The Strongest Sleep
Phantasos readily accepted Richard's conditions.
Fortunately, he said he had a full week before his next adventure. During that time, he promised to teach Simon the Sleep curse personally.
And the following afternoon, the lessons began. Simon was climbing a mountain path side by side with Phantasos.
He's really going to pass down his original Sleep to me!
His father Richard's behavior yesterday had been a little embarrassing, but as a result, Simon was now going to learn the Sleep of Phantasos—the man whose reputation as the strongest rang across all of Kizen. It would be a lie to say he wasn't excited.
"This spot will do nicely! Mm!"
Phantasos said, looking around.
"A fine mountain! High mana density, trees growing tall and strong, and no lethal monsters to speak of."
"I'm glad it's to your liking, sir."
After a brief round of small talk, they moved straight into the lesson. Phantasos could only stay in Leshill for a week—a tight schedule, honestly, for learning his original magic.
"The dark magic I'm about to teach my junior is called Sleep."
He extended a finger and pointed at something off in the distance, and something dropped from a tree with a soft thump.
Simon squinted at it—a squirrel was curled up, snoring away.
"As you well know—a sleep curse!"
Rapid casting time. Clean, streamlined execution with nothing wasted.
Simon turned back to him with sparkling eyes, and Phantasos let out a hearty laugh, clapping his hands together with a light snap!
The squirrel bolted upright, then scrambled away in fright.
"It's hardly humble of me to say, but this single curse is what made me the strongest in Kizen! Mm!"
Simon blinked.
"Weren't you an ability user, though?"
"Haha! I hear that a lot, as it happens. But it's all a misunderstanding! From start to finish, I was a student who got by on this one Sleep curse alone! Mm!"
At Kizen, necromancers with innate abilities inevitably held an advantage.
Loraine Archbold. Serne Aindark. Both of them relied on their abilities as their primary weapon. And beyond those irregulars, ability users in general tended to post strong results.
Merely possessing a weapon no one else had was already a plus—but most ability users admitted to Kizen had abilities compatible with Jet-Black besides. A necromancer's strength flowed directly into the strength of their ability.
So while certain pessimists sneered that rank was determined by inborn talent rather than effort, the man who shattered that prejudice and unveiled an entirely new paradigm was none other than Phantasos.
He had entered Kizen with no foundational knowledge, no prior study—nothing but sleep-type curses, honed to their absolute limit. And with them alone, he had knocked down every ability user in his path and ascended to the very summit.
"For the next week, I shall pass down my original Sleep and everything I know to you, my junior!"
"Yes, sir!"
Simon nodded vigorously.
"I can't wait to see how the third-years react! Mm! The ones who looked down on you as a mere second-year—I want to see their faces when they watch you use my Sleep! Wahahaha!"
Richard's pressure had backed him into teaching the curse, but Phantasos seemed to have his own reasons for agreeing so readily.
Having laughed at the top of his lungs, he crossed his arms and looked at Simon.
"Now then, before we begin—one question! What do you think an original dark magic is?"
Simon answered immediately.
"Dark magic you developed yourself!"
"Close, but wrong! The truth is, everyone defines it differently—but in this Phantasos's book, the correct concept is 'dark magic only you can use.'"
He spread his palm open.
"Right! First, I'll show you the runes and formulas of my Sleep curse."
Simon sharpened his focus.
Finally—the signature technique of Kizen's strongest!
Determined not to miss a single formula, Simon poured everything into watching.
Whoosh!
But that resolve crumbled in an instant.
Unfolding across Phantasos's palm was not a two-dimensional circle but a three-dimensional one—strange, uncanny, and impossibly layered.
"What in the—!"
A wave of dizziness hit him. He couldn't understand anything about this magic circle, but as a necromancer, he couldn't help but be stunned.
"A state like this... is even possible?"
Because it mocked every convention he knew—a combination of formulas that should have been impossible, laced with mystical equations that shouldn't exist in reality.
There was no way anyone could master this in a week.
"Hahahaha! Don't lose heart, junior! Ask me anything you like! Feel free to take your time and examine it closely."
Simon closed his eyes for a moment and gathered his concentration. Once the dizziness subsided, he reopened them wide and studied the circle.
"This circuit on the right—why did you wind it up like a spring? Wouldn't a straight line be more efficient?"
"Ahh! That goes back to the Duel Evaluations in the second semester of my first year!"
Phantasos, it turned out, was far more talkative than he looked. The story ran long, but the gist seemed to be that he'd needed to punch his Sleep through an opponent's Calculation Degrade curse during a Duel Evaluation, and the design had evolved that way as a result.
"Why is this formula cut off, like it was abandoned halfway through?"
"Hahaha! That one's just a mistake! I tried using a cone formula, it didn't work out, so I pivoted to something else—and apparently I dozed off mid-thought, because it hardened into habit before I knew it!"
"Then what about this part?"
"Ah, this one calls for the tale of my Dispatched Evaluation! I was preparing a magic circle when a monster attacked—it raked its claws right through my formula! I patched it up in a hurry, cast the spell as-is, and would you look at that, it worked surprisingly well, so..."
The stories were long, but one thing became clear.
This curse was the crystallization of countless trials, errors, and variables piled one atop another.
"Do you understand now?"
Phantasos said, his voice turning serious.
"Why I called an original 'dark magic only you can use.'"
"Yes. And the reason the circle is tangled up like this is..."
"The Jet-Black Property of Memory!"
