Kaizen walked toward the desk like a condemned man walking to the gallows.
'It's fine. It's totally fine. Just act dumb. Be the most useless, uninteresting F-Ranker in recorded history.'
'Drool a little if you have to. If I'm boring enough, he'll eventually get tired of me and go summon a succubus or something instead.'
He had to survive. That was the only quest that actually mattered right now.
Klaus stood up gracefully and pulled out a chair. It was technically a polite gesture, but coming from him, it felt more like he was strapping Kaizen into an electric chair.
"Sit," Klaus commanded.
Kaizen sat. He slumped his shoulders forward. He tried his absolute best to look like his brain was made of wet cardboard.
He looked down at the desk. It was a chaotic mess of ancient leather-bound encyclopedias, complex star charts, and that sheet of parchment with the failed magic circle.
Klaus loomed over him from behind. The Demon King candidate slowly raised one hand, his index finger beginning to glow with a faint violet light.
'I shall transfer the basic runic alphabet directly into his hippocampus,' Klaus plotted silently.
'I must be extremely careful. His cranial capacity is likely quite limited.'
'If I upload the data too quickly, his head might literally explode like a ripe melon dropped from a tower.'
Klaus moved his glowing finger slowly toward Kaizen's temple.
'Just a small packet of data. The vowels. Perhaps a few consonants...'
Kaizen didn't even notice the finger of doom approaching his skull.
He was too busy staring at the paper on the desk.
At first glance, it looked like complete gibberish. Random scribbles. Angry geometry drawn by someone having a mental breakdown.
But then his eyes started itching.
BZZZT.
A familiar static noise buzzed loudly in the back of his brain.
The ink on the page shifted slightly.
To Klaus, it was high-tier demonic geometry. Sacred ancient knowledge. To Kaizen... it just looked like code. Programming code.
[Rendering Magic_Circle.exe...]
The black ink began to glow softly.
A stream of bright blue light started flowing from the top of the circle, moving clockwise like water flowing through a pipe. It was beautiful. Perfect logic. Smooth execution.
The blue light flowed smoothly through the first quadrant. It flowed through the second. It reached the bottom section.
?!
But suddenly, the bottom rune turned angry red, flashing like a warning light. The blue light hit the red rune and scattered chaotically, fizzling out into complete nothingness.
It wasn't some mystical cosmic forces failing to align. It was just a typo. A simple spelling mistake. A missing semicolon in a line of code.
"That's the problem right there," Kaizen blurted out.
His hand moved on its own. He pointed a shaking finger directly at the red, flashing rune at the bottom of the circle.
Klaus froze completely.
His glowing violet finger was hovering exactly one inch away from Kaizen's temple. He hadn't actually touched him yet. He hadn't transferred a single byte of information.
Klaus looked at his finger. He looked at Kaizen. He looked at the parchment.
'I... I haven't done anything yet,' Klaus thought, his aristocratic composure cracking slightly.
'How? How can a primitive F-Rank possibly identify a flaw in Third Circle Geometry? He shouldn't even know which direction is up!'
Klaus lowered his hand very slowly.
"You..." Klaus narrowed his eyes. "You believe the error lies in the Southern Quadrant?"
"Huh?" Kaizen blinked. The blue and red lights were still dancing in his vision. "Uh... I don't actually know what a Quadrant is. But that squiggly bit right there?" He tapped the paper. "It's... it's blocking the flow."
"Blocking the flow?" Klaus repeated carefully. "You can see the flow of mana?"
"I mean... kind of?" Kaizen rubbed his eyes. "It just looks... stuck. Like a clogged drain or something."
Klaus stared at him in silence.
'A clogged drain. He compares High Magic to common plumbing.'
Klaus grabbed a quill from his desk. He looked carefully at the rune Kaizen had pointed at. It was the Glyph of Stabilization.
'It looks perfectly correct,' Klaus thought. 'But...'
He dipped the quill in black ink. He tweaked the angle of the rune by exactly two degrees. He added a small decorative tail to the bottom of the symbol.
HUMMMMM.
The paper vibrated.
The black ink flashed bright purple. A low, harmonious hum filled the entire room. The circle wasn't just drawn anymore. It was alive. It was stable. It was absolutely perfect.
Klaus dropped the quill.
He stared at the completed circle in genuine shock. He had spent three full hours working on this problem. He had consulted the ancestral memories of ancient demon warlords.
And a human boy, who looked like he was perpetually afraid of his own shadow, had fixed it in five seconds flat.
"Astonishing," Klaus whispered.
"See?" Kaizen mumbled, half to himself. "It turned blue now. The whole thing loops properly."
Kaizen was in some kind of trance.
He looked up at the tall stack of books on the desk.
BZZZT.
They all suddenly lit up in his vision.
He didn't need to read the titles on the spines. He could just see the "code" of the books themselves. One glowed with a warm orange light [Pyromancy Magic Theory and its paths]. Another pulsed with a jagged yellow light [Electromancy Dynamics].
It was fascinating. It was like seeing the Matrix for the first time. He reached out slowly, his fear momentarily forgotten, completely captivated by the beautiful, logical system of the world.
"It's just logic," Kaizen murmured. "Input. Process. Output. If the syntax is written right, the reality compiles."
He was smiling. For the first time since waking up in this world, he felt in control of his surroundings. He understood this.
Then he felt a gaze burning intensely into the side of his face.
Kaizen snapped out of his trance immediately. The blue and red lights faded away. The books became just books again. The magic circle became just ink on paper.
He turned his head slowly.
Klaus was staring at him.
But it wasn't the look of a predator staring at prey anymore. It wasn't the look of an arrogant noble looking at a worthless peasant.
It was the look of a Scientist staring at a new, completely undiscovered species of bacteria under a microscope.
It was a look of pure obsession.
"You..." Klaus stepped closer, his blood-red eyes wide with manic curiosity. "You claim you do not know the proper logic... yet you can somehow see the fundamental 'code' of the universe itself?"
Kaizen's smile vanished instantly. His blood ran ice cold.
'Wait.'
He frantically replayed the last thirty seconds in his head.
'I pointed out the error. I helped fix the spell. I muttered stuff about syntax and compiling reality like it was a computer program.'
He looked at Klaus's face. The Demon King Candidate was grinning widely. He was already pulling out a notebook that said "Subject K: Cognitive Anomalies". He was uncapping a new pen with trembling hands.
"Fascinating," Klaus breathed. "Truly, utterly fascinating. I initially thought you were a complete simpleton. But you... you are an idiot savant. A perfect anomaly."
Klaus grabbed Kaizen's shoulder firmly.
"We have much work to do together, Roommate."
Kaizen stared at the hand gripping his shoulder.
'I messed up.'
'I messed up so incredibly bad.'
He wanted to be useless. He wanted to be boring and forgettable.
Instead, he had just become the Demon King's favorite science project.
"I..." Kaizen whimpered. "Can I please go buy milk now?"