"Your center is unsteady. Your footwork is a mess."
A cool voice rang through the indoor sparring hall.
It belonged to Kairon Belt, the swordsmanship professor at Rodein Royal Combat Academy.
His gaze was fixed on the wooden sword lying on the floor and the boy standing beside it, breathing hard.
"You are so focused on putting magic power into your attacks that your lower body is not supporting you at all. Your opponent does not even need to knock your sword aside. A simple dodge will make you fall over on your own and leave yourself open."
"……I will keep that in mind."
Aron answered briefly, bending to pick up the wooden sword.
The force of the blow still lingered, leaving his hand tingling, but his expression did not change.
He offered no excuses. Not a word of the professor's criticism was wrong.
Kairon looked down at Aron with dark, impassive eyes and continued.
"Your understanding of tactics in the entrance exam was excellent. But this is not a gathering of scholars. Knowing something in your head and proving it with your body are different things."
"I am aware."
"If you do not master the fundamentals, you will have a hard time surviving this semester. You know your own limits best."
With a soft click of his tongue, Kairon turned away.
That was the end of his assessment of Aron. A dry conclusion, without any further expectation or reproach.
As the professor's retreating figure grew distant, open laughter erupted among the students gathered in a corner of the sparring hall.
"Lost again? How many times has it been since you enrolled?"
"He's probably lost every match for a whole month. He's the bastard who barely scraped in at 312th, after all. A commoner who got lucky and aced the written exam should know to leave on his own."
"He really drags down the standards. Even breathing the same air as that bastard pisses me off. Whenever I get paired with him, it feels like my swordsmanship gets contaminated."
The jeers of the nobles' children in their ornate training uniforms rained down like sharp arrows.
Rodein Royal Combat Academy was the cradle of the kingdom's finest talents. Among a constellation of brilliant students blessed with natural gifts and the full support of their families, Aron, a commoner whose magic power was below average, was a complete outsider and an easy spectacle.
But Aron did not so much as glance at them as they whispered.
He quietly withdrew to a corner of the sparring hall and brushed back his sweat-soaked bangs. Then he took an old notebook with frayed edges from inside his clothes.
'Right ankle twisted at the moment of impact. Failed to shift weight. Insufficient lower-body strength and poor distribution of magic power.'
He calmly wrote down the mistakes he had made in the sparring match and Professor Kairon's criticisms.
It would have been a lie to say he was not upset, but he had no time to nurse his pride and rage recklessly. Bristling at their insults and clenching his fists would be pointless bravado.
He had a clear reason to survive at this harsh academy, no matter what.
His widowed mother, Elena, and his little sister, Mia, were waiting back home.
When he thought of his mother's calloused hands, hardened by work she never shied away from, and his sister's face as she smiled brightly at him, a weight settled in his chest.
Aron could not rest easy unless he sent money home, even if it meant cutting his monthly food budget. To support his family and pay the academy's expensive tuition, he had to keep his scholarship and earn rewards from practical combat somehow.
Dropping out had never been in Aron's vocabulary.
'If I don't have enough magic power, I need to waste less movement. Just as the professor said, without support from my lower body, even the sharpest thrust is nothing but a paper tiger.'
Aron capped his pen and gripped the heavy wooden sword again.
Whether the others laughed at him or not, all he could do was repeat his training in silence.
Before picking a fight he had no chance of winning, he needed to find a practical way to survive real combat.
SNAP—!
A crisp sound of air being cut split the empty training ground, where darkness had settled.
But he was not satisfied, and he adjusted his stance again. It had been a showy swing with no weight behind it.
'Again.'
He drew a deep breath and repeated the exercise of drawing his magic power down into his lower body.
Beads of sweat gathered at the tip of his chin and fell, one after another, onto the dirt floor.
Every muscle in his body screamed, and the calluses on his palms stung as though they might tear, but he did not stop.
While his classmates rested in warm beds or relieved their fatigue with the finest magic power recovery potions, the only weapon Aron possessed was relentless repetition that wore his body down.
When he thought of his family, this much pain was nothing.
He had to survive here somehow, be recognized as a full-fledged combatant, and pull his family out of the shackles of poverty.
Aron's eyes gleamed coldly in the night air. The dull sound of his sword cutting through the air continued without pause until late into the night.
Several days later, at the Third Training Ground, where practical sparring class was being held.
First-year students stood in rows across the open-air training ground as dry dust gusted toward them.
Today, too, they would be assigned to random pairs to hone their skills in practical combat. The results of the matches would count directly toward their midterm evaluations, and sharp tension lingered in the students' eyes.
The instructor serving as evaluator raised his voice, a thick roster in his hand.
"Next pair. Rowen Hart and Aron."
The moment their names were called, the taut air around the training ground went slack, and the mood turned flat.
"Ah, the last-place guy again."
