"So you're saying you want to learn magic from Flamme for a while?"
He had just returned by teleportation magic, and now he was saying he wanted to learn magic from someone else.
The sudden declaration made even Serie ask back in surprise.
"Yes."
"..."
To suddenly turn his attention elsewhere like this.
For Serie, it was the sort of thing that could only feel deeply unpleasant.
The slight twist at the corner of her mouth made it clear, even without words, that she did not view the situation favorably.
As befitted a great mage who had lived through myth, she possessed immense power, but what truly supported that power was her exceptional knowledge.
Serie, so learned in magic that she could be called a living grimoire, asked,
"Are you going to learn some magic even I don't know? If it's that girl, she may have devised something new."
He shook his head at her effort to understand.
"It's magic you know as well."
"I truly can't make sense of this. There is no place where more knowledge of magic is gathered than here."
"The magic that makes a flower field."
"What?"
"I'm going to learn the magic that makes a flower field."
At that utterly unexpected answer, Serie looked dumbfounded, as if she had been struck across the face. Then she covered her face with one hand and laughed.
"Not magic that spews Hellflame, nor magic that hurls Annihilation of Ten Thousand Thunders, but magic that makes a flower field?"
As her hand slid down to her chin, the laughter vanished, and her face returned to its usual blankness.
In a voice that had grown perfectly calm, she said,
"If it's that magic, then there really is no one better suited than Flamme."
Even though she knew that magic and had even learned it herself, Serie admitted she still could not match Flamme in it.
"Go, then."
With those words, she tossed the object in her hand to Ainz.
The thing he caught was the monocle that served as an automatic translator.
"What about your research into magic?"
"I've reached the point where I can read books without it. After reading enough, I started interpreting them automatically."
Her tone said she no longer needed it now that she could read on her own.
It was prickly behavior, but to Ainz it looked like her way of telling him not to worry and cutting off any lingering attachment.
He could tell from experience, having once served as a guildmaster who had to mediate opinions and suppress discontent.
It might be a little odd to say that this understanding came from memories of deliberately yielding equipment he had needed among the items won from raid bosses, but in any case, if it helped, that was enough.
"You can keep it."
"I said I don't need it."
The monocle was a precious item, the only one of its kind, yet Serie trusted him enough that she had been willing to lend it.
A brief contest of wills followed, but in the end, the one who gave in was Ainz.
He stored the monocle in his subspace.
"For humans, learning may feel like eternity, but for us, even at its longest, it's only an instant."
At his brief detour, Serie offered advice as one who had lived far longer.
"We may not change, but what surrounds us does."
His time with Flamme would be short, no more than a brief respite for the sake of study.
"Treasure that moment."
"Yes. I know."
He knew of a guild from which everyone had departed.
He knew better than anyone a world that had writhed in loneliness.
Seeing through his thoughts, Serie said,
"Knowing isn't enough. You need to learn how to give up, Ainz."
"I said I understand."
At his complete lack of seriousness, Serie shook her head.
She had only just begun lamenting that he was still trapped in a human sense of time when Ainz changed the subject.
"More importantly, since when were you able to interpret books on your own?"
"It's been a while. I only use it when I come across a sentence I don't know."
"Until right before I left, you were telling me to come back quickly because you wanted to ask about the meaning of sentences."
"When did I ever..."
Only then did she seem to remember the thoughtless remark she had made, and her mouth fell open.
"I'll come by often. With my magic, reaching this place takes only an instant."
"Don't ever come back."
He listened to those words with ears that did not exist and let them pass.
*
With the light of high-tier teleportation, he returned to Flamme's house.
Inside the house, where all manner of miscellaneous magic formulas had been drawn, Yggdrasil items lay scattered about like odds and ends.
Among the mountain-like piles of Yggdrasil items was Flamme, checking them and assigning them value, aided by the object in her hand.
That was one of the items with built-in appraisal support.
Since there might be things valuable in this world besides healing potions, he had asked her to take a look.
In any case, they were junk items with substitutes or such excessive quantities that they were practically overflowing. If possible, he did not mind selling them off.
"Flamme. I'm back."
"That was quick. Did things go well with your master?"
"I got permission. From now on, I'll be using this place as my base of operations."
"Your master must be awfully strict, so I'm surprised she allowed it. Well, I did think she might."
