Chapter 27

Chapter : 27

Gilbert sent back both his reply and a catalog regarding the mana-related items I had asked about.

Gilbert described the items in exhaustive detail, almost like a subordinate reporting to his superior. I read through it and spent money.

I had plenty of money, and plenty more still coming in, so I simply emptied my mind and spent extravagantly.

Broadly speaking, the catalog offered two kinds of items.

There were Elixirs, and there were Artifacts.

If taken, Elixirs increased mana either temporarily or permanently.

The temporary ones were relatively cheap, while the permanent ones became absurdly expensive. If the effect improved by even the tiniest amount, the price nearly doubled, so it was truly the sort of thing one only did to burn money.

The moment the Elixirs arrived, I swallowed every last one that permanently increased mana.

“I still can’t really tell.”

I had consumed Elixirs worth hundreds of thousands of gold, and yet my dantian had barely even noticed. It felt like I had taken a few vitamins.

Once I went through the refining process of turning the absorbed mana energy into my own mana, even that effect would be reduced further.

Seeing that, I could understand why even nobles who bragged about their wealth were reluctant to buy mana with money.

The efficiency was atrocious.

Unless someone’s money was truly rotting away, it was impossible to justify.

If you were not like me—someone with money to burn, nowhere pressing to spend it, and an urgent need to increase mana—there was no reason not to avoid it.

Still, in my case, it worked out well enough.

Because Raphael had neglected training for so long, compared to the main characters, I was still very close to the state I had been born in, almost untouched from the beginning.

Perhaps because my dantian was still so pure, my absorption rate for the Elixirs was quite high. And besides, I had plenty of money. Even now, more was piling up in my balance in real time.

After the Elixirs came the Artifacts.

[Casis’s Gloves]

The moment I heard those had gone up for auction, I was genuinely dumbfounded. That was supposed to be an item that ended up in Jefrin’s hands.

Originally, it was a treasure the Crown Prince tossed him as a reward after Jefrin saved Bishot when she was in danger during their second year. It seemed it had not yet entered the imperial treasury.

Casis’s Gloves.

Once the built-in mana battery was fully depleted, it required forty-eight hours to recharge. But once fully recharged, it could raise the grade of one’s mana by an entire level for a short period.

Casis’s Gloves did not increase the quantity of mana. It elevated its grade.

Even if two people possessed the same amount of mana, the power they could exert with it varied so widely that the difference was nearly incomparable.

This was called Magical Power, or sometimes Dominion, and Casis’s Gloves strengthened Magical Power itself when activated.

Its one flaw was that the duration was extremely short, but judged purely by effect, it was an extraordinary item.

Even for me, buying it meant accepting a painful hit.

It was outrageously expensive.

Lastly, I purchased a large quantity of an herb called Star Lily.

Star Lily was a commonly used Mana Amplifier in many places.

There had not yet been enough experimentation for it to be safely used on humans, but eventually some genius alchemist was supposed to develop it for Jefrin. As I’ve said before, in the extreme early part of the story, Jefrin’s combat power was pitifully lacking compared with the other male leads.

To make up for that, Jefrin was given a great many growth events, and one of them was an Elixir Bishot would create.

Once taken, it boosted mana for about three minutes.

Later, once my own innate mana had increased, it would become useless to me, but for the present it was still valuable.

I took the gloves and the Star Lily and went to find Katarina.

After explaining the items I had bought, I asked her to spar with me just once. She snorted and laughed at me.

It was almost the sort of reaction a parent might have if their child had just entered university and then handed over all their saved allowance to a peddler.

“Hey, you idiot. True strength doesn’t depend on things like that. A truly strong person believes in his own power. As far as I know, not a single swordsman worth the name pulls this kind of nonsense. A sword is enough. Why are you wasting money on that? Are you really that rich?”

“Yes. Well, I am rather rich. But could you at least take a look once?”

When I stubbornly insisted, Katarina reluctantly drew her sword and pointed it at me.

The mere fact that her blade was aimed in my direction was enough to make my heart pound.

My hair stood on end, my breathing grew shallow, and sweat gathered between my fingers from sheer tension.

Was this what it felt like to have the muzzle of a gun right in front of your face? Even knowing the other person had no intention of firing, it was chilling.

With Katarina watching, I placed the Star Lily into my mouth.

The Star Lily displayed its effect the instant I swallowed it. I could feel mana that wasn’t mine. It was rather difficult to control. Whenever I tried to move only the mana amplified by the Star Lily, it froze solid and resisted my intent.

To use it, I had to gather the Star Lily’s mana into my own and drag it along. I forced the mana together with all the effort I could muster.

At the same time, I activated Casis’s Gloves. This was only the second time I had ever used them.

A current surged upward from the extremities of my body. My five senses sharpened, and the sixth sense called mana awakened. I could hear and smell as keenly as if my eyes had been closed, and my reaction speed reached the limits of my body.

In that state, I roused the mana within me. I tightened my muscles and told the mana inside my body that I was going to use it.

“Inhale.”

It had not yet been even three full months since I learned Force Release.

And the gap between Force Release and Double Force Release was the gap between a talented person and a genius.

Without outside assistance, this was a technique utterly beyond what I could ever have used at my current level, no matter what happened.

“Hey. What are you doing?”

Even after seeing it with her own eyes, Katarina sounded as though she could hardly believe it.

