Chapter 599: Common Ground
Editor: Tseirp
The next morning.
The dishes, quickly but neatly washed by a water-attribute magician, were delivered to the neighbors by Advance-Notice Officer No. 1-kun.
But when he returned to Rondo Manor, there was a letter in his hand, which he passed to Ryo.
“Ah—according to this, as promised yesterday, Captain Lu Yao of the Magic Artillery Unit will bring the gauntlet over later.”
Reading the letter, Ryo instantly brightened.
For the record, Abel had already started his daily flight training and was listening to Ryo while floating right there in front of him.
He really did seem to have learned to fly freely.
“At last—Abel the Aerial Swordsman is born!”
“What’s that supposed to be…”“A swordsman who fights without ever setting foot on the ground.”
“No, this Flight Ring isn’t fast, you know?”
Right—its top speed was about forty kilometers per hour.
Car speed.
Faster than running, sure, but for combat, it would be situational.
It might be effective for massed charges from a distance, but in close quarters, it’d be tough.
“That’s where the aerial swordsman shows his skill.”
“Yeah, I’ll just be a normal ground swordsman.”
Aerial Swordsman: not born.
Before long, Captain Lu Yao arrived alone.
Carrying a box.
“Duke Rondo, here is the promised gauntlet. I’ve removed the protections on the magic formulae, so you can examine them freely.”
“Ooh! Thank you very much.”
Inside the box Captain Lu Yao carried was the gauntlet.
After Ryo had had his fill of marveling, he summoned one golem.
For some reason, this golem wore a yellow scarf around its neck.
No other golem did…
“This is ‘Friendship Token No. 2-kun.’ I’ll lend him to you.”
“Thank you!”
Ryo introduced him; Captain Lu Yao smiled happily.
As usual, Abel muttered, why that name… but—fortunately—no one heard him.
“Right, I’ll ‘register’ him so you can operate him… Could you look at No. 2-kun’s head for a moment?”
“Yes.”
Ryo placed his right hand on Friendship Token No. 2-kun’s head and murmured something; the golem’s head glowed faintly.
A gentle alchemical light.
“All right, registered. He now recognizes you as a ‘provisional master’, so he’ll obey simple commands. Try giving one.”
“Uh, um… then, please follow behind me.”
Captain Lu Yao said, a little nervous, and Friendship Token No. 2-kun immediately lined up behind her.
When she walked, he followed right at her heels.
“Oh! He really follows! Amazing!”
“Right? He can carry up to 300 kilos… about five adults. Any more and… well, he can lift it, but he’ll lose balance and topple. Still, he’s built sturdy, so please try various things. If anything’s unclear, come ask anytime.” 𝘳АNỘᛒÊŚ
“Yes! Thank you!”
Saying so, Captain Lu Yao dashed off.
Friendship Token No. 2-kun ran after her, scarf fluttering…
“So he understands the Eastern Countries’ language too.”
Abel sounded impressed.
“Yep. I built in a conversion dictionary between the Central Countries language and the Eastern Countries language, so he can recognize commands in either. He can’t speak, but he understands what people are saying. Abel, don’t say mean things in front of the kids, okay? They seem not to hear, seem not to see… but that’s exactly when they do.”
“Ah… right.”
To Ryo, golems were apparently like children.
And so Abel went back to flight training with the Flight Ring; Ryo, clutching the gauntlet, to alchemy.
“Hm… as I thought, this part’s a black box.”
By evening, when Abel finished training and landed in the garden, Ryo was at a fairly large ice workbench, the gauntlet and Flight Ring laid out side by side, muttering that.
Both were connected to ice plates.
It was something Ryo often used when doing alchemy.
These plates projected the magic formulae.
Call it a reverse-engineering ice board, a kind of hacking tool…
“Black… what?”
“I mean an unparseable section of magic formula—strings that don’t make sense…in fact, these two share an identical, incomprehensible formula.”
“A gauntlet that fires fire-attribute attack magic and a ring that flies with wind-attribute magic? Totally different things.”
“Exactly. And yet this string of 1,024 characters is present in both, in pretty much the same spot…”
Ryo answered Abel’s doubt, head tilted.
