Author: Himezaki Shiu | Original Source: Syosetu |
Translator: PunishedLyly | English Source: Re:Library |
Some time has passed since we decided on our plans. Considering that we still don’t know what Ciel’s job is, I don’t think she’s 10 years old yet. Thanks to the long time we spent, I finally managed to read letters and Ciel has also finished reading everything in this room.
Of course, we spent our time just as usual and took the medicine as well, so our magic power has increased more. The books in this room include sorcery (magic)-related books, job-related books and writings about gods as well; so I now roughly understand why that man thought of reaching for the gods.
Personally, learning that the words Ciel used to comfort me before came from a children’s picture book was the best part of it all. Why? Because it gave me a chance to see Ciel’s embarrassed, apple red face. The scene of Ciel muttering 「I just wanted to make you feel better」 in a quiet voice was something I would have liked to record in physical media.
Anyhow, we’ve gathered all the information that we can, so here we are today deciding to put it all together.
「As expected, I couldn’t find any way to ensure a Job beforehand.」
『Well, we were just hoping for it in the first place. After all, if there really was a way of securing a Job, I’m sure that that man would have already used it on you. Still, it was good that we found out about the different kinds of Jobs. And even though we can’t be certain that we can have it, we’ve found our target Job.』
「The Disappointing Kings and Princesses, right? Calling them ‘disappointing’ seems to me like people haven’t put any actual thought to them, but that’s something we can use to our advantage.」
Jobs are, so to speak, a talent carved into the soul by the gods, I guess? The technical skills related to the Jobs are passively augmented. It can probably be seen as a type of support magic, in which the offering needed by the said support magic is compensated by the gods instead. In other words, Jobs are directly connected to the gods and we suspect that’s the connection that man is using to reach for the gods.
Back to topic. The terms Disappointing Kings and Princesses are insults referring to people who gained King or Princess tier Jobs that are unnecessary in battle or in everyday life. They are sometimes called the Dud Kings and Princesses as well. For example, it was once said that there was a man who became a Clown King that didn’t really have much success in life so, as a result of being ridiculed continuously, he lived his whole life hiding his Job1.
Kings, Princesses and other high tier Jobs can do more things than other people in the same Job line; but for some reason, higher tier Jobs —Clown Kings rather than Clowns— have a worse reputation to the public.
To roughly describe it, they are probably seen as people mastering a useless skill. Although the jobs have some sort of uniformity, it’s not strange to discover a completely new Job; in the past years, the number of Jobs have continued to increase. It won’t even be surprising if a “Pebble Princess” that’s skilled in using pebbles suddenly appeared.
And even among these disappointing jobs, the one that’s touted as synonymous to the term Disappointing Princess is the “Song Princess”. Other than making singing easier, the effects of this job are the so-called buff, debuff, and healing support in video games. Comparing it with other existing Jobs, it’s a Support Sorcerer and Priest/Saintess hybrid, I guess.
Song Princesses can provide highly effective support and healing. Just hearing that would probably make you think of them as extremely excellent back liners, but the problem here is their effective range.
You see, the said range includes everyone that can hear their song. In a battlefield, everyone regardless of affiliation are enchanted; and when they intend to heal an individual, even the enemies are healed. The effects of their enchantment only last within the duration of the song, so they can’t even apply support sorcery beforehand.
Due to that, they get don’t much work at all. On the contrary, you can say that it’s the number one Job you don’t want people to know you have.2 In reality, even among the books, there are quite a few records of Song Princesses being persecuted after having their Jobs exposed.
There is even a record of a Song Princess that had enough of it and used her power to attract monsters, destroying both the royal capital and herself. The said capital is somewhere far east from here, seemingly still abandoned. Hearing this story, I was just weirdly impressed by the existence of monsters.
The reason we’re aiming for a disappointing Job is, of course, so that man gets sick of Ciel. There’s a chance that he’ll run wild with his knife again the instant he sees her Job, but I can defend her from that much. More importantly, it would be much worse if that man still has his eyes on us and sends pursuers after us when we escape.
