Professor Mlnébeur Morgan (1)
Mlnébeur's unexpected words left Skadi and Hervena frozen where they sat. Hearing them, Hervena tried to call the white sphere back to mind—no, the Spirit of Space. The thing refused to mingle with anything around it. It gave off an alien presence, as if someone had torn the moon clean out of the sky and brought it down whole. Had she been able to look at it as a bystander, the sight might have pricked her curiosity. But Hervena had watched with her own eyes how that sphere had come into the world, and her face could only harden.
Back then her master, Blow, had been lost in agony. What state of mind had let him endure that pain, get up, and get up again—she could guess at it only faintly, and she did not understand it down to its depths. Afterward Blow Deblique had smiled at everyone as if to say it was fine, since it had all worked out in the end. From that day on, though, Hervena had lived with the regret that she ought to have stepped onto the dueling ground even a little sooner. She could not easily say so to him. Blow was the one who would be more anxious than she was, and he would only tell her he was all right.
So when she heard her professor's words, revulsion could not help surging up inside her. His right arm seized by mana rampage, red mana drawn across the skin, blood dripping from his whole body in backlash against the magic. That sight.
And now the young master might have to go through that again? And she might have to watch it again?
Was the professor saying this because she hadn't been there? Hervena had written it all into the report, in painstaking detail.
The memory alone turned her stomach. If it truly came to that, what was she supposed to do? Would she even be able to look straight at it? She felt her heartbeat quicken. Still, it was only a possibility for now, so she waited in silence for whatever Mlnébeur would say next.
Mlnébeur went on in a tone dry as dust, without a drop of moisture in it.
"My conclusion, so far, is that after the mana rampage Blow fell into a state we don't really understand. A deathlike trance brought on by magic."
"......"
"I went through the records from the war. A few of them say that some mages, pushed to the absolute limit, went through something similar. Of course, none of those records mention a sphere as enormous as the one that formed around Blow."
"So that means..."
"Yes. We have to put Blow back into a state close to the duel. Drain his mana completely, drive him into rampage, then twist him dry—mana and stamina, all of it."
What had been only Hervena's fear was now a fact. She did not bother to hide the way her face set as she looked at her professor.
"So, for the experiment, I'm having a space prepared. Underground, beneath this building."
Where Hervena felt despair, Mlnébeur explained it with a cold, clerical calm. Hervena could not bear it. She bit down hard on her lower lip and spoke in a voice that shook.
"Professor, when that spirit appeared, the young master lost consciousness. It was as if someone else had come into his body."
"That's right. What I'm saying is that we have to create that state first. Ideally, we wake Blow from inside it—"
At words cold enough to chill the air, anger flashed through Skadi's eyes. She shoved her chair back and shot to her feet.
"How can you say something like that as if it were nothing?! You're going to wring him dry—you're going to knock him out of his mind?!"
Mlnébeur did not so much as blink. She pointed at the chair Skadi had been sitting in.
"Sit down, Skadi Hetaya."
"......"
"I called the two of you because I intend to have a conversation. When you have something to say, say it without flying into a rage."
"......"
"Before that, could you hear my explanation through?"
At that, Skadi had no choice but to catch her trembling hands and take her seat again. Mlnébeur dropped a few pieces of ice into her coffee, pushed the cup toward her, and opened her mouth once more.
"After the incident, I went over the magic Blow was hit with at the time. I ran the numbers."
"What sort of..."
"First I measured the intensity of the magic Greig poured into Blow. I met him in person."
"...That couldn't have been easy."
"It wasn't. But it had to be done."
A bitter smile touched Mlnébeur's mouth as she remembered Greig, who had refused to cooperate in the slightest, and she went on.
"So when I calculated the total magic that hit Blow—and he said he'd switched off his Magic Neutralization at the time."
"......"
"Even assuming the shields he raised were at their maximum, the conclusion was the same. No ordinary person could have endured it. The calculation was easy enough. We still had the data from the last time Blow collapsed."
"......"
"I ran it several times more. It didn't change the fact that the Spirit of Space appeared at the moment he passed a human being's physical limits."
Hervena, who had been listening in silence, pressed her feelings down hard and spoke.
"So you're saying you'll create that state now? Artificially?"
"Yes."
"...No. What magic could even put him in that state?"
"That's what we have to find out. To start, I mean to begin with the water-attribute magic Greig cast most that day."
Hervena shook her head hard.
"And how do you intend to control the strength of that magic...?"
"That is what we—"
"Professor, what I'm asking is whether any magic exists that can strike a person with exactly enough force not to kill them. Fitted to that person."
The more she spoke, the hotter her feelings ran, and her eyes would not stop trembling. Mlnébeur let out a thin sigh and answered.
"...No such magic exists. Not yet."
That was the truth of it. If you meant to break bone, magic broke bone. If you meant to take a life, it took a life. There was no spell for putting someone, neatly and just short of death, into a magic-induced trance. When magic needed a person soaked, it had not developed as a sprinkle measured to dampen their clothes. It had developed as a downpour. And of course the shock one person could endure was not the shock another could, so the magic each could take was different as well. Time, meanwhile, moved on without pause, and because of it Blow's mana and the state of his body kept changing. The conclusion in front of Hervena was therefore far too simple.
She wanted, desperately, for it not to be so—for there to be something she could not see, only because she was still nothing more than an academy student and her view was too narrow. In a pleading voice she asked Mlnébeur the question anyway.
"Then you're saying each spell would have to be cast on the young master directly."
Her hope was shattered to pieces by nothing more than Mlnébeur's nod. Hervena felt something drop inside her chest with a dull thud.
"And pain will come with it. I'll look for a way to lessen it as much as I can, but..."
At those words Hervena bit her lip until it hurt, seized a handful of her own hair, and stared at Mlnébeur with a sharp, unsteady glare. Skadi, beside her, could not look at their professor straight on at all. If their eyes met, she was certain something would come out of her mouth that must not be said.
"Professor."
"Yes."
"You're saying the young master is going to be in pain again."
"That can't be helped—"
"I'm his retainer. I don't want to see it again. I really don't. I hate it."
"......"
"I'd rather it were me. I'd rather I were the one hurting."
Hervena was seeing Blow Deblique as he had been then. Unconscious, he had looked terribly lonely, and sad. He had looked at her like someone who had thrown his feelings into the void and left them there. She hated those eyes—eyes that seemed to have no intention of holding anything at all. Not enough time had passed to forget them. A week had not even properly gone by. On the wounds he had taken, and on the wounds they had taken, there was no new skin. There was not even a scab. The more she spoke, the more it felt as if that wound were being stirred, and the bridge of her nose kept stinging.
Worse, there was no promise that when they faced the Spirit of Space again, her young master would be able to come back as he had this time. This once might simply have been luck. The damned White Sphere had been named the Spirit of Space in part because space magic had landed a blow on it—but there was no promise that space magic would work on the sphere a second time. And whether that was the spirit's influence or not, the magic Blow Deblique had poured out then had been far too destructive. Then, at least, there had been a clear target: Greig. If that power were turned loose on people who were not a target at all, then truly...
In the rush of that thought she came, all at once, face to face with an uncomfortable truth. The truth that her master, Blow Deblique, was dangerous. And the truth that until this moment she had been looking at their situation far too much through herself alone, and far too optimistically. Hervena's pupils shrank all at once. The hand that had still been clutching her head fell, limp, to her side.
"Professor. Don't tell me..."
"Yes."
Mlnébeur paused for a moment, then added the rest.
"Word came from the Imperial Palace."
With that, silence alone filled the laboratory for a long while.