The Delivery Department (4)
Rouen, the heart of the East.
At a certain door in the Yellow Tower, the seat of the empire's magical engineering, there came a resounding bang as it was thrown open.
"H-Head of Magic Engineering, sir!"
"……"
Tony paid no mind to the rudeness of the Information Department head, who had barged in without so much as a knock, and merely cast him a sidelong, unreadable look.
"What is it?"
"We found out."
"……You don't mean the matter I asked you to look into just a few days ago? That was remarkably fast."
"No, sir. This is about a topic that came up in passing during a meeting we had a few weeks back — the news that the White Tower has been buying up magic engineering papers and Levitation Stones in bulk."
As the conversations of that day resurfaced in his memory, Tony nodded slowly.
"I remember. So? What exactly did you find out?"
"The answer was bikes."
"Hm?"
Bikes? Surely he didn't mean the very bikes Tony himself knew of?
As Tony tilted his head, the Information Department head asked with a look of triumph on his face.
"Do you recall the report I submitted three or four months ago, regarding the status of the bike rental business?"
"Of course. You said it flopped in the mountainous North and the desert-heavy West."
"Correct. It didn't just flop — it collapsed so catastrophically that recovery was impossible. Don't you remember how the rental shop owners ran all over the place trying to sell off their bikes afterward?"
"I do."
He even remembered some of them coming all the way to the Yellow Tower, begging to be paid half the purchase price — begging.
Naturally, no one had bought the bikes back.
By that point, the Yellow Tower had already written the bike off as a failed product and withdrawn from the business entirely.
"But you're saying the answer was bikes. Surely the White Tower didn't go and purchase all those piles of scrap metal?"
"Uh… how did you know, sir?"
"?"
At the entirely unexpected reply, Tony's eyes went round.
"That's hard to believe. They actually bought them? Why on earth?"
"If you connect it to their earlier bulk purchases of magic engineering materials and Levitation Stones, I'd have to guess they're modifying the bikes for some other use."
"……The most likely candidate would be delivery."
"Ah, actually — that may not be it."
With those words, the Information Department head lowered his voice.
"According to the rumors I've been hearing, the White Tower is finally preparing to pull out of the delivery business altogether."
"They're leaving the delivery business — and they bought bikes?"
"Well, presumably they're starting some new venture with them. Delivery wasn't making money, after all."
He said it as though it were nothing, but Tony's thinking ran in a different direction entirely.
The West and the North. Combine the fleet operated by the bike rental businesses in those two regions and it comes to more than five thousand units.
Acquiring all of that meant spending a sum that absolutely could not be ignored.
Granted, the price would have been pitifully cheap compared to retail — but those were still vehicles, functional ones.
And they intend to build a new business on top of them?
Nonsense.
For all that the White Tower had been gleefully raking in profits from its potions, business still required plausibility.
In other words, if this wasn't an extension of the delivery business, then the direction of this development was far too out of left field.
And above all, Fidelina Chase, the elder of the White Tower, has a genius-level talent for managing money.
The fact that she'd somehow kept the White Tower afloat for over a decade on profits the size of a mouse's tail was proof enough of that.
Which meant that, in the end, they must have done this because they were confident of something.
What could it be?
An inexplicable unease crept up his spine, prickling at instincts he usually trusted.
It was a feeling he personally despised.
And yet — of all places, from the White Tower. He'd never imagined it would come from them.
"Find out thoroughly what the White Tower is preparing regarding those bikes."
"Leave it to me."
"And — did you learn why the information out of Vince has been locked down?"
"……"
At that question, the Information Department head's expression grew heavy.
"I apologize. I tried to go through my usual inside sources as always, but they turned me down flat, white-faced with fear. Said their own necks were on the line."
"It's that serious, then?"
Just days earlier, all information concerning Vince Territory on the far side of the continent — and everything surrounding it — had been cut off for roughly a day.
"Yes. It appears…… the Imperial Palace has classified that information at the highest tier."
"The highest tier, you say."
That was the most restricted grade of information the Imperial Palace handled.
Feeling an unease he could not quite explain, Tony turned his gaze back to the documents before him and spoke.
"……Keep digging."
When morning came, a rather welcome face appeared at his door.
"Whoa, finally! We finally meet."
Franc Sirius.
The moment he'd flung the door open, the boy came pouring inside, launching straight into a litany of complaints.
"I've never in my life seen a low-rank mage as busy as you. Where on earth do you keep running off to?"
"Busy here, busy there."
Now that he thought back on it, it really had been quite a while.
The last time had been the get-well visit, back before they hunted the White Star Mole and he departed for Baran, hadn't it?
After that, even once they'd returned to the Magic Tower, the boy had gone straight into boot camp training, and there simply hadn't been time to see each other.
"Ugh. When you were recruiting me, you talked like you'd be glued to my side twenty-four hours a day teaching me all sorts of things……"
Franc stuck out his lower lip in a pout.
But for all his grumbling, it seemed he hadn't been the only one who'd been busy.
The magic of the boy standing before him after so long had deepened considerably since they'd last met.
"You say that, and yet it looks like you've been training quite hard on your own?"
"Obviously. You think I'd just sit around doing nothing because you weren't here?"
At the sharp retort, one of Franc's arms vanished with a sudden whoosh.
In the same instant, a cool breeze swept across his face, as if a fan had started spinning right in front of it.
"I can turn parts of my body into wind now, at least to a degree."
