Reid, once a renowned archmage of the empire, is now 42 and living in secluded retirement in the remote village of Kazami. His glory days are behind him, and he's treated with mild pity by the village youth. When rumors of an imperial invasion from the east threaten the borderlands, the village girls dismiss his concerns. Witnessing ominous signs, Reid resolves to protect his fragile peace.
The problem is his declined body and magic. He turns to a forbidden art: 'Mana Fusion,' a technique that
The Gray Wizard Rises Again - The homecoming operation that tastes like medicinal herbs—the sky over the ruined city was purple.
The white light slowly faded.
It took several seconds for his vision to return.
Raid was standing on stone paving. The sensation beneath his feet was the first thing to come back. Cold. Hard. But completely different from the soil of the Verdant Dark Forest. The seams between the stones transmitted themselves through the soles of his boots.
Next came the air.
Something filled the back of his nose. The humidity was low. Dry, yet clear. And—thick, somehow. If the atmospheric mana of the Verdant Dark Forest—the essence of magic drifting in the air—had been like a "mist," then what was here was closer to a "liquid." Just breathing it in felt like something was flowing into his body.
Then he looked at the sky.
"...What the hell is this?"
The words left his mouth. He'd tried to suppress his emotions, but a mutter escaped anyway. In forty-two years of life, he had never seen a sky this color.
It was purple.
Not the red-purple of dusk, nor the purple of a coming storm. Deeper. Quieter. If he compared it to a gemstone, it was like layer upon layer of amethyst. Within it, two suns—no, things like suns—hung side by side as if drawn to each other. One large, one small. The direction of the shadows was subtly off.
Two light sources. He'd never seen anything like it anywhere in the Empire.
The stone paving underfoot was covered in moss. Green swelled up from the gaps between the stones, coating the surface thinly but unmistakably. There was a slight give with each step. The softness of vegetation accumulated over long years. How long had it been since human hands tended this place?
It was a ruined city.
As far as he could see, the remains of buildings stretched on. Towers over thirty meters tall stood thrusting upward here and there. Crumbling, but still not fallen. This scale and style—it wasn't Imperial technology. Compared to the architecture of the Imperial capital Velga, the precision of the stonework was different. No visible seams. Wall surfaces that looked like single slabs of rock stretched for dozens of meters.
And there was no sign of anyone, anywhere.
Raid looked at his left arm.
The pale scar—the mark of damage from mana fusion—was faintly warm. The "movement toward filling" that he'd felt in the Verdant Dark Forest and the Ash Corridor was stronger here by a degree. Something was flowing into his body. His dulled mana circuits were responding, slowly but surely.
"...Raid-san. Where is this place?"
Aira's voice came from beside him.
Her reddish-brown long hair swayed in the strange wind. Her sharp green eyes quickly scanned the panorama of the ruined city. She hadn't drawn her sword, but her right hand was near the hilt. A knight's body did that naturally. Her polite tone hadn't broken, but beneath it was confusion she couldn't fully hide.
"I don't know."
"You don't know?"
"I've never seen it. It's not the Empire's Eastern Cluster territories, and it's not the Great Demon Realm, the Ash-Lid Abyss. That sky color and those two light sources—nothing like that was in the Lampmark Institute's textbooks."
Aira looked up at the sky. The purple canopy. The two suns. After confirming the sight, she pressed her lips slightly together.
"The transfer device flew an unexpected distance."
"That's what it comes down to."
There was no means of return.
That fact settled quietly between them. Like a pebble dropped onto the stone paving, it sank without a sound.
"Um..."
Lilia's voice came from behind.
When he turned, the silver-haired girl with the short bob was crouched on the stone paving. The same enormous load as always—a bundle of specimens, dried herbs, a few pebbles—was tucked against her chest. Despite the shock of the transfer, she hadn't dropped a single one. Before Raid could process his amazement at that, Lilia spoke.
"I'm hungry."
There was a beat of silence.
"...You're saying that now?"
"Obviously. Even with two suns, you still get hungry."
Raid thought for a moment, then nodded. "Me too."
Aira made a face that said "What?". On her brisk, composed features, a flicker of bewilderment—where is this going?—mixed in for just a moment. But reality didn't move. Her own stomach, if she traced her memory, hadn't had anything in quite a while.
"...I suppose I am, somewhat."
The word "somewhat" was scrupulously honest.
Lilia immediately began rummaging through her pack. She pulled out a bundle of dried herbs, and a pungent, grassy smell spread. They were the kind gathered around Kazemi Village, famous for its herb collecting, and they were supposed to have restorative properties—but whether one recognized them as food was another matter.
"Here."
Lilia held the bundle out to the two of them.
Aira raised an eyebrow for an instant. Looked at the bundle. Looked at Lilia's face. Looked at the bundle again. "...Thank you for this." she said, and accepted it with perfect propriety.
The sight was so funny that Raid felt the corner of his mouth twitch. There was no need to wrap it in self-deprecating humor. It was just funny. Three people crouching on the stone paving of a ruined city, chewing dried herbs while starting a strategy meeting on how to get home—as a picture, it was something else.
"H-how is it?"
"Bitter."
"Right? But it's good for you."
Aira took a bite. Her expression shifted subtly. A clean bitterness spread between her teeth. "Do you... always carry these?" she asked, her voice maintaining its courtesy. No matter how chaotic the situation, her polite speech didn't break.
"I do. They're nutritious, and light."
