All five apprentices, Adam among them, had imagined how the great Mage would take them out of the Northland—perhaps with some mysterious device they had never heard of or laid eyes on, perhaps with some spell. Yet when the moment actually arrived, they still could not help crying out in wonder.
Flight is the oldest dream of every race born on the ground; everyone has looked up at the sky and envied the birds. Today the apprentices learned what flying felt like.
"Then let us be off," said Mage Blake. The words had barely left his mouth when they and their packs rose into the air, higher and higher, straight up into the heavens, and then shot south like an arrow from a bowstring.
The people on the ground were struck dumb. After a brief silence they began to scream like madmen—screams whose meaning even they did not know, though no one cared about that. The clamor in their hearts simply demanded release, because they had witnessed a miracle.
Inside the city lord's mansion, Count Johnson listened to the uproar in the streets for a good while. Then he ordered Knight Wynn and Knight Wright, "Drive off the crowd. Restore order."
The two knights departed to carry out the order and calmed the restless crowd. Afterward Knight Wright said with a sigh, "It is different now."
When the people of the manor learned that Ophelia and Adam had left, each took it differently. Marshall and Dennis felt the weight lift from their shoulders and were eaten up with envy at the same time; bearded Joe sank to the ground in an instant, his mind a total blank.
In the stables, Dark Cloud drove off one servant after another with her hooves, battering the wooden fence again and again with her horn. At last she tore free of her reins and smashed through the wooden door. No one dared stand in the way of Ophelia's warhorse; Dark Cloud burst out the manor gate, gave a single mournful cry, and galloped south at a dead run, vanishing from sight in moments.
Up in the sky, Mage Blake looked placid. The four apprentices trembled, staring at the ground below—now no more than a black speck—unable to get a word out, not daring to move.
Adam was the exception. He had no concept of fear, and he was the first to move. He found that beneath his seemingly empty feet there was in fact a layer of membrane. He reached out and groped to either side, and felt the membrane there as well. So this was what held them up and blocked the violent wind of their high-speed passage.
The other four apprentices stared at Adam, and only once they saw that he had not fallen did they summon the courage to move. The joy of flight quickly drowned out their fear, and they wandered about inside the membrane, full of curiosity.
"Is this magic? It's amazing!" Cristel gave a little jump, shocked and full of admiration.
"You could say yes, and you could say no," Mage Blake explained. "This is the power of knowledge, a derivative effect of magic. It takes no special rune set to construct."
The other four looked blank, but Adam understood Blake at once. In other words, flight of this kind was merely a byproduct of some spell program—once the program was constructed, a thing like this came naturally.
Mage Blake went on, "The Mage World is vast, and it grows larger almost every moment. Formal Mages can travel through the teleportation formations built in various places, but your bodies could not withstand that pressure. And you have never lived in a high-magic environment, so you must take the slower route to the Mage Continent and adapt to it by degrees."
The others put on expressions that said they did not understand a word but were very impressed. Adam blinked. He could not make sense of Blake's "grows larger." Could it be...?
Adam looked toward the ground, and discovered that this world was not a sphere at all! The Mage World—or rather, the Mage Plane—was flat!
Ophelia asked, "Respected Mage Blake, what does 'grows larger' mean?"
This time Mage Blake did not bring up the matter of a price. He said directly, "That will be explained in detail once you reach the academy. I will keep it brief. I assume you have heard of Prometheus the True Spirit Archmage and Anne Croft, Guardian of the World."
Everyone nodded—even Adam had heard those two names from Ophelia.
"About twenty thousand years ago by the Mage Plane's reckoning, the Mage World was a small, cramped plane. Mages slaughtered one another over its limited resources, yet those resources only dwindled further, and the Mage Plane slid toward decline and extinction. Then two True Spirits raised a revolution. With great knowledge they changed the very nature of the plane, halting internal consumption by plundering the outside, and replenishing themselves with a spell beyond all comprehension. Only thus did the Mages of today come to their glory as the destroyers of the planes."
"Plane Sacrifice—that is the name of that great spell. As for how it works, never mind you; even I do not understand it," Mage Blake said in admiration.
The apprentices were spellbound. With their shallow knowledge and narrow horizons they could not begin to imagine what kind of power that was, and their longing for the life ahead grew all the stronger. Mage—truly a name that could make one fall in love with it.
Some time later, seeing that the group had grown used to flying, Mage Blake said, "I am going to speed up. Before evening we must reach this continent's southern seaport and join up with the academy's other guides."
