A Headache (2)

Amon Vincent’s mana first bloomed toward the end of his twelfth year.

Nobody in the family was particularly surprised, Amon included. For anyone born a Vincent, it was simply the next step.

His parents’ money and rank carried him into Everforce Academy without a hitch. But not long after, he ran into the biggest crisis of his life.

The cause was the academy’s operating policy.

Everforce Academy’s board of directors didn’t put its effort into teaching students better. It put it into weeding out the ones who showed no promise, and the yardstick it used to screen them was none other than the “Circle”.

The Circle mattered, of course, since it decided both the total volume of a mage’s mana and its output. But whether a Circle opened or not depended on all sorts of things, and the gap between one person and the next was enormous, so it made a poor measure of potential.

Even so, with the board and the Dean leading the way, Everforce Academy pushed the policy through on the strength of the Circle. It set a target Circle grade for every year and forcibly expelled any student who fell short.

Amon was no exception.

When he missed his target, “Reach the fourth Circle by the end of your third year,” the academy handed him an expulsion notice on the spot. With his house’s expectations riding on his back, it came as a tremendous shock to Amon.

In the end he re-enrolled at Kestral Academy, where his uncle taught, and it was as good as running away.

He’d hoped for some warm comfort and encouragement. Instead, when his uncle Graham looked at him, his eyes held cold contempt mixed with disgust. Far from looking after Amon, Graham made a habit of ignoring him even in private.

After all, someone who’d become a stain on the house had no right to hold his head up proudly.

That’s why.

Amon slowly opened the eyes he’d been holding shut, and the ceiling of his room, spotless without a speck of dust, filled his view.

That’s why I have to see this job through, whatever it takes.

Place Leonard Felix under the family’s control. It was the first and last chance he’d been given to recover, and failure wasn’t an option.

— Knock, knock.

Just then someone knocked. Amon sat up from the bed where he’d been lying, perched on its corner, and spoke.

“Come in.”

With his leave, a first-year opened the door and came in, carefully checking their surroundings.

That one?

It was Jace Impersia, one of the stooges Amon had planted near Leonard. Jace seemed nervous and hung back for a good while with an anxious look until Amon, exasperated, spoke first.

“You’re here, so say what you came for.”

At that, Jace answered in a small but clear voice.

“Um, there’s something new I need to pass on about Leonard Felix…”

“What is it?”

“Yes. An outing to Everton’s been arranged for Friday lunchtime.”

A brief silence followed. Amon stared at Jace in disbelief, then asked again.

“That’s all?”

“Ah. Well…”

“I asked if that’s all!”

Amon’s patience ran out. He shot up from the bed and glared, and Jace, frightened, stepped back without meaning to.

“You could’ve at least found out their route or something… Damn it!”

— Crash-bang!

Amon kicked the chair, and it landed a hair’s breadth from Jace’s toes. It was Amon himself who’d ordered them to report every last trivial thing, but right now he was too on edge to weigh even that.

He panted for a moment, got his breath back, and spoke to Jace, who stood there trembling, not knowing what to do.

“…Get out.”

“Y-yes?”

“I said get out.”

The words were barely out before Jace shot through the door without a moment’s hesitation. Alone in the room, Amon turned where he stood, collapsed onto the bed, and groaned like a man at death’s door.

Goddamn it.

If it hadn’t been Graham’s order… no, if it hadn’t been tied up with the family, he’d have turned down a job this tiresome and this unsavory without even hearing it out. But Amon had no real choice.

Be that as it may… an outing, is it.

He was used to driving home a strong impression. He had no gift at all for enduring, holding his patience, and building a connection step by step, so in practice it was closer to the truth to say he had only one chance.

A strong impression called for a stage to match. An outing would have fewer eyes on it, and he could set the scene and the mood however he liked, so it would be the perfect moment to approach Leonard Felix.

Even so.

Amon got up quietly from the bed and tapped a spot on the wooden floor with his heel. One of the floorboards lifted slightly, revealing a hidden compartment.

Inside lay a little money, a few important documents, and a single bracelet rippling with an ominous energy. Amon silently took the bracelet and shoved it inside his coat, then put the lid back and hid the compartment away.

I ought to have at least some insurance.

“At this rate we’re going to be late for the showing.”

“Could you go just a bit faster, please!”

A week later.

Leonard was formally issued an outing pass and climbed into a carriage bound for the Everton town center. They passed the outdoor training ground, laid out like a forest, went out through the main gate, and the vast streets of Everton spread open before them.

Maybe because the students kept urging the driver on, the carriage reached the center of Everton in barely ten minutes. They had a schedule worked out in advance, so the moment they were off the carriage they moved fast, and Leonard, caught by the wrist, got dragged this way and that.

“Er, I’m not really sure what we’re doing, but do we really have to see this?”

After a long walk, Leonard asked cautiously, and the students glared at him as if he’d said some forbidden word that must never pass anyone’s lips. They were so fierce that even Leonard flinched.

“The kid doesn’t get it.”

“If you don’t get it, cut the chatter and just follow.”

“So you’re a genius. So what?”

“…”

What on earth did that last one have to do with anything?

Unable to put up any real resistance, Leonard was half-forcibly “escorted” along by the students, and he kept reeling off curses in his head all the way to the theater, things along the lines of “No respect for your elders,” and “You’ve wasted your whole life.”

What is that?

Leonard looked at the poster pasted on the outer wall of the gaudy theater building and narrowed his eyes to slits.

