12. Genius
12. Genius
The academy life I'd been dreaming of began.
At a hotel located in the center of Hetairo Island, I woke my driver and roommate early in the morning and got ready for school.
"You're really strange. You're bad at studying but you love the act of studying. You hate sitting still for long but you attend class diligently."
"I'm just fundamentally diligent."
I let Leon's observation go in one ear and out the other.
I thought it was contradictory too, but there was a reason for it.
After spending over ten years rolling around battlefields in my past life, everyday life had become unbelievably precious to me.
Regardless of whether I was good at studying, the simple fact that I could sit peacefully at a desk made me so happy.
And besides, I had never experienced campus life in my past life either.
I went straight into the military right after graduating high school, ended up applying for non-commissioned officer on impulse, and then World War III broke out...
Somehow I got transferred from the Korean military into a US Army Ranger unit...
Sigh.
Negative thoughts, end here.
Anyway, my academy life was starting now.
I understood intellectually that going to university didn't automatically make life a youthful paradise. Still, didn't everyone harbor at least a small what-if fantasy?
The source of that fantasy might differ slightly depending on whether it came from comics or dramas, but it would be an imagination close to goddess-tinted rose.
I wasn't any different.
I knew rationally that the odds were low, but imagining it wasn't a crime, was it?
I practically jumped into the car, stuffed full of giddy expectations that didn't suit my age.
The driver, who had suddenly been conscripted to drop me off at the Hero Department and then escort the prince all the way to the Political Science Department, gripped the wheel while rubbing his sleepy eyes.
"Allen, aren't you working me a little too hard this early in the morning?"
"Why. Tired?"
"Of course I am."
"Then I'll take the wheel while you sleep in the car. Want me to?"
With a head not yet fully awake, he briefly imagined my driving, then jolted alert.
"I'll drive."
"Good man."
Of course, I could've obtained another car and driven myself, but both the Emperor and Father opposed that idea.
They said something about how they couldn't let a guy like me loose on the roads.
'What, were they treating me like Immortan Joe or something?'
In any case, Karl resolved to toil every early morning for the sake of road safety.
"I should look into a room near the Hero Department."
"Why, trying to gain independence?"
"I can't keep imposing on you guys' dorm forever. And to begin with, the Hero Department and Political Science Department are practically on opposite ends of the island."
"I'll look into it for you."
If only for his own sleep, Karl was all the more enthusiastic about finding me a room.
*
After eating a sandwich in the car and arriving at the Hero Department, I waved goodbye to the two of them heading back to the other side of the island.
This kind of routine would probably repeat for the next few days.
With that thought, I headed to my lecture hall.
My lecture hall was 1-F.
The classes weren't ranked by grades. Students enrolled according to their specialties.
Since I was a brawler, F Class.
If I remembered correctly, archers were A Class, oversized weapons were B Class, sword-types were S Class, polearms were P Class, firearms were G Class, something like that.
You just took the lectures corresponding to the weapon type you wanted to use.
If you wanted to use all weapon types, or you didn't know your specialty yet, you could take O Class.
In my case, I was tempted by O Class at first, but I signed up for F Class with the idea of solidifying my fundamentals first.
I walked straight down the hallway, checking the location of F Class marked on my communication crystal.
Maybe I had arrived too early, because there wasn't a single classmate to be seen in the hallway.
I couldn't ask anyone for directions, so I was wandering the unfamiliar corridors searching for the classroom.
"Oh? Allen!"
"?"
"Allen! Why are you pretending not to hear me?"
From behind me, a woman called my name.
Ooh. She'd called me her upperclassman.
What a wonderful ring it had.
A title befitting campus life.
If only I hadn't enrolled just yesterday.
I turned to identify the mysterious woman calling me her upperclassman.
There stood a set of violet twintails I could never forget even if I tried.
"Aileen Violin Quantum."
"It's Ailey Violata Quinterin! Why do you always get my name wrong! At the very least, could you try to get Ailey right, please!"
