Germania (4)
The suddenness of it must have caught her off guard. Larilura, who had been scribbling furiously in her notebook, didn’t catch what I said right away.
Well, that was fine. I’d just repeat it two or three times.
Tap. Tap.
I drummed my fingers on her notebook.
“You don’t need a reason to come over to our house. Just show up at the front door and boldly say you were bored. I guarantee neither Franc nor Dana will act like they’re annoyed that you’re there.”
That was the important part. The absolute confirmation that my wives wouldn’t reject Larilura. Whether that confirmation existed or not would make a massive fucking difference.
We were a three-person marriage. If even one of them hated her, I’d be out on my ass in seconds. If Dana or Franc said they didn’t want her around, how the hell could I invite a guest?
That was probably what Larilura was worried about. It was only natural to fear getting on the bad side of the women enjoying their newlywed life if some random girl suddenly showed up.
“Umm……”
Larilura opened and closed her mouth a few times before her face flushed bright red. Looked like I’d hit the nail on the head.
“……Senior? Do I really wear my thoughts on my face that obviously? Honestly, before I started getting completely played by you, I was pretty confident in my poker face.”
“Adults see everything, kid.”
I’m what you become after growing up from someone like you, you little brat.
“Ugh, why do you keep calling me a kid……”
Larilura’s face turned an even deeper shade of red as she sulked. When I didn’t respond and just chuckled, she started shoving my back like she was angry. It was the exact reaction of a teenage girl who just caught her dad walking into her room. I could kind of understand the feeling.
“I’ll finish the rest by myself, so just go to your room and do whatever you need to do! If I run into something I don’t understand while studying, I’ll ask you about everything later!!”
“Did our little Larilura get mad? Where did that girl who said she had such a big heart and would overlook everything go? Give me back the real Larilura, you fake.”
“Senior, you really look like the type who’d float mouth-first even if you were thrown into water♥!”
Bang!
She shoved me hard and kicked me out of the living room. At this point I genuinely wasn’t sure who the real owner of this house was anymore.
Wasn’t I supposed to be the owner? The house deed had basically turned into toilet paper.
‘The stormy age of eighteen, huh. Must be a turbulent time.’
Still, as the adult here, I didn’t need some grand reason to look after the kids’ convenience. Back when I was a snot-nosed elementary schooler in Korea, if I went to the neighborhood supermarket after playing at the playground, the owner would give me free hard candy. That same uncle was fishing buddies with my dad, so whenever I ran errands to buy my father liquor, he’d put soju in a black plastic bag for a kid who wasn’t even ten years old. That was the neighborly affection of 20th-century Koreans. A nostalgia for a time swept away by redevelopment.
Therefore, as someone who remembered that era, I—Kang Bukho, existing somewhere between a geezer and a fossil—had a sacred duty. The duty to guide this fully grown pink elementary-schooler in spirit.
How beautiful was a society where you gave back as much as you received! Lenin and Marx must be weeping in hell, saying communism had bloomed on a cactus.
“Hey, sorry. I was wrong. Open the door.”
I apologized and tried to go back into the living room, but Larilura opened the door first. Then, as if she absolutely refused to let me in, she only poked her eyes out through the crack.
What the fuck was this? The Gates of Truth? Peephole Season 2?
“……The unnies like alcohol, right? What about you, Senior?”
“Out of nowhere, what are you talking about?”
Larilura fired the question through the door crack. When I asked back because I didn’t understand, she grumbled and explained.
“The unnies like drinking, don’t they? Even if it’s not expensive stuff, I think they’d be happy if I brought some good beer. What do you like, Senior? I want to bring a small gift when I come over sometimes.”
“……Me?”
The question left me speechless. It felt like I’d been smacked in the back of the head.
‘What do I even like?’
It didn’t seem to exist in this world. I wasn’t that big on alcohol—considering I quit right after graduating college—and I wasn’t the type to enjoy tinkering with things like Franc. I did like reading books like Dana, but the literature of this world just didn’t click with me. It was always a deadly binary choice between dry, boring pure literature or trashy erotic novels.
‘──Wait, seriously? There’s nothing?’
Maybe it was the aftereffect of living with the mindset that I would eventually leave this world. If I excluded my wives, it felt like there was genuinely nothing here that I purely wanted to do.
“Senior?”
When I spaced out in response to her question, Larilura called out to me as if she found it strange. It was like someone had dumped cold water on my head; I snapped back to reality.
