Week 1 PvP (2)
“……”
Yang Jihong no longer came charging in recklessly. Holding to a defensive posture, he began closing the distance one measured step at a time. It was close enough to the right answer that I gave a small nod.
'Right. Getting zapped three times ought to teach a person something.'
I cast Hummingbird and sent it flying. Yang Jihong's eyes flashed as he met the oncoming bird. His spear drew back, then shot out like an arrow, and the Hummingbird was pierced mid-flight and scattered. He swung that same spear and cleaved the second one apart as well.
'Was that too easy?' Under the pretense of going easy on him, I had deliberately sent them along monotonous trajectories, but watching him swat them aside without effort, I seemed to have underestimated him far too much.
I cast Hummingbird again. This time the bird wove erratically as it flew. Yang Jihong tried to run it through, but a hair before the point connected, the bird slipped away on a supple wingbeat and rode up along the shaft of his spear. When he bounded sharply sideways, the bird banked hard after him as though it had predicted even that.
Crackle!
“Nngh…!”
Yang Jihong kept up his arrogant front, though even he seemed genuinely shaken. He had offered up his family's spirit pills just to get this match arranged—and it had ended after barely three exchanges.
I tossed out the question. “Convinced yet?”
“This cannot be. Had I only been given more chances—!”
“Probably. So you're not there yet.”
“……”
“……”
“……?”
The indignant glare on Yang Jihong's face slowly gave way to puzzlement. Landing a Hummingbird should have meant moving in to finish the job, yet there I stood rooted in place, not taking a single step.
“……You're not going to finish it?”
“I told you. I'd keep sparring with you until you were convinced.”
“……!”
“Speak up when the paralysis wears off.”
He had paid me in spirit pills, after all; I fully intended to earn my tuition.
An indescribable tangle of emotions crossed Yang Jihong's face. Then, apparently concluding that he would give it everything he had for as long as he could stand, his eyes hardened with resolve. Soon he took his spear in hand once more and settled into his stance.
He was ready. Sparks scattered to life above my palm.
“Here we go again.”
The lightning hummingbirds took wing, one after another. Having gotten a fair measure of Yang Jihong's ability, I tuned the difficulty with a careful hand—troublesome enough to be a genuine nuisance to swat down, yet not so cruel that he couldn't so much as touch them.
Crackle!
Whenever he dropped into paralysis, I waited for him to recover; once he was ready, I cast again. Yang Jihong, it seemed, had finally set his pride aside, resolved to wring every lesson he could from the ordeal. His original purpose had been to strike me down, but now every fiber of his concentration was fixed on the Hummingbird—thrusting and swinging his spear like a man possessed against birds that menaced him from every unpredictable angle. And with that, his skill climbed so fast the improvement was plain to the eye.
Crackle-crack!
“Kgh.”
That made the eighth time Yang Jihong had fallen to a Hummingbird. I used the lull to turn my gaze to the scoreboard.
The PvP assessment's ten-minute limit was nearly spent. I put the question to Yang Jihong as he shook himself out. “Convinced now?”
“……I am.”
He had to understand it by now—that his defeats in the previous two matches had owed nothing to carelessness or misfortune, and everything to a plain difference in skill.
“One last thing to show you. Take this.”
Amplification
Hummingbird rank rising: E → C
A hummingbird wrought of pure current took form. Larger in body, the light it pulsed out crisper and clearer. Yang Jihong caught the difference too; tension sharpened him as he choked up on his spear.
Pop!
“!!”
The Hummingbird crossed the distance in a single bound. To Yang Jihong's eyes, it must have looked as though it had skipped straight through space. A C-rank Hummingbird, elevated two full tiers—even with his gaze strained to its utmost, he could not pin down its movement.
Pop, pop, pop!
A few leaps and it was right on top of him. The point of his spear trembled finely, and his eyes wavered. He had watched it with his own eyes the entire way, and still failed to read it. Yet, as though he refused to let things end like this, he ground his teeth, dragged up every scrap of momentum left in him, and poured it into the spear—then hurled it forward with everything he had.
KWAAAAAM—!
