Full-Blown Class Begins (2)
- Tak, tak, tak!
Swords were flying at me.
And not just anywhere.
I still wasn’t even used to holding a sword properly, but the attack came in with enough force to make it clear that wasn’t the professor’s problem.
Professor Ceres kept charging at me, hammering away with her blade.
At first I hesitated, because she was the teacher and I was the student, but...
“Gah!”
It wasn’t until I took a direct hit that my head finally snapped clear.
First things first, I needed to stop this insane assault if I wanted to stay in one piece.
I hurriedly swung my sword back in resistance. My sword was still so unfamiliar to me that, honestly, whether I swung it or not probably wouldn’t matter, but...
My guess was right, and the sword strike I threw with everything I had in me had, of course, no chance of reaching Professor Ceres.
She slipped past every desperate attempt of mine by the narrowest margin, moving at a speed I could never have kept up with by sight alone.
When I started to take a stance to thrust first, she saw straight through that preparation too.
Professor Ceres calmly dodged a few more times, predicting every move I was about to make, then took hold of her wooden sword with a blank expression.
- Tak, tak! Tak! Tak!
“Too slow. Once, twice, three times.”
Even though the attacks were plain as day, I still couldn’t keep up with them.
The angle, speed, and force of each blow were all beyond anything I could have imagined.
Counting out loud, she lashed out at my whole body with the wooden sword, once, then twice, without mercy.
If I blocked my head, she hit my arms. If I blocked my arms, she went for my legs. If I blocked both, she smashed into my waist.
It had been a long time since I’d felt so helpless.
“Ugh...!”
Every scream clawing up from my throat would have been justified.
And yet I couldn’t even let it out properly, because even the act of screaming felt like it would open another gap.
It wasn’t the kind of pain that made me think, I’m really going to die, but it was more than enough to wrench a cry out of me.
As I kept getting hit through every opening, the thought crossed my mind.
Wasn’t this a little too Spartan?
Sure, even Spartan training usually didn’t involve whaling on someone who still didn’t know how to hold a sword, just because they happened to leave an opening.
Of course, this was still training.
If I swung without any meaning, she’d tell me how to swing properly and then hit me anyway.
Well, I supposed that still counted as “training.”
- Thwack!
“What are you thinking about? Hold your sword properly.”
Ha...
So even a fleeting thought like that was enough to get me smacked.
The instant even the smallest opening showed on my face, she moved in like lightning and battered my entire body.
It was a merciless beating.
- Tak! Tak! Tak!
“Where do you think you’re looking?!”
No matter that I was a special case, no matter that I was at rock bottom, wasn’t this a little too much?
No, maybe because I was a special case, she was hitting me harder.
Maybe she had no personal feelings about me as a special exception, but a shred of annoyance still existed somewhere.
That thought crossed my mind, so I tried to feel out Professor Ceres’s mana, wondering whether she was really just blowing off steam on me, but her expression and mana were both utterly flat as she kept coming at me with complete indifference.
- Tak! Takat-tat!
“Kgh...”
“Don’t let your guard down!”
- Taaak!
The frantic beating went on and on.
.
.
.
By the time the special class finally ended, after I’d been beaten senseless with a wooden sword without once managing to respond, the lecture was over.
“That’ll be all for today’s class.”
Professor Ceres slowly approached me, as I lay sprawled out with my whole body marked from the beating.
As if to reward me for enduring all that pain, she set a bottle of water down near where I’d collapsed.
At the moment, I desperately needed hydration, so I dragged my trembling body over and grabbed the bottle.
By then evening was already approaching, and the pale orange glow of sunset was coloring the ground.
“I found something more interesting than I expected, and I also clearly found room for even greater growth.”
Wait a second.
That sounded kind of off.
“So for the next few weeks, I’ll be conducting class in the same format as today. Naturally, I won’t be accepting objections.”
Oh.
I’d half expected it, but good grief.
I nearly spat out the water I’d just managed to get down.
I swallowed with desperate force, unwilling to waste a single drop of this precious hydration.
She was seriously saying I’d have to keep doing this for weeks just because she saw potential in me?
My body, which had finally stopped shaking a little, started trembling again with renewed enthusiasm.
