EPISODE 11: Identity and Lessons

The wind of the Crimson Forest carried the iron smell of blood mingled with a bone-deep, penetrating cold. Across the frost-whitened grass, the stiffened carcasses of Crimson Apes lay scattered. Several had been shattered into pieces like glass sculptures hurled against stone.

On a branch of one of the enormous red-leafed pines, Zenoda sat in absolute stillness, legs crossed. His deep black eyes — carrying their hidden cosmic shimmer — were fixed downward, recording every movement, every breath, every fluctuation of energy from the snow-haired girl below.

That girl was Elara Rosecold. A Princess of the royal bloodline of the Kingdom of Koreson, who had, somewhat surprisingly, requested Karham's team — a group of adventurers freshly promoted to Rank B — to accompany her in training her lethal magic.

Having just witnessed Elara's one-sided annihilation of over a dozen mid-class monsters, the mind of Zenoda — now assimilated with the memories of the Supreme God Ursilium — reached two absolute conclusions.

The first was a deeply fatal flaw.

Despite the terrifying destructive output of Elara's ice magic, there was a consistent activation delay every time she transitioned from one form of magic to another. When she canceled her defensive ice pillars and summoned the rain of ice spears, the mana circuit within her body required nearly two full seconds to recalibrate its temperature and water particle control.

For an ordinary knight or a monster relying on raw instinct, two seconds might feel like nothing. But to Zenoda's eyes — and to the eyes of an assassin of Ziryal's caliber — two seconds was an eternity. More than enough time to take Elara's head three consecutive times before her next spell could form.

Then there was the second conclusion. The one that made Zenoda narrow his eyes ever so slightly.

He focused his gaze on the mana flow deep within Elara's core. The raw mana capacity that the Princess possessed was enormous — nearly comparable to Annesia's explosive reserves. Yet strangely, Zenoda could see that the energy was not flowing naturally. Elara appeared to have deliberately constructed an invisible dam somewhere inside her own circuit. This girl was suppressing her true power. Whether it was the result of a curse, a past trauma, or simply a fear of losing control over her own magic, Zenoda knew that the Elara currently before him was only a shadow of what her actual potential could be.

He exhaled quietly.

"That's none of my business," Zenoda thought flatly.

He had no intention of prying into the private matters of a royal princess he had known for a matter of hours. Involving himself in a mortal human's past would only invite unnecessary complications. And so he resolved that the second conclusion would remain unspoken — locked away, shared with no one.

Below, Elara lowered both her hands. The thick cold blanketing the area slowly receded. The Princess steadied her slightly labored breathing, then turned toward her four escorts still holding their defensive formation.

"The last ape has been dealt with," Elara said with composed pride, brushing frost from her battle attire. She fixed her gaze on Karham at the front. "The four of you covered my blind angles adequately for new adventurers. But I didn't come here to show off magic. I require an honest assessment. What do you think?"

Karham, Ziryal, Annesia, and Linaya exchanged glances, their smiles slightly awkward. In their eyes, Elara's magic was genuinely terrifying. But they knew they were not the right people to evaluate it.

Without a word, Karham pointed upward toward the enormous pine to their right.

Elara frowned and followed the direction of his finger.

Tap.

Without even the rustle of leaves, Zenoda's figure was simply there — having landed silently on the frozen ground five paces in front of the Princess. His dark linen cloak shifted slightly with the motion. He looked at Elara with a face entirely devoid of expression, as though he had just stepped down from a bed rather than dropped from fifteen meters above them.

"If you're looking for praise, you can find plenty of that from the flatterers in the Palace," Zenoda opened, his tone as cold as the ice Elara had just been creating. "Your magic is powerful. Your mana capacity is above average. But in a real fight to the death against a true combatant, you would be the first corpse to hit the ground."

Hearing that blunt, entirely unvarnished criticism, Annesia held her breath — afraid that the Princess would take offense and have their instructor executed for insolence.

Elara, however, did not look angry. Her brow drew together sharply, her pride issuing a silent challenge. "Explain yourself, evaluator. What weakness did you observe in the ice magic of the pure Rosecold bloodline?"

"Your weakness is the kind of flaw that practitioners across this continent have been trained to accept as an absolute law of magic," Zenoda answered, walking slowly around Elara in a deliberate circle, gesturing at the empty air as though tracing the architecture of her spell structure. "Every time you change your magic structure from passive defense to aggressive area attack, you have an activation delay."

Zenoda stopped directly in front of her, looking straight into her sapphire eyes. "That delay consumes nearly two seconds. For any enemy with high speed, two seconds is more than enough time to cut your throat, burn your heart, and leave for tea before your body has finished falling."

