Not Tutoring Like You're Supposed to
Not Tutoring Like You're Supposed to
If thousands of suns were to explode at once, and their flash dyed the entire sky black.
This world would never be the same again.
**
"Ugh."
I clutched my head and rose from the bed.
About an hour remained before the mountains lifted the sun. Rote was sleeping soundly in the next bed, breathing softly.
It was the first weekend since enrolling at Tillet. I should have been in a good mood at the thought of not seeing the prince or the professor for two whole days, but I couldn't be.
[Did you have a nightmare?]
Well, it wasn't exactly a nightmare. Ever since I'd become this body, I had no memory of dreaming at all.
"Maybe it's because mosquito season's coming up."
I hadn't known there were mosquitoes in this world too. One difference was that mosquitoes here were classified as magic beasts. If you killed one, it gave you a magic stone slightly smaller than the thickness of a hair.
It was the weekend, but I had plenty to do. I had to learn the other schools of magic besides fire magic, and I needed to complete the unique magic art for dealing with an Extinction-class. As if that weren't enough, today was the first day I'd promised to tutor Rote.
I rummaged through my pocket, and two unused silver coins clinked together. These silver coins were far more precious than the dozens of gold coins the professor or the prince had said they would give me.
There was no time to grin. Before I could teach Rote magic theory, there were about three places I had to stop by first. I set aside my thoughts and finished getting ready to go out.
The first place was the library. Tillet's library operated 24 hours a day for students who pulled all-nighters. I returned the books I'd read, borrowed some others, and headed out.
The second place was an institution managed by the academic society affiliated with the academy. Simply put, it was like the Royal Society in Britain. By paying a fee and completing a series of registration procedures, one could be registered as a member of the society and submit papers.
At the same time as I registered, I submitted a paper I had prepared in advance. It was a paper detailing the derivation process of the 'Maso-Energy Exchange Theorem.' Since it was the first thing I'd written since becoming a girl of the Gold-Eye Tribe, a mix of emotions crossed my mind.
"The formatting has been confirmed. The review will take a minimum of two weeks to a maximum of three months."
"Understood, thank you."
I bowed in greeting and left the institution.
The last place to stop by was Professor Herlein's private laboratory.
"You came?"
"Hello."
I had signed the internship contract with Professor Herlein just two days ago.
Originally, Professor Herlein had wanted to take me on as an intern from the moment I passed, but she'd held back, saying she felt bad about putting a kid who'd just escaped the shackles of graduate school right back into the grind.
"This teacher is truly touched you came. I'll teach you a lot over these three months, so let's work hard together."
[Master. I can't see a thing ahead.]
Me neither.
Since I already knew my way around scroll writing to a fair degree, I was a quick learner. Originally, elemental magic had so many similarities between its attributes that if you knew one school, you could easily construct scrolls belonging to the rest.
"The foundation of earth magic is creating various types of solids. Solids are generally divided into crystalline solids and amorphous solids."
"So, are we starting by learning how to make crystals today?"
"Oh my, you already knew? That's right. The basics of earth magic begin with creating a solid with translational symmetry in space. This area also overlaps with alchemy, so it's important when you take upper-level courses."
Saying she would show me a simple example, Professor Herlein stepped into the supply room and came back out.
A solid crystal plate wrapped in a thin film and a liquid contained in a dark brown glass bottle were placed on the table. Below them was a simple alchemy circle with a combination formula inscribed on it.
"This is something I've been working on recently in collaboration with scholars who majored in fire magic. Want to take a look?"
I nodded vigorously. After setting up the transmutation formula, Professor Herlein placed the bottle and the crystal plate inside, and with a short incantation, she etched and mixed the two materials.
The resulting product that was created....
"A polarizing filter?"
"You know about this too. Had the Gold-Eye Tribe already developed all these things beforehand?"
I responded with silence. It was because I didn't really know. Since I hadn't met a single other member of the Gold-Eye Tribe besides myself.
With nothing else said, the topic circled back to the beginning. Professor Herlein continued her explanation.
"You seem to already know, but this is a device that manipulates earth-element elements to control fire-element elements. Since light is provisionally treated as an element handled by the fire school, academia explains the concept of polarizing filters in this way."
[□ Material Analysis]
[The primarily detected substance names are as follows: polyvinyl alcohol (PVA), iodine]
"That's fascinating."
"Right? In academia, this kind of composite magic is expressed as 'hybrid.' It's mixing two magics. Hybrid magic can't be researched alone, so usually, it's jointly researched by two or more labs."
Hybrid magic. It was a concept I hadn't been able to learn from the books in the library.
"Was it established recently?"
"About a year ago. Since it's been concluded that fire magic alone can't handle the Extinction-class, the number of people researching it by introducing changes like this is growing."
I had definitely made the right call coming under Professor Herlein. Just getting out from under Professor Haspelt's eye and dodging the prince's advances was killing two birds with one stone, but now I could finally do research that was truly worthy of being called research.
At this rate, escape wasn't far off.
**
After that, until the sun passed its zenith, I ran a few more practical exercises and made several crystals. I'd smoked so many Mana Cigarettes for the first time in a while that my mouth was parched.
But I couldn't rest. Most of the afternoon had to be devoted to Rote. It was for the tutoring.
The tutoring location was the dormitory. If we had been in separate rooms, I would have settled for a bench somewhere, but there was absolutely no need. Placing a few fire magic books I had borrowed from the library down, I asked Rote.
