...It’s morning.
Wake up.
The celestial bodies orbiting the star continued faithfully along their courses, just as they always had. Today, too, the distant sky was said to have brightened. With two suns rising side by side like a harmonious pair of siblings, perhaps the upper world never knew loneliness.
But where I live, seeing them is not so easy.
I have to get to work.
Even at this very moment, countless citizens are desperately waiting for the assistance of our First Archmage.
From now on, I’ll turn my attention to the sea and personally inspect the surrounding environment. I’m ready to carry out my duties according to the instructions of my sole direct superior...
Or rather, I had intended to begin immediately.
Just as I was about to depart for the sea area assigned to me, something suddenly caught my eye.
[Wait a minute.]
The day before yesterday, my superior had been male.
Yesterday, female.
And today, they had suddenly appeared in a form whose sex I could not even identify.
Naturally, I was curious.
[What exactly is that form?]
I asked.
[You said the intervals between your transformations have been getting shorter. But now you’ve taken on a body where I don’t even know which pronoun I’m supposed to use for you anymore.]
“Hahaha.”
[At this point, I can’t even tell what your original form was. Is there some particular reason you change your gender so often?]
My superior answered.
“Reason? The reason is understanding.”
There was nothing quite like firsthand experience when it came to learning something vividly.
Male bodies.
Female bodies.
And even the rare intersex or hermaphroditic Alphaurans born through abnormalities of the sex chromosomes.
After personally experiencing every type of body that existed among their species, the superior had reached a conclusion.
Bodies designed primarily for reproduction, equipped with reproductive organs and driven by breeding instincts, were undeniably inferior.
At the very least, they were poorly suited to the world of the present day.
“So.”
“What you’re looking at now is the asexual prototype I developed recently. Once I finish making the final improvements, I plan to reproduce it and distribute it among my acquaintances immediately.”
Well.
That was the situation, apparently.
It seemed like a pointless undertaking in more ways than one, but eccentric behavior from that superior was hardly anything new.
It had been going on for a very long time.
“Now that your curiosity has been satisfied, could you go to work?”
After our conversation ended and some time passed, my senses became filled with the vast ocean.
The familiar, beautiful scenery of the planet stretched before me, enormous satellites drifting far overhead.
***
“Let’s see.”
Now that I actually looked at the list, there were quite a few tasks to deal with.
[Which one should I start with if I want to make a good impression?]
I pretended to consider it for a moment before deciding simply to handle everything as usual.
[As expected, the safest thing is to do them in the order I was given.]
***
• Guidance and punishment of criminals
The first assignment was to destroy a certain research facility hidden across the abyssal plain.
[Hmm~]
Judging by the information supplied by my superior, the research institute in question had been reproducing the so-called “bone experiment” from the distant past.
The “bone experiments.”
They had once been carried out by the organization known as the Magic Tower.
As far as I knew, the project had quickly been abandoned during the Middle Era because there had been very few genuine mages at the time.
Under those circumstances, the experiments had rarely produced worthwhile results.
[Is there really any reason to revive such an ancient relic of an experiment?]
In recent years, many useful magical creatures had gone extinct within Alphauri’s ecosystem.
Consequently, the price of various materials used in magocraft had risen dramatically.
Apparently, even these mediocre sorcerers had eventually turned to forbidden experimentation for that very reason.
Perhaps things had simply become too difficult for them.
“Ugh!”
Bam!
“Damn it, we’ve been found!”
“Grab the data and run!”
“We layered this place with so much cognitive distortion! How the hell did anyone discover us...?!”
Whatever their reasons might have been, actions like these still had to be punished.
In our world, experimentation on intelligent beings without their consent was strictly forbidden by law.
And yet the researchers hiding here had gone so far as to imitate the darkest practices of that historical militant organization known as the Magic Tower.
They had acquired their experimental subjects through kidnapping.
Wasn’t it about time they paid the price?
[This place is far too well constructed to simply tear apart.]
Alphauri had long possessed an abundance of naturally luminescent materials.
And with recent advances in technology, many new spells had been developed to stabilize their glow.
As a result, it had become fashionable to construct brilliant white buildings almost entirely from luminous substances.
The laboratory I had raided was no exception.
Its interior had been designed in precisely that modern style.
[Everyone, stay exactly where you are. If you don’t resist, I promise I’ll spare your lives.]
“Aaagh! You monster bastard!”
“Ugh.”
“No! That thing has already twisted the mana flow around us completely. Even teleportation is—”
“I’d rather die than be captured!”
But after learning what crimes had been committed here, I could no longer find the sleek hallways impressive.
After subduing every criminal who resisted, I searched the interior of the research facility according to my superior’s instructions and secured additional evidence.
[So this is why the assignment was classified as authorized for immediate execution.]
