Proof (6)
"...Is that even possible?"
"He's— he's definitely asleep, though?"
Kallen had dodged not just one attack but an entire sequence of them, one after another, and the students' jaws hung wide open at the sight.
"...I-it must have been a coincidence."
Even Zarel, the one who had set the whole thing up, stammered his words as if he couldn't believe his own eyes.
"Unless maybe he's actually awake..."
Muttering suspiciously, Zarel had been just about to creep over and sneak a closer look at Kallen.
Then the bell signaling the end of class rang out, and Kallen's eyes snapped open in an instant.
"Gwah!"
"Ah, that was a good nap... hm?"
Rising with a long, lazy yawn, Kallen glanced down casually—
—and promptly startled backward onto his rear, locking eyes with Zarel, who had just done the exact same thing.
"What are you doing down there?"
"N-nothing at all, Professor...!"
"Hmm...?"
Kallen frowned at the flustered Zarel, then smacked his lips a couple of times with sharp, narrow eyes.
"Good grief, look at the time already..."
He surveyed the students standing around in a daze, then waved his hand at them as if shooing away an annoying fly.
"Don't just stand there. Class is over, so get moving to your next lecture on your own."
Then he pointed at the three nearby—Zarel, Yulian, and Kayden.
"You three stay behind and clean this mess up."
"What? Professor? How are we supposed to clean up all of this—"
"Quiet. I'll give you five merit points. That should be more than enough."
"P-Professor, hold on..."
"Talk back again and it's ten demerit points."
"..."
With Zarel's protest cut off before it could even begin, Kallen simply strolled out of the training grounds at his leisure.
Left slumped amid the wreckage of scattered barrier stones and the hopping rabbits, Zarel let out a heavy, heavy sigh.
"Ugh..."
***
"Huh? Hey, look over there."
A group of first-year Magic Department students moving down the corridor stopped dead when they spotted something.
What met their eyes was a trio of male students trudging along, completely worn to rags and a sorry mess besides.
"Swordsmanship Department?"
And when they noticed the conspicuously small-framed student in the middle, mischievous smiles crept across their faces.
"It's Half-Pint Yulian."
The nickname had stuck because the boy did nothing, ever, to live up to the storied name of the Grand Ducal House of Phebiel.
"How did someone like that even get into Elysion? I heard he couldn't so much as swing a sword at the entrance exam. Just stood there shaking like a leaf."
"What? Come on, no way it was that bad."
Having barely scraped past a failing score on the entrance exam itself, Yulian had become a magnet for rumors that only grew more malicious with each retelling.
"Anyway, the Swordsmanship Department really has become a joke. That's supposed to be a new student?"
"We're going to crush them at the interdepartmental tournament this year for sure."
Their voices dripped with unmistakable contempt.
Besides, the notoriety of the academy's newest delinquent professor—a man called Kallen—was already old news to them as well.
Rumors ran rampant across the academy that this year's Swordsmanship freshmen were being put through pointless harassment disguised as training, all on his orders.
"Yulian's kind of cute, though."
"Well, his face is decent at least..."
At the girls' murmuring within the group, the boys somehow ended up wearing sour expressions.
Before long, a vicious grin bloomed across one of their faces.
"Hey, hey—what do you say we teach that half-pint a little lesson?"
With a casual incantation, a fist-sized ball of flame erupted to life above his open palm in an instant.
One of the girls paled and grabbed his arm.
"Hey! What are you doing? Get caught using magic on campus and you'll be up for disciplinary review!"
"So what? There's nobody watching."
The boy who had conjured the flame only puffed himself up further.
"I'll just singe his clothes a bit. Aren't you curious? Whether that half-pint's actually got one hanging down there."
"Hey! I said stop it!"
"Ugh, what a pain in the—huh?"
Mid-tussle with the girl trying to stop him, the boy's face suddenly went blank.
The ball of flame had veered far off its original course and was now streaking straight toward the back of Yulian's head.
With no protective gear on him whatsoever, even a grazing hit could mean a serious burn.
"H-hey! Watch—! Uh...?"
The Magic Department freshmen were just opening their mouths in horror at the sight—
—and then choked on their own strangled exclamations at what happened before their eyes.
The ball of flame sailed right past Yulian's head and did nothing more than scorch a black patch into the floor directly in front of him.
His head hadn't even turned to look; his neck was still twisted nearly at a right angle to his shoulders.
"Uh...?"
Only then did the stunned expression on Yulian's face give way, belatedly, to shock.
He crumpled straight down onto the floor, panicking and shouting.
"Wh-what was that...!"
Kayden and Zarel, who had been scanning their surroundings, finally spotted the hidden Magic Department students.
"You sneaky little magic-geek bastards..."
