The Fair Instructor (3)
After that, Lee Han went on demonstrating without a break.
"A mage's magic is, broadly speaking, nothing but telekinesis. And as you just saw, the mass that telekinesis can handle is enormous. Threatening stuff. To an ordinary soldier, it's no different from a calamity. A knight, though, has to be able to stand against a calamity. Otherwise the name isn't worth the breath."
He flicked a look, and Irene caught it and brought her telekinesis to bear.
An instant.
Pop!
"See that?"
"......"
They had. An invisible current, bursting in midair like a balloon.
"A warrior meets telekinesis in three ways. First is Fighting Art. You blast fighting-energy hard enough to foul the flow of mana. Second is to take the telekinesis head-on. Do that, and the pressure can pin you until your whole body bursts, so you'd better not."
"Th-then the third is...?"
"You lot don't have Fighting Art, so the third is the only answer you've got."
Pop!
The invisible current burst again.
"The release of force. Same principle as the Hundred-Pace Divine Fist I just showed you. Think of it as shooting the telekinesis down. Mind you, you don't pull this stunt against telekinesis venting in every direction at once. Your body could get ground to powder."
"Um... do that, and I think it's the mage's body that gets powdered."
Mana was a power close to omnipotence, but it was not truly omnipotent. You needed the capacity, the work, and the cold nerve to handle an all-purpose energy. Venting telekinesis in every direction was just the thrashing of someone set on dying. No different from firing a cannon with your bare body, shot after shot. You wouldn't last long before you coughed blood and dropped.
"Ah. So that's how that bastard died? Useful thing to know."
"......"
...So he'd already fought one.
"Anyway, you saw it. If you want to stand up to telekinesis, you have to be able to do what I just did. Only two things to it, so it ought to be easy."
The manifestation of Gyeong, and its release. To him, a task so simple it would put them to sleep.
"...Easy where, exactly?"
For people who had seen nothing but force bursting in empty air, it was anything but easy. Why that huge log had split clean in half, and how you were supposed to shoot telekinesis out of the air—they still couldn't grasp the principle.
"Mm. Hands up if you got it."
He had explained. Only by feel, so of course it was hard. Even so, surely someone had caught it. He looked them over with that small hope, and got nothing back but awkward smiles.
"Kunta still not understand. Kunta is idiot."
"You aren't an idiot, Kunta. I don't think anyone understood."
"It's too abstract, Instructor."
He'd thought Kunta, the one nearest his own kind, would get it.... Hm. Should he have explained it more kindly after all?
Then—
"Um, e-excuse me..."
A girl he hadn't expected in the least raised her hand.
"I-Instructor, do you perhaps mean something like this? All this time we've been learning how to wring strength out of our whole bodies. You stressed that training to build muscle, of course, but also so we would feel how the body's strength actually moves. You've always emphasized it."
Levi Fault. A slender, lovely girl who brought to mind a full bloom of hydrangeas—and not merely slender, as she had proved by lasting twenty days of training without once running away. That commendable girl let a keen light gather in her eyes and set out what she had felt.
"That phrase you always stress: 'Feel the strength.' It's terribly abstract, but the rest of us and I did the calisthenics, climbed the cliffs, and learned when a muscle is used and how—and that even when it feels as if our stamina is utterly spent, we can still train, somehow. Because of that, we know now that strength doesn't come from muscle alone. Entirely thanks to your class, Instructor."
Her wording was elegant. A noble young lady, perhaps; she didn't speak bluntly, but in a way that gave the other person credit. The sort of speech that put you in a good mood. Lee Han, though, liked the explanation itself more than the refined diction.
"You explained it right, Chick No. 1. Thanks. I'm the type who just hammers it out by feel, so I couldn't explain it properly, and here you go making everybody understand."
"N-no. You already knew all of it, Instructor. I only unpacked it a little."
"...Instructor will get you some candy later."
"Pardon?"
A truly good, kind kid. How did someone talk that prettily, and that admirably? A purity you couldn't find in men whose speech was rough and whose pride was filthy-strong—it warmed the heart.
I want a daughter exactly like that.
