Chapter 6
“Good grief, every inch of me aches….”
Standing alone in front of the firmly closed door to the principal’s office, I let out a deep sigh.
The academy’s tight security was a good thing. They said students were the future of the nation, after all. It was a place where many students lived, and quite a few of them were, as they say, princes or children of high-ranking nobles.
But even so.
They spent an entire hour nitpicking the design of my magic sword, then took issue with the fact that my ID card had been issued three years ago.
It wasn’t as though some ghost who had died without finding fault with anything had possessed them.
“A magic sword can be bladeless. Why are they making such a fuss over nothing?”
A magic sword was a magic knight’s primary weapon, important enough to be called their alter ego. And since Magnus Academy was an academy that trained magic knights, possessing a magic sword itself wasn’t a problem…
The guards had taken issue with the design of my magic sword.
My magic sword, which my master had made for me personally, was a katana with no blade, only a hand guard and a hilt about fifty centimeters long—in other words, what was commonly called a great sword, or an ōdachi.
Normally, I used it as an ordinary magical catalyst without forming a blade, forming one only when necessary…
The problem was that the guards had taken issue with the design of my magic sword.
They kept hounding me, saying it didn’t look like an ordinary magic sword and was suspicious.
In the end, I only barely managed to convince them after drawing the blade right in front of them and showing it to them.
“Ow, my veins are throbbing.”
The problem was that some part of me always tingled painfully after I drew the blade. It was unavoidable because of the mechanism unique to my magic sword, but I had wanted to avoid drawing it whenever possible.
And the nitpicking hadn’t ended there.
After the magic sword, they took issue with the fact that my ID card had been made when I was twenty-six.
I met my master at fourteen and secluded myself in the mountains until I was nineteen, undergoing magical training to control the ‘curse.’
Then, from the age of nineteen to twenty-six, I had no choice but to spend seven years on the battlefields because the eastern region where my master and I lived had been caught up in war.
In other words, I hadn’t had a chance to make an ID card in all my life.
But they even went so far as to call Lord Logis, and I only barely managed to get through the academy’s main gate after Lord Logis, who had received the unexpected call, swore that he would vouch for my identity.
Tight security was a good thing, but… I couldn’t shake the feeling that they were going a little too far. Would they really nitpick and hound some other important guest this much if one came to visit?
This absolutely wasn’t a thought I was having because I was annoyed at being put through all that.
And the academy itself was enormous. It didn’t merely contain school buildings; ordinary shops had even sprung up around the residential areas for students and instructors.
Carriages and automobiles even traveled along the broad road running through the center of the academy grounds.
It was so vast that it could practically be called a small city enclosed by walls rather than a school. If Miss Miriam hadn’t shown me the way, I would definitely have gotten lost.
And after all sorts of twists and turns, I finally arrived in front of the principal’s office. I stood there stiff with tension, repeatedly taking deep breaths.
It felt like being a prospective new employee about to sit an interview.
“…No, I’m already confirmed as an instructor. Why am I trembling like this?”
Even after forcing myself to mutter that, I couldn’t stop trembling.
The thing was, although my appointment itself had been confirmed, there was no telling whether I would actually be given work befitting an instructor.
‘What if they make me teach something like math, which I don’t even know how to teach…?’
I had been terrible at math even in my previous life….
‘No, get a grip, Haru.’
I shook my head vigorously, somehow forcing away my distracting thoughts. Then, squeezing my eyes shut, I muttered in a shrill voice that barely carried.
“Excuse me.”
-Knock knock.
“Come in.”
The deep, resonant voice of an elderly man echoed from beyond the door.
I drew in a sharp breath, slowly placed my hand on the doorknob, and carefully pushed.
-Creeeak…!
The large wooden door slowly opened with the sound of its old hinges.
As I entered, an elderly man with a snow-white beard was gazing intently at me with his interlaced hands resting on the table.
‘That must be Lord Ludwig….’
I met his eyes without thinking, and at that moment, I felt something strange.
‘…Is he reading me?’
There was no doubt about it. Principal Ludwig was reading my mana.
Of course, my master had told me as much. Mana didn’t lie.
If you wanted to know what kind of person someone was, a duel was best… no, you should start by reading the flow of their mana.
‘But to manipulate another person’s mana so subtly….’
Had I not undergone my master’s training, I surely wouldn’t have noticed that my mana was being read even after entering the room.
Lord Ludwig’s ability to sense mana was on par with, or perhaps even greater than, my master’s.
‘…What should I do? Should I just stay still?’
Of course, there was a way to block it.
The most basic and simplest method was to intentionally scatter the mana inside my body. Strictly speaking, it was closer to interfering with someone reading my mana than actually preventing it.
‘I learned this from my master.’
Thinking that, I reflexively scattered the mana inside my body, disrupting Lord Ludwig’s mana sensing.
Sure enough, perhaps because it wasn’t going as he had expected, Lord Ludwig opened his eyes wide and seemed clearly flustered.
