Absolute Command
My meeting with the principal over, I was training my body with Kim Seohyun.
"A-are you really okay?"
"Yeah."
Kim Seohyun watched me with worried eyes. My training was simple: the bench press. The weight, however, was no joke — seven hundred kilograms of it.
'Still fine.' I gritted my teeth and pressed. Coordinating every muscle with meticulous care through the Heukshin Martial Art, I lowered the bar to my chest, then drove it back up.
"Nngh!"
I felt like dying. Every single rep consumed everything I had. But I had an ace to fall back on.
Infinite Stamina (S).
It showed off terrifying performance in the carnal department as well, but this talent's true worth lay in its near-infinite stamina. As the bar sank to my chest, I felt vitality come rushing back through my body, fanning out into every corner of me.
'Slowly.'
Gritting my teeth, I straightened my elbows and raised the barbell, using the Heukshin Martial Art to divert the strain down into my lower body. The simple act of lifting a weight — that alone, without the slightest waste, stimulated and strengthened every muscle I had. Such was the power of the Heukshin Martial Art.
"Whoa. Seoha, your abs are, what the..."
Kim Seohyun muttered something beside me, but it never reached me — because I genuinely felt like I was dying. Infinite stamina let me keep the bar moving, somehow, but that didn't make the pain go away.
Why was I putting myself through this? Did I really have to? As every negative thought in the book came crawling in, I sank them with a calm mind and kept lifting.
Thud.
After about thirty minutes of repetition, the strength drained from my entire body in an instant.
'So even Infinite Stamina isn't truly infinite, huh.' When I willed it, the talent granted me boundless vigor for that moment — but once the duration ran out, it seemed that was that. My arms wobbled like wet noodles, yet vitality still coursed through me; even so, it was a remarkably useful talent.
I swept the sweat from my hair and looked over at Kim Seohyun.
"...?"
She swallowed hard, her face flushing scarlet. Sniffing at the air, trying to catch the scent of my sweat — seriously...
"...Seohyun?"
"..........................................Huh?"
"Nothing. You just seemed out of it."
"N-no, I'm fine! Totally f-fine! S-Seoha, you must be so t-tired, right? I'll clean up here, so you go take a shower first."
"...Okay."
I nodded and headed into the shower room. After a good twenty-minute wash, I stepped back outside and noticed something odd. A few items had vanished from where I'd been working out, and the chair looked like it had been swapped out entirely.
"..."
Doing my best to keep my composure, I texted Kim Seohyun that I was heading out.
I made my way to the workshop inside the school branch. All sorts of goods were already streaming in.
"Shorty."
"Yes?"
A familiar voice. I searched around for a moment before looking down. The fairy folk — and among them, a dwarf. It was the vice principal, who carried the blood of the race known as the Iron Kin.
"What on earth did you do to the principal — boil him alive or something?"
"Boil him alive? What do you mean?"
"...You genuinely have no idea, do you."
The vice principal studied me, then tilted his head. "Anyway, the thing the principal ordered is more of a headache than I expected. It'll take about three days, so keep that in mind."
"Understood."
"Also, there's plenty of useful stuff lying around here — mind if I take a few pieces? Ah, I'll pay for them, of course."
"I'm afraid not."
I said it with a smile. The vice principal's eyes narrowed to slits.
'Does he have any idea how valuable the things in here are?' One casual glance around told me most of it couldn't be bought with money. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say the principal had gone to extraordinary lengths on my behalf.
'Which is exactly what frightens me.' Just how much expectation was he piling onto me, to hand over this much?
"B-but, Shorty. C-can you— can you even handle all of these materials?"
The shorty vice principal asked. I gave a faint smile and let him in on it.
"That's a secret. But actually... I'm Veritas."
"Huh?"
The vice principal blinked at me. The fairy folk possessed a racial ability known as the Mind's Eye. Nothing grand — simply the power to tell truth from falsehood.
"No way."
And then he realized I was telling the truth.
"No— seriously? You're— you're V-Veritas?"
His eyes were pure panic. I gave a quiet nod and lifted a nearby material with my will.
In virtual reality I could use mana; here, that was impossible. That didn't mean I couldn't work the materials, though. I touched the reagent with Reverse Heaven. Reverse Heaven was the power of negation — it faintly denied the material's inherent properties. The mana within began to twist, its flow reversing from right to left. I took a deep breath and concentrated. Handling materials through Reverse Heaven demanded extreme precision.
