kscans

Chapter 139 - Chapter 9: Latter Half, Countering the Circuits

"Alright, I'll share what we've learned from the prisoners. We found out a few things from the captured horse-dragon unit."

Prince Craig began, his mood seemingly unaffected.

"First, about the horse-dragons. They seem to be quite difficult creatures."

Apparently, the captured horse-dragons thrashed violently when they tried to confine them in a small space. Without a rider to control them, they were incredibly hard to handle. The consensus was that getting them across the great river to Kurtheite would be difficult.

"We also learned a fair amount about the Empire's political situation, but we can set that aside for now. What's important is the matter of magic I mentioned earlier. We found something interesting in the horse-dragon unit's baggage."

Craig took a crystal from his pocket and placed it on the desk. I tilted my head. While I wouldn't say it was a familiar sight, it looked like an ordinary magic crystal. Fulsy and Noel, however, looked shocked.

"Well now, this is quite..."

"Is it different from a normal one?"

I looked at it again. It was a transparent crystal that glowed red. Its size seemed normal. I couldn't see anything particularly unusual about it.

"You can't tell? Right, of course you can't. You really just don't get it, do you."

Noel sounded exasperated with me. Her words made even less sense.

"The strength of the magic it contains is vastly different from an ordinary magic crystal," Fulsy explained.

Now that he mentioned it, the red did seem a little deeper.

"This crystal seems to be a special item, even in the Empire. Most of what the horse-dragon unit carried were ordinary ones. It appears they used this to operate that battering ram."

"I see. There were legends that powerful magic crystals exist deep within magic veins. The Empire must be able to reach those depths with their Sorcery."

"And they were stockpiling them instead of exporting them to the Kingdom," Craig added.

It was only natural, when you thought about it. No country would hand over its best military supplies to a nation it planned to invade.

"You managed to get some surprisingly detailed information."

"Yes, well, we had to cut off a few arms."

"Ugh."

It wasn't just me. Everyone's expression turned grim. I knew things like that happened in war, but hearing it from this cheerful prince gave it a certain impact.

"Don't misunderstand. I'm talking about the tattoos on the prisoners' arms, the ones connected to the reins. Some of them were suffering terribly from a swelling that was spreading from there."

Craig smiled wryly.

"So there is a price to pay for engraving magic circuits onto a human body."

Fulsy nodded. So it's like a rejection response.

"It isn't so bad when they aren't using them, but they seem to require medicine periodically. The time between doses varies quite a bit from person to person."

"I'd be very interested to learn about the pigment used in those tattoos," I said. Of course, it was related to what we were working on now, but I was curious about the side effects of channeling magic.

"Perhaps I should have brought the severed arms. ...I'm joking. The prisoners have been transferred to the Royal Capital. If you speak with the Chancellor, he should be able to make some accommodations. The truth is, there's been movement in the west. It seems Dagobard's replacement has arrived, along with a small number of horse-dragon reinforcements. Thanks to that, enemy activity has started to pick up."

"I see. They won't fall for the pollen trap so easily anymore, I imagine."

"It's easier now that the enemy is on guard. Still, that speed of theirs is a real problem. I'm glad we managed to establish a system to monitor Kazel from three directions, in coordination with the forts in the defensive line that weren't taken in the initial surprise attack."

I thought we had dealt with the main force in the west, but of course the Empire wouldn't just leave things as they were. The situation, with the Royal Capital being pressured from both east and west, hadn't changed.

"So, the hero prince can't leave the west."

"That's right. And naturally, there will be movement in the east as well. Which is why I'd like to place my hopes on the true hero."

I wanted to ask who in the world he was talking about. What a ridiculous overestimation. Noel and Fulsy's reactions when they saw through my self-preservation instincts earlier made it clear. If I were back in my original world, I'd be nothing more than a simple graduate student. If Fulsy had been born on Earth, he'd be a university professor at the very least. Mia goes without saying. If Noel had been my classmate at university, I probably would have looked up to her in admiration. As for Craig, it wouldn't be surprising if he had started a venture capital firm.

In the first place, it was the absolute truth that I was clueless about magic. Take that crystal just now. I had no idea what it even meant for magic to be "strong." With light, for example, there are two kinds of strength. If you think of light as particles, its intensity is determined by both the number of particles and the energy each particle possesses. The latter is what our eyes perceive as color. They could probably see it.

"I'm no hero, so I have two questions. First, about the battering ram. The surface, the metal part, is made of Sorcery Gold, right? They carved grooves into it and poured a different metal into those grooves to block the magic, creating circuits or paths for the magic to follow. Is that correct, Noel?"

"Yes, that's right."

"The grooves don't go all the way through the Sorcery Gold, do they? So wouldn't the magic just flow underneath the grooves?"

"...Magic travels along the surface. To be more precise, it flows along the surface's pattern. When you work with Sorcery Gold in alchemy, you need air holes, remember?"

