Chapter 95: Professor Lilia
Kalender had just left the blacksmith’s at around the same time a certain Lawyer got spirited away. It didn’t take him long to get back to Freedom’s Peak.
It felt strange going home alone; everyone else he’d passed on the street was going home with someone else. It felt worse when he finally got back and, opening their room’s door, only found it empty.
Well, it was still fine on some level. An empty room was better for weapons manufacture.
Minimine had asked for weapons, so she’d get them: air rifles and pistols fit to turn her lowliest followers into a well-armed militia. That she’d done so with telepathy was likely a gesture of courtesy to keep it looking like Kalender wasn’t already becoming more and more involved. He didn’t want the others to see him making weapons, after all. He wasn’t sure what his face looked like throughout the process, but he was sure it was something terrible to see.
Unraveling the bundle of broken swords he’d brought back, he laid out the chipped blades along the floor. He pulled out an empty crate from under the work desk, spending the next minute stacking up blades inside like bricks.
He sighed out the heaviness in his chest. It really did bother him to make weapons meant for killing people.
The lid went on the crate, and the magic schematic reader—a sheet of vellum inscribed with a magic circle—went over the lid. The schematic for today’s production went on top last.
Warm steam bellowed from the crate’s cracks as he put MP into the schematic reader. Molten steel twisted and warped into a glowing yellow core, floating in the middle of the boundaries of space defined by the crate. The steel flowed into an invisible mold, shaping it into something flatter. Five minutes and an accelerated cooling phase later, he took off the lid and took out the new rifle. It came with a wire butt stock so no one would need to do any carpentry. Two 1L air bottles came with the rifle, among the accessories indicated by the particular schematic he’d used.
Half an hour later, he had five rifles ready for delivery to the Temple of Minimine.
It had been months since Minimine’s first request. He’d made 200 of them by now.
Not just rifles, but he’d also delivered pistols and various other magical weapons. For the magical weapons, he made sure to hide their magic circles between hot-welded steel sheets, other times inscribing them on easily destroyed materials like paper, entrapping them with vials of strong acids to destroy them if accessed or tampered with—anything to keep their enemies from being able to reverse engineer them.
He just didn’t want to see his own designs pointed at people he knew.
He bundled up the new rifles on the floor before any of his companions could come in.
It was right at the moment when he’d tied off the last knot and kick-slid the bundle under the table when the door opened. His head flicked around, expecting either Jyn or Page, perhaps a little excited.
Lilia’s head poked in. “Kalender?”
Kalender frowned, but that was rude, so he hid it the next moment. “Are the others downstairs?” he asked. They should be. It was already well into evening, and dinner was due.
Lilia shook her head. “I thought they were up here.”
Well, what now, huh? Lilia held her gaze on him, while he averted his. The two of them weren’t particularly close, but eating alone would be too sad, on the other hand.
“Hungry?” Kalender finally thought to ask.
“A little.”
“Well… Wanna eat?”
***
After moving downstairs and getting their usual chow, finding their seats around their usual table, they found the atmosphere between them to be unreasonably awkward. They both wanted to talk, and they both knew that the other person wanted to talk, but about what?
It was either going to be awkward silence or an awkward conversation, and Kalender far preferred the latter, leading to him taking the initiative. “Where were you today?” he asked.
“Training,” Lilia said.
It was quiet again. Lilia genuinely didn’t know what else to say. Kalender had asked, and she’d answered, and she wasn’t wrong, so why did the conversation stall?
“Training?” Kalender parroted.
Lilia nodded. “Training.”
“I-I see…” Kalender took some time to enjoy his food for five seconds and think about how to work with this thread. “Who’d you train with?”
Lilia withheld her spoon from her mouth before answering. “Zee.”
He didn’t think he’d hear that name. Made sense, though. “Oh? You talk to each other?”
Lilia thought back to her encounter with Zee. The woman had just one-sidedly gone up to her and asked for a spar. It was less talking and more business.
She shook her head. “Not really.”
Just when Kalender thought she’d keep speaking, perhaps to talk about what had happened, a few moments passed…and she didn’t. That left him a little stumped. All his conversational routes were getting blocked one after the other, and he couldn’t find a way out of this maze.
Well…it wasn’t that he felt the need to get out of it. Staying quiet all throughout dinner was an option. He just needed to keep his mind off of things, was all—and he had plenty of things he didn’t want to think about.
… Things that he ended up thinking about, anyway.
Would Jyn accept his answer? No, no, thinking past that, it should be a given that she’d feel bad for a little while—though, feeling bad for a short while wasn’t bad in the end. The thing he really wished to avoid was any possibility of her thinking that she didn’t matter enough to him—when she did matter a lot!… So much that he just couldn’t wish enough for her happiness.
Unbeknownst to him, his worry showed in his shoulders being raised as high as the tension of his thoughts. As a fencer of considerable skill, able to interpret her opponent’s intentions with eyes that could practically see muscle tension like X-ray vision, Lilia could tell as much.
To see worry written in the posture of one of her benefactors, she couldn’t help but ask about it.
“Are you worried?”
