There Is No Hidden Villain in This Novel Chapter 52

“Even so…”

“Is it because of your reputation?”

“Excuse me? My reputation?”

He seemed to be thinking of the risk involved when the subordinates I commanded as a de Millan were dragged away by a professor. And the possibility of me being identified as the one behind them.

“Well, what will you do if it is about my reputation. It’s not like anything would change.”

“…”

“Haha. I’m joking. It’s not because of my reputation. Would you believe me if I said it was out of affection for my friends?”

“I’d sooner believe a fool than believe you, but I will believe you anyway.”

“Pardon?”

“I will become a fool just for you.”

“Oh my, what to do. I’m not really into stupid people.”

As if he didn’t want to be stupid alone, Ryuseong pressed my temple with a squeeeeeze without another word. Thanks to him, I had to bite my lip and stomp my feet on the unlit chandelier, holding back a scream.

And right at that moment, the first match was announced.

“It’s no use being cute. I won’t go easy on you.”

“Please stop with the mental attacks!”

[Hae Yuna VS Capone.]

They were preparing for their duel.

“If a mental attack works, wouldn’t the one who doesn’t use it be the fool?”

Capone said as she summoned her weapon. Hae Yuna’s main weapon is her fists. In that case, what does Capone use?

“Holy shit.”

Capone Yones is a mage. Therefore, just like the shaman Lee Hyang, she summons something from a subspace to use as a medium for her miracles.

According to Hae Yuna’s assessment, Lee Hyang swings a smoking pipe because her arm strength is lacking (“That’s not true! I’m strong! It’s just that I imprinted on a cigarette when I was little, so I can only use a smoking pipe!”), but Capone’s case is different.

Hae Yuna’s jaw dropped as she looked at ‘that thing’ her opponent had taken out. Capone smirked faintly.

“You must mean hammer, not holy.”

That’s right. The second daughter of the Yones family is a power mage who swings a giant hammer thicker than a grown man.

It was the first time in her life that Hae Yuna had seen a slender, short-haired girl holding a giant hammer. So she was so surprised her hair stood on end.

They had not yet fought with their official weapons in a formal setting.

All they had ever done was spar with wooden staffs or wooden swords provided by the school, or at most, unsharpened wooden staffs with iron cores.

Therefore, to Hae Yuna, Capone Yones’s hammer was something she had never seen before. Naturally, she couldn’t help but scream when Capone swung that hammer around.

“Ah! This is too much! I’m bare-handed, and you have a hammer?!”

“Did we agree to a bare-handed match? We didn’t.”

“Ugh! You’re so annoy—.”

Before she could finish her sentence, Capone swung her hammer. The hammer, with its considerable thickness and weight, moved so nimbly that in the blink of an eye, the spot where Hae Yuna had been standing was crushed with a crunch.

However, Hae Yuna dodged it by a paper-thin margin with chillingly fast footwork and immediately snatched Capone’s wrist.

Pulling her forward, she delivered a single punch.

POW!

It was just a fist hitting a head, a simple impact, yet a tremendous wind pressure swept through the surroundings.

The complexions of those huddled together inside the barrier split in two. Lee Hyang and Shin Myohan cheered excitedly, while Logan and Dietrich’s faces turned cold, their lips twisting into a smirk.

But when Hae Yuna herself shook her fist with a dissatisfied look, Lee Hyang and Shin Myohan also sensed something was off, their expressions turning strange.

At that very moment, the Capone that Hae Yuna was clutching began to scatter into dust, starting from the wrist. It seemed the Capone that Hae Yuna had grabbed was an illusion from the start, and her punch had merely burst a simple illusion.

It was only natural that Logan became triumphant.

“Getting fooled by a fake, how foolish. The sages were right when they said not to associate with the unlearned.”

And Lee Hyang turned them into speechless chicks with just two sentences.

“Are you trying to get your master in trouble right now? The ‘unlearned’ are your master’s lover’s friends, you know?”

“…”

Up on the chandelier, Cassis burst out laughing, but the area was thoroughly soundproofed by his magic, so not even a whisper escaped. In any case, it seemed Capone was deceiving Hae Yuna with an illusion, hiding her presence and aiming for a surprise attack.

“Agh, damn it. What a disappointing feel.”

However, Cassis, who was longing for popcorn on the chandelier, was not worried about Hae Yuna.

The principal had once said that the best condition a martial artist must have is an unbreakable mentality against a magician. This is because Hae Yuna is the very existence that perfectly fits that description.

“Heyyy. Capoooone. Come on out. We have to get some sleep before class, you know. Don’t leave me bored. You said I was cute!”

Hae Yuna had a mentality that wouldn’t break against a foe who could nullify her attacks even if she swung her fists.

If one swing doesn’t work, then swing twice, three times, a hundred times, a thousand times. Magic absorbs the impact? Then hit it until it can’t absorb anymore. They scatter fake bodies and run away annoyingly? Then kill the real one when it comes to attack. What’s the problem? What reason is there for one’s mentality to break just because a magician negates the meaning of an attack?

“Are you going to leave cute little me all alone like this?”

That much couldn’t break Hae Yuna. She had already thrown countless punches and shed countless beads of sweat while resenting someone who was already dead. Compared to the emptiness of that time, this was nothing.

