Pyromaniac
On the stage, several fierce pillars of fire surged upward, and near the firewalls a storm of mana was taking shape.
Those immense torrents of power were, naturally, proof of the fighting spirit blazing from both me and Yoon Hwayeon.
"Mwahaha! Come on, then, if you want to come at me! Han Riae!"
"Yeah, I will."
"Huh? W-wait."
With a halfhearted response to Yoon Hwayeon's provocation, I shot straight toward her at a speed so fast she probably never saw it coming.
As if she had not expected me to close the distance that quickly, she looked flustered and promptly withdrew, scattering flames as she retreated from me.
"Ha. I knew you were crazy, but I figured you'd lunge in if it was you!"
- Fwoosh!
The instant she finished speaking, I felt a searing heat beneath my feet, and instinctively dumped mana into my legs to throw myself clear.
Where I had just been standing, flames that looked ready to devour everything were roaring into a terrifying wall, scorching the air around them.
"I'll say this clearly, Han Riae! Even if we're friends, I won't hold back!"
"Hmph... that's exactly what I wanted, Yoon Hwayeon!"
Hwayeon, toying with the mana in both hands and spinning fireballs around as if she were performing a trick, grinned playfully and taunted me.
I certainly had no desire for her to go easy on me, and I was confident I could beat her, so I took her challenge head-on and answered in kind.
- Fwoosh! Fwoosh!
The heat from the surrounding flames, as they devoured nearby mana and spread like mad, pressed against my skin in waves.
The difference between Yoon Hwayeon and the other students who possessed flame-based unique abilities was simple.
The others conjured embers with mana, then used formulas and small magical circles woven between those mana-born sparks to evolve them into proper flames.
But Yoon Hwayeon. More precisely, the fire of the Yeomhwa family manifested flame in a slightly different way.
The only ingredient that went into her fire was pure mana.
Ordinary fire grew fiercer by feeding on oxygen, while Yoon Hwayeon's flames fed on the mana around them, swelling larger and larger as their output grew ever more violent.
Unlike the fires of other flame-type students, which contained various "impurities," Hwayeon's flames converted an opponent's mana entirely into her own firepower, which was why they felt so different.
Powerful unique abilities all shared one fatal weakness: poor sustainability.
But that crazy woman there could directly use the mana her opponent scattered, maintaining that terrifying output for the duration of the fight.
Of course, abilities that broken always had their own flaw.
Normally, magic born from a caster's own mana had little effect on them, or none at all. It did not harm the caster.
But the Yeomhwa family's flames, with their blistering mana and overwhelming power, could cross a certain threshold; once they did, the fire turned blue and became blue flame, cangyeon, consuming the caster as well as it burned.
Its output was, of course, something basic Yeomhwa flames couldn't even hope to match, but its fatal weakness was that it burned indiscriminately, reducing both enemy and caster to ash.
There was even a record from the past of someone draping themselves in blue flame all over their body and meeting a glorious death beside a Class 2 boss monster.
It was a notch below Class 1, of course, but no sane person would complain about that.
Dungeon that housed Class 2 monsters were usually places that Class 1 hunters went to, and if it was the boss of that dungeon, it would only fall after several Class 1 hunters joined forces and barely managed to bring it down.
That was how intense the firepower was, and how heavy the risk, when it came to cangyeon.
And there was one more trait shared by those who carried the Yeomhwa family's mana.
- Fwoosh! Pop!
"Kyahahah! Burn brighter, even more brilliantly!"
Namely, they had trouble controlling their emotions when releasing mana.
The mana of Yeomhwa circulated through the caster's body, and when it became active, it brought the caster's emotions into a heightened state.
That was why even Yoon Hwayeon, who usually seemed calm and perfectly normal, turned into a pyromaniac I could barely handle the moment she unleashed her mana.
Of course, her mind stayed intact and only her mood grew excited, so basic communication and self-control were still possible.
- Fwoosh! Fwoosh! Pop! Pop! Fwoosh!
