The Mage Hunter (1)
The Yellow Tower, seated in the city of Rouen—the beating heart of the East—bore almost no resemblance to a conventional magic tower, right down to its very silhouette.
It was not the usual cylinder. It looked as if hundreds of cubes, each a different size, had been stacked at random into the sky.
"The Head of Magic Engineering is entering!"
Among all the eccentric halls of the Yellow Tower, the department with the greatest power was, without question, the Magic Engineering Department. In a mere twenty years, it had been credited with changing the world—an organization that boasted the most overwhelming influence in existence. And its head, Tony Havertz, was the sole disciple of the Yellow Tower Master himself.
The man who strode into the meeting room, brown pomade slicking back the hair of a man in his mid-thirties, took his seat at the head of the table without ceremony and swept the room with a gaze that settled just the right measure of tension into the air.
"Let's begin. As always, we'll start with the movements of the other towers."
At his words, an elderly mage who had already prepared his report spoke up.
"The Red Tower has secured operational authority over a large-scale monster subjugation. We're told the appointed commander is the Red Tower Master's own disciple—the mage called Lloyd Schultz, the Ash Mage."
"There was no opening for us to wedge ourselves into?"
"W-well... the military seems to have bowed to the Red Tower's influence on that front..."
The mage let his sentence trail off, glancing around cautiously. The mages of the Yellow Tower all feared Tony without exception—even though he was neither particularly cruel of hand nor the sort to lash out with punitive disciplinary measures.
"Then the Red Tower will post the finest results in the next subjugation."
If the commander hailed from the Red Tower, they would simply station Red Tower mages wherever the best achievements could be won. Tony nodded indifferently, as if he had expected nothing else. After all, nothing wasted energy quite as inefficiently as pouring it into the impossible.
"The day they make a truly catastrophic mistake, our turn will come around. What of the Blue Tower?"
"Ah, that side's house is on fire."
The mage in charge of Blue Tower intelligence jumped at the chance to lift the mood.
"The Blue Tower has been steadily ceding shares of the potion market to the White Tower. For now it's merely an embarrassment, nothing more—but if the trend continues, that story changes."
Tony nodded slowly.
They really did stumble badly. They got complacent.
They had launched a discount campaign to trample the White Tower, only for it to become the very dagger that slit their own throats. If it had been him, he would never have committed such an idiotic blunder.
His expression lightened slightly as he spoke.
"I imagine the White Tower is in full festival spirits, then."
"Indeed. Above all, what pleases them most is that Oscar Crucian is making a name for himself."
"...That name has been coming up rather often lately."
Frankly, he had expected never to hear it again. Wasn't that the broken toy of a boy, ruined beyond repair and discarded by every magic tower in existence?
"Yes, and there is fresh news on that front as well."
"Really? What did they develop this time, I wonder. A new potion? Or a supplement?"
Tony asked with a bored look.
"No, sir. They say that while carrying out a commission in Baran City, he encountered the Tattooist."
"...That is rather unfortunate news."
A genuine flicker of sympathy rose in him—the sincere pity of one man walking the path of magic for another.
The Tattooist was a mage of the Violet Brigade, a brigade notorious for its cruelty, with an enormous bounty hanging over her head. For a beginner mage to cross her path was no different from being swept away by a natural disaster through sheer bad luck.
"Did he die?"
"No. Surprisingly, he wasn't badly hurt at all. They say a few days of rest will see him right."
"...He met the Tattooist, and it ended at that?"
Disbelief crept across Tony's face. In all the news ever reported about her, not once had such a benign outcome ever come out of an encounter.
"Yes, and word that Oscar Crucian has reached 3rd level is spreading just as fast."
"3rd level? The man is a Mana Deficiency patient, isn't he?"
"He is. Which is likely why rumors are circulating that he may have cured the condition itself."
"A cure for Mana Deficiency Syndrome..."
If that were true, it would be the discovery of the century. An incurable disease that no great mage in history had ever solved—that was precisely what Mana Deficiency Syndrome was.
"We'll keep watching that situation for now."
"Understood. To add one more item on the White Tower—they seem to have recently developed an interest in magic engineering."
