Tao was flying the helicopter, Rai's coffin (seriously, an actual coffin – at first it was creepy vampire stuff and then it was actually scary because his friend was in a coffin and might have never woken up) was in the cargo space along with their luggage and Shinwoo was sitting in the cabin with Seira, Rai and the Chairman.
He probably should have been more worried about that last one. Shinwoo knew the Chairman could see right through him. It was actually really nice: he had his friends, but having an adult that got him was different somehow.
Shinwoo knew that he should definitely feel bad about the fact he was a regular at the Chairman's office. When he'd taken Rai there, the Chairman said something like, 'Who did you beat up this time?' and it was a relief to be able to go, 'I'm just dropping this guy off; it's totally not me for once!' and run to class.
If he'd stuck around, maybe he could have seen Rai and the Chairman meet up after all that time… or maybe they both would have had to act like they were strangers so he didn't guess that anything was up. He would have felt really bad about ruining their reunion by being a third wheel.
About as bad as he felt about making all those messes. Oh, right. Shinwoo gulped and smiled. "Uh, Chairman?"
"Yes, Shinwoo?" the Chairman asked, looking up from the files he was reading through.
He clasped his hands in front of him and bowed his head. "I'm sorry about trashing the place when we came over!"
The Chairman smiled at him, still wearing his reading glasses. They'd driven to the helicopter pad as soon as everyone but Shinwoo got back from school – it was nice of Rai to insist on stopping to get Shinwoo some snacks on the way. "A few crumbs doesn't qualify as trashing the place. Don't worry about it, Shinwoo. You're a growing boy who works out for hours every day. Of course you're hungry when you get out of class."
"Yeah, but I didn't have to make a mess," Shinwoo said, frowning, because that wasn't the point.
"It's normal for children to make messes when they hang out. It's not as though you knew it bothered me… Ah." The Chairman looked sympathetic. "That's what's bothering you."
Shinwoo nodded, because that was it. "You've been really great about everything," all the trouble he got into, "and you were letting us hang out at your place, and I was doing something that bothered you the way getting teased bothers Yuna, and I didn't even know."
"Because I didn't tell you," the Chairman reminded him.
What did that have to do with anything? It didn't matter if the person teasing Yuna was doing it to hurt her or just to joke around: after when they were kids her nerves were scraped raw enough that it hurt, every time. "Doesn't mean it didn't bug you. You've always understood and…" Aargh. "I didn't even pay enough attention to notice I was doing something that bugged you. I owe you a lot, and that's how I pay you back for everything?"
The Chairman removed his glasses and folded them as he let out a small laugh. "Shinwoo, I don't teach so my students will owe me. Looking after children is its own reward. I'm old enough that I'm perfectly capable of being responsible for my own personal comfort. Yes, seeing messes does bother me, but I could have just left the room until Regis cleaned everything up. I stayed because the mess you made was a small price to pay to see Master so happy…" He winced.
"It's okay," Shinwoo reassured him. "Seira told me about you guys and your contract, even though ours is really different." True, except she'd told him about it before they contracted, instead of after. He hoped he didn't give it away by revealing he knew a lot more than Seira could have told him this morning. Distraction… Right, he was wondering, "Did you know King Arthur?"
"I'm not quite that old." The Chairman smiled. "But yes, I was knighted for services to the realm. Just a different realm, and I was hunting vampires instead of dragons."
Folding his arms, Shinwoo nodded to himself. Knew it. "Everybody knew Rai was foreign nobility, but if he almost got adopted as the Lord's brother he's the next thing to a prince. Of course he'd have knights."
Tao leaned around the pilot's seat, grinning. "I know, right?"
Shinwoo nodded and Tao flashed him a thumbs up before going back to the non-standard instrument panel. Then Tao turned around again. "You should call yourself Seira's Knight!"
"Maybe." Shinwoo grinned. Tao was a lot of fun, no wonder he and Ikhan hit it off. "Fighting for people is…" he rubbed the back of his head. "It's really hard not to," he confessed, blushing.
