Back in the days, I couldn’t really ask Mylarka for help given what had happened between us, so I had Verlaine help me with the first transfer-crystal we found and I managed to learn a few things from it.
The first is that the magic circle for Transfer Magic cannot be written by a human mage alone since they don’t have enough strength to reproduce it correctly.
The principle behind moving to a far location was totally different compared to the one behind moving to a close one, and it couldn’t be reproduced in any other way if not by using the crystals, which was why they were so few in the first place.
Still, teleporting to a close point drained quite a lot of magic power even to me.
“You studied the transfer-crystals and managed to learn how to teleport, Teacher?”
“Eheh… you did too? Good. Who knows how many you found so far. However I never taught you how to imbue magic tools with magic.”
“You taught me the basics, didn’t you? As long as I can read the runes, I can find a way to use a transfer-crystal.”
“My, you really are special, Dee. Stellaphact’s1 runes will never be readable by your average kid.”
She slightly acknowledged me when we clashed our swords too, although sarcastically.
I kept the feeling of happiness that was surging in me at bay. Spirit Limiter Hold could suppress my emotions too.
“Stellaphact… that’s a unique transfer-crystal, right?”
“Only because this country’s archaeologists have yet to dig that deeply. You went in the deepest part of the royal researching division, didn’t you? If you did, I’m sure you know what I mean.”
“Why are you telling us that now…?”
Mylarka asked, trying to let the talk go on. She never butted in because she was concentrating on preparing a magic field that could jump at Teacher any moment now… and thinking that she was doing it without being noticed gave me the goosebumps from nervousness.
However, Teacher knew how to seal magic, so that move was useless.
“I believe that Dee will come back to me, and I will teach him every single thing he wants.”
“I don’t want to comment on your wish of dying by his hand… and I don’t mean to insult you, but your love is very twisted.”
“Eheh… people never speak the truth, don’t they? Thugs almost caught you when you ran from him. You hurt him, and yet you didn’t give up on him and walked by his bar many times to see how he was doing, didn’t you? You wanted him to be fine, but you fled.”
“Mylarka, don’t listen to her. She’s going to mess with your head.”
The genius girl fell silent.
It was normal for Teacher to know everything.
Her strength was to remember everything, almost like her memory had no limits.
While my information network was built on my guild members, Teacher’s was based on her ability to read the memory of anyone she came across simply by approaching them. She only needed a few days in a place to gather a terrifying amount of information.
That was also why I knew she didn’t really want to kill us right now.
Also, I cast Mind Guard on us to block that monstrous ability. It prevented her to literally read through us.
“You are so sweet, Dee… do you remember? When you were attacked by that hurt wyvern you healed it right away.”
“And you’ve been the one to save me when I was badly wounded.”
“Yes. You’ve been so stupid that I thought helping you couldn’t hurt. Here you are now, still standing because of a whim.”
Whenever I thought she was being kind to me, she always hurt me. I couldn’t understand her when I was a child.
“And yet you’ve taken me under your wing. You acknowledged my power… and now I must stop you.”
“I’ll be blunt… Blue Sagittarius and Purple Scorpio have been terrible for a long time now. They didn’t keep up with time. They only accepted requests to satisfy their members and never opened to new business. It would’ve been better if only half of the twelve guilds in this capital were still around. The others are useless, they have no reason to exist.”
“Why do you know so much about the guilds? Why did you come back?”
The answer to Mylarka’s question was obvious. My teacher wasn’t called ‘Ashen clown’ for nothing.
I would’ve never expected that my teacher had something to do with the guilds. I could’ve found information about it if I wanted, but I wanted to forget about her so badly I never thought about it.
Why did the twelve guilds have a color in their name?
Had they always been twelve? I already knew they were not.
“I’ll tell you once you manage to win, Dee. And you, girl. Keep your magic away, it will never graze me. This is only between Dee and I.”
“What…?!”
“I know the only magic who can affect her. It would be best if you don’t show her too many of your cards… Teacher has the ability of analyzing anything’s structure and nullifying it. Just like you.”