"Your name's just too hard. What can I do."
Part of it was that I didn't bother memorizing it because I liked teasing her, but even if I made a deliberate effort, I couldn't memorize it.
Even in my previous life I could remember names from Germany, Greece, Japan, and even Iran, but Spanish and Portuguese names simply refused to roll off my tongue.
In any case, Ailey was a kid I knew.
She, like Karl, was a wizard from a magic tower.
Her school was the Golden School, which, as you could guess from the name, was a school specializing mainly in alchemy.
And it was also the place where my mother had once been the tower master.
Where else would my transmutation ability have come from?
Since Father's mana and Mother's brains had gone to my brother, wasn't it only natural that Father's body and Mother's mana came to me?
If the Capital Knight Order's training yard had been my playground, then the Golden Magic Tower had been my cram school.
The magic of the Golden Magic Tower was divided broadly into four stages.
Alchemy, which turned iron into other substances like gold;
Transmutation, which shaped metals and such into desired forms;
Concoction, which mixed substances to create new kinds of medicines or organisms;
and Enchant, which bestowed specific properties upon already-made objects.
Among those, I was too dim-witted to understand the complex goddess-level magic, but my transmutation alone was something even the tower master acknowledged.
Perhaps because I was the son of a predecessor he respected, the Tower Master saw my unimpressive transmutation and gave me a room directly below his laboratory, then told me to come for private lessons every day.
I met Ailey when I was regularly heading to the magic tower for tutoring.
At the time, she had only recently joined the Golden Magic Tower as an apprentice. The moment she happened across me in the corridor, she called me her upperclassman.
I initially avoided her because it felt awkward, but our cruel Tower Master paired us as mentor and mentee. That connection eventually made us close enough to call each other upperclassman and underclassman.
And it was only after we became close that I learned: in the magic tower, giving someone the room directly on the floor beneath the tower master's chamber was a privilege bestowed only upon his direct disciples—and among them, only upon those he held special affection for.
Because of that, so I heard, I had at some point become a legendary existence within the Golden Magic Tower.
The son of the woman once called the Third Tower Master of the Golden Magic Tower, the genius of the era who had earned the tower master's favor before even turning fifteen.
Ailey said she followed me around because she wanted to learn anything she could from her legendary upperclassman.
I felt bad for her, but apart from transmutation, I wasn't exactly an upperclassman worth emulating...
Still, feeling bad for the junior who kept following me, I taught her many things, and in the process learning things myself too—all of that was a fond memory.
"But what are you doing here? You should be tucked away in the magic tower."
"Me? I'm already an elder, you know."
"?"
What kind of crazy talk was this.
Elder was the final stage of a magic tower wizard's advancement tree.
If the tower master's direct disciple was like a graduate student, then elder felt like a professor.
It had been about three years since I stopped seeing her—ever since the John Armstrong Series shoot began.
Up until then, she had been an apprentice wizard in the tower, never mind being a direct disciple.
And in three years she had passed adepts, taken a direct disciple position, and risen to elder?
Was that even possible?
"Did you, what, pull a Rakhshir or something?"
—I mean, it would check out if she had purged everyone above her.
"What's a Rakhshir?"
"It's a, you know. A bad thing."
"I don't know what you mean, but I earned it fairly through my own ability. It was all thanks to you, Allen."
"?"
The more I talked with her, the less I understood what she was saying.
Was this how protagonists of those misunderstanding stories felt.
'What was this? How had she done it? I was scared.'
Absolutely not wanting to know the fallout when misunderstanding piled upon misunderstanding, I decided not to ask her about the magic tower's internal situation.
Whether I asked or not, she was, as ever, at her own pace.
"Thanks to you, I was recognized as the chief elder of transmutation studies! It was all thanks to you, Allen."
"Uh... yeah, sure."
"Oh, right. They still haven't cleared out your room in the magic tower, so I've been cleaning it myself. By any chance, do you have any plans to come check on it sometime?"
"They didn't clear it?"