“Ah, no. I’ll think about it. Nothing immediately comes to mind.”
“……Is that so?”
Larilura blinked a few times before opening the door properly.
Swish, swish, swish!
The moment I stepped back into the living room, she used some kind of footwork to dodge away. She was like a scared hedgehog. When our eyes met, she immediately put on an exaggerated cute act.
“Ahaha♡! If I don’t need an excuse, then I’ll finish translating everything today☆! Even if I can’t, I can do it by myself if I go to the Mage Guild library!”
“This brat gets completely shameless the second she gets permission.”
I hadn’t thought of that. The Mage Guild would definitely have an ancient Romanian dictionary.
“Making mistakes is embarrassing no matter what you do! In that case, laughing it off is what first-rate clowns do☆!”
“Did you swap your face out for puppet parts while I wasn’t looking? What a thick-skinned little thing.”
The second her excuse was exposed, she immediately changed her attitude. When I stared at her in disbelief, she shamelessly threw up a V-sign and acted all triumphant.
“Hehe. You said you’d feel lonely without me around, Senior~ So even though it’s really annoying, I’ll keep you company♡? Having a kind and cute junior like me, you really are lucky!”
Give her even the slightest opening and she runs her mouth. I put on a straight face and raised both hands, extending my fingers like guns. Ten shots with dual five-finger guns.
The previously cocky Larilura’s face stiffened.
“Vector—Re-Education Returns.”
“W-wait a second Senior that’s been a while, ah! Uhh…♡?!”
Oh shit. The startled Larilura twisted her body, causing my aim to go slightly off.
Squish!
I did poke her side, but my fingertips felt an unexpectedly soft sensation. Just as I suspected. This couldn’t be……
“……Have you gained weight?”
“……Are you going to hit me? For real?”
No, but that wasn’t the position where I should’ve touched her chest. I was telling the truth—her sides really had gotten softer than before.
“Hehe. So what? It’s fine to gain a little weight. For the past month, aside from when I went out for work, all I did was eat and sleep, right? There was no one to stop me from buying whatever I wanted to eat, so if I bend forward, I might have a tiny bit of love handle that you can grab on my──”
“……★!!”
Thud!
I ran away from the silently screaming Larilura who was chasing after me. Her ears and the area up to her neck had turned bright red, so it looked like her face would explode if I so much as touched her with a finger.
‘But it’s not my fault she cried.’
She was the one who started crying. It wasn’t like I made her cry on purpose. Therefore, my fault percentage truly converged to 0%. I am not a pervert who enjoys making others cry.
‘Things I like, huh.’
After escaping from Larilura and heading to the garden, I crossed my arms at a thought that suddenly occurred to me. Both Franc and Dana had said it. That I was the type of person who set goals and moved toward them. I hadn’t realized it until they pointed it out, but it was probably true.
That might be why, after living four years in this other world, I still hadn’t found a single personal hobby I genuinely enjoyed.
‘This is something I need to seriously think about.’
There was a chance I might live here as the otherworlder Norde until I became an old man. Simply writing down Franc and Dana as the things I liked had its limits. As a macho man, shouldn’t I have some cool hobby that didn’t neglect my family?
I wrote “Find Hobby” in my notebook. I’d look into it later. Brooding over it alone wouldn’t give me an answer.
‘It’ll come to me if I keep thinking. For now, maybe I should practice spearmanship.’
I couldn’t go back to the living room, but I could still take out my spear. I grabbed the rune stone and the spear and headed to the garden. There probably wasn’t anyone watching, but I checked carefully before activating the rune stone’s video.
Since the house was surrounded by walls, there was no one who could peek in.
Can you hear me clearly? From now on, I will teach you, who have acquired this rune stone, my spearmanship—Geirtýr.
Whoosh!
When I poured mana into it, the spear instructor lady was summoned. Even on second viewing, her spirit was incredible. If she had intentionally released killing intent, my balls would probably shrivel up and the contents inside would leak out.
The video explained that Geirtýr consisted of nine offensive stances and nine counter stances. Of course, a video was still just a video. The explanation was the same as last time. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t scary. Even knowing a 3D horror movie was fake, your heart still pounded.
Can you tone down the pressure in your eyes, damn it.
