Arc 2 - Chapter 10: Wizarding Academy (1/3)

Opposite them stood two gigantic towers, each twice as tall as the Sigma Tower.

They were built south of Rolderhelm, on either end of the islands of Easthelm and Southelm. The Wizarding Academy was a structure beyond his imagination.

But what really astonished Yu was not the towers; what astonished him was the bridge that connected the two towers, or better to say, the two islands.

"They should not have been able to build this bridge."

"What nonsense you're talking about?"

Yurine was angry after what happened last night. Even though Yu had thought about his decision until dawn, he knew what he had done was right. He had only seen Yurine's battle power a few times and never had any data on her full strength.

Maybe Yurine could defeat whatever was out there, it would have been a piece of cake for her, if Yu knew the opponent and Yurine's strength. Knowing nothing, Yu had refrained from jumping into the middle of danger and dying for nothing.

Others might argue that what Yu called nothing was human life, and Yu knew that, but he still felt that their life was not worth more than his or Yurine's.

He could only speculate about what had happened to the people in the forest that night, and it was certain that nothing good had happened to them either way. How was it possible for Yu to stand up to a monster if even the people of this world couldn't?

It was even possible that the people he had heard that night were much more powerful than Yurine. If that was the case, then by deciding to help them, he would be leading both himself and Yurine to death.

Maybe there were no people in the forest and the voices they heard were a trap set by an evil being. Whichever of the scenarios he imagined came true, Yu was glad he didn't go there.

In the morning he told the villagers about the noises they had heard during the night, and they immediately organized a search party and went into the forest. Yu and Yurine had breakfast and left without waiting for the villagers to return, but Yu was going to ask the villagers what they had found when they got back.

"The bridge, I can't believe such a bridge was built in this era."

The academy consisted of two buildings, one at each end of the islands of Southelm and Easthelm. The distance between the two islands was almost as far as the Bosphorus. The bridge was as long as the bridge in Istanbul, even though it was supported by a small islet in the middle.

What made things even more interesting was that it was not a suspension bridge. Even in his time, it would have been impossible to build an arch bridge this long.

"I can't imagine how it was built."

"It's been here for so many years, the gods helped build it."

"That makes the perfect sense."

Being in a fantasy world, he had to get used to the fact that most things were explained by magic or by the gods. These were often simple but satisfying explanations.

They walked a little from Urta towards the Wizarding Academy and turned onto a marble road that stretched for a kilometer.

At the end of the road was the Easthelm Tower of the Wizarding Academy. The tower grew larger as they approached, ivory colored, with smooth walls and every window covered in glass.

As Yu got closer, he began to wonder how accurate it was to call it a tower, it could have been compared to an oversized apartment building.

The windows were so big that when Yu got a little closer he could see what was happening on the first floors. A strange man was waving a stick and explaining something, a few students were walking up the stairs and a floor above them were walking down the stairs.

When Yu took his eyes off the stairs and looked down, he saw two swordswomen, or rather two knights, greeting them at the entrance to the academy.

"Neko, it's you, isn't it?" One of the knights was sitting upside down on the chair she had pulled under her. The one talking to Yurine was standing.

Their blue cloaks were fastened to their white armor with silver buckles. They wore helmets like those used in ancient Greece, and their helmets were topped with feathers the same blue as their cloaks. The swords hanging from their waists had gold hilts.

Yurine nodded, they recognized her. They turned their heads away from Yurine and looked at Yu, the man they did not recognize.

"Hello there," Yu said with a slight smile and thought, "You can look as long as you like, I like to take a long look at myself too." He liked to feel the gaze of two women on him.

"Who are you?" the standing knight asked.

"Yu Valarfin."

"He is my friend." Yurine immediately intervened. "Open the door and let us in."

"Oh my God, are you starting to think of me as a friend? Our relationship is moving so fast, it will soon reach the point where it needs to be."

"Shut up."

He imagined himself with Yurine calling him father. That would certainly be a happy day.

"Where are Madam and Mr. Bishory?"

