The Final Victor
"...Did you just see that?"
"I did."
From one corner of the spectator stands, the teachers looked down upon the sparring grounds in a daze. The duel was already over.
"Light-attribute magic? One of the two attributes counted among the rarest in existence — second only to those of the black mages, who've all but vanished from the world?"
"That isn't even the half of it. The spell that boy Free just unleashed wasn't high-tier. It was something you can learn from a mid-tier grimoire. Judgment of The Light."
"Right. As far as I know, it is a mid-tier light-attribute spell. But has it always produced that kind of power and range?"
"This is the first time I've ever seen it cast with my own eyes. Even watching it, I can hardly believe it."
"Hah. I couldn't agree more. Simple beginner-tier light magic like Light — you'll find people who use that now and then. There are even those who can fire Light Arrow, one of the representative beginner spells. But..."
"Yes. Across the entire world, those who can wield mid-tier or higher light-attribute magic number in the extreme minority. Practically no one except the Saintess, the High Priest, and the senior clergy."
"...It's like watching a Saint reborn."
A Saint. If the continent had a single Saintess, then it followed that there would also be a man chosen by God — not a woman. The people of this world called such a man a Saint.
"I doubt that's the case. A Saint of God would bear a mark somewhere on his body — the sign that he is both God's messenger and a Saint."
"Hmm. True enough. I hear it usually manifests somewhere visible, like the back of the hand."
A nod.
"That's right. And a Saint is an even rarer being than the Saintess herself. They almost never appear."
"Mm. Besides, those chosen by God have almost always been women. The reason, as I recall, is that a woman can keep a cleaner, purer heart from childhood, and hold on to that unsullied state longer than a man can?"
"That's the rumor, at least. Whether it's actually true is another matter."
"Well, the boy is still young. Couldn't Free still meet the conditions for being a Saint?"
"There's a chance. But after hearing that laugh of his — bizarre enough to send a chill down your spine — I rather doubt it."
"A groundless worry, then. Come to think of it, if he really were the continent's God-chosen Saint, he wouldn't look that exhausted just from casting a single mid-tier light spell."
He was right. Even from the distant stands, the only figure still on his feet in the sparring grounds — Free — was plainly worn down, sweat beading on his brow. He looked close to collapse, as if mana exhaustion had driven him to the edge of total depletion.
"He's gone white as a sheet. Looks ready to drop any second."
"He used a wide-area spell of that magnitude. Of course he would. Even so, it's an extraordinary thing. A first-year, barely through the gates, producing magic of that power — and beating young Rekas, of all people. I saw it with my own eyes, and I still can't believe it..."
They were not wrong. Free's mana reserves were running dangerously low.
Inside the sparring grounds, he looked down at Rekas, who lay face-down on the floor. One hand closed over the Mana Heart in his chest. He dropped to one knee, and his gaze went still.
...The mana consumption was far worse than I expected. I had to mobilize almost every last drop I had. Even hitting the spell's minimum activation threshold was a struggle.
Had it been any other elemental attribute, even a mid-tier spell under a Full Chant would never have demanded this much.
Light-attribute magic. It's a completely different animal from when I used it at the beginner tier. A single rank of difference, and the cost gap was this severe.
Judgment of The Light — the Judgment of Light, a mid-tier light-attribute spell — was something Free had learned from a mid-tier light grimoire he had stumbled upon in the Phoenix family's archives. It was true that any spell consumed more mana as its rank rose. But this went well past what that principle could account for.
...Fortunately, the series Aina gave me — The Most Efficient Mana Cultivation Method — kept me from collapsing in an unsightly heap. Barely.
To be driven this hard by a single spell. As things stood, Free judged it a magic he could not fire twice in succession.
And then the unbelievable happened.
A twitch.
"...!"
Rekas, who had been lying face-down on the sparring ground floor, suddenly planted a hand against the earth. Agonizingly slowly, little by little, he began to force his upper body up.
He still hasn't lost consciousness? Even after taking that spell head-on...?
Surely not. How was that even possible?
The absurdity of it struck everyone in the stands at once — every spectator who had already been certain of Free's victory.
But Rekas, having raised his torso that far, could go no further. He froze in that posture, unable to stand.
"......"
Then, without a word — perhaps without the strength left to form one — he slowly lifted his head toward Free.
His face was a ruin. Wounds covered every inch of it, the skin stripped away in places, the injuries that severe.
"...Hah. Hah... kkh...!"
Even breathing looked like a struggle. Stamina and mana both spent, Rekas was a wreck of a body. Down on one knee, one hand braced against the ground, he locked eyes with Free, whose expression had gone openly startled.
