Chapter 18
One of the first students enrolled after Tokyo Magic University adopted a one-year curriculum was Handa Sakunosuke, who originally lived in Saitama City, Saitama Prefecture.
Saitama City was one of the many ordinary areas where public order completely collapsed during the Gremlin disaster.
Any region that was not blessed with the birth of a witch or mage followed a horrific fate without exception. Unable to resist the monsters that attacked one after another, such regions were swept by waves of slaughter and looting. Even if the Self-Defense Forces and police managed to postpone the collapse of public order for a while, the moment their ammunition ran out, the people were swallowed up by the monsters' violence.
The weak-bodied, weak-minded, and those lacking the drive to act were the first to die, regardless of age or sex, and Saitama City's population plummeted in less than a month.
Exact population statistics were not taken everywhere, but the average surviving population in regions with witches or mages was said to be 20 percent. In regions without them, it was said to be around 0.1 to 5 percent. Saitama City was no exception.
Handa, a hard-working man in his mid-thirties who had been employed by a plumbing contractor, lost his entire family immediately after the disaster and was swept up in the upheaval of society before he even had time to grieve.
His survival was sheer luck.
For about a year, Handa had been forced to sustain himself through looting in Saitama City, where monsters ran rampant. Sickened by everything, he abandoned his hideout and began heading south in search of an ideal land.
Even if he were attacked and killed by monsters along the way, it would be far better than continuing to live by robbing dying old people and children who had lost their parents of their meager supplies.
There were rumors that witches who had gained the power of monsters lived in Tokyo, protecting people from monsters and distributing food. Handa headed for Tokyo along the Arakawa River.
In a world where communications had been cut off, there was no way to verify the rumors. There were countless similar rumors, and most were nothing more than fantasies born of the fleeting hope that everyone would be saved. Somehow, though, the rumors about the witches felt credible.
Perhaps he had simply wanted to believe them, but in the end, Handa won his gamble.
Accepted into Tokyo as a refugee from outside the capital, Handa underwent several medical interviews and was assigned to the Flower Witch's administrative district, which stretched from Arakawa Ward to Taito Ward.
A new life began.
First, he was astonished to be treated as a refugee. It had been a long time since he had met people who treated complete strangers like human beings.
He was even more astonished that his place of residence had been assigned according to clear rules.
Unbelievably, order had been preserved in Tokyo.
There were organizations and politics.
These were things he had taken for granted before the disaster, yet he felt as though he had encountered the customs of an alien culture in another world.
The longtime residents of the Flower Witch's district welcomed Handa with pity.
They told him that among the members of the Witches' Assembly ruling various parts of Tokyo, anyone assigned to live in the Flower Witch's district was unlucky. It wasn't the worst district, but they wouldn't be able to die a decent death...
The defining feature of the Flower Witch's district was that the corpses of its residents were used as her nourishment. The Flower Witch would not permit residents who tried to flee outside the district to avoid this fate.
The Flower Witch's people had no graves. Roots that burst out of the ground dragged the dead into the earth, where they became her nourishment.
After drinking in those corpses, the Flower Witch would bloom in beauty so otherworldly that she seemed not to belong to this world.
But conversely, that was the only downside.
Thanks to the Flower Witch's Fertility Magic, residents could eat three meals a day, though the rations consisted solely of grain, vegetables, and fruit.
The roots spread throughout the soil beneath the district defeated any monsters that appeared in an instant. Flying monsters could only be dealt with by the guards or by requesting assistance from a witch in another district, but life was easy enough as long as there were no monsters on the ground.
The Flower Witch did not interfere excessively in the lives of her residents, imposing only basic laws such as not stealing, killing, or deceiving.
Handa didn't think anything of the corpse-eating that some residents described with horror.
He was impressed enough to think, "Tokyo really must be peaceful if people worry about what happens after they die."
She merely used corpses as nourishment; she did not actively create corpses for that purpose, so there was no need to worry.
After living peacefully at the very roots of the Flower Witch for several months and healing his exhausted body and mind, Handa met a mage for the first time one day.
The worn-out man, roughly Handa's age, called himself a future-seeing mage. At first glance, he was an utterly unremarkable middle-aged man in a rumpled suit, but he boldly negotiated with the Flower Witch, whom the residents feared, made some sort of agreement, and left. (He later heard that the mage had paid a price and learned Fertility Magic.)
Seeing the future-seeing mage arrive from outside and return safely, Handa felt as if a veil had been lifted from his eyes.
The Flower Witch used dead residents as her nourishment. She disliked having that nourishment escape, so she forbade her people from leaving the district.
