The Degenerate Professor (6)
"…And why, exactly, are you suddenly flying into a rage?"
Talisa merely kept smiling her inscrutable smile, even at the sight of Kallen bellowing at her with eyes gone half-mad with fury.
"First, kindly release this body of mine. If anyone were to walk in and see us like this, it would be awkward for the both of us."
Kallen scrunched his face in sheer exasperation at Talisa's composure, which gave off not even a whisper of menace.
Shaking himself loose, he dispelled the strange sensation and rounded on her, shouting as though to crush her under the weight of his voice.
"Shut up!! You old hag, cheating people without a shred of conscience?! Who gave you the right to cut my salary?!"
And so he lunged forward as if to seize her by the hair, ready to grab a fistful of it roughly—
"Playing innocent has its limits…?!"
Kallen's eyes flew wide open as he realized that, at some point, he had been shoved back through the very doorway he'd come in by.
It felt as though a soft current of air had swept him away in a single breath.
Startled, he turned his gaze forward again.
Talisa, who had been right in front of him, was now standing at a considerable distance away.
She made a small motion of sweeping her hand down the front of her body, then let out a quiet sigh.
"I would ask you to restrain yourself from that sort of thing. Strike this body with too much force, and it may simply vanish. Recreating it takes no small amount of effort, you see…"
"A… clone?"
Kallen, who had been frowning in momentary bewilderment, gritted his teeth once more.
"This woman…"
It was certainly a trick worthy of the headmistress of Elysion—but in the present circumstances, it only stoked his anger further.
Talisa glanced at him sidelong, and her eyes soon curved into a knowing crescent, as if she'd read the situation at a glance.
"I never hid it from you."
"The sheer audacity…"
"It's true. You confirmed it with your own eyes—you read the contract yourself, did you not?"
Then she let out a small sigh and added one more thing.
"Well, hearing you out, it seems I simply forgot to explain one of Elysion's minor traditions. Do forgive me. At my age, one tends to forget a great many things."
"Quite the blabbermouth for someone who insists she never lies. I'll rip that tongue out of your head right now."
As he muttered the threat, Kallen's hand had already drifted toward the battered old sword at his hip.
Even in the face of the murderous pressure prickling against her skin, Talisa simply watched him with quiet, intrigued eyes.
And so the old sword was on the verge of leaving its sheath.
"…Tch."
Kallen's eyes, which had been trembling and losing focus to his rage, abruptly regained their clarity.
"No sense wasting it on some clone…"
As if none of it had ever happened, Kallen cooled his temper, clicked his tongue, and slid the sword back in.
As he flexed his numb right hand open and shut, Talisa's voice reached his ears once more.
"I apologize for failing to explain that point. No need to say it—this body's oversight, plain and simple."
As if the whole commotion had never occurred, Talisa's manner remained nothing short of serene.
"This woman, are you mocking me right now or not… Hoo…"—Kallen swallowed the retort rising in his throat and let out a long, heavy breath, barely managing to leash his temper.
Then, glaring at the headmistress once more, he spoke quietly.
"…So what becomes of my salary, then?"
"Why, it will proceed as it should. The contract remains entirely valid. But Elysion's customs cannot simply be ignored either…"
In other words, if he ranked dead last in the evaluations, as Professor Jiya had described, the pay cut would take effect.
"Even a headmistress is bound by rules she must keep."
Talisa said it with a bright, innocent smile, utterly oblivious to the man seething in front of her.
"In exchange, I shall exercise the headmistress's discretion to accommodate your other needs as best I can. Come now, that much I can arrange without any trouble at all."
"Who in the world is that sophistry supposed to serve…"
As he glared at her and grumbled, Kallen suddenly remembered something.
"…If my pay gets cut, what happens to my debt repayment?"
He had signed a contract halving the debt after one year, but Talisa standing before him was, undeniably, his creditor.
If his salary was simply slashed without recourse, she too would find herself with little hope of ever recovering the enormous sum she was owed.
Considering her reputation, there was every chance she might resort to less-than-gentle methods.
"Well, I hardly intend to string you up by the wrists or torture you. You are a professor, after all—or so the title goes."
But Talisa just kept giggling, breezing along without a care in the world.
"In exchange, your years of service may simply stretch a bit longer. Until it's repaid, you'll have no choice but to work as a professor, year after year."
"Son of a…"
"Now, now, don't take it so hard. It's not even settled that your pay will be cut, is it? Just teach the children entrusted to you with all your heart."
"Ha. And who exactly are you mocking right now?"
Tearing at his own hair, Kallen glowered at Talisa.
"I told you already. I have never once in my life taught another human being."
"Then I suppose you'll simply have to work a few more years as a professor. Not that it makes any difference to me."
"…"
"Oh, and don't you dare think about running away, not even in your dreams. What did I say? This body has never once let prey slip through her fingers."
