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Project GB is an official initiative by Re:Library.

“A-a huge syringe… a massive one… they drained like 5 liters of my blood…”
“Relax. If you’re still alive after that, you’ve already stopped being human— no need for any tests.”

Momo, having barely survived her ordeal in the examination room, collapsed onto the floor in utter exhaustion.

Despite glimpsing some rather ominous-looking medical equipment, her skin still retained a healthy color. Whatever they’d done to her, it probably wasn’t too out of line.

“Wahaha! Sorry, sorry! Our people tend to get a little carried away! It’ll take some time to finish the tests, but do you have any plans afterward?”
“Not particularly. If it’s alright, would you mind if we toured the place? As someone who also deals with magic power, I’m quite interested in magitech.”
“I don’t mind at all. It’s an honor to have you interested in our work. Zaif! Show them around!”
“W-why me!? They can just wander around on their own, can’t they?”
“There are plenty of dangerous rooms they could stumble into. Besides, aren’t you stuck on your research anyway? A little walk might clear your head.”
“…Tch. Fine! Damn it, I’ll go, alright?!”

At Arnitta’s call, the young man —Zaif— came jogging over.

Even if his progress had stalled, it couldn’t have felt great to be dragged away from his work like this. The irritation on his face was obvious.

“I’m sorry. If we’re getting in your way, feel free to say so. We can find a way to kill time on our own.”
“Nah, it’s fine… The old man’s right— I’m in a slump anyway. I wouldn’t get anything done if I went back.”
“O-oh, I see… Um, would it be alright if I asked what you’re working on?”
“I’ll explain while I show you around. Come on, follow me.”

✦✧✦✧✦

“…In the first place, magitech is the newest of the disciplines that deal with magic power. It’s a complete newcomer compared to magecraft.”
“Master, is that true?”
“Magic came first, then magecraft followed. If you trace history back, the order would be magic, magecraft, and then magitech.”
“Magic is the manifestation of divine miracles, borrowed by humans. Then, as research into magic power progressed, it became something humans could wield as a technology— that’s magecraft. The old man taught me that.”

We walked down a corridor paved with some strange material, neither stone nor metal, as the young man kept talking.

He was explaining the history of how humans unraveled the mysteries of magic power. I knew the story up until the birth of magecraft, but beyond that, it was completely unknown territory for me.

“Magitech is about guiding people through magic power. It’s a field of study that aims to make techniques that were once only usable by a chosen few accessible to many, even if just at a basic level.”
“Whoa… Is magecraft really that hard? Even I managed to use it, though.”
“Barely. Your magic capacity is so low you can hardly handle it properly. And there are plenty of people with even less talent than you. The size of that ‘vessel’ is determined at birth.”
“To use magecraft, you need magic capacity, output, and control techniques. Control can be trained, but capacity and output are hard to improve after birth. But magitech is different.”

The young man pulled a small cube from his pocket and pressed the bump at its center.

The cube immediately started to shift and transform on its own, eventually turning into a palm-sized golem.

Gii-goo…

“Whoa! It’s so cute!!”
“It’s a golem powered by an internal magic stone. It’s just a prototype, though— it’ll run out of fuel in less than three minutes.”
“I see… So as long as you can activate it, the performance doesn’t change based on who’s using it?”

Creating a golem was supposed to be incredibly difficult. Their performance usually depended on the skill of the caster, and the more you made, the more magic power they drained.

But if they could run on internal magic stones, mass production might not be such an impossible dream after all.

“It can only run on small magic stones for now, but eventually, we’ll be able to make human-sized golems. When that happens, we can leave all the dangerous work to them.”
“Is that your job, Mr. Zaif?”
“Nah, that’s just something my old man used to say. He died in an accident a few years back, though.”
“Oh… I-I’m sorry!”
“Don’t worry about it. It was a long time ago. My actual job is this.”

The young man touched a door partway down the long corridor, and a 3×3 grid with numbers from 1 to 9 floated up in the air.

He casually keyed in the digits, and the sealed door slid open to both sides.

“Pretty careless of you to punch in the code right in front of guests, don’t you think?”
“It’s fine. The code alone isn’t enough to unlock this door. Come on in, but don’t touch any of the machines, kid.”
“Huh? I’m not a kid, though???”
“Master, easy, easy.”

The room we stepped into, with Momo calming me down, was a stark contrast to the sterile, polished hallway. It was a messy, cluttered lab filled with scattered junk.

Golem parts still half-assembled, along with hastily scribbled notes, littered the floor. Zaif had said we could come in, but there wasn’t even a clear spot to step.

“The beauty of magitech isn’t just that talentless people can interact with magic power. Its true charm lies in its potential for expansion.”
“What do you mean?”
“If we improve magitech tool performance, we can reach places humanity never could before— even beyond this planet.”

Zaif skillfully navigated the obstacles on the floor, heading toward something covered in a white cloth at the back of the room.

When he lifted the cloth, what emerged was a massive, tripod-mounted magitech device, taller than he was.

“…A telescope.”
“What, you know what this is? Yeah, this is my real work— a tool to one day extend humanity’s reach beyond the planet!”

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