What the Master Left for Blackie
The freshman entrance exam, the academy's grandest event of the season, drew to a close alongside the final interviews, and the day of the acceptance announcements arrived.
"Next! Applicant number 3,224, Magician Allan, Water Hall!"
Each time a student's name and assigned dormitory were called, they puffed out their chest with pride, walked forward to stand before the presiding Chair Professor, and offered a respectful bow.
Twenty students per house, four houses in all — the placements were finally complete.
The twenty gathered before me could barely contain their excitement, yet they also looked, comparatively speaking, rather short on confidence.
I understood why. The ranks were full of nobles, and set against the immaculately dressed students of the other halls, my lot looked like nothing so much as a band of ragged stragglers.
From the other dormitories came the sound of freshmen laughing openly in our direction.
I couldn't let my kids be made a laughingstock.
"Everyone, attention."
Powerful Oratory Lv.7 is activated.
Persuasion Lv.8 is activated.
"I am Wicker Phedia, Chair Professor of the Earth Hall."
My voice claimed the entire space. Not only my own students but students from every dormitory — even the Chair Professors themselves — turned their ears toward me.
"I will make you one promise, right here and now. Trust me, follow my curriculum, and I guarantee that every last one of you — all twenty of this incoming class — will graduate with the highest possible grade: Opticulum."
"What is he even talking about?"
"Ridiculous. Of all places, the Earth Hall?"
"Where does he get that confidence?"
As the speech went on, willpower bloomed in my students' eyes. Even the other halls' students were drawn in by my voice, and a low murmur rippled through the crowd.
"There is a reason I chose each of you. You may not know this, but I am the legendary teacher who took the Heroes who saved this continent and — only then — truly made them Heroes."
At the words teacher of the Heroes, the students stirred.
It was an outright lie, of course — but even the Academy Principal would back the claim now, and there was no one alive who could verify it either way.
The second rule of merchant craft I'd learned over long years in the trade: brazen it out until the cards are laid on the table.
"Hah, all bluster. What could a mere slave merchant with not even a 5-Star title to his name possibly do?"
A halfling from the Water Hall sneered at me. I lifted my chin.
"Professor Alencia, would you care to know why I don't display my Chair Professor title on my nametag?"
"What?"
"Because I have no wish to be lumped in with the likes of you. My teaching will be nothing like the textbooks cooked up by people who've spent their whole lives cooped up inside this Academy. And by a very great deal, at that."
"…What did you just say? Hey — hey!"
Apparently it took the halfling a moment to parse my words, because the outrage arrived belatedly and in full force.
"All of Earth Hall, follow me."
Ignoring the snarling halfling and the wolf beastkin beside him, I set off for the dormitory, twenty wide-eyed freshmen trailing after me.
Hmm.
They waddled along behind me in a single file line like a brood of ducklings.
They've got no shape to them yet.
I had no intention of drilling them in formal uniform, but I'd have Sersi fit them for some decent clothes regardless.
"Welcome to the Earth Hall. These will be your classmates for the next three years, so take the time to learn one another's faces."
The twenty regular-division freshmen were assembled in the dormitory lecture room for a brief orientation.
"From this day forward, you will devote yourselves to your studies here in this hall. And as I said before — every single one of you will pass with an Opticulum at graduation. That is not a hope. It is a certainty."
The students tensed. Apparently they'd taken my earlier declaration not as sincere conviction but as mere provocation aimed at the other dormitories.
That one was dead serious, kids. So you'd better take it seriously too.
"You all know how Opticulum graduates are treated out in the world, I trust."
"Of course…"
"It's tremendous honor, sir."
"Any nation would hand them a key post on the spot."
"Ironclad proof of real ability."
Expectation was rising in their faces. I pressed on.
"Some of you may believe you were left behind — cast off for lacking talent, and that's the only reason you ended up in the Earth Hall. You're free to think what you like. But it was you, no one else, that I chose. You were the ones with more potential than anyone."
A student raised his hand.
"Speak."
"Um, Professor? Do you mean that seriously? You really think I could pass the Opticulum?"
"Marque. Current occupation, swordsman. Primary armament, longsword. Four years as a mercenary, and failed the knight order's entrance exam two years running."
"Yes, sir…"
"You chose the wrong discipline, that's all. You'll be taking up spear and shield and riding as cavalry from now on."
"C-cavalry? But horses are so expensive—"
"This is Caesus Academy. Name any steed you want, and I'll provide you a hundred of them."
Marque sucked in his breath at that. I let my gaze drift slowly across the rest of the students.
"The same goes for everyone here. I will be the one to raise your talents to their full height. You've come to the finest academy on the continent, so use every resource it has. Drink down knowledge and hard-won know-how greedily. Treat me — your professor — as a tool, and put me to work shamelessly. Do I make myself clear?"
The reply came back louder than before. I liked the posture.
"If anything occurs to you, take it straight to Assistant Professor Cersi Paniya here, any time."
"P-please take good care of me, everyone…!"
Cersi bowed her head deeply toward the students.
Then a hand shot straight up. So the earlier brute was just playing a character.
