The Genius They Say Every Academy Has (01)
Incredible.
A black-haired boy wearing a thoroughly insolent look, and beside him a blonde girl who had taken her place without so much as a flicker of expression, had gone up onto the stage as the male and female representatives of the incoming class.
Cheonryong Academy's entrance ceremony always drew swarms of reporters, but today the crowd was absurd, every camera jammed toward the stage. The reason wasn't hard to guess. The two representatives standing up there were Cheon Dae-seong, fourth son of the Cheonryong Sword Family, and Cheon Yu-rin, its fifth daughter.
"That freshman... is he who I think he is?"
"A freshman like that? There's only one."
"Great-house stock really is different. The bearing. The bearing."
It wasn't only the reporters. Students were murmuring all around me too.
So this is what the Cheonryong name is worth?
In the original story, when the protagonist Cheon So-hyeong enrolled, he was a scorned concubine-born son of the house, and there had been nothing like this crowd. Even in the middle of the uproar, Cheon Dae-seong wore an arrogant smile and waved as if he were used to exactly this sort of reaction. Watching him, I started to think this much might simply be the baseline. Cheon Yu-rin, by contrast, held her place with a blank face, whatever she was thinking locked away where no one could see it.
Having two representatives at the entrance ceremony at all was ridiculous.
Normally they pick one person to stand for the incoming class. This time, just because two of the Cheonryong Sword Family enrolled at once, they dragged both of them up under the excuse of a boys' representative and a girls' representative?
That alone made it plain how thoroughly Cheonryong Academy was being led around by the Sword Family. And if anyone asked how a fourth son and a fifth daughter could possibly enroll at the same time—whether that was even allowed—the answer was simple enough. Cheon Dae-seong was the only son of the second wife, and Cheon Yu-rin was the eldest daughter of the third wife, the same mother as the protagonist.
A complete mess.
The first child through the third had been born to the first wife. After she died in an accident, the legal wife they had no choice but to bring in as lady of the Cheonryong Sword Family gave birth to Cheon Dae-seong. It was an intensely political marriage between great houses. Around that same time, Cheon Jin-myeong—adrift after losing his wife—took as a concubine the foreign woman who had comforted him, and Cheon Yu-rin was born of that union. The last child to come along was the protagonist himself, Cheon So-hyeong.
As for me, I was sitting through the entrance ceremony from the very back row, half checked out, on the official grounds that I was tall. More precisely, the bigger reason was that my parents were successful in business and had plenty of money, but still weren't anything you could call a great house. In the end I'd been shoved out by their lack of pedigree, and I was watching the stage from the last seat.
Works out better for me, though.
It put me close to the guests' section, where the triplets were, and the three of them were each holding a camera, recording me on the grounds that they would show the ceremony to my parents. Duna had her smartphone. Sena had a little camcorder that fit in her palm. Hana had turned up hauling something like a broadcast-station camera—where she'd even found it, I had no idea—and was filming with that.
This is not that important an event...?
All they were going to get was the back of my head. I wasn't sure they needed it.
Still, for a while now I've had the feeling someone keeps looking at me...
The triplets were behind me, shooting footage to show my parents, and the other students were all facing the stage, so there was no reason I should have felt anyone's eyes. The only person I might actually meet a gaze with was Cheon Yu-rin, up on the stage, staring openly in this direction. Even now it felt as if our eyes had brushed, and she seemed to be looking straight into mine.
I'm imagining it.
She was probably just looking somewhere near me, and I'd only gotten the idea that our eyes had happened to meet.
"Heh. You may not be on the level of the Cheonryong Sword Family, but each of you is still the child of a house with real standing, are you not? I, Cheon Dae-seong, regard you as talents who will bear the future alongside me."
The students in the front rows, listening to the entrance address, held their heads high with thoroughly pleased expressions. The ones at the very front weren't Cheonryong-level, but they were Awakened from respectable houses all the same—elites who had already started on aura cultivation.
It's absurd that talents that good end up playing lackey to Cheon Dae-seong. But what can you do? From where they stand, he must look as strong as heaven itself.
"Now then, let us hear a congratulatory address from Miss Cheon Yu-rin, the youngest daughter our Cheonryong Sword Family takes such pride in, who has come up as representative of the young ladies."
Smiling, Cheon Dae-seong passed the microphone to his younger sister Cheon Yu-rin, younger than him by only a matter of days. She kept her eyes fixed on me, brought her mouth to the microphone, and moved her lips as if she meant to speak—then, without actually saying anything, handed it straight back to him.
She is looking.
I shifted, just slightly, and Cheon Yu-rin's eyes followed. That settled it. She was watching me.
"Haha. It seems my little sister is feeling shy. Be generous with her, all of you. She's a sister who has done nothing but train the sword in our Cheonryong Sword Family, so she's rather bashful!"
There's no reason Cheon Yu-rin would take any interest in me... there really shouldn't be.
Laughter rolled through the freshmen in the front rows, and with it the noisy entrance ceremony came to an end.
The other freshmen started hunting for faces they knew and trading greetings, but I didn't have anyone here I particularly cared about, and getting tangled up with people was the last thing I wanted. So before the students were properly turned loose, I slipped out and checked the daily quest I had to clear today.
Do it, and you get:a little bit stronger
Don't, and you get:your body hurts...
"Ten thousand times again..."
Not that I minded. My body had been itching for it anyway. I grabbed my wooden sword and headed for the empty lot where I'd found the Black Dragon Yeouiju, loosening up as I went.
