Chapter 28
Chapter 28
Ttak-tak! Tada-dak! Pak! Pak!
Chalk dust scattered in all directions.
Fuck.
I couldn't tell because it was under anesthesia right now, but at this rate it'll hurt like hell once it's over.
Why is there never any middle ground with this guy?
My right hand, which had no intention of stopping, apparently wasn't satisfied even after filling one blackboard and moved on to the next.
The equations kept following one another in a chain.
Of course, my brain didn't understand even one bit of it.
Snap!
The chalk broke.
Even then, my hand didn't stop, and I kept writing while crushing the broken chalk pieces.
The sensation of the blackboard scraping beneath my fingernails filtered through my nerves, even if only at less than half strength.
Feeling even half of this is creepy as hell.
Regardless of my own will, I was writhing like a mathematician possessed by madness, locked in a fierce battle with the blackboard.
I heard a murmur from behind me.
"W-What is that?"
"It's so complicated... can we even make sense of it?"
Even if it were short, you bastards wouldn't know.
And then, after a long while.
Only after I had densely filled even the side blackboard did the floating sensation wrapping around my body ebb away like the tide.
[Ability Activation Ended]
[Remaining uses today: 2/3]
Throb!
My damn wrist hurts like hell!
I turned my head to check Iris noona, and then turned a little farther to look at the professors I'd just been facing.
Mm.
Okay.
The professors were still staring hard at the formulas, apparently not yet understanding what my right hand had scrawled on the board, so I couldn't guess the result yet.
But Iris noona was looking at me, not at the blackboard.
And she was smiling.
That smile spreading across her lips—fond, proud, and practically shouting, "My kid's amazing."
Unlike the old professors, who were still floundering in the equations' swamp, she seemed to have understood all those incomprehensible scribbles long ago.
Well.
This should be good enough.
Still, I was glad I hadn't just slapped down the answer and ended it like last time, without a shred of courtesy.
That was when it happened.
Professor Hicks, who had been silent until now, tucked his wand into his sleeve and declared solemnly,
"Professor Iris."
"Yes, Professor Hicks."
"I think today's class would be better held in another empty lecture room."
The students began to murmur.
They're telling us to move rooms in the middle of class?
Even amid the surrounding commotion, Professor Hicks's eyes were still fixed on the blackboard.
"And I'll cast a preservation spell on it now."
"……Understood."
Iris reached out toward the blackboard.
Then the board soon began to shine.
A coating, basically. Something like that, I guess?
Iris said to the students,
"Please pack your things in advance. I'll check whether the lecture room next door is empty, and as soon as I get back, we'll move there and continue today's class."
The students looked completely lost, but overwhelmed by the atmosphere, they started shuffling around and gathering their books.
And meanwhile,
'What a sight. Absolutely a sight.'
The stares being thrown my way were a sight in themselves.
Contempt and dismissal had peeled away, and in their place a sticky mix of awe and suspicion was settling in.
When the rumor spread that I'd become Iris's disciple, their reaction had been, "No way, that barbarian?"
Now they were making a full about-face: "Oh, so that's why. It was because we're mediocre that we couldn't see it."
I swallowed a dry laugh inwardly.
'These bastards trash me and then fawn over me... are they messing with me?'
I had to admit, their fickle nature was something else.
Of course, even now there were a few still in denial, going, "This guy, really?"
"Cassian, pack your things."
"Ah, yes."
I was just about to step away from the lectern when,
"You did well."
Iris tapped my shoulder and whispered,
"……I thought my wrist was about to fall off."
"I'll massage it for you later."
That's not what I meant.
When it came to social skills, though, she was definitely a fool.
* * *
Once Professor Iris, her disciple, and the students had flowed out like the ebbing tide,
the white-haired senior professors swarmed toward the blackboard as if by prior agreement.
With the eyes of archaeologists who had discovered a rare relic.
"……Hah."
Professor Hicks glared at the blackboard as if he wanted to bite into it, then finally let out a deep sigh.
