—One week later.
We were riding out to the Thunder God Emperor Festival preliminaries. They’d laid on two carriages for the trip: ours carried me, Maria, and Anastasia, with Merlin along as our chaperone, while the other took the two boys from our class.
“Still, a special match venue? It’s not like we needed to go that far, is it?”
“Well, it’s a festival.”
Merlin cleared her throat.
Today’s event needed a lot of open ground, so the academy had borrowed the national Order of Magic Knights’ training facility for it. On equipment alone our own field would have done the job, apparently, but the entire student body was coming to watch, and that settled that. The main tournament, I was told, would be held in the colosseum on academy grounds.
“And the carriage, too… Isn’t this a bit much? We could’ve walked. It’s not far.”
“Being class representative is an honor. Those with real ability receive treatment to match… and that’s part of an education too.”
“Except in our class it’s turned into nobody wanting the job at all.”
At that, Merlin gave a wry smile.
“There’ve been rather a lot of that sort lately. It’s a fine thing for peaceful ages to go on and on, but the softness they breed is a nuisance.”
The two of us traded a shrug. Apparently watching that spineless bunch had left us both thinking exactly the same thing.
Beside me, Maria spoke up.
“By the way, Ephthal? The other day, the way it shook out, you ended up saving me. Right?”
“Yeah. More or less how it shook out.”
“Owing somebody, one-sided like that… it doesn’t sit right with me.”
She raised one finger of her right hand.
“So. As thanks, I’ll grant you exactly one request. Anything at all. Go on, name it.”
“I mean, springing it on me out of nowhere…”
Honestly, where does this kid get it from. Then again, out of nowhere is about as Maria as it gets.
“…I’ve been thinking about it this whole time. How to pay you back. You saved my life, so obviously I’d have to get serious and… do all kinds of things. That’s where I’ve landed, so I’ve made up my mind about it. You really can ask for anything.”
Maria’s face was dead serious, and I shrugged. Earnest to a fault, this one.
“I didn’t save you because I wanted thanks. I don’t need any of this.”
“But then I never get to settle it, do I. Having something handed to me one-sided… I want no part of that. If I leave it here I’ll be looking up at you for the rest of my life, and I’m not having it.”
Earnest, or maybe just constitutionally incapable of losing. Hard to say which.
That was when Merlin turned a challenging little smile on her.
“You there, student Maria. I have heard what you had to say… you said you had made up your mind, did you not? I do not admire the casual use of such words.”
“Meaning what, exactly?”
“Consider. Were Ephthal-sama to bid you share his bed, what would you do? Making up one’s mind… can encompass that sort of thing as well, and that is precisely why it is not a phrase to be thrown about.”
At that, Maria fixed her eyes on mine.
“Hey, Ephthal. Do you want to sleep with me?”
It wasn’t only me. Merlin and Anastasia both went “Eh!?” too.
“Do you… want to sleep with me?”
“…”
“…”
“…”
Silence fell.
The air in the carriage had gone strange, Anastasia had frozen solid, and Merlin, the one who started all this, was wearing a face that said Wait, hang on!? Good grief. I knew elves took their obligations seriously, but I hadn’t expected a thank-you to arrive with a mind made up to quite that degree. And Merlin. What exactly do you plan to do about the atmosphere you’ve just built in here?
“Look, my request isn’t going to be anything like that. I’m not going to back you into a corner.”
Merlin cleared her throat and tried again, in the tone of a patient tutor.
“W-Well, then. Student Maria. That you have made up your mind as far as sharing a bed, I understand. But suppose it were not a single night. Suppose you were told to become his lover, or to marry him. Making up one’s mind, you see, means precisely that sort of—”
Maria cut her off halfway through and fixed her eyes on mine again.
“Hey, Ephthal. Do you want me to be your lover?”
And once again it wasn’t only me. Merlin and Anastasia went “Ehhhh!?” together.
“Do you want me… to be your lover?”
“…”
“…”
“…”
Silence, again.
No, no, no. The air had gone stranger still, Anastasia had been frozen so long she’d crossed over into statuary, and Merlin, once again the author of all this, had progressed to a face that said Wait, wait, hang on!?
“Like I said, I’m not asking you for that. And honestly, that isn’t the sort of thing that belongs under thanks or favors in the first place.”
“And I’d made up my mind, too…” Maria shrugged, looking genuinely put out.
