Episode 11 — A Knight Hates Spell-Slingers (5)
…To put it bluntly, Lee Han and Odewal were summoned before the Dean and thoroughly chewed out.
In Lee Han's case, the charge was that he had bent Odewal's wrist. Even that, however, was weighed in his favor. Odewal had grabbed his collar first, and what followed had only been an accident while Lee Han tried to pry him off, so the circumstances were judged mitigating.
Odewal was not so fortunate. The Dean tore into him at length. Barging uninvited into another faculty's territory was bad enough, and the fact that he had thrown his weight around made the affair impossible to view with any kindness. In the end, Odewal was sentenced to six months at reduced pay.
With the mountain of patronage money that bastard's sitting on, that isn't even a punishment.
Lee Han had long since heard that a sponsorship vast enough to make an ordinary instructor's monthly wages look like nothing dropped into Odewal's pocket by the week. He knew perfectly well the penalty would barely sting. The Dean likely knew it too. And yet this was the discipline he had chosen to hand down.
Did that old geezer take the money and stuff his face with it?
Lee Han could hardly help the suspicion. He learned soon enough, though, that it was a misunderstanding.
"The Dean is hardly in a position where he must watch the nobles' moods."
"His house is wealthy. One of the five richest in the kingdom. Five great merchant companies could lean on him at once, and he wouldn't so much as flinch."
"Rather, if some noble tried to slip him a bribe under the table, he's the sort who would have them on the headsman's block by tomorrow. Haha."
…So the man was even more outrageous than Lee Han had imagined?
Blinking, Lee Han listened as the instructors he had only recently grown friendly with told him things he hadn't known.
"Then why did he punish him no more severely than that?"
"To protect you, Sir Turtle, I should think."
"Me?"
"Yes. You yourself, of course, are hardly a man who would fear Master Odewal. But the others—the nobles sponsoring him—dealing with all of them would be a troublesome matter, wouldn't it?"
"…?"
Me?
The word surged all the way up to his throat, but Lee Han decided to hear the rest.
"I suspect the Dean judged as he did in order to keep you from suffering at the nobles' hands."
"A fight with nobles brings all manner of trouble, no matter how strong you may be, Sir Turtle."
"They're a headache, nobles."
Something bitter showed in their faces. They had probably earned a noble's dislike before. Well, they were commoners, or fallen nobility, and unusually capable besides—trouble of that sort was bound to have followed.
"At any rate, the Dean handed down a wise ruling. You ought to let your anger cool, Sir Turtle. Unless a man has considerable backing, picking a fight with Master Odewal would be foolish, wouldn't it?"
"Hmm."
They were soothing him out of genuine concern, and Lee Han gave a small, quiet nod. The instructors broke into bright smiles.
Just as they'd thought. He had only been a little much at the entrance ceremony. Not a brute through and through, but a rational knight.
……However.
Backing, was it?
That night, rare as it was for him, Lee Han drew out a single sheet of letter paper, wrote one sentence across the blank page, sealed it, and handed it to the maid blessed with a beautifully vacant face.
A few days later—
"…It's you! It's you…! It can't be anyone but you…!!"
Odewal came raging in again and disrupted a Sword Faculty class, and toward that mage Lee Han did nothing more than shrug.
"What's he on about?"
As if he hadn't the faintest idea.
All he had done was this.
I only went to someone I know for a little advice. Why's he like that?
Lee Han looked at Odewal the way one looks at a madman, and at last Odewal clutched the back of his neck and collapsed.
Half a day later, word circulated quietly that the nobles who had been sponsoring Odewal had cut him off, and the academy erupted into an uproar.
Fight poison with poison. Just as toxin must be mastered by toxin, a man of power had to be mastered by a man of power.
……He did wonder whether the poison he had reached for might have been a little too strong.
Of late, the academy had not had a dull moment.
More precisely, one topic after another had seized everyone's attention, and the place was busy talking of nothing else.
Rumors of the so they say variety have existed in every age, without exception.
To young students forever starved for amusement, fun, and a little stimulation, a fight between a mage and a knight arrived as entertainment of the highest order. Which of the two would win? It was nothing but interesting.
And a certain gray-haired student, hearing all this noisy talk, sank into worry.
"No, this is wrong… this can't be how it goes…."
What had wrapped the gray-haired student in worry was not the childish fun of betting, as the others did, on whether the mage or the knight would win.
…It was the story, which had changed beyond any mistaking.
Odewal is supposed to be one of the main villains, the sort who backs the villainess and corners the protagonist. He's already walked onstage?
By rights, half a year should still have remained before the Main Story began. Already, though, the way things were unfolding was anything but ordinary, and the gray-haired student's head grew hopelessly tangled as the information he knew kept proving wrong.
If it goes on like this, everything I know might turn meaningless.
