by Tsutomu Sato
“A specialized type?”
But pointing one at another student was not a normal situation. In fact, it was an emergency—especially if the CAD being pointed was a specialized type focusing on attack power.
Casting Assistant Devices were split into two categories: multipurpose and specialized. Multipurpose ones could store a maximum of ninety-nine types of activation programs, but it put a large burden on the user. Specialized ones could hold only nine types, but they were fitted with subsystems to lighten the load on the user, allowing him or her to cast magic more quickly.
On top of that characteristic, there were many specialized CADs that stored activation programs for offensive magic.
With the shrieks of onlookers as background music, he stuck the “barrel” of his pistol-shaped, specialized CAD in Leo’s face.
This student wasn’t all bark. His skill at drawing his CAD, the speed at which he aimed—both were clearly the movements of a magic technician experienced in the ways of battle.
Much of magic depended on innate talent. That meant that at the same time, a lot in magic depended on your lineage. If you were a Course 1 student who had enrolled in this school with excellent grades, then even if you hadn’t received any magical education in school, you were more than likely to have received real combat experience from helping parents, family businesses, and relatives.
“Tatsuya!”
Before Miyuki had finished calling out, Tatsuya had already stuck out his right hand. He reached out, though his hand wouldn’t reach her from this distance.
Did the action mean something? Or was it a pointless reflex, created outside the realm of conscious thought? Whatever it was, here and now, it didn’t have any effect, because…
“Eeegh!”
The one who shrieked was the Course 1 student jabbing the gun in Leo’s face.
His pistol-shaped CAD had been sent flying out of his hand.
And before his eyes was Erika, smiling, having whipped out an extending police baton from somewhere. There was no lingering waver or panic in her grin. But he’d known from the start there had been none of that, just by seeing her skillful alertness, which almost gave away her personality. If the same thing happened a hundred more times, Erika would without a doubt smack the CAD out of the Course 1 student’s hand with her baton every single time. He could clearly see that ability in her.
“At this distance, whoever moves their body first is fastest.”
“Yes, but you were totally trying to hit my hand, too, weren’t you?”
No sooner had Erika let down her guard than she had returned to her nonserious demeanor and began to explain it proudly to him. Answering her was Leo, who had pulled his hand—which was about to grab the CAD—away at the last moment.
“Oh, no! I wouldn’t do anything like that.” Erika flashed a smile that might have been evasive, as though she might have instead put the back of her hand holding the baton to her mouth and gone Oh-ho-ho-ho!
Leo’s patience with her was wearing extremely thin. “You’re not fooling anyone with that dumb grin!”
“I’m serious. I can tell whether or not someone can dodge based on how they carry themselves. You may look like an idiot, but you seem like you have skill.”
“…You’re making fun of me, aren’t you? You’re making a complete fool out of me, aren’t you?”
“Well, I did just say you looked like an idiot, didn’t I?”
Forgetting about the “enemy” in front of them, the two of them went back and forth loudly, like a comedy routine. Tatsuya, Miyuki, and everybody else around were too amazed to say much. Miyuki’s classmate was the one who snapped out of it first and faced them.
It wasn’t the male student who had the specialized device knocked out of his hands—it was the female student behind him, whose fingers flew over her multipurpose bracelet CAD.
The systems inside sprang to life, and an activation program began to expand.
Activation programs were the blueprints for magic. The programming within directly defined how to formulate magic programs. Once it was finished expanding the activation program, it would then read it into the user’s magic calculation region, an unconscious location in their brain. It would input the values for the variables that denoted coordinates, output, and duration. Finally, it would build up the psions—and the magic program—according to the process described in the activation program.
The calculation region of the person’s subconscious would construct the magic program and then transfer it through a route between the lowest level of consciousness and the highest level of unconsciousness. Then the magic program would be projected from the gate existing between consciousness and unconsciousness into the external world of information. Thus would the magic program interfere with the projection’s target, the information bodies incident to events—in modern magic, these were referred to as eidos, from a Greek philosophy term—and temporarily overwrite the target’s information.
Information accompanied events. If you overwrote the information, you would overwrite the event. The state of events described in the psionic information bodies would temporarily alter the event in the real world.
This was the magical system that made use of CADs.
The speed at which psion information bodies were constructed was the user’s magical throughput. The scale at which the information bodies could be formulated was the user’s magical capacity. The intensity at which the magical program overwrote the eidos was the user’s influence. Currently, the three of these together were referred to as one’s magical power.
The activation programs that were the blueprints of magic were a type of psionic information body as well. However, they themselves couldn’t effect change in events. The CADs would convert the psions injected from the user into signals, then return an activation program to the user.
Broadly speaking, this was the function of a CAD. With the psionic information body (the activation program) supplied from the CAD as a base, the magician would construct a psionic information body (the magic program) to overwrite events.
