Chapter 8
“…Ah, Teacher Haru!”
As soon as I came out of the principal’s office building, Miriam, who had been sitting on a nearby bench and swinging her feet back and forth, whipped around and shouted.
“Is it all over?”
“Yes.”
I nodded, casually sidestepping Miriam as she rushed toward me.
“Then hurry…!”
“Miss Miriam?”
Just as the excited Miriam was about to shout, a familiar elderly voice came from behind her.
“Principal?”
“Eek?! Princ—No, no. Why is the principal here?”
Sir Ludwig walked past the increasingly flustered Miriam and asked her a question.
“I hear you made some sort of promise with Instructor Haru.”
“Ah, yes… No, I mean, yes.”
“May I ask what kind of promise it was?”
“Well, actually, I promised to spar with her….”
“Oh dear, have you bullied someone else through sparring again?”
Miriam shook her head and protested.
“No! I wasn’t bullying anyone, it was….”
“I—I made a promise.”
I quickly spoke up before the flustered Miriam could say more.
“Hmm?”
At the sound of my voice, Principal Ludwig turned his head slightly, as if mildly surprised.
“She showed me around the academy. In return, I only promised to cross swords with her once.”
I answered while touching the magic sword hanging at my waist.
“I see.”
Sir Ludwig said that and gave Miriam a brief bow.
“I misunderstood. I was only worried about Miriam.”
“Ah, no… it’s fine.”
Miriam fidgeted and bowed at the waist, and I turned to her and said,
“Then… Miss Miriam. Would you show me around?”
“M-Me?”
Miriam blinked and asked in return.
“Yes. I’m not familiar with the academy’s layout yet. Since we’re sparring anyway… could you show me around too?”
I turned to Sir Ludwig and asked,
“I’m sorry, Principal. Things somehow turned out this way. Would it be all right if I asked Miss Miriam to show me around the academy?”
“I see no reason not to.”
Sir Ludwig answered with a faint smile.
“On the contrary, seeing you become friendly with a student on your very first day, I should be thanking you.”
“It’s nothing.”
I gave a small smile and spoke to Miriam again.
“The principal gave his permission, too.”
“….”
“Would you show me around?”
“…Uh, yeah! Got it!”
Miriam quickly regained her energy, nodded enthusiastically, and walked ahead of me.
“This way, Teacher!”
“Yes, yes.”
I nodded slightly and followed Miriam.
=
“I wanted to ask what kind of instructor you hope to become someday, Miss Haru.”
It was a question Sir Ludwig had asked.
An utterly theoretical question—and therefore, all the more difficult to answer.
“I….”
Haru trailed off. She wasn’t trying to figure out what to say, but struggling to draw out an answer already in her heart.
“…I don’t have any grand thoughts about what kind of instructor I want to become.”
Haru raised her head as she spoke. Though the answer was rather anticlimactic, there was a peculiar confidence in it.
“But I do want to be a teacher.”
“A teacher?”
“I heard you say that, Sir Ludwig. An instructor leads students, but a teacher moves forward alongside them.”
The faintest smile touched Ludwig’s lips.
“I don’t possess any extraordinary abilities. I don’t have Lord Roses’s discerning eye for seeing through people, nor the strategic acumen to command others. However….”
“However?”
“…Even if I can’t see into children’s hearts, I want to be able to listen to them and empathize with them. Even if I can’t lead them, it would be enough if I could walk alongside them. Thus, my modest goal is for the children to call me a teacher rather than an instructor.”
After finishing, Haru hesitated for a moment before quietly adding one more thing.
“…Just like my own teacher.”
Sir Ludwig nodded instead of answering. Then he asked Haru,
“May I ask about that teacher?”
Haru drew another breath and carefully opened her mouth.
But unlike before, she did not look at Ludwig.
Her eyes were focused on something beyond the man standing before her.
“My teacher was──”
.
.
.
‘I never thought I’d hear that name again in my lifetime.’
Watching Miriam recede into the distance with Haru following behind her, Ludwig slowly lowered his head and looked down at his hands.
They were sturdy hands, hardened over decades and deeply marked by calluses, scars, and wrinkles.
And whenever he looked at these hands, there was always someone who came to mind.
‘So this is what you’ve been up to….’
Ludwig slowly closed his eyes and raised his head toward the sky.
The late-afternoon sunlight shone scarlet through his closed eyelids.
‘You really stayed true to yourself to the very end, you stupid friend.’
=
“Oh, what’s this?”
“A barrier stone!”
