"Noah-kun, the Chairwoman has requested you visit her office after your morning classes."
"Thank you, I understand."
Noah waited for the elevator in the teaching building.
Suddenly, a voice came from behind him.
"Oh my, isn't this Noah-kun?"
Nene Saikyou held a folding fan, her tone tinged with amusement.
Noah gave her a slight bow.
"Nene-sensei."
"Hmm, such a polite child. But with me, you could be a little more rebellious, you know?"
In an instant, Noah sensed the physical mass before him gaining tremendous acceleration.
Visually, Nene remained motionless, but Noah, deliberately maintaining his Elemental Perception, noticed something approaching—something humanoid.
Or rather, a form identical to Nene's.
He instinctively dodged, and his vision blurred.
'Strange.'
'What just happened?'
Noah noticed Nene moving before him.
No, it was more like frames had been removed from a film, making it appear to fast-forward.
In less than 0.1 seconds, Nene, who had been motionless just moments before, appeared right in front of him.
If he didn't dodged, she would have been right on top of him.
'Time stop?'
'No.'
The Yaksha Princess was a Natural Interference System user, a gravity manipulator.
She shouldn't possess such a conceptual ability.
Compared to Noah's bewildered expression, Nene looked even more astonished.
She asked blankly, "You... you saw it?"
What she had just done was simple.
And it wasn't an innate Ability. It was martial arts. To be precise, a technique from ancient martial arts called Trackless Step.
Noah tilted his head.
'Saw it?'
He hadn't seen anything clearly at all.
To the naked eye, what she had done looked exactly like time stopping and instantaneous teleportation.
But through his airflow perception, he could sense that time hadn't stopped.
There was no unnatural feeling in the physical world, no sense of discontinuity.
It wasn't teleportation, because the airflow sensed the object's rapid movement.
Seeing his bewildered expression, Nene realized her mistake.
She unfolded her fan, hiding her smile.
"Ah, I see. You're not seeing it, but this is fascinating."
As one of the world's top-tier powerhouses, Nene had detected the anomaly in this space through subtle sensations on her skin.
She licked her finger to moisten it and held it upright.
This was an indoor space, yet the airflow was circulating in a structured, magical pattern, not a natural convection current.
"So that's how it is. I understand now."
'To manipulate the surrounding elements to create such a "barrier," or perhaps a domain...'
'How intriguing.... how fascinating.'
No wonder she had noticed this child's extraordinary reaction speed in previous tournament battles, neutralizing even invisible strikes.
'A five-meter radius, was it?'
'This truly resembles an absolute domain-like ability.'
'But it's so strange.'
'With a Magic Power level of only C Rank, how could he sustain such a complex, invisible construct? Is he maintaining this extravagance even in his daily behavior outside of combat?'
Seeing her peculiar actions, Noah knew his little trick had been exposed.
Though it was just a simple trick, none of his student opponents had ever seen through it.
Their attention always remained fixed on his exaggerated magical attacks or unexpectedly skillful swordsmanship, completely overlooking his exaggerated reactions.
In Noah's view, the act of combat—the part necessary for victory—could be broken down and understood through analysis.
The most crucial aspect was "seeing," meaning the ability to detect and observe the enemy.
The Truth Seeker ability allowed him to gain a tactical advantage even before the battle began.
Once the fight started, all he needed to do was track the enemy, never losing sight of them.
However, the physical limitations of the human eye meant he needed to compensate for what his eyes couldn't perceive.
This was where Magic Power and Elemental Perception came into play.
For objects imbued with Magic Power, Magic Perception offered superior effectiveness and precision compared to Elemental Perception.
This didn't mean Elemental Perception was weak.
Elemental Perception could achieve the same level of sensitivity as tactile sensation.
Magic Perception was even more powerful, but Elemental Perception consumed almost no energy, making it a permanent physical buff.
Through several iterations, Noah had experimented with Elemental Perception, sensing wind, air moisture, gravity, and more.
After observing Stella and Tohka Todo's sparring match, he discovered a new method: bio-electricity.
Tohka's lightning vision, despite its name, wasn't a visual ability. Instead, she actively suppressed her vision to enhance her sensory precision.
Human physical actions are entirely driven by neural signals transmitted from the brain.
With her mastery, Tohka could not only monitor these signals but also decipher their underlying meanings.
This was an even more broken ability than mind-reading. No clever physical tricks could bypass it.