Many specialized types were shaped like guns. The advantage to this was that they had an alignment support system on the part corresponding to the gun barrel. This system would embed coordinate information into the activation program when it was expanded. In doing so, it would lighten the computation load for the user.
From the magician to the CAD, and from the CAD to the magician.
If this psionic flow was obstructed, any magic using the CAD would cease to function.
For example, if you hit it with a clump of psions from the outside while the activation program was being deployed or being read, the psionic pattern constructing the activation program would be corrupted, it would fail to build a functional magic program, and the magic would fizzle.
And that was exactly what happened.
“Stop this at once! Attacking another person with magic outside of self-defensive purposes is not only against school rules but a criminal act!”
The activation program being expanded by the female student’s CAD had been blown apart by a psionic bullet.
Forming psions themselves into bullets and firing them was the simplest form of magic, but the delicate precision and controlled output of destroying only the activation program and not causing any damage to the caster herself spoke volumes of the shooter’s skill.
Recognizing the voice’s owner, the female student trying to attack Erika and the others went pale with shock—and it wasn’t because of the magic. She staggered as another female student held her up from behind.
The one who had delivered the warning and used a psionic bullet to stop the magic from executing had been the student council president, Mayumi Saegusa.
Her expression, which was normally a smile—as far as Tatsuya knew—was still not very strict, even in this situation.
But the eyes of those who used magic saw the light of energized psions, and it was obviously far larger in scale than the l
ight given off by average magicians. It wrapped around her small body like a nimbus, giving her a sort of impenetrable majesty.
“You’re all from 1-A and 1-E, right? I’ll listen to what you have to say. Come with me.”
The one who gave the order in a cold—well, it had to be—and hard voice was the female student standing next to Mayumi. According to the student introductions during the entrance ceremony, she was the head of the disciplinary committee, a senior named Mari Watanabe.
Mari’s CAD has already finished expanding an activation program. It was easy to imagine that if they showed any signs of resistance, she would use force instantly.
Leo, Mizuki, and Miyuki’s classmates all stiffened without a word. It wasn’t that they couldn’t move out of rebelliousness, but that they had been overawed by her. Leaving his classmates aside…
…without puffing out his chest with pride or arrogance…
…without hanging his head in dejection or atrophy…
…Tatsuya walked before Mari with a composed gait, with Miyuki gracefully following behind him.
Mari gave a quizzical look at the freshmen who had suddenly appeared. Tatsuya and Miyuki hadn’t appeared to her to be part of all this. Tatsuya, unperturbed, returned her gaze and gave a slight but polite bow.
“I’m sorry. We let our horseplay go too far.”
“Horseplay?” Mari’s eyebrows pulled into a frown at the statement, which seemed abrupt.
“Yes. The Morisaki family is famous for its quick-drawing, so I wanted him to show us for future reference, but it was so lifelike and real that we accidentally reacted.”
The male student who had aimed his CAD at Leo—his eyes were widened in astonishment.
As the other freshmen looked on, speechless now for a different reason, Mari glanced between the baton in Erika’s hand and the gun-shaped device that had fallen to the ground. She turned her gaze on the boy and girl who had attempted to use their CADs in an illegal way, and after seeing them start to tremble, she shot a cold smile at Tatsuya.
“Then after that, why did the girl from 1-A execute an attack magic?”
“She was probably surprised. She’s able to execute the activation process out of pure conditioned reflex—that’s a Course 1 student for you.” His expression was totally serious, but his voice was completely transparent.
“Your friends were about to be attacked by magic. Are you still going to claim this was just horseplay?”
“You say attack, but all she was actually planning to activate was a bright magic flash to distract us. And it wasn’t high-enough level to cause blindness or impair our eyesight permanently, anyway.”
Everyone gasped again.
Her scornful smile turned into an expression of astonishment. “Impressive… You seem to be able to read and understand expanded activation programs.”
Activation programs were vast clumps of data for constructing magic programs.
Magicians could intuitively understand what sort of effects a magic program possessed.
During the process where a magic program interferes with eidos, a magician could “read” what sort of alteration the magic program was trying to achieve by the reaction given from the eidos, which resisted the alteration.
But the activation program was nothing more than a cluster of data on its own. And it was an immense amount of data, too. Even the magician who expanded it would only be able to semiautomatically process it unconsciously.
Reading an activation program was like being able to visualize an image in your head by looking only at the digits making up the image’s data. Normally you couldn’t understand such a thing consciously.
“My practical abilities are subpar, but analysis is a specialty of mine.”
But Tatsuya summed up the abnormal ability as simply analysis, as if it didn’t mean anything.
“…And deception is apparently another.”
Mari’s stare was somewhere between an appraisal and a glare.
Only Miyuki stepped in front of her brother, as if to shield him from taking the brunt of it. “As my brother said, this was really just a minor misunderstanding. We deeply apologize for getting our upperclassmen involved.”
Without a scrap of artifice, she bowed deeply directly to Mari who, taken aback, averted her eyes.
