TPTR 29

Chapter 029 16. The Value of Power (1)

“Not only is the young teacher cautious, she’s perceptive as well. Don’t you agree?”

“Indeed. I’ve really come to see her in a new light. Ah, don’t misunderstand me. I simply thought she was gentle and delicate by nature.”

So if she wasn’t gentle, would she be dirty instead?

Lucien put on her ‘I know nothing at all’ smile.

“You’re giving me far too much credit.”

While the three adults—now at ease after satisfying their respective desires—chattered on about things that lacked both conscience and substance, Cordelia quietly set her cutlery down.

That teacher wouldn’t know what kind of opportunity she had just given Cordelia.

“A debt? A child, owing something like that… Don’t say such things. Anyone would have done the same.”

Just like in her previous life.

‘No one ever did this for me.’

Knowing nothing, having no obligation whatsoever—yet still going this far.

Even while speaking with the duke and duchess, Cordelia had noticed that Lucien’s gaze kept returning to her plate.

It wasn’t something she could mistake for anything else: a look of concern she had never once received in this mansion, in this hall, at this table.

‘And yet, you yourself…’

Across from her, at Lucien’s seat, the soup that had been served first had gone completely untouched, cooling and congealing in the bowl.

For some reason, Cordelia felt she would never forget that sight.

After returning through time, many things in the world had changed.

One of them was the existence of Beatrice, the saintess candidate. In her previous life, there had been no such girl—neither in Noctua nor in the temple.

‘And Duke Rosanacht.’

She hadn’t thought of him at first, too startled to notice, but he was someone who should not have been alive at this point in time.

History itself had changed so drastically that she’d even wondered if this wasn’t regression at all, but merely a dream.

Yet her family’s eyes, their behavior, the words they directed at her—absurdly enough—were exactly the same as she remembered.

Even when Cordelia changed her own attitude, nothing about them did.

Which meant that this time, too, they would use her and discard her.

‘I thought everything was pointless.’

She didn’t even feel like taking revenge.

No matter what she did, they would never understand her heart.

‘In the end, they’ll all die anyway.’

To Cordelia Arce, who had been drifting helplessly through reality, a new goal was born.

‘Teacher Lucien, I will save you.’

Using the opportunity you created for me.

Cordelia chewed slowly on the salad after meticulously picking out all the almonds.

‘And I’ll try to live, too.’

Lucien finished up her turbulent round of counseling.

Thanks to how busy certain households were—including the Münster ducal family and the temple—it ended earlier than expected.

‘His Grace is swamped with work. Of course that’s the case. I’m not a child, you know.’

Klein had clicked his tongue, acting far too grown-up for his age.

‘That’s great!’

Beatrice had practically bounced with joy.

She’d been fretting over whether she really had to meet her guardian, but now color had finally returned to her face.

‘I heard Miss Cordelia moved in as your roommate. Are you getting along well?’

Because nobles shunned her for being a commoner, and commoners avoided her for being the future saintess, Beatrice had been using a double room alone until recently.

‘Yes. It doesn’t seem as uncomfortable as I expected.’

Indeed. No place could possibly be more uncomfortable to Cordelia than that house.

In any case, Lucien was able—after a very long time—to focus properly on her actual job.

“What do you think is the most important thing when handling barrier magic?”

At Lucien’s question, several students raised their hands.

“Isn’t it the amount of mana? Barriers come in many configurations, so continuously supplying mana to maintain them seems important.”

“That’s not wrong. However, before that, there’s something even more important to understand.”

Lucien lightly tapped the classroom floor with her staff. Centered on her, a pale golden, dome-shaped layer of mana spread out.

“This is a basic defensive spell. Noel, could you try attacking it lightly?”

Noel, who had been dragged in as a teaching assistant as part of his punishment—no magic, just labor—snapped his head up.

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

“Like, really?”

“Really.”

After seventeen days and nine hours, he’d finally been allowed to use magic again, and the excited Noel suddenly hesitated.

What if I go too hard?

He hadn’t planned on using an attack spell in the first place, but every spell he cast carried destructive force.

Noel examined Lucien’s still-utterly-ruined body.

An enormous amount of mana—so dense it left no room for anything else—seethed within her, as if on the verge of bursting.

No wonder her body’s like that, carrying something like this.

Lucien Philonia—his ill-tempered new homeroom teacher—belonged to a rare group among mages: the high-risk class of excess mana holders.

When the body couldn’t properly contain overwhelming mana, the mana instead destroyed the body from within.

It wasn’t exactly a disease—more like an unusual constitution—but most high-risk individuals kept their condition secret.

Depending on the nature of their mana, it could negatively affect those around them, and if contamination occurred, they would undergo monsterization faster than anyone else.

At least in Lucien’s case, part of her mana constantly leaked out, seeping into her staff, the ground, and the air, easing the burden on her body.

That was only possible because this was Noctua, a city run by countless unseen spells.

Still—if his magic struck that body, which looked like it could shatter like glass at any moment…

Wouldn’t she die?

Being too strong is a problem.
In the fourteen-year life of a prodigy mage, it was a very serious concern.

Noel did everything he could to fire the weakest spell possible.

Pop!

A palm-sized, pitiful little flame tapped the barrier and vanished.

“……”

“What’s he doing? Is that really Noel Efron?”

“I heard he’s being punished—maybe that’s why?”

“Yeah, with that lunatic personality, he should’ve blown this classroom apart.”

Whispers rippled through the room.

Noel’s ears burned red as he ground his teeth.

What do you idiots know!

You have no idea how hard it is to use only enough strength to avoid crushing a single blade of grass—like an elephant tiptoeing!

Lucien, who had just been treated like a blade of grass by a much younger student, was impressed.

So it’s not that he couldn’t control his power—he just didn’t bother to.

A heavy, pulling sensation at the back of her neck, along with a sense of betrayal, came as a bonus.

If he’d shown this level of precision when he blew the classroom doors off and punched a hole through the north tower wall, she wouldn’t have had to write that incident report.

“As you just saw, defensive magic blocks force with force. Barrier magic, on the other hand, is closer to the concept of filtering.”

Lucien tapped the floor again with her staff. In an instant, a massive formation spread out from beneath her feet, covering the entire classroom.

The students gasped and murmured in shock, and even Noel stared with his mouth open.

This is possible?

Barrier magic wasn’t an unpopular specialty for no reason.

With barrier stones becoming easier to install, mages were often treated as nothing more than charging devices—but the bigger issue was that barriers were slow to activate, making them far less practical in combat than defensive magic.

The Mage Tower missed a mage like this? That’s impossible!

The truth was that Lucien had failed the first physical fitness test and never even got to take the magic exam—but Noel had no way of knowing that.

“Noel, try once more. Stronger than before—use an attack spell.”

“……Do I really have to? You could make one of those guys do it.”

“Do you want your punishment extended?”

“Tch… fine. Hand it over.”

What an ill-tempered old hag.

Always threatening, without even realizing she was doing it for his sake.

Irritated, Noel took Lucien’s staff.

He meant to use it to fine-tune his output more precisely—but the moment he grasped it, far more mana than usual was drawn out of him.

Before he could cancel it, a spell far stronger than intended flew toward its target.

“……!!”