Book 4 Chapter 22
Episode 96
“I can’t do it, I won’t.”
Rin, covered in sweat, irritably threw down his practice staff and plopped onto the ground.
“It’s enough for a mage to be good at magic, what’s with close combat? I’m not doing it!”
The suggestion to teach Rin close combat came from Kies.
This was because during the <Shuriganakyus> battle ten days ago, Rin had been isolated and almost died after being separated from his comrades, causing the party's atmosphere to become acutely tense.
“Get up, Rin.”
Rista strode over and stood before Rin. His expression was stern and resolute, unlike usual.
“It’s hard, I don’t want to do it.”
“It’s natural for it to be hard. Nothing in the world is easy.”
“Magic wasn’t this hard.”
As Rin replied with a sulky face, Rista sighed as if giving up.
“It might be hard for Rin, who showed prodigious talent in magic, to understand… but it would be good to clearly grasp this opportunity.”
“What?”
“Rin, talent doesn’t make a person. Time makes a person.”
“……?”
“The sweat and tears you shed while thinking it’s hard, those very moments accumulate to create the future you. Nothing else, but those moments.”
Time, not talent… Rin blinked blankly, and Rista chuckled, extending his hand.
“…….”
Rin, who had been alternating gazes between the smile and the hand, finally grasped it and got up.
“Rin, martial arts are the same as magic.”
Rista gathered only the essence of practical utility and created five stances, teaching them to Rin.
These stances each required different muscles and strengths, aiming to ensure Rin thoroughly learned how to use his entire body.
“Just as magic becomes easier to solve if you know various mathematical formulas, if you know how to use your body, even movements you do for the first time can be learned easily.”
Only Rista and Kies knew that this was something planned not just for the war, but also for after the war.
Even the sad feelings contained within it.
After the war, Rista had hoped it could be of some help, however small, on the boy's long journey through life, a journey Rista could not accompany him on.
‘This is absurd…’
Weybert, who had no way of knowing the boy had received such training from Rista, couldn't help but marvel at Rain's astonishing growth rate.
When first learning a movement, it’s awkward and clumsy, as it is with most humans.
But by the tenth, or hundredth time, wasn't he slowly starting to display stances similar to Weybert's?
‘It’s not just talent. How many hours has this guy been at it?’
Weybert had accepted Rain's request to teach him how to be a setter.
Had he changed his mind?
Absolutely not.
It was deliberately to make Rain cry out, to make him say he couldn't do it and would give up, by pushing him tens of times harder. But this guy…
- What are you doing, not tossing the ball!
He's even pushing for more training?
One day, after training late at night, he had even said something strange.
- Weybert, you're really amazing.
- What?
- When I learned from Logan or Nora, I couldn't quite get a feel for it, but when you explain it, I definitely know exactly what it feels like.
Is this a provocation? How much pain does he think he's been deliberately put through? There's no way he wouldn't know that, is there?
He glared with suspicion, but Rain chuckled, patted his shoulder, and ran off towards the [True] dormitory.
- Then I'll count on you tomorrow too! Sleep well!
As he watched his retreating figure with a dumbfounded expression, Cayden's words suddenly and spontaneously resurfaced in his mind.
- Rain Ludwig is different somehow.
No, that can't be.
They're all the same.
Nobles are all the same. Duplicitous, arrogant, conceited, and annoying…
“Young Master, another nice serve!”
At that moment, Logan's vigorous shout pulled Weybert out of his reminiscence and back to reality. And simultaneously, a fierce tearing sound echoed.
“Gertrude!”
Once again, it was a serve that sharply pierced the corner. But this time, Gertrude Fenton threw her body into its trajectory.
The Fenton family had pursued both martial and scholarly arts since ancient times, and Gertrude, raised in a place that sought the unification of martial arts and magic, definitely possessed abnormal physical abilities compared to her peers.
The magical orb, which seemed to be caught by her neatly clasped hands, spewed out fierce electricity the next moment and was bounced back.
“Two consecutive serve aces…?!”
Everyone fell silent for a moment at the unexpected situation, then soon erupted in cheers. Crysta Warden's eyes were wide too.
‘Gertrude was perfectly in the path of the spike serve just now. It should have been a situation where she would stably send the ball up. But…’
There was only one reason for the magical orb to show such a rebound phenomenon: when the defender failed to calculate the mathematical formula ordered by the attacker.
‘At that speed, the mathematical formula orders the inverse function of an irrational function?’
Gertrude alternately massaged her numb arms from the recent impact, letting out a hollow laugh in disbelief.
‘It’s a natural principle that the faster the ball, the less time there is to calculate the mathematical formula…’
It seems like only a handful of people in the whole country could perfectly receive that ball.
“Gertrude, I heard you’re close with Young Master Ludwig.”
At that moment, Gertrude's eyebrows twitched at Maya Snark's cold remark.
“Are you implying I intentionally let it pass?”
“Not necessarily, but.”
“This is absurd. Shall we see if you can still say that after trying to receive it yourself?”
It was an unbelievable situation, to the extent that Maya couldn't help but be suspicious. Gertrude was a skilled player who had secured a starting position as soon as she joined.
“Alright, alright, Super Receiver Lowinbelt Kanwer makes his entrance!”
At that moment, a figure appeared with the sound of a whistle, ending the conflict.
“Everyone, relax. I’ll receive all those one-trick-pony serves.”
The second-year student who was in Griffinvalor's back row left, and in his place, the third-year Lowinbelt, small in stature and nimble, walked onto the court.
‘That guy…’
As Weybert's eyes narrowed, scattered gasps also emanated from the stands.
“Hmm?”
