Chapter 200 : Chapter 200
Chapter 200
"Did I perhaps make a serious mistake?"
At my words, the two teaching assistants looked at me with eyes full of contempt.
Hmm, this is bad.
Without Latrine's help, training the knights is going to take considerably longer.
Nothing for it.
Authority existed for times like these.
"Teaching assistants."
"Yes?"
"Go bring her back."
If I went myself, I could certainly bring her back, but it would clearly become a hassle.
This was precisely why graduate students existed — so professors could offload the troublesome work.
The two of them looked even more cold-blooded.
"......Fine. I will bring her back, but I am free to use whatever method I please?"
Shasha declared.
Given that Abrahal had sent her as a spy to me, she was surely trained in reading people and possessed various social skills.
"I trust you completely."
And three hours later.
"You rotten bastard!"
The three of them came back blind drunk.
I should not have trusted them.
***
Shasha and Jacy had gone looking for Latrine.
The two had not initially planned to get her drunk.
Rather — she was already drunk.
"How could he say such things? Huh? I got rejected before I even confessed — does that make sense? Huh?"
Latrine was sniffling and drinking hard liquor.
All Shasha and Jacy had done was sit across from her and agree with everything she said.
"I know, right? That man truly has no human heart."
"I mean, he asked us to help with his class a bit and turned us into graduate students? Is that right?"
"And there is no master's thesis or doctoral thesis system here, either."
"If there is no system, how do you graduate?"
"What is 'graduation'? Is that something you eat? Nom nom?"
"Drink!"
"Die!"
The three found common ground faster than expected.
It was all because of Cassian.
Jacy and Shasha admired and respected Cassian's ability, but that did not necessarily extend to his completeness as a person.
On the contrary, the more outstanding someone was, the more they tended to be a little unhinged in their own domain.
"Every time he disappears, who do you think cleans up the mess? Us, that is who — us!"
"And you know what the students say then? He is not Cassian, so how could the likes of you teach us? They look at us with those eyes!"
"Those eyes full of contempt — you do not know it until you have been on the receiving end!"
"You know what? I know about this. Those students, behind our backs, giggling like they are something special, looking down on us with that expression. And there is nothing we can say about it!"
"Because we are not professors!"
As the night wore on, it was Jacy and Shasha who had more complaints to air.
From Latrine's perspective, it was actually a somewhat amusing set of grievances.
Latrine's organization was the military.
A top-down structure where you did what you were told.
In Cassian's case, most of his absences were not out of personal negligence but for the sake of world peace and the fight against demons.
In many cases, their frustrations boiled down to: Cassian is too brilliant, Cassian is too excellent.
They could not bring themselves to blame the inexperienced students, after all.
But.
"That is right! Cassian is to blame!"
Latrine, who had developed a grudge against Cassian, cried Hear, hear! at every word they said.
The result was three women, dead drunk within three hours, storming back to Cassian.
"......"
Cassian held his head in his hands and stared at the three of them.
He had asked them to bring her back, and technically they had — but could this really be called "bringing her back"?
As he was thinking that, a hypothesis occurred to him.
'My sword absorbs mana into my body and discharges it through my body. Then could I do the reverse — push mana into someone else's body and force it to discharge?'
A skilled mage could expel alcohol from their system along with their mana.
A spell to cure hangovers and clear drunkenness, essentially.
If such a mechanism existed in magic, could something similar not be done with the sword?
Having organized the thought, Cassian immediately drew his blade.
"Huh?"
"What?"
"Hm?"
The three women looked at him with startled expressions.
"S-surely you are not going to kill us over a protest this small?!"
"Th-the tyranny of a professor! Graduate students are humans too! Give us our rights!"
"S-sob, I knew it the moment you exposed my unrequited love. You never intended to treat me as an equal fellow subject, did you!"
Cassian silently concentrated.
If nothing else, he ought to swing the sword quickly to cut off that stream of drunken babble.
He set his Sword Intent and drew the blade downward.
In that instant, the energy emitted by the sword pushed the surrounding mana hard toward the three women.
Rather than cutting something away, it was closer to brute-forcing mana into them.
And simultaneously, a powerful alcohol odor and the haze of intoxication flowed out of their bodies.
"Wha?"
The flush drained from the three women's faces, their color returning.
The racing blood calmed, and the brains numbed by alcohol partially returned to normal.
The world, which had been swaying sickeningly from side to side, righted itself.
In truth, they had been the ones swaying mercilessly.
The moment they realized that all of this had been accomplished with a single stroke of the sword.
"Brought her back, Professor!"
Shasha snapped to attention with blistering speed and presented Latrine.
It was a display of discipline that even Latrine found impressive.
"Huh?"
Latrine had not collected herself.
The alcohol was gone, but the shock of having her unrequited love exposed and the shock of being rejected before even confessing had not been resolved.
"B-brought her, sir!"
Jacy, reading the room, joined Shasha's formation.
She was not naturally the perceptive type, nor particularly confident.
But one skill she had picked up during her time as a graduate student TA was the art of riding someone else's coattails.
