Divine Luck: SSS-Rank Battle Maid Harem

Magic is the external expression and application of energy.

Orthodox magic is the study of those expressions and applications meant to equalize and standardize it for the shared and common use of magic. Orthodox magic uses laws, rules, and understanding of concepts and magical energy to explain the expressions of magic.

Talent is necessary, but hard work goes a long way as well.

Unorthodox magic is the free expression and application of magical energy or energies with similar enough functions. It is unbound by rules other than the ones each practitioner sets for themselves. Branches of unorthodox magic can share rules, but mostly in terms of application and use.

Unorthodox magic requires talent. Feeling. It is something a practitioner learns by doing, not reading.

"..." Zach stared blankly at Nessa who had just shared a summary of the two different types of magic that she, Violina, and a few others had managed to find after several days of looking through the library.

He was tired.

While they did all that, he had been busy shoveling doll corpses into a pile in the city center while his familiars killed the dolls that kept coming to take down talismans. When they could without it impacting their hunt, Soara and Yanael threw the dolls they killed onto the pile. Otherwise, they were left lying on the ground until Zach could pick them up with his shovel and wheelbarrow.

It was hard but necessary work since they couldn't risk the underworld energy pervade the city even more or spread beyond the city's borders. They also couldn't let the dolls be, even if they hadn't started burning their surroundings.

While he and his familiars had been doing the work of a dozen people, his friends, his trusted comrades, the ones who had his back in desperate times, had flipped through a bunch of books to tell him; yep, magic is magic.n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

Zach sat down and rested his arms on his knees as he stared into the pile of burning dolls. He had confirmed one thing during the last few days.

Violina's guess that the dolls were related to the magic was true.

Each doll caught fire some time after it broke. The time varied slightly between each doll, but after several hours, the black tar-like blood would start burning. And it seemed that fire was the catalyst to launch an attack on whoever had killed the dolls. The more dolls they had killed, the stronger the attack.

Zach had no idea how, but Yanael managed to sense and defend against the attacks whenever they came.

Soara didn't need to. He guessed that the dolls couldn't pick up her as the attacker since they just collapsed and started bleeding after getting too close to her. She hadn't attacked them. They had died. Thus, there was no counterattack.

It wasn't a matter of distance. Zach had tried throwing rocks at the dolls from afar and killed them. When it was time for the counterattack,

something

struck the skin-tight barrier, regardless of how far away he was.

What surprised Zach was the fact that the attack bypassed the dome around him that had a radius equal to a stride of his. It wasn't an attack that would reach him regardless of how far away he was. It was an attack that would hit him regardless of where he was.

It was a subtle difference, but it might help them figure out ways to defend against it.

After all, Zach's classmates still couldn't help out, even if they weren't as wary and frightened anymore. They could have their familiars do it since they were more resilient. But some familiars weren't. Some familiars weren't even suited to killing the dolls since they were slow, weak, or just not very good at it.

That was why almost all the students had been running around and kicking or whacking the dolls in the first place.

"Hello?" Nessa waved her hand in front of Zach's face. He hadn't looked at her or reacted to anything in a few minutes. His eyes slowly moved to her face.

"Oh. Hey, Nessa. Did you guys find anything?" After all that time in the library, he hoped they found something useful.

Nessa narrowed her eyebrows with concern. Hadn't they already had this exchange shortly before she shared their findings?

"Zach? You alright?"

"Nope. I dreamt you said that magic was magic. Please tell me it was…" Zach could already see it on Nessa's face that it had not been a dream.

"That's…"

"Well, that's not all you found, tough, is it?" Zach asked, fresh out of hope.

Nessa's eyes lit up.

"No, we found similar types of magic, both orthodox and unorthodox!" she said excitedly.

"Great."

"Yes. Basically, there's a mage down there creating these dolls and imprinting them with spells. It's similar to magic tools but different. They're disposable, which means they are more powerful. They are also very complex since they overlap or work together, I guess you could say." Nessa sat down next to Zach as she explained.

They looked at the burning pile of dolls like a bonfire together.

"..." Zach silently waited for her to continue.

"...?" She didn't.

"That's it?"

"Yeah? There isn't much more we can find out without asking the mage directly."

"So, what we know now is that there's a skilled mage down there creating dolls that burn and counterattack the ones who destroyed them."

"Yeah…?" Nessa's expression gradually sank as she turned back to the bonfire. Put like that, there was no difference in what they knew now from what they knew a couple of days ago.

They had spent those days in the library for nothing.

Zach had worked that hard alone for nothing. No, it wasn't for nothing. The other students couldn't kill the dolls, so he had to do that alone. But they could have helped him with the shoveling as soon as they figured out the part about the counterattacks.

Zach turned to Nessa with a dead expression. The existence of his familiar, the deity of Death, was fully reflected in his face.