The Margrave's 10th-Class Ne'er-do-well Chapter 50 : Chapter 50 — Ultra Long-Range Magic

༺ 𓆩 Chapter 50 — Ultra Long-Range Magic 𓆪 ༻

「Translator — Creator」

᠃ ⚘᠂ ⚘ ˚ ⚘ ᠂ ⚘ ᠃

When Isaac knocked on the central doors of the church, an aged priest opened them with so difficulty.

The thick, towering doors parted only enough to reveal a sliver of his face.

The old priest, when he showed himself, did not seem the least bit pleased to receive callers in the dead of night.

"Co back when day breaks."

"It is the night I fear, Father. I ca seeking peace from the Lord."

So saying, Isaac pressed two silver coins into his palm.

The old priest grew agreeable in an instant.

"The Lord does not turn away those who co seeking. May His peace be with you."

"Thank you, Father."

Isaac and Bill made their way to the chapel and went through the motions of praying together.

"What do you intend to do now?"

Bill kept his voice low.

The priest stood at so distance, hands clasped before him.

So long as he remained there, there was nothing to be done but to kneel quietly in the pretense of prayer.

The one small rcy was that, befitting the largest church in the city, the chapel had pews, and one could pray sitting down.

"Wait."

Isaac's reply was curt.

It crossed Bill's mind that perhaps Isaac had learned so wicked sorcery. Or perhaps Isaac's faith ran so deep that his prayers alone could call down divine retribution upon another.

But he soon shook the thought from his head.

In Bill's reckoning, Isaac was a man who stood about as far from piety as a man could stand.

He had felled Nias in a single blow and tad a colossal hellwolf.

That hellwolf, by any charitable estimation, looked like nothing so much as a watchdog from the pit itself.

If God had set aside a place for Isaac, it surely lay closer to hell than to heaven.

The hours dragged on emptily, and Bill, who had been turning over one useless thought after another, soon began to nod off.

The priest, who had been pacing nearby, must have grown drowsy himself, for he yawned at length and took his leave of the chapel.

Isaac quietly opened his eyes.

He did not bother to wake Bill.

Bill had stretched himself out across the pew and was sleeping in earnest.

The two silver coins, then, had paid for Bill's lodging.

Isaac began to climb the bell tower at a asured pace; the spiral staircase wound upward without seeming end.

As he ascended, the mana at his fingertips drew tight and loosened by turns.

For a knight, it would have been the equivalent of warming up.

It smoothed the flow through stiffened mana circuits and reaffird the elentary stages of magical construction.

Ordinarily Isaac had no need for such preparations, but tonight he judged it well to make them.

Jonas had once said that ninety-nine percent of chess was tactics.

The maxim might not hold true in the world at large, but in the present ga, at least, it had its uses.

For Isaac, who possessed at least a fragntary knowledge of the future, this ga was governed by rules, much like a chessboard. And his condition for victory was the dismantling of those forces seeking to claim Bern's autonomy.

And, further, the channeling of whatever profits they had hoped to seize back to Goethe, in a form steady and lasting.

There were rules, and there was a strategy.

The strategy was to fracture the alliance among them.

To cast in so unforeseen variable that would shake them to their roots.

It would begin with the death of Mayor Baris, the lynchpin of Bern.

Now, what mattered from here on was tactics.

Mayor Baris had to die, but no thread of evidence could lead back to Isaac himself.

He had instructed Carlson to deliver a slip of parchnt bearing his na, but they had to be unable to find any link whatsoever between Mayor Baris's death and Isaac.

Beyond that, Mayor Baris's death had to be inexplicable, and it had to plant in their hearts the dread that they could be cut down at any place and any hour.

That would tether the Marquis's movents, and provide him the opening for his next step.

'For all of which, this magic must succeed.'

The tactic Isaac had chosen was magic.

Not Carlson as an assassin, nor a hired bowman of skill, nor a household cook bought to slip in poison, nor bribed guardsn.

It was the thing he had given the better part of his past life to, the thing that had let him bear an existence shot through with pain.

Magic.

