Chapter 20: Red Metal

「Was this the hole you opened, Sensei!?」

A gaping cavern punched into the mountainside. Looking up at its ceiling, Luka’s eyes went wide.

「Really—?」

Unable to believe it at once, Rin tilts her head, looking doubtful.

「Yes. I remember that day very well. Even from the elf forest, we could clearly see the flame Sensei unleashed back then.」

She nodded and said it with a nostalgic air. Even for the elves, five-plus centuries ago counts as “a while back.”

「Well, I’m not doubting it. Sensei’s usually pretty mild, but every now and then you do something outrageous, don’t you.」

Sig pokes me in the back with a smirk.

「Nostalgic, huh—」
「No, you weren’t there, Yuuki. Come on, hop down.」

I press my snout to the rock face and angle my neck like a staircase. At my current size, carrying all the students on my back and flying isn’t much trouble.

「So... what shape is this “metal” supposed to take?」
「As for its shape, actually... I don’t know.」

As Nina asks inside the tunnel, I shake my head while shifting into human form.

「It’s, how to put it... something that glitters—feels different from ordinary stone.」
「Glitters...?」

Nina sweeps her gaze through the tunnel.
You couldn’t see the sun from within; it was almost pitch black inside.

「Maybe it’s not here?」
「No, it doesn’t shine by itself... it strongly reflects when light hits it.」

How do I explain metallic luster?

「Like water?」
「Yeah, that might be close.」

Rin throws me a lifeline as I struggle.
It’s so very her to bring up water when we’re talking about rocks, but the way a water surface glitters and reflects light is a bit like a metal’s sheen.

「In that case... little sun, please shine on us.」

Light spills from Luka’s palm, gathers into a sphere, and floats up, illuminating the area like a tiny sun just as her chant said.

「Nice stability.」
「Ehehe... thank you.」

When I praise the steady, flicker‑free light orb, Luka shyly smiles and wags her tail. Keeping a spell’s output constant looks simple but is surprisingly hard.

「Still, it’s more scattered than I expected...」

A hole bored by a fire dragon’s laser breath ends up smooth as glass—it melts everything open. But five hundred years is five hundred years: cave‑ins and debris have piled up, and the interior was choked with rubble.

「First, we clean.」

Violet‑san wraps both arms in brambles, forming giant gauntlets. She plucks up a rock with them, and that’s the cue for everyone to start clearing in their own ways.

「Fwaa—float up... and boom!」

Chanting an impressively unique spell, Rin levitates a boulder and hurls it toward the entrance.

「Whoa—hey, that’s dangerous! Watch it!」

Dodging the rocks flying overhead and grumbling, Sig carries a stone under each set of arms, steadying them with his upper pair as he hauls them out. With his strength, he can handle rocks like these without magic.

「Okay, Luka, take this one!」
「Sure!」

Beside them, Yuuki chops big rocks into smaller pieces with her stone blade and Luka carts them away—a smart division of labor to tackle a tough job together.

I shift back to dragon form and start with the big pieces. A dragon’s forelegs aren’t great for gripping, so I bite and drag, sweep with my tail, and rake the debris out.

Next to me Nina does the same thing with magic. She sweeps her arms as if parting the air, and the rubble moves in sync with her motions. I have no idea how it works, and I know asking her will only get me another unhelpful answer.

「Haah, I’m beat—」
「Hey, don’t slack off.」

Rin had been blasting rubble with gusto, but it must have burned through her stamina—she flops to the ground first. Sig glances over, half exasperated, and calls her out.

「Hey, hey, Sig—can’t we make these, like, round?」

Unbothered, Rin starts saying that while pat‑patting the rubble with her tail.

「Round? What do you mean?」

As Sig tilts his head, Rin points, beckoning, at her own wheelchair.

「I see.」

Catching on, Sig nods and sets down the stone he was holding.

「O you stones, hard and heavy, children of the earth—obey my hand and take form.」

As Sig chants and strokes the rock, it slowly begins to change shape. After a moment, it turns round like a ball.

「Then off you go—!」
「I told you it’s dangerous!」

With a bright shout, Rin shoves it, and the rock barrels down the tunnel like a bowling ball.

「Sig, that spell just now...」
「Huh, did I mess up?」
「No, not that—how did you think of it?」

Hard rock changed shape like clay.
I’d never taught a spell like that, never used it, never even thought to try it. So magic could do that too...

「Well... I only changed its shape.」

Sig answers, looking a bit puzzled.

