The glasses that I had made for Charlotte before were made to read Ancient Spirit Script, meanwhile the pair I had made for Linze were to read Ancient Magic Script. I had no idea what the difference was, but I was just the guy casting the spells, so I didn’t have to know what they were for.
Anyway, I handed the translation glasses over to Linze. She put them on, and they suited her so well that I pictured her as some kind of scholarly student. She looked really cute wearing glasses. Now fully equipped, the young scholar turned her sights to the magic scroll.
“Ah...! This is... incredible! I’d heard about it before, but seeing it myself is completely different!” Linze spoke with great surprise as she devoured every last letter on the scroll in front of her.
“What’s it say?”
“It appears to be the record of a spell of ancient magic. A Water type spell... called [Bubble Bomb]... an offensive spell, it seems...?” Linze let out a few puzzled groans as she continued to read through the scroll. Seemed I’d come to her rescue. I still felt a little guilty about having peeked in on her while she was changing, but this was probably a good step toward making up for that.
Having gone over the scroll, Linze insisted that she try out the spell as soon as possible, but it was already quite late, so I told her I’d tag along the next day and got her to give up on it for the night. The minute Linze left, I whipped out my smartphone and deleted the photo I’d taken of her room. Better to dispose of the evidence while I still could. I definitely didn’t need the title of Peeping Tom on my head.
Now that I think about it... [Apport] for theft, [Long Sense] for peeping, [Gate] for housebreaking, and now an enchanted camera app for voyeuristic photography... I seem to be accumulating a lot of Crime-Elemental magic as of late...
I decided that from then on, I would practice my dubious skills in moderation.
The next day, I went with Linze to the eastern forest. I was able to use [Gate] since it was somewhere we’d already been before. I recalled that there was a wide open area inside the woods, so we set that as our destination. That place was perfect for magic training, so long as it wasn’t Fire magic since we didn’t want to risk starting any forest fires.
We made our way through the woods and came out into the clearing. Linze took out the scroll and read it over carefully a number of times with the translation glasses, before preparing her silver wand and concentrating her magic.
“Come forth, Water! Ballistic Bubbles: [Bubble Bomb]!” Several small balls of water appeared around the end of Linze’s wand, but they all fell lifelessly to the ground. Seemed like her attempt had failed.
She prepared her wand once more and tried chanting the spell again.
“Come forth, Water! Ballistic Bubbles: [Bubble Bomb]!” Again, little balls of water gathered around the end of her wand, and again they simply fell to the ground. Another failure. Well, it was ancient magic we were talking about. I had a feeling it probably wasn’t so easy to get the hang of.
Linze read through the scroll again before making another attempt at it, but it only led to yet more failure.
She tried the same thing over and over, and each time little balls of water would form in the air, move ever so slightly, and then fall to the ground. A string of failed attempts.
After ten attempts, Linze became unsteady on her feet, falling down on one knee shortly after. I rushed over to her to help support her upright.
“Linze, you okay?!”
“...I-I’m fine, I’m only... running low on magic... I’ll be... better after... a little... rest...” Linze was spacing out as she explained the situation to me. So this was what having zero MP was like. There was no way I could just leave her in that condition.
“...Umm, T-Touya...?!” I picked up the dizzy Linze and carried her under my arm while I opened up a [Gate]. It looked like she was hurt somewhere, since her body stiffened up and her face burned bright red. I just had to have her bear with it for a little while.
We returned to the back garden of the Silver Moon, and I carried Linze upstairs to her room. I set her down in her bed and noticed that her face was still bright red, so I put my hand to her head to make sure she hadn’t come down with a fever. I sure hope she’s okay.
“...Ha, hahh...!”
“Looks like you don’t have a fever, at least. Just stay right there, I’m gonna go get Elze.” I called Elze in from the room next door and had her remove Linze’s armor for her. There was no way I could’ve touched all over Linze’s body myself, even if it was with good intentions.
