Oneself (3)
What were those idiots thinking, doing something so reckless…!
Grades. Naturally, that was where it all began.
Written exams had always been Aris’s greatest weakness, and when it came to dry theory, she loathed it enough to make her skin crawl. Yet her pride could never stomach dragging down her party members, who consistently held their ground at the top of the rankings, and falling behind to the point of ruining the schedule was something she refused to let happen.
Thus, her first true trial had begun. But the path of an educator was far from forgiving. Teaching demanded not only that she explain what she knew with crystalline clarity, but also that she master entirely new layers of knowledge along the way. For Aris, it was nothing short of torture.
Even so, night after night, she had gathered her vivid pink hair into a tight tie, gripped the cursed pen she despised, and ground through her notes.
“Hey, Teach! Don’t tell me you brought a cheat sheet today too?”
“Why do we tease you? Because seeing you get all flustered makes it ten times more fun!”
“All right, time for our daily Teach-teasing hour, let’s gooo!”
They were students at that delightfully insufferable age. They would burst out laughing whenever Aris fumbled her words, and on the days they caught her peeking at her lecture notes like contraband, her face would burn crimson for hours. Seeing them chatter away and fill the room with noisy banter, she had made a daily habit of dishing out playful knuckle-raps on their heads and smacks to their backs.
And through it all, she had laughed with them, utterly swept up in those lively days.
Of course, it stung whenever they tuned out her lectures, but those hours were never defined by frustration alone. She couldn’t bring herself to hate them. She couldn’t bring herself to truly scold them—even knowing they weren’t taking their studies as seriously as they should have. Attaching names and silly nicknames to those familiar faces, trading jabs and laughter day after day—it had long stopped being merely about earning a grade.
That was why, when the catastrophic results came in, Aris could only hang her head. She accepted full responsibility for failing to rein them in and guide them properly.
“I-It’s those slackers who skipped class that are the problem! Not you, Teach…!”
“Just wait until week two! We’re gonna show everyone what we’re really made of!”
“We’ll prove it next time with our own hands. It really wasn’t your fault! We were just slacking off…!”
When Aris had shouldered the blame before the students who returned, they vehemently denied it, even calling their absent classmates lazy freeloaders. Some had even hung their heads in genuine remorse, acknowledging that they hadn’t applied themselves. It was clear proof that Aris wasn’t the only one who had grown attached.
And that was precisely how disaster had struck.
Not long after, a lone, visibly trembling student had sought her out to deliver the horrifying truth.
“They… they said they’d prove you weren’t a bad teacher, so they banded together and went out to hunt magical beasts on their own…”
Aris felt the world collapse beneath her feet.
Kids who’ve spent their whole lives only ever fighting critters that barely qualify as pests… going out to hunt real beasts by themselves…?!
The moment she learned they had prepared late into the night and departed before dawn, she scribbled a frantic note and bolted out the door.
There was an insurmountable gulf between those who had internalized combat through firsthand bloodshed and those who had not. Why were seasoned mercenaries hired? Why did the guilds enforce such grueling prerequisites? Why did the Academy place paramount importance on field experience, dubbing the third year the “cursed crucible”?
Because ordinary civilians who had never faced a real threat simply could not fathom the brutal reality inhabited by those who fought magical beasts.
“Haah, haah…!”
Gasping for breath, Aris skidded to a halt.
Human footprints began to appear in the muck, and the trail terminated abruptly before a sprawling, towering dome of tangled vines.
“This is it.”
Certainty gripped her. They were trapped inside.
Crack-bang—!
A lotus of flame bloomed violently, blasting a gaping hole through the thicket and spilling a bright beam of sunlight into the pitch-black interior.
She had found them.
“This way, you absolute morons!”
“Wh-What was that…? An explosion?”
“Teacher… Aris?”
“It’s Teach…! It’s Teacher Aris!!!”
They were terrified out of their wits. Demanding an explanation for their reckless stupidity could wait. Right now, what they needed to hear was…
“Are you going to haul ass or what?! Move it, before I leave the lot of you behind!”
It was the same sharp, exasperated tone she always used during lectures—a familiar anchor in their panic.
“I’m keeping the exit open, so run! You’re all getting an earful when we get back!”
“Y-Yes, ma’am!!”
“We’re so sorry, Teeeach…!”
Considering how far she had sprinted, Aris had harbored a sickening fear that she might arrive too late, but none of them appeared critically injured.
Thank goodness…
They had acted out of childish pride and runaway emotion, but their bodies were intact. Though several sported scrapes and bruises, none were crippled or groaning in agony. If she could just shepherd them out right now, everyone would make it home safely.
Or so she thought.
“Wait… is it just me, or is the hole getting smaller…?”
“N-No, you’re not imagining it! It’s shrinking!!”
“What’s happening?! Is it regenerating?!”
As if refusing to surrender its prey, the dome began knitting its woody prison back together with terrifying speed. Nourished by the swampy moisture of the surrounding mangrove basin, thick roots, soggy boughs, and barbed creepers surged forward, rapidly choking off their path to freedom.
“Sixth Lotus: Tilmasia!”
Refusing to let the maw snap shut, Aris blasted another opening through the barrier. The detonation carved an aperture far wider than before, yet the forest’s unnatural vitality outpaced the destruction.
“What is this… Why won’t it give?!”
Certain beasts possessed inherent resistance to concussive blasts. Shifting tactics, she unleashed spells designed to shear and shred the plant matter through raw physical force. Yet the result remained identical. Elemental spells, transmutations, concussions—nothing made a dent. No matter how many of her signature lotus blossoms bloomed to blast, rend, and tear at the encroaching thicket, the vines knitted shut in the blink of an eye.
“Gasp, pant! Teach!!”
