Signature Phantasm
"One of the spirit-magic formulae left by Melina Hamelon, she whom they call the Mother of Spirit Magic. Chapter Spring. Number Twenty-Seven. Sunlight of the Dawn Sky."
The professor launched into it from nothing more than a look at my Signature. The spell had only just left my hand.
"No unnecessary models worked into it, so it takes well to irregular use—from a narrow scale all the way up to wholesale slaughter. If you can cast spirit magic at all, this is a spell you ought to consider at least once for a Signature Phantasm. Even Melina herself, the one who created the art, kept this magic as her Signature."
I was sure of it: a mass greater than any boulder, its heat laced with a spirit's power, boiling over. The trouble was that none of it could compare with the monster's bulk. A grotesque hand stretched out from the creature's nape, closed around the fireball, and—through the acrid stench of searing meat—managed only the faintest burn.
The professor flicked a glance at that.
"If I set you down, can you run?"
"M-my legs... the strength's gone out of them..."
"Then we keep going just like this, lecture and all, while I carry you! Hup! Hold on tight!"
The monster roared along with his rallying cry. Whether in answer to my fireball or not, it raked the cliff and hurled a chunk of rock. The impact swept the whole stretch of ground and tore it open, and still the professor could not have been calmer.
"Clean casting. You managed to learn spirit magic when you can't have had much information on it. Or did someone teach you? Whoever it was, they're impressive. ...Not that I know who!"
"That's..."
"Still, it doesn't look like you've used it very often. Not many chances to try, being in the Hero's party?"
The question closed my throat.
My role in the Hero's party had been to pick out a monster's position by scent and by sound. Once I lost even that, Rebecca would throw me into the middle of the Snowfield and use me as bait to draw the monsters in. Chances to cast had been few. Ashamed even to answer, I shut my mouth, and the professor's voice went on.
"Construction of the essential circle at the center. Adjustment of the mana array. Setting the auxiliary margins. Computation of the structural formula. That much is the casting. The chant is self-suggestion, together with the refining of mana. You already know this. Spirit magic requires attunement with a spirit, and it's true it differs from other schools in the finer use of its margins—but the framework is the same."
The ground shuddered. The monster hauled its speed up in a single burst and sprang like a coil, meaning to swallow us whole. Still carrying me, the professor cut hard aside. He swung the wooden club in his left hand in a great arc; a clean, cracking impact rang out behind us, and he was running again. It had not been much of a blow to the monster, either. It came after us at once.
"I know there are mages who believe the margins of spirit magic have to be built on feel. Most of the spirit magic that exists was made by so-called geniuses—the ones with exceptional spirit attunement. I understand being taken with a genius that looks as if it just tosses the margins out and they happen to lock together. Personally, though, it isn't a direction I'd care to recommend to my students."
"...Yes?"
"What separates genius from mediocrity in magic is a difference in understanding."
"......"
"Magic is the discipline of reproducing the language of the gods in a mortal's way. There are established rules, and at the same time there is no law that is ever completely defined. And if you ask whether that means some of it is the product of pure chance—no. Not that, either."
"......"
"It looks like a field that's always advancing, but set a textbook from a thousand years ago beside the one students use now and you'll faint at how identical they are. That is the essence of magic as a study. Stiff to the point of rigidity, irregular to the point of the grotesque—a discipline of nothing but contradiction. That is magic. And from that point of view, your magic is thoroughly by the book."
"...Are you saying my magic is wrong?"
"Your textbook magic, wrong? Nonsense. The textbook is a god, and optimal regression is invincible. The optimal formula, drawn out by the highest of mages after tens of thousands of observations. Worship it your whole life, if you like."
"Then what you meant was..."
"Right. A textbook does give you an optimized formula. Think of the optimized formula you cast as a kind of recipe—something produced in the course of getting the most efficient result for the mana put in."
"...I read that one should avoid tampering with an optimized formula."