So what that meant was, I’d be getting beaten like this again tomorrow, right?
My eyes were starting to sting with tears.
My body ached and felt heavy, just like yesterday.
The difference was that yesterday’s pain had been muscle soreness from overusing muscles I’d never used before, while this was the raw pain of being thoroughly beaten.
“And as much as possible, don’t get any recovery or treatment from medicines or superhumans with healing abilities.”
Wait, what?
“If you recover through medicine or a superhuman specialized in treatment, your pain and wounds will disappear immediately, but the training you did today and the results you gained from it will almost all be lost, and it will interfere with the growth of your natural recovery ability.”
It was somehow even worse because it made sense...
“And from what I was told, your natural recovery ability is above average, so it shouldn’t cause you any major problems.”
Damn it.
This cursed mana erosion had erased even the faintest hope of getting treated.
It wasn’t that I couldn’t understand the logic. On the contrary, I understood it far too well, and that was what made it so miserable.
By nature, all physical growth comes from the recovery process, when muscles tear and then knit back together again.
The body tears under pain it has never felt before, then recovers into a stronger state so it won’t tear so easily the next time. That was how flesh grew.
Among innate abilities, healing types naturally existed, and most innate abilities included either instant healing, which restored wounds at once, or recovery amplification, which accelerated healing by flooding the body with external energy.
If torn muscles were healed immediately before they had time to recover naturally, then all the effort spent ripping them open would be for nothing.
Recovery amplification worked the same way. It did increase healing speed, but because it drew energy from the caster and used that to help restore the injured person rather than relying on the injured person’s own energy, growth was inevitably delayed.
In short, I had no choice but to drag this bruised wreck of a body home.
Goddamn it.
“The reason I set this schedule, as I said before, is that I found room for you to grow even more, and because, if my prediction is correct, I believe you’ll one day be able to withstand my attacks.”
Perhaps thinking I might question this class, Professor Ceres went into detail about why she had set up the schedule.
“Then I’ll see you tomorrow. If you’re late, it’ll only get harsher, so make sure you arrive on time.”
Having said her piece, Professor Ceres turned on her heel without a trace of lingering attachment.
I collapsed onto the ground, covered in dirt and dust.
A refreshing breeze brushed past me. When I took a deep breath, clean air filled my lungs.
With each passing moment, I was realizing just how important this mana erosion was to me.
At first it had felt like I was holding a time bomb with no timer written on it, but now it was becoming something I could never be separated from.
It was thanks to this mana erosion that Professor Ceres’s beating had gone from ten hits to eight.
I could feel Professor Ceres’s mana moving with intensity, and because it was being transmitted directly into my skin, I had managed to adapt somehow and keep up with her attacks.
Of course, I still dodged all of them...
I let out a long breath and replayed the lecture in my head.
Since waking up, I’d never once held a sword, and I’d never once swung one properly.
But the sensation of gripping a sword just now had felt strangely familiar and comfortable.
That was probably why Professor Ceres had suddenly said what she did earlier.
All the sword strokes I’d just made were drawn along the direction of mana I had felt during the friendly sparring match at the entrance ceremony.
A friendly duel between Han Riae and Miel. Just like now, they had both used wooden swords, and their mana had only been used to reinforce the durability of the wood.
It had been almost the exact same situation as a moment ago.
I quietly compared my movements just now with the movements from that sparring match.
Hah.
The result was something so embarrassing it hardly even deserved to be compared.
The more I thought about it, the more it just made me laugh how clumsy it was.
During the friendly duel, the two of them had shown what it really meant to be excellent.
Miel Norison’s sword was quick and sharp, reading the opponent’s openings perfectly and striking with swift precision.
He had been pushed back again and again by Han Riae, but even while losing ground, the tip of his blade would flash sharply, sometimes even stopping Han Riae’s combo attempts in their tracks.
Han Riae was the type to launch one solid, heavy blow after another.
Ice fortress? No. She fought like a fortress itself was smashing down on you.
Every movement of her sword carried such fierce force that it was hard to deflect and even harder to block, and she kept pouring on those attacks one after another.
And yet, despite the heaviness of those blows, she still delivered deadly strikes with speed, as if she were skating.
