A few days later...
“Ooh, what a large school building.”
“Yes, it really is big.”
“I guess I made the right choice to not take any alcohol with me.”
“And I guess pigs will start flying now.”
“The lecture on calf muscle nutrition would be...”
“There’s no way they have a lecture that specific.”
A group of noisy elderly people arrived at the school.
“So this is the Magic Academy.” Ferd looked up at the odd patchwork building.
As the youngest son of a family from a poor village, Ferd barely had any education to speak of. When he had been fighting on the front lines, he’d been unable to even read or write, so he could only understand the army’s or kingdom’s actions if they were explained to him verbally. As a result, even when he’d started achieving great results, nobles and high-ranking army officials had really looked down on him.
Other people had also thought the same of him: They’d believed that nothing would come out of some illiterate boy claiming he’d bring back the blue sky. This behavior might have seemed ridiculous in an era where might reigned supreme, but humans always had a tendency to seek out faults in others. In the end, a man who couldn’t even read or write had saved the world regardless—and Elrica had given him lessons after the war.
“What a wonderful place.” Elrica, who was looking up at the Magic Academy alongside Ferd, also contained many odd facets.
Elrica had been raised solely as a weapon to kill the Great Demon King. While she had been taught how to read and write, it had only been to ensure that military operations proceeded smoothly, not out of any consideration for her future. Considering that the other education she’d received included knowledge of medicines, poisons, treating wounds, and ways of killing, it was clear that she had been created as a weapon for slaughter.
“M-My muscles and nature are being obstructed by my clothes, so I can’t muster any strength...” Everyone had told Stein that he obviously couldn’t visit the school half naked, so he’d wrapped a piece of cloth around himself.
“Yeah, yeah,” Max said dismissively.
Both of them had received a proper education. Stein had been a proper clergyman who’d studied hard along with his comrades, while Max had been given a private tutor despite being a nonexistent member of the royal family, as per his father’s policy before he’d gone feeble.
Max seriously asked Stein to remain clothed. “Stay like that forever. It gives you a certain dignity.”
“I categorically refuse,” Stein immediately replied.
Stein was in harmony with nature, so without the unnaturalness that came with him being half naked, he now had the air of a virtuous priest.
“All right, time to go observe our son and great-great-grandson’s class.”
“Agreed.”
Sazaki and Lara, a couple with many similar qualities, were grinning as usual. Sazaki was the type who was just happy to swing his sword around, regardless of the presence of his son and great-great-grandson, and Lara was a sage who needed no introduction.
“Come to think of it, this might be my first time coming to a place with so many youngsters,” Ferd said as he toddled his way into the academy grounds.
“That’s right,” Elrica agreed.
Naturally, there hadn’t been any armies made up entirely of young soldiers even during the great war, so neither Ferd nor Elrica had ever come across a place where so many young people lived together. Though at some point, it had seemed like an army of solely young people had been just one step away from being established...
“Sorry, wait a moment! I forgot something!”
“Okay!”
“I feel like those two are dating.”
“Oh, I think so too.”
“Oh crap, I’m late!”
The members of the Hero’s party took in the boisterous students’ voices with their sharp ears.
“Ha ha ha.”
“Oho ho ho ho.”
Ferd and Elrica started laughing reflexively. Young people were acting like young people should. This was something to be treasured, not to be taken for granted.
How peaceful, Max thought for the umpteenth time.
At the very least, they hadn’t forgotten to give their families keepsakes. They weren’t saying their final farewells to their lovers. They hadn’t been left behind after being too slow to escape. The old norm had faded away, being replaced by the new norm that pervaded this school. Back then, everyone had been risking their lives.
“Is this...a memorial?” Ferd asked as he looked at a large, polished, white stone with names carved in it.
“Yeah. It includes everyone who died during the great war, from the students and teachers to the traveling merchants who came and went from the academy,” Lara explained in detail.
“I see...”
The memorial was right in the middle of the path leading from the gate to the school building, in a place where visitors could never miss it. The names easily numbered over a hundred, each one belonging to someone’s parents or children. They had been crushed, burned, and eaten. It was considered lucky if even half the body remained; in some cases, only an arm had been found. These were the names of those who’d fought to the end to survive.
