Proof (1)
"When I think about how I ran around all night catching these things yesterday… phew…" Kallen grumbled, thumping his shoulder with his fist as if he deserved some sympathy for it.
"You'd all better be grateful to the teacher who made such a heavenly sacrifice for your sakes."
"…"
The students still had no idea what was going on, and a vague sense of dissatisfaction hung over them.
Before long, someone among the crowd raised a hand and ventured a careful question.
"Um, Professor? What exactly do you mean by 'sparring partner'…?"
"Exactly what it sounds like."
Kallen answered before the question was even finished, as though asking such an obvious thing were absurd.
The students' expressions only grew more bewildered.
"…You mean training where we hunt Wolpertingers with swords? That's far too easy…"
"I wasn't finished talking. Tsk, cutting off your professor mid-sentence—where do you get the gall…"
Kallen glared at them with mounting displeasure, then addressed the students once more.
"For the time being, none of you will be swinging a sword."
"?"
And what followed was even more ridiculous.
"Didn't I tell you? Your fundamentals are still lacking. That's why teaching you swordsmanship would be a waste of time. You can't ask someone who can't even crawl to walk."
Rebellious glares bloomed across the freshmen's faces almost immediately.
Noble or commoner, every single one of them had proudly passed Elysion's notoriously grueling entrance exams.
With the obvious exception of someone like Zarel, it was only natural that they took a certain pride in their own abilities.
So hearing a scruffy, disreputable-looking drunkard who barely passed for a professor talk down to them like this—it was impossible not to bristle.
"Then what kind of training…"
"Let's see… how should I explain this… ah."
After a brief moment of thought, Kallen snapped his fingers and nodded.
"Forget explanations. Showing is always better than telling."
His gaze, sweeping over the students, soon came to rest on a small, frail-looking boy.
"You there. What's your name?"
"Ye-yes?"
Yulian, startled by the sudden call, gulped hard before answering.
"Y-Yulian, Professor…"
"Hmm, come out here for a moment."
Kallen spun around and beckoned with a flick of his fingers without so much as a glance at him.
Confronted with this unprovoked catastrophe, Yulian could only tremble miserably as he trailed after him.
Kallen went about placing small, angular stones at intervals along the edge of the sparring grounds. When he set down the last one, a thin, glowing line carved itself along the ground, perfectly enclosing the arena on all sides.
Someone in the crowd recognized it at once.
"That's a Presence Repulsion Barrier. It prevents you from perceiving anything beyond the line…"
It was a low-grade barrier, useless against intelligent beings with sharp perception, and thus typically used for protective purposes in pastures or stables.
And for an instant, a flicker of puzzlement crossed the face of the student watching it.
"…But why is the direction reversed…?"
"Alright, then."
With every barrier stone set, Kallen approached the cage holding the Wolpertingers, reached inside, pulled out a handful, and tossed them casually into the arena.
Then he fished something else out and handed it to Yulian, who stood there shaking without the faintest clue what was happening.
"Wear it over your eyes."
"Wh-what is this…?"
In Yulian's hand was a blindfold that blocked his entire field of vision.
While Yulian stood frozen stiff, staring at it, Kallen turned behind him and in a flash had tied the blindfold over his eyes.
"Hwaaah…! P-Professor…!"
Then he seized the boy by the scruff of his neck, dragged him along, and shoved him bodily into the sparring grounds where he'd just released the Wolpertingers.
"P-Professor! W-wait, just a moment—!"
"It's fine. You're fine. All you have to do is walk to the middle."
Despite the boy's desperate cries, Kallen simply smirked, wearing the grin of a man thoroughly enjoying himself.
And so Yulian, on the verge of tears, had no choice but to set one quivering step after another—
When one of the rabbit beasts, which had been feigning indifference while biding its time behind him, suddenly flashed its eyes and lunged—dead-on for his heart.
-THWACK!
"Mo-MOMMY!!"
Yulian screamed and went tumbling across the ground.
Frantically tearing off the blindfold, he groped at his chest with eyes brimming over with tears.
He was picturing himself with a neat hole punched clean through him by the Wolpertinger's sharp horn, blood streaming out in ribbons.
"Uuu, I-I'm dying…! Huh?"
But the words died on Yulian's lips.
Far from a punctured heart, all he could see was a round, blue dye-stain blooming on his plain work clothes.
"Huh? Wh-what's this… WAAGH!"
While he stood there gaping at it in confusion, sparks suddenly exploded before his eyes.
Kallen had delivered a savage knuckle-rub to the head of the drama queen who'd been wailing so theatrically, and now beckoned with a tilt of his chin.
"Failed. Back to your seat."
"Uuuu…"
Clutching his head, Yulian trudged out of the arena wearing the expression of a man gravely wronged.
"It's easy to overlook because of their cute appearance, but the Wolpertinger is a magical beast far more dangerous than any of you give it credit for."
Having tidied up the scene, Kallen swept his gaze over the students once more and continued.
"Piercing wounds rank fifth among the leading causes of death for rookie adventurers, according to the Guild's records. And every one of those deaths came from letting their guard down and getting a vital point skewered by one of these things."
"Hiihk."
At Kallen's menacing gesture, Yulian swallowed a hiccup, still clutching his chest.
"Underestimating them is out of the question. However weak they may be, a monster is still a monster. Anything that has to fight tooth and nail to survive in a brutal wilderness can't help turning vicious."