The feeling of looking at a much younger sister, or a daughter. Lee Han turned a thoroughly satisfied gaze on her, and Levi Fault's cheeks ripened pink. Unused to praise, maybe.
Wh-what about me? I'm good too, so why won't he praise me?
The magic girl, who had never once been praised like that, felt thoroughly wronged.
"Arin. You lost. You're the prettier one, sure, but we lost on dignity. Sob, sob."
...Dignity can drop dead.
Top of the class as a siege engine, and an F in dignity, the girl grew steadily more sour. Lee Han, unaware that her delicate feelings had been bruised, poured his attention onto Levi Fault.
Commendable. That's what she is.
A different sort of commendable from a moment ago. These past twenty days, everyone had been fierce enough that you couldn't say one had tried harder than another, but few had been as fierce as Levi Fault.
Up the earliest, and training closer to the edge than anyone.
She had willpower—no, she had sheer grit. She looked delicate and frail, but the temperament underneath was upright. Knowing she stood on the latest starting line, she never eased off; she ground her teeth and pushed. Effort upon effort, and only now had she begun to run from that line. At a considerable speed, too. Even if Vulcan's mystery had lent a hand, her effort was not to be slighted.
Can't keep treating her as nothing but a chick.
The girl was no longer merely a noble young lady. She had become a martial artist. He didn't know what circumstances had driven her to it, and he didn't care. He looked only at resolve and results. People who worked hard were always commendable.
So.
"Levi Fault."
"Yes? Yes!?"
"What's the matter?"
"Ah, n-nothing..."
For the first time, she had been called by a proper name. That alone set her chest trembling. As if it weren't the young lady of House Fault who had been acknowledged, but she herself.
"Levi Fault. Listening to you, I can tell that of everyone here, your understanding of Gyeong is the highest."
"B-but compared to the others, my body is still..."
"A long way short. Can't be helped. Unlike you, they've trained for over ten years."
"Yes..."
"However."
"?"
"What matters isn't the span of time. Sometimes what matters more than the span is how thick the time was, and how intense. In that sense, Student Levi Fault may have started late, but she made a proper start. You're welcome to take pride in it."
"...Instructor."
Words that made a person choke up for no good reason. He was acknowledging her effort, and he went further.
"So for a student like that, this instructor means to help in person."
"What do you..."
"This instructor prefers to treat people fairly. Which is why Student Levi Fault will receive one particularly kind lesson."
"??"
An explanation she still couldn't follow. The instructor—no, adults in general—really did seem to have a habit of knotting an explanation until it was impossible to untie. As she blinked, Lee Han stepped in close.
"From this moment, this instructor will briefly place a hand on the student's back. Is that acceptable?"
"Yes? Yes!?"
"If you permit it, I will. For the record, there is no impure intent whatsoever. I'd like you to understand that."
"Uh, um, yes. I-it's fine."
A little embarrassing, but she had already rolled around Vulcan and shown every sight fit and unfit to be seen. Getting shy about it now would be rather ridiculous. Above all, she knew the instructor was not that sort of man. So she permitted the hand with relative ease, and then Levi Fault—
"Hup!"
—swallowed an empty breath.
"All an instructor can do is show the way. But this ought to be an experience that closes a great deal of the gap between you and the other students. I hope it helps."
"......"
The girl's mind was reeling. Shame had vanished long ago. She was in the middle of something astonishing—no, a miracle.
Th-this is...
Hoooo—!
A palm rested lightly against her back. Hard beyond measure, more iron than flesh. What shocked her even more than that iron palm was the fierce pulse pouring in through it. A pulse of force. From muscle, from bone, from sinew, a violent pulse overflowed and passed wholly into her, and sweat streamed down her body as if it had gone mad.
C-compared to this, I really am nothing but something shabby.
The violence of a wave—vast, utterly unrestrained, majestic. That passion drove straight through her whole body, and it was an experience like a miracle: the wonder the first humans must have felt on finding some great trace of nature. And when the surge of that wave, that pulse, touched her, she could sense the shabby current moving inside her own body as well. An infinitely feeble pulse. If he was a sea in storm, she was only a tremor spreading over a still puddle. Disappointment had just begun to spread when—
"That all you felt?"