The words had barely landed when the speed leapt. The violent booms were piercing even from inside the membrane, and the fierce airflow outside as it struck the membrane was plainly visible to the naked eye.
"Breaking the sound barrier..." Mage Blake's flying speed surged in an instant, with no preparation whatsoever. The strange thing was that the people inside the membrane did not feel the least bit uncomfortable.
The acceleration did not stop. Adam spread out his spiritual power to observe, and saw the membrane's shape change from a half-sphere into something smooth and aerodynamic. Stranger still, by some means Blake gathered all the airflow striking the front into a single direction and turned it into kinetic energy, driving the speed higher yet again.
A few seconds later the speed steadied. A din filled their ears; they had to shout at the top of their lungs to make themselves heard, and so they fell silent.
The current speed is roughly Mach 3. Adam's face was blank, but inwardly he marveled: The power of magic has overturned everything I thought I knew. Someone can carry dead weight like us, with no artifacts, and push the speed this far all by himself—and still look like he is taking it easy.
Time wore on. Because they were inside a membrane racing at such speed, they were not sensitive to changes in temperature, but one glance down showed the white fading from the land and green filling the whole field of view. After nearly three hours of flight, they had left the Northland.
It was hard to imagine just how large the Mage World was. From what Mage Blake said, the land the Northland sat on seemed to be an island, and reaching the Mage Continent required a ship; bounded by an ordinary person's abilities and lifespan, one could be trapped in a single place for an entire life.
At midday the others took food from their packs. Adam had again made no preparations, but he was not hungry: the energy stored in his body was enough for three days' consumption without training the breathing method. And Ophelia had no need to eat at all.
Mage Blake showed no inclination to eat either; Adam even noticed that the Mage did not need to breathe.
Even having noticed that the Mage did not eat, none of them dared offer him their coarse food. But Cristel saw Adam sitting alone off to one side, and, summoning her courage, walked up to him and pointed at him, then at the hamburger-like food in her hands.
Adam's face was expressionless.
Cristel thought Adam had not understood. She stepped closer and shouted at the top of her voice, "If you don't mind, I can share my food with you. My mother made it specially for me this morning—there's meat in it."
Faced with the girl's goodwill, Adam did not accept. As a knight he naturally had a way to project his voice precisely. He said, at a conversational pitch, "Thank you, but there is no need. I am a knight; for the time being I do not need to eat."
Adam's words were well-mannered, which lifted the spirits of the girl, whose eyes had dimmed at the refusal. She was still a little insecure about her commoner birth and very sensitive to such things; she had thought Adam was turning up his nose at her food.
"So you're a knight! That's amazing—just like Miss Ophelia." Cristel worshipped Ophelia: a noble, and powerful—everyone in the Northland knew it—and courteous besides, with the air of true quality. Truly a perfect person, Cristel had thought with envy more than once.
Having her answer, Cristel went back to eating alone.
Ophelia, standing motionless nearby, heard the two of them talking and, recalling Count Johnson's warning of the night before, lapsed into a daze.
She did not know what she was thinking either. Like him? Don't be absurd—that doesn't exist. If she truly liked him, it would have been impossible to go seven years without a word. Then what was it?
In the shrill howl of the wind, Ophelia dissected herself, and in the end arrived at an answer she did not want to admit.
Probably the loss of something that belonged to me. Like losing an object? Or a pet that ran away? Ha—so I really am a noble after all. How contemptible. Ophelia mocked herself savagely in her heart.
Adam did not know what Ophelia was thinking. Of course, even if he had known, he would not have cared.
Two hours later, Adam could already make out the deep blue ocean in the distance, the cities below flickering past in blurred shapes. The flight was nearly over.
Half an hour after that, Mage Blake slowed and gradually descended. Below them lay an enormous city, far more prosperous than Cold Maple City in the Northland; the harbor bristled with ships of every kind, and not one of them had a sail.
Not sailboats. Right—the world is this huge; how could backward wind-powered ships ever cross the ocean?
The group landed, and the crowd around them instantly fell back, respectfully opening a path. But they were not alarmed—evidently, in the Southern Seaport City, Mages were not so rare.
Then Mage Blake's voice rang out: "We will rest here and wait for the academy's other Mages to assemble. In the meantime you may stay at the Duke's mansion or move about as you please, but it would be best not to go too far. If you miss the departure time, no one will wait for you."