The Chairman smiled: yes, he knew. "As long as you keep it under control and channel it appropriately. You are going to have to work on controlling your temper and learning some diplomacy," he warned him. "Miss Seira will likely remain Lukedonia's ambassador." He looked at Seira, who nodded. "No humans and very few nobles remember what it was like when our two species lived together, and as the first example of a normal true contract, the world will be watching you."
Ouch. He didn't want to even think about that, so it was probably a good thing he had other stuff to worry about right now. "So what else are we going to work on?" Shinwoo wondered.
The Chairman's eyes went to Shinwoo's wrist, and Shinwoo pulled back his shirtsleeve a little to show that he was still wearing the bracelet. "First, a basic assessment of your strength to be sure you won't hurt yourself. Then making sure that Death Scythe won't cause any difficulties, and after that we'll work on refining your deportment until you've learned enough to return to my school."
"Deportment?" What was that?
"You have enhanced strength – no, technically you don't," the Chairman corrected himself. "This is a natural phenomenon, not a product of enhancement, but it's effectively the same thing. You're going to have to learn to think before you move and control your movements not just in a fight, but in everyday things like opening doors. Otherwise, you'll break things."
Yeah, if Seira could finger-flick a hole in a frying pan, but more importantly, "People," Shinwoo said, wincing.
Yes, the Chairman didn't say. He looked just was worried about it as Shinwoo before he smiled. "On a happier note: learning to think through your actions before, for example, ripping open a bag of chips will help you avoid spraying crumbs everywhere."
Meaning after this he'd have absolutely no excuse for doing it again in the Chairman's house after this. "Right," Shinwoo said, determined. "Are you going to be training me?"
The Chairman nodded. "In deportment, yes. The sooner you learn how to conceal you enhanced strength, the sooner you can start attending class again. I've had my physical strength change quite abruptly several times in my life, so I know a few tricks for adjusting to different levels."
"What about fighting?" Shinwoo asked, leaning forward eagerly. "Are you going to teach me how to fight?" Because that would be awesome! He hadn't gotten to see the Chairman fight before, and that sucked because according to Seira he was badass.
A rare flicker of alarm from Seira made him turn to see her eyes were slightly wide.
Motion made him look up and to the left to see Tao waving frantically with a 'Nope!' expression on his face.
"No," said the Chairman.
Shinwoo's face fell. "Huh? Come on, can't we just spar?"
"I don't spar," the Chairman said, utterly serious. "All my training is combat training, and in combat training, just like in combat, people can die. Right now, I don't even know how physically resilient you are. If Tao and the others were unenhanced humans, they would have died a second into our first training session. I know martial arts, I've observed and dissected several styles in order to derive useful principles, but I am not a martial artist." He frowned, tapping his glasses on a knee. "Honestly, your martial arts training is going to be a problem."
Shinwoo's face fell. After he'd worked so hard… "What do you mean?"
"I mean that a great deal of your training has revolved around subduing opponents without killing them, both because a death at a tournament is a tragedy and because with your training, you can afford to fight to subdue. For years, if you've known that a certain strike will kill your opponent, then you've avoided using that strike."
Shinwoo nodded and the Chairman continued, "My 'style,' such as it is, is designed to fight beings much stronger than I am, with inhuman resilience and healing or regeneration abilities. I need to go for the kill, and I absolutely cannot afford to get in the habit of avoiding killing blows. Especially when I need to prepare Miss Seira, Tao and the others to fight enemies who aren't fighting to 'win,' but fighting to kill them. If you intend to fight alongside Miss Seira, then you're going to have to be taught to go for the kill… And that means you will never be able to participate in a martial arts tournament again."
Shinwoo sucked in a breath, but, "I already figured that was going to happen anyway." Between enhanced strength and the Union. It wouldn't be fair, either, if he was stronger than them and could take hits better. That was going to suck, but if he could spar with Seira and his friends? It wasn't like he'd really expected he could make a living with martial arts.
"Not necessarily," the Chairman told him. "I'm not just planning to teach you how to handle your new strength, but how to automatically gauge your strength and compensate for it. That means that if your powers are sealed, you should still be able to compete well enough to get those scholarships. But if I'm supervising your combat training, you're going to have to tell Ikhan not to do quite a few of the things he's tried doing to get you out of bed, because otherwise you might mistake him for an attacker."
