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Translator/Editor: Coughing Baby

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◈ Surviving in the Magic Academy

Chapter 129

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Inside the crystal ball, the puppet let out a loud howl. I could tell at once that it was celebrating another victory. Its excitement still had not faded, and it lightly scraped the wall with its claws.

Despite how casual the motion looked, the wall split like water, and a huge scar followed the path of its claws. Koite took his hand off the crystal ball and folded his arms. He glared at the thing and clicked his tongue.

“Why the hell is that thing so strong?”

He leaned back in his chair and slumped in place. He looked completely drained. I poured a cup of tea and held it out to him. He accepted it and took a small sip. Even then, his eyes stayed fixed on the crystal ball.

All I could do was blink. I had no idea why that thing had grown so strong either. Like Koite, I stared at the puppet beyond the crystal ball.

With two wolf heads baring their teeth at each other and four arms dangling sharp claws that leaked murky magical power from their tips, it looked utterly grotesque.

It was also the optimal expression of Lumira’s inner demon, now bound inside it. What it contained was a tendency toward self-destruction. It was the result of condensing the emotion that lay at the end of doubt turned inward.

Maybe that sort of emotion existed inside me too. Of course, it would not be exactly the same as that. The hesitation inside a mage’s heart took a different form for each person.

Lumira wanted to erase all such hesitation within her. This Trial Tower was the shape that desire had taken. At her request, the tower had been built with seven floors in total.

The seven hesitations within Lumira’s heart waited for her, each bound to the body of a puppet stationed on a different floor, just like the thing inside the crystal ball.

That thing, no, should I call it the wolf puppet? The wolf puppet was only the first step on the path to the 7th floor. I never expected us to get stuck here already. I had assumed Koite had designed it this way on purpose.

Koite moved his fingers again and began tapping the crystal ball. The magical power wavering from his fingertips wrapped around it, and the time inside slowly began rewinding.

As the battle between Lumira and the wolf puppet flowed backward, Koite stroked his jowls. In that slow-moving time, the course of the fight was laid bare.

In other words, we could analyze exactly how the result had been decided. But after watching it all, Koite let out a faint sigh. The analysis did not mean much.

The wolf puppet had simply relied on overwhelming magical power to chew up and swallow Lumira’s magic. Watching that, I had no choice but to tilt my head too. I was the one who had made that thing, but I had not expected it to become so strong just from containing her inner demon.

“Don’t tell me the other floors are like this too.”

Koite muttered to himself. When he stopped injecting magical power, the crystal ball’s flow returned to normal. Lumira appeared in its view again. She was reentering the first floor.

She poured several spells at the wolf puppet. She interfered with the flow of time to slow its movements and distorted space so it could not find a proper path.

At the same time, several offensive spells shot from her fingertips toward the wolf puppet’s body. Those spells had grown sharper and larger than before.

But the wolf puppet chewed up and swallowed all of Lumira’s magic, then grabbed her by the nape. Koite shook his head as he watched her neck snap.

He began moving the crystal ball’s viewpoint. The view did not remain on the first floor, but started moving upward. At the end of that path, the shape of another puppet came into sight.

It was a burly puppet with a bull’s head. The one in charge of the second floor stood fixed in place like a stone statue. Murky magical power rippled strongly from its body.

That magical power was no weaker than the wolf puppet’s on the first floor. Seeing it, Koite clicked his tongue. Then he moved the viewpoint even higher.

The third floor, then the fourth floor. The higher the view climbed, the more Koite’s face hardened. Every puppet had been strengthened. At last, the viewpoint reached the final floor. It was the floor Mira was in charge of.

The crystal ball captured Mira’s appearance. She was drawing the magic circle for the Perfect Tea spell I had made. After pouring herself a cup of tea from it, she lightly savored the aroma.

Murky magical power flowed from her as well, just like it did from the other puppets. She too had the inner demon bound to her body.

Unlike the other puppets, however, she had not undergone any deformation. Her mind also looked perfectly intact, just as it appeared now. Her own desire was probably stronger than the inner demon contained inside her.

She lightly pushed up her glasses. Then she turned her eyes toward us. For a moment, I flinched. Her eyes were staring straight at the crystal ball.

Her gaze did not stop at the crystal ball. It was directed at us beyond it. Our eyes met. She smiled brightly and lightly shook her teacup.

“Peeking at an actor waiting backstage. How rude. My turn is still far away, so please visit me a little later.”

With those words, mist began flowing from her. It softly filled the room and blurred the crystal ball’s view. The crystal ball could no longer make out her form.

