Aron pushed his tray aside and tossed his worn pocket notebook onto the table.
He stuffed a piece of soup-soaked bread into his mouth and surveyed the dining hall with an indifferent gaze.
Students poured in after their morning training, making the place fairly noisy. Talk of the ranking adjustment matches that morning could be heard here and there.
"Hey, did you see Derek fall earlier? Imagine getting tripped up by the last-place guy and landing on your ass."
"He had rotten luck. Why did his footwork have to go wrong right then?"
"Just one of those unlucky days."
Voices belittling Aron's victory and laughing at Derek's mistake reached his ears.
But Aron paid no attention to their chatter. He had no time to bristle at other people's judgments or bask in the thrill of his first victory.
His gaze was fixed on the students at a table across the hall.
'Distance: roughly 30 meters.'
Aron narrowed his eyes.
Faint writing flickered above the head of a male student in his view. But its shape was so blurred that he could not read any of it. Straining his eyes made no difference.
The farther away someone was, the harder it became to make out detailed information.
He quickly drew a line in his pocket notebook and wrote a short sentence.
This time, he fixed his gaze on a female student ladling soup at the serving counter. She was about 10 meters away.
A familiar chill brushed his eyes, and transparent text appeared.
[Minor damage to right ankle ligament]
After the sentence appeared, Aron kept watching the student as she carried her tray back to her seat and ate.
But five minutes passed, then ten, and no further information appeared.
'Ordinary movement only reveals major habits or obvious injuries. That's the limit.'
Aron chewed and swallowed the bread in his mouth, rolling his pen between his fingers.
He recalled his match with Derek.
That had been different. As soon as Derek gripped his spear and began making combat thrusts, crucial information had poured down like rain: the collapse of his lower-body balance and the excessive rotation of his wrist.
There was a clear difference between merely glancing at someone and analyzing them while they used a combat technique. In the latter case, the speed of analysis increased dramatically.
Most fortunately, he did not see useless information.
Not a single line appeared about private feelings or past events, such as whether that male student had a crush on someone or what he had eaten for dinner yesterday.
The ability showed only physical conditions and factors directly connected to combat.
"Whew."
Aron closed his pocket notebook and pressed a hand to his brow.
After turning his gaze this way and that and concentrating, an aching fatigue had gathered around his eyes.
If he kept staring at people and analyzing them at every opportunity, he would be drained before he could even train.
Aron consciously relaxed his focus and withdrew his gaze.
The faint afterimages that had flickered above passing students' shoulders vanished at once.
'Only when I need to.'
Having set himself that firm rule, he picked up his tray and rose.
***
Even the air was different from the swordsmanship training ground steeped in the smell of sweat.
The training ground is reserved for the magic section in Sector Two.
Aron sat on a worn bench in a corner. He crossed his legs and folded his arms, silently watching the central platform.
"Focus! Magic power is at its most unstable before it takes shape!"
The instructor's sharp voice rang through the broad training ground.
In the center, dozens of students from the mage track faced sturdy wooden targets ahead of them.
Standing in a row, they held out short staffs or their bare hands and fired magic bolts again and again.
BOOM—! BANG—!
Dust burst up in every direction, and explosions struck his ears.
No one paid any attention to Aron, who had come to watch with nothing but a wooden sword slung across his back.
Aron's eyes moved keenly.
It was time to see whether his ability also worked on people who handled invisible magic power, unlike those in the swordsmanship track who swung physical weapons.
His gaze stopped on a female student.
Her blue-tinged hair was tied tightly back, and she wiped away her sweat.
Celia Noren, ranked 271st.
She and Aron had never even exchanged greetings.
She gripped a wooden staff tightly and steadied her breathing as she stared at the target ahead.
Aron narrowed his focus to her fingertips and staff. As he drew on his ability, his vision grew ever so slightly cooler.
"Hup."
As Celia took a short breath, blue magic power began swirling at the tip of her staff.
