Week 5 Mentoring, PvP (11)
I sat across from Hong Ye-hwa and hammered out a few agreements.
First, her condition: for this week's PvP assessment only, the job of peeling the sticker would be handed entirely to Hong Yeon-hwa.
Given how her growth was trending, it would almost certainly end in failure — but it seemed she saw the value in her sister taking on the difficult role.
Of course, the accompanying drop in my own PvP score of fifty points was written into the deal as well.
And my condition was this: melting the Ten-Thousand-Year Cold Iron alloy.
I'd hoped the club president herself, or some flame mage with a special trait, might lend a hand.
But mid-conversation, Hong Ye-hwa suddenly mentioned her own sister.
Hong Yeon-hwa, it turned out, possessed exactly the 'special trait' I was looking for.
Use her as much as you like.
I hadn't asked for the girl's own consent yet, but as far as her guardian(?) was concerned, approval had been granted.
With the important terms settled, that was the end of the negotiation proper.
As a small addendum, I was asked to help Hong Yeon-hwa learn as much as she possibly could — with full ownership of the massive ruby handed over to boot.
Since the terms were vague and heavily dependent on my discretion, it felt less like a trade and more like a favor.
But the value of what I'd received was far too high to treat it so casually, so I intended to work for it properly.
Thanks to this tangled web of reasons, I found myself joining Hong Yeon-hwa and Dang Gyu-young for their one-on-one close-combat training the very next day.
Not that I did anything special — I simply stood off in a corner of the Circular Colosseum and watched the two of them go at it.
More precisely, I watched Dang Gyu-young fling shadow magic of every variety at Hong Yeon-hwa, and Hong Yeon-hwa roll across the arena floor in equally varied ways.
"Ugh."
"Kgh."
"Aack!"
She threw her whole body into dodging every blow, but it clearly wasn't easy.
Before long, a massive shadow hand seized Hong Yeon-hwa and hurled her with all its strength.
She arced through the air, tumbled across the ground, and lay sprawled in a heap.
Just as Dang Gyu-young raised her back up to resume the fight, I slipped in and cut in.
"Senior."
"Hmm? What is it?"
"What if we changed the method a little?"
"Change it? How?"
"I think mixing attacks in would suit the sticker PvP better."
It wasn't that Dang Gyu-young's beatdown training method was wrong.
Pounding someone relentlessly to draw out their hidden potential was a traditionally effective technique, and I'd quietly used it plenty of times myself.
Case in point: Hong Yeon-hwa's close-combat skills had visibly sharpened compared to just a few days ago.
Her one flaw, if I had to name one, was that all that growth had gone exclusively into blocking and evading.
Since this week's PvP objective was peeling off the sticker, she needed to practice attacking too, so her offense and defense could find the right balance.
"……!"
Hong Yeon-hwa's face lit up instantly.
Is this what a desert traveler looks like when they spot an oasis?
She'd been bracing for a week — or at least the rest of this mentoring cycle — of getting pummeled into the dirt, and now that I'd proposed a different training method, it must have felt like her suffering had already been cut in half.
Dang Gyu-young mulled it over, apparently found the logic sound, and flicked a sticker my way.
"Fine then. You show us. I'll watch first."
Meaning she'd decide whether to adopt it after seeing how I handled things.
I didn't hesitate. I slapped the sticker onto my forearm.
Dang Gyu-young wasn't exactly a natural teacher herself, so it seemed best for me to demonstrate once, in the role of the seasoned drill instructor.
I pointed at the sticker and addressed Hong Yeon-hwa.
"Come peel it off. I'm only going to dodge."
From Hong Yeon-hwa's perspective, I wasn't as overwhelming as Dang Gyu-young, but I was still a difficult opponent.
So her approach was careful, deliberate.
Once she closed some of the distance, she built up speed and thrust her hand straight for the sticker.
The instant her fingertips were about to make contact, I cast Thief's Step and slid backward like smoke.
