The Tower Master (3)
Oscar had acquired his Sixth Sense, and in the process, he had become a Level 4 mage.
Which meant he had accomplished his original purpose in full.
Ado Bale knew it too, and his tone softened back into the easy warmth of before.
"Seventeenth Master. It was a pleasure meeting you, and you've worked hard all this while."
He sounded for all the world like a man seeing someone off on a long journey.
Oscar tilted his head in confusion.
"Sorry? I wasn't planning on leaving yet."
"...Hm?"
Startled, Ado Bale blinked rapidly and asked back, "What do you mean? Once you've gotten everything you came for, you leave. Why on earth would you stay?"
"Well, obviously because training here is far more efficient."
As he said it, Oscar glanced around at their surroundings. He wasn't exaggerating — this place was the ideal training ground. Five months had already passed since he'd entered, yet barely two and a half hours had gone by in the outside world.
"I love it here. Since I'm already in, I figure I'll push through whatever it takes and leave when I hit Level 9."
"..."
At those words, Ado Bale stared at him as if looking at a lunatic. "Seventeenth Master. Don't tell me you actually think that's possible."
"Is it not?"
"Whew."
So even the dead could get a headache. Having made this remarkable discovery, Ado Bale pressed a hand to his throbbing forehead.
"Of course it's impossible. If it were, I'd have grabbed any passerby long ago, awakened their Sixth Sense, forged them into a Level 9 mage, and sent them on their way."
"...Tsk."
Wearing a look of genuine disappointment, Oscar haggled like a merchant at a market stall. "Then what's the maximum I could stay? Just a little longer?"
"About thirty minutes remain in outside time... so you could stay another month or so."
"A month... that's far too short. Could I perhaps leave and come back in?"
"Y-you—! Listen to this boy! What do you take this place for, an inn? In and out whenever the mood strikes you?"
"...Isn't it?"
It was, of course, not.
Ado Bale let out an exasperated laugh. "Heh... I never thought I'd have to explain something like this, but what exactly do you take me for?"
"Ado Bale, First Tower Master of the White Magic Tower."
"Not the textbook answer — my current state."
"Ah."
Only then did Oscar grasp what the man was getting at. "You mean you're a kind of... thought-form?"
A thought-form was a being in which thought itself had taken on physical shape. Grand knights and archmages who had reached the absolute pinnacle commonly left one behind, hoping to find an heir to pass down their ultimate techniques.
"Well learned. I was set to vanish either the moment I passed the complete legacy of Space to someone, or after half a year passed with someone inside this place. Which is precisely why I suffered so much, searching for a mage with real talent."
"...I see."
So that was why he'd turned away hundreds of mages over the years — none of them had satisfied him. Privately, Oscar found it a great pity.
This was a grand archmage who had reached Level 9 centuries before him. If they could keep conversing steadily, he might well glean hints about the legendary 10th Level.
"Hmph. But a month, you say."
Learning that Oscar wouldn't be leaving immediately, Ado Bale at once began drafting a new plan. "I may not manage anything advanced, but I could cram a couple of simple techniques in as a crash course."
"Please do."
"Sit down here."
The two of them settled cross-legged on a flat, broad rock in the middle of the forest.
"As you well know, spatial magic is a tremendous power in and of itself. It's convenient in daily life, of course, but in battle it can serve as an unpredictable variable that strikes at an opponent's blind side."
"When you say convenient in daily life, you mean Blink and Teleport, I take it?"
"Sharp as ever. Though of course, Teleport — long-range movement — requires one to be a high-tier mage before it can even be attempted."
"...Harder than I expected."
Teleportation was surely one of the dreams of every mage — no, of every human being alive. Breakfast in a bustling eastern city, lunch in the western desert, dinner amid the cool mountains of the north, and falling asleep at night gazing out over a southern beach. That was the fantasy everyone harbored.
Hearing this, Ado Bale gave a scornful snort. "You think spatial magic can do anything? If that's the kind of freedom you're after, you'd need to be at the very threshold of Level 8 at minimum."
"Which would mean you've actually done it, Master Ado."
"Me? I've done all of it. A thoroughly amusing life, I must say."
With a faint, faraway smile, Ado Bale went on. "But there's a technique far more useful than Blink or Teleport — the Subspace."
Snap! He flicked his fingers to demonstrate, and the empty air split clean open.
Oscar's eyes went wide at the sight. "A Subspace! I've studied artifacts like subspace packs quite a bit, but this can be done with raw spatial magic too?"
"Normally? Impossible. The Subspace belongs to the dimensional realm — a concept an entire order higher."
"Then how...?"
"A loophole, of sorts."
Grinning, Ado Bale began his explanation. "I only discovered the method myself after reaching Level 9. It felt like it ought to work, so I tried it — and it did. Now, listen closely."
He laid out three prerequisites for using a Subspace.
"First, abundant mana. You have to expend an enormous quantity of it in a single instant."
"I'm fairly confident in my mana reserves."
"It shows, even to my eyes. We'll pass over that one, then."
The second prerequisite was simpler still.
"Talent, needless to say. An innate sensitivity to mana. Without it, the whole thing is flatly impossible."
"I'm quite confident in that as well."
"It shows, even to my eyes. We'll pass over that one too."
And then came the third condition — one that bordered on the impossible.
