"A noble price for a first-time use... nothing could possibly be wrong with that."

Leomaris was starting to feel just how hard being a Magician truly was. Advancing to the rank of Sorcerer required two things: personality synchronisation and a solution to seal it permanently. Simple enough to state. Another matter entirely to achieve.

Each mage’s solution was unique to them. The procedure was laid out by their contracted creature within their grimoire, covering everything from ingredients to measurements and calculations.

Advancement to Sorcerer came with its own reward: an automatic excellent understanding of one’s abilities, built on top of everything already gained at the Magician rank.

Day by day, Leomaris understood more acutely what he needed from the Sorcerer rank. But personality synchronisation was far off, and without it, the solution wouldn’t work. Consuming it anyway would only bring severe side effects. That wasn’t an option.

Just as he’d feared, it came to this, a complete understanding of the Mercy of Death technique, down to its smallest detail.

The range of movement. The force required. Which muscles fired at which moment and which compensated for the others to maintain precision. The mental state. The positioning. Every variable, accounted for.

Despite the dreadful nature of it all: sleepless nights, memories lost to overuse of his ability, he pushed through.

In the end, he’d convinced himself the price was noble enough for the cause.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Now...

His room at Privileged Hall was newly furnished and quiet. He stood directly in the path of the air conditioner, its cool air moving over his bare, sweat-damp skin.

Ahead of him, his wardrobe. Beside it, a stained glass window, the reddish setting sun pressing through it, casting gold across everything.

"Enough pressure from shoulder to fingertip. Less in the legs. The sensation of floating... like a feather."

Wooden sword in hand, Leomaris muttered to himself.

"The mental state required for his technique was simple: fearlessness, no regrets, no attachments. The Apostle of Death did not fear dying. If anything, he welcomed it. He named the technique Mercy of Death as a wish for death itself."

There was an irony to it. Someone doing everything in his power to prevent his own death, and yet these words sat heavy in his throat.

Three days of suffering, and he knew to accept it, or the technique would never work.

Everything was a puzzle. Every detail mattered.

In class he was either half-asleep from the sleepless nights or studying the muscles around him, the pressure behind each movement, filing it all away.

It made him a laughing stock, though that was nothing new.

It was why he was in this predicament to begin with. But being perceived as a fool had its quiet advantages. Instructors only bothered to insult him once they noticed he wasn’t paying attention.

The technique wasn’t the only lesson the past three days had offered. The rumours were worsening each day, and some of the hatred directed at him seemed to come from nowhere at all.

It led him to a conclusion: Emerald, the one who had started his downfall, either possessed the ability to amplify dark thoughts about him or had an ally who did. Either way, it was one more reason to perfect the technique.

"The sight of Mercy of Death was said to be terrifying. Enough to make people surrender before it arrived. It struck terror into the enemy’s hearts."

As he spoke, he moved through the motions, tracing the blueprints the Apostle of Death had left behind, calculating pressure, force, mental state, each variable in turn.

"...This happened because of the Apostle of Death’s overwhelming speed. They didn’t see him move... they only saw the aftermath. His hands lashed out like whips."

Like choreography, he danced across the room, as though he were at a ball with his beloved.

Every pain his body gave him became resentment. Every bit of it, Emerald’s.

He didn’t know what he’d done to earn her hatred. But his resentment had surpassed hers long ago.

In the original timeline, the original Leomaris had taken his punishment and died.

This was his sweat and blood. Emerald was going to pay for every bit of it.

Minutes passed. Then hours. Before he knew it, night had stretched across everything, stars filling the sky until it seemed like the cosmos itself, vast and beautiful.

And then, quietly, the sky became perfect.

"Solve," he muttered. A second passed, barely. The refreshing feeling moved through him like a current, and he forgot entirely about the silence, about his neighbours, about everything else. "I did it!"

His eyes sparkled, his body alive with excitement. The wooden sword cut through the air with speed and precision so complete that even he couldn’t track his own movements.

He moved beautifully. Terrifyingly. The technique had become second nature, and he felt it, the pride of it, full and unguarded. He nearly came to tears.

He went further than he should have, and then his bed caught him, a wide grin across his face, chest heaving as his muscles finally let go. His sleepless nights and unbounded efforts had paid off.

"To think — only a few weeks ago I was bedridden. In my past life."

He let that sit. 𝑓𝑟𝑒𝘦𝓌𝑒𝑏𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝘭.𝒸𝘰𝑚

"Now I can move faster than the ordinary eye can perceive."

The words came slowly and left something behind them. His expression darkened without warning.

"Wait... how was I able to learn this?"

He was at the technique book before the thought had finished forming. He opened it.

Everything was the same, every page, every diagram, and yet something had shifted. It looked bizarre. Almost beyond him, in a way it hadn’t been before.

He sat with it, questioning reality, turning it over, and then his eyes widened. "Oh," he said. "I get it now."

His ability had warned him. Once a technique was solved with "Solve," the difficulty doubled. He had known it would apply to him too. He had expected nothing less.

It only added to his satisfaction. The Mercy of Death sword arts had gone unmastered for two hundred years, and once word spread that he had learned it, others would inevitably try. But with the difficulty now doubled, nearly impossible was a generous description of their chances.

The sigh that left him was the deepest relief he could manage, and then he hauled himself onto his bed.

His father, Godfrey, was coming in a day to assess his and Rosay’s progression at the academy. One day to make a name for himself. He had the perfect scapegoat already. Ekko.

Ekko worshipped the Lady of the Frozen Throne and had been foolish enough to leave the cold southern hemisphere of Chatenham for an academy built entirely on the influence of the Firstlight Goddess. All to prove his goddess the superior one.

He was going to be expelled eventually, his beliefs would see to that. Leomaris was simply going to make it happen sooner than planned.

But one question still lingered in his mind...

Was he truly planning to drag a second-year cadet into a fight under the pretense of honoring the Firstlight Goddess?

And more importantly... how was he going to make the entire academy witness him wield the sacred sword art, Mercy of Death, the very art said was manifested by the Goddess herself?