Chapter 97

That evening, Iiria’s speech in the town square certainly sent unrest through the territory.

However, in the end, almost no one tried to leave the island.

At most, some of the wealthy merchants evacuated only their wives and children to towns on the mainland side.

Of course, the townspeople each had their own reasons for reacting that way.

For example, the people of the magic stone workshop seemed to think that Roran meant the Bax Company, and the Bax Company meant the den of evil that had joined hands with Nodon and thoroughly squeezed them dry, so they were fully ready to stand against them and take them down a peg.

They even pressed me, saying they would process magic stones without sleeping, Lord Yorinobu.

As for the beastfolk, they could predict that if they lost to Roran, they would be sold as slaves, and since there were no decent lands anywhere they could flee except Jirenu, they had a desperate resolve from a practical standpoint.

Unexpectedly, the reason the merchants stayed seemed to be because as long as this island had a magic stone mine, even if Roran won, someone would have to trade here, so no matter how things turned out, they would be safe.

I did wonder whether things would really go that well, but the truth seemed to be that packing up their belongings and going to another land was not easy in its own way.

In this world, where things like moving house were not taken for granted, outsiders were always nothing but targets of exclusion.

Considering harsh friction with local merchants and the rebuilding of trustworthy connections, even if they were occupied by the enemy, holding their ground here gave them more hope.

Each of the people’s decisions was something like that, and none of them was quite the same as something like love for their homeland.

Listening to their stories, I reaffirmed that this really was not a kind world.

Just being able to make a place for oneself somewhere was already enough to be thankful for, and once one had taken root, there was no choice but to hold out in that land.

That meant protecting this land also meant protecting the tomorrow of far more people than I had imagined.

In that case, this was no time to be choosy about methods.

Because if we lost it, everything would end there.

Thus, the day after we revealed the matter of the war to the people of the island.

I, together with Gerario, Kururu, and Dodol, chartered a ship early in the morning and crossed over to an uninhabited island.

In order to confirm the “method” for protecting the island by any means necessary.

“Master, are you really going to do this?”

Kururu, who seemed reckless but was unexpectedly sensible, said that.

Facing her was Gerario, who was rubbing both hands together as soon as he unloaded the baggage from the ship, looking like an elementary school kid before a field trip.

“Of course I am! But hey, don’t worry. Even at the Ministry of Magic, the accepted theory is that large-scale magic circles don’t activate!”

Of course, Gerario, who said that, did not look like he believed his own words.

He busily unloaded and stacked what looked like wooden measuring boxes borrowed from a bakery.

Apparently, the bakery used those boxes to ferment bread dough, but what was placed there now was synthetic magic stone made from clay.

From its size and the complexity of the magic circle carved into it, I could tell that if the magic activated, something outrageous would definitely happen.

That was why we had landed in a rocky reef area where not even trees grew, a place where there would be no loss even if it sank to the bottom of the sea.

“I find your story difficult to believe at once, though…”

Dodol, who now held a position overseeing Jirenu’s beastfolk, had been told about the synthetic magic stones.

I thought that continuing to hide it from Dodol, who had fought with us when Nodon was driven out, would be contrary to good faith.

Also, his tight-lipped nature had already been proven by the fact that he had helped conceal that Kururu was a magician.

“It’s not that I’m uninterested, but…”

Saying that, Kururu looked at me.

“It might be similar to that ‘nuclear weapon’ thing Yorinobu talked about, right?”

Since I did not know how to translate nuclear weapon, I had conveyed it with its pronunciation as-is.

It was the previous night that I had told Kururu we would be testing large-scale magic circles.

After running around the island and using magic to make roads through the wilderness to transport materials for the semaphore towers, Kururu had returned to the manor utterly exhausted.

Iiria had also said she wanted to bathe, perhaps tired from the speech, so while I, who had the lowest standing, was diligently boiling water, I told them about the experiment.

Kururu, who had lined up chairs and was lying limply on top of them, listened to the story quietly for a while, but then suddenly asked me.

If the magic circle was real, did I intend to conquer the world?

It was so outlandish that I nearly laughed, but I immediately realized it was no laughing matter.

In this world, naked violence still sat at the center of society.

In other words, if one gained the appropriate power, one might be able to obtain the world as it was.

However, I had no desire for territory, and large-scale magic circles were not simple military power.

So I talked about nuclear weapons.

About how weapons that were far too powerful could not be used so easily.

Even if one turned an imperial city into charcoal with magic, that would not make everything fine.

It went without saying, but if the empire collapsed, the economy would probably collapse too, so a place like Jirenu Territory, which could not be self-sufficient, would be among the first to become unsustainable.

If we tried to live within the collapse of the empire, we would eventually have to begin invading in search of rich lands.

Whether that would be better than our current lives was a delicate question.

Just because we obtained large-scale magic circles did not mean all problems would be easily solved.

Society was complicatedly intertwined, and the very existence of great power itself caused new problems.

“Of course I’m scared of this too, but leaving it unknown is even more worrying. Someone may have already reached the same answer and put it to practical use.”

To deal with nuclear weapons, we had no choice but to possess them ourselves.

In that sense, perhaps a reckless spirit like Gerario’s was necessary, but we must not forget that in the research leading up to the production of nuclear weapons, a number of people had died from radiation.

There were plenty of concerns, such as magic backlash, and for all we knew, unbelievable mistakes like the Demon Core could happen too.

Gerario was far too valuable a person to lose.

“Now then, this is the moment Lord Gerario leaves his name in the chronicles!”

Gerario said that as he lowered one level of the stacked wooden boxes.

There was a medium-sized large magic circle of the sort apparently often seen in churches.

