The Diehard
The proposition that true darkness falls once the sun slips beyond the horizon—a truth as natural as the order of things—had, in the Federation at least, ceased to be true more than a decade ago.
It was around the time the titles of those who studied magic were gradually changing, from conjurer and mage to magic scholar. Asked by the bureaucrats what possible use the experiment could have, one such scholar had answered that someday their honors would be able to levy a tax upon it. That prophecy had come to pass.
Mana lamps were laid across the Federation. Stars risen out of the earth blanketed the ground in a gentle warmth of color, and people were at last able to bid farewell to darkness, that age-old companion of love and loathing. In the Federation now, darkness was little more than a relic of the past.
And so, when that relic returned in the shaft in the instant after the collapse, Damon was seized by panic.
"Goddamn it!"
Bang!
Forgetting even the danger of a further collapse, he drove his fist into the floor with every ounce of rage he had.
He could see nothing. All there was to see was the terror that this side, too, might come down at any moment, and the unease of a vision gone pitch-black. The perils of a shaft collapse, which he had heard of often enough, only pressed Damon's anxiety harder.
"Damn it. We're supposed to last days in here? No food, no water, and the air could give out any minute?"
Might as well have told them to die. That was how Damon took it.
Then it struck him that he had been muttering all this while and gotten no reaction at all from beside him. He shouted toward some point in the void, a void stitched through with dark.
"Hey. Ash-head. You dead? Say something!"
The voice, thick with anger, rang out to no purpose. The cavern, sealed perfectly shut by the collapse, threw it back all the louder. The echo sounded, and sounded again.
But no answer came.
"......!"
Left alone?
In this darkness?
The anxiety that surged in that instant finally crossed the limit of what Damon could bear.
"Hey. Ash-head. Wh-where are you."
With a trembling hand he raked wildly over the floor around him. A shaft might run deep, but it was never all that wide. If the other had only fainted, his body ought to turn up somewhere close by. At the very least, there ought to be a corpse.
And yet.
"......Nothing. Hey, ash-head!"
His fingertips met only cold, damp rock. Nowhere in the area was there anything that might have been Eugene's body. Damon was very nearly out of his mind.
"Ash-heaaaaad!!!"
That was when it came.
"Ash-head, ash-head—you're loud as hell. I'm trying to concentrate, so keep it down."
The voice he had been waiting for came not from the left or the right or from behind, but from somewhere up ahead.
"Y-you're alive!"
"Thanks to you flinging me back there. I'm looking over the blocked shaft right now, but... there's no light. This is killing me."
Light was Type 2 Magic. Tch. I should have found some way to learn Type 2 Magic too. Muttering something of that sort, Eugene suddenly seemed to hit on a good idea and began to rustle about. Was he undoing that unidentified sack he had kept tied at his waist all this time?
Damon was still guessing from the sound alone when the other called to him.
"Damon."
"Wh-what."
"Come over here."
He did as he was told. The strength had gone out of his legs, and even getting to his feet was a trial—but keeping a living warmth beside him was far better than facing the cold of that pitch-black emptiness alone.
"What are you doing?"
"Don't go telling anyone what you're about to see. Not the foreman. Not anyone."
With that, Eugene opened something. Damon could tell what the motion was only because light leaked from whatever had been spread open.
"A glowing book...? No way. Is that—a grimoire?"
"It's only the letters that glow, so it isn't very bright. Even this goes out the moment the mana runs dry, so we have to hurry."
"Hurry with what?"
"What do you mean, hurry with what?"
Faint blue light spread like mist, and Eugene tilted his head as if the answer were obvious.
"Getting out. Obviously."
Accidents in a coal mine came in many kinds, from a simple fall of rock to a catastrophe in which the ground itself gave way. This one, it seemed, had lain infinitely closer to the former.
"Only that one stretch had weak ground, and there weren't enough supports, so it came down. I don't think there's much risk of another collapse."
"Agreed."
Eugene and Damon were of one mind. For a collapse, the supporting structure was remarkably stable. Reopening the shaft would go quickly, with little fear of a second cave-in. It was absurd to use such a word of an accident, but if one had to put it some way, heaven's own luck had been with them.
The tension leaving him, Damon dropped heavily to the floor.
"Haaaaah......"
"What are you doing?"
"What does it look like. Now that we know it's safe, we sit quiet and wait to be rescued."
