Yuzuha Serdik (2)
She flipped through the air in a neat somersault and landed lightly on her tiptoes.
Smoothing out her disheveled clothes, she continued speaking.
“Sniff sniff… I don’t even smell, so why do you hate me?”
“Pfft… It’s nothing like that.”
“If it’s not that, then there’s no reason to put up such an iron wall!”
Ethan deftly changed the subject.
“…By the way, Professor, you’re from the East, yet you don’t use plum blossom sachets or anything of the sort?”
Wealthy Eastern cadets like Sera typically carried sachets blended with various scents to maintain an air of cleanliness and dignity. Yuzuha was surely from a high house as well. The fact that she gave off nothing but a sweet, fragrant scent of bare skin was, if anything, a little strange.
“…What kind of question is that? Of course I don’t!”
Yuzuha’s eyes turned serious.
“Thieves are a class that has to infiltrate heavily secured facilities and carry out operations as a matter of course! Concealment is the absolute baseline, and getting discovered is simply not an option.”
For the first time in a while she slipped fully into professor mode.
“If you go around burning incense, how are you supposed to maintain concealment? No matter how finely you hone your stealth arts, you can’t fool a nose! The guards will catch you! A thief who carries a sachet has no right to call himself a thief!”
She launched into a lengthy lecture on concealment techniques before clapping her hands sharply and returning to the main point.
“Anyway! I’ll teach you the basics of qi manipulation for starters!”
Good thing I steered the conversation with the sachets. If I hadn’t, she would have clung again and I’d have been stuck enduring another half hour of affection.
“Alright, we begin from a horse-riding stance.”
Yuzuha pressed right up against Ethan and began correcting his posture.
“Fists clenched.”
“Professor.”
“Shift your thighs this way.”
“Take your hand off my stomach.”
“Hing…”
Ethan made a firm resolution. He would have to enforce a thorough fence rule against the constantly clinging Professor Yuzuha.
Anyone can see she’s out to devour a Westerner.
On top of that, campus romance carried an unforgiving fifty demerit points. In more ways than one, Professor Yuzuha was launching assassination attacks against him. For Ethan, who absolutely had to graduate from Thief School and infiltrate the imperial palace, she was a serious threat.
“You hate me!? In the Empire you’re an adult from seventeen! Everyone gets married then!”
“I’m a cadet and Professor Yuzuha is a teacher.”
“Just you wait! I’ll make you fall head over heels for me.”
Not a chance.
“Even if I die, I’m never going to Thief graduate school.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
For the rest of the session Ethan had to desperately defend his body against Professor Yuzuha’s relentless assaults.
Professor Yuzuha was a genius in her own right.
“Repetitive mastery is what matters for qi manipulation!”
Teaching, however, was not her strong suit.
“Just copy me!”
She stood in a ballerina pose, left foot pressed against her right calf, and crossed two fingers into an X.
“Ugh… Pah!”
The moment she lightly drew her fingers apart, a tremendous surge of qi erupted straight forward from her body. Several trees were caught in the blast and ripped out by the roots. The fallen trunks immediately turned transparent.
“You do it like this! Easy, right? Give it a try!”
“Impressive, Professor.”
So that was Yuzuha Serdik’s signature technique—Long-Range Invisibility. He had only seen it once in the webtoon, yet even now it felt remarkably powerful.
“Ang! I’m a genius, after all!”
She planted her fists on her hips and thrust out her chest.
“Though your ability to teach cadets is not particularly…”
“Cadet Ethan, what exactly did you mean by that?”
“Not par…ticularly needing any effort, since you are the finest educator imaginable.”
“Right? I am Yuzuha Serdik, after all.”
Ethan mirrored her movements from the side, yet he felt no qi whatsoever inside his body. Even when he pressed a hand to his lower abdomen there was not the slightest stir.
I don’t have this mana vessel or dantian or whatever it’s called.
He suspected he would have to focus on utilizing external qi instead.
Whether it’s internal qi or external qi, as long as I can use it, it’s all the same, right?
With that thought he concentrated on his breathing once more.
Whoom.
The tattoo on the back of his hand began to fill with pale green light.
“Yes, if you concentrate too—huh?”
Rumble.
The platform started to crack with a grinding creak. Before anyone realized it, dense fog had packed itself around Ethan like a thick cotton quilt.
“How can you gather natural qi to this degree!?”
With qi concentrated so powerfully, of course Yuzuha could see it with the naked eye. When Ethan half-opened his eyes, the silhouettes of previous-generation thieves flashed through his peripheral vision, racing past like the wind in every possible motion.
My head… my head feels like it’s going to explode.
If he forced all that information in, his brain would surely burn out. Ethan closed his eyes and focused on a single thing.
Qi manipulation.
In that instant a crackling sound rang out, and the World Fragment in Ethan’s pocket evaporated into nothing. Two tiny concentric circles bloomed on the tattoo on the back of his hand, sparkled once, and vanished just as quickly.
Zwoong.
What remained was a tattoo of four concentric circles—including the two that had briefly appeared inside the vanished upper-left ring. Shaped like a miniature archery target, the mark continued to glow faintly on the back of his hand.
The surroundings fell silent. Only the sound of Professor Yuzuha gulping for breath could be heard from in front of him.
“Hah… hah… ack…”
What on earth happened to make her sound like that?
Ethan slowly opened his eyes.
“Huh.”
Including the platform he stood on, a radius of several hundred paces was empty—as though a bomb had gone off. Cries and screams rose from every direction.