Noel looked at me as if this was common knowledge. Come to think of it, I had wondered why we needed air holes when we were making the die for the bearings. Were they not for air, but to allow magic to flow into the interior?

"With the Sorcery Gold weapons the knight order uses, the magic takes effect on the surface. You need some thickness for it to flow in an orderly fashion, so you can't just plate it."

I get it. If the cross-section of a groove is U-shaped, the magic follows the surface and flows along the inner walls. Air isn't a perfect insulator. That's why they fill the indented parts with a metal that doesn't conduct magic well. I see...

"Um, the knights riding the horse-dragons were covering that pattern with their reins, weren't they?"

"This must be it. You can see the pattern on it corresponds to the reins."

The surface patterns match. That's consistent. I don't understand the principle at all, but maybe an interface is required. In this case, the boundary between air and metal. Air is physically sparse. Perhaps a vacuum, unoccupied by other matter, is what's needed. For example, what would happen if you tried to channel magic while increasing the air pressure?

Once again, I'd run into a difference between the circuits I knew and the ones here. But separate from that, I had an idea. You could call it a ray of hope for countering Sorcery.

"What happens if it gets rained on?"

The match cord of a matchlock rifle came to mind.

"It would have a slight effect. But a user could compensate for that with their control."

Magic circuits, just like magic circles, have not only geometric patterns but also characters written on them. That's how they process information. They must be like complex gates.

"My other question is related to that. In using a magic circuit, that is, to activate its effect, what is a human's role?"

"That's so basic I'm not sure how to answer. Magic won't flow through a 'magic circuit' just by connecting a magic crystal to it. Furthermore, even if you just let it flow, the magic circuit won't activate its effect."

"In that case, relying on just one method won't be enough."

Let's say a magic crystal is a battery and a magic circuit is an electric circuit. In an electric circuit, if you connect a battery, a current will at least try to flow through the wires. But a magic circuit is useless without a magician or sorcerer, someone who can handle magic. Does that mean a user is needed to apply something like a voltage? Furthermore, it seems the user consciously operates the gates of the magic circuit. I can't imagine how they do it remotely, but I'll set that aside.

The former property of magic is interesting, but for our purposes, the latter is more important.

Although there are major differences from what I know, there's no doubt that a magic seal is a circuit. A circuit is essentially a combination of places where something flows and places where it doesn't. It's information processing using gates to control that flow. Whether the thing flowing is water, electricity, or magic, that fundamental principle doesn't change.

It would be terribly inefficient, but you can build a computer circuit using waterways and floodgates.

To generalize even further, if you think of money flowing between people, the economy itself is a circuit. To take it to an extreme, even this meeting we're having right now is a circuit of words, or information, flowing between people. A company's financial statements and a meeting's conclusions are basically the results of calculations performed by a network.

I glanced over at Mia. The magic circuit patterns she mentioned earlier are a part of mathematics that describes the behavior of networks, called graph theory.

Fulsy should be lamenting Mia's lack of aptitude for magic, not my inability to use it.

"Senior?"

"Ah, sorry, it's nothing."

I got sidetracked. What I need right now is something much simpler. A circuit has the properties of a circuit. As long as it is a circuit, it cannot escape them, no matter what is flowing through it. I shouldn't think about how to deal with Sorcery, but how to deal with the circuit. In other words...

"If we can do something about the enemy's exposed magic circuits, we can stop their Sorcery."

This is all assuming the purification of the magic-inhibiting substance we're working on below is successful.

"Ho. I had assumed you were going to use the mass-produced IG-1 on shields, but it seems I was wrong."

Fulsy grunted in approval.

"What's IG-1?" Craig asked.

"It is a magic-inhibiting substance being created based on this one's idea," Fulsy explained. Hey, don't go hyping it up as vastly more powerful and cheaper to produce than conventional ones before we've even finished purifying it.

"...So that's what you meant by finding a countermeasure to Sorcery itself in the Red Forest. Ricardo, you never cease to do the unimaginable... But wait."

Craig fell into thought.

"You say 'exposed,' but their attacks have a longer range than our bows, and they're more accurate. How would you get to them?"

"Exactly. That is the very challenge we must overcome."

As always, Craig's point was the most critical one from an operational standpoint. From what we saw of Kurtheite's fall, the enemy's offensive magic has a longer and more accurate range than arrows fired from atop castle walls. That is their great advantage.

If we have bows and they have matchlock rifles, I'm proposing something like shooting the rifle's match cord with an arrow. If you could do that, it would mean bows are stronger than guns in the first place, and you could win a normal fight.

But...

"Prince Craig. There is one weapon I need you to prepare. Also, I would hope for humane treatment of the prisoners."

If the work downstairs succeeds, there's only one condition left to clear. The prisoners are going to have to be my test subjects.