“What?! No, it can’t be! No one can dispel my magic!”
My teacher didn’t inform Mylarka that I could do the same. When our battle began, she would see it by herself.
“The only opponent worth of being called that in the expedition party is the demon girl. She might even overpower me when she goes all out in terms of sheer strength. On the other hand, dealing with your magic or that knight’s wouldn’t be hard. The spirit sword is annoying, but it’s possible to get through it… like this.”
There was another kind of unique spirit in the world along with the sword spirits—the shield spirits. They granted an impenetrable defence, and once they were summoned, they took the shape of a shield on the summoner’s arm.
The murals in some ancient ruins showed those same shields protecting the arm of the Lance Goddess.
I knew my teacher could use sword spirits, but I had no memories of her summoning the shield ones too.
Somehow I knew she could do anything, but seeing it with my own eyes was simply terrifying. I could vividly hear the danger bells screaming in my head.
“She summoned her equipment…?! So there are other spirits like the swords’ ones…?”
“The armors’ ones exist too. I suggest you to lay your hands on some if you want to be very strong. No matter your rank, everyone’s defence is always paper-thin.”
She swung her sword and a cutting wave of magic power hissed through the air, directed to Mylarka. Not sensing any bloodlust before the attack, she was surprised and didn’t react in time to defend herself, but luckily I knew that Teacher acted like this, so I jumped between them and fended off the incoming attack by cleaving it.
“Wow, Dee, how fast… she must be very important for you.”
“I didn’t feel any bloodlust… I can’t read her at all…”
“She wasn’t this mean back then. Teacher, can I speak my mind freely?”
I kept our foe’s attention in check by gathering magic in my sword until Mylarka had stepped far enough to be out of danger. Teacher allowed us to and let her magic flow freely out of her.
Then, it split into different kinds, powering both her defensive and offensive prowess to an insane extend.
“You can’t break this shield. I tried many times to and I always failed. It will be the same for you.”
She knew my power very well, but I had yet to remove my limit. I couldn’t tell if she noticed it or not.
If she did, she surely had something up her sleeve to counter me.
“We can’t tell before I try. Besides, I don’t need to break my foe’s shield to take them down.”
“You can’t do it with the little magic you have. You can’t win against me as long as you keep it so cramped.”
No… you just never bothered to look at me closely, not even when I was about to leave you five years ago.
After all that time, although her presence was still towering above everything, her magic power hadn’t changed in the slightest. However, I could feel she was more powerful.
After our expedition, I kept racking my brain on how to train myself no stop. The limiter removal was the product of all that hard work.
I am the kind of adventurer who wants to become better, no matter how strong I become.
“Stop looking at me like that.”
Teacher’s voice was dry, her look stern.
“Why are you looking at me with pity? You’ve never been that kind of boy. You should just keep following me like you always did. It must be that way. Forever.”
“I’m not pitying you. I just understood that I can’t lose against you.”
“Is that so…? I will never lose against someone who restrains himself like you. Are you saying you can take me down without getting serious? Without bloodlust or any wish to kill me?”
Her words confirmed that she didn’t know about that card up my sleeve.
She also implied that the reason why she was back was seriously me.
She expected to forget me like she always did when she tossed everything away and moved to another place, but this time she failed to.
I was probably like a boulder in the middle of the flowing river that was her endless journey—she just couldn’t get over it.
“You won’t break this shield and you will never hit me, Dee—”
She didn’t finish her sentence: I teleported in front of her, my sword already swinging down on her, but she rose her shield and blocked me.
It was the first time I saw that expression on her face. For a moment, she looked exactly like a child whose time had been stopped.
If she really was immortal… if her time had really stopped, she would’ve walked on the threshold of time forever, unable to grow like any of us.
“I’ve been waiting for you in that village… I’ve been keeping my promise and waiting where I taught you how to fight… and yet you…!”
A force field burst out of her shield and made me fly a short distance away.
That was another use of that shield.
I could come up with an anti-magic spell to nullify it if I had enough time to analyze it, but I didn’t.
