It Was a Romance Fantasy?
What is it that really matters in a person's life?
Money, love, honor — all of them are necessary, of course. But if I had to pick just one, I would say it's a dream. Imagining the future, working toward something you want to achieve: that's how you feel alive.
That's just my personal opinion, though.
So what was my dream, then?
I want to become a magician.
It was a thought I had carried in a corner of my heart from some point onward. But people cannot become magicians. That's just how it is. Reality is not a fantasy novel.
So I made my peace with the real world early on. Instead, I consumed every work that featured magic — fantasy novels, comics, anything at all. I didn't discriminate. I can say with confidence that I didn't miss a single one. Because for as long as I was reading them, I could dream of becoming a magician too.
Maybe the heavens took pity on that tearful persistence of mine. One day I opened my eyes, and I had been reborn in the fantasy world I had longed for so desperately.
Of course, the beginning wasn't exactly auspicious. No — to be honest, it was the worst possible start. My starting point was the youngest son of a dirt-poor peasant family. And as if that weren't enough, a brutal famine struck. My starving parents eventually sold me off as a slave at the age of ten, just to have one less mouth to feed.
And so, in a situation where I didn't know if I'd be sold and killed tomorrow — never mind learning magic — a stroke of incredible luck found me. A magician from a magic tower, who had come to the slave market looking for a test subject, took an interest in me.
The magician looked me over from every angle, then asked, as if genuinely intrigued:
"Hmm. The name Evan... doesn't sound like a noble's bastard, though..."
The magician in front of me clutched her head with an expression that was anything but magician-like, pondering. Then, as if a brilliant idea had just struck her, she smiled with childlike innocence and tossed me a question.
"I've got it!"
"What do you think a magician is?"
"A being who uses an energy called mana to manipulate supernatural phenomena — mysteries, more precisely — and who, at the end of that path, can even change the world itself... that's what I think."
Hearing my answer, the magician clutched her stomach and burst out laughing, as if she couldn't believe it. It wasn't as if I didn't know that answering like that in front of a complete stranger would get me a what the hell is this kid on about look. But it was the first time anyone had ever asked me about something I had always thought about, and I was too happy to help myself.
"Sure, sure. Magicians are beings who take what's unreasonable about themselves and rewrite it into something reasonable. But they can't change the world."
"Really?"
That was a rather sad thing to hear. This was someone wearing an obviously expensive robe and a pointed hat. She looked like a fairly high-ranking magician, and just as I was wilting from being contradicted by someone like that—
"By my standards, of course. A magician stronger than me might be able to, who knows?"
There was playfulness in her voice, but the eyes visible beneath the pointed hat were strangely deep and unyielding. The magician crouched down to meet my eye level.
"Kid."
A ten-year-old slave, covered in filthy dirt and grime, reeking of stench. She looked at that wretched sight and didn't seem to mind in the slightest, the corners of her mouth curling into a grin.
My heart dropped to the floor with a thud, then started pounding like mad. In that instant, the noisy clamor of the slave market fell silent, as if it had never existed. Every sound in the world vanished, and only that one word echoed in my ears.
Magic.
The thing I had longed for so desperately since my previous life. The dream I had been forced to bury deep in my heart because the wall called reality had made it forever unreachable. And the person who could make it come true was standing right in front of me, holding out her hand.
My head was already nodding up and down like crazy, purely on instinct.
"That's it. That's the way. Those eyes of yours — I like them a whole lot. From today on, you're my disciple."
Clang—!
The magician flicked her fingers lightly. The cheap iron collar and shackles that had bound me crumbled into dust in a burst of dazzling blue light.
And so my second life took its first step toward becoming a real magician, right in the middle of that sewer of a slave market.
Five years since the magician had picked me up.
In all the time I had been alive, I had had one piece of good news and one piece of bad. The good news was that the magician who had taken me in — my Master — was one of the most renowned magicians in this world. The kind of person people recognized just from seeing her face, just from watching her walk down the street.
