Ted came charging after him with burning determination. Abel leaped up onto the rooftop. The move instantly fired up Ted's competitive drive even further. He threw himself into a leap as well and clumsily crashed right into the wall.
Abel smirked inwardly. The gap between the two of them was astronomical. Yet Ted tried again, and this time actually made it up. He began giving chase in earnest.
This actually surprised Abel a little. This time Ted wasn't using enhancement magic. He was relying purely on his own physical ability.
As Abel evaded him, he calmly sized up his pursuer. Average looks, and he didn't seem particularly sharp. Not a trace of intellectual presence about him. Only his stamina and his sheer persistence were worth noting.
Ted lost his balance on the rooftop again and went down hard. He demanded to know why Abel wasn't even the slightest bit tired. Abel deliberately asked whether he was looking for an excuse to give up. As expected, those words sent Ted scrambling back into the chase, but to Abel's eyes his movements were painfully slow.
In the end Ted was completely spent, collapsing in a heap. Still, the fact that he had lasted twenty minutes was more than Abel had expected.
He turned to head back to his study, ready to put an end to this farce. But as he passed the window, he caught an unexpected glimpse of Lilith. She was inside, speaking with young master Bors.
Abel discreetly cast a spell to sharpen his hearing. He heard Lilith politely but firmly declining whatever Bors had proposed. Bors instantly flew into a rage, roaring at her about what she could possibly find lacking.
It seemed that a noble young master with a pride this fragile was, predictably, the type who found rejection from a woman the hardest to stomach.
But Lilith quietly explained that her refusal had nothing to do with dissatisfaction. It was simply because her heart already belonged to someone else.
Those words made even Abel, eavesdropping outside, freeze for a moment.
Bors clenched his teeth. He asked if that person was her brother Abel. Lilith was silent for a moment. Then, with a smile, she admitted that it was.
Abel was completely stunned, a storm of emotion rising within him.
Bors trembled with rage, hurling insults at her, calling her shameless to think she had fallen for her own brother. At the word shameless, Abel's gaze turned ice cold. After all, he was not Lilith's brother in the slightest, but the sibling cover was the most convenient disguise available to them for now. Bors's ugly words were certainly unpleasant to hear, but he had just been flatly rejected, and that pitiful state of his made Abel decide to look the other way.
From that day on, Ted became a constant little shadow trailing behind Abel. Playing with the young noble had somehow become a fixed part of his daily routine.
After a few days of observation, Abel noticed something. Although Ted had blazing eyes suited to fire attribute magic, he lacked the complex reasoning needed to support high-level elemental spells. That instinctive talent for reading and constructing runes in an instant — he clearly didn't have it.
Yet Abel also discovered a different kind of talent in him. When it came to physical enhancement magic, Ted had a remarkable natural aptitude. This kind of magic, one that required no reliance on logic, might be exactly right for him.
Ted came charging at him again, brimming with excitement. Abel noticed that in just a few days the kid had made tangible progress.
At that moment Bors spotted them through the window. His gaze fixed rigidly on the two figures on the rooftop.
Abel effortlessly deflected Ted's reaching hand, casually remarking that his movements were too slow. Ted tumbled on the rooftop, skidding across the snow for quite a distance. He scrambled back to his feet, frustration all over his face, but his foot slipped and he lost his balance completely. He screamed as he plunged off the edge and hit the ground hard.
Tears sprang from Ted's eyes in an instant. Abel leaped down at once, assessed the situation, and suspected a fracture. He began to cast healing magic.
At that moment Bors came charging over, roaring. He shoved Abel away with full force, knelt beside his brother, and declared that he would perform the recovery magic himself.
Abel was a little surprised. Could someone without gray eyes perform healing magic? But the green magical light rising in Bors's hands made Abel's eyes sharpen. It looked convincing enough on the surface, and yet Ted's cries of pain grew louder and louder.
Abel immediately sensed that something was deeply wrong. Proper bone healing was like building with blocks. You always start with the large foundational pieces, but Bors was doing the opposite, forcing large pieces onto small ones. It was nothing more than a surface-level illusion of repair. The internal structure was a complete mess. Such a joining would lead to catastrophic consequences.
Abel urgently called out that a doctor needed to treat him immediately, but Bors roared back in fury. It was not a commoner's place to give him orders. He accused Abel of being the one responsible for Ted's fall, and pointed out that Ted was a noble, the honored second son of the Langbart family. He repeatedly hurled insults at Abel, calling him backwater trash with inferior eyes. He declared he would never let off anyone who damaged the dignity of his noble name.
His long sword was drawn, and Bors issued a challenge to duel.
Abel froze on the spot, overcome with weary resignation, because Ted was still lying on the ground groaning in agony. A duel right now was hardly the wisest course of action, but the commotion had drawn onlookers, making the situation even harder to manage. He had no choice but to accept the challenge.
Bors announced the rules and magnanimously offered to give him a handicap. Abel declined his generosity. He just wanted this over with quickly.
That dismissive indifference was the last straw for Bors's composure. He let out a furious cry and unleashed his prized finishing technique. A spell called wind cleave tore through the air with tremendous force. Abel stepped aside without effort. The attack split the great tree behind him clean in two.
He quietly assessed it. The power was decent enough, but the casting speed was exceptionally fast. In the past, that kind of speed had been within reach of almost no one but him. Yet the opponent before him clearly didn't possess that level of ability. The answer had to lie in that peculiarly designed sword.
Bors sneered in triumph, asking if he had never seen a magic tool before. He boasted about the sword's power, claiming it could assist in constructing spells. Then he swung the sword again, launching another fierce assault. This time Abel caught a glimpse of the runes on the blade, and everything clicked into place at once.
Bors leaped high into the air, intent on overpowering him with sheer force. Abel only felt an overwhelming sense of weariness. With a casual flick, he neutralized the fierce attack with his bare hand. Bors was visibly stunned.
Abel understood now. Magic tools were the very root cause of the mages' decline. An over-reliance on convenient external devices had stripped people of the ability to think for themselves.
He decided to put an end to this farce and show this man what real power looked like. He gathered his focus, and the same wind cleave took shape in his hands. But its scale and its force were worlds apart from what had come before. The devastating windstorm left Bors nowhere to run. He was sent flying, crashing to the ground in a heap — and that was Abel already holding back.
Bors still refused to concede, spitting bitter insults. Just then a flash of skirt appeared without warning before him. Lilith, without any warning at all, swung her foot and drove it straight into his face.
Bors went flying once more.
Lilith's voice was as cold as ice. She said slowly that she could let insults toward herself go in one ear and out the other, but she would not stand for anyone continuing to insult Lord Abel. She looked down at him from above, her eyes full of cold warning. Bors was scared out of his wits by the sudden viciousness, and Abel had no choice but to call out and stop her.
The doctor declared that Ted would need to rest for half a year. Abel's heart sank to the floor. For a lively boy like Ted, that was nothing short of imprisonment.