Time Flies Right Along - 2
The four-person match that would crown the inter-class tournament. Beatrix’s text, hinting that she meant to take part in it, nearly drove me out of my mind. No—calling it a “hint” was far too mild. She had simply stated, outright, that she intended to compete.
And so, after reading the message over and over, I quietly turned my gaze to the window. The weather outside was clear, but inside my chest, tears had begun to pour down like a monsoon.
Why?
Soon enough the fundamental question surfaced. Why—why on earth was Beatrix inserting herself into something the kids were playing at? And why had Luise invited her in the first place?
Fine. Granting a hundred concessions, I could understand Beatrix joining the match. She hadn’t volunteered of her own accord; it had been a proposal from her only disciple. And if Beatrix stepped forward, the Magic Department students would weep and cheer as though they’d just received a living god. There would be a commotion, yes—but the positive kind, the kind where a teacher ushers her students into a whole new world.
A commotion, yes.
But why invite her?
Luise’s sudden summoning of a final boss, though—no matter how I turned it over, I could not find a reason. If Luise were the type to be shortsighted and reckless, I might have understood. She wasn’t.
In the first place, Luise had been closer than anyone to what happened at last year’s four-person match. She was a living witness to history—the legendary thrashing of royalty that would live on forever at the Academy, and the equally legendary workplace confinement that followed, both of which she had watched unfold in real time.
On top of that, she had been apologetic from the moment Erich named me as an outside participant for the four-person match, and when I was put under confinement she had been genuinely heartbroken. There was no way a Luise like that would have caused a disaster of this scale for no reason. The club members from the Class of ’77, maybe. Luise? Absolutely not.
I’d better check with the person herself.
In the end I let out a small sigh and sent Beatrix a reply, saying we could talk through the details during club hours.
This was a problem that could only be settled by sitting Luise, Beatrix, and me down for a three-way confrontation.
When club time came, I sat Luise down the moment she walked in wearing the face of a dog that knew it had done something wrong. Fortunately she seemed to feel the prick of conscience herself, so the conversation would go smoothly enough.
Naturally, I seated Beatrix right beside her. I had said I could understand Beatrix’s participation in the four-person match after a hundred concessions—that did not mean I supported it. When a disciple makes a strange proposal, a master is supposed to scold her. What good comes of treating the idea as a positive one?
"You know why I’m doing this, right?"
"Y-yes..."
Luise answered with a soft little nod, taking in everything those words implied.
There was a faintly dejected air in that nod and that reply, so I let a small smile slip out. If she had armored herself in shamelessness the way Erzebet would have, I might have pinched her lips—but I didn’t particularly want to grind down someone who already knew she was in the wrong.
"I’m not angry. I’m just a little thrown, that’s all."
At the gentle tone, Luise carefully lifted her head. The club members who had been watching with serious faces, wondering what this was about, settled into quieter expressions and started to enjoy the show.
"There was a reason, wasn’t there?"
"Th-that’s right. Yes."
Watching Luise nod again and again, I felt my heart ease by degrees.
Right. There was no way Luise would have done this without thinking. She must have had some circumstance she couldn’t get around.
"Well... the Magic Department students begged me so intensely..."
"The Magic Department?"
My brow furrowed at the words intense begging. The Magic Department students were fanatics enthralled by Beatrix, true—but they couldn’t possibly have been mad enough to put pressure on her disciple. Had I underestimated a mage’s mania that badly?
"Ah—it really was just begging. There wasn’t any other pressure."
Sensing my doubt, Luise hurried to add that.
At least it hadn’t been pressure; that was a relief. But if mere begging alone had been enough to move Luise, just how desperately had they pleaded?
"They’re already taking weekly lessons and they still want more. Greedy."
It was unpleasant. They were enjoying a once-in-a-lifetime fortune—the Magic Lord’s personal instruction—and still they wanted too much. They should have been satisfied with the classes. Instead they harassed my third wife to get my second wife to move? Outrageous beyond—
"B-Brother. Actually... there’s been a bit of a problem with the recent lessons."
"Hm?"
I tilted my head at that. A problem with the lessons?
The words made no sense, so I turned my gaze to Beatrix. How could there be a problem with Beatrix’s classes? The highest authority on magic was teaching them herself, with all her heart?
It’s real.
But seeing Beatrix drop her eyes in embarrassment only made me more certain. Something really was wrong.
Is she half-assing it?
A strange conclusion—and at the same time a highly plausible one.
Magic Department students mid-miracle, sitting through a once-in-a-lifetime course, were begging hard enough to shout, “Send Her Excellency the Magic Lord into the four-person match!” That could only mean the classes they were already receiving no longer filled their hunger.
What if—what if Beatrix, unused to teaching others, had grown bored and started phoning it in? Then this bizarre request from the Magic Department students would suddenly make sense.
"Are the kids not keeping up with the lessons, by any chance?"