"You need the magical knowledge and perception of a high-tier mage — at the very least, something equivalent to Level 9."
"When you said you'd only managed it after reaching Level 9, I rather expected as much."
True to form for such a brilliant student, Oscar deduced even the reasoning behind it. "I imagine you have to feel the concept of a dimension with your own senses, not merely grasp it intellectually."
"Hoh! Teaching you really is a pleasure."
Delighted, the old man nodded with gusto. "Exactly. Everyone knows the word dimension, but almost no one has ever felt it in their bones. But someone who once stood at the pinnacle of Level 9 — surely you've sensed its shadow already."
"Yes. I felt it clearly during my battle with the Great Emperor."
The attacks they had hurled at each other in that fight would, without much exaggeration, have erased mountain ranges and boiled seas dry. Naturally, the mana consumed had been staggering — and every time it flowed, space itself warped and buckled.
"The core of the technique is this: distort space in one surge with an overwhelming volume of mana, thinning the boundary between dimensions. Then, with keen mana sensitivity, sense the seam — and force a hole through it to create the rift."
Even just hearing it explained, Oscar could tell it was no simple feat. It was difficult to count how many separate abilities a single technique demanded.
"One month remains before you leave. In that time, I'll drill two techniques into you."
Ado Bale raised two fingers. "Blink, for short-range movement. And a technique to manipulate a Subspace, however small."
"Is that possible in a month?"
"For anyone else, I'd say not a chance in hell..."
He shot Oscar a sidelong glance. "...But for you? I'd wager it can be done."
There was a strange, quiet faith in his voice.
The month flew by like an arrow loosed from a bowstring.
Ado Bale and Oscar stood at the edge of the forest where they had first met, speaking their farewells.
"A fine stretch of time, that was."
"For me, it was a privilege beyond anything else in this world — a time nothing could ever replace."
"...Hmph. Flatter away, you rascal. You won't get anything more out of me for it."
Though he scoffed, his expression betrayed nothing like displeasure. If anything, he looked like a parent sending a child off from home, pressing earnest parting advice upon him.
"Always stay careful. Always stay vigilant."
"Vigilant of what, Master?"
"You are a single mage who happens to handle space. Never forget that."
Then, suddenly, a bittersweet smile crossed Ado Bale's face. "Wielding this magic, there are moments when you stumble into mistakes. You fall under the illusion that you've become some omniscient god — you start nursing the delusion that there's nothing you cannot do."
"..."
"Guard against that. Especially when there is something precious nearby."
Oscar could not bring himself to answer. The look on Ado Bale's face as he spoke was too sorrowful.
After a moment's hesitation, he asked carefully, "What was it that you lost?"
"...My heart."
Turning his head, the old man gazed out over the grounds where the half-built White Tower had once stood.
"To tell the truth, the concept of the magic tower was never my idea to begin with. It was my beloved's dream. An ideal order of mages, where the elder generation passed down knowledge and the younger made that vision bloom and bear fruit. In a mages' society saturated with individualism, she championed cooperation — a notion that, in those days, sounded like pure fantasy."
But she was gone. Taken by a single mistake, sucked into a place from which no one could ever return.
"...I half lost my mind, back then. And I needed something to bury myself in. That tower exists because of that. The longing to see her again, the duty of fulfilling the dream she left behind — the tower was nothing more than an outlet for those feelings. People called me a prophet, a pioneer of the age, heaped title upon title on me. But the truth is, I was none of those things."
He had simply been an ordinary man, aching with longing for a lover he would never see again.
Having steadied his emotions for a moment, Ado Bale turned back and spoke. "And... this is a rather embarrassing thing to admit, but scattered throughout that tower are hidden spaces — every one of them made while thinking of her."
"?"
Those expanded zones — the ones whose very purpose Oscar had never been able to fathom?
He asked, "What's inside them?"
"Ahem. That much, I'm too embarrassed to say. But one thing is certain: if you've grown strong enough to remove them, your spatial abilities will advance another full step. More of the White Tower's floor space becomes usable — hardly a bad thing, either way. Think of it as homework."
Suddenly assigned homework, Oscar hesitated before asking, "Is it truly all right to erase them? Those spaces must be precious to you, Master."
"...In life, there are things you must simply let flow past. Back then, I didn't know that. No — truthfully, even now I understand it only with my head, never with my heart. But this much I know for certain: those spaces have no place in the White Tower of today. None for those of you living in the present."
With a wry smile, he asked once more. "Let go of my lingering attachments. Let go of my longing. And all of you — live in the now. That, surely, was the dream she wished for."
"..."
Oscar nodded slowly. Then he bowed low, and offered Ado Bale nine full bows.
"In my previous life, I served a single master for my entire life. I don't know if you'll grant it, but in this life, the one master I will serve is you, Master Ado."
A voice full of laughter reached his ears.
"...My final years were steeped in regret, remorse, and longing. What I never got over was dying without a single disciple to my name — and yet here you are, wringing every last emotion out of this old man, right to the very end."
A breeze swept through, carrying his voice away on the wind.
Raise your head, Oscar. I had already come to think of you as my disciple.
"..."
When Oscar slowly lifted his head, there was no trace of his second master anywhere.
And yet — unlike the day he lost his first master, it did not feel like grief.
May you finally be at peace.
After all, the old man had departed happier than anyone, with a smile clear and bright as day.