Running her hand over the rough, stake-like stone deeply embedded in the ground, Miriam answered cheerfully.
“A barrier stone…?”
“Sparring always has to take place within a barrier stone’s effective range. That’s a school rule.”
Miriam tapped the barrier stone a few times and let mana flow into it.
“What was it called again? Illusion magic? Apparently, once it’s deployed, even if you get hurt inside the barrier, you heal instantly when the spar is over.”
“Convenient.”
Having lived a life with no connection whatsoever to that sort of magic, I naturally found myself intrigued.
I approached Miriam as she channeled mana into the barrier stone.
“Do I need to do this to all four barrier stones?”
The four barrier stones stood at the four vertices of a square with sides one hundred meters long.
Since barrier stones of this sort usually worked that way, I assumed all four had to be activated for them to function, but…
“Nope. One’s enough.”
Miriam shook her head.
“Mana threads connect them underground. So activating just one is enough.”
-Vrrrr…!
The moment Miriam finished speaking, the barrier stone emitted a soft blue light accompanied by a low, vibrating sound.
All four barrier stones did so at once.
“It really does.”
“All right, then.”
Still crouched, Miriam stroked the barrier stone, then slapped the glowing stone with her palm and sprang to her feet.
“Let’s begin!”
“Ah, right. We should get started….”
I muttered awkwardly and took an unsteady stance.
Even with barrier stones and all, they were ultimately nothing more than a precaution against fatal accidents.
This wasn’t some modern-fantasy setting, and there was no artificial intelligence or judging system to determine the winner.
Well, telephones and waterworks seemed to exist, too. Even so, the world had yet to progress beyond the level of the early modern era.
So, under normal circumstances, a third party would be needed to announce the start of the spar and serve as a referee to determine the winner.
But, as Miriam’s personality made clear, she was a loner, while I was a new instructor who had only just taken up my post that day. With no one to ask, we ended up starting the spar without a referee, in an awkward sort of limbo.
“Then… I’ll go first from this side?”
But Miriam, as if the absence of a referee didn’t matter in the slightest, shouted at me while repeatedly bouncing on the spot, as though shaking herself out.
Well, whatever. What mattered was that Miriam enjoyed herself. This wasn’t a spar where winning meant anything, so I only had to play along…
-Whoosh.
I heard the sound of the wind being split apart. I hurriedly forced my wandering thoughts to a halt and looked ahead, only to find that Miriam’s fingernails had already reached the spot directly in front of my eyes.
‘Wait, fingernails?’
Realizing I was in danger, I quickly bent my knees and leaned my upper body backward. In what was commonly called a bridge dodge, I planted my hands on the ground and sprang backward, scraping the dirt with my toes.
Immediately afterward, I checked Miriam’s appearance. Her bobbed hair had instantly grown long enough to reach her waist, while thick, coarse fur emitting a faint blue glow covered her arms below the elbows.
And most importantly, her fingernails. Each one had grown long and hard like a sharp dagger, scattering dense mana into the air from its tip.
‘Could that be… arcane magic?’
There were many ways to classify magic, but the most widely used distinction was between standard magic and arcane magic.
Standard magic was magic with a system recognized by the state, including magic with single elemental attributes such as fire, water, and wind. It was internalized through standardized instructional manuals compiled under state certification, and its defining characteristic was that it imposed almost no burden—or Rebound—on the user.
Arcane magic, on the other hand, was magic belonging to a system not recognized by the state. It was internalized through oral instruction or inherited traditions rather than instructional manuals, and included the unidentified transformation magic Miriam was using and the ‘blood magic’ passed down to me by my teacher. Officially, arcane magic was a unique form of magic not recognized by the state. Even when it was cast through exactly the same formula, the result varied slightly. Another defining feature was that the burden placed on the user was far more pronounced than with standard magic.
‘But that’s not the only problem. Miriam’s current form….’
I swallowed hard before speaking to her.
“Miss Miriam.”
“Mmm?”
She answered in a drawn-out voice. Fortunately, she did not seem to have lost her reason yet, so I breathed a sigh of relief and asked her,
“What’s the name of that arcane magic?”
“This?”
Miriam lifted her chin and smiled broadly.
“Wolf Magic!”
With her chin still held high, she shouted confidently,
“It’s arcane magic I developed myself!”
‘You developed it yourself?’
At her words, I involuntarily furrowed my brow.
Although I had labeled it arcane magic simply because I didn’t know what else to call it, the transformation she called ‘Wolf Magic’ was far more like
the ‘beastification’ of the demi-humans I had seen countless times during the Seven Years’ War.