A Small Action Starts a Snowball Effect
A Small Action Starts a Snowball Effect
I had momentarily forgotten that even food has its proper pairings.
"Gwaaeugh......."
It was obvious in hindsight. Every thing has its match. You drink cola with pizza or fried chicken, not dumped into rice like some kind of broth.
The combination of chocolate and mint was absolutely the worst. Enjoyable enough on their own, but putting them in your mouth at the same time turned them into a hideous bomb.
With proper processing, maybe it could become a passable food, but...... eaten raw like this, it was the perfect recipe for an upset stomach.
I had been thinking purely in theoretical terms and ended up forgetting everyday common sense entirely. After completing this self-feedback, I wiped the corner of my mouth with my sleeve.
Still, it was the first meal of the day. I could not bring myself to spit it out, so I swallowed it.
"Uuugh......."
In exchange, dry heaves kept crawling up my throat.
At least there had been no one around to see me in this state.
If Professor Haspelt had witnessed this sorry spectacle, she would have laid into me. Listening to that woman's lectures had a way of rousing expletives I did not know I possessed, so the situation would only have escalated.
First, I decided to stop at a nearby stream and wet my throat. After swishing some water around and spitting it out, my mouth felt considerably fresher.
- Return by 5:00 PM.
I had gathered all the Magic Stones, and my stomach had settled. I also had to meet the deadline, so I made up my mind to descend the mountain.
Boom! Boom! Kaboom!
What in the world was that noise?
I moved my feet in the direction the vibrations were coming from.
It was not simply curiosity. The way down the mountain led that way anyway.
Kabooom!
The ground shook. I lowered my center of gravity and steadied my wobbling upper body.
Straight after, I lifted my head to face forward. The culprit that had rent the earth was standing over there.
"Why in the world is an Iron Drake in a place like this?!"
"How should I know?!"
It was an Iron Drake. A dinosaur-type Magic Beast clad in a tough iron-plated carapace.
Its appearance was something out of the Cretaceous, but in this world—perhaps mass extinction had never occurred—they were not hard to find.
Mm, flying-lizard bastard. Its temper was as foul as its looks.
Why had that thing shown up here?
Iron Drakes live in deep forests. They rarely appear on mountain slopes like this.
I looked further ahead. Two terrified female students trembling in front of the steel reptile, one male student behind them readying to flee, and one more male student with red hair chanting a spell at the very front.
I knew they were academy students. What I was trying to confirm was the color of the sash tied over their robes.
Green. They were first-years, still fresh and green.
"I'll buy time, so go get a professor!"
"Lorwell, are you an idiot?! You can't even stall for time on your own!"
The student in the middle was right. Unless he had done some advanced study beforehand, the magic taught to a first-year would not let him put a scratch on a Drake. Hurling a few fireballs at frontal armor thick enough to stop armor-piercing rounds would not even scratch it.
This person called Lorwell, judging by his eye color, was a Fire Magic user. To bring down that Magic Beast with flame magic, he would need to deploy at least a mid-grade technique.......
Huh. Wait. Did I not have something?
I rummaged in my hip bag and pulled out two Scrolls. Both were Scrolls that instant-cast 'Light Arrow'.
Light Arrow was mid-grade flame magic. And this one, in particular, was a custom job with maximum penetration enhancement loaded on. Against a Magic Beast with tough carapace, its destructive force should have rivaled that of high-grade magic.
For now, I did not know why the Iron Drake had come down to the foothills. I knew only one thing: if I left matters as they were, those students would die.
I finished my thinking in a fraction of a second. And, as always, the moment my judgment was reached, I kicked off the ground and rushed forward.
"Bullet!"
The hurtling flame orb struck the Magic Beast's scapula and ricocheted. The male student at the front let out a faint stream of cursing.
Meanwhile, the deflected fireball landed near me. That was fortunate. I fished a Mana Cigarette out of my hip bag and used the ember at the very tip to light it—no need to even flick a lighter.
