Agora Board
Agora Board
"Just finished over here myself."
The student glanced at Craig and grinned.
He looked utterly unfazed — the last expression you would expect from someone stuck on punishment detail.
Craig slowly turned over the scene he had just witnessed.
A watercolor.
What the boy had unfurled was not mere magic but a single panel of watercolor art. Intricate, its details incomprehensible, yet undeniably vivid.
Then, a beat later, the sensation hit: it was beautiful.
He should say something — that his own section hadn't been touched yet, or that the boy was free to go since his work was done.
His mouth refused to move.
He closed his eyes.
Selfish, maybe, but he wanted to hold onto that image a moment longer.
◈
"Off."
The dissonance was sharp. First time casting magic through someone else's body — of course it was.
Still, one thing put me at ease.
'The fundamentals are the same as my old world.'
I had worried everything I'd spent a lifetime learning might crumble to foam on the first attempt. It hadn't. The core principles of magic were identical. The theory still lodged in my head was usable in this world, which meant I could let myself relax, just a little.
Not that I knew this world yet. Unforeseen variables could lurk anywhere.
...But even so, I wasn't afraid.
The mind inhabiting this body was Kaplan's. If a variable appeared, I'd simply prove it all over again.
I left the dazed janitor behind me and walked away.
The restroom was spotless. He had no reason to stop me.
Exactly — no reason at all.
"Student!"
Yet there he was, one hand clamped onto my shoulder.
The astonishment plastered across his face made one thing clear: this wasn't anger.
"That was incredible! Wait — are you the one who took over the whole Agora Board?"
"The Agora Board?"
Getting grabbed by a janitor's cleaning hand was not pleasant, but the phrase "Agora Board" had already snared my full attention.
The Agora Board. A chalkboard where mages pitted their theories against one another.
Whoever solved the inscribed formula could wipe the board clean and write their own in its place.
Think of it as an arena for proving each other's theories.
But those were only in the Magic Tower. This was an academy.
"...A student is allowed to touch the Agora Board here?"
"Allowed? Isn't it obvious? Students are the only ones who can. Professors can't interfere."
"Professors can't?"
"Of course not. The thing was built for students."
That told me everything.
Here, the Agora Board shared the name but was essentially a tool designed for academy students. Interesting.
The janitor scratched his head sheepishly.
"Judging by your reaction, guess not. You were slinging magic around so impressively, I figured you might be the one everyone's been talking about."
"What rumor."
"The one about the student who anonymously filled the entire board. But wait — you're a student here, and you know even less than I do, the guy who cleans the place? That's something, even for a new student."
"There's a rumor like that."
"Yeah. If you didn't know, go give it a shot. I hear once you make a name for yourself on the Agora Board, scouting offers flood in. So, anyway — were you always that good at magic?..."
I listened to a few more obligatory compliments about my spellwork, asked where the board was, and left.
With every step, I turned the Agora Board over in my mind.
The detail that snagged: whoever it was had done it anonymously. On a stage meant for parading your name, no less.
It brought back memories of my former self.
Anonymously submitting answers to the Magic Tower's unsolved problems, then kicking back and enjoying the chaos that followed.
Another step, heading toward the Agora Board.
"Plan!"
Someone called out. A professor I had never seen before — a woman.
◈
"Your personal belongings."
The professor told him he had left his bag in the lecture hall and handed it over.
Books, writing implements, magical tools — what they all shared was that every last one was worn to tatters.
He looked less like a student and more like a traveling peddler.
The only thing that gleamed like new was the student ID.
That janitor had called him a new student. So he really had only just enrolled.
Merhen Academy, 1st Year.
The academy name and grade were hardly surprising.
Plan.
The name caught his eye — similar to his own, yet unmistakably different.
Holding the ID in his hand drove the reality home: he was inside another person's body.
'So I have to live in this body now.'
Not a difficult concept to grasp. Accepting it, though — that would take time.
He stood still for a while, fingers pressed to his temple.
What kind of world was this?
No academy by this name had existed in his original world.
Magic functioned the same, but the world itself was subtly different.
He exhaled a long breath and walked the academy corridors.
With no idea where else to go, he headed for the Agora Board.
In any situation, magic had always been the breathing hole that kept him alive.
The academy's scenery as he walked looked familiar at a glance, yet wasn't. The design leaned more refined, and the students he passed carried a different air from the styles he was used to.