Watching that, I stroked my chin. I remembered the time I had wandered through her mist before. The flow of that mist, slowly melting and devouring everything inside it, had felt almost like a dream.

Was that why? Her mist was more compatible with Dream Theater’s dreams than I could have imagined. Normally, she would have needed a month to adapt to the dream, but she had freely perceived it before even a day had passed.

That allowed her to exert influence over the dream she existed in. Enough to block Koite’s viewpoint, which governed the dream, just like this. It was enough to fluster even Koite.

“Ah, and what is happening downstairs has nothing to do with me. Huhu, I am watching too, and it is quite entertaining. I am telling you in case you misunderstand.”

Her words came from within the gaps in the mist. After that, the mist grew even thicker. Then the crystal ball’s viewpoint was forcibly guided by the mist and flowed back down to the first floor.

Once again, Lumira appeared within it. Standing at the tower entrance, she was weaving a magic circle in the air. These were new spells, different from her previous attempts. Her will had not broken yet.

Koite looked slightly relieved at that. Mira’s words were probably true. She had no reason to ruin this dream for nothing. I could not be certain, though.

Koite seemed to understand that well enough too. He stroked his jowls for a moment. While lost in thought, he glanced at me. There was a hint of suspicion in his eyes.

“Did you do something? This is completely different from my calculations.”

At those words, I could only smile bitterly. The arrow of suspicion had come my way. His suspicion was perfectly reasonable. The things causing trouble right now were my puppets.

But like Mira, I had no reason to ruin this dream either. I quietly shook my head to show that. As if I would ever do something like that.

This dream cost a full one million eight hundred thousand points. I had only done my best to make it perfect. Those puppets were the result of all the effort I had poured into them. Koite knew that too.

“Koite, you already checked everything, didn’t you? When we saw them in the preliminary dream, there was nothing wrong.”

“I did. I did, but why are they like that now?”

He roughly scratched his head. His face was full of discomfort. Unable to think of a cause, he collapsed facedown onto the table.

Before entering this dream, we had already carried out many rehearsals. No mistakes could be allowed in this dream, after all. Of course, an accident had happened anyway.

In any case, during those rehearsals, the seven puppets, including Mira, had experienced many other dreams. Not a single abnormality had been found in them. Koite had checked the process himself, so there was no mistake.

Of course, this was the first time the inner demons had been fully planted into their bodies. Koite had said that binding a person’s inner demon into a puppet body like this was extremely difficult even for him. That option alone cost one million points.

So during practice, he had only made them recognize a faint flow of it. At that thought, my eyes widened slightly. Maybe that was the problem. The inner demons had fully settled into the puppets.

Just then, Lumira stood up again. Koite must have noticed as well, because he straightened himself. Then he began manipulating the crystal ball.

At the end of the viewpoint, the wolf puppet on the first floor faced Lumira again. It glared at her and growled. At the same time, a circuit began wavering across its body.

It was the only spell I had engraved into that body when I made it. Its function was simple. It allowed the puppet to endure magical power a little better. It created a kind of weak anti-magic resistance.

Using that as its foundation, the wolf puppet split the enormous spell Lumira had created in a straight line. It chewed up and swallowed the collapsing spell in one bite, then charged straight toward Lumira.

Watching that, I fell into thought for a moment. I had given it that spell, but its power had grown far stronger than I expected. If Koite could not find the reason inside the dream, that meant the problem lay with my puppet.

No, rather than my puppet being the problem, the inner demon was the problem. There had been no abnormalities in any dream without it. Then was there a reason inner demons had such a powerful influence on puppets?

I folded my arms and stroked my chin. That kind of adaptation was quite interesting. It too could be called one direction for obtaining power.

Why had I been attending the puppetry lecture? It was to contain Cassian’s perfect body, which I had remodeled together with Mira, inside my puppet. To make at least part of that power mine.

And that lecture had been very helpful. That puppet could now take twenty steps. Considering that it could not even walk ten steps before I attended the lecture, that was tremendous progress.

That puppet no longer stopped at simple movement. It could even swing a sword now. Of course, it had to devote its whole body to that single swing. Considering the cost of the materials used for it, it was practically a loss.

Like that, puppets were supposed to collapse if they contained power their bodies could not handle. But these puppets, even if this was a dream, were fully holding that power.

So I needed to investigate the reason. It might be possible to apply it to my puppets outside the dream too. Of course, before that, we had to handle this accident. I glanced at Koite and shook my head.

He was stamping his feet as he watched the crystal ball. His eyes flashed with panic. It was an anxious look I had never seen from him, who usually acted so easygoing.

