Cleaning
Cleaning
"Well, I'm off. Hope you find someone nice, too."
With those parting words, the girl was gone.
As I stood there in a daze, some man yanked my ear and dragged me along.
I was on cleaning duty, or so he said. Going by the uniform, he was probably a janitor.
In the end, I got hauled all the way to the bathroom, but I couldn't spare a thought for any of that. Right now, sorting out my tangled thoughts took priority.
What on earth had happened to me?
My breathing was normal, so I wasn't dead. My senses felt perfectly natural, so this wasn't some hallucination either.
"What are you doing, student? Take this."
An older janitor held a bucket and a wet mop out to me.
That girl earlier seemed to be a student. This man looked like a janitor.
"Where is this."
"The bathroom."
"Obviously it's a bathroom. I'm asking what institution."
"It's Märchen Academy. Hey, what's with the Van speech?"
Märchen Academy? I don't recall any academy by that name.
Thunk. A flick landed squarely on my skull.
"!"
It wasn't the sensation of getting struck that startled me. No—it was the fact that I'd reached out to block it and failed.
'My arms are short.'
That was why I'd failed to block it, even though I'd extended them correctly.
Not just my voice—my body was different too.
My voice was thinner than the one I recognized as my own, and my frame was shorter. And weren't these clothes practically a uniform?
"Mirror."
"You wanna start by cleaning the mirror?"
The man jerked his chin toward it. I strode over immediately.
"This..."
Isn't me.
'Getting younger' had been the worst side effect I'd allowed for. But this, quite literally, was not Kaplan at all.
My once-prized white hair was now black, and my eyes were crimson.
The contours of my face, my entire build—none of it matched any appearance I'd worn across a lifetime.
The sharp features once brimming with poise and dignity and absolute self-assurance were nowhere to be found.
No matter how heavily I scowled, it only ever looked like a fit of pique—a face too terribly young, a boy's face. Youthful and pale.
My jawline and nose were keen, but thinness lent me a slightly frail air.
"Student. Time to put that book down and clean. The faster you work, the faster you go home."
"Cleaning?"
When was the last time I'd cleaned something?
He was telling me to clean before I'd even grasped the situation. It wasn't an easy order to stomach.
"This side's yours, student. I'll go handle the bathroom across the way."
"Hm."
And that was the end of our exchange. Seemingly devoted to his work, he vanished into the other bathroom.
I assembled the information I'd been given.
This was an academy. The girl who'd kicked me aside earlier was a student. The man giving me orders now was a janitor.
And the reason this situation had come about...
'Was that I'm a student here too, and I couldn't even manage one basic spell?'
My gaze fell to the copy of Basic Magic clutched in my hand.
'And I'm supposedly a student who doesn't even understand something like this?'
The dissonance was overwhelming.
The mana flowing within this body was on the purer side. Unrefined, yes—but put another way, it was untouched by any influence whatsoever.
Given such excellent conditions, why had he failed to understand something so trivial that he'd sought out a professor?
My interest was piqued.
True, I wasn't the body's original owner, but proving things from the ground up is always a pleasure.
Even more so when it's something no one else has ever experienced.
"Which part did you find difficult, I wonder."
A soft scoff escaped me as I opened the book.
◈
'Another problem child, is it.'
Craig's face twisted. His grip on the mop tightened with irritation.
Being able to use magic in this world was a privilege reserved for a blessed few.
He belonged to the unblessed side, and so he worked as a janitor at the academy.
Märchen Academy often assigned students to assist him with cleaning like this, purely to shame them...
"How good could a bunch of pampered kids possibly be at cleaning."
First, they'd never done a proper cleaning job in their lives.
Second, they were kids who hated cleaning in the first place.
So, in the end, Craig would just have to do all the cleaning himself and head home. Same as every other time.
Still, at least he was a male student. Probably wouldn't be crying in the bathroom.
Whenever Craig found himself consoling some tearful student blessed with the ability to use magic, he sometimes felt like biting his own tongue off.
He resented these kids who'd grown up coddled.
That mouthy little punk. He'd gone and spoken Van to him just because he was a janitor at the academy.
But then, it happened.
Shhh. The sound of flowing water. He'd just finished rinsing the mop, so he was sure he'd shut the faucet off. A glance confirmed it—still turned firmly closed.
