Successful? (Revised)
Beeeep—
With the signal tone announcing the start of the duel, Leon's figure came hurtling toward me. Trailing right behind him came a diagonal slash, arcing from the upper right down toward the lower left.
I rolled out of its path, barely managing to evade, then conjured a one-handed sword into my palm and charged. I tried to carry the motion straight into a horizontal slash—but Leon had already reset into a guard, and my blade stopped dead against his.
At the same moment, pain bloomed in my abdomen. Even as he blocked, Leon's foot had shot out toward my stomach and slammed squarely into my body.
I tumbled twice across the ground and scrambled upright, only to meet another onrushing slash. Somehow I conjured a shield in time to catch it, but the thing had been made in such haste that it shattered almost immediately.
"...Is that all you've got?"
"...."
"...Well, I suppose you had no room left to hide anything more. Fifty days cooped up in your room after becoming a commoner—was that all you did with yourself, fritter it away on nonsense?"
Spouting whatever suited him, he came charging again. I kept retreating, conjuring throwing daggers and hand axes and hurling them at him one after another.
Unfortunately, Leon was a genuinely capable fighter who held the middle ranks of Class A. And that standing was something he had earned with his sword.
Clang-clang-clang— Deflecting every one of my projectiles as though they were so many arrows, Leon drew closer and closer. The sight of him made me grasp, viscerally, what a battle-hardened veteran looked like.
"...Pathetic. Are you really a Class A cadet?"
In my original body, it would have gone without saying that I'd win even a bare-knuckle brawl against him on the spot. But sadly, the body I now possessed had been tempered for barely fifty days. Compared to his—forged from childhood in the mold of a knight aspirant—even the sheer density of our training was worlds apart.
For now... I fall back.
And so the chase dragged on and on. I did nothing but run, tossing whatever I could conjure at Leon behind me—but in the end, a gap in stamina was still a gap in stamina. As I said, he was a man who had trained ferociously to become a knight. Training I had done for all of fifty days.
"What's the matter?! Tired already?!"
You could chalk it up to stamina alone, but that gap was what I felt more keenly than anything else. After all, stamina was the single most important factor in any fight.
Worse, all the constant conjuring had nearly bled my mana dry as well. He, meanwhile, was running on nothing but raw physical ability—he had no reason to burn a single drop of mana.
This won't do...
I hadn't expected him to tire out and give up, of course. But I hadn't expected him to cling this stubbornly, either. Deciding that enough was enough, I gave up on dodging and weaving. Any further, and I'd only be wasting stamina I couldn't spare.
"Haha! Has your stamina finally hit rock bottom?!"
Leon came rushing at me, spitting his arrogant taunts. Perhaps he judged this his moment, because his sword now carried a faint shimmer of mana—and in his eyes burned a desperate yearning, the certainty that he would finally make me pay.
"...What a coincidence. I feel exactly the same way."
"What are you muttering about—ghk!!"
Thwack—
I drove my fist straight into his Adam's apple as he rushed in, letting the blade that flew at me by a hair's breadth slide past my side. A counterattack that harnessed the full momentum of his own charge. And the spot I struck was the Adam's apple—the one place that could rob a man of his breath outright.
"Ghk... khh..."
Unable to draw so much as a breath, he crumpled right where he stood. The sight of him retching at nothing was deeply, richly satisfying.
"Y-you insolent little brat...!!"
"Now who's calling whom a brat?"
Granted, close combat was comparatively my weak suit. But I wasn't so rusty that I couldn't handle one furious, overexcited boy. If I couldn't finish off a single kid like this, I'd never have survived my past lives to begin with.
"Punks like you used to be a dime a dozen, back in the day."
He had won. He had most certainly won. That was what Leon believed. Just as no one had ever even entertained the possibility of his losing, he too had never once given a thought to the notion of his own defeat.
As if I could lose to a piece of trash like that... heh heh.
His opponent was that Jenison. The moron they called the stain on the Duke's house—a fool with neither talent nor skill, who leaned on nothing but his family name while dragging Class A's honor through the mud. He had been certain that he, tempered since early childhood, could never lose to such a creature. After all, the bastard's swordsmanship and magic had always, without exception, been beneath his own.
Thwack—
"Guhhaak..."
And that conviction began to crumble the moment he stepped onto the training ground.
Wham— Human thought is, by nature, utterly powerless before pain.
Crunch— As his mind clouded, his reason went with it, and his body, having lost its way, flailed wildly on its own.
Crack— And trained assassins never, ever miss so small an opening.
"Khaaagh...!!"
Leon Venil went flying, pain wracking him as though every bone in his body were being crushed. Setting aside his morning drills, a boy raised soft and sheltered within the walls of a count's estate had never once known pain like this. And with it, a distant, formless terror began to settle over his mind. Terror of the pain—and terror of his own body failing him.
"Get up."
At the voice calling to him, Leon Venil lifted his head. Before him stood a pair of black eyes looking down. Chilling black eyes, like the mouth of a bottomless abyss.
"Y-you... you son of a... you were hiding your strength...!!"
"...Apparently you still had the wits left to wonder about that."
I really have gotten quite rusty, haven't I.
The cryptic remark was followed by fists raining down once more. It was excruciating, but Leon ground his teeth and forced his sword to swing all the same. He could not—would not—accept losing to a nobody like this.
Trash was trash, it seemed. Seeing Jenison's body slashed here and there by his own blade, Leon allowed himself a faint smile—
"B-but how...!!"
—only to shout again at the scene before his eyes.
"What's the problem, third-rate swordsman?"