"The tower master and the elders told me absolutely not to touch it."
"??"
What kind of existence had Allen Price turned into inside the Golden Magic Tower?
I seriously couldn't help but agonize over the image of me that lived inside her head.
*
Ailey walked alongside Allen down the corridor.
That was because the wizard lecture room she was heading to (Class M) happened to be right next to Class F.
She looked up at the nearly 190-centimeter giant she was guiding.
He was lost in thought, completely unaware that she was looking at his face.
To her, that sight was inexplicably endearing.
No doubt he was laboring under another grandiose misunderstanding.
He probably thought of himself as a dim-witted but lucky idler, and that Ailey had become an elder purely through her own skill.
Ironically, that was Allen's own misunderstanding.
The people of the magic tower were not fools.
They weren't the sort to mistake a fool for a genius, nor was it a place so rotten that they would elevate someone simply for being the child of the former tower master.
What determined one's standing there was purely skill and talent.
Conversely, a high position meant high skill and talent.
The tower master's eyes were not knotholes.
The fact that he gave Allen a room fit for a direct disciple, and assigned him as her mentor to Ailey, was all because he had seen Allen's talent.
In fact, even while he was at the magic tower, Allen constantly went around saying he was a fool who knew nothing about theory.
The tower master and the elders agreed with that statement.
He was illiterate in the basic formulas of alchemy, unable to even memorize something like the Hohenheim Formula.
But they could never agree with the statement that he lacked talent.
He was a genius who understood magic by feel.
The prime example was an incident that occurred on his very first day at the magic tower.
The magics of the Golden Magic Tower required ritual formulas.
So its members typically carried special chalk for drawing circles and geometric patterns, or staves engraved with ritual formulas.
However, the performance he gave on his first day at the tower was enough to turn the entire magic tower on its head.
- How did you perform the transmutation? There shouldn't have been a transmutation circle.
- There is a circle, you know. Right here.
He pointed to his own heart.
At first they didn't understand what he meant, but after hearing his explanation, the tower's wizards were left speechless.
He was using his blood vessels and heart as the geometric pattern.
He had drawn a transmutation circle with his own body, using his arms and legs as the outer circles and the chambers of his heart as the inner circles.
- Where did you come up with such an idea? Did the tower master teach you?
- I just did it and it worked.
With that remark, the tower master and the elder realized it.
Allen Price was an intuitive genius.
Thereafter, he continued to produce one genius idea after another.
- When changing the shape of something, is it really necessary to convert it step by step from solid to liquid and back to solid?
- Because that makes it easier to shape.
- Can't you just change it while it stays a solid?
- If that were easy, we'd have done it long ago. Don't just talk, try it yourself... How did you just do that?
- I just felt this resistance during the deformation, so I poured a little mana into it.
- You tampered with the elastic modulus...!!!
Of course, he had no idea what he had created.
He'd made it half by feel and half by luck, so he didn't even know how to explain it to anyone.
Thus, what he discovered had to be proven by the tower's senior wizards (otherwise known as graduate students), but that was no reason to undervalue his achievement.
It was only regrettable that, having made it purely through luck and feel, the man himself had no understanding of what a monumental discovery he'd made.
Since he couldn't understand or prove things, he couldn't be given the position of elder, which required teaching others—but at the very least, he could be treated as an honorary direct disciple of the tower master.
Ailey being chosen as his mentee was also the tower master's intention.
He had seen her interpreting Allen's words well when they happened to meet in the hallway, and so paired her with him.
Just as the tower master had thought, she was weak at generating ideas, but her ability to theorize Allen's genius was exceptional.
- So a catalyst is a substance that helps with alchemy?
- Yes. It would be safe to understand it that way.
- Then, is it faster to first transmute a catalyst and then perform alchemy with it, or to just do the alchemy outright?
- Doing it outright would be faster, wouldn't it? Unless the catalyst had been prepared in advance.
- Really? That's strange.
- Why?
- For me, it's much faster when I re-transmute the catalyst simultaneously while performing the transmutation.