Tense from the warrior’s intimidation, I copied the stance. She was the type to keep the intro short and get straight to the point. I’d been worried she might just show it quickly and tell me to follow along, but fortunately that wasn’t the case.
The lecture continued, explaining each stance one by one. The first offensive form looked like this.
The spear lady swung her spear shaft. Surprisingly, the video even supported sound, but there was no noise of the spear cutting through the wind. It showed just how much my skills had improved compared to before, and also how insanely high-level her technique was.
‘Fuck. She really is a transcendent old monster.’
Those panty men and women who could fuck with the laws of physics using nothing but an iron rod! The spear lady recorded in the rune stone was that kind of monstrous master technician. No wonder that one-eyed god, that Nick Fury lookalike bitch, liked her enough to name the spearmanship after her. In modern otherworld standards, she would be at minimum Mithril Class. No wonder my balls were trembling in fear.
‘Ah, shit. Focus. Focus.’
The rune stone’s interface was dogshit, so there was no pause function. Like a real-time professor’s write-and-erase magic, if I let my mind wander even for a second, I’d fall behind in the lesson.
“Kiyoooooot!!”
Whoosh—thwack!
I put power into my shout and copied the stance, but I had no way of knowing if I was doing it correctly. I clicked my tongue. From the outside, both the spear lady and I were just swinging in the same posture, so maybe it was fine?
The lecture on the first counter stance followed. The explanations were vague, as if telling me to realize it myself, and the pace was fast, but memorizing the stances themselves was manageable. There weren’t any overly complicated forms.
‘The month I spent studying the spearmanship manual and practicing really helped.’
Looking purely at the stances, Geirtýr wasn’t all that unique. Or maybe every single form contained some profound principle like in those martial arts novels that old farts loved, but I was too stupid to notice.
‘Is the reason there are eighteen stances out of respect for the eighteen runes Odin created?’
Still, there weren’t any stances that felt like they were just thrown in to fill numbers. Every single one was logically constructed. Sometimes it even told me what situation it was meant to be used in.
This stance is for shooting down an enemy casting magic from the sky. Grab the middle of the shaft, fly up, and pierce them.
It wasn’t fucking helpful at all, though.
“You son of a bitch. At least explain how the hell I’m supposed to fly.”
I learned with my body that even geniuses weren’t necessarily good at explaining things. Whether the rune stone’s recording couldn’t capture it or not, it didn’t even demonstrate the three-dimensional aerial maneuver. It was telling me to figure it out myself.
Ah, but there was one thing I could say with absolute certainty. This spearmanship could only be followed if you could, at the very least, treat your own mana like your own limbs.
“If you can’t use mana~ you can’t fight~.”
I continued copying the eighteen stances to ingrain them into my body. As it said to combine and apply them, the spearmanship was basically foundational postures. Mimicking the shapes was roughly done.
Whoosh—thwack!
My spear slapped the ass of the wind with a satisfying smack. I was Norde, the hellish druid who raped nature. Today I raped the wind. Tomorrow I would rape the water.
“Aaaagh.”
No matter how much I copied the stances, it was all completely useless. The moment I started thinking it was as pointless as a squirrel running on a wheel, random thoughts flooded in. I stabbed my spear into the ground.
Drip, drip.
Sweat fell. Since I hadn’t activated Beast Regression, my body was drenched in sweat.
‘Mana, why won’t you move?’
When I tried to unfold Geirtýr, I could feel my mana twitching inside my body. But it was so damn stiff that it wouldn’t actually move. It felt as frustrating as trying to shoot starch water or mud from a water gun. Every time I tried to follow a form, this happened and my concentration kept breaking. It felt like trying to bench press while desperately needing to take a shit.
To cool my head, what came to mind was the top-class old monster among the people I knew. I took off my top and pulled out my notebook. Enjoying the cool autumn breeze, I flipped through the pages.
‘After I fell into the sea of the other world with Larilura, I copied it down somewhere around here……’
Found it. It was the honey tip left behind by Nefertiti.
I roughly wiped the sweat from my hands onto my pants and read the text with my eyes. Nefertiti’s expressionless face and flat voice replayed in my head like an audio recording.
Create systematic attacks like magic formulas.
Just carve the path inside your body where your mana moves most comfortably and familiarly.
The technique created that way will be the strongest and fastest.
‘The path where mana moves most comfortably and familiarly?’
Wasn’t this tip perfectly suited for me right now?! I glared at my notebook with burning eyes.