God-Tier Deflection
Why was I guzzling Elixir and lying flat on a human-body Transmutation Circle?
To explain that, I have to go back to when I offered to help with Charlotte's research.
The research is just a smokescreen. The real goal is to drag Charlotte around with me until I can shift the way she sees the world.
Make Charlotte change how she looks at the world.
It might sound like nothing special, but for me it was the single most important thing.
Charlotte believed that if she ever stopped producing steady results in alchemy, the people around her would grow disappointed and peel away in no time. That was simply how everyone she had known since childhood had been.
The elders of her house, her private tutors—even the parents who had given birth to her and raised her. The moment her learning lagged even a little, they freely showered her with disappointment and scolding.
From the start they had only ever seen her as a tool for the glory of House Hohenheim and themselves, so not one of them had ever given Charlotte anything resembling genuine love.
When you grow up in that kind of environment, your whole way of thinking hardens around it.
So there was only one way to solve Charlotte's problem.
She had to deal with the people around her herself, realize how abnormal that environment had been, and step out of the cage that had bound her all this time.
Luckily, there are a lot of good people near Charlotte right now.
Which was why I went to Sayulcheon first. Of everyone I knew, she interacted with Charlotte the most, so I figured I could count on her for some real help.
Somehow, though, talk of the Headmaster's recovery derailed everything, and we ended up here.
"Whew. This is a little scarier than I expected."
"…Is that all you have to say about it? To my eyes it looks like some new method of suicide."
Dismantle the entire body in real time, then restore it to its absolute best condition.
The theory was perfect, and I had the ability to pull it off—but it was a method I had been putting off as long as I could.
You might ask why someone who had already swallowed a Philosopher's Stone would hesitate over something like this, but honestly, efficiency wasn't even the issue.
The idea of scattering my body to pieces was one thing. Actually carrying it out was another.
And more than anything else—it hurt.
The Transmutation Circle would handle the body breaking apart whether I paid attention or not, but the pain was something even I couldn't do a thing about.
The Headmaster was a battle-scarred veteran who had been through every kind of hell; he had gritted through it with a twisted face and a few low groans. If I felt that same agony?
I'd invent secret base locations that don't even exist just to spill them.
To put it bluntly, I might scream like James—every scream he had and a few he didn't.
"Instructor Sayulcheon, I might end up screaming pretty loudly, so please bear with me."
"…The more you talk, the more uneasy this instructor becomes."
Leaving Sayulcheon's increasingly sour face behind me, I drew in a deep breath.
Then, as if to soothe the heart hammering with tension, I forced every scrap of ambient ether I could into the Transmutation Circle.
Kzzzzzzzzzt!
The eerie sound unique to human-body transmutation spilled out, and the circle flared with a hair-raising light that washed over my body.
"Ghk—?!"
At the same time, an overwhelming agony began to crawl up from the tips of my limbs.
"Ghhh…!"
It would all be restored anyway. I clenched my teeth hard enough to crack them and held the scream in as long as I could.
But before long, even that grit and resolve hit their limit.
"GAAAAAH!"
At the scream that finally tore free, the hand of Sayulcheon watching over me trembled hard. Her pupils shook as if an earthquake had struck, and yet she still believed my word and stood silently at my side.
Crazy. This really hurts like hell.
By then my limbs had already been fully dismantled, and the trunk of my body was coming apart. My lungs dissolved and choked off both breath and scream; my head dissolved and cut off my vision.
Just when I thought it was over, my consciousness blurred and floated free.
Like an out-of-body experience on the edge of death, I seemed to be looking down at the Transmutation Circle from the air.
Taking that in from a spirit-state, I gazed at the red crystal left in the center of the circle.
The Philosopher's Stone made from James.
Staring at the jewel that would become my spare life, I watched the Transmutation Circle finish its work.
Unlike the dismantling, the restoration spread from the center of the body outward toward the extremities—because the Philosopher's Stone sat at that center, and my body was being rebuilt around it.
My soul, which had been trapped for a moment outside the flesh and inside the circle, was drawn into the Philosopher's Stone.
As I entered the red jewel faintly tinged with gold, I saw a dimly glowing soul.
James's soul?
With his ego almost completely collapsed, James's soul was small and pathetic. I turned my attention away from that fragment and focused instead on the flesh returning to me.
I felt the beat of a heart. I felt power pulsing through every vessel of my body.