I wasn’t quick enough… but I could be. Even if I had to see my teacher despair.
Spirit Release, Limit Burst.
I felt like my body was freed from its chains, and the world around me started to change.
My thought and body reached an impossible speed and I jumped again at my teacher, taking the force field head on.
In that brief moment, I managed to analyze and nullify her defence, then I swung my sword again and she blocked my assault with her shield.
Sparks flew around us.
“Why are you quicker than me…?! You shouldn’t be able to…!”
“Didn’t you want me to kill you? Why do you sound so whiny?”
“You’re mine…! Why…? WHYYY?!”
Her feelings were evident.
She never had interest in anything other than me since the day we met.
Cleaver after-image – Thousand-cut dance.
I mimicked one of Aileen’s secret hand-to-hand techniques which consisted in attacking the foe using the after-images of the sword as a decoy while attacking from other directions. It was usually used to unleash a flurry of slashes on multiple enemies and thanks to my spirits it was about eighty percent as strong as the original.
I combined that with Teleportation Magic and imbued each and every attack with Support Magic, trying to hit her as hard as I could.
She was reacting at a breath-taking speed, and sparks danced all around us to the beat of our clashing.
However, now that I nullified her force field, she was sustaining all the shocks on her sword and shield with her sheer strength, and after about one hundred of them, she got on the offensive and started to swing her sword around with deadly precision.
We kept that head to head fight up for a while, but Teacher slowly lost ground, and my last attack crashed on her shield with a thunderous roar, pushing her a little distance away.
She fell on her knees, blood staining her tattered clothes as it trailed out the countless cuts on her body. Her sword was in bad conditions as well: plenty of cracks covered it and its blade was chipped.
Her shield had taken several damage. It was now filled with scratches, cracks and dents, but it had the ability to slowly repair itself.
I could’ve damaged it if I reproduced Cody’s sword of light too, and maybe if we attacked it together, we could even be able to break it.
“Dick… that’s Aileen’s technique…!”
“Mine aren’t that strong, so it’s easier if I learn and use those of other people.”
“Your adventurer score can’t just be slightly over 100.000 points… the entire expedition might not be able to bring you down right now…”
“I don’t think so. My reproductions will never be as good as the originals, but being a jack of all trades comes in handy sometimes.”
Mylarka’s face was puzzled, and I couldn’t help but smile to her. I almost felt guilty to see her taken aback like that.
I thought she wouldn’t even be surprised to see me using the same magic as her at that point.
When our conversation ended, Yuma, who was on Aileen’s shoulder, Cody and Verlaine showed up from the ceiling door.
That was the first time they had seen me like that.
As soon as I saw them, I restrained my power again and had my sword disappear.
“Dick… I ran like crazy because I thought you were having a hard time, and yet here you are… victorious.”
“Y’know, I felt like a shiver running down my spine when I saw you a minute ago… later can you tell me what happened?”
“Dick, is that the head of White Aries…? O-Oh no, her clothes are in tatters…!”
Verlaine gave Yuma a sidelong glance and approached Teacher while untying her own apron, which then used to cover the woman as the best as she could.
My teacher wasn’t still on her knees due to the cuts on her body, which weren’t a big deal thanks to the defensive magic she was using, but due to her shortage of magic power. She had almost drained it all to keep up with our fight.
I was so focused on our fight that I hadn’t noticed that she was now half-naked: her clothes were in such bad condition that Verlaine’s apron was the only layer that blocked my eyes from seeing what I shouldn’t have.
Once by her side, the former Demon Lord crouched down nearby Teacher, her gaze stuck to the woman.
“I was not sure that my Master’s teacher was one of them. I never expected you to be real… and who could expect you to be defeated.”
“Them…? Verlaine, do you know something about my teacher?”
Ashen clown looked like an elf, but she wasn’t.
Verlaine looked up to me, a hint of hesitation in her eyes.
Then, she started explaining what my teacher—the SSS rank adventurer who wandered the lands and who was strangely affiliated to White Aries—was for real.
