Male Regression (2)
The gold coins Yona had coughed up were already being poured into the mana basin.
The basin was filled to the brim with aqua regia, and thanks to that, most of the gold coins dumped inside had melted down into liquid.
"Now, on to the next step…"
Escara glanced sideways at Yona, who lay sprawled behind the stone slab.
It was certain she'd already fallen asleep under the influence of the golden script carved into the slab, but just to be safe, Escara approached her and waved her hand a few times before those closed eyes.
"She's out."
A triumphant smile spread across Escara's face.
Wizards were, by nature, a curious breed. They cared little for wealth, which they could scrape together in any amount they pleased, but the moment an unusual case like this crossed their path, that ravenous hunger for knowledge caught fire. And once it caught, it blazed up in an instant, like bone-dry kindling in the dead of winter.
A test subject who had originally been a man, acquired this effortlessly? And with Yona even offering up the gold coins needed to draw the magic circle herself? Escara had no reason whatsoever to refuse.
"Looks like it's already begun."
The aqua regia in the mana basin had drunk its fill of gold and now shimmered a brilliant yellow. And as Escara stirred that molten gold with a mana-infused paulownia staff, the door slid open and Alevian stepped inside.
"Yes, it's already underway. The gold solution's ready too."
"You could have covered the gold coins yourself, Escara."
Alevian looked distinctly put out about it.
Drawing a magic circle required gold solution, and a large-scale circle like the one Yona wanted meant a correspondingly enormous outlay of coins.
"That's simply how procedures work. Naturally, the one in a hurry pays for the materials."
"Still… that's money our pretty one worked herself ragged to save. Spending it like this doesn't sit right with me."
Alevian, who had entered the room, was dressed in a white robe draped over a purple dress. That unreadable gleam still glinting in her eyes, she drifted toward Yona.
"Yona, Yona… our pretty one, Yona. The hour has finally come to untangle that long-nursed knot of yours."
Alevian's long white fingers stroked Yona's cheek.
Ordinarily, Yona would recoil in absolute horror at being touched like this, but touching her while she slept, as now, could surely be forgiven. With an expression laced with a faint wistfulness, Alevian kept caressing her cheek.
"We'll be drawing the circle now. Alevian, I'd appreciate it if you stepped out."
At Escara's considerably excited voice, Alevian rose silently from the slab where she'd been seated and stepped outside the circle's perimeter. Only after confirming that she had completely cleared it did Escara extend her finger and begin tracing a star.
Wherever her finger passed, a hexagram star took shape.
The seal on the mana basin released, and the liquid gold soared skyward, clattering into place along the circle's outline that had been drawn around the stone slab.
Gilded leaf coated the hexagram's densely packed black script. The extremely pure gold solution filled the frames of the black letters and blazed with dazzling light.
With Yona's slab at its center, it did not take long for the great ring of filled hexagrams to gleam entirely gold. Bathed in the light of the luminescent stones, the golden script flared even more fiercely—and the moment the circle was complete, it grew warm, rose into the air, and hovered about a handspan high, rotating in place.
It was a wondrous sight.
At some point the luminescent stones had all gone dark, yet the room was not the least bit dim. The golden radiance generated its own light and filled the chamber, and the glow pouring from each letter became bright as high noon, dyeing Yona's face gold at the circle's heart.
Escara's finger traced the magic circle once more.
It was far too vast to draw with a finger alone—she had to sweep her whole arm through the air, and wherever her finger reached, violet trails wove themselves into geometric forms.
Each time Escara added to the circle, the letters hovering and spinning in midair rose higher still, until they brushed near the ceiling.
Alevian watched it all in silence.
Eyes closed, chanting her incantation, Escara was drawing out the circle, and interfering with her now would almost certainly ruin everything.
Ceres… I will never, ever let it go the way you planned.
Alevian bit her lip as she watched. Golden and violet light mingled across her face, casting an ill-fitting shadow over it.
At last, having finished the circle, Escara drew a deep, ragged breath. Drenched in sweat at some point along the way, she opened her eyes, ran one final check over the circle she had drawn, then thrust her finger deep into the activation node at its center.
"…Now. This is the last step."
Escara looked back at Alevian, as if seeking her confirmation, and Alevian gave her a nod.
For things to unfold as she intended, Yona had to return to being a man, right here and now. It was the only way it could be.
"Then."
