Enrollment Arc, Part II

by Tsutomu Sato

  “You think so?” “Is that so?” answered Tatsuya and Miyuki in perfect harmony. For a full second, Leo froze, then collapsed onto the table entirely drained of energy.

  “…It would be absurd to try and get a word in when they’re in newlywed mode like that,” said Erika quietly to him. “I told you, you never stood a chance.”

  “Yeah, I was wrong…” Leo answered, also quietly, sitting back up.

  “This is not something I would willingly have people say about us…”

  “Oh, but it’s true,” said Miyuki soothingly and fluidly. “My brother and I are bound together by strong fraternal love.”

  This time, both Erika and Leo fell onto the table at the same time. “Ghah!” Leo even made his own sound effect as though blood were spurting from his nose, expressing his sentiments.

  And still Miyuki didn’t stop. “I do adore my brother more than anyone else in the world.” She moved her chair and brought her body near Tatsuya’s, then passionately looked up into his eyes, all as if putting on a show for their friends.

  “Ah, okay, I think I’m going home now,” said Erika, utterly sulking, her cheek still plastered to the table.

  “Miyuki, don’t get carried away, all right? There’s, let’s see…approximately one person who doesn’t understand it’s a joke.”

  “…” “…” “…”

  After Tatsuya grinned drily and chided Miyuki, she, Erika, and Leo all looked toward the last person present.

  “…Huh? What? A joke?” Mizuki’s gaze was downcast, and her face flushed red—her eyes were even darting from left to right. Someone sighed.

  “…Well, that’s what makes Mizuki who she is, I guess.”

  At Erika’s heartwarming murmur, Mizuki groaned, her face turning red for a different reason.

  Then, despite having been strung along himself, Leo couldn’t seem to take the creepy atmosphere any longer, and forcibly brought the conversation back to its original topic. “…By the way, you mentioned Cast Jamming, didn’t you?”

  “Well, it’s a secret, but yes.” This wasn’t a topic Tatsuya much wanted to discuss, but he probably cared more about dispelling the air that had formed around them. He went along with Leo’s suggestion without any other choice.

  “Cast Jamming… That’s jamming magic waves, right?”

  “They’re not waves,” retorted Leo, though it was better left unsaid.

  “It’s a figure of speech!” Erika shot with a straight face, turning her gaze back to Tatsuya.

  Cast Jamming was a type of magic that prevented magic programs from going to work on the information bodies called eidos that were incidental to phenomena. It could be broadly classified as having the same properties as typeless magic.

  There was another spell called Area Interference that also nullified an opponent’s magic. This spell used a magic program that specified only interference strength in a fixed area around the caster and prevented all alterations to information in that area. Using it would shut down the other person’s magic program interference. Cast Jamming, however, worked by scattering large amounts of psionic waves, or psi-waves—a technique to prevent the process by which magic programs interacted with eidos.

  In a way, Area Interference “reserved” magic in an area and prevented other casters from interrupting with their magic. Fundamentally, you needed more magical influence than the opponent.

  On the other hand, Cast Jamming affected the metaphorical radio tower that other users tried to upload data to. By requesting a huge amount of access, it would reduce their upload speed to almost nothing. One’s magical influence wasn’t that much of a problem. In exchange, the psionic noise could obstruct all four families and eight types of magic—following with the radio base example, by rapidly and irregularly changing the frequency of the waves. It would require one to create enough waves to completely block off an entire region with just one transmission antenna.

  “But don’t you need a special rock for that? Anti…anti-something.”

  Erika broke off at an odd point, unable to remember the proper noun. Mizuki, who had managed to revive herself, threw her a lifeboat. “It’s antinite, Erika. Tatsuya, do you own any antinite? I thought it was really expensive.”

  Antinite was known to be a substance that could generate enough psionic noise to fulfill this condition. While it was theorized that a magician could create the noise needed for Cast Jamming with their own calculations, it was nevertheless difficult to implement.