Because otherwise Ikhan would end up dead, Shinwoo thought, face paling. No, because otherwise a half-asleep Shinwoo could kill his best friend. "And sealing the power from the contract's not going to help that," he knew, because he was a martial artist. He didn't need enhanced strength to kill somebody.
The Chairman nodded. "Memory is a very large part of what makes us who we are – or at least I hope so, given how often I've tampered with my genes – and I didn't seal your memories lightly. Especially not at your age. I sealed them because…" He looked at Rai – no, past Rai to the back of Tao's seat. "It's my duty to prepare my students for the struggles you will face, and the Union has been consolidating its power for a long time. I've done everything I can to preserve your ability to live an ordinary life, but I would be remiss in my duties if Ye Ran's curriculum wasn't designed to help all of you in the event of a Union takeover."
Seira's eyebrows rose.
"Huh?" Shinwoo asked on her behalf, since she was too polite to imply that she doubted her teacher. "If the Union took over, there's no way we'd just take it lying down."
"Yes." The Chairman smiled approvingly. "But I think you're aware that in order to resist, you must first survive."
"And we're unenhanced humans, but so were you once." Shinwoo started to grin.
That earned him another smile. "A great deal of the Union's power lies in its secrecy. Knowledge is power: in order to fight the Union, first one must know it exists. Once it's known that something is possible, it's much easier to replicate it than it was to invent it from scratch." The smile vanished. "But the first and most significant challenge would be keeping people alive. The Union wouldn't care about infrastructure, and thanks to ordinary human criminal greed, the world is now a few months of uninterrupted shipments away from most of the planet not having anywhere near enough seeds to plant to grow food."
Shinwoo nodded, wincing.
"The Union will fall apart quickly," the Chairman assured him. "It was designed to be incapable of surviving over the long term, because that way when the nobles and werewolves pulled out, the enhanced humans would be left with an organizational structure simply incapable of mounting an organized resistance to either of those races. They neutered the Union thinking they were neutering humanity; they dismissed us and Lukedonia to focus on each other, and that will be their downfall."
"I get what you're saying," Tao said, leaning around his chair to look at the Chairman, "but the Union's been around five hundred years, and that's just when it officially started. You were fighting basically-the-Union way before then, Boss!"
"Yes, and I exterminated it easily," the Chairman agreed. "The problem was that the nobles and werewolves kept restarting it, and since then they've kept propping it up. Master, to a noble like Lagus Tradio, about how long is five hundred years in human terms?"
Rai looked thoughtful. "Perhaps two years; the clan leaders are older than the Union."
"You see?" the Chairman told Seira and Shinwoo. "They needed enhanced human test subjects, but they certainly weren't going to allow human enhancement to be anything more than a temporary measure. None of the human Union 'Elders' were supposed to live long enough to become a threat. If we remove the traitor clan leaders and do something about the werewolves, the Union will fall apart quickly in noble terms… the problem is the collateral damage."
Cities blown up. Countries starved.
"Sir Gejutel told us what Ragnarok meant to humans," Seira said. "When the Gods fight, the world ends." Face set, she looked at the Chairman.
"…What?" he asked her, blinking.
"You have known this was coming, and humans are those you wish to protect."
He looked happy she'd figured that out: Yeah, Seira was smart. "Ye Ran isn't the only school I've established over the centuries, and I've been creating seed banks and taking as many of the obvious precautions as I can without drawing attention."
Red eyes didn't look away from blue.
The Chairman coughed, looking out the window at the ocean. "There are things I would like to do, in an ideal world where I could get consent and run clinical trials, but if we lived in an ideal world no human would have died of old age except by choice for centuries. Not to mention that Master withdrew my permission to conduct experiments…"
Seira sighed, too polite to call, "Bullshit," said Shinwoo.
The Chairman glanced worriedly at Rai, who sat with his legs crossed, looking out the window of the plane.
"What truly worries me is that you are smiling," Seira said with a sigh.
Yeah, Shinwoo could see it there. Not just the relief that Rai was acting like this was none of his business, but a tiny little smirk.
