The Wizard of the Ashes (2)
Clunk.
"……"
Oscar abruptly looked down at the bracelet fastened around his left wrist, then fixed Lloyd with a long, level stare—the kind of look that said, just what is this ridiculous thing supposed to be?
"It's a shackle," Lloyd replied, receiving the gaze with an air of supreme indifference. "It tracks the wearer's location and mana usage, and it can restrict the use of mana as well."
"Are you insane?" Why on earth would anyone fasten such a thing on him? At the look of sheer incredulity Oscar gave him, Lloyd tilted his head with genuine puzzlement.
"Why that reaction? Do you perhaps lack the awareness that you're a hostage?"
"I knew I'd be taken hostage, but I didn't expect to be treated like a criminal on sight."
"You are, after all, a being who might flee at any moment and sell everything to the Imperial Household. The distinction is a narrow one."
With that bored rejoinder, Lloyd strode into his enormous barracks. Oscar followed him inside and took a slow turn around the interior, which was barren to the point of desolation. It was unmistakably different in atmosphere from the room he remembered from the boy's childhood—so much so that his wistful gaze seemed to grate on Lloyd, whose brow furrowed.
"There's nothing here worth looking at. What are you staring at so hard?"
"It's simply barer than I expected. I assumed there'd at least be a flower or two—I heard your magic had something to do with them."
Lloyd was a mage of a Special Attribute. More than that, he possessed Blooming of a Hundred Flowers—the power to make any flower he had seen once bloom again at will.
Maybe it was because of that ability, but his room had been wallpapered with flowers of every color since he was little. He had been the one, too, who painted the 10th-floor Flower Garden more brilliantly than anyone else. While the other children had obsessed over ancient creatures, Lloyd had loved only flowers. Watching him, one could almost believe he wasn't training to be a mage at all, but a florist—so wholehearted was his devotion.
Of course, the Lloyd of thirty, a gaunt and desiccated adult, shook his head firmly. "That's prejudice. I've come to dislike things that wilt quickly. Flowers, for instance. Or promises."
"……"
This promise-keeping fanatic hates promises? Could I be the one who drove him to it?
While Oscar hesitated, weighing what to say, Lloyd pulled aside an enormous rug laid over the floor, revealing a heavy door of solid iron beneath.
"The laboratory is this way."
Click. At a snap of Lloyd's fingers, the iron door groaned open upward, and the man tipped his chin toward it. "Go down."
"……"
Oscar descended the stairs in silence and blinked, mildly surprised at how much more spacious the place was than he'd imagined.
"Did you build this specifically to research the seeds?"
"It's a modified version of a space my predecessors used. A vault, most likely, judging by the construction."
As Oscar surveyed the interior, he came upon a second door and asked, "What's that door for?"
"……You don't need to know. It's locked regardless. Whatever happens, do not open it."
His face made it plain that neither rebuttal nor question would be entertained, so Oscar simply nodded and recited the materials he would need. "A large pot, flasks in assorted sizes, a precision scale… and I'll want some holy water as well."
"Nothing else? Surely you'll need a mana isolation unit, a mana detection lens—things of that sort?"
"As for that—"
Clunk. Oscar raised his left arm as he answered. "Give me access to mana alone, and I can handle it all myself."
"……"
At that brazen confidence, Lloyd gave a small nod. "The equipment will be brought to you within thirty minutes."
Oscar's daily routine was simple: some fifteen hours of research a day, after which his time was entirely his own. He spent the remainder on meditation, walks, and meals.
Honestly, at first it felt absurd and bitterly unfair to be held hostage by my own disciple… but I can't say it's been all bad. In fact, some of it had proven unexpectedly fortunate—because one of the things Oscar had been most curious about was the very existence of the demonkin.
There had been no such concept in his day. More precisely, it wasn't that the concept didn't exist—it was that it couldn't exist.
The very idea of drinking in demonic blood and becoming demonkin had been impossible, for to humans, demonic energy was a poison more lethal than anything else. Demonic energy and a human's innate mana are fundamentally incompatible. Like water and oil, the two simply could not mix.
And yet they had gone and made the impossible possible. And now they dangle that plump bait to command the Black Finger—a pack of lunatics for the ages.
Oscar had been skeptical of the so-called "seeds" from the beginning. He'd believed the whole thing was a sleight of hand: demonic energy diluted from demon blood to its absolute limit, its symptoms merely delayed rather than eliminated.
But I was wrong. Astonishingly, the seed's underlying mechanism was simple. If oil—the demonic energy—couldn't mix with water, then remove the water altogether. That was all.
In practice, once a subject takes the seed, their entire store of mana converts into demonic energy.
Oscar laid this out as he paged through the living-experiment reports Lloyd had compiled to date. "According to this report, a number of orcs died because they couldn't digest the seed. My guess is they failed to survive the process of their mana converting into demonic energy."
"Hmm. So is there no way to intervene in that process itself and artificially improve the success rate?"
"Not that I'm aware of. If such a thing were possible, you'd be called a god."
Lloyd nodded, taking a moment to organize his thoughts, and murmured, "…Remarkable."
"Yes—discarding your mana entirely because it interferes. A positively diabolical idea."
"What I called remarkable is your alchemy."
Lloyd was genuinely impressed by the depth of alchemy Oscar had demonstrated. "How in the world did you accumulate knowledge of this caliber at your age?"
