Break the Floodgate (1)
The spot where Professor Berne had been dragged away, spitting blood, was near the entrance to the training grounds. The moment that mud-slinging commotion died down, an awkward silence settled over the Class 7 students left standing in the middle of the yard.
Lucien Bell stood there in a daze, staring down at his own two hands.
He had watched, straight on, as I subdued Berne in a single exchange. For a brief moment, awe and wonder had flickered across his face—but the steps he took toward me were heavy and cowed, as if he might stumble at any moment.
No matter how extraordinary the professor who had demonstrated miracle-like power before his eyes, the flaw buried in his own body hadn't changed one bit. That was the bitter self-mockery eating at him, and that deep, long-festering despair was what weighed down his shoulders.
"...Professor, if this is some kind of joke, you should stop now."
Lucien ground the words out through a cracked voice. Every joint in his fingers was trembling faintly.
"I'll admit that you knocked down Professor Berne just now. It was... genuinely astonishing. But that was your power, wasn't it? What does breaking a floodgate have to do with someone like me—a mana control defect? The second I hold mana, the spell snarls itself together in my hands and blows up like this."
Lucien clenched his teeth and forcibly hauled the mana up from his chest.
Vwoooong—!
Bluish mana bloomed between his two hands, but before the runic script of a basic 1st-Circle fireball could even take shape, it burst apart with a discordant shriek and scattered in every direction.
KWAANG—!
A small explosion, a cloud of gray smoke—and Lucien's palms, glowing red-hot, were left smeared with soot. Breathing hard, he stared down at his scorched hands.
"See? I told you it wouldn't work!"
The end of Lucien's voice was trembling, ever so slightly. It looked like anger, like mockery, but in truth it was closer to the scream of someone who had reached out more desperately than anyone alive, only to be slammed back into place.
"The Magic Tower ruled me uncontrollable! The Central Department ruled me uncontrollable! I'm a defective product! What exactly do you want from a guy who can't even draw a single basic magic circle?"
Teaching assistant Mariel, standing nearby, fidgeted anxiously and pulled a magic-engineered burn salve from her pocket—one that drew heat out on contact.
"Lucien, let's treat your hands first. When you force your mana up like that, the rune arrangement of the spell generates friction against itself. Professor, you saw it, didn't you? Lucien's fundamentals of compressing and refining mana are completely broken. Forcing him into practical training in this condition is dangerous. We need to go back to the standard 1st-Circle foundational meditation and refinement drills, step by step."
Even after Mariel hurriedly spread the salven in a thin layer and finished the emergency treatment, heat still lingered in Lucien's palms.
Her voice was utterly sensible and reasonable. It was the correct answer, copied word for word out of every academy textbook in the empire and the Magic Tower's own primers.
She was genuinely worried about Lucien's hands, doing her best to guide the boy down a path where he wouldn't get hurt. From the position of an assistant who needed results to earn a full professorship, if her assigned student so much as blew off a finger during training, every ounce of responsibility would land squarely on her. Clinging to textbook principle like that wasn't unreasonable.
I tapped the dirt with the end of the wooden sword I was holding.
Eyes that had walked the line between life and death could find nowhere to hide even a single circuit like his.
To me, the shape of the mana running from his chest down both arms was laid bare.
Mariel and the empire's scholars believed Lucien's problem was an absence of precision in refining mana. They had judged that he shattered the glass because he'd never learned to fill a thin glass cup one drop of stream water at a time.
But the inside of Lucien that I saw was entirely different.
The mana packed into his chest was already vast enough to overflow. And the circuit built to receive that power was excessively simple and thick.
Into that raging torrent, the Magic Tower had demanded he force dozens of fingertip-sized runes to construct some delicate floodgate. It was like trying to shove a whole log through the eye of a needle—of course friction heat would burn his hands off. The result was inevitable.
"Who told you to set your runes in with precision?"
"Excuse me?"
Lucien looked up, brushing the ash from his palm.
"You don't blow up because you can't control your mana. You blow up because you're pointlessly weaving the spell into something complicated. Too much water is pouring through, and in front of it you've layered net after shredded net—so the nets burst apart and burn your hands."
Lucien's hand stopped mid-brush.
The boy had grown up his entire life inside the Magic Tower and the academy, and in all that time he'd been taught exactly one lesson: a mage must be precise; a spell must perfectly follow the standard specification written in the textbook; an error-free rune arrangement is what determines a magic's grade. Blaming himself for failing to adapt to that rule, he must have swallowed down his choking sobs hundreds, thousands of times, chewing on blood and ash.
"Professor, that... that's a denial of the very foundations of magic."
Mariel couldn't hold herself back. Beyond her silver-rimmed glasses, her eyes were a tangle of deep confusion and defiance.
"Take Fireball, a standard 1st-Circle spell—it requires at least twelve basic runes combined with three stabilization control formulas. Without them, you can't even guide the mana's directionality, and the spell can't hold the form you intend. Telling him to cut them out is the same as telling him not to use magic at all!"
"Where on a battlefield are you going to find the time to draw twelve runes?"
