Yulia Wants to Play!
Yulia wanted to play!
Afternoon duties had begun.
Though, truth be told, there was hardly anything that qualified as afternoon work beyond playing with Yulia.
Having finished her Imperial Studies and Unique Ability training since early morning, Yulia threw herself into play as if determined to work off every last scrap of that morning’s frustration. She was utterly relentless.
“Okay! I’ll be the hero, so Seo-hyun, you get to be the monster invading the village!”
“A m-monster?”
“Yep!”
Apparently the children of this world were collectively obsessed with hero games—playing out monsters and the heroes who stopped them. I had no idea what they were teaching kids these days, but I’d played soldier when I was little myself, so I decided to roll with it.
“Hiyah! Take my sword!”
Yulia charged in gripping a foam sword that looked like something straight out of a neighborhood hapkido dojo. The lightning-fast dynamic vision I’d honed at the National Intelligence Service kicked in at once.
Her form was riddled with openings; if I’d wanted to counter, it would have been trivial. But my current status made hitting her… complicated. So instead of blocking, I chose to dodge.
I twisted my body just enough to slip outside the arc of her swing, then took a single step back. Her sword sliced empty air.
When the attack she’d clearly expected to land missed completely, she yanked the blade back and reset her stance.
“Urgh! You dodged that?! But can you dodge the next one too?!”
“Uh… well…”
What am I even supposed to say in a situation like this?
I’d never once played hero-and-monster defending a village, so I was still fretting over my role when her sword came flying at me again.
“U-ugh…!”
I slipped aside with the lightest shift of weight. Yulia’s eyes went round as saucers.
The first miss she could shrug off. The second was starting to rattle her.
“Hiyah—!”
She swung again. Once more the blade carved nothing but air. The next swing met the same fate.
Minutes of her swinging and me dodging stretched on until, at last, exhaustion—or pure sulkiness—won out. Yulia planted herself in place, face scrunched into a full pout.
Did… did I do something wrong?
Was I supposed to let myself get hit?
Come to think of it, in every hero movie I’d watched as a kid, the monster never once beat the hero. Maybe in this world it was simply common sense that monsters lost to heroes.
In the end, a role-playing game like this didn’t matter whether the outcome was fixed or not. I told myself that and looked at her.
She stood frozen, all fighting spirit drained. I racked my brain for a way to rekindle her enthusiasm—and then a perfect idea struck.
“Young Miss.”
“…”
“Could you show me your Unique Ability?”
“…Huh?”
Her eyes flew wide at a suggestion she had never seen coming.
“Heroes fight with all sorts of weapons, sure, but a lot of them rely on their Unique Abilities as a foundation, right?”
“Th-that’s true?”
“So swordsmanship is important, but isn’t a Unique Ability just as vital if you want to become a real hero?”
Yulia thought it over for a moment, then nodded firmly.
“Yeah, you’re right! But I have to get permission from the butler first. He said if I swing my power around carelessly, people could get hurt.”
That was a good attitude.
Seeing that a prestigious house that ruled over people was teaching her philosophy and restraint like this made me think coming to the Wittelsbach family might actually have been a stroke of luck.
Yulia and I dashed over to the butler waiting nearby and asked whether we could use the training grounds. He gave his approval on the condition that a servant keep watch. He assigned us one of the idle staff—purely as a safety net, it seemed—and otherwise placed no real restrictions on us.
Probably because Yulia was, nominally, their superior, and because of the education she’d already received, he judged she wouldn’t make any catastrophic mistakes. Or maybe he was simply confident he could protect us if anything went wrong.
When we arrived at the training grounds, a facility large enough to hold an entire school assembly spread out before our eyes.
I’d known the Wittelsbachs were wealthy, but I hadn’t expected they could freely use something this grand without a second thought.
No one else was using the place, so we claimed the smallest of the private training rooms.
“Okay! I’ve been training super hard! Watch this!”
She closed her eyes, tensed her whole body, then thrust both hands straight forward.
Moments later the air around us began to stir.
Whoooosh—!
