The Boy Beneath the Bridge
December 7. Rain.
The sky brooded.
Shaaaa—
It was not only I who would have thought so. December had already worn on for weeks in which a cold sharp enough to flay the skin lived side by side with a clammy, endless drizzle.
People had little wish to step outside. On a day of rain like this, there was nothing to be done out of doors in any case. Beneath that leaden sky, the indigo river cutting through the heart of the city did nothing but add to the damp.
I had no way of escaping it.
Home was the underside of a half-collapsed bridge. To keep the rain off I ought to have stayed tucked meekly beneath it, but then the river rose, and a vicious humidity came creeping in. Today was worse than usual. Water was climbing the banks, and at times like these even the space under the bridge was no safe ground.
"Damn it."
I had to get clear. Between letting the drizzle soak my shoulders and being swept away by the current, there was no question which to choose.
I dug through the tin where I kept my odds and ends. Nothing so fine as an umbrella waited inside. I owned a single ragged coat and nothing more; an umbrella had never been among my possessions. What I did have was smaller, and heavier.
My treasure, picked up on the road while I was fleeing. A small, thick book.
Words were printed across the cover.
A book of magic. Clutching to my chest that fragile thing—so easily soaked, so easily ruined—I left the shadow of the bridge, hopping from rock to rock up the slope.
The rain came down.
I may as well say it now. I dislike a dim sky, but I do not much dislike the rain.
The cover of the book was glowing. It had drawn mana out of the rain and the damp, and the irony of that was not lost on me. Days when other people slumped about with nothing to do were, for me, a precious chance to use magic as freely as I pleased. Sunlight never yielded anything like this return.
Before the drops could wet the pages, I hurried through the word that would wake it.
"Disc."
⟨ Disc ⟩
My mouth shaped the spell. In my head, I pictured what it had to become.
Rise into the air. Turn aside every drop of rain. A blue disc.
Wooooong—
The image locked into place. The moment I passed that vivid intent along, the book answered.
Plip. A blue droplet formed above my open palm. The instant I lifted it overhead, it began, slowly, to turn. The bead of water flattened by degrees until it was a disc. At first it was no larger than my palm, but it drank the falling rain and swelled, and kept on swelling.
At last Disc had grown broad enough to pass for an umbrella. My shoulders were dry.
"All right."
An umbrella made of water. It was the spell I had cast more than any other, and so the one I trusted most. I ran along the riverbank without the least fear of losing my hold on it, tipping the disc to meet the wind whenever the wind shifted. Tomorrow I would have to go out and beg. I left that for later, and for a little while I played, with everything I had, at being one of those mages I had only ever heard of in rumors.
A rainy street is empty of people. Puddles and the broken faces of walls lay strewn in no order at all, and now and then a gust lifted the Federation's flag, soaked through to the cloth. On an ordinary day, that would have been all.
Today it was not.
In a certain alley, an old man who had folded his umbrella for a moment and was shaking the droplets from the hem of his coat beneath the eaves looked up at the hammer of running feet.
A grimy boy with gray hair, a magic book clutched to his chest, was tearing through the rain.
And there was magic.
The old man's eyes flew wide. His gaze met the boy's. An oh, hell crossed the boy's face, and he shot away down the alley. The old man remained exactly where he was, marveling.
It was not because someone was working magic in a nation of war criminals, where magic was forbidden. Nor because the boy carried a grimoire with his own name lettered on the cover. His astonishment had a far plainer cause.
The boy's command of Type 1 Magic—of Disc—surpassed his own.
Immeasurably.
"…Hoh."
He wanted that boy.
The greatest scholar of theoretical magic. Chaired professor of the Federal Magic University. And a madman who, a mere two months after his appointment, had been exiled to a foreign land for smashing the sitting chancellor's statue to splinters, on the grounds that it had been raised beside the father of magical scholarship.
The world had a name for him: the Genius Collector. Quietly, Benjamin Oslo's eyes began to shine.