There Are Only Crazy People Here *Revised
Having walked out of the classroom like that, I ran and ran. Slow at first, then fast. I had no intention of handing Aria or any of the others even the slightest pretext to come chasing after me, so I kept running, and running, until at last the place where I finally stopped was the Abandoned Plaza at the very heart of the Academy.
The bench at its center had lost its coat of paint long ago and was rusted through, and the trees scattered about, untended for who knew how long, had died off ages since and showed not a trace of life. Standing quietly in the middle of it all, I matched that scenery perfectly — no sense of dissonance whatsoever. Anyone who laid eyes on me now would have called me a walking corpse, my complexion was just that bad.
For some reason, I was craving a cigarette fiercely.
Across every one of my lives, I had spent nearly all of them as a smoker. Pipes, no less — the kind most people either love or hate. Whenever life wore me down. Whenever the gloom closed in. Whenever my mind refused to be put in order — a cigarette calmed me, and I had never seen any need to give that up. After all, I was never going to live long anyway.
'I figured I'd die young anyway, so I picked up the habit in this life too, but...'
Now that I'm actually at it, I can't seem to quit again.
I was still mulling over cigarettes, resolving to get my hands on some in secret at the next opportunity, when a rustling sound came from behind me. I turned — and the person behind the tree stood out so blatantly that I honestly doubted whether they had even meant to hide.
"Come out..."
At that, a male cadet emerged, smiling sheepishly. Yellow hair fixed firmly in place, as if he waxed it down wherever he went. An anchor tattoo conspicuous enough that anyone's gaze would find it first. And muscles showing here and there, as if to flaunt his robust health.
"I believe I told you that hiding doesn't suit you."
"So you did. I just didn't expect to get caught this fast. Haha!!"
Who, at a single glance, would ever suspect that a man who laughed so frivolously, so freely, possessed strength worthy of the Academy's uppermost ranks?
"W-well, you seemed to have something weighing on you. Everyone needs time to themselves now and then, no?"
A man who, despite his bulk, offered careful consideration to everyone he met and carried justice on his lips at all times. And...
The one friend I could claim at present, and the eldest son of a house whose fortune rivaled the Empire's own. Albert Iris.
"So what is it you're brooding over, my friend?"
"What's with all that grinning..."
"You never let anyone see what's truly on your mind. Which makes a moment like this rather precious from where I stand, wouldn't you say?"
"There's nothing good to be learned from what goes on in my head."
"You'd have to learn it first to know that!"
He was always like this. Meddling in everyone's business, helping as far as his strength would carry. Why a decent fellow like that ever asked to be friends with me, I couldn't say... but, well. If he was offering his friendship, that worked out fine for me. Of course, that didn't mean I had any intention of sharing my circumstances with him.
"It's nothing."
"...I'd say by now you could stand to tell me."
"My apologies."
At my apology, he finally relented, backing off as though there were nothing to be done, offered a parting word of advice not to worry him too much, and was gone. For just an instant, something like hesitation flickered across his retreating back.
When class time came, I returned to the classroom, but the stares fixed on me hadn't changed one bit. The one mercy, if it counted as one, was that Isabella's gaze, which had been locked on me all along, was gone. Against that, the drawbacks had multiplied considerably.
First, the rumor that I was committing ever wilder outrages at the Academy. That I'd become a madman slashing at people with a drawn blade. That I swung a hand axe around without the slightest hesitation, and so on. These inflated tales kept sprouting one after another, and my reputation sank lower by the day.
"Hey... you the piece of trash who disrespected Lady Isabella while being nothing but a commoner?"
I had no idea what version of how I'd treated her was making the rounds, but the upshot was that punks picking fights with me had multiplied beyond counting.
Even within the Academy, the power of the Four Great Families made most everyone yield a step. And among them stood the beautiful eldest daughter of the Renuiel Ducal House — a family that loved magic and magic alone, and always approached it in earnest — Isabella. Her beauty was known to her peers, and even to the students above and below her. She was the one regarded as the Academy's unreachable flower.
And then word spread that that proud, aloof blossom — whom no one had ever so much as exchanged a word with — had been disrespected by a fool cast out of his own house for being a Delinquent. Worse still, talk followed that she had seemed deflated even in the next class...
The male students who had long secretly nursed their admiration for her, and the cadets who saw this as their golden chance to curry favor with the Four Great Families, joined hearts and hurled every provocation imaginable at Jenison, the man said to have slighted her.
