vs Luke Cruella (1)
"The winner! Agnes Elizabeth Blaze!"
"Waaah! Blaze! Blaze won!!"
"Inferno! Inferno!"
"That's our next Red Tower Master for you!!"
The announcement of the match results and the roaring cheers of the spectators carried all the way into the waiting room. As that overwhelming clamor echoed inward, the tension I'd been trying to set aside for the moment began to bubble up all over again.
It went without saying that Agnes, the top-scoring freshman of the Magic Department, had just absolutely wrecked Isabel, the second-ranked student. You could see it coming a mile away.
At this level, it was one of the basic events that showed up if you'd played Luminor Academy even once or twice, so nothing about it surprised me.
Unless the protagonist enrolled in the Magic Department, the Engineering Department, or the Pharmacology Department and targeted Agnes directly, this event triggered with 100% certainty.
Truth be told, it barely qualified as an event at all. In actual play, it got glossed over with a sentence or two in a mid-story summary, and it had no real bearing on the game's plot progression. Honestly, the only one I felt sorry for was Isabel, doomed to get her teeth kicked in every single run for the crime of being ranked second.
About ten minutes passed while I mulled over such things and the arena was cleared, and then the match between Karan and Sieze, ranked third and seventh, got underway as well.
And just like Agnes's evaluation match before it, that one wrapped up anticlimactically in under five minutes.
"The winner, Karan Iris Stormweaver!"
"Waaah!"
"Karan! Karan!"
Scarcely ten minutes after Agnes's match ended, the victory declaration and the students' cheering rang out again.
Only natural. Students with the right to designate their own opponents tended to pick whoever they could beat with minimal effort.
Judging purely on raw skill, a bout between third and seventh place shouldn't have ended that quickly — but Karan held a crushing advantage in their respective specialties.
Karan's signature magic was wind magic. Sieze's was plant magic.
'In a normal run, I'd have cruised to a comfortable victory against some summon or dark magic user and wrapped up the semester in peace.'
I still couldn't wrap my head around how things had come to this.
One way or another, this academy just refused to cut me any slack, right up to the end of term.
"Lilith."
"...Yes, Young Master Ethan."
Ethan, who had been waiting with me in the same holding room out of concern for me, came over to speak. Surely he wasn't about to tell me something like, if you're worried, just forfeit.
Even if he did, I had zero intention of passing up an experience-grind event this massive. I'd have to deflect and refuse politely...
"Win, Lilith. You have to."
"...I'm sorry, what?"
"Because I think you can win, Lilith."
...Where did that sudden gust of confidence come from?
Well, it was still far better than him wagging his finger at me about how dangerous it was and telling me not to fight.
Being cheered on, if anything, actually helped me steady my nerves a little.
I gave a small bow to Ethan, who spoke with an uncharacteristically earnest look in his eyes.
"Naturally, that is my intention."
"Good. I'll be waiting."
...Saying something that shameless means if I come back having lost, I won't be able to show my face around here for a month.
Apparently, winning this match was non-negotiable.
"Next match! From the Magic Department, fourth-ranked Lilith Blackwood Rosewood! From the Engineering Department, second-ranked Luke Cruella!"
As the match coordinator called my name, I stepped out into the arena, where the fairly spacious evaluation-stage dueling ground of the Magic Department spread out to greet me.
At the same moment, I felt that peculiar sensation of every other student in the stands turning their gaze my way.
'Can't be helped. The evaluation matches are one of the better spectacles the academy has to offer.'
An academy built on the isolated Isle of Knowledge meant duels between its top-ranked students — swordplay or magic — were among the few entertainments the student body ever got.
They do say the most fun things in the world are watching a fire and watching a fight, after all.
With that thought, I moved toward the center of the training grounds, and there on the far side I spotted Luke walking in from the opposite end of the arena.
She looked thoroughly resolved, steeling herself for our match with grim determination.
'And she's plenty poisonous about it, too.'
The pair of daggers — her signature weapons — gripped in both hands made it abundantly clear she wasn't coming at me with any casual attitude.
She had truly, literally come to this duel with her knives sharpened.
One careless moment and a dagger would be buried in my flank; I wouldn't have blamed anyone for calling my retirement right then and there.
For the record, this evaluation-stage arena was equipped with Death-Prevention Magic, installed to head off any unfortunate incidents arising from ferocious duels.
This was, after all, an institution that gathered renowned talent from across the nation to cultivate learning and raise up skilled people. Naturally, accidental deaths during evaluation matches were something it absolutely had to prevent.
The instant a student's body sustained a fatal wound, the Death-Prevention Magic froze the injury's progression at that very moment, and space-transference magic whisked the wounded student off to the academy church.
Of course, that didn't erase the damage itself — it only forestalled death. In the worst cases, a student could be laid up in the church ward for days or even weeks.
But the point was this: your life — the one thing you should protect above all else — could be preserved one way or another, and in this world, nearly every injury could be healed, short of wounds to the mind.
...In other words, inside this arena, I really could hurl myself at my opponent with full killing intent and no one would bat an eye. The Death-Prevention Magic had our lives covered.