  Unlike Area Interference, Cast Jamming would obstruct the caster’s own magic as well. Even if a magician tried to construct the noise for Cast Jamming consciously, his or her unconscious would instinctively reject it. (The magic calculation region formed within a person’s unconscious, so it prioritized unconscious control over conscious control.)

  Because of this, antinite—which could generate the required noise just by emitting psions—was thought to be indispensable for using Cast Jamming.

  Tatsuya’s answer, however, overruled common sense. “No, I don’t have any. It’s a military-grade product in the first place, after all. The problem isn’t the price—civilians can’t get it.”

  “Huh? But you just said you used Cast Jamming…” Erika was the one who actually spoke, but both she and Leo looked at him incredulously.

  He paused for a moment, his face troubled. Then he leaned over the table and said lowly, “Uh, this is all off the record, okay?” The other three, now drawn in, leaned forward as well, nodding in seriousness. “It’s not technically Cast Jamming. What I used is Specified Magic Jamming. It operates under the same theory.”

  Upon hearing Tatsuya’s whispers, Mizuki looked startled and blinked a few times over. “Umm… I didn’t know magic like that existed.”

  Erika was the one to directly answer that question. “I don’t think it does,” she said. “Doesn’t that mean you worked out the theory for a new spell?” Once again, her voice sounded more appalled than impressed or shocked.

  There were plenty of magicians who used their own, original magic—and plenty of up-and-coming ones who specialized in original magic from a young age. However, that was a case of them instinctively—or intuitively—coming up with magic in a natural way. There weren’t many magicians who could construct new magic from a theoretical standpoint.

  Magic depended heavily on the use of one’s unconscious.

  While it may have been easy to retroactively attach a theory to magic one could use unconsciously, creating a new spell on a theoretical level—even if it was a simple variation on an existing one—demanded a complete and total understanding of the spell’s construction and the principles it operated under.

  Someone the age of a high school student formulating a theory for a new spell wasn’t just abnormal—it made no sense.

  “It was less me working it out and more a chance discovery,” answered Tatsuya, smiling at Erika’s straightforward reaction. “You know that in most cases, when you try to use two CADs at once, the psi-waves interfere with each other and the magic doesn’t go off, right?”

  “Yeah, I learned that the hard way,” nodded Leo.

  “Whoa, that’s way out of your league,” muttered Erika, appalled at Leo’s words.

  “What was that?!”

  “You were trying to use two brooms to cast magic in parallel! If you thought you could pull off a high-level technique like that, then you were way out of your league.”

  “Oh, shut up. I thought I could! Since I can activate multiple spells as long as they’re my type, you know.”

  “No way. Seriously. Amazing.”

  “…You’ve made your point already, so quit talking in monotone. It’s making me even angrier.”

  “H-hey, come on, let’s listen to what Tatsuya has to say!”

  “…”

  “…Hmph.”

  Erika and Leo looked away from each other.

  Tatsuya shrugged at Mizuki, whose gaze was wandering to and fro. “I’m fine with stopping here…but
you want me to keep going? I don’t mind, I guess…

  “The psionic interference waves emitted when using two CADs at the same time, just like with Cast Jamming, get sent to the Idea, which contains the eidos of events near the magician. With one CAD you expand an activation program for the spell that will do the obstructing, then with the other CAD you expand an activation program in the opposite direction. Then you make multiple copies of the activation programs without actually converting them into magic programs. If you release the resultant psionic signal waves as typeless magic, then—to a certain extent—you can block the activation of spells that are the same type as the two magic programs you would have created from the activation programs with each CAD.

  “Even for persistent spells like High-Frequency Blade, you can’t maintain the magic program’s effects indefinitely. At some point, you’ll have to expand another activation program and redo it. I just happened to figure out the exact timing to do that in this case.”

  “Seriously…” whispered Leo. His monotonous tone revealed that it wasn’t only his expression that was dumbfounded.