Inside the ten-meter training chamber lined with solid metal, a gale reaching twenty meters per second whipped up into a miniature storm.
This… this can’t be real…
As the wind began to spiral around Yulia, every scrap of common sense I’d ever held shattered into pieces.
I’d heard of Unique Abilities, of course. One of the first things they’d said about me at the auction was that I was an Inferior—someone who had never awakened one.
Back then I hadn’t given it much thought. I’d come from a world where such things simply didn’t exist, and I’d never truly felt their power. So even after learning they were real, I’d treated Unique Abilities as little more than a fancy kind of talent.
But this.
This was something far beyond talent.
A single gesture from a six-year-old child summoned a howling gale and rewrote the very flow of the air in an instant.
Knowledge that had taken humanity seven hundred thousand years to grasp even partially—she was performing it as naturally as breathing.
No wonder people who never awakened a Unique Ability were discriminated against.
The fact that this world hadn’t simply executed the unawakened as “cursed by the gods” was, by itself, proof that its ethics weren’t completely rotten.
“Well?! How was it?!”
“Y-yes? That was…!”
I hesitated, searching for the right words.
I didn’t know the average standard of this world well enough to praise her blindly, but I could at least share what I thought from my own perspective.
And as I did, the thoughts that had been crushed under the sheer force of her ability began to stir again. Instead of pure awe, practical applications started flooding my mind.
“First of all, the versatility is excellent. It would be incredibly useful for fire-based tactics, and it could also counter projectile weapons that rely heavily on wind. If you kicked up dust, you could even use it as a smoke screen on the battlefield…”
“Th-that’s true…?”
She looked a little deflated, as if that wasn’t quite the reaction she’d been hoping for.
I’d meant it as praise—so what part had she disliked?
I turned the question over for a moment and arrived at a conclusion.
Maybe what Yulia wanted wasn’t empty compliments, but meaningful advice.
Oh, for heaven’s sake!
Someone this young already aiming for self-improvement and self-reflection?!
The passion that had cooled considerably since I arrived in this world suddenly flared back to life.
“Just wait a second! I’m going to grab a notebook!”
“H-huh? O-okay.”
I asked the nearby butler for an unused notebook and pen, then sat down.
“First I need to understand the activation conditions. Has the teacher in charge of Unique Ability training ever told you exactly what ability you awakened?”
“Mm… I think it was Ruler of the Wind? They said I have dominion over gases…”
“Dominion over gases. Does that mean you can control every substance in a gaseous state?”
“Uh, probably…?”
“Then could you separately manipulate the elements inside air molecules? For example, separating or combining nitrogen and oxygen?”
If that were possible, she might be able to take the nitrogen, oxygen, and a little hydrogen already present in the air and skip every complicated industrial process to produce nitric acid—the main ingredient of gunpowder. Even if not, chlorine-gas biochemical attacks, shockwave incapacitation… the possibilities were endless.
The real problem was how to explain any of those concepts to Yulia.
Just as I’d expected, she answered with a bright, sunny smile.
“Uuuung, I dunno!”
“R-right, of course.”
Better to start with ideas she could actually grasp. With that in mind I began jotting down every application I could think of for her ability.
That was when the servant the butler had assigned us approached and held out a single sheet of paper.
“Hm? Th-this is…”
“The analysis results of Young Miss Yulia’s Unique Ability. Your friend seemed to need them.”
By rank the man stood far above me, yet he was using honorifics simply because I was Yulia’s friend. It made me oddly embarrassed.
(In truth the servant simply found Seo-hyun’s flustered reaction adorable.)
“W-wait a second! Why do you even have that?!”
“Memorizing information about the master one serves is one of a servant’s duties.”
“Grr! Give it here!”
Yulia jumped and lunged, trying to snatch the paper, but the overwhelming difference in height defeated her.
“Ch-cheater.”
“Haha. Reading it together with your friend will be helpful.”
With that the man laid the analysis sheet of Yulia’s Unique Ability in front of us.
Yulia wore a half-sulky expression, but she didn’t openly protest.
“All right then—shall we look at it together?”
I said, and began reading the report.