Walter's Offer of Direct Discipleship
Walter's offer of direct discipleship.
It was the second such offer he'd received in recent memory. But Simon didn't need long to deliberate; he simply bowed his head.
"I'm sorry."
He figured it was best to refuse clearly and leave no room for ambiguity.
Walter didn't press for a reason. He only nodded, composed as ever.
"If you ever change your mind, my door is always open. With the two of us working together, your hemomancy could advance far beyond what it is now."
"Thank you. I appreciate you taking an interest."
Walter smiled gently.
"Save your thanks for Professor Silaje when you see him again. All of this research was carried out under his direction, after all."
"Of course. I'll be sure to pay him a visit when he returns to Kizen."
Simon gave Walter a parting bow and stepped out of the laboratory.
And so his first hemomancy class came to a safe end. Simon headed to the dining hall with his group for lunch.
"What if you pick up a tree on the way somewhere? Wood-wood-wood!"
On his twentieth attempt, one of Rick's jokes finally landed. Camibarez burst out laughing, while Meilin, her pride wounded, merely twitched the corners of her mouth.
Rick caught the movement in a flash and shouted.
"Yes! She finally laughed! Meilin laughed!"
"I—I did NOT laugh! Why on earth would I laugh at something that stupid……!"
At the sight of Meilin stammering through her excuses, Rick and Camibarez erupted into even louder laughter.
Simon watched them with a smile tugging at his lips, then sank back into thought.
A new power.
He'd turned down Walter's offer of direct discipleship, but if not for Silaje's sake, then for his own, he had no intention of neglecting this new technique. The question was how to put it to the most effective use.
Come to think of it, might as well give it another try.
He drew out a bead of blood from his index finger and unfurled the magic circle he'd just learned from Walter. The blood and the circle fused together, and out flowed a peculiar smoke patterned like a snail's shell.
It was strange — blood and Jet-Black had combined, and yet the result shimmered with a vivid emerald hue. It felt like an entirely different, third substance altogether.
When Simon lifted his finger and flicked it up and down, the smoke followed his movements exactly. Finally, he stretched his finger out to the side, and the smoke shot off like an arrow, snaring the sauce jar on the neighboring table.
It really does feel like grabbing things with my own hand.
Controlling the Cloud was as easy as moving his own body.
The smoke returned and delivered the sauce jar into Simon's palm. He dismissed the Cloud and seasoned his freshly served, steaming noodles with the chili sauce.
"……"
At some point, his friends' conversation had gone silent. He looked up to find all three of them staring down at him in uniquely astonished poses.
"Wha—wha—what was THAT?! How did you just do that?!"
Meilin shrieked, wide-eyed.
"……Ohhh boy, was that kind of cool just now? Grabbing things your hand can't reach — that's the dream, you know."
Rick said enviously.
"It WAS cool! Is that your new technique, Simon?"
Camibarez asked, eyes round, hands clasped together. Taken aback by reactions far more intense than he'd expected, Simon smiled awkwardly and explained.
"Professor Walter taught it to me earlier. He said it's a new way of using SM-1."
"That new blood type you have?"
"Yep."
Simon turned back to his meal and blew on the noodles.
Hk— that's insanely spicy. Way too much sauce.
"So does that mean you'll be learning with the rest of us in hemomancy class now?"
Camibarez asked with a shy smile.
"Yeah, I guess I will."
"That's wonderful! It always bothered me, watching you sit all alone in hemomancy class!"
Come to think of it, that thought alone lifted his spirits considerably. From now on, he could actually attend hemomancy class properly.
Meilin, who had gone back to nibbling at her lentil salad, looked up.
"Oh, right. What's our next class?"
"Summoning!"
Rick answered instantly.
"Two days in a row, huh. At least this one's the last Summoning class of the week."
"Professor Aaron really crammed the schedule in! I wonder if he's heading out on another mission."
Listening to Rick and Camibarez chat, Simon drifted into thought for a moment.
Ah, now that they mention it……
The venue for the second Summoning class was the same racetrack as yesterday's.
"Today, we review the 'Skeleton Dash' you learned in the first class."
Aaron crossed his arms and continued.
"Let me make one thing clear — fail this class, and points come off your evaluation. Remember that."
That single remark sent the students' focus and participation soaring higher than ever. Hands shot up everywhere requesting help and feedback, and the teaching assistants were run ragged rushing from place to place.
"Sustaining the skeleton comes first. The dash comes after."
Aaron was personally supervising the students' practice as well. His first subject was Cindy Vivace, who was in danger of failing every subject except Spirit Magic.
"You're so focused on the dash that only the legs are popping out."
"But if I concentrate on the skeleton's binding, the dash won't go off at all!"
"The binding comes first anyway. Your priorities are backwards."
Accepting Aaron's feedback, Cindy prioritized the skeleton's binding before commanding the dash.
The skeleton's foot slid forward from the starting line — a few centimeters.
"Ugh. As expected……!"
"Good work. This is exactly how you build the feel — learning it piece by piece."
"But everyone else's skeletons are zipping along so fast, though…"
WHOOOOOOSH!
Just then, behind Aaron, Simon had his skeletons lined up in a row and was commanding them to dash. A sharply cut bundle of straw flew high into the air and dropped with a thump right beside Aaron's feet.
Aaron pretended not to notice and stayed focused on Cindy's feedback.
"Stay true to the fundamentals, and distance will grow in time."
Whoosh!
"Neglect the fundamentals out of impatience, though, and everything falls apart."
WHOOOOOOSH!
"Nobody's good from the start. Take the time you need, and——"
WHAAAAAAM!
"SIMON POLENTIA!"
