4. Cheon Yuha (2)
The Young Cult Leader, Cheon Yuha.
I studied her intently.
Deep red hair, a face like white jade, and black robes draped around her entire body. I burned into my retinas the sight of that simple color combination radiating such striking intensity.
Perhaps even the hidden inner energy I couldn't see.
......How many seconds had passed since our eyes met?
Cheon Yuha suddenly shifted her posture and asked, her voice unmistakably tinged with wariness.
"Who are you?"
She was looking at me the way you'd look at a burglar who'd broken into your own house. Did she not realize that the one who'd committed a crime here wasn't me, but the person herself, who had lavishly devoured school property?
She was unreasonable, sure, but she'd never been the shameless type.
Or is she acting like this on purpose?
A grim hypothesis suddenly crossed my mind.
Don't tell me she thinks I'm one of the school security guards or something.
......Come on, no way.
Granted, that signature mature, seasoned aura of hers would be impossible to hide entirely. But even so — I'd traveled back to my teenage years, so there was no way I'd look that world-weary. For one thing, someone like me was pretty average for my age, and I'd always lived young.
I am absolutely not someone who aged early. There's no way she'd mistake me for a security guard......
"Ahem."
After composing myself for a while, I swallowed my inner tears and answered.
"......I'm Choi Gangjun, from Class 3 of the first year."
Then I casually unzipped my outer jacket to show the uniform underneath. The design itself was ordinary, but the magic and power woven into it were anything but. A garment enchanted with everything from translation magic to the blessing of life protection — at Seondo, where a horde of multiple races and nationalities mingled, it was an item you always had to carry.
"......Ah, I see."
Perhaps because she'd confirmed I wasn't remotely suspicious, Cheon Yuha gave me another once-over and soon relaxed her stiffened face.
......Surely she hadn't actually taken me for a security guard. My face must have twisted with doubt, because Cheon Yuha suddenly glanced at her own disheveled appearance and at the golem sprawled behind her, then wore an embarrassed expression.
"I am Cheon Yuha, of the same class as you. I thought I had handled things rather carefully, but it seems I caused you trouble nonetheless. I apologize."
And with that, she bowed her head without hesitation.
Watching her, even I — who prided himself on knowing her well — was inwardly impressed.
Cheon Yuha, Young Cult Leader of the Heavenly Demon Cult. The one and only treasured jewel of a great organization whose power had only grown into the twenty-first century, and a martial artist who had reached the Super-Peak Realm. Though she'd placed only third in the entrance exams, the martial world had already granted her the epithet of Martial Dragon.
Considering how many students her age strutted around arrogant and full of themselves, her attitude was remarkably mature. Some might criticize her for bowing her head too easily, but honestly, I was moved.
Right. This is what she was like.
I thought coming here had been worth it after all. Better not to suffer the indignity of showing up to the first day of school in a wheelchair, if I could help it.
She was a lunatic who, during the war, would sometimes swing her fists at me for looking too strong — but come to think of it, even that side of her wasn't so bad......
No, actually, that part I could've done without.
Let's just let that one go.
"Hm."
Ultimately, what mattered most was her own wishes.
Scratching my head, I pointed at the main thoroughfare visible between the buildings across the way.
"You were planning to head over there, weren't you?"
Cheon Yuha followed my finger with her eyes, looked toward it, and smiled. She nodded readily.
"Of course!"
Figures. So she was going dojo-crashing.
I gazed at the research building beyond the distant thoroughfare and reassessed it. More precisely, the caliber of the monster standing at its entrance.
──The Inner Gate of the Research Building's Double Gates
Near the outer gate, relatively low-priority experimental facilities and administrative buildings clustered together. That was why security had stopped at stationing guard golems. While they'd be helpless against a true expert, that alone was enough to block anyone wandering in on a lark. After all, the only person who would smash a golem, break in, and shoulder the disciplinary consequences waiting for them afterward would be a battle-maniac like Cheon Yuha.
The inner gate, however, was different.
The buildings beyond it housed the Special Research Building — the repository of the core research materials of Seondo's faculty and high-grade artifacts. Even Seondo, remarkably generous toward its students in matters outside of education, would react sensitively to anyone touching this treasure vault.
Whether the guardian posted there had been placed out of admiration for people like Cheon Yuha who went dojo-crashing, or out of a policy of unconditionally eliminating intruders, no one could say for certain......
But the inner gate had a guardian.
Something on an entirely different level from ordinary golems — a guardian built for decisive battles against Transformation Realm masters. It couldn't hold a candle to a genuine Transformation Realm martial artist, but it was the ultimate endgame boss, one the current Cheon Yuha had no hope of contending with, and it stood watch at that entrance.
I laid the facts out clearly for her. If she was about to charge in blind, I wanted to stop her.
"......Oh."
Cheon Yuha flinched visibly at the machine spec sheet I began reeling off, but she soon nodded and listened attentively. And when she'd heard just how dangerous the thing ahead was, she — to my surprise — beamed.
"You may know things I do not, but this I do know! For something to be that powerful — is that not a fine thing indeed!"
She was practically vibrating, like a child moments before receiving a present.
