After school the following day, Aristia and I met at one of the campus training grounds we’d managed to reserve.
There was a good chance we’d be letting high-level attack spells fly, which meant we needed a facility with some decent durability. This place was perfect for the task. I dragged a portable blackboard out from the corner of the room, and Aristia and I stood before it.
“Uhehehe, Albert-kuuun. Did you dream of your ultimate original magic last night?”
“I just want a spell that can kill Verdict,” I replied.
“Aww, how unimaginative.”
“I don’t need imagination. I need results.”
“That’s not it at all. It’s about the excitement, the heart-fluttering thrill! You have to fall in love with your magic.”
“I have no idea what you're talking about.”
“Yesterday, I thought and thought and thought about what to do with your Ancient Magic—until I couldn't even sleep. See? Look how dark the circles under my eyes have gotten.”
“They definitely look... darker. I think?” It was hard to tell, considering they were already quite dark to begin with.
“So, can I tell you? Can I tell you about the strongest attack magic I came up with? Can I? Can I?”
Her breathing became strangely heavy, her voice thick with an excitement she could no longer suppress.
She was a being who had mastered the peak of magic and become a Demon King. Perhaps one had to be this far "gone" to reach that height. I wondered if Verdict also huffed and puffed like this whenever the topic of magic came up. The thought was a little nauseating.
“Go ahead,” I said.
“Uhehehe! When you're creating original magic, the most important thing is the theme—the catchphrase. The image is everything! You want to take down Verdict, right?”
“Right. If it can do that, I don't care about anything else.”
I picked up a piece of chalk and wrote ‘Magic to Absolutely Kill Verdict’ across the blackboard.
“No dream! No thrill!” she cried.
“Like I said, I don’t need them.”
“You have to replace it with words that make your heart race!”
“Thinking about killing Verdict makes my heart race just fine.”
“You’re just a berserker.”
Aristia wiped the board clean with a swift motion.
“Listen, Albert-kun. Killing Verdict is the result. You shouldn't think about the result; you should think about the process—how to make it happen. If you can achieve these specific steps, Verdict will die. See? Doesn’t that get you excited?”
“I see.”
It was a fair point. Essentially, she was telling me to break the goal down into manageable parts.
“This is the theme I’ve come up with.”
Aristia began scribbling on the board.
“Well? What do you think?!”
She finished writing and looked at me with sparkling eyes. I stared at the board for a long moment before answering.
“Your handwriting is so messy I can’t read it.”
What even was this? It looked like a cluster of earthworms that had died on hot asphalt in the middle of summer.
“I guess it can't be helped... I’ll read it for you. ‘The Strongest Magic of Destructive Energy, the Opponent Dies.’”
“...That’s certainly simple.”
It was the magical equivalent of hitting an enemy with ten thousand health points with a spell that dealt ten thousand points of unblockable damage.
“Uhehehehe! If your goal is specifically to defeat someone, slamming them with pure, unadulterated energy is the most efficient path!”
She had a point. Converting mana into lightning or constructing funnels disguised as flower petals were flashy and served as effective bluffs, but every bit of mana spent on the aesthetic was mana that wasn't going into the raw power of the strike.
Aristia added a few more notes beneath her theme.
“Since this is still a bit vague, we need to add restrictions. Otherwise, we might accidentally end up with a spell that destroys the entire world, and that’s a bit over my current capacity to build. Since the scale we need is just ‘defeating Verdict,’ let’s limit it to an ‘Anti-Personnel Specialization’ and keep it ‘Super Simple’ to maximize the purity of the power.”
I see.
So, 'The Strongest Magic of Super Simple Destructive Energy Specialized for Anti-Personnel, the Opponent Dies' was to be my original magic. The sheer stupidity of the phrasing bothered me, but if it got the job done, I suppose I could live with it.
“Can this really exceed the power of 'Thunder Emperor's Flash' or 'Tria Petal'?” I asked.
Those were powerful spells created by a genius on par with Aristia. The only reason I couldn't draw out their full potential was because of my own limits as a mere human. If that was the case, I wondered if I could expect any better results from this new spell.
