Chapter 45: Goodbye, Young Ed
"What's with those papers?"
Oswald's smile froze at Uriel's question. For a split second, something sharp flashed in his eyes—gone before Uriel could be sure he’d seen it.
He shifted half a step to the left, placing his body precisely between Uriel and the door.
"Administrative documents," he said. His tone remained warm, carrying just a hint of an elder chiding a junior. "Rummaging through other people's files is quite rude, young man."
"I didn't rummage."
Uriel raised his index finger and pointed at the stack of curling, blackened parchment.
"I'm asking about the ones you just burned."
Oswald's smile didn't change. But he fell silent. In a room filled with nothing but the crackle of flames, that silence stretched unnaturally long.
The temperature in the office seemed to drop.
The fire popped softly. Hot air scattered a flurry of ash across the desk.
Without a word, Oswald picked up the brass poker, pressing the embers down twice before setting it aside. He didn't rush. Taking his time, he circled back to his chair and sat, sliding effortlessly into the posture he knew best.
In an instant, his entire demeanor shifted. The fabricated grandfatherly warmth was stripped away. As the firelight caught the side of his face, it cast harsh shadows over the deep lines of his age.
He studied the boy on the windowsill. An ordinary face. An ordinary uniform. So painfully generic that tossing him into a crowd would make him vanish instantly. Yet this utterly ordinary student was looking at him with eyes that were anything but ordinary. Too calm. Abnormally calm. Oswald added a final note to his mental assessment of the boy. Ordinary, and suicidally ignorant.
"You know," Oswald began again, his tone completely transformed. "When I was young, I claimed the champion's laurels in the Royal Grand Melee."
Uriel said nothing. He just listened.
Oswald didn't look at Uriel. His gaze drifted past the boy's shoulder, landing on the academy grounds burning red outside the window.
"Not a particularly impressive title. But I was young back then. Back then it was just me, a sword, and whoever was unlucky enough to stand on the opposite side of the arena. More often than not, I walked away the victor. And I walked off that stage on my own two feet, every single time."
"I eventually grew tired of the arena. It felt like child's play. So I moved on to dungeons. Which ones? The Molten Hell, the Labyrinth of Shadows—hell, I even joined the raid on the Evil Dragon's Lair. Cleared them all. Couldn't even be bothered to count. Back then, nothing could stop me."
He looked down at his own hands, his eyes lingering on the joints that still ached with old injuries.
"I thought it would always be like that. But mortals are ultimately just mortals."
He raised his head and met Uriel's eyes.
"You'll find your sword getting slower than it used to be. You see the opening coming. But by the time your brain tells your hands to move, the moment's already gone. The motion your brain commands is a motion your body simply refuses to execute."
His voice grew quieter. He trailed off.
"You'll understand when you reach my age."
There was no sorrow in his face as he spoke. No anger. Just a complex, heavy exhaustion. It was the look of a man who had bottled these words up for a very long time and never spoken them aloud.
Uriel listened. His expression barely changed. He glanced at Oswald's bald spot, then at the long-haired wig sitting on the desk.
He blinked. He lowered his leg from the window frame and hopped down to the floor. His shoes hit the stone with a soft tap.
"Done?"
Uriel rolled his wrists. He wasn't warming up for some heroic, protagonist-tier showdown. Honestly? He was just stretching because holding that edgy, one-handed windowsill pose for so long had made his entire arm go totally numb.
Fortunately, his poker face was immaculate. He sold the movement perfectly, turning a simple stretch into an aura of cold, murderous composure.
"I'm really not interested in a middle-aged man's midlife crisis monologue."
He finished rolling his left wrist and started on his right. This time, he was actually posturing for a fight.
"If you're out of your mind, I'll knock some sense back into you."
Oswald froze for a fraction of a second. Then he laughed. He was genuinely amused. His shoulders shook, and the chuckle squeezed out from deep in his throat, carrying a tone of almost patronizing tolerance.
"Interesting."
