The marathon-type exam left most of the cadets out of the batch dead tired. It made them push themselves to their very limit by dangling the most coveted prize in the whole area—score points.
That's why, out of the oldest batch of the cadets, only a very few of them gathered, most of whom belonged to the second and third groups, one of which had their exam tomorrow while the other concluded theirs yesterday.
When it came to the younger batches, those who had yet to qualify for the first rank, they were outright disallowed from visiting the dueling grounds beyond the scope of their set lessons and exercises, as the instructors found it counterproductive to let them spar without supervision.
That left only a select few to actually give a crap and attend today's rounds of bullying, making for a very small crowd to witness Theo's strike.
Even then, when Theo's fist dug into Gracian's stomach, everyone gasped. And despite their small number, their coordinated sigh was enough to turn the air still.
Thump.
Despite taking a solid hit, Gracian softly landed just a few steps away, easily killing off the momentum that carried him.
But as he raised his face—
"Thank you for the fight!" Theo pressed his arms along his waist before bowing down with his entire upper body.
"You little…" Gracian's face grew red as he took a step ahead, ready to charge Theo down…
Only to sigh out and slow down, merely raising his hand and patting Theo's shoulder as he came to a stop but a few inches away.
"Honestly, that was a good one," Gracian praised while tapping away at Theo's upper arm, each tap heavier than the one before. "You've won the bet, congratulations!"
The strikes grew stronger and stronger… only to reach their peak weight right as Gracian spoke. Gracian then held his hand and pressed it down against Theo's shoulder right as he opened his eyes and locked them on his junior's defiant glare.
"Now, what do you want me to do?" Gracian smiled without even a single iota of warmth behind his curved lips. "Two favors, wasn't it?"
Theo defiantly looked into his senior's face, only to retreat two steps…
And bow down again.
"First, I wish for Senior to kindly teach me swordsmanship for the two weeks of the camp that I have left!" Keeping his head low, Theo made sure to bow in the most formal way he knew.
'Just like I thought, huh?'
While all of this was playing out, the once-again-young man's thoughts couldn't be directed anywhere further away.
'The plunder didn't activate…'
Theo didn't have a convenient message window that would detail all the missing conditions for his talent to activate. Those requirements were something that everyone had to discover for themselves, which was also why talents of higher ranks were so increasingly difficult to learn—for the higher the talent's rank, the greater the number of conditions for its wielder to activate for the skill to work!
While lacking any form of quantification, he could still feel it.
'Whatever it was that allowed me to plunder that guy's ability to go back, it is missing now. But…' Theo squinted his eyes a bit. 'Is it because I failed to fully defeat him? Or maybe I outright need to kill my targets for this talent to work?'
"Wait, you want me…" In the meantime, Gracian took his sweet time to process Theo's words and actions, so different from what he likely expected. "Me!" he emphasized, pointing his hand at his own chest. "To teach… you?!"
Glancing up, Theo could see the critical confusion in his senior's eyes.
Now that he had pretty much humiliated him, he was asking the man to beat the crap out of him on a daily basis?
Even though there were only a few cadets in the crowd to observe the process, their rumors quickly grew loud enough for Theo to start hearing their whispers.
Is he a masochist? -
- A suicide by senior, huh? -
- Maybe he lost his mind from the strain of the exam? -
- Gracian, quite clearly, heard those whispers too, only adding more valid concerns to his bottomless confusion.
"And the other one?"
Theo took a deep breath.
'Now, you know what to do, don't you?' he encouraged himself before taking a deep breath and raising his face.
"After this period of tutoring is over, I will ask you for something that won't benefit nor hinder or harm either of us. It will be but a suggestion, one that I will, with all of my heart, urge you to follow."
Theo pushed his mana reserves to their absolute limits, using what little magic his current body could wield—as expected from a commoner attending the knight's boot camp to gain his qualification to join the academy—to endlessly refine it over and over again.
Then, with the minuscule amount of superior, extremely condensed mana he managed to refine, he infused it all into his very voice, making it merely seem much grander and deeper than normal.
It was a relatively simple, audio-visual trick designed to slightly affect one's perception of the other party's words.
But it also mirrored the side effect of using a certain talent that was as common as it was capricious, if not totally random, in use.
Gracian squinted his eyes.
"Let me reiterate," he raised both of his hands and took a step back, as if gesturing at everyone to slow down. "You want me to bull—train you for your last two weeks at the camp, only to then ask me to do something that neither of us stands to benefit from and that I'm free to refuse?" Gracian raised his eyebrows and locked his eyes on Theo's face.
"Well, now that you've put it in this way…" Theo raised his hand and—as he relaxed his face a bit and even forced out a clearly forced smile—scratched the skin behind his ear. "Yeah, I know it sounds weird, but that's exactly what I mean and what I want."