"Good heavens — an artificial life form that could effortlessly slay a Super-Peak Realm master?! A boulder that moves like light?! Of course I am curious!"
She looked so openly delighted that I swallowed back the whole litany of warnings I'd prepared.
"I do not enter a fight expecting to lose, and I have heard that as a student of Seondo, I shall not die! Then is my task not simple?! This is an opportunity to widen the horizon of my martial art in a single stroke! Is a few broken bones not a price worth paying?"
At the same time, I gave up on talking her out of it. She wasn't delighting in this thoughtlessly.
She knew, clearly and precisely, that her odds of losing were high. She was simply willing to march off and get pummeled for the sake of a single moment of learning.
"Well now, I am grateful that you worry so for me, a stranger. But......"
Because she trusted that the beating would teach her to dodge better, to hurt less when struck, and to strike harder in return──
"I am going."
Cheon Yuha said it with a voice full of conviction.
And then she was gone.
I watched her figure recede into the distance in an instant.
"So she was like this back then, too."
Feeling grateful all over again for this very moment. She was a comrade who had once fought beside me on the battlefield, a martial artist I had watched with admiration and envy — and now I got to witness her growth firsthand. I felt thoroughly content.
And yet, at that immaturity of hers, I couldn't help shaking my head.
"I get that some things you only learn by getting your teeth kicked in, but still......"
Fighting spirit. That was what they called it — but this went past any such polish. The sheer recklessness of believing that even if you got blown to pieces a hundred times, all you needed was to win the next one. She had never once faced anyone above her realm, yet this didn't strike me as the right way to go about things.
This was a problem that came before defeat and pain.
"Still, I should've at least told her to plan an exit strategy. How's she supposed to get home if she's flattened into the floor?"
In my past life, as a matter of fact, they said she wasn't found until the next morning. A professor on his way to work had reportedly screamed at the sight of Cheon Yuha sprawled across the ground. That girl — her combat intelligence was high, but she was a total airhead in the strangest places.
Well then. What do I do now?
Still, having come this far, I ought to at least get a taste before I left, no?
I turned over in my mind whether I could crash the monster showdown about to unfold.
Jumping into a battle between a Super-Peak Realm martial artist and a Super-Peak Realm golem in my current state was, admittedly, insane. But surely, with the experience I carried, I could manage something.
"......Well, one strike, maybe?"
That would be enough.
The corners of my mouth curled into a grin, and I set off, belatedly. I chased after the girl who had already vanished from my sight.
Was it the hot blood of youth, from coming back to my younger days? Had my brain rotted? Or was it some lingering grudge against the school that had expelled me?
"Might as well do something crazy."
Suddenly, I wanted to smash some school property too.
Thud. Thud──
A woman walking the road in the dead of night abruptly turned to look back the way she had come.
Cheon Yuha licked her lips as she recalled the man she'd just encountered.
"What a pity. A real shame."
Being generous, he was at the very tail end of First-rate. A solidly tempered body, but the smallest reserves of internal energy she'd ever seen in the school. Then again, accounting for his age of seventeen, that was decent talent — so the school's standards really were high.
That was what she'd thought, right up until she looked into the man's eyes.
......That he would dare think of defeating me.
At first she'd wondered if it was lust. Whether he was dismissing her, mocking her, as nothing more than a mere girl.
She'd considered breaking his limbs one by one.
But the longer she held his gaze, the more she felt it — an inexplicable confidence, a certain certainty.
You, as you are now, could manage it.
That absurd, impossible thought had been written plainly in the eyes of a First-rate.
Against him — a Super-Peak Realm martial artist, no less.
Cheon Yuha burst out laughing.
"Is he a madman?"
Or a hero who transcended realms entirely? She'd briefly considered cutting him down on the spot, but decided against it — fighting a classmate on the very first day felt deeply distasteful. Besides, they were in the same class, so they'd be meeting plenty. There was time.
"First things first."
Cheon Yuha took her stance, a smile spreading across her entire face. By now, at the end of her gaze, the Special Research Building stood — and the guardian keeping watch over its entrance.
......Click. Gear. Grind.
The guardian built for decisive battle against the Transformation Realm — THE KINGGODEMPERORGENERALTMAJESTYTHEANGEL 『MAXIMUS』.
Its name bore the Latin word for "the greatest" — Maximus — and it was the ultimate autonomous security system, modeled after the figure acclaimed as the strongest and most exalted being in the present world──
A superalloy statue in the likeness of Museon, Chairman and Principal of Seondo, rose to its feet.
The statue of Museon, thus standing, stared down at Cheon Yuha intently, and──
──Click.
Cracked its fingers.
"......Hoho."
At that, Cheon Yuha's smile only deepened.
Perhaps even her killing intent.
"So many audacious fools cross my path today."
Yes — it was a sky she would have to surmount sooner or later regardless. Might as well test herself against the hardcover edition while she was at it.
Cheon Yuha grinned and crooked her finger at the hunk of scrap metal in the distance.
"Come to me."
The moment the words left her lips, 『Maximus』 was already standing before her.
Cheon Yuha's eyes snapped wide open as she crossed her arms.
CRACK!
Her arm broke.