  All of a sudden, Mizuki coughed. She had nearly choked on her straw—she’d been slurping from it even after her glass had been emptied. Her emotions seemed to finally snap out of her trance because of the painful coughing, and her face gave way to shock.

  Erika furrowed her brow, silently thinking about something. It didn’t look like anything particularly pleasant given the grim look on her face, but it didn’t seem like she was particularly unhappy with anything.

  “…I have basically no idea what you would actually do, but I think I understand the logic behind it. But why is this all off the record? If you patented it you could probably make money off it,” said Leo, managing to restart his thought processes and evidently not satisfied.

  In response to his confusion, Tatsuya grinned bitterly—more bitterly than happily. “First, because this technique is incomplete. It just blocks the spell the enemy is in the middle of activating; it isn’t like they can’t use magic at all, it just gets harder. The user, however, can’t use magic at all after using this. That in itself is a fatal flaw, but the more important issue is that it can obstruct casting without using antinite.”

  “…Why is that a problem?” asked Leo, more unsatisfied than suspicious.

  Erika, who had been lost in thought, scolded him in a fairly serious manner. “You’re an idiot. Of course it’s a problem. Magic is currently something that national defense and peacekeeping forces need at all costs. If some easy, magic-nullifying technique that didn’t need expensive antinite or a lot of magic power started to spread, it could shake the foundations of society.”

  “Those are my thoughts as well. There are even radical groups advocating for the abolition of magic on the grounds that it’s somehow a source of discrimination. Not much antinite gets produced, so it doesn’t realistically present a threat. Until they can find a way to deal with it, I don’t want to go public with this Cast Jamming imitation.”

  Leo nodded a few times, his curiosity appearing sated at last. For some reason, Mizuki was nodding with the same expression. “That’s amazing,” she sighed in admiration. “You thought so far ahead.”

  “Yeah, I would’ve probably gone straight for the fame and popularity!” sighed Leo in turn.

  Miyuki gave a soft, reserved smile at him. “I believe my brother is thinking a little too hard about it, to be honest. It isn’t as though just anyone can read an activation program as an opponent is expanding it, or project CAD interference waves. But I suppose that is just how he is.”

  “…How I am? Are you calling me lazy and indecisive?”

  “Well, I don’t know. What do you think, Erika?” said Miyuki with feigned ignorance, throwing the ball to Erika.

  “I don’t know. I, for one, want to hear Mizuki’s opinion on it,” said Erika in an affected tone, tossing the ball back into Mizuki’s court.

  “Huh? Um, I, well…”

  “No one’s going to disagree for me…?” With Tatsuya’s rueful stare turned on them, Miyuki constructed a cheerful smile and averted her eyes, Erika hid her face behind her menu, and Mizuki’s eyes darted back and forth, unsure—but from none of them came any help.

  Tatsuya was on the run again today.

  The new club member recruitment week (which was the fancy term for all this horseplay) was already on its fourth day. Though perhaps the word still would have been more apt than already…but regardless, it was busy. It seemed backward to him that it was far more exhausting after school than during classes, but unfortunately, nobody would listen to his objections.

  It made him wonder what resort in which time period these barkers belonged to—or rather, these solicitors—or sorry, the recruitment officers. Instead of cutting through the jam-packed schoolyard, he avoided it (he’d learned on the second day there was no point in volunteering himself for labor like that) and ran toward the location from which he’d received the report of trouble.

  On the way there, from the other side of the tent-forested area in the shade of some trees, he detected signs that someone was about to fire magic at him.

  It wouldn’t interfere with him directly—it seemed to be a spell to upturn the ground at his feet (more accurately, to shift the ground under his feet on top of the ground to the front and back).

  Not again, he thought, sick of it. He must have stood out too much on the first day. Now people were bullying him like this all the time.