The “bone experiments” being performed in this laboratory were far more grotesque than I had expected.
Long ago, when the Magic Tower first devised the experiment, its researchers had wondered what material would produce the best results when used to draw magic circles.
By fortunate coincidence, they had soon discovered that the body of an exceptionally intelligent magical creature—
In other words, the bones of a mage—
served as an excellent catalyst.
Orphans.
Wanderers with no home.
The homeless.
And others like them.
Unable to kill genuine mages freely, the old Tower had preyed upon vulnerable people who merely possessed magic within their bodies and harvested their bones.
But in the modern era, that cruel experiment had evolved.
Only in a far more sinister direction.
[This technology was never meant to be used like this.]
Nowadays, fast-acting regenerative medicine was widely available.
This was completely different from the old days, when reattaching a severed limb could take hours.
The researchers here appeared to have impaled entire mages inside tanks filled with water mixed with powerful regenerative agents, repeatedly harvesting the bones that grew back.
With that method, I suppose they never had to worry about obtaining catalysts for magic circles, even in an age of soaring material prices.
Honestly.
To construct a crude factory for producing bone chalk purely for economic reasons...
[Hmm.]
I turned my head.
Throughout the laboratory stood tanks of various sizes.
Inside them were imprisoned mages belonging to every kind of living species.
The weakened Alphaurans lay motionless on their backs, bellies turned upward like dead sharks.
Thump!
Thump, thump!
There was no response even when I tapped my tentacles against the tanks.
[Did they use sedatives as well?]
At this rate, the victims would probably suffer severe aftereffects even after being rescued.
[There’s nothing I can do.]
It was unfortunate, but I could not take responsibility for what happened to their lives afterward.
I had more important work to do.
One by one, I loaded the captured old-era worshippers from the laboratory onto a transport.
Then, as usual, I sent them to my superior’s address.
.
.
.
Now for the second assignment.
After shutting down the illegal bone-chalk factory, I swam upward into the endless blue waters of the middle layer.
“Kyaaah!”
“Whaaa!”
“Someone stop that thing!”
This was an affluent residential district where many members of the planet’s elite lived.
But despite my hurried arrival, there was no reward for getting here quickly.
By the time I reached the scene, the entire area had already descended into chaos.
“W-water... It’s all water!”
According to the emergency report I had received, this massive disaster had been caused by a single emaciated mage acting alone.
Chiiiiii—
Soon, the sound of something violently vaporizing reverberated through the water.
I turned toward it.
A radiance so intense it could have been mistaken for a falling star burned in the distance.
And as I approached its source, a wave of dry air rushed toward me.
A deeply unfamiliar sensation for marine life.
Pyromancer.
That was right.
The one responsible for this incident was none other than one of the era’s heretics—
a mage who favored fire-attribute magic.
But his deviation from mainstream tastes was no reason to underestimate him.
He was not merely boiling seawater.
He possessed enough talent to vaporize everything around him.
[Mow.]
One glance was enough to tell me that the terrorist was a powerful individual, easily worthy of being called an Archmage.
So the moment I spotted him, I immediately moved.
[Stop! Stop right there!]
That blazing sphere of fire had already killed around three hundred citizens simply by entering the residential district.
If he were left alone, most of the city would obviously be destroyed.
He had to be subdued immediately.
[Cease casting magic at once. From this point forward, every action you take will only increase your sentence.]
But before I could finish delivering the warning, a response came from the other side.
“So you finally came, you filthy livestock bastard of this nation!”
That was harsh.
“You disgusting machine pretending to be a person! You hypocrite! You mass murderer! I couldn’t believe it, but here you are, shamelessly showing your face! You piece of shit!”
Perhaps because he was such a powerful mage, his lung capacity was remarkable.
Without even pausing to catch his breath, he unleashed an uninterrupted stream of abuse like some fiery public speech and immediately charged toward me.
But I was not flustered.
The position of First Archmage was essentially a combined military and police role.
In a society where overwhelming public authority like mine existed, anyone brazen enough to commit crimes openly was usually not in a normal state of mind.
Being cursed at without warning was therefore a fairly common occurrence.
“You filthy ■■stard! A ■■■■■ who’ll spend your entire life licking the tentacles of those above you!”
Yeah.
I had grown used to that sort of treatment by now.
[Judging by how unoriginal those insults are, he doesn’t seem particularly intelligent. How did someone like this acquire such powerful magic among ordinary citizens?]
Murmur.
I let out a brief sigh.
I could not understand what exactly had made him so furious, considering that he was the one who had committed the murders.
“An accomplice, too!”
The terrorist pyromancer continued shouting at the top of his lungs.
“You people in power are the ones actually destroying this planet, and yet you try to push the blame onto innocent citizens?”
