Night Work on the City Barrier
“Boss?”
“Hm? Ah—three magic stones.”
“Yes, ma’am. Here you go.”
I dug into the backpack slung over my shoulders, pulled out the stones, and handed them to Presia. She took them without looking up and set about swapping them into the sockets set at intervals along the outer wall, patching the barrier as she went.
“Didn’t you already repair the Academy’s outer wall barrier last time?”
“I did, didn’t I? Two more stones.”
“One moment. Yes—here they are. But why are you the one doing the restoration again, Boss?”
A few nights earlier, Presia had dragged me along the Academy’s encircling walls in the dead of night and restored the barrier from end to end. Now the two of us were repeating the exact same work—only this time for the city itself.
“Ah… the higher-ups dumped it on me.”
…Classic magic academia. Corrupt old fossils, every last one of them. Aura might slow the body’s aging, but physical types—knights and the like—still felt the years in the end, and never kindly. As a knight grew older, the influence they could wield tended to shrink with them. Reputation and skill only carried so far once the body itself began to fail. Act too proud, thrash around without knowing when to bow out, and some junior with blood in his eyes would simply put a blade through you and call it justice.
If you didn’t want that fate, you either learned to behave, became a political animal of expert caliber, or reached the realm of Sword Master. Become a Sword Master and physical decline all but vanished; if you were already advanced in years, the body was even said to reverse toward its prime. A clean solution, if you could manage it.
The magic world, though, was a different story.
Most magic only grew more refined and profound with the passage of time. It was a discipline of knowledge, barely touched by the flesh, and the years were firmly on a mage’s side. Fresh flashes of inspiration might dull a little with age, but by then a mage had usually already established their own signature spells.
When did a mage ever truly collapse under the weight of time? Dementia, maybe. Short of that, I couldn’t think of much.
Which meant the upper ranks of magical academia were a long-running banquet of entrenched old men who had occupied their seats for decades.
Even so, exceptions existed. The girl standing right in front of me was one of them. Knowledge might deepen with the years, but no amount of accumulated experience could outmatch a single true genius.
Geniuses could not be measured by ordinary standards. They were geniuses precisely because they accomplished what people like the rest of us could never even imagine.
At sixteen, Presia had become the master of an entire school of magic. That was why the Emperor himself had granted her a surname, and why she held a professorship at the Academy.
In the end, though, even she was still only a child in the eyes of those aging mages. Talent and ability counted for something, but the other professors were not people she could simply ignore—and unlike knights, they did not grow weaker with time. So she had been quietly pushed aside by seniority alone.
To escape that absurdity, she would need magic that far surpassed theirs.
With the talent that had already made her a professor so young, ten years ought to be enough. When that day came, the continent’s magical academia would almost certainly revolve around her.
“Well, nothing we can do about it, then. If we can get through about a quarter of it by tonight, that would be ideal.”
The Academy’s barrier had been finished in a single night, but the city was vastly larger. I had classes in the morning; pulling an all-nighter every night was not an option. We would have to split the work across several days.
Presia herself was a nocturnal creature—an owl of a human being—and could have worked alone until dawn without trouble. As her employee, though, leaving the boss to handle it solo felt wrong. And more than that, she was still a sixteen-year-old girl. I could not simply leave a girl that small wandering the streets alone after dark.
“Mm. Shall we keep going, then?”
Satisfied that the section we stood on was finished, Presia started walking at an unhurried pace. I fell in behind her.
“Hahaha! Hey, barkeep! Another round over here!”
“Urrrgh… I can’t drink any more…”
Night did not mean every shop locked its doors and called it a day. If anything, the taverns only truly came alive after dark. Walking through the city at this hour, I saw sights I never encountered on ordinary outings.
Blazing lights that turned the streets bright as day. People spilling out onto outdoor tables for drinks now that the weather was starting to warm. Drunks clinging to lampposts and trying to remember what they had eaten for dinner. A man relieving himself against a wall in full public view…
“You absolute lunatic!”
I bolted forward, cracked the back of the man’s head with an open palm, and casually flung him aside. What was a guy with a dick that small so proud of that he had to whip it out in the middle of the street?
