Bored Enough to Want to Die
I was so bored I wanted to die.
The classroom had gone cold.
The racket that had filled it only moments ago was gone without a trace, leaving a hush so complete you could hear the person in the next seat swallow.
“Quiet at last.”
The man standing directly before the lectern had made that silence. He had opened the door, walked in, and simply stood there, saying nothing at all, and the room had changed around him. Overwhelming, uncanny charisma—that was the only honest way to put it.
“I am Edward Heisen. I will be conducting this course in Theoretical Magicology.”
His voice settled low. It drew the eye whether you meant to look or not. There was a strange force in it.
“The thing I despise second most is the waste of time. Which is why I foist nearly everything that is not research onto the assistants beneath me… Lectures, however, cannot be avoided.”
Edward’s eyes flashed, sharp. Crimson irises, as if they were burning, swept the room.
“So any of you who gives me cause to think you are wasting my lecture time… would do well to remember that I will assign you the lowest mark on the spot.”
The lowest mark.
At those words, most of the students in the room began to murmur. The arrogance threaded through his tone was bad enough, but the substance was worse.
What, exactly, counted as giving him the impression you were wasting his time? A standard that vague and that subjective had the lowest grade hanging from it, and the unease that followed was hard to shake.
Even so, no one stepped forward to object. The room filled with that particular atmosphere in which no one wants to be the one to speak, and everyone hopes someone else will.
Edward, as if their reaction were none of his concern, took up a pen without expression and began to write on the board.
“Pay attention.”
Every gaze turned forward. A few lines of text had been written there.
“Before the lesson, I ought to test whether you know the fundamentals.”
Fundamentals. A test. Between the lines already on the board and the attendance roster Edward had opened, it was not difficult to guess what was coming.
“You. Black hair… Bella.”
“Yes.”
“The mechanism by which magic activates?”
“…Resonance, attunement, incantation, manifestation.”
“Correct. Anyone admitted here ought to know that much.”
Edward went on.
“Resonance: sensing the mana within the body and without. Attunement: regulating the flow of mana inside the body into a steady current. Even an ordinary person without a circle can manage those two. What matters, therefore, is what follows. Bella… the one beside you. Purple hair.”
“Uh… yes!”
“Keep your answers short, Pierre. Read the runes written on the board. From the top, in order.”
The boy Edward had named—Pierre—stumbled through the runes in a voice that trembled faintly with nerves.
“F-from the top, in order: Blaze—flame. Whirl—wind. Bloom—ice. Race—lightning… sir.”
“Yes. In sequence, those are the basic-form incantations required to cast Tinder, Wind, Freeze, and Spark.”
He had answered correctly. Pierre was just letting out a breath of relief when the follow-up struck.
“Why?”
“…Pardon?”
A stupid, reflexive question slipped out of him, and a crease formed between Edward’s brows.
“Why is Race—lightning the incantation for Spark? Will Strike not do? Or Bloom?”
“Uh, th-that’s… that’s……”
“……”
Edward looked at Pierre and said nothing. Tick. Tick. The second hand moved. Tens of seconds of silence passed, and Pierre still had no answer.
“Hm.”
A short sound escaped him. Everyone who heard it could already predict Pierre’s grade in Theoretical Magicology.
“Merely knowing how to read runes. Being able to memorize a spell’s incantation and cast it.”
His gaze swept the seated class once more. A few began, subtly, to look away, thinking they might end up as Pierre had. Edward paid those small shifts of the eyes no mind and continued.
“If all you want is to use magic, that is sufficient. Not in this class.”
The attendance roster in his hand dropped onto the lectern with a dull tap.
“This class is Theoretical Magicology. It is for those who mean to descend into the deep abyss of magic such as this.”
He lifted the pen he had set on the lectern and began scratching at the board again. This time it was figures and graphs.
“A theoretical magicologist must never stop asking questions. Even in the case just now, it is not enough to memorize the incantation. You must consider why that result manifests, and which parts of it are essential. Accordingly, why and how come—those two words will be the ones I speak most often in this lecture.”
The pen in Edward’s hand moved. At the end of its path was a girl who had glanced, for a moment, toward the window.
