“The only thing he ever has to say about any drink is that it’s delicious, after all. And his teachers would probably be constantly warning him not to just guzzle everything.”
“Ha ha ha. I can picture it. I think Lara would be the one causing more trouble for the teachers, though. She might even be off on a little tryst with Sazaki instead of in the classroom doing her work.” Ferd figured that since Lara had already been such an accomplished mage since her youth, if she were a student, she would make a less than ideal one. He also remembered that during the second half of the war, she and Sazaki would sometimes disappear together, so she might not even go to the classroom at all.
“That happened often, didn’t it?” Elrica had a similar recollection.
“Mm-hmm. Thinking about it now, they probably just snuck out for walks or something.”
“I do recall a time when Sazaki was together with Lara and he waved his hand at me angrily... Was I perhaps...getting in their way?” A strange memory resurfaced in Elrica’s mind, and her eyes darted around as she belatedly realized that she might have been interrupting them, decades after the fact.
Toward the end of the great war, Elrica had become aware of her feelings for Ferd, but she had no sense for the love affairs of others, so she’d apparently misread Sazaki and Lara’s relationship back then.
“As for Stein...he probably wouldn’t change one bit.” Ferd could only imagine Stein constantly talking about muscles, even as a student.
“Th-That’s right,” Elrica agreed, pretending that the mistakes of her youth had never occurred.
“Max...is a smart guy, so he might actually be an honor student. Well, I can just as easily picture him trying to hit it big and failing.” Though Max was sensible, he also showed his careless side in strange ways.
“I bet he’d say something like ‘This is going to be on the test! No doubt about it!’”
“Mm-hmm. Then he’d be hanging his head in disappointment at the end, once he’d turned out to be wrong. Now, Erhard... He wouldn’t possibly wear his heavy armor even to class, would he?” Finally, Ferd remembered the last of their companions—a man as eccentric as the rest of them.
“Who knows? He just might...” Elrica couldn’t deny the possibility; Erhard had just been that much of an oddball.
“Well, in any case, it would be a fun life.” Ferd supposed that there would be all kinds of chaos, but that they would have had fun as students.
“Yes, I’m sure it would be.” Elrica nodded with a smile.
All of this was nothing but a hypothetical scenario. Not even a “what if”—just a fun fantasy. However, there were a certain number of people who earnestly wished such fantasies could come true...as well as those who would actually try to make them a reality.
For example, in the Arzyna Kingdom, which lay in the vicinity of Greer, most of the elders were apathetic sorts, living in isolation. From time immemorial, the Rin Kingdom had decided that there would be no value in invading the nation, which was surrounded by mountains. With nowhere to go, its people often looked at the sky, leading to the development of astrology. Furthermore, because the lands, blocked by the mountains as they were, received so little sunshine, the entire kingdom was covered in mirrors in order to spread the illumination. The kingdom also exported game boards simulating the great war, though those who knew of the place thought of it no differently from any other country.
So, anyway, why were this kingdom’s elderly people so apathetic?
“Your Majesty, I have come to report on tax yields.”
“Mm-hmm.”
It was not because King Nephen—a middle-aged man with gray eyes and hair—was oppressing the people. The whole kingdom was involved in its own oppression, including the ancestors of this listless king.
“There’s no doubt about it. The world will be destroyed!”
“We’re done for, this is the end!”
“No matter how many times I try, I can only see a doomed future!”
Since the Arzyna Kingdom was a small nation, all of its people were involved in some kind of stargazing. It also boasted many people who could be called master astrologers, and every citizen could read the stars to a certain extent.
And those astrologers had seen a terrifying scene: the world sinking in eternal darkness; the already-weakening gods completely eliminated, their temples vanishing without a trace; the sleeping dragons slow to awaken and submerged in darkness; every country, race, and sacred site trampled down. In this vision, the Boiling Mountain fell in a vortex of flames, the Rin Kingdom was overwhelmed by the deluge of enemies and defeated, and Greer, the Academic City-State, was reduced to a pile of rubble. The enemy army finally crossed the sea and even attacked and destroyed the neighboring continent. And the Great Demon reigned in the stillness of eternal darkness.
The astrologers’ inference had been concise...and conclusive. The world was going to fall at the hands of the Great Demon King, certainly, no matter what, absolutely, unmistakably, and without a doubt. The Arzyna Kingdom had been no exception. No matter what tribute they could offer him or how much they submitted, the Great Demon King would mercilessly dispatch his troops, and not even the name Arzyna would remain.
