The Staged Falling-Out (3)
"Have you said your piece?! Y-you fat cow, get back heeere!!!"
"Kyaaah?! A-Agnes, stop!"
"W-wait, Agnes! What on earth are you doing?!"
"Don't you dare lay a hand on Lilith, Lady Blaze!"
Thanks to her performance, the staged falling-out—meant to show everyone that Agnes and I were now on the worst of terms—wrapped up as a complete success.
Agnes had lunged at me with a shrill, genuinely furious voice, and right on cue, Gehmajoshigi-gwat and Ethan, who had been waiting outside the plaza, swept in to "mediate" between the two of us. The whole thing went off perfectly.
She threw herself into the act so completely that even her face flushed red with theatrical rage as she screamed at me, one jab after another.
"Let go! Let go of me!! That Lilith bitch! Th-that absolute cow!!"
"C-calm down, Agnes! Why would you do this to your own friend?!"
"Friends don't say the things she said!! Real friends don't talk to each other like that!! You—you've always been thinking it deep down, haven't you! Flat chest AND flat personality?! No curves anywhere, nothing but an icy, frozen heart?! You horrible, horrible—AAAAH!!"
"……"
For a moment, Agnes's whole-hearted performance knocked even my own lines clean out of my head, and I could only stand there staring at her, dumbfounded.
It was the first time I'd ever learned she had a talent for acting, and it made the Agnes I thought I knew look like an entirely different person.
Her acting skill is one thing, but I never dreamed she'd go this hard for my sake.
When we'd rehearsed the fake argument beforehand, she'd been so painfully stiff that I'd had no choice but to engineer the situation itself to feel like the real thing—never in my wildest imagination did I expect her to deliver something this convincing.
Looking at her now, who would ever guess it was an act? To anyone watching, it was nothing but pure, blistering fury being unloaded on me.
Gehmajoshigi-gwat and Ethan were supposed to wait for a prearranged signal before stepping in, but the fact that they'd rushed in so urgently told me they'd probably been genuinely taken in by Agnes's performance too.
And I, for my part, was swept up in a wave of gratitude toward Agnes for committing this hard to a plan I had dreamed up. I honestly hadn't known she'd be willing to go this far for me.
"A-Agnes. Y-you can't actually get this angry. We agreed we'd only pretend to fight."
"B-but she… Lilith, she…!"
Gehmajoshigi-gwat, who had dragged the lunging Agnes back, murmured quietly with her off to the side. I couldn't make out the words, but they were probably re-confirming the plan one last time.
Meanwhile, Ethan—who had sprinted over to my side the instant Agnes and I launched into our act—wrapped a steadying arm around my shoulder and whispered carefully.
"You okay, Lilith? You're not hurt anywhere?"
"I'm quite all right, Young Master Ethan. We were only performing a quarrel, after all—no actual fight has broken out."
"…R-right? So it's not a real fight?"
"A real fight? Surely not. This was a plan Agnes and I worked out together from the very beginning. I explained everything to you beforehand as well, Young Master Ethan—don't you remember?"
"I do, but… this feels like something that wasn't in the conversation we had…."
That's how acting always goes. When a better ad-lib presents itself in the moment, you pivot to it—that's simply the professional way.
Ethan was watching Agnes with an uneasy look in his eyes, but the odds were good that he was worrying over nothing.
Even Agnes wouldn't fly into genuine rage over a minor jab at her physical shortcomings. And besides, she had been the one to bring up those traits first, not me.
That said, if even Ethan—who already knew about our plan—was second-guessing it, Agnes's angry performance was truly a masterpiece. Stiff as could be in rehearsal, yet a natural in live performance. So that was her type.
"You awful… you awful cow… sniff, hic…."
Agnes had resolved to fool every single person present, her eyes even welling up with tears, and at this point it honestly crossed my mind that she might be overdoing it.
Of course, I still felt deeply grateful to her for such a passionate performance, and without a doubt, everyone watching now believed an unbridgeable rift had opened between Agnes and me.
It was more than enough to fool McHeart, too. Convinced that the bond between Agnes and me had been severed completely, he would come charging in with utter confidence the next chance he got.
The plan was this: Agnes, Ethan, and I—along with Agnes, unexpectedly—would confront him together and hold him off, and then Gehmajoshigi-gwat and Serista would burst onto the scene and join the fray, turning it into a full-blown battle. That was the staged falling-out in its entirety.
With the first domino now placed flawlessly, I barely managed to suppress the grin threatening to creep onto my face. Laughing now, for no reason, could have thrown the rest of the plan into disarray.
It was the end of the semester, so all the Magic Department classes were finished—I wouldn't be needing Agnes's escort again until next term. The only thing left on the schedule, really, was the evaluation tournament battle a week from now.
I was quietly celebrating what seemed like a perfectly timed plan when Agnes, still milking her tears, shouted one last parting shot in my direction.
"Y-you just you wait!! I'm not letting this go!! Y-you're going to get down on your knees and apologize to me if it's the last thing you do!!!"