Tssssk!
Whoooosh, haaah.
This secondhand smoke? It was incense for the soul.
The moment I inhaled the Mana Cigarette deeply, mana circulated inside my body. What a genuinely annoying piece of labor. I unfurled the Light Arrow Scroll and poured mana into the Magic Paper.
It was over in an instant.
Shriek, bang!
"Krwoaaaaaargh!"
A ray of light so fast the eye could not track it tore into the Iron Drake's thigh. Penetrated clean through.
The arrow's exit point was the latissimus dorsi on the opposite side. Whether a machine had a latissimus dorsi I could not say, but it was certain that it had blown through somewhere thereabouts.
Missing its flank, the Drake lost its center of gravity. I did not miss the opening and planted my foot on the thing's back, climbing up.
"......!"
My eyes met the male student's at the front. Introductions could happen later.
More to the point, the last shot had scattered all my mana. Burning more of the Mana Cigarette to recover it would take time, so I decided to toss the remaining Scroll to the male student instead.
"Catch!"
"This is......?"
The distance between the student and the Drake was about one meter. Even with Magic Paper, you could throw it across this short range without trouble.
The male student caught it deftly after I flicked it to him.
"You know how to use it, right?"
"......Yes!"
He seemed to have grasped my meaning, judging by the nod.
Boom!
The Scroll activated at once. The Light Arrow, loosed from head-on, pierced straight through the Iron Drake's chest. The creature's resistance dropped markedly.
This was my chance.
Most reptile- and amphibian-type Magic Beasts had a Magic Stone at the back of the skull. Remove the Magic Stone, and the beast could do nothing.
Same as when I dealt with a Magnet Turtle. I used a staff whenever I took down a Magic Beast. I drew the steel staff secured to my back and extended it to full length.
Whirrrr. The staff freewheeled eight times before impacting the Drake's cervical vertebrae squarely. The further you placed the fulcrum from the striking point, the greater the rotational inertia—basic physics.
"Kr...woah...aaargh......."
That one blow alone must have been enough to cave in the back of its skull.
The outer carapace stripped away, revealing the blackened interior. Petroleum flowed sticky as honey, wires stained black, even bone joints of lead. No matter where you looked, this was no living creature.
I rolled up my sleeve and pulled the Magic Stone out of the cavity. Pieces of hematite and bronzite came out with it. Plop-plop. Something inside tore free with a series of snaps. The eerie light glimmering in the Drake's eyes vanished.
I stepped down from the collapsed Drake corpse, planting my foot on it.
From the moment I landed, my eyes locked with the male student's. I took in the student behind him and the two still-trembling female students in turn, then shifted my gaze back to the red-haired male student.
"Is anybody injured?"
"No, we survived thanks to you."
"All the same, this is strange. Drakes almost never come down to the foothills. Do you know anything?"
At my question, all four students shook their heads.
"We have no idea, either. We just came out for our practical exercise."
"I-it's probably nothing, right? Maybe they're running short on food......."
"I'm more puzzled by you, actually."
At this last, casually informal remark, I turned my head to the side. It was a male student with a large build.
"Gold eyes.... You're from the Gold-Eye Tribe, aren't you? How can one of the Gold-Eye Tribe use magic?"
"Hey. Don't be rude to someone you've just met."
This was a pattern that came up with tiresome regularity when I first spoke with people. Each time, I chose silence. I was not a person of this world, and I felt I had no right to explain my race to anyone else.
Lorwell stopped him, and since I did not volunteer any remark, a bleak silence settled over the group.
I suddenly looked up at the sky. The sun was visibly creeping westward.
The sun's position alone made it hard to determine the exact time. And I did not carry a watch, either. That was a luxury a slave could not afford.
Partly to break the frozen atmosphere, I asked the male student at the head of the group what time it was.
"Right now? Mm...... half past four in the afternoon."
"Ah."
"Why? What's wrong?"
"I'm sorry. I have to go on ahead."