"We were talking about Shinwoo," the Chairman remembered with relief. "Shinwoo, now that you are keeping your memories, it is my responsibility to teach you how to survive the Union coming after you." He met Shinwoo's eyes, and he could see the old grief there. "Now that you remember, I can't let you live that ordinary life, because you would die. I'm going to have to teach you to live in fear, always looking over your shoulder. I'm going to have to teach you how to kill, and kill again, as many times as it takes." He looked tired, looking from Shinwoo, to Seira and Tao. "I'm sorry," he said. "You shouldn't have to fight this war, when it's my responsibility."
"My duty," Rai said, frowning at him.
Frankenstein nodded in acknowledgement. "I will do my best to be sure you have the strength to protect those important to you, and the ordinary life we have here."
…Shinwoo didn't really think their life qualified as ordinary, when the Chairman was rich and they had foreign nobility living with them and Tao was Tao, but he figured it wasn't the time to point that out.
In one of the clearings a safe distance away from the lab, Frankenstein stood next to a broken board and a pipe tied into the knot of someone who knew nothing about knots but did have a lot of practice tying the laces of exercise shoes for proper ankle support. "Let me see that again," Frankenstein said, forcibly restraining his irritation while he kept a smile on his face.
Shinwoo pulled on the tab. The third soda Rai brought for the trip popped open as Tao stared, moving to look at Shinwoo's hands from different angles.
"It looks as though I was wrong," Frankenstein said, wanting to facepalm. "There are significant differences between this and enhanced strength. The strength of your body is exactly the same: the additional force is telekinesis. Of course you're not having trouble applying the exact amount of force you want to apply: it's your want that applies the force. So this is why none of the illegal contractors gave themselves away by accidentally breaking things." Damn, if he'd figured out this ability before enhancing his strength, he could have saved himself so much trouble, because he was fairly sure that using telekinesis to control how much of the force their bodies exerted acted on the object was how Gejutel and Ragar avoided crushing the handles of those teacups the first time Frankenstein tried to arrange for Rai to have a social life by swallowing his pride and actually inviting the two semi-tolerable nobles to stay and drink his tea and eat his food.
The Landegre weren't supposed to be telekinetic, but what did nobles know about their powers?
Suspiciously little, especially when the most powerful members of the species got their memories tampered with on a regular basis. With power came the temptation to abuse it: if one of the previous Noblesse hadn't realized that the clan leaders could be made to forget just how powerful they were along with the contents of certain conversations, Frankenstein would make a hat and eat it.
Now, the current generation had been forced to more or less teach themselves how to use their abilities, without the wisdom or limitations of the previous generation, with no Noblesse to take their shiny new toys away.
Frankenstein could picture the Previous Lord watching, just waiting for Tradio and the others to attack Lukedonia. His soul was in Ragnarok, so he certainly had the best seat in the house. Probably had popcorn, too.
Not that Frankenstein could really begrudge him that: he had centuries of cursing his inability to kill those clan leaders, but the Previous Lord had millennia. Where Frankenstein was limited by his power, the Previous Lord had to stay within the limits of the law. Or else, who would?
He doubted that it was a coincidence that the Landegre-Loyard massacre occurred only a few years after the Tunguska Event. It was a message. 'Train, and we'll slaughter your people.' Roctis hadn't kept records of his meetings with the Elders and other clan leaders, but Ignes had spied on her father, and the traitor nobles knew damn well that if Raskreia gained control over her powers and there was a 'real' Lord of Lukedonia again, the window of opportunity left by her father's eternal sleep would close. They'd taken Lukedonia's people hostage against their Lord, to force Raskreia to stay weak.
Master would have known that part of their plan. Would have seen that in their minds, long ago. No wonder he'd played along with the plan he must have seen in Gejutel's mind. Raizel had presented Raskreia with an enemy she had to fight, wanted to fight, so she'd have the chance to learn how her own powers worked.
Thanks to Master, when the Union attacked Lukedonia Raskreia wouldn't be as weak as they thought. None of the clan leaders would be, and being underestimated by your enemy right up to the moment you killed them was one of the best tactical advantages there were.
