When Gerald and I landed at the blast site on the Central Tower, the explosive flames were nowhere to be seen. In their place stood a lone elderly woman.
"Oh, my?"
The stooped old woman, who looked like she would be right at home quietly knitting, turned around as if only just noticing us. I had never seen her face once since coming to this academy.
"It is Vice Principal Gertrude."
Gerald's words brought me to a sudden halt.
I see.
So she was the one who put out the flames.
"Ah, are you boys from the Imperial Archmage Faculty?"
"Indeed."
Before I could say a word, Gerald answered.
Indeed? Who actually talks like that?
"Gerald Whitesmith, first-year of the Imperial Archmage Faculty. Given the emergency, we have hastened here to bring the situation under control. I shall reclaim the barrier. Please leave the restoration of the tower to this man."
Gerald, who acted haughty even toward Professor Blanchard, was being ridiculously deferential. I would have to look up the vice principal's history sometime—assuming I made it back alive.
"That's all well and good, but will you be all right? The principal is holding it up for now, but as you can see, the main pillar has been destroyed..."
Holding it up...?
What? What did she just say?
Did she mean the principal was personally halting the collapse of this massive tower through sheer power? Was a superhuman feat like that even possible?
Weren't key faculty members supposed to be weakened by the barrier's interference? Was she doing that on top of being crippled, or—no, questions could wait. If someone was buying us time, there was no reason to waste it.
"I'm Brendan Walker, faculty representative of the Imperial Archmage Faculty. I'll fix the tower."
"Walker?"
The vice principal peered closely at me with eyes so narrow it was hard to tell if they were even open. Her gaze settled squarely on the magical catalyst hammer at my waist—the one given to me by my grandfather.
"...Ah, is that so? In that case, I'll leave this place in your hands. I'm off to deal with that ring."
"We shall surely live up to your expectations."
As Gerald bowed deeply, the vice principal gave a gentle smile and stepped off the exposed outer edge.
She kind of just dropped, but she would probably be fine.
Right now, I had to focus on my own job.
"We split up from here, then?"
"Yes. We are close to one another. If anything happens, share it."
Leaving only those words, Gerald floated upward, drifted outside, and soared toward the upper reaches. He was a man wrapped in mystery, but right now, his presence was reassuring.
I surveyed our surroundings.
Just as expected, the central pillar supporting the Central Tower was exposed, with nearly half of it completely obliterated. As a result, the floors above this one were visibly tilting.
However, getting here early had worked in our favor.
In this state, there was still a way.
Channeling mana into my hammer, I struck the pillar.
A split second later, the walls and floor across the entire level thinned and contracted, grafting fresh mass onto the missing section of the central pillar to make up the deficit.
First step: gathering materials.
I scraped together enough matter from the surrounding slabs and walls to reinforce what had been lost.
Since it couldn't be used as-is, I had to compress it through smelting to increase its density, all while filtering out structural impurities.
Once more, this time with even greater force, I brought down the hammer.
The floor vanished from the edges inward, turning the stripped mass into raw material and forge-welding it directly to the pillar.
And with the sixth strike of the iron hammer, the reconstruction of the missing section was nearly complete.
The floor I was on, along with the levels directly above and below, was stripped down to a bare-bones skeleton, leaving only the minimum necessary scaffolding. This area wouldn't be usable for a long time, but it couldn't be helped.
If the principal was truly holding the structure up alone, this much ought to reduce the burden at least slightly.
However, the real challenge started now.
Left alone, the collapse would resume immediately.
I had to use smelting magic to reinforce the structure so it could withstand the abnormal strain caused by the off-center load.
I had never forged an object this massive before, but compared to a magic sword with an incomprehensible internal matrix, what I had to do was simple.
Pouring every drop of mana I had into the hammer, I struck the core.
Just make it strong, hard, and resilient.
A sound resembling the toll of a great bell reverberated through the tower.
I felt as though the tower had regained its footing just a tiny bit more than before.
◇
A short while after entering the basement, Wilhelm noticed the presence of flies interfering with his plan.
"Hmm."
Halting in the dim subterranean corridor, he allowed his ears to tune into the commotion beyond the ceiling.
Thanks to having brought the barrier under his control, everyone's location was fully exposed to him. For that very reason, he found it exceedingly strange that no deaths had occurred yet.
He believed he had severed the chain of command, yet he still felt the distinct rhythm of coordinated movement from Magias's side.
He thought he had incapacitated nearly all of the academy's main combat forces, but... it seemed this year's crop of new students was exceptionally talented.
To think they intended to rely on mere first-year brats to weather this assault in such an unsightly manner.
The standard Faculty of Magic was full of small fry, and by contract, they wouldn't be deployed for combat in the first place. Excluding reinforcements from the outside, relying on the Imperial Archmage Faculty was indeed the only option left by process of elimination.
The magic interference was powerful, but once a target parameters were set, switching them wasn't easy. In other words... he would have to face the youths approaching from behind head-on.
"Take this!!"