"Speak."
"Shifu! I have a question!"
"Hm. And that would be?"
"Where's the best food on campus?!"
I crossed my arms and glared at Mutooga. The other students sensed the dangerous air and clamped their lips shut.
I opened my mouth.
"An excellent question. Food is a matter of the gravest importance. THIS is exactly how you make use of me."
Light smiles spread across the students' frozen faces.
"Here's a bit of know-how for you, free of charge: nowhere in the rules is there any provision forbidding students or professors from visiting one another's dormitories."
"Wait — you mean?!"
"I have conducted field tests, and the Water Hall's cafeteria proved the most delicious. Tonight, we raid it. All of us. Together."
"Waaah, the wind feels amazing!"
Tia swept her hair back as she watched the drifting clouds slide past. The mountain ranges and forests far below, small as a miniature diorama, flashed by in an instant.
"Hieeeek, we're so fast! Way too fast!"
Where Tia lounged at the rail, gazing out from the deck with perfect ease, Yuri was frozen in terror, hugging one of the airship's support posts and trembling like a leaf.
It was hardly surprising. They were closing in on three hundred kilometers an hour.
"Fast is good! The faster we go, the faster we arrive! Who'd have thought a relic like this was sitting in a dragon's nest? This thing predates the age of developed magic, doesn't it?"
Tia asked Aisha over the wind. The airship they were riding was a vessel-shaped craft of rot-proofed wood and iron, only a little larger than a six-person carriage. Long wings extended from either side, sails caught the lift, and propellers mounted all over the hull spun at blistering speed.
And its power source was not the mana they all knew so well — it was pure human muscle.
"Don't talk to me! I'm dying over here!"
Aisha sat astride a saddle shaped like a bicycle seat, pedaling like a woman possessed. Her legs' RPM was so high her feet were a blur. Sweat poured off her like rain, pooling on the deck.
"You're the Sword Saint and you're struggling that much?"
"There are ranks within the Sword Saint title too! I mean, normally I'm the strongest one here! And you try keeping up with HER pace!"
There were two saddles on the contraption. In the seat ahead of Aisha, Luca pedaled away with a perfectly blank face, steady as someone out for a morning constitutional.
A tandem bicycle's pedals. That was what powered the airship.
"If it ran on magic I could have handled it for you."
"Graaagh! Hey, Yuri! Come over here and give us some stamina recovery!"
"Hieeeek! Hieee… thud."
Yuri, who had gone her whole life unaware she suffered from acrophobia, finally foamed at the mouth and fainted.
"Seriously, do we have to keep doing it this barbaric way?! Can't you just use teleportation magic?!"
"Teleportation only works on places you've been before. So, dear sister — would you like to teleport into Imperial territory?"
"KEEP PEDALING!!"
Tia laughed with delight and, out of habit, cycled her mana through a few rotations.
Even magic has its limits, after all.
In the end, the things you truly wanted, you had to seize with your own two hands.
Still — magic is so much fun.
She could enjoy magic now only because every last drop of the black mana that had been pumped into her as a child had been purified into mana clear as light. She'd used the technique the old Magic Tower Master had taught her.
But the very first clear mana to ever take root in her body had been Wicker's.
The dark elves had lost to the high elves centuries ago. To prove their own superiority, the high elves had addicted the dark elves to black mana.
Newborn dark elves were no exception. They were forced to learn nothing but black magic, denied even the elemental arts.
Thanks to that long, patient campaign, the notoriety of dark elves as a wicked, accursed race had spread among the other peoples as simple common sense.
Had Tia grown up as she was, she would have been no different from any of them.
— Magic, you say? Magic, magic…
When Tia had said she wanted to learn magic, Wicker had bought her an introductory primer — and then, when it became clear the girl couldn't make heads or tails of it, he'd fretted over the problem for a long while.
Then one day he sat down, propped his right arm up on the table, and said to her:
— Blackie, come here and sit down. I'm about to show you something absolutely insane.
Taking the hands of the girl now seated across from him, Wicker let his own mana flow gently into her, and step by patient step, taught her the fundamentals of magic.
Back then he was a complete stranger to magic himself. Everything he taught her, he had taught himself — for her sake.
This was already after Tia had quietly claimed him as her own, and the two of them had set out on their life as adventurers together.
So his instruction, taken on its own, hadn't helped much — but the mana he had left behind her went on circling through her body, round and round, to this day.
It was warm. Like sunlight slipping through a gap in the trees — the kind I'd brush against without realizing, in the middle of an adventure.
Even now, when she closed her eyes, she could almost feel his orange-gold mana spreading through her whole body.
It was an infinitesimally small remnant, one no longer possible to find or trace — and she never wanted to let it go. Not ever.
No — maybe she'd been unable to let go from the very first moment she'd fallen into his arms.
Master… I wonder if you're doing well?
Letting her imagination soar along the trace of him flowing through her heart, Tia surrendered herself to the sky streaming past.
"MY THIGHS ARE TEARING APART!!!"
It was a sky filled with the screams of the Sword Saint.