And the bad news?
...You're supposed to be a magician.
The problem was that my Master was someone people called a witch more often than a magician. She had no interest in exploring magic, posing questions about it, or solving its difficult problems. She was more interested in flattening any place that rubbed her the wrong way, and her tastes leaned heavily toward black magic.
The silver lining was that she wasn't a villain. She wouldn't harm innocents unless someone picked a fight with her first. Of course, that didn't mean my survival was guaranteed.
KRA-KOOM—!!
No sooner had the thought crossed my mind than a massive explosion erupted from the top floor of the tower, shaking the entire building. A fine white dust sifted down from the ceiling and settled in a soft layer over the parchment I had been so carefully taking notes on.
Haa. Here we go again.
I shook the parchment off with the ease of long practice and stood up from my seat. To survive as Master's only disciple, you needed sharp instincts and faster reflexes more than you needed any gift for sensing mana.
"Disciple! My adorable little disciple!!"
A clatter of footsteps came thundering down the stairs, and the firmly shut laboratory door slammed open hard enough to break. Master stood there in a soot-stained robe, looking as sunny as a summer morning. In one hand she held a flask of unidentifiable contents, ominous purple smoke bubbling merrily from its mouth.
"Master. What is it this time?"
Master's eyes sparkled as she thrust the flask right under my nose.
"Quit complaining and just drink it! I made something truly incredible this time! If you drink this, that pathetic mana vessel of yours will double in size!"
The reason Master kept making things like this was, in fact, because of me. I had one fatal shortcoming as a magician. In Master's words:
The Heart that builds the framework of magic is decent enough.
Meaning the formulas and structures I drew in my mind were perfect. The problem was the fuel needed to pull them into reality — my mana capacity was so wretched it defied all hope.
"I said quit complaining and drink it! I stayed up all night brewing this concentrate out of sheer affection for my disciple!"
I politely pushed away the hand she was waving in my face as she bounced on her feet.
"I'll gratefully accept the thought, Master. The color alone looks like it'd cut my lifespan in half."
I appreciated the effort. I just had no desire to drink an unidentified poison. Based on previous experience, the odds were extremely high that it would taste vile and be good for nothing except my health.
"My disciple is clearly a genius, so why is his mana capacity like this..."
When I ultimately refused to drink the reagent, Master slumped over the side of the desk in a full-body sulk.
"Is having a little less mana really such a big deal?"
More than anything, I had no particular complaints about my current state. It's not as if I can't use magic at all. The basic spells were perfectly usable even with my current paltry supply of mana. And whenever I established a theory, Master would handle the practical tests that required enormous amounts of mana anyway. It was a life in which I could touch and research real magic every single day — the very thing I had wanted so badly in my previous life.
"Think I could get a Dragon Heart on the black market? Just one of those and I could expand that mana vessel in no time."
"Can a human even kill a dragon in the first place?"
"Hmm... if it were me after some serious training, maybe I could've managed it."
So what if I was born with a small mana vessel? As long as I could use magic, that was enough. I'd drink to that. With a mindset like that, I figured there was no happier life than this.
Ten years was all it took for that thought to shatter.
Ten more years had passed.
No one called Master the Black Witch anymore. These days, more people called her the savior of the Black Tower, or the Empire's genius magician.
Wasn't that a good thing?
Does it even mean anything?
No matter how many fine titles they bestowed, no matter how much gold and treasure they heaped on, the dead did not come back. And a magician was a paltry thing that could neither raise the dead, nor save the world, nor change it.
And so, wandering the battlefield half out of my mind with hollowness and loss, I happened one day to save a woman who was dying, covered in blood. "Saved" is a strange way to put it — all I did was treat someone who had been holding off a vast army alone as she bled out. But this stubborn woman, having kept her life, immediately started raising hell about becoming my assistant.
"Please let me work at your side, Magician! I'll help with anything!"