It was only natural. This was a huge commission worth one million eight hundred thousand points. The refund he had joked about earlier might really happen. If Lumira gave up on advancing, he would have no choice but to return those points in full.

From Koite’s perspective, this was a major crisis. That was probably why he looked so agitated. And this being a major crisis was also true for me.

Koite had treated me with considerable respect until now. The reason for his obvious favor was clear. It was partly because I was a puppeteer, and partly because of Mauro.

But the bigger reason was Mira. As she had just shown, her power matched dreams extremely well. Perhaps because of Mira, he had spent the past month trying to draw me into Dream Theater.

What would happen if this dream shattered under these circumstances? The respect he had held for me would definitely disappear. He might even hold a grudge against me. Considering the greed-filled eyes Koite sometimes showed, it was plausible enough.

Even if that did not happen, it was obvious he would not let us go easily. He might tie me and Mira down here and try to squeeze out as much as he had lost. Either way, I was the one in charge of this dream.

As my thoughts reached that point, I even wondered for a moment if this was a trap. I had been caught once before by being tied down with points, after all.

Thinking that, I shook my head. Unlike that previous case, I belonged to the same guild as him. Koite had no reason to do that. Guild members did not harm one another. That was the guild’s rule.

“Damn it, let’s get her past the first floor for now.”

Koite grabbed the crystal ball. Then he poured a large amount of magical power from his fingertips. His body grew thin, and his fat began transforming into magical power. That transformed magical power seeped into the crystal ball.

He closed his eyes and began gathering his focus. A careful look settled over his face. He scattered magical power throughout the first floor, then used it to slowly change the structure of the whole floor.

The once-flat terrain gradually grew complex, and dense pillars rose up one after another so the wolf puppet’s huge body could not move easily. He had changed the structure into terrain favorable to Lumira.

Lumira narrowly dodged the wolf puppet’s attack. Her shoulder, caught by the tip of its claw, was torn open.

The wolf puppet tried to chase after her, but the pillars blocked it and forced it to stop. Koite carefully shaped the cavern in that way. Whenever Lumira fell into danger, he reflected another change in it.

With Koite’s support, she overcame several crises. But in the end, she failed to escape the wolf puppet’s grasp and collapsed. Seeing that, Koite rubbed the corners of his eyes.

Such extreme modification harmed the continuity of the dream. Lumira, the owner of the dream, might notice it. But the wolf puppet contained so much power that he had no choice but to choose that method.

Fortunately, Lumira did not seem to realize it. Watching her stand at the tower entrance and draw another magic circle, I opened my mouth.

“How about weakening the puppet outright? Make it so its power decreases each time she dies.”

If it had too much power, we only had to suppress it. And if we lowered that power gradually, Lumira would not notice a huge change.

I glanced at the magical power surging around Koite’s body. At my question, Koite lightly touched his jowls. The layers of fat that had once been there were now nearly gone.

“Mm, should we go with that for now? She has to get past the first floor.”

Koite muttered and gathered magical power, weaving it into something like a chain. Then he placed that transparent chain around the puppet’s body. The murky magical power flowing from it decreased a little as well. He had begun suppressing its power.

Lumira challenged the thing again. And died again. Through those attempts, Koite adjusted the weakening process with great precision.

In that way, the puppet’s power continued to decrease. It was the result of the chains wrapping tightly around its body.

Lumira did not miss that opening either. Was this what it meant to be a mage? She seemed to have fully adapted to the process of death. Even when claws flew toward her neck, she did not so much as blink.

She simply searched for the optimal way to bring it down. Through that process of death, she began weaving the ideal spell for that thing. It was an extremely simple and sharp spell meant to pierce through its anti-magic resistance.

I blinked as I looked at the completed spell. What it created was a mass of magical power like a single awl. Perhaps because it was a spell she had newly created, its structure was very simple, and also unstable.

But she turned even that instability into power. The awl twisted and began rotating violently. It was a spell made solely to pierce. It had been created for the single purpose of facing that thing.

Even after dying again and again, was this what it meant to be from the sixth floor? It was a power and method befitting the Complete Tree realm. She fired that spell straight ahead and pierced the puppet.

The weakened puppet’s body could not withstand the spell’s power and collapsed. Lumira clenched both fists as she watched it. She had achieved it after a full thirty attempts.

Finding the answer somehow through repeated attempts was a fitting method for a mage. Of course, without Koite’s help, that would not have been enough. Still, she had not noticed, so was that not a good thing?

She passed the first floor like that. I glanced at Koite. One might have expected him to feel relieved that she had cleared the first floor, but his face remained stiff and showed no sign of relaxing. His thinned face clearly showed the seriousness of the situation.