Back in the days, I couldn’t really ask Mylarka for help given what had happened between us, so I had Verlaine help me with the first transfer-crystal we found and I managed to learn a few things from it.
The first is that the magic circle for Transfer Magic cannot be written by a human mage alone since they don’t have enough strength to reproduce it correctly.
The principle behind moving to a far location was totally different compared to the one behind moving to a close one, and it couldn’t be reproduced in any other way if not by using the crystals, which was why they were so few in the first place.
Still, teleporting to a close point drained quite a lot of magic power even to me.
“You studied the transfer-crystals and managed to learn how to teleport, Teacher?”
“Eheh… you did too? Good. Who knows how many you found so far. However I never taught you how to imbue magic tools with magic.”
“You taught me the basics, didn’t you? As long as I can read the runes, I can find a way to use a transfer-crystal.”
“My, you really are special, Dee. Stellaphact’s1 runes will never be readable by your average kid.”
She slightly acknowledged me when we clashed our swords too, although sarcastically.
I kept the feeling of happiness that was surging in me at bay. Spirit Limiter Hold could suppress my emotions too.
“Stellaphact… that’s a unique transfer-crystal, right?”
“Only because this country’s archaeologists have yet to dig that deeply. You went in the deepest part of the royal researching division, didn’t you? If you did, I’m sure you know what I mean.”
“Why are you telling us that now…?”
Mylarka asked, trying to let the talk go on. She never butted in because she was concentrating on preparing a magic field that could jump at Teacher any moment now… and thinking that she was doing it without being noticed gave me the goosebumps from nervousness.
However, Teacher knew how to seal magic, so that move was useless.
“I believe that Dee will come back to me, and I will teach him every single thing he wants.”
“I don’t want to comment on your wish of dying by his hand… and I don’t mean to insult you, but your love is very twisted.”
“Eheh… people never speak the truth, don’t they? Thugs almost caught you when you ran from him. You hurt him, and yet you didn’t give up on him and walked by his bar many times to see how he was doing, didn’t you? You wanted him to be fine, but you fled.”
“Mylarka, don’t listen to her. She’s going to mess with your head.”
The genius girl fell silent.
It was normal for Teacher to know everything.
Her strength was to remember everything, almost like her memory had no limits.
While my information network was built on my guild members, Teacher’s was based on her ability to read the memory of anyone she came across simply by approaching them. She only needed a few days in a place to gather a terrifying amount of information.
That was also why I knew she didn’t really want to kill us right now.
Also, I cast Mind Guard on us to block that monstrous ability. It prevented her to literally read through us.
“You are so sweet, Dee… do you remember? When you were attacked by that hurt wyvern you healed it right away.”
“And you’ve been the one to save me when I was badly wounded.”
“Yes. You’ve been so stupid that I thought helping you couldn’t hurt. Here you are now, still standing because of a whim.”
Whenever I thought she was being kind to me, she always hurt me. I couldn’t understand her when I was a child.
“And yet you’ve taken me under your wing. You acknowledged my power… and now I must stop you.”
“I’ll be blunt… Blue Sagittarius and Purple Scorpio have been terrible for a long time now. They didn’t keep up with time. They only accepted requests to satisfy their members and never opened to new business. It would’ve been better if only half of the twelve guilds in this capital were still around. The others are useless, they have no reason to exist.”
“Why do you know so much about the guilds? Why did you come back?”
The answer to Mylarka’s question was obvious. My teacher wasn’t called ‘Ashen clown’ for nothing.
I would’ve never expected that my teacher had something to do with the guilds. I could’ve found information about it if I wanted, but I wanted to forget about her so badly I never thought about it.
Why did the twelve guilds have a color in their name?
Had they always been twelve? I already knew they were not.
“I’ll tell you once you manage to win, Dee. And you, girl. Keep your magic away, it will never graze me. This is only between Dee and I.”
“What…?!”
“I know the only magic who can affect her. It would be best if you don’t show her too many of your cards… Teacher has the ability of analyzing anything’s structure and nullifying it. Just like you.”