It was a magic he had wished, once he overca his peculiar constitution, to attempt at least once.

He had certainly never imagined he would put it to such a use.

Whoooosh—!!!

A fierce wind ca rushing in as he reached the top of the bell tower.

Three great bells of mingled bronze and copper hung from a tal crossbeam.

Isaac drew back his hood.

What mattered now was not the magic alone. The senses mattered too.

Temperature, humidity, the wind - all of it had to be felt and reckoned and folded into the casting.

Isaac's eyes shone with a yellow light brighter than they had ever shone before.

Without the senses of the King of Wolves, he would not have dared to so much as attempt this tactic.

Mana, glowing pale blue against the night, flowed in unending currents toward Isaac's right hand.

Crrrk!!!

At last an ice crystal took shape at his fingertips.

Crrrk—!!!

Unlike when he had dispatched Nias, this ti Isaac layered cold magic upon it again and again, sheathing the crystal in successive coats of ice.

But the cooling had been pushed too far, and the crystal soon crumbled like flour and scattered on the wind.

"It needs a core."

Murmuring to himself, Isaac glanced about the bell tower.

He swept together the dust and stray bits of straw and flecks of stone that had collected in the corners.

Then he made these the seed and laid the cooling magic over them in succession.

Moisture in the air clung to it as iron to a magnet and froze.

A hard ice crystal, no larger than a small marble, hovered at Isaac's fingertips.

But he did nothing with it just yet.

He simply seated himself upon the railing of the bell tower, from where the lights of the city spread before him at a single glance.

As befit the largest church in Bern, the bell tower was set at a trendous height; the streets below, draped in shadow, looked impossibly distant.

For Isaac, it could not have been a finer perch.

From here, Baris's mansion was in view.

It lay a thousand paces or more in a straight line, but distance posed no difficulty for him.

The senses of the King of Wolves, of a fearso beast, could pierce through to objects far away, regardless of whether light fell on them or not.

Only, to sharpen his sight to such a degree, he had to bend the whole of his concentration upon it.

Isaac kept just enough attention on the ice crystal to hold it in being and poured the rest into his eyes.

Baris's mansion, where a faint light leaked from within, ca into view as sharply as though it stood within arm's reach.

As Bill had said, guardsn were stationed about the place.

In Isaac's field of view alone he counted eight.

There would surely be more on the side he could not see.

The mansion's windows must have been the work of so accomplished glazier, for they were clear and clean.

By their grace, the inside was laid bare.

Baris would not know. He could not have dread that the windows on which he had lavished so much money would prove a hand in his own undoing.

Baris was at his supper.

But servants ca and went constantly, and a middle-aged woman who appeared to be his wife sat squarely between him and Isaac's line of sight.

Ti and again Isaac weighed whether to loose the crystal or not.

The crystal hung in the air, never leaving his hand.

He would have only one chance.

If the tactical effect he sought was to be had, no error could be allowed.

What was more, this was a magic he had not so much as practiced once.

Even in the future Isaac knew, there was no record of a magic struck ho from a distance of more than a thousand paces.

It was a magic that fell outside any existing category.

Ultra long-range magic.

Not rely a matter of magical capability, but a magic that demanded the whole of one's bodily senses to support it.

He had to be careful.

He had to succeed at a magic that did not yet exist, without practice, and without the slightest mistake.

It hardly seed likely that such an opportunity would co to him this night.

"Hooo."

Isaac drew a long breath.

He had pressed his sight too far; his eyes stung and his head throbbed.

He let his focus loosen and took in only the broader shape of Baris's mansion.

Instead, Isaac turned his attention to the workings of the ice crystal.

He laid phase shifts upon the crystal and bent its course this way and that.

He pictured to himself the ideal conditions of a clean strike.

What Isaac wanted was for the crystal to drive precisely into Baris's vital point and end his life. And, further still, to lt within his body and mingle with his blood.

The coroner would only puzzle over the trace of dust and straw he found within the corpse.

How they had co to be there would be no easy thing to determine.

For that, the proper state of the ice crystal had to co first.

It could not be too deeply cooled.