I left Linze in Elze’s care after that. Having seen her practice until her magic ran completely dry, I couldn’t decide whether she was simply taking her magic very seriously or whether she was struggling for dear life just to get by. There was that time I first met Charlotte, too. Was that just how mages were in this world? At the very least, there appeared to be a fair few among their ranks with such straightforward dispositions. Saying they gave it their all was just another way of putting it.
The next day, Linze was back to normal. I learned then that once someone had run out of magic, they’d usually fully recover after a day’s rest.
“...S-Sorry for causing you trouble yesterday!” Linze apologized to me, but I didn’t feel she’d done anything that warranted an apology. Just like the previous day, we headed out into the forest so that Linze could practice trying to learn her new spell.
Linze tried and she failed, and she tried and she failed. I kept watch on her from a distance, and made her stop after her ninth failure. Any more and she’d end up in the same state as last time.
“Let’s take a break for a bit.”
“...Okay.” I handed a flask of cold tea over to Linze.
“Feel like you’re getting the hang of it?”
“...Not in the slightest. When casting a spell, the end result is greatly influenced by your knowledge of it, which makes it a challenge to learn spells I’ve never seen in action before...” In other words, she couldn’t form a clear picture of the spell in her mind because she didn’t know how it was supposed to look.
We rested there for an hour, but her magic didn’t recover much and Linze was down again after two more failed attempts at the spell. Following that, we called it quits for the day.
Linze kept practicing and practicing in the same manner for the next few days. Every single day until her magic was on the brink of exhaustion. It took about an hour of non-stop casting for Linze’s magic to reach its limits, leaving us taking breaks for the rest of the time. Things weren’t proceeding very smoothly at all.
“You’re really giving it your best, huh, Linze? Even after all those failed attempts, you haven’t even thought about throwing in the towel.”
“I’m... clumsy when it comes to things... like this... Only by doing the same thing... over and over... can I finally acquire any new spells. It’s always been this way, so you don’t have to worry about me.” Linze spoke with a smile. She was a strong girl. Whatever didn’t kill her only made her stronger. She understood fully well that it was important not to give up if you ever wanted to make any real progress with anything.
Even so, there had to be a more efficient way of going about things. Like, a way to let Linze make more attempts at the spell before she ran out of energy, or something along those lines... Hrmmm... I decided to consult Charlotte about it, since she was apparently the best mage in the country.
I stopped Linze right before her magic ran out for the day and took her back to the inn. Once there, I asked Yumina to tag along while I opened up a new [Gate] and went off to the castle to meet Charlotte. Without Yumina by my side, it was hard to even walk around inside the castle... Apparently they took me for a suspicious individual...
We found Charlotte in the castle’s research tower, but for some reason she had bags under her eyes. She told us she hadn’t been sleeping much recently. Even so, she heard me out and even came up with a solution to our problems. In exchange, however, she made me promise to help out with her resear
ch when I next had the time...
The next day, I went to the eastern forest with Linze yet again. And once more, Linze tried and failed to cast her new spell. Recognizing that her magic was about to reach its limit, Linze decided herself that it was time to call it a day. That was my cue.
“Linze, come here for a second.”
“Hm...? What is it?” Linze stood in front of me, and I grasped both of her hands in mine.
“H-H-Huh?! Wh-What’s going on...?”
“Calm down. Just chill out.”
“Ch-Chill myself?!”
“Umm... it’s a figure of speech. It means relax a little.” I calmed down the panicking Linze and focused my magic, casting the incantation for the non-elemental spell I had learned about from Charlotte the other day. My hands began glowing with a warm light.
“[Transfer].”
“H-Huh?!” The light left my hands and sunk into Linze’s, to which she reacted with a start. I took that as a sign that it had worked properly.
“My magic... has completely recovered. But, in an instant...? How...?” All thanks to my new Null spell, [Transfer]. It allowed me to share my own magic reserves with other people. There were apparently a few people who could use this one, with one such person being Charlotte’s old mentor.
