Is the Disciple Doing Well?
“…Night already.”
Whether it was because he had grown used to the repeated fainting spells, his mental recovery was getting a little faster.
…Was that a good thing?
“Still, being able to scrape together even a little meaningful progress has to count as a positive.”
His Natural Mana had increased by a tiny amount as well. Didn’t that mean the fainting shows hadn’t been completely pointless? At the very least, compared to the sheer hopelessness right after losing his Aura Heart, things had clearly improved, so he decided to take the win.
“I wonder how strong that kid’s gotten.”
Considering the true identity of Master Las—someone who was at least a top-tier mage, possibly even an archmage—and the way that man had shown such extreme deference… ordinary strength was out of the question. Maybe she had already surpassed the realm of a true master? He was estimating so high that he started worrying he might just be inflating things ridiculously because she was his disciple, but when he thought about the monstrous talent she had shown him, it felt entirely possible.
There was even a chance she was already racing past that level by mastering his Aura Heart completely.
Even he had to admit that sounded like the thoughts of a hopeless disciple-obsessed fool… Handling someone else’s Aura Heart shouldn’t be that easy. If the compatibility was miraculously perfect it might be a different story, but the odds of that happening were so low that “good compatibility” was usually just a polite way of saying things were going well.
Or maybe if his own Aura Heart was acting like an obedient, panting dog that followed every command… but given the kind of person he had been during his mercenary days, hoping his Aura Heart would be that affectionate was probably asking too much.
“I just hope she’s healthy and doing well…”
As a master, desperately wishing for his disciple’s well-being was simply inevitable.
The Emperor considered the situation a crisis.
So he forcibly selected Hero candidates and assigned them masters of expert rank or higher. But that created a problem. Mass-producing Hero candidates was important. Using the title of “Hero candidate” as a pretext to bulk up the ranks of excellent warriors wasn’t a bad plan either.
But what about the real Hero?
How were they supposed to choose the actual Hero?
That was the issue.
Something had to be done because a crisis had erupted.
Doing nothing was impossible.
Whatever project they cooked up, they had to launch something or that would become a problem in its own right.
So in the end, they just made a huge mess of things.
It was the kind of mindless waste of administrative power that always happened when a nation tried to “do something, anything” inside its massive systems during an emergency. The classic “just start big and leave the cleanup to future me or my colleagues” approach.
What mattered right now was making it look convincing.
But this kind of cover-your-eyes-and-pretend method always created problems later.
In this case, it was the Hero Selection.
From the perspective of “whether a real Hero emerges among the candidates or not, at least we’ll have more high-grade combat power to throw at the Demon King’s army later,” mass-selecting candidates and handing them over to masters of expert rank or higher had been fine.
The problem was the method of choosing the Hero.
They would have loved to just dump it on the Temple…
But they had also assigned disciples to the Temple’s experts—Holy Knights and combat priests.
In other words, the Temple had become an interested party this time.
Even if the Temple picked one of its own candidates as the Hero, no one would believe it. In a situation where they needed to unite around a Hero, they would end up arguing over “Is this person really the Hero or not?” If they had calculated that far and simply never sent candidates to the Temple, it wouldn’t have been an issue—but they had selected so many candidates that keeping them away from the Temple had been impossible. And given the Temple’s vast network of connections, even trying to argue over whether someone was a “Temple-side candidate” or not would have been a nightmare.
In situations like this, what a national system usually did was obvious.
They created a title called Hero Selector, stuck it on a few convenient people, and declared, “This is classified; no one is allowed to talk about it.” If you had a fancy-sounding title and some powerful figures supposedly handling it in absolute secrecy, it looked just plausible enough for people to think, “Oh, the nation actually thought this through.” The truth was that it was nothing more than a hasty patch job to cover up the mess.
Besides, national secrets weren’t exactly trustworthy. It wasn’t an exaggeration to say that anyone competent already knew them through back channels. If the nation had been competent in the first place, it wouldn’t have handled things in a way that left so many rumors floating around.
In other words—
If you found out who the Hero Selectors were and got to them first,
you could basically decide who the Hero would be.
And what did that mean?
For a regressor who had already decided to become the Hero, the path was set from the very beginning.
Mercenary King Balik had every right to feel wronged.
Every other expert-rank or higher fighter had been given a Hero candidate as a disciple. He alone had been left out. In a way, that was proof the imperial bureaucrats still possessed a bare minimum of conscience. The Mercenary King was infamous as the absolute worst possible master.
Originally, the title of Mercenary King required not only raw power but also enough brains to keep the entire mercenary industry from descending into chaos. But in an age of turmoil, who had time for that? In the end, the current Mercenary King had taken the seat based on pure combat strength alone, intelligence be damned. That man was Balik.
Which was a polite way of saying—
Mercenary King Balik was not smart.
