The Colorless Professor
The next morning brought Spirit Magic class—which meant a free period for Simon.
Tap. Tak. Ta-at. Taah. Tak.
From early morning, Simon was scrawling formulas across the chalkboard of an empty lecture hall in a frenzy. His shirt collar flapped wildly, and beads of sweat dripped from his tossing hair.
Taa-aat.
On the final formula, the last stroke stretched long, halted, and a decisive dot punched down at the end.
*That's it.*
Simon dropped the chalk and bolted for the desks.
Four desks pushed together held a Skeleton Mage set and a magic circle sheet laid out and ready. Glancing between the board and the sheet, Simon began carefully revising the circle's formulas and circuitry.
"The problem was the main circuit from the start."
His Jet-Black flowed into the magic circle and began correcting the errors—carving new pathways, transforming the values within the formulas.
With the revisions cleanly finished, Simon placed his hand on the circle once more.
"Activate."
*Vwoooong!*
The magic circle powered up.
Jet-Black awakened the rune script, and the formulas processed the runes' power. Along the circuitry spreading out from the core like a spider's web, Jet-Black flowed like a river, and ten strokes gleamed in beautiful hues.
*'Everything's fine up to here.'*
Having confirmed the circle's condition, Simon's gaze shifted to the staff secured to the desk.
He had linked the circle's circuitry to this staff. If the spell fired properly from the staff, then an undead assembled from these skeletons would be able to cast the exact same magic.
*'Come on!'*
The magic circle unfolded above the staff. And then—
*Crrack!*
With a burst of black current, the circle collapsed.
"Haaaah."
Simon collapsed along with it. Every ounce of strength drained from his body.
"What's the problem?"
He muttered to himself in a cracked voice, staring at the chalkboard.
A magic circle was an ecosystem where everything was tightly interconnected.
Eliminate an insect, and the spiders and mantises that preyed on it vanish; then the birds that ate them vanish; then the snakes that ate the birds. That was the nature of it.
Yet the result staring Simon in the eye said: *'Killed the bug, and the snake went extinct.'*
He couldn't begin to understand how the causality in between had twisted itself around.
It felt like drifting through an endless Möbius strip.
He could sense a great wall looming ahead of him.
*-When will you be able to create a Lich?*
The memory burned with embarrassment.
Here he was, unable to manage even a Skeleton Mage—what on earth had possessed him to speak of a high-tier undead right in front of Professor Aaron?
"Uuuugh."
Simon lay flat out on the floor, wiping his flushed face with slow strokes of his hand.
The ceiling of the deserted classroom drifted into view. A breeze swept through, rustling his hair.
"And yet..."
Staring blankly at the curtain fluttering in the wind, Simon—with his deep dark circles and haggard face—broke into a small smile.
"This is fun."
The dazed Simon sprang up. He'd only meant to clear his head for a moment, but ideas for the next step and the one after came flooding in one after another.
Chasing after a goal is a joy. Sometimes you're out of breath, sometimes your ankles ache—but he knew this hardship had an end. And he knew the view from the top would be breathtakingly beautiful.
"Seriously, let's see who wins."
Simon dashed back to the chalkboard and began plugging in the revision points that had just occurred to him.
Getting worn out already, when he was the one who'd vowed to create a Lich? That was laughable.
*This Skeleton Mage—I'll finish it with my own two hands, no matter what.*
* * *
"Hmm-hm. Hmm. Hmm."
Meilin strolled through the campus grounds in high spirits, her sky-blue hair streaming behind her.
Today, she was in a rather good mood.
*'What's gotten into him?'*
And no wonder—Simon had asked to meet her alone before afternoon class.
Not Dick, not Camibarez. Just the two of them.
Him suddenly pulling a stunt like this out of nowhere made her feel all fluttery again.
So she'd gotten up early to prepare. Her hair was cooperating today, and her makeup had come out just right.
Her long hair swishing breezily, Meilin arrived at the appointed place—an empty lecture hall.
The door stood slightly ajar.
*'?'*
She peeked through the gap and caught sight of Simon.
Bathed in sunlight seeping through the window, with a pleasant breeze drifting past, Simon was fast asleep, slumped over a desk. The guy who never even snored was now making soft sleeping sounds.
She quietly slid the door open and stepped inside.
Simon had his face turned sideways, pillowed on his own arm. From this angle, the line of his jaw and the curve of his neck stood out sharply.
*'He's completely knocked out.'*
Mouth slightly parted, sleeping without a care in the world—Simon looked nothing like his usual grown-up self. He just looked like some little kid from the neighborhood.
She felt a strange urge to poke his cheek with her finger and wake him up, but he was sleeping so soundly that she held back.
Instead, she quietly dragged a chair over and sat down directly in front of him.
*'Hmm.'*
The wind was strong today.
Simon's blue hair, swaying in the breeze, looked like rolling waves, and where the light caught it, faint glimmers shifted the color this way and that—like a painter's palette of blended pigments.
Meilin, who had been gazing vacantly at his face, felt her cheeks grow warm.
*'Am I being a total creep right now?'*
Just in case, she reached out and waved her hand briskly in front of Simon's face.
Not a single sign of waking.
*'Haah.'*
Calling a person out and then conking out in the classroom, oblivious to everything—some attitude that was. No sense of occasion whatsoever.
Well, fine. All the better for her. Crossing her legs and folding her arms, she leaned her head forward, fully ready to admire the view.
Normally she was too shy and self-conscious to look at his face this closely, this directly.
*'...'*
When she sat still like this, quietly watching Simon.
Pion came to mind.
The Pion who had saved her in Deathland—she'd always pictured him as fierce, terrifying, and massively built.