"Rowen got lucky today. That's a free win."
"It'll be over in less than a minute, obviously. Let's go get some water in the back."
The students openly lost interest, already certain it would be a dull match with a foregone conclusion. One of them even turned around to retie the straps on his equipment.
Aron walked to the center of the training ground, his expression impassive as he stepped across the dirt.
Rowen Hart stood opposite him. He had ranked 246th in the entrance exam. Like Aron, he was an ordinary swordsman in the lower ranks, but against Aron, who had placed 312th, he was strong enough to take it easy.
There was no personal grudge or bad blood between them. There was only the clear hierarchy of skill and rank that the academy had created.
With his wooden sword resting on his shoulder, Rowen lifted his chin slightly at Aron.
"Let's get this over with, Aron. It's hot, and there's no point wasting our strength, is there?"
A confident smile. His easy, familiar tone carried the certainty that his opponent posed no threat to him.
Aron gripped the wooden sword's hilt tightly and let out a short breath.
"Sure. If you're ready, let's start."
It was a calm answer, neither taking the other's attitude as mockery nor shrinking from it.
Rowen gave a little snort of laughter at that dry response and began to warm up casually.
He bounced lightly in place to loosen his stiff muscles, then rolled his wrist and flicked his sword back and forth. He acted as if he had come out for a leisurely morning walk rather than an intense sparring match.
Aron watched him steadily and calmly gauged the distance between them.
'He's a swordsman. His strength and reaction speed are both slightly better than mine. If our swords clash head-on, I'll be overpowered. I need to deflect his first strike and slip into the opening.'
He was calculating how to defend himself and the path his opponent's first attack would take, concentrating intently on Rowen's every movement. That was when it happened.
BUZZ—
A strange pain suddenly flashed through Aron's eyes.
His vision warped oddly. A transparent shimmer seemed to rise before him, and then alien-looking letters appeared, layered over the empty air.
[Target analysis in progress.]
Aron knitted his brow and blinked several times.
'What's this? Did sweat get in my eyes?'
He tried to dismiss it as a momentary hallucination brought on by the intense tension. He shook his head to clear his vision, but the letters before his eyes did not disappear.
Instead, whenever Rowen stepped or swung his sword as he warmed up, the sentences floating in the air rapidly changed shape as if processing data, growing clearer still.
It looked as though a living creature were dissecting his opponent's movements and gathering information.
Then distinct, specific sentences overlaid Rowen's body like wedges.
[Minor damage to left knee.]
[Right flank exposed immediately after overhead slash.]
His breath caught.
Aron swallowed dryly.
The information in the text was far too specific to dismiss as a mere illusion or a trick of fatigue.
He firmly suppressed his surprise, lowered his gaze slightly, and studied Rowen's lower body.
Rowen was still stepping lightly from side to side, loosening his ankles.
But when Aron looked very closely, concentrating without the slightest lapse, he noticed a tiny irregularity he had not seen before.
Each time Rowen planted a foot, he shifted the axis of his weight ever so slightly, instinctively, onto his right leg. It was a small habit, as though he were unconsciously avoiding pressure and impact on his left knee. When he swung his sword, too, the support from his left leg wavered for an instant compared with the movement of his upper body.
It was a fleeting flaw no ordinary student would ever see, one that perhaps even Rowen himself had not properly noticed.
But as Aron observed him, working backward from the information floating before his eyes, that tiny crack stood out in his vision with startling clarity.
'It's real.'
His heart began pounding like a drum in his chest.
'I wasn't seeing things just now. That mysterious information points exactly to Rowen's physical impairment and a fatal weakness in his swordsmanship.'
He did not know why. With his woefully limited magic power, he had no logical way to explain why he had suddenly begun experiencing this strange phenomenon.
But he did not need to uncover how it worked right now. Only one thing mattered.
This was no hallucination, and he was certain that this analysis might be the only key that would let him, the perennial last-place student, survive among the academy's monsters.
"Here I come!"
With an easy battle cry, Rowen pushed off the ground and closed the distance.
Before, Aron would have shrunk from that swift, fierce charge and struggled just to defend himself. His body would have failed to react even though he saw it coming; he would have stumbled backward and eventually lost his grip on his wooden sword.
But now it was different.
The unstable angle of Rowen's left knee as he stepped against the ground, and the fatal opening in his right flank beneath his raised wooden sword, were etched with perfect clarity into Aron's eyes.
If I have accurate information.
If I can see straight through the enemy's structural flaws.
'I can do this.'
The most basic dodge and thrust, which he had pictured and practiced hundreds, even thousands, of times in his mind.
Aron steadied his ragged breathing and looked back and forth between the information window before his eyes and Rowen as he charged toward him.
He clenched the sword's hilt as if wringing the sweat from his palm, and his foot slid across the dirt, carrying him straight forward.