Thanks to Agnes exiting the stage in the role of a heartbroken, defeated loser to the very end, every eye in the plaza locked onto the two of us, and the staged falling-out—which had wobbled dangerously for a moment—was brought to a flawless conclusion as she sprinted off toward the Magic Department dormitories.
…At least, that was what I believed at the time.
One week later.
Back in the present, I sat quietly lost in thought inside the waiting room for the evaluation tournament matches.
I still hadn't fully resolved the question of why, exactly, I had to face the monster ranked first in the Magic Department for my final evaluation match.
Why would Agnes go out of her way to close out the semester with a sparring match against me of all people?
Showing the world our falling-out should have been accomplished well enough by that little incident in front of the student council building a week ago.
Extending the act all the way into an official evaluation match, though—no matter how I turned it over in my head, something about it didn't add up.
Otherwise, it would look as if what Agnes and I did back then wasn't a performance at all, but a genuine grudge she was still nursing against me. Any other reading made no sense—picking me as her opponent for the evaluation match was simply incomprehensible behavior.
Unless, of course… the fury she showed that day hadn't been acting, and she really had flown off the handle into that hyper-realistic performance. In that case, it wasn't entirely impossible, but—
"…Ah."
Right. Maybe I'd been thinking about this far too narrowly.
Now that I really considered it, something had been off the whole time. The performance Agnes had given me back then overflowed with realism to a degree that no mere act should have been able to match.
If the rage Agnes had displayed that day wasn't acting but the genuine article—and if I thought through what her final declaration of not letting this go actually meant—then the answer buried in those words really wasn't that hard to see.
…Agnes's performance never ended that day. It's been running this whole time.
I had very nearly been taken in myself.
Agnes had predicted exactly how she would behave if she were genuinely furious with me, and had simply executed that behavior from the start. One item on the list: dragging me into the final evaluation match as her opponent and using me as a testing ground for every spell in her arsenal.
After screaming herself hoarse with rage like that, it would have been bizarre for her not to summon me onto the battlefield where she held the greatest advantage.
If you're going to put on an act, commit to it completely. If the goal was to make people believe she'd truly lost her temper, she'd judged that she needed to keep displaying the textbook behavior of an enraged person right up to the end.
In other words, Agnes had been playing a far longer game than I was. She'd prepared a performance so airtight that McHeart could never, under any circumstances, sense anything amiss from the circumstances alone.
I got played. One clean move, right down the middle.
To think she'd lured me into such a natural-seeling situation without saying a single word to me beforehand.
My original plan had been to fix Agnes's wooden acting skills, and yet here I was, the one scrambling to keep up with her performance.
Thank goodness I'd caught on at all, really. I'd been genuinely worried she was so furious with me that she actually intended to cut me off for good.
"We will now begin the Magic Department second-year final evaluation matches! The first match: Agnes Elizabeth, top student of the second-year Magic Department at Luminor Academy…!"
As the voice outside the waiting room called Agnes and me forward, I made my way toward the evaluation arena with steps that had grown noticeably lighter.
After all, the final act of Agnes's and my staged falling-out was now sprinting toward its climax.
The moment I stepped into the tournament arena, my eyes naturally found Agnes walking out from the waiting room across the way toward the center of the field.
Her gaze was grave and resolute, as if she'd steeled herself for something. After spending so much time in her company lately, I'd grown used to seeing that degenerate, sullying look in her eyes—this was the first expression I'd seen from her in a while.
It was close to the face she'd worn back on the first day of Spirit Studies class, when she'd spouted that crazed-lunatic nonsense at me. If anything, somehow, it felt even harder and more set than it had been then.
And she'd even brought along that low-grade fire spirit, the Inferno-something-or-other, the one I'd handed her just before that Spirit Studies class ended. She really had shown up with every possible contingency covered.
'Hey, you! The one with the mega-chest!'
"Yes?"
'You made our Agnes cry! I don't care if you're her friend, I'm not letting this one slide!!'
"……"
To think she'd even ordered her own spirit to deliver an enraged performance on her behalf.
Even as I was quietly marveling at Agnes's relentless thoroughness, the provocation continued straight from the spirit's mistress herself.
"…Lilith."
"Yes, Lady Agnes."
"…This time, I'm really not letting it go."
"And what, exactly, do you mean by 'not letting it go,' Lady Agnes?"
"…I'm going to show you exactly how wide the gap between our abilities is—and make you get down on your knees before me and apologize, with everything you have."
For a threat delivered to her evaluation opponent's face, it was a surprisingly cute one.
That said, whatever the match was for, I had absolutely no intention of meekly rolling over and taking Agnes's magic on the chin.
If I threw the fight too obviously, my first-semester evaluation scores would go tumbling clean out of the top ten—and worse, it risked planting seeds of doubt in McHeart, who might well be watching this match from somewhere.
It was a match that hadn't been in the original plan, but now that it had come to this, I fully intended to fight a proper, honest battle from start to finish.
"I do hope your dream comes true, Lady Agnes."
"……"
-KwaAAAANG.
Agnes tightened her grip on the staff in her hand and retreated to the boundary line of the arena, while I, keeping my distance from her across the field, readied myself for the evaluation match.
The temporary falling-out staged to deceive McHeart—this was the final act of that little production.