It was like suddenly finding a 1,024-character block of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs smack in the middle of a Japanese text.
Too wildly different—too alien.
“At first, I thought it was a mana-saving circuit. Both the Flight Ring and the gauntlet run very efficiently, don’t they?”
“True. I can fly all day and not run out of mana.”
“Yes! And with the gauntlet, they said an average magician can fire about three hundred shots. In the kingdom, mages on the battlefield can’t shoot anywhere near that many, right?”
“If I recall… for the Javelin line, the limit was around twenty at best.”
“Eh? That few? I figured at least… seventy or eighty. Rin can do around that, can’t she?”
Rin was the wind-attribute magician in Abel’s party, ‘Crimson Sword’.
“Rin’s a B-rank adventurer, okay? Frankly, she’s top tier among wind-attribute magicians in the kingdom. If you use Rin or old man Ilarion as your baseline, you’ll be wrong about everything.”
“So… not normal people.”
Get too close, and you stop seeing straight.
“Well anyway, I thought it was about saving mana, but it wasn’t. On the contrary, it amplifies mana.”
“Mana amplification? Using magic stones?”
“That’s the thing—it doesn’t. The Flight Ring uses a wind magic stone, but the gauntlet uses no stone at all.”
“So entirely off the user’s mana. To get that punch and that stamina is impressive.”
“Right. The stamina comes from needing very little mana per shot. And the reason you need so little is that this black-box section amplifies the mana… hmm.”
“Naive question… how do you amplify mana without magic stones?”
“You don’t.”
“…Huh?”
Ryo answered as if it were obvious; Abel’s face went slack.
“You can’t possibly amplify mana with alchemy alone, no magic stones. If that were doable, everyone would do it—and someone would build an alchemical device that lets a single magician destroy a nation.”
“Yeah, I’d rather no one build something that insane… So right, amplification shouldn’t be possible. But this ring and gauntlet…”
“Yep, they are doing it. I measured the mana flow—it increases. It’s baffling.”
Ryo kept cocking his head, and Abel could hear him mumbling “No way…” over and over.
“Ryo, you do have a hunch, don’t you?”
“Eh?”
“You’ve been saying ‘no way’ this whole time.”
“Ah… um… remember that magic-power theory I told you before?”
“Magic-power theory? The thing about extra dimensions or whatever?”
“That one. If this black-box part is doing that…if this string enables it—then mana amplification is plausible. Strictly speaking, not amplification but reading in—or siphoning—mana from extra dimensions.”
Ryo still looked doubtful.
“If you’re hesitating this much, you think it’s impossible with alchemy, right?”
“That’s what I think. We magicians—almost unconsciously…do it: reading or using mana from extra dimensions. Even I can’t fully analyze it…I only just finally got it into theory form. But whoever wrote these alchemical strings has already found a logical method to do it, and is using it in alchemical devices.”
“…That’s incredible.”
“‘Incredible’ —or abnormal.”
Ryo nodded repeatedly.
He’d only reached ‘mana is gravity from extra dimensions’ because, back on Earth, he was fascinated with theoretical physics—superstring theory—and had devoured books and magazines on it since grade school.
But whoever created these strings figured this out without that theoretical backdrop… If that’s not abnormal, what is?
“That wasn’t…something Captain Lu Yao herself discovered, right?”
“I don’t think so. It’s in the Flight Ring too.”
“Right, that’s true.”
Ryo denied it; Abel remembered.
“Hey, Ryo, another simple question…”
“Yes?”
“The gauntlet is fire-attribute, and the Flight Ring is wind-attribute, yeah? And you said they share the same magic formula—not a magic circle?”
“Right.”
“You taught me that while a magic circle can take any attribute’s mana, a magic formula needs the ‘appropriate’ attribute: fire-attribute mana to trigger a fire formula, wind-attribute mana for a wind formula. Yet that black-box whatever is the ‘same’ formula—though the gauntlet is fire and the ring is wind.”
“Exactly, Abel—fantastic observation!”
Ryo praised Abel’s question.
That was, in fact, one of the keys to ‘mana is gravity from extra dimensions’.