She did not know exactly what was going on, but following Shasha seemed unlikely to backfire.
"Eeeek!"
Latrine, who grasped the situation in an instant, flushed crimson.
"Hmm. Well done. You said to leave it to you, and you delivered admirably."
But Cassian was faster.
He might currently be an immature man consumed by the sword, but in his student days he had been the most perceptive, sharpest man around.
Reading the political dynamics of a campus had been child's play.
At his words, Latrine's fury redirected toward Shasha and Jacy.
'So these two sold me out?'
'Are you really blaming us here?'
Suspicion bred suspicion; trust shattered.
Cassian tidied the mood and started the lesson.
Of course, "starting the lesson" did not mean no one got hurt in the process.
"So, Latrine — having observed Duke Crownhardt's body more closely than anyone......"
Latrine tried once again to bolt, but her body was already firmly restrained by Shasha, a Sword Adept.
No matter that she was a soldier-class administrative officer attached to a military house, she could not escape the grip of an actual swordswoman.
"You will be able to instinctively catch even the most subtle irregularities. Take a look at this."
Cassian took up his sword and assumed a stance.
A diagonal standing position, sword dangling low, poised to charge forward at any moment.
It was an extremely familiar stance to Latrine.
"This is......?"
"Duke Crownhardt's stance before I refined his Sword Intent. The pre-refinement stance may be a bit unfamiliar to you."
She had known without Cassian saying a word.
The reason Latrine was startled was that the stance looked perfect.
"This is......"
"What do you think? Look closely."
She squeezed her eyes shut and flushed out her emotions.
Right now, this was a lesson.
The shame and the urge to die could be dealt with later — alone, in her dormitory at night, drinking in secret.
She pictured Duke Crownhardt in her mind's eye and slowly opened her eyes again.
Cassian's image and the Duke's began to overlap.
And soon.
"Ah. That — what is it? Something...... is a bit off?"
Latrine had found a very subtle difference.
"The toes, slightly...... or am I wrong?"
"No, you are exactly right."
Cassian smiled faintly.
And watching that smile, Shasha and Jacy thought:
'She really did stare at him obsessively.'
'To catch that level of minute difference......'
Their eyes grew unwittingly sympathetic, which made Latrine's face redden.
Her eyes seemed to glisten a little.
But Cassian pretended not to see and continued the lesson.
"Then what does it mean that these toes have shifted like this?"
"Pardon?"
"Or if I twist my wrist just slightly like so — what meaning does that hold?"
From there, it was the domain of Sword Intent.
A realm Latrine had never reached.
A story she had never felt, and would not feel for quite some time — her expression grew distant.
"I do not know."
At her honest confession, Cassian nodded as though he had expected as much.
"I will teach you starting now. Memorize it."
Saying that, Cassian began slowly dismantling the Crownhardt Ducal House's swordsmanship.
From the position of the fingertips to the line of sight, neck, toes, muscle usage, balance, and more.
Information that even skilled knights would struggle to absorb at once poured out endlessly.
Latrine, who had initially been listening comfortably and trying to memorize from familiar sword knowledge, suddenly raised her hand.
"W-wait a moment."
"And the elbows are...... yes?"
"I cannot memorize all of this at once. At the very least, let me get writing materials and organize it once before......"
"Ah, is that so? Why can you not? This seems simple enough."
At Cassian's words, the eyes of Shasha, Jacy, and Latrine all went flat with displeasure.
"I have never properly studied the sword in my life!"
"But this is not the sword. It is just theory. A kind of exam, really. Can you not just cram it into your head, like studying for a test?"
At that moment, Shasha and Jacy understood.
Ah — this man was the genius who had entered and graduated top of his class from the Imperial Royal Academy in fields like administrative science, military science, and political science.
He was not someone good with a sword. He was simply a genius with a good brain.
And when a person like that spoke this way —
'Insufferable.'
Cassian was genuinely puzzled as to why this was difficult.
Was he making his explanations too complicated again, like before?
But he was going very slowly, tailored to a beginner.
The truth was, Cassian had never had a good sense of the average person's cognitive level.
Until now, when teaching students, it had not mattered.
He slowly corrected their bodies and guided them toward proper form.
Students internalized theory through practice — by continuously using perfect form, even without knowing the theory.
But memorizing the theory itself — the theoretical data of a body divided into five hundred parts — on the spot, from hearing it once?
The one proposing that was the abnormal one.
"......Please let me go get writing materials."
At Latrine's plea, Cassian nodded.
Latrine walked toward the dormitory, shoulders slumped, dragging her feet.
It seemed that drinking alone tonight to nurse her sorrows would be impossible after all.
"What are you doing?"
"Huh?"
Cassian jerked his chin at the two who had been watching Latrine's retreating back.
"I said I am teaching both of you today too. If Latrine is at that level, I imagine you two are similar...... can you memorize all of it?"
The two silently slipped away toward the office.
As they walked, their eyes met.
'We are dead.'
'Dead.'
'I want to kill him.'
'Save the world first, then what?'
'Deal.'
It was a night when the stars in the sky were truly warm.