ch61-ch80 · 077-ch64

Chapter 64

What Sai did hadn't changed.

But even as he said that, the situation kept changing moment by moment.

In the other world, as a result of Sai coming to Japan, the Trade City Adventurer's Guild had lost one instructor. Because of that, Sai had received consultations like "Is there anyone who can serve as a substitute instructor?"

For that matter, he'd arranged to dispatch one of his disciples from the other world, but in other words, that meant he'd lost his job as an Adventurer's Guild instructor.

At the same time.

Sai had continued his instructor work even after returning to Japan.

One of the new things he'd started in Japan was instructional streaming.

A pioneer in conveying a new method of increasing magical power, controlling it, and utilizing it — magical power control training, which was a cut above anything before.

What's more, he had the top-tier know-how of an adventurer learned in the other world.

Thanks to that, the number of people who wanted to learn directly from Sai had increased more than he'd imagined.

Sai had never had experience instructing this many people at once.

In the other world, he was just one instructor at the Trade City Adventurer's Guild, after all.

Even if he said nothing had changed, things were probably shifting little by little.

◇

Now then, being in a position to teach many people came with increased responsibility and more things to think about. He wanted to pass on as much useful know-how from the other world as possible to as many people as possible.

But Sai himself had no idea what would happen to him in the future.

As long as he kept adventuring, there was always a good chance he could suddenly drop dead.

So today, Sai had come to the Adventurer's Guild's martial arts dojo.

There were about twenty participants.

All were men and women in their thirties or older.

While the main demographic of adventurers was in their twenties, this group had a rare composition of only members thirty and above.

The reason was obvious.

Everyone here was either a combat training instructor working at the Adventurer License Center, or someone like Sai who provided individual instruction to adventurers.

The goal was to teach them magical power control training, Five Senses Enhancement, recovery magic, and the use of the Hexa Shield — to speed up the rate of spread as much as possible.

Among the combat training instructors, a middle-aged man greeted Sai.

"I've been curious about you for a while. Thank you for your time today."

"No, the pleasure is mine."

It hadn't even been a year since he started adventuring in Japan.

It had only been a few months since he'd started getting recognition, and this level of recognition was humbling.

...He'd thought it would take longer to be recognized.

It was probably thanks to Hexaria.

Thanks to her lectures, magical power control training had been revealed to be far more important than expected. How well you could control the magical power flowing through your body affected everything related to magic. There was no reason not to learn it.

"Well then, I'd like to start right away — please form groups of three or four and sit cross-legged."

First, magical power control training.

What they needed to do was the same as what he'd taught Hiyori and Mio.

Pass lumps of magical power between each other to improve the flow of magic.

That was all there was to it. Like muscle training, if you kept at it, results would surely follow.

He'd probably need to teach them several times, but he hoped they'd learn and pass it on to the next generation.

◇

That evening, Hiyori and Mio came to Sai's house.

They had come to learn the exorcism magic that Yoshida had requested.

They had been flower-like high school girls until last month, but now they were flower-like university students.

"Ya-hoo, Sensei! We're here♪"

"Excuse us, Sensei."

"Oh, come in, come in."

The two sat at the usual table.

Sai prepared tea he'd set out and sat down as well.

Incidentally, Hexaria was holed up in the workshop, in the middle of research.

He had the fórmula to teach them, but before jumping into the main subject, he started with some small talk.

"So, how's university life?"

"More annoying dudes hitting on me than I expected."

"Honestly, Hiyori."

Hiyori made an exasperated face and Mio scolded her.

That wasn't exactly the first impression of university life one should give.

Wasn't it supposed to be a sparkling campus life or something...?

That's what Sai thought, but apparently there were a lot of people trying to reinvent themselves for university.

"Setting that aside. I think I mentioned this before, but the reason I'm going to this university is that there's a plan to gather young exorcists in one place and train them all at once."

"Now that you mention it, you did say that."