Aristia gave me a cryptic reply.
“...Well, we’re all very selfish people, you see.”
“What?”
“We don’t create things with the intention of others using them. We make them for ourselves. As long as the creator can master it perfectly, that’s all that matters. That’s why no matter who else tries to use a spell, they can never surpass the one who made it. So, Albert-kun, you need to build your own from the ground up. That’s the only way to increase the purity of its power. As for how far you can take it...”
The temperature in her eyes seemed to drop instantly.
“That depends entirely on your talent, doesn't it?”
“...Is this not something that can be overcome with effort and willpower?”
“It isn’t. You should know that by now. Effort and willpower can never bridge the gap of true talent. I never intended to become a Demon King, yet here I am because I was chosen.”
I felt a cold stir in my chest. To have one's talent questioned by an Absolute Being who had reached the very summit of existence... it was a deeply unsettling sensation.
“Uhehehe! It’s okay, don’t look so serious!”
Aristia reached out with the hand that wasn't holding the chalk. She pressed her index and middle fingers against the skin just below my heterochromatic eyes. Her own purple eyes seemed to deepen in hue.
“You possess eyes that house such pure mana. I’m sure you have plenty of talent.”
In that moment, the words of the demon Salicia—the one I’d encountered during the Kingdom Festival—flashed through my mind.
“You are the ultimate catalyst for the manifestation of the Demon King! With a body of such high mana purity, the Demon King can descend with even greater power!”
“Those eyes of yours... they look so delicious.”
Aristia licked her lips and pulled her fingers away.
“Well, shall we get started?”
For the next few days, I was completely absorbed in my research with Aristia. Classes? I ignored them entirely. The theories she was teaching me were lightyears beyond anything covered in the standard curriculum.
It was on an entirely different dimension. To put it in perspective, it felt like a primary school student being suddenly dropped into a high-level university lecture. Even with the excellent mind and years of diligent training I had cultivated since my reincarnation, I found it grueling to keep up.
And yet, she rattled off these concepts as if they were common knowledge. It felt like I was being lectured on magic theory from several centuries in the future. I had heard that the ancient magic civilization was far more advanced than our own; Aristia and her kind were the survivors of that era, and she was an apex genius even among them.
With Aristia doing the heavy lifting, I finally managed to reach the prototype stage of my original magic—the 'Magic to Absolutely Kill Verdict (Provisional).'
“Uhehehe... now we just have to keep testing it to refine the precision.”
I held out both hands, manifesting the spell. For now, it was nothing more than a tiny red spark with its output throttled to the minimum.
But the control... the difficulty was staggering! If I relaxed my focus for even a second, the mana threatened to surge out of control. And that wasn't all. I could feel the resonance of the destructive force lurking within that tiny spark vibrating through my palms. A terrifying amount of power was concentrated right there.
“...Hey, what happens if I mess up the control on this?”
“Hmm? It’ll just explode.”
“Will I die?!”
“Not just you. This entire building will probably go up with it. I imagine quite a few students would die, too.”
She said it with such casual indifference it was jarring.
“Wait, wait, wait! Don’t let me test something like that in a place like this!”
“It’s fine. I won’t die,” she said with a vapid grin. “Besides, it doesn’t really matter if they die, does it? You don't need to worry about things like that when you're pursuing the truth of magic.”
There wasn't a trace of a joke in her expression. She truly, fundamentally, did not care. She was fine with me gambling my life since I’d volunteered, and she didn't care about her own, but the fact that she was perfectly willing to sacrifice the school and its students without a second thought was chilling.
She really was the same as the others.
Just like Shiunin and Verdict, her values were completely alienated from human standards. I had begun to think we were reaching an understanding, but a cold shiver ran down my spine at the realization that we were separated by a fundamental, unbridgeable gap.
“...I’ll think of a safer way to conduct the experiments later,” I said, forcing myself to refocus.
I had to remind myself: don't assume you understand her. Aristia is an unpredictable parameter. She isn't an ally.
She is a Demon King whose interests simply happen to align with mine for now.