As I made my way to the Guild’s training grounds, I was met with an insanely large crowd.
“Look, he’s here! It’s Rex!”
“Idiot! Don’t just point! You have to treat him with respect!”
“Please! Tutor me!”
I rubbed my forehead in exasperation. Goddamnit, I knew this would happen!
Ever since Nirva’s statement there had been people lining up here to beg me to teach them, but now the crowd was larger than ever. This was all thanks to the PR article the Adventurers’ Guild had published based off of the interview I’d conducted.
I’m gonna get you back for this Veteram, mark my words!
If this was Japan I could have sued him, but sadly this medieval-ass world didn’t have nearly as strong personal privacy laws.
I guess this is still better than before, since at least Veteram’s making sure people don’t follow me around outside of the set hours I’m supposed to be teaching people manual Arts.
Sighing, I steeled myself and walked into the throng of excited adventurers, then gave a quick lecture on the basics of manual Arts activation. After that, me and the Guild members assigned to help me split up and started giving more individualized instruction to the adventurers.
As I was dispensing advice and demonstrating how to use manual Arts I spotted a familiar face among the crowd. “Magey, is that you?”
Magey twitched and looked guiltily up at me, like a child who’d been caught pulling a prank. She was the very first adventurer I’d appraised the growths of. She was best suited to be a Mage, but because of how the game randomly assigned growths and starting classes she’d ended up a Fighter instead. I’d used Analyze to figure out she was meant to be a Mage, and I’d thought that she’d accepted that and swapped to that class, but now here she was.
“What are you doing here? Don’t tell me you ended up hating magic so you—?”
“N-No, that’s not it!”
In that case, why are you here?
There was no manual equivalent for magic, and Mages had little aptitude for physical attacks for obvious reasons. They had no reason to learn manual Arts activation.
“I’m just doing this...as a hobby. I plan to stick to Mage for the foreseeable future, and I’m grateful you showed me I have a talent for magic. But even if I have no use for manual Arts, I still want to learn how to use them...”
“So you’re learning them for fun?”
Honestly, I couldn’t fault her for it. She may have become a Mage now, but she’d lived as a Fighter for most of her adventuring life. Of course she’d want to keep up to date on new close combat fighting tactics.
“S-So do you think you could give me some advice, L-Lord Rex?” Magey asked. As always, she stumbled over the word lord. She wasn’t used to polite speech still.
I cocked my head and asked, “Advice for what, specifically? It looks to me like you’ve got the basics down already.”
It was hard to believe this was just a hobby for her considering how proficient she’d already become at manual activation. Then again, maybe she’d gotten this good precisely because it was easier to put in effort for a hobby than your actual job.
“Yes, but I need an outside opinion to know if I’m doing it properly or not.”
I stared at her thoughtfully. Before, I’d thought as long as people discovered Arts could be activated manually, they’d figure the rest out on their own, even without a teacher. I still believed that to an extent, but I realized now that manual Arts were more complicated than I’d thought. Furthermore, I’d had the benefit of being able to master manual Arts in practice mode, where Arts didn’t cost MP to use, had no cooldown, and there was a grading system that rated how well you’d traced the motion. In this world people had to expend mana to practice manual Arts activation, wait for their cooldowns, had no way of knowing how well they’d performed when they did succeed, or how closely they needed to follow the correct trajectory for it to technically count. They were playing on hell mode.
“You’ll be able to tell if my motions are sloppy, won’t you? Also, if you’d be so kind as to show me how you use manual Arts...”
“If you want a model to follow you should just auto activate the Art and try to copy that,” I said with a smile, but Magey shook her head.
“I’ve been coming to your lessons a few times and there’s something I’ve noticed. If you perfectly trace the trajectory you make when you automatically activate an Art it will give you a successful manual activation, but that’s not how you do it, Lord Rex. And I get the feeling the way you do it is the proper way.”
I raised my brows. I was surprised by how perceptive she was.
“I saw how Radd activates his Arts too. It’s amazing. He’s definitely the best manual Arts user out of everyone here. I bet that’s because he learned from your example rather than copying how the Art looks normally. But the way you use Arts is totally different, Lord Rex.” Magey looked up at me, absolutely confident in her analysis. “Your movements are a lot more freeform. You mess up some of the more detailed movements sometimes, but you always make sure the core motions are done properly. It’s like you have a feel for the proper way to manually activate Arts. That’s not something I have, and I don’t think it’s something anyone else in the world has.”
Honestly I had not expected Magey to read me that well. I nodded, accepting that I’d been seen through.
“Well...you’re not wrong.”
For simplicity’s sake I’d been telling people that to manually activate an Art you needed to copy the trajectory your weapon made when you used the Art automatically. That wasn’t wrong, but it wasn’t completely correct either. The ideal way to manually activate an Art was to swing your weapon like it was a motion controller roughly tracing the motions of the actual Art. Of course, the only person who knew that was me, because I was the only one who knew this world was based off of a game.
“Are you coming to these training sessions because you want to figure out the secret and tell it to your friends?”
I could see that, since Magey was pretty fond of her comrades. To my surprise though, she shook her head.
“No, like I said... I’m just doing this as a hobby. That really is all there is to it.”
I could tell from the look in her eyes that she wasn’t lying. She really was just practicing manual Arts activations because she enjoyed it.
“I see... You really do love swordplay, Magey.”
She had far more of an attachment to the sword than someone like me who’d become a swordsman a few months ago. But to my surprise, Magey gave me a confused look.
“Huh? I’m not really that interested in swordsmanship though. If anything, I prefer magic because I don’t even have to train to get stronger...”
“B-But didn’t you say this is a hobby for you?”
Realizing the source of my confusion, Magey proudly puffed out her chest. “That’s right! I’m an honorary member of the Rex Fan Club so of course I need to come here to tell everyone else about how awesome you are!” She declared this loudly enough that her words echoed across the training field.
“...Come again?”
❈❈❈
“Thank you so much for teaching me!” Magey said with a bow as today’s training session ended.
“I’m glad you enjoyed today’s training session.”