“What?! No, it can’t be! No one can dispel my magic!”
My teacher didn’t inform Mylarka that I could do the same. When our battle began, she would see it by herself.
“The only opponent worth of being called that in the expedition party is the demon girl. She might even overpower me when she goes all out in terms of sheer strength. On the other hand, dealing with your magic or that knight’s wouldn’t be hard. The spirit sword is annoying, but it’s possible to get through it… like this.”
There was another kind of unique spirit in the world along with the sword spirits—the shield spirits. They granted an impenetrable defence, and once they were summoned, they took the shape of a shield on the summoner’s arm.
The murals in some ancient ruins showed those same shields protecting the arm of the Lance Goddess.
I knew my teacher could use sword spirits, but I had no memories of her summoning the shield ones too.
Somehow I knew she could do anything, but seeing it with my own eyes was simply terrifying. I could vividly hear the danger bells screaming in my head.
“She summoned her equipment…?! So there are other spirits like the swords’ ones…?”
“The armors’ ones exist too. I suggest you to lay your hands on some if you want to be very strong. No matter your rank, everyone’s defence is always paper-thin.”
She swung her sword and a cutting wave of magic power hissed through the air, directed to Mylarka. Not sensing any bloodlust before the attack, she was surprised and didn’t react in time to defend herself, but luckily I knew that Teacher acted like this, so I jumped between them and fended off the incoming attack by cleaving it.
“Wow, Dee, how fast… she must be very important for you.”
“I didn’t feel any bloodlust… I can’t read her at all…”
“She wasn’t this mean back then. Teacher, can I speak my mind freely?”
I kept our foe’s attention in check by gathering magic in my sword until Mylarka had stepped far enough to be out of danger. Teacher allowed us to and let her magic flow freely out of her.
Then, it split into different kinds, powering both her defensive and offensive prowess to an insane extend.
“You can’t break this shield. I tried many times to and I always failed. It will be the same for you.”
She knew my power very well, but I had yet to remove my limit. I couldn’t tell if she noticed it or not.
If she did, she surely had something up her sleeve to counter me.
“We can’t tell before I try. Besides, I don’t need to break my foe’s shield to take them down.”
“You can’t do it with the little magic you have. You can’t win against me as long as you keep it so cramped.”
No… you just never bothered to look at me closely, not even when I was about to leave you five years ago.
After all that time, although her presence was still towering above everything, her magic power hadn’t changed in the slightest. However, I could feel she was more powerful.
After our expedition, I kept racking my brain on how to train myself no stop. The limiter removal was the product of all that hard work.
I am the kind of adventurer who wants to become better, no matter how strong I become.
“Stop looking at me like that.”
Teacher’s voice was dry, her look stern.
“Why are you looking at me with pity? You’ve never been that kind of boy. You should just keep following me like you always did. It must be that way. Forever.”
“I’m not pitying you. I just understood that I can’t lose against you.”
“Is that so…? I will never lose against someone who restrains himself like you. Are you saying you can take me down without getting serious? Without bloodlust or any wish to kill me?”
Her words confirmed that she didn’t know about that card up my sleeve.
She also implied that the reason why she was back was seriously me.
She expected to forget me like she always did when she tossed everything away and moved to another place, but this time she failed to.
I was probably like a boulder in the middle of the flowing river that was her endless journey—she just couldn’t get over it.
“You won’t break this shield and you will never hit me, Dee—”
She didn’t finish her sentence: I teleported in front of her, my sword already swinging down on her, but she rose her shield and blocked me.
It was the first time I saw that expression on her face. For a moment, she looked exactly like a child whose time had been stopped.
If she really was immortal… if her time had really stopped, she would’ve walked on the threshold of time forever, unable to grow like any of us.
“I’ve been waiting for you in that village… I’ve been keeping my promise and waiting where I taught you how to fight… and yet you…!”
A force field burst out of her shield and made me fly a short distance away.
That was another use of that shield.
I could come up with an anti-magic spell to nullify it if I had enough time to analyze it, but I didn’t.