The main reason Frankenstein didn't use his psychokinetic abilities was that many of his enemies were idiots and might not realize he had them if he didn't use them. Playing the weak human was a lie they wanted to believe, when it fit their prejudices, and keeping powers in reserve both made him appear weaker and meant he had more traps available to spring the moment they let their guard down.
But damnation, he'd been hemorrhaging lab equipment for months after the first time he enhanced his strength.
Shinwoo was grinning. "The bond is a lot easier than I thought it was going to be, and it's this easy to control my strength too?"
Frankenstein frowned, knowing he needed to find a way to remind the boy that he could not take this lightly, when he noticed the word control. Shinwoo wasn't having trouble controlling his link to Seira or the powers he drew from it? "Of course, this is why first generation contractors don't become mutants!" No wonder Frankenstein hadn't recognized it, when this was the first time it was working in his favor instead of the criminals'.
Tao, Miss Seira and Shinwoo looked at him.
"Mutants are created when a contractor drinks someone's blood, and they drink someone's blood, until the new contractors are several people removed from the noble," he explained to Shinwoo. "Contractors don't just receive raw energy from nobles, but also copies of their abilities. The more times those abilities are copied, the more errors creep in, until eventually a mutant can't control the noble energy within them, and it changes them."
"So they're called mutants because their powers mutated when they were copied, like DNA?" Shinwoo asked. "Seems kind of weird for people centuries ago to name them that. Were you the one who decided what to call them?"
Frankenstein shook his head. "It's a translation of the Lukedonian term. Since I had access to nobles," Central Order Knights, "I had them give me translations of several of the key terms into multiple languages. It means 'the changing ones.' Present tense. The defining trait of a mutant is that their body and blood are constantly changing, so whoever took their blood will lose control over them and getting a second blood sample won't let them get control back, because that one will also quickly become outdated." He looked at Tao. "The Union term 'modified human' is a Freudian slip on someone's part: it means a human that was changed, in the past, and now is limited to being what the Union wanted them to be. A modified human is by definition less than what they were before. I prefer enhanced human: a human whose potential has been brought out, someone who has been made more themselves, not less."
When Tao nodded, Frankenstein went back to what he'd been saying. "But the important thing, from the traitors' perspective, is that modified humans have stopped changing. That's why the Union wasn't interested in learning how to modify someone twice, much less slowly enhance them like I've done with you. The nobles don't want humans they can't control, and the werewolves don't want humans that have one of their main abilities."
"That's why you're stabilizing and enhancing us gradually instead of doing steps at a time so we're the same for awhile before getting changed again!" Tao grinned. "It's not just the samples they got from us back when we were in the Union, but even if they scraped some of M-21's blood up off a battlefield… No, right, he's a werewolf, so it won't work anyway. That leaves me and Takeo." Tao punched his palm. "Aha, so that's why you want Takeo to learn about mind control!"
Frankenstein smiled. "Very good, Tao." Even before Master had the idea of taking Ignes' inheritance and using it as reparations for one of her victims' victims, Dark Spear would have protected Tao's mind from everything but themselves. That meant he'd needed to come up with something for Takeo.
Tao for tactics, Seira for cooking, Regis for the cleaning, Rael to run the school; before very long, there would be people who could ensure that Master's ordinary life continued.
There was a sound from Master's pocket: it wasn't one of the alarm tones Frankenstein had heard Master use before, for things like snacktime and when he should head home while hanging out with Shinwoo and his other friends so he was back in time for dinner.
Master took the phone out of his pocket and showed it to Seira.
"Thank you," she said, bowing slightly. Turning to the rest of them, she said, "Tao, it is time for us to begin preparations."
"Right," Tao said eagerly, although a moment later he glanced at Shinwoo and Frankenstein. Even with the promise of a soul weapon, his keen sense of responsibility still meant he wanted to watch over this training.
Frankenstein would adjourn for now, but "I'd like to check a couple more things before removing Cetus from Dark Spear." If he was wrong about Shinwoo's level of control, what else was he wrong about? He wouldn't be in any condition to do more testing for several hours after forcing Dark Spear to release some of their prey. He'd like to get a good enough idea of Shinwoo's current status so he could spend that time figuring out a new approach to Shinwoo's training.