Having pieced together roughly what had happened, Zarel scrunched up his face and stepped forward.
"You're all dead today, you hear me? I was already in a foul mood, but this works out just perfect—"
Despite the way Zarel squared his shoulders threateningly, the Magic Department students continued to do nothing but stare blankly into empty air.
Before long, the boy who had thrown the fireball pointed a finger at Yulian and spoke, stammering.
"H-how did you dodge that...?"
"What?"
"That thing, it just..."
The three Swordsmanship boys exchanged looks of pure incomprehension—
—and then, as if on cue, all of their eyes went wide at once.
As if something had finally clicked.
"...Huh?"
***
"Hm?"
The next day.
Arriving at the training grounds fashionably late as always, Kallen squinted with suspicion.
The grounds, which until yesterday had been saturated with nothing but a listless, dragging atmosphere, were today overflowing with a strange, unfamiliar energy.
"So close! I almost had it!"
"One more time...!"
Watching students who had flopped around like sick chickens just the day before now hopping about with frog-like enthusiasm only deepened Kallen's puzzlement.
"...What in the world is going on here?"
At his muttering, several of the students turned and greeted him loudly.
"Professor! You're here!"
"We're... training hard, sir...!"
"Er... y-yes, good..."
Caught off guard by the greetings, Kallen scratched the back of his head sheepishly.
What could possibly have changed their hearts in the span of a single day? It made no sense at all.
"Well... that's... good, isn't it...?"
Whatever the reason, it was nothing if not a welcome development for Kallen.
With the students' attitudes as lukewarm as they'd been, he had already begun to feel the need for a different kind of whip himself.
At this rate, I might actually be able to manage this side of things...
Kallen breathed a quiet sigh of relief.
The club still had some breathing room, so for now he intended to focus on the students under his own charge first.
He'd said all that talk about fundamentals, but the truth was that every one of them had talent that was far from shabby.
Yulian and Kayden, the two who had greeted him just now, were especially worth keeping an eye on.
"That Zarel fellow didn't look half bad either... just hopelessly lazy... and then there's..."
Suddenly thinking of someone, Kallen's gaze swept casually around the grounds.
"Tch... maybe I should've made attending class seriously a condition of that duel..."
Clicking his tongue in dissatisfaction, Kallen forced his thoughts back on track.
"...Right."
He had already gotten a rough idea of what the Alheim Practical Exam—scheduled for next month—would entail.
Alheim was the name of a vast forest lying in immediate proximity to the Talaran Mountains.
The gist of the exam was this: over five days, the students would cross the beast-infested jungle and a winding river as they traversed the forest and emerged from the exit on the far side.
"And they said it's the exam that carries the greatest weight in the first-semester grades."
If his students scored well, Kallen's own evaluation as their homeroom professor would naturally rise along with them.
And that was precisely what Kallen was banking on.
If only I can raise their senses...
A forest environment—dense with trees and undergrowth, vision restricted, sight lines shrunk to almost nothing.
In terrain like that, even a master swordsman would find his movements constrained, no matter how skilled.
For students lacking in both experience and ability, there was no need to even say it.
"...This is better than having them fumble half-heartedly at swordsmanship anyway. As long as nobody fails outright, we're already halfway there..."
Kallen exhaled an exasperated sigh, and his face promptly curdled.
Features twisted into a full grimace, he spat out a curse directed, as if by reflex, at someone in particular.
"Damn it, what kind of rotten luck is this, playing professor of all things... that accursed old woman...!"
Just as his indignation surged and the familiar tingling crept into his fingertips, he reached naturally for his flask and took a swig—
"Professor Kallen. Really now, you ought to refrain from drinking during class hours, don't you think?"
Along with a voice as light as a bird in flight, a presence suddenly made itself known.
Through narrowed eyes he saw a woman in a pointed witch's hat, her whole look somehow impish, approaching him with a breezy, unhurried gait.
"It's bad for your health, you know."
Kallen recognized her at once.
The woman who'd spent the entire faculty meeting teasing Simon without pause—Professor Blithe, head of the Magic Department and instructor of Elemental Magic.
"Well, it's my Life Water, you see."
"Do have some moderation with the jokes and the drinking both. What will you do if you go before Lady Talisa does?"
"..."
Even in the face of Kallen's unbothered shoulder-shrug, not a trace of unease showed on Blithe.
"I haven't interrupted your lecture, have I?"
"No, well..."
Giving a noncommittal nod, Kallen shot her a sideways glance and asked in a distinctly unenthusiastic voice.
"What brings you here?"
"Hehe, I had a free period, so I was taking a stroll around the grounds. And then..."
A curious smile playing at the corners of her mouth, Blithe turned her head this way and that to survey the surroundings.