"He's a genius, all right. No, what on earth is this...?"
His gaze remained fixed on one line drawn at the very start of the blackboard.
The first line—the sharp scratch of the stroke.
"How brazen... this wasn't written to solve the problem at all. It looks like he intended to change the problem itself from the very beginning."
Changing the problem itself. That was entirely possible.
Magic is an act of intervening in causality.
Because of how brutally dangerous and difficult it was, there was no absolute correct answer to what were called "formulas."
There were papers arguing, "This would be the most efficient way," and those papers laid out hundreds of pages of reasoning for why that was, but
that didn't prove it was logically the one perfect answer.
Because that was impossible.
Because unless you were a god, it was impossible to perfectly calculate the gaps in causality.
That was why, when you dug deeply into magic, it eventually began to resemble the domains of philosophy or religion, much like swordsmanship did.
"This is... an implementation of the fire element using the water-element manifestation method, isn't it?"
In response to the stout old professor's question, the bespectacled old professor beside him pointed out in a trembling voice,
"More precisely, it's closer to the water element. It's also different from the orthodox water-element manifestation method."
In the millennia-long history of magic, there was something unavoidable if a human, who lived only a hundred years, wanted to leave a mark.
To follow the formulas left behind by previous geniuses—the ones called the "orthodox" methods—without ever questioning them.
Because that was the safe, fast path.
But the formula spread out before their eyes flatly denied that common sense.
The traditional approach to handling the fire element was to push convergence and divergence to their extremes.
That was because its tendency to run wild made it difficult to control.
So mages approached it by forcing mana, the instant it was converted into the fire element, into the core with brute force, then treating that core as something to be detonated at a single point.
That was the orthodox method.
"Hah. A chain of convergence and divergence?"
Hicks shook his head in amazement.
The formula Iris's disciple had written was completely different in nature.
You trigger divergence in the first mana circuit.
And instead of discarding that exploding energy, you use its recoil to force convergence in the next circuit.
With that force, you drive the convergence harder and faster, then immediately trigger an even stronger divergence.
Like everything being swept away by a wave.
Using that stronger divergence as a base, you carry out an even greater convergence, then diverge again.
"To think you could chain convergence and divergence infinitely like this? I never imagined it could be implemented in reality, not just in theory."
"Isn't this... basically suicide?"
The old professors listening in shook their heads.
If you did this, even a 0.001-second slip during casting would cause mana to backflow and the spell to misfire.
The caster's heart would burst, or their brain would melt.
It was no different from buying a one-way ticket for a grand tour of the road to the afterlife.
But,
the formula on the blackboard was completing that deadly waltz far too smoothly.
"Looks like he even managed to implement it and finish fine-tuning it somehow."
Eric let out an admiring sigh.
Mages, unlike the mysterious image known to the outside world, absolutely despised unverified speculation.
Anyone can propose a hypothesis. If the premise is that you're interfering with causality, there's almost nothing you can't do.
The key is whether it can actually be implemented.
So if this formula Iris's disciple had scribbled were merely a hypothesis stage—something like, "Wouldn't it be nice if we could do it this way?"—they would have snorted and moved on.
But,
"If the department head sees it that way, then I do too. Even to my eyes, this is the touch of someone who's actually cast it countless times."
Hicks nodded.
It was a beautiful formula.
It had no excess, and at a glance you could tell there wasn't even the tiniest logical flaw.
The kind of detail that could never come out without firsthand experience.
Therefore, this formula was not some mere hypothesis, but a fragment of a finished paper whose proof had already been completed.
It gave them chills.
And brazenly so, it was just some twenty-year-old freshman.
He was tossing out only a tiny fragment of a completed formula and putting on a show.
'You decide for yourselves. Whether I was spouting nonsense, or whether I wrote down the real thing.'
Even so,
"Heh-heh."
Hicks wasn't offended.
No, if anything, he felt something hot boiling up deep in his chest.
He tapped the blackboard's final period with the wand he'd pulled back out of his sleeve.
