You Suck at Alchemy?
The live combat drill began without warning.
The instant it started, Victor vaulted into the air, stepped onto a platform of frozen moisture, and launched himself even higher.
Suspended there, he drifted slowly down through the still-lingering smoke and sank into thought.
What is the true essence of alchemy?
Instructor Ryu Seojun had told him as much. That he still failed to grasp alchemy’s essence—that the very way he thought was nothing like an alchemist’s.
Before Victor could even ask how to fix it, the lesson had turned into a live spar.
I understand it up here, at least.
Alchemy’s greatest strength was its sheer versatility. No matter the opponent, you never had to worry about being forced onto unfavorable ground. At the same time, you could constantly probe and exploit every weakness, so an alchemist always fought from a position of advantage.
As he silently reviewed Seojun’s words, Victor’s train of thought slammed to a halt.
…Is that even possible?
A flicker of bewilderment threw his breathing slightly off. It felt as if something deep inside him had just come loose and fallen away.
On the surface, there’s nothing wrong with the statement.
And yet—Victor murmured the word to himself. An alchemist was someone who looked at all of creation as material. The ground underfoot, the air in his lungs, the clothes on his back, the water and food he consumed—everything could become a weapon.
But was it really that simple?
Alchemy forever demanded free-form combat from its practitioners while never truly granting them freedom.
“Smoke, huh? Not a bad idea.”
Victor landed and turned toward the voice. The vapor had already scattered; aside from a thin haze of dust, his vision was nearly clear again.
No. It didn’t just scatter.
His field of view flooded with green. Plants that had never been there before were sprouting in wild, chaotic profusion. The moisture he had sprayed as a smokescreen had almost certainly been sucked dry by those plants.
Victor steadied his breathing around that conclusion.
“Talk about a bad matchup.”
The moment Jerie muttered the words, Victor drew up his mana. Expecting another transmutation, she thrust a hand toward him.
But contrary to her expectation, Victor’s transmutation circle never lit. The surging mana sank instead into every part of his body.
Those plants are stealing the moisture right out of the air. Alchemy’s a losing game here.
His own alchemy weaponized water. In a field stripped of moisture, it was useless. Having reached that private verdict, Victor poured every scrap of mana into physical reinforcement.
“Hmm.”
Ryu Seojun’s soft sound of dissatisfaction cut through the air. The open disapproval rattled Victor’s thoughts for a heartbeat, but he forced himself to ignore it.
Focus on what’s in front of you.
He slipped past the wooden vines lashing toward him at high speed and closed the distance. He had never neglected his physical training. At this density of attack he could still force a breakthrough, even if it would be a little tight.
“Heh.”
A bad feeling. He had almost completely evaded the rain of strikes and had only a few steps left—yet his instincts screamed at him to pull back right now.
Trust the gut and retreat, or keep pushing forward?
Faced with the sudden binary choice, Victor clenched his teeth and stepped in. Just a few paces. Then he would close the gap with a single leap and strike.
That was the mistake.
“You… you really suck at alchemy, don’t you?”
A chilling shadow fell across Jerie’s face. Her mouth twisted into a sinister curve; half-lidded eyes that revealed nothing fixed on him. Victor knew that expression. It was the look of someone certain of victory, mocking an opponent who had just walked into a trap.
Ignore it. Don’t let her get to you!
Mana gathered in Victor’s fist. The blow that shot toward Jerie was born of pure confidence—that even a hastily woven wall of branches would shatter under it.
“Think for even a second and the answer’s right there, but you can’t manage even that. An alchemist who throws away alchemy… pathetic.”
Now she looked at him like something pitiful. Victor ground his molars and stamped the last step forward with a heavy thud.
“What the—?!”
“You didn’t listen to a single word that guy said, did you?”
In that instant, a soft light bloomed across the ground. More precisely, the wooden vines that had spread in every direction across the floor each pulsed with a greenish radiance.
How could wood give off light? The question rose first—but years of alchemy practice let Victor’s eyes identify the glow in a fraction of a second.
“Transmutation light…?”
The luminous phenomenon that occurred when a transmutation circle drank mana and ignited alchemy. By what principle it was happening on the surface of wooden vines, he could not begin to guess.
The next moment, Victor’s vision rocketed straight upward. The ground he stood on had abruptly risen into the air.
“Looks like the match is decided.”
Ryu Seojun clapped his hands and strolled forward. After a quick glance around, he addressed Victor, who now stood roughly as high as a two-story rooftop.
