Your Paper Is Dope (2)
Your Paper Is Dope (2)
There was bad news.
No, it was more of an annoying sort of news.
"Midterms are a month away. Aren't you going to study?"
"I'm studying right now."
Studying Flare.
"I mean... shouldn't you be studying for the exams too...?"
Even though it was already early April, I was still pouring every ounce of my attention into Flare.
[Seeing you obsess over magic research like that... like professor, like slave, I suppose.]
Quiet, you.
I had resolved to complete Flare within two months. If I failed to finish by next month, my pride would take a scratch. I suppose you could say my conscience would prick me if I couldn't keep a deadline I'd set myself. At the very least, I intended to submit one more paper before midterms.
So, to spare myself that self-loathing, I had made various preparations.
Most important of all was a target to test Flare's power.
Not long ago, while visiting the museum as a club member, I had met separately with the curator and pleaded to borrow the outer skin of a Calamity-class magic beast.
"Could I possibly receive the frontal armor of Gargantua?"
"What do you intend to use it for?"
"Our club is researching a new penetration magic, and I wanted to acquire a target suitable for comparison."
The academy museum was a museum in name only; in reality, no more than four-tenths of its collection was ever exhibited. The majority of magic beast carcasses that entered the museum were released for research purposes.
This was precisely why I had joined an academic club. As a member of an academic club, the rental fees for borrowing items from the museum were either negligible or entirely nonexistent.
— It was such a huge creature, so we had a surplus of its armor in stock. Take it if you wish.
— Thank you!
I was lucky. I never imagined it would be free.
The iron armor of the Calamity-class magic beast Gargantua was heavy enough to be difficult to lift with both hands. Its thickness was nothing to scoff at. It was roughly the size of a standard concrete outer wall. Since I couldn't very well cut it up and carry it, I had to move it using a carrier.
When I returned carrying Gargantua's frontal armor, Frey, who had been fervently crafting something in the clubroom, rose to her feet. The little kid came scurrying over, a Mana Cigarette still in her mouth. Frey's eyes, which had been half-dead for a while from doing nothing but transmutation work, began to regain their life.
"W-Woah! This is the Gauntlet of Gargantua, isn't it?!"
"How did you know just by looking at it?"
"I saw it in a book!"
Frey fumbled over the armor and let out an unidentified exclamation.
She was impressive at times like this. Usually, she was just a kid with a loud voice, but ask her anything about magic beasts or Earth Magic, and she could answer almost anything.
"Gargantua's armor is incredibly thick and hard. I heard it took dozens of strategic-class mages gathering together and pounding it with top-grade Magic Arts for six whole days before they could barely pierce it!"
Rote, who had been listening from the side, joined the conversation with a serious face.
"To think a magic beast of this level is merely classified as Calamity-class... Just how powerful can an Extinction-class be?"
"That's exactly why we're developing Flare. We have to try, at least as far as we can go."
And also fill up my Magic Compendium a bit while I was at it.
"We can talk about the rest later! Now, come look at this! I just finished what you commissioned, so take a look!"
As Frey stepped aside, a certain iron doughnut was visible in front of her.
It looked like a transformer iron core wound round with highly conductive wire. However, its diameter was only about one meter. This was far smaller than what I had initially planned.
This iron doughnut was a toroidal device called a tokamak, which used magnetic-field coils to confine plasma. I had practically begged Frey to build it from my blueprints and had only just managed to obtain it.
So, why had I suddenly built a Tokamak?
[The sun, the fourth state of matter, and the fifth way are here.]
Because the hint for Flare was plasma. 'The fourth state of matter' was highly likely to mean plasma, the fourth state of matter.
Of course, the Tokamak device I had just built was for testing. This size was insufficient to confine a massive amount of plasma or to apply it seriously to a nuclear fusion process. Larger experimental equipment and a bigger Tokamak were necessary.
Right now, it was nothing more than a prototype built to confirm Flare's results.
"You actually managed to make this."
"See, I told you! If I have the blueprints and materials, I can transmute anything!"
Even transmuting a Tokamak in a fantasy world in the first place was over-technology.
Yes. Frey's transmutation skill was beyond common sense, but I could somehow accept this much.
Even besides that, it was absurd. Although I was someone who had rolled around in this field, I wasn't a master of everything to the point of having every detailed Tokamak blueprint and all other required equipment perfectly memorized.
Yet the moment I thought, 'Should I try making a Tokamak?', the relevant blueprints just popped into my head.
What the hell?
It felt as if I had become a supercomputer. Was it because of my Gold-Eye Tribe adjustments?
Since the Gold-Eye Tribe was a race with superior computational and memorization abilities, it might have synergized with my knowledge. Or perhaps the Goddess, taking pity on me, had given me a special merit.
I decided not to think about this point further.
"We have Gargantua's frontal armor, and the Tokamak is complete."
The materials for the third preparation were surprisingly easy to acquire. I took items out of the basket, including a few lenses and concentrators, and several thin films.
"What are all these?"
"I borrowed them from the Earth Magic Research Lab. They'll be necessary to focus and polarize the Flare."
They were optical instruments.