The trends had flipped completely.
"Hmm."
He reached the Agora Board.
Standing out in the open air, the thing looked less like a chalkboard and more like a small ceremonial gate. That massive, that imposing — the only reason it hadn't been housed inside a building.
The board's surface was crammed with a specific magical formula written in white.
The sight stirred a pang of nostalgia. There had been a time when blackboard writings held a certain romance for him.
He lowered the bag from his back to the ground and was about to focus—
"You'd be better off giving up."
A clear, ringing voice struck his ears.
The girl offering unsolicited advice to a stranger stood with both hands on her hips, a self-assured look on her face.
She was shorter than him, but her presence was anything but small.
Crimson hair fell in glossy waves to her waist. He was still taking in its luster when she spoke again.
"Word is a professor wrote that formula, not a student. You could spend the whole day on it and still get nowhere."
"And you are?"
"Me? Becky."
Even a child could tell the question had not been about her name.
The boy's brow furrowed openly. Becky shuffled her feet and kept talking.
"I've been here all day too, ever since the new student reception. And I couldn't crack it. Got a tiny bit of headway at first, but after that... nothing."
"That much is obvious."
"...What's that supposed to mean? I'm pretty impressive myself, you know."
Wasn't she essentially admitting she had given up? Why insist I do the same?
I turned my gaze back to the Agora Board.
Countless formula lines, dots, circles — tangled together like a knot that could never be undone.
My expression tightened on its own.
Truly great magic is not this complicated. It is intuitive. Simple. The price it demands is simply enormous.
The intent behind this board, then, was obvious: look as difficult as possible, make the author look as brilliant as possible...
The "difficulty" it aimed for was the opposite of what I value.
It irritated me a little.
"See? Hard, right? Told you it was hard."
'More tedious than hard.'
That was my honest thought.
This formula, stuffed with an absurd quantity of components, did not represent a high barrier of difficulty so much as a malicious demand for brute-force calculation.
'That'll burn through a lot of mana.'
Accelerating my thought process to compute at speed was not impossible.
But the body was the issue. Even a mana expenditure I would have scoffed at in my original form became a different matter in the frame of this boy I had possessed.
The harmony spell I had attempted in the restroom alone had pushed its capacity to precarious levels. That said it all.
I planned to tear those limits apart later, of course.
But for now, tackling a problem like this without enhanced mana reserves was pure recklessness.
I could not even gauge how many days it might take.
"No answer? Hey. It's okay if you're in shock. You don't have to hide it."
Becky waved a hand in front of my eyes. Only then did my focus drift back to her.
And then it hit me — there was no reason to chain myself to my own mana supply.
Was there not another mage standing right beside me?
"Becky."
"Yeah?"
"How far did you get."
"I figured out it's a picture. Each formula component is both a coordinate and a dot, pointing to a specific location. Connect them all, and you'd definitely get an image."
Becky shared what she had deduced without a flicker of hesitation.
Because she was certain that even with the information, no one could actually pull it off.
"Why didn't you connect them all yourself."
"When would I ever finish calculating all that? It's basically impossible."
I nodded.
It matched my own assessment exactly. Her grasp of it was solid enough to be useful.
She shot me a suspicious look.
"By the way... do you always talk like that?"
"The vertices."
"Huh?"
"Just as three points can evoke a triangle, you only need to solve the formulas corresponding to the vertices."
Becky let out a scoffing laugh.
"Hey. Easy to say. How do you even find them?"
"Like this."
I laid out the proposal with perfect ease.
"I'll pinpoint the exact vertices. You handle the calculations."
"Just find the vertices? That doesn't make any sense."
Becky's mind simply could not process it.
To identify a vertex, would you not have to examine every single point one by one?
If you could pick out the vertices at a glance, the formula on the board would never have earned its reputation in the first place.
"Just answer: yes or no."
The reply came short and flat. Becky swallowed.
The sharp-featured boy looked frail at a glance. Yet Becky did not perceive him as weak.
She could feel it physically — the certainty that saturated his expression, his tone, his every gesture.
She hesitated, but in the end there was only one answer she could give.
"...Fine. If you actually manage to nail them."
The boy gave a small, pleased smirk.
"I like that."
He wove his mana into the shape of a chalk stick.
It touched the board — and moved without a flicker of hesitation.