After hearing Jeanne's explanation, Leon stroked his slightly stubbled chin, weighing the matter with a wandering gaze.
"Sell to Riveria, huh... Tsubaki's right, she really is a pretty fitting candidate."
"But if we're selling to her, we can't move them now. We need to put some time between us and the deal."
"Riveria's different from Tsubaki. As a smith and a materials buyer, Tsubaki doesn't actually care where things come from. As long as it's quality goods her familia can put to use, she'll take pretty much anything. The Hephaestus Familia is a commercial faction, after all."
"But Loki Familia is another story. They've been tracking and investigating the connection between the Black Market and Evilus lately."
"On top of that, given Riveria's standing, the moment she finds out we're sitting on a stockpile of Great Sacred Tree Branches with no clear provenance, untangling ourselves from the mess later is going to be a nightmare."
Rose propped her chin in her hand and tilted her head thoughtfully.
"So... you're going to wait for the storm to blow over before selling?"
Leon's mouth crooked sideways.
"We're not hurting for funds at the moment. No reason to expose more of our hand and risk drawing eyes."
Not hurting for funds?
Kureha looked at Leon's smug expression, then thought back to the cheque Tsubaki of the Hephaestus Familia had written out when she and Jeanne went to handle the Evilus loot. A faint smile surfaced on her face too.
...
Happy times always pass quickly, and a week slipped by in the blink of an eye.
Having just come off a stretch of high-intensity exploration, the Leon Hart household had zero appetite for grinding the Dungeon these past few days.
Forget Jeanne and Rose, with their iron self-discipline. Even Leon, who had a desperate hunger for Excelia points, had hit the burnt-out, fatigue-driven slump where his body just refused.
Apart from the day Loki Familia came calling, when Laurier and Aura swung by the markets to pick up groceries and household supplies, everyone spent most of the past week lazing around the house, recuperating. Aside from their usual training and study, they let the quiet of home soothe minds and bodies that had been wound tight from prolonged combat.
In Leon's words, this was called balancing work and rest.
Anything you do needs tension and slack, like drawing a bow. You can't keep the string pulled taut forever. When it's time to relax, you relax.
Besides...
He'd been transmigrated. If he was going to come to another world only to grind harder than he had as a wage slave back home, what was even the point of being isekai'd?
As desperate as he was for Excelia, that was no excuse to skip out on rest.
In the parlor, on the carpet.
"Yawn..."
Leon closed the heavy reference book, took off his Gale-Force Reading Glasses, stood, and stretched.
He worked the kinks out of his joints, picked up his lemonade, and ambled out of the parlor. Leaning lazily against the wall, he settled in to enjoy the gorgeous sight of beautiful women fighting on the training ground in the corner of the courtyard.
Steel rang on steel.
Jeanne, Rose, and Kureha were in the middle of a fierce three-way melee.
Tsk, tsk. Nothing like watching women fight. Sharp and beautiful both, that perfect blend of visual appeal and crisp competence.
Grace and power in one package. You couldn't pick a better description.
His eyes narrowed at the thought, something stirring inside him.
Scholar's Heart, activate!
A glimmer of light flickered across his irises, and Leon's capacity to learn and comprehend surged.
Oh ho...
Let me take a look at your little secrets...
Rose's combat style... she relies on razor-sharp intuition to read her opponent's attacks, blocks, then exploits the opening for an immediate counter. A textbook counter-fighter.
Kureha, as a swordsman, has nimble, lightning-quick footwork, and she's especially good at generating power through bending and extending her knees. Pure speed type. Her burst, her reflexes, her transitions between offense and defense, all of it geared toward overwhelming opponents with a storm of fast strikes. Pure rush-blitz style.
And Jeanne... Jeanne specializes in steady, methodical defensive tactics... uh, basically the turtle's playbook?
Having sized up the three women's combat styles, Leon refocused and started absorbing every bit of experience and technique he could from their exchanges.
With three master-class fighters going at it in front of him at full intensity every day, his combat instincts were leveling up at a visible pace.
