The City of Mages
The City of Mages
"Well? How do they fit?"
"Mmm...."
Scarlet-haired and burdened with an oversized pack, the girl let out a low murmur, shifting her weight and rolling her ankle where she sat. The boot moved with her.
Scales the color of dark brown, shot through with faint veins of red — one look was enough to know these were no ordinary boots.
"Yeah, suspiciously well."
The answer came out doubtful, and the mage who had handed them over could only manage a pained smile.
"They're enchanted, miss. A spell that adjusts the fit precisely to your foot. On top of that, reinforced durability and a charm to keep you from tiring even on long marches."
The girl — scarlet hair, vivid gold eyes that conjured thoughts of a dragon — ran a hand over the boots with a contemplative sound. Watching her suspicion play out, Aslan allowed himself a quiet smile.
Just as the mage said, layers of magic were stacked into the leather — minor Transmutation for sizing, precise alteration for fit, a sophisticated bit of Transformation magic to raise both elasticity and hardness at once, and another Transmutation effect that modestly boosted fighting spirit.
And even with only his right eye — the one that still had vision — Aslan could tell the leather itself was far from common.
Dragon leather.
The sort of material you'd only find in the empire of the Southern Continent, and here it sat in this city. The price would not be trivial. Getting an item like this for free — a little suspicion was earned.
Not that Angie's suspicion came from that direction. Which was why Anna's disciple, the weary-looking mage before them, smiled with such exhaustion.
"Real magic? Not, y'know, something from a priest, or..."
Maybe these things catch fire the second you wear them long enough. It was an absurd suspicion, but the mage only tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear and shook her head.
"I was born and raised in this city. Ask my teacher, she'll tell you. Everything I make, every spell I put into it — it's safe."
Angie narrowed her eyes and studied the mage, then shot a glance at Aslan. After all, she had no way of judging magic herself.
"It's fine. The enchantments I can see are harmless." More than harmless, they were genuinely useful. "The leather's dragon hide, too."
Angie, who had no way of knowing the half of what he meant, repeated her question.
"Really?"
"Really. They're so well made I almost want them for myself."
"...Y-you can have them if you want...."
"No, they're for you. The enchantments on these are tailored to help you specifically."
The mage had already explained as much several times over. Angie mulled it for a moment before nodding and rising to her feet.
Tap. Tap.
She bounced lightly on the soles, and the mage exhaled in relief. Here she was giving away fine work for free and being interrogated for it — she'd been nursing genuinely hurt feelings. Only the fact that these two had saved the city kept her from speaking sharply.
Just as she was thinking she could finally escape back to her research, the woman noticed the girl still staring at her and flinched.
Eyes sharp enough to pin a person to the wall.
Those gold irises were intimidating enough to a mage who could barely manage basic Manifestation magic. In that single glance, the woman found herself mentally confessing to a dozen crimes she hadn't committed — because this was the gaze of the girl who, when the city was under attack, had charged priests with her bare hands and beaten them to death.
The mage set her jaw and braced herself. Only when Aslan caught her expression and grinned did she realize something was off.
"Th...."
Th?
Was she about to say she had a bad feeling and start swinging?
The mage tensed, and Aslan covered his mouth, snorting softly.
"Thank...."
The threat in the girl's eyes softened, color creeping into her cheeks. The mage's mouth fell open as understanding finally arrived.
The girl in front of her — all sharp edges and fierce features — was just flustered over saying thank you.
The embarrassment had stiffened her expression into something harder, and that only made her stammer the words out while her face went red.
The mage pressed her lips together at the unexpected cuteness, then glanced at Aslan. He wore a gentle smile and gave a small nod, and only then did she let herself relax into a laugh.
"It's nothing. For the heroes who saved our city? Anything. May these boots serve you well on your journey."
At last she got to say the words she'd meant to deliver when she handed the boots over. Angie flinched and went rigid, and the mage, seeing the reaction she'd expected, finally eased.
Then the girl's face shifted. Not the tense, embarrassed red of before — this was something deeper. Pride tangled up with bashfulness and joy, all of it spilling into a grin. The corners of her mouth quivered as she smiled.
"Ah — yeah. Right! I'll just, uh, go save a bunch more cities! In these boots!"
Saving cities wasn't the sum total of a hero's calling, but the mage didn't quibble, and neither did Aslan. The girl let the words hang, smiled to herself, and turned away.
Aslan ducked his head in thanks with a soft smile, and the mage withdrew with a swell of quiet satisfaction.
The two of them stepped out of the workshop into the open air. The mage vanished into her study without a backward glance, and as the heavy wooden door shut behind them, Aslan and Angie cut across the City of Mages toward the harbor.
Every stride Angie took came with a hum, and with every stride the dragon-leather boots answered — a light, springy sound that seemed to push her forward. The push made for fast walking, and they reached the city's outskirts in short order.
The sea wind blew cold. The harbor lay before them, its waters near the shore frozen white and dead — the same harbor they had barely managed to swim to after falling into the sea outside this city.
"Took you long enough, brat."
The docks bustled with a handful of figures. Sailors hurried cargo aboard as a great ship groaned against the wind, and amid the noise, a solid silhouette raised a hand in Aslan's direction.