A colossal shockwave rolled past, sweeping everything before it. At least, that was how it must have looked to Yang Jihong. But before the sigh of relief could even leave his lips, the hummingbird alighted on his chest.
BZZZT-CRACKLE-CRACKLE!
The detonation of lightning swallowed Yang Jihong whole. When the flash subsided, he was bracing himself on his spearshaft, barely holding his body upright. And then, at last, one knee gave out and sank to the floor. He spoke to the ground as though muttering to himself.
“You were hiding your strength all along… From the very start, this was a contest I could never win.”
“Keep training. You've got potential.”
“……I concede.”
Stepping off the stage, I found that Go Hyeon-woo and the male student he was up against had apparently finished their match around the same time. Faint traces of smiles lingered on everyone's lips, so it seemed to have ended on an amiable note.
“A fine bout indeed.”
“Likewise. I learned a great deal from watching your swordplay, young hero.”
“Let us cross blades again at the next opportunity.”
It carried roughly the air of let's meet again sometime and play a game of baduk.
I walked over to Go Hyeon-woo. “Win?”
“Two victories to my name, Brother Kim. And yourself?”
“All three of mine are done. You going again?”
“Since I am here regardless, it seems cleanest to see the third through to its end. You go on ahead, Brother Kim.”
He had already scanned his student ID into the terminal and was waiting on his next opponent. I couldn't spectate anyway, and I would be spending time in the cultivation room afterward regardless, so from my standpoint there was no reason to keep burning time here.
“Fair enough. I'm off, then.”
“Until tomorrow.”
“A moment.”
Yang Jihong called me to a halt just as I turned to go. Not a trace remained of the condescension from the day we first met. He bowed to me with perfect courtesy before speaking.
“I wish to apologize for my insolence. I judged you rashly, seeing only one side of you. You are no coward.”
“No—do keep taking me for a coward for a while yet.”
“'A coward for a while yet'…”
Yang Jihong chewed on my words for a moment, then chuckled as something seemed to dawn on him. “……I see. Then remain a coward you shall, for now. I can hardly be the only one taken in.”
After all, the longer I stayed underestimated, the longer the list of victims would grow.
With that, he produced one more wooden case and held it out. “A single spirit pill hardly settles the account. I learned a great deal thanks to you.”
“Oh my, you really shouldn't have.”
I snapped the spirit pill up and stowed it away without a shred of hesitation. An unexpected windfall—and the all-important PvP quest had been cleared as well.
Week 1 PvP Assessment
▷ Objective: Complete 3 PvP assessments. (3/3)
▷ 3-Win Reward:Rank Up (F)
The quest reward was a single sheet of parchment with a great big "UP" stamped across it—an item called Rank Up. Use it on anything, regardless of type, and the rank of a skill or trait climbs by one tier. The F-grade Rank Up I had just received could promote any F-rank skill straight to E-rank. And its destination was obvious.
Rank Up (F)
Amplification rank increased: F → E
Duration: 1:00 → 2:00
Cooldown: 1 hour → 50 minutes
A skill boasting utility as outstanding as Amplification's deserved top priority for the boost. The window in which it could amplify a skill had doubled, and its cooldown had been cut by a full ten minutes. In other words, I could now drastically shorten the time needed to complete the Life Cube. What had been a knife's-edge race to finish by Friday was now comfortable enough to wrap up by Wednesday. And spare time meant, in turn—
'I can give the Magic Bullet some proper attention.'
Room to devote to Seo Ye-in's training.
Seo Ye-in and I finished a simple dinner and made our way to the Training Center together, where we snagged a Mana Cultivation Room and slipped inside.
“The Level One Magic Bullet special lecture will now begin.”
“Wow—”
Seo Ye-in clapped without making a sound. Then she immediately went for her mana pistol, and I raised a hand to stop her.
“Holster it. We won't be needing the gun for a while.”
“Okay.”
“First, try making one Magic Bullet.”
I needed to see it with my own eyes to pinpoint exactly where she was falling short. At my instruction, Seo Ye-in drew up her mana. The power gathering over her palm compressed into a soft, doughy clump of magic.
