your grades. And as a reward for surprising me, I should at least give you this."
"...What is this?"
"A copy of the Dual Casting thesis I submitted recently. I had two sets left — how convenient."
...Can I just not take this?
Of all things, the original paper. My head already hurt just looking at it. Refusing felt awkward, so I accepted it, but I had no idea what I was supposed to do with the thing.
"It's actually in here."
The part we'd been curious about — the fast circle-drawing method — was there. Unlike our simple half-circle approach, the paper devoted an entire major section to it, sprawling on for an absurd length. The early examples matched what we'd done almost exactly, but...
"Ah. It's long because of the part about restoring the circle's efficiency as much as possible..."
"That was solvable?"
"Apparently so."
Drawing a magic circle as a perfect ring maximized mana efficiency. But "perfect" here was a conceptual ideal — just looking circular wasn't enough. That was why joining two half-circles the way we just had caused efficiency to plummet. We'd only argued that the speed advantage still made it worthwhile. Turns out there was a way to solve that problem even while drawing with both hands.
Fuck. Looking at this, she'd clearly dumped it on us as extra study material.
"We come in having studied extra, and this merciless professor just throws more studying at us."
"Well, think of it as summer homework."
"Yeah. Absolutely not doing it."
I planned to focus on drawing comics over break. Whatever free time was left, I wanted to actually rest and recover from everything I hadn't been able to enjoy during the semester. If I had spare time next term, maybe I'd look at it then.
Of course, if this technique had been a core skill related to Record Magic — something I needed for building computers and the rest — I would have thrown myself into studying it immediately. Combat magic just wasn't that interesting to me. I'd enjoyed the ideas because they were magic, but I had zero desire to do supplemental study just to squeeze out more efficiency.
"You said you're heading back tomorrow, Cali?"
"Yeah. The club wrap-up party is tomorrow. You're leaving today, right?"
"...That's a shame. I wanted a little more time together."
"Can't be helped."
Still, we'd be together until evening, when the knights came to pick her up. Until then, I planned to spend the time with Nia instead of anyone else. Depending on how things went, we'd already talked about meeting up over break too. Once the next semester started, we'd be stuck to each other every day in the dorms and lectures again — no real reason to get too sentimental.
"Hup. Living without a bra in the dorms these days has ruined me. Something I used to tolerate just fine feels way too uncomfortable now."
"Well, it was a complicated mess of events, but you did come out ahead in some ways, right?"
"As long as you ignore how soft I've gotten."
She did seem unusually loose lately, for Nia. Walking around the dorm naked was one thing. But a girl who used to keep her sleep schedule razor-sharp was now sleeping in beside me — and instead of that cool, composed air she always projected, she was even being cute and clingy.
Somehow that only made her feel more human, and I liked it. The old Nia had always had a stiff edge that made her feel like a little old lady. Outside, when she was dressed as a boy, she still carried a similar vibe.
And that makes it even better.
A side of my girl that only I got to see. Honestly, that kind of thing gave a man an irresistible sense of superiority.