And Jenison, knowing nothing of any of it, simply mistook it for his own notoriety climbing higher still, and quietly blamed himself.
"Tsk... watch where you're walking."
That made the fourth blatant provocation today alone. I ignored it and kept on attending class.
Before I knew it, the final period had arrived. It was supposed to be magic studies, but today the professor in charge had personal business to attend to, and the lesson had been switched to swordsmanship instead.
Personally, I rather liked swordsmanship class. It was mandatory, so there was no skipping it — but it let me train my lacking stamina, and I could build up a decent foundation in the sword besides.
Now and then we paired off for sparring, but surely there wouldn't be any of that today. This was, quite literally, a class thrown together on the spot. What mad professor in this world would order students to duel without so much as proper preparation...
"Today will be free sparring."
'...?'
There he was.
You absolute bastard.
Nothing ever goes my way. Why today, of all days, for sparring? A class improvised at the last minute — shouldn't the theory explanation come first? A man who'd served as a full Knight Commander, why would he pull something like this...
I denied reality all I liked, but nothing changed. Like it or not, I had to pair up with someone and fight...
"...Haha, let's head over there..."
"Y-yeah...!"
"...Haah."
Naturally, no one wanted to spar with me. As everyone knew, I was the Academy's official Delinquent. There was no chance in hell that a student existed who would hear my reputation and still calmly agree to pair with me. Even if one did, the people around them would chew them out thoroughly first...
And on top of that, right now — thanks to my brush with Isabella earlier — I was even catching flak from random street punks. With not a single soul coming within two meters of me, I could take a rough measure of the situation.
'One glance and I can tell — those guys made sure nobody comes near me.'
Childish beyond words, yet undeniably effective. Without even resorting to force, it was the perfect way to put me in a bind. And if the student count happened to turn out odd...
Then I would be automatically excluded from the duels, left with nothing to do but spectate everyone else's matches.
'...Huh. That actually sounds kind of nice...'
"...So you're the one left over..?"
But alas, the world did not take my side, and for better or worse, exactly one person had still failed to find a partner.
...Who was it, you ask? The most exalted bloodline in the Empire, her face contorting like a scrunched-up ugly doll as she looked at me — Imperial Princess Kiana Frabel.
"...Surely you've received more pairing requests than you could count, Your Highness..."
"Do you believe that if you reach for the stars in the sky, you can actually touch them?"
"What do you mean by that?"
"Perhaps my status was too daunting a burden... but not a single person asked me first."
Granted, even now I could see them, one after another — the ones whose eyes screamed that they wanted to ask her this very instant. But whether they had caught the gaze of her escorts watching from afar, even from where they stood apart from the Princess, they lowered their eyes once more.
"I don't believe that was any failing of yours, Your Highness..."
"Spare me the honeyed words. Let's just duel."
"....."
"Because I have no desire whatsoever to converse with a man like you."
With that, the Princess turned away and vanished — and in that retreating figure there was, unmistakably, the dignity of one born to rule. The problem, of course, was that a person like that was hostile toward me...
Before long, I slowly watched over everyone's duels.
Albert overwhelmed his opponents with elixirs secured by flexing the Iris Ducal House's fortune and with superb magic tools. The cadet who took his gauntlet at the very end and went flying, ending up embedded in the Sparring Ground's wall, nearly earned my pity.
Isabella was as aloof and beautiful as ever. Flame magic in one hand. Ice magic in the other. The technique known as Double Casting. Most people struggled to so much as brush against its rudiments, let alone master it — and she was performing it at a cadet's age. Flooding the ground with fire as she loosed ice spikes, she finished her match without granting her opponent's hands the slightest courtesy.
"Next: Cadet Jenison and Her Imperial Highness Princess Kiana."
Before long my turn arrived, and the Princess looked me over and said,
"Sounds like I'll finally get to vent my frustrations after all this time, doesn't it?"
Adjusting her robe, she carried a staff with a magic stone set into it — high-grade at a single glance — and stepped into the Sparring Ground.
It wasn't that there was no way for me to beat her. But weighing her status against my reputation...
'I'd better lose here, shouldn't I..?'
After all, what raving lunatic would ever try to defeat the Imperial Princess? Thinking that, I stepped forward at almost the same moment she did.