"The efficiency of the mana, the complexity of the auxiliary circle, the clarity of the structural formula, the time the casting takes, even the length of the chant. Weigh all of it together, and the most ideal method is the optimized formula set down in the textbook. But you have to remember this. An optimized formula is the best answer that currently exists. It can never be an unconditional right answer."
"......"
"Say you're making an apple pie. If it's only you, and you're the one eating it, the optimum is to follow a famous recipe down to the measurements. But what if, through no choice of your own, you suddenly have to feed a crowd? Are you going to run that same recipe hundreds of times and plate every single serving by hand, the way you did just now?"
"Magic isn't cooking. ...I can't calculate every possibility on the spot."
"If you can adjust every variable by reflex to fit the moment, then yes, as you said, that's the realm of genius. ...... But I'm quite sure I told you to show me your Signature."
With those words, the professor stopped where he stood.
"A Signature Phantasm is the magic a mage is most confident in. But carving a standardized margin into an object, or into your own body, and casting it by that exact process is nothing more than the caster reproducing a spell they personally prefer. It's closer to scholarly negligence. Hardly a level at which one can even bring out the words 'a magic I'm confident in.'"
Ash billowed up beneath his boots as he shed the speed they had been carrying. The moment he set me down off his back, the strength left my legs and I folded to the ground; the professor caught my wrist and drew me up.
Even if you fall behind in everything else,
this one magic, at least, yields to no one—
absolute confidence,
and an overwhelming emblem.
A Signature like that."
In the very instant the monster came charging, jaws flung wide—
"Flame that swallowed the ash,"
"by a small spirit's gesture,"
"burn utterly—leave not even a mote."
⟨ Sunlight of the Dawn Sky ⟩
It went out with his hand. First, a wave. A spark no larger than a mote of dust—that tiny ember lifted, slowly.
Ignition.
It was no longer anything one could call a mere blaze. It was closer to hellfire: blue flame, split into thousands of strands. Like a swarm of vipers they wound up around the cliff and climbed, swallowing everything in reach, and then they began to melt it. That warped heat reached its peak and lunged for the distant sky, and in the very moment it meant to take the monster—
it scattered, as if the roaring heat had been a lie, and there was only ash, drifting apart.
As though he had cancelled the magic at will. Nothing remained but the shreds of mana, thinning away as they lanced upward, razor-sharp.
"Now you try. I'll help with the fiddly parts—margins, formula adjustments, that sort of thing."
...Try it? How in the world...?
I stood there blank, and when I gave no reaction at all he abruptly caught me about the shoulders and under the knees and leapt high.
He was jumping the wrong way—straight for the monster's mouth. I didn't even have time to be horrified.
"Two choices. We drop like this and sightsee the tentacles and the belly together, or you burn it before we get there. I'll go with you either way, so don't worry."
The monster's mouth rushed closer. Something hideous showed inside it. Closer still. Ah—not there. Anywhere but there.
"Essential circle on an optimal-regression base, diameter widened by half. Auxiliary circle: Carlos's asymmetric mana-reversal arrangement, suited to irregular work. The structural formula... it's complicated, I'll tell you later. I'll cut the mana myself, so pour in everything you've got."
The margins assembled themselves the instant the words were out. His handiwork, no doubt. Scared out of my wits, I could only answer by dumping mana over them.
Essential circle, auxiliary circle, structural formula and all—the casting I had only ever watched was finished in a flash. I poured mana, and poured, and poured again, desperate that no gap should open and the margins crack apart in some disaster, and then, at the very moment a chant was required, the monster's glistening tongue raised gooseflesh all over me and I curled in on myself—and yet, all at once, the warm body heat felt over my shoulder seemed to sink my heart into a drowsy calm.
A sensation that was not unfamiliar.
Opening my mouth and letting the chant spill out was something closer to instinct.
"Flame that swallowed the ash,"
"by a small spirit's gesture,"
"burn utterly—leave not even a mote!"
⟨ Sunlight of the Dawn Sky ⟩