“Mari, isn’t that enough? Tatsuya, this was really just a practical observation, right?”
Since when are we on a first-name basis? thought Tatsuya, but he couldn’t let the lifeboat Mayumi offered him go unused.
As before, he nodded his head in all earnestness, and Mayumi gave a somehow proud smile—almost as if to say You owe me one.
“It certainly isn’t against the rules for students to teach one another, but there are detailed restrictions on even executing magic. This is something taught in class during the first semester. I believe it would be best for now to refrain from any self-study that involves activating magic.”
Her serious expression returned as she conferred her directive. Then Mari, as well, delivered her judgment, using carefully chosen words.
“…The president has spoken, so I won’t question you this time. Make sure this doesn’t happen again.” Without sparing a glance at the group of students, who were bitter enemies but all hastily straightening up and bowing to her together, Mari turned on her heel.
But she had taken only one step before she stopped and asked a question, her back still to them.
“What is your name?”
Only her head was facing him, and her eyes were thin slits, their edges reflecting Tatsuya in them.
“Tatsuya Shiba, from Class 1-E.”
“I’ll remember it.”
He was about to say Fine by me out of reflex, but he caught himself and stopped himself from sighing.
“…I don’t consider this a debt, you know.”
After watching the officials disappear into the school building, the first person who made a violent move—in other words, the male student from Class 1-A, whom Tatsuya had ended up covering for—shot him a thorny stare, and with an equally thorny tone of voice, said that to Tatsuya.
Tatsuya sighed and looked behind him. All of his friends were making the same face, too. Relieved that their uselessly excitable personalities weren’t here, at least, he returned the thorny 1-A student’s gaze.
“Don’t worry. I don’t believe I gave you anything anyway. It wasn’t my words that decided this, but Miyuki’s good faith.”
“Tatsuya may be good at talking people down, but he’s not so good at persuading people,” remarked Miyuki.
“You’re not wrong.” He returned her feigned stare of criticism with a dry smile.
“…My name is Shun Morisaki. As you deduced, I’m part of the main Morisaki family.”
The hostility in his face thinned a bit, his spirit perhaps dampened at the siblings’ heartwarming—depending on how you looked at it—exchange.
“Well, it wasn’t anything so grandiose as a deduction. I’ve just seen an example video of it before.”
“Oh, come to think of it, I might have seen that, too,” remarked Erika.
“And you just didn’t remember it until now? You really are different from Tatsuya,” said Leo.
“Don’t sound so self-important. You’re such an idiot that you tried to grab a broom with your bare hands! Your head is what’s different!”
“What was that? Why do you keep calling me an idiot?”
“Umm… It really was dangerous. Activation programs made by the psions of other magicians could cause rejection in your magic calculation region…” mentioned Miyuki.
“There, see? Understand now?” agreed Erika.
“But you too, Erika. Even if you didn’t directly touch it with your hands, it could still interfere with you.”
“I’m fine! This thing’s shielded.”
His friends’ conversation behind him had begun to take on meaning, but Tatsuya remained where he was, eyes locked with Morisaki.
“I wo
n’t accept you, Tatsuya Shiba. Your sister should be with us.”
With a parting threat, he turned his back without waiting for a reply. Parting threats didn’t need responses in the first place—since they were parting threats—but they did require the other person to hear them.
“Using my full name like that already, I see,” he said, almost as though he were talking to himself, but purposely murmuring loud enough for him to hear. Morisaki, turned away, gave a start. A certain kind of stubbornness was probably what allowed him to keep going and leave without stopping.
Next to him, Miyuki looked bewildered when she heard Tatsuya allow his muttering to be overheard. She was always fretting over this—for someone with such an introspective personality, he had a self-destructive recklessness. He wouldn’t hesitate to make enemies, and it was a big flaw in his character. Of course, she was more disconcerted about Morisaki’s mistaken impression.
“Tatsuya, shouldn’t we go home soon?”
“You’re right. Leo, Chiba, Shibata, let’s get going.”
In any case, the two of them shared their feeling of mental exhaustion, nodded to each other, and decided to leave.
The girl from 1-A who was about to make the situation worse was standing in their way, but he honestly didn’t want to get any more involved with her today. He exchanged looks with Miyuki and went to pass her by. Miyuki, trying to guess Tatsuya’s feelings, was about to say See you tomorrow when the girl opened her mouth first.
“I’m Honoka Mitsui. I apologize for being rude earlier.”
She suddenly bowed to Tatsuya, and frankly, he was taken aback. Until now, her attitude hadn’t been able to fully conceal her sense of being an elite—and that was an understatement—but now it had flip-flopped.
“Thank you for covering for me. Morisaki may have said that, but it’s because of you, sir, that it didn’t escalate.”
“…You’re welcome. But don’t call me ‘sir.’ We’re still both freshmen.”
“I understand. Then what should I call you…?”