Wilhelm gracefully dodged a thrust from Garry's lightning spear without even looking. Judging by the uniform color glimpsed in passing, he was indeed a first-year from the Imperial Archmage Faculty.
Three of them.
One brown-skinned youth who had just appeared.
And two girls flanking Wilhelm.
A petite girl with dark hair, and a brown-haired girl with a rather solid build for a woman.
The brown-haired one was equipped with a uniquely shaped longsword.
That was a weapon of the Hinoe Ittou-ryu.
If so, she was the rumored daughter of the Sword Saint...
"Dear me, to think I would be caught so soon. It can't be helped, then. Your senior shall play with—"
What cut off Wilhelm's provocative smile was a slash unleashed by Mercedes without the slightest warning.
Aiming for his neck without hesitation, she executed a lightning-fast draw, which he barely managed to intercept by erecting a buckler-sized barrier in the nick of time.
Fast—no, heavy.
What is this magic coefficient?
Even if she was from the Imperial Archmage Faculty, wasn't this girl just a greenhorn who had only recently entered Magias?
"This is Mercedes. Target intercepted. Subterranean Sector 13. Commencing engagement. Locke, Vandenberg. Cover my openings."
With a cold gaze laced with contempt, the girl pressed a hand to her ear. She had likely transmitted a telepathic message to her allies over a dedicated channel.
"Amae, Roger."
"Let's get this over with quick."
The instant the three fell into combat stances, Wilhelm ceased viewing the mages before him as cute underclassmen and recognized them as enemies obstructing his plan.
If they were enemies, it couldn't be helped.
Nipping the buds of promising youths was regrettable, but they too were surely acting under official orders.
They could hardly complain if they met a wretched end here.
◇
When Gerald Whitesmith reached the control room of the Guardian Barrier, all the personnel in charge were, as expected, collapsed on the floor, foaming at the mouth.
He had considered the possibility that the dedicated casters monitoring and inspecting the system were already neutralized or killed, and his hypothesis had proven correct.
(They are breathing.)
Confirming their vital signs and nothing more, he directed his gaze toward the center of the room. A massive sphere formed of countless magical scripts was floating in the air. That had to be the core spell formula.
Promptly deploying the control console, he skimmed through the structural formulas—a routine check to verify the exact parameters under which the barrier was operating.
Just as he thought, the command hierarchy was completely distorted.
What should have been neatly partitioned according to functions like defense, detection, communication, and protection had been rewritten from the ground up to place Wilhelm as the absolute priority.
While keeping the existing architecture intact, the deep-layer command structure had been cleverly swapped out. It was no exaggeration to say that the grounds of Magias were currently acting as Wilhelm's pseudo-domain.
What deserved special mention was the addition of new functions.
As far as Gerald remembered, the Magias Guardian Barrier had no native magic interference capability.
Presumably, by intricately combining various functions, effects that had not originally existed were being manifested.
The fact that the system was designed never to stop as long as mana was continuously supplied from the Great Dragon Vein was equally splendid.
The crime had been engineered so that the heavily weakened Magias personnel would be forced to watch from front-row seats as their workplace, their students, and uninvolved spectators were trampled underfoot, fully savoring their own powerlessness.
It was fair to say this was a deed that could only be pulled off by an extraordinarily vile and obsessive human being.
While Gerald could not fathom Wilhelm's ideology or motivations in the slightest, he had no choice but to acknowledge his barrier construction techniques.
And the seemingly endless horde of monsters, along with the mysterious teleportation technology used to materialize them here—just how much of his private fortune had he poured into this?
He truly had the means to attack Magias, an institution said to rival a national military division.
Perhaps this could have truly become a major incident recorded in the history books.
If only he had not mistaken the priority order of the weakening effect.
"...Right."
Gerald quickly rewrote part of the spell syntax and moved on to the next task.
As expected, perhaps having anticipated a short, decisive battle, Wilhelm had set no protections to prevent a recapture.
Fearing too much that his tampering would be exposed, the system had been altered in such a way that tweaking a minimal number of key points would tilt it back toward its normal state. Even so, there was not enough time to restore everything from scratch.
Information sharing, alerts, and surveillance were being handled via proxy by Luluck.
The restoration of the Central Tower was likewise being addressed by Brendan.
The monsters were being handled by the faculty and security forces.
Restoring functionality with a primary focus on lifting the weakening effect and protecting the spectators—that was the most efficient work Gerald could perform.
The tangled knots were placed in repetitive patterns. Gerald simply had to run down a single road, picking up the stones lying by the wayside. It was a remarkably simple task—strictly speaking, from his perspective, at least.
Spectators swiftly evacuating, the barrier gradually being recaptured.
In addition, the state of the Central Tower had improved drastically in this short span of time.
Not a bad deployment of forces.
And that was a remarkably high level of smelting magic.
It seemed he possessed enough competence to back up the title of faculty representative.
Which meant Gerald Whitesmith could not afford to lose either.
"Hah..."
A quiet chuckle escaped him.
He decided to think about the reason behind it at his leisure later.
◇
"They're stupidly tough! What the hell is with these things?!"