Aaron whirled around and roared. Simon, who had just landed successful dashes with five skeletons in a row, turned to face him with the picture of innocence.
……You sly little snake.
Aaron let out a long sigh and closed his eyes.
"You're staying after class."
"……Ah!"
Whenever Simon failed to learn something in his class, Aaron always made a point of giving him supplementary lessons.
At those words, Simon broke into a beaming smile, as if he'd been waiting for exactly this.
"Yes, Professor!"
Once the regular Summoning classes had all wrapped up, Aaron and Simon met in the open ground behind the track. The two exchanged a brief rundown of how things had been going.
"You learned…… Corpse Explosion?"
Aaron asked, his face hardening with grave seriousness.
"Yes! Want me to show you?"
"Who taught you?"
Simon, who had been quietly hoping for a bit of praise now that he'd picked up a new technique, was caught completely off guard.
Aaron's expression was terrifyingly serious, without the slightest trace of playfulness.
"This is an important question. Don't look away — answer honestly."
With the Legion Commander Magnus's reach stretching ever closer, information connected to Legion Commanders had to be sealed off as tightly as possible. Even with his mouth torn open, Simon could never answer 'Yona,' and even uttering the name Richard Polentia was dangerous.
A somewhat clichéd excuse, but Simon decided to go with it.
"A retired necromancer stayed at our house for a while over the break. From him, so……"
Aaron clearly didn't believe a word of it.
"Show me the magic circle."
Aaron's voice had gone so cold that Simon gave a slight shiver.
Watching him warily, Simon did as he was told and constructed the Corpse Explosion circle he normally used.
Aaron's eyes swept over the circle in a dizzying, meticulous examination.
"……Haaaah."
Only after a long moment did something like a sigh of relief escape his lips. Simon swallowed nervously.
"Who did you say taught you?"
"A—a friend of my father's. Is something wrong?"
Aaron, studying the circle over once more as if savoring it, let out a small gasp of admiration.
"This is remarkable, truly."
Simon's eyes went wide.
"The Corpse Explosion formula has been tuned for rapid casting, yet without sacrificing meaningful power. It might put a slight strain on your mental fortitude, but in a real situation where one slip means death, this kind of refinement is only natural. This is a thoroughly battle-hardened circle, polished through tens of thousands of uses and packed with hard-earned personal know-how."
It was that impressive?
When Richard had taught him the Corpse Explosion circle, he'd admitted it was a simplified version of the one he himself used — the formulas and structure pared down.
"You learned from a good teacher."
Click.
Aaron fished a cigar out of his pocket, set it between his teeth, and lit it. Then he turned away to blow out a cloud of smoke before looking back at Simon.
"As you know, Jet-Black has a 'tendency to remember.' If you learn a circle with flawed or unnecessary formulas — or one with a serious flaw baked in — you'll suffer later trying to correct it. For teenagers like you, still in the middle of learning, that caution matters even more. It's precisely why you must never learn dark magic from just anyone."
"I—I'm sorry."
"You have nothing to be sorry for. If you'd learned Corpse Explosion from me, I'd have taught you something heavier, but this compact version isn't bad at all. Whoever taught you even left room for supplementary formulas to scale the power up as you grow. Filling in that remainder is now your job."
Aaron crossed his arms.
"Whoever it was, they're no ordinary person. Someday, I'd genuinely like to meet them and have a conversation."
For a Kizen professor to go that far — it was astonishing, but Simon drew the line quickly.
"W-well, other than being my father's acquaintance and someone I saw often as a kid, I don't really know much about him."
"Fair enough. Plenty of necromancers are still closed off like that. That's enough about Corpse Explosion."
Aaron tapped the ash lightly from the end of his cigar with his finger and continued.
"So — what do you want to learn from me this time?"
"Ah, that's……"
Simon explained everything that had happened in Walter's laboratory, then raised the Cloud himself and demonstrated it before Aaron's eyes.
But perhaps because it was a hemomancy technique, Aaron's reaction was rather lukewarm compared to his groupmates' astonishment.
"I don't see why you're showing this to me. Professor Walter understands hemomancy far better than I do."
"Ah, well, it's like this."
Simon scratched the side of his head and gave a sheepish laugh.
"I actually turned down Professor Walter's offer of direct discipleship recently. And since this isn't some technique out of a textbook, it felt awkward to just ask him about it outright, so……"
"……"
"So I was thinking — maybe this power could be combined with Summoning?"
Aaron lit a cigar.
He smoked it long and slow.
He burned it down to the stub, took out a fresh one, and lit that too.
"……An entirely unknown hemomancy technique. And a fusion with Summoning, no less."
Tap, tap.
Aaron knocked the ash from his cigar and looked at Simon.
"When you reach your second year, you'll encounter something called 'combined disciplines.' These are fields that can't be completed by a single branch of magic alone, so knowledge from other disciplines is blended and layered to create synergy."
"Oh! So Hemomancy and Summoning too, then!"
"Naturally, that combination exists as well. Teaching you wouldn't be a problem, but an original hemomancy technique of your own fused with Summoning would be a bit trick——"
Aaron, who had been muttering to himself, suddenly went wide-eyed.
"Hold on. You said this smoke feels connected to your body?"
"Ah, yes."
"It shares your senses and nerves as well?"
"Yep."
Aaron reached for a third cigar, then put it back. He deliberated for a long moment before speaking.
"One week."
"Sir?"
"Come find me after next week's Summoning class. I'll have it finished by then."
In Aaron's eyes as he raised his chin, a fierce academic passion burned.
"The technique you'll be learning next is one the third-years study — the Blood Golem."