If I’d had my way, I would have answered her, but I felt that if I did anything else at all, my concentration would shatter. And that would mean the failure of the technique.

So I ignored Katarina’s words.

Double Force Release.

Once I actually tried to use it, it was horrifyingly difficult.

Ordinary Force Release simply required you to make the mana inside your body explode. The mana within the dantian was already one unified sphere.

You only had to touch it, so in theory, as long as someone had a sense for mana, they could hear the explanation and pull it off immediately.

But in the case of Double Force Release, I had to split that mana—already formed into a single mass—into two. That was where the difficulty began, and even after that, I had to maintain the separation and then complete the sequential detonations.

Any one of those steps by itself would already have been a grotesquely difficult test.

And every part of it was slower than the Double Force Release Katarina had demonstrated before.

The speed at which I split the mana, the speed at which I moved into detonation afterward, even the gap between the first and second detonation—every part of it was crude.

This was the best I could do.

But the technique itself succeeded.

My shoulder and arm moved like a whip and struck Katarina’s blade.

The impact felt as though it would split my palms apart. The two swords collided, scattering sparks in every direction, and the pressure of the blast sent my hair flying. The ground beneath my lead foot caved in, and Katarina was pushed back by roughly two steps.

Her feet remained planted.

The thought of stepping backward before someone like me would never have been tolerated by her pride. So she stood there with both feet fixed, like a boulder driven back by floodwater, sliding away from me instead.

SKRIIIIICH!

Skid marks appeared beneath her feet.

Biting down hard on her lower lip, Katarina said,

“Yes. At that level, I can understand relying on tricks.”

I grinned and answered,

“Right?”

Katarina had acknowledged it.

That was enough.

---

After finishing Raphael’s instruction, Katarina scratched at her jaw awkwardly, almost like a monkey.

Raphael’s rate of growth was monstrous. Normally, she would have felt pure delight, but the speed was absurd.

The reason Katarina had taken Raphael as a disciple was because he had defeated Jefrin.

That much was true.

But that did not mean Raphael’s talent exceeded Jefrin’s.

Nor did it mean Raphael had been stronger than Jefrin.

Across the countless real battles she had seen, Katarina had witnessed weaker men defeat stronger ones many times.

In a good number of those cases, it had been sheer luck.

Pure fortune.

Raphael, perhaps, could have been one more of those many accidents.

“No, that can’t be it.”

Raphael was different.

He had seized his own luck with his own hands.

He had compared himself and his opponent clearly, distinguished strengths from weaknesses, and, while accepting the possibility of defeat, taken the gamble necessary to claim victory.

That was where Katarina had recognized Raphael’s talent.

That was the nature of Raphael’s gift.

Swift and precise judgment, and the courage to cast the dice.

If it came to the use of the body itself, Jefrin was several times superior.

Katarina had thought that gap impossible to close. Even though Raphael had won in the entrance examination spar, she had been certain that, given time, Jefrin would utterly overwhelm him.

Once a disparity opened in physical performance, there was no way to bridge it.

And yet today’s strike.

It had borrowed the strength of things Katarina despised and looked down on, yes, but it had been heavy.

It was not on her own level.

If she had prepared for it, she was confident she could have brushed aside sword strikes many times stronger without effort.

The astonishing thing was that it had been an attack produced in only a few months.

He might actually be better than I was.

Katarina thought back on her own childhood.

During the day, she had helped her parents with farm work, and at night she had swung a wooden stick and honed her swordsmanship.

Yes.

Compared with Raphael, the environment she had grown up in had been utterly barren.

She hadn’t even had a proper wooden sword, never mind a genius master like herself.

Comparing Raphael’s speed of growth to her own in those days was meaningless. Katarina knew that.

And yet she couldn’t help comparing them.

Katarina regarded herself as one of a kind in the world.

No—perhaps one of only two.

Setting aside that old man from the White Lion Knights, no one else stood on the same ground as she did. Not now, and not in the future.

When she first saw Jefrin, she had thought that if that boy worked hard for decades, she could not be sure what he might become.

Even though Raphael had defeated him, she had still felt Jefrin had the greater potential for growth.

His talent was dazzling.

That might not have been true.

Raphael Isaac.

If that man continued to grow like this?

Not in decades.

In as few as ten years, it might even be possible—if he continued exactly as he was.

“No. Surely not. He said it was all thanks to the Artifact.”

Katarina shook her head.

It was still too early to speak of Raphael’s talent.

Whatever kind of strike he had produced, it had only been possible because he had borrowed the strength of an Artifact and an Elixir.

“Without things like that, he’s still lacking.”

Compared with geniuses like herself, that was true.

Compared with those blessed with extraordinary talent who had worked harder than anyone else to refine it into greatness.

If not compared to such monsters?

Among his peers, it would be difficult to find anyone who could match him, and even outside the Academy he would already have been capable of making a name for himself. On top of that, his growth remained smooth, so it would have been natural for him to grow arrogant, to relax.

“And yet why is he like that?”

Raphael ran as though something was chasing him. He drove himself beyond his own limits, and yet whenever she spoke with him, he did not seem like the type obsessed with strength for its own sake.

To him, strength was only a means toward some other goal.

Then what was it?

What was he so afraid of?

She had asked him several times, but Raphael had always avoided answering. It was as though he didn’t trust her, or believed she wouldn’t help him.

“He really is frustrating. Making a person this curious.”

He had probably made an enemy of something monstrous.