Chapter 49: Three Days Later

Gotta say, Leo’s learning ability is really good. Elementary school knowledge and a part of middle school stuff was learned clean by him within one session.

About teaching more, Michael couldn’t remember more anyway and it wasn’t too necessary. After all, the system mentioned is about simple calculation speed, not thinking ability.

The upcoming time is just practicing solving some simple exercises in different question types to increase the diversity in calculation. This is something the two of them deduced during study from diverse practical experiences in combat.

—

Three days later…

During this period Michael and Leo continuously solved different types of questions, making Raphael see it and get a headache along with them because they did it by mouth and were incredibly noisy. The two rarely had such a long time without fighting like this.

“Time to check the results of the last few days. Ready?”

Michael’s sharp gaze stared at Leo as if a fight was about to happen. The momentum on his body tensed up, even though there wasn’t any kind of energy, it still felt a bit oppressive.

“Always ready.”

Leo, facing this momentum, his face unchanged in color, responded with momentum not one bit inferior. The atmosphere between the two was already tense like a bowstring.

“Good then…” Michael narrowed his eyes, took a breath preparing to strike.

“Three thousand eight hundred fifty-seven plus five thousand nine hundred forty-two equals what?”

“Nine thousand seven hundred ninety-nine. Your turn. Five thousand eight hundred twenty-three plus four thousand zero thirty-four equals what?” Leo answered in just the blink of an eye the next day immediately threw out a riddle.

“Nine thousand eight hundred fifty-seven. Let me increase the difficulty a bit. Twenty-seven times eighteen equals what?”

“Hmph, four hundred eighty-six. One thousand nine hundred fifty-three divided by thirty-seven equals what?”

Leo hmphed once showing a disdainful expression which was actually to fight for an extra second to calculate. Multiplying two digits in the blink of an eye currently he couldn’t do.

“Just these little trivial calculations and you dare to try and trouble me? The answer is fifty-three.”

Michael’s words were full of momentum but him saying that many words was clearly because his calculation wasn’t fast enough. If he kept hemming and hawing thinking longer than Leo it would be too face-losing so he had to show off a bit. As long as he wasn’t embarrassed, the one feeling awkward would be someone else.

Moreover, this could also be considered part of the training. Mouth spouting nonsense while the brain is calculating also counts as a form of doing multiple things at once. The key is to maintain high accuracy, can’t have calculations spitting out wrong answers all the time.

“The difficulty is still a bit low, let’s raise it a little. Three to the power of seven is how much?” Michael asked, the corner of his mouth curling up full of provocation.

This question really stumped Leo. He didn’t memorize that answer because these past few days he did so many calculations he couldn’t remember them all. So every time he encountered a calculation he had to treat it as starting from scratch.

“Just this little question and you call it raising the difficulty? If you only have this little level then don’t quiz anymore, it’s embarrassing for math learners. The answer is obviously two thousand one hundred eighty-seven.”

Blathering a bunch of meaningless sentences Leo finally finished calculating the result. He felt a bit face-lost so he wanted to ask a question hard enough to regain some face.

“Hmph, I bet you can’t answer this one. The cube root of four thousand nine hundred thirteen is how much?”

“What? You brat, are you looking down on me? I hold your talent in such high regard, constantly nurturing you, and now you show me this? How can you, as a person, not know how to conduct yourself like this? Do you need me to teach you…”

Michael blabbered nonstop, the more he talked the more off-topic he got, but the answer was nowhere to be seen. He actually didn’t know any trick to calculate the cube root of a number. His method was to guess a number that seemed about right and then test each calculation one by one.

“Heh heh, you’re panicking, you’re panicking…” Leo laughed cunningly. A few days studying together was enough for him to know what Michael’s ’weak point’ was.

“Panicking my ass! You little punk only knows how to play these petty tricks, what’s there to be proud of? The answer is seventeen, right?”

Michael, face not red, heart not racing, still kept that arrogant demeanor. As if the memory of him stalling for a really long time just now never existed in his brain.

“Hmph hmph, just these simple calculations, what’s so great? Let’s do something that seems more practical.”

“Oh, practical and also ’seems’? You don’t seem too confident about this ’practical’ thing, huh.” Leo curled his lip teasingly.

Of course he understood that in such a short time, coming up with a one hundred percent practical problem was very difficult.

“Keep showing off. If you answer wrong later, I won’t be polite.”

To make this little competition more spirited, Michael and Leo set a small rule: whoever answers wrong has to call the other one ’Papa’.

“An army besieging a city has one thousand two hundred soldiers. Only three-fifths of the soldiers participate in the attack, the rest guard the logistics. Among the attacking soldiers, one-quarter use bows and arrows, the rest use ladders to scale the walls. How many soldiers participate in the attack? How many soldiers use bows? How many soldiers scale the walls?”

A series of rapid-fire questions along with the long-winded problem statement made Leo’s brain work nonstop. But just this much wasn’t a big deal because a few days ago he tried using domain expansion once. That feeling was truly terrifying beyond his imagination.

“Hmph, besieging a city, how can you use that many people? Isn’t it normal for me to go pioneer, sweep the walls, then break the gate and charge in?”

Leo hmphed while simultaneously bragging about his own battle achievements to buy time for him to have enough time to calculate.

“Stop talking nonsense, you can’t figure out the answer, right?” Michael on the side poked and prodded, not letting Leo calm his mind.

“These little brainteasers and you think they can trouble me? You’re delusional. Seven hundred twenty soldiers attack, which includes: one hundred eighty soldiers using bows and five hundred forty soldiers scaling the walls.”

The two of them, neither yielding to the other. You ask one question, then I must definitely ask one back, can only ask harder ones, not easier ones.

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