Lich and Life Vessel
On the way to the 'Mutant' club room with Toto.
From Simon's point of view, Toto was a good friend he could talk to anytime, without any pressure. They were both aiming for the same major, and with summoning as a solid common ground, they never ran out of things to discuss.
"I thought the last summoning practical exam was way too hard!" Toto, walking beside him, said with an expression full of anxiety. "It was hard enough just to build a single Skeleton Mage that could produce a tiny flame — and then they want original work? Original! It sounds like they won't give us a single point unless it's something new. It's stressing me out!"
Having held forth at length about the exam's difficulty, Toto stole a glance at Simon's face. "Right? Am I wrong?"
Simon answered with an easy smile. "I feel exactly the same way."
"See? See!"
Delighted that his opinion had been seconded, Toto broke into a relieved grin. "Which brings me to my next point — Simon! What are you going to make?"
Simon smiled back and said, "A Lich."
CRASH!
Toto, who had been walking along just fine, toppled over in spectacular fashion and rolled a full turn across the floor.
"A-are you INSANE?!!"
The words shot out of him as he bolted upright. Two girls passing by heard it, covered their mouths, and snickered.
Toto's face turned as red as a tomato. He whipped his head around to check who'd seen, then spoke in a tiny voice. "Y-you're serious? I already think the Overlord and the Deimos are barely normal by anyone's standards, but that's just…!"
Simon pulled a book out of his subspace and showed it to him. "See? I even brought a book. I'm planning to take it slow and steady before the second-year promotion. The bigger the dream, the better, right?"
"……Even big dreams should be, you know, reasonably big."
Toto picked himself up, dusted off his uniform trousers, and peered at the book in Simon's hand. "Lich and Life Vessel? Where on earth did you get a book like that?"
"Professor Aaron lent it to me. He said if I bring him even a basic Lich framework, he'd take a look at it."
At those words, Toto's eyes lit up, then shifted into an expression brimming with admiration and envy. "……I-I wish I could set so much as one foot inside Professor Aaron's lab."
Simon answered in a gentle voice. "Just go and knock sometime. Professor Aaron always looks like everything's a chore, but honestly, he likes students who want to learn more than you'd think."
"……That's only because you're Special Admission No. 1 and the summoning department's ace. If I showed up, he'd probably—"
Simon smacked Toto on the back. "Oh, come on! Have some courage!"
"Oof!"
It had been nothing more than a light tap, but Toto's slight frame wobbled back and forth several times before pitching forward.
"And if you really can't bring yourself to go alone, I'll take you along next time I visit Professor Aaron's lab."
"R-really?!"
Toto looked at Simon with shining, grateful eyes. "You really are my role model, Simon! Great skills, plus the looks, plus the personality — a triple threat…!"
"……Please, I'm begging you — not between friends. It's embarrassing."
Before they knew it, the two had arrived in front of the Mutant club room. No matter how many times he came, Simon always felt the same way: the exterior really was shabby. A scrap of paper, flapping as if it might fall off at any moment, was stuck to the door, the crooked handwriting spelling out 'Mutant'.
Simon pressed the paper back into place and said, "I'll knock."
Toto, meanwhile, was busy checking out his reflection in the nearby window, fussing over his hair. Having finally finished his grooming, he gave a nod.
Knock knock.
"It's Simon Polentia! Toto's here with me. Coming in."
The two opened the door and stepped into the club room. The moment they entered, a booming laugh rang out — Hahaha!
"There you are, comrades!"
The girl beaming at them with a wide, toothy grin was Benya Vanilla, the club president. She had a map of the continent pinned to a portable blackboard and was hard at work explaining something, while a boy seated on the sofa listened.
It's been ages since I've seen him.
A bespectacled boy with the unmistakable air of a scholar and a closed-off, stiff expression. Resting on his knees were two books: Why Do Men Even Have Nipples? and How to Explain Things to the World's Idiots with a Smile.
Simon greeted him warmly. "Hey, Fitzgerald."
Fitzgerald of Class M, the boy with the glasses. Simon had nearly forgotten his face, but as it happened, Toto and this guy had joined the club together with him.
"Oh."
Fitzgerald adjusted his glasses and looked at Simon. "I almost forgot your face."
"……That's exactly what I was about to say. I thought you'd left the club."
"I attend two to three times a week."
Apparently their timing just never seemed to overlap. Fitzgerald set his books down beside the sofa and turned his head. "Then please, continue your explanation, Madam President."
"Got it! So full of enthusiasm, comrade Glasses!"
Simon wondered what the two of them were up to — and it turned out to be yet another discussion of that strange 'world conquest' scheme. Judging by the map, this time the target of conquest was one of the Four Great Kingdoms: Shahed.
"See, the northern territories of Shahed can't do anything on days when the blizzards come down!"
She rapped her knuckles against the blackboard with the map pinned to it. "So we build undead to pull snow sleds, and that's how we conquer Shahed!"
"And what, precisely, would be doing the pulling?"
"Obviously we make undead out of their reindeer! They'd be built for the cold, wouldn't they?"
"If you're counting on frost resistance, wouldn't a ghoul form — one that retains its pelt — be the superior choice?"
It was, more or less, this kind of pointless banter. Talking things over with Benya was clearly going to take a while, so Simon decided to wait it out by doing some maintenance on the Overlord.
Having set the book down on a nearby shelf, Simon sat on the floor, pulled the Overlord's tentacles out of his subspace, and fetched a cloth and some slime lubricant from the shelf.
"I'll help too, Simon!"
