“What is magic?!”
With a huge BAM projected behind her, Asahi shouted at the top of her lungs.
“Asahi, lower the volume.”
“Asahi, you’re loud.”
Up on the platform, Asahi nodded several times, then flicked a hand to bring up her slides.
“Now then, let’s go over what we know so far! Time to share information!”
Completely ignoring the heckling from the audience—and of course making no effort whatsoever to lower her volume—Asahi pressed on.
“Asahi’s in good spirits.”
“Yes, Big Sister, I’m full of energy!!”
The first slide displayed an image of what looked like some kind of armor plate with a spear driven through it.
“This is footage from an experiment we ran with the help of some adventurers in Northend City in the United Kingdom of Aphrasia!”
The projected display began playing the recorded footage of that test.
The test subject, with observation markers attached all over the body, hurled a spear after drawing it back.
Thrown with tremendous force, the spear stabbed straight into the laminated armor plate that served as the target.
“Like this! It’s an utterly ordinary spear with a bronze tip! But with the help of magic, it can easily punch through even our prized armor plate!”
Watching the footage, Eve let out an impressed sound.
When all was said and done, this was her first time carefully observing analysis footage of this sort of absurd fantasy phenomenon.
Up to now, what she had mostly seen were things more on the level of giant-monster slugfests.
“And one more thing!”
The next image Asahi displayed was a recording of an experiment on a different kind of plate.
“This one is armor made from <Big Moth> material! It’s a thoroughly unfair material with ridiculously high strength thanks to fantasy effects!”
In the footage, a spear thrown in the same way pierced the armor.
Unlike before, however, it stopped when the tip had gone only about halfway in.
It was a profoundly unfair fantasy result: an organically derived compound outperforming laminated armor in sheer strength, even though chemistry said the latter ought to be far tougher.
No wonder <Ringo> and the other information intelligences, children of science that they were, were frowning.
“Now, trying to uncover the mechanism behind that is unbelievably difficult, so we’ll set that aside for the moment. What we noticed in this comparison test was the spearhead!”
Growing more heated by the second, Asahi switched slides.
“The spear that pierced the laminated armor still had a sharp tip! It supposedly slammed into hard metal and ceramic, and yet mere bronze kept its shape, which, well, makes absolutely no sense, right? But with this <Big Moth> armor! The spearhead used here is clearly worn down, as you can see!”
An enlarged image of the recovered spearhead after the test filled the screen.
Sure enough, the tip of the spear that had pierced the <Big Moth> armor was blunted, and the whole head looked scratched up.
“So then we thought, all right, what if we combine <Big Moth> armor with laminated armor...”
The next recording showed a spear that had pierced through the surface layer of <Big Moth> armor, only to be repelled by the laminated armor behind it, leaving no more than a slight dent. Then came an enlarged image of that spearhead.
“And what do you know! This time, the laminated armor actually did its job! The damage is a little worse than the calculations predicted, but at this point that hardly matters, so let’s ignore it!”
Striking a pose, Asahi cried out:
“Magic can be stopped by magic!”
The projected display flashed with a TA-DAA sound effect, and the caption Magic VS Magic appeared across it.
“The people on this planet use magic as casually as breathing! For example, there are techniques called things like <Penetration>! And if you use one of those, then no matter how tough the armor is, it’ll usually get pierced!”
If someone used <Penetration>, even a random tree branch could punch through a steel plate.
And the branch itself would come through undamaged.
“However, that only applies to the phenomenon of penetrating! Even if you use <Penetration> magic to deliver a slashing attack, its effect is limited. The point of impact gets damaged, but it doesn’t actually get cut! So we now know that <Penetration> magic is specialized for making something pierce through a target. It doesn’t just add raw attack power or impact force!”
“...Hmm. So in other words, it’s not just boosting the power directly?”
“Yes, Big Sister, exactly! Also, harder and thicker targets do seem ◆ Nоvеlіgһt ◆ (Only on Nоvеlіgһt) to reduce the effect of <Penetration>! It turned out to be surprisingly difficult to make it pierce a concrete wall one meter thick! A dirt wall of the same thickness was easy, though!”
“Hearing it that way, it still sounds like a power issue...”
Apparently Asahi had repeated the experiment under a wide variety of conditions.
For the most part, the results did scale in proportion to the strength of the armor.
“But what’s really interesting is a wall with self-repair capability! This type has the internal voids filled with a gel-like shock absorber, so if it only gets a hole in it, it seals up immediately, and the surface hardens by reacting with oxygen in the air...”
Only this type of wall behaved differently. Even though the spell effect was still supposed to be <Penetration>, the target suffered major structural damage.
Huge holes were torn open, large enough that its self-repair function couldn’t recover, and cracks spread through it—damage that clearly would never result from an ordinary spear thrust.
“And in the end, we concluded that this self-repairing armor, which ought to be vastly more fragile than laminated armor plate, actually has greater resistance to <Penetration> magic!”
“An ordinary armor plate just gets a hole punched through it, but this one gets completely wrecked? That’s a strange effect for something called <Penetration>...”
“Exactly, Big Sister! I-it’s still just a hypothesis, but it looks like <Penetration> magic may not be producing a phenomenon that leads to penetration so much as producing the result of penetration itself!”
“...?”
That conclusion made everyone tilt their heads.
“What I mean is... <Penetration> magic doesn’t seem to be increasing the projectile’s power or hardness so that it can pierce the target. Instead, it appears to strengthen the projectile so that it can withstand the already-established result of having pierced the target. The result comes first, and the phenomenon follows. Isn’t that a fascinating hypothesis?”
That was the hypothesis Asahi had arrived at.
To produce the result of the target being penetrated, the spear that had been thrown was granted the strength and force necessary to make that happen.
Which, apparently, was why an excessive level of force was displayed in order to “penetrate” a self-repairing wall. Unless it inflicted damage severe enough to prevent the wall from repairing itself, it could not count as penetration.
“And here’s the really wild part: even if the magic user doesn’t know what the target is, the output still gets adjusted automatically. We selected the targets using quantum random numbers, and the spell still produced exactly the force required. We repeated that experiment many times, so I’m almost certain of it!”
A quantum random-number generator, incidentally, is a true random generator: even given exactly the same initial state, it produces different results.
Physically speaking, the numbers it produces cannot be predicted.
And yet, despite that complete scientific randomness, <Penetration> magic still correctly manifests its effect.
In other words, magic is not bound by physical phenomena.
“So if one of our weapons gets hit by an attack using <Penetration>, does that mean it’ll definitely be pierced?”
“If that were the case, we’d be completely doomed! But apparently, there are limits to what it can do!”
After prefacing that the results seemed to depend on the magic user’s own perception, Asahi went on.
“If we hid another armor plate behind the first one with enough space between them, then even though the front plate was pierced easily, the rear plate was able to stop the attack. And if we made the armor thick enough, there were also cases where the magic user showed symptoms of magical exhaustion and the spear stopped partway through.”
“...I see. Magical power. If they don’t have enough magical power to fully produce the phenomenon, the result ends up incomplete.”
“Yes, Big Sister! And magic apparently clashes with magic!”
Presenting it as a scientific finding, Asahi brought up the <Big Moth> armor on screen again.
“It’s chitin-based, and there are some mysterious molecular structures in there too, but if you separate it from the <Magic Stone>, its hardness is more or less what you’d expect! Physically, it isn’t all that hard! Since the underlying material is soft, then by pure physical reasoning it ought to be pierced easily by <Penetration> magic!”
“So a hardening spell and a penetration spell collide, and both cancel each other out?”
“That’s probably pretty close, Big Sister!”
