Anyway, the Cult's to Blame
The ground chosen for the trial by combat was none other than the inner courtyard of the Adventurers' Association's Rostov branch. It sat out on the edge of the city, and the buildings around it were low; the hope was that any damage could at least be kept to a minimum.
Emelin and Yegor happened to be in the middle of a spat inside the association building, and Vatslava, who had been watching them, wound up with the best seats in the house almost by accident.
Unable to make sense of how things had come to this, Yegor dug his fingers into the crease between his brows and sighed.
"They took every scrap of help there was to take, and now they're hauling her into a trial because she might be Parmenia? What is this..."
"Even so. Some things have to be settled clean. Lupin was accused — she wouldn't want it ending in some half-cleaned, unpleasant mess, would she? I didn't say anything, but I was doubtful at first too. Then I fought her, and I was sure she wasn't."
Wanted posters for Parmenia were plastered across every corner of Rostov, but the resemblance was just off enough that people didn't readily take the two for the same woman. In a way, it may have been thanks to the charm Lupin had deliberately sealed away. The composite sketch showed Parmenia with a woman's features honed to perfection, while Lupin still hadn't quite shed a youthful softness.
"Anyway, Ekaterina's got a real hook in her this time. Lupin might not slip out of this one so easily."
Personality aside, Ekaterina never let a marked quarry escape. She bulldozed ahead with no regard for method, and the weight carried by the name Rounds was so immense that her opponents often opened their eyes to find themselves already sunk in a mire they had no way out of.
"She's on the verge of losing her Rounds seat, too. Don't you think she'll latch onto Lupin and wring some kind of merit out of this, no matter what it takes?"
"Don't jinx it. The moment you say something out loud, things that weren't going to happen start happening."
"Excuse me? What do you even take your big sister for? Do you actually think Lupin's going to lose?"
Yegor shook his head.
"See? You think so too."
By then Tasili, drawn by the news, had arrived. He set the butt of his heavy iron staff against the ground with a dull thunk and spoke.
"You needn't worry too much. Lupin has been tangled up in all sorts of trouble before, but the outcome has never once been bad."
The moment those words landed, Yegor abandoned Emelin's side and sidled over to Vatslava, making room beside her. Watching her little brother turn toward some outside woman instead of his own sister, Emelin tried to lodge a protest with her eyes alone. It didn't take.
Vatslava addressed Tasili in a voice that shrank as it left her.
"I'm not worried Miss Lupin will lose... but if some misunderstanding forces her into a life on the run, that would be awful. I'd help if I could, only I think she'd refuse. She'd say it would be a problem if I ended up dead because of it..."
At that gentle heart, Tasili let out a soft laugh.
"Let's not think so darkly. Excessive worry has a way of fulfilling itself. Things that were never going to happen sometimes happen precisely because someone fretted over them."
"Urk. Y-you're right."
"Simply trust Lupin. Trust her, and trust that she'll handle things well on her own. I have been doing exactly that for some time now."
Vatslava flushed and smoothed a hand over the nape of her neck.
"You're right. It would be a problem if I didn't trust Miss Lupin. Thank you for pointing that out, Administrator!"
"Not at all."
With all three young people's eyes on him, Tasili went on.
"All we have to do is cheer. And hope Lupin puts Ekaterina down... gently."
All three of them caught the strange worry threaded through that otherwise ordinary voice. Which was only natural. Everyone present had seen, at least once, just how savage Lupin could be.
Rounds versus the Hero of the Republic.
That absurd lineup packed the seats to bursting — association staff, half the neighborhood, and even the nobles who had made Lupin's acquaintance at the party. The Imperial Alliance had no shortage of sporting leagues, and international tournaments were held often enough, but no amount of passing time could kill the public's hunger for that old "sport" which drove pleasure straight into the raw, animal nerves.
Which was why nobles and commoners were already snarling over whose seat was whose. The trial hadn't even started, and it was already five minutes to a full-blown riot. Only the Adventurers' Association stepping in to mediate saved them; otherwise the pre-show would have kicked off before the main event.
Unlike the buzzing crowd, Klein was uneasy. She had managed to avoid being cornered completely, but now that Lupin was actually being sent into the fight, worry crept in anyway. Lupin might be an Apostle of the Calamity Star, but her patron star was still only a newborn. Common wisdom held that an Apostle could fight a Master on even terms — but only a Master of formed aura. If Lupin lost, Klein would be dragged straight into Ekaterina's bedroom and toyed with. Of course she couldn't relax.
"You sure about this? She may not look it, but she's Rounds. She uses formless aura. You saw it, right? The clone summoning."
"Oh. Right, those were clones? No wonder. They just popped up out of nowhere."
"......"
Looking back, Lupin hadn't even registered the clone that appeared out of nowhere, and had dropped the potion vial. ...Should she call off the trial and run, even now?
Whether she sensed that worry or not, Lupin only smiled.
"Don't worry. I'm not handing you over to a pervert like that. I don't understand how a dangerous beast like her is allowed to wander around out in the world."
Hadn't the pink-headed beast beaten Klein to the brink of death, too? Wait — was she talking about herself?
