Chapter 2 – The Cat-Eared Girl, the Spirit, and the Emperor of Ice
—The magic academy cafeteria.
With our place in the main tournament secured, we were holding a celebration dinner in the academy cafeteria. This is a custom of ours going back to my previous life: whenever a disciple gets recognized for something, a tournament or a paper or whatever it happens to be, the whole household turns out to eat and drink. Being hard on them is necessary if you want them to grow, but there’s a saying that a child raised on praise grows well, and praise, or rewards if you like, matters every bit as much. So on nights like this I pay, and we make a racket.
“Still, that was priceless, Ephthal-sama. The faces on those damned student council brats—”
I brought a fist down on Merlin’s head. Hard.
“Do that again and I really will get angry.”
“…My apologies.”
“Merlin. You’ve been alive more than four hundred years. It’s about time you stopped behaving like a child.”
“And by the by. This fried shrimp is quite the fine article.”
At that distinctive turn of phrase, Maria nodded hard.
“You think so too, Sasha-sama? I love them!”
“Aye. And another thing, this cafeteria keeps a decent wine. Is the stock for the faculty?”
My master—Sasha—tipped his wineglass to wash the fried shrimp in his mouth straight down. It was Anastasia who fielded that one.
“Yes. They won’t sell alcohol to students.”
And there, all four of us, Merlin and Anastasia and Maria and me, went wide-eyed in the same instant—
“Why are you here!?”
“Hm? There was a good smell on the air.”
“Master!? You spend your time shut up in your quarters in the World Tree, asleep, don’t you?”
Sasha tilted his head at the question.
“Aye, well. There was a chance of seeing a Level 10. There’s a festival on… is there not?”
I turned the real meaning of that over and shrugged. Good grief.
“Do you honestly think I’d use a Level 10 here? It would be nothing but trouble, wouldn’t it?”
Sasha laughed at that, loud and hearty, and took another mouthful of wine.
“Nay, not you. A Level 10 other than you.”
“A Level 10 other than… me? In this era the only ones who can handle one are me, and you, Master, and the Fire God Emperor Cliff. Because of the Magia Burst, even Merlin can’t manage it.”
Sasha gave a small nod.
“That is how it stands. Officially.”
“Officially…?”
“Take this, for instance.”
He pointed at Anastasia and Maria.
“Ephthal. You used Vessel Transcription on these two, did you not?”
“…Nothing gets past you, does it.”
“Look at the flow of their magic power and it’s plain enough. In theory these two fledglings carry souls the same as the lot from before the change, from four hundred years and more ago. Train them and reaching Level 10 stands to reason.”
At that the pair of them went “Eh!?” and stood there dumbstruck.
“We can…”
“…use a Level 10?”
“Beyond training that beggars imagination, aye.”
“I told you back then, didn’t I, Maria?”
“Told me what? Ephthal?”
“That I’d take you to the highest title a young mage can hold. The realm of the Hihiirokane.”
Maria swallowed audibly.
Exactly as Sasha said, it’s an outrageous road. In the end it comes down to their own effort, but if the two of them want it, I intend to teach them how to walk it—a hard road, wall after wall, with a guaranteed run of setbacks along the way.
Anyway. Setting that aside—
“What do you mean, a Level 10 other than me, Master?”
“I mean there are ways. Even in this world, changed as it is.”
“But if you came to watch the Thunder God Emperor Ephthal Festival… that means they’re among the students?”
There was no way. Not a chance. Even back in that era four hundred years ago, or anywhere in recorded history for that matter, I’d never seen or heard of a Level 10 in their teens.
“Say, Ephthal. Shall I tell you a piece of the secret of magic aptitude I’ve kept from you all this while? You’ve been hunting for a way to cure aptitude, have you not? We get nowhere on the other Level 10 unless I explain that part first.”
“You knew about my aptitude too. Nothing really does get past you.”
“I am your master, for what it’s worth. So, then. Having no aptitude means being colorless, in short. Fire is red, wind green, earth brown, water blue, and so on down the line.”
“…I’m not following.”
“Faster to give you the conclusion. The only cure lies in the chain of phenomena that connects to the Root of Roots.”
“The Root of… Roots?”
“You carry a singularity at the level of your soul. There are those in this world who happen to be colorless, rarely. In your case it is inevitable.”
“My having no aptitude is… inevitable?”
Sasha stood then, and murmured into my ear.
“So it was the second time as well, was it not? That fate of yours is inevitable.”
Cold sweat prickled its way down my spine.
“Master. How much do you know about me?”
“Well, I am your master. I knew from the start. And after you died… no, the Fire God Emperor knew too, did he not? Before he ever made the aptitude test reagent.”
“…What is the Root of Roots?”