It was only natural. We could not resolve all six remaining floors this way. Inner demons tended to grow stronger the higher the floor was. No matter how much we weakened them, there was a limit.

He rubbed his thinned stomach and began devouring beads. After eating dreams like that, his body received a supply of magical power and puffed up a little. I lightly bowed my head to him.

“Could you put me into the dream? Then I will try to resolve this.”

Impurities could not mix into dreams. If two or more living beings entered the same dream, they were bound to clash. That was why only puppets, which did not dream, could become actors.

But there was a kind of workaround. It was also the reason I had been waiting here. To respond when a problem appeared, like now.

Koite looked at me. After thinking for a moment, he nodded. He seemed unable to think of any proper method other than sending me in. He had to direct the dream from here, after all.

This dream was also my problem. I lightly scratched my head. Koite did not seem to have noticed yet, but it looked like my puppet had caused the accident after all.

So I had to resolve it with my own hands. I needed to enter the dream myself and check those things. I rummaged through my clothes. Then I took out a puppet. It was an ordinary puppet that did not contain a soul.

“Then I will prepare.”

Saying that, I gently closed my eyes. Then I flowed magical power into the puppet in my hand. At the same time, my consciousness slowly began to drift. I entrusted my mind fully to that current.

It did not take long to reach the end of that flow. I opened my eyes again. Then I flapped the wings on my back. Wings. The sensation, which I had never felt before, was a little awkward, but I soon adapted.

I looked down at my hands. They were very small and adorable. Waving those plump hands, I released magical power. I could feel an extremely faint magical power flowing inside them.

This was definitely the body of the puppet I had been holding just moments ago. I looked around. The Black Sun, the wide wasteland, and the huge tower standing at its center. This was definitely inside Lumira’s dream.

Koite had inserted the puppet’s body into the dream while my consciousness was moving. This was a kind of smuggling. By dwelling inside the puppet’s body, I could deceive the dream for a short while.

Because of that, I could not hold more than a certain amount of power. Just like this puppet body of mine, I could only handle a very faint amount of magical power.

Of course, even this much was enough. Even if my real body came here, I would not be able to interfere in the fight anyway.

I released magical power and adjusted my body. Then the body’s senses began falling fully under my control. After finishing that work, I lifted myself into the air.

Then I began flapping my wings. Following those awkward wingbeats, wind stirred, and my body rode it smoothly forward. I flew toward the tower entrance.

As if sensing my movement, the dream’s magical power began soaking into me. It could detect even such a small movement? When I flinched and stopped, purple magical power gathered from somewhere and naturally pushed the dream’s magical power away.

It was Koite’s magical power. That meant he was watching me. I lightly nodded toward the air. Then I flew again.

I had to guide this dream, this play, perfectly. To do that, I first had to meet the owner of the dream. After slowly making my way forward, I reached the tower entrance. Lumira stood there.

I stopped in front of Lumira. She seemed to notice me, because she glanced over. I bowed my head slightly to her and smiled brightly. Then I lightly flapped my wings. I had to look as cute as possible.

I recalled the notes about her tastes. She apparently tended to like dignified and beautiful things. The one who fit that taste perfectly was Mira.

But how could a person have only one preference? Just as she liked beautiful things, she also liked cute things. Koite had confirmed it through dreams, so there was no mistake.

The puppet I had entered had been tailored as closely as possible to those tastes of hers. I could see my appearance reflected in her eyes, along with a hint of question.

A girl with blond hair and emerald eyes was flapping fairy-like wings. At a glance, she resembled Professor, but that was a misunderstanding. This was simply the form it had taken because I had tried to make it as cute as possible.

“Hello! I am Ian, a fairy born from the tower. I came to help you conquer the tower!”

Saying that, I flapped my wings wildly. Lumira blinked as she looked at me. This dream was being perceived by her as a kind of reality. That was the most effective way to erase her inner demons.

So I could not let her suspect that this was a dream. The moment she recognized this place as a dream, its sense of reality would collapse too. I smiled brightly at her again and again.

The slight question in her eyes melted away like snow as she met my smile. Then she lightly stroked my head. When I gently rubbed my head against her hand, her cold face softened completely.

This place felt like reality to her, but it was still a dream. As Koite said, what mattered in a dream was not causality. If I earned her favor like this, it would naturally become convincing.

I smiled brightly again and steeled myself. I was no longer Evron. From now on, I was one actor participating in the dream, no, a fairy. With that, I looked at Lumira with sparkling eyes.

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