“Cadet Victor, take a look at Miss Jerie’s surroundings.”
Obeying, Victor walked to the edge of the rectangular pillar of earth and scanned the ground around Jerie.
“W-what…?!”
He staggered back several steps in pure shock. Watching the stunned cadet, Seojun sighed and spoke.
“Cadet Victor, you are excellent. Your understanding and mastery of alchemy are high, and your outstanding physical ability and polished martial skill are clear strengths.”
But—he continued.
“Your thinking is locked inside a box. Because you still can’t shed that narrow mindset, your actual application of alchemy is at a pathetic level.”
The moment the plants absorbed atmospheric moisture, Victor had abandoned alchemy entirely. A little thought would have told him that moisture was everywhere—yet he had clung to a one-dimensional fighting style that decided every tactic from whatever was immediately visible.
“The water the plants stole is sitting right there in their xylem. There’s moisture in the soil. Hell, there’s water flowing through a human body.”
And that was only the beginning. Without even needing to say it aloud, every drop of water in the vicinity could have been Victor’s weapon. Yet the instant he tried to win by discarding alchemy and choosing raw physical combat, he had forgotten the very lesson that an alchemist who abandons alchemy has already lost.
“I told you to use alchemy broadly. Cadet Victor, you aren’t using it at all.”
“But the matchup—!”
Victor shot back. The words had slipped out in a flare of indignation, yet there was real conviction in them. Plants that relentlessly stole moisture from every direction were growing in real time. Their roots were obviously underground, so both the air’s moisture and the soil’s would be gone in moments. Using the water in his own body? Without serious resolve, he’d simply collapse from dehydration.
“You idiot. Can you live without water?”
A crude curse floated up from below. Victor whipped his head down to find Jerie glaring at him with pure incredulity.
“Moisture manipulation is the most lethal alchemy there is against living things. One touch and you’re done. Bad matchup? What bad matchup? I was the one fighting at a double disadvantage.”
Victor’s mouth shut. The moment he heard her, countermeasures against the plant barrage suddenly bloomed in his mind.
Ah. So that was it.
Only then did he understand the true meaning of her earlier remark about a bad matchup right after the fight began. She hadn’t been saying the moisture-stealing plants held the advantage. She had been signaling the fundamental disadvantage of any living creature that dies the instant moisture manipulation so much as grazes it.
“Hell, I’d use alchemy better than you.”
As she spoke, Jerie poured mana into a transmutation circle. The wooden vines flared with light again, revealing exactly how she had cast alchemy.
Jerie really is a genius. Who would have thought of stretching vines across the ground to draw a transmutation circle?
Ryu Seojun let out a low laugh of genuine admiration. The circle she had formed was the same type used by the low-ranking Hohenheim alchemists he had once met in a back alley. She had simply memorized it and woven the wood on the spot to complete it.
“Well? Starting to get it a little?”
He had come face-to-face with his own bad habit, experienced an utterly unexpected application firsthand, and even received direct feedback that produced real insight. Victor had no choice but to nod.
“Thank you. I’ve learned a great deal from both of you.”
He bowed at the waist in gratitude, then picked up the academy jacket he had discarded earlier, his expression complicated. As he turned to leave, he left one quiet parting line.
“At the midterms… I’ll definitely show you I’ve improved.”
Victor was the cadet once evaluated as the strongest combat alchemist purely on the overwhelming mastery of his craft. Right now the sight of him trudging away in defeat looked pitiful, but he would without doubt take today’s loss as a lesson and eradicate every one of his flaws in short order.
Jerie’s one-sided thrashing made the title feel undeserved, yet Victor’s skill was nothing anyone could afford to dismiss.
“Looking forward to it.”
“That guy? He looked pretty half-baked to me no matter how you slice it.”
“That’s just for now.”
But—Seojun continued, watching Victor’s retreating back.
“If a cadet were already perfect, why would they bother seeking instruction here? They’re cadets precisely because they still lack something, because learning can still make them better.”
Barely two weeks remained until the midterms began. Yet when those two weeks were over, Victor would stand as a proper alchemist in his own right.
“Well then… looks like we’ve run out of things to do for the moment…”
Seojun let the sentence trail off and pointed toward the main building of Origin Academy.
“Since it turned out this way, why don’t we finish off the work we can finish early while we still have the leisure?”
An Elixir swayed gently between the fingers he idly flicked.