"Little sister!"
At the sound of Cheon Dae-seong calling—he was coming over with his followers in tow—Cheon Yu-rin let out a small sigh, careful that he wouldn't catch it. The moment he had enrolled, he had started building a clique. He had always been like this. From childhood, he did things that did not suit the Cheonryong Sword Family.
Any other heir of the house would temper themselves and show their overwhelming strength, and people would follow of their own accord. Cheon Dae-seong obsessed over his connections instead, pouring more effort into growing his faction than into growing his skill. In an ordinary family, political sense of that kind would not have been a flaw. In the Cheonryong Sword Family, it was utterly pointless.
"Well then. What do you intend to do from here?"
Inside the family they were siblings who did not so much as speak to one another, and yet he was closing in on her with the others who followed him.
"If things had gone according to the original plan, you would have entered this Cheonryong Academy a year late. This esteemed one would have taken the presidency, and then handed it down to you..."
Every heir of the Cheonryong Sword Family had held the student council presidency of Cheonryong Academy. The first son, Cheon Hong-gun. The second son, Cheon Hyo-won. Even the third daughter, Cheon Se-ryeong. But the fourth son, Cheon Dae-seong, and the fifth daughter, Cheon Yu-rin, were practically the same age, and so his mother—the second wife—had made a proposal. Since each of them would have to serve as president once anyway, they need only say that Yu-rin was ill, or that there was some problem, and delay her enrollment by a single year.
Of course, set against the gap between the second wife, who commanded a powerful faction within the Cheonryong Sword Family, and the third wife, who held on with no supporters at all and nothing but the family head's favor, it had not been a request.
It had been a threat.
Perhaps he had sensed as much. The family head, Cheon Jin-myeong, ordered the fourth and the fifth to enroll together, and this was what came of it.
"This esteemed one will become student council president. Just as Father did, and my elder brothers, and my elder sister."
Cheon Dae-seong declared it, utterly sure of himself. Had he enrolled on his own, the might of the Cheonryong Sword Family and his own ability would almost certainly have been enough to set him in the president's seat.
If only Cheon Yu-rin had not been there.
"Of course, in our Cheonryong Sword Family, the strong reign supreme. The strong are meant to possess everything. Which is to say I will not go easy on you merely because you are my dear little sister."
"Do as you please, Elder Brother."
"What?"
"I will yield the presidency to you."
From the very start, Cheon Yu-rin had never intended to aim for the student council presidency.
"Well, naturally! Our Cheonryong Sword Family does not grant the right of succession to women!"
That was because inheriting the house had never been what interested her. The third daughter, Cheon Se-ryeong, had tried every avenue to overturn the family's rules—declaring that she herself, a woman, would inherit, that she would change the rules—and she had asked Cheon Yu-rin for help besides. Yu-rin, however, felt nothing at all for the seat at the head of the Cheonryong Sword Family.
There was only one thing that drew her interest.
"......"
"Haha, yes, that's the spirit, my sister. Yu-rin! Once this elder brother becomes student council president, I'll see to it that you can live comfortably here at the academy..."
She could not hear a word of Cheon Dae-seong's voice. He was someone who held not the slightest interest for her.
An Aura Heart. That person... he had an Aura Heart.
The Aura Heart Cheon Yu-rin had spent her life concealing, out of her mother's worry, was beginning to beat. Vanishingly few people had ever stirred this sensation in her. Her father, Cheon Jin-myeong, who had reached a realm so far beyond the heavens it was dizzying to look at. Or the blood kin from the first child through the third, whom even she—the greatest genius in the family's history—had yet to catch. Or the elder-tier figures of the Cheonryong Sword Family, and the swordsmen of great houses who could stand equal to them. The throb of an Aura Heart was something one felt only from people like that. To think she would feel it in here. And not from a graduate, but among the freshmen.
That person... who is he? Which house is he from?
A tall male student with a languid look about him was carving himself into the things Cheon Yu-rin cared about.
Who was he?
As a daughter of the Cheonryong Sword Family, she had in her own way memorized the faces of the heirs of the great houses, but she had never seen this young man. It was not as though his looks were so faint they would fail to stay in memory—not with a height that stood out like that, and those lowered eyes that somehow looked innocent.
She was already moving on instinct, following the pulse of the Aura Heart, when the sound of air being torn rang through her ears and snapped her back to herself.
"Ah......!"
An empty lot where people had grown scarce, weeds sprung up because no one tended it. Even the old stone statue once set there as an ornament had snapped at the waist and been shoved into a corner. An abandoned place. And there, the young man from before was swinging a sword.
Whoosh. Vwoom. Whoosh. If this was training, the paths were simplicity itself—vertical cuts and horizontal cuts. What astonished her was the speed, and the way the air warped into a searing wind every time the wooden sword cleaved it. Even carrying that much destructive force, the blade's trajectory was impeccably clean.
Cheon Yu-rin had watched the swords of people forged to the bone inside the Cheonryong Sword Family, people who had trained since childhood, and even she could find no flaw. It was being swung along a trajectory that perfect. At a realm like that, he must have drilled the fundamentals until he was sick of them, and yet he swung with such total absorption that heat-haze rose off his whole body. Before she knew it, the hunger to cross blades had risen in her, and her hand settled on her sword.
She had no need of the Cheonryong Sword Family. No need of money, or of honor. Her interest had only ever been one thing.
This man is strong... I want to fight him...!
Nothing but a fight against a powerful foe. The kind that set her heart pounding.