Yet the sound persisted. Ah. Right. The bathroom across the way.
Come to think of it, water running from a faucet didn't sound like this.
The noise was so peculiar that Craig couldn't suppress his curiosity and found his feet moving.
Step. Step.
The closer he drew, the clearer the sound became. And what came into view was—
"What..."
—the sight of a boy manipulating water freely.
In one hand, he held a book open. His other hand propped up his chin.
He wasn't even looking at the empty air, yet droplets of water were writing letters and fixing themselves there, as if text were being scribed onto a blackboard.
Craig did not know how to wield magic. That was something decided from birth.
Thus, even if he saw a formula, he could never understand it. An inevitable truth.
And yet.
'It's beautiful.'
Simply because it was beautiful, Craig found himself staring at a sight he couldn't even comprehend.
◈
"Basic, my ass."
The title Basic Magic had been more than enough to draw my attention. The content was anything but basic, yet the title bore the shameless word "Basic."
That alone let me gauge this academy's caliber. It suggested a gathering of fairly talented prodigies.
"I'm not normally one to treat books this roughly, but..."
Still, a book so heavily underlined that it was falling apart earned points in its own way.
It didn't take long to identify the pattern.
When classifying the schools of magic: a blue triangle.
For the ratios of mana blending that must be strictly observed: a red circle. For the "circuits" that served as mana circulation pathways: a yellow underline.
"This must have been difficult material for you."
I didn't know his exact age, but the body was young.
The Harmonization school demanded tremendous delicacy, making it hard to pursue at an early age.
How old had I been when I mastered this? Hazy memories of the old days flickered to the surface.
Judging by how tattered the pages had become, he must have wanted, more than anyone, to prove to the world that he understood this.
"I'll give you a hand."
Put simply, Harmonization is a method of linking spells together, and to link them, you need at least two spells.
Depending on which two spells you've prepared, the method of linking changes so drastically it might as well be a completely different discipline.
The most iconic example is fire and water.
I traced the formula for a flame in the empty air. It was the first spell I'd cast with this body, but I never once worried about failure.
Why would I? Kaplan is Kaplan, and a great mage is a great mage.
Sure enough, a spark bloomed in midair.
The firepower was unsatisfactory, but it was sufficient for a link.
Next, water.
My remaining mana was already dangerously low, so instead of generating water, I decided to borrow what was already nearby.
With both spells prepared, I substituted them into the formula written in the textbook.
The very formula the body's original owner had marked with over ten stars and still failed to comprehend.
Presently, two elements that should never mix began to converge.
A billow of steam, hissing loudly, signaled the true start of harmony.
The mana consumption was staggering.
Naturally, the textbook explained that one should merely "understand" this, rather than "attempt" it.
But I'm the type who can't rest until I've proven something.
In fact, I could honestly say that these moments—advancing toward a new proof inside this shoddy body—made me happier than any time I'd ever spent looking down on the mages of the Magic Tower.
Whoosh—!
A thick fog settled in like mist. With a single stir of the surrounding currents, I swept it all away in an instant.
What remained before my eyes was the formula written in droplets.
...No, to be precise, it was what should have remained. It hadn't.
Ironically, I'd attempted to manifest a flame blazing atop a droplet of water, and it had failed so spectacularly that it turned into steam.
Just one droplet.
A small flame flickered briefly over a single droplet, then produced a cacophony of dissonance before vanishing into vapor.
'A truly flawless failure.'
In the most literal sense.
So humiliatingly perfect a failure that I could hardly lift my head.
I understood the theory. But my body had not mastered it.
This body was still too wretched, too weak to keep pace with overwhelming theory.
I shut the book with a snap.
Just as I thought. Still too weak.
It was around then that my eyes met those of the janitor, who stood there wide-eyed.
"Finished with your cleaning already?"
How long had he been watching? It didn't really matter.
The mist, thick with moisture, had filled the bathroom before dispersing outward.
Laden with traces of mana flow, no speck of dust or grime could possibly have resisted that act.
As a result, this bathroom was now cleaner than it had ever been.
Which meant my job was done.
"Mine just wrapped up as well."
I simply offered a leisurely smile.