Beast

 

Our investigation revealed that every last one of them possessed an exceedingly troublesome nature.

A hide so tough it repelled blades. Claws sharp enough to rend iron.

And meat that would ruin your stomach if you ate it raw.

 

"Twenty. Ordinary weapons won't get through this."

Innis pressed the mana gauge against the armored bear's hide and grimaced.

"Twenty? But if I recall, when you measured my mana before, the force of you trying to stab the needle in was only around twenty or thirty."

Innis was nearing three hundred years old, yet she still looked no older than her early teens. Shorter even than Chryse, with physical strength to match. Which was to say, nothing to write home about.

"The numbers don't really have much to do with arm strength or momentum, you know. It's more of a magical thing. Just because I'm a frail and delicate beauty doesn't mean the reading would be that low. It's just that when I seriously try to kill you with all my might, that's roughly how much it comes out to."

Several things in that sentence warranted a response, but if I stopped to nitpick every little thing when talking to Innis, we'd never get anywhere. I let it slide.

"Besides, on top of the mana value, there's the base toughness of the hide itself. While it's still attached to a living armored bear, the muscle and bone behind it factor in too. And if the mana of a stabbing attack is roughly equal to the mana in the hide…"

Innis pulled a small knife from her pocket and held the blade upright against the armored bear's hide. The tip touched the surface, nothing more. No force behind it at all.

"It's like this."

"I see. If it's just resting there, of course it won't penetrate."

That also explained why the armored bear had withstood a blow from my staff. The mana stored in my staff was probably somewhat greater than the mana in the bear's hide, but with the hide's share subtracting from the attack, the remaining force wasn't enough to overcome the beast's sheer mass.

"So what you're saying is… you need an attacking force that exceeds the sum of the material's physical defense and its magical defense. Otherwise, you can't get through this armored bear's hide."

"Magical defense? Ooh, handy term. Technically, offense and defense are just different applications of the same thing, so 'magical intensity' would be more accurate, but eh, whatever."

Innis turned to the blackboard and began chalking up a bulleted list.

"There are three ways to penetrate this hide. Can you name them, Mentor?"

"The most obvious would be to increase your magical attack power."

That was the method I'd used. I'd never measured the exact mana output of my magical bullets, but my sorcery could pierce dragon scales. At minimum, it carried enough force to punch through an armored bear's mana-fortified hide, bore through its muscle, and shatter its skull.

"Right. Simple and effective, but you're pretty much the only one who can do that. Next?"

"… You could raise your physical attack power instead. Train your strength, use sharper, harder, heavier weapons."

I thought for a moment before answering, and Innis nodded approvingly.

"Yep. What the Swordsaints do falls more or less into that category too. Targeting softer spots, striking at the most opportune moment, all of that. So, what's the third?"

"Lowering the opponent's defense would fall under those first two categories, right?"

Then… what else was there? There were only two types of attack power… No, wait. Of course.

"Increase the mana of the attack itself."

"Ding ding, correct!"

Professor Innis awarded me full marks.

"Well, it's basically the same thing the armored bear is doing. You just imbue the weapon itself with mana. If the force of the thrust and the mana in the hide cancel each other out, then hit it with something that already carries its own mana. Simple addition."

Innis ran her fingers along the blade of her small knife, infusing it with mana, then set it on the hide the same way as before. This time, the knife sank straight through.

It sliced through the hide and bit into the desk beneath, stopping only when the handle caught at the surface.

"Wait… hold on. But we're already doing that, aren't we?"

The only reason people under two meters tall could bring down ferocious beasts over five meters long with primitive weapons was that they reinforced those weapons with magic. In my previous world, brown bears were not creatures you could easily kill even with a firearm. That we could hunt beasts far more formidable was thanks to magic as our greatest weapon.

Now that armored bears had acquired mana and could wield magic themselves, that advantage was gone. Could a person kill a bear with a spear and no magic at all? That was essentially what it came down to.

"I know that much, obviously. But to be precise, what we've been doing is enhancing the effect a weapon exerts on its target… in plain terms, reinforcing its sharpness, its cutting power, that sort of thing. We haven't been reinforcing the weapon itself."

"Hm? How is that different?"

I tilted my head. Reinforcing a weapon versus reinforcing the effect a weapon has on its target. It sounded like the same thing to me.

"It's totally different. The former generates a minute Arendal field, whereas the latter involves magical particles mediating the bonds between the atoms that constitute the material, causing the Tenesis intensity to exponentially… ugh. Okay, um…"

Innis could tell she'd lost me entirely. She scratched her head and, after a moment's thought, tried again.

"Put simply: we make stronger weapons. Improving materials or manufacturing techniques to make physically stronger weapons isn't feasible on short notice, but I have an idea for making magically stronger ones. Layer reinforcement magic on top of those, and we'll be able to take down mana-bearing armored bears."

I was surprised. Not by the idea itself.

"You'd already realized. That beasts with mana probably aren't limited to just this one armored bear."

"Well, obviously. You wouldn't come to me looking this worked up if it wasn't something that threatened the village."

Precisely. It was hard to believe this single specimen was the only beast to have acquired mana. And it likely wasn't limited to armored bears, either. The forest teemed with ferocious beasts beyond count. If every one of them gained mana, the threat would surpass even that of monsters.

"Beasts with mana… let's tentatively call them manabeasts. I have a rough idea of what caused them to appear, too."

The mana-infused armored bear showed no unnatural signs… no traces of deliberate tampering. If Algernon had somehow survived and was enhancing armored bears to harm us, you'd expect them to be more ferocious, more aggressive toward humans, or perhaps to display higher intelligence and fight in formation. There should have been some sign.

But aside from possessing mana and wielding magic, the armored bear had been no different from any ordinary beast. It lived in the forest the same way, attacked people the same way. Nina and I could tell at a glance that it carried powerful mana, but that was the extent of it.

In other words, it was a natural change, and there was only one cause I could think of.

"Monsters."

I nodded at Innis's word.

Monsters possessed mana and used magic, but unlike manabeasts, their skin didn't carry an innate charge of mana. Attacks could get through without magic. In numbers they posed a threat to us, but lone stragglers were manageable enough. Wild beasts could certainly prey on them.

"Beasts that ate monsters accumulated mana within their bodies until they became capable of using magic themselves. Is that a fair understanding?"

"We'll need to verify it, but there's really no other explanation."

I nodded again. We needed to investigate how many beasts in the surrounding area had undergone this transformation. I could ask the Swordsaints to look into it. Even against manabeasts, they wouldn't be outmatched.

"So then, how exactly do you plan to make these stronger weapons?"

"Easy. We just use materials that already carry a lot of mana."

At Innis's words, my gaze went to the armored bear's hide. If the mana had permeated not just the hide but the claws and fangs as well, the beast's body could potentially be processed into powerful weapons.

"Wrong. Not a bad line of thinking, but even an armored bear's body isn't harder than iron. It'd lose out in physical attack power. Those parts only work as weapons because of the bear's massive frame behind them."

From my gaze alone, Innis had anticipated my thought.

"There is a creature, you know. One with far more abundant mana, far harder than iron, with an incredibly tough body."

She smiled at me with a face so adorable it could have belonged to an angel.

And with that look, I finally grasped what she was getting at.

"Oh. Me."

"Yep."