Entrance Ceremony (4)
Entrance Ceremony (4)
"...What a shit show."
When I reached the east gate, one of the entrances into the academy, the situation was far worse than I had imagined.
The magic beasts had been transmuted out of the ground, which left the roads torn up all over the place. The repair work looked like it would take nearly a week.
That wasn't what mattered right then. Under Rote's protection, I ran from the east gate to the open-air theater. I was out of breath, but I had no time to care.
Fuck, my tuition money.
My beautiful plan to spend the first day camped out in the library reading room had gone off the rails. At this rate, the plan to check out the academic clubs was going to get pushed back even further.
The moment I calculated how much time I'd lost, my first thought was that I needed to land one solid hit on whoever caused this mess. I forced down the fury bubbling up inside my head and focused on what Rote was saying.
"Horde told me to bring you, no matter what."
"Horde? Who's that?"
"Vermel Horde. The elf male student who ranked first on the entrance exam."
Was it that guy I locked eyes with for a second in the written exam hall...?
Our conversation ended there. Not long after, we reached the central fountain.
Looking around in every direction from the middle of the campus, I could tell where the worst damage was. The area with the most magic-beast activity was probably the north side, where the open-air theater stood.
In the central plaza with the fountain, Professor Herlein was gathering and protecting the students.
Armored Saurians came charging in from all sides. Since the beasts were mid-grade to high-grade at best, they were at a level that Professor Herlein could beat down with her golems, but the real issue was the number of them and the direction they were coming from.
The bastards kept swarming in from every direction. Still, this was better than holding them off in a corner with no way out.
For a 'courtesy call,' the destruction was severe. What had started as a few dozen steel mountains was growing into hundreds, then thousands, as time passed.
The role of the current faculty, Herlein included, was not 'breaking things' but 'protecting people.' In combat doctrine, the latter is considered harder than the former. If even one out of several hundred students got injured, it would blow up into a major incident.
Not a single mistake could be allowed, and that had to be a heavy burden on Professor Herlein.
Fortunately, she wasn't the only one lightening that load.
"Duck, you idiots!"
The short kid gripping an anti-tank weapon turned three drakes charging in from the rear into corpses in an instant. Amid an explosive roar that seemed to shake heaven and earth, the drakes were blown in half.
"Where'd she get that?"
The question didn't last long. Frey reached toward the split carcasses and used them as a medium to transmute another anti-tank weapon.
Given the way she was transmuting firearms like that, it had to belong to earth magic at least.... Something about it felt alien.
"Professor Herlein!"
The elf male student scanned the central plaza rapidly. Right behind him was a fierce-eyed female student clutching a massive icicle.
[That student appears to be Vermel Horde.]
Vermel's gaze landed on the same target as mine. We each gave the other a brief once-over, then shifted our eyes to the central fountain.
There was no time to lose. If we wanted to stop this situation, we had to speak up right then.
"The fountain is the center of the Construction Array!"
"We have to destroy the fountain now!"
[Huh?]
What's this guy.
**
"You two, is that true?"
"Yes. The core is right here. We need to pump out the water now, while the magic beasts are thinning out, and expose the foundation."
Vermel Horde was indeed the elf male student who had sat next to me during the earlier written exam. I had predicted he would pass, but I never dreamed he would take the top spot.
This elf knew that the core of the Construction Array was located in the fountain.
A Construction Array is hard to pinpoint with detection magic unless its creator tells you where it is. I only knew because the array's builder told me personally, so how did he know?
That bothered me, but given the situation, I decided to let it slide and focus on the original objective.
"The top-rank and second-rank are saying the exact same thing.... All right, then it's worth a shot."
After hearing us out, Professor Herlein brought in her golems and blew the entire fountain away. The foundation sank slightly and water splashed everywhere. Inside the deep hollow, the actual Construction Array revealed itself.
"It really was there!"
The spot where the fountain had been torn out smelled like burning hydrocarbons. The heat gushed out in an instant and made my face flush. That happened because the continuous Construction had overheated it.
[I see. So the core was placed under the fountain on purpose, for cooling.]
Then Vermel made a request.
"You handle this."
I knew what that meant.
There are broadly two ways to dismantle a multi-layered Transmutation Formula like a Construction Array.
The first method was to carefully interpret the formula and dismantle it as if you were defusing a time bomb. The second method was to destroy the circuits from the outside and render the function itself inoperable.
The first method was safe but took a long time. The second method was fast but extremely dangerous. If an unskilled person tried to forcibly dismantle a Construction Array and messed up, it would explode.
However, a Construction Array was still, at the end of the day, just a circuit.
[Only two things are needed to dismantle this Construction Array.]
[□ Foundational Theory]
[Kirchhoff's Circuit Law (Condition Satisfied)]
[Thevenin's Theorem (Condition Satisfied)]
I just needed to simplify the complex circuit into an equivalent circuit and then manipulate the magic current running through it.
[Take the magical power you were about to use earlier.]
I received roughly 100 Sieverts of magical power from the Hardcover Book and gathered it into my staff.