He turned and walked to the wall. A row of antique decorative weapons hung there—swords and shields displayed alongside his Royal Grand Melee trophies. He unhooked a beautifully maintained longsword, tested its weight in his palm, and tossed it backward toward Uriel without looking.
Uriel caught it. He gripped the hilt with one hand and gave it a test swing.
"I was planning to silence you anyway."
Oswald's tone was casual, as if discussing the weather. He drew his own blade. The hiss of steel sliding from its scabbard drew a sharp line across the office air.
"But I didn't expect you to actually have the guts."
He raised his tip and aimed it squarely at Uriel.
"It's a shame. If tonight hadn't happened, you and I might have made fine teacher and student. Perhaps even friends."
He paused abruptly.
"What is your name?"
Uriel tightened his grip on the sword and answered without a single heartbeat of hesitation.
"Ed."
"...Ed who?"
Uriel didn't answer, because he genuinely had no idea how to answer that.
Oswald chuckled softly. Forget it. The name didn't matter. Whatever this boy was called, it wouldn't matter in a few seconds.
Both of them settled into their stances simultaneously.
The office wasn't large. The desk and chairs ate up half the floor space. The remaining room was just barely enough.
Uriel saw it.
That was the exact look that turned the "perhaps" into absolute certainty. The old man hadn't been bragging. In his prime, he had been a top-tier killer.
Oswald stopped talking.
His sword tip dipped. His left foot stepped forward. His center of gravity compressed like a coiled spring pushed to its absolute limit. He launched a full-speed, full-power thrust straight down the center. The blade tore through the air, aiming dead at Uriel's chest. It was so fast it left a ghostly afterimage in the firelight.
And then Uriel went flying.
A full half-second before the tip even reached his chest, Uriel violently yeeted himself backward. He kicked off the floorboards, throwing his body into a completely absurd, physics-defying backward arc.
He looked like he had been yanked by an invisible rope. He slammed back-first into the window ledge with a dull thud, his entire body tipping over the sill and falling outward.
Then he dropped out of sight.
The sound of a body scraping against the outer wall drifted up, followed by a chaotic crackle. The raging inferno on the ground floor swallowed every other noise.
Oswald slowly retracted his sword. He walked to the window and looked down.
The fire below had spread into a massive sheet of flame. The blaze he had started had crawled from the building into the shrubbery and hedges. The orange glow projected upward, and thick smoke curled up the exterior walls, completely obscuring the ground below. He couldn't see a thing.
He stared downward for a while.
Then he looked at his own hands.
"...Did I actually hit him?"
His brow furrowed slowly as he replayed the exchange in his mind.
He had thrust his sword. The boy had flown backward, hit the windowsill, and tumbled out. Every step of the sequence was correct. But there was a lingering sensation of swinging through empty air. The moment the tip shot forward, there was zero physical feedback. No resistance of fabric tearing. No sticky drag of flesh parting. Nothing.
Normally, even a glancing blow should register in the wrists.
But there had been absolutely nothing.
"It feels like... he flew away before I even connected."
He dismissed the thought immediately.
An ordinary student. A teenager. How could someone like that possibly dodge his strike? Where would a kid find the precision to predict the exact trajectory, the complete body control to launch himself backward through a window, and somehow survive unscathed in a sea of fire? Impossible.
The fire had likely finished him already.
A sudden, hollow sinking feeling hit Oswald's chest.
Has my perception really degraded this much?
He quickly scrambled to rationalize it. He must have overexerted himself. The target was lighter than expected, so the force passed through without leaving any tactile feedback.
"Just a student. I thrust too hard, so I didn't feel the impact."
He exhaled a slow breath and casually stuffed the metal case containing the prototype elixirs into his pocket.
"I really do need that elixir after all."
The fire downstairs was burning beautifully. Big enough. Conspicuous enough. The Knight Order would tackle that first when they arrived, giving him plenty of time to slip out the back.
What a shame, Young Ed.