"Adam."
Tonight, after the five Fireballs, that name had taken on a singular magic aboard the Mordo Academy. In everyone's hearts Adam had become synonymous with power; they could ignore Ophelia, but they could not fail to consult Adam.
Tom did not dare speak again. A petty, low creature like him had his own way of surviving: he could fawn on the strong, but he would never challenge an opponent on an entirely different level.
Adam had been watching from the side for quite some time. He truly did not care in the least who the beast belonged to; what interested him was the ugly face humanity showed when its own interests were at stake. Ophelia, Quentin, Tom—each face was like a set of symbolic data, steadily filling in the blank spaces in his understanding of human nature.
When Cristel finished speaking, she went thump-thump-thumping over to Adam's side. She had meant to ask him to step in and see justice done, but the moment she saw his expressionless face, she suddenly did not dare open her mouth.
An awkward silence fell over the deck.
William kept to himself behind the crowd. He had already made up his mind not to start any conflict with Adam, at least not on this ship. As for a stupid running dog like Tom—if the man was set on seeking his own death, William had no interest in saving him. Besides, William thought Adam would not stoop to quarrel with Tom, since that would be beneath his dignity. What he did not know was how Adam would handle Quentin and Randy.
But what happened the next second exceeded everyone's expectations.
Adam threw a Fireball straight at Tom's head, blasting him to pieces, then walked forward as naturally as could be, picked up the beast's carcass, and carried it back to the side of the deck.
The apprentices were stunned. They stared open-mouthed, not knowing what expression to wear in the face of what had just happened. Right in front of them, one apprentice had simply and without the slightest hesitation killed another.
Adam walked back to his spot and waited to see their reaction. He had done this for two reasons. First, although he could not yet tell whether the Mage Continent was an ordered civilization or a disordered primitive world, at least aboard this ship the four Mages tacitly permitted conflict, even when it came to life and death. Second, he was genuinely curious what sort of creature humanity was—what it would do when a predator trampled on the convictions they all shared.
Would they submit, or would they resist?
About a minute passed before the crowd finally understood what had just happened. In an instant their expressions went from dumbstruck to terrified.
"He killed someone!"
"How dare you! How dare you do such a thing!"
"We're all Mage apprentices, we all hold the same status! What gives you the right to kill another apprentice like that? The Mages won't let you get away with this!"
What a strange reaction, Adam thought.
When magical beasts killed their companions, they had felt panic too, but never anger like this. In their eyes, it seemed, beasts killing people was only natural, while people killing people was unforgivable.
"Adam, you've gone too far," Randy shouted.
"You owe the other apprentices an explanation. We cannot tolerate someone among us who kills his companions at will—you must pay the price for what you've done." Quentin stepped forward, eyes fixed hard on Adam, and spoke with righteous indignation.
Ophelia and Cristel were frozen too. Even in her fury, Ophelia had never thought of killing Tom—not on this ship, at least. And Cristel had asked Adam for help only because she wanted a little support.
Neither of them had ever imagined Adam would kill.
"No feelings. Not our kind."
Once again Ophelia remembered her father's words—Count Johnson's words—and never before had that sentence been so clear to her, or chilled her so deeply.
To Adam, this was an experiment, and he now had to cooperate with the experiment's steps for it to continue. So he answered, "What kind of explanation do you want?"
Quentin's breath caught. He suddenly had no idea how to go on. Yes—what explanation did he want? Did he want Adam to pay for Tom's life with his own? Obviously that was impossible.
What do I do now?
Cold sweat ran down Quentin's temple. He felt he had done something stupid; he had set himself on top of a roasting fire.
Adam was dissatisfied. The test subject was not cooperating—how was he supposed to continue? He turned to Randy. "Where exactly did I go too far?"
Randy said, "We're all on the same ship, and we'll study at the same academy in the future. Tom was merely a little offensive in word and deed. How could you just kill him like that?"
Adam was deeply dissatisfied. After the initial shock, these people had recovered their reason, and every thought in their heads was bent on themselves. A companion had died beside them—true enough—but not one of them would ever avenge another. And their current words of condemnation were riddled with holes and retreats.
Was this cowardice universal, or did it only appear in these particular people?
Adam shook his head and walked toward the cabin. Sure enough, not a single one of them—Randy and Quentin included—dared stand in his way, and Adam returned to the cabin without hindrance. Only after his figure had vanished from the deck did the others dare to murmur complaints about Adam's cruelty, putting on a show of fearlessness before their companions.