From what Charlotte had told me, she would be made to practice her spells until her magic ran out completely, only to have it recovered, and then made to practice to the brink of collapse once more. That mentor of hers had to have been a monster in disguise.
I wasn’t one to talk, though, since I was about to put Linze through the same. Though unlike Charlotte’s old mentor, I wouldn’t be forcing her into it.
I only just then recalled the magical toll I’d been paying to keep Kohaku materialized in this world, but I was able to fully recover Linze’s magic for even less than that. Basically, what this meant was that even doing both things at once was well within the range of my magic’s natural recovery rate. Though that didn’t mean Linze had a particularly small capacity for magic, but was rather an indication that my own magic was so monstrous.
All in all, it was a good thing that Linze was now able to practice her magic without fear of collapsing anytime soon.
“Come forth, Water! Ballistic Bubbles: [Bubble Bomb]!” Linze spent the next several hours after that trying to master the spell. I was amazed at her perseverance. Still, while we had covered the problem of magical exhaustion, there was nothing I could do for physical fatigue.
I made her take a break for her own well-being.
“It really is, difficult... I just can’t seem to grasp the nature of this spell...”
“That so...” Ancient magic was turning out to be as difficult as I’d expected. Since there were hardly any people who still used it, there were no real examples to follow. All Linze could do was try to solidify her own mental image of the spell until it worked.
“...If only I at least knew what [Bubble Bomb] meant...”
“...Come again?” I sounded like a total idiot, but Linze’s words threw me for a loop for a second. Huh? She doesn’t know what the spell’s name means?
“You want to know what [Bubble Bomb] means?”
“Eh? Well, yes. There is a meaning to the name of every spell. For example, the [Fire] part from Fire Storm means to create flames, and...”
“Whoa whoa whoa, no, hold up a sec.” What did that mean? The spell’s name was being translated... too literally? The words themselves were being used without regard for whether the person reading it knew what they even meant? I borrowed the scroll from Linze for a moment and cast [Reading] on it... I saw the words for “Bubble Bomb”... but it was written in katakana... Well, that sure explained a lot.
So they’d see a spell name like [Fireball], but... they had no idea what it actually meant. Similarly you would have to understand the meaning behind the different shapes among the spells. [Fire Arrow], [Fireball], and [Firestorm] all shared the word [Fire], so it was safe to say they could group the spells and guess the effect based on that even without understanding the words. But even if you could tell from the names that they were all fire-related, that didn’t help with picturing the shapes of each individual spell.
So what did that mean? That there were a bunch of people running around yelling the names of spells that they’d just sort of learned without really understanding how they worked? It all seemed just... a bit too strange for me. People would talk about these spells all the time, but to them they were just using words and phrases that were completely alien? When Elze used [Boost] she didn’t know the spell name was about increasing her own strength? They all seemed to have roughly figured it out, at least, but only through sheer brute force methods. Well, I guess it is English, after all... Dear God, please fix your translations to convey meaning as well, rather than just directly converting the words.
...Was the image of a bubble bomb just that hard to grasp over here? I mean, sure, they weren’t exactly common daily words back home, but still, it shouldn’t be that hard to picture...
“What’s the matter...?”
“Ah, nothing... er, about that spell... [Bubble] means like a watery kind of foam, and [Bomb] means well uh... bomb, yeah? You know, kaboom and stuff.”
“...What’s a bomb, exactly?”
“Eesh, well, uh, it’s an object that blows up. You know, like that [Explosion] spell you can cast.” Linze sat and thought over my words in silence. After a while, she raised her head and readied her wand to take another shot at it.
“Come forth, Water! Ballistic Bubbles: [Bubble Bomb]!” A single lump of water... or rather, a round ball like a soap bubble appeared floating just in front of Linze’s wand.
The bubble had a diameter of about twenty centimeters. It looked like Linze could control the bubble by concentrating on it. She let it drift around in mid-air for a while before pointing it at a single tree which she bumped it into.
