Vanished Like a Debt (2)
Ivy had only just woken and was stretching long and lazy, the way she always did, when she felt it. The laboratory was strangely cold. In that awkward silence, her gaze turned of its own accord.
"Ah! L-Levian?!"
Only then did she realize that the person who ought to have been asleep beside her was gone.
"Agh!"
She had been chatting with Mira on WizardTalk and, without meaning to, had dropped off the way she always did. That was the mistake. She had not even seen the sick student through to the end, and she had slept like the dead without noticing him get up. It felt as if someone had struck her across the back of the head.
Where could he have gone, in that condition? If he had only waited a little, she would have walked him to the infirmary herself, or given him whatever help he needed. The regret came too late.
Ah! What time is it, anyway? Maybe he waited for me, and then his lecture overlapped and he had to go!
The gloom lasted only a moment. He had left the bed made without a single wrinkle, so he had not gone because the clock was hounding him. In a hurry she pulled the roster for Basic Mystery Theory and checked his timetable.
His first class, Circuit Orthodoxy, was set for nine sharp. It was about ten to nine.
"I-I knew I was right!"
For a moment she had thought he might have ungratefully walked out on the person who saved him. Of course he had not. Levian had only gone to class, doing his duty as a student.
I still haven't even made the offer to take him as a disciple. I'll go find him again. This time I'll convince him properly!
She sprang up, washed and changed in a flash of magic, and made for Lecture Hall 402, where Circuit Orthodoxy was held.
Just after nine, as class was due to begin, the front door rattled open and someone no one had expected stepped through.
"E-excuse me.... H-has Student Levian not arrived yet...?"
It was Temporary Professor Ivy Rain. Whether a student had taken her class or not, that distinctive appearance made her easy to place.
Why is the professor looking for that idiot? Did he get in trouble outside again?
Honestly, none of them wanted any part of it. Afraid that so much as meeting her eyes might get them mistaken for friends of Levian, the students quietly looked away.
...So Levian really is completely isolated.
Ivy caught the mood as well. Even the students who sat her remedial lectures pretended not to know her and ducked their heads.
Ugh. I hate it when there are this many people.
She had no choice. With the class in front of her and the weight of their eyes on her, she was about to look over the hall herself when a voice came.
"P-Professor."
A student who had been glancing around, plainly uneasy, lifted a hand just barely. Anyone could see they were watching the room for who might be watching them. Ivy hurried over to stand in front of them, hoping to block the others' view.
Given how small she was, it did nothing.
"Levian said he wasn't coming to class today. Said something came up he had to do on his own. Studying? Exploring?..."
"Wh-what? Th-then that's an unexcused absence!"
Taking her reaction as blame aimed at them, the student rushed to add more.
"Ah, right. He said he was leaving a substitute assignment! If you check the drawer in Levian's desk, it should be there."
Unexpected. She had been certain he was entirely alone, and yet here was a student stepping forward to help. Had he made a friend overnight? If not...
"Hmm.... A-are you from the Abyss Dormitory?"
"...Huh? Yes."
Of course. It had to be the aftermath of Levian crushing Andreas, the fourth-year, only yesterday. To think that showing his magic a single time would let him swallow an entire dormitory whole. If that counted as ability, then it counted. At this rate, the ugly rumors and the reputation that had spread through the academy would not be long in fading. Her heart felt a little lighter.
And so she went to the window seat the Abyss student had named as Levian's assigned desk, and found a small desk of no discernible use sitting there alone. Academy issue was four-person desks as a rule. Set apart like a lonely island, it wore a strangely bleak air even under the hard glare of the sun.
Familiar. Far too familiar.
Don't tell me... that really is Levian's seat?
It was a kind of instinct, and an old trauma. A bad feeling settled over her. Without meaning to, Ivy called up her own past and approached the window desk with her face drawn tight.
"Ha...."
Unfortunately, it was exactly as she had feared. Why did a bad feeling never turn out to be wrong? Someone had taken something sharp to the desktop and packed it with curses she could not bring herself to say aloud. All of it was hatred aimed at a single person. The milder lines hardly counted.
Half-wit. Idiot. A student bound to drop out any day.
His parents threw him away, because his ability was pathetic.
Better off dead than living with talent like that.
A past she had believed long forgotten began to surface, memory by memory.
"Hey. Be honest. What magic are you gonna cast with a body like that?"
"Top of the class? The likes of you? How? Did you slip a little something to the professors who like you so much?"
"Pfft. Magic as dainty as your face."
It was more wretched than she had imagined.
I... I still don't truly know Levian at all. In the end, I was no different from the rest of them.
If he had not possessed talent enough to hold her eye, her interest would have faded too. She had nothing to say in her defense.