The moment she began working the spell formula in earnest, lines of translucent text appeared before Aron's eyes.
[Spell formula wavers during third magic power compression]
[Concentration drops after four consecutive casts]
The corners of Aron's mouth rose ever so slightly.
His ability had detected weaknesses in the flow of invisible magic power and the structure of a spell formula, not merely physical movements such as the path of a sword or the steps of someone's lower body.
But his satisfaction did not last long.
Resting his chin on his hand, Aron looked back and forth between Celia and the writing in the air, his brow gradually tightening.
'But what does that mean?'
The information could not have been clearer.
Yet Aron's mind was a blank sheet of paper.
He had learned only the basics of handling magic power. The detailed structure of spell formulas was beyond him. He was a swordsmanship-track student ranked 298th who had strained every nerve building his stamina and swinging a wooden sword.
To someone whose supply of magic power was already scraping the bottom, terms like 'magic power compression' and 'spell formula instability' might as well have been a foreign language.
WHOOOSH—! BOOM—!
A condensed blue magic bolt shot from Celia's staff and struck the right side of the target.
"Again!"
Without lowering her staff, she immediately turned toward a second target.
Blue light began gathering at its tip again.
Aron watched the process without blinking.
'Where does gathering magic power end and compression begin? Does an unstable spell formula mean the magic power scatters, or does it mean the shot comes out late?'
BANG—!
The second hit.
Then a third cast immediately followed.
Celia's shoulders stiffened ever so slightly, and the light at the tip of her staff trembled.
BOOM—!
The magic bolt missed the target by a wide margin and dug a large crater in the dirt instead.
"Oh no."
Celia let out a short exclamation and bit her lip.
Aron replayed her movements in his mind.
The magic power had certainly gone astray on the third cast. But he could not tell by sight which stage of compression had wavered.
Aron's expression grew cold.
'When should I extend my sword?'
He asked himself the question, but no answer came.
'When the tip of her staff trembles? Or should I move in just after the magic bolt misses? What if I approach blindly while the spell formula is unstable, and that magic power explodes right in front of my face?'
Aron leaned forward from the bench's backrest.
He could not find the answer.
He did not know how a mage released and drew back magic power. He did not possess even a line of knowledge that would let him predict what an unstable flow might do.
"Damn it."
A hollow, breathy laugh escaped him.
It did no good even when the information window kindly spoon-fed him the answer.
He could see his opponent's fatal flaw, yet he had no idea how to cut into the opening it created.
'If I don't understand it, it's just meaningless scribbling.'
It was a painful realization.
Things had been different against Derek's spear technique.
A buckling wrist or collapsing balance belonged to the physical world Aron knew intimately from grueling practice in the dust. As soon as he saw those weaknesses written out, he could instinctively calculate when to move in.
But what about magic, spirit arts, or an unusual style of martial arts?
"I can't strike what I don't understand."
Aron muttered under his breath and shoved the worn pocket notebook into his waistband.
The ability was no miracle.
It was only a tool that offered hints.
To put that tool to use in real combat, the one holding the weapon needed the right knowledge.
Just as much as observation distance or whether an opponent was using a technique, his own level of knowledge was a crucial condition governing how useful the ability could be in combat.
BANG—! BOOM—!
At the center of the training ground, Celia staggered and breathed hard after pouring out magic power in more than four consecutive casts.
[Concentration drops after four consecutive casts]
With those words still clear before him, Aron rose without hesitation.
He knew precisely what he lacked and what he had to learn.
He had never intended to rely on reckless luck.
To cut into an opening he could see, he first had to understand thoroughly how the thing he was targeting worked.
'The library, then.'
Introductory books on magic theory and the combat methods of other classes.
And the still woefully poor efficiency of his magic power control in his lower body.
The tasks he would have to work through at the cost of sleep were piled as high as a mountain.
Aron adjusted the wooden sword on his back and left the training ground.
His steps carried the same firm resolve as ever.