By Madam, she must have meant Rie, and by Bishory she meant Sharley, Rie's apprentice. At that moment both Yu and Yurine realized something, they had never thought about what had happened to Sharley.

After they had left him under the Sigma Tower, they hadn't had a chance to go back for him. Sharley was under the building, not inside it. "Smoke comes down from the tower into the tunnel? I never thought of that." The smoke from the tower could have gone down into the tunnel where they had left Sharley and suffocated him to death. And since there was no combustible material in the tunnel, he wouldn't have burned to death.

But if he woke up and went into the tower and the fire blocked his path, there was a possibility that he could have burned to death, and another possibility was that he woke up and came out of the tunnel by another route. If so, he would be alive. But if he was alive, why hadn't he returned to the Wizarding Academy? Was he looking for Rie and Yurine in capital?

"What happens if we meet him? Would he help us? Or will he see me as a criminal and attack me?" In some of the cliché anime he watched, there were unnecessary side characters who were on the good side at first and then attacked the main character with a ridiculous plot. "If he's alive and he tries to take Yurine away from me..." He knew Yurine better than Yu, had spent more time with her and was her mother's apprentice.

And he could believe in Yurine's dream more than Yu could, and really work for her.

"Fuck..." Giving Yurine to someone else meant he would be alone. "Would I really be alone? Like I could make a life here... But..." He looked at Yurine. She had long white hair, two cat ears on the top of her head and big red eyes. He had spent less than a month with this arrogant little girl, but it was more than enough for him to love her.

"My mom..."

Yu didn't let Yurine continue.

"Rie and Sharley will join us in a few hours. They're in Urta right now. They had to deal with a monster situation."

"Why did you come separately?"

"Aren't these personal matters that only concern us? If you are curious about me, we can talk privately."

The knight looked Yu up and down. If it wasn't for Yurine at his side, they would probably have kicked him out of here because his eyes were restless.

"Neko and Yu Valarfin. Wait for me, I will ask the headmaster."

The knight entered the academy and Yu, Yurine and the knight sitting in her chair were left alone outside. Yu looked up to see several people staring at him from the balconies of the tower.

"It's no surprise that most of them are girls, but why are those boys staring at me?"

"Why are-" Yurine spoke without lowering her voice.

"What happened?" Yu's gaze was enough to silence Yurine.

He wondered how Salery would act when he heard that Rie was alive and how he would react when he told him that Rie was actually dead. Even though he hadn't seen Salery's face yet, he was his first suspect and he wanted to take the chance to play a little game like this.

The knight in the chair had been staring at Yu for two minutes. Yu said, "I know I have a handsome face, you can look at me all you want. I also take a long look at myself on mirror." After she kept looking at him he felt he need to continue. "Well... I know I said you can look as long as you want, but I feel like you're undressing me with your eyes..." He scratched his cheek with one finger, averting his eyes and pretending to be a shy girl. If Yu was a girl and the knight was a boy, his coquettish looks might seduce her.

The knight kept looking at Yu and after fifteen minutes Yu was bored to tears. Standing still for a few minutes made him more tired than walking for half an hour. He locked his eyes on the knight watching him and started a staring contest of his own.

Their contest lasted exactly twenty minutes. For twenty minutes Yu and the knight exchanged glances, neither looking away for a moment. The victor had not yet been decided when the knight who had left them half an hour earlier returned.

"The headmaster is waiting for you."

"You traveled too fast, I wish you had walked a little slower, you are out of breath."

"I will accompany you, Headmaster Salery's room is in the West Tower." The knight started walking again, ignoring Yu's sarcastic words. Accompanied by him, they entered the building.

"Headmaster Salery. That means he has more opportunities at his disposal."

The inside of the building was no different from a school. It was simple and there were boards and paintings on the walls, glass cabinets with glass doors containing the prizes.

"How many different competitions can you organize in a small country and win so many prizes?"

A few students were sprawled out on the couches, a few were looking at their books, a few were chatting and a few were looking at the fish in a big aquarium.

