Our admission letters arrived in the second-last week of August, carrying expected news. The headmaster kept his word, and Emily could stop chewing her fingernails, a student of magic like any other. The nearer the day by which we’d be notified drew, the more of a nervous mess my co-student became, and the quality of training went down accordingly. But she had her deliverance at last, and it sent her straight up to cloud nine.

  What would she have thought if she knew her studentship was corruptly gained? She would never know. I’d take that secret to the grave with me.

  There were arrangements to be made before the start of the academic year, like going to the tailor to order uniforms. Fortunately, we had servants to handle most of the small stuff, like procuring stationery, notebooks, bags, and whatever else. Anyone used to basic schools would assume we'd also have to haul a mountain of books with us, but that wasn't the case. The required list contained exactly zero titles.

  Mysterium maintained ironclad control over how much arcane knowledge was available to public and in how many copies, and printing books was expensive. No shop even in capital could provide over ninety fresh copies of every title on demand each term. The lectures and school library would be our primary source of knowledge outside private collections. How else could academies maintain their role as gatekeepers of progress?

  The worldy preparations soon done and over with, we could savor what was left of the summer and continue with our practice.

  We were only enrolling in a school, but before I knew it, I'd begun to treat it like an operation to capture an enemy castle. Not a very fitting image, maybe, but it was the approach most familiar and relaxing for me.

  Was I actually getting nervous about the future? Now, after all this time?

  That Friday in the garden, it was Emily’s turn to take the lecturer’s position and tell me about her own specialty. A normal mage could, in theory, learn and train whatever magic best pleased them, but seeking to be a jack of all trades usually left you a master of none. Not everyone could be an archmage.

  The smartest thing to do was to study your inborn affinity and assemble techniques around it. Anything else could come after acquiring at least one solid ace in your sleeve, and that was what they commonly referred to as a magician's focus. Having specialization made it easier to establish your name in the field and sell your talents to potential employers. Ending up as a war mage was the dead end every proper wizard wanted to avoid to the last. What with having the average lifespan of fourteen minutes in battle, and all that.

  “I have to be honest with you,” Emily prefaced her story, “I promised I'd tell you about my magic, but I never learned so much of my family's arts that you could call it a secret worth keeping. My father barely started to teach me the basics before he was already gone. I followed him around all the time when he did his experiments, but I was so young then, I understood pretty much nothing of what I saw. So, you'll probably find what I do know less than impressive, after everything. Sorry about that in advance…”

  So it wasn’t only stress over the school term that troubled her? I thought she had been abnormally reticent and guilty-looking recently. The more she learned, the more aware she became that she had nothing of real value to offer in exchange for the tutoring. Always the defender of justice.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I told her. “I wasn’t after your family’s techniques from the beginning. Since I probably wouldn’t be able to use them, even if you could teach everything in perfect detail.”

  “Huh. Why couldn’t you? I think it’s pretty easy compared to what you normally do.”

  “Because of biases.”

  “Hmm.” The girl twisted her lips, wearing a skeptical look. “But I don’t think you were very honest when you said you needed to know about my ability as an insurance against my betrayal either. Since you could kill me with a peanut if you really wanted to. So why care at all?”

  “I told you, didn’t I?” I said, calmly, and closed my eyes to escape her persistent staring. “It’s your future that interests me more than the past or present. This is an investment.”

  She came over and leaned closer to my face.

  “You say you need a collaborator, but also won’t take any measures to ensure obedience and won’t accept any real payment, either…Won’t that be just charity then?”

  She had to get weirdly perceptive at the strangest times. I could feel her stare even with my eyes closed, so I turned my back to her.

  “Hurry up and get started. Or I'll go back inside.”

  “Ehehe.” Emily snickered. “You often talk about how a real mage should be, but honestly, you’re not very like that yourself. Boss.”

  “What are you calling me? Stop that.”

  She answered me with an impish grin. “No can do, Boss!”

  I gritted my teeth. What a cocky chick.

  Before I could put her back in her place, Emily spun away and went to approach the fountain. We’d recharged the mana crystal and Sylphid’s horn was expelling a clean arc of water again. Emily raised her hands and began to cast. This time, she imbued her mana with a distinct charge of her own color before weaving it into a physical form.

  “My father’s specialty was frost magic,” she said. “This is the one spell of his that I ever learned. It took me many years of experimenting to make it even vaguely like he used to do it. Here's how it looks: Cold Field!”

  A bright flash of light lashed outward in a pale wave. A blink. Nature itself seemed to briefly hold its breath and sounds grew distant. A circular area around Emily was painted with a thin, twinkling coat of rime. In the sector overlapping with the pool, the water’s nonchalant rippling stilled, a clear deck of ice drawn over the shallow waves. The arc pouring from the statue solidified halfway up its run, momentarily stilling, but then fell down, shattering the thin ice layer with a hollow crash, and water resumed pouring as before.

  I observed what happened with special care.

  “Oh!” Emily looked surprised at her hand, turning back to me. “The affected area is much wider than it used to be, though I didn't even put that much oomph into it. Guess the cultivation thing really helps!”

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  Don't call it c******.

