Good Things Come to the Master First—But Something's Off
A blessing, huh…
There was nothing wrong with receiving one.
That was, of course, assuming everything this elf named Riel was saying was actually true.
An elf who had already lied once by calling herself the Elf of Luck could just as easily be lying again by calling herself the Elf of Blessing. The possibility wasn't zero—and that alone was reason enough to be suspicious. So doubting her here was both rational and efficient.
Suppose the future of "getting burned" was already set in stone.
Was it better to get burned while being suspicious?
Or to get burned while trusting blindly?
Which of those two was more rational and efficient?
Ask anyone that question and they'd give you the same answer. (Well—except for the devout types who believed you shouldn't dare question anything because faith demanded absolute trust in the divine.)
Getting burned while being suspicious was better.
In that sense, being suspicious in any situation was rational and efficient. Sure, sometimes you'd strike out. Sometimes the suspicion would be wrong. But what about the times it wasn't? If you refused to doubt anything out of fear of being wrong, and then got burned like an idiot for it—wouldn't it have been better for your own survival to be suspicious in the first place?
Granted, a guy who doubted everything would eventually end up with nobody left around him. But if you were prepared to carry that risk, then yes—doubting every possibility was both rational and efficient.
Which was why, right now, I considered it rational and efficient to be suspicious of the elf Riel, who had already lied to me once.
…But then again.
I never taught Sera to be like that.
I never taught Sera that way. Sure, I'd taught her to be somewhat wary—but I'd never told her to scrutinize and doubt every single possibility. Even though I knew perfectly well that it was the most efficient survival skill there was. The reason I hadn't was simple.
A being who doubted everything and ended up alone was infinitely hollow. Just like I had been before I met Sera. I couldn't find meaning in this world. And I figured I never would. So I retired and went into seclusion. I thought that was how my life would end.
Then Sera came looking for me.
And through Sera, I found meaning.
It wasn't anything particularly grand. Having that meaning didn't suddenly transform my world, either. But if I'd stayed alone in that hermitage, locked in solitude, I never would have found it for the rest of my life. In the end, people simply couldn't exist in complete isolation. Even a Hero was no exception.
It was a truly inefficient, irrational thing.
Get involved with others and you risked getting hurt by them—yet without others, you couldn't even grasp the meaning of life. That was what it meant to be human.
So what was I trying to say?
Simple.
Doubting everything and holing yourself up in your own little world might be efficient—but it looked pathetic. And no matter how you sliced it, looking pathetic just wasn't a good look, was it?
I was a man, after all. I couldn't help caring about looking cool. More than that, I was a kid's master. A master couldn't afford to be a pathetic master, could he? So in this case…
"Fine. I'll believe you're the Elf of Blessing."
"It's not about believing me—it's the truth!"
"Okay, okay. So you want to put a blessing on me, is that it?"
"…Wow. Thinking about it again, this is ridiculous. I'm not even asking for anything in return. I'm offering this freely to the man who saved my life. Why do I have to put up with this much suspicion?"
"I was just about to drop the suspicion… Want me to keep going?"
"I wasn't complaining! So don't be suspicious!"
…She was nothing like the elves I'd imagined, this one.
Part of the reason Riel wanted to place a blessing on Jade was that what she had seen in his soul was so extraordinary it had drawn her in. But there was more to it than that—she was also doing it for his sake.
Just as moths were drawn to flame, just as bees sought honey, there were things in the natural order that pursued and sought to claim souls of that rare caliber.
In her long life, every slightly unusual soul Riel had ever witnessed had suffered every manner of hardship and been forced to endure those trials. Having seen that spectacle not once or twice but many times over, she had reached an unavoidable conclusion: fate never left those who possessed such souls alone.
And if that was the case—
What kind of suffering and adversity would fate visit upon this special soul, one Riel had never seen before, one that only this human man could show her?
She couldn't even begin to imagine.
It certainly wouldn't be easy. It might be a future so terrible that death would seem preferable.
Of course, the possibility that nothing would happen at all wasn't zero. Exceptions existed for everything, and this human man with his extraordinary soul could well be one of them. But fate had always preferred to hand humanity its worst-case scenarios over its best ones.
In other words: rather than sitting still and hoping for the best, preparing for the ending you hoped would never come was the more rational and efficient approach.
More than anything, if this man dies, I'm the one who's in trouble.
If Jade died, his soul would vanish, and she would never again see the things she was seeing now. For Riel, that was the worst possible ending—one she absolutely had to avoid. Having already witnessed the light of Jade's extraordinary soul, she could no longer live with the quiet detachment of the days before she met him. Just as someone who had experienced paradise would regard the world outside it as hell, having seen paradise in him, she could no longer live as she had before. So of course she was the one in a hurry. She was the one who couldn't afford to lose paradise.
"There's a condition, though."
"…You're getting a blessing and you're attaching conditions?"
"I don't have to take it if I don't want to."
"…So what is it?"
"Once you put the blessing on me and I've confirmed it works—could you put one on my disciple too?"
"…So basically, you want to use yourself as a test subject, and if it checks out, you want one for your disciple?"