The male students didn't pay much attention to Yu, but he could see the girls looking at him. When he realized this, he started to give a nice smile to his audience.

The knight said that the headmaster's office was in the west tower. So that meant they would have to go up a few flights of stairs, enter the bridge and then go to Southelm.

As they made their way to the stairs, the door of a classroom that had just finished a lesson opened and students started to come out with a slight noise.

"Isn't that Neko?" The boy Yu didn't know seemed to be the sassy type, the kind of guy who would do anything to get favor with girls. "Hey, did you forget about us?"

The boy waved at Yurine, trying to get her to notice him. Yurine didn't even turn her head, she approached Yu and kept walking.

"I don't like meeting acquaintances on the road either," Yu said. He grabbed the approaching Yurine by the shoulder and pulled her a little closer to him. "In fact, if I notice someone in the distance, I even change my path to avoid saying hello."

It was fine for him to see acquaintances if they just raised their hands towards each other and said hello and hello and then went their separate ways, but when the other person had something to say, Yu was going crazy.

He was the kind of person who was determined to reach his goal. He wouldn't deviate from his path unless he had to, he wouldn't slow down, and he would grumble his way through people walking slowly on the sidewalk. Someone would stop him, making him feel obliged to say hello, and he would have to talk to them.

He didn't like the people he was supposedly friends with very much either, so he didn't like had to have a conversation with someone he didn't care about something he didn't care. But he cared too much about the impression he made in people's eyes, so he couldn't cut them off, he had to keep the conversation going to avoid embarrassment.

He would forget what they were talking about as soon as the conversation was over and move on, having lost a few minutes.

"Those snippy whoresons, I tell them I don't want to talk to them, I don't like them and to leave me alone, but the stupid whoresons keep picking on me, saying 'how cute'." Yurine was really angry, her problem was a problem that many children have.

"Wow, motherfuckers, I don't like them at all. I would beat them up for you if they weren't mages who could turn me into pulp in an instant." He hated humans too, he would beat them if he could. "But I don't want to hear you swear like that."

Putting Yurine's choice of words aside, he couldn't deny that she was right. As Yurine had said, some snotty sons of bitches insisted on doing the same thing even when the other person said they didn't want to.

"So far I've been taking it easy for my mom's sake, but if they mess with me again, I'll kick their ass and fuck their all future even their little child-"

"I see, you've got a bad mouth on you today."

When they went up five floors inside the building, they saw that the floor was entirely dedicated to bridge traffic. There were a lot of doors and all the doors led to the bridge.

The bridge was as wide as a highway and about two kilometers long, so transportation was by horse-drawn carriages.

"Yurine, when we get there, let me do the talking." He was afraid that if he let Yurine do the talking he would scare Salery.

Looking at the floor plans on the walls, she saw that the East Tower in Easthelm was mostly classrooms. The West Tower, apart from the classrooms, was mainly reserved for administration, the library, laboratories and dormitories.

"The headmaster's office is on the top floor, keep following me."

Hearing the word headmaster again, Yu thought back to his high school years. In high school, nobody liked the principal of his school and they made fun of him behind his back. In those days, he heard a joke from his friend.

"Headmaster is a principal right?" He asked but nobody answered. "One day all the organs in the human body gathered to choose a principal. The brain spoke first, saying 'without me you are all useless, I should be the principal.' The heart rejected, saying 'without me you would all die and that is why I deserved to be the principal.' All the organs spoke their opinions in turn, but not the give a chance to speak to ass. The ass got angry that no one asked for his opinion, so he closed all the doors and didn't shit for three days. After three days, the organs realized that there was no way out, it was a shithole inside, so they reluctantly made the asshole the principal. Since that day, all assholes are principals and all principals are assholes."

"Pffh..." Yurine was about to laugh at the joke for a moment, but she restrained herself because she didn't want to laugh at something Yu told her.

The knight kept silent and kept walking.

Yu knew a good principal, but exceptions were the rule. Salery was a possible asshole.