Clearer than ever, through a triple compound crystal lens! The very latest high-definition image stones for projectors — a feast for your eyes!

The poster was full of phrases he couldn’t make sense of. Past it, with no idea himself what was going on or how, Leonard was helped along by his classmates and sat down in the audience seats around an enormous circular stage.

“It’s starting!”

A huge light burst from the image stone set at the center of the circular stage. In the blink of an eye a sphere-shaped image rose into the air, and the audience quietly held its breath.

“…”

Culture shock.

It was the term for the shock of meeting something completely different from your own culture, or a new way of living. It was also the only word that described exactly what Leonard was feeling right now.

Wow. That’s insane.

Dozens of auxiliary projectors installed around the stage threw out all kinds of light and sound, breathing splendor and life into the image. Leonard had kept up an air of indifference at first, but by about the middle of the film even he was dumbstruck.

An image stone was a special and rare crystal that could record any situation or scene in real time. On the battlefield they’d been put to good use as tactical maps, for taking in the terrain at a glance and drawing up operations.

But they were priced to match, and they could record so little footage that they were hardly ever used outside special purposes. Spending them on eye-candy on this scale wouldn’t come close to paying for itself.

And yet some madman out there had actually gone and done it.

…No. Maybe there’s plenty of profit in it after all.

Leonard cast a quick look around. The ticket had cost about two gold. Not too cheap, not too dear, a subtly well-judged price. And if theaters all over the Empire were taking in a crowd this size every single day…

To think an amusement this tremendous was sitting barely ten minutes away by carriage.

Was thrift just that ingrained in him? Exaggerating only a little, he was starting to have doubts about his whole life. What was more, he’d privately looked down on this sort of thing as something for children, yet the film wasn’t bad. No, it was outstanding.

The story was as standard as good-triumphs-over-evil gets. A mage is bitten by a mysterious ancient spider, gains the spider’s power, puts on a mask, and ranges across the whole Empire as a vigilante whose identity nobody knows.

But the acting, the staging of the scenes, and all the special effects were good enough that even the obvious clichés were entirely forgivable.

“Well? Good, isn’t it?”

“How was it?”

The long running time passed, and the moment the film ended, the students asked for his verdict with triumphant faces.

“It was good.”

“Huh? Really?”

Against all expectation, Leonard admitted it just like that, and one of the students asked back in bewilderment. Leonard lifted the head he’d been holding down. His eyes were shining bright and clear, the exact opposite of when he’d walked into the theater.

“Mm. I’m going to save up and come back for sure.”

Leonard pressed his lips shut, promising himself a next time, and it was the students who’d dragged him to the theater who ended up thrown.

“R-right.”

“Glad you liked it, I guess…”

Once they were out of the theater, the students looked a good deal more relaxed. The film had been the one thing with a fixed showing time, and now that it was out of the way, their schedule had room to breathe.

“All right, what should we do next?”

“Staffs! Let’s go look at staffs.”

“Why do boys love staffs so much?”

The girls muttered it in disbelief, but Leonard understood exactly how the boys felt.

A staff was as good as proof that you were a mage in your own right. But first through fourth years, whose skills were still raw, weren’t allowed to own a personal staff, and even after reaching fifth year, a student only got to use the academy’s communal staffs until graduation.

With things like that, it was hardly unreasonable for a first-year to have fantasies about staffs.

“The market you lot are going to is by the staff-maker’s workshop anyway, right? Let’s walk together till we split off.”

“…Fine.”

The girls didn’t seem to have any particular objection, so they readily agreed to the boys’ proposal, and everyone set off.

Come to think of it… a staff, is it.

Leonard clenched and unclenched his fist. By his own reckoning it had only been a few weeks, so maybe that was why the feel of the staff he used to carry still seemed to linger in his hand, exactly as it had been.

It had a hell of a feel in the hand.

He’d pushed that staff past its limits to the very end, and it had been smashed to pieces only a few hours before he lost his life. He’d wondered whether things might have turned out a little differently if the staff had been intact, but honestly, there was no point dwelling on it.

“Leonard, what’re you standing around for? Hurry up!”

“…Huuh?”

While his attention had wandered, a fair distance had opened up between him and the students. Leonard came back to himself and tried to catch up, but in the blink of an eye a huge crowd surged in and cut him off from them.

“Hey! Hey!”

“You still there?”

The students’ voices reached him from here and there.

“Leonard! Don’t be late, be at the meeting point by half past five! Got it?”

The crowd had swollen so much that whenever he tried to squeeze into a gap, he only got pushed back the other way. In the end the students must have given up on regrouping with him too, because after that last shout, nothing more came.

“Oh, hell.”

Once it had come to this, there was nothing for it. For a moment he thought about using magic to push people aside, but he dropped the idea at once. Since things had turned out this way, maybe it’d be better to go and explore the town center to his heart’s content instead.

He turned and started off in the complete opposite direction from the students, and just then a strange sensation brushed his nerves.

Hm?

For the briefest instant, the space around him blurred and rippled like a mirage. It was such a momentary flicker that ordinarily nobody would have noticed, but Leonard caught the “anomaly” without any trouble.

Illusion magic.

Someone was artfully adjusting how many people were visible, restricting the routes he could take. But why? And out of nowhere, at that?

Which bastard is it?

Leonard concentrated and spread out detection magic, and it caught someone approaching with their presence hidden by magic. The other party didn’t seem to have the slightest idea.

Behind me.

Leonard turned to look behind him, and a big student came into view, striding toward him with a yellow collar fluttering.