「Isn’t that way easier than making fire or water from nothing, or flying without wings? Rock shapes change if you hammer or bash them—this is no different.」

His answer shocks me.
I’d always thought of magic as something mysterious, inexplicable.
Put the other way around, the viewpoint of reproducing what could happen anyway with magic had completely slipped my mind.

「O you stones, hard and heavy, children of the earth—obey my hand and change your shape.」

I mimic Sig’s spell and stroke a rock. It warps at once, but getting it as neatly round as his is hard. Maybe my output is too strong— it becomes far too soft, more like mud close to water than clay.

「This is indeed difficult.」
「It won’t get soft at all...」

The others immediately start to imitate it too, but Violet‑san can’t reshape it well, and Luka doesn’t seem to get any effect at all.

「Sig’s really good at this!」
「Why are you acting all high and mighty?」

Even as he elbows the proudly puffed‑up Rin, Sig can’t help a bashful grin.

「Hmm—」

Offering a perfunctory response, Nina casually stretches the stone between both hands. Like she’s pulling udon or soba. Poor Sig, who’d just been so pleased, deflates at the sight—this genius really needs to ease up sometimes.

Then something plops out from the udon‑like stretched stone.

「Hey. Isn’t it this?」

What Nina picked up was a red mineral with a luster clearly unlike stone.

「Yeah, that’s the one!」

In my hand it felt chill and, for its size, solidly heavy.
No doubt about it—some kind of metal.

「...Sig, can you change this one’s shape too?」

A notion hits me, and I ask Sig that.

「Sure, but... what’s its name?」

Name. Asked that, I freeze up.

「I can’t cast without a name. Is “metal” good enough?」
「Wait, hold on...」

I hadn’t thought about that at all. It didn’t look like iron or copper. It was red— not the dull brownish red of rust, but a vivid, flame‑like red.

Following the likes of Hiiro wheat and Hiiro yams, perhaps we should give it another name.

「Hiiro iron... no. Right—let’s call it Hihiirokane.」

The name pops into my head and I decide on it. In ancient Japan it was said to be a legendary metal, harder than anything and never rusting. Not that this one necessarily has those traits, but it’s a fitting name for a red metal.

「Got it. O red one, hard one, Hihiirokane, child of the earth—obey my hand and...」

Sig breaks off mid‑chant and glances around, hesitating.
Before I can ask what’s wrong, his eyes find Yuuki; something clicks, and the doubt vanishes from his face.

「...obey my hand and become a sword.」

Pinching the lump of Hihiirokane between his fingers, Sig pulls it straight. Like finely crafted pulled candy, it shapes into a blade; the other end he rounds out into a grip.

「This is way easier than rock.」

Only when I hear him say that do I realize the working difficulty changes with the material. He needed many strokes to round a rock into a ball, but he turned the Hihiirokane into a sword almost instantly.

「Here you go.」

He flips the one‑piece metal sword—blade to hilt all of a piece—to Yuuki.

「Heavy...」

Contrary to the words, Yuuki swings it around with ease.
She brings it down, cuts up, thrusts, sweeps—
Her movements are so natural it’s as if she were born with them.

Yuuki turns to a nearby rock with a solemn look.

「Hup...!」

With a sharp breath, a single flash. The rock cleaves cleanly in two.

「Amazing, amazing! Onii-chan, this is amazing!」

Yuuki hops up and down, visibly excited.

「Um, may I?」

Luka brings the sword to her nose and sniffs at it—sniff, sniff.

「...Huh?」

She tilts her head.

「What is it?」
「Sensei...」

Luka knits her brows and looks up at me, then speaks as if it’s hard to say.

「If it’s this, there’s quite a lot of it near the school.」
「Huh?」

Luka’s unexpected words catch me so off guard I let out a dopey sound.

「The stone I threw when we chose the Class Leader—that was this.」
「Ehhh!?」

Q. Without metal tools, how did ancient humans obtain metal?
A. In ancient times, ores lay around on the ground—no digging required.

Come to think of it, the answer was simple.

I’d somehow assumed you had to dig deep into mountains to get metal. Granted, it probably does form deep underground, but mountains are uplifted land to begin with. Over long, long spans, minerals can very well surface.

Why didn’t I have that recognition? That too is simple: in my time, the metal at the surface or in shallow layers had long since been picked clean.

But in this world there’s still plenty of metal at the surface. After I had the students search around, we were able to gather more than enough ore just in the area around Hiiro Village.