"It's achievable if you study the textbooks primarily."
"You do tell a fine lie."
They had grown somewhat closer over the past several days. At the very least, Oscar's jokes no longer went ignored. About time I started asking, I'd say.
After a moment's deliberation, Oscar broached the subject as though in passing. "Just before I was brought here, I had an audience with the Tower Master."
"I see."
A silence followed, heavy without end, until at last Lloyd let a sneer curl across his face. "You were hoping for some particular reaction, were you? My apologies for disappointing."
"Not at all. There is something I'm curious about, if I may ask."
"Ask, and I'll decide whether to answer."
"When I mentioned I was coming to see you, she was overjoyed. But when I asked what your relationship was, she shattered the teacup in her hand. She forbade me from so much as uttering the names of my master and senior brothers in her presence."
Lloyd wore an expression impossible to read, then nodded. "I'd expect as much."
"Speaking frankly—do the two of you simply not get along?"
"You ask obvious questions. Of course we don't. I—"
"Betrayed the White Tower?"
Betrayal. The word must have stung more than a little; Lloyd's brow twitched once. He stared at Oscar for a long moment, then inclined his head. "Yes. I betrayed the White Tower."
"Why?"
Lloyd's lip curled into another sneer. "Why? Are you asking why I became the Red Tower Master's disciple?"
"Yes."
"I don't know what answer you expect, but there's nothing grand behind it. I'll say only this: it was the more rational choice. That's all."
A rational choice. It wasn't wrong. The White Tower, sinking slowly into dusk, and the Red Tower, burning brighter than it ever had—ask anyone to choose between the two, and nine out of ten would pick the Red.
…And it's an answer that suits him, more than anything. He had always been a boy who loved weighing efficiency above all else.
The moment a bitter smile crept onto Oscar's face before he could hide it, Lloyd glanced at the time and rose from his seat. "I'll stop here for today."
"Your hours with the research keep getting shorter. Is something happening outside?"
He pondered the question briefly, then nodded. "The orcs keep gathering. A force of a scale without precedent in the last thirty years."
"Thirty years…? What's the presumed cause?"
"Under ordinary circumstances, we'd simply conclude that a great leader has risen among them."
Lloyd's eyes flicked sidelong to the seed resting on the table. "The problem is that we can no longer afford to believe that."
"So you believe the orcs' chieftain has taken the seed as well."
"Not believe. I'm certain. I obtained these seeds by killing a chieftain-class orc myself."
So the shrinking research hours were because more and more time was demanded at the front lines. Oscar asked, "When do you think it will begin?"
"The battle? I'd expect them to charge within two weeks, at the latest."
His indifferent gaze turned toward Oscar. "Until then, I'll let you come and go freely, so don't worry. Of course, you'll have to swear on the Parchment of Covenant first."
"……"
Truly charming to the very last, this one.
The afternoon after lunch, Oscar was out strolling to settle his stomach when shouting reached his ears.
"Keep that mouth shut if you can't watch what comes out of it!"
"Why? Did I say something wrong?"
Drawing closer to where the crowd had massed, Oscar found soldiers split into two camps, squaring off against each other—and without meaning to, he nodded to himself. A faction fight. Even at a glance, one side was mages and the other knights. At the head of the knights, a man easily two meters tall loomed over the mage before him, growling.
"I'm sure your captain thinks it's just swell that our commander went missing. Thanks to him, he snatched the commander's seat without lifting a finger. Ha—maybe 'missing' is a lie, too."
"…Are you insulting the honor of the Red Tower right now?"
"Hah. Men who know the meaning of honor would have launched a search operation, no matter how routine, when their commander disappeared. Where was yours?"
"A search operation? You're out of your mind. Are your eyes too blind to see the orcs swarming out there like clouds?"
So that's why it felt strange, Lloyd being the Red Citadel's supreme commander. When Senior Sister Lena had shown him in, he had been nothing more than the commander of the subjugation campaign.
Which means the knight who was the original commander lost his captain mid-mission. Afterward the orcs had come flooding in, leaving no capacity for a search, and the rift between the two camps had evidently festered into a chasm.
Then, unable to swallow his temper, a knight finally crossed the line. Thwat! A wad of spit struck the mage's face. "Scheming mage bastards."
"……"
The Red Tower mage who had taken the spit closed both eyes. To a casual observer it might have looked like an effort at self-control, but it was merely time to brace himself. When those eyes opened again, a frigid bloodlust lay coiled within them. In an instant the air grew dense, and against the cold of that gaze, mana of a different sort rose like wildfire—
"Everyone, halt."
"……!"
"……!"
At the sound of Lloyd's voice, the mana across the entire clearing vanished as though it had never been. Showing the bearing befitting a 7th-level high mage, he issued a dry command. "Disperse. Return to your posts."
"……Yes, sir."
"Tch."
That was the whole of it—no further punishment followed. No doubt he had judged that crushing morale any further on the eve of war would be inefficient.
"……"
But to Oscar's eye, none of it looked good. The rift between the two factions appeared to have been carved deep, far beyond patching. That's a bomb, no matter how you slice it. A bomb buried in the middle of a war camp, liable to go off at any moment.
Amid that worry and unease, a week passed in the blink of an eye—and the research on the seed arrived, almost without his noticing, at its final stage.