At Talisa's brazen declaration, Kallen's mouth snapped shut.
The obsession of that unknowable old woman was precisely that chilling.
Only then did Kallen realize he had stepped foot in a swamp he could never crawl out of.
After staring blankly for a moment, he turned toward the door.
And just before leaving, he threw a look back at Talisa and muttered low.
"One day, I will pay you back for today. In full."
"Come by whenever you like. Sitting alone in that spacious office, the loneliness does creep in from time to time."
Whether he did or not, Talisa only smiled sweetly and waved him off.
With the door thudding shut behind him, Kallen let out a deep, deep sigh.
Scowling as if the whole thing were suffocating him, he unscrewed the canteen at his hip and took a long, burning swig.
"Damn it all…"
Then, gripping his hair in both hands, he all but wailed to himself, alone in the corridor.
"What the hell am I even supposed to teach those little brats?!"
His plan to coast through the job and collect a paycheck had been miscalibrated from the very start.
The first-year students of the Elysion Swordsmanship Department were idly passing the time at the outdoor training grounds.
One male student, crouched low with his face turned skyward, murmured in a listless voice.
"No matter how many times I look at it, I can't believe it's a fake sky."
The scenery all around them was steeped in the brightness of early spring.
Cumulus clouds rolling endlessly past the horizon, warm sunlight pouring down, even a soft breeze that tickled the skin as it drifted by.
Yet every sensation they were feeling was nothing more than a magical illusion conjured by the Great Barrier of Elysion.
Woven with the craft of ancient elves, the shield had guarded Elysion from the threats of the Illusion Realm for well over a thousand years.
The magical principles behind it, on the other hand, remained stubbornly beyond human understanding.
Even the greatest intellects among mankind—the Grand Mages—could do little more than maintain and repair the barrier itself.
"Hey, don't you remember what the upperclassmen told us?"
Someone beside the daydreaming student tossed out a remark.
"They said don't go zoning out at the sky."
"Huh…? Oh."
Kayden, who had been blankly admiring the clouds, finally came back to himself and shook his head.
Do not gaze upon the sky for too long. Your soul will sicken, and in the end, even yourself will be taken from you.
It was the very first warning written in the opening paragraph of the rulebook handed to every incoming student of Elysion.
But the barrier's illusion was so vividly, convincingly real that even upperclassmen occasionally forgot that the sky above was nothing more than a single thin veil.
And for those who did forget, the outcome was almost always the same.
They would chance to lock eyes with something swimming through the boundless sea of the Illusion Realm stretching out beyond the barrier.
"…They said if you're lucky, you faint. If you're not, you go mad."
The Illusion Realm was home to mana beasts, restless spirits, demons, and every manner of terrifying entity that humanity had yet to even catalog.
Bearing the oppressive shadow such spiritual beings cast over a mortal mind was next to impossible with ordinary willpower.
Worse still, most of them were creatures brimming to the brim with hatred and contempt for all intelligent life.
"And you *know* that, and you're still doing it? Honestly…"
The bespectacled student sprawled across the grass, rolling around as if it were his own bed, drawled out his rebuke in a languid voice. Zarel.
"Why on earth did the elves abandon a place like this and hole up in the mountains, anyway?"
"Is now really the time to worry about elves? Worry about our own gloomy futures."
Worn down by Zarel's continued ribbing, Kayden finally gave in and let out a deep sigh.
"You're right. Our future is, even now… Ugh."
As he moved to stand, his body wobbled for an instant before he barely steadied himself.
The cause was the crushing pressure of mana, squeezing at his body from every direction like a hand closing around his throat.
Because the campus sat directly against the Illusion Realm with only that one thin barrier in between, the air here was perpetually saturated with dense, high concentrations of mana.
To the unaccustomed, it was a disaster in itself—but in exchange, at Elysion, one could cultivate resistance and attunement to mana as easily as breathing.
Three years spent at Elysion guaranteed at least four times the growth of the same time spent outside its walls.
It was precisely why the academy had built its thousand-year reputation as the cradle of education on the continent.
Mortgaging the constant danger of assault from the Illusion Realm, Elysion had, throughout its history, produced heroes beyond counting.
"…Whew."
Kayden recalled the scene from his first day of enrollment, only days ago.
Compared to the students who had spent that morning all but crawling on the ground, unable to endure the pressure, his current state was nothing short of remarkable progress.
His body was still heavy and sluggish, but in just a few short days he had raised his adaptability to the point where he could move more or less normally.
He might never become a Sword Saint or Grand Mage recorded in the annals of history, but if things continued this way, he would surely achieve growth worth marveling at.
If things continued this way.
"Wasting away in an environment this good—does that even make any sense…"
Kayden's bitter smile was steeped in unmistakable anxiety.
His homeland, once prosperous and abundant, was now known by the grim name of the Eastern Plague Zone.