What do I actually know about him? That he's twenty, a first-year at Alkanium? That he's been looked down on because he can't use magic? And then...
The end. That was all of it.
What his life before this had been, and what he wanted. What goal he had been learning magic toward, or what kind of magic he hoped to learn. Not one of the things a master ought to know as a matter of course. She knew none of them.
"Haa...."
At Ivy's sigh the students turned, one after another, to look back. At first she had wanted to give those vicious students a sharp word or two, but—
I don't have the right.
Without a word, Ivy swung her staff and laid a spell across the desk.
Returns a damaged object to its prior state.
As if time were running backward, sawdust climbed in tidy layers over the gouged letters. The revolting words vanished, and the desk returned to a state like new.
Seeing the desk like this, I understand why he skipped class.
In a state like that, even if he had come to lecture, he could not have learned with an easy heart. She could not leave things as they were.
If I offer to take him as my Exclusive Disciple, he won't have to attend the other classes! It'll be easier to persuade him, too!
There was no time to take it slow. Ivy went straight to the drawer and drew out the substitute assignment Levian had left. It was special mana paper, the kind that could hold mana.
She was curious. Levian, who knew enough to take a spell apart and copy another person's magic. The student she had taken for a fool, who was in truth a genius. What might be written there? Curiosity welled up. It might even help her own growth.
First-years can't substitute assignments anyway! It shouldn't matter if I read it in his place!
It was a magic circle.
"Uh...?"
Four dimensions, forced onto a flat sheet.
Chaotic enough to look like frantic scribbling. The lines would not sit still.
Her eyes swam.
A reactive defense... using polyhedra?
It was absurd. A mere undergraduate — a first-year, at that — had built a mana circuit out of polyhedra. Magic this intricate could stand beside the High magic taught only in the degree course. And if Ivy had never seen it before, it had to carry Levian's own reading of the spell.
All at once she remembered the syllabus for Circuit Orthodoxy. Today's lecture was definitely—
"What is today's lecture topic?"
"Uh, Basic defense magic."
Just as she had known. Then this astonishing circle had been turned in as nothing more than a substitute assignment.
...Is Levian an idiot?
She could not make sense of it. On the circuit alone, it surpassed existing defense magic — good enough to submit to the Symposium as it stood. Too fine a thing to leave rotting in a drawer.
She was standing there with the mana paper in both hands, shaking, when the door rattled.
"Now then. Another pleasant hour of lecture."
Class ought to have begun at nine sharp. Only now, some ten minutes on, did Professor Wallace, the man in charge of the lecture, make his entrance — late by his own whim, without so much as a show of regret, and wholly unashamed of it.
"Haha. Why so quiet today? Struck dumb with joy at the sight of me?"
Annoyed at missing the greetings that usually burst out the moment he walked in, he swept the students with heavy-lidded eyes.
"...Oh. Professor Ivy?"
"Yes, Professor Wallace."
Only then did he make out the compact little figure standing in a corner of the hall. Short pastel-pink hair. Green eyes. A fairy's face. The genius mage offered a professorship at only twenty-eight: Temporary Professor Ivy Rain.
"To think a celebrated personage like yourself would come looking for me. Surely you don't have business with me?"
Ivy hurriedly clutched the mana paper to her chest and hid it. Hand the circle over like this, and it might well be dressed up as Professor Wallace's own research.
Hmph. Not a chance. Even if I have to push it a little, I am not handing this over!
Ivy's final aim was the rank of archmage. In the end, she could not resist the lure of a new circle shimmering right in front of her.
"Th-this is a new defense magic that Student Levian and I are researching."
"...Pardon? With that idiot?"
At the strained lie, Wallace's face twisted into something strange. The reaction was plain — he had just been fed nonsense — and heat climbed into Ivy's cheeks.
"I-I'm telling you it's true! A-anyway! From now on, Student Levian will study under me as my exclusive disciple. So h-he isn't absent without leave today."
"...Hmm. Well. Nothing to be done, then."
He had not heard from the main office, so the excuse was suspicious, but it was not one he could not grant. Better the exasperating half-wit vanish than sit in the room. And Ivy, who enjoyed the headmaster's favor, would never lie over a trifle like this. Or so he thought.
"Then I will record today as exclusive disciple instruction and count him present. I hope you see good results."
"...S-sorry for taking your time. H-have a pleasant class."
A long, silent breath left her. The lie had landed. At the thought, she tapped the tightness in her chest, twice, as if to settle it.
Mira, who ought to have been helping her, had vanished as well. Important news had piled up, and Levian himself, the one it concerned, was nowhere to be found.
"Uuugh... where did he even go..."
The regret came too late. How she had come to wander the whole academy like a parent searching for a lost child, she could not have said herself.