"That's right."
"……."
Whether it was because of that special soul of his or not, Riel found herself concluding that this guy was an extraordinarily, almost pathologically devoted disciple-obsessed fool…
Caron, the Swordsman Butcher.
A man who swung his blade for one purpose alone: to become the strongest swordsman.
Put that way, it almost sounded admirable.
The problem was that this man knew nothing else. He had lived looking at nothing else—even in the moment when humanity was plunged into crisis by the Great War between Humans and Demons.
The result: in a situation where every skilled fighter was desperately needed, people died because of him. All because he wanted to become the strongest swordsman. All because he wanted to wield the strongest blade. After crossing swords with the Hero—humanity's strongest—he decided that defeating the Hero would make him the strongest, and so he switched sides entirely to the Demon King's army.
A man who had discarded everything else for the sake of becoming the strongest. A man who was nothing but a blight on humanity. A man who had to be eliminated. That was the conclusion Sera had reached.
Shiiing!
"…You're strong."
"Am I?"
He hadn't yet earned the moniker of Swordsman Butcher, but he was already hunting down renowned swordsmen and killing them. The moment Sera found him, she swung her blade without hesitation. Sensing the killing intent by pure instinct, Caron drew his sword and blocked.
That Sera was a young girl meant nothing to Caron. What mattered to him was that she was strong. And so he unleashed his specialty without a second thought—his swift blade.
A speed so extreme that an ordinary swordsman wouldn't even register that a swing had occurred. A blade that had reached the realm of magic itself—one that left its victims knowing only the result, my head has been cut off, before they died.
Clang!
Sera stopped that blade in front of her throat as if it were nothing. It was a razor-close moment, yet she remained utterly composed. That was only natural confidence, Caron thought—because his hands were screaming.
It felt like the days before I knew anything about Aura, when I just swung a sword at trees without understanding a thing.
He had nothing.
He simply loved swinging a sword.
He swung it blindly, knowing nothing at all.
It was powerless. Utterly powerless.
But that was why it felt good.
Even if he was powerless now—if he kept swinging and swinging at those hard trees, someday he would become strong!
And eventually, he felled the trees.
He grew stronger and stronger, until he could cut through steel.
He cut, and cut, and cut, and cut, and cut, and cut, and cut, and cut, and cut, and cut, and cut, and cut, and cut, and cut, and cut, and cut, and cut, and cut, and cut, and cut, and cut, and cut, and cut, and cut through everything.
When he thought there was nothing left to cut—
He saw a swordsman with a blade.
That swordsman boasted.
Claimed to be the strongest.
So Caron cut him down.
He was strong, certainly.
And it felt far better than cutting trees or steel. From that point on, he began seeking out every powerful opponent he could find. But it wasn't as enjoyable as he'd expected. It wasn't as special as he'd expected. It wasn't as satisfying as he'd expected.
And then—
This appeared.
A powerhouse who felt like a fortress wall itself. A true powerhouse for whom the word "strongest" was the most fitting description of all—standing right before his eyes.
"What's your name?"
It was a first for Caron. Standing before a strong opponent and asking for a name instead of swinging his sword. He wanted to remember it. He wanted to commit to memory the name of the true strongest he was about to cut down.
"Shut up and swing your sword."
There was only one person whose knowing her name and calling it out meant anything. No one else mattered. For Sera, who thought that way, there wasn't so much as a grain of sand's worth of reason to tell Caron her name.
"Heh heh. That works too! Let's swing until one of us dies!"
Caron grinned and prepared to swing his blade.
But—
"Wh-what? Why is my body…"
"Sorry. You were weaker than I expected."
"……?"
"You're already dead."
"What do you…"
Thud.
Caron's body crumpled uselessly to the ground.
There was a saying that a blade swung by someone who had reached the end of the sword's path could cut the soul itself. It didn't mean they literally severed souls. It meant their swordsmanship was so precise, so perfect, that the victim could be cut without even realizing they had been cut. And that was what had happened to Caron. He had been struck so perfectly that he never even knew he was dead—he simply kept trying to swing his sword until he collapsed, empty and meaningless.
The man who had dreamed of becoming the strongest, who had desperately yearned for even a glimpse of that pinnacle, had experienced the strongest blade firsthand—and never realized it, not even in the moment of his death. He squandered the opportunity he had finally obtained in the most hollow, pointless way imaginable, and that was how his life ended.
"That's just how it is. Wanting something doesn't mean you'll get it. And no one can guarantee that what you want will look the way you imagined it would. Not that you can hear me, I suppose."
She hadn't particularly said it for Caron's benefit in the first place. Without hesitation, she simply turned her back.
"William."
The Archmage William, who had been concealing his presence, revealed himself.
"You called for me?"
"Go to Master."
"Already? It's not yet the day I'm supposed to deliver the potions."
"Just go. Now."
The instincts she had honed across infinite regressions were telling her something was wrong. She needed to check on her master's side.
Stray cats had a way of turning up anywhere. No matter how thoroughly you secured a place, there was always the chance of a stray cat that could slip right through.