Why the disappointment, though. What am I supposed to do with an attitude like that, exactly.
“By the way, Ephthal-sama?”
“Yeah, I noticed. A freezing barrier.”
Right, joke’s over. I was on my feet in the same breath, Maria tucked under one arm, and out through the window.
Merlin, by the look of it, went out the front, with Anastasia under one arm and the driver plucked off the horse under the other.
The magic went off the instant we were clear, centered on the carriage. Cold rolled through the air, and in a heartbeat the whole thing sat sheathed in a hemisphere of ice: the carriage we’d been riding in a moment ago, horses and all, sealed under a thin dome. Stay inside for that, naturally, and you’d have been locked in an ice cell along with it. We’d been a beat slow getting the driver out and he’d blacked out, but that was all it was, as far as I could see. No injuries. Fine, then.
“M-Master! What’s happening!?”
“Ah. That’d be Level 5: Magic Eater.”
Anastasia and Maria both went “Eh…” and lost the color in their faces on the spot.
“Hold on, hold on, what does that mean? Level 5 is serious magic, you know.”
“It’s a curse barrier. Strips every last drop of magic power out of whoever’s sealed inside the ice, and anyone half-trained ends up unable to cast for days. Merlin, can I ask you something?”
“Were you to ask whether you may—if it is a thing Ephthal-sama desires, then this Merlin holds only two answers in her hand. ‘Yes,’ and ‘yes.’”
No telling whether that was a joke, so I let it sail on past.
“That Level 5 gave me nothing to sense until the instant before it fired. Just to be sure, same for you?”
“Indeed. And though the difficulty of the spell itself is a mere Level 5, moving magic power that quietly takes real craft—whether even the Four Emperors of old counted such a caster among them, I couldn’t say. I certainly couldn’t manage it.”
“Right. Casting a Level 5 solo is nothing to write home about on its own… but that’s exactly the part that snags.”
“Um, Ephthal? You two keep talking like Level 5 is nothing at all, but casting one solo makes you an ace among aces even for a court mage, you know.”
“Then might this be Sasha-sama at his games?”
Merlin ignoring Maria that thoroughly was funny enough that I nearly laughed, though this wasn’t the moment for it.
“Sasha’s hardly so short of things to do that he’d come all the way out here to tease us, is he?”
“He does seem the sort to enjoy a prank… doesn’t he.”
Granted, I didn’t know another monster alive who could pull this off. I ran a detection spell to be sure, and there was nobody in range carrying magic power above a certain threshold. Nobody but Merlin. A caster who could slip my detection. So it really was one of Sasha’s pranks, then?
“Anyway, it’s too good an opportunity to waste. Anastasia, Maria. Watch closely.”
The spell had no habits in it. No color of its caster, nothing, and that in itself was uncanny. It was so textbook that assembling the formula that way would have been the harder trick, which put me right back at Sasha. I couldn’t have done it myself, not even aiming for it. And if he had set it up, there was no cleaner teaching aid going, so I’d put it to work on my own grand-disciples.
I held my palm out toward the wall of ice, and as I focused, I started tinkering with the formula laid into it.
“Master? What are you doing? Are you canceling it out with defensive magic?”
“No. I’m rewriting the formula that’s building the wall. Watch how the magic power moves and you’ll see it.”
“Um… I have absolutely no idea what you just said.”
The two of them tilted their heads in matching question marks, and Merlin let out a small laugh.
“Fledglings would not understand it yet. But once one becomes a mage of our tier, reaching into an enemy’s formula midway is a rather ordinary occurrence.”
“…No, I genuinely don’t understand what you mean, Merlin-sama.”
“The point is this. Magic, fundamentally, goes to whoever gets it off first. The higher the difficulty, the longer the formula takes to build, and tactics get built on that premise.”
“That part I understand! Master’s school is famous for its divine-speed barrages!”
“Just so,” Merlin said with a nod. “My own byname in the scholarly societies is the Thunder God of Flashing Chains. We too hold divine speed sacred. And there are occasions when reaching into a formula midair and collapsing it from the inside is faster than raising a high-level barrier to block it.”
“Formula intervention? Meaning…?”
“Meaning one does not meet it head-on with defensive magic, force against force. One reaches into the formula the enemy has assembled and makes a thorough nuisance of oneself. It does not merely weaken the spell. Strike the right point and the whole thing can be forced to cancel.”
