- Creeeak...! Fwoosh!
“A little farther down from there.”
- Creeak... fwoosh!
What am I doing right now, you ask?
As you can see, I’m shooting a bow.
I thought starting the next day, we’d just take turns having meals and that would be the end of it, but no one really said anything.
So I was training like usual,
when Elladrien came to find me and suggested I try learning archery first.
And that’s how I ended up in this situation.
It’s been about a week since I started shooting a bow, and after doing it for a while, I’ve started to get the feel for it.
According to her, I apparently have some talent for archery too.
She said I pick things up quickly.
She said I’m the type to calculate things like humidity, wind direction, and wind speed in each situation before shooting.
Apparently, those are things you’re normally supposed to acquire through experience.
- Thwack!!!
Right now, I’m practicing hitting a target one kilometer away.
‘Now that it’s actually one kilometer, it’s definitely hard to hit.’
For reference, it takes an adult man about five minutes of running to barely cover one kilometer.
Because it’s the number one, it might not feel that impressive, but it was farther than you’d think.
On top of that, factors like the wind changed little by little depending on the distance, so it was quite difficult.
She told me to interact with the nearby natural objects at each distance and control the variables in each section,
and hearing that, I could definitely understand why elves were so good at shooting bows.
“You know, at this level, it really wouldn’t be bad for you to switch over to the bow.”
Elladrien watched me shoot and made the suggestion quite seriously, but,
“I’ll just learn enough to be able to shoot. It’s good to know how to do a lot of things.”
I politely declined her offer.
Honestly, if I followed my heart, I’d want to seriously dig into both,
but even though they use the same aura, swords and bows have strangely different mechanisms.
Should I say it feels like some kind of law of the world?
Well, once you become a Master, you can use all sorts of weapons anyway,
but even those people can’t use something other than their main weapon at a Master level.
There’s no need to in the first place.
By then, even if I launch slashes with a sword, it won’t be on the level of a Bow Master, but I’ll still be able to do as much as I need.
But like... why bother?
Anyway... I planned to focus firmly on just the sword.
“That’s a shame. I thought I might finally be able to make myself a disciple.”
A-a disciple, all of a sudden?
Are you trying to disciple-light me?
“I’m telling you, you really have talent. You’re fun to teach!”
“...Still, I’ll keep practicing whenever I have time.”
“Fine, I’ll be satisfied with that much.”
We looked at each other and laughed.
After going on a date disguised as recreation together, the distance between the two of us had grown much closer than before.
When I first saw only her appearance, she seemed like someone from another world I could never approach,
but after one event, she turned out to be just an ordinary person... no, an elf.
And so, today as well, we planned to spend a fun time together.
After we grew closer, I spent time with her and we often talked about all sorts of things,
and especially the things she told me about herself, and about elves, were extremely interesting.
The most shocking thing was the fact that she was actually the daughter of the elven king,
and if I’d heard that at first, it would have been a little difficult, but since I found out after we had already become quite close, it didn’t create any sense of distance.
Anyway, just as we were about to spend time like that,
“El!! Brother Evan!!”
Ariel rushed in from outside and shouted.
“Our next destination...! It’s been decided!”
As soon as we heard that, we immediately cleaned up and followed Ariel to gather in one place.
“You’re here?”
When we arrived, Signica and Veronica were already waiting for us.
“We just received word from the imperial family. But unlike before, the imperial family didn’t decide the destination for us.”
“Then where is it?”
At Elladrien’s question, Veronica answered.
“The Magic Tower has formally submitted a request to us.”
The Magic Tower.
It refers to the place where mages gather and carry out all work related to magic.
Why was it built in the shape of a tower, specifically?
...
They don’t have money.
A tower is fine because you can just keep stacking it upward,
but if it wasn’t a tower, they’d have to spread all those facilities out horizontally,
and whether it would be hard to manage or hard to move around in, there were probably many reasons, but fundamentally, they didn’t have money.
Real estate... It was something threatening even to mages.
Of course, it wasn’t that they couldn’t earn money.
After all, mages were valuable strategic assets no matter what.
If martial artists excelled at stubbornly breaking through one thing,
then as I said before, magic could be applied in many different ways.
That was why their market value tended to be quite high, even if their realm was low.
Then where did all that money go?
It all got drained into research-related expenses or facility repairs.
The Magic Tower was still a place where people lived, after all.
There was no choice but to have expenses in many areas.
Of course, the Magic Tower received a lot of support from the imperial family and nobles,
but even with that, it still wasn’t enough to cover everything. In any case, they lacked money.
Anyway, this is why the Magic Tower is a tower.
Oh, for reference, there isn’t just one Magic Tower.
If there were, they’d probably be in the black.
I don’t know if you remember me talking before about the five primordial attributes.
