How to Level Up (1)
My lecture had been perfect, just as I'd expected. Even someone as completely green to magic as him had, after listening to me, locked down a solid grasp of mana itself.
"Something like this?"
As he said it, a spark of the most basic ignition magic flared up from his fingertips. The look on his face was no different from any complete novice flush with the thrill of first dipping into magic.
It isn't that he has no talent.
If anything, Sung-jun's form radiated nothing but overflowing talent—enough that, setting myself aside, he ranked among the very best of every mage I'd ever seen.
Is the Incubus-ification… the cause?
Classified as a monster, yes—but if you traced it to its roots, an incubus was a dream demon. In other words, a demon. That a demon would have a gift for magic wasn't strange if you thought about it. Mana had originally been a demon's power, and the craftsmen who learned to wield it were the breed called mages.
"Not bad."
I carved a sword of ice and set it spinning. The blade-shaped ice whirled in place at a blistering speed, so fierce it looked ready to slice through anything it touched in rapid succession and grind it to dust. I kept talking as I did it. This was only a demonstration, after all—meant to snag his interest.
"Once you can use mana the way I do, you'll be able to put this kind of motion into a sword. You might even open up a whole new realm—something like a magic swordsman."
"Aren't I still at the crawling stage?"
"True enough. But having a goal makes the effort more fun, doesn't it?"
"When you can see the goal, it does get easier."
He tracked the sword I'd made without so much as a blink. He answered me, yes, but his gaze never left it for a second. Excellent posture for magical research. This was going to be fun to teach. Maybe I should pile the homework on thick?
With interest like this, I don't have to worry about his growth.
It wouldn't have been an overstatement to say he was captivated by magic; Sung-jun's eyes were razor-sharp. Not an instant, not a flicker of change, not even the tiniest shift of mana would escape him—that was the intensity in his gaze.
"All right. Next step."
I flicked my fingers and the sword vanished. I'd taught him how to resonate with the mana outside; now it was time to teach him how to store it in his body. Being able to sense mana meant he could control it to some degree already. The next stage was stacking magic into his body and making it his own.
While I explained the method to him in the simplest terms, my other hand prepared a magic circle—one that would draw mana in, so he could store it more easily.
"Sit on the circle."
He sat on the magic circle without a second's hesitation. I moved behind him and carefully set my fingers against his chest. The space a human could use to store mana was the heart.
It's gathering.
I could feel him drawing the currents of mana together. The mana being pulled steadily into his heart took on a single form. Mages called that a Circle, and because greater mages held more of them, Circles had become the measure of rank.
Circles aren't everything, though.
A Circle was more like a weight class. In army terms, you could call it the number of soldiers. But as countless wars had proven, sheer numbers of troops weren't the absolute factor that decided victory or defeat. Results that overturned numerical gaps through tactics and preparation filled the histories of war East and West, past and present. Of course, those were exactly the battles that made history. Anyway, what I meant was that more Circles didn't automatically make someone an absolutely superior mage. There were more battles than you could count where a gifted commander overcame inferior numbers. Take me—after becoming a doll, my Circle count had dropped, but I was still an unprecedented genius of a mage, and I had every confidence that if someone of the same Circle count, or even more Circles than me, assumed they could beat me in a magical duel, I'd make them pay dearly for that arrogance.
With a low hum, mana formed a line around his heart. The line drawn from gathered mana stretched slowly outward, becoming a ring that wrapped his heart, and that single ring began to turn, slowly, with the heart at its center.
Worth the help.
They say a beginner forging a Circle on the first try is talent in itself. I'd never failed at Circle formation, so I couldn't speak from experience, but I had seen mages who couldn't work because they'd failed—the aftereffects were supposedly tremendous. At any rate, preparing the circle and personally monitoring the mana movement inside his body had paid off.
"……It formed."
"You can observe it, right? That's your Circle."
Well. Forming a Circle didn't mean he could just start casting magic freely.
"Now I'll teach you how to use Circle magic."
With a 1-Circle, you couldn't cast anything impressive. Still, you could use simple spells and foundational elemental magic—nothing worth neglecting.
I wasn't one of them—I was a genius—but some mages specialized in only a single attribute. Mages who could cast fire magic as high as 5-Circle with ease yet only managed other elements at a 3-Circle level weren't rare. So foundational elemental magic wasn't something to write off, either.
After finishing the lecture, coaching his practice, and tidying up the house, I went to bed—and was dragged straight into a space much like yesterday's.
"So yesterday really wasn't just some random nightmare."
Muttering that, I glanced around and had no trouble finding something wearing Sung-jun's face. That it wasn't Sung-jun was obvious at once. The air it gave off was completely different. Sung-jun, if you had to put a finger on it, carried a heavy atmosphere; the thing in front of me was all light, smiling buoyancy.
"You're the Incubus, aren't you?"
I'd already guessed its identity. The thing before me only ever made contact through the place called dreams.
"Heh heh. I really do love sharp little things like you. Makes conversation so much easier."
Whatever it found so amusing, it spoke with a grin.
"Simple enough. You probably already figured it out. I came to tell you how incubi and succubi raise their levels."
"I know."
The rumors about Park Ji-hye. The fact that the industry skewed heavily male. And that the survival rate for the Succubus-ification curse was higher than for Incubus-ification.
"Skinship. Dirty stuff. That sort of thing, right?"
"What, do we really need to dress it up? It's sex. Sex."
It slid its thumb between its index and middle fingers and snickered—a vulgar gesture that meant sex, pure and simple. A parasite demon, of all things, making that motion with Sung-jun's face. It felt like an insult to him for no good reason.
I can use mana.
This was different from yesterday, when I'd been dragged in unprepared. I could use mana, and I'd even prepared a way to escape the dream if it came to that. So unlike yesterday, I had room to spare.
"Me. With you?"
I snorted and laughed in its face. In the same instant, dozens of magic circles bloomed into existence around my body.
"Just because you've got a mouth, you go and say something that cocky."
The circles fired and swept the surroundings. This place, done up like somewhere you could enjoy a quiet tea time, was shattered in an instant by the barrage of magic.
The dust of the ruins hung in the air for only a moment. With a sharp snap of its fingers, the shattered fragments reversed as if time itself had rewound.
Absolute ruler—within the dream, at least.
Dominion worthy of the name "dream demon," I supposed. Not that I had any reason to flinch. I'd prepared my own emergency exit, after all. Waking from a dream was well within my means.
"Whoa, whoa. Calm down."
As if nothing had happened at all, it went right back to its tea time.
Bluff.
I sensed the dream-world writhe, but I didn't bother saying so. The fact that it had expended effort to restore this space was proof it meant to talk with me. Otherwise it could simply have thrown me out of the dream. With an attitude like that, I was willing to have a conversation.
If that thing were simply an incubus parasitizing Sung-jun because of the curse, I'd smash it to pieces until it was dead—but I didn't have enough evidence to be sure yet. If its relationship with Sung-jun went so far as sharing even their lives, killing it with my own hands would be the same as killing Sung-jun.
"I never said you had to do it. You can raise the level yourself. The efficiency just drops."
It laughed, low and amused.
"If you want efficient level gains, doing it with me works just fine too."
"A dog's yapping."
Dismissed. Opinions not worth listening to got ignored.
"Fine, whatever. Go find the traps yourself."
The Incubus spoke as if its business were finished, and at the same moment a hole opened where I stood. The hole swallowed me like a swamp.
That bastard… why is he being so cooperative?
As I was swallowed into the hole, I kept turning over a small worry. I still couldn't read that demon's intentions.