“Wh-Why do you look further away…?! We’re running straight toward you…!”
“I don’t know! No matter how hard we sprint, we aren’t getting any closer…!”
An eerie dissonance distorted the space, as if the children were slipping further into the gloom despite running forward. It was worse than running in place—it felt as though an invisible tide were pulling them backward.
Why… why aren’t my spells working?!
They were just wooden boles and creeping vines. If the stumps were indeed flora-type beasts, why was an incendiary blast merely accelerating their regeneration?
“Teach!! Save us!!”
There was no time to analyze the anomaly.
Her thoughts scrambled, but her instincts took over. Frantic cries for help echoed endlessly from the darkness within. They were right before her eyes, yet impossibly out of reach. The moment she gouged an opening, it sealed; every step she took forward seemed to stretch the distance between them.
Panic clawed at Aris’s chest.
“If I can just… blow this whole damn dome away…!”
Geometric arrays flared brilliantly as she crammed dense mana into every geometric line. She channeled her desperate will into the spell without restraint, pouring every ounce of her soul into carving a path to reach those children.
KABOOOM—!!!
An earth-shattering roar shook the basin, threatening to obliterate the clearing entirely. But in the next heartbeat—
“Aaaargh!!”
“What… what have I done…?”
Because the barrier was already punctured, the overwhelming shockwave had slammed directly through the opening, wreaking havoc on the interior as well as the outside. Driven by blind panic, her unrestrained firepower had become a catastrophe for the fragile mortals inside. The shockwave hurled the fleeing students backward, slamming them into the mud and tossing several deep into the darkness.
And to her horror, the scorched vines surged back with monstrous vigor, cruelly obscuring the fallen disciples once more.
“No… No, please, NO!!!”
Rip, tear—!
Sharp thorns gouged her flesh, drawing crimson beads of blood. Splintering wood groaned under her weight as she threw herself bodily into the thorny mass, shoving past the tangled barrier. She didn’t care about the needles raking across her skin.
Yet with every lurch forward, the interior receded. As if deliberately prying her away from her students, the living structure shifted its internal architecture, stubbornly spitting her back out.
“Open up!! I said, OPEN UP!!!!”
She shrieked until her throat tore, but the aperture continued to strangle itself closed. No matter how violently she battered it with her fists or scarred it with sorcery, it absorbed every blow. The desperate cries of “Save us!” that had rung out moments before were now completely stifled.
Severing the dead branches to heal the wound, the canopy sealed shut, extinguishing the last sliver of daylight inside.
A suffocating silence descended, her mind spinning out of control.
The boisterous voices of those unruly kids echoed in her head—the cheeky remarks that filled her classroom, the laughter that had made the hard days bearable. In the deafening void left behind, only one thought crystallized within her.
Crushing, sickening self-loathing.
She was utterly, completely useless.
“H-Hmph! You can tease me all you want, but you know what? I spent time as a real mercenary, thank you very much! I might not be great at lectures, but I’ve got real skills!”
Real skills? What a sick joke.
“It’s true! I didn’t just waltz into the Tembris Party, you know! Goden tested me personally before letting me join!”
A Tembris member? What right did she have to that title?
“Of course I’ve saved plenty of people! That’s why we were promoted to an official party!”
Saved people? Her?
She had done nothing but ride on the coattails of giants, basking in their brilliance while contributing nothing.
“I promise. If any of you are ever in danger, I’ll drop everything and come running to save you.”
A promise?
When she was so pathetically weak?!
When she couldn’t accomplish a single thing on her own?!
When she couldn’t even control her own power, hurting the very people she came to protect?!
How dare she boast about saving anyone when she couldn’t even rescue the children right in front of her eyes?
“If only… if only someone else were here instead of me…”
If it were Cain. If it were Charlotte. If it were Erika, or Senia, or Michel, or Goden…
They would have saved them without breaking a sweat.
The bitter thought took root and poisoned her heart.
“…”
From her shredded, lacerated palms dripped the crimson proof of her incompetence. From her split, bloodied lips, bitten in furious self-hatred, trickled the taste of failure. And from her burning eyes spilled hot, uncontrollable tears of despair.
“I will save them… No matter what it costs…!”
Her soft pink hair began to whip wildly in an unnatural wind. The delicate floral ornament her students had gifted her fluttered amidst the surging tempest. Mana, wrenched from the deepest marrow of her bones, saturated the clearing with a tremor violent enough to rattle the air itself.
A colossal magic circle blazed to life before the suffocating dome.
The Deltis Line. The Gammut Line. The Betrine Line.
And finally, her turbulent power surged into the central core—the Alpeid Line.
Detonating a spell of this magnitude at point-blank range would shatter her body beyond repair. The backlash would tear through her circuits like wildfire. But she didn't care. If sacrificing her life could tear open a path and give even a single child a chance to crawl out alive, she would gladly burn to ash.
Almost there. Just need to trigger the sequence…
No matter how miraculous the forest’s regenerative properties were, a blast that leveled the entire basin would buy more than enough time for them to escape.
Yet in that split second, a suffocating blockage choked her mana pathways. The surging flood of power she was pouring into the array abruptly ground to a dead, shuddering halt.
“What…? What is…”
SLAP!
“…Ah?”
Her head snapped violently to the side before she could even process the impact. It wasn’t just the magic circle that had been interrupted.
Something had struck her cheek.
Slowly, Aris brought a trembling hand to her face. As the sharp, throbbing sting bloomed beneath her skin, dragging her back from the brink of madness, she turned her wide, disbelieving eyes toward the source.
“You utter fool, what in the hell do you think you’re doing?!”
Standing before her, grinding his teeth in raw, unbridled fury, was the very man she had spent so long running from in terror.