by Tsutomu Sato
“Come to think of it…that’s true.”
“Their aim is abolition of the societal discrimination due to magic. That in itself is undeniably correct.”
“…Right.”
“What is discrimination, then?”
“When society’s opinion of someone doesn’t reflect their actual skills and hard work…?”
“Like I said, Miyuki, you shouldn’t think about it from a general viewpoint.” As he spoke, he smoothly picked up the remote control on the sideboard, then pointed it at the screen. One of the areas of the sixteen-way split screen came to the front and magnified. “Blanche, in terms of its outward political society guise, cites the difference in average salary earned by magicians and non-magician company workers as proof that magicians are being given special treatment. The discrimination they’re talking about, in the end, is a difference in average pay. But they’re only talking about averages, about results. They don’t think at all about how exhausting and taxing the work done by highly paid magicians is. They also completely ignore the vast number of ‘spare’ magicians who, despite having magical skill, can’t get employed in occupations related to magic, and actually make less money on average.”
The emotion in his flat voice was sparse, but there was just a hint of downheartedness in it. “No matter how strong it may be, magic that society doesn’t value won’t bring either money or honor.”
Miyuki cast her gaze downward, bitterly. He got up, walked around her, and gently put a hand on her shoulder. “The reason the average magician’s salary is high is because there are ones who do possess rare skills that society needs. Among those scant few magicians, there are a relatively high percentage of top earners, which means the average salary is calculated as being high, that’s all. And those magicians working at the forefront contribute to society—actually, that’s too pretty a way of putting it. Magicians receive high rewards for creating some sort of profit, whether it’s financial or not; but they aren’t given special treatment in a financial sense just because they’re magicians. Their world is not an easy one—they can’t live in luxury just by having the innate talent for magic. We know that all too well. Don’t we, Miyuki?”
“Yes… I know it well,” said Miyuki, nodding deeply and placing her own hand atop her brother’s on her shoulder.
“What this essentially means is that Blanche’s stance of opposition to magic-based discrimination really means they’re opposed to magicians being paid in a financial sense. They want magicians to donate their services to society unselfishly.”
“…I believe that a rather selfish, arrogant thing for them to say. Magicians and non-magicians are alike in that they need money to live. And yet they say they can’t allow magicians to make a living with magic, and that those who can use it have to make a living on something else… Doesn’t that just mean they’re saying they don’t want to respect magic as a human skill because they can’t use it themselves? They’re saying magicians don’t need to be repaid for the effort they put into studying magic, and that their hard work shouldn’t logically need to be respected… Or are those kinds of people not aware that you can’t use magic with natural, inborn talent alone? Has nobody told them that using magic requires long years of learning and training?”
Tatsuya pulled away from Miyuki’s back, gave a cynical smile, and returned to his seat. “No, they know. They just don’t mention it. It would be too inconvenient to say it, to think it. The ideal of equality is easy on the ears, so they trick others with it—and themselves. Remember what you asked at the beginning? About why students in a magic high school would be active in anti-magic groups like Blanche and Égalité?”
“Yes… You mean they don’t understand what the magic-rejecting faction really wants…?”
“People who can’t learn to use magic, no matter how hard they try, think it’s unfair that those who can use it to gain high positions. Then, even if you can use magic, the students with less talent for it think that it’s strange they can’t catch up to those with abundant talent even though they put in a lot of work, and that it’s strange they should be seen as inferior… It wouldn’t be mysterious to think this way, would it? Differences in talent aren’t limited to magic—it happens in every single field in every kind of human work. Even if you don’t have magical talent, you might have other talent. If you can’t stand not having magical talent, then you should find a different way of life.”
For those who didn’t know any more about Tatsuya than what he showed, it would have sounded like he was saying that for his own benefit. But Miyuki, the only person here listening to him, wasn’t prone to such a misunderstanding.
“The only reason for those studying magic to reject magical ‘discrimination,’ I think, is because they can’t get away from magic. They don’t want to leave it, but they can’t stand not being seen as a full-fledged magician. They can’t stand the fact that the same amount of effort on their part won’t make them catch up. They can’t stand the possibility that even working many times as hard won’t make them catch up either. So they reject being judged based on magic. Of course, they’re aware that those with the talent are paying the full price in hard work. They see it personally, every day. But they look away from the truth, shove all the responsibility onto ‘inborn magical talent,’ and reject it. Well… It isn’t as though I can’t understand such weakness. I have similar feelings as well.”
“That’s not true!” Miyuki knew as well as he did that he wasn’t seriously deprecating himself. But she still couldn’t help but protest. “You have a kind of talent nobody else can emulate, Tatsuya! Just because you don’t have the same talents as everyone else… You’ve done many-times-harder work to come this far, haven’t you?!”