And the words he forced out were these:
With that declaration, thick with conviction, a tiny sphere of flame-mana took shape in front of his open mouth — fire, in place of the arm and hand he could no longer use.
"...!!"
Startled, Free wrung out every last scrap of mana he had left, gathered it with whatever he had managed to recover, and threw a final Shield into the air in front of him.
In the same instant, Rekas's last, desperate strike — already loosed from in front of his lips — slammed into the barrier.
A dull thud.
With that last act of defiance — a bombardment technique that looked cobbled together on the spot — Rekas's raised torso and head dropped back to the floor. Only then did he fall fully, finally silent.
"...What a remarkable one. He went beyond even what I hadn't expected."
Free had barely stopped Rekas's final, desperate shot with a single layer of Shield. He seemed unharmed. And with that muttered remark, he closed his eyes.
With that, the victor was decided in truth.
Victory belonged to Free.
"...It was incredible. I still can't believe it."
The one talking to herself was Aina, walking the path away from the stands now that the match was over.
Free von Betelgeuse. Rekas von Buster. Both of them had displayed exchanges well beyond anything she had assumed they were capable of. She might, if she was honest, have been looking down on them a little, somewhere in a corner of her heart. She had never predicted that either of them would reveal talent of that order — ability that absurd.
And among them, Free.
He was a being who existed outside every specification she had drawn up.
"...Free von Betelgeuse."
She murmured his name as if etching it deep into her heart — a whisper whose meaning even she could not have named.
Some time later, Free sat alone in the bedroom of his dormitory, cross-legged, both eyes closed. Then, slowly, those eyes opened. For an instant, blue-tinged mana stirred in his gaze and leaked faintly into the air around him — a thin remnant, as if it had exceeded what his body could yet absorb and hold.
"Hooo..."
With that, his mana had fully recovered. No — more than that. He had succeeded in generating a greater quantity than his original target and storing it in the Mana Heart in his chest. The reserves now sitting there were a terrifyingly vast quantity of mana, easily surpassing his previous stage.
A full day of drilling the habit into himself had brought him to this: he could now draw in ambient mana and accumulate it even while going about ordinary life. Of course, the effect rose sharply whenever the flow of his consciousness was focused on absorption.
"By now, that strange sense of dissonance when I move is mostly gone."
What he meant, precisely, was the creaking.
In the days since the match, his physical condition had been worse than expected — his usual state so thoroughly wrecked that every blood vessel in his body had seemed to scream, a grinding, foreign sensation running through him after he had dumped a vast quantity of mana in a single instant. Strangely enough, though, it had stopped at a level well below what he himself had predicted, and he counted himself enormously fortunate for it.
He had, after all, unleashed a massive volume of mana that went beyond all reasonable degree, and he had done it in a single burst. Inwardly, he had more or less concluded that the process would destroy his physical condition outright. Thankfully, there had been only that uncomfortable, creaking dissonance. Nothing worse had come of it.
Having fully observed his own interior, he found that the vessels running through his body actually felt a little larger than before — expanded, somehow.
I should start going to class again. I've rested longer than I meant to since then.
On the grounds of a serious personal injury, he had managed to obtain official leave from the Academy and had spent the past few days devoted entirely to rest and recovery.
If anything, I'm more worried about whether Rekas is all right.
According to the healers who had appeared on the sparring grounds, Rekas — already unconscious — had been in even more horrific shape than Free had been at the time, his injuries that severe. He had been loaded onto a stretcher at once and carried off somewhere, still insensible. Whether he had come around by now was still unclear.
He really was something. He analyzed a battle that had been against him from the start, and adapted his responses to match me, fast. Honestly, I never even imagined I'd be driven into a corner like that.
He pulled on his uniform for the first time in days and stepped outside. Residents of the Academy dormitories were required by regulation to wear the uniform whenever they went out, except after hours or on weekends.
He walked the dormitory corridor, thinking as he went.
...If I'd used anything but mid-tier light magic from start to finish, that last moment — the one that made my blood run cold — never would have happened.
It had caught even him off guard. And what had caught him more off guard still was the mid-tier light spell itself — Judgment, for short.
Judgment of The Light. The power and the wide-area performance were genuinely astonishing, I'll give it that. But for the time being, I should be careful about using it unless the situation is truly dangerous. The mana cost is too high. As long as it isn't a Full Chant, it should be fine.
He finished sorting his thoughts and stepped out into the open air — truly fresh air, for the first time in what felt like ages.
He had not gone far before he found students heading back toward their respective dormitories; class must have just let out. And among them, one person. A beautiful girl.
Aina von Frost.
"......"
"......"
It had been some time since they had last seen each other. The meaning in the gazes they turned on one another's faces was something neither of them could quite pin down.