  The frosty earth steamed lightly, already melting in the warm sunset glow. The film of ice cast on the pool was very thin, unable to endure the tension of the water shifting under it. The broken fragments scattered and melted away faster than cubes in a glass of juice. For ice magic, it was…not very impressive. But something about the phenomenon bothered me immensely. How could it consume so much energy, with so little alteration? The spell seemed irrationally unbalanced. But if it were simply a matter of flawed technique, or subpar execution, there should be a lot of leftover mana. But I could see none. It was clearly, cleanly all spent. Spent on what?

  “Could you cast it one more time?” I requested.

  “Sure. But just one more. Despite how casual it looks, it gets tiring fast.”

  Instead of a wide area, Emily focused the magic on the jet. The starry light appeared again and water began to coagulate in its proximity, plummeting along the ceaseless downpour in irregular chunks. Emily maintained the spell for a few seconds until the pool looked like an iced punch bowl, and then let the power fade, breathing a little heavier.

  I nodded.

  “I see. I understand now. This isn’t ice magic.”

  Emily's face turned exceptionally silly. “What?”

  “You’d assume that to be the case, looking at the effect, but this is something else. An ‘ice mage’ is often actually a specialist at manipulating water or air. But your technique involves neither element. It's important that you understand the distinction when you shape your imagery. Your specialty—the study of late Baron Troyard—appears to be ‘stagnation.’”

  The girl looked at me as if I'd just told her she smelled bad. “Stagnation…?”

  “I know how it sounds, but we’re talking about physics here. This technique is not aimed specifically at any set element, but inhibits interaction between all particles in the target region. When heat transmission is blocked, rapid cooling is the immediate visible consequence. But that's merely a side effect. Most of what's really going on can't be seen by eye.”

  What absurd magic. No wonder her channel capacity was what it was, if she spent all these years practicing that. The more variables a spell had to account for in one action, the higher the power consumption. I wouldn't have believed total inhibition was even possible in theory, if I hadn't just seen the vaguest approximation. It was a pure miracle she hadn't overloaded again.

  I never was a believer of destiny, but what were the odds that this girl we randomly picked up could hold what was essentially the polar opposite of my own ability…?

  Emily looked down at her slender hands.

  “So, what? Does that mean this magic is something awesome? Or something really lame?”

  I rubbed the bridge of my nose.

  “Think about it. Your ability is essentially a hard counter to all forms of magic that rely on transmission through a medium. Fire, lightning, earth, sound, wind…The possible applications are endless. I take back everything I said before. This is certainly a secret you have to keep with great care and never tell anyone about it. Not unless you want to get snatched by bad people, locked up in a lab without seeing daylight again, or turned into an anti-mage executor.”

  “A-aren’t you exaggerating a little now...?”

  “I wish.”

  How could I beat this into her head so that she wouldn't forget…Then I glanced up at the dimming sky, startled by a random observation.

  Emily noticed the change in my expression. “What's up?”

  “The birds have gone quiet.”

  “So? Maybe they went to bed early?”

  “When it's still this light?”

  The mood over the estate grounds was different from any other evening. Every living being seemed to hold its breath, and the evening sky was clear of movement. A tense, silent wariness hung in the air. No question about it. There was someone around who didn’t belong. And a guest who didn’t come through the front door was never a welcome guest. But where…I would've felt it if anyone was looking directly at us, and the garden ward hadn’t reacted. So whoever it was, they hadn’t come very far in yet.

  Damn. Because of the dragon rings’ interference, my detection couldn’t cover half of this uselessly big plot, even if compressed only to a narrow sector. I’d gotten a bit better with it, but the noisy waves I could project still collapsed beyond a seventy-yard range. I wanted to send Emily indoors, but reluctantly turned to her now for help instead.

  “I need you to scan the grounds. Your sensory range exceeds mine right now.”

  “Eh, is there really somebody out there?”

  “That’s what I want you to find out.”

  “O-okay. I’ll try.”

  The girl drew a breath, closed her eyes, and held up her hands, index fingers pointed at the temples in a bizarre pose, and began to scan the backyard. Was that gesture actually helpful?

  “Hmm,” she muttered. “I’m not picking up anything out of the ordinary. Grass. Trees. Flowers. A sparrow there. Oh, dunnocks have a nest up that cypress! Aww, they’ve three little chicks in there too. They must’ve hatched only yesterday. They don't even have feathers yet. So cute…”

  “Focus, please.”

  “Ahem. No, seems business as usual. I see nothing wrong. Moving southward. A hare hiding in the bushes. Its little nose is trembling, the ears bent all backwards, and—Whaaat, there’s some guy climbing up a tree by the fence!? What the heck is he doing? That’s not the gardener, is he? I can’t see too clearly, he’s a little too far. He’s got something on him. These small, sparkling, glittery things hanging over his suit.”

  “That’s a metal reaction. Iron reflects the manawaves. It means the person is probably armed.”

  “Huuuh!?”

  Clearly not the gardener then. Who would dare infiltrate the residence of the head of the Royal Army? Saying sorry wasn't going to settle that. It was an act of war. Whoever it was, he was willing to risk his life for his objective. That objective being what?

  “Oh god! What are we going to do?” Emily asked, opening her startled eyes. “Call the guards?”

  “We could…” Maybe the most sensible choice. But our guards were at the front yard and the gate, getting to them from here would take time and allow our guest to come further in. I didn’t feel like running all the way there and back again, either. Instead, I chose the lazier way.

  “But, say, Emily, would you like to get a bit more practical training done today?”

  “...You’re crazy.”

  An unlawful intruder couldn't complain if we roughed him up a bit.