Tatsuya didn’t have normal talent, that was all—he had a magical talent far exceeding others. Miyuki was proud of being the one who best understood that. If anyone was trying to deny that, even if it was the person himself, her older brother, she couldn’t let that slide.
“That’s because I had a different talent.”
“Ah…” Tatsuya, however, had still said he could “understand such weakness” even in understanding of what Miyuki was trying to say. She realized her refutation had been shortsighted, and her cheeks flushed crimson with embarrassment.
“I covered for my lack of talent in modern magic with another talent. I can comment from an objective viewpoint like this because I had that option. If I hadn’t…I might have been clinging to the beautiful ideal of equality myself. Even if I knew it was a lie.”
“…”
She didn’t argue with her brother’s matter-of-fact tone this time. Miyuki already knew what he was trying to say. Tatsuya was neither lamenting himself nor pitying others; he was talking about the “human weakness” that existed in him, too.
“Those with inferior magic talent don’t want to think about the fact that it’s inferior, and so they preach the ideal of equality. Those who can’t use it at all don’t want to think about the fact that it’s just another type of talent people can have, and so they veil their jealousy with ideals. So then, what about those who understand all of that, and are still fanning the flames? The equality they talk about is to treat everyone the same whether or not they can use magic. The abolition of societal discrimination based on magic is the same as not valuing magical skills. And when it comes down to it, that’s a denial of the significance of magic in society. Magic cannot advance in a society that does not value it. Hidden behind those who shout their opposition to magic discrimination and those who scream for equality between magicians and non-magicians is a faction that wishes to make this country abandon magic.”
“What is this faction…?”
“For better or worse, magic is power. Money is power, too, and technology, and the military. Magic has the potential to be the same kind of power as battleships and fighter jets. Military uses for magic are being researched all over the world, in fact, and plenty of military spies are hard at work snooping a
round through magic technology.”
“Then the magic-denying faction’s objective is for this country to abandon magic, and thus cause the nation to lose its power?”
“Probably. And because of that, they’ll spare no efforts—even inhuman terrorism. With that said, who is it that would benefit from this nation losing power?”
“Wait… Then they’d be supported by…”
“That’s right. And the Ten Master Clans would never leave them unchecked. Especially not the Yotsuba family. So we need to take extra care while we still have the chance.”
He didn’t say what they should be cautious of. There was no need to say it between the two of them.
Miyuki nodded to her brother, her face slightly pale.
With the club recruitment (war?) week ending, enrollment-related events came to a close.
Even Tatsuya’s class got up to full tilt with its magic studies.
Serious, focused education in magic began in the high school curriculum, but given the fact that the entrance exams included a practical portion, the students had already acquired some fundamental magical skills by the time they enrolled.
Classes were conducted based on this, too—so even though one would systematically relearn everything from the start, there were cases of students who were poor at practical abilities becoming unable to keep up not long after school started.
From a certain point of view, the Course 1/Course 2 divide was logical for taking this gap into consideration so that neither would negatively affect the other—even if that was leaving one side behind.
“Nine hundred and forty milliseconds. Tatsuya, you did it!”
“Sheesh… Third time’s the charm, I guess.”
Mizuki’s eyes glittered in vicarious pleasure, and Tatsuya responded with a tired grin.
Their class was in the middle of magical practice.
It involved pairing up, then compiling and executing a single type of magic program under a time limit.
One would read in an activation program, then use it as a base and let their magic calculation region, an unconscious region of the magician’s brain, construct and execute a magic program.
That was the modern system of magic.
Under this scheme, the process of converting the activation program—data that could be stored on a device—into a magic program that could not, used the word compile, which was taken from information technology parlance.
In modern magic, the scheme of digitizing the necessary work to execute magic and converting that data into an activation program, then using that as a base to construct a magic program, meant that it was accurate, safe, and versatile.
In exchange for that, it sacrificed the speed possessed by supernatural abilities, wherein a person could alter events just by willing it. As it placed the extra step of constructing a magic program in the middle, there was nothing that could be done about it. However, while the construction time for magic programs couldn’t be reduced to zero, you could come infinitely close to it.
The reason modern magic placed an emphasis on the speed at which one constructed magic programs went something like this: CADs were originally only a storage device meant to record the original activation program data, but magic execution speed quickly became the main point. The CAD they were using in class today didn’t need to be adjusted based on each individual—and because of that, there were absolutely no functions that supported speeding it up. The goal of today’s practice was to practice compilation speed by using this CAD, which was, in a certain sense, the way the devices were originally.
If one member of the pair couldn’t clear it, the other would automatically be kept for overtime. Mizuki had completed it on her first try, so for Tatsuya, this was the time to breathe a sigh of relief.
“But I was a little surprised. You really are bad at using magic practically, aren’t you?”
For single-type, single-process spells like the one they were using, the aim for magicians was to get the time between starting to read in a completely expanded activation program and executing the magic down to less than five hundred milliseconds.
