The Uninvited Guest at the Dormitory
As we stepped out of the dining hall that evening—
"That hit the spot, disciple!"
my master declared.
"Now that our bellies are full, let's get to training."
"Uh..."
I offered her an awkward smile.
It wasn't as if I had anything better to do.
"Master, today was the first day of the new term. Maybe we could just rest for once..."
I simply couldn't be bothered.
But then—
"Nonsense! The realm of a true master is not forged overnight! Be honest with me, disciple."
She jabbed a finger at me and pressed the point.
"Did you train every single day over break, just as I told you?"
"Ahem."
I cleared my throat and started herding her toward the academy forest.
"Haha... right this way, then. Training..."
She stared daggers into me, but I carefully avoided her gaze.
"Hmm..."
"Let's go already!"
A short while later, we arrived at the clearing deep in the academy woods where we usually practiced.
Now that she had come down from the mountain, we could have used the official training grounds—but she didn't teach just anyone. Training out in the open where others could watch was something she would almost certainly hate.
"All right. Show me what you've got."
My master narrowed her eyes at me.
I knew that look well.
If I failed to perform here, she would either crack me over the skull with a sharp thwack or launch one of her signature cat punches.
I focused and demonstrated the Shadow Step technique.
At last she gave a small nod.
"Hmm... well, your skill hasn't rusted away, at least."
I had barely scraped a passing grade, and I let out a breath of pure relief.
Break had been busy, but I hadn't completely abandoned footwork practice.
Once properly learned, the technique was insanely useful, after all.
Of course, I hadn't managed to practice every single day the way she had ordered.
"Even so, you're still far from ready. Watch carefully—this is the next stage you will learn."
Then she demonstrated the footwork for me.
No—calling it mere footwork felt almost insulting. It was something far greater.
She moved her feet for only a moment.
Her form blurred, then vanished entirely.
When she reappeared, she was standing right behind me.
Honestly, it was a little unnerving.
"Holy crap..."
I muttered under my breath.
This was a stage you couldn't even learn in the game.
"With this, you could hide yourself even in front of a powerful enemy, right?"
I said, recalling words she had spoken before.
She shook her head.
"No. This alone is not enough."
"What?"
I hadn't been able to see her at all.
Granted, ranking myself as a "powerful enemy" was a stretch—but still...
"Your master told you before, didn't she? To erase your presence, you must stop not only your breathing and your movements, but even the mana in your body... or rather, your internal energy."
I nodded.
Maybe because of the magic lecture earlier, she was calling it mana now.
"What I just showed you is a little different. Instead of concealing your internal energy, you wrap your entire body in it."
She began explaining the principle.
"You drape yourself in stealth magic—sound dampening, perception interference, light absorption, and the like."
The moment she said it, I thought of the cat mask I had obtained last time.
In short, it served a similar purpose.
"Of course that is not the end. A true master can read the flow of internal energy, so the moment you activate a technique, you must match that flow to the surrounding environment."
I considered it for a moment.
Is that even possible...?
"And finally, because you must move while activating the footwork, you have to be able to use that magic as naturally as breathing."
Having heard her out to the end, I could only cry out:
"This is already way past the point where you can still call it footwork!"
"Even this is still insufficient. As I said, a true powerhouse will be able to pinpoint your location from the flow of your internal energy alone."
She had told me before—
If I mastered the Shadow Step to its absolute end, I would be able to hide myself even before the strongest of foes.
...for roughly 0.1 seconds, anyway.
In the world of masters, that difference could decide victory or defeat.
I was nowhere near that level yet.
For now, I needed to focus on absorbing what I had just witnessed.
And for that—
"All right! Time to practice, disciple!"
"Yes, ma'am..."
I had been feeling it more and more lately.
Was I living a little too hard?
Time passed. The sun sank, and the forest had grown pitch dark by the time she finally called it.
"That's enough for today!"
"Hah... hah..."
I collapsed flat on the ground.
I had burned through far too much mana; my head throbbed faintly.
Looking up at the bright moon hanging in the night sky, my master bid me farewell.