I glanced back at Presia. Fortunately she was still checking the barrier’s condition and seemed not to have noticed.
If I had been a second slower, she might have walked straight into a full view of that drunk’s equipment while following the wall. I was not about to let anything soil her still-young eyes.
Honestly, though—this place was a complete circus of drunken dogs. It was hard to believe these were the same streets I usually walked with my friends.
“Hey there, missy. Out late with your little sister, are we?”
Some mongrel decided to open his mouth.
“Mister. If you’re drunk, go home and sleep it off.”
I ignored him and started back toward Presia. But then—
“C’mon, dressed like that and prowling in front of the bars? You’re lookin’ for it, right? How much? Name your price.”
He was thoroughly plastered—so far gone he failed to recognize the Academy uniform and kept needling me anyway.
I wanted nothing more than to finish tonight’s quota and get to bed as soon as possible, so I brushed him off and turned back toward Presia.
Fwoosh.
?
Something tugged at my clothes. I looked down to find the same man gripping the hem of my skirt and lifting it.
Wheeet! Wheeet!
The bastards at the outdoor tables were watching and actually whistling.
Only then did the full shape of the situation hit me. More than two months had passed since the TS magic, and I had been doing my best to remember I was a girl—but nothing like this ever happened at the Academy. The proper reaction should have been shame at having my underwear exposed. Instead I simply stared at the lunatic with the eyes of someone looking at a madman, and the feminine response arrived a full beat late.
Belatedly, I gave the skirt-lifting bastard a light kick, dropped the hem, and straightened my clothes.
“What happened?”
“Nothing, Boss. Nothing at all. Please don’t worry about it.”
“Really? Then two more magic stones.”
We still had the rest of the tavern district to cross. By the time we finished, I had dealt with three more public urinators, four more harassers, two more would-be skirt-lifters in the same vein as the first madman, and one who actually tried to put his hands on me. Only after I had suitably educated every last one of them were we able to complete the night’s work.
“Here’s today’s pay, then. Looks like this will take a few more days, so I added a bit extra on top of the night differential.”
The moment we returned to the laboratory, Presia handed over the evening’s wages on the spot. True to her word, the pouch she pressed into my hand was impressively heavy.
This was exactly why I could never leave my boss. What other employer looked after their staff this well?
“Come wake me at ten again tomorrow, same as today.”
“Yes, ma’am! I’ll be heading in, then!”
I bowed, stepped out of the lab, and opened the pouch right there to check the contents.
It was substantial. Judging by today’s progress, finishing the entire job would take another four or five days beyond tonight. That meant my final pay would be four or five times this amount.
I was not joking—at this rate, this month’s extra wages would exceed my regular salary. I returned to my room in high spirits, happily imagining what I might do with the money.
City barrier restoration, day two. Dormitory roll call was over, and ten o’clock was drawing near. I stood in front of my wardrobe, stuck in indecision.
The Academy’s girls’ uniform was, as a rule, a skirt. Spring, summer, autumn, winter—the fabric grew thicker or thinner with the seasons, and jackets came and went, but the lower half remained a skirt by default.
Working under the Boss had finally given me a little financial breathing room, but until recently I had been forced into a strictly frugal life. As a result, my wardrobe held almost nothing in the way of civilian clothes for going out—aside from a few undershirts meant to be layered, I might as well have said I owned none at all.
On any ordinary day I would simply have worn the uniform into the city. This was an Academy town; plenty of students wandered around in uniform even on weekends, and I was usually one of them.
After last night, though, the idea of walking the streets after dark in a uniform—specifically in a skirt—no longer seemed like a wise choice. Even if I did go out in the uniform skirt, and even if more pests tried to get handsy the way they had yesterday, I could always crack them across the back of the head or force a kiss onto the top of their foot. That part was not the problem.
The problem was that, in the middle of handling them, I might end up showing Presia something she should never have to see. Better, then, to keep exposure to a minimum from the start and stop trouble before it tangled itself into a knot.
So I dug through the few clothes I owned, searching for whatever would cover the most of me—and among them, I finally found something that would do.