"...Magic engineering? Of all places, the White Tower?"
Tony's head tilted to one side. Fair enough—the White Tower's current ventures in delivery, potions, and supplements had nothing whatsoever to do with magic engineering.
"What is your reasoning?"
"We've found evidence that books and papers related to magic engineering have been flowing into the White Tower in large quantities."
Anyone else would have snapped at such a report—you're jumping at shadows over that? The sensible assumption would be that a few mages had simply bought them out of private curiosity.
But Tony understood better than anyone that a hole no bigger than a hairline could bring down an entire dam. He did not let the report slide past his ears; his eyes narrowed in thought.
"Hmm... let's say—purely hypothetically—that the White Tower really has taken an interest in magic engineering. What do you suppose the reason would be?"
At the question, the mages in the meeting room fell silent all at once. Tony neither rushed them nor lost his temper; he simply waited, hands folded, with easy patience. Presently, one young mage hesitantly raised a hand.
"Um... there was a rumor circulating through the mineral markets a while back that the White Tower had purchased levitation stones in bulk. Levitation stones, sir—they're among the minerals with the highest mana conductivity, inferior to mithril but not by much. They also have a peculiar property: when they hold mana, they float on their own."
"Go on."
"So a thought occurred to me—could the White Tower be developing an airship? Levitation stones are an essential component of airship construction, and if that were true, their interest in magic engineering would make perfect sense..."
The moment his words ended, a heavy, suffocating silence settled over the meeting room.
It held for a breath—and then, as if on cue, everyone burst out laughing.
"Bahahaha!"
"An airship—pfft! Ahem, hah!"
"That boy there—I thought he was some shut-in who did nothing but pore over documents all day, but he tells a fine joke."
"Quite the imagination on him, isn't there?"
The eldest mage in the room opened his mouth with a chuckle.
"An airship is nothing but a futile delusion, boy. Do you think we haven't tried building one ourselves?"
"Ah—was that so?"
"Well, the mages of today wouldn't know. The very technology of magic engineering was, at its root, one of the byproducts of the Sky Project."
After the discovery of magic engineering, the Yellow Tower too had secretly attempted to develop an airship. Unlike the past, they had believed the new technology would patch up the failures of old.
But what they met was failure, failure, failure—and failure again, in the most wretched forms imaginable.
"At the end of that endless chain of failures, we reached one conclusion: lightning magic and magic engineering, on their own, will never operate an airship. It might be a different story if we had the signature magic of the dead Oscar Sage—Ouroboros."
Another mage listening nodded along in agreement.
"He speaks true. We're no fools. If we could build and operate an airship, we'd hardly have staked our lives on developing a train."
The Yellow Tower had already completed trial runs of its trains in several cities, including the capital, Rosetta. Riding on that success, they were now laying a great railway destined to cut straight across the continent.
"We have no need to chase the phantom called the sky."
"The iron horse clad in the most cutting-edge magic engineering will make the Yellow Tower the foremost tower on the continent."
"Well, granted, laying the track is draining an astronomical sum of money even now..."
"Once the line is complete and the trains run in earnest, recouping it is merely a matter of time."
By their calculations, once the railway was finished, a journey from one end of the continent to the other would take a mere two weeks. That figure even included the stops to swap out the magic engineering batteries along the way—and compared to the present, when even the fastest available transport, a ship, took months, it was an unthinkable speed.
Which was to say: the very concept of transportation would be overturned.
Potions? Delivery services? Monster subjugation?
Such antiquated enterprises couldn't hope to catch even the heel of the profits that continental train trade would bring.
Tony roused the mages, who had drifted off into happy daydreams.
"Enough of the White Tower and trains. Have you identified the mage who set the new record?"
A while ago, an anonymous mage had appeared and cleared all 100 stages of Argo, the magic engineering training program, in just 9 minutes and 57 seconds. Naturally, the Yellow Tower was casting its nets far and wide to recruit the genius who had blazed onto the scene like a comet.
"We've narrowed down the list, but no candidate has proven suspicious yet."
"Hmm."
Tony's face soured. The training program was the Yellow Tower's own creation, but they had no authority to freely examine its records—the imperial household had strictly forbidden it under the banner of protecting personal information.