"What do you want to know first?"
"Everything you know."
Ambitious, aren't we.
I needed to run a test first. I needed to know how much you knew so I could tailor the tutoring accordingly.
Rote nodded at my words. There were two things to do first.
First, I needed to check how much math she knew.
Magic Arts was a discipline that aligned closely with the science of my original world. Even if the principles or aspects used were different, it was so as long as it was a natural law existing in this world. Because of that similarity, humanity in this world had also built up magic theory based on mathematics. The most developed field among them was geometry.
Rote solved most of the geometry problems with ease. Of course, geometry wasn't the only area she was good at. She also showed talent in algebra, analysis, and combinatorics.
"What was your math score on the written exam?"
"Was it 89...? Probably around there."
With this level of ability, she wasn't ordinary. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that, by the standards of Earth's education system, she had the mathematical thinking ability of a junior or senior at a prestigious university.
Next, I needed to confirm the level of her knowledge in fire magic.
As befitting the daughter of Count Saliere's house, famous for its fire magic, Rote had a firm grasp on most high-class magic. She was practically at a level where there was almost nothing left to teach her.
Normally, the standard way to do a first day of tutoring was to just teach a few simple things and end it....
"Is there maybe an alchemy formula that could catch an Extinction-class magic beast?"
I, needing to save face by teaching her something, couldn't help but bring this up.
"Do you know about Flare?"
"Flare?"
I hadn't planned on telling her this far because I really was starting to seem like Professor Haspelt, but sadly, this was the only 'magic that might be able to kill an Extinction-class magic beast' available at the moment.
I rummaged through my hip pack and pulled out a piece of Magic Paper the size of a 34-inch monitor. Inside, a basic construction array for Flare, overlaid with the Eightfold Way, had been constructed.
"Whoa. It's really complex. What kind of magic is it?"
"It's still under development in academia, so the details aren't well known. I think it's probably a magic that pierces a magic beast's thick armor with some kind of powerful beam."
How should I describe it, a plasma-emitting laser? It was tricky to portray since there was no precisely corresponding terminology in this world.
Even just the foundational magic circle of Flare was practically packed tight. At this point, it was dense enough that it could be perceived as a single point when viewed from a distance.
Because of that, I had generously estimated the development period for Flare at one year.
"Why is this so difficult to develop?"
A fundamental question that dug right to the core. It was a good attitude. I pondered for a moment before I opened my mouth.
"The biggest problem would be the amount of magical power Flare needs to contain."
"Because it consumes too much magical power? Couldn't we use a transistor?"
"No. I tried it, and it exploded. Magic Stones also have a total capacity they can hold."
"How much magical power does it need to cycle?"
"At least 100,000 Sieverts. I calculated it, and for this to work, you'd need a piece of Magic Paper the size of the Empire and Kaurelia combined."
Rote's jaw dropped as she stared blankly at the scroll containing the early draft of Flare. Almost a minute of silence passed. It was Rote who broke that silence again.
"Hey. Even this magic circle looks like a dot from far away, right?"
"It does."
"Then couldn't we make a magic circle in a different shape? Like one that circulates in a straight line."
"Like a harmonic oscillator vibrating?"
"Yeah."
"Wait. Hold on a second."
I propped my chin on one hand and tapped the magic circle. I tried holding it far away, and I tried modifying some of the pathways.
Eventually, I brought out a fresh sheet of Magic Paper. I tried writing a scroll in the form Rote had suggested.
As expected, it didn't activate. Still, it was a usable topic. I thought about it for a bit longer, then I pulled out one more sheet of Magic Paper and joined the two together, one facing the other.
This was an attempt to expand the scroll, which until now had only been drawn in two dimensions, into three dimensions. My idea was to create a composite-type magic circle that looked like a straight line when seen in 2D but revealed a circular form when unfolded in 3D.
Naturally, it wasn't easy. Rote seemed to be continuously thinking hard as well. This was supposed to be a tutoring session, but at some point, we'd ended up sitting there doing research together.
"How about doing it like this?"
"This is way better. We attach the magnetite and topaz crystals here and flip it over."
"Then the output gets cut in half, but the magic current quadruples... we can compensate by attaching a transistor here."
"I'll draw an I-V characteristic curve. If my prediction is right, there'll be eight sections that increase exponentially at low AC frequencies."
It was 1 PM when we started the tutoring. When I came to my senses, Saturday was fading and Sunday was approaching. I was hungry, but I had no time to care about that.
Because I'd never proactively researched something like this before.
Tap—.
"It's done...."
"It worked...!"
Smack!
Two in the morning. We high-fived in joy and collapsed onto our respective beds.
[■ R&D completed: N-Dimensional Scroll (n=3)]
[A scroll with a composite figure form. Expanding the topology to a higher dimension theoretically increases mana condensation. A new spell can be constructed by passing a spell, compressed and stored in a lower dimension, through a series of filters after activation.]
[◆ Progress Change Notice]
[Upon the completion of the above R&D, the following magic has been automatically acquired.]
[Supreme Unique Magic—Scroll Writing Master]
[Progress change: Unique Magic Arts 2 (out of total 149) → 3 (out of total 149)]
"Huh."
Invest a year in developing Flare?
That damned long-term plan had just been completely overturned.
The biggest obstacle hindering its development had disappeared, so there was practically nothing much left until its completion.
Two months.
Even at the very worst, I would finish it within that time.