[...]
“You still think we’re fools, don’t you? Did you really believe we’d never discover the population-control plan?!”
[...]
“If I’m going to suffer anyway, I’d rather strike first and die! After I burn every rich bastard in this city to death, I’ll turn the body of that damned chief you serve into nothing but ash!”
While he indulged in his one-sided fury, I calmly began evacuating the residents.
Using magic that detected heartbeats, I quickly pinpointed the locations of surviving citizens.
Then I deployed a golem modeled after a burrowing creature with a long snout.
It swam through the collapsed buildings and swallowed every survivor it encountered into its mechanical mouth.
SrrrK...!
A moment later, sensory feedback flowed back to me.
Several residents had been safely secured inside the rescue golem’s abdomen.
Once it had swallowed all the survivors in the immediate area, the golem began retreating along its preprogrammed emergency route.
It was also equipped with hidden stores of medicine for the injured inside.
With that, I no longer needed to worry about the safety of the rescued citizens.
[Hmm.]
There was, however, one minor concern.
Complaints about the rescue golems had been increasing lately.
People said the inside was too hard.
That the ride was uncomfortable.
Even the medicine-dispensing mechanism—which I had painstakingly installed—was frequently criticized because it resembled stomach acid being secreted by a beast after swallowing its prey.
Apparently, passengers found that unsettling.
If I received more harsh feedback today, I might seriously have to gather the engineers and discuss some improvements.
[Phew.]
But if I design new golems...
Taxes will rise again, and then everyone will complain about that too, won’t they?
I think about this all the time.
What exactly do people want from us Archmages?
[They don’t even understand how hard I try to avoid increasing the budget unnecessarily—]
“What are you talking about?”
Well.
Whatever.
That was not something I needed to worry about right now.
“Let’s see whether those soldiers you’re so proud of can withstand extreme heat, Mage Captain! I bet those miserable duties of yours have kept you from setting foot on the ice floes above for decades, haven’t they?”
I quickly dismissed my pointless thoughts and focused on the situation before me.
The pyromancer was closing in from the distant sea.
“You probably don’t even remember the last time you saw the sky, and yet you dare raise your head before the blazing sun...”
Cliiiik—
Wrapped in brilliant light and constantly rising steam, the pyromancer looked almost like a deity from some ancient legend.
Anyone foolish enough to approach his effective range would be destroyed.
Even high-grade combat golems—machines requiring budgets comparable to those of entire cities—would melt away almost instantly.
But I had anticipated that.
And I had prepared countermeasures.
“Kagh! Ugh... Air?!”
A positive response came almost immediately.
I activated the vacuum magic I had developed not long ago.
It was a small technique that artificially removed matter from a selected space.
Creating an empty region large enough to extinguish all of his flames at once would have been extremely difficult.
But I did not need to extinguish everything.
“Kagh... ugh...”
Through the layers of barriers protecting the pyromancer, I removed one small organ.
His right lung.
The lung belonging to the pyromancer who had been rampaging so violently simply disappeared.
And when the sudden shock forced him to interrupt his spell, I took advantage of that brief hesitation and finished the fight.
Brain.
Heart.
Spinal cord.
Even in this age of advanced technology, those organs remained extraordinarily difficult to regenerate.
In other words, if the source of a mage’s magic—
and their will—
were destroyed, their future was effectively over.
[That’s it.]
The rampaging pyromancer fell silent with almost disappointing ease.
These days, antimagic had developed considerably.
If one used a technique that another mage had originally cast, it was often possible to turn their own spells back against them.
[Hmm.]
Despite fighting on countless battlefields, I had never once been caught off guard by a tactic like that.
Perhaps the difference really did come down to processing speed.
[I don’t know.]
Titt.
With only mild concern remaining, I began cleaning up the aftermath.
Aside from the long-bodied golem used to rescue civilians, I employed roughly twenty-eight golems brought to the site and quickly began restoring the collapsed city.
But as I worked alone on the reconstruction, another question slowly crept into my thoughts.
[I’ll turn the body of that damned chief you serve into nothing but ash!]
Seriously.
What exactly had the people above done wrong?
Why were the inhabitants of this planet so quick to curse their own rulers?
[I don’t know.]
For a long time now, the entire sea of this planet had been ruled by a single nation.
From the citizens’ perspective, that meant they had no alternative at all.
Perhaps it was only natural that they became frustrated from time to time...
Still.
Wasn’t life good enough as it was?
■ was actually a fairly competent ruler.
[They have no idea how hard we work to protect this planet. Honestly, everyone has become far too spoiled these days.]
I muttered to myself and continued working.
Clang, clang, clang.
The only sounds left in the area were the inorganic noises produced by the golems.
But that was fine.
My shift would be over soon.
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