Even though it was called medium-sized, it was incomparably more complex than the magic circles carved into currently practical magic stones, and nearly twenty basic magic circles were combined and drawn in a size about that of a manhole.

Since it included many magic circles indicating fire and lightning, even I could tell it was not something peaceful.

However, there were no records of what effect it had, and we had no idea what would happen.

As small waves lapped into the tidal pools, I swallowed nervously.

Dodol had his arms crossed firmly as if to hide his anxiety, and Kururu was unusually half-hiding behind me.

Gerario, who had knelt and held his right hand over the synthetic magic stone, turned back toward us.

“Pray that at least my left hand remains.”

The tattoo that identified him as Gerario was carved into the palm of his left hand.

That was because the right hand, which often held magic stones, was easily targeted by enemies, and also the first thing blown away by magical backlash.

“God, if you exist, then show yourself!”

Gerario shouted.

And then—

The synthetic magic stone did absolutely nothing.

There were thirteen large-scale magic circles we had prepared.

None of them activated, and the most successful one merely flared up like a stove on the verge of running out of gas.

However, the reason Gerario was so reluctant to give up seemed to be because the sensation was clearly different from when trying to operate a magic stone engraved with a meaningless magic circle.

Kururu also agreed with that, saying it felt as if something was stuck somewhere deep inside.

Dodol, who like me could not use magic, and whose ancestors had been dragged down from their position as rulers of the world precisely because of that magic, looked half relieved and half exasperated as he went to inspect the reef.

He might have been thinking about personnel placement to watch for ships from Roran, or whether large ships could dock there.

“Was part of it altered out of fear of abuse?”

Gerario’s comment as he sat down on the scant sandy ground sounded extremely plausible.

“In that case, we just need to replace the basic magic circles one by one and check. Eventually, it’ll become the correct magic circle.”

Kururu, who had learned for the time being that it was harmless and was poking the synthetic magic stone with her index finger, said that.

“Yorinobu, you can do that much at the workshop, right?”

Kururu directed the conversation to me, but my reaction was slow.

“I don’t think it’s… impossible. But considering the number of basic magic circles making up a large-scale magic circle, the possibilities are practically infinite.”

At that, Kururu pricked up her ears.

“Huh? What are you talking about? There’s no way that’s true. For example, with this one, the basic magic circles are…”

While waving her well-groomed cat tail like a conductor’s baton, Kururu counted.

“Eighteen… twenty. It’s only twenty combined together. Even if they’re basic magic circles, there can’t be that many kinds, right? Fire and lightning, and then maybe control over power? Even if there are five kinds like that, it’s just combining five kinds twenty times.”

Kururu, with both hands on her hips, spoke like an older sister teaching her foolish little brother.

“You just test it a hundred times. It might be a little difficult, but it’s completely doable.”

“Um…”

Unfortunately, that was completely wrong, and humanity had always been powerless against this kind of problem.

Because the number of possible ways to combine five kinds of things twenty times was not five times twenty.

For example, consider an offensive magic circle like the one Kururu mentioned.

There were many more kinds of magic circles used as basics, such as attributes like fire, water, and lightning, or magic circles that governed power adjustment. But suppose, generously, that there were only five kinds here.

Then suppose we combined these five kinds of basic magic circles into a magic circle half the scale of the magic circle Kururu was talking about, meaning five combined together.

Even this would be exceptional complexity for a magic stone made in the current magic stone workshop. The required magic stone size would probably be third grade or higher.

Then how many possible combinations would there be for a magic circle of this scale?

It would not be 5 × 5, or 25 possibilities.

It would be 5 to the 5th power, or 3,125 possibilities.

Then what if one more basic magic circle was added here?

15,625 possibilities.

That was already enough to make me dizzy, and each time the magic circle grew larger, the number of options increased fivefold.

And ancient magic circles all included twenty or thirty basic magic circles, so finding a single intentionally changed part within a magic circle would be almost impossible by human hands.

Incidentally, when I later calculated 5 to the 20th power, it came to a little over 95,367,431,640,000.

Finding the correct combination of magic circles from among those would be basically impossible.

Problems involving powers are full of cases that even supercomputers cannot solve unless one devises ways to reduce the amount of calculation.

All the more so in a manual magic stone workshop.

Since the brute-force method was essentially impossible, we had no choice but to construct a theory and derive the answer from there.

“There’s also the theory that the people who built the churches were careless.”

Gerario said that out of frustration, but I had heard that floor stones in churches with magic circles carved into them had been deliberately brought from other lands when the church was built.

Because they were recognized as sacred things, floor stones carved with magic circles were apparently handled through proper procedures and bestowed by larger churches.

That meant they should not have been made carelessly.

Conversely, if they had been intentionally altered, then the possibility arose that the church knew the answer.

Had the secret of large-scale magic circles been solved, or had it not?

As I was thinking about that, Kururu was considerately speaking to Gerario, whose shoulders were slumped. Somehow or other, their master-disciple relationship seemed to be going well, which made me smile a little.

Also, in terms of feelings, I was closer to Dodol’s side.

Because I was relieved that large-scale magic circles could not activate as they were.

However, since we had gone to the trouble of coming to a place far from human habitation, there was something I wanted to ask the two magicians.

“Then for now, would it be all right if I crush this magic stone?”

The two magicians turned toward me, and since the reef was not particularly wide, Dodol came back as well.

“There’s something I want to check for the war.”

What I held in my hands was the belt buckle engraved with the fire magic circle that had saved us in Roran’s underground prison, and the signboard I had removed from the eaves of the magic stone workshop.

In front of the two magicians and one beastman, who were staring blankly, I worked busily.

Then, not long after.

We would glimpse a small part of the tremendous power of the technology in our hands.