There are many things one needs in order to grow stronger.
If asked to choose the most important among them, most would usually pick these two.
Talent and effort.
Those two are the most fundamental elements needed to become strong, and only when they are properly mixed can one grow stronger.
But for an individual to mix those two alone is an exceedingly difficult thing.
Isn’t it said that the person who knows you least is yourself?
What your own talent and capacity are like.
In what direction you should accumulate your efforts.
It is far too difficult to figure out alone.
What is needed there is a guide who can grasp your talent and capacity and show you the direction of your efforts.
In short, one would call such a person a teacher.
But even teachers have something called ability.
If a teacher’s ability is low, even a genius can become mediocre,
and if a teacher’s ability is high, even a dullard can become a talented student.
That was why Darkan’s declaration that he would take exclusive charge of educating the Weed Class, the commoner class, held tremendous meaning.
Among the countless armed organizations in the empire, whenever the greatest were discussed, one name was never omitted.
The Black Lion Knights.
They were the supreme military force that guarded House Seronis and the northern region of the empire,
and it was widely known that the Sword Duke had personally trained that knight order, which countless knights admired.
The mere fact that such a man, whose ability as a teacher had been more than proven, would teach the commoner class was enough to make the commoner students of the academy unable to hide their excitement.
“Your Excellency.”
In the entrance ceremony hall, where a heated fervor was swirling, a knight in black armor approached Darkan.
The emblem of the black lion engraved on his armor meant that he was a knight belonging to the Black Lion Knights.
“In the territory, Your Excellency is fine, but at the academy, call me Professor if possible. We came here as professors, after all.”
“Understood, Professor. Also, academy staff have arrived from Central. They say the dean sent them.”
“The dean?”
“Yes. They say they came to assist you in settling the chaos. And they say they will transport the top incoming student, the one collapsed by the young lady, to the infirmary.”
Darkan recalled the student from the commoner class who had dueled his daughter.
And he immediately sensed something amiss.
“Wait. That child should have been taken away earlier. The dean sent people again?”
That commoner entrant—Azelan, was it?
When he had spoken with the dean a moment ago, the dean had made special mention of him, so Darkan had thought the dean had issued swift instructions and entrusted Azelan’s person to them.
“...We’ve been had.”
“Pardon?”
Seeing Darkan’s expression turn grave, the knight voiced his confusion.
“To think I forgot that moving amid chaos was their specialty. Have I grown dull as well...?”
“Surely...?”
At the knight’s question, Darkan nodded.
“They made the first move. Mobilize every Black Lion and Black Panther we brought and find that child. I won’t ask about your means or methods.”
“Understood.”
After hearing Darkan’s order, the knight bowed his head and immediately left the entrance ceremony hall.
Leaving behind the academy entrance ceremony hall, which was filled with excitement and fervor, two men were walking down a dark alley.
Between them, a student in an academy uniform was being carried on a stretcher, unconscious.
“Shall we do it around here? There are hardly any people now.”
“Yeah. This should be safe enough.”
After confirming there were no people around, the men abruptly threw down the academy student they had been carrying—Azelan, the top incoming student of the Weed Class.
Azelan’s sword clattered as it tumbled along with its owner, but the two paid it little mind.
“But is this really the Hero’s bloodline? From what I saw earlier, he seemed weaker than expected.”
“The higher-ups said he merely inherited the bloodline. I don’t know the details either. And from what I saw, I got the stronger impression that his opponent was simply a bad matchup. The Sword Duke... Is the monster’s daughter a monster too, after all...? Ugh...!”
One of the men mentioned the words Sword Duke and immediately grimaced.
“What’s wrong?”
“Sorry, just had a bad memory from the past come back to me for a moment... Now then, let’s finish this quickly and get out of here.”
The man quickly regained his composure, said that, and drew his sword.
Then, walking slowly toward the unconscious Azelan, he said,
“Farewell, last bloodline of the Hero. With this, the Abyss reborn will completely rule the world!”
He spoke with words full of murderous intent, and just as the man was about to bring down his vicious sword—
“Fuck. So this is how things are going now.”
“?!”
A mysterious voice reached their ears.
When the two startled men turned their heads toward the direction the voice had come from, a person was standing there.
With the midday sunlight behind him like a halo, they could not make out his face in detail, but they could tell it was the voice of a young man.
“I was sure I’d finished laying all the groundwork about five years ago, so I thought something like this wouldn’t happen. I never thought things would proceed like this.”
Saying that, the man began slowly walking toward them.
“It’s been five years. Followers of the Abyss. Unfortunately, I’m not happy to see you at all.”
.
.
.
Because the academy entrance ceremony was such a major event, relay screens could be seen here and there throughout the streets and shops.
Every one of them was showing Darkan’s face.
And then came the bombshell declaration from him.
The Sword Duke would take exclusive charge of the commoner class.
Not only in the entrance ceremony hall, but even here, the shock of the people watching the broadcast was vividly conveyed to Mel as he moved through the streets.
