When Eleanor lightly brushed the edge of my consciousness, the hidden world revealed itself.
Above the skies of the peaceful empire.
‘Fuck. What the hell is that…….’
Something was writhing inside the violet rift.
What kind of creature was it?
No, could that even be called a creature in the first place?
“Do you see? We are holding them back with Our entire body so that those things cannot cross over.”
It was an utterly shocking twist.
So.
She’d been working an unpaid night-shift security job for a thousand years?
And while body-blocking a hole on a cosmic scale?
What kind of worldview is this?
Is this really romance fantasy?
Isn’t this genre fraud?
Eleanor stared at me, the chains around her clinking.
“Yet you are truly strange. This place is originally a sanctuary that only those whose souls have grown vast may set foot in. No, an exile ground. And yet, with that rat’s tail of mana, you opened a gate in space and entered while maintaining your physical body.”
I had only wandered in because the coordinates got tangled while I was doing a physics experiment in the lab.
“This is an anomaly without precedent in history.”
I tried to search my memory for whether there had been such a setting.
I had no idea.
I don’t think there was anything like this in the novel.
I’m sure the title was a romance with the language of flowers in it.
Where does cosmic horror suddenly barge into the genre like this?
‘Hmm…….’
As far as I could tell, this was outside the main story of the original work.
Either that, or it was a late-stage setting I hadn’t read.
“You, aid Us. No, you must aid Us. For even Our endurance here is now reaching its limit. If I fall, then that laughable empire you lived in and everything else will become mana fireworks and vanish!”
As threats went, the scale was too big.
The destruction of the empire!
“What am I supposed to do?”
“There is a way.”
Eleanor took a step closer.
“Your eyes for handling mana are far more precise than Ours…… and alien. The only key capable of ending this hellish breakwater farce is you.”
She didn’t seem to be lying.
Then there was no need to think long.
First, I had to get out of here.
Besides, if the world ended, my comfortable sofa would disappear too, wouldn’t it?
Most of all, when the knowledge of a tenth-rank mage who had even experienced ascension was combined with my knowledge of physics, what kind of result would come out of it……?
If things went well, I might even be able to perform magic on a cosmic scale.
My scholarly curiosity began to overtake my survival instinct little by little.
“Very well. I accept. In exchange, once you escape, you’ll become the assistant in my personal laboratory.”
“Assistant? I know not what that is, but it seems to be an honorable post in which one receives a share of Our authority!”
Eleanor smiled brightly and clasped my hand.
“Good, I accept! Just get Us out of here!”
***
Eleanor Eterna watched Rihan’s receding back and gave a bitter smile.
In truth, the absolute power she had first offered him was a kind of sweet trap.
If Rihan had said even a single word that he would accept that power.
Eleanor would have shoved the duty of being the breakwater entirely onto Rihan and fled as a free woman.
A kind of hot potato.
A search for a substitute she had awaited for a thousand years.
It had been the moment she had waited for so desperately over the past one thousand years.
And yet this bizarre boy had rejected the temptation in a single stroke.
‘……He is insane.’
That was Eleanor’s own form of praise.
After all, mages were a breed that could not reach the truth unless they were madly obsessed with something.
But Rihan was on a different track.
A monster of an entirely different grain.
Eleanor recalled the afterimage of mana Rihan had bound to his fingertips.
‘What absurd precision.’
The pinnacle of precision.
It had only been for an instant, but his technique had achieved a mana conversion rate approaching one hundred percent.
Rihan’s potential was far too vast for her to simply pass on power to him and run away.
‘If it is this boy…….’
Eleanor looked down at her own emaciated hands.
The tragic cycle that had repeated for thousands of years.
This hellish cycle in which a mage ascended and became a consumable for the world.
Someone who could smash it entirely had appeared.
Not someone who would become a breakwater to stop the storm.
But a mad genius who could erase the storm itself, or even make use of it!
“Wait for me. You damned causality……”
***
On the laboratory desk.
Amid the fragrant steam of freshly brewed coffee, a palm-sized doll sat arrogantly with its legs crossed.
A translucent body.
Ragged clothes that perfectly reproduced attire from a thousand years ago.
Even the haughty gaze that could instantly make a person shrink back.
[What are you staring at so? Is Our august countenance so wondrous?]
A tenth-rank mage.
Eleanor Eterna’s avatar.
A magical entity commonly called a human shadow.
I pressed my fingers to my temple and asked in a voice mixed with a sigh.
“……So, to summarize, you’ve moved into my body?”
What kind of unauthorized tenant is this!
Do you know how expensive housing is in the imperial capital these days!
Setting up a leasehold between my neurons without even paying a deposit.
[Now, now, are your words not too harsh? To call a pitiable woman who has set foot on her homeland for the first time in a thousand years moving luggage. If anything, I have settled on prime land.]
Eleanor’s voice echoing in my head matched exactly with the movements of the human shadow’s lips on the desk.
Fantasy really did have good technology.
If science developed here as well, Earth probably wouldn’t even be able to hand out a business card.
She continued speaking while savoring the heat rising from the coffee cup.
[In that sense, you must find my spiritual artifacts.]
“No.”
I refused without even 0.1 seconds of hesitation.