The question caught Kalender off-guard. He was about to chuckle and wave her off with a “yeah,” but Lilia was too perceptive, he realized—and he was too anxious just to bottle it up.
“Guess I am,” he said with a nod. Lilia didn’t say anything to that, though he wished she did. He couldn’t come up with anything to say, at least not anything he felt comfortable saying. He knew on a superficial level that it should be fine to confide in Lilia a little bit, but he just couldn’t do it. They weren’t close.
Still, he thought to ask an appropriately-distanced question, one which ought to get a special response from Lilia. She always looked far too calm during their expeditions into the Monster Wall, even compared to Jyn.
“Don’t you feel nervous before a fight?” he asked her.
What an odd question. Lilia shook her head.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
“Really?” Kalender asked, though all he got in reply was a shrug. Was she really just that good of a swordswoman? He chuckled. “Curse of the genius, huh?”
“Genius?” Lilia said. The uptick in her voice almost came off as annoyance, something Kalender was very surprised to hear from the least-spoken of the group.
She was also surprised to feel such an emotion well up from within her. Why would she be offended by being called a genius? Just thinking about it…no, that’s right. It made her feel wrong. She wasn’t a genius. She couldn’t be. She’d been defeated too many times to be a genius, and not just in this life—the voices and protests of every single past life said so.
The air of annoyance came and went with a deep inhale and exhale, putting her back in the right mind. “That’s wrong,” she said.
She went quiet after that. Kalender easily saw a whole emotional arc flash across her face in the space of those few seconds—an arc which raised just more questions. He let a few more seconds pass—a necessary pause to keep emotions from spinning out of control—before he asked, “Then how?”
Lilia almost opened her mouth to answer, but she realized that she’d never answered a question like this before. It vexed her to have to explain something that seemed like common sense to her. Rather, she didn’t know why others were so afraid of fighting, themselves—why they insisted that they needed to come out of a fight alive.
Perhaps that was what made her different from them. “Either result does not matter,” she answered, and Kalender raised an eyebrow.
Everything this person says just keeps giving me more questions. It was an amusing thought, but Kalender kept it to himself. “Either result?” he continued to ask.
“If I win, I have no problems anymore. If I die, I have no problems anymore.”
“Huh.”
“The only thing that matters to me is how I fight. Purity of will. Nothing else matters.”
Kalender nodded. He couldn’t say that he understood, but it just went to show that there were all sorts of people out there.
Rather than that, it’s surprising that she could even talk this much! Wow, full sentences. It made him feel a little more relaxed around her. Even though they weren’t close, at least familiarity was in the air, and that was pretty good.
“Purity of will implies the existence of impure will,” he said, intending it as a mild joke.
Unfortunately, this specific turn of phrase did not register as any tiny bit humorous in Lyrica.
“That’s true,” Professor Lilia said, speeding up. Thousands of years of heroism were already beginning to burst from of her soul’s old seams. Indeed, for a Heroic soul as old as hers, she would instantly pass any life coach certification exams without even batting an eye—no, she’d be walking up to the exam board and correcting their errors.
“It’s surprising, but the most motivated people aren’t guided by lofty goals. For Heroes, defeating an epic enemy comes to mind for most people, but this kind of hyperfocus and obsession almost always leads to an unclear mind within two weeks, and any Hero who does just that meets a swift end. In fact, focusing on defeating the enemy right in front of you sometimes presents the same issue. In a way of saying it: ‘being blinded by what’s right in front of you, forgetting to be conscious of what’s around you.’ As you see in both cases, one of being obsessed with a future that does not exist, and one of being blinded by what’s in front you, these both exist at the same time, presenting a tall mental hurdle for a prospective savior of the world looking to survive a journey with an end goal of killing what normally cannot be killed.”
Kalender sort of just…sat there. Blinked. Which mythical place was this person coming from? A deep place, surely, but it was most definitely one he had never been to before.
He didn’t have the heart to interrupt her, either. The sharpness of her eyes and the way she vigorously shook her head at every point she made showed a pent-up passion over this very topic, and he wasn’t one to stand in the way of someone’s bullet train of thought.
Attention! —Professor Lilia wasn’t finished yet!
“Of course, these are just abstractions to the concrete issues, which would be the actual thoughts the Hero would be having. Thoughts like ‘I have to get stronger,’ ‘I must protect my friends,’ or ‘I don’t want to die’—these are goals, but goals are a burden to your conscious mind. To ‘have’ to do something, that you ‘should’ be something, that you ‘want’ or ‘don’t want’ something—I’m already telling you, it is all just a slow death wish—a productivity scam slowly dissolving your presence in this world, killing your sense of the present, and robbing you of peace in what should be peaceful moments.
“What a true Hero needs are neither lofty goals too far to be reached, nor one hundred bread crumbs that lead to nowhere. A true Hero needs a way of life—a path where you do not have to think about winning or losing, because you would be satisfied to die at any point along the path. To be on the path, dead or alive, gives you the right to choose any challenges you wish without fear of failure, because both success and failure on the path are equal in meaning.