The gray-haired student was clever, and his mind turned no less quickly than that cleverness deserved. So he went back over every incident of recent days, checking what obstacle had wedged itself into each, and reached a conclusion.
…The Sword Faculty instructor.
Ihan Turtle. The center of the whole fuss, and the one absurd character whose existence he alone had never known.
Turning that instructor's somehow familiar name over in his mind, the boy wondered whether he ought to meet him. If he could only speak with the man, he might unravel at least some of the questions.
…The problem, however, was this.
"Hey, you."
"!!?"
"Oh my? What's the matter?"
"Ah, n-no. I was just… a little startled."
The boy suffered from a severe difficulty with communication that made talking to people extraordinarily hard.
And that was not all.
"There, see? You haven't caught a cold, have you? Why has your face gone so red?"
"Th-that's…."
"……Oh my."
The closer the beautiful girl student—every inch a noble young lady—drew, the redder the boy's face became, and at that refreshingly novel reaction she beamed and came nearer still. The mischievous girl had apparently caught on to his condition. Realizing it, the boy squeezed his eyes shut and inwardly recited a magic spell.
U-until the East Sea's waters and Mount Baekdu dry and wear away….
Besides his trouble with speaking to people, his immunity to the opposite sex stood at absolute zero. A rural elementary school with five boys and a single male teacher, then an all-boys middle school, an all-boys high school, an engineering college, the army, and a game company packed with men—that was the tech tree of his life. In all his years, he had never once managed a proper conversation with a woman.
He tried to calm himself by reciting all four verses, but it seemed this mischievous girl had no intention of letting him be.
"What's your name?"
"…!!"
A scent of lilac, far too stimulating for a man with zero resistance to women, washed over him. The boy immediately turned his back and fled.
"H-hey… h-he's already all the way over there?"
The gray-haired boy was remarkably fast, and the girl blinked as she watched him go. She was not startled because he was unusually quick. Her keen ears had simply caught the words he had spat out, and that was why she blinked.
"Didn't he shout Acceleration?"
Sadly, the boy who might have answered her was already long gone, far away.
Thwack!
"Pick it up, swordsman!"
"……He's finally lost it."
Over the past four days, the relationship between Odewal and Lee Han had curdled into a hostility fiercer even than the old grudge between dog and monkey, and the air between them grew uglier by the day. True, most of the time it was Odewal picking a one-sided fight and getting the worst of it. Even a worm squirms when you step on it, though. How was that prideful mage supposed to simply endure the humiliation of being put down by a knight?
His patronage cut off, disgrace heaped upon humiliation, the mage seemed at last to have let go of reason, and he came to fling a glove at Lee Han.
It was a custom in fashion among the nobles. To throw a glove was to demand a contest, or a duel.
Lee Han looked from the glove on the ground to the spell-slinger and back again, a sneer on his lips.
"Given up on living, have you?"
Steel rasped. Instead of taking up the glove, he leveled a wooden sword.
There was no reason to be frightened of a mere wooden sword pointed one's way, and yet for an instant Odewal felt a chill. It was a worthless, battered wooden sword. So why, the moment it turned on him, did it feel as though a spearhead honed to a killing edge meant to run him through?
Odewal wiped at the sweat beginning to bead on him and waved his hands.
"A-a misunderstanding. Of course I don't mean a fight with you, swordsman."
"You gonna keep talking shit? From a minute ago, what the—"
"I mean a match between my student and yours!"
"…What?"
For a moment it sounded like pure nonsense, but the man spat out his excuse so quickly that it did not seem to be only nonsense.
"I-I regret it as well, but a fight between instructors is not permitted at the academy. That is a decree handed down directly by the royal house."
"……"
"Ahem."
When Lee Han at last lowered the wooden sword and listened without a word, Odewal pressed on.
"Wh-what I mean to say is this. A duel between instructors is impossible, but a duel between students faces no great obstacle. On the contrary, competition is encouraged."
"Hm."
Limitless competition. The academy's doctrine that people grow through rivalry. Nothing strange in that, really. Contests of wit and skill were everywhere, and it was no oddity for the thing being contested to be martial strength.
However.
"So what you're saying is, you want a proxy match."
"Yes."
"…Pathetic. You figure you can't win, so you're throwing your students at me…."
No matter how he looked at it, the man knew he had no chance in a direct fight and was dragging the students in. Lee Han could hardly believe the gall. He clicked his tongue and shook his head, and at that Odewal flared up and shouted.
…Shouted, and yet—
"You bastard!"
"Didn't you say you were younger than me? Where do you get off calling me bastard? You disrespectful little shit."
"……"
He was shut down in an instant.
"A snot-nosed brat, running his mouth—!"
"S-snot-nosed is…."
"Ah-ah! Is that any way to speak to your elder?"
"……"
"Smack!"
"……"
Before the power of Confucianism, long asleep inside Lee Han and awake now for the first time in a very long while, a mere mage was truly powerless.