“The Roots. The road that leads to the goddess. The ancient artifact the Fire God Emperor was after… well. Telling you for free is a bit much.”
“The goddess. And the Fire God Emperor!? Hey—what the hell are you actually saying!?”
“Are you not better versed in the goddess than I am? I’ve never met the thing, unfortunately. Me—I’m wild-caught. Not reincarnated stock, like you.”
Hey, hey. So Sasha knows the goddess of reincarnation exists after all, does he.
Sasha grinned.
“You’ll run into that Level 10 at the festival whether you like it or not. Better I tell you once you’ve seen what it is.”
He waved a hand behind him—“Be seeing you. Come to my quarters once the festival’s done”—and started to walk off, and—
“Hey, Master! We’re not done—”
I clicked my tongue.
—Level 9: Ex Teleport.
“The bastard ran. Still… a monster through and through, that one.”
Vanished without letting me catch so much as the first stir of his magic power. Honestly. You can’t get a thing past that old man. I shrugged.
Saturday, our day off.
“So! We’re heading for the dorms to drag in our last member!”
At Maria’s clarion call, we set off for the student dormitory. Anastasia and I are day students, so the dorm is a bit of a blank to me. What I knew came to this: the six-story building in the corner of the school grounds, no shared rooms, every one of them private. Word had it the interior was fairly luxurious, and one step inside told me the word was good. Say what you will, this school is a prestigious one with a great many demon nobles from far-off places, so that much is a given.
“So whose room are we heading for?”
“Remember I said our classmates are useless as fighting strength? There’s exactly one exception. Difficult personality, but she’s in the dorm.”
I don’t think she’d want to hear ‘difficult personality’ from you, of all people. I nearly said it out loud, then thought about the aftermath and let it go.
“Um… Maria-san? What sort of person is she?”
“Special recommended admission, affiliated with the human religious organization. The Holy Church. A genius girl who got into the magic academy at six years old.”
Anastasia and I went wide-eyed together.
“Six years old? That’s incredible!”
And it really is. My era had skip-a-grade systems of a sort, but admission to a magic academy at that age is something I’ve never heard of anywhere.
Anastasia tilted her head.
“But why would someone from the Holy Church be at a demon school?”
“She’s got circumstances, apparently. Her family sent her away, and she got passed along from there. That’s how she wound up with the Holy Church. Part of her magic training, basically. From the day she was born she was knocking on the doors of one tradition after another, studying under all sorts of schools right up until she turned six.”
“She’s six, though. All those traditions, at that age? There isn’t even time to learn the fundamentals…”
“No, she’s got them down at a serious level. Bluntly? That girl is the one person who has surpassed the genius beauty that is me, and I don’t even need a ‘maybe’ for it.”
For Maria to go that far. This might genuinely be quite the talent.
“But then why wasn’t she picked for the class selection in the first place?”
Maria let out a deep sigh where she stood.
“…She’s a shut-in of monstrous proportions.”
“A shut-in?”
“Yeah. She’s already repeated three years, for one thing. Disowned by her family, expelled from the Holy Church, and it seems to have hit her hard. She’s repeated so many times the academy’s about to throw her out too. She’s what you’d call standing on the edge of a cliff.”
“Hold on, Maria, I don’t follow. The girl was a genius, wasn’t she? Three years repeated…?”
“Er… a child prodigy at four, a bright kid at five, and by six just an ordinary person. Compared to the normal crowd she was still miles ahead, sure, but the plan was to skip her a grade inside two months, and instead she got a normal promotion. That’s where she broke.”
“So she fell from grace at a spectacular rate. Is that about it?”
“That’s about it. Anyway, from what I hear there’s no question she’s far and away the best of the first years. As of right now she’s obviously a usable piece. And besides?”
“Besides?”
“Like I said, she’s repeated three times, so her scholarship waiver on tuition and dorm fees should run out with this Thunder God Emperor Festival. She’s been backed into a corner far enough that without a result here she has nothing left, and that’s a fact. Depending on how we pitch it, I think she’ll cooperate.”
“I see. All right, let’s go.”
A few minutes’ walk through the dorm and we arrived in front of the room.
Knock knock. I rapped on the door, and something snagged at the back of my mind. Entered at six, three years since, and a shut-in, which means she never goes out. And that girl had said, if I remembered rightly, that she doesn’t live with her parents. Come to that, her selling goods openly inside the magic academy grounds when she had no business being there had been a question in itself.
From beyond the door came the soft pat, pat of someone padding toward us. Then it opened, and a cat-eared girl with sleepy eyes stood there, expressionless.
“…And here I was enjoying my shut-in life all by myself. What do you want?”
Needless to say, the girl in question was the light-blue-haired girl. Sheryl.
And I sighed.