Even so, Klein couldn't bring herself to purely hate her. They had fought with their lives on the line because each of them held her ideals too firmly to yield. Lupin had been rough with a defeated opponent, but by Klein's standards that was practically genteel — not one enemy Klein had met before had escaped being reduced to scraps of meat. And aside from an outrageous stubbornness about clothes, Lupin had treated her like a little sister the whole time. She had dragged Klein around for nearly two weeks, but she hadn't worked her like a slave. Klein had only started helping first because she was reading the room. So there hadn't really been a reason to hate her.
Of course, even Klein thought Lupin's sense of common sense was strange. She kept treating Klein like an eight-year-old. Klein was small and slender, yes, but by this world's common standard, once you passed sixteen you were, for most purposes, an adult. The bar for wow, that's a bit much was nothing like the one in the modern world where Lupin had lived. So Klein had no choice but to misread what she was thinking.
Her reaction to Ekaterina had been fierce — she was acting like someone about to have blood family stolen from her. How was that not strange?
Klein called her big sister a few times, and she actually thinks she's Klein's real sister.
It didn't help that Lupin looked like Parmenia, so the difference from life in the cult didn't feel all that large.
The porter's cooking is better than Klein expected. And that huge-chested sister is so nice......
Klein startled and wildly mussed her own hair.
Ghk?! What am I thinking.
The cult was about to be smashed to pieces by Lupin, and she had nearly rolled over completely just because someone had been a little kind to her. She had to remember. If she left Lupin alone, or let her fall into trouble, the cult would perish — and the world would perish with it.
Before she knew it, the duel was nearly upon them. Klein gave Lupin one last piece of advice.
"Ekaterina handles nine clones freely, so you won't know where an attack is coming from. If you dodge by sight, you'll be too late. You have to dodge by feel. You understand?"
"Aha. Dodge by feel."
It wasn't exactly Lupin's strong suit. Her instincts were good, but her absolute evasion came mostly from overwhelming dynamic vision, and from the agility that let those eyes sweep everything around her. In the time other people spent looking only forward, Lupin split that same instant and saw front, back, left, right, up, and down — the way a famous pro gamer from her homeland used to flip the view several times a second and scan the whole map.
Sure, if her opponent summoned clones only into blind spots before Lupin could detect them, tracking and evasion might become a problem....
Don't I just have to wreck the main body?
Classic clone-user trait: hit the original, and they drop on the spot. Lupin was convinced that, just like facing a master of the shell game, so long as she never took her eyes off her opponent she would know exactly which one was real.
So what, is she the legend of Riore, the Undying Demon King? No, she isn't.
Even if they split from a single body, clones always gave themselves away. So Lupin fiddled confidently with the sword hilt at her waist, ready to cut the original down with a Swift Truth the instant she found her. Surely the woman's head wouldn't just come clean off in a single stroke. She was Rounds, one of the Empire's twelve strongest, supposedly. If she up and died to one true cut out of nowhere, Lupin would be the one left flustered.
"Anyway. I'll do my best. Thanks for the advice."
"Uh. Yeah."
Klein hesitated, then left the floor. Shouting a cheer felt embarrassing, but just walking off felt worrying.
At last, it was time.
"Both sides, to your marks."
At Dmitri's declaration, Lupin strode forward and set both toes of her shoes neatly along one of the two lines drawn at the center of the dueling ground. Step by heavy step, Ekaterina came the other way, the white cape of the Rounds snapping behind her, and took her place opposite.
Provocation before a match, meant to shake an opponent's guard loose, was basic. The more you wore down someone's will, the easier the fight — common sense among common sense. It was also rude, which was why the knightly orders of every nation had written a ban on taunts straight into their codes for sparring and trials by combat.
But the Rounds were not a knightly order. As the strongest on the continent, some of them were like sect leaders with countless disciples beneath them — most of the Sub-Rounds among that number — and they cared about face and propriety. Others were fierce individualists. And one person here knew nothing but herself.
Ekaterina.
Ekaterina drooled, then wiped it away with a swipe of her hand. Then she put on that obscene finger-play of hers. Whether she had bent the joints backward or not, they moved like snakes. Her voice was so loud that the people watching flushed, imagining the scene despite themselves.
On another woman it might have landed. On Lupin, the attack meant nothing at all. She had experienced that sort of thing from a third-person observer's seat, but she had never once cast herself as the lead inside it. That would have been an intrusion — an absolute taboo in the scissoring genre.
"I'm sorry. I've never had anything shoved into my body except a blade, so I'm having a rather hard time picturing it."
But Lupin knew very well what degenerates like this hated most. Man or woman, people who swung their dicks or their fingers around without a thought never seemed to realize they themselves could end up on the receiving end. Just like the ones who went around shooting people and then acted shocked that a bullet might find them too.
"Come to think of it, I never set a condition for if I win, did I? I was thinking of setting one now. Would that be all right?"
"Sure, sure. Whatever you want. That's only fair."
Ekaterina was still lounging in her confidence. Lupin looked at her and smiled with her mouth alone.
Ekaterina's reaction came a beat late.
"...What?"
Lupin's expression didn't change.
"Be my slave. A slave for anything."