But apparently, that was not an absolute rule. With enough power or status, or through negotiation, one could avoid spending the rest of one's life in the district.
After spending several months in peace incomparably greater than that of the previous year, Handa had begun to grow ambitious. He wanted to see other parts of Tokyo.
His current life was good, but if he could live an even better one in another district, that was what he wanted.
First, Handa gathered materials from the rubble-strewn city, where the lack of functioning heavy machinery had made demolition and removal painfully slow. He gave the Flower Witch artificial flowers and pressed flowers to curry her favor, and praised her beauty with syrupy lines he had only ever said to his late wife, hoping to raise her opinion of him.
Then, taking advantage of Tokyo Magic University's recruitment drive, he asked to be allowed to study outside the district.
"I'll definitely come back. I'll learn knowledge, skills, and magic that will be useful to you, then return."
After hearing his plea, the Flower Witch smiled gracefully and whispered into Handa's ear.
"If I let you leave here, I hear you won't come back even after you graduate. Is Magic University really that comfortable?"
"!"
Handa went pale and dimly grasped the nature of the deal the Flower Witch and the future-seeing mage had made.
Indeed, if the future-seeing mage had paid some sort of price in their bargain, it had to be his greatest bargaining chip: his power of foresight.
Handa steeled himself to be seized by roots, have his limbs torn apart, and die, but unexpectedly, the Flower Witch stepped away and giggled, seeming to enjoy his reaction.
"But that's fine. I'll permit it. It's not a bad idea to establish a connection with Magic University. Even after you go there, write me a letter now and then, all right, Handa Sakunosuke?"
Handa left the Flower Witch's presence feeling as though he had barely escaped with his life.
It was only after he had finished the Magic University's entrance ceremony that he realized, come to think of it, that she remembered people's names.
Tokyo Magic University currently had only one department, Magic Linguistics, so Handa necessarily enrolled in the Department of Magic Linguistics.
He had expected his second university experience to be an uncomfortable one surrounded by young people more than a decade his junior, but the ages of his classmates varied remarkably. There were men close to sixty, older than him, as well as girls who still looked about middle-school age.
He had heard that Magic University did not select students by age, but he had assumed that was merely a formality and that younger applicants would still be given priority, so this was quite a surprise.
Handa had entered university less to study magic than to sightsee around Tokyo, so he attended his classes without overdoing it and explored Bunkyo Ward, where the university was located, whenever he had free time.
The first thing that surprised him was that there were no corpses lying anywhere.
In Saitama City, it was normal for corpses to be left unburied, picked apart by animals and monsters, and left on display as miserable remains.
In the Flower Witch's district, it made sense that there were no corpses because they were consumed as the witch's nourishment.
But the future-seeing mage who ruled Bunkyo Ward was not the type to eat corpses. If 80 percent of Bunkyo Ward's population had died, what had become of the more than 180,000 corpses that should have existed?
It must have been an enormous undertaking. It wouldn't have been strange for them to have been piled up somewhere, but Bunkyo Ward's streets were clean. There were no mountains of corpses, no pits for dumping them, and no smell of decay.
Curious about this, he asked a classmate who had lived in Bunkyo Ward the entire time, and received an answer he never could have expected.
Apparently, at the height of the chaos caused by the Gremlin disaster, when the most people died, "the Zombie Witch walked all over Tokyo, turning corpses into zombies one after another and taking them away."
That was why there were no corpses lying around in Tokyo.
Handa was impressed.
It was true that if corpses could walk on their own, the effort required to clean them up would be drastically reduced.
When he nodded and said, "What an efficient disposal method," his classmate frowned and moved away from him uneasily.
In reality, if mountains of corpses had been left lying around in Tokyo's population density, carrion-eating monsters and wild animals would have been drawn there constantly, flies would have swarmed, and the soil and water would have been contaminated, becoming sources of disease.
Even if it meant desecrating the dignity of the dead, turning them into zombies and collecting the corpses had been enormously significant for protecting the living.
Handa was irritated by his classmate's disrespectful attitude toward the Zombie Witch's immense achievement, but a few days later, after hearing the details from another source, he understood.
Apparently, the Zombie Witch kept the best-looking of the zombies she collected around her and indulged in a reverse harem of corpses.
That was enough to make even him recoil.
Handa's sensibilities had been warped by a year of extreme living and never returned to normal, but even he could not begin to understand the witches' sensibilities.
Bunkyo Ward was comfortable to live in as well as free of corpses, and Handa quickly came to like it.
The Flower Witch's district had been safe, but after living in Bunkyo Ward, he understood why the Flower Witch's people had complained. The remnants of an Apocalypse Now-like hell were still strongly visible, but everyone's eyes shone with hope for reconstruction, and they were full of life.