"Tiyamal."
"That's right. Your poor elder, freezing out here after you said you'd just take a quick look at some boots."
"Sorry. Angie was thorough. Took a while."
Aslan's reply came with a rueful smile. Tiyamal, swaddled in a thick fur cloak, rubbed at his nose.
"A little longer and you'd have been scraping a frozen Dragon-kin off the dock. So — those are the boots?"
Tiyamal was closer to reptile than mammal, cold-blooded by nature, and he pulled the cloak tighter as he asked. Angie answered with a sidelong smile and thrust a foot forward to show them off. Dark-brown leather crossed with the faint scale-pattern of a reptile, that reddish gleam running through it. Something about it prickled at Tiyamal, and he frowned.
"Looks good. The hide gives me a weird feeling, though...."
"It's dragon leather."
Damn.
Aslan was too late to clamp a hand over her mouth. The words were already out, and Tiyamal's expression went strange. He took a step back.
"...I see."
Dragon-kin and the dragons of the Southern Continent shared blood, and Tiyamal was looking at boots made from the hide of kin. To a human it might be the equivalent of chimpanzee boots — or maybe Australopithecus boots — and from Tiyamal's perspective, deeply unsettling.
Aslan knew all of this perfectly well, and still he couldn't quite suppress the chuckle that slipped out. Tiyamal shot him a sour look and sighed.
"Well... it's not Dragon-kin hide... and I doubt the little one specifically asked for dragon leather... so, fine. It happens."
Truth was, given Angie's general lack of fondness for Dragon-kin, it was entirely possible she had specifically asked for dragon leather, but Tiyamal clearly preferred not to think so. He shook his head.
"Anyway, everything's ready while you two were off. The brat and Ereta are waiting inside."
He jerked his chin toward the ship. The vessel moored at the dock was an unusual one — a ship fitted with twin paddle-wheel-like structures on each side, forged from some kind of blue metal. Where a mast should have stood, there was only a thick blue pillar. It looked more like somebody's strange experiment than a seaworthy craft.
But Aslan recognized it. This was the kind of ship the City of Mages used for trade — the very vessel he had asked Anna Heleminus to lend them.
Two paddle wheels of Blue Iron, a metal with exceptionally high mana conductivity, drove the ship forward. Not as fast as a sail-driven vessel that ran with the wind, but on the windless Night Sea, nothing else would work.
Seeing a ship he'd only known from the game, now solid and real before him — the feeling was peculiar. Familiar and foreign at once. Knowledge he'd internalized long ago, things he'd only ever watched through a screen, now given weight and substance. Aslan felt a strange mingling of pleasure and familiarity.
Almost like slipping back twelve years into his gaming days. And more than that — a structure this massive was simply a pleasure to look at.
Aslan stood there, smiling faintly at the thought, and Tiyamal finally let the tension drain from his own expression and grinned.
"Heh-heh. The brat likes big machines, does he? Figured you for all grown up, but maybe you're still a little brat after all."
"What's a 'little brat' supposed to mean?"
"Bah, don't go picking at an old-timer's avant-garde phrasing. You wouldn't understand anyway, pipsqueak."
Tiyamal refused to back down even when Angie objected, and Aslan left the two of them bickering and headed for the ship.
Their voices — the Dragon-kin and the girl — faded behind him as he climbed aboard and found the captain's face waiting for him.
Archmage Anna Heleminus, an Elf girl cradled in her arms. The woman waved gently, and Aslan bowed his head in return.
The sea wind stirred his hair softly as he looked out toward the horizon and let out a breath.
The next destination was the City of Pleasure — Asan.
*
The City of Pleasure, Asan.
Situated at the edge of Imperial Direct Territory in the Kallus Empire, the city was a haven of decadence. Vice and pleasure ruled here, and true to its name, a certain degree of crime had always been quietly tolerated. But now the city was losing sleep over an atrocity without precedent.
The stench of blood hung thick in the air where the man knelt. A guard had vomited nearby, and the sour reek thickened the alley where a corpse lay sprawled across the ground.
Wounds from blade and spear covered the body. The clothes were fine — a nobleman's clothes.
Nobles did not die easily. Even in a world where gods and priests made human life cheap, the aristocracy tended to persist. Alley killers knew that murdering a noble meant consequences you couldn't outrun. Thieves were interested in a noble's coin, not his death.
So the guard knew, with a deep instinct, that this killing was something else. Not that he needed instinct. The noble's corpse had been, in a word, brutalized.
Spear wounds and blade wounds layered across the body. The spear thrusts were shallow, aimed solely at crippling mobility. The fatal damage came from the blade — a single strike driven precisely through the heart. Every other wound was either non-lethal or carved in after death.
"Gruesome."
The guard muttered the word without thinking, adjusting his pot-shaped helmet. In nearly twenty years of duty, he had never seen wounds like these. Not even victims of the priests were left this mangled.
Yet somehow he understood: these wounds had been made with a spear. A dagger or longsword couldn't have produced this. Not a simple piercing — the wound was spiraled. A strike so powerful it had bored through ribs, lungs, heart, and out the back, scattering fragments across the alley behind the sprawled body. The guard forced down the bile rising in his throat.