"Thanks."
While Simon and Toto tended to the Overlord, Benya — still deep in her world-conquest discussion — caught sight of Simon's book.
"Oh! That book!"
She hurried over in quick strides and picked it up. "Lich and Life Vessel! My grandfather wrote this one!"
Her grandfather, of course, would be the current chairman of the Vanilla Group.
"Senior, by any chance—"
It was pure luck. But Simon was not the sort to let an opportunity like this slip by.
"Do you happen to know about this semester's summoning assignment for the first-years?"
"Glasses comrade told me. An original magic-type undead, right?"
"Yes — I want to try building a Lich!"
Fitzgerald, who had been expressionless, blinked in surprise, while Toto shook his head back and forth in dismay.
"That's our comrade for you!"
Benya, by contrast, clapped her palms together with a laugh. "Aren't you getting a little too fired up about world conquest?"
"……Haha."
"Great! There's nothing you can't conquer! Let me walk you through Liches!"
She peeled the map off the portable blackboard for the moment and picked up a piece of chalk.
"Liches have what's called the 'Three Essential Elements.'"
On the blackboard, she wrote: 'Life Vessel (heart)', 'Skull', 'Staff'.
"The hardest ingredient to get your hands on, without question, is the heart that will become the Life Vessel!"
She drew a cute little heart symbol under the word 'heart' as she went on. "Not just any heart can become a Life Vessel. You need something a little bit special!"
"Could one be sourced through Vanilla, by any chance?"
"Oh, we could get one, but Life Vessels are almost entirely made to order. Nothing in stock — you'd have to place a request, and even then it'd be prepared from whatever stock remains. The cost would be considerable, too."
Simon nodded, and she moved straight on to the second element.
"Next! The second element is the skeleton that will become the Lich's body! The skull in particular has to be a special one, capable of withstanding an absolutely monstrous amount of magical power. This part's a bit finicky too."
Finally, Benya pointed at the staff.
"Third is the staff! Most necromancers these days tend to avoid them, but plenty of the older generation still use them, and they come out for especially powerful dark magic."
She wiggled her fingers as if keeping a rhythm as she explained. "Whether it's a Lich or a Skeleton Mage, it's practically essential equipment for any magic-type undead. An undead's spatial perception is severely limited, you see. So channeling the spell's release through the staff's magic core is the best-balanced approach."
"Understood, Madam President."
Fitzgerald nodded and pushed his glasses up. "In conclusion: to build a Lich, the very first step — gathering the materials — borders on the impossible."
"Honestly? …Yeah, that's about right. And even with all of these, there's no guarantee of a hundred percent success."
Simon considered for a moment, then spoke. "Senior, that skeleton's skull I left with you a while back. Do you remember it?"
He was talking about the skull of Manus, the Ancient Undead he'd retrieved from Deathland.
"Hm? Oh! I remember!"
"What do you think of it as a Lich's skull?"
She fell into thought for a moment. "Hmm~ Honestly, I've squeezed just about all the data I can out of it. I was preparing it as a close-combat skeleton for you, so I'm not sure how it'd do as a Lich's. Want to bring it by and see?"
"Yes! I'd like to have it checked out. As for the Life Vessel and the staff……"
Those, it seemed, would have to be bought. Simon mulled it over briefly, then opened his mouth.
"By any chance — would Vanilla be interested in the Gwaegong's corpse as well?"
"Huh?"
Benya blinked.
Back when he'd been dispatched to the Neutral Zone.
There had been a conversation with Rick while working at Vengeance.
"Y'know that Gwaegong you caught? Ownership rights should belong to you, since you took it down. Kind of a waste, isn't it? That thing's worth a fortune."
It had been about the Gwaegong's corpse, plain and simple. Simon had indeed caught the thing, but since its body would have sunk to the very bottom of the sea, he'd assumed hauling it back up was impossible.
"Any professional salvage outfit could bring it up, no problem! These are the same people who raise century-old shipwrecks like it's nothing."
Rick had sounded confident.
"It spent over a week in the ocean. Wouldn't the fish have picked it clean by now?"
"You're turning it into undead anyway, right? All you need are the bones and the special organs."
Even his roommate Simon knew perfectly well that Rick, whatever his other qualities, had an uncanny nose for money. Rick had offered to handle the salvage contract and arrange the raising of the Gwaegong's corpse, start to finish, in exchange for a five percent cut of the total proceeds.
Simon had seen no obvious problem with the arrangement and had delegated the work to Rick, planning to either sell the Gwaegong to Vanilla or request an auction once it was recovered.
"Good thinking? Let's see what condition the Gwaegong comes up in, and then I'll decide!"
Benya's reaction had been favorable as well. Whether Vanilla took it or it went to auction, money would come in either way. And Simon intended to use that windfall to buy the Life Vessel and the staff his Lich would need.
I'll have this side of things prepared too, then.
"Uung! Uuuung!"
Simon climbed onto his dormitory desk and stroked the head of the teddy bear acting cute before him — in truth, Akalion, the Divine Beast. They were at Kizen, but unless Simon himself imbued the beast with divinity, it was no different from any ordinary wild animal or monster.
Professor Farahan would be in for quite a shock if he found out, wouldn't he?
Simon had thought about waiting for his tutoring schedule, but in the end he planned to arrange a meeting and visit Farahan early tomorrow morning. The Lich project was one thing — but he couldn't afford to let his holy power training slip, either.
If the day ever comes when I have to fight Magnus…
Simon quietly raised his fist and studied it.
Divinity might just be the biggest key of all.