Having received even Alevian's confirmation, Escara twisted the finger embedded in the activation node. As her finger turned, the magic circle turned with it. And by the time her finger had swept nearly a full rotation, the circle, too, was pointing in the exact reverse of its original orientation.
- Fsssssss…
The stars floating at the ceiling hurtled down as one, all of them diving toward Yona. They seeped into the sleeping girl's body, and only after the last of them had been absorbed did light at last begin to pour from every inch of her.
And that light, starting from the crown of Yona's head, crept downward, spreading across her whole body.
The white hair shortened, and black began to surface in its place. Yona had been fairly tall, but her height began to climb further still. And that chest of hers, once famous for its imposing dimensions, shrank until it was flat enough that not even a trace of it remained.
Then, the moment the light reached Yona's two arms—
- BOOM!
With a thunderous roar, an explosive burst of light erupted.
Waking up because of a bone-deep chill was never a pleasant experience. Even camping out, she'd always slept wrapped in a bedroll, so she'd never once been cold like this.
The very instant Yona blinked her eyes open, the first thing she registered was the cold, and a curse slipped out of her before she could stop it. Then, the moment her vision snapped into focus and the first thing she saw was Alevian's face, she very nearly swore a second time.
"Our pretty one, you're awake?"
"…Wh… what happened… uh."
That same slender voice, unchanged. And this strangely front-weighted balance of her body.
"…What happened to me?"
Only then did Yona look around. She distinctly remembered that when she'd entered this procedure room, it had been sealed on all four sides—not so much as a window. But now—
"The wall… it's… gone?"
An entire wall had all but vanished. Anyone could see how unnatural it was—one whole side simply blown wide open.
So that was the source of the chill. That thing—far too big to be called a mere hole.
"Pretty dear."
"If you're calling me that… it failed, didn't it."
"…I'm afraid it did."
Alevian wore a rare, awkward expression. Yona had never seen her look like that before—Alevian, whose face was perpetually curled into a sly, knowing smirk—but then, none of that mattered at the moment.
"Why?"
Despite herself, Yona's voice trembled slightly.
She had believed, truly believed, that she would wake up as a man. It's possible, they'd said. She'd had her doubts—no, fine, she'd had some doubts—but they said it was possible, and Escara the mage said it was possible. So she'd believed. And it had failed.
"The magic itself was a success."
Alevian said it with conviction. Hadn't she seen it with her own eyes? Bathed in starlight, Yona had been reverting—her hair, her build, her height, all of it shifting back into a man's.
And yet—
"…But that thing on your arm. That tattoo had a violent rejection reaction. As if… it refused to let you go back to being a man."
Only then did Yona look down at herself.
The white shirt and trousers she'd been wearing were gone without a trace—even her undergarments had vanished, leaving her bare. It was the very body she had grown sick to death of looking at in the three years since she'd been flung into this world. And on both her arms, the black tattoo sat bold and unaltered.
Not the slightest change.
"The tattoo did it."
"Yes. The tattoo did it. But next time, I'll cover the gold coins mys—"
Yona simply stared at her in silence.
An explosion at the Wizard Tower was hardly news.
The higher up the tower you went, the more minor and major blasts erupted every few days, and a eccentric mage blowing out a room or two in the middle of an experiment was such an everyday occurrence that it barely warranted a raised eyebrow. Even when a wall blew out, the debris never fell to the ground—protective enchantments saw to that—so witnessing an explosion from outside was, at most, a decent bit of street entertainment.
Alec had been nursing a beer in the dining hall when the chatter around him reached his ears.
"Another explosion, they say?"
"So I heard. A pretty big one this time, apparently."
"What in the world are those mage folk experimenting on that's so violent?"
Alec, whose instincts were sharper than he let on, quickly gathered that explosions at the Wizard Tower were far from rare. When blast accidents had become regular table talk in a dining hall like this one, they were clearly routine—and there was no particular reason for him to care.
"Blowing things up morning, noon, and night. Nothing but good business for those dwarf construction crews, I tell you."
"Well, hauling materials around is honest work, they say."
"So which floor was it this time?"
"The thirteenth, I heard?"
Clack.
Alec's mug came down on the table. A few coins tumbled and rattled across its surface—and by the time they finally settled, he was already gone.
By the time the inn's door, still rattling on its hinges, had barely swung shut, Alec was already sprinting at full speed down the road toward the Wizard Tower.