Flamme marveled at the magic that let him cross vast distances in an instant, so soon after they had been speaking.
"By the way, if that teleportation magic of yours could be put into practical use, it'd be incredibly useful."
"Maybe for short distances, but long-range use would be difficult. You still can't even fly through the sky yet, can you?"
"Magic for flying through the sky, the exclusive domain of demons."
Flamme, having reached for the list of appraised magic tools, picked up an item with Fly built into it.
"Now that you mention it, this winged necklace lets you fly through the sky just by wearing it around your neck."
"What do you think it's worth?"
"It's a shame it can't be mass-produced, but for now it'd be so valuable that it's impossible to put a price on it."
She went on to explain the functions of various other items and roughly how much they might be worth.
Even if he thought an item seemed quite suitable as merchandise—
"This is something you absolutely can't put on the market yet. If it gets released, the Empire's hounds will come after you."
Even if he had thought something was practically useless—
"Infinite water, huh? That could be used in emergencies when there's no water."
In this way, she reassessed the value of Yggdrasil items in all sorts of unexpected ways, according to the standards of this world rather than Yggdrasil's.
"Thank you. Thanks to you, I resolved this easily."
"It's fine. It was fun for me."
"If you want, you may take one thing from here—whatever you like."
At those words, Flamme stiffened.
"What's wrong? Is there nothing here that catches your eye? Hmm... to be honest, that would be understandable. If so, I have other things as well."
"No, what's here is more than enough. I was just surprised you said I could have one."
She stopped his hand as he was about to pull out a divine-class item from his subspace.
"There was something interesting I had my eye on."
Flamme reached into the piled-up heap of items and pulled out something wholly unexpected.
An item made by carving ivory, boring holes through it, and stringing the pieces together with cord.
It was none other than the Goblin General's Horn Whistle.
'So that was mixed in there.'
Its effect was simple enough: it summoned nineteen goblins. But true to the name goblin, it called low-level monsters, so it had been treated as trash.
He had meant to exclude items that summoned or altered races that did not exist in this world. But since it had been on the list of junk items, it must have come out with the rest.
"Are you sure that's enough? It's not a very good item."
"This is enough. My instincts are telling me so. This is definitely an interesting magic tool."
With complete confidence, she hung the horn around her neck.
"Now then, let's go learn magic."
With the horn on her person, she headed for a hill near the house.
"Do you know why my master didn't say anything when I told her I would teach you?"
"You're Serie's disciple. She must have thought that if it was you, it would be fine."
"My master isn't that simple. Well, you're partly right, but that's not the answer."
Walking ahead, Flamme seemed to say with her back alone that she was waiting for his own thoughts, not someone else's.
He decided to meet that expectation.
"I thought that if I learned the magic that makes a flower field from you, I would come to understand it better. That's all."
She nodded.
"Instinct matters. It lets you know for certain whether something can be done or not."
When they reached the center of the hill, she stopped.
"The magic that makes a flower field. Originally, it was magic my parents taught me. It's also what made me come to love magic."
Serie, who encompassed all magic, was surely so exceptional that no one could follow after her.
But when it came to the magic that makes a flower field, Flamme would be superior.
Just as the one who carefully cultivates a single flower sees that flower more deeply than a gardener who waters every flower in the garden.
The weight of her affection was different.
That naturally led to interest, and from interest to observation.
Do you know the fragrance of a flower you have imagined with your eyes closed?
Is the touch of a plucked petal soft?
What kind of butterfly seems as though it would like to rest upon the calyx?
The better one could answer such questions, the easier it became to form the image.
"You said the very first thing you used was magic to lift objects."
"Yes."
"That's hard to call magic. It's closer to mana manipulation than magic."
For Flamme, the magic that makes a flower field was a memory of her parents.
Mana blossomed, and from that point, countless flowers filled the hill.
Like splashing many colors of paint across a white canvas, a flower field bloomed, and petals drifted on the wind.
"The magic that makes a flower field will be your first true magic."
As she stood there, she overlapped with the Serie of that day, the one who had promised to teach a human.
That little girl he had only watched back then had grown this much.
Placing a brush in his hand before a canvas painted in her own colors, she said,
"In this flower field, make your own flower bloom."
And so began the study of a new magic.
Comments (0)
Please log in to leave a comment. Login or Register