Week 5 Mentoring, PvP (7)
Roll the clock back by roughly two weeks.
Ahn Jungmi had been, that day as every day, processing her workload without the slightest gap. Her hands moved at a speed beyond imitation while retaining machinelike precision, and the mountain of documents stacked before her melted away at a remarkable pace.
They were hands that never stopped until every last task was seen to—though on that day, for once, they did.
"I beg your pardon?"
Ahn Jungmi shot up from her seat. Her face was quivering with disbelief—both sights almost never witnessed from her, which meant something genuinely astounding had occurred.
And the astounding thing was this: word had arrived from the 'trusted informant' she had planted inside Dragon Slayer Academy.
"The Agassi applied for mentoring?"
That Seo Yein, of all people, had applied for mentoring.
It was so preposterous that she nearly doubted the informant's reliability.
In all her long years of service, Ahn Jungmi had never met anyone further removed from the word scholarship than Seo Yein. The girl found learning anything new, or cramming it into her head, unbearably tiresome.
No—strictly speaking, it wasn't a matter confined to study. Seo Yein was simply devoid of motivation for everything, the sole exception being holing up in some corner and sleeping.
How anyone could possess such radiant talent and potential and still be that lazy was a mystery that left onlookers grinding their teeth in frustration.
And since Ahn Jungmi had shouldered the bulk of Seo Yein's education herself, that frustration weighed on her more heavily than on anyone.
It was against that backdrop that the Future Strategy Office, as a last resort, played its final card: enrolling Seo Yein in Dragon Slayer Academy.
Once she meets plenty of students her own age—mingles with them, competes, knocks heads with them—surely a little of it will rub off on her?
They sent her off clutching that hope, but the expectations Ahn Jungmi allowed herself were not especially high.
She will nap all day in some corner of the library or the dormitory, as always. I shall count it a blessing if she simply attends her classes.
Then came one month after Seo Yein's enrollment, and the 'trusted informant' kept sending updates that strained belief.
Not only was Seo Yein attending class every single day, she was reportedly fighting hard in the weekly PvP assessments and dungeon raids as well.
Her grades were even said to be respectable!
Had her peers truly worked a positive change in her after all?
Even so, mentoring is a bridge too far.
Applying for it—voluntarily begging to be taught—surely that went too far?
And so, of the entire bundle of news, the mentoring alone Ahn Jungmi flatly refused to believe.
But the report was cross-verified again and again, hardening into fact each time, until at last she had no choice but to accept it.
Well. This works out rather nicely.
Ahn Jungmi's brain whirred at speed, drafting a new plan on the spot.
As it happened, the academy had just circulated an official notice recruiting mentors.
And as it happened, Ahn Jungmi was a high-rank gunner who matched the 'graduate' requirement to the letter.
This is my chance.
A golden opportunity to teach her Agassi—a young lady who had never once listened to a soul, no matter how hard one tried to teach her.
What was more, Seo Yein herself had applied for this mentoring. Unlike before, she now possessed the will to learn, which made the opportunity twice as valuable.
Accordingly, Ahn Jungmi set aside all other affairs and contacted Dragon Slayer Academy, declaring that she would serve as mentor.
The academy had no reason to turn away an expert of her caliber, and accepted the offer without hesitation.
Among ranged classes, gunners were markedly scarcer than archers. Of those, gunners of outstanding skill were scarcer still; and of those, gunners idle enough to volunteer for mentoring scarcer yet again.
Thanks to this manpower shortage, Seo Yein had been due for reassignment under an archer mentor—until Ahn Jungmi took the post, and the girl was placed beneath her instead.
That, too, was exactly as intended.
The result was the one-on-one lesson Ahn Jungmi had dreamed of in her wildest imaginings: private tutoring for a motivated Agassi.
Her whole body trembled with the swelling emotion.
This time, for certain...!
This time, at last, I will devote myself body and soul and pass on everything I know!
For the moment, however, she smothered her true feelings and spoke in a perfectly ordinary tone.
"For the next month, you will be fighting the PvP assessments and the raids together with me."
"..."
Seo Yein remained utterly expressionless, offering no reaction at all—but Ahn Jungmi, who had watched her for years, could read the minute shift of feeling hidden beneath that stillness.
That is the face she wears when something has displeased her considerably...
The fact that Seo Yein was already finding this whole arrangement a bother.
Does she truly wish to be mentored at all? Could some misunderstanding have led to a mistaken application?
All manner of doubts flickered past, but having come this far, retreat was unthinkable.
Ahn Jungmi pressed briskly on with the explanation.
"The [Formidable Opponent] for this week's PvP assessment is myself. And before I explain the details, I intend to verify precisely how much you have grown, Agassi."
Even with a trusted informant at her disposal, the information that could be smuggled out of Dragon Slayer Academy was severely limited—little more than fragments such as Seo Yein's win-loss record in the PvP assessments, with replays entirely out of reach.
She therefore needed to measure Seo Yein's exact growth with her own eyes before the mentoring could begin.
Ahn Jungmi gathered a mass of mana above her hand. It spread thin into an octagonal plate, completing a shield that doubled as a target.
"I shall be using this again."
The mana shield she had summoned carried a proud record of turning aside Seo Yein's shots time and again in the past, which made it ideally suited for gauging skill.
Then Ahn Jungmi added a light provocation.
"I reinforced it in the belief that you would have grown at least a little, Agassi. You will most likely fail to pierce it."
She knew that for all the girl's chronic listlessness, Seo Yein was secretly a poor loser once a fire was lit under her.
Raise a simple shield with the barest minimum of mana, turn Seo Yein's shot aside with it, then follow with the second provocation—'Agassi, you can't even break this?'—and she was all but guaranteed to apply herself diligently for a good while afterward.