Just having a Disappointing Job has the demerit of simply making it hard for us to grow stronger. However, I do feel that their bad reputation, especially of the Disappointing Kings and Princesses, are intentional. So I think that depending on the situation, they could likely fight toe-to-toe with the combat jobs.
Now, for the question of which Jobs are conversely the most popular, it’s the Combat Jobs. In this world where monsters exist, it’s best to have power, and strength becomes a sort of status. After all, if you’re strong, then you can live off of that strength; and if you’re not, then it’s dangerous to even travel to the next town without being escorted by strong people.
And among all of the Combat Jobs, we especially need to avoid the sorcery-related Jobs. I don’t know how we’ll do it, though. Not studying sorcery seems like it would help us with that, but I think that’s exactly what that medicine exists for. Most importantly, I don’t want to throw away one card that could help us during our escape. After all, if we can use combat sorcery, we can reduce the chances of dying to some random monster encounters after leaving the mansion.
If the combat Jobs are the stars of the Jobs, then farmers, merchants and other Jobs that are greatly concerned with livelihood are like the office workers in my past life. Most people get these kinds of Jobs. And at the bottom of the Job caste are the people with jobs that are related to entertainment, like Clowns. Even among them, the Song Princess is at the bottom so to speak.
A slight change of topic but some Jobs are subdivided even further, for example: the Sorcerer has Jobs like 「Flame Sorcerer」 and 「Ice Sorcerer」 that are specialized in a specific area, as well as 「Sorcerer」 that encompasses all of those. The difference of a specialized-type and balanced-type makes which one of them better dependent on the situation, so there isn’t much discrimination on that regard.
Speaking of which, a special tool is needed to know your Job. Some wealthy individuals personally own one, but generally 10 year old children gather at the church and are inspected. During that event, they seem to have ways to make sure that other people won’t know the results, but the church itself probably knows. Moreover, the privately owned inspection tool’s way is different from the one used by the church, so it’s likely that Ciel’s inspection will use the former. Since there isn’t any difference in accuracy, there’s really nothing to worry about.
「As for the job, we’ll just try what we can. But Ain really can’t use combat sorcery, right? 」
『That’s right. I’ve tried using both chants and magic circles, but it seems that a cup full of water is the best I can do. It should be useful in our everyday life but it’s absolutely useless in combat. I’m sorry.』
「That’s not what I mean. Don’t apologize. Instead, I’m the one that should be apologizing. After all, for Ain to use sorcery without prior knowledge, using magic to facilitate chantless sorcery and magic circles were the only ways. I’m sure that Ain was supposed to be a really amazing sorcerer, but you gave up your ability to use combat to protect me. I’m sorry, no, thank you, Ain.」
『No, please don’t mind it. As long as I can protect Ciel, I don’t mind. Besides, thanks to that, it seems that my barrier and detection has turned quite powerful.』
「Right, I’ll just do my best in your place instead. It’ll be nice if we can defeat that man, but running away is our best option, right?」
『After all, he is someone that reached for the gods and, even though he failed, he left tangible results. He’s likely to have high-tier Sorcerer Job, and he is definitely experienced. Regardless of what job we acquire, since sorcery is our main means of combat, I’d say that man has an overall advantage. I can’t deny the possibility of him being actually weak, but it’ll be best not to invite unwanted trouble.』
In this world, magic and sorcery exists. Sorcery is defined as a systemized method while magic is seen as the unknown, so all magic might eventually become sorcery in the far future. The fundamentals of using sorcery is to have magic power and circulate it through the circuits in your whole body. By using chants or magic circles with that said magic power, it turns into sorcery.
Chant spells are activated by chanting three word incantations –what, will become, will do– , in which you circulate and control the magic power needed corresponding to the sorcery. If you just say it, it won’t activate and if you only poured in a lot of magic power, it doesn’t work.
For example,「Fairas Baalaru Fralie (Fire, become an orb, fly)」will shoot out a ball of fire. Magic circles are defined as a more complex version of this and can be thought of as an objects transforming magic power into something else. And to use sorcery without these, you could either rely on your Job’s power or use magic.