Having arrived at that conclusion, the people of Arzyna moved from despair to apathy. Unfortunately, in a world with extraordinary powers at play, where the gods were often directly involved, there were many highly accurate prophecies and predictions, and it was not unreasonable that many would believe them.
“Let’s take it easy until doomsday arrives.”
“A request for reinforcements? What’s the point in doing something so meaningless?”
Not many had committed suicide, and since the people had kept living out of sheer force of habit, they hadn’t faced any hardships. But no matter how many times other countries asked for its cooperation, Arzyna had continued to refuse, looking at their pointless efforts with cold eyes. Its people had seen no point in fighting on the battlefields to only experience pain and suffering, and they’d considered those who kept struggling to be fools.
Of course, the king and some others hadn’t remained idle spectators and had tried to do something about the situation, but practically the entire kingdom besides them had given up. The people had been annoyed by the king’s constant attempts to rouse them into fighting for their lives, so they’d banished everyone who began shouting about them joining the war, including the king and his immediate family. It was laughable that despite feeling despair about the state of the world, they’d still had the energy to exile “annoying” people, but the king’s younger brother then succeeded the throne. Soon, everything would end with the upcoming annihilation of the world—or at least it should have.
The dragons had taken to the skies much earlier than predicted. The Boiling Mountain had repelled the vortex of flames. The Rin Kingdom had slain the countless invaders. Greer had been rebuilt. The world had continued to exist, while darkness itself had been defeated. The future, prophecies, and readings the Arzyna Kingdom had believed in...no, the entire kingdom itself had been mistaken. The kingdom had survived because its people had maintained the essentials of their everyday lives through their grit, but after the war, Arzyna came to be known as a kingdom of complete and utter buffoons. The results they’d been so sure of hadn’t come to pass, and the other countries they’d ridiculed for pointlessly struggling now called them fools, leading to the Arzyna Kingdom becoming even more insular than before.
The entire Arzyna Kingdom was yet unable to admit to its mistakes of seventy years past, and they still insisted that they hadn’t been wrong. They had continued telling their children that the world would eventually end, inducing apathy, so what would you call them if not fools? But after so many years, differences in attitude between generations inevitably emerged. The younger generation believed the elderly to be morons, creating a huge rift between them and the generation who had grown up constantly being told that the world was going to end. In other words, anyone middle-aged and above in the Arzyna Kingdom believed everyone else to simply be jealous enemies, who ridiculed them.
It was into this stagnant kingdom that Emmeline’s mentor, Udo, had fled.
“Your Majesty, Master Udo has arrived.”
“Mm-hmm. Bring him here right away.”
Udo had come before King Nephen. He was a man of terribly advanced age, with the rich, golden hair he’d had in his youth long gone and his back bent. He was on the verge of death no matter how you looked at it, but his blue eyes still shone brightly with the light of blind faith.
“I will begin my report. As expected, a direct descendant and a high-precision computing device are necessary to activate it. I have an idea for the device at least,” Udo said.
“A direct descendant after this long...” Nephen frowned from the bottom of his heart.
“If Your Majesty would share some of your blood, my creations can find their scent and bring them to us.”
“Won’t it cause a commotion?”
“There shouldn’t be any unless it’s an exceptionally special location.”
It was true that the plan had progressed greatly thanks to this old mage, but the king realized that he was a little, no, very obsessed with magic and his own creations in particular. Therefore, even though Nephen gave his stamp of approval, he couldn’t quite trust Udo.
“Very well.” But Nephen couldn’t begin to imagine how long it would take to find what they were looking for at this stage either, so he gave permission in the end. “What about the computing device?”
“To put it another way, it’s the core component. Someone with the ability to perform magic of the Deep layer is required. It would also work well enough with someone simply possessing the potential for it,” Udo explained. However, most mages of the Deep layer were important figures and not people they could easily exploit.
“Do you have any ideas on that front?”
“Well...” Udo was being evasive. After all, he’d once tried to create a mage with power beyond the Hadal layer—to put it bluntly, someone comparable to Lara—yet his creation’s potential had only been of the Deep layer at best, so he’d given up on it. Therefore, he was being vague in his response, as he was unable to admit that he’d failed.
“That will be all.” Udo disliked being questioned too deeply, so he ended the conversation and went to take action.
These extreme fools were trapped in the delusions of an era steeped in mystery, staying stagnant in an enclosed space with their victim mentality and persecution complexes, and were now on the verge of exploding.
Immediately after this, Udo ran away with the treasured article.