I wasn’t quick enough… but I could be. Even if I had to see my teacher despair.
Spirit Release, Limit Burst.
I felt like my body was freed from its chains, and the world around me started to change.
My thought and body reached an impossible speed and I jumped again at my teacher, taking the force field head on.
In that brief moment, I managed to analyze and nullify her defence, then I swung my sword again and she blocked my assault with her shield.
Sparks flew around us.
“Why are you quicker than me…?! You shouldn’t be able to…!”
“Didn’t you want me to kill you? Why do you sound so whiny?”
“You’re mine…! Why…? WHYYY?!”
Her feelings were evident.
She never had interest in anything other than me since the day we met.
Cleaver after-image – Thousand-cut dance.
I mimicked one of Aileen’s secret hand-to-hand techniques which consisted in attacking the foe using the after-images of the sword as a decoy while attacking from other directions. It was usually used to unleash a flurry of slashes on multiple enemies and thanks to my spirits it was about eighty percent as strong as the original.
I combined that with Teleportation Magic and imbued each and every attack with Support Magic, trying to hit her as hard as I could.
She was reacting at a breath-taking speed, and sparks danced all around us to the beat of our clashing.
However, now that I nullified her force field, she was sustaining all the shocks on her sword and shield with her sheer strength, and after about one hundred of them, she got on the offensive and started to swing her sword around with deadly precision.
We kept that head to head fight up for a while, but Teacher slowly lost ground, and my last attack crashed on her shield with a thunderous roar, pushing her a little distance away.
She fell on her knees, blood staining her tattered clothes as it trailed out the countless cuts on her body. Her sword was in bad conditions as well: plenty of cracks covered it and its blade was chipped.
Her shield had taken several damage. It was now filled with scratches, cracks and dents, but it had the ability to slowly repair itself.
I could’ve damaged it if I reproduced Cody’s sword of light too, and maybe if we attacked it together, we could even be able to break it.
“Dick… that’s Aileen’s technique…!”
“Mine aren’t that strong, so it’s easier if I learn and use those of other people.”
“Your adventurer score can’t just be slightly over 100.000 points… the entire expedition might not be able to bring you down right now…”
“I don’t think so. My reproductions will never be as good as the originals, but being a jack of all trades comes in handy sometimes.”
Mylarka’s face was puzzled, and I couldn’t help but smile to her. I almost felt guilty to see her taken aback like that.
I thought she wouldn’t even be surprised to see me using the same magic as her at that point.
When our conversation ended, Yuma, who was on Aileen’s shoulder, Cody and Verlaine showed up from the ceiling door.
That was the first time they had seen me like that.
As soon as I saw them, I restrained my power again and had my sword disappear.
“Dick… I ran like crazy because I thought you were having a hard time, and yet here you are… victorious.”
“Y’know, I felt like a shiver running down my spine when I saw you a minute ago… later can you tell me what happened?”
“Dick, is that the head of White Aries…? O-Oh no, her clothes are in tatters…!”
Verlaine gave Yuma a sidelong glance and approached Teacher while untying her own apron, which then used to cover the woman as the best as she could.
My teacher wasn’t still on her knees due to the cuts on her body, which weren’t a big deal thanks to the defensive magic she was using, but due to her shortage of magic power. She had almost drained it all to keep up with our fight.
I was so focused on our fight that I hadn’t noticed that she was now half-naked: her clothes were in such bad condition that Verlaine’s apron was the only layer that blocked my eyes from seeing what I shouldn’t have.
Once by her side, the former Demon Lord crouched down nearby Teacher, her gaze stuck to the woman.
“I was not sure that my Master’s teacher was one of them. I never expected you to be real… and who could expect you to be defeated.”
“Them…? Verlaine, do you know something about my teacher?”
Ashen clown looked like an elf, but she wasn’t.
Verlaine looked up to me, a hint of hesitation in her eyes.
Then, she started explaining what my teacher—the SSS rank adventurer who wandered the lands and who was strangely affiliated to White Aries—was for real.