“His Excellency definitely appeared from the middle of the story onward, yet he’s showing up from the start? And as a professor at the academy, no less. He never moved from the north, did he?”
As Mel remembered it, the Sword Duke of that romance-fantasy novel had not taken a position as a professor at the academy.
A doting father who loved his daughter to an absurd degree.
That was the Sword Duke in the romance-fantasy novel.
When his daughter, Sisne, was miserably defeated by Azelan, a commoner, he flew into a rage and sent the Black Lion Knights under his command to harass Azelan—
a petty, pathetic man who cowardly interfered in a children’s quarrel and tried to crush him with force.
Of course, in the original story, the overpowered protagonist, with his tremendous talent and luck combined, splendidly repelled the members of the Black Lion Knights, one of the finest knight orders,
and that moment was the starting point that set him at odds with the villainess Sisne and her family, the villainous House Seronis.
‘But in the background story revealed later, during the Black Lions’ first attack, one of the Black Lions was an agent those bastards had planted, wasn’t he?’
The masterminds lurking in various parts of the romance-fantasy story, tormenting the protagonist and the heroine.
Followers of an evil god, said to have been working in the shadows since long ago to plunge this world into destruction and chaos.
The Followers of the Abyss.
Mel thought this as he spotted two men carrying the collapsed Azelan into a dark alley.
There was certainly no hospital or anything like it for treatment in that direction.
And their movements, too. The way they were trying to avoid people’s eyes by taking advantage of the chaos was suspicious.
They were undoubtedly the movements of those who acted in the shameful shadows.
Having found his target, Mel caught up to them, and what he saw was...
two men trying to kill the collapsed Azelan.
The men did not answer Mel’s words.
It was the cold-blooded movement of men who intended to immediately eliminate a witness who had seen them, without the slightest hesitation.
One man, holding a chillingly sharp sword, rushed at the witness with great speed.
The witness was unarmed, without any weapon at all, but he paid no heed to that and thrust his sword, swirling with ominous killing intent, toward Mel’s heart.
But...
“?!”
Mel twisted his body slightly and evaded the murderous thrust.
And that was not all.
Before anyone knew it, his raised leg fell toward the man whose guard had opened, like the blade of a guillotine.
—Crack!
Mel trampled the man as if he were an insect.
He crushed the man’s spine in an instant, rendering him incapable of recovery.
“Cough, cough!”
Perhaps even his internal organs had been damaged, as the man sprawled on the ground vomited blood in agony.
But Mel grabbed him by the hair and lifted him up. Holding the fairly sturdy adult man lightly in one hand, Mel threw him into the sky.
“U-uaaaagh!”
The man screamed as he soon fell back toward the ground under gravity.
With his broken spine, his lower body would not obey him. As the man fell, flailing only the arms of his upper body, Mel swung his fist in a wide arc.
—Kwaaaang!
As if a cannonball had been fired, the man struck by Mel’s fist sprayed blood from his entire body and slammed into the wall.
The man embedded in the wall died instantly, his eyes wide open and his body utterly still.
“I thought about a lot of things on my way here. How did things end up like this? When I first came here, I was actually pretty full of passion, you know?”
Mel said as he shook the blood and bits of flesh off his fist.
Protagonists who had experienced regression, possession, or reincarnation commonly had some idea of the future that would occur and generally prepared for it.
As if Mel was no exception, immediately after his reincarnation he had acted with great passion.
Although he knew he was not the protagonist, but an extra whose name might not even have appeared, once he had ended up belonging to the villainous House Seronis,
he had no choice but to act, if only to survive.
“In the end, after seeing Lady Sisne’s condition, I realized I’d failed and gave up on everything. Since this world would be saved by the Hero anyway, I thought I didn’t have to do anything more. At least, that’s what I thought until today.”
That was right.
After all, the basic story of this romance-fantasy world was that the Hero would take care of everything in the end.
Even if Mel himself did not act, this world would not be destroyed.
The only ones who would be destroyed were those bastards and House Seronis, which had been manipulated by them.
Knowing that this fact would never change, Mel had fled the household he had served for ten years and moved here.
“But seeing everything go wrong, I guess it was all just wasted effort. The guy called the Hero went down from the start, and you bastards are still running around as always.”
Saying that, Mel picked up the sword of the man he had killed.
“The moment I saw His Excellency the Sword Duke here, I figured I could no longer trust the information I’d known until now—where you people hiding in the academy were concealed, who the enemies were. It’d be idiotic to keep believing information that was wrong from the very beginning.
But this much should be certain. You Followers of the Abyss are here, and you’re working in the shadows throughout the academy.
If so, my course of action from here on is simple.”
When the situation was chaotic, floundering about in confusion was never a good move.
It was better to deal first with the simplest and most straightforward thing he could do right now.
Recalling the words Vincent, the head butler during his days as a butler of House Seronis, had once told him, Mel made his decision.
The simplest and most straightforward thing Mel himself could do at present.
“I just have to beat you to death whenever I see you. Truly simple, isn’t it?”
It was kill on sight.