I picked up a tree branch lying embedded in the dirt.
"Your enemy is charging at your heart with a blade, and you're sitting there drawing pictures in the air with your finger? Your flesh gets torn off first. On a battlefield, a mage isn't an artist. He's just an artillery piece that spits fire."
With the tip of the branch, I slashed a single rough line across the ground.
The empire's standard 1st-Circle magic circle was three concentric rings crammed dense with intricate stabilization glyphs. I stomped those complicated lines into a smear, and left behind only one thick line running through the center and two simple wedge symbols where the discharge point would be.
"Strip out every bit of decoration."
"...Excuse me?"
Lucien stared blankly down at the crude scrawl in the dirt.
"Throw away all twelve runes. Two guidance formulas to set the direction, and one discharge formula to shove the mana outward. Hold exactly those three in your head and nothing else."
"But if you do that... the mana won't ball up into a sphere, it'll just disperse! There'll be no control over the output at all, and—"
"Who told you to control it? Dump the whole thing out."
"...!"
"Your vessel is enormous. Stop trying to pour it carefully into a cup—hurl the entire water barrel straight into the bastard's face. Who cares if the shape falls apart? When your mana volume is insane enough, even a formless blast shatters a wall."
Lucien forgot how to speak.
We moved to the impact range tucked into the corner of the training grounds.
As the morning slot's approved usage time ran out, Mariel swiftly slipped an impromptu extension request through to the administrative office, securing approval clear through the afternoon.
Past noon, the sunlight slanted low, casting a long red shadow from the curtain wall across the far side of the impact range.
At its center stood an oak target reinforced with steel plating, modeled on the heavy armor worn by warhorses. It was a special target—the kind the Knight Department used to put full weight of horse and rider behind a sword strike, or the Central Department's mages used to test magic of the 3rd Circle and above. With thick steel reinforcement layered over it, ordinary impacts wouldn't so much as scratch the thing.
"All right, get over there."
When I jerked my chin toward a spot ten paces in front of the target, Lucien staggered over on unsteady legs.
Cold sweat was soaked into his forehead, and the forearm showing between his sleeve and his wrist was twitching in fine spasms. I could see it plain as day: the primal terror of failure was crushing his whole body.
"Professor, do you truly intend to proceed like this?"
Mariel pressed in close beside me and murmured under her breath.
A deep shadow lay across her composed forehead. She'd been shaken by the combat power I'd shown in flattening Professor Berne, sure—but when it came to magical theory, she still didn't trust me an inch. A natural reaction.
Accepting the strength that had put Berne down was one thing; a past as the hero of the Demon King War and the ability to recalibrate a mage's circuits were entirely different matters. The domain of the warrior and the domain of the mage were two separate worlds, and my current official rank was a mere D.
"If you simplify the formula and force high-output mana through it, the caster's wrist circuits may fail to withstand the backflow and suffer permanent damage. Even the empire's certification exams would fail an approach like this for lack of precision. This is a gamble."
"It's not a gamble. And exam scores are worth nothing in a real fight."
I answered while glancing at the sinking sun.
"That boy's wrist circuits have thickened far beyond the empire's standard mages. The outer tissue is scarred all to hell, but underneath, the mana circuits themselves have swelled abnormally from withstanding overload after overload. What he's carrying right now isn't a thin glass tube. It's a wrought-iron pipe. It won't burst."
Mariel drew in a breath and looked again at Lucien's arms.
To her eyes, they must still have read as the scars of repeated explosive accidents—but to mine, long accustomed to tearing apart every manner of monster and war engine on the battlefield, they looked like a malformed cannon barrel, self-forged to vent an enormous output.
"Lucien."
At the low call, the boy flinched and turned to me.
"Erase the spellbook from your head. Don't tremble your fingertips trying to arrange runes prettily. Just open a single channel and shove the mana filling your chest straight out of it."
"...But, Professor—"
"Spend the time you'd waste crying on one more moment of focus. Cry while you do it if you have to. I don't care."
Lucien's jaw hardened.
First, I had him bleed a mere spark of mana out through his fingertips three times. The circuits inside his wrists warmed faintly, but showed no sign of splitting or warping. After that, we raised the output in small increments and ran several more passes, gauging the circuit's limit. Only after confirming, every single time, that the circuits held firm did I nod.
"Mariel—raise a barrier ward, and everyone fall back."
Mariel hurriedly drew her casting rod and planted it, unfolding a defensive barrier, while Erin and Brahm retreated several steps and cleared the area.
The boy stretched out his trembling hands. From his fingertips, bluish mana began to rise like heat haze.
Ordinarily, this would have been the point where, in his desperate struggle to force dozens of stabilization runes into the working, his mana would swirl and discolor to red. But he seemed to have made up his mind to follow my words—eyes screwed shut, he began smashing the complicated magic circle in his head apart with his own hands.
One, two. The guidance formulas.
Three. The discharge formula.
And then he flung open the floodgate he'd been holding shut in his chest, all at once.
VWOOOONG—!
In that instant, the grains of sand across the training ground floor lifted into the air as if gravity itself had let them go.
"...Huh?"