Master nodded and turned towards the lab. Seira and Tao looked at Shinwoo and Frankenstein, but then followed Master, taking up positions slightly behind him and to either side, flanking him protectively.
It made him smile to himself for a moment "Next, I'd like to see how much strength you can call on in a fight," Frankenstein said, turning back to Shinwoo.
"Yes!" The boy pumped his fist. "What do I do?"
Frankenstein held out his right hand to his side and conjured up a black force field around it. He wasn't going to tempt fate by telling Shinwoo to attack him with all his might: he couldn't use anything as fragile as a mountain to test Shinwoo's strength, but he knew the power of his force fields and could regrow a hand. "Punch this as hard as you can when I say now," he added quickly, seeing Shinwoo start to pull back his fist. "Coming in contact with it will hurt, so see if you can muster any energies to protect your hand. Get in position when you think you're ready to give it a try."
Shinwoo nodded and stepped over, pulling back his fist, blue eyes focused on the target.
"Now," Frankenstein said after a moment.
Hmm, not bad speed. Frankenstein felt the impact on his shield – it was made of his energy, and just how much power it used could give him a rough idea of the amount of force applied. But that energy flare… "Give me your hand," he said as soon as his student drew it back; he'd heard the crackle when it came in range.
Good, he thought, turning over Shinwoo's hand. No visible drawn blood, no healing energies present to mark a just-closed wound. Frankenstein had modified his aura to suppress noble power so he could make chains capable of holding mutants and contractors even before he found Dark Spear, so that flare was probably just an automatic reaction to being attacked by a vampi... contractor's energies instead of Dark Spear getting out.
"Huh," Shinwoo said, shaking out his hand automatically when Frankenstein released it. "I did this before. Not this powerful, but I know I used this to beat some guys up before the contract."
Wasn't that interesting. "Do you remember who, or when?"
Shinwoo shrugged helplessly. "Just some punks; they blur together after awhile."
Hmm… "When we get home, see if you can figure out where and when it happened." Putting him in those circumstances again might refresh Shinwoo's memory.
"Say," Shinwoo wondered, kicking a tree stump – probably felled by M-21, judging from the slashes. "Can I ask you something?"
"Of course. You can always ask me whatever you want to know. I can't always promise a complete answer, but I'll tell you as much as I can." Hopefully Shinwoo would listen to him when he said this, unlike most of the rest of the household
He nodded, understanding. If the enemy knew things, that could put Shinwoo's friends in danger. "What's up with you and Rai?"
Frankenstein paused. Shinwoo had claimed he wasn't bothered by Frankenstein addressing Raizel as Master, but it would be normal for someone raised in the modern day to have concerns. Or was it something else? "Can you be more specific?"
Shinwoo winced, swallowed, and made a face like someone about to bite a bullet. "How sick is he?"
Oh. Damn. Frankenstein closed his eyes for a moment. "Why do you ask?" What exactly did he sense? Had he noticed some sign that Master's condition was worse than it appeared?
Shinwoo's eyebrows went up. "Because he's my friend and I'm worried about him?" Of course he wanted to know.
"There are a lot of unknowns," he said, stalling for time. "I haven't been allowed to get readings on the injury, because he doesn't want me to worry. I share his ability to burn life for power because of our contract, but Rai would never forgive himself if I severely damaged my soul so that I could watch it bleed for his sake." The charms were risky, but they were something he'd done to himself with his own power, or Dark Spear's at least, of his own will, so Master didn't feel as responsible. "There is some good news: the charm on your wrist is something I came up with so he wouldn't keep tearing open the wound in order to protect us." When Shinwoo started to remove the charm, Frankenstein held up a hand. "Don't worry, there are more, so loaning that one to you isn't a problem. Even better, I'm fairly sure that Raizel is surprised that he's as healthy as he is."
"So he should be even sicker? Seira said he was bleeding from – " Shinwoo couldn't say it, just waved at his face. He knew a little about organ damage.
