Something's Off About This Secondhand Newbie
The younger you are when great power falls into your hands, the more likely you are to stray down the wrong path. The Church, which branded every power in the world as evil, coveted young talent of exactly this sort—nudging a gifted child toward Chaos was all too easy.
Of the adventurers Tasili had known over thirty years, a great many now belonged to the Church, or were dead. That was why Lupin worried her. The madness she sensed in the girl was no ordinary thing; it felt as though a single push would send her tumbling straight into Chaos.
Once the trial is over, I ought to sit her down and have a proper talk...
Of course, the worry was premature—nearer to an old woman's fussing than to any real danger. Unless, perhaps, every Secret Safe in the world vanished overnight. Having established it as common sense that shaking down villains produced Secret Safes, piling up good deeds would, for the moment, be quicker than piling up evil ones. Her brutal way of meting out judgment would inspire fear and awe, yes, but that too might simply harden into part of her character. If there was a problem, it was that no one alive could understand an obsession as mad as hers. And yet, should even a single person standing on the side of Order notice her love of treasure chests, Lupin would never fall into the Church's hands.
More than anything, unless she had a solid reason, she did not go out of her way to stake her life on killing someone. She did have the bad habit of not immediately squashing bugs that got cocky—but that much was nothing. For certain adventurers, it was simply another day.
Whether he knew she was going easy on him or not, Kair swaggered forward and provoked her.
"Alright. Let's do this. Me? My toughness is off the charts. Even the boss—no, even a senior I know—said so himself!"
"Ah. One proposal, before we fight."
"What, you gonna tack on some condition that favors you? Getting cold feet?"
Lupin walked over at a steady clip and stopped about three paces from him. With the toe of her shoe, she drew a small circle barely wide enough for both her feet.
"If even one of your attacks touches any part of me besides my hair, I'll spare you. In exchange—call it an advantage—I won't set foot on any ground outside this circle. Call?"
Kair's miserable skill had already been laid completely bare, and not a single spectator expected him to win. A few, declaring one-sided violence boring, gave up on the show entirely and headed inside the building. A handicap match, though? That was a different story. The people who had been leaving turned right around and started betting among themselves. The odds were still tilted pitifully, but they were nothing like what they had been before the handicap.
"You moron. That's not an advantage, that's a handica—"
"But what if you fail to land a hit, and a hundred seconds pass?"
Pop.
Lupin rounded her mouth and laughed, bright and ringing.
"Your head gets smashed like an overripe watermelon~."
Adventurers who pictured that gruesome sight grimaced. Tasili cut in at once, determined to shield her.
"A threat. Merely a threat. Is this not the sort of thing you all say to villains as a matter of course? Surely she would not actually do it."
Did they, though? Threatening a criminal quite like that was rare. Speak too strongly and you only look weak—and the sort who actually listen to threats generally don't commit crimes in the first place. Even so, after a round of heated little debates and muttering, the crowd quickly withdrew their objections. If the Administrator said so, then it must be so. It was a moment when Tasili's good name shone.
Once the murmuring died down, Lupin picked up where she had left off.
"In other words, you've been given three choices. Land a hit within a hundred seconds. Or let those hundred seconds pass and become a crushed watermelon."
"That's two."
"Oh? You can count."
"You bitch?!"
"What? You charged in so blindly I figured you didn't even have that much going on upstairs. Anyway, listen. I'm about to tell you the last one."
Lupin traced a shape in the air with both hands. A treasure chest.
"If you shout 'Treasure chest!' before the hundred seconds are up, I'll spare you."
"You'll spare me?"
"Yes. In exchange, you have to help me find a real treasure chest. Not the one your boss had. A different treasure chest."
Kair could not quite make sense of it. So she would spare him if he landed a hit, and spare him if he merely shouted a single word? Then there was no need to fight at all...
No. That's not it.
In that last condition, Lupin had stressed the word help. She had not said how he was supposed to help. That was the trap. She would obviously make him do all sorts of humiliating, inhuman things. As expected, this genius brain of his could not be fooled. Kair broke into a triumphant smile and cracked his knuckles. By accepting the handicap match he had just announced to the whole world that he was a weakling—but if he had possessed the intelligence to understand that, he would never have ended up in a trial by combat in the first place.
"A hundred seconds is plenty. Start!"
In lieu of popcorn, the audience tore into jerky and the like fished from their pockets and joined in counting the time.
One. Two. Three.
Kair moved first.
Break her stance, then hit her right after...!
He was confident enough in a one-on-one. Fights against many were routine, and he had brushed past death more than a few times. As befitted a headquarters officer, he had survived being stabbed, and survived taking a steel club to the head. Surviving Lupin did not count—he could not remember it, so he filed it as an exception. In any case, he was brimming with confidence. His plan was solid, too. Solid enough that he was already imagining where he would spend the money after he won.
