Chapter 18

Even though it was a completely ridiculous idea, after hearing the explanation, Kengo expressed neither criticism nor concerns, just grinned and said, “Let’s do it.”

Rather, I was so taken aback that I blurted out:

“Even though it’s this ridiculous? Even though we might hurt Kururu-san again?”

Kengo shrugged and answered like this.

“I think it’d be better to tell Kururu-chan that instead of giving up, there’s no need to give up, so for now she should recover her health and then we’ll rethink the plan.”

Our interpretation of Kururu matched, and he added this as well.

“Besides, I think history is on Yorinobu’s side in this idea.”

So it wasn’t just my own assumption after all; the history of this world was strange.

The biggest question was this.

Even if it was in the distant past, could magic stones for carving such enormous magic circles really have been quarried? And to complete a new magic circle, an enormous amount of trial and error would have been necessary.

Because they would have had to find meaningful combinations from among infinitely many possible patterns, that alone would have required a vast number of magic stones. And the more complex the magic circle became, the number of combinations would increase exponentially. Realistically speaking, I couldn’t believe they could have prepared huge magic stones in quantities sufficient to test them all. Humanity has always been vulnerable to exponentials, after all.

Thinking that way, we couldn’t accept the history of the development of magic circles at face value.

Church doctrine held that God taught humans how to use magic stones.

And in its holy text, it recounted the history of the war in which humanity wrested control of the world back from the beastfolk, and recorded the huge and complex magic circles said to have been used at that time.

But if you thought about it normally, it was obvious.

No matter how you looked at it, such things were unsuited for war.

I couldn’t imagine they had had the leisure to spend months or years having large numbers of craftsmen carve complicated magic circles. Much less that they’d had the luxury for research and development. Because humans were supposed to have been treated as slaves by the beastfolk.

Which meant we had to reason backward from the practical side of things.

In other words, we had to assume that magic stones were not precious, that they were easy to process, and that trial and error could be done as much as needed. Most important among these was failure in the process of carving magic circles into them.

In a format where they were carved into stone, trial and error came at a terrifying cost.

That part wouldn’t change no matter how abundantly magic stones could be mined. Unless they were treated as disposable, the work of shaving down magic stones to flatten them would never go away.

And besides, even if a super-civilization had existed, it should have come only after victory in the war against the beastfolk.

If that was the case, then I could only think that there had to have been a fundamentally different method in the process of trial and error that discovered magic circles. There must have been some operational method that allowed ancient humanity to defeat the beastfolk without being a super-civilization.

Once I boldly changed my perspective like that, a possibility came into view.

Seeing the shattered magic stones in that warehouse, and then striking sun-dried bricks against them, had allowed me to shatter my own preconceptions.

And by doing that, the strange parts of ancient history would also be shattered.

“Are you serious?”

Several days after telling Kengo my idea, on a moonlit night.

Kururu, who had appeared at the stone dumping ground where scrap magic stones were thrown away, said that with a slightly haggard face.

The reason she looked like she was about to cry, about to vomit, might have been because she was suppressing her emotions.

“I’ve… never heard of anything like this.”

Kururu said that, and twisted her mouth into a crooked smile.

“You two are bigger fools than I am.”

After failing to decipher the magic circle, the two men had returned not having given up, but carrying an outrageous hypothesis with them.

However, Iiria, who was standing behind Kururu, said in a voice colder than the night wind.

“This is the last time.”

We would bring Kururu back from the world of bad dreams.

Kururu turned toward Iiria, who declared that so firmly.

“Iiria-sama, I—”

“This is the last time.”

The only reason Kururu had been able to come here was because Iiria had reluctantly given permission.

The condition she had set was that we would never involve Kururu in anything strange again.

We had no wish to tear apart the bond between Iiria and Kururu either, and it was obvious that Kururu ought to prioritize Iiria over our relationship with her.

Even so, when it came to giving something up, there were many different ways to give it up.

What suited Kururu was not the image of leaving wisely and cleanly, with no lingering regrets.

It was the image of stubbornly and earnestly reaching toward the light until the very end.

“Kururu-chan, it’s okay. We just have to make it succeed.”

That sort of baseless confidence suited Kengo very well.

Kururu gave a wry smile at Kengo as he flexed his arm for show, and toward me—exhausted from tension and simply from how hard the preparations had been—she showed a somewhat gentler smile.

“You two are strange. Aren’t you out of your minds?”

Was she talking about our refusal to quit gracefully, or about how the very way we conceived of things was fundamentally different?

It was probably both, but of course the reason was obvious.

“Because we’re people from another world.”

At my words, Kururu laughed and reached out her hand. The thing her fingers touched was the magic stone we had prepared. By current grading standards, it would probably be a third-grade piece about the size of a palm.

If one were to buy it, it would be an ultra-luxury item worth no less than a thousand gold coins, but it was something only superficially similar to the magic stones traded by merchant companies.

Because it was not a single stone.

It had been made by gathering small magic stones that had been discarded because magic circles couldn’t properly be carved into them, smashing them up into powder, and hardening that powder with an adhesive made by boiling down animal tendons and the like, called nikawa [animal glue].

Onto that so-called substitute magic stone, we had pressed and printed a magic circle using a mold made from a magic stone into which a craftsman had actually carved the magic circle.

Kengo and I had neither worked out the correct combination of magic circles nor used any refined skill.

In other words, this was a way to mass-produce magic circles that even an idiot could do, so long as there was a correct original magic stone for copying and scrap magic stones.

A method simple enough for even slaves being worked to the bone by beastfolk in the middle of a war to carry out.

And if powdered magic stone was kneaded and hardened, you could make giant magic stones as large as you pleased, and even making the magic circles more complex only required pressing the original copying stone against them. You could experiment as much as you wanted.

That was why, with this technology, it was possible.

To scale Blitz Magic at explosive speed.

To begin with, we should have recalled the history of this world.

If humans, who had been ruled by the beastfolk and existed as something between livestock and slaves, had discovered how to make use of magic stones and pulled off a great reversal, then it must have been a brutal war.

It couldn’t have been a war between equals like the one we imagined, with humans clad in fine armor and bare-muscled beastfolk meeting one another on the battlefield while announcing their names.

Because it had been a war of liberation by slaves.

Which meant the materials humans could use for magic must have been limited, skilled technicians must have been almost nonexistent, and the tools and everything else must have been crude things cobbled together from whatever was at hand. It must have been a harsh struggle so severe that now no one even remembered it or could imagine it.

They couldn’t possibly have had the luxury of leisurely digging huge magic stones out of mines and hauling them along with heave-ho effort.

But with this, every problem was solved.

It was such a primitive method that it made the image come alive before my eyes of desperate people, with hardly any resources, pushing themselves to the limit and going forth to fight.

I was praying so hard that this method would be the correct one that I almost felt like crying, and yet at the same time I had this strange feeling that I was certain it had to be the correct answer.

Or perhaps that was because the one reaching out to that substitute magic stone now was the daughter of oppressed beastfolk. Just like that, people who had once been oppressed must also have reached out to magic stones for the sake of battle.

History does not repeat itself. But it does rhyme, writer Mark Twain once said.

Kururu’s fingers touched the shabby handmade magic stone.

The reason Kururu turned around was probably to reassure Iiria, who looked as if she wanted to take Kururu back home at any moment.

Iiria’s fear came from dreading that Kururu would fail. She feared Kururu being hurt again, feared learning that the star she had seen in the distance had been an illusion.

“Iiria-sama.”

And yet Kururu’s murmur was gentle, full of confidence.

And the name she spoke became the first name murmured in the new world.