"I'll see you tomorrow, then."
"Yes, Master. Take care...?"
I had been saying goodbye on pure reflex when something felt off.
But before I could grab her—
she had already vanished into the darkness of the woods.
Wait. If she's heading back to the dorms, shouldn't she be moving with me?
What was that about?
Maybe she needed the bathroom that badly.
Then again, the direction she had disappeared in didn't seem to be toward the dorms either.
I decided to ask her tomorrow and headed for the dormitory myself.
After sweating that much, I would have liked to feel refreshed—but I had poured so much mana into the full-body magic that my head was still pounding.
All I wanted was to wash up fast and fall into bed.
Yet this unkind world seemed determined to sabotage every last second of my rest.
Standing in front of the men's dormitory was an uninvited guest.
She was crouched by the entrance, curled into herself and trembling.
...Honestly, she looked pitiful.
Pitiful enough that a flicker of sympathy rose in me.
But that was that.
Desperate for rest, I naturally tried to walk past her and into the building.
Of course, I failed.
"Wait, Louis!"
That pitiful uninvited guest—Veronica Eltwin—caught hold of me.
"I already told you. I'm not interested in any apology."
"Th-that's not it! Just a second, okay? Let's talk! No—please talk with me!"
Hmm. She was a little more polite than before.
Even so—
"No."
"Please, Louis!"
She latched onto my pant leg and refused to let go.
"Let go!"
"I won't!"
"You crazy bitch, my pants are coming off!"
"Then talk to me if you don't want them to!"
"Haa..."
In the end, for the sake of my dignity as a human being—and to avoid becoming the academy's official exhibitionist freak—I had no choice but to relocate and hear Veronica out.
Originally I had planned to half-listen, drop a few choice insults, and leave.
But Veronica's opening line was enough to leave me completely speechless.
"Louis... I'm really sorry about everything. Not just for what happened last time. I feel like I need to properly apologize for the rest of it too..."
Her words threw me.
Coming from the usual prideful, foul-mouthed Veronica, they were almost impossible to believe.
So I had no choice but to listen to her long story all the way through.
And this was the result.
I stood in front of her, sighing again and again, while Veronica watched my every expression like a thoroughly cowed dog.
Seriously... I have nothing to say.
The whole thing was so absurd.
I started going back over her words from the beginning.
"So, let's summarize..."
From the top.
"First of all—everything you did to me was just a joke...?"
She nodded.
"Because I always just laughed it off, you thought it was fine."
"Yeah..."
"Are you fucking kidding me?!"
I was pissed from the very first point.
"Fine, maybe that was true at the start of first year! But later on I kept getting annoyed and telling you to cut it out, didn't I?!"
Raising my voice only made the throbbing in my head worse.
When I winced from the headache, she flinched hard.
"..."
"If you've got a mouth, say something... ugh, forget it."
I moved on.
"And you say you actually hated that Leo bastard, but you went along with him because the Epsilt family is a client of the Magic Tower?"
Veronica nodded vigorously.
All right. That part I could understand—
not the part about bowing to the Epsilt family because they were Tower clients,
but the part about hating Leo on the inside.
Anyone with half a brain would never like that guy.
...Though by that logic, there seem to be quite a few people without half a brain walking around the academy.
Anyway, the rest made sense, but—
"You used to constantly compare me to Leo and trash me, didn't you?"
That had been one of the things that made me the angriest.
Veronica looked exactly like someone who had committed a crime...
Well, she did commit one.
...and she couldn't meet my eyes. She just kept her head bowed low.
I asked her,
"Why did you do that?"
"W-well..."
She fidgeted with her fingers as she spoke.
"Th-that was also... just a joke... Your reactions were funny... I never, ever meant any of it for real! I swear! Of course I always wanted to be closer to you than to Leo—"
"Haa..."
My sigh cut her off.
"So everything you've been saying this whole time was 'just a joke'? Even after you watched me struggle through all of it?"
My voice was cold enough that anyone could hear it.
Veronica flinched.
"It sounds to me like you never saw me as a friend at all. Just some toy you could mess with."