Through experimentation, Noah found he could also capture neural signals within his five meters, but he couldn't achieve the same level of tactical insight as Tohka, a dedicated Thunder Mage.
Perhaps his current Orario Level limited the effectiveness of his spellcasting.
If he could achieve Level 3 or even Level 4, the skill's effects would also become stronger, perhaps even capable of achieving the impossible.
Currently, the only thing he could accomplish with bio-electricity was physical location tracking.
"Nene-sensei, are you here to see the Chairwoman?"
"Hmm, Kuro asked me to come. I don't know what's going on, but it's probably just to make me do some grunt work."
The Former World Third and the Current World Third were actually close friends?
Come to think of it...
"You two knew each other back in your student days, right?"
"Gueh?! What's with you knowing that?!"
Nene didn't want to bring up the past, as it contained her dark history.
Back then, she had been invincible throughout elementary and middle school and always disdainful of her peers.
Feeling bored, she couldn't even be bothered to participate in national-level competitions.
Even a stage like the Seven Stars Sword Art Festival seemed like nothing more than a bunch of weaklings squabbling over trivialities for her.
If she were to participate, no competition would stand a chance.
There was no point in fighting weaklings.
It was at that time, when she was so self-assured and arrogant, that she met Kurono Shinguuji, a girl her age from a different school, through her master's introduction.
Their first encounter was a simulated battle, and it ended in an instant.
By the time she regained her senses, she had already lost, lying on the ground, completely unaware of what had happened.
Yet she could guess what had occurred: she had been instantly killed by her opponent, without even a chance to resist.
That marked the beginning of their ill-fated connection.
She didn't want many people to know about this, but those who had studied her closely would eventually discover it.
For Noah, this was his path to becoming stronger.
"Because my abilities include gravity manipulation, I was interested in the techniques used by the Yaksha Princess, the Former World Third, during her youth. That's why I specifically researched them."
"Heh."
Nene gazed at the composed young man before her and sighed inwardly.
With her discerning eye, she could see that Noah's abilities were like rough jade, their ultimate potential dependent on how they were refined.
The more he learned, the more refined they would become.
Recognizing his gap in Magic Power and targeting information about her past self—that was insightful.
Suddenly, she realized something.
"What do you mean 'during her youth'?! I'm still young!"
'Good point.'
"Ugh!" Nene complained loudly.
Noah glanced down at the "mature loli" who barely reached his chest, then casually surveyed the flat plains stretching behind her, indistinguishable from her back.
"Well, you're not wrong," he conceded.
"Hey, where are you looking when you say that?! You're a boob guy too, aren't you?!"
"Hell, yeah."
"Grrr, damn you—!!"
Ding.
The elevator finally arrived.
The two entered one after the other and rode straight to the top floor.
"Hey, Noah-kun," Nene said, "I've never thought about this before, but how about becoming my student?"
"Huh?" Noah blinked in surprise.
He studied Nene's expression. She didn't seem to be joking.
Become the Yaksha Princess's student?
Before he could seriously consider the offer, Nene changed her mind. "No, never mind. Stundents are too much trouble. Forget it."
Noah: ...
In truth, aside from the political fame it would bring, the Yaksha Princess had little to teach him.
First and foremost, she wasn't the type suited for teaching.
Since being summoned to Hagun, she hadn't taught a single class.
Rather than a teacher, she seemed more like a powerful thug hired by the underworld to guard their territory.
Yet Noah knew her Magic Control was the lowest possible rank: E-Rank.
He had realized this when reviewing her few past competition records.
Her techniques were impossible for him to imitate, for a simple reason: she had no technique at all.
She was the type who relied entirely on brute force, achieving miracles through sheer, overwhelming power.
Her standard tactic was to unleash tenfold gravity from the start, crushing her opponents outright. If that failed, she would simply double down with even greater force.
Coupled with her abysmal Magic Control, her attacks lacked finesse, resulting in devastating collateral consequences for her opponents every time.
Despite this, she possessed a signature Noble Art called Bakuya Kuheki (Overlord Heavenly Star).
By manipulating gravity, she would pull physical space debris from Earth's orbit down to the ground, unleashing a single, devastating kinetic strike.
Its destructive power rivaled that of a low-yield nuclear weapon, capable of annihilating an international metropolis and causing national-level devastation.
Due to its extreme danger, this technique was classified as a forbidden skill by the League of Mage-Knights, prohibiting her from using it.
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