The silver lining was that his instincts and gut feelings weren’t completely rock-bottom either.
So in this chaotic era, he had managed to keep the noisiest industry of all more or less under control with sheer force, papering over his lack of brains with instincts and street smarts, and running things surprisingly well. That deserved high marks… but raising a disciple was a completely different matter.
The mercenary world was naturally overflowing with people who preferred solving problems with their bodies. Of course plenty of them came charging in full of enthusiasm, begging the current strongest mercenary to teach them a thing or two.
And yet…
And yet…
…not a single one of those many hopefuls had lasted.
Not one had survived the position of the Mercenary King’s disciple.
It was a famous story.
That was why the bureaucrats who had even sent a Hero candidate to a retired A-rank mercenary living in seclusion still couldn’t bring themselves to send one to the Mercenary King. Part of it was that bare minimum of conscience, but a not-insignificant part was the pure terror that they might personally hand over a potential real Hero only for the story to end with “died before even becoming the Hero.”
So the Mercenary King had plenty of complaints.
They wouldn’t send him a single disciple,
yet they dumped the annoying title of Hero Selector on him.
It’s not my fault. It’s the fault of those idiots who couldn’t even learn something that simple.
Balik felt wronged.
It wasn’t like he had tried to teach them something difficult the way mages did,
or some flashy, overly complicated swordsmanship the way knights did.
He had taught them something incredibly simple,
incredibly straightforward,
incredibly easy,
and yet guaranteed to make them strong.
Where else could you find a master this good? A master who even guaranteed free time once you finished the day’s quota?! How modern and progressive was that?! And so the Mercenary King proudly declared himself an excellent teacher.
And in this world,
whether master or professor,
anyone who said “I am a good teacher (professor)!”
was never actually a good teacher (professor).
That was practically a universal truth.
The Mercenary King’s method had a fundamental problem.
It wasn’t that he had been spouting nonsense.
He really had stripped away all the complicated stuff and taught only the simplest methods for getting stronger.
The problem was that the body required to actually pull it off was impossible unless you had the physique of a giant.
If you had overwhelming physical power, who needed magic? Why bother with profound swordsmanship?
Exactly.
Mercenary King Balik was a genius when it came to physical strength and combat. And geniuses, by nature, completely failed to understand the reality and psychology of ordinary people. Who would have guessed that the dim-witted Balik would end up as a “genius” who couldn’t understand “normal people”? But the world had always been full of such ironies.
Anyway, Mercenary King Balik thoroughly disliked the position of Hero Selector.
And now he had one more reason to dislike it.
“Cough. Cough. Cough.”
Some crazy bitch had barged in out of nowhere and beaten him half to death.
Mercenary King Balik—
A man so strong that he had claimed the seat of Mercenary King through pure combat power alone, a seat that normally required brains as well. That man was now half-dead.
“Man. The world really is a big place.”
His body was screaming, but Balik forced himself up. The greatsword specially forged so that only the Mercenary King could even lift it had been cut clean through. He had poured real aura into it, and it still got sliced. Balik wasn’t a Transcendent, but with his monstrous strength, durability, combat sense, and willpower, he was a freak who could force even Transcendents into draws. And yet here he was, every part of his body screaming, his greatsword destroyed. That greatsword had been the only one of its kind in the world, forged from special metal so it wouldn’t break even against a Transcendent’s Aura Blade.
In other words, it showed just how insanely strong the crazy bitch who attacked him was.
But—
Mercenary King Balik stood up.
He knew he couldn’t win.
He was dumb, not so far gone that he couldn’t recognize reality. On the contrary, as a combat genius, he could read an opponent’s level more accurately than anyone.
“Make me the Hero. Then I’ll just leave.”
“Hell no!!!!!!!”
It wasn’t because he felt any duty to be fair now that he held the title of Hero Selector. He had zero sense of responsibility toward the position. His instincts and gut had already told him, just from the bureaucrats’ reactions when they dumped the job on him, that this “Hero Selector” title was a hasty cover-up the Empire had slapped together. He was stupid, not completely lacking in street smarts.
So the reason he was refusing right here, right now, wasn’t anything grand.
“You crazy bitch. You know what I hate most in this world?”
“No idea.”
“Yeah, of course you don’t. So I’ll specially tell you. People like you—people with those arrogant eyes that say ‘I’m strong, so this world turns the way I want.’ That’s why I’m in a really good mood right now. I’m weaker than you, but right this second I can ruin your mood worse than anyone else, can’t I?”
“Even if it gets you killed?”
“Heh heh. Once you’re a man, you’ve gotta know how to stick to pointless stubbornness till the end.”
“…Are you insane?”
“Heh heh heh heh. Saying that right to my face… first time since Brother Jade.”
“What…?”
“……?”
“……?”
“……?”
For a while, an awkward silence that was hard to describe settled over the space.