'Which also means I can use Mana Blast without worrying about witnesses.'
Land one hit, any hit, and that was my victory. Fail to land it, or botch the casting, and that was my defeat.
A simple formula for winning. It was just the road to that point that seemed like it might be a bit rough.
The moment my eyes met Luke's as she approached from across the arena, I could feel the tangle of complicated emotions in her gaze, all of them aimed squarely at me.
We exchanged no words, simply taking our positions at the demarcated distance and finishing our preparations for battle.
"...Ready."
"......"
"......"
At the coordinator's word, Luke and I both settled into our stances.
I gripped the silver dagger tucked into my uniform's inner pocket, ready to start chanting the moment combat began, while Luke held her twin daggers poised, coiled like a spring about to launch.
Into that strangely charged air, the coordinator's declaration of the match's start finally fell.
"Begin!"
-Fwababak!
Luke's body came rushing at me with lightning-quick footwork, her daggers sweeping in from both sides of my body in the same breath.
Closing a distance of some fifteen meters in an instant, her twin daggers came whirling in fast, as if determined to finish me with a single strike.
For an ordinary person, the blades would have been nearly impossible to even track, coming at my body from both flanks.
It was ironclad intent: whichever way I dodged, at least one blade would be buried in me for certain. But the sound that followed wasn't the sickening bite of steel splitting skin — it was a single screech of friction.
-Tchaang!
"...Huh?!"
My silver dagger, drawn from my coat, met Luke's left dagger, and the impact scattered a spray of sparks into the air.
At the same time, murmurs of astonishment at my reaction began to drift up from the spectator stands.
"A sword? That's not even a proper shortblade, is it?"
"Wait, isn't Lilith in the Magic Department?"
"Hey, hey — isn't she the girl who sliced open Leydenhardt's wrist with a silver dagger at the entrance ceremony...?"
Thanks to the little incident I'd stirred up at the entrance ceremony, most of the Magic and Sword Departments already knew I could fight with a silver dagger in hand — but the stands weren't exactly restricted to students from those two departments.
So seeing the crowd react with such startled confusion wasn't the least bit strange.
Apparently, the same went for Luke, who had charged me daggers drawn.
"H-how...?"
How, my ass. She's the one who picked this fight in the first place — getting flustered over something like this was just embarrassing.
Strictly speaking, it hadn't been a pure contest of blade against blade. She had swung her daggers with nothing but raw grip strength, while I had knocked her blade aside with mana reinforcement and a shockwave layered on top.
Twist my body to evade one of the two incoming blades, deflect the other, and open a gap in her guard — that was all.
Not that the details mattered much. What mattered was that I had the means to answer Luke's movements and techniques.
"You weren't a mage... were you...?"
"No, I am."
"Then how could you parry a bladed—"
"What do you want me to say? If it bothers you that much, learn some magic yourself."
"......"
And you call yourself the Engineering Department's second rank. Pathetic.
As obvious as it should have been, no rule existed that forbade a mage from wielding a blade in the term-end evaluation matches.
Magic itself was never the exclusive property of the Magic Department to begin with, and among the nobility, close-combat warriors who used magic as a supplementary tool — Magic Department affiliation or not — were hardly rare.
Whether a Magic Department student fought with a sword or a spear, it broke no rules whatsoever.
What the academy wanted, at the end of the day, was students with cultivated combat ability — and it was hardly some blockhead institution foolish enough to outlaw mages carrying secondary armaments in the name of building exactly that.
"......"
Luke, on the other hand, whose first attack had just been turned aside, wore an expression of visible confusion.
For a woman with the pride of the Princess's personal guard, getting her blade caught by a girl from the Magic Department was something she plainly could not process.
But that hesitation of hers, ironically, was my opening.
When a close-combat fighter gives a mage distance and time, they're handing over exactly the breathing room their opponent needs to respond.
Thanking Luke for her momentary lapse in judgment, I unleashed the spell I had quietly committed to memory.
-Fwaaat!
"Ghk—?!"
Dim Light — a spell I'd picked up separately from the support-magic tree in preparation for this fight.
It thrust a blinding flash right in front of the target's eyes, momentarily smearing their vision — a tool meant to buy your party members an opening to strike. Granted, with no party members present at the moment, I had to handle both the support and the striking myself.
Luke's face scrunched up at the flash shoved into her eyes, her guard breaking for an instant.
And that gap was exactly the moment I'd been waiting for. This time, three mana arrows born of Triple Casting went hurtling straight at her.
I didn't have the time to bring out Mana Blast, so the plan was simple: chip away at her, little by little.
-Fwook!
"Aaaargh!"
At a paltry twenty percent accuracy, all three could easily have sailed wide — but thankfully, the goddess of fortune hadn't abandoned me just yet.
One of the three mana arrows struck Luke's left forearm, and her pained scream rang in my ears.
'One hit down. That's a start.'
For a duel between a close-combat fighter and a mage, the opening phase couldn't have gone much better.
Whether I could keep it going that smoothly all the way to the end, though — that remained to be seen.