"A knight as my assistant? You're a nuisance. Get lost."
I hurled every cutting remark I had and threw her out without mercy. But the woman didn't give up. Instead, knight or not, she stubbornly stood guard in front of my laboratory — and at the end of it, she glanced at my research out of the corner of her eye and wove mana into form right then and there.
Insane... she did that after seeing it once?
From her sense for handling mana to the speed at which she constructed mental images, her magical talent was so absurd it was a waste for her to be a knight — a truly freakish kind of genius. I wondered if this was how Master had felt, all those years ago, when she picked me up at the slave market.
And so, after taking on a former knight with that malformed, monstrous talent as my assistant, I pulled out the old parchments that had been gathering dust ever since Master died. As if matching the rhythm Master and I had once shared, we threw ourselves into the work like madmen, pulling countless all-nighters — until at last.
A low, resonant hum filled the air. The enormous magic circle packed across every inch of the laboratory began to pulse with golden light.
But completing a miracle did not mean every problem was solved on the spot.
KRA-KOOM—!
The sky over the Imperial Capital was already stained a burning blood-red, and the dying cries of the capital garrison carried on the wind. We had deliberately abandoned the magic tower and come all the way to the capital to continue the research, and now this place didn't have much time left either.
"Magician! The enemy is already here!"
My assistant shouted urgently as she checked the window. I clenched my teeth, watching the hourglass in midair as it slowly began to turn.
"It needs at least five minutes to activate."
The words had barely left my mouth before my assistant drew her sword from her hip without a shred of hesitation.
"I'll buy you the time."
"Are you insane? I'd rather go myself."
"You saved my life once, Magician, so how about we call this even?"
I stood still and watched her back as she tossed out a pointless joke even in a situation like this. Thinking about it, maybe it was because I had lived buried in research ever since Master died. I had never properly looked at anyone else — my assistant included. Only then did the figure standing in front of me come into focus for the first time.
Cherry-blossom pink hair streaming over armor stained with dust and blood. And beneath it, clear emerald eyes shining with resolve.
...Huh?
A strangely, fiercely familiar sense of déjà vu slid cold down the back of my neck.
"You... what was your name again?"
At my sudden question, my assistant adjusted her grip on the sword and turned her head slightly. Then she answered with a faint smile.
"It's Cecile. This is the end, so how about calling me by my name instead of 'assistant'?"
Cecile.
In that instant, I heard a snap as one of the threads of reason in my head simply broke. Pink hair. Green eyes. And the name Cecile. On top of that, a broken character with absurd talent in both swordsmanship and magic, despite being a knight. The contents of a certain novel I had forced myself to finish in my previous life — the setting had been interesting enough to drag me through to the end — tore through my mind like a storm.
A romance fantasy that put a little more weight on the fantasy than the romance, and that had turned into a dark fantasy the further the story went.
...Ah. So we'd been inside a romance fantasy this whole time?
While I stood there with my mouth hanging open at the absurd truth, Cecile, who had been striding toward certain death, suddenly turned her head. For someone walking into enemy lines, her smile was far too bright and playful.
"Um, Magician. If we really do make it back to the past..."
CRASH—! BOOM—!
Even with the horrific sounds coming from beyond the door, she went on without the slightest tremor in her voice.
"What?"
"If you think about it, there isn't even that much of an age gap between us, right?"
Without waiting for my answer, Cecile kicked through the door that was about to shatter and charged out into the enemy-infested dark without a shred of hesitation. But there wasn't even time to grieve or despair.
One minute left.
My second savior, the one who had rescued me — and the true protagonist of this wretched romance-fantasy world. At the end of the time she bought with her own life, a ringing that erased every sound in the world rose up, and an overwhelming flood of golden mana swallowed my entire body.
"My disciple is clearly a genius, so why is his mana capacity like this..."
The witch sprawled out in front of me, grumbling. The moment I saw Master, I could finally let out a sigh of relief.