"Yes?"
"Concentrate more wholly. Deeper. You'll feel something more interesting."
"......"
She obeyed. In this moment he seemed a superhuman she could not possibly defy. She followed by reflex, driving deeper into the pulse running through her, and at a certain instant—
"...Huh?"
—she understood. The power inside her was not merely muscle and bone and sinew.
Thump, thump—!
The heart, for one. Had a heart always beaten this dynamically, this hard? It was strong. The organ feeding blood to a shabby girl was neither shabby nor weak. It was endlessly intense, and worthy of awe.
Fwoosh—!
And the blood riding that beat? Tremendous! So this was a blood vessel—this fast, this headlong, this brave.
"Think you understand?"
"...Yes."
"Understand what?"
"That everything that makes up... me... isn't trivial at all."
She had thought herself weak. She was not. Every piece of her was this fierce, and this vast. Levi Fault—no, a human being—was this extraordinary.
"I may be infinitely small, dust beside the shining sun and the stars, but even so, I could become a star myself!"
"Noble young lady, all right. Lofty way of putting it."
"Th-there's simply no other way to say it!"
She was alight. No embarrassment; she put her weight behind the claim and stood by it. Anyone who realized how fierce this pulse was—the power moving inside their own body—would have done the same.
"Then show me."
"Yes?"
"The power you called a star."
"......"
"No confidence?"
"Th-that's..."
"Have some. I'm helping you right now."
"!!"
"Try. Take the pulse, that force, from the shoulder to the elbow, then from the wrist out through the fist."
"......"
"You can. Right now."
"...!"
His words followed one another as if there were no doubt in them, and Levi Fault gambled for the first time in her life. On something that might work or might not. A gamble whose effect on her body she could not know. But she was drunk—on the pulse inside her that she herself had never known.
And so she moved.
Whoosh!
Of her own will she clenched a fist and drove it out. A punch still endlessly clumsy. But that punch—
Boom!
"...Ah!"
—was not weak. She had burst the force. Grip, and the release of force. Seeing that she had done it for the first time, she opened her eyes wide. Her fist hurt. She had discharged power through a body not yet ripe, so of course there was strain. In this moment she didn't care. And no wonder.
"I-I did it! I—I...!!"
"Yeah. You did it with your strength alone."
"Yes!!"
Set beside this feeling, this joy, the pain was nothing.
"I won't. I absolutely won't...!"
The blooming of a new sense. An unforgettable feeling, and a meeting. She would never forget the emotion and the joy of this moment. It was a rapture she would not forget even at the last of her life, whenever that came.
Do they not know what they've just done?!
Roen was aghast. He had probably never been this aghast in his life. What Lee Han had done, what Levi Fault had done, was not merely the act of letting force out!
It can replace Fighting Art.
A wonder, wrought by a frail noble girl who had not yet trained in earnest for a month. Still weak, but it would surely grow. The road would be harsh, but what mattered was that bloodline and all the rest were irrelevant. It was power you could gain by effort alone. And if it could replace Fighting Art, then it would be a hidden blade to smash the privileges of knights—no, of the nobility itself.
Yes. That. That's what I wanted!
The first time. The first time he had ever yearned this badly to possess something.
I was arrogant.
At last he admitted it. Before enrollment he had been an arrogant fool, and nothing else. He had thought he knew everything; that the academy was only a place you attended to secure talent, and that it was fine if you learned nothing; that no one alive dared teach him. ...He had been wrong. Look ahead of him now. Was there not a man who set him trembling—a man teaching a way for a human to become a superhuman, even if it wasn't Fighting Art?
It's absurd to say this of an instructor, but.
He hadn't meant to think it, and he thought it anyway. Across his past life and this one, perhaps.
Could you become my first master?
The first master worthy of his respect. Arrogant—but the young lion had every right to his arrogance—and so he held that hope, and at the same time another.
If it is you, you might even become the lead of my secret wish.
The secret wish he carried. The leading role in a revolution.