Chapter 42

Chapter : 42

I thought back on the spar I had with Katarina yesterday. She had batted away my Mana Bullets with ease.

If she had used the Aura Blade she mastered upon reaching Sword Master, that would have made sense.

Aura Blade.

The finest secret art a swordsman could produce.

With Aura, one could swat away Mana Bullets as easily as smacking mosquitoes.

But she had matched her strength to my level.

Her Sword Aura had been no more than the same Expert level as mine. It should have been difficult for her to knock aside Mana Bullets, and yet she had done it with absurd ease.

I kept thinking about that. Could I imitate it?

“Um... then I’m throwing!”

To practice reproducing the technique Katarina had shown me, I asked Leo to throw some stones for me. As quickly as possible, and in succession if he could.

He picked up several fist-sized stones and waved them over his head as a signal that he was about to throw.

It seemed he was worried I might make a mistake and get hit in the head while standing there unprepared.

“Here it comes!”

Whoosh!

Leo hurled the stone with all his strength. It came at me in a straight line rather than an arc. I tracked its path with my eyes.

Then I knocked it away with a wooden sword.

It was easy enough to bring the sword to the stone at the right moment. If I saw the posture of the throw, I could have done that with my eyes closed.

But the instant the stone met the sword, I knew I had failed.

This wasn’t it.

I had shoved the sword away with brute force, but Katarina had flicked aside the Mana Bullets lightly.

Her technique had felt closer to the way light struck a mirror and reflected.

It wasn’t the same as me simply smashing it away by force. The stone bounced up from the wooden sword and rolled across the ground.

Leo glanced at the stone lying on the floor and said,

“Did it work?”

On the surface, it had looked similar enough. No matter what else one said, I had still deflected the attack.

But the process had been completely different. If I did it like this, dealing with a stone was one thing, but handling a Mana Bullet would be awkward.

“No. I failed.”

“But it went flying.”

“It has to be lighter.”

I practiced over and over, trying to imitate Katarina. Leo matched my pace and threw stones for me for quite a long time.

As I kept knocking them away in different ways, some of the stones slammed into my body, and at times I lost my footing trying to force the movement and fell over, but none of that mattered. I knocked the stones aside, again and again. And then I felt that I understood a little more. Katarina moved again inside my memory.

“Like this...”

Until then, I had been too focused on nothing but batting the stones away. My mind had been fixed on the motion itself.

That wasn’t it.

I brought the sword to the incoming stone and stored the impact. Before that force could settle into my body, I stirred the mana within me. It wasn’t Force Release. It was something smaller than that.

I let the strength flow from my back and chest into my arm.

Then I moved the sword.

TWOONG!

I guided the stone along the flow. It rotated smoothly according to the angle of the blade, then sprang away in the opposite direction with the exact same force it had come in with.

Without losing even a shred of speed, the stone flew off and smashed into the ground.

“Ahh...”

Now I think I get it.

Leo must have realized it too, because he grinned and said,

“I think that one was a success.”

“Yes. Let’s do it a few more times so I can keep the feeling.”

I knocked aside about two hundred more stones before stopping. Now I felt confident that I could do it no matter how many times I tried.

---

Today was the Academy’s weekend. When I looked out the window, bright sunlight was pouring down onto the ground.

A clear day at noon.

My body felt languid as I stretched my arms toward the ceiling and thought,

Ah, I’m hungry.

Ever since Navier teased me the other day about my tastes, I had found myself craving good food from time to time. Whenever that happened, I looked for sweet desserts or quality meat, but something still felt lacking. I thought it over carefully and came to a conclusion.

Korean food...

Even I hadn’t expected this from myself.

When I lived in Korea, I had never once thought of Korean food as especially appealing. It was all carbohydrates, too little protein, and too much sodium. I had even argued with my mother, who was a devoted believer in Korean food, about it.

The thought I had held toward Korean food shattered only a few days ago.

I realized that if I just went on living however things happened to flow, I might never again taste the food I used to eat in Korea.

My eyes snapped wide open, and it was like a flash of light went off in my head. One after another, foods I wanted to eat came to mind with startling clarity.

Bulgogi... Samgyeopsal... Galbi...

I had been craving Korean food for days. Then, at last, the Academy’s weekend arrived. By some miracle, my schedule was empty, and for once I even had no appointments, so I had time to burn.