Get her into the air, and I win for sure...!
A human launched skyward has no choice but to come back down. This was a world where even an Aura Master could not fly. The opening would come. It had to.
"Hup."
Lupin answered a swift low sweep with a light hop. Just as he had expected. Now, the instant she landed—
"Did you think that meant you'd win for sure?"
A voice came from overhead, so he looked up. An ample backside was blocking his view. Lupin was standing on his shoulder. The weight arrived a beat late.
"Wh-what are you doing! Get down this instant!"
A wild punch swept the air above his head, but it never had a chance. Lupin slipped aside with ease and returned to her spot. The duel was back to square one. The crowd's clock ticked out seventeen seconds.
"Hey, this is cheating!"
"Huh? You should have read the terms properly."
Cheating? Hardly. Lupin had followed the rules she had set, to the letter.
"I said I wouldn't step on any other ground."
"Th-that's just wordplay!"
"Miss Lupin stated it clearly. It was you, Mr. Kair, who agreed. Continue the trial."
Tasili drove the point home. The spectators, as if they had expected nothing less, promptly showered him with boos. For Kair, it was a brutal away game. The stunt Lupin had just pulled wrecked the victory formula in his head completely. What attack was he supposed to use? Nothing came to mind. No matter what he tried, it felt as if she would dodge it just as she had a moment ago. Think. Think, damn it...
While he stood there blankly, thirty-four seconds slipped past.
"Screw it!"
He threw a punch anyway, straight at the very center of the body—the dantian, the lower abdomen, a spot you could only evade by wrenching hard at the waist. He had to abandon the idea of landing a hit in two strikes. If not in two, then three. If not in three, then four. He had to believe in himself. He could catch up. His enemy was laid wide open beneath the constraint of the air!
"Hraaaaaaah!"
Fifty-seven. Fifty-eight. Fifty-nine.
"Hraaaah!"
Seventy-one. Seventy-two. Seventy-three.
Punches and kicks struck empty air to no purpose, and time flowed on without mercy. Lupin's acrobatics only grew more spectacular. The crowd cared less now about whether Kair landed a hit than about how she kept dodging. A shoulder. A head. The length of an outstretched arm. Anywhere that was not the ground, she could step. Her footfalls were light as feathers, soft as a breath. Kair, the one being trampled, might not have agreed—but to the audience, at least, Lupin looked like a bird in mid-flight.
"Hah... hah... Son of a bitch!"
"Ooh. Time's about up. You might want to decide. At this rate your head's going to crack~."
The countdown had already passed ninety seconds. The moment of choice had come. Declare a humiliating defeat, or die here with his skull caved in.
Ninety-six. Ninety-seven. Ninety-eight.
And Kair's choice?
"Treasure che—!!"
The corner of Lupin's mouth sank.
"Oh dear. A hundred seconds have already passed."
"Wh-what are you talking about? I said it properly, inside a hundred seconds!"
A few adventurers who had been hoping for something spectacular sided with Lupin. Tasili, however, had no desire to see her become the madwoman who smashed people's heads, and once again she stepped in with both feet.
"I believe he said it within a hundred seconds."
Fortunately, as the adventurers rallied to Tasili, Kair's head was spared. And with that, the invisible tug-of-war—between a Lupin who was not thinking about any of this, and a Tasili trying however she could to keep her clear of Chaos—seemed to come to an end.
"Hmm. But by my count, it was a hundred and three."
Smiling brightly, Lupin brought her fist down on Kair's skull. A crack like a splitting watermelon rang out, and silence settled over the grounds. Everyone could only blink, while Lupin clutched her hand and whined.
"Ow, ow, ow. Right where I bumped the staff earlier..."
Kair's skull had caved in enough to be plain even from a short distance away, and blood streamed from his nose. It was not completely smashed, not the way Lupin had described—but it was hardly a pleasant sight. At this point the adventurers' eyes turned, quite naturally, toward Tasili, wondering just how she would cover for Lupin this time.
"This is less a smashed watermelon than a slightly cracked one. For a criminal who sold people like goods, would you not call that mercy?"
...Was it?
The adventurers glanced at one another, unsure how to react. When a senior of her standing said so, though, you could hardly argue otherwise to her face. Lupin, however, was someone who absolutely had to keep a promise, and Tasili's words only reminded her that she had failed to keep hers. And so, in place of her throbbing right hand, she lifted her right foot high into the air.
"H-hey, wait, wait!!"
"Ack."
In the end a rap from Tasili's staff to the crown of her head stopped her—but from then on, whenever those adventurers ran into Lupin, they found themselves reaching up to feel their heads without quite meaning to.