Firmly convinced it would play out the same this time, Ahn Jungmi gave the signal.
"Come."
"..."
Without a word, Seo Yein drew both pistols, assembled them into a rifle, formed a magic bullet, and loaded it.
Hm?
Watching her, Ahn Jungmi's eyebrow crept upward of its own accord.
A month ago, Seo Yein's magic bullets had been nothing more than carelessly clumped lumps of mana. But the round now glowing blue above the girl's hand was without a single flaw—a magic bullet so perfectly wrought it was nearly beautiful.
A bullet of that quality...
There was a very real chance it could smash straight through the mana shield she had raised.
Strengthen the shield now, then?
Absolutely not.
Hadn't the gauntlet already been thrown? If she was caught feeding extra mana in after the fact, it would not inflame Seo Yein's competitive pride—it would only backfire.
Besides, Seo Yein was uncannily sharp in exactly this respect. Her eyes, too, were preternaturally good; even the faintest drift of mana had always been caught the instant it stirred.
The contest would have to be fought with the shield as summoned.
So Ahn Jungmi ran her calculations down a different road.
If I focus my mana onto a single point at the moment of impact...
the odds of holding would climb sharply. It would call for rather fine control, but for a gunner of her caliber, no great feat.
The long rifle leveled itself at her, and Ahn Jungmi gave one final nod.
— Thoom!
And the muzzle spat blue fire.
Two things lay beyond what Ahn Jungmi had foreseen.
The first: believing that even Seo Yein's staggering talent must have required tremendous labor to hone [Magic Bullet] to such a pitch of perfection, she had never once dreamed the girl might have learned another skill on top of it—[Ejection], of all things.
And the second: that Seo Yein's skill had not grown somewhat, but enormously—exponentially.
For the entire past week, Seo Yein had poured every spare moment into drilling [Magic Bullet] and [Ejection], precisely as Kim Ho had instructed. Monstrous talent compounded by genuine effort—the skills could hardly have refused to grow.
On top of that, the B-Rank cushion had quietly raised her sleep efficiency, lengthening her waking hours, and those hours, too, went wholly into training.
The result: [Magic Bullet], once D-Rank, and [Ejection], once E-Rank, had both attained C-Rank.
She had finally pulled off the very feat Kim Ho had privately judged 'absurd—but maybe, just maybe, possible.'
And so what discharged from Seo Yein's rifle was a single blow of power that left Ahn Jungmi's predictions far behind—a blow against which the shield she had raised while thinking she'll be somewhat better than last month could not possibly hold, no matter what she tried.
A single streak of blue drew itself between muzzle and mana shield.
The next instant, the magic bullet shattered the thin shield into fragments and rammed home between Ahn Jungmi's brows.
— BAM!!
Unable to withstand the tremendous shock rattling her skull, Ahn Jungmi toppled slowly backward.
Only by taking the hit herself could she finally understand.
She has learned [Ejection] as well...
And at quite a high rank, at that.
As her consciousness faded to black, a soft breath of admiration slipped from Ahn Jungmi's lips.
"Agassi... you are truly magnificent..."
To grow this splendidly in barely a single month... Thud.
Ahn Jungmi had been felled in spectacular fashion by an unexpected blow, but she proved her graduate's mettle by collecting herself in short order.
Then, with a swollen lump rising in the very center of her forehead, she asked everything she wanted to know.
"How did you learn [Magic Bullet]? And [Ejection]?"
How had she acquired two skills in a single month—and beyond that, honed them both to C-Rank?
Unfortunately, Seo Yein was a woman of exceedingly few words, substituting short answers and head shakes for most replies, so the exchange turned into something like a game of twenty questions.
Anyone else would have thrown up their hands halfway through, but Ahn Jungmi, tempered by long years as Seo Yein's butler, had been seasoned to the marrow.
By now she had reached the point of understanding her charge at a glance—grasping the whole context from a mere handful of words, however carelessly mumbled.
And so, the full picture assembled, Ahn Jungmi nodded.
"So it was this Kim Ho-nim who taught you."
"Yeah."
"Then, Agassi—might the mentoring also be his doing?"
"He told me to."
"...!"
Ahn Jungmi felt her respect for Kim Ho swelling lushly in her heart.
What on earth had he done to motivate this human sloth of an Agassi? What was his secret?
Half hoping he might teach her if she asked, Ahn Jungmi lobbed the question out as if in passing.
"Seeing you labor so earnestly is admirable, Agassi—and, I confess, rather curious. Might I ask the reason?"
"..."
Seo Yein stood blankly still, staring into empty air. She tilted her head a little to one side, as though turning something over.
After a very long spell of thought, the answer that finally left her lips was:
"Just because."
It had simply, sort of, happened—was what it amounted to.
To Seo Yein, Kim Ho was a special existence: one of the very few whose status windows, as seen through her 'Eyes,' were filled with nothing but question marks.
And yet if asked whether that was why she had spent the past month at his side, it didn't seem to be the whole of it.
Then what other reason could there be? Seo Yein herself could not produce a precise answer.
She had only trailed along after Kim Ho—and somewhere along the way, without her noticing, she had come to attend class every single day, to fight the PvP assessments and the raids, to train in earnest, and to apply for mentoring.
She would most likely go on that way, too.
And so all of these unexplainable things, bundled together, amounted to 'just because.'
Needless to say, it was an answer Ahn Jungmi could neither comprehend nor accept.
But Seo Yein was not the only one who would be hearing it.
"I would like to meet this Kim Ho-nim for myself."
[85] The Support Ate It All