Logan handed the ball to Rain Ludwig, who was wondering why the stadium was stirring, and whispered.
“Lowinbelt Kanwer. He's Griffinvalor's Hard-Receiver.”
“Ah, so he’s the one…”
“Be careful, Young Master. Once he adapts to your serves, it will get difficult.”
A hard receiver is best understood as a reception specialist (who cannot participate in attacks), a master of receiving.
Right, so that’s how it is.
In that case, it’s best to prevent him from touching the ball as much as possible. My goal is to score at least 3 points with my serves.
“Alright, here I go.”
The first foot to step forward is the left foot.
Completing three approach steps, he simultaneously concentrated his leg power to jump.
To draw the necessary power from his abdominal and back muscles, he twisted his back maximally from his stomach, then loaded all the elasticity and repulsion resisting that force onto the ball.
‘This feels good…!’
The moment he fiercely struck the ball, it was such a perfect serve toss and serve spike that he felt an almost dizzying pleasure.
It definitely was.
Before the cracking sound of hitting the ball had even finished, another cracking sound erupted from beyond. In the time it takes to blink once.
“Oh, sorry, I made a slight calculation error!”
By the time Lowinbelt, who had rolled once on the floor with a fluid reception movement, said that, the ball was gracefully flying over the net.
However, because the answer to the mathematical formula was wrong, the right to attack had returned to the challenger team.
Lillian took an underhand stance at the ball's landing point.
“Chance ball!”
But the moment that easy ball went up, it was the challenger team that was flustered.
Rain immediately ran to the front-center, the setter's position… but Weybert, who was standing there, jumped up instead of moving aside.
He wondered if Weybert was breaking his own rules to set up, but it was merely him jumping up out of habit after being momentarily distracted.
“……!”
Thus, awkwardly in mid-air, he switched from a setup motion to a spike motion, not tossing the ball but striking it straight down.
“Where do you think you’re going!”
Griffinvalor was not a team to fall for such a naive second-touch fake. The ball was instead slammed back down onto their court by the two immediate blocks.
A strange silence flowed.
It was a cold, sharp silence, different in quality from the one Rain had caused with his two serves.
Logan narrowed his eyes and tensed his muscles.
“Weybert, you, surely you weren’t thinking of…”
Weybert was just as flustered, but his pride wouldn't allow him to call it a mistake and apologize.
So he silently turned around and met their gaze, and surprisingly, the one who mediated the situation was the person who should have been the angriest.
“It’s okay, Logan. No need to get angry. At most, it’s just one point, we can just make it up again, can’t we?”
“But Young Master, that guy definitely did that on purpose, sir!”
Logan's anger was based on valid grounds.
What kind of guy was Weybert?
He was Lionheart's starting setter.
He was a skilled player who would never make such an absurd mistake. His helping Rain in the first place was strange. It clearly seemed he joined the team to make them lose the game.
“On purpose? No. He probably knows himself it was a mistake.”
But the Young Master of character…
Rain Ludwig, who should have been scolding Weybert more than anyone else in this situation, shook his head.
“If you start finding fault with every little thing like that, it’ll never end, will it? You’ll just get intimidated and make more mistakes. What’s the point of doing that to each other?”
He beamed a bright smile at Logan and Weybert, who were staring with wide, bewildered eyes.
“We gathered with difficulty to do this together. Let’s enjoy ourselves.”
That was the hero's mindset the boy had learned from Rista 300 years ago, a trace of the truth that illuminated an era.
Smiles bloomed on the faces of Nora, Cayden, and Lillian, who had been watching the conversation that almost escalated into a crisis.
And also on the face of Professor Owen, who was watching the court from the stands with his arms crossed.
‘Although they are collectively called the Eight Great Schools, there are many conflicting schools, and their later disciples often have bad relationships rather than good ones.’
It was unbelievable that he had gathered five such later disciples into one, but seeing that just now, I can understand it a little.
- You damned Logan, you've been getting overly close with the Young Master of character lately! Rumors have spread throughout the school!
- Th-that is… the Great Senior told me to be friendly, sir? I am merely acting, sir!
- You cursed Logan! Are you daring to tell me a damn lie right now? Do I have to rub dung on your mouth for you to speak properly?
Only after being scolded like that did Logan awkwardly and sheepishly reveal his true feelings.
- Rain Ludwig is, well, he's a bit different.
- Different how?
- He treats me like a real friend. Even though he's a noble, and the successor of one of the Five Great Families…
- You? You, who are worse than a monkey?
- Yes. That's why I think I became close with him. I want to help him with anything…
It was true. In Rain Ludwig's world, there was no distinction of noble or commoner, which every noble implicitly held.
In this <Delaiten>, there were only comrades who explored magic together.
It was that pure mindset, not derived from lineage or wealth, that was making Rain Ludwig a true noble.
‘And that is what elicits not obedience forced by a class system, but willing compliance from deep within the heart.’
A faint smile also bloomed on Valensidis's lips, who had arrived at the same thought as Owen.
‘Like a butterfly drawn to the scent of a flower.’
***
At that moment, the § rune engraved on his left palm blazed, and Rain gasped, feeling a pain like a knife scraping bone.
New strokes were being added to the rune.
Since he always wore a glove on his left hand to hide the rune, Rain himself didn't know the reason… but if Rudyien had been nearby, such a window would have appeared:
Socrafres.
- You can inherit the progress of 'unique magic' research from the surrounding environment.
- Progress: 49.8% -> 50%.
- 'Unique Magic' comprehension, 50% achieved.
>>>
Brante.
- A change in the magical circuit has been confirmed: Flowing World-Honored One => Flowing World-Honored One - Vigilant.