  Thanks (?) to that, though, he’d gotten used to it. In an unhurried, matter-of-fact way, he activated his Cast Jamming imitation and matched it with the spell’s type. He actually possessed a way of nullifying the spell more easily, but the kind of aftereffects it would cause made it highly probable he’d have a pain dealing with it later. One of the valuable teachings he’d acquired during his short life thus far was that cutting corners never led to anything good.

  His psionic wave spread and dispersed, and the magic program dissipated without going off.

  Without stopping even a moment, he took a sudden turn.

  Cutting corners really wasn’t ever a good thing. Maybe it was because he’d let things be since they didn’t actually harm him, but the number of times he’d experienced magic harassment like this had been escalating rapidly. He’d been ignoring it out of his responsibilities as a disciplinary officer, but at this point, he thought it was okay to start taking his self-defense more seriously.

  His opponent, however, was shrewd as well. Right as Tatsuya turned toward him, he leaped out of the shade with speed impossible by pure physical talent. Whoever it was had probably prepared a high-speed running spell beforehand by combining movement magic and anti-inertial magic. The issue with such spells was that your legs wouldn’t normally be able to keep up with the speed and you’d fall, but the culprit seemed to be quite physically fit.

  Tatsuya judged it would be hard to apprehend the person in a short time and canceled his pursuit.

  The only clues he’d gotten were the tall, thin stature of the culprit and the white wristband, lined with red on blue on either edge, he wore on his right hand.

  A week passed.

  The new club member recruitment week had been a torrent of events for Tatsuya.

  He was probably the busiest out of all the members of the disciplinary committee.

  —For slightly different reasons than you might think.

  Takeaki Kirihara, whom Tatsuya had subdued on the first day, was apparently one of the school’s most hopeful competitive magic athletes. Some held the opinion that Tatsuya could dispatch him so easily because Kirihara had been hurt during his duel with Sayaka Mibu before Tatsuya had gotten involved. However, most of the students who weren’t aware of the finer details of the competitive magic athlete certainly weren’t too pleased with the incident where the regular athlete had been beaten by a freshman—and a Weed, at that.

  As a result…

  “Tatsuya, you got disciplinary committee stuff a
gain today?” asked Leo, picking up his bag and getting ready to go home.

  “I’m off today. Looks like I’ll finally get a break.”

  “You did a bang-up job, after all.”

  “I’m not at all happy about it, though,” sighed Tatsuya glumly.

  Leo was clearly holding back laughter. “You’re a celebrity now, Tatsuya! The mysterious freshman who went undefeated against all the regular magic athletes in the room—that’s what they’re saying.”

  “Mysterious? Why…?”

  “There’s one theory that you’re a hired killer sent by a magic opposition group!” That was Erika poking her face into the conversation, also just about ready to go home.

  “Who on earth would spread such irresponsible rumors…?”

  “Me!”

  “Hey!”

  “I’m joking, of course.”

  “Give me a break… You’re really nasty, you know that?”

  “But it’s true that the rumors exist.”

  Tatsuya ended up sighing once again at the substance of the rumors Erika had brought to him. He didn’t think anyone would readily believe such groundless stories—at least he didn’t want to. It was fully within the realm of expectation that someone or other would take advantage of the talk and make a move on him, though.

  “That was quite a sigh!”

  “No empathy at all, I see… Try putting yourself in my shoes. I almost died three times this week!”

  “No thank you!” Leo wasn’t trying to hide the amusement from his face. Tatsuya felt an urge to punch him in the nose, but instead he just breathed a third sigh.

  Takeaki Kirihara, viewed as the top of the sophomore class in terms of practical ability, was the next ace of the kenjutsu club. And a freshman Weed had beaten him. As stated before, the news surprised and infuriated those steeped in a superficial stance of them being some “chosen ones.” They directed their completely unfair anger and resentment at Tatsuya. Currently, people bent on misdirected acts of retaliation were coming out of the woodwork.