“The Heroes who attain complete victory walk this path. They are not concerned with victory itself, because the idea of victory is a distraction. Being a Hero is not a goal, but a place where they wish to remain. This is the purity of will: to remain still in a place in their mind, not chasing anything, and not distracted by flies.”
I-incredible—
“And no,” Lilia continued.
— She still had more to say?! —
“I’m not a genius. Even if someone were to suddenly take away my Skill or my skill, I would still happily flail my arms around like a newborn child without a care in the world, all just because I like it. If I am holding a sword, I don’t have to think about anything else. There is nowhere else I need to be.”
A moment passed, and it seemed like Lilia had nothing more to say. Another moment passed, and Kalender was sure she was done.
It was…an amazing experience. He had always known very little about Lilia, and to suddenly be confronted by a wall of words that probably meant something so deep that he wouldn’t even completely understand it until it hits him one day—well, amazing was the only word he had for it!
“ ‘Nowhere else you need to be,’ huh?” What was a poetic thing to say, he thought. “Is that why you’re a Tourist?” he asked.
She showed him a polite smile before looking back down at her food. “Mayhaps.” Lilia chuckled—though, she considered it seriously for a moment. “It might be like that.” She thought about it a little more. “I like the sound of that.”
A contemplative silence came between them. The words soaked as seconds and minutes passed.
What a way of thinking about things, was all Kalender could think. To be someone who could be content with just being on their path, it was an amazing concept. He tried to imagine himself becoming the same…but he couldn’t.
On his current path, he was dissatisfied, and he had to admit that to himself. He had to admit that if he wasn’t right beside the people he loved, just like he wasn’t right now, it was the same as a hundred rubber bands squeezing his heart. Even now, try as he might to distract himself, his mind kept snapping towards the thought of being right beside his dear friends and how he wanted to keep that place of his—how he needed to fight and get his hands dirty to keep it.
Lilia was right, though. It hurt to just think about how he had a goal, but couldn’t get it. He didn’t even want to think about it, yet he felt he had to, or else he’d be going nowhere.
“Are you okay?” Lilia asked again, and he looked up to see her eyes analyzing his. Was he just that easy to read for her?
“If you can help me out,” he said. Lilia nodded, so he continued, “There are people I want to be with, but I can’t be with them all the time…and I’m afraid there might be a day when I can’t be with them anymore. I don’t know how to deal with that. How would you… How would you deal with that?”
It was obvious to Lilia just whom he was referring to. She didn’t have anyone like that, and she didn’t have any distinct need for such a thing in her life. The best she could do was to imagine a situation where she had to part from swords. How would that happen, though?
Well, there was one way. She faced Kalender after a short moment. “I think I’d suffer just like you if my hands were cut off.”
Well, that was a little graphic, but Kalender understood the analogy. If her hands were cut off, she wouldn’t be able to hold a sword again; she would be apart from the very thing that defined her way of life.
“I’m not sure how I’d live without my swordsmanship,” Lilia continued. “I don’t really remember a time without it. If someone tried to take that away from me, I’d fight back.”
Something short-circuited in Kalender’s brain. “Wait, doesn’t that mean that you still technically desire something?” he asked. “I mean, you can think of ‘always holding a sword’ as being your goal. It’s a goal if you think of it that way, right?”
Lilia rolled her eyes. “My goal is to breathe air.”
“Ai—right.” Kalender chuckled. It might not be clearly defined, but there was a difference between wanting something and needing something.
“You don’t think about breathing, do you?” Lilia continued. “You just need it.”
… Like how he needed to see Jyn right now, huh? And tell her his exact thoughts: how much she mattered to him, and where, exactly, he wanted her to be in his life.
He sighed—fitting for someone talking about air. What was he doing holding his breath, anyway?
Yeah… Yeah, why? Why wait? Everything made sense. It was almost funny just how clear the path before him was—had always been.
Just talk to Jyn. Just say the damn words.
It wasn’t so complicated now, was it?
He chuckled. He smiled. He shook his head. Did talking to someone new about it clear everything up? He should talk to more people.
Confronting Jyn with his choice, spending time with the people he loved, freely expressing it, and correcting a perceived wrong—what was he so nervous about, again? Well, fighting, that was out of his element for sure, but everything else taken into consideration:
— He was exactly where he needed to be.
He’d just never thought to be content with where he was. His next steps might yet be shaky, but at least he knew—he was sure that they were going to be in the right direction.
Gosh, talking to someone new about the same old things resulted in way too different conclusions, didn’t it? “Thanks,” he said, almost offhandedly. Lilia perked up a little confused as she’d been preoccupied thinking about how to wield a sword without a need for hands. “For the conversation,” Kalender clarified.
“Oh.” Lilia nodded. “It’s not a bother.”
It truly wasn’t. Just as Kalender found himself satisfied with his new understanding
Just as their dinner ended, the doors to the street opened, and in came Jyn, Page, and Minimine, their purpose and mission apparent on their faces. One shared look between Goddess and Champion, and then Champion and Knight, and then Knight and Librarian, and then Librarian and the Cook behind the counter (she was very hungry), and they all knew what was coming next.