‘…No, maybe I should stop.’
But that lasted only a moment. I soon stopped disturbing my mana.
I hadn’t come to a battlefield. I had come to meet my future boss.
Surely someone who had risen as high as principal of the academy couldn’t be so narrow-minded, but what if he held a grudge against me for interfering with his attempt to read my mana and assigned me to some remote, undesirable post?
Right. Even if that was taking things too far, he might think there was something suspicious about me intentionally concealing my mana.
Yet even after I stopped disrupting my mana, I no longer sensed any sign that Lord Ludwig was reading it.
“Welcome.”
Lord Ludwig looked at me and spoke. He appeared perfectly calm, as though he had never been flustered.
“And I apologize. It’s become a habit. It’s something I do as a matter of course whenever I meet new instructors.”
That was why I was somewhat surprised by what he said next.
He had merely read my mana. That was fairly common among magic knights, and it wasn’t particularly problematic by social standards, either. I hadn’t even considered it something that required an apology, so hearing this out of nowhere left me somewhat flustered… in a positive way.
Could this be what came with age?
“If this old man may offer an excuse… there’s an old saying that mana doesn’t lie, isn’t there? I suppose I made the mistake of indulging my desire to learn what kind of people the instructors were in my own way.”
“Ah, no, it’s fine. I didn’t do it on purpose either… It’s a habit.”
I quickly shook my head as I answered. It wasn’t a lie. Since I had been trained by my master to scatter my mana the instant I sensed anything like that, the behavior really had become ingrained in my body at nearly a reflexive level.
Hearing my answer, Lord Ludwig tilted his head toward me as though interested.
“By ‘habit,’ you mean…? Ah, forgive me.”
As he tilted his head at me, he suddenly waved his hand through the air as if he had just remembered something.
A guest chair resting in one corner of the room flew through the air and thudded down in front of me.
“Have a seat.”
“Th-thank you.”
A faint breeze rose around the chair, making my bangs flutter slightly.
‘He cast air-manipulation magic without even a preparatory motion….’
It was a spell that manipulated the air overhead with mana to create an artificial breeze, one of the most basic spells in wind-element formal magic.
It was a low-level spell in both acquisition difficulty and power, yet Ludwig had displayed a technique close to telekinesis.
Had he cast the spell without canceling the spell formula and drawn each magic circle individually, hundreds of magic circles would have been embroidered across the air.
‘This is the skill of the man at the top of Magnus Academy.’
I swallowed dryly and carefully sat down in the chair.
The strongest person I knew had been my master, but I had a feeling that my ranking would change today.
A teapot floating in midair poured clear tea into a teacup suspended in the air.
“Do you like tea?”
“Thank you.”
I accepted the teacup with both hands and bowed my head.
‘Good thing I learned basic etiquette.’
This was something I had learned from Lord Logis, not my master.
My master wasn’t a noble, after all, but simply a wandering ronin. Apparently, he didn’t know much about that sort of etiquette.
“So. About this habit…?”
“I learned it from my master. It’s a sort of trick for preventing people from reading my mana, but I trained rather harshly, so it became ingrained in my body like a reflex.”
“Your master.”
Lord Ludwig murmured, letting the words trail off. I glanced at him and quickly brought the teacup to my lips.
I was thirsty from having repeated the same things several times while dealing with the guards.
“I’ve heard about you from Lord Logis.”
As I tilted the teacup, Lord Ludwig opened his mouth.
“In particular… I’ve heard that you’re quite strong.”
“Pfft!”
The tea I was swallowing nearly came back up. Fortunately, I avoided the unprecedented disaster of spraying tea everywhere, but my throat throbbed painfully as though it had been struck with a hammer.
‘Aaargh….’
“Oh dear, are you all right?”
“Y-yes….”
I barely managed to nod and rubbed my throbbing chest. Better not drink tea.
“I hear you served with Logis on the Eastern Front.”
“Because Lord Logis provisionally knighted me.”
“Provisionally….”
Lord Ludwig nodded and said,
“So you’re saying you haven’t been formally knighted.”
“Er, yes….”
His tone sounded oddly reproachful, so I nodded dejectedly.
‘I knew it.’
Clearly, someone like me really was out of the question. A gloomy thought suddenly reared its head in my mind.
Lord Ludwig silently watched me, then casually raised the teacup to his lips.
A quiet slurping sound echoed through the room.
After lowering the teacup, Lord Ludwig said to me,
“It can’t be helped. The entrance ceremony is a month away, if I recall?”
“….”
I lowered my head. What would happen now? Would the start of my work as an instructor be postponed?
How long would it be postponed? What would I have to do to receive a formal knighting? Would I have to graduate from a training camp like Rex?
How long did magic knight training camps usually last?
I… what was I supposed to do from now on…
“A month gives us plenty of time. Let’s see… We’ll hold your formal knighting ceremony in about two weeks.”
“Yes… Huh?”