The charging didn't last long. In fact, I felt my operational efficiency had improved so much that the whole process took far less time than when I was fighting Rote.
Over the past month, I hadn't just been working a part-time job. I had spent that time refining my technique. By then, I had reached the level where I could feed a magic-based EMP only in the direction I wanted and only as much as I wanted.
So, unlike before, there would be no mishaps like the kids' mana circuits shutting down or functioning golems suddenly stopping dead.
The elapsed time felt short. In under three seconds, I succeeded in moving all the mana particles to the tip of my staff. Then I drove the end of the staff into the Construction Array the magic beasts had built.
Eightfold Way — First Form.
"Short Circuit."
As I chanted the spell, only one thought went through my head.
I hoped I could get my tuition refunded.
**
After the Construction Array was destroyed, no more beasts spawned.
The situation ended as the faculty swept up the remaining magic beasts. Fortunately, the only casualties were property damage and minor injuries; nothing worse happened.
The incident was over, but the Board of Directors judged that a potential threat might still remain, so we were all sent home on our very first day of classes.
The school said they would pay students disaster relief funds as compensation for the shoddy handling of the matter. I was at least glad the administration wasn't the worst. Still, Tillet was already strapped for cash, yet it had to cough up some of the students' tuition money and even pay to repair the northern sector.
As for the damage compensation from the drakes that invaded Eastern District 5.... Well, they'd figure it out themselves.
In the end, I spent one more night at Professor Herlein's house.
[Today was genuinely eventful. We didn't even set foot in a classroom, so why am I this tired?]
Well, look at that. The book said it was tired.
[But that's not the important part, is it? You learned something new today too, didn't you, Master?]
"Yeah."
That speaker attached to the mutated drake that blocked my path when I tried to go to school this morning. The voice that came through that speaker had the power to stain a person with pure terror.
The aftershock still lingered. I was half-certain that the owner of that voice was an Extinction-class magic beast.
While talking to me, the magic beast had continued speaking with the nuance that this entire situation was a joke. It even described the whole of today's events as "stopping by to say hello."
Put simply, it was a roundabout threat that said, "This shit is just the beginning."
—The Empire is already halfway in our hands.
"That line bothers me the most."
The Empire was an absolute monarchy. All power flowed from the emperor and was used for the imperial family and the nobility.
A gap in the status system called Tillet Academy did exist, but that was nothing more than a prop to shore up the bizarrely functioning political structure within and outside this country.
If the magic beast's words were true, then the Empire was currently a house of cards.
[There's also this possibility. Maybe a magic beast has actually infiltrated the imperial household or the emperor's inner circle.]
"Is that even possible?"
[There are humanoid types among the magic beasts. Those are usually Calamity-class or higher, and their mimicry skills are no joke. They're the type to do whatever it takes to build an alibi just to slip into human society.]
I'd only ever seen the mindless ones running around, so I hadn't known. The moment I met a magic beast capable of conversation, they didn't strike me as an enemy we could easily beat. They were way smarter than I imagined.
I couldn't just view them as machines. It was much better to think of them as futuristic monstrosities equipped with state-of-the-art artificial intelligence.
The problem was... thinking that way made my head hurt.
The difficulty setting on my life really was Hell Mode. At this rate, could I even get back to my original world before I died?
[The most urgent priority is finding a way to repel the Extinction-class. Even if the active mages somehow manage to bring down the Calamity-class beasts, we currently have zero means of response if those things show up.]
If the claim that they were toying with the Empire wasn't bluster, then it meant that the Extinction-class magic beasts were fully capable of wiping out humanity at any time but were slacking off for some other purpose.
That was the true horror. Fear of the unknown. It meant that somewhere out there, an enemy that no amount of magical engineering could currently repel was sitting back with its legs crossed, looking down on us.
[I finally get why Professor Haspelt was so obsessed with developing Flare. Though that still doesn't justify what that bitch did to you, Master.]
If I wanted to live, if I wanted to survive and return, I needed one method to prepare against the Extinction-class.
When I mobilized every scrap of knowledge I had, only one method came to mind right away.
"Hey, you said the writing function is supported starting from the Intermediate guidebook, right?"
[Yes. You can develop whatever magic you want. I'll pull up a holographic keyboard, so jot down anything you have in mind.]
A semi-transparent virtual interface appeared before my eyes. I never dreamed I'd see something like this in a fantasy world, but it didn't surprise me now. This had to be another one of the Goddess's authorities.
[* Switching to Administrator Mode.]
[Booting.......]
[TOOL : Developing a new Unique Magic Art in the current development environment.]
[Writing Foundational Theory]
I typed the first paragraph into the development environment below.
[□ Foundational Theory : Mass-Energy Equivalence Principle]
[The total energy E of matter is equal to the product of the Lorentz factor γ, mass m, and the speed of light c squared. Energy can be converted into mass, mass into energy, and during a physical process, energy is generated equal to the mass deficit.]
[TIP : This principle plays a core role in the development of nuclear weapons.]
I would attempt a research-and-development project to extend this theory into the 'Maso-Energy Exchange Theorem.'
An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.
Extinction must be met with extinction.