Watching the process, I couldn't help but marvel.
'She really is something else…'
How on earth had she pushed Song Cheon-hye all the way to a judges' decision with this—not a Magic Bullet, just a carelessly kneaded lump of mana? On top of that, Seo Ye-in's PvP score stood at 600, meaning she had gone two-and-one, her only loss coming against Song Cheon-hye. True, she'd been swinging gear far too good for a freshman—a high-grade rifle, a transparent ghillie suit—but that alone didn't explain all of it.
'Let's see what her manipulation looks like.'
“Now, copy me.” I shaped my mana into a circle. Seo Ye-in mirrored me, forming a ring of her own. When I changed the circle into a triangle, hers became a triangle as well. Circle, triangle, square, star—I had her trace one shape after another.
'Her mana control is fairly deft.'
"Deft" was underselling it; by any objective measure, she belonged among the genuinely exceptional. She claimed she'd never once practiced mana control, and if that was true, she must simply have been born with it. My bet was that as long as I pointed her in the right direction, she would shoot up without pause.
“Today we start with 'Distribution.'”
I produced a glass box—an item the Training Center supplied for practice. It was small enough to cradle easily in both hands, with a fist-sized hole bored into one side.
“Watch.” I blew mana in through the hole, and the box filled to the brim in moments. When I deliberately pushed more in, the excess began seeping out little by little. “Exactly this much is the proper dose that goes into an F-grade Magic Bullet. Step one: use the right amount for each round. And step two—”
I gave the box a single shake, and the mana inside separated into bands like a gradient, from deep indigo all the way up to a near-white sky blue.
“You can't have patches that run dense here and thin there. Spreading the mana perfectly even, until the whole thing is one unbroken color—that is the heart of 'Distribution.'”
Seo Ye-in raised her hand to shoulder height. The classroom signal: she had a question.
“Yes~ go ahead.”
“Why does it have to be even?”
“Easier to show you.”
The gradient mana in the box rushed to a single point and compressed in one breath. I held the finished Magic Bullet out for Seo Ye-in to see. Study it as closely as you liked, it was hard to spot—a flaw so faint it barely registered on the surface.
“Mana that isn't distributed evenly crumples during compression. At your level it doesn't matter, but past a certain threshold, that flaw becomes a real problem.”
A high-grade Magic Bullet, for instance, compresses far more power than this little box holds—and if a flaw is present, the mana comes streaming out through that weak point until the whole form simply collapses. Far better to learn it properly from the start than to suffer through breaking the habit once it has set into your body.
“So, to recap: blow in exactly the box's measure, distribute it evenly so the color never varies, and finally—”
Snap!
The instant my fingers flicked, the Magic Bullet was complete.
“Both steps, in a single breath. Pull that off, and you can consider 'Distribution' mastered. Now you try.”
I handed the glass box over. Seo Ye-in set her mouth to the hole and blew, and the surplus mana came trickling right back out. The inside of the box mottled with every shade of blue at once—and completing it in one breath wasn't even a dream yet.
“……”
Every attempt ended in failure, and her brows creased a little. She turned to me with eyes that plainly demanded advice, but I shook my head. This was a territory ruled by raw feel, and there was little I could tell her here. Grinding through the failures until something clicked was the best path there was.
“I'll be in the room next door. Message me when you're done.”
“Okay.”
That was what I said, but this was not the kind of thing finished in a day or two. It was, for all practical purposes, homework. And I had business of my own. I found an empty Mana Cultivation Room, settled in, and pulled out the cube blueprint.
Shhhraaaang!
My hands turned out cube after cube without a hitch while my mind wandered elsewhere.
'How long will she take?'
I had raised a whole truckload of S-rank Gunslingers in my day, and more than a dozen of them had been built from the ground up, exactly like the Seo Ye-in of now. The quickest of the lot had needed two days to grasp 'Distribution,' and even I had burned an entire day on it my first time through. I wasn't expecting that much of her, but with her talent, surely she would manage it inside of three days.
And yet…
My prediction was dashed—and dashed beautifully.
[25] The Support Ate It All