Instead, Kyle raised both hands in surrender, as though admitting defeat.
Ian narrowed his eyes at the gesture before slowly releasing his grip on Kyle’s hair. He had opted for something marginally less violent than punching him in the jaw, and judging by the result, it had been considerably more effective.
As though blessed with some supernatural instinct for self-preservation, Kyle sensed the instant Ian’s grip loosened and quickly stepped back.
A few strands of purple hair drifted to the floor.
“I thought I was going bald!”
A tug like that was hardly enough to strip his entire scalp bare.
Ian dusted off his hands and turned away without so much as acknowledging him.
Behind him came an aggrieved whine.
How could you do this to me? What happened to the friendship we’ve built over the past few weeks?
Apparently, Ian had pulled out Kyle’s sanity along with his hair.
“……”
“……”
A brief silence settled over the room.
Schwartz looked torn between praising Ian and reprimanding him, while Claude seemed utterly speechless at the sight of Ian throwing every rule of etiquette straight out the window.
Aily alone remained composed.
She looked from Ian to Kyle and back again, deep in thought.
At first, she had thought the idea absurd.
Now, however, it occurred to her that this pairing might actually be the best option available.
“See? He’s this prickly. Who else but me could possibly handle him? What if he grabs some other knight by the hair? In case you’ve forgotten, our prince killed three assassins. Next time, instead of ripping out a few hairs, he might rip someone’s head off.”
“……”
Human beings generally did not possess enough grip strength to tear another person’s head from their shoulders.
Ian responded to Kyle’s nonsense—which had begun simply because he had gotten his hair pulled once—by saying nothing at all.
Aily glanced once more at Ian’s expression, which seemed to say that some dog was barking in the distance, then smiled.
“Shall we entrust him to Kyle, then?”
“Aily…”
“Absolutely not.”
“Actually, Kyle does have a point. Who else in this mansion treats Lord Ian with so little formality? Learning tends to be most effective when there is at least some degree of goodwill between teacher and student.”
Ian had no idea where she had found any goodwill in Kyle’s behavior.
His brow furrowed slightly at the strange remark, but the conversation continued without regard for his opinion.
“With the expedition only a month away, things will become busy again soon. It would be inefficient for the Captain or Vice-Captain to carve time out of their schedules. In that case, Kyle—who habitually skips training anyway—is the better choice. It isn’t as though Lord Ian needs sophisticated vocabulary right now.”
What Ian needed most was ordinary, everyday conversation.
Aily emphasized the point with another pleasant smile.
Schwartz and Claude exchanged looks, apparently unable to find anything in her reasoning they could directly refute.
Besides, this gives us a way to keep that lunatic tied down for a while.
Aily silently counted through the countless problems Kyle had caused in the past.
Kyle was always the one creating the mess, but it was invariably someone else who had to clean it up afterward.
If this could keep him confined to one place for even a little while, that alone would be a relief.
Initially, Aily had objected because she worried Ian might not be able to deal with him.
But after what she had just witnessed, she no longer thought there was any reason for concern.
Most people were deceived by Ian’s pale complexion and finely sculpted features and instinctively assumed he was delicate.
Yet when one actually listed everything he had done so far, he was by no means mild-tempered.
“So, it’s settled?”
Aily clapped her hands once, bringing the discussion to a close.
A series of hesitant nods followed.
Kyle, meanwhile, had already recovered from his supposedly devastating ordeal. As though he had never been on the verge of tears at all, he approached Ian with the corners of his mouth curling into a grin.
“Wow. I never thought I’d live to see the day when I’d be teaching someone.”
Realizing that he was now genuinely expected to learn how to write from Kyle, Ian opened his mouth to object.
Unfortunately, he could not speak.
Fuck.
Ian had wondered whether Aily had truly meant it.
She had.
The very next day, when Ian arrived at the training ground, Kyle presented him with a sheet of paper covered in unfamiliar characters.
Before Ian could even ask with his eyes what it was, Kyle dragged him toward a table in the corner.
Only when Kyle began tapping each letter on the page with his fingertip did Ian realize what was happening.
They seriously expect me to learn from this guy?
He almost felt he would be better off being taught by Ed.
“Alright. Listen to the pronunciation first.”
Unfortunately, there had never been a choice to begin with.
Quickly accepting that refusing to acknowledge reality would not make Kyle disappear, Ian sighed and picked up the pen that had already been laid out for him.
Naturally, the sight of a beginner’s classroom suddenly opening beside the training ground drew the attention of the knights.
“What are they doing?”