But this was already a part of history. The memorial was just another usual sight in the students’ everyday lives. It was spotlessly maintained, but with the exception of the long-lived races, most of the generation that had been involved in the great war had already passed away, so this trending away from relevance was inevitable. Once Ferd’s generation and the one right after it passed away, the great war would be wholly a thing of the past for ordinary people.
Ferd and the rest didn’t arrogantly believe that they were somehow responsible for failing the people named here; such guilt belonged to the gods. Of course, even many of the gods had been unable to withstand the simultaneous attacks launched by the Great Demon King at the beginning of the great war and had been wiped out. No one could understand the feelings that Ferd and the others felt as they stared at the memorial. This was especially true for the students of this academy, who hadn’t been involved in the war.
“Shall we go now?”
“Yes.”
Sent off by these ghosts of the past, Ferd and Elrica stepped into the school building. Just like that memorial, they might also one day be relegated to history, legends, and fairy tales, and eventually be forgotten. However, a world where champions or Heroes were unnecessary was exactly what they had always wanted.
After that, the Hero’s party finished the process necessary to tour the academy, and they decided to split up. Sazaki had little interest in most of the school’s classes and had no intention of touring every nook and cranny, so naturally, he and Lara headed straight to observe their seventy-year-old son’s lecture.
This is stressful... Falke thought from the bottom of his heart. It was a fact that parents observed classes to see how their children were doing, but he’d never expected it to happen at this point in his life.
The students gathered in the outdoor training grounds were confused by Sazaki and Lara, who were watching the class from far behind them.
Are they higher-ups?
Who are they?
I’ve never seen them before. Are they great mages from some distant land?
Still, if they aspired to be mages, they couldn’t look down on people who were approaching a hundred years old. Even if a swordsman could no longer hold their sword after growing old and frail, a mage was actually often more powerful thanks to all of their years of accumulated knowledge. There was a fairy tale about someone trying to kick a toddling old man, only to suffer when it turned out he was a powerful mage, but in a city like Greer, where many mages gathered, there was a good chance of that actually happening.
It’s my great-great-grandpa and great-great-grandma. Meanwhile, Connie, the youngest of the bloodline, casually watched Sazaki and Lara.
“All right, let’s begin class,” Falke told the young students after pulling himself together. “My name is Falke. My role is to teach you about the relationship between mages and swords.” It was the start of a new term at the academy, so Falke started explaining his job to the students taking fundamental classes.
“First of all, cast away the notion that as long as you have magic, you don’t need to be afraid of people with swords. Even if others tell you that swords are nothing to fear, even if you become mages of the Progressive or Deep layers, this is simply untrue.” Falke looked at the students who’d studied to a certain extent under mages outside the academy, and told them to get rid of any complacency or conceit they had toward swords.
“I have a question,” one of the boys addressed Falke with his hand raised.
“Go ahead.”
“I’d like to know your layer, sir.”
“The Deep layer.”
“Huh?”
The students who didn’t know Falke murmured in surprise. Excluding the few rare historical exceptions who’d made it to the Hadal layer, mages of the Deep layer were effectively considered the top, and many of the members of the Magic Council, the pinnacle of Greer, were of the Deep layer. The students were bewildered that the teacher standing in front of them was a top-tier mage, and they were also confused because a mage like him had just told them to get rid of their contempt for swords.
“Both swords and offensive magic are ways to kill. It’s dangerous to simply assume that magic is superior and that there’s an absolute power dynamic between them; they’re both means to an end.”
A girl slightly frowning at Falke’s lesson raised her hand. “I’d like to share an opinion.”
“Go ahead.”
“My mentor believes that since swordsmen can’t break through magic barriers, it’s impossible for them to defeat mages.” The girl shared the opinion of many high-ranking mages born after the war. The idea wasn’t completely mistaken; a basic swordsman would be unable to break through a mage’s barrier and end up getting unilaterally slaughtered. However, that was only true under limited circumstances, so it was mostly just a delusion of arrogant magic supremacists.