Every month-end, Bunkyo Ward held an exchange market where supplies were brought in from all over Tokyo. Since the value of currency had collapsed, everything was bartered, but there were eccentrics trying to trade precious alcohol for expensive trading cards from before civilization collapsed, so it was entertaining even just to watch.
Food rations were stable and colorful. The portions were small, but nutritionally balanced, like a modest school lunch.
The response to monster attacks was superbly swift. Once, Handa saw the future-seeing mage hurrying toward a manhole while checking a pocket watch; just as a giant frog the size of a calf leaped out, he struck it cleanly in the crown of the head, killing it instantly, then hurried away.
Apparently, he could not predict every monster appearance, but seeing firsthand how he anticipated them and prevented damage made him feel incredibly reassured.
It was also worth noting that a public bathhouse opened on Sundays only. The bathhouse had begun operating not long after Handa enrolled, apparently at the medical team's recommendation. They had passionately argued that maintaining the residents' cleanliness, even at the cost of consuming large amounts of water and fuel, offered major long-term benefits, and the proposal had been accepted.
In fact, even though the bathhouse was packed wall to wall, Handa was quite happy to be able to bathe once a week. It was worlds better than wiping himself down with a wet towel.
In Bunkyo Ward, most things proceeded efficiently and in an orderly fashion.
It was probably the work of the future-seeing mage's magic. It could not have been more welcome to the residents, but Handa worried because every time he saw the future-seeing mage, the man seemed more haggard.
With excellent personnel being led by the finest leader Handa knew, Bunkyo Ward's reconstruction being a cut above the rest made perfect sense. The backbone of Bunkyo Ward was, in both name and reality, none other than the future-seeing mage.
However, just as Minato Ward had become a wasteland and its residents scattered after the death of the Vampire Mage, Bunkyo Ward would plunge into utter chaos the moment the future-seeing mage disappeared.
A short speech by Professor Ohinata before class—"That's why Tokyo Magic University exists: to cultivate technology and talent so that doesn't happen"—struck a chord with Handa, who had become thoroughly accustomed to Bunkyo Ward.
As he grew fond of Bunkyo Ward, he also grew attached to the university and his classes.
Though he was currently only benefiting from Bunkyo Ward, he began to want to repay what he owed it.
After the commotion over the collection of the mass-produced general-purpose magic wands used in class, Handa was examining the wand that had been returned to him improved in his dormitory room.
According to Professor Ohinata, a mana-backflow-prevention mechanism had been incorporated into the wand's handle, and at the beginning of class that day, they had been taught how to hold the wand correctly and the principle behind the backflow-prevention mechanism.
The proper stance was one thing, but even understanding the mechanism's principle did not make it easy to reproduce (how on earth was he supposed to obtain a reverberatory furnace?), and Handa found it extremely intriguing.
Handa had worked for a plumbing contractor for many years. His shop manager had drilled all sorts of knowledge into him that might or might not be useful on the job, so he had a decent understanding of fluid dynamics.
Knowledge he had nearly forgotten amid the upheaval of those days came back to him as he listened to the explanation of the backflow-prevention mechanism.
The backflow-prevention mechanism apparently worked because mana was lost when mana flowing backward passed through a rod-shaped mass of remelted and resolidified Gremlin.
In other words, mana was flowing through a pipe.
Handa himself thought the theory was full of holes, but it felt like water flowing through a water pipe, and he began thinking about the essence of the problem and its solution.
Then, to test an idea that had occurred to him, Handa began disassembling the magic wand that he had been forbidden to take apart.
Magic wands were awarded after graduation and were merely on loan until then. They were university property. They had to be handled carefully, and disassembling one was absolutely out of the question. But Handa's curiosity got the better of him.
Handa believed that reshaping the remelted and resolidified Gremlin from a rod into a Tesla valve should improve its function.
Mana flowing backward through a straight pipe would naturally travel straight and forcefully.
So he would alter the shape of the pipe, causing the backflowing mana to create turbulence and vortices inside it. If changing the shape disrupted the flow and weakened the force of the backflowing mana, the reduction rate of mana backflow could be improved dramatically.
That was assuming, of course, that the backflowing mana behaved like a fluid as it flowed through the remelted and resolidified Gremlin...
Handa was not a mage, so he could neither tell nor sense how mana flowed. The only way to verify the idea was to try it in practice.
He wasn't trying to perform some grotesquely intricate process beyond human ken like Professor Ohinata's regular-dodecahedron fractal wand Aleister. He only meant to shave down the straight rod a little and see how it felt.