"Han Riae! Take this!"
What was funny about her was that, because she had been trained by her family from a young age, her mind was perfectly clear.
And the ridiculous part was that she was hurling deep, violent flames at me while remaining in that perfectly sane state.
Firecrackers of flame spread across every path I took, forming walls of fire.
I slipped through the flames by a hair's breadth and closed in.
Yoon Hwayeon already knew my main strategy in one-on-one combat was to dominate space, so naturally she blanketed every route I could move through, every patch of empty space, with fire.
"Hah..."
Honestly, I had expected her to swallow the battlefield whole, but she was burning everything so indiscriminately that I really couldn't help feeling speechless.
She was skipping over the mana warm-up most combat-focused students needed and, with absurd firepower, already turning the whole place into a hellscape before I had even finished circulating my own mana.
"Hm, this shouldn't be much to you, Han Riae."
"You know me too well..."
But of course, I had my own way out of this bind.
- Whuuuum!
I concentrated mana into both legs.
Then I sealed off the channels so none of it would circulate elsewhere.
- Hum. Hum. Hum.
A cold sensation gathered in my legs while my body temperature kept rising.
Then I released the mana packed tightly into my legs with all my strength.
- Bang!
I kicked off the ground and leaped upward with all my might. Naturally, that was a stunt most combat-focused students could pull off, but what I was doing from here on out was different.
- Thoom!
"You're faster than I expected, pyromaniac."
"Haha, I knew only you could fight that stupidly."
Opening the mana channels I had been circulating, I guided the warmed mana up into my upper body, and then into my arms.
If it had been anyone else, they would have vomited blood and collapsed while moving it around, but who did they think I was?
The Melitton family did not earn its name as a house of close-quarters combat for nothing.
Flexible, warm mana. Because I possessed mana like that, I could move it fluidly all over my body.
I shifted the mana that had reinforced my legs into my arms and thrust forward, intending to drive it straight into Yoon Hwayeon, but just as I knew her well, the years we'd spent together meant she knew my strengths just as well.
"How in the world do you warm up that fast? It doesn't make sense."
"That's not something you should be saying when you don't warm up at all despite having that kind of firepower."
We traded easy little jabs and rushed at each other again.
This time, as I moved the mana to my arms, I let the mana circulating naturally throughout my body settle in evenly.
The heat in my body climbed higher, and sweat began to bead on my forehead. It was already blistering from all the flames scattered around us, and now my own body was turning hot too, which was just...
"Ack! It's hot... Quit throwing fire around already, you pyromaniac!"
I drove my overheated body forward and charged at Yoon Hwayeon.
The mana I kept circulating pooled into my legs and arms, sharply increasing both my destructive power and my speed.
- Fwoosh! Whoom! Bang!
I thought I'd gotten in faster than expected, but Yoon Hwayeon's figure had already vanished, swallowed by a shimmer of heat haze.
"Ha... she's at it again."
It was the same trick I'd seen and suffered through many times before.
She made a flame duplicate of herself, one that looked nearly identical to her own form, fled in advance, and then struck from behind the instant its traces vanished.
And what would come flying at me next was--
- Swoosh!
"Ghk!"
- Bang! Fwoosh!
"Again?"
"What, am I supposed to abandon my main weapon?"
She shaped flames into arrows and fired them rapidly at her opponent.
Until now, she had used fire to create greatswords, axes, daggers, gauntlets, and all kinds of weapons.
But Yoon Hwayeon had gone and manipulated her flames into a bow, something Yeomhwa had never been known to produce, and loosed arrows from it.
Of course, it wasn't as though nobody had ever made flame in the image of a ranged weapon before.
They simply hadn't bothered to create inefficient ranged weapons when Yeomhwa already let them paint the battlefield with fire, gather flames in one place if need be, build pillars of flame, and detonate them all at once.
In the first place, if you could shoot fire from a distance, why bother? It was more efficient, more versatile, and safer to make a close-range weapon to fight mages, so there had been no real reason to fashion a ranged weapon like a bow.