For instance, a Fabry-Perot Interferometer that filters only a specific mana wavelength, or a Polarizer that makes mana waves oscillate and travel in only one direction.
Because I was an intern under Professor Herlein, these were items I could easily borrow. Squatting in the Earth Magic Research Lab early in the semester had been a stroke of genius.
"This is something we'll only know for certain through testing, but according to my hypothesis, Flare might not be a magic belonging solely to Fire Magic."
"What? So it could be Earth or Air Magic?"
"It might be a mix of two attributes. Or perhaps it's an Elemental Magic of a new attribute never discovered before."
Though that might be going too far into speculation.
"Anyway, what I'm saying is we might need optical equipment like this to land Flare on the target."
The scroll used to construct Flare. If you carefully observed the Magic Circle on that scroll, you wouldn't see a mechanism that seemed to produce mana nuclear fusion.
The theory was surely correct. But as if its name and substance were at odds, I had no certainty that anything like a flame would burst from the scroll containing Flare.
[You don't suppose you're thinking about that, are you?]
"I don't know. We'll have to test it and see."
The three of us prepared the experimental apparatus as we had previously discussed. It took another half-day before everything was ready.
**
And then it all went to absolute shit.
"Hey, what's with this output?"
Frey shook her head and clicked her tongue. Rote and I had no energy left to answer her.
Almost simultaneously, we both lit a Mana Cigarette and let out deep sighs. Hazy smog drifted upwards into the air. It felt like our mental fortitude was ascending along with it.
"Just how many Mana Cigarettes did we burn through activating a single Flare...?"
"This makes eight for me."
I leaned against the wall. From this position, the hollowed-out frontal armor of Gargantua came into full view.
The center of the iron armor where the Flare had struck was heated red-hot. The surrounding air shimmered, creating a severe level of distortion. If we hadn't set up protective measures, the entire clubroom would have become dangerous.
[According to the Saha Ionization Equation, a meaningful level of plasma was observed.]
Plasma. Yes, we did create plasma. Very briefly.
Our technology and equipment were insufficient to immediately confine that created plasma in the Tokamak. We were also lacking in many ways for maintaining high temperature and high pressure. It was safe to consider the experiment half a failure. Well, of course it was. The planning period had only been a few days, after all.
But.
"Still, I learned Flare's true nature."
"I saw it! Something like a beam went shoo-shook, right past?!"
"The Gold-Eye Tribe calls that a laser."
A laser.
Flare's true nature was none other than a laser that took the form of a high-peak-power pulse.
If it was a laser, why was the magic called Flare?
The original purpose was to confirm with my own eyes what kind of magic Flare was. Hoping to be full on the first spoonful is a thief's mentality. I hadn't expected the experiment to succeed in one go from the beginning.
"You said you saw the line where the Flare passed?"
"Yeah."
"That's why its destructive power was weak. Assuming the total energy was the same, the shorter the output time, the higher the penetration power and such."
If Flare could be observed with the naked eye, that meant it was emitted continuously over a correspondingly long period. The amount of magical power Rote and I had injected to activate the scroll was constant.
The Mana Particles contained in that magical power would have converted into energy, and most of that was likely lost passing through the optical instruments. The scroll wasn't damaged, but the problem was that its intensity was weak compared to the amount of magical power input.
Simply put, the efficiency was poor.
"Still, isn't this a pretty significant result? It's not fully destroyed, but Gargantua's armor is about half damaged."
"That's true. If we fire one more time, there won't be a problem piercing it. But ideally, it should pierce in one shot. It's not easy to land two consecutive hits on the same spot against a moving magic beast."
Forcing magical power to circulate through my body left my whole frame aching. By nature, the Gold-Eye Tribe had a constitution that succumbed to mana fatigue more easily than other races.
I spent some time catching my breath. Once the heat in the clubroom had subsided somewhat, I closed the window and picked up a pen. Rote, who had been resting in a slumped position, also cleared the experimental equipment to one side.
It had grown dark outside the window. I'd been so absorbed in research that time had already passed like this. I planned to just organize today's experiment records and return to the dormitory to rest.
"...What are you two doing."
"Aack!"
At the sudden voice of a man, I leaped forward off the floor. Unluckily for me, there was a desk right in front of me, and I slammed my little toe against its leg and tumbled a full rotation. Frey, who had been drinking water, choked at the sight of me.
"Ah, shit, agh...."
What the hell? I hadn't heard the door opening or anyone coming in.
Rote and Frey were equally startled.
Because the person standing right behind me was none other than Vermel.
"How did you get in without opening the door...?"
"Teleportation."
Teleportation? Wasn't that a top-grade Air Magic?
"Anyway, I asked what you were doing."
"Hiss... I was running an experiment with the club members."
"What kind of experiment?"
"Why are you asking that all of a sudden?"
"I'm a member here too, technically. I was curious."
How should I answer that? Could I just say we were researching a new Fire Magic?
Still, since Vermel was a Possessor, there was a high chance he already knew whatever magic I mentioned. With that certainty, I omitted all the previous context and uttered just a single word.
"Uh, have you heard of something called Flare?"
"......."
A brief silence.
And a fact I had just learned.
This Possessor was absolutely shit at managing his expression.