Whiffing at empty air, Hong Yeon-hwa strode in again and reached out — but I'd anticipated it, and this time walked forward to meet her.
The end result was the two of us crossing paths and passing each other by.
"……!"
Startled, Hong Yeon-hwa froze in place for the briefest of moments.
Then she spun around, rapidly chanting a spell, and snapped her fingers.
Combustion
— Boom!
A small burst of flame erupted, but I was already clear of the blast radius.
She'd apparently cast another spell in that same sliver of time, because a lava whip came lashing at me.
I tilted my body just enough to slip past each strike, while Hong Yeon-hwa kept the whip cracking.
She really has improved.
Back on Monday against Dang Gyu-young, she'd tried to snag the sticker directly with the lava whip.
Unless you were a whip master, aiming such a demanding target with a weapon you never normally used was a massive overreach.
Now, by contrast, she was using it purely to restrict my movement while going for the sticker with her own hands.
She'd found a more efficient approach — that much deserved praise.
Still a long way off, though.
She'd clearly banked some experience at mid-to-close range, but peeling that sticker off me would take a great deal more practice yet.
Hong Yeon-hwa kept up the harassment, and when the gap between us shrank, she reached for me again.
I gave her just enough hope that she might touch me, then twisted away the instant before her fingertips arrived.
"Kgh……!"
Her pride stung, she swung the lava whip all the harder, laced with small fire spells in between.
— Boom! Boom-boom!
The pattern repeated itself: Hong Yeon-hwa harassing, closing in, and lunging for the sticker by every means she could devise, while I evaded every single attack.
Watching from the sidelines, Dang Gyu-young let out a short breath of admiration.
"Oh……."
"Even I learned something from that."
"He dodged that?"
At first she'd watched with a light heart — a bit of roughhousing between juniors, and a chance to rest — but seeing what I was actually doing, something seemed to click, and now she was studying my every move with dead-serious eyes, committing each motion to memory.
In fairness, this was only because I'd insisted from the start that I would dodge everything. A mentor doesn't strictly have to evade it all.
If it were Dang Gyu-young, she'd naturally work out her own blend of defense and evasion.
And whether her version worked would be discovered firsthand by Song Cheon-hye and Gwak Ji-cheol, whose turns came next.
When today's mentoring ended and we stepped outside the Arena,
Hong Yeon-hwa looked like half her soul had left her body.
The sticker was one thing, but she'd assumed at least a few of her harassing fire spells would land — yet she'd never managed to touch me even once.
She seemed swallowed by the self-doubt of a girl wondering if her skills had always been this meager.
And at the same time, her eyes as she watched me were full of fear.
Before, her magic had simply been blocked by something and refused to connect. But the one-on-one duel just now had taught her one more truth.
That if I wanted to, I could simply not get hit at all.
Judging by her expression, her inner thoughts ran something like:
'What kind of monster is this person…….'
By every measure, she wanted to be anywhere but near me.
She rolled her eyes sideways to gauge my mood, then said,
"Well then, I'll be going…… now?"
And made a swift bid for the exit.
But I couldn't just let her run. I still had business with her.
"Hong Yeon-hwa."
At the sound of her name, her body froze mid-stride, as though someone had seized her by the nape of the neck.
She turned her head slowly.
"Wh-why? Me……?"
"Come somewhere with me."
"With you? Where……?"
The color was already draining from her face,
as if I were dragging her somewhere from which there was no return.
Drag her along by force and she'd bolt, I figured, so a little explanation and motivation were in order.
"I hear you have Aqua Flame."
"Did Unni tell you?"
The trait I'd demanded from Hong Ye-hwa to melt the Ten-Thousand-Year Cold Iron alloy was none other than this.
Aqua Flame.
A trait that manifested in only the rarest fraction of a fraction of flame mages.
Rare enough that even the Hong clan, a prestigious house within the Ruby Magic Tower, passed it down only sporadically.