Elara's eyes widened slightly. In all the years she had trained under the Kingdom's Royal Magic Knights, not a single instructor had ever highlighted that delay — because every one of them had accepted casting delay as a natural limitation of human magic. None of them had ever measured it with that precision.

"That... that is the natural law of magic!" Elara pushed back, her voice rising slightly as she fought to preserve her composure. "Every mana circuit requires time to alter the ambient temperature! Do you honestly believe anyone can activate an entirely different spell structure for the next attack without any delay?!"

Zenoda turned his face away, gazing at the distant monster carcasses with a maddening blankness. He was briefly reminded of how Mincilia could simultaneously cast millions of solar-system-annihilating spells without so much as a millisecond of pause between them. But naturally, that was the realm of gods entirely. For a human being—

"Some can," Zenoda answered, casually. "There are people out there who break through that limitation. Circuit simplification, mental pre-casting, spell overlapping. Overcoming the delay is ultimately a matter caught somewhere between pure luck and raw talent."

Those words landed on Elara like a silent slap. The phrase "between luck and talent" carried the unmistakable implication that Elara — the celebrated genius of the royal family — lacked the talent to overcome the flaw he had identified.

Noble pride and stung ego began to ignite in the Princess's chest. She clenched the hem of her cloak tightly, her eyes sharp as she fixed them on the village boy standing before her with his air of insufferable certainty.

"Is that so? An absolute weakness that only the talented can overcome, you say?" Elara stepped forward, directly challenging Zenoda. "Then tell me, evaluator — what exactly happens if this so-called absolute weakness of mine continues on an actual battlefield?"

Zenoda held her gaze without blinking. No hesitation. No deference to titles. His mouth delivered the simplest, most lethal word available.

"Death."

The air of the Crimson Forest appeared to freeze completely.

The word was delivered in a tone of perfect flatness, as though Zenoda were reading tomorrow's weather report. But to Elara, it was the highest insult ever directed at the magic she had poured her entire life's blood and tears into mastering.

The snow-haired girl clicked her tongue in sharp displeasure. Disbelief and wounded pride swallowed her composure. She would not allow some lowborn young man to demean the pride of Rosecold magic.

"I'll prove that mouth of yours is all talk, Zenoda Blanco!" Elara hissed in a voice edged with a real threat.

Without any warning, Elara leaped back with swift agility, opening a ten-meter gap between herself and Zenoda. Her small hands rose into the air, and a chill far more intense than anything she had produced before detonated outward. She was no longer restraining her casting speed.

"Frost Spears: Rain!"

The air above Zenoda thundered. Hundreds of serrated ice lances materialized from nothing, aimed directly at the black-haired young man who was still standing perfectly at ease with both hands in his pockets.

"ZENO!" Linaya screamed in panic.

But before the lethal volley could descend, a flash of blue light cut across the clearing.

"COVER!"

The earth shuddered. Karham burst from the tree line, activating his signature defensive technique. His massive frame blinked across the short distance and materialized directly in front of Zenoda. He drove his tower shield into the frozen ground, layered his body with Iron Body, and braced himself to receive the Princess's ice barrage.

"Your Highness, please calm yourself!" Karham called from behind his shield, having misread the situation as genuine rage and loss of control. "This evaluation doesn't need to go as far as killing each other!"

A hand touched Karham's shoulder from behind. Gently, but with unmistakable finality.

"Karham. Stand down."

Zenoda's voice was quiet. But the resonance in it made the hair on the back of Karham's neck stand up. It was not a request.

"Let me handle this," Zenoda continued, stepping out from behind Karham's protection. The boredom in his eyes was gone — replaced by the sharpness of a predator that has found something genuinely interesting to play with.

Sensing the shift in his instructor's aura, Karham understood that Zenoda was going to act. The big young man swallowed, pulled back his shield, and stepped away obediently.

"U-understood," Karham said, his voice unsteady. But before he moved fully clear, he leaned in and whispered urgently under his breath: "Please... Instructor. Hold yourself back. If you kill her, the entire Kingdom of Koreson will be hunting us."

Zenoda didn't respond. He simply kept walking forward, letting the cold wind press against his cloak.

His left hand reached for the ebony scabbard at his hip. His right hand closed around the handle of the sword.

SHING.

The sharp, ringing sound of a blade leaving its sheath cut through the frozen wind of the Crimson Forest.

For the first time since his arrival in Koreson, Zenoda had drawn his real sword. The blade forged by the Kaigan blacksmith and blessed by Mincilia finally revealed its edge to the open air.