Tatsuya, who needed three attempts to get under just one thousand milliseconds, couldn’t be called positive even in flattery. “Surprising? I feel like I make that assertion a lot.”
“I do hear you say it quite often…but I assumed you were just being modest. I mean, you can do anything, Tatsuya. I didn’t think you’d be bad at actually using magic.”
Mizuki tilted her head to the side, utterly confused, and Tatsuya couldn’t keep a dry grin from his face—he didn’t have the option to choose any other expression. “…It might sound like I’m bragging, but if my practical skills were average, I wouldn’t have been in this class at all.”
He took particular care not to let his tone sound sarcastic at all. Perhaps it worked—or maybe she was just being considerate—since she nodded straightforwardly. “I see. If you were good at practical skills, too…you’d be a little perfect! We might not have wanted to come near you,” said Mizuki, giving a carefree smile.
He was smiling along with her, but it got to him a little.
“But Tatsuya… Don’t you get frustrated?”
“…With what?” He couldn’t figure out what her repeated expression of confusion meant, so he started to want to answer her question.
“You’re actually very skilled, but you’re seen as having no talent. I think normal people would be frustrated. I personally can’t help feeling frustrated. If I had the kind of skill you do, I don’t think I’d be able to endure being looked down on as a Weed…but you don’t seem to care about it much, so…”
It was an extremely difficult-to-answer question.
Given Mizuki’s personality, he didn’t think she’d go and spread mean rumors or tell others, but if he were to try and give a convincing response, he’d need to get somewhat into his own personal circumstances. “Processing speed is a form of skill—and an important factor, at that. There are plenty of times where a tenth of a second can mean the difference between life and death. They’re not wrong in thinking I don’t have talent.”
Tatsuya decided to choose the answer he could say in public.
If Mizuki had been just any Course 2 student, she probably would have been satisfied with that.
But she—“But in the real world, Tatsuya, you can activate magic a lot faster, can’t you?”—was possessed of special “eyes.”
“…Why do you think that?” He knew giving such a response itself meant that he was admitting to what she’d said, and that he had been defeated, but amid his confusion he could produce no better reply.
“During that practice, you looked like you were having a really hard time on all three attempts. My mom is a translator, so it might sound strange, but it’s like you’re a person who can think about an English question in English and answer in English, but it wants to force you to answer in Japanese first and then translate it to English. And during the first attempt, you had almost put together a magic program, but then you got rid of it and redid the compile, didn’t you? From a timing point of view, you were reading in the activation program and constructing the magic program in parallel. And that’s when it hit me—that maybe you didn’t need to use an activation program for this level of magic. Maybe you could just construct a magic program directly.”
Using magic with the same speed as this, but without using an activation program—in other words, not using a CAD. He was under strict command to keep this skill a secret.
And she’d seen through it with just one attempt.
The very core of his mind froze over.
His caution reached its peak, his confusion went past its limit, and then subsided as he regained his calm.
Tatsuya was not at all used to being shaken like that; it was a very rare experience for him.
“I didn’t think you had seen that far. You really do have a good pair of eyes.”
This time, Mizuki’s face was the one that paled, rea
ffirming Tatsuya’s belief that she’d been trying to keep her own “eyes” a secret.
Maybe that was a little mean, he thought, the corners of his mouth turning up just slightly. But judging from her reaction, there was now far less risk of her seeing through to the true essence of this secret skill he had.
He then decided to give her one more push. She already knew that he was able to call forth magic programs without using an activation program. So by leading her to think it was purely a skill achieved through personal effort, he could lead her interest away from it. If he satisfied her curiosity just the right amount, then, considering her personality, she wouldn’t dig any deeper. “You’re right—if it’s a single type of spell, I can execute a little faster by creating a magic program directly. But I can only use it for magic that doesn’t involve a whole lot. Five processes is as high as I can go.”
The term process in the context of modern magic referred to two things: One was the actual process of executing magic, and the other was each individual step of activating multiple spells that you would put together to achieve some desired alteration in events. When Tatsuya referred to five processes, he meant a technique that brought forth a single event alteration by using five different “pieces” of magic put together.
For example, if you were going to use magic to move an egg from the kitchen to the table, you would need four processes: acceleration, movement, deceleration (negative acceleration), and stopping (ceasing movement).
Movement magic overwrote the speed of an object and its linear coordinates; if you didn’t also apply a specific acceleration process, the movement would ignore the target’s inertia and accelerate it. In the case of an egg, it would crack.
If you eliminated the movement process and tried to only use acceleration and deceleration, the egg would end up moving along a projectile path, and you’d need extremely precise deceleration control. It was easier, even at the cost of additional processing, to apply deceleration at the same rate as acceleration, then bring its speed to zero with a movement spell.