A flame mage with this trait held overwhelming elemental superiority over every form of water and ice.
They could kindle fire even in the crushing dark of the deep sea, and deal damage that ignored an opponent's water-attribute defenses entirely.
Beyond that, once its rank climbed high enough, it could even make inroads against defenses of other attributes — a trait whose mere existence was a crushing advantage.
Hong Yeon-hwa's 'rising star' title from the Magic Tower Council reportedly owed a great deal to this very trait.
There was just one problem.
"I heard it stopped growing at E-Rank."
"……She told you that too, huh."
Hong Yeon-hwa's face darkened, with a flicker of irritation toward the sister who'd aired such an embarrassing fact.
Traits as powerful as Aqua Flame didn't come along often.
But even the mightiest trait was useless at a low rank.
Word had it that her Aqua Flame had been stuck at E-Rank for ages. She'd thrown every tool she had at breaking through, made no progress, and had all but given up by now.
For me, it was the perfect situation.
"What if I told you there's a way to break through to D-Rank?"
"What? Really?"
"Yes."
Hong Yeon-hwa closed in on me, questions spilling out in a flood.
"You can really break it through? Aqua Flame? Not some other trait? How?"
She was so worked up she'd apparently forgotten who she was talking to.
Hardly surprising — after years of yearning for and hunting after an answer, to be handed one out of nowhere.
Still, the explanation could wait until she'd calmed down a little.
I held my silence and stared at her for a moment, and she snapped back to her senses and scurried a few steps away.
Reason seemed to have returned in decent measure, so I spoke again.
"Basically, the rank of a skill or trait rises every time you cross a wall that the system has set up. You know that much."
"Yeah, that's common knowledge."
"And the type of wall you have to cross depends on the skill's inherent nature. You know that too, presumably."
"Yeah, that too."
Take Monstrous Strength, for example.
Since it's a trait that massively reinforces physical power, the wall it demands would be 'lifting something so heavy that your current rank can barely budge it.'
By the same logic, for Aqua Flame — with its potent penetrating force against water and ice attributes — the wall to cross was obviously:
"You burn targets steeped in intense cold with your fire magic, over and over……. And that's where you stalled out at E-Rank."
"……Right."
Of course Hong Yeon-hwa had tried that method.
She'd worked at it earnestly in her own way, and it hadn't worked. Wondering if she needed to cross a different wall entirely, she'd tried her hand at various other approaches, failed each time, and arrived where she stood now.
"That method wasn't wrong. And you don't need to cross some other wall."
"Th-that's……"
Half believing, half doubting.
My tone brimmed with such certainty that it sounded right — but then, if that were true, why was she still stuck at E-Rank?
I kept going.
"If you've got the direction right and still see no results, the cause is one of two things. Either the quality is lacking, or the quantity is."
Translated to Aqua Flame: either the things she burned were too low-grade, or she hadn't burned enough of them to push the rank up.
"……"
Hong Yeon-hwa went quiet for a long moment, apparently comparing my words against her own memories.
I asked her:
"Tell me what you used when you were grinding for rank."
"Ice golems, frost spirits, and also……"
She rattled off an assortment of ice-attribute monsters and materials.
Backed by her clan's resources, the quality had been reasonably decent.
However,
"None of those would've lasted more than a few minutes of training, would they."
"Right."
Before Aqua Flame, everything melted away in an instant.
No matter how she stretched it, the training time simply couldn't be extended.
And she couldn't exactly pour ice-attribute materials into the bottomless pit indefinitely — like filling a leaking jar.
Back then, she hadn't even had any certainty that this approach would work in the first place.
Which was precisely why the proposal I was about to make was one Hong Yeon-hwa could never refuse.
"What if there were an item that carried intense cold — and didn't melt easily?"
"……!"
With that, Aqua Flame would have to grow.
"Something like that really exists?"
Hong Yeon-hwa asked, but instead of answering, I held my tongue and started walking.
As if under some spell, she trailed after me, quick and quiet.