The blade was not ordinary steel-grey. It was a pure, silvery white — as though it had been cast from compressed moonlight. Near the base of the blade, close to the tsuba, there was an exquisitely detailed engraving: a pair of silver wings framing a softly glowing blue diamond. A motif bearing an unmistakable resemblance to the cosmic wings of Mincilia herself.

Sunlight filtering through the crimson canopy caught the white blade and sent blinding light scattering in every direction.

Zenoda set his stance. He planted his feet shoulder-width apart and leveled the white sword vertically in front of him — the blade's tip pointed directly at the bridge of Princess Elara's nose.

At the edge of the improvised arena, Annesia covered her mouth with both hands. Cold sweat ran freely down her forehead. "No, no, no, no. Zeno drew his sword. Back in the village, he wiped out the entire Iron Fang gang without ever unsheathing it! Is he actually planning to go through with this and behead the Princess?!" she whispered in barely-controlled panic.

Ziryal and Linaya had also gone rigid, silently preparing to intervene if the situation turned genuinely lethal.

But right beside Annesia, Karham was showing a completely different reaction. The young tank — normally the most anxious of the group — crossed his arms over his chest, a faint smile forming at the corner of his mouth.

"Relax, Anne. The Princess will be fine," Karham said quietly, his gaze fixed on Zenoda's stance.

"Fine?! Are you blind?! Zeno drew his sword!" Annesia hissed.

"That is exactly why I know he's holding back," Karham answered with quiet analysis.

As the person who had taken more of Zenoda's training strikes than anyone else, Karham had studied his instructor's fighting patterns with obsessive care. He had discovered one of the great secrets of Zenoda's swordsmanship.

"At its core," Karham explained to his bewildered companions, "Zenoda's most terrifying killing technique is Iaijutsu — drawing the blade and delivering an ultra-fast strike in a single motion, using the friction of the scabbard itself to detonate the sword's speed. If Zeno intended to kill Princess Elara in an instant, he would not have drawn the sword before moving."

Karham pointed toward Zenoda, who remained motionless with his blade held vertically before him. "But look at him now. He drew first, let his opponent see the blade, then settled into a static stance without attacking immediately. To someone who doesn't know him, Zeno looks threatening and unrestrained. But to us — this is absolute proof that he is deliberately limiting his speed and giving his opponent the opportunity to strike first."

Karham's analysis was one hundred percent correct.

In Zenoda's mind, he had intentionally surrendered the advantage of the first strike — because if he employed Iaijutsu, Elara's head would genuinely leave her shoulders before her brain could register the sensation of pain.

But Elara, across the clearing, had no knowledge of any of that.

Seeing a village boy dare to draw a live blade and point it at her face, Elara interpreted it as nothing less than absolute defiance. A double insult.

"You dare raise a sword to a member of the royal family?! Good! I will freeze that arrogance of yours along with that oversized mouth!" Elara roared.

She thrust both hands downward.

FWIP. FWIP. FWIP. FWIP.

The hundreds of ice lances that had been hovering in the air above Zenoda launched simultaneously like a storm of frozen meteors, sealing off every possible escape route.

But Zenoda was no longer still. He finally moved.

Not teleportation. Not an incomprehensible burst of impossible speed. Zenoda used pure footwork agility and perfect prediction alone. He broke into a sideways run, his body weaving through the barrage like a dancer in a storm.

The ice spears slammed into the ground where Zenoda had been standing fractions of a second earlier, erupting in explosions of shattered ice and frozen earth. Clang. Clang. Occasionally Zenoda used his white sword to deflect a projectile whose angle of descent was too awkward to dodge cleanly. The blessed blade split Elara's enchanted ice as though cutting through warm butter, leaving not even a trace of frost on its surface.

"Don't think you can keep running!" Elara shouted, chanting the next spell with no regard for her own labored breathing.

She canceled the remaining spears and drove both palms flat against the ground.

The one-point-five-second delay occurred.

To Zenoda, currently in motion, that pause felt very long. Frankly, he could have taken a yawn if he had wanted to. He continued pretending to run at a normal human pace, waiting patiently for Elara's spell to finish forming.

BAM. BAM. BAM.

Three enormous ice pillars erupted from the ground in rapid succession, attempting to impale Zenoda from below. But because he had already read the delay and tracked the directional flow of Elara's mana through the earth beneath him, he simply rotated his body, evading each one with the bare minimum of motion necessary. He stepped lightly onto the first pillar as it rose, used it as a platform to clear the second, and landed smoothly behind the third.