With those words, I took off sprinting down the slope. A voice called "Excuse me!" from behind me, but I had no room to look back.
If I did not get the hell out of here right now, Haspelt would kill me.......
That was the only thought in my head.
**
"Um....... Shouldn't we repay her for helping us...?"
"We'll run into her someday. From the robe, she looked like she's with the academy."
"Though I've never seen a robe like that. Do any of the upperclassmen wear black sashes?"
"Must have. Anyway, let's haul this thing down the mountain. We're going to lose the daylight."
**
- Return by 5:00 PM.
The world had it in for me.
The reason: I got back at 5:01.
"You've gotten comfortable lately, haven't you?"
"No, I haven't."
"Did I not tell you that if you fail to return on time, I would put the collar back on?"
"You did."
She had.
Honestly, this was grossly unfair. I had sprinted back so hard a sweetness rose in my esophagus, and I was late by the barest margin. That a difference so small meant I had to receive punishment in the form of a pre-dawn work assignment made my teeth grind.
Professor Haspelt was someone who enforced punctuality to this degree. She had so little flexibility that being exactly one minute late was enough to set her off.
"The reason I neither bind you with an engraving nor leash you when I let you go outside is because I trust you. Do you not believe you have conducted yourself well for the past three years?"
Wow, there it was. Haspelt's signature trap of a multi-choice question.
I could not answer 'Yes' here. The big data cached in my brain over the past three years had taught me that much.
"No. It remains insufficient compared to the benevolence you have shown me, Professor."
"You know your place. Your results, of course, remain substandard. I will grant you an opportunity to make amends."
Thud. Tens of pages' worth of Magic Paper dropped in front of me. Inscribed in a short hand at the edge of the top sheet were the words 'Chaser Flow'.
It was a magic I had never seen before.
The sheer volume of it was staggering. I accepted the Magic Paper with trembling hands. Except for the first sheet, none of it had been inscribed with a Scroll yet.
"The front page is a specimen. You will use it as a base for your work. I will handle the Light Arrow drafting myself, so you just go and complete this."
This was no ordinary Magic Circle. It was the most complex I had seen to date. Staring at these geometric patterns that seemed to writhe up and down made my head feel as if it were undergoing a phase transition.
"What's the deadline?"
"Are you asking because you don't know? Have it finished by tomorrow morning."
"Excuse me....... And what about sleep?"
"While you are in the dormitory, you can rest and work at your own discretion. You only have to finish this. Ah, and you said you took down an Iron Drake a short while ago, did you not? Use that when you write this."
"Ah, yes......."
"If you have nothing else to say, you may leave for today. Next time you need to go out, be back on time."
Professor Haspelt had issued a dismissal. The money she gave me as a meal allowance amounted to two donghwa in total.
God, the crap daily pay was exactly the same here as it had been there. Some things really did not need to resemble each other.
All two donghwa could buy was a single loaf of rye bread. If the tavern keeper was generous, they might throw in soup as service, but right now even the time to find such a kindly establishment felt too precious.
In the end, gnawing on one dry chunk of bread was the sum total of today's meal. By the time I passed the academy research building and headed toward the Stable, my stomach was completely hollow.
I grabbed the old door handle and entered the pigsty. It was a place where a person lived, but a place where a person could not live.
After setting down my bag and other odds and ends, I exhaled every last bit of the air trapped in my lungs.
"Heuh, heu-heuh."
It was not because I was miserable. If it were, I would have cussed until the Stable blew apart.
[Top-Grade Fire Magic — Chaser Flow]
[Generates a colossal thermal flow to incinerate a designated target within a 10 km radius. The entire thermal flow is absolutely influenced by the caster's thoughts.]
[▷ This magic has not yet been learned.]
It was one of the mere fourteen recorded top-grade flame magic spells. I had been keeping an eye peeled for when I might learn it.
To think the snowball of helping those students would roll this way.
"This actually worked out well."
Enduring the position under this authority figure had been worth it after all.