Which ties into why Djinns skilled with gravity can use other attributes’ magic as well.
“This is pure conjecture, but I think this formula operates on mana before it splits—before it changes—into the six attributes.”
“Before it splits into six? Fire, wind, water, earth, light, and dark? Does it… split?”
“In my magic-power theory, yes.”
Even in Earth’s theoretical physics, as expressed by E = mc², energy and matter are essentially the same—interconvertible—even in the classical theory of relativity.
And in particle physics, which deals with the subatomic, both energy and matter are nothing more than vibrations of ‘strings’…
In short— pursued to the limit, they’re fundamentally the same thing.
The four forces of physics—‘gravity’, ‘electromagnetism’, ‘the strong force’, ‘the weak force’—were originally one.
At the universe’s birth, they were the same; as pressure and temperature fell, they differentiated into four.
That much is common understanding in physics now.
One thing at the start.
Then it splits.
That flow is the logic of the world…
“Maybe I should ask Captain Lu Yao tomorrow.”
If someone can tell you, it’s no shame to ask.
You won’t learn everything, but you might pick up a clue.
And he’d loaned her Friendship Token No. 2-kun, after all.
“We’ll visit the neighbors tomorrow, asking, ‘How’s Friendship Token No. 2-kun doing?’”
All set and ready!
“By the way, Ryo—that golem you lent out…”
“Friendship Token No. 2-kun.”
“Right. Is his power source… not you?”
“Abel—another excellent question.”
Ryo praised him again.
Being able to ask great questions is proof of keen intellect—
And of thinking things through yourself.
So when someone asks a great question, you should praise them—over and over.
“I used to power them myself, but I’m trying various experimental setups now.”
Saying so, Ryo picked up the gauntlet and the Flight Ring and walked from the garden into a room.
Abel followed.
It was the room where Ryo always holed up for alchemical research.
In the center stood a large ice desk, and on it, two blue magic stones sat on pedestals.
One pedestal seemed to be faintly glowing—
The light of alchemy.
“Don’t tell me that glowing pedestal’s stone is…”
“Yep, that’s what’s supplying the mana.”
“And the golems… aren’t physically connected, right?”
“Ultimately, I’d like to link them with invisible mana lines, like what magicians do…but for now, I’m transmitting mana via the water vapor in the air.”
“That one unit powers all the golems that are moving?”
Abel asked, eyes wide.
Ryo grinned.
“Heh heh—surprised, Abel? This is bona fide mana-saving.”
“Ah, the thing you mentioned earlier. Those magic stones—they’re from the fish, right? The monster fish you called ‘sardines’?”
“Yeah—caught with a returning tentacle* rather than a returning blade after we felled the Kraken, and then they went into our bellies—stones from those sardine-like monsters.” (TLN: Capture arm)
They were blue stones about the size of a pinky nail.
Even so, in Darwei they were shockingly valuable—supposedly one such stone could buy a count’s fief…
He vaguely recalled someone saying that, somewhere.
“Once, way out on the eastern edge of the Western Countries—the QC Duchy—I had a chance to disassemble a golem and tinker with it. QC’s golems are overwhelmingly advanced in mana-saving tech… and I’ve applied that know-how here.”
“That’s impressive.”
Ryo said it with pride; Abel offered honest praise.
Abel also knew that back home, Viscount Kenneth Hayward and the others were making golems.
He’d even seen a prototype.
It wasn’t battle-ready yet, but it could walk on four legs.
The magic stone used as its power source, though, had been fairly large—
about half a wyvern stone…in other words, half a fist.
Compared to that, a pinky-nail stone was remarkable.
“What Kenneth’s building is a prototype premised on battlefield deployment, so the concept differs from mine. That side is aimed from the start at a high-power unit, so they’re deliberately designing it to run on large stones.”
Ryo explained the difference in concept.
It wasn’t about which was superior.
Different roles mean different everything.
Both were fine golem research.
“Of course, my kids will one day set out as an Ice Golem Corps to conquer the world!”
“Yeah… when you say it, it doesn’t sound like a joke…”
Ryo thrust a fist in the air; Abel shook his head repeatedly.
Whether Ryo was kidding… no one could say.
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