There was no food, and no water. If their luck turned bad, they might have to stay in here for days. Damon meant to husband every scrap of strength until rescue came.
"If we burn ourselves out and die before anyone gets here, the whole thing comes to nothing, doesn't it?"
"......"
Damon fixed him with a steady glare that meant so don't fight it—sit down and rest.
But Eugene shook his head.
"If you're going to rest, go rest back there."
"What?"
"I'm going to swing a pick for a bit."
A moment later Eugene came back with a pickaxe, set the grimoire down in a corner, and truly began to swing.
Clang— clang— clang—
Rock crumbled, and a way began to open. Very slowly. Very, very slowly.
"Hey. Ash-head. You'll die if you keep that up!"
"A man doesn't die from walking around hungry for three days."
"......You're insane."
"I'll take that as a compliment."
Clang— clang— clang—
Damon watched that back without end, his mouth hanging open. Look at him from any angle and he was no flawless superman. Once every three swings he nearly lost his grip on the pick, and his form had gone thoroughly to pieces. Those hands were surely as covered in wounds and weeping sores as his own.
Damon thought it. That body was in no better shape than his own. And yet, while he himself sat slumped and resting, the other had set his teeth, gotten to his feet, and was swinging a pick.
"......Damn it!"
Unable to watch any longer, Damon shoved himself up.
"Move!"
"What?"
"Division of labor. Division of labor. You take the left. I'll dig the right."
"You could pace yourself."
"None of your business."
The sound of the picks doubled. Forcing himself to ignore the fathomless fatigue and the pain climbing through his grip, Damon opened his mouth.
"Ash-head. What the hell—hah—made you like this?"
Eugene answered.
"I'm sick of sitting down, that's what!"
Clang— clang— clang—
The picking the two of them had begun from the inside did not end in nothing. They were pulled free a day and a half after they had been cut off. Had the blocked shaft not been dug from both directions, the want of air and water would have put their lives in peril.
Shaft No. 7 resumed work only after a thorough round of safety repairs. The rest of the time slipped by.
Clear.
"You're really leaving?"
Beside the hut near the shaft, the first words the foreman let out—looking at me with my things already packed—were a plea.
"Can't you stay on a little longer before you go? I'll pay you handsomely. Even the old hands in our shaft won't have a word of complaint, if it's you."
"That's tempting. But I'm sorry."
I shook my head.
"There's somewhere I have to be."
The time had come. A month had already passed since I began spending my days in the coal mines of Leslie. By now I had saved a considerable sum—enough for a train ticket, of course, and enough besides to rent a room in Fraussen for a couple of months.
The work was familiar now, and staying longer to build a nest egg, as the foreman said, would not have been a bad thing. In exchange, the day I arrived in Fraussen would be pushed back by just that much. I couldn't let the means overtake the purpose.
"Well then. I've been greatly in your debt."
"Wait!"
Just as I turned my back to leave, a familiar voice reached me. A voice I had grown used to, hearing it beside me for a month and more.
"Damon."
"You picked your shaft however you pleased, and now you're leaving the same way. What if you'd just bolted without a word?"
"Hahaha."
"Look at you, laughing."
He must have come hurrying out of the shaft; his clothes, the soot, his whole body were a wreck. Even like that, Damon grinned and looked at me.
My eyes went wide. The next moment I smiled softly and waved.
"You take care."
And so I left Leslie, the city of coal mines.
To go from Leslie Station, still within Oslovia, into Fraussen territory, one had to pass through several stations along the way. Fortunately, I had fare enough.
My funds were far more ample than when I had first stepped off at Leslie Station, though it grated that my appearance had grown thoroughly filthy. That, however, was a problem time would solve.
In Fraussen, one of the Federation's three core nations, there was a city that bore the same name as the nation itself.
Fraussen. The fountainhead of magic.
My final destination.
I boarded the last train, and once we had passed a few more ridges, the view beyond the window began to show not nature but an advanced civilization. A cityscape so broad and elegant that to set it beside the port city of Oris would have been almost unfair. Off to one side, a district had been laid out where solemn buildings that spoke of a long history clustered together with handsome facilities.
I was seeing it with my own eyes for the first time, but the name came to me at once.
"Fraussen Federal Magic University."
The front line of research in the scholarship of magic.
I clenched both fists tight.
At last I was setting both feet upon the very ground that had been the backdrop of the dream I used to dream beneath a bridge.