- Wait, could you show me?
That was the discovery of 'Cross Alchemy', which shook the entire Golden School.
Of course, as happened anywhere, the other wizards had no reason to look kindly upon Ailey monopolizing Allen's theories.
Regardless of her talent, the mere fact that she was monopolizing the opportunity was enough to ignite their jealousy.
But Allen was, in many senses, an intuitive genius.
If there was a wizard who tried to drive a wedge between Ailey and him, or frame her—
- I challenge you to Mak'gora.
- What do you mean by...?
- Follow me to the underground sparring hall.
After being dragged underground, the wizard would, starting the next day, either be rehabilitated or vanish without a trace—one of the two.
The epithet he gained during that time was 'Golden Devourer.'
Afterward, he presented her with several more new theories and then promptly left the magic tower.
When he disappeared from the tower, the people there were surprisingly calm.
Allen was such an unpredictable person within the tower that it was no surprise when he stopped coming around.
It wasn't as if his whereabouts had become a mystery—he said he was too busy to come to the tower, so there was no need to make a fuss.
His blood relative was bound to the tower by ties, and his talent was connected to this place, so they merely assumed he would return in due course.
Ailey, too, simply thought she'd see him again if their paths were destined to cross, and immersed herself in theorizing the ideas he had left behind.
And by the time she had theorized all of those ideas, she had become an elder before she knew it.
It didn't suit her age, but weren't her achievements far too brilliant to place her on the same level as a mere direct disciple?
The magic tower was such a closed community that ordinary people knew little of this, but she was now being pointed to as the next tower master among wizards.
She gazed at the man who had changed her Fate.
When she first entered the magic tower, people used to call her golem-like.
The general consensus was that she memorized theory well, but her ideas were so weak that her limits were clear.
But Allen had steered her talent in a different direction.
He had elevated a woman who otherwise should have remained an apprentice for life—never mind becoming a direct disciple—into the next elder.
This indifferent man would probably never know what achievements he had left behind.
Even if he did find out, he was clearly the type to dismiss it as Ailey's own accomplishment, not his.
'Well, I don't intend to be buried by gratitude, either.'
She, too, had her own mission at the academy, so she wasn't in a position to devote herself to repaying favors.
Besides, the more she tried to repay him, the more obviously he would refuse.
So, ironically, the way to fully repay her debt to him was to repay it only moderately.
They'd be running into each other often at the academy from now on anyway, so there was no reason to rush.
Before they knew it, the two of them had arrived in front of their respective classrooms.
Just before bidding farewell to Allen, a sudden curiosity arose in her.
Come to think of it, back when they were at the Golden Magic Tower, besides the wizards he'd 'fixed,' there were also those who had challenged him to spars.
When you asked those who'd sparred with him how it was, they'd give a bitter smile and—
- Utterly helpless.
That was the only impression they gave.
They said it was so overwhelming that it could only evoke the relationship between predator and prey.
She had never once fought Allen or even seen him fight, so she was intensely curious about his combat.
Back then, she'd been scared of him and afraid their relationship would grow awkward, so she hadn't been able to challenge him—but not anymore.
She had now reached the rank of elder herself, and within the Golden Magic Tower, she was practically among the strongest besides the tower master. She also calculated that it might make for a fairly decent match, wouldn't it?
So, before he entered the lecture hall, instead of a farewell, she spoke different words.
"Allen."
"What?"
"Do you have time during lunch later?"
"A lot. As it happens, the friend I'd eat with is on the other side of the island, so I am lonely."
He asked with a brightened expression.
'Goodness, your face was far too honest.'
He was probably dreaming of some rose-tinted youth, wasn't he?
She didn't dislike the fact that she was the object of that dream, so she felt a little sorry for him—but what she was about to propose was a far cry from rose-tinted.
No, it was closer to crimson.
"Then, during lunch, would you care to have a single duel with me?"
- With full power, if possible.
By the time Ailey's last words ended, Allen's expression had visibly soured.