Elphin Jare, the instructor in charge of ancient magitechnology, spat out the words and clicked her tongue for what felt like the hundredth time.
Swarming before her eyes were armored monsters clad in thick shells.
True to their appearance, their carapaces were rock-solid, requiring a good ten or more heavy blows to bring down.
Under normal circumstances, it would have been child's play for Elphin, but the sole reason she was struggling was that the output of her Dragoon was suppressed to under twenty percent.
Those monsters were sluggish, but their lethality was immense.
Had the first-year witch student from the Imperial Archmage Faculty not been directing evacuation routes to steer people away from the monsters, numerous casualties would have surely resulted.
"Wil-he-lllm...!!"
A venomous curse leaked from Elphin's lips.
They really shouldn't have dealt with him through formal legal procedures.
If not for that man, neither innocent young children nor lost elderly folks—no one here right now—would be suffering through this nightmare.
Calm down.
Thanks to everyone pulling together, they were holding their ground just a step shy of the worst-case scenario.
Elphin Jare's job was to keep the monsters away from the evacuation routes. Swiftly and surely. Swiftly and surely. Maintaining a broad field of view.
"Aaaahn!! Even the communications network to the outside is cut offff!!"
Holding her head and screaming from behind was a dark-haired female student who happened to have been walking with her during the match.
She too belonged to the Imperial Archmage Faculty.
One of the advanced course students—an upperclassman to Brendan and the others.
Naturally, orders to respond to the emergency had been issued to her as well.
However, she had also been targeted by the magic interference, and under its influence, she was no longer in a mental state capable of fighting.
"It's overrr!! We're gonna dieee!! We're all gonna dieee!!"
"Hey, Niko! Stop losing your shit and help out!"
"No wayyy! I'm scared! God, help meee! Dear Gooood!"
Unfortunately, she was useless.
She was a timid girl to begin with. It was only natural.
The moment Elphin turned around to urge her to evacuate with the spectators, one of the monsters entered the corner of her vision. It was sprinting straight toward the girl called Niko.
"Hey, Niko! Run!"
"H-Eeeek?!"
She wouldn't make it.
The instant Elphin braced herself to throw her body in as a shield, a translucent giant materialized from behind Niko.
"Oh?!"
The giant lunged forward as if shielding Niko, driving its right fist straight into the approaching monster's abdomen. The counter-blow, unleashed with lethal precision, packed more than enough power to snip away the monster's breath of life.
Niko Bright's Phantom Order was activating?
Until just a moment ago, she could barely maintain a basic barrier.
Which meant...
"H-Hey, Niko! Your magic's coming back a bit!"
"H-Huh?! A-Ah, it really is! A-Aha! Ahahahahaha! G-Gooood!!"
Glancing at Niko, who had suddenly switched to an unnatural, trembling mix of laughter and tears, Elphin felt her own physical condition improving as well. Was someone wresting back control of the barrier? It was still far from full throttle, but with this, she had a fighting chance.
"Gooood!! God has arrived!! The Messenger of Gooood!!"
"Hell yeah! Follow me, Niko! We're pushing them back just like this!"
◇
Their response was unexpectedly swift.
Without letting his focus drift from the enemies before him, Wilhelm took a bird's-eye view of his current situation once more.
Someone was trying to seize back control of the barrier.
(Who is it?)
He had kept tabs on all personnel related to the Guardian Barrier and neutralized them in advance.
Right now, there should hardly be anyone on the Magias grounds capable of repairing this barrier.
No, the issue went deeper than that.
To restore a spell formula hijacked and encrypted by the once-in-a-generation genius Wilhelm should have proven extraordinarily difficult even for the casters who performed regular maintenance on it.
If so, was the person interfering with the barrier's console not a first-year? Even then, it was far too fast for an intervention by a third party from the outside.
Well, whatever.
In any case, reclaiming the barrier was impossible.
However, it was true that they had submitted a rather decent answer to the problem Wilhelm had presented. He would give them honest praise for that.
"It appears I underestimated you slightly. I can no longer afford to be careless."
"Then don't be, and play with us till time's up!"
The brown-skinned youth—the student named Garry—laughed with a provocative edge. Did he intend to emphasize his composure by insolently bantering?
"For a southern bumpkin to wield magic, the intellectual asset of the Gleefia nobility, as if it were his own... My, how terrifying the passage of time is. To rob even a sense of place from the paupers."
"Huh?"
A vein bulged at the corner of the youth's eye.
He had probably heard a bit of the historical background from his parents.
"Garry, don't take the bait."
Wilhelm felt a telepathic wave from the petite female student.
Since it was a private transmission, he couldn't read its contents, but she was likely offering prompt backup to her pitiful classmate.
These two didn't matter.
The problem was the Meltzelia girl.
She was the only one possessing destructive power sufficient to pierce Wilhelm's defenses.
"Very well. I shall give you a special demonstration of my research results."
Wilhelm swung his staff like a baton.
The prep work for the most troublesome one, Mercedes, would be complete in just a little longer.
Until then, all he had to do was endure their attacks.