"...I see."
There was no prospect of return. Calva and Golt—neither knew where the transfer had taken them. They had weapons. The only thing that could be called food was dried herbs. The gap between the gravity of the situation and the current tableau created an indescribable atmosphere.
"First, we explore."
Raid stood. Chewing on dried herbs, he surveyed the depths of the ruined city. "We check whether there's an exit. We get a sense of this city's scale. We look for anything usable. Then we talk again."
Aira rose smoothly. She tucked the herbs into her breast pocket and placed her hand on her sword hilt. "Understood."
Lilia stood too, picking up a pebble and adding it to her pack.
***
The ruined city was vast.
The stone-paved road toward the center stretched straight, half-covered in moss. Ruined buildings lined both sides. Only window frames remained; all the glass was gone. Carvings were visible on the walls here and there. Geometric patterns and something like writing were intermingled. It wasn't Imperial script. It wasn't demon script either. Something older—truly old, something else entirely.
"The stonework here is amazing."
Lilia approached a wall and traced its surface with her fingertip. The seams between the stones were almost invisible. "Imperial stonework is, you know, rougher than this, right? Like the stone huts in Kazemi Village. But this is kind of... like it was melted and hardened."
"If it was shaped with magic, that would explain it. Considering the scale, it exceeds the technical level of the Empire's Lampmark Institute."
"How old is it?"
"The oldest records in Imperial history go back four hundred years. My assessment is that this is even older."
Lilia looked impressed. Tracing the stone surface with her finger, she seemed to be rolling something around in her mouth. A quiet motion, as if confirming syllables.
Aira was checking the entrance to a half-collapsed corridor. Her sharp green eyes looked up at the ceiling, assessing the stability of the stone. She tapped the wall with the back of her fist, checking for hollow spaces. A habit ingrained from training with the knight order.
"We can pass. There's a risk of ceiling collapse, but if we walk along the edge, it should be fine."
"Let's go."
The three entered the corridor.
It was darker than outside, but the stone itself emitted a faint light. A quiet, phosphorescent glow. The same type of luminescence as the Ash Corridor, but the color was slightly different. If that one had been bluish-white, this one had a pale green tinge.
The footing was bad.
Parts of the stone paving had caved in, making it uneven. Aira, walking along the edge, checked her footing with each step. Raid walked a little behind her. His eyes naturally followed her feet. He wasn't especially conscious of it. Watching the footing of the person walking in front was a habit from marching in mountainous terrain.
On the next step, Aira's right foot caught in a gap in the stone paving.
Less than a second before her balance broke.
Raid's hand moved on reflex.
He grabbed Aira's left arm.
The force he used to pull her was minimal. Just enough to stop her falling momentum. But in the narrow corridor, with its cramped stone paving, the distance between them closed in an instant. Through the armor, her body heat transmitted. The hardness of Aira's arm, and the unmistakable human warmth between cloth and metal.
"...Ah, forgive me."
Aira quickly righted herself. Raid let go. The original distance returned between them.
But something small remained inside Aira.
Deep in her chest, on the right side. Not hot or cold, just a sense of "being there." Her heartbeat marked a single beat in a rhythm different from usual. Something personal, something that couldn't be classified as a mission-related check, was mixed in.
(What was that just now?)
Aira faced forward. She fixed her gaze on the far end of the corridor. See what a knight should see. Emotional processing could wait. Right now, it was exploration. But her fingertips still remembered the outline of the body heat she'd felt through the cloth.
Raid said nothing. He glanced once at Aira's profile beside him, then faced forward again. Nothing showed on his face. Forty-two years of composure kept his expression neatly arranged.
Lilia watched the two backs from behind. She said nothing.
***
When they emerged from the corridor, they came out into an open plaza.
It was the center of the ruined city. A circular plaza about fifty meters in diameter. At its center, carved into the stone paving, was an intricate magic circle.
Raid stopped.
Magic circles—geometric patterns for deploying spell formulas through the body's mana circuits—were something even the Empire's Lampmark Institute handled. But this was on a different scale. Within a circle over ten meters in diameter, dozens of concentric rings and radial lines were carved, and at each intersection, fine characters—or something like them—were inscribed. The precision of the carving, cut directly into the stone, was an accuracy that ordinary engraving could never achieve.
"This is..."
Aira's words cut off beside him. In the Imperial knight order's training, she had learned the basics of magic circles. But this scale and intricacy lay outside that knowledge.
Then his left arm grew hot.
Raid looked at it. The pale scar was faintly glowing, the same color as the patterns carved at the center of the magic circle. From deep within his mana circuits, a sensation like resonance. The "sensation of filling" he'd felt in the Verdant Dark Forest grew stronger by a degree here. Circuits that for three years had only moved in the direction of depletion were now unmistakably moving in the direction of "filling."
Lilia approached the edge of the magic circle. She crouched and stared at the characters on the stone paving.
"Oh."
"What is it?"
"I... can read this."
Aira turned her face toward her. "The same as in the Ash Corridor?"
"Yes. It's like, when I look at it with my eyes, sounds just come out—oh, this is the script from around here. I'll keep reading."
Lilia began tracing the characters with her fingertip. Syllables strung together. A language with angular sounds, neither Imperial nor demon tongue. The surface of the stone paving changed its light faintly in response to Lilia's voice.
Raid listened in silence. The glow of his left arm synchronized with Lilia's voice, g
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