"If Rai is healthier than he should be, based on the experiences of the previous Noblesse, then there must be a reason he's doing so well. I was feeling his surprise," and gratitude for additional time with them, "before I made the charms. That means I have two different avenues of research to pursue, and if there are two factors that can help his condition, there may be more."
"How much longer has he got? Or is that a stupid question? I mean, nobles are immortal, right?" Shinwoo laughed… until he saw Frankenstein's expression.
"Most nobles are immortal. In a sense, you could say that the Noblesse are mortals like humans, with a limited time on earth." Bodies that wore out, power that was used up. Yet Frankenstein refused to abandon any of them to mortality when it wasn't necessary. "Raizel's soul is no longer able to heal itself. He's already pushing his luck: I would not have been surprised if he had died sentencing Urokai and Zarga." That was why he'd taken such a risk with Dark Spear. If he'd fought them conventionally, before long they would have injured him badly enough for Master to sense it: he had to try to take them out first. "I managed to take out Roctis, but the other traitor clan leaders… I have a means of sabotaging Gradeus so he can't gather enough power to break through Master's guard, but Lagus… that clan specializes in poisons, he must know a great deal about how the body and soul can fail. How to make them fail. He's ancient, and he very well may know things I don't about the noble equivalent of biology in general and a Noblesse's or soul weapon's in particular." He shook his head. "I should have made the connection between Grandia, Ragnarok and my work with Dark Spear artifacts."
Belatedly, he realized that none of that would make any sense to Shinwoo, much less reassure him. "He should be fine unless he fights," unless whatever mysterious factor was holding him together stopped, "and he should be fine in a fight as long as he doesn't run out of charms." Or decide not to use them so Frankenstein could have them back. Or have some sort of compatibility issue, or hell, the noble equivalent of something going down the wrong pipe. Nobles weren't used to handling foreign energies – trying to convert the charm into power with a failing soul? There was a reason the human liver needed to be as miraculous as it was: the human body routinely juggled poisons and performed metabolic processes with toxic byproducts trying to get energy and the components necessary for a living thing out of other living things. The human body was evolved for this and it still could have serious, even deadly problems; nobles were producers, not consumers, and Frankenstein had seen what happened when a noble had no idea what they were doing. Far too often, they pretended that they did, muddled along well enough on practiced grace and superior resilience, until they'd dug themselves deep enough they couldn't get back out when something went very wrong.
At least Raizel's soul was used to the presence of Frankenstein's soul energies, so he could hope Raizel's mental defenses or equivalent of an immune system wouldn't rouse itself to force out the foreign power, but he had no data.
He had never experimented on innocent people before (gotten blood samples from innocent nobles, yes, but never experimented on them). If Master wasn't already a dead man walking, so it wasn't possible for Frankenstein to make things any worse. If there was any chance that Raizel could survive without treatment, then Frankenstein would have had a difficult time bearing the thought of taking a risk with Master.
"Is there anything I can do to help, besides fighting?" Shinwoo almost pleaded. "Experiments and stuff wouldn't bother me." Unlike 'Ajussi' and the others. "Not if it can help Rai?"
"That may help," he said, forcing a smile for his student. "I've never met anyone else with a true contract until now. It might help to take some readings on the transfer of energy between you and Seira, to see if I can improve the current method of augmenting… Rai's energy." Almost slipped up there.
"I know that he means a lot to you. You don't have to act like he doesn't. It doesn't bother me," Shinwoo said, scratching the back of his head.
"You're right: calling him Master is an important symbol of how special he is to me." A title, an honor that no one else would ever receive from him again. "It is important to me, but I know it bothers him. That was actually why I started doing it, I was posing as a servant and, well, it's a long story." He'd called him Master with obviously-fake obedience to drive Urokai up the wall, and that made it almost a pleasure to call a noble 'Master.' The years went by, and it became something of a pet name, a joke between the two of them because Raizel knew very well why Frankenstein did it and hadn't asked him to stop, because Raizel knew that given Frankenstein's disobedient streak, asking him to knock it off would only encourage him.