Kayden, who had barely escaped alone, had clenched his teeth and fought his way into Elysion for one reason: to build the strength to take his home back.
Yet instead of proper training, he was squandering every passing day.
"What's sulking going to change? Just accept it, like I do."
"You little…"
Zarel, third son of the Prime Minister's family, by contrast, showed not a spark of drive or ambition.
His goal had always been to scrape by and graduate with a diploma, and among this year's swordsmanship freshmen, he was the only one actively welcoming the current idleness.
"S-still, surely he means to do something today?"
The delicate-featured boy sitting across from them, Yulian, glanced warily at Kayden's flaring temper and ventured his opinion with care.
"He did gather us all out here at the sparring grounds…"
"You still don't know that man?"
Zarel scoffed outright, waving the boy's words away.
"He'll tell us to enjoy nature, take a nice long nap, and go home. Honestly, you can see it coming a mile away."
"But… still…"
"Tsk tsk. Anyone that naive ends up getting duped by his father into forced enrollment. Do the world a favor and never tell anyone you're from House Phebiel, got it?"
Under the hail of Zarel's venom, Yulian's face crumpled into a picture of misery.
There was not the faintest trace of the spirit of the Grand Ducal House that guarded the Northern Wall to be found on that timid face.
It was exactly why the exasperated Grand Duke Phebiel had hurled his son into Elysion, ordering him to come back a real man.
"I just can't wrap my head around it. How does a man like that end up hired as a professor?"
Stretching luxuriously, Zarel scrunched his face in genuine incomprehension.
"Word around campus is he's Lady Talisa's young plaything… Don't tell me it's actually true?"
"No way it's that… I mean, it's *Lady Talisa* we're talking about…"
Kayden shook his head as if dismissing pure nonsense, then glanced around the grounds.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the other students' faces carried no particular expectations either.
Then, all at once, Kayden's eye caught a platinum-haired girl standing apart from the group, gripping her wooden sword with a face tight with barely contained fury.
"Now who was that again…?"
Her bearing was the very archetype of the stoic female knight.
Her presence crackled like a volcano on the verge of eruption, and Kayden tilted his head at it.
"Oh, Garnet, was it? But why is she like that…"
Just as he was groping through his hazy memory with a puzzled voice, Zarel abruptly sprang to his feet and—with rare alarm—pulled him back.
"Hey. Don't even think about getting mixed up with that one. You're not an imperial, so you probably don't know, but your best bet is to steer clear of her entirely."
"What? What's that supposed to—"
"Ah, enough! Weren't you listening to the girls prattling on about traitors and whatnot? Just take it at face value. It's not like I have anything personal against her either."
"…?"
Zarel said his piece and spun away again, leaving Kayden with a thoroughly bewildered expression.
Just then, one of the students seemed to spot something and leapt up from his seat, shouting.
"Hey—he's coming!"
Before long, a disheveled man appeared before the murmuring students.
The man who had been a topic of conversation all week, and in the worst possible way—Professor Kallen, their homeroom instructor.
And today, for some reason, he was carrying something unusual: an enormous crate shrouded in thick cloth.
"Haah—haah—goddamn it all…"
Dropping the bulky load in the middle of the sparring grounds, Kallen spat out a steady stream of curses.
"This is killing me… why in the world am *I* doing this…"
The deep shadows hanging under his eyes spoke volumes about how exhausted he'd been since last night.
Then he stepped up onto the platform set at the edge of the grounds, took a deep breath, and gathered himself for a moment.
Surveying the students around him, he cleared his throat a couple of times and finally opened his mouth.
"Ahem. Well, it looks as though you've all had plenty of rest lately."
A flicker of sheer absurdity crossed the students' faces.
Paying it no mind whatsoever, Kallen looked around once more and spoke again.
"Starting today, sparring practice begins."
"!"
At the words that followed, the students' eyes went round with shock.
None of them had imagined that a professorial statement could come out of this slouching loafer's mouth.
"However—your opponents will not be people."
But at that utterly contextless remark, puzzlement crept back over their faces.
Only then did their attention turn to the enormous cloth-covered crate Kallen had hauled in.
From within it, something had been rustling and stirring all along.
As Kallen slid the shroud away, an immense cage lined with iron bars was revealed.
Behind the bars, a pack of rabbits—each sprouting a horn and a pair of small wings—were hopping about wildly.
The students recognized them at once.
Wolpertingers—the lowest-ranked of mana beasts, commonly found all across the Empire, including the lands near the Talaran Mountains.
"P-Professor… what is…?"
While the students stood dumbfounded, one of them raised a hand and threw the question at Kallen.
"Say hello."
At that, Kallen flashed a grin as though he'd been waiting all along for exactly this moment, and gave a nod.
"Gentlemen—these are the rabbit knights who will be serving as your sparring partners from today onward."