“You. Brown hair. Of these, which figure is not used in the magic circle that activates Ice Arrow?”
And so the execution that called itself a class began. As if determined to keep his word, Edward pressed on with question after question. Some managed passable answers. Some, like Pierre, failed to answer and sank. A few, watching the ones who sank, succeeded in cobbling together something plausible by dragging out every scrap of knowledge they had. Whether any of it was an answer Edward would find satisfactory was another matter.
Question. Answer. Question. Silence. Question. Silence. Question. Reply.
Question.
Question.
Question.
Question—
“Therefore we can see that what matters is not the shape through which mana flows, but its speed. An identical shape does not produce an identical spell. Remember this: in the instant mana passes each point, its acceleration, its direction, and its speed are what determine the spell’s nature.”
The lecture went on. It was not only question and answer; explanations were woven in between.
The lecture was, without question, of a rather high standard. Set aside the way he kept hurling questions, and it was good enough that I might have given it the highest mark of any lecture I had heard so far.
Time passed, and before anyone quite noticed, the lecture was nearly over.
“…Is it already this late.”
An emotionless voice. Flat, as if he were merely stating a fact that happened to be true.
“Then, last of all…”
Edward turned again. He began writing words and formulas across the board, but the volume and the density were nothing like what had come before.
The board filled, edge to edge.
“Then this problem…”
Edward’s gaze fixed. On the one person whose name had not been called even once.
“Miriel. You will solve it.”
“…Yes?”
At that foolish little voice, most of the students turned to look. There was pity in it.
This was the girl who, only yesterday during introductions, had been asking people their own names. In an atmosphere like this, there was no way she could answer that professor’s question properly. She would fail, tremble, and get torn apart like the others—that shared understanding spread through the room. And besides, anyone could see that the problem on the board was not something solvable at their present level. All the more reason.
“What is it? Were you not listening to the lecture?”
At those words, a few faces twisted. No matter how you looked at it, the problem written there was not something you could solve merely because you had sat through today’s class.
A situation that could only be read as harassment. At the center of it, Miriel—the one Edward had called—tilted her head this way and that.
“…I… I don’t know……”
She mumbled it, very small.
“…You don’t know?”
Edward said. The students who heard him braced for the scolding that would follow, the possibility that they might be next already occurring to them.
“You truly do not know?”
“Yes.”
“…I see. Very well.”
It was not what they had expected. No shouting. No rebuke. Only a calm voice, and a murmur spread among some of the students.
“…Quiet.”
Unlike before, this time Edward reacted.
“The atmosphere has changed. Did you grow lax because class is over?”
The noise inside the room vanished before he had even finished speaking. Looking over the students who had gone silent, Edward spoke again.
“You seem to be laboring under one large misconception, so I will correct it.”
A misconception? An unexpected word.
“I said at the very start of the lecture that the thing I despise second most is the waste of time.”
A few nodded.
“And the thing I despise most is…”
Edward’s head turned, slowly. At the end of that turn were several students. They had one thing in common: they were the ones who had wrung some kind of answer out of themselves, however they could, when he questioned them.
Several faces went pale.
“Not knowing is not a fault. The fault lies in refusing to humbly admit one’s own insufficiency, and putting on airs instead. Of course, one ought still to consider whether one truly cannot solve the problem, or whether one has simply abandoned the attempt because one believes one does not know.”
Time was up.
With that, Edward walked straight out. Just as he had come in.
The students left behind let out breaths of relief and sagged.
That startled me.
He asked out of nowhere, and I jumped. I dozed off in the middle, of all things, and the perception-dampening magic nearly came undone.
Well… it was still a pretty decent lecture. Not bad.
But—
“Hey. You.”
“Eep?!”
I turned at the sudden voice. Black eyes were staring straight at me.
Her name was definitely…
“Hmm…”
I can’t remember! I’d seen her talking with Mariella, though.
“You’re interesting.”
“Huh? Me?”
“Yeah. Why didn’t he call your name even once?”
Long, straight black hair slid down with a soft rustle. Her eyes drew closer and closer.
“Your name.”
“M-Miriel…”
“I’m Bella.”
“……”
“Let’s get along from now on.”
And then that girl—Bella—was gone from in front of my eyes.
“What was that…?”