After a while they seemed to realize how pointless this was, and the whole lot of them fell into an embarrassed silence and set about carrying beast carcasses—only the body of that body-refining beast did no one dare to touch.
Cristel suddenly felt that her surroundings and the people around her were utterly unfamiliar. She had found Adam cold before, but she had never imagined this youth could hold life so cheap. To her it overturned everything she had assumed.
Ophelia, by contrast, sighed, her heart full of tangled feelings she could not name.
On the first level of the cabin, in the Mages' rooms, the feast never stopped, fresh food carried in without end. Mages had no need for sleep, that crude means of recovery; judging by their total spiritual power, so long as they did not use magic, they could remain at full capacity indefinitely.
Mage Irene seemed drunk. She lay lazily across the table, head propped on one hand and a wine cup in the other, and said softly, "I never thought—never thought the little one would dare kill someone. Did he guess we wouldn't interfere?"
"That's not the point, is it? He doesn't seem to have killed for resources—he simply needed to kill, and so he did? That's dangerous, this apprentice called Adam. If he kills everyone, you'll be paying my share out of your own pocket." Mage Jerome teased Mage Blake.
Mage Blake agreed at once: "Of course." Then he added, "It really is a strange style. Killing purely for the sake of killing? I can't make sense of it, and I don't think I've ever heard of such a thing. But it shouldn't matter—I doubt he'll kill everyone."
Indeed, Adam would not, because it would be meaningless. Needing to run experiments on a group did not make every individual in that group a test subject; finding a single sample was enough. Tom had merely happened to be at hand.
The voyage continued. The beasts grew more numerous and the apprentices fewer; in the second half of the month the Mages sealed the cabin completely, and the apprentices had to keep their nerves strung taut twenty-four hours a day, ready at any moment for a beast to come charging in. (Why is a day twenty-four hours in another world too? Because changing that setting would be too much trouble.)
Only six survived: the three of Adam, William, Quentin and Randy.
Mastering Fireball was the baseline; those who could not even manage that were the first to die. Next came instant-cast Fireball, then two instant-cast Fireballs. In these conditions, if you did not improve, you died.
Tracing the spiritual-power solidification rune and the spell's rune group had become instinct to them; these two tasks went on every moment of every day.
As Adam had expected, the closer they came to the Mage Continent, the greater the number and quality of the beasts. By now the low-grade magical beasts had vanished entirely; every beast that charged onto the deck could use magic or possessed combat power far beyond a Grand Knight's.
But the most terrifying was a kind of hideous beast that used poison gas. It appeared only once, and that once took half the apprentices' lives. William and the others finally realized that the alliance of the weak meant nothing in the Mage World, and the childish, pointless organization collapsed completely.
Adam's situation was somewhat peculiar. No one, Ophelia included, was willing to get too close to him, yet whenever a beast attacked, they would spontaneously arrange themselves around Adam as their center—especially after that time he cast twenty Fireballs at once and blasted the poison-type magical beast to cinders in a single instant.
Adam sat directly opposite the Fireball rune group. Over the past month he had shown no change at all—no wounds on his body, no weariness on his face. Days full of danger were no different from ordinary days to him; what did displease him somewhat was the endless repetition of the beasts.
However hideous such things were, their carbon-based nature had not changed—which meant that to Adam, only the different magics the beasts used were worth recording. But nearly a month had passed and still no new, more powerful magic had appeared before him. Adam was getting a little bored with the game.
He thought and he acted: Adam instantly fired off fifteen Fireballs, blasting them into the rune group that had been hovering in midair all this while. The rune group shattered on impact and dissolved into nothing with a crisp, tinkling chime.
Just then Cristel had been alone at the other end of the deck, idly gazing into the distance. Suddenly she noticed a wisp of a different color on the far-off, hazy sea. She turned and came running back, shouting in joyful surprise, "The Mage Continent! We're almost at the Mage Continent!"
But she found everyone staring at Adam, their faces ashen, and Cristel shrank back and said no more.
Only after Adam picked up the fragments in the rune group that had actual mass did William ask, "Was that the reason for the beast attacks? You knew all along, didn't you?"
The moment Adam's hand touched a fragment, his spiritual power automatically interacted with it at tremendous speed, and mana began to condense far faster than usual. Adam hurriedly restrained himself, and only thus avoided the absurd end of having his soul burst from an overflow of mana.
"Mm, that's right. I knew all along."