'Protection,' my foot. In truth it's nothing but a scheme to keep our Yellow Tower in check.
If the unlimited viewing of personal information had been permitted, the Yellow Tower's intelligence apparatus would have grown into something even the imperial household could not have dared to trifle with.
In the end, they had been forced into a treaty requiring imperial authorization before anyone's private records could be examined.
"...Nothing to be done, then. Keep searching, and search thoroughly. Talent like that must be brought into our Yellow Tower, no matter what."
"Yes, sir."
So many things stood in the way of the great Yellow Tower's road ahead. Clicking his tongue, Tony murmured absently,
"Let's move on to the next agenda item."
Just before they were to leave the Hoover Estate, an unfamiliar visitor came calling.
"Good day. I am Klein Matisse, a 5th-level mage serving as the Blood Tower's branch manager of Varan."
"...Oscar Crucian, a 3rd-level mage of the tower."
Oscar mumbled his answer, doing his utmost to swallow the word White into an indistinct slur. The moment they learned he belonged to the White Tower, they were bound to charge him thirty percent extra.
But his desperate effort crumbled away without ceremony.
"So you are White Tower. The mage who survived the Tattooist—not a difficult piece of information to come by."
"..."
Pat, pat, pat.
Oscar patted through his pockets. Thirty percent extra—that was how much more, exactly? Would he need another 850,000 vell on hand?
Just as he was crunching the numbers in his head, Klein abruptly produced a money pouch and held it out to him.
"...What is this?"
"The 1,100,000 vell you paid as the retainer. Please count it."
"My question was, why are you returning it?"
"To put it bluntly, we failed to locate the owner of the blood. The tracking spell kept severing mid-trace, you see."
The spell kept severing?
Could it be...?
A grim premonition flashed through Oscar's mind as he accepted the pouch and asked,
"Do you have any idea what might be causing it?"
"Yes. There are several places on the continent where the flow of mana grows so violently unstable that our tracking spells are severed outright. In the case of this commission, judging from the point at which the spell was cut off..."
Klein continued with an uneasy look on his face.
"The person you're seeking is most likely beyond the Red Mountains."
They did say bad premonitions always came true—and of course, it had to be the Red Mountains. Even in the past, spells had severed constantly whenever they searched for the demons hiding beyond that range.
"In any case, we have returned your full deposit, so the commission is void."
With a brief bow, Klein hurried out of the room—as though he wanted nothing more to do with this affair.
Oscar stared at the money pouch on the table and sank deep into thought.
'Beyond the Red Mountains...'
Could it truly be that, since his own death, she had never managed to leave the Grey Zone on the far side of the range? If so, her silence—all those twenty years without sending a single scrap of intelligence to the White Tower—made perfect sense.
But the question why? kept circling back to the front of his mind.
'Even with her gliding above the clouds with every trace of her presence erased, the demons could never detect her by any means.'
Wasn't that precisely how she had harvested such enormous advantages throughout the entire war?
If she hadn't escaped that place, there had to be some other reason behind it.
'...One thing is certain, at least—she isn't dead.'
The proof was that the Blood Tower's tracking spell had functioned normally for a stretch before failing. And if her life had ever truly been threatened, there was no way she wouldn't have used her signature spell, Everlasting Garden.
It was a spell that rendered everything within a fixed radius—including the caster herself—untouchable and frozen in stasis.
'Using it means she can't move, but it also means she cannot die.'
The surrounding space was severed completely from the flow of the world. In fact, had the White Tower failed to slay the Great Emperor, it would have been her—standing by with Plan B—who was deployed. Her sacrifice, locking herself into eternal stasis together with the Great Emperor, was to be Plan B.
'The details, I suppose, I'll only learn by going beyond the Red Mountains myself...'
Impossible at his current strength. He would need to be at least 5th or 6th level merely to wander that region without dying.
'Then my immediate priority is...'
Growth, presumably. He was in the middle of agonizing over how to grow stronger as quickly as possible when someone knocked at the door.
"Come in."
The Hoover household servant who entered at his answer was carrying a large wire communication device.
"Master Oscar, there is a transmission from the White Tower."