That’s a thing you can do…? The pair of them blinked at us.
“Obviously,” I put in, “the other side fights your intervention with intervention of their own, defensively and desperately. Anyway, worth watching for future reference. Do it this way and you can cancel an enemy attack without touching a defensive spell.”
So I reached into the formula generating the ice wall, overwrote it with one that produced flame instead, and steered the two formulas into canceling each other out. The wall came apart in front of us, and as the last of it went, the mass of magic power left with nowhere to go dissolved into the air in glittering motes.
“See? Pretty, isn’t it. Anyway, that’s how you—”
“How you what!?”
I caught it from both of them at once.
Well, it’s more or less a secret art of the Ephthal school. It really only comes up in Level 9 and 10 exchanges, in that endgame-puzzle world where everything turns on who moves a fraction of a second sooner, and it’s entirely possible the technique has no place left in this era. It’s also very much a hit-and-hope move, the sort where the other party goes, “Ah, I forgot to guard that one! You’ve been sneaking in there this whole time!?”
And obviously, the spell is the caster’s own formula, built by their own hand. Whoever’s intervening has to start by analyzing it, while the caster knew every line of it from the beginning, so blocking is by far the easier side of that exchange. Barring an enormous gap in skill, it only ever works as an ambush. Then again, being an ambush is exactly why it’s devastating when it lands.
“Anyway, I’ve been drilling Anastasia and Maria on formula construction from the foundations up, so take it a step at a time and you’ll get here eventually.”
The moment I finished, Merlin nodded, proud as anything.
“Yes. Just as I did… mm.”
“Still… this has turned awkward.”
The barrier was down, but the horses had been drained and were out cold. It amounted to having their life force siphoned off, which meant healing magic wouldn’t touch it.
“Yes, we’ll be walking, then.”
I shook my head.
“No, that’s not it—I mean the other two.”
Here’s how the Thunder God Emperor Festival preliminaries worked. Five classes from the second years, five from the third years, and from the first years only ours: eleven teams. Add the student council on their special slot and that made twelve. Too many to run a main tournament straight off, hence a preliminary round to thin the field first. Only the top four go through. And apparently the preliminaries don’t require a full five.
There’s a reason for that. They’re young students, and once in a rare while one of them wakes up to their talent and shoots forward all at once over the space of a few months. When some unmarked kid like that turns up as a sort of secret weapon, it’s entertaining, and the crowd loves it. Some of that is Merlin’s own taste, admittedly. Either way, to keep that dark-horse slot alive, running the preliminaries with four is permitted.
Originally it was nothing more than permitted. But a four-man team’s score is averaged and then multiplied by five to give the team total, so somewhere along the line fielding your best four became standard practice.
So we reached the venue, Maria went straight for the entry desk, and—
“I’m telling you, we were attacked!”
“Rules are rules.”
Sure enough. Our two remaining classmates had taken the spell head-on and were unconscious, drained dry the same as the horses. They’d be no use to anyone for a while, which made registering them as competitors impossible, hence Maria going around and around with the staffer in the reception tent. Though honestly, ‘rules are rules’ is a hard thing to argue with.
“Hey, Merlin? Bottom line, we need four to get through today. Right?”
“Five for the finals and the semifinals, but as things stand right now… yes, that’s right.”
Maria came back over and let out a sigh.
“No good. There’s no talking to them. I’ve got one person in mind as an absolute last resort, but signing them up today, right this second, isn’t happening… That’s it for member hunting. There’s nothing we can do.”
And then every eye there, mine included, turned to a certain person.
Merlin took the weight of all those looks like she’d been waiting for exactly this and swept her long silver hair back with a flourish.
“Well, if I am to be relied upon to that degree, there is nothing else for it. Yes. This Merlin—”
She stopped there. Then she drew in a long, long breath.
“—shall simply have to take the field in cosplay, in a student uniform and a mask!”
Which, in fairness, was the only option left, so there wasn’t much to be done about it. But Merlin. Why do you look so delighted about this? You look like you’re in your twenties, you know. Are you honestly going to go through with cosplaying a student uniform?
“Merlin. I’m sure you know this already, but you’re strictly there to make up the numbers. You’re not to do anything except forfeit.”
Merlin actually competing would be cheating of the highest order. Which goes without saying, really.
And so… I let out a thoroughly dejected sigh.