But the Pion she'd encountered in the village of Kelso in the Neutral Zone had, on second look, been somewhat leaner than she'd imagined.
Yes—leaner, exactly like the Simon sleeping in front of her now.
*'And I'm pretty sure Pion's Jet-Black had that same faint blue-black tint to it.'*
Her heartbeat quickened, her breath turning shallow. Lacing her fingers together into the shape of a mask, she brought her hands up in front of Simon's face.
*'Whoa... seeing it like this, he really does look like—'*
The moment she stretched her arms out to hold the mask up to him—
His sleeping eyes snapped wide open.
"GWAK! WAAAK—! UGYAAAK—!"
Meilin jolted backward, her whole body trembling. Her face flushed scarlet all the way to her earlobes.
"?"
Simon blinked innocently for a moment, evidently having no idea what was going on—then broke into a smile.
"Oh, it's you, Meilin. I dozed off."
"Agh, jeez! You scared me!!"
She squealed, clapping both hands over her chest.
Her heart was pounding like mad. Anyone could see that she was the one at fault here, but somehow her voice just came out loud anyway.
"Sorry."
And as always, Simon accepted it with a smile.
"...Hmph."
Meilin swiftly scooted her chair back until she'd put a safe distance between them, then fanned herself with both hands.
"S-so, why did you call me here, anyway?"
Turning her head away with an air of indifference, Meilin stole a sidelong glance at him.
He answered.
"There's something I wanted to ask you."
*!'*
Why did that sound so *loaded* all of a sudden? Knowing Simon's personality, it absolutely, positively couldn't be!
"Actually, I'm completely stuck on a Jet-Black Elemental circle. I was working on a Cold Bolt magic circle earlier, and—"
Right. Of course it wasn't.
What did you expect, exactly?
Fool me twice, huh.
Meilin's mouth corner trembled violently beneath her smiling face.
"So when I tried changing the circle's main circuit..."
Oblivious to her feelings, Simon launched into an enthusiastic lecture about magic circles. Somehow this only made her pout harder in sulky indignation.
"...And that's why the base formula itself keeps falling apart. You following me so far?"
Meilin heaved a quiet sigh and rested her chin on her hand.
"That's a circuit resistance problem."
"Hm? I thought resistance wasn't the issue."
"No, you dummy! Just listen to me!"
At some point, the two of them had raced over to the chalkboard and were scribbling formulas at each other in heated rebuttal.
"Nope. You can't take it that route!"
Meilin snapped, correcting Simon's formula with fiery intensity. Then, as she scrawled formula after formula in a flurry, she suddenly burst into a small laugh—*pff.*
*'I really am a necromancer after all.'*
Because here she was, storming out to the chalkboard the instant something ticked her off.
"What?"
"N-nothing. I'll prove it, so just watch and learn!"
After roughly twenty minutes of debate, the victor was Meilin. Simon, once he understood where his error lay, finally got the clean answer he'd been searching for.
It was only natural. She was the genius ranked second in all of Kizen on internal grades alone, and Jet-Black Mechanics and Elemental magic were her specialities. The gap was so vast that Simon even challenging her was almost embarrassing in hindsight.
Meilin wore the victor's smile as she spoke.
"But why Jet-Black Elemental all of a sudden? You were doing fine with Summoning and everything else—why go out of your way to mount a whole new offensive toolkit?"
"Well, I'm building a Skeleton Mage."
"Huh?"
Meilin's face went blank with confusion.
"What nonsense is that? We have the Skeleton Mage assembly class tomorrow—why are you building one all by yourself?"
"Er, it's just... sort of a preview?"
"What a glutton for punishment."
Meilin shook her head and planted her hands on her hips.
"Anyway, I helped you, so you're buying me food, right? All that brainwork made me hungry."
"Yeah, let's go."
* * *
The next class was Professor Eric Aura's Jet-Black Mechanics.
Jet-Black Mechanics was the backbone of all dark magic.
So integral was it that professors of other subjects would sometimes ask their students how far they'd gotten in Jet-Black Mechanics before calibrating the pace of their own lessons.
After all, the pace of this one class determined which formulas and rune script every student would know.
*-We didn't cover this in Jet-Black Mechanics?*
It was one of the questions professors asked their students most often.
Students like Meilin, who wielded Jet-Black Elemental magic and the like, could choose this subject as their major—but Jet-Black Mechanics was a required course for everyone. That was why no professor took direct disciples from it.
"And we'll end today's lesson here."
And the middle-aged man who taught this all-important subject—Eric Aura—carried a rather famous nickname: the Colorless Professor.
His ability and expertise were universally acknowledged, but he was known for being strictly orthodox and never imprinting any personal flair on his teaching. He was also a thorough devotee of theory.
His classes were clean, spare, and focused exclusively on conveying knowledge—and to students accustomed to the flashy showmanship of professors like Bahil, or Hong Peng's aggressive crowd participation, they carried a reputation for being somewhat dry.
Pure theory, with no practical component.
A subject that demanded students pore over magic circles, rune script, and formulas all day, wracking their brains without pause.
Even so, every student understood this course's importance. Everything learned here would inevitably be reapplied in their other classes—this was a subject no one could afford to neglect.
"Thank you for your hard work, Professor!"
Class ended, and the students filed swiftly out of the lecture hall.
Eric was tidying up around the room when a student approached him.
"Alright, if you have a question—"
He turned his head, saw who had come to ask it, and was mildly surprised.
The students who usually came to him about Jet-Black Mechanics were a fixed crowd, but today's visitor was a rather unusual one.
"This is the first time you've come to see me, Simon Polentia."