Thinking that even his own processing skills should be enough for something like that, Handa picked up his tools and began working. Within mere seconds, he had broken the remelted and resolidified Gremlin into several pieces of various sizes.
He thought he had gotten the feel for it after cutting the first piece, and the instant he tried to shave down the next one in the same manner, it developed cracks in an incomprehensible pattern. Those cracks spread across the whole thing in an instant, and it broke apart.
Handa went pale.
He had done it.
It wasn't a matter of chipping it a little. He had destroyed it so spectacularly that there was no excuse he could make.
He knew in theory that it was difficult to process, but he had never imagined it was this delicate.
Gremlins should have been more durable, but apparently he had somehow concentrated the impact on an especially weak cleavage plane.
Handa clutched his head and spent nearly an hour on his bed thinking up excuses and ways to cover it up. Then he took the broken magic wand and went straight to the chancellor's office.
If the person he had to deal with had been a chancellor older than him, he probably would have chosen to conceal the mistake. But he felt uncomfortable trying to hide his error from a thirteen-year-old girl. It was too pathetic for an adult. Going to apologize was pathetic too, though.
After Handa explained the situation in the chancellor's office, Professor Ohinata folded down her animal ears and let her tail droop limply. She folded her arms, wearing an unmistakably troubled expression.
"Hmm, this is a problem."
"I'm sorry..."
"Oh, it's all right. I'll take care of it somehow. This wasn't mischief; you took it apart and broke it out of academic curiosity, and specifically for an experiment, didn't you? As the head of an institution of learning, I mustn't punish you for that."
"Um... excuse me, but are you really thirteen?"
"I am."
Professor Ohinata tilted her head, looking as cute as her age would suggest, but her words and behavior were those of a seasoned educator. Handa felt even more pathetic.
Professor Ohinata folded her arms and fretted with a series of thoughtful "Hmm"s for a while, but eventually clapped her hands and said brightly:
"I know. How about this, Handa-san?"
"Y-yes."
"Would you like to try being the professor of Gremlin Engineering, a department we're establishing next year?"
"Huh?"
Thinking he must have misheard, Handa asked her to repeat it, but Professor Ohinata repeated the same words with a genial smile.
He had not misheard.
"Handa-san, your idea is a brilliant theoretical concept that even professional magic-wand craftsmen failed to think of. And if you broke it on your second attempt at cutting, that means you managed to cut it once, doesn't it? With whatever tools you had on hand, no less. To do that on your first try is truly, truly impressive! None of the applicants for the Gremlin Engineering professorship we're currently recruiting has been able to do the same. You're good enough to call yourself the second-best in the world!"
"W-well, yes, but it only worked once. It was probably a fluke. Don't flatter me so much."
"Even if the cutting was a product of luck, the idea is genuine. Handa-san, you're far, far more impressive than you think. I would really like you to teach that knowledge at the university."
"No, even so, I used to work for a plumbing contractor. This time, the knowledge I gained there just happened to be useful—or rather, I only tried to put it to use by chance."
He had come to apologize prepared to be expelled, but the conversation was turning into something completely outrageous.
Handa was intimidated and tried to decline, but Professor Ohinata clasped both his hands and earnestly persuaded him with sparkling eyes, leaving him no chance to escape.
"I know full well that you aren't a Gremlin expert right now. I'm not asking you to teach perfect classes or guide students flawlessly from the very beginning.
But someone has to pioneer Gremlin Engineering. We can't rely entirely on the exceptional individual skill that no one else can imitate. We need knowledge and techniques that anyone with a certain amount of aptitude or enthusiasm can reproduce. In other words, we have to research Gremlin Engineering as an academic discipline, then teach it and spread it.
If anyone can do that, it's you, Handa-san. I am certain of it."
"B-but how could I possibly become a university professor?"
"It'll be fine! Our university has no history. It's a university that was just born. You can take it easy, thinking of yourself as growing from scratch alongside the university. If you ever feel it's truly too much, you're free to quit at any time. What do you say?"
"Uhh..."
"Could you, please?"
"I-I understand. I'll give it a try. But really, don't expect too much from me."
"Thank you! If you don't want me to expect anything, I won't, but I will trust you, all right? I know perfectly well that you weren't interested in classes at first, but came to take an interest and apply yourself seriously. I believe you'll do the same with your work as a professor!"
"Ha-ha..."
Normally, those words would sound like nothing more than flattery, but when Professor Ohinata said them, they sounded like nothing but her sincere feelings.
You want to live up to someone's trust—especially in a world where trust is precious.
And so Handa Sakunosuke became a professor in the Gremlin Engineering Department of Tokyo Magic University.