52. Field Training (2)
A warm afternoon sun poured down.
At the Stella Sky Balcony Café, Sayeran Orkan found herself having tea with the princess she served, Hong Si-hwa Adolevit.
It was not something that happened often.
Hong Si-hwa had said she had extended a certain degree of influence into Stella, but because she also had plenty to do outside of it, she tended to leave the internal affairs entirely to Sayeran.
“How was it?”
An abrupt question.
It was the first thing Hong Si-hwa had said in thirty minutes, after keeping her eyes fixed on the documents before her while elegantly sipping tea with one hand.
Sayeran thought for a moment, then answered as she always did.
“It was a method worthy of you, Princess.”
“Fufu, not that. I mean your impression of it. Was it disgusting? Did you come to hate me?”
“……That is not the case.”
How could she ever dare use a word like disgusting for the lord she served?
And knowing that full well, was it really acceptable to describe Hong Si-hwa—who would casually throw out such a question—as merely “mischievous,” using such a cute little word?
“Then let me change the question. What about my little sister? Hmm? What kind of reaction did she have?”
Eyes sparkling, she asked like a child full of curiosity, resting her chin on both hands. What in the world was this princess of hers thinking?
“She was simply…… calm and impassive. Is Princess Hong Biyeon’s reaction important?”
“Yes. Very important. I deliberately let her know part of my secret.”
“I did think it was a somewhat sensitive secret…….”
“No. You know nothing. It’s not that kind of secret.”
“……Pardon?”
Was she saying that the secret Hong Si-hwa had hidden—the fact that Isaac Morf’s body had been sealed beneath the altar—was not the whole of it?
“You may not know, but that child might have figured it out. She’s a clever girl.”
“……Is that so.”
“Yes. Did it upset you, the way I dismissed you?”
“It did not.”
“Don’t worry. Without you, I would not have become what I am now. I cannot imagine a life without you, so there is no need for concern.”
When she had been very young,
when Sayeran had only just learned her letters and had begun learning what etiquette even was,
her parents introduced Princess Hong Si-hwa to her for the first time.
Back then, merely hearing that the Princess was preparing to enter Stella Academy had made Sayeran’s eyes shine with expectation. She had been too young to know much, but at least she knew Stella Academy was a place only the finest elite mages in the world could enter.
But when she met the Princess in person, Sayeran felt a slight…… chill at how completely different she was from what she had imagined.
Eyes hollow as if the soul had drained out of them.
A dead gaze.
Each and every one of those vacant movements, as though she lived not in this world but somewhere else entirely, made Sayeran’s chest ache as if it were being torn apart.
‘You are so radiant and beautiful, and yet you cannot shine on your own.’
Her parents had made her serve the Princess.
But in that moment, Sayeran made a decision of her own.
That she would surely restore this Princess.
……At the time, she had not known.
She had not known what meaning that decision would come to hold.
“I’ll be going back now. Try to get along well with Biyeon!”
Sayeran did not understand why she would say that when she knew better than anyone that such a thing was impossible.
After Hong Si-hwa departed, Sayeran stared blankly at the teacup she had been drinking from.
‘Princess Hong Biyeon…….’
The “purification ritual” from this weekend.
It had also been a deeply unfamiliar experience for Sayeran, and a terrible one.
Hong Biyeon, who must have felt more disgust than anyone, had not shown it anywhere. She had calmly completed the purification ritual, turned elegantly on her heel, and disappeared.
No wonder the nobles of Hong Si-hwa’s faction had been disappointed as well.
They had imagined a young princess coming to expose a secret, only to recoil in horror at a truth she never could have expected. But instead, from beginning to end, she carried out her role perfectly and disappeared coolly and gracefully without losing her composure for even a moment.
Even though they were political enemies, Sayeran could not help but think she was impressive.
And there was one more thing—a question.
‘The binding spell.’
At that time, Hong Biyeon had looked as though she were suffering severely from the side effects of the binding spell.
But knowing the sort of person Hong Biyeon was, Sayeran believed she would certainly have rejected the binding spell.
With that proud personality of hers, would she really have obediently accepted a binding spell created by Queen Hong Seryu and Hong Si-hwa?