Before he met Raizel, how long had it been since he had an in-joke with anyone? He was so lonely he could have latched on to a pet or a houseplant, if he was irresponsible enough to make himself responsible for another living thing with the criminals constantly hunting him. Instead?
Master… It was impossible that Frankenstein would ever call a noble Master willingly and mean it, and did that not make it a miracle? That he had found someone impossibly worthy?
Even if Rai had another nickname now, one that didn't imply that he didn't value Frankenstein as an equal, one that didn't place a gulf between them, he wouldn't ask Frankenstein to stop doing something that made him happy.
"We should get back to the evaluation," Frankenstein said, brushing nonexistent dirt off his hands. "Master and Miss Seira will be helping Tao tonight, and we can talk then."
Shinwoo nodded, relieved.
Frankenstein smiled: he understood why M-21 and the others were cautious around not just someone with enough power to get away with abusing them if this was the Union, but a powerful scientist, and he couldn't blame nobles for being nobles, but it was refreshing to have a student who knew who and what he was and didn't hesitate to come to him with their worries and ask him questions.
'In this place, you smile all the time.'
Master was right: Frankenstein was happy here. He had an entire school of people to look after, and several wonderful children.
And that worried him. Because Master had to know that if he died now, Frankenstein would not be left alone… Provided Master managed to protect these children, instead of preserving his own life by letting them fight and put themselves in danger.
Not that Frankenstein had any right to talk when he was the one training replacement cooks, and cleaning boys, and a scientist/engineer/doctor, and a school administrator, and simply company, so that Master would not be alone if Frankenstein was the one to die first.
Either way, he needed to find some way for these children to protect themselves, because after the battle with the Twelfth Elder, he and Master had known that they couldn't guarantee their safety.
And now one more child had refused to leave.
It baffled him that the Union, that anyone could think that the lives of people like this were meaningless, it really did. What gave them the idea that they had the right to deprive the world of something so precious? What plans or ideology could be more important than a child's life?
The idea that people could be treated like things of no value was one thing Frankenstein didn't want to understand.
He wanted to purge it from this world.
Take a look at what Frankenstein says in episode 391, it's interesting as well as entertaining.
Memetic viruses would be a major health concern for beings of mind/soul/self. Criminals are incentivized to spread their ideology/bullshit justifications since if they can make the people around them think that doing something is okay, then the criminals can do it without being punished. The Union uses the 'the weak are worthless' ideology to keep its slaves from banding together and no longer being weak – want to bet M-21's outlived the people in episode 407 who thought they were so superior to him and therefore they were safe from the Union? This absolutely damages their victims' sense of self, and that means they likely wouldn't last long as immortals. The idea that it's okay to abuse/kill [anyone] for [some bullshit reason] is probably the noble equivalent of rabies, only it can hide itself better (criminals are cowards) and therefore has more chances to infect others. Take a look at Lagus Tradio, how sick he is, and think that this is someone Gejutel used to like. There are clans that got near-completely depopulated because of how he spread his sickness to others. That's some black plague-level scary, so yes, it makes sense that this is the threat to the nobles that the Noblesse is supposed to stop. This is why they have the authority to read people's minds, since how else are you supposed to spot a mind-virus? And it's also why they have the ability to put people down like rabid dogs.
As was discussed in a recent episode, eternal sleep doesn't really scare nobles since they normally live just absurd amounts of time. Going to eternal sleep a little early, meh. It can be annoying if you had stuff you were doing, but not terrifying, more inconvenient. Mind rape/getting turned into something disgusting and pathetic? That's pure NOPE.
The kids at the school are aware that Rai, Seira and Regis are some kind of foreign nobility. The Chairman was also obviously a foreigner, and clearly he has some connection to Rai and the others since he's hosting them, so the obvious guesses were that he's either nobility himself and just didn't tell people (see the 'related to Rael' guess) or some kind of loyal retainer – they're aware that he cares about Rai, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything when he's a very caring person in general.
Given how awkward the vampire discussion was before ('munch munch'), Shinwoo does want to make it clear to Rai and the Chairman that he definitely doesn't think his friend would enslave someone! Hence telling them that he gets that Frankenstein calling Rai 'Master' is a fealty thing.