If adventurers from other familia caught wind of this private-tutor treatment of his, he could only imagine how much envy and resentment it would stir up.
Heh, with them coaching me, from now on I can say with my chest out that I've got proper formal training. No more backwoods self-taught nonsense!
Leon flexed his wrist, mimicking Rose's stance with a few movements, a smile spreading across his face.
Beside him, Laurier and Aura stood shoulder to shoulder, taking a water break.
Laurier, the elf girl who wielded wind magic, had her gaze locked tight on the three women clashing in the training ring, especially on Kureha's dazzling rush-blitz style. Her eyes shone with longing and admiration.
"So amazing... Kureha's combat style is so cool and so beautiful!"
Unlike Laurier, who was glued to Kureha, Aura wore a small frown as she carefully studied Rose's tactical thinking.
I'm a back-line mage. I have basically no talent for melee or close-quarters fighting... So the next critical step for me is mastering an advanced mage technique, Concurrent Chanting. That's the only way I won't drag everyone down on future expeditions. But...
Thinking about how difficult Concurrent Chanting was, Aura's delicate brow furrowed tighter.
The whole exchange happened to fall under the watchful eye of Leon, who had been quietly observing them from the side.
"Aura, why the frown? Run into something you can't crack? We're the only two mages in the familia, so don't bottle it up. Talk to me about it. Maybe I can give you some useful advice."
"Mr. Leon..."
Spotting Leon, who had somehow appeared at her side, Aura's flushed ear-tips twitched. Her small hands wrung anxiously in front of her, and she lowered her head, hesitating.
But this concerned both her and the team. Cheeks red, she finally spoke up.
"It's, it's like this... Mr. Leon..."
The moment Aura finished explaining her predicament, Leon got it.
"Concurrent Chanting, huh..."
"It's pretty much an essential high-tier combat skill for any decent mage, and the training method itself isn't a secret either."
"But... it's the textbook example of easy to learn, hard to master."
In other words, low entry barrier, brutal ceiling.
"How far have you gotten so far?"
Concurrent Chanting:
An advanced technique that allows a mage to move or fight while chanting a spell.
Casting magic normally requires concentrated focus on the incantation, making it nearly impossible to do anything else while chanting.
Concurrent Chanting demands handling the chant and real-time combat at the same time. Any slip can cause magic backlash, even self-detonation.
What's worse, the difficulty scales sharply with the number of simultaneous actions involved.
The technique covers five distinct actions in total: attack, defense, movement, evasion, and chanting.
Only when all five can be woven together fluidly under the pressure of high-intensity combat is one said to have truly mastered the "complete form" of Concurrent Chanting.
...
With these key points in mind, Leon offered Aura a suggestion.
"Aura, I don't think you need to aim for the complete form right out of the gate."
"How about trying a split-step approach? Tackle it one piece at a time, what do you say?"
Aura tilted her head, eyes filled with confusion.
"Split?"
Leon thought of a certain shadow clone-loving idiot back home and smiled knowingly.
"Right. For step one, you only need to practice chanting while moving."
"Once you've got the first step down cold and can apply it in an actual fight, you add another action."
"That'd be chanting while moving and evading."
"Just like that, gradually increasing the number of actions and the difficulty. It builds combat power fast, raises your survivability, lightens the team's load, and slashes the learning curve too."
Laurier: "..."
Aura: "..."
The two stared at Leon, completely unprepared for him to come up with such a clever method.
"Hey now, what's with those looks?"
"I might be self-taught with no formal combat training, but I'm not exactly slow upstairs!"
He spread his hands.
"Humans always figure out a way when they hit a wall."
"Eh?"
Laurier blinked. In her impression of him, Mr. Leon was reliable in a fight, sure, but in daily life he was a thoroughly improper man.
His reputation outside the house wasn't exactly great either.
The womanizer rumors, for one...
But now.
She really hadn't expected that, when it came to studies and learning, Leon could show this kind of dependable side too.
...
...
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