The Exorcist Alliance was a young organization formed after Shinjuku Tower appeared.

There were many senior members, but many of them had been injured in the long history of demon extermination and had moved to support roles. Because of that, the current Exorcist Alliance was in need of young, strong combat power.

"So anyway, we got strong thanks to Sensei, right?"

It was around last autumn that he'd met Hiyori and the others and taken them as disciples.

Since then, half a year had passed.

In just half a year, they had been trained considerably.

Of course, that was also a result of their talent and effort, but they had fought Majin and fought a Demon King-class monster.

That experience was immeasurable.

It was only natural they'd grown stronger.

"The word among exorcists is that we were trained by Sensei..."

Hiyori looked up at Sai with a meaningful gaze as she spoke.

Mio, sitting next to her, had a slightly troubled expression.

"We've been getting inquiries from all kinds of people asking if we could introduce them to Sensei..."

"Not just introduce, but asking if you could train them..."

"Ahh, I see..."

He thought it was small talk, but a consultation had come flying in.

Sai received a lot of these kinds of consultations.

Requests came from all sorts of places — university adventurer clubs, adult adventurer parties, and so on. He had no objection to doing it once, and he could accommodate giving advice.

He actually did things like that as part of his instruction.

But many of them were long-term requests.

When you looked at Sai's week nowadays, first there was his role as Hexaria's lecture assistant (chaperone), and as an adventurer, he had to aim for the top floors. That took two to three days, and the rest was spent on instructing young adventurers.

With Hexaria's arrival, he'd started teaching recovery magic and the Hexa Shield under the pretense of having learned them from her (a very long time ago).

There were still many things he wanted to pass on to the young adventurers.

But the young exorcists had their jobs — exterminating demons.

At the moment, the demons were subdued, and he had a sense that through Ginreibo, the relationship with demons might change in the future. But that wasn't something that would happen overnight, and if you considered Japan as a whole, combat power was still needed.

In that case, it would be better to spend at least one day for the future exorcists.

"Yeah. Depending on my schedule, tell them I'll consider it positively."

"Thank you very much!"

"I'm so glad~! It wasn't just my classmates, but even the seniors were really passionately requesting it..."

Sai's position was rather peculiar.

On one hand, he was active as an adventurer instructor; on the other hand, thanks to Hexaria's declaration that "Sai is my property," he was in a position where people found it oddly difficult to approach him.

He'd told his students that it was fine to talk to him normally, but from the perspective of someone meeting him for the first time — especially from the university side that eagerly attended Hexaria's lectures — it seemed to be a "we want to approach him, but if we do, won't we get yelled at?" kind of situation.

In the other world, there was this kind of talk too, but since information diffusion wasn't as strong as on Earth, there were many people who didn't know that Sai and Hexaria were married (even if it was fake).

Even if what he did stayed the same, the results inevitably differed.

After that, he listened to their impressions of university life, but at a reasonable point, he ended the small talk and decided to teach them the Exorcise fórmula.

"Here's the fórmula."

They looked at the fórmula summarized on paper.

Since Sai himself couldn't use Exorcise, he'd written the fórmula down.

The exorcism magic "Exorcise" was a spell that borrowed the power of a god to expel and remove evil. It had the effect of eliminating curses or removing possession from a target afflicted by an evil spirit.

There were several kinds of magic for driving out evil, but for this kind of situation, this spell was the best.

Since Yoshida's request was about "magic to handle cases where a human is possessed by an evil spirit," just "Exorcise" would have been enough, but while he was at it, he also taught them several holy-type spells that borrowed divine power.

After finishing the series of explanations, Hiyori and Mio looked at the paper with the fórmula written on it, their expressions turning serious.

"I see. By praying to a god and borrowing their power..."

"Right. The language is different, but it's the same as norito..."

"Norito?"

Looking at the fórmula, the word Hiyori had spoken was unfamiliar to Sai.

"Yeah. It's a prayer exorcists use when they exorcise evil spirits — not annihilate them, but purify them. I guess you could call it a type of 'evil spirit be gone' thing."