At the same time, I engaged the kit, employing my will to brew the elixir. 'No wonder this thing costs a fortune.' With a Gold-grade kit, doing both at once would have been impossible. It only worked because this kit was beyond Diamond grade — the kind reserved for those called Alchemy Masters — and because the one wielding it happened to be me.
Three minutes of that, and I presented a glass vial filled with a resplendently glowing blue liquid.
"Ta-da."
The finished product was an Elixir of Mana — a potion that boosted one's mana for a set period of time.
"Convincing enough for you?"
"..."
The vice principal stared at me blankly, then down at the elixir. He kept that up for a while.
"...please..."
"Sorry?"
"S-sign! P-please give me your autograph!"
Face burning red, the vice principal turned and presented his back to me. "I-I don't have my s-signature board on me right now, so f-for now, on my work coat..."
"Aren't you a blacksmith, Vice Principal?"
"..."
Out of nowhere, something I'd seen on the internet surfaced in my mind. The Veritas Cult. Everywhere and nowhere at once — that phrase came back to me unbidden.
The vice principal put me through the wringer for a long while after that. It started with how on earth I'd come to possess such skill and ran all the way to whether I had any interest in collaborating with him to build a workshop down the line.
In Epic World, blacksmiths and alchemists were deeply intertwined. In the course of that relationship, the protagonist would go on to invent Enchant. I hadn't unveiled it yet, though — bringing it out too soon risked throwing the world into confusion.
'And my proficiency hasn't climbed that far yet, either.' It would only unlock once my Alchemy rank reached S.
'I did wonder why he became my fan.' According to the vice principal, my opening declaration — You were all wrong — had been so impossibly cool that he'd kept following me ever since, and somewhere along the way, he'd fallen for my knowledge.
'So the vice principal was the type to fall head over heels at the drop of a hat, huh.'
Anyway. I finished sorting out everything that needed sorting at school — tidying up the schemes I'd set in motion, compiling the lectures I owed BiLab into documents, and sending them off.
'..................Surely not.'
But if anyone would, it was the Veritas Cult. Some of them genuinely worshipped me, after all — and then there were the internet lunatics who praised me purely for kicks. Honestly, judging by the things the Veritas Cult got up to, I'd have nothing to say if someone called them a den of degenerates.
'But.' Right now, there was something that came first. I raised my head to the sky. A crescent moon hung in the night.
'Time to start moving, I think.' It was time to hunt down the Retribution Brigade.
When a meeting disguises itself as coincidence, some might mistake it for fate. But if the other party happens to be a terrifying individual, the only thing they will feel is dread — much like a woman tormented by a male stalker. That was precisely my situation.
"My, we meet again?"
A tall woman with long, sleek black hair — quite the beauty — gave me a smiling once-over, eyes crinkling. "This must be fate too, you know. Hey there, handsome. Care to join me for some tea?"
"I told you, I have a girlfriend."
"That's fine. Everyone lives like that. Men always say their ideal type is a woman they've just met, don't they? So — how about being my partner?"
So spoke Ha Seonghwi, a member of the Retribution Brigade. She gazed at me with what she clearly believed was a seductive expression. A quick scan of our surroundings showed the men nearby staring at her with vacant, dopey looks.
'What a pain.'
Ha Seonghwi. A succubus by race — originally a monster that had dwelled within the Tower of Illusions. For reasons of her own, she had managed to make it out of the tower and into this world, where she joined hands with the Leader of the Retribution Brigade, the one who had helped her. In terms of rank, she sat at the very bottom edge of the upper tier, yet her signature illusions were potent enough to leave even the highest rank floundering. That made her one of the members the Leader cherished above all others.
I stared at Ha Seonghwi with a blank expression. I was torn. Should I play along — let her believe she was abducting me — and take her down from within? Or subdue her right here, right now?
[ The Brand of False Dreams (S) is reacting. ]
A faint pink glow pulsed from where the brand had been etched.
"...Huh?"
[ Built-in skill, Qualification of False Dreams (A+), has activated. ]
[ You are not inside the Tower of False Dreams. Ability has been downgraded. ]
[ Absolute Command authority to issue orders to the succubus Ha Seonghwi has activated. ]
"Well, well."
Ha Seonghwi stared at me, dumbfounded. For starters, I gave her a low, wicked smile.
'Lucky me.' Things just might go more smoothly than I'd planned.