“A thousand years have already passed. Your staff or rings have probably rotted away and become dirt ages ago, or if you’re lucky, they’re inside a museum showcase. How am I supposed to find them? I’m a theorist and a dreamer. I detest fieldwork.”
Most of all, I was sufficiently satisfied with my current life.
The title of chief imperial researcher.
A hefty salary.
And peaceful rest.
Throw all that away to go film Indiana Jones?
Ugh, that was not something an intellectual should do.
A grand fate like that could be left to Yuna, the protagonist of the novel.
[No, my treasures are not so shoddy. I arranged for them to self-destruct if they lost mana, or I fixed the very “concept” itself so that they would not weather away. I personally secreted away the truly valuable ones.]
Eleanor snapped the fingers of her human shadow.
Of course, no sound came out.
But a clear bell rang inside my brain.
[If I am to continue playing the role of breakwater, I need mediums imbued with my power. You also would not want the world to perish and your workplace to disappear like fireworks, would you?]
As if she had read my thoughts, she stared straight into my eyes.
[The imperial family that bestows your salary will vanish, so will you still stand by with your hands behind your back?]
“……To take hostages so underhandedly. Isn’t this totally a black-company tactic?”
Just as I pouted.
Bang!
“Rihan! Are you here?”
The laboratory door opened without warning.
Ivelin von Estal.
Reflexively, I shoved Eleanor, who had been arrogantly sitting cross-legged on the desk, into my sleeve.
At the same time, I opened a notebook and pretended to write differential equations.
“Please knock, my lady. This is the chief researcher’s lab, full of state secrets.”
“State secrets, my foot. You’re always just eating snacks.”
At her cutting words, my pen stopped for a moment.
Ivelin ignored my rebuke completely and strode closer.
Her eyes were shining far more seriously than usual.
“I thought all night about what you said yesterday. You said imagery is important, but logic is the core, right? Controlling the energy generated when forcibly bonding particles…… that thing.”
Ivelin stood before my desk.
She took a deep breath, then extended her palm into the air.
“Watch carefully. I’m going to succeed this time.”
Mana began to condense above her palm.
It was not her usual vast and rough mana.
Amazingly, she was layering mana like an exceedingly thin membrane and distinguishing the particles in the air.
‘Huh……?’
My eyes narrowed.
Already?
It hadn’t even been a few days since I told her.
She was assimilating the physical properties I had explained to her with her own senses.
Hydrogen and oxygen.
Using mana, she collided those two properties at the molecular level.
Then she attempted to cool the reaction heat that occurred by sending it through another mana circuit.
Chiiiiik—!
A clear and transparent sphere of water formed above her palm.
It was different from my failed product, which had emitted steam at one hundred degrees Celsius.
But that didn’t mean it was perfect either.
The surface of the sphere was trembling faintly, and a bit of steam was rising from it.
“……How is it?”
Ivelin looked at me cautiously.
I was honestly impressed.
And naturally so.
A person from another world who had not gone through modern Earth’s education system had implemented the mechanism of molecular bonding with magic in a short period of time.
‘She really is a genius.’
Whether it was the product of superior genes.
Or thanks to the genius setting the author had carefully carved out.
She was extraordinary.
At that moment, along with a squirming sensation inside my sleeve, Eleanor’s voice rang through my brain.
[Hooh, that lass…… is a genius. Truly a fine article.]
‘Right?’
Hearing my student praised made me feel rather proud.
Was this what a professor felt while looking at a graduate student?
‘I guess a ducal family is a ducal family for a reason.’
[No, it is not the backing of her family. That child has a good eye. She was born with the sense to see the grain of mana and slip into its gaps. Whether she became that way because she learned from you or not, she is material rarely seen even in my era.]
Eleanor paused for a moment, then added.
[However, in my eyes, you seem more monstrous. For a fellow without even such innate senses is redefining the laws of mana through understanding alone.]
Leaving Eleanor’s praise behind, I gave Ivelin a moderate round of applause.
“Not bad. Looks like you’ve finally graduated from the mandrake level.”
“What? Mandrake? Do you want to die?”
Ivelin made as if to throw the water ball at my face.
But seeing the smile on her lips, it seemed she didn’t hate it.
I calmed her with a deliberately solemn expression.
“Your efficiency gets a passing grade. But your management of the residual heat produced during the spell’s deployment is still lacking. Your next assignment is to calculate how to disperse the leftover heat after extracting the energy. Can you do it by tomorrow?”
At my question laced with provocation, Ivelin’s eyes flashed.
“Got it. Just wait. I’ll have it done in no time!”
Ivelin confidently left the laboratory.
‘If only you set aside the fact that she’s a villainess, she’s really quite decent.’
At that moment, Eleanor popped out from my sleeve.
[That child…… has no ordinary spirit. She would not be lacking as Our disciple.]
“She’s my disciple, all right? Don’t covet her. And let’s get back to the point. I absolutely refuse to search for your spiritual artifacts. I’m not suited for dangerous fieldwork.”
[Rihan, did you say that child’s name was Ivelin von Estal?]
Eleanor’s human shadow leisurely walked across the desk like a ghost.
Then pointed in the direction beyond the window.
[You will have to go even if you do not wish to.]
“Why?”
[In that family’s treasury, one of my spiritual artifacts lies dormant. And a very powerful one at that.]
“……What?”
I nearly spat out the coffee I was about to drink.