It Fell Off?
Why in the world was an elf—one of the magical races of Eldas Legendary—sitting there so meekly in captivity?
Had someone taken a hostage?
Think it through simply, and the most efficient way to catch an elf was exactly that. Even a gun no one could ever wrest from your hands still needed the will of the person holding it to pull the trigger. Holding a loved one's life as collateral worked on anyone, reason and race aside.
But...
"Sorry—what did you say?"
The moment Artia let the question slip, the look that shot straight back at her—pure, speechless disbelief—stung. Artia, however, was not ashamed in the slightest. Not knowing was no cause for shame. Hiding your ignorance and pretending otherwise: that was shameful.
I may look like an elf, but I'm an otherworlder who doesn't know the first thing about elven culture, etiquette, ways of thinking, or history. So whatever I do is fine, so long as I don't step past the basic morals of a human being!
Armed with that mindset, she endured Ella's stare. Ella studied her face for the briefest moment, then, for some reason, nodded to herself and muttered something under her breath. The words were so mashed they were hard to catch, but they sounded roughly like that could happen, and Artia squared her shoulders with pride. She wasn't sure why, but the woman seemed to have understood. Her shoulders straightened a degree more shamelessly still.
Ella raised her own arm into the space before Artia's eyes. Look at this—thock. The arm stopped exactly at the height of Artia's gaze. It was a lovely thing, white and pleasing to the eye, the fingers long, straight, and slender.
And yet, jammed right through the middle of that beauty with a dull thunk, was something that was not beautiful at all. Like a black speck ruining a work of art, it was a black bracelet through which a strange light flowed. No ornament to speak of. Too little luster to be called metal, too smooth to be called wood or stone—a bracelet of some unknowable material. Far too crude to be jewelry, and by no stretch of the imagination a thing that suited Ella. Its purpose was obvious.
"Ten years ago. A damned restraint, made by human mages."
Ella bit the words out.
Wh—what?!
Artia was aghast. There was a seal that could lock away an elf's magic? Not even twenty-four hours since she had dropped into the world inside the game, and already it had sprung loose from everything she knew.
Artia stared, fascinated, at the black bracelet locked around her arm with a clack—so light she couldn't feel so much as a hint of its weight.
Magic in Eldas Legendary came in two kinds. According to the setting it had originally been one, but that one had vanished in the distant past, destroyed by the arrogance and the sins of the ancient fairy empire. After the empire's fall, the single art split in two, and those were the magics of the present age.
Contract Magic and Ritual Magic.
From what Artia had learned playing an orc archmage on her second run, elves and beastmen had received Contract Magic, while humans, dwarves, and the other races had received Ritual Magic. A human awakening Contract Magic was said to happen, very rarely—but that was strictly an exception. In any case, both were lumped together under the name of magic, yet from the very manner of their use they were enormously different.
Ritual Magic was the ordinary sort one usually pictured: magic unleashed by performing a ritual through incantations, hand seals, magic circles, and the like. The mage processed their own mana through the ritual, resonated it with the mana of the world, and thereby realized a miracle. That was Ritual Magic. When people said mage, they usually meant someone who used it.
An elf's Contract Magic was different. For one thing, elves needed no ritual whatsoever to cast. Their magic worked by contracting with a higher spiritual being of the astral plane—a being that embodied a primordial power—and using one's own soul and body as a conduit to call that power down into the material world. Elves exercised it through contracts with the elements; beastmen, through contracts with spirit beasts suited to the nature of each tribe. It felt akin to the spirit arts so common in novels, except that one was not commanding some summoned creature.
Ordinarily, to set them apart from the mages who used Ritual Magic, those who used Contract Magic were called sorcerers. Well—that distinction was only kept by people in the trade. Most folk simply called both of them mages.
The strengths and weaknesses of the two arts could wait for another day. For now, what actually mattered was this: what did it take to catch these mages and keep them locked up?
Stopping Ritual Magic was easy, if one cared to call it easy. However mighty the mage, the basic principle never changed—magic was exercised through ritual. The concision, the speed, and the variety of that ritual might differ with the mage's level, but the foundation did not. Keep them from performing the ritual, and the magic would not activate. Bind the hands and feet (and cut them off, if it came to that). Gag the mouth (the tongue, likewise). Restrain them so they cannot move, blindfold them—block them, one way or another, from doing anything at all.
Contract Magic was another matter. A sorcerer needed no special action to wield their power. Once the contract was made, so long as they were not dead, so long as the will remained, they could call on that power whenever they pleased. Drugging them senseless worked once or twice. Sooner or later, they opened their eyes. And the moment a sorcerer came to, their enemies had no idea when a spell might come crashing down, or how.
Taking a sorcerer—an elf—as a slave was therefore exceedingly dangerous, and nearly impossible. Why else would even orcs, issued from birth with bodies superior to any human's, snatch up the food and the treasure and never lay a hand on the elves themselves?
What kind of principle is this thing even running on?
The blackish shackle wound around her arm gave off an unpleasant sheen. No ornament, and nothing that even looked like a complicated magic circle engraved into it. It hadn't existed anywhere in Artia's knowledge of the original work, and no matter how she looked at it, it did not seem like an object into which any high-order technique had gone.
Asked about it, Ella didn't seem to know much either. The bracelet had appeared only recently—a mere ten years ago. (An elf's sense of time was, indeed, something else.) The elves themselves had tried to uncover the principle of the appalling thing and a way to counter it, but Contract Magic was, by its very nature, poorly suited to crafting or analyzing magical implements of this sort, and nothing proper had come of the effort. All they had was a guess: that the restraint was some unknown alloy, and that the substance seemed to suppress an elf's Contract Magic.
Thump. Thump. Artia tapped the restraint with a finger for no particular reason. The gesture meant nothing. Pure reflex—no different from idly knocking on a desk you'd just bought.
Watching her, Elgaia sighed.
"That won't even come close. I couldn't tell you what it's made of, but it won't break even under a weapon a mid-rank warrior swings with their mana packed into the blow."
So saying, Ella slammed the bracelet against the wall of the prison wagon. Thud. It was a considerable force. Even so, her restraint was flawless, without a single scratch, and she swung the arm back and forth as if to say see?
"Quit wasting your strength, you elf bitches! Heh heh!"
Whether they'd heard the thudding or not, the jeer drifted in from outside the wagon—a slave hunter, by the sound of it, standing watch.
"Hmm."
Artia paid Ella's gesture no mind. She looked for a moment, then stroked the restraint, slow and curious. The texture was peculiar. A roughness, like metal that hadn't been finished properly. Stranger still was a warmth that wasn't like metal at all—an unpleasant heat that nagged at her for no good reason. When she hadn't known what it was, it hadn't bothered her in the least. Now that she did, it was terribly in the way.
And then—
Crack.
"Huh?"
A sound that should not have been made. The sort of sound a thing makes when it breaks, goes wrong, or falls apart. She lifted the arm that had been fiddling with the restraint, and fragments of the black-gloss shackle crumbled and spilled from her hand. She looked down. Her handprint stood stark on the restraint, cracks racing every which way across it, the whole thing ready to shatter at any moment.
Artia looked at Ella. Ella looked at Artia. Two bewildered gazes tangled.
"Uh—"
"You mad—?!"
Mm. She was fairly sure she had just heard something she was not supposed to hear.
Artia decided to forget both the Ella whose eyes looked ready to burst from her head—a shock so severe that even that Elgaia's beauty failed to shine—and the something Ella had blurted that began with an M.
In Artia's mind, Ella would be beautiful. Always. No matter when.