When Kallen snatched up the ear of one of the hopping rabbit beasts, a chorus of shrill squealing erupted.
Scowling, he flung the rabbits back into their cage.
"These things never miss the moment your back is turned. They feign indifference, and the instant they sense your attention has slipped away, they'll charge without warning and punch a hole straight through you."
Only now did a few of the students understand what had just happened, and they nodded slowly.
With the Presence Repulsion Barrier in place, the Wolpertingers had perceived Yulian in the arena as the only hostile presence around them.
And with his vision blocked on top of that, they had charged at him without a moment's hesitation.
"Catch a Wolpertinger with your eyes blindfolded. That is the training you'll be undertaking for the time being."
Then Kallen said, the corners of his mouth curling upward:
"Naturally, weapons are forbidden. You will train with your bare hands and nothing else."
"I'm… sorry, what?"
"Ah, no need to worry about getting hurt. I've had all their horns filed down to blunt nubs. And I had their front teeth cleanly pulled out while I was at it."
The students, still utterly lost, continued to wear blank, dim-witted expressions.
"However, you will not be allowed a single clean hit on the beasts."
Hands clasped behind his back, Kallen walked slowly past the stupefied students as he went on.
"I've coated the trimmed tips of their horns with dye. No matter how well you catch a Wolpertinger, if the dye ends up on your clothes, that attempt counts as a failure."
In other words—no cheap tricks like simply feeling for its presence in advance and snatching it out of the air the moment the rabbit beast collided with their body.
"Drawing out every sense in your body to its absolute limit—that is the true purpose of this training. Only after you've cleared this stage will you be permitted to hold a sword."
"…"
Then Kallen glanced sidelong at the dumbfounded students and added, his voice dripping with mockery:
"I hear the Swordsmanship Department has been getting thoroughly trounced by the Magic Department at the academy tournament for years now, hmm?"
His words made the students flinch almost imperceptibly.
Elysion's Magic and Swordsmanship Departments—both claiming descent from the Sword Saint and the Grand Magus—had carried on a ferocious rivalry for as long as anyone could remember.
They were the two departments that drew the most freshmen, and the contest was, in a sense, an extension of the age-old debate over whether knights or mages were superior.
But just as Kallen said, the Swordsmanship Department's students had lately been unable to hold their own against the mages.
The previous professor, Tyrell, had certainly been an honorable knight, but his teaching had focused less on practical combat than on the realization of an idealized chivalry.
Then, on top of that, an extraordinary talent named Professor Ziya had risen to prominence in the Magic Department, leaving the swordsmanship students utterly outmatched.
The seniors' bitter laments during the entrance party, when they'd begged the freshmen to restore their honor, were still carved vividly into their memories.
"Well, don't worry. If you just do as I say, this year we'll knock that insufferable woman right off her high horse…"
"Don't make me laugh!!"
Kallen was about to wave his hand dismissively—
When a voice rang out across the sparring grounds, so loud and clear it left everyone's ears ringing.
Kallen's and the students' gazes snapped in the same direction at once.
A girl with platinum blonde hair pulled back in a tight tail—Garnet—had shot to her feet and was glaring daggers at Kallen.
As Kallen blinked at her, dumbstruck, she ground her teeth and shouted.
"Do you have any idea what it means to be a professor? This isn't some kind of joke, so what exactly do you think you're doing…!"
Garnet had finally let the fury she'd been swallowing down burst free.
The professor who had shown nothing but incompetence from day one was now shamelessly pushing blind man's buff with the lowest tier of magical beasts as "training."
For someone who had steeled herself to take the lessons seriously while doing her best to ignore the scorn around her, her anger could only boil over.
"So this isn't a joke, it's serious—?"
"If playing tag with rabbits isn't a joke, then what the hell is it?!"
At Garnet's furious rebuke, a crushing silence fell over the grounds.
The students had kept Garnet at arm's length for purely external reasons, but somehow, this once, every last one of them seemed to silently agree with her.
"Fundamentals are lacking? Do you have any idea how hard I worked to get into Elysion…! Who do you think you are, saying that to me…!"
Garnet, barely able to string her words together, was trembling violently with rage.
Glaring at Kallen as if he were her mortal enemy, she thrust a finger toward him and screamed.
"You blow off your lectures and skip out whenever you feel like it—and you're one to talk about skill? You're scared of everyone seeing how empty you really are, so you're pulling this crap! If you're going to lecture us about fundamentals, why don't you show us what you can do first!"
"…"
Somehow the words stung, and Kallen quietly averted his gaze.
Her delivery was a bit rough, but nothing she'd said was actually wrong.
It was true that, after showing them nothing but that side of himself, suddenly demanding their obedience was more than a little absurd.
Kallen glanced around at the students.
At the sight of several of them nodding along with her words, his brow creased slightly.
"…Well, that does have a certain logic to it."
He mulled it over in silence, scratched his head vigorously, and muttered as though the whole thing gave him a headache.
"Then how would you like me to prove my skill?"
"Ha—isn't it obvious?"
Garnet, her face full of scorn, flung something at him.
What rolled to a stop at Kallen's feet was a battered old glove caked in dirt.
As he looked down at it, her sharp voice drove into his ears like a blade.
"I challenge you to a duel."