The Property of Memory was, in a sense, the very essence of a necromancer.
When a magic circle built from particular runes and formulas was used repeatedly, Jet-Black memorized the process. Eventually, merely recalling the circle's name and tending to its opening steps was enough—the runes and formulas completed themselves automatically.
Once the property hardened like that, corrections became extremely difficult down the line—which was why Kizen, in principle, forbade the modification of established magic circles.
"The Property of Memory is a double-edged sword!"
Phantasos drew out that intricate three-dimensional dark magic once more and spread it open again. Exactly as before. The circuits coiled like springs, the formulas abandoned mid-build—all the inefficient, messy debris remained, preserved in perfect detail.
"We necromancers exploit this property for rapid casting—but it leaves these unnecessary scars behind as well."
He clenched his fist and scattered the circle.
"No need for despair, though! Think of dark magic as a warrior's body covered in scars! It shifts and evolves ceaselessly, adapting to every situation and condition!"
"...Oh. That's a rather romantic way to put it."
"Hahaha!"
Phantasos boomed with laughter and turned his head.
"You'll have one of your own soon enough, junior! Now then—we start from the fundamentals. You'll build up from the basics, layer on variation step by step, and make it your own."
Phantasos closed his eyes and murmured something under his breath like a man performing a ritual, then opened his left hand.
The moment it opened, a magic circle appeared.
"This is the most basic Sleep curse you'll learn in your second-year curriculum. And—!"
This time he spread his other hand, the right one.
"THIS is the original Sleep curse I propose to you, my junior!"
Simon's eyes went wide as he examined the two circles.
"Can you spot the difference?"
"The textbook Sleep curse uses the Rune of Sleep. And Chairman Phantasos's curse is..."
Simon's eyes grew wider still.
"...just the Rune of Calming?"
"Precisely!"
Simon didn't stop his analysis there.
"A Sleep curse built on the Rune of Sleep has a simple structure. All the formulas it employs focus on drawing out one hundred percent of the rune's power."
Simon's head turned to the right circle.
"The one using the Rune of Calming is several times more complex in construction. Naturally—calming alone can't put a person to sleep. The auxiliary formulas are all working hard to produce the sleep effect."
"Mm! Sharply observed!"
Phantasos nodded his head back and forth, clearly pleased with the answer.
"Then here's the question! Why do you think I, of all people, abandoned the efficient Rune of Sleep and built my Sleep curse on the Rune of Calming instead?"
Simon rested his chin on his hand and sank deep into thought, while Phantasos waited patiently beside his struggling junior.
"If you get even this one right, that's a thousand points out of a hundred."
"A sleep induced directly by the curse's effect is artificial,"
Simon said, a brilliant light flickering in his eyes.
"but the Rune of Calming produces 'an effect identical to genuine sleep.' That's the difference, I believe."
A storm of emotion swept across Phantasos's face. He clenched both fists and threw his head back.
"PERFECT!!"
Vrrrrrrrmmm!
The songbirds in the surrounding forest startled and scattered into the sky.
"That's exactly it! Truly worthy of being this Phantasos's junior! Timber for the next Kizen Student Council President!"
He was so worked up that spit was flying from his mouth.
"Sleep! Sleep! What do you think sleep IS? 'A periodically recurring state of physiological unconsciousness!'"
"...Uh, yes. That's right."
"Humans spend roughly a third of their lives in this state of physiological unconsciousness! From a curse scholar's perspective, most living creatures are casting a curse on their own bodies to sustain their life processes! Fascinating, isn't it? The Sleep curse must recognize and seize upon exactly that truth! Humans are, in fact, always waiting to fall under the curse of sleep."
"I—I suppose so."
Simon smiled as if to calm him down, but Phantasos's lecture showed no sign of stopping.
"Of course, a curse on the Rune of Sleep is faster! But there's resistance to contend with! Necromancers wrap themselves in layers of curse resistance, and priests wield purification magic! So we needn't strain ourselves forcing our target under! Humans are primed and ready to sleep at any moment—we simply need to gently stroke that readiness! Relaxing the muscles, stabilizing the blood pressure, slowing the tempo of the heartbeat and breathing—like so!"
He mimicked each exaggerated gesture as he went on.
"Sleep must be of a different character entirely from other curses! Where other curses focus on viciously carving the enemy apart, Sleep's performance depends on how comfortable and at ease the target feels!"
A Sleep curse that left its victim tossing, turning, and sleeping fitfully on the surface was trash. The Sleep that helped an enemy sink into satisfying, restful slumber—that, in Phantasos's usual doctrine, was a good Sleep.
"Drive them into that satisfying deep sleep, leave them completely defenseless, and then—"
Phantasos drew a finger across his throat like a blade.
"what you do from there is the curse mage's own affair."
"Th-that's terrifying."
On the battlefield, sleep was death.
Still, this really is an invaluable lesson.
Simon was thoroughly satisfied. Perhaps because this was a lecture from a man who had devoted his entire being to Sleep alone, everything—the techniques, the philosophy—was on another level.
It was a lesson he knew he could never learn in school. No—he couldn't have bought it with money.
"You'll start with this."
Phantasos said, showing him the curse built on the Rune of Calming.
"Memorize the entire magic circle—formulas, circuits, all of it! When you're first learning, brute-force memorization is the fastest way to drive it into your head!"
"Yes, sir!"
This was the power that had made Phantasos the strongest Student Council President in Kizen's history. Simon swore he would make it his, no matter what.
"One hour should do it."