The Magic School and the Secret Room (3)
For all the grandeur of the explanation, the test itself amounted to nothing much.
Levian was as listless as ever.
"Hey, half-wit. Try blocking this!"
What that mighty ancient being had offered up as a trial was nothing more than a revival of his trauma.
"I've taught you again and again, and I still don't see a shred of progress. You stupid boy!"
"Haa... Student Levian. Please, at least make an effort. Keep carrying on like this after getting into Alkanium, and they may well ship you off to the East."
"It's not that he won't do it. He can't!"
"You mustn't make fun of a friend who's lacking!"
"Tsk. If he at least had parents, counseling him would be easier. He can't use magic, and you can't even talk to him..."
It was useless. The faces were familiar and the voices were familiar, and every last one of them was heaping insults on him, yet Levian only watched the phantoms drifting like ghosts, his expression as blank as ever.
Perhaps it had hurt, back then.
Unlike me, they could use magic—and still they clung, without end, to incomplete spells.
Looking back on it now, the surge of emotion in people, their instinct to shut others out, their violence, all of it sprang from that incompleteness.
I have no intention of fighting with words, the way they did.
What good was dredging up the past? It was over. That was all.
The people who had shut him out and tormented him had pressed him, every one of them, to prove himself through skill, and he knew better than anyone that words alone would never get through. So he had simply shown them proof: that even a simple fire spell, given the right catalyst, could burn a massive building to ash in an instant, and that a barrier a single Sharp could pierce grew sturdy the moment you added one straight line to spread the impact. Raging at empty memories would change nothing, so Levian took his time and looked around.
There is no effect without a cause. This, too, is a kind of magic.
He focused instead on tracing the source of the magic hidden inside the phantoms.
A magic circle that absorbs my memories is laid over the entire room. It filters the trauma through an inner circle and manifests it as puppet magic.
Once he grasped the root, undoing it was not difficult. He could not smash a room whose material he could not even identify, a room that had likely lain hidden for centuries, but the puppet magic itself was truly simple. It seemed to be ancient work, more complete than modern spells, and yet its weakness remained.
"Give me the next test."
All he had to do was use Creation to twist the waist of the circle and pull it free.
The puppet phantoms. Astonishingly, the spell was built of nothing but straight lines, and its structure was as hollow and flimsy as a scarecrow. Worse, the things possessed no physical force at all, so they could not even stop what he was doing.
How bewildering it must have been. The woman's voice, which had at least expected Levian to show some feeling one way or another, came through trembling.
This was not a normal reaction. Even a psychopath or a sociopath would seek revenge, or hunger to feel superior. Bring the greatest priest or the wisest sage you liked; no one could hold their emotions steady when their trauma was dragged back into the light like this.
"Enough. Open the door."
Levian was far too calm. No—worse than calm. He looked bored. He showed not the slightest interest in the woman's shock, and only knocked, tap-tap, on the door that remained shut fast.
The original purpose had been to gauge the subject's latent violence and to see whether he could overcome his trauma. As the upheaval of the ancient age had already proven once, calamities born of Creation were disasters on a catastrophic scale. Yet Levian met even the memories the magic had objectively drawn out as trauma with a reaction that suggested they mattered less than a stranger's affairs.
False memories of this sort, it seemed, could not draw a proper emotion out of him. By the rules of the test she ought to let him pass regardless, and yet—
The woman brought him to a halt. As if to prove the trial was over, light bloomed once more through the corridor that had sunk into gloom, and the hall brightened.
Unable to understand why he had been failed, Levian tipped his head and asked her again.
"Why?"
Still no particular feeling in his voice. He simply wanted a logical reason. Even so, the woman could not rashly lay her thoughts bare.
He had not overcome his trauma. Levian was no different from a boy carrying a latent bomb in his heart. What if he caused some incident in order to prove something? What if he did not stop at proving his theory, and began to squander that power?
If Levian ever set out in earnest, declaring he would have his revenge, the magical world that had only just recovered might collapse. He would not be the first to go mad, drunk on the vast power called Creation. Even the ancients whom modern people revered so deeply had died in droves after trying to approach the source of Mystery.
Of course, an explanation that leaned on uncertain dangers lying somewhere in the future would mean nothing to the Levian standing here now. So the custodian, heir to the knowledge of the ancient mages, set a new rule before him.
Revenge. What was revenge?
"Hm."
Dragging in the teacher who had dunked him in a bathtub and screamed at him to use magic, and drowning them? Stripping the orphanage children of everything, the same children who had boldly taken his blanket, his spoon, his snacks, on the grounds that such things were wasted on a half-wit?
"Wouldn't that be self-defense, rather than revenge?"
If someone came at him meaning to kill him, striking back in order to live was only natural. Because he had been wronged? Because he was angry? It was not because of feelings that simple. The will to survive was one of the most primitive necessary desires that reason could still explain. Refuse to resist, and you were only eaten.
Levian had held stubbornly to his own ground against others even when he could not use magic, and the custodian saw straight through precisely that.
"Say it."
At Levian's listless answer, the woman's voice came back threaded with a quiet irritation.
Even for a custodian bound to protect the gallery, it was an extraordinarily generous choice. But Levian, who had no way of knowing that—
"Yes. Well. Fine."
He answered just like that, and turned to go back outside without a moment of regret, without even a heartbeat of hesitation. If it could not be done, then it could not be done. He did not know how much time had passed, but evening ought to be coming on, and he meant to get dinner before it grew too late. He was already under the professors' bad eye. Skip roll call on a whim, and there was no telling what punishment would follow. If he wanted to clear this unknown gallery to the end and obtain its power, the one situation he could not afford was being driven out of the academy.
What caught his steps as he turned to leave was none other than the woman's urgent call.
As it happened, Levian was passing through a corridor lined with several crystal orbs. He had not seen them when he first came in. It was as if the space itself had expanded, and sure enough, whatever method had been used, he could not find a magic circle. Just how timid had the ancestors been, to hide their magic away this tightly? This, too, was plainly the power of Creation.
So I can use magic like this as well?
Interest welled up at that boundless power. By now he was curious enough to wonder what reward could possibly justify putting him through a test like this. The first reward, after all, had been a spell that raised a system window and made the world look like a game.
"From the left, or from the right?"
"The left, then."
Whatever they were for, even his ability could not identify the orbs. Even so, Levian did not hesitate for an instant before taking one. Expectant, he reached out with both hands at once and seized the blue-glowing crystal tight.
And at the same time—
Nothing happened. People of the old days, it seemed, simply lacked this sort of wit.
"Kids these days like it when there's light, or a fanfare. Something flashy. Do it like this every time, and you won't even know what you received. It feels so empty that you won't have any will to take the next test."
The woman accepted Levian's sincere advice, and the unexpected exploration of the ancient cavern came to an end.
What role did the crystal he had gripped serve? What had he received in return for the first test? What lay deep in the cavern? Who was the woman speaking into his head? Pure questions of that sort kept prodding at Levian's curiosity.
Coming up from underground, he brushed the dust from his uniform with a few rough pats. Then, as if nothing at all had happened, he slipped past the clusters of students in his usual silence and headed for the class dining hall. With the Mana Link severed, his body sagged back into its ordinary limpness. But for the first time in his life he had been handed a task he had never once considered—he had to make a friend—and there was no room left in which to be bored.