Thought returned—not as a soul, but as a brain—and with a sharp flare of light I frowned and opened my eyes.
The agony from moments before faded into memory like phantom pain, and the sheer vitality flooding every inch of me tugged at the corners of my mouth.
"Looks like it went smoothly."
"…I can't believe it actually worked."
I was a little taller than before, and my muscles had packed themselves in denser and fuller. Even my five senses and the speed of my thinking had risen so sharply it felt like I had become an entirely different species.
"And yet—an oddly familiar mana has appeared."
"Ah. You can feel it after all?"
The Philosopher's Stone that was all but my second life, the core I had made of my body. Inside it, everything that had once been James's flesh and soul had been stored as information and energy—now only his soul remained.
Of course it did. I had used every other content while transmuting my body.
To raise my physical ability even a little and make the result as perfect as possible, I had taken every element except James's soul as material.
Even the mana he had cultivated. Even his memories.
"This human-body transmutation has left this instructor with a great many questions for you."
As if drawing a firm line between the success of the procedure and what came next, Sayulcheon spoke in a distinctly heavy tone.
"When your body was dismantled, a single red jewel sat alone atop the Transmutation Circle. You will not claim you know nothing of that."
A red jewel.
She had phrased it carefully, but Sayulcheon almost certainly already knew what it was.
"You mean the Philosopher's Stone."
"…Correct. For some reason, you appear to have embedded a Philosopher's Stone within your body."
I had expected from the moment I drew the circle that Sayulcheon might ask about the Philosopher's Stone. I had even roughly anticipated what she would want to know.
"That mana. As I sense it, it belongs to James Baker—the teaching assistant who served under Instructor Charlotte."
I kept silent and did not rush to speak. Sayulcheon was not finished.
"And of late, James Baker's whereabouts have been unknown. Even a layabout like him used to show up at Charlotte's laboratory every single day—yet he vanished as if he were dead."
"I see. So you suspect I have some connection with Assistant James?"
"Not a suspicion. A certainty."
James Baker, vanished without warning. The Philosopher's Stone that had suddenly appeared from my body, and James's mana felt in the flesh rebuilt around it.
In ordinary circumstances, the whole thing would have been strange but easy enough to shrug off. Most people would never link a Philosopher's Stone to a missing person.
But Sayulcheon is different. As an instructor-level figure at the Academy, she would naturally know even the information the public has buried.
Sayulcheon was one of the few who knew what a Philosopher's Stone was made from. And from the perspective of someone who knew that Philosopher's Stones were crafted from human beings, the present situation raised one very natural suspicion.
"You. Did you make a Philosopher's Stone using James Baker as the material?"
In other words—had I ground James Baker down into a Philosopher's Stone?
Judging that there was no point in hiding it, I answered Sayulcheon's question without hesitation, exactly as things stood.
"Yes. The Philosopher's Stone you saw, Instructor Sayulcheon, was made using James Baker as its material."
Having said that much, I narrowed my eyes and watched to see how she would respond.
Would she press on with more questions to clear up her doubts? Or would she simply charge in and try to restrain me?
I waited for her reaction amid those few possibilities. Either way, I was confident I could persuade her—and pull her over to my side.
At last, Sayulcheon's mouth opened roughly.
Her expression and voice chewed on something unpleasant, yet the gaze fixed on me held a faint thread of expectation. It was a rather strange look.
"…So you, too, have stepped on their tail."
"Pardon?"
Her reaction was so far outside anything I had imagined that my thoughts stalled for a beat. Then, as I grasped the situation, the corners of my mouth curved, and a smile slipped onto my previously stiff face.
"Don't tell me—you already knew as well, Instructor Sayulcheon?"
Oh? You too?
With roughly that nuance, I smoothly rode the current of her reaction.
"Indeed. It would seem you and this instructor now have a great deal to discuss."
Sayulcheon huffed a short laugh and snapped her fingers. Mana spilled from her fingertips and laid down soundproofing and several other measures across the area.
"From this moment, not a soul outside will know what we say here."
Sayulcheon was famous for a face that rarely showed emotion, or for a faintly furrowed brow. But that same Sayulcheon now turned a rare, challenging smile on me.
"This instructor believes she could make an excellent partner for you."
What do you think?
To Sayulcheon's unspoken question, I answered at once with a broad grin.
"If the Dragon-Slaying Practitioner would stand with me, I could ask for nothing more."
Even by my own standards, that had been a flawless, god-tier deflection.