Teaching

It has been a month since Rudeus took up the role of Eris' bodyguard and started following her everywhere. But since he was acting the part of a hidden guard, the excuse they gave to the other retainers of the Boreas Family was that Eris had demanded Rudeus to accompany her everywhere. Did that reasoning make sense? Not really. But did the servants dare to question it? Nope.

Now that Rudeus was serving as a bodyguard, albeit in disguise, there were things he had to pay attention to. His attire for one. He no longer wore the fur-lined leather coat Zenith had made for his fifth birthday and rough linen clothes. Instead, he wore a neat shirt and slacks befitting of a Boreas retainer, along with a coat that had the Boreas coat of arms emblazoned.

He followed Eris everywhere, from morning, noon to night. Either always by her side, quietly and carefully observing, or at most one room apart. His room was right next to Eris', for example. And the little lady always went the extra mile to bother him in the middle of the night.

She had behaved defiantly when he first started working as her bodyguard, believing that she had been forcibly humiliated by having to politely and respectfully ask for his tutelage. As such, Eris violently resisted just for the sake of her personal little rebellion. Unfortunately for her however, violence had little to no effect on the immensely more skilled Rudeus.

As a result, Rudeus ended up spending a lot time alongside Eris, and her rampant, naughty behaviour was put fully on display for Rudeus to see.

In a way, Eris was incredibly sexist. She wouldn't abuse her female servants, but occasionally would punch male servants or guards when they displeased her. Rudeus was not at all happy to see this. The abusive part, not the sexist part.

Since he had already decided to teach Eris magic, and his unique silent casting as well, he was resolved to fix her attitude. Rudeus understood that she acted this way because Sauros spoiled her too much, and because there was no one who dared to scold her and punish her. Since he was more or less indispensable to the Boreas Family, Rudeus took it upon himself to be the one to scold her.

There had to at least be one responsible adult in the Boreas household after all.

Initially, Eris resisted forcefully to his attempts at lecturing her. Violence seemed integrated to her very nature. However, Rudeus was more than capable of fending off her wild, but still feeble assault. Seeing that force did not work on Rudeus, and Sauros had also expressed his approval for his moral lectures, Eris had no choice but to run away instead.

But how could she be faster than Rudeus who had full control over Battle Aura and more than a few spells that could increase his movement speed?

When Rudeus would inevitably catch up to the fleeing Eris, he would trap her with Earth magic and proceed to lecture her while she had no choice but to listen obediently.

He espoused basic life lessons that should have been taught by her parents, who neglected in instilling basic social skills and common sense. Things like having good manners, being respectful if one wanted to be respected in return, being a graceful loser, taking responsibility for their own actions and having gratitude to her parents and those who have done kindness for her.

As such, in addition to teaching the girl language, math and magic, Rudeus also took on the role of a moral and ethics professor.

To Eris, though she respected Rudeus' strength and admire his Magic Sword, he was also her biggest weakness since she was no match to Rudeus physically nor could she get her family to intervene. Ghislaine did not really care how she treated the servants, so only Rudeus could force her to submit.

Despite Rudeus feeling that his lectures had little effect on Eris, seeing that his words entered one ear and went out the other, he believed that since Eris was still young, sooner or later she will learn the error of her ways. It had only been a month after all. If this went for two years or three? There would definitely have an effect.

On the other hand, their language and math lessons went a lot rougher than him trying to teach empathy to the girl. Eris took to his lessons very slowly. That was not to say that she was stupid or empty-headed. It was just that the girl had little to no interest in learning language or math.

Before Rudeus, the only words she knew how to read and write was her own name. It took her an entire week just to grasp the Human Language's alphabets. For a 9 year old, that was simply unacceptable. Even Sylphiette, who did not have even a fraction of Eris' resources, could read and write when she was only five years old. Rudeus didn't think Eris was just that stupid. Rather, he believed it was because she had a bad attitude towards learning and lack of discipline to concentrate.

Eris' math lessons usually went like this:

"What is 2 + 3?"

"8!"

"...Why are you wrong so confidently?"

"If I say 2 + 3 is 8 then it is 8!"

Ghislaine on the other hand was quite the opposite. She attended Rudeus' language and math lessons earnestly, but her head really was only filled with muscles, like how Paul had described her. When it came to physical activities like swordsmanship, Ghislaine was a genius. But in terms of linguistics and mathematics, she learned very slowly.

But progress had still been made, so Rudeus decided to reward Eris by teaching both of them a little magic.

"Let the great protection of fire be on the place thou seekest. I call the bold heat of a torch here and now. Fireball!"

A palm sized ball of fire materialized in front of Eris' outstretched palm. Her face instantly brightened, and she beamed from the result. This was her tenth attempt and the spell had finally worked.