I couldn’t exactly say to Beatrix, Are you half-assing this?, so I took a different tack—asking whether the students simply couldn’t keep pace with her high-level instruction.
And once I’d said it, that actually seemed even more likely. Knowing a great deal and teaching are two different things. Even in the world before my transmigration, undergrads failing to move the way their professors taught them had been an everyday occurrence.
"Well—"
The moment Beatrix, after a brief hesitation, began to speak, a hollow laugh nearly escaped me.
There had been nothing wrong with Beatrix’s teaching. People say a genius can’t understand an ordinary mind, but Beatrix had explained everything so kindly and so thoroughly that even the students could follow. It was only natural that the Magic Department students had gone wild over that merciful grace.
And thanks to that, beyond her one-sided lectures, the students had poured out countless questions—and so long as they came during class time, Beatrix had answered every one of them gladly.
Through the whole first semester that way, Beatrix had perfectly mapped the passion and the level of the Magic Department students.
And the catastrophe began in the second semester.
"Once I had a grasp of the children’s level, I meant to move into more advanced lessons starting in the second semester. I planned the course around presentations and discussion."
Of course, Magic Department students who danced a perpetual two-step between passion and mania had not been stopped by the wall of presentations and debate. On the contrary, they had been delighted at the chance to voice their own opinions before the authority they so revered.
For exactly one week.
"An impressive presentation. I could feel how hard you worked to look at existing magic from a new angle."
"Th-thank you!"
"As it happens, that is a spell I created seventy years ago."
"……."
Sadly, having to present in front of a living legend of the academic world was a thoroughly terrifying affair.
"—and following that principle, I created a new magic tool."
"Excellent. A small idea, but a rather important one."
"Thank you!"
"I made the same magic tool myself thirty years ago. It never saw commercial use because of a flaw that turned up, but what matters is that you arrived at the idea on your own."
"……."
And that legend was not merely a repository of knowledge. She was a being who had reached the extreme of practical application as well—a creature that lived above the sky.
Magic research and magic-tool crafting were the road Beatrix herself had walked. No matter what a student brought up, they were inevitably hammered by an experience so distant it might as well have been from another age.
Even so, most of the students remained in an “actually, this is great” state—until—
"Ah. That theory was established by my father. I’ve personally revised some of the content myself, so this is well done."
From that day on, every student fell silent.
Wow.
I almost let out a groan of pity, for all that I felt bad for the embarrassed Beatrix. Beatrix’s father was a man so immersed in magic that he had been called the Duke of Arcane Inquiry. Regarded as the greatest mage of the Empire in his day, he had produced countless spells and treatises with his own hands; his stature defied description.
Which meant that most of the presentations the students prepared were influenced by the Duke of Arcane Inquiry’s papers—and Beatrix, delighted whenever her father’s legacy came up, had given them detailed feedback with a willing heart.
Yes. Far, far too detailed.
Feedback on a theory from a hundred years ago.
It was horrifying. The Duke of Arcane Inquiry had passed away a century ago, and so his theories had stopped a century ago.
Theories that were no longer being revised, that had been sanctified into holy ground. From the presenting students’ point of view they were the finest of materials—unfortunately, the Duke’s daughter had been updating her father’s theories alone. Without publishing them to the magic world. Alone.
So what could anyone do? The Magic Department students lost the courage to present in front of Beatrix, and the second-semester classes quietly bled out their vitality.
...
"I’ll speak to the headmaster for you."
"R-right. Thank you..."
Only then did I understand everything. The despairing Magic Department students had begged Luise for a chance to receive Beatrix’s teaching in practical form, if theory was no longer an option. And Beatrix, who had inadvertently wiped out her entire student body, had agreed out of a faint sense of guilt.
So you got hit too.
Looking at him now, Later’s expression had turned bitter at some point as well.
Truly, a melancholy business.
Word that my second sister-in-law would be competing in the four-person match spread fast. She had put a restriction on herself for fairness’ sake—she would forfeit if it came down to a one-on-one against another class—but the Magic Department students, who had never cared about fairness in the first place, simply cheered that she was participating at all.
Are they really that happy?
Watching the Magic Department students chatter with faces full of laughter was almost uncanny.
I couldn’t understand it. If you translated that into Swordsmanship Department terms, it would be like my brother joining the four-person match to show off Sky Slash—
That’s the best thing ever.
I understood at once. I would have been thrilled too.
And so a thin thread of jealousy began to crawl up through me. The Magic Department was that happy. The absolute pinnacle of magic was competing. Shouldn’t the Swordsmanship Department bring in a heavyweight of our own?
"Erich."
While I was thinking that, someone shook my shoulder and spoke.
"Ryutis?"
I turned around to find Ryutis wearing the expression of a man who had just made some great decision.
It was such a grim, resolute face that I swallowed without meaning to.