Yet if it was not cooled enough, the crystal would lose its force as it cut through the air on its way.

A balance was needed.

He also had to know how long the crystal would hold once it had left the caster's hand, and how greatly its course would be swayed by the run of the wind.

Isaac kept the crystal moving through the air without pause and watched how it answered.

He did not forget, all the while, to keep his eye on Baris's mansion.

Sunk into a state of perfect absorption, Isaac lost all sense of how the ti was passing.

The only thing that held his interest was this: from the bell tower as the point of departure to Baris's vital point as the point of arrival, to narrow the margin of error to its utmost.

Before he knew it, the day had begun to break in a dim glimr.

The reckoning of errors that Isaac had pursued through the night was not yet perfect, but it was nearing its end.

He had not slept, and the punishnt he had visited upon his mind had left him in a haze.

Holding still through such concentration, his body had gone past the point of feeling.

He felt as though he had been turned into sothing inanimate.

His own body did not seem to belong to him.

It was hardly the condition in which to land a magic over a distance of more than a thousand paces.

But opportunities did not wait upon all things being prepared.

Into the courtyard of Baris's mansion there suddenly erged a man in a gown, walking with a waddling gait.

Isaac sharpened his sight and looked the man over.

The pot-bellied man, who must have found the previous night satisfying, wore a smile upon his face as he settled himself before the tea table set out in the garden.

A servant soon brought tea on a tray.

A teapot and cup were placed upon the table, and the man lifted the cup to take in its fragrance.

It was Baris.

Isaac knew at once that no better chance was likely to co.

Baris would not stir for so while.

The reckoning of errors was not perfect.

His own condition was not perfect.

He might fail.

But it was better than not trying.

There was a fallback, but it was not so effective as this.

"Sssss—hooo—"

As one might in ditation, Isaac drew the breath in long and let it out long.

By the wind that brushed his cheek he gauged the temperature and humidity of the air, and the direction of its flow.

Once more he laid cold magic over the ice crystal.

It might not lt the mont it lodged in flesh, but that was better than its being too soft to deal a fatal wound.

Baris seed lost in reverie, his gaze cast toward the sunrise.

The sky had been dyed pink.

Mana surged powerfully through the six circuits Isaac possessed.

For most magics, a single phase shift along a single circuit was enough to strike a target true.

But now Isaac drew upon four circuits at once, weaving phase shifts in concert.

Shhhk—!!!

Isaac's hair was tossed about.

Not by the wind, but by the recoil of the crystal as it sped away.

In an instant the crystal had passed beyond Isaac's range of control.

Without thinking he clenched his fist tight, sharpened his sight to its keenest pitch, and fixed his eyes upon Baris. A mont, no more, slipped by. By Isaac's reckoning, that was the ti it should have taken for the crystal to reach Baris's head and drive ho.

And yet Baris was still at his ease, cup in hand, savoring the dawn.

In that breath of ti a hundred thoughts passed through Isaac's head.

'Did it miss? What are the chances the man's swordsman caught wind of it? Where did it go? Did it veer entirely off course? What was the cause? The wind? Did I misjudge its strength…?'

Just then, Baris's head twisted to the side and his weight tipped over with it.

The chair he had been sitting in toppled, and his body was flung to the ground.

A startled servant ca running, and the guardsn followed at a run, ringing him about and casting their eyes warily over the surroundings.

Isaac wrung the last of his concentration to take in Baris's state.

Baris's eyes were still wide-staring as his body trembled and shook.

The servant did not know what to do; And soon Baris's convulsions slowly ca to rest. His gaze remained fixed upon nothing. Not the rising sun, nor the sky, nor anything at all. He seed to have lost the power to see anything. The strength left his body and Baris went slack, and then the side of his face, which had been turned away from Isaac's view, ca into sight. The socket of his eye was empty.

Isaac felt every hair on his body rise.

A chill prickled across his skin and ran through his flesh in a sudden wave.

For a mont he thought it was the cold of the dawn air, but it was not.

It was a thrill.

The ultra long-range magic had succeeded.

END σϝ CHAPTER