Taeribeon, believing Hong Biyeon could not deceive his eyes, seemed to have readily set aside his suspicion. But paradoxically, it was Sayeran—whose ability to discern magic was poorer—who found Hong Biyeon even more suspicious.
‘She definitely pulled some kind of trick.’
It was an absurd thought.
There was no way a girl of only seventeen could dare resist the binding magic created by Queen Hong Seryu.
Sayeran Orkan viewed the world realistically and thought in terms of calculation.
And yet, despite that, something she had felt in Hong Biyeon’s eyes at that moment kept returning to her.
Should she really just dismiss it as a simple trick of the imagination?
At that time, Sayeran had nearly pointed Hong Biyeon out.
If she had said just one sentence to Taeribeon—if she had told him she was suspicious whether the binding spell had truly taken hold on Princess Hong Biyeon and that he should scan her again on their return—then perhaps the truth might have been uncovered.
But she had not done so.
Strangely, she had been unable to.
She could not attack Princess Hong Biyeon.
Not once in her life had she ever hesitated like that, so what was the reason?
Thinking back on it now,
that had been the first time…… they had ever really met each other eye to eye and spoken as one person to another.
Until then, they had only attacked one another from afar. How many times had they ever actually stood face-to-face?
Clink—!
As she absently traced the teacup the Princess had used, she quietly closed her eyes.
The secret of Morfran Forest was so terrible and revolting that even Sayeran’s cold and ruthless sensibility found it difficult to fully grasp.
Knowing that all of it had been brought about by the Princess, would she truly be able to keep serving her with the same sincerity as before?
If her true heart no longer pointed in that direction, what was she supposed to do then?
Crash!
“……Ah.”
Hong Si-hwa’s teacup slipped from her hand
and shattered beneath the table.
The waiter quickly ran over and cleaned everything up neatly, but……
‘Was it already too late?’
It would be impossible to restore Princess Hong Si-hwa’s teacup once it had already broken.
As one would expect from a dating simulation game, there had naturally been a choice in this episode as well.
It was not about choosing a heroine (male), but about deciding which mission to be dispatched on.
Most players usually chose monster hunting.
There was no reason to deliberately pick a difficult Persona Gate in what was basically a breather episode.
However, he had heard that there were, very occasionally, cases like this.
If one had thoroughly built up one’s relationships with a character, one could get dragged into a route by having a choice effectively forced on them by that character.
Baek Yuseol had always played games very casually, so something like that had obviously never happened to him. He had even heard that it was uncommon among seasoned veterans.
And yet……
“You want to take the Persona Gate mission?”
Baek Yuseol himself had no idea how he had somehow gotten swept up by Hong Biyeon into this.
Well…… he had infiltrated the Adolevit royal palace directly, and they had even melted the frozen Levian coast together. If one had to say they shared a bond, then sure, maybe it was deeper than usual—but Hong Biyeon was not the kind of person who would become obsessed with someone over just that much.
‘Hmm. Is she interested in me?’
The sort of fantasy every man has at least once.
Just because he had made eye contact with a beautiful girl, he would immediately start imagining, Could she maybe be into me?
Of course, 99% of the time it was nothing but imagination.
The reason he did not confidently say 100% was because he had heard stories online that claimed, on very rare occasions, such things really did happen.
And there was a very simple way to check that 1% possibility.
“Hey.”
“……Speak.”
When he called out to Hong Biyeon, who was filling out the mission application form, she cast him a sidelong glance and answered curtly.
Just from that attitude alone, he could already tell everything he needed to know.
“Do you like me?”
At that, Hong Biyeon’s hand stopped dead over the document, and then she forced her neck around with a creak to stare at him.
Was it his imagination, or did those bright red eyes genuinely seem to burn with murderous intensity?
“……Are you insane?”
“Ahem. If not, then not. Why are you looking at me like you’re about to shoot me dead with your eyes?”
He swiftly snatched up the document Hong Biyeon had been writing on and read the mission application.
[Application for Persona Gate Operation]
[Difficulty: 3-Risk]
A 3-Risk Persona Gate normally required at least five 3-Class mages gathered together in order to be cleared safely.