“I don’t know…”
The table in the corner of the training ground was, for all practical purposes, decorative.
Officially, it was meant to be used during breaks.
In reality, no lunatic was going to finish thirty laps around the grounds and then walk all the way over there simply to sit down and rest in elegance.
So Ian sitting there and scribbling something on paper was already unusual enough.
The fact that Kyle was sitting opposite him made the entire scene even stranger.
What kind of trouble is that lunatic planning this time?
None of them dared approach.
They merely stole glances from a distance until someone finally ventured close enough to investigate and returned with an explanation.
Ian was awkwardly practicing the basic letters of the Shettian alphabet.
“He seemed to understand everything people said to him well enough, but he can’t write?”
Daniel muttered after overhearing the conversation nearby.
Fred, who had been deliberately avoiding looking in that direction, snorted.
The Captain was back, which meant everyone was already on edge.
Fred had not been summoned separately, but judging by the atmosphere, someone had clearly tattled on all of them.
Otherwise, there was absolutely no reason he should be the only one being forced to run fifty laps!
“But why the hell is that bastard teaching him? Yesterday he was practically hanging off him, going on about ‘our prince’ this and ‘our prince’ that. What’s gotten into him?”
“Exactly. Think the prince has something on him?”
There was no chance Kyle was being kind for no reason.
They had known him long enough to understand his personality better than most.
He refused to do anything he did not want to do.
Anything he did want to do, he absolutely had to do.
And one of his favorite hobbies was getting under people’s skin with that infuriating mouth of his.
The only reason his head remained attached to his shoulders was his ability.
Kyle was the only person who could spout nonsense directly at the Grand Duke and get away with it, because when given a mission, he carried it out flawlessly.
The number of people who had died by his hand was already well into the hundreds.
If indirect deaths were included, the number might even be approaching four digits.
There was even a rumor that he was some sort of sexual deviant who enjoyed the sight of blood.
Kyle never bothered denying it.
He merely laughed whenever someone brought it up, which somehow made the rumor even more disturbing.
“Hmm. Is this difficult? Want me to say it again?”
Yet regardless of whatever was being whispered behind him, Kyle paid attention only to Ian.
Contrary to Ian’s expectations that he would teach lazily, show off, or spend the entire lesson fooling around, Kyle looked surprisingly serious.
His voice, unlike its usual teasing tone, was calm.
He pointed to each letter with his fingertip, pronounced it clearly, then explained the basic structure of a sentence.
Whenever Ian’s pen hesitated for even the slightest moment, Kyle somehow noticed immediately and repeated whichever point had caused the confusion.
“Oh. Our prince has a talent for languages.”
One fortunate thing was that Shettian word order resembled Korean.
Despite Aily’s warning that foreigners generally found the language difficult, Ian was already familiar with this kind of grammatical structure.
Whenever Ian understood an explanation immediately, Kyle praised him lavishly and moved straight on to the next point.
The lesson progressed with remarkable smoothness.
Ian could plainly hear the murmurs around them and feel the knights’ gazes, but he had never been the type to care what others thought of him.
The training ground had been chosen as their lesson location only after Claude objected to Kyle teaching him inside his room, arguing that there was no telling what someone as unpredictable as Kyle might do behind a closed door.
There was also another motive behind the arrangement.
Since Ian would be joining the knights on the expedition and would continue seeing them afterward, this was meant to help him grow accustomed to the others.
Ian did not feel remotely grateful for the consideration.
Before long, Schwartz and Claude entered the training ground.
They glanced briefly toward Kyle and Ian in the corner before morning training began.
“Fall in! One!”
A thunderous shout rang out.
Then the running began.
The training ground behind the mansion was enormous, appropriately so for such a vast estate.
Even a single lap was daunting, which explained why being ordered to run dozens every day was considered genuine training.
Shouts rang out from every direction, but Ian’s concentration never wavered.
Perhaps impressed by this, Kyle smiled once he had finished explaining the fundamentals.
“Do you understand everything up to here?”
It had been a rapid-fire lesson covering only the essentials, with everything supplementary—etymology, historical background, and the like—discarded entirely.
Kyle’s teaching was efficient enough to put a star instructor to shame.
Ian set down his fountain pen and nodded.
It was not an absentminded gesture this time.
He genuinely understood.
Looking at Kyle’s pleased grin across the table, Ian found himself thinking that Kyle’s habit of building each example carefully from the fundamentals made everything surprisingly easy to follow.
He may be unreliable, but he’s actually pretty goo—
“Then shall we start memorizing five hundred words a day?”
…d.
No, he wasn’t.