Chapter 181: A Sudden Engagement [1]

"So, what do you say, Ilya Belozersky? Interested?"

"Let me think about it first, sir."

"What’s there to think about?" Hakon raised a brow. "I’m offering you additional instruction without asking for anything in return. Most students would have accepted before I finished the sentence."

That was true, and Ilya knew there was little reason to refuse the offer from a practical standpoint.

Professor Hakon was an experienced professor who had already demonstrated that he understood Ilya’s fighting style well enough to notice problems Ilya himself hadn’t properly considered, and personal instruction from someone like that wasn’t something a first-year student would ordinarily receive simply because a professor found him interesting.

Still, Ilya hesitated.

Perhaps there was some small sense of betrayal toward Vera in accepting another person’s offer to personally train him.

It was a ridiculous thought when he actually considered it.

This was an academy, and the entire reason he attended Holy Trinity in the first place was to learn from people who knew more than he did, not attach himself to a single mentor and reject everyone else who offered to teach him something.

Vera had never asked for that kind of exclusivity from him either, and knowing her, she would probably call him an idiot if he rejected useful instruction because he was worried about offending her.

More importantly, what Hakon was offering was different.

Ilya thought back on everything Vera had taught him over the past several months, and strangely enough, very little of it involved teaching him spells.

There had been some, certainly, but most of what Vera gave him consisted of solutions to immediate problems.

When Niflheim threatened to freeze him from within, she gave him the foundation that eventually became the Ring of Fire.

When he lacked knowledge about his condition, she gave him enough information to understand what he was dealing with, and whenever he stumbled into another problem involving his unusual circumstances, Vera would usually point him toward something that allowed him to keep moving forward.

She had taught him plenty.

Just not in the conventional sense.

Vera had never sat him down with the intention of turning him into a particular kind of wizard, nor had she systematically developed his combat abilities from one stage to another.

Even the things she taught him tended to feel less like pieces of a larger curriculum and more like tools she believed he needed at that particular moment.

As far as Ilya understood it, Vera was teaching him how to sustain himself.

How to control what he possessed. How to keep himself alive long enough to figure out everything else.

Hakon, on the other hand, was offering that everything else.

He wasn’t interested in solving Niflheim or keeping its cold from killing him. He was looking at Ilya’s swordsmanship, his magic, his habits in combat, the advantages of his Domain, and all the weaknesses he hadn’t accounted for, then asking what those separate pieces could become if someone deliberately developed them toward the same purpose.

The culmination of his abilities.

That thought settled the matter rather quickly.

There was no reason he had to choose between the two.

If anything, refusing Hakon because of Vera would have gone against the very reason Ilya had transferred into the Magic Department.

He had already wasted seventeen years. Deliberately limiting who he could learn from would have been absurd.

Ilya let out a breath.

"Actually, forget what I said."

Hakon blinked. "That was quick."

"I’ve thought about it."

"For all of thirty seconds."

"I think quickly."

Ilya extended his hand across the desk.

"I’ll accept your offer, Professor."

Hakon looked at the offered hand for a moment before a satisfied smile appeared on his face.

He reached across the desk and shook it firmly, although there was something about the expression that immediately made Ilya wonder whether he had agreed to more suffering than Hakon had bothered mentioning.

"Good. Then I’ll start arranging something suitable for you."

"Something suitable?"

"You didn’t think I was going to train you the same way I train everyone else, did you?"

Hakon released his hand and leaned back.

"That would defeat the entire purpose of this conversation. I want to figure out what kind of fighter you can actually become, which means we’re going to have to strip apart quite a few habits you’ve spent years building."

Ilya’s expression flattened. "...You made the offer sound much more pleasant a moment ago."

"Of course I did. You hadn’t accepted yet."

"Can I reconsider?"

"No."

"I thought you said there was nothing stopping me from refusing."

"There wasn’t." Hakon smiled. "Past tense."

Ilya stared at him for several seconds before sighing.

Perhaps he should have taken longer than thirty seconds.