Seeing the happy look on her face Rudeus also felt quite warm. This was probably the satisfaction felt by diligent teachers who managed to teach a delinquent student that finally got their act together and does well for the exam.

"Now I just need to be able to throw the fireball with a sword like Rudeus!" She excitedly exclaimed.

"Learn what is 2 + 3 first."

While Eris and Ghislaine took a long time to learn language and math, Rudeus saw his swordsmanship improve by leaps and bounds from his tutelage under Ghislaine. After spending years learning from Paul who was a terrible teacher, receiving proper guidance that did not amount to 'just do it like this' felt to Rudeus like he was finally given glasses after looking at a blurry world for his whole life.

Ghislaine was able to put into words what he had been instinctively doing since he first picked up a sword, and improve on it even further. She had not only perfected his Sword God techniques, which had a few flaws since the majority of it was self-learned from watching Paul, Ghislaine was able to teach Rudeus how to fight.

What did that mean, how to fight? This did not refer to how to swing a sword properly or how to move your feet. It referred to miscellaneous factors that went into fighting an opponent of equal or greater skill. Things like reading an enemy's movements, measuring distance and positional awareness, using feints and fakes to test your opponent's reactions, etc.

It was only by combining all of these skills could one then effective utilize their techniques efficiently and productively.

Rudeus had actually been familiar with these skills from the beginning, since they were applied to soccer as well which he had played professionally. But there was still a fundamental difference between executing them in a game of soccer, and doing so with an enemy holding a sword and would not hesitate to cut you down with it.

Rudeus also started learning Saint-rank Sword God techniques from Ghislaine. At this level, there were only a few techniques, unlike the previous tiers. For instance, there were ten different Advanced Sword God techniques, fifteen Intermediate techniques and even more Beginner techniques. But for Saint-rank Sword God techniques, there were only four.

From Ghislaine's explanation, these four techniques was what the Sword God style could basically be narrowed down to. It fundamentally encompassed every single technique in Advanced and below. And following which, these four could be further merged into three King-rank techniques, then two Emperor-rank techniques, and finally only a single God-rank technique which was the essence of the entire Sword God style.

Only by being able to merge all four of these Saint-rank techniques into one, could a person attain God-rank in the Sword God style. It sounded simple, but was actually impossible to pull off.

The four Sword Saint techniques represented the four aspects of the Sword God style: Speed, Force, Unpredictability and Control. Yet, these aspects also contradicted each other.

For instance, Force referred to using brute strength to carve through an enemy's defence. The Saint-rank technique was called Earth Splitting Sword. The user had to pour in all of their strength into a single swing that could theoretically cut through earth.

Yet Control represented finesse and accuracy. It was not the fastest nor the strongest technique, but the most precise. The Saint-rank representative technique for Control was called Seamless Sword, a technique that embodied perfection in the swordsman's mastery over the limitations of their strength, possessing no flaws in their execution.

But how does one merge savage strength and control? Those two were fundamentally contradictory concepts.

Ghislaine told Rudeus not to worry about that. Once he reached a certain level in his mastery of the Sword God style, he would start to understand the profundity of its techniques. Trying to imitate the Sword God in merging all four aspects of the Sword God style would only result in him confusing and messing up his current foundations.

She also explained that the King-rank technique she had demonstrated during their spar, Sonic Sword, was the integration of Speed and Force.

For now, however, he just needed to focus on mastering the four Saint-rank Sword God techniques first before he started worrying about how to merge them together.

While Rudeus learned from Ghislaine, he also helped her train Eris in swordsmanship, since he was known to the servants as having hired to be Eris' training partner. And also because Ghislaine wanted Eris to learn how to fight against the Water God style and North God style.

Ghislaine was not familiar with the techniques of the Water God and North God style, so only Rudeus could be an effective training partner for Eris.

Like Ghislaine, Rudeus knew how to control his Battle Aura, and was able to lower it down to the minimum. But he did not use any when training Eris.

That was because the level of his swordsmanship was just that much higher than Eris, and he also had a lot more experience fighting with swords as well. Not just sparring, but real life-and-death battles that had honed his instincts beyond any amount of mere sparring could ever help with.

Initially, Ghislaine had also wanted Rudeus to teach Eris the Water God and North God style as well. But both quickly judged that she did not have the temperament for these two sword styles. Water God required one to be patient and tactical, while North God required adaptability and trickery. Eris was instead straightforward and belligerent, which was why Sword God was the perfectly suited for her.

However, Eris was still very talented in swordsmanship. Though it did not reach the exaggerated level that was Rudeus, she learned extremely quickly and picked up techniques with ease. The girl was already more than half the way to achieving Beginner rank in North God and Water God style.

'If only she showed similar enthusiasm during my other lessons…' Rudeus mused.