Therefore, the Mage Association had established regulations stating that the minimum deployment force was at least one 4-Class mage and at least seven 3-Class mages.
To clear it with absolute safety and certainty, without any casualties, it was necessary to prepare forces above a certain level.
“So, the two of you are a duo?”
“Yes.”
“That’s right.”
The teaching assistant handling the registrations gave the two of them a suspicious look in turn.
Sometimes, when a man and woman submitted an application as a pair, the assistant would toss out jokes like, “Campus dating is forbidden.” But perhaps because this was a pairing of a commoner and a royal, it seemed even that sort of joke was impossible to make, because he said nothing of the sort.
“The two of you will be merged into another team. Student Hong Biyeon is still just a student, so she has not been officially registered as a 4-Class mage yet, and as for you…… you’re not just low-ranked—you’re registered with the Association as a 0-Class mage.”
“Uh, yeah. That’s true?”
“So you will be excluded from the counted combat force, and another group will have its personnel supplemented accordingly.”
It was an unavoidable reality.
Since Baek Yuseol was officially a 0-Class mage, he had taken plenty of abuse in the game as a glorified walking bag or porter and all sorts of other things.
Come to think of it, the poor treatment he received within the game itself had also been one of the reasons “Character Baek Yuseol” had such low popularity.
“Anyway, the mission briefing sheet will be distributed later, so—”
“Wait.”
He had been listening quietly to the assistant, but Hong Biyeon cut him off.
“The commoner…… is registered with the Association as 0-Class?”
“Huh? Ah, yes… no, I mean, yes. That’s right.”
Overwhelmed by Hong Biyeon’s force, the assistant unconsciously spoke to her politely, then cleared his throat and corrected himself.
“Why?”
“What do you mean, why……? Because they failed to properly measure his magical power, of course.”
The most basic unit used to divide a mage’s class:
total mana line capacity.
How many mana circles one had created was the clear standard by which a mage’s level was judged.
That did not mean a 2-Class mage was unconditionally superior to a 1-Class mage. A person with only 1-Class mana could still perform great magic.
But preconception was a powerful thing.
On average, it was common sense that a mage with denser mana and more mana circles would be able to wield superior magic.
“I can’t understand it……”
“Ahem, I think so too. Looking at his recent actions alone, it’s obvious that Student Baek Yuseol isn’t ordinary. But what can you do? That’s just how reality is. You know it too, Student Hong Biyeon. The Association is terribly strict.”
The older a mage was, the more they disliked change and the more strongly they tended to cling to existing tradition to the bitter end.
Even while knowing that one must break that mold to move to the next stage, they remained in place and stagnated.
The physiological limit of mages.
To them, a “0-Class mage” was a being that infringed upon the sturdy frame they themselves had built, and those arrogant old mages who could not tolerate such insolent defiance had simply defined Baek Yuseol as 0-Class.
“How stupid…… truly, unbearably stupid. If it were me, I would have issued his identification not based on useless things like mana lines, but on pure combat power.”
“S-Student Hong Biyeon? There’s nothing I can do about that either. It wasn’t my decision.”
“Hoo……”
Baek Yuseol stared blankly at the flustered assistant and the furious Hong Biyeon.
He had no idea why she had suddenly gotten so angry, but he did at least understand one thing: once she started getting mad, she was impossible to stop.
“Um, Princess. I really don’t care whether I’m 0-Class or whatever, so shouldn’t we just go—?”
At that, Hong Biyeon shot him a vicious look, then snatched the mission guide right out of the assistant’s hand.
“I care.”
And then she strode off first to attend the orientation for Persona Gate mission dispatches.
For some reason, chasing after her right away felt extremely frightening.
‘This…… is going to be okay, right?’
As he stood there blankly watching her retreating back, the assistant poked him lightly on the shoulder.
“Student Baek Yuseol……? This guide……”
“Ah, yes.”
The assistant glanced awkwardly back and forth between Hong Biyeon in the distance and Baek Yuseol, then bared his teeth in an awkward smile and clenched a fist.
“I-I wish you luck.”
“……Thank you.”
That was truly a tremendously helpful show of support.
— Read only on MugenCodex —