"...."

Even so, he found a small smile appearing on his lips.

Professor Hakon, from what Ilya knew, had once been a frontline combat wizard before eventually leaving active service and finding his way into Holy Trinity Academy, and that alone made the opportunity more valuable than ordinary private instruction.

That was probably why he had noticed Ilya in the first place.

Most professors evaluated him primarily as a wizard, which was perfectly reasonable considering he was now a student of the Magic Department.

But Hakon looked at him differently. He saw the swordsmanship and magic as parts of the same person.

More importantly, he didn’t seem interested in forcing Ilya to choose which one was supposed to define him.

Perhaps that was exactly what Ilya needed.

"I’ll be in your care, then, Professor."

Hakon’s smile widened. "You say that now."

"I already regret the phrasing."

"You should."

Ilya stood from his chair, but before he could turn toward the door, Hakon spoke again.

"Before you go, would you mind explaining why several strands of your hair turned white during our conversation?"

"...."

Ilya stopped. His hand rose toward his hair, although he caught himself halfway and lowered it again.

"They didn’t."

"...."

"...?"

Several seconds passed in complete silence before Hakon slowly leaned back in his chair, apparently deciding that whatever answer he might have expected, he wasn’t going to get it.

"...Very well, then."

Ilya opened the door.

"Have a good afternoon, Professor."

Hakon watched him leave without another word.

* * *

Crackle——!

The small sphere of light suspended above the table flickered before collapsing in on itself, scattering several sparks across the protective barrier surrounding their workspace.

"Ugh, another bust."

"It’s because Garen keeps changing the third junction!"

"Because the third junction is leaking!"

"It wasn’t leaking this badly yesterday!"

"That was because yesterday we couldn’t keep the damn thing alive for twelve seconds!"

Ilya watched Solveig and Garen immediately begin arguing across the table while the last traces of mana disappeared from between them.

Beside him, Ma?lle had already lowered her head and started recording the result as though the argument wasn’t happening, while Wolfram examined the spell formula spread across the center of the table and Lisbet quietly reset the measuring apparatus for another attempt.

It had been a little over a month since the six of them began working on Low-Circle Unanchored Spell Persistence, and despite the increasingly frequent arguments that accompanied their experiments, they had made more noticeable progress than their latest failure suggested.

Their earliest attempts had barely deserved to be called persistent.

The moment they severed the connection between caster and spell, the structure would begin deteriorating almost immediately, with mana escaping through dozens of tiny inefficiencies until the entire construction collapsed within a second or two.

Professor Edvard Rask’s work on closed-loop mana circulation had given them a theoretical direction, but turning a circulation model designed to minimize internal mana loss into a self-contained spell structure had proven considerably harder than drawing a loop and expecting the mana to obediently remain inside it.

Still, they had gotten it to work.

Their current prototype was nothing more than a modified illumination spell, chosen because it was simple, harmless, and required little mana to maintain.

There was no reason to complicate their experiments with a more demanding spell when the important part wasn’t what the spell actually did, but whether its structure could continue functioning after being completely severed from the wizard who cast it.

Three weeks ago, the light had survived for four seconds.

Two weeks ago, they reached seven.

By the beginning of the current week, ten seconds had become consistent enough that nobody celebrated it anymore, and their better attempts regularly lasted somewhere between twelve and sixteen seconds before destabilizing.

Their record was now at twenty-three, although nobody had managed to reproduce whatever combination of conditions had allowed that particular attempt to survive so much longer.

The latest one had lasted fourteen.

Ma?lle finished writing down the result.

"Fourteen point six seconds. Initial circulation remained stable through the first nine, then mana loss increased at the third and fifth junctions before complete structural failure."

Garen immediately pointed toward Solveig.

"See?"

"That doesn’t prove the third junction caused it!"

"It started there."

"And the fifth failed less than a second later. If your adjustment forced more mana through the third junction, then you could’ve destabilized everything downstream."

Garen opened his mouth, paused, then looked toward Ilya.