"Hmm. You're taking this far more seriously than I expected, aren't you?"
Spotting the students absurdly absorbed in their training, her narrow eyes gleamed.
Resting her chin on her hand for a moment of thought, she then opened her mouth in that characteristic drawn-out drawl of hers.
"...I did a little digging through the papers published by the Mana Beast Research Association. Not my field, so I didn't know much about it, but there were some surprisingly interesting findings?"
"...Such as?"
"It seems the wolpertinger's horn has a special structure that captures and condenses the mana in the surrounding air. It stores that mana and then uses it for things like reinforcing its legs when it flees. The desperate struggle for survival of a lesser mana beast, shaped by selection pressure—or so they say?"
Gazing steadily at the horned rabbits in their care, she continued in a low voice.
"So... I did a little thinking of my own, you see."
"Thinking about what, exactly?"
"Could the biological traits of such a wolpertinger be applied to education? How does it differ from existing methods? Why should this particular approach be necessary at all? Something... along those lines?"
"..."
"Condensed mana carries a much stronger presence—but in ordinary daily life, that presence is nearly impossible to perceive. Do you know why? Because our bodies are already taking in far too much information at every moment. Sight, touch, smell, and so on."
"And?"
"And what if some of those senses were cut off? What if it were sight, in particular—the sense that accounts for by far the greatest share of them all?"
Before he knew it, Blithe was laying out her findings with the smooth flow of someone delivering a lecture.
"A channel would naturally open for the other senses to activate, wouldn't it? Say, the sixth sense—the one prized above all by mana users. Well, up to this point, it's knowledge just about anyone could recite, but..."
"..."
"In any case—once that channel is open, what happens to the body if you repeatedly expose it to condensed mana? In any other place, it would be hopeless, of course. But this is Elysion, connected directly to the Illusion Realm. Even the least talented person here can raise their mana sensitivity several-fold at minimum."
Then she turned back to Kallen with a beaming smile.
"And so, little by little, they grow accustomed to the presence of mana... until at last—the gateway of the sixth sense swings wide open!"
Pop-pop! Blithe mimed setting off fireworks, bobbing her head all by herself.
"In conclusion: a training method with no equal for drawing out the abilities of first-years who are still clumsy at wielding their sixth sense."
"...Yes, well."
There was nothing to add.
Watching Kallen awkwardly avert his gaze, Blithe clapped her hands together with a flourish.
"Thinking it over again, what a genuinely brilliant idea it was! I should have said all this at the faculty meeting from the start. If I had, that bald old Simon wouldn't have managed a peep—just a few helpless coughs."
"Heh heh. I'm not much of a talker, you see."
All Kallen could offer was a flustered reply.
Never mind eloquence—for him, it had been nothing more than an instinctive something he couldn't have put into words if he tried.
marshaling a situation into tidy logic and drawing conclusions from it was a skill thoroughly unfamiliar to the Kallen of today.
In that sense, the woman before him truly deserved to be called a professor.
"Eh, show them the results and everyone will come around eventually. Won't they?"
"My, how bold of you."
Blithe laughed—hoho—and tapped him on the shoulder, nodding with satisfaction.
"In any case, from where I stand it really does look like a sound approach. I don't imagine the Church of Aten would have grounds to make a fuss over it either. Ah—would it be all right, later on, to teach this to our Magic Department students as well?"
"I'm afraid that won't be possible... it would rather trouble me if the other professors started collecting better evaluations than mine..."
Even at Kallen's outrageous words, Blithe simply doubled over, cackling.
"And a fine sense of humor to boot."
"I'm being completely serious, actually..."
"Oh, hush! I'll buy you a drink sometime, so consider us square, hm?"
Having carried the whole conversation on her own thus far, Blithe abruptly glanced around and said,
"By the way—where is Miss Garnet? I don't see her anywhere."
At the sound of that name, Kallen flinched, a stab of guilt jerking through him of its own accord.
Feigning indifference, he asked casually in return.
"You know that student?"
"Of course I do. Anyone who observed the entrance exam couldn't possibly miss her. Talent of the very highest order... such a shame she set her sights on the Swordsmanship Department, really..."
"Well, after what happened, would she show her face here?"
The incident in which Kallen had beaten Garnet within an inch of her life was, naturally, well known to Blithe as well.
Somehow, her voice sank a little lower as she went on.
"A truly pitiable child. She did nothing wrong herself... but she's had to bear the sins of her father..."
"What do you mean?"
"That girl is from the Potts family. Have you heard of them?"
"Potts... Potts... Ah."
Searching his memory, Kallen seemed to arrive at something, and his brow creased.
Seeing his face, Blithe could only hold back a bitter smile.
"The daughter of Nigel—the Traitor of Talonde. His eldest granddaughter."