Currently, not much is really understood about magic. What is known is that by losing magic power and something that serves as an offering, you can acquire something else. Magic power will recover eventually, but what you’ve offered will never return. It’s not sure to be an equivalent exchange, so using it needs resolve.
In my case, it’s likely that by offering my ability in using combat sorcery, I succeeded in transforming my barrier, detection and concealment into chant-less and magic circle-less sorcery. It’s not really something that happens by coincidence, but it actually did, so I don’t have anything to say about that.
While it’s true that I thought that I don’t need a magic strong enough to kill that man, I didn’t actually think that it would actually happen. Because of that I was able to protect Ciel, so it’s all good. But using combat sorcery was a bit of a dream of mine, so that was depressing.
It’s said that the reason magic circles are called so even though they are used to execute sorcery is because it is something that was originally used to execute magic. In actuality, there are cases where you need magic circles to use magic, but you can also use magic without it, so it’s likely somewhat arbitrary.
Both magic and sorcery use magic power and it is commonly thought that magic power is produced in the center of the body. However, it seems like a result of that man’s research found that it’s actually in the soul. Rather, me finding it the way I did was irregular.
Since both magic power and jobs are rooted to the soul, following where Jobs come from should lead you to the gods. Likely thinking so, the man used magic and tried to implant a god into Ciel. Disregarding the morality of what he’s done, and considering the scale of what he’s doing, you can’t really expect him to be a regular old sorcerer.
『I will be protecting you with my barrier as usual, so Ciel will be in charge of fighting off monsters and pursuers. Until our escape, let’s have you pretend to be incapable of using sorcery. That way, I think it would make him see you less useful. If, in the worst case, you ever get a Sorcerer job, as a last ditch effort we’ll destroy the mansion and run away.』
「That, doesn’t really sound like much of a plan, does it?」
Hearing my words, Ciel giggled. What Ciel said is frankly true, but we don’t really know how the mansion is built; we don’t even know what job Ciel will have and, in the first place, I’m not really that bright. Fortunately, Ciel’s magic power seems to have increased by a lot as well, so she can probably destroy the mansion; also, more importantly, just having a last option can give people an emotional leeway.
Frankly, it’ll be better if I already made plans on what to do after escaping the mansion. Although Ciel may be smart, she’s still a child not even 10 years old. Rather than making her remember a lot of things, I thought that it’s better for her to only focus on one thing.
Also, it’s a bit off topic but we’ve learned a bit about this household. Duke Rispelgia, one of the kingdom’s high nobility. That’s the name of this mansion’s master. As I suspected, this world runs on an aristocratic governing system. This was my first thought. That man did indeed look the part, so I wasn’t that surprised; but the fact that he’s a duke is a big problem. After all, his authority is only next to the royal family. And depending on the situation, he might even be more influential than the royal family.
Naturally, his finances are incomparable to the lesser nobles and now that it’s come to this, I can only hope that the nobility itself doesn’t have much power here.
The nobles of this world are, so to speak, individuals with magic power. People that can use sorcery are nobles and those who can’t are commoners. However, in the long records of history, nobles born without magic power as well as common folk born with it were few but certainly existed. Among the said commoners, there were some with as much magic power as nobles; but it seems that to be a noble, you need some great achievements or a large amount of riches.
The greatest card in our hand is Ciel’s job. That man —Duke Rispelgia— might have already been informed about what we’re doing, so it might be a really dangerous gamble, but I think we have a winning chance. Thinking so, today we once again spend our remaining time just as usual.
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Footnotes:
- Silva: To be fair, if you have the clown king Job, then you probably have the talent to make a successful circus show. The reason he’s being ridiculed is that he tried to deny his job instead of embracing it. It’s not anyone’s fault but himself. Ok, ranting over, let’s get back to the story, shall we?
- Silva: The people of this world must not know what entertainment is, I guess they’re too hung up about the usefulness of Jobs in combat to care about anything else.