Leon's blade was unmistakably smeared with blood. Yet not a single drop of it welled from Jenison's body.
"B-but how."
"What exactly are you asking?"
"What trick did you pull, you bastard?!"
He jabbed a finger at my clothes, torn open by his slashes, and shrieked himself hoarse. Well, no wonder he was stunned. From his side of things, he must have distinctly felt his blade cutting into flesh.
In this world, there was no such thing as treating a wound. Without modern medicine or science, any attempt to dress an injury here only made it worse.
There were exactly two ways in this world to treat a wound without worsening the patient's condition—and of the two, only one required no preparation whatsoever.
"D-don't tell me you can wield holy power!!"
Divine magic. Which was to say, drawing on the power of a god I was already thoroughly sick of.
"I have no idea what you're talking about."
Besides, I was hardly the sort of man who could use such a thing. No one alive despised the gods more than I did.
"Don't spout nonsense!! Do you take my eyes for knotholes—"
"I made it."
"Wh... what?"
"I said I made it."
Even handed the answer, he only stared, eyes wide, one corner of his mouth curling upward. He probably thought I was spouting pure absurdity. A perfectly natural reaction.
People hear "Creation Magic" and imagine it can conjure anything, but the reality was a little different. Creation was only possible if you thoroughly grasped the principles and the constituent materials of the object you wished to make.
Heap on its ravenous mana consumption, and it was naturally regarded as one of those magics deemed unfit for combat.
But that depends entirely on who's wielding it.
I had lived far longer than anyone here could imagine. In the twenty-first century, I had lived as a university student of the sciences, and in a life after that, I had even been a scientist running experiments on human bodies. Becoming well-versed in human anatomy had been only natural.
Granted, a great deal of time had passed since then, and some of that knowledge had faded—but I'd also had no small stretch of time to make up for it. Roughly fifty days, to be exact.
More than enough to relearn the human body. And anything I still didn't understand, I could simply take my own body apart to find out, exactly as I'd been doing. It would heal soon enough anyway, and if a repair went wrong, I could always brew a potion and pour it over the mess. Besides, for a man who had trained to endure torture, a little self-mutilation was a trivial thing.
"Y-you little...!! A good-for-nothing cast out by his own family...!!"
"...I've heard just about enough."
I had no desire to listen to any more drivel from a man who couldn't even stand on his own two feet. I snapped my fingers once, and at that simple signal, the enormous magic circle I had embroidered across the floor came alive—the circle I had traced with my toes as I fell back, woven together with the countless daggers I had scattered across the ground.
"W-what is this...!!"
Leaving his bewildered sputtering behind me, I snatched up the bag I'd carried with me into the training ground and flung it open.
"Those are...?"
Something dropped out with a soft patter. Five scrolls, their circuits drawn by my own hand and inscribed onto paper.
"What kind of bullshit stunt is this...!!"
Riiiip—
The first I tore was the [Weighting] scroll, which added weight to its target. Leon's body swayed for a moment—then buckled at the knees.
"W-what is... ghk."
Watching him somehow struggle to hold on, I tore the [Anti-Gravity] scroll in the next instant—and in the same breath, every hand axe and dagger I had hurled at Leon during the chase rose into the air, floating upward.
Leon's eyes went round at the impossible sight. He strained to push himself upright, shooting resentful glances at knees that refused to straighten—and as I watched him, I tore the [Grant: Dispel] scroll once more.
Magic tools: implements that carry a spell sealed within their core. Every dagger and hand axe now hanging in the air had become a magic tool that ignored all magic. Smiling at the sight, I tore the [Reinforcement] scroll next.
Shhhk-shhhk-shhhk—
The sound of blades being whetted filled the air, and every edge that had been dulled from tumbling and clashing across the dirt ground was restored as though the damage had never happened—sharper than before.
"W-what are you trying to do!!"
"You're loud... Can't you just die quietly?"
Savoring, slowly, the fear creeping into his eyes at the sight of blades sharpening of their own accord, I tore the final scroll—the [Mana] scroll. The mana I had burned conjuring projectile after projectile came flooding back. Enough, even, to pour into the enormous magic circle at my feet.
Then I pressed my palm to the ground and activated the circle. Everyone present surely understood its effect in that instant—because the moment I fed it mana, the dozens of floating daggers and hand axes went screaming toward the man's head.
The effect of the circle I had activated was [Tracking]. And its target... was his head.
"W-wait...!! Let's talk this over...!!"
"...Die, Leon Venil."
A rain of blades swept through the Academy.
A downpour of blades swept across the field of battle. At that overwhelming wall of malice, like something torn straight out of a war zone, every soul present trembled with fear for an instant.
Only one person moved.
Professor Oliver, terrified that Leon Venil would die then and there.
If I don't stop them, Cadet Leon is going to die!
He sprinted straight into the training ground—but the hand axes and daggers were already bearing down on him at terrible speed. Instinct told him he could not stop them, and helplessness dropped him where he stood.
Ting!! Ting! Ting!
Ting?
—that is, until he heard that sound from within the dust cloud kicked up by the impacts.
A moment later, a single gust of wind came sweeping in out of nowhere, washing over the training ground—and in the same instant, the thick smoke vanished entirely.
What remained visible inside the arena was this: Jenison, radiating killing intent, his expression ruled by sheer irritation; Leon, toppled onto his back where the crushing weight had pinned him, trembling uncontrollably, soaked in his own piss; and a woman standing gracefully amid it all, her dazzling platinum hair streaming behind her.
The Chairwoman of this Academy—and one of the most celebrated Archmages in all the Empire.
Ruine Descartes.