Fire, water, wind, lightning, earth.
These are called the five primordial attributes,
and in accordance with them, the towers are divided into the Red Tower, Blue Tower, Wind Tower, Lightning Tower, and Earth Tower.
The names sound worse than you expected, right?
That’s because mages aren’t really the type to care about that sort of thing.
Anyway, there are these five basic towers,
and research into the remaining attributes or things like everyday magic all falls under the White Tower.
As you can tell from the name, the White Tower was originally a tower that mainly researched light magic,
but since there weren’t many people who used light magic, all sorts of other things ended up being combined into it.
In total, there are six towers like this.
As for their arrangement, the five basic towers each occupy a vertex so that, when viewed from the sky, they form a pentagram.
The White Tower is located at the center of that pentagram,
and the reason they arranged it that way... well, only the guys who first created the Magic Tower would know.
Anyway, lastly,
though no one has ever been there, they say that above the towers, in a place ordinary people cannot even perceive, there is a garden called “Senatus.”
It is said that the Tower Masters of each Magic Tower regularly gather there to hold meetings.
That concludes the explanation about the Magic Tower.
Since it’s where we’ll be going soon, I thought it’d be good to know in advance.
There’s also something called the Black Tower, but I think I can explain that later.
***
Including Elladrien, this time even Signica asked her a question.
““Why??””
Signica, in particular, seemed quite shocked by this request.
And understandably so,
because the Magic Tower had never once submitted a request to an outside party until now.
Especially not for anything related to combat.
They had always been the ones being called by others, not the ones calling others.
I’m not talking about a client-and-contractor relationship here.
I’m just saying the Magic Tower was so damn strong that it didn’t need anyone’s help.
The Magic Tower was where almost all the mages on the entire continent gathered.
Naturally, many incredibly skilled people were gathered there as well,
and no matter what happened near the Magic Tower, most things could usually be dealt with by a few spells.
But people like that had submitted a request to someone?
People who, before submitting a request, could send a 9th Circle mage or whoever else was available to try handling it?
This was definitely a little strange.
It seemed like Veronica might be able to answer that question, but,
“I don’t really know either. For now, what’s certain is that we have to go. Let’s depart tomorrow.”
Unfortunately, she hadn’t been told anything either.
Well... calling us over first without even telling us what the request is about is certainly innovative.
If they tell us to do it, we have to do it, I guess...
Ah, that’s the mercenary mindset.
But isn’t a Hero’s party not that different?
‘A Hero’s party is a highly well-publicized elite mercenary group...’
For now, once Veronica finished speaking, we each began preparing to leave, packing our things and so on.
***
The Magic Tower was located in the center of the Astra Empire.
From Rotten, at the northern end of the empire, it was quite a distance away.
Fortunately, however, we didn’t have to walk that entire long distance.
“We’ll be going to a viscounty called Alden. From there, we’ll move straight to the Magic Tower through teleportation.”
Alden was the southernmost territory in Rotten.
We were planning to teleport from there,
but normally, of course, teleporting from there to the Magic Tower would have been impossible.
Teleportation was indeed a fairly good spell, but magic was not omnipotent.
Naturally, there were all sorts of restrictions.
There were conditions like needing to know the coordinates or needing to have a rough idea of what the place looked like,
but the most important condition among them was distance.
From Alden to the Magic Tower, the distance normally wasn’t close enough to move in one go.
If it were ordinary teleportation, that is.
In cases where one was moving to the Magic Tower, that distance restriction was relaxed to a certain extent.
Normally, to go to the Magic Tower, one would have to use teleportation several times to move there, but apparently the Magic Tower side had set up the magic so that the process could be treated as already completed and skipped.
Here, another question might come to mind.
If they could do that, why not allow the intermediate process to be skipped when moving to other places too? Why set it up so that only trips to the Magic Tower could be skipped?
At times like this, just pick budget shortages or material shortages.
Then in most cases, you’ll be right.
“Normally, we could have teleported to Alden first and then gone straight to the Magic Tower, but unfortunately, I’ve never been to a place called Alden.”
Signica, who had been explaining various things to me about teleportation and the Magic Tower until just now, added an extra explanation.
It seemed she had noticed that I was the curious type.
She probably thought I was going to ask why we were walking when Alden was within teleportation distance.
“And, Evan.”
I thought that would be the end of her explanation, but Signica continued.
“Yes?”
“Once the matter at the Magic Tower is over, let’s go on a date then.”
...?
When I gave her a flustered look at her words,
“Not a date between lovers. A date to get closer to each other.”
She said it to me in a playful tone.
“S-sure.”
I thought I’d be used to it since I’d done it once with Elladrien,
but looking at Signica, I could already tell this would have its own difficulties.