Adelle was genuinely stunned. She’d only turned Julian into an honorary instructor with one goal in mind, making sure the Academy had a personal protector, someone genuinely powerful backing them up.
But she never once imagined a day like today would come, a day when this monster she’d recruited would go and hand her an enormous favor entirely on his own.
He’d made a whole slew of sponsors withdraw voluntarily, while the ones who stayed surrendered their right to interfere with any of the Academy’s training programs.
And it suddenly made sense why Eland Dimne had reached out with such an unbelievably generous sponsorship offer. Not without reason, clearly, that had to be Lord Julian’s doing, given the history between them.
So, could Adelle say that Lord Julian had quietly forced Eland into submission?
’Incredible... incredible... incredible...’
Adelle felt like crying, wanted to throw her arms around Inna, but Inna had already stepped a fair distance back, as though she’d predicted exactly what might happen.
’How cruel...’
Wiping at her eyes, Adelle decided to try her luck. She asked, could this monster possibly offer help with the students’ training program too?
Thinking back to how he’d trained a monster like Kiena, that alone was enough to make Adelle think... if she could get even a fraction of that help applied to their programs...
’It’ll definitely be difficult, though.’
Right, the results would be extraordinary. Except, watching Lord Julian simply stare back at her in silence, Adelle could tell right away that wasn’t interest at all.
Lord Julian had absolutely zero interest in this. Still, Adelle had no intention of backing down, so she pressed forward again.
"In that case, would you be willing to just sit in on a meeting for the new program? Lord Julian only needs to be present, and if anything seems off, please offer advice, beyond that, we won’t ask for anything more."
Adelle carefully worded her request. If she couldn’t get Lord Julian to design the program for them directly, then she’d simply use his presence as a form of verification, proof that they weren’t heading in the wrong direction.
That didn’t demand too much either, since as long as Adelle’s planned program showed no glaring flaws, Lord Julian wouldn’t need to say a single word.
So, given how minimal the ask was, Lord Julian nodded in agreement.
"Fine."
Adelle screamed with delight internally. She felt so genuinely happy that her gaze turned utterly starstruck.
"With this, the headmaster must be head over heels for him."
"Of course, a future husband capable of making every single sponsor kneel, no wonder she’s falling for him even harder."
"True... what’s Lord Julian even missing? He’s handsome, and clearly loaded too."
"He even turned down every single gift!"
Overhearing the students murmuring such embarrassing things left Adelle startled and flustered, coughing awkwardly, her face flushing red.
"Anyway, I’ll contact Lord Julian by phone once the meeting is set to begin."
"See? Turns out they’ve already exchanged phone numbers."
"...."
Adelle jolted in front of him, quickly apologized to Lord Julian, bowed her head, and hurried off alongside Inna, apparently refusing to discuss the matter any further.
Meanwhile, the aforementioned Lord Julian stood frozen in place.
’Oh god... what am I supposed to do about this meeting?’
Thinking back to his old life, Julian had once sat in on a meeting alongside his manager, spending several hours there, thoroughly bored, listening to an endless string of conversation.
Ever since that day, Julian had come to loathe meetings, finding them genuinely inhuman.
Yes, he despised meetings with a passion. So he found himself wondering, was there any possible way to escape this particular meeting?
Any way at all.
But even after mulling it over the entire day, Julian kept coming back to it, right up until evening, when he found himself seated in a chair, right at the far end, in the seat reserved for the head of the meeting.
’Why am I even here?’
Julian propped both elbows on the table, lacing his fingers together, his expression completely blank, even internally.
But that blankness was purely born of sheer frustration.
’Where am I? Who am I, even?’
Across the long table stretching out before him sat several people. Not too many, and a few of them Julian already recognized.
Beyond Adelle and Inna, the rest were likely trusted individuals within the Academy that Adelle relied on.
No, wait, that wasn’t the actual problem here.
’So, right, I’m currently in a meeting room.’
Yes! That was exactly the problem.
Right then, Julian felt like throwing up. His expression darkened as he listened to a conversation that had already dragged on for a full thirty minutes, sitting there in complete silence, drowning in boredom.
His head throbbed with pain and dizziness. Meanwhile, Adelle would occasionally glance his way, as though expecting something from him.
’Don’t look at me, you she-devil!’
Forget about kind, cheerful Adelle. Right now, she looked exactly like some kind of meeting-summoned demon.
With a sigh, Julian steadied himself internally and tried to actually listen and follow along with the discussion.
In short, their conversation had reached the point of figuring out how best to give students genuine life-or-death combat experience against Invaders, without actually putting them in real life-or-death situations.
Besides, there was no way they could throw students into genuine life-or-death combat, because, well, who could say for certain?
The students might actually end up dying for real.
"What if we deploy an Invader, but keep it carefully monitored, making sure it doesn’t slip past our attention?"
"You mean managing an absurdly large number of students at once? While we’re busy saving one, the other seven might already be dead."
"Couldn’t we work around that by having students go through it one at a time?"
"Sure, but how efficient would that actually be? How long would that take, are you suggesting we do this every single day? Every week? The time it’d eat up would make the whole thing hopelessly inefficient."
The genuinely painful part about all this was that every single plan someone proposed always came with some gap that made it either wildly inefficient or completely unreliable.
And with that, another full hour slipped by.
Julian had turned into a dried-out corpse in his seat, not moving an inch, simply watching them all argue back and forth.
He let out an exhausted sigh, and for the first time, every gaze in the room finally turned toward Julian.
’I’m sick of this whole thing. Can’t we just make this simple?’
Like...
"Why overthink giving students life-or-death experience so much? Just let them fight low-Rank Invaders and build up experience that way. The rest will come naturally on its own, there’s no need to rush it."
Realizing his internal thoughts had slipped out loud, Julian blinked, lifted his head, and found everyone currently staring straight at him.
’Oh... this... this is stupid...’
Julian suddenly felt confused, what exactly was he even doing right now?
He clicked his tongue internally, then took a breath, since he’d already gone this far, he might as well just say whatever crossed his mind.
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