Closer Than One Would Think
The world of mercenaries had always been thick with stories.
That was only natural, really. People gathered from every corner of the continent, and if you collected even a single tale from each of them, you could easily fill several volumes and still have material left over.
Of course, most of it was nothing more than a braggart’s hot air—amusing enough for the occasional joke, and little more than that.
Even so, among those countless yarns, there was always at least one anecdote that had hardened into legend.
Take, for instance, the tale of the reaper who walked alone out of the ashes.
“But that teacher of ours… I heard he has a pretty wild past.”
Some ten-odd years ago, there was a greenhorn mercenary handed a single assignment.
Dark mages on the kingdom’s fringes had kidnapped a target. He was to bring that target out alive.
In truth, it was less a mission than a thinly veiled death sentence—an order forced on him by a superior who disliked him, the kind that said fail this and you’re out. The young mercenary carried it out without a word of complaint.
Late at night, when the enemy’s watch grew slack, he snuffed every torch and light-stone one by one.
Then, in the dark, he began taking the dark mages’ heads, one after another.
Those who resisted lost their hearts. Those who never even noticed lost their throats.
Whatever came at him could not endure so much as a single stroke of his blade. The skill reeked of something beyond human—of a god, or a devil, nested in his hands.
So when dawn began to break, it was only natural that nothing remained but burnt wreckage and two people still standing.
“That’s right! The Ashen Reaper, wasn’t it? That’s what they called him back in his mercenary days.”
Before the first light of dawn had fully settled, the mage he had rescued looked up at him with awestruck eyes and asked his name.
Ash-gray hair. Eyes empty of feeling. The man’s name was Glen Bernak.
Impossible martial prowess, and a short, dazzling career that followed. Those flame-bright exploits were the chronicle of the Ashen Reaper.
And that was as far as the legend of Glen Bernak went in the world of mercenaries.
From here on, then, is a story only I know.
Later, building on that strength, he founded the Ascher Mercenary Company, toppled a castle, and eventually washed up at St. Celestia Academy—all because of a single promise.
The mage whose life he had saved offered him a favor by way of repayment.
Once he retired from mercenary work, he need only get in touch. A good post would be waiting for him.
A few months ago, for reasons no one quite understood, Glen quit the mercenary life and truly did contact that mage from years past.
By then the mage had become the headmaster of St. Celestia Academy. That was how Glen Bernak became a teacher there.
So we end up meeting after all…
And when I heard the news, my heart was anything but calm.
Was it excitement? Or something closer to unease?
The knowledge that I would soon meet the protagonist I had spent years walking beside in one form or another… and the knowledge that the person I would meet was the protagonist—not me.
When that moment came, what on earth was I supposed to feel as I faced him?
No matter how hard I thought, no clear answer presented itself.
How could it? In all the years I had played this game, I had never once been in a situation like this.
Somehow… I find I rather don’t want to meet him…
It was probably fear of the unknown.
Every character I had met so far was someone I had already interacted with countless times inside the game. People packed full of a kind of internal intimacy, if you will. I knew their motives, their likes, exactly how to handle them.
But how was I supposed to deal with a protagonist who would not move according to my will?
That, in the end, was what I was fretting over.
Honestly. I’m not even a philosopher…
It was a paradox. The person I had thought closest of all turned out to be the farthest.
“The Ashen Reaper, huh… That’s one terrifying moniker. I can’t wait for the day I get to cross blades with him myself.”
Ruthlessly oblivious to my serious brooding, Roxanna and Adrian both looked rather excited.
“Ah, how I look forward to that day! To see how His Highness’s swordsmanship will transform once he wrests insight from a true strong one!”
Adrian’s eyes sparkled—as if he were already savoring a match against a superior opponent.
That unchanging enthusiasm of his settled the turmoil in my chest.
Seeing him like this, so true to the original—it’s terribly reassuring.
This game had what were called common routes: events that unfolded no matter which ending you pursued.
Adrian challenging the protagonist was one of them.
Early in the game, his competitive blood boiling at the sight of a stronger fighter, Adrian would provoke the protagonist into a duel.
At that point, however, Glen was already a considerable powerhouse—so much so that using his strength to build a stable environment for the students’ growth had become established early-game strategy in The Rodoros Chronicle.