Every one of the Princess's killing attacks missed. Not one of them so much as grazed the hem of Zenoda's linen shirt.

Elara's breathing had become ragged. Cold sweat beaded at her temples. Frustration was eating through her rationality. She — the feared academic genius — could not touch a young man armed with nothing but a sword.

To cover her panic, she assumed a contemptuous sneer.

"Keep running like a rat!" Elara taunted from across the ice pillars, her voice laced with fury and fatigue in equal measure. "I'm starting to doubt you even taught those skilled adventurers anything. Are you just accidentally fast on your feet, and you've been pretending to be their instructor to ride on their reputation?!"

At that cheap provocation, Zenoda stopped moving.

He stood there, spinning his white katana lazily in his right hand. The cold wind moved through his black hair.

"Princess," Zenoda replied in a voice that was very calm and very clear, carrying through the entirety of the frozen forest around them. "Trust me on this. If I were actually serious in this fight... it would only make you disappointed in yourself."

That sentence reduced whatever remained of Elara's patience to nothing. "Silence!"

With the mana she had left, Elara committed to the fastest combined assault she could produce. She no longer cared about elegance. She only needed to prove that her magic was unmatched.

Elara hurled three large ice lance projectiles from her right hand directly at Zenoda.

Seeing the large projectiles coming in a straight line, Zenoda stepped sideways, avoiding all three easily.

But that was the feint.

The instant Zenoda's evasion carried his foot precisely onto the spot Elara had calculated for, she drove her left palm into the ground and triggered a high-tier confinement spell she had been quietly weaving beneath the surface the entire time.

"Glacial Prison!" Elara cried out, her eyes blazing with the light of victory.

All around the patch of ground where Zenoda stood, a glowing blue magic circle detonated. Four walls of massively thick ice pillars erupted simultaneously from the earth, curving inward as they rose and locking together at the top — forming the absolute enclosure of a small tower of ice.

The sound of the sealing impact resonated through the air. The walls were enormous. The temperature inside was engineered to freeze any living creature within seconds.

Zenoda was inside it. Completely sealed within an ice coffin.

Karham, Ziryal, Linaya, and Annesia stood frozen. Silence fell like a dropped stone. They could not believe their instructor had been caught by such an obvious trap.

Elara sank down onto one knee, breathing in desperate, heaving gasps. Her chest rose and fell wildly, cold vapor pouring from her mouth. That final spell had consumed nearly every last reserve of mana she had. She stared at the towering ice structure before her with a smile of exhausted, triumphant satisfaction.

The snow-haired girl wiped the sweat from her forehead and laughed quietly between her heavy, labored breaths.

"Hah... hah... Look at who's disappointed now, big talker," Elara murmured with what remained of her arrogance, trying to calm her racing pulse. "You underestimated royal magic. The fight is over."

The silence of the Crimson Forest held — broken only by the faint groan of ice shifting in the wind.

Then a voice answered her.

"Yes. You're right."

The voice did not come from inside the ice tower.

It came from somewhere very close, very calm, drifting softly from directly behind Elara's right ear.

Princess Elara's sapphire eyes flew completely open. Her heart felt as though it had been physically wrenched from her chest. The blood in her veins went cold — not from her own magic, but from the pure, sudden terror that seized her.

Someone was standing behind her. No sound of footsteps. No shift in the air. No shadow.

"This is over," Zenoda's voice continued.

When Elara swallowed and slowly, carefully turned her head, she felt something metallic — cold and unambiguously lethal — resting with feather-light precision against the skin of her throat.

It was the white blade of Zenoda's sword. The weapon engraved with its wings and blue diamond caught the filtered sunlight, beautiful and radiant and promising instant death.

Zenoda stood tall behind the still-kneeling Princess. His linen clothing was not even wrinkled. He was not inside the ice tower. At the moment the pillars rose around him, his speed had created an afterimage convincing enough to deceive Elara's eyes — while he had calmly walked around the outside and positioned himself behind her.

As the full, incomprehensible depth of the gap between them became impossible to deny, the ego and pride of Princess Elara Rosecold finally shattered into pieces. Her body trembled violently. She did not dare swallow her own saliva for fear that her throat would press against the blade.

She — a magical genius from the Royal House of Koreson — had been read, analyzed, outmaneuvered, and defeated without her opponent appearing to exert any effort whatsoever.

Remaining still in the absolute quiet of her defeat, Elara lowered her head. She closed her eyes, bearing an almost unbearable weight of shame, and let the words of surrender leave her trembling lips.

"I... I concede."