Even when her motions seemed absurdly wide, she still attacked as freely as if all of it was her own field.
The moment you rushed in without knowing better, you’d freeze up before you knew it. She created her own stage.
Because of that, Miel, who had kept trying to find some opening in Han Riae, ended up showing one himself and was defeated in a flash of chained attacks.
In pure swordsmanship, Miel might actually have been better, but once he was swallowed by Han Riae, who had already seized the stage, skill difference was what decided the loss in the end.
Right now, Han Riae alone could probably hunt down even a 5th Class monster, let alone a 6th Class one.
Of course, a big reason for that was the Melitton family’s Mana Circulation, but the thing that truly made those movements work as monster-killing blows was Han Riae’s own ability.
Compared to swords like that, I was painfully clumsy.
The moment I swung, the sword seemed to lose all sense of direction, and by the middle of the motion, I wasn’t even sure what I was supposed to be striking anymore.
Of course that meant my sword had openings everywhere, and Professor Ceres had been coming at each and every one of them.
There wasn’t a single thing about me worth praising, but there was one thing I knew for certain.
Every time I reset my stance, Professor Ceres looked interested.
I didn’t have Han Riae’s stage presence, and I didn’t have Miel’s ability to spot openings in an instant.
And, frankly, my body itself was too weak.
In short, my score was basically zero.
And Professor Ceres?
I shoved those thoughts aside and thought instead about Professor Ceres’s sword.
She swung it in a completely orthodox way, with nothing special about it at all.
She planted her feet firmly on the ground and tested her opponent with a few measured blows.
The instant the other side attacked, she deflected it and shut down the flow. And once that flow was broken and an opening appeared, only then did she attack.
She used nothing but completely textbook movements, the sort of thing that would appear in a manual.
Most of what she did matched the swordsmanship book I’d seen at the treatment center.
In other words, it was a stance I already knew.
I remembered the mana erosion, and the vivid, multicolored mana I had seen with my own eyes.
The information was already overflowing, and Professor Ceres’s movements, which I had learned through being beaten for hours by both body and mana, were now stored away inside me.
I compared and analyzed all the movements of Miel Norison, Han Riae, Professor Ceres, and myself.
Where exactly did the differences arise? What, exactly, was the difference between that breathing and this one? Why did she defend while taking breaths like that?
The position of the feet on the ground, the spacing of the breaths, the difference in force used when gripping and releasing the sword, the way the sword was held, how the stance should be formed for efficiency, where the center of gravity should go, upper body or lower body, the direction of the gaze, the counterattack after deflecting an attack, and so on.
All that information accumulated in my mana, and pure mana carved each detail into my body one by one.
It had been the same last time too, but swordsmanship and close-quarters combat were disturbingly easy for me to perceive.
This was a chance.
I would somehow learn the technique into my body, study it, and get myself used to it.
I ran simulations in my head as much as I could.
The ending was always a defeat, but the process kept changing every time.
I could feel the me in my imagination inching forward, slowly.
The sunset that had painted me in a faint glow had long since slipped behind the earth, and in the sun’s place, a huge moon and bright stars decorated the sky.
The more I went on, the more I felt like I was grasping at something I almost understood, only to lose hold of it again. It was maddening, itchy, and strangely thrilling all at once, making me look forward to what came next.
It was the first time I’d ever felt this way.
Even the spar between Han Riae and Miel had never given me this feeling. And now, carefully, it was beginning to bloom.
“Well... not bad.”
Really.
Not bad.
.
.
.
It was the morning after the beating from yesterday.
Even with my mana erosion, I hadn’t expected the bruises I’d gotten yesterday to disappear in just one day.
The treatment center had me hooked up to IVs all over my body, so the effects probably had been doubled.
As always, I arrived at the lecture hall early.
And as always, Han Riae wa—
“Who did this.”
“Y-yes?”
“No, I mean what the hell happened to your face... which bastard did this to you?”
If there was one thing that was different from usual, it was that the expression Han Riae wore when I met her in the lecture hall was nothing like her normal one; instead, she stared back at me with cold, frozen eyes, asking in a voice just as icy.
In that instant, I understood why she had earned the name Ice Fortress.