In Japan, when someone was possessed by an evil spirit, the possessed person would be surrounded by a barrier, exorcists would encircle that barrier, and they would exorcise the evil spirit by chanting purifying norito.

The key point was deliberately creating an escape route for the evil spirit.

If you sealed it completely, the evil spirit couldn't escape and would just keep writhing inside the possessed person. So they intentionally created an escape route that only the spirit could pass through. Once the evil spirit entered that escape route, a different exorcist would annihilate it.

That was apparently the approach they used.

"I see. So that's one way of doing it too."

That approach didn't exist in the other world, so it was educational for Sai instead.

Hiyori, having finished her explanation, continued reading the fórmula.

"It's probably not as accurate as Dad's, but... this fórmula, um, first you set up a holy-attribute barrier..."

"The barrier itself is structured to be self-made in the fórmula."

Mio, sitting next to Hiyori, was also checking how the fórmula worked.

"Yeah. And then... you borrow a bit of divinity from a god... and purify the evil spirit... Whoa..."

Having grasped the fórmula, Hiyori muttered to herself as she realized its significance and let out a gasp of admiration.

"This looks like it compresses part of the fórmula and deploys it."

"Oh. Mio-san, good eye."

Praised by her teacher Sai, Mio smiled with a hint of shyness.

"Hehe, it's thanks to what you taught me, Sensei."

In the other world, to reduce the effort of chanting long incantations for removing possession, they compressed the incantations, incorporated them all into the fórmula, and once learned, the spell could be triggered with a single activation word.

"Sensei, can I share this with my dad?"

"Of course. That's the plan. You two learn it, and then teach it to everyone else."

As it happened, incantation compression was something Hayato had been struggling with considerably.

Like data compression technology in computers, he'd been researching whether incantations could be compressed and deployed, but he hadn't had much success and was troubled by it.

Seeing this precedent of an exorcism magic fórmula from the other world might provide a hint for advancing Japan's exorcism techniques.

Meanwhile, Mio gazed at the fórmula and murmured to herself.

"This incantation... maybe we could borrow Set-chan's... Seoritsuhime's power too..."

The divine spirit Set-chan they'd met in Kakuriyo. Her true name was Seoritsuhime.

She'd been injured protecting Mio during the fight against the Shadow-Eating Demon King, but as expected of a divine spirit.

Currently, she was dormant within Hiyori's exorcist blade, Shiroharai, using it as a vessel.

"Yeah. You have a connection with Set-chan, so I think she'd lend you her power."

"Yes... ever since then, I've been praying at the shrine every day. I hope it reaches her..."

Mio felt responsible for having been protected, but for a god, prayer was power.

And Seoritsuhime was what you might call a great deity.

Set-chan herself might have lost her connection to Seoritsuhime, but for a high-ranking god, the Shadow-Eater's wounds were probably nothing serious.

She might even make a surprise recovery from her dormancy.

That's why Sai told her with confidence.

"It'll be fine. I'm sure it reaches her."

"...Thank you, Sensei. ...This might be a strange question, but... do gods exist?"

For Mio, this question was a bit delicate.

She had met a divine spirit named Set-chan, and she had met Hexaria, a woman who was practically a god. But throughout her life, she had never met a god.

A presence she could feel close to, but couldn't see. That was what gods were.

To that, Sai answered with confidence.

"They exist. At the very least, in the other world, there were gods you could meet normally."

"Like Hexaria-san?"

"She's an exception. So-called great deities with strong authority reside in the divine realm, but gods who casually live in the mortal world, or guardian angels of churches — they're surprisingly common, you know?"

"Is that so..."

"For now, the atmospheric mana in Japan is still low, so you can't see them, but if mana increases, you might start seeing them more often."

The world continued to change moment by moment, but perhaps someday, beings like that might become a little more familiar.

Sai's words concluded on that note.

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Thank you for reading.