At least to a degree.
He hadn't fully conquered it, then, but it seemed he'd pushed past his trauma at least a little.
"And what counts as 'a degree'?"
"My limbs are about the limit for now. My head and my heart still scare me too much — I've never even tried those."
"That much is plenty. You've worked hard."
After all, if a true crisis ever came, his head and heart would turn to wind on their own.
That had been true since before he'd even begun training.
"You didn't come all the way here first thing in the morning just to show me your face, so — you've hit a wall in your growth, haven't you?"
The remark hit dead center, and Franc quickly averted his eyes.
"……Guilty as charged. I'm not sure how I'm supposed to make use of this ability. So I came to ask what you think."
"Hm. Say you had to fight Sir Lazley again, right now. How would you use it?"
"Well… probably something like this?"
As he finished speaking, one of Franc's arms transformed into wind, and moments later it bristled with a keen edge.
He had turned his entire wind-formed arm into a Wind Cutter.
"I wouldn't use that, would I? Even a knight wouldn't be able to get close easily against it."
"It's not a bad interpretation, but……"
Personally, Oscar found it a little disappointing.
Because Franc's physical abilities fell far short of his own or Killian's.
"If you fix your growth path in that direction from the start, that ceiling will arrive sooner than you think."
Against a knight or mage skilled in close combat, he would be neutralized in an instant — that much was obvious.
Perhaps Franc already knew it himself, because he let out a deep sigh.
"I know. That's exactly why I came to find you. I'm asking that big, thick, brilliant head of yours to cook up some ideas."
"'Big, thick, and brilliant,' is it……"
It would have nothing to do with any of those qualities — but Oscar already knew the answer to this particular problem.
The 7th Tower Master, the first wielder of Pungbaek.
All he needed to do was reference the man's method of combat.
"Follow me to the training hall."
This was already the second time he'd walked to the training hall together with Franc.
Oscar held out a single weapon to the boy standing there blankly.
"Here. Take it."
"……What is this? Looks awfully like a whip?"
"That's because it is a whip. It's the weapon you'll be practicing with and mastering from now on."
At those words, Franc couldn't hide his displeasure.
And small wonder — the whip was notoriously one of the most difficult weapons in existence to handle.
"Why a whip, of all things?"
"Because it's the weapon that makes the best possible use of your ability."
In terms of killing power, the whip ranked among the very highest of all cold weapons.
Its reach outclassed even the spear, and its speed went without saying.
It was, in fact, the only weapon capable of breaking the sound barrier in an instant without any use of magic.
"Its destructive power is tremendous, too. Land a clean hit, and you could quite literally tear skin right off the bone."
"……If it's that good, why doesn't everyone use one?"
"Because it has a few flaws so fatal they drown out every one of those advantages."
Oscar made a light gesture with his hand.
"Better to experience it than hear about it. Swing it at me."
"If I tear your skin off or something— wait. Never mind."
Having realized exactly who he'd been worrying about, Franc whipped the lash with all his strength.
Crack!
The instant the whip's tip, having shattered the sound barrier, came hurtling toward Oscar —
he caught it between his fingers, casual as anything.
"You—! Is your hand okay?!"
"It's fine."
Thanks to Breeze, an attack of this level was no trouble to catch at all.
Only once Franc had confirmed that his friend was unharmed did he exhale.
"……You absolute monster. Let go already. If you keep holding it, I can't get my whip back."
"And that is the first problem with this weapon."
Oscar spoke as he eyed the whip stretched taut between them.
"The wind-up before a whip strike is enormous, and against an opponent with sharp eyes, the trajectory is easy to predict. What's more, if the whip gets caught by the enemy like this, the fight is as good as over. It's the classic weapon that invests everything in offense — with next to no defense to speak of."
Every one of those flaws was devastating.
They were precisely why the whip, for all its superior speed and destructive power, had been passed over as a mainstream weapon.
"But what happens if you lay your Pungbaek over this weapon?"
"……Huh?"
At that moment, Franc's face lit with sudden realization — and simultaneously, the whip vanished from Oscar's grip.
It had dissolved into wind and scattered into nothing.
Having reclaimed his whip with ridiculous ease, Franc spoke with a dazed look.
"So in my case, there's no chance of the whip being caught by an enemy? Because it's impossible to grab the wind."
"Better still — a whip turned invisible by becoming wind makes its trajectory and timing brutally hard to read."
And a whip that had broken the sound barrier was difficult to react to even when you could see it coming.
"In other words, with your Pungbaek, you can erase every single one of the whip's weaknesses."
"……Hearing that, it sounds like a one-of-a-kind cheat weapon."
Franc stared at the whip coiled in his hand for a long moment before speaking.
"But if the whip turns into wind, doesn't that mean its destructive power drops too?"
"Good question. And you're right. If all we wanted was to corrode things with wind, there'd be no reason to use a whip at all."
The world was already awash with better weapons.
But the 7th Tower Master had eliminated even that final flaw — through a remarkably ingenious method.
"There's an intermediate-tier spell that was once used in actual combat by the White Tower — one I'm currently in the process of restoring. Well? Care to learn it?"
"Obviously. What's it called?"
"Steel Breath."
A spell that hardened every wisp of wind the caster controlled into something as solid as steel.
Wielded together with Pungbaek, it would make Franc's whip a perfect weapon.
Steel no eye could see, moving faster than sound — coming for an opponent's life.