The result was a clean, one-sided defeat for Adrian, crushed by the sheer gap in force.
But there were lessons to be taken from defeat as well. The boy would recognize his own shortcomings and take another step forward.
That he could turn even loss into nourishment was an event that let you glimpse the makings of a crown prince.
“Well then, I shall cheer you on.”
And so I rooted for Adrian.
He was hardly my favorite character, but my reason was simple enough.
I needed him to lose successfully.
I would rather not have the future I knew start changing on me, after all.
Not long after lunch ended, the practical session we had been waiting for finally arrived.
“From this moment on, you will all compose the formula for the low-tier flame spell, Ignition.”
The magic practice hall was a spare, simple place. A broad open yard for the students; opposite it, a space for the professor, with a clock and writing tools set out on a table.
This seemingly empty chamber was a gate every student who had chosen magic as their major at the academy had to pass through at least once.
“You have two hours. Use the paper and pens on the table freely, and write out your formulas.”
“Hmph. For someone of my caliber, this won’t take long.”
“Ignition? What’s so impressive about that?”
Some might have wondered why such a grand word as gate was attached to so simple a test.
In fact, a fair number of students had already manifested Ignition, little flames dancing at their fingertips.
But everything has its reasons.
“Begin… now.”
Tick. Tick.
At the professor’s gesture, the two-hour limit began to dwindle.
And what broke the brief silence that followed was a flustered voice.
“Um… so how exactly do I turn this into a formula?”
Manifestation and formula composition.
Both produced the same result—and yet the gulf between them was on an entirely different order of magnitude.
You had to take a magical process that unfolded by feel, through the circuits inside your body, and move it outside yourself.
By way of analogy, it was like teaching a puppet to walk exactly as a person does.
Walking was something so thoroughly internalized that it happened of its own accord. Most people thought, I’m walking, so my legs are moving—not, my legs move in such-and-such a way, and that is why I can walk.
So to break the motion of the legs into fine stages, order them, and instruct someone else to recreate them… that demanded a skill set almost the opposite of the ability to walk itself.
“This is… I can’t even get a feel for it.”
“Urrrgh… Burn! Burn…! Wait, that’s just manifestation again!”
“Aaagh! My paper’s on fire!”
And so the students struggled.
Every last one of them was a talent who had spent a lifetime casting magic by pure instinct. Ask them now to lay out that process in careful detail, and those who could do it properly were few to none.
“Hmm. This is certainly rather troublesome…”
Carmilla scratched her head.
It truly was a difficult assignment. Magic practicals had never been depicted in any detail in the game.
All you got was a line of text along the lines of Angelica successfully passed the magic practical!—with no way to see how the process actually went.
It was the same unkind opacity the game had shown at cafeteria time.
On top of that, she had little experience casting magic, and even less practice applying it. In that sense, she might well have been the student under the worst conditions in the entire examination hall.
And yet her fretting was of a different sort entirely.
How do I flip this formula so that it becomes Ignition…?
While everyone else was straining to construct the spell, she was trying to invert one.
What she meant to reverse was the most basic ice-magic formula she carried in her head—the one she had burned into her memory while building a refrigerator not long ago.
So, before anything else, Carmilla decided to write out the formula she already possessed.
Like a decalcomania—a pair of moons circling around a central circle… was that it?
From the morning’s magic theory class, she transcribed the formula she had doodled in her notebook like idle scribbling, and revisited an old question.
“Why the moon, I wonder?”
The moon that rose at night. She stared for a long time at the crescent shape, then decided to turn it over.
And so what she drew was a sun.
“Ah… so that was it…”
It was an intuitive inversion of imagery, in its own way.
From a cold night to a warm day.
When she poured mana into the formula she had inverted by her own lights…
at last, a small flame bloomed upon the paper.
“I’ve done it…!”
Carmilla let out a quiet cheer of triumph and looked around.
What met her eyes was a landscape of bowed heads. Not a single student had lifted their face the way she had.
It felt rather like finishing an exam early and surveying the room.
Surely not.
Only then did it sink in.
Among the kingdom’s most promising young mages, she had been the first to pass the test.
Barely ten-odd minutes had ticked away on the clock.
Carmilla had no way of knowing it, but that was the third-shortest time in the academy’s entire history.
In other words—a legendary record.