The next instant, the tree burst into splinters with a deafening roar. I could only sit and watch in dumbfounded amazement.
Linze just seemed pleased to have gotten it to work.
“...I did it...” [Bubble Bomb], huh... one hell of an ancient spell. It packed a serious punch.
Linze tried it out again. This time five bubbles appeared, then a sixth. She sent all of the bubbles flying toward different trees. The moment the bubbles made contact with the trees, it triggered a series of violent explosions mowing down a chunk of the forest before our very eyes.
This spell was beginning to terrify me already... Meanwhile, Linze dashed over to me and bowed her head.
“I was only able to master this spell thanks to your help, Touya. Thank you very much!”
“Nah, I’d say it was your own efforts that led up to this. I only helped out a little right at the end.” I really wasn’t used to being thanked by people for every little thing. I was more impressed with how Linze refused to give up on learning the spell no matter how much the experience drained her in the process. She struck me as the hardworking type who took things one step at a time, starting with what she knew and building on that with her own efforts.
I was happy to have learned something new about Linze. Feeling that our efforts had been duly rewarded, I opened up a [Gate] to take us back to the Silver Moon.
◇ ◇ ◇
“Hmm... what am I gonna do about this...?” Elze seemed troubled. She sat at a table in the dining room, looking at her favorite metallic gauntlets. Those gauntlets were heavily damaged from a fight the day prior.
It was all thanks to a particular encounter we had gone through the day before. We’d ended up having to fight a bunch of Gargoyles: monsters with stone bodies.
We had gone to apprehend a group of thieves for a guild quest, and among them was someone proficient in Dark-type magic.
The Gargoyles were this person’s contracted familiars. It became a tough fight for us when those devil-shaped stone monsters surrounded us from all sides. They were extremely hard, so sword
s didn’t work against them at all. They also resisted magic, and arrows bounced right off them. Elze was the only one of us capable of dealing any significant damage against them.
Once we had some breathing room, Linze was able to start shooting off her larger-scale destructive spells like [Explosion] and [Bubble Bomb], which I used as cover to charge in and cast [Paralyze] on the summoner. Once we’d made it out safely, we took the thieves and their mage friend and turned them in to the royal knights.
We cleared the quest, but Elze’s gauntlets were badly damaged in the process.
“Guess I’ll just have to buy a new pair...”
“You probably should, yeah. I could restore the shape of those ones by casting [Modeling] on them, but I don’t think they’d hold out very long with a quick patch-up job like that.”
“This sucks... These were the best gauntlets I’ve ever used...” Elze seemed really down about it. It’s always sad when something you like breaks, regardless of the reason.
“Gonna go look for new ones at the Eight Bears Weapon Shop?”
“I took a look earlier. Barral said they won’t have anything like that in stock for at least another five days.” That was a fairly long time to be without weapons for an adventurer. You might think that gauntlets shouldn’t be that hard to come across when there were whole suits of armor available for purchase, but gauntlets made as weapons required strengthening in different parts. There wasn’t really much demand for those types, so fewer places stocked them.
People like Elze, whose primary weapons were their own two hands and martial arts knowledge applied by way of extreme close range weapons like battle gauntlets, were collectively referred to as brawlers. There weren’t many fistfighters in Belfast. The demi-human Kingdom of Mismede was a different story, however. Since their populace was primarily beastmen, whose physical prowess was generally well above those of humans from birth, it made a lot of sense.
“Touya, take me to the capital. I can’t wait five days for new weapons!” She really didn’t need to rush herself, but I didn’t particularly mind. Elze was the type to move almost reflexively when she came up with an idea. On the other hand, Linze was the type to knock on a strong stone bridge before crossing it just to make sure. Given the same situation, Elze would sooner dash across it faster than it got the chance to collapse. That was just how those sisters were.
In Another World With My Smartphone: Volume 2 Page 2