“Wh-what!? Where did the bathroom wall go!?”
Across the forest a cadet who had been sitting in midair answering nature’s call hurriedly yanked his pants up in shock.
“What the—my shuriken!”
“Hey, we’re floating in midair right now? What is this?”
“Aaaah! Where’s my ladle! I dropped it in the pot by accident!”
Senior cadets researching in a nearby empty classroom tumbled over in surprise. The floors beneath their feet and the tools in their hands had turned completely transparent.
“Who’s that kid?”
“Where, where? He’s not even a freshman, is he?”
“Professor Yuzuha is there too? Did the professor do this?”
“No—even Professor Yuzuha couldn’t pull off Area-of-Effect Invisibility on this scale.”
Every one of them was staring at the epicenter—no, at the culprit of the entire situation.
Professor Yuzuha stood rooted in place, trembling from head to toe.
“How already… Area-of-Effect Invisibility, a fourth-rank technique…”
Yet the invisibility soon lifted, and the forest returned to its original appearance.
“And over such a vast range…!”
Her face flushed deeper and deeper.
“Ah ah…! Ethan…!♡”
She dashed to her student in a single breath.
Yuzuha Serdik.
Occupying the current Sixth Seat of the Round Table, she was a high-ranking thief from the East. Already regarded as Thief-Master level in stealth arts alone, she was known as the third-fastest graduate in the history of Thief School. The imperial citizens whose lives had been saved by the operations she performed already numbered in the millions. Because she came from the thief class she had never gained the fame her abilities deserved, yet even if she had been a knight or a mage—or even a priest—there would not have been a single citizen on the continent who did not know her name. That was how extraordinary her talent was.
“Ah… ah…!”
Yet even to Professor Yuzuha, who had carried out those legendary operations as casually as eating a meal, a cadet of this caliber was unprecedented.
“Mixing luck into qi is an advanced technique that even active thieves struggle with…!”
Her eyes flew wide. She had clearly witnessed it. A freshman who had enrolled a mere week ago had already gone beyond proficiency and fully mastered qi manipulation. She had no idea by what principle, but he had unconsciously woven in that finicky, dangerous luck power as well.
“Even upperclassmen in third year and above struggle to render a single dagger transparent.”
The duration had lasted only a few seconds, yet performing Area-of-Effect Invisibility on this scale was impossible with ordinary luck power. Even someone born with the destiny of a small kingdom’s hero would influence no more than a few dozen paces at best. The boy standing before her, still at the stage of taking his first steps, was radiating luck power powerful enough to embrace the entire world!
“Um… Professor?”
“Uh… yeah?”
Yuzuha forced her unfocused eyes to focus and looked at the boy as handsome as a sculpture standing before her.
“E… Ethan… you…”
Those red eyes simply gazed at her. He bowed his head and offered his thanks.
“Thanks to you, Professor, I was able to greatly master qi manipulation. I don’t know how I can ever repay this kindness.”
“Uh…? Uuh…!”
Honestly she had done almost nothing. This extraordinary cadet had figured nearly everything out on his own. Tell him one thing and he grasped ten.
Ah ah… what am I supposed to do with this adorable disciple!
Her breathing grew rough.
“Ethan Cass… so you had a talent for exciting women…”
“What are you talking about?”
“Ah, I feel like I’ve turned back into a young girl…!”
Even accounting for her well-known preference for the strong, having her head spin over such a young genius was a first in her life. Looking at Round-Table knight-origin thieves had never stirred this throbbing emotion.
“Ethan Cass… you really are a once-in-a-generation genius…!”
She unconsciously lunged for a headbutt toward Ethan’s lips, but residual fog still lingered around him; he read the motion in advance and dropped low to dodge.
“Ang! Whyyyy!”
“Campus romance is fifty demerit points.”
“I’ll kiss you and then go to solitary!”
“Absolutely not.”
“Let go of me!”
Even though Yuzuha possessed more than enough strength to free herself, she allowed herself to be carried like luggage under Ethan’s left arm as they left the training ground.
Shap.
After they departed, a girl in a purple robe appeared in the empty space they had left behind.
“E… Ethan-nim… ehehe…”
Around her neck hung a necklace strung with a single porcelain fragment. She caressed it lovingly. A rather cute face peeked out from between the folds of the robe, yet large round glasses sat heavily on her nose, and her filthy appearance—days without washing—robbed her looks of any luster.
“I’m just waiting for alchemy class…! Ha… hak…! This is Ethan-nim’s sacred relic…!”
She carefully picked up a short black hair left where Ethan had stood and placed it inside a metal box.
Click.
The box already held a large quantity of what could only be Ethan’s hair.
“I, Nina Extra, simply cannot hold back…!”
Thud.
The giggling expression vanished; her face went blank.
“Professor Yuzuha, Sera Barakin…”
Crunch—the iron chain in her hand crumpled.
“…And…”
A rapid-fire stream of women’s names from Thief School spilled from her lips.
“…Princess Iria Astrabel, Muria, Professor Mibir, Professor Lena, Doler, Schnell, Ellis, Dietrich, Mirias, Lilian, Jaerin, Casanael…”
She recited names for a long while before abruptly stopping.
“….”
She opened her mouth quietly.
“You cannot dare take Ethan away from me.”
She stroked the porcelain fragment hanging at her throat.
“If you try… I’ll curse you even if I have to drag my own future into it…”
On the reverse side of the porcelain shard a boy as handsome as a sculpture was engraved in bas-relief. The crushed iron chain in her hand glowed a faint green.