It didn’t matter that Logan was glaring at her with contempt, that Dietrich was shrugging as if she was hopeless, or that Lee Hyang looked uneasy.

It was just annoying that the feel of the punch was disappointing.

‘Grandma always said I needed to know how to slice moments into tiny pieces, but if I could do that, would I be a cadet?’

Hae Yuna has never transcended a fleeting moment by her own will.

But she has experienced it.

However, Hae Yuna never told her grandmother that she had experienced that moment. It was because at that very moment, when her parents were being murdered, the movement of the blade digging into flesh and blood had felt so chillingly slow.

She confessed only to Lee Hyang. And what he had heard through the grapevine was that it seemed she had temporarily transcended that moment due to the desperate struggle to survive when her life was threatened.

The condition to become a Ranker is transcendence. How finely one can break down a fleeting moment determines one’s rank. It meant that for a human to face a Named, one had to become a transcendent. That was why Hae Yuna’s dream was to become a Ranker. She wanted to paint over that slow-motion scene with a new memory, so she trained in martial arts with the resolve to die.

Perhaps, some might not understand why Hae Yuna seems so relaxed.

They might not understand why she is so carefree in everything she does, despite having trained so desperately.

‘But a person can seem carefree precisely because they are desperate enough to face death…’

Because the target of her revenge was already dead, she had to be all the more desperate with the resolve to die. She had to desperately cling to living each day happily. She was a person who had to be desperate just to lead a normal life.

That’s why Hae Yuna sometimes resented Cassis de Millan’s subordinates. Honestly, while Cassis de Millan had shown unexpected sides (in many aspects), his subordinates were just as expected. They had lived lives where looking down on others was natural, so in Cassis’s absence, they would look down on some cadets, leading to friction with Lee Hyang and Hae Yuna.

They could despise people so much because they had never truly understood what it means for someone to die. So Hae Yuna couldn’t help but resent them, and at the same time, she couldn’t help but be sad, knowing that even that wasn’t their fault.

Therefore, Hae Yuna’s best was this.

“Capone, want to go get mascarpone cheesecake together sometime?”

Hae Yuna smiled with a wink as she walked, dragging her shoes nonchalantly as if on a stroll. As expected, no answer came.

Meanwhile, Capone Yones hated that Hae Yuna was standing with her hands behind her back as if she were at ease. She hated the carefree attitude of someone who had no idea what kind of blood-curdling life others lived.

Cute, soft, and gentle…

Hating how the flowers of the greenhouse, raised so delicately, could produce such sweet and tender words, she desperately constructed a magic circle. She pasted in the language of magic like a woodblock print.

The main sentence that floated behind her head like a halo was a series connection of the formula for [To do] and [Enhance].

—[To enhance]

The main sentence, lacking any particles, might not be detailed or sharp, but it would be helpful for simply and foolishly piling on firepower.

For sub-clauses: [Weight] [Impact]. For modifiers: [Squared].

—Enhance [Weight]. Enhance [Impact].

And [Square] all of it.

After some thought, the mana circuit was set in series.

A series circuit, with its great power but considerable resistance, was tricky for a cadet to handle no matter how simple the sentence. If the magic circle shattered unexpectedly, she might not have the strength to create the next one. But the very purpose of the magic circle was a one-hit-KO fight.

The magic circle, which clearly revealed its teleological purpose of felling a person with a single blow loaded with everything, was flashing like a brilliant light.

‘I’ll end you with this one blow.’

If the attack landed, even if she guarded with her arms, her bones would crumble. But conversely, if the magic circle shattered, the one who would have to bear the corresponding blow would be Capone herself. Capone was used to such moments. Tightrope walking was no different from her life.

So she decided to jump down from the chandelier where she had been hiding.

Unaware of the foolish postscript that when Capone Yones had hidden in the chandelier, two people had held their breaths even though they didn’t have to.

—She fell with her hammer.

In that moment, Capone felt the pull of gravity and the effect of the magic engraved on her hammer intensifying. And she clearly saw Hae Yuna, who had her hands behind her back, take a dance-like, smooth step, pull her arm back, and extend her fist, aiming precisely at her.

And.

CRASH!

“Ugh, sorry! I broke the hammer too. I’m sorry. Ugh. How much is this? Is it very expensive?”

“…”

Hae Yuna fretted in front of the shattered hammer.

But Capone had seen it clearly. Right before her eyes, she had altered the path of her fist. That was why she herself was unharmed, not even by a speck, while blood was flowing from the back of her hand because she had crushed the hammer.

She could have crushed her at any moment, yet she forcibly twisted it to show mercy.

As if it were a mistake…

“I-I’ll pay you back. Bank transfer for the hammer!”

She was spouting such ridiculous nonsense.

Soon, the victor of the first match was decided. In the fleeting void as they decided the next turn, Cassis de Millan, his face expressionless as if he might disappear, asked softly.

“How was it?”

“What was.”

“Their sparring match. Well, they seem to call it a duel, but how could such an adorable squabble be called a duel.”

As he said this, Cassis de Millan’s eyebrows drooped languidly like a well-fed lion. Like someone who, after countless battles, had torn all his enemies to death and built a mountain of their corpses.

To that, Ryuseong asked without thinking.