So I decided to make tteokbokki.

Once I sorted the ingredients into those that were difficult to get and those that were easy to get, the answer was cream tteokbokki.

I preferred rice cakes, but unfortunately they were too troublesome to obtain, so I substituted wheat cakes instead. In return, there was one mushroom here that was truly excellent.

When I asked what it was, since it gave soups wonderful aroma and texture, I was told it was called a Fragrant Mushroom, a useful thing employed both as food and as medicine.

Today, I intended to use that Fragrant Mushroom in the tteokbokki.

I finely sliced the mushroom, which looked exactly like a tiny parasol, then stir-fried it together with the other vegetables. The scent of the mushroom tickled the end of my nose and sent a signal straight to my stomach.

My stomach answered the aroma with a long growl.

Then I poured in milk, added the rice cakes, and simmered everything down. Making sure the cakes didn’t stick to the bottom, I stirred it for a little while and finished the cooking.

Forget plating.

I speared one of the rice cakes with a fork and tasted it first. I chewed it slowly with my molars and swallowed.

“Ah...”

The taste was excellent. If I ate enough of this to make a full meal, the rich sweetness would probably turn heavy, but for the first bite, that very sweetness was a virtue. It felt as though if I carried these Fragrant Mushrooms back to the modern world and sold tteokbokki made with them, it would be a huge success.

“This isn’t it...”

But I still felt unsatisfied. Only after eating the cream tteokbokki did I realize that this wasn’t the tteokbokki I had truly wanted.

What I wanted was tteokbokki loaded with bright red chili powder.

The kind that made your face flush hot and filled your mouth with little huffs of air as you tried to cool it.

This wasn’t that.

“What am I supposed to do with this?”

I had gotten too enthusiastic at the thought of making Korean food for myself. Looking at it now, the portion was far too much for one person. As I stood there wondering what to do with the leftovers, a face rose in my mind.

Agares Ingrid.

I’ll bring it to him.

I arranged an appropriate amount of the food on a plate and headed for his room. Since we were both scholarship students, his room wasn’t far from mine, so I arrived quickly. I knocked and waited a little, and then Agares opened the door with a book still in one hand, as though he had been reading.

“What is it?”

“Ah. I was cooking, and there was a bit left over.”

Agares looked at the tteokbokki and asked,

“What is this?”

At his question, I hesitated for a moment. Could something without rice even be called tteokbokki? Could something made from flour be called a rice cake at all? And wasn’t what I had done closer to simmering than stir-frying?

“It’s called tteokbokki.”

I leapt over all those doubts and called it tteokbokki anyway. With time, anything could be improved and turned into a better version of itself. If one stayed old-fashioned and trapped inside rigid definitions, one would never move forward.

“It’s a dish I’ve never seen before. Where did you learn to make this kind of food?”

“Ah... from the cook in my territory.”

“Cooking? That’s an unusual hobby for a lord.”

Agares gave that judgment, then let me inside. He tasted the tteokbokki. After chewing the rice cake a few times and swallowing, he said,

“I’d quite like to see the face of that cook. It tastes good.”

“Does it?”

“I was never fond of sweet things, but this is the sort of taste that would come back to mind later.”

“Right? I wasn’t especially fond of sweets either, but lately I keep reaching for them.”

“It doesn’t seem like a dish one would find in the Empire. Where is the cook from?”

“I wouldn’t know that much. I’m not the one who chooses the cook.”

“I see... Then I suppose I’ll have to find out for myself where the dish you call tteokbokki comes from.”

“What? Is it really that good?”

Agares nodded readily.

“Yes... good enough that I feel I absolutely must know what kind of dish it is.”

I was glad he liked the food, but at the same time I felt oddly unconvinced. Was it really that good? The fact that Agares wasn’t the sort to offer empty praise only made it stranger.

“If you’re that curious, I could tell you the recipe.”

“Tell me again later when you come to my territory.”

“All right. I will.”

---

Agares Ingrid stopped halfway through filling his glass with liquor.

Thunk.

He set the bottle down on the desk and held his head.

It was because of the food Raphael had brought. In the North, people from all sorts of regions gathered, and all kinds of cultures mixed there. Because of that, even if he never went out of his way to seek them, he inevitably came to know many different foods.

“What is it, then?”