"That's right. A genius needs this much pride."
One who challenges existing authority, dances with death, and opens a new path.
If you were to become a grand master who would usher in a new era, that level of loftiness and arrogance was absolutely necessary.
"He's a genius, all right. Maybe I'm looking at someone even greater than Iris."
No one could refute that.
The old professors gathered here had all once been called prodigies themselves.
This was the Department of Magic, where the Empire's most brilliant young talents gathered.
They all remembered.
The frustration and awe they had felt when they first saw the true genius, Iris von Evergarden.
If Iris had appeared not as a young girl, but with the mature appearance of a woman in her forties or fifties like them, they might have fallen into terrible inferiority complexes.
But today, that nightmare-like shiver was revived once more.
And it came from the fingertips of a twenty-year-old freshman called a barbarian.
"If the world we see is monochrome black and white, then the world they see would be in full color."
Hicks murmured as he brushed his fingertips across the blackboard.
"If the melody we hear is the noisy static of a broken phonograph, then the melody they hear would be a live performance played by a master in the hall itself."
It was cruel, but true.
Looking at the blackboard before them, they had no choice but to admit it.
The formulas written on this blackboard were, in a way, a window that let them faintly glimpse how those two saw the world.
This wasn't a leap in logic.
It was simply that what they saw was different.
'Maybe...'
A strange desire began to glimmer in Hicks's eyes.
'Maybe Iris alone would have been too much, but what if there were two out-of-spec geniuses like that?'
The continent's mage community had two central pillars.
One was the Department of Magic at the Imperial Academy.
The other was the Magic Tower in Bardray, the free-trade city-state in the south.
In those two places, there was a single mainspring that had stood still for two hundred years.
Research into ancient magic, sealed away because it was impossible to decipher.
'If it's those two, they might finally be able to wind that mainspring after all.'
A shiver ran down his spine.
Hicks gripped the slender wand tightly with trembling hands.
'A letter... I need to write a letter.'
He had to send this news to the former department head, Iris's teacher, who was now living in seclusion.
That your disciple had found a monstrous talent.
Of course, in that monster's head, there was nothing but thoughts of getting a diploma and running off.
Even last night, Cassian had been mumbling nonsense in his sleep, hugging armfuls of potatoes and corn he'd harvested and piled up in the dream, saying, "This is the good stuff."
Of course, if Hicks found out, he'd grab the back of his neck and collapse.
* * *
Clatter, clatter.
Inside the finest carriage on the way back to the imperial palace,
the cushions were soft, and the interior was kept comfortably temperate and humid by a climate-control artifact, but Iveline de Leopold's mood was more unpleasant than ever.
'Too noisy.'
She frowned and pressed hard at her temples.
The Academy had been noisy all day.
Wherever she went, there was only one topic.
Cassian del Farne.
'I heard that barbarian wrote something incredible in front of the Department of Magic professors?'
'I heard Professor Hicks gave him a standing ovation?'
'He wasn't an uneducated brute, but a hidden genius?'
'Maybe we were just watching the eccentric behavior of a genius.'
Iveline bit her lip.
'That barbarian is really a genius?'
She couldn't accept it.
She didn't want to accept it.
The praise still buzzing in her ears was driving her to the brink of a nervous breakdown, and her pride was being torn to shreds.
"Haa..."
She lifted her head to soothe her irritation.
The seat opposite her.
The one who would one day become the Empire's sun.
Her perfect older brother, Crown Prince Louis de Leopold, was sitting there.
Normally, this would have been time to talk about the mountain of documents that would be piling up or discuss affairs of state.
Even if not that, he would have kindly asked how her day at school had been.
"..."
Louis was staring blankly out the window with unfocused eyes.
Resting his chin on the window frame, his profile as he watched the passing scenery looked dazed, like someone with a screw loose.
From some point on, he had even started to look anxious.
The rhythm of his fingers tapping the window frame—tap, tap—was irregular.
'...What on earth is my brother thinking?'