But Yoon Hwayeon was one of the students known as the golden generation, just like me.
She had far more abundant mana than the other Yeomhwa members, stronger firepower, and excellent control over Yeomhwa itself, so she hadn't felt any need to invest in close combat.
Instead, she decided to strengthen her long-range attacks more decisively, and flame took the shape of a bow.
She compressed Yeomhwa, which had been specialized in wide-area dispersal, into the form of arrows, condensing it again and again to maximize its single-target destructive power.
- Whoom! Bang! Fwoosh!
If she aimed well for the core, it was an attack with enough firepower to take down even a Class 5 monster alone.
Of course, the stronger the attack, the longer the charge time, but once you got hit dead-on by that strike, you were immediately out of the fight.
I wrapped Magi around both hands and pushed the speed of my mana circulation even higher as I rushed in.
Blow after blow was exchanged, and the fight continued.
- Hey, don't those two ever get tired?
- Wow, look how intense that is...
- No wonder they're the top and runner-up
Well, I guess we were entertaining the crowd.
"Ugh! Han Riae, when on earth are you going to go down?"
"You tell me, why are you so damn fast..."
Because I specialized in short bursts and was weak in drawn-out fights, while Yoon Hwayeon was the opposite and excelled in longer battles, I was the one steadily growing more exhausted.
"You're starting to get tired, aren't you? What should I do about that..."
Of course, Hwayeon looked tired too from burning through mana nonstop.
Both of us had been fighting for so long that the initial sharpness was gone, and we were each exhaling hard as we stared into one another's eyes.
After catching her breath for a moment, Yoon Hwayeon spoke first.
"If we keep this up, we'll both end up exhausted. Want to finish it with one last attack?"
One last attack.
"Sounds good... fire arrows or whatever, just bring it."
I agreed at once, thinking there was no particular advantage to dragging the fight out any further.
- Ssshhk! Fwoosh!
Hwayeon exhaled flames lightly from the tips of her fingers, sketching out a small arc until a bow of blazing fire took shape.
- Fwoosh! Ssshk, ssshk, ssshk!
Then a tiny red flame blossomed in Yoon Hwayeon's grasp, growing smaller and thinner until it transformed into the shape of an arrow.
The look in her eyes as she locked onto me was steady and unwavering, with not even the slightest hesitation that she might shoot elsewhere.
Heh... if you're going to do that, then I will too...
There was no choice but to meet it head-on.
I drove the speed of my mana circulation to its absolute maximum.
I wrapped both my arms in tightly hardened Magi.
And I would break through that arrow with everything I had.
That was the only scenario I could imagine now.
"Come on!!!"
"Coming."
- TUKWAAAAANG!!!
We counted down to each other at the same time, and the instant that count reached one, our bodies moved.
The arrow packed with insanely compressed mana struck my body dead-on, bursting with a violent crack as it exploded.
But...
"Hnnngh!"
I endured the Yeomhwa blazing across my whole body and charged straight at Yoon Hwayeon.
- Tap.
"Hey... you crazy woman... I won..."
"Ha, haha... you're really like a wall..."
With those words, Yoon Hwayeon collapsed flat on the floor, apparently exhausted.
That last arrow must have been her decisive strike, the one she'd drawn every bit of her mana into.
I kept my footing with all my strength, clinging to consciousness so I wouldn't fall too.
With the recoil still rippling through me, my vision spun from mana exhaustion, and the ground seemed to sway beneath my feet.
"Guess... that was a bit much..."
She gave a relieved laugh, and just as she was about to collapse, I heard it.
- Riae!
Huh?
Paran's voice?
- Riae! Are you all right...
No.
There was no way afternoon major class had already ended...
"Riae, focus!"
...Huh?
My fading consciousness snapped awake in an instant.
A fresh blue color, and the scent of soda, filled my senses.
A body I wanted to pat right away was holding me tightly in its arms.