Proof (2)
"…"
A heavy silence settled over the training grounds.
Kallen could only blink, wide-eyed, not even registering the glove in front of him.
He pointed a finger at himself and asked, as if he couldn't believe his ears.
"So… you're telling me to spar with a student? Right now?"
"Not a spar. A duel."
And Garnet immediately snapped a fierce correction at him.
"Pick up the glove. Today is the day your true colors get laid bare, once and for all."
"Ha. Unbelievable…"
Despite her continued prodding, Kallen only managed a hollow laugh, utterly dumbfounded. He scratched the back of his head and muttered under his breath, half to himself.
"No matter how you slice it, crushing the pride of a budding sprout is a bit much…"
The instant the words left his mouth, a small vein bulged on Garnet's forehead. Having taken the unwitting provocation, she gritted her teeth, then barely suppressed her fury with a deep breath.
"Are you so afraid of losing to a student that you're hiding behind excuses? You have no right to be called a professor."
Then, twisting the corner of her mouth into a sneer, she mocked him in return.
"What's the point of a sword at your hip if you never draw it when it matters? No need to watch any longer, I see. You're just like that half-wit who'd stand there gawking even if his own woman were in danger…"
"…"
At the succeeding taunt, Kallen's eyebrow twitched ever so slightly. A moment later, he brought his faintly trembling right hand up to his canteen and took a long, hard swig.
"Phew…"
Only then did his scrunched expression ease, and he let out a small sigh.
"…Fine."
He paused in thought for a moment, then at last bent down and picked up Garnet's fallen glove.
"I accept your duel."
"So even a coward like you knows better than to run?"
"Shut it, you nasty little brat. Now — what are the duel conditions?"
"Imperial Tournament Rules."
At her immediate answer, Kallen pressed a hand to his head yet again.
Live steel and sword aura permitted. Strikes to every vital point, including the head. Hand-to-hand brawling with fists and kicks fair game. The duel ending only upon a direct declaration of surrender or complete incapacitation. Until then, no third party could halt or interfere with the duel under any circumstances — and so on.
Rules fit for the grandest of tourney matches or duels between mortal enemies, declared so brazenly by a green little whelp — a headache was inevitable.
"…Well, I suppose it's not a bad thing to learn firsthand how frightening real combat can be."
Besides, at this point, retreat was no longer an option. Kallen sighed and gave a nod of acceptance.
"…All right."
Kallen and Garnet stood facing each other at the center of the training grounds. By now, the surrounding air had grown thick with the feverish energy of an arena.
The frail male student Yulian had ended up serving as the referee. Kallen had more or less forced the role onto him, and now the boy stood trembling as he looked back and forth between the two of them before speaking.
"Th-then, let me confirm the… the duel conditions…"
"If I win, he resigns his professorship on the spot, reads an apology aloud before the student body, and leaves."
Before Yulian could even finish, Garnet cut in sharply. She stood utterly rigid, without a hair's breadth of hesitation, glaring at Kallen like he was her sworn mortal enemy.
"…Nothing to add."
Kallen, by contrast, swayed as though perpetually drunk, even yawning lazily.
Seeing Garnet's face contort as she clenched her fists, Yulian swallowed hard. Soon the two combatants took up positions at opposite ends of the grounds, distance drawn between them.
Barely clinging to his fading composure, Yulian squeezed his eyes shut and shouted.
"Th-then, the duel begins…!"
No sooner had the signal fallen than a fierce gust whipped up right before Yulian's face.
In a heartbeat, Garnet's blade had crossed the entire arena and hurtled with terrifying speed toward the nape of Kallen's neck.
At the sight of Kallen tilting his head back by a paper-thin margin, screams burst out among the students.
Riding the centrifugal force of the missed strike, Garnet spun her whole body around in a single rotation and went for his waist this time.
"Fierce, isn't she…"
Kallen sprang back into the air, muttering with a grimace. Once again, the icy sword aura grazed past him by a hair, doing little more than tear a slight nick in his outer coat.
"Prove that you're not all mouth!!"
Garnet gritted her teeth, lowered her stance once more, and roared. She gave the freshly landed Kallen not a moment's respite, hammering him with a relentless chain of strikes.
Her blade bent and weaved through the air, flashing brilliantly from every direction — for an instant, it almost seemed as if her single sword had multiplied into many.
"Wow, that's a bit much even against a professor, isn't it…?"
"Her skill is no joke, though…"
The students watching the duel wore somewhat dissatisfied expressions, yet couldn't help the admiration welling up inside them. In their eyes, Kallen was doing nothing at the moment but desperately blocking and dodging Garnet's onslaught.
"I-is anyone else worried this is about to end really badly? Those are live blades…!"
"How should I know? The infirmary will patch things up. Worst case, they cart him off to the temple…"
Unlike Yulian, who hopped from foot to foot with a face on the verge of tears, Zarel answered with his usual air of indifference.
"…She really is fast, though."
Even Zarel clicked his tongue lightly at the sight of Garnet hounding Kallen so relentlessly he could barely breathe. He then poked the male student beside him and spoke in a flippant voice.
"Hey, Kayden. When you think about it, couldn't you beat that professor too? You placed third in the entrance exams, didn't you?"
"Hard to say…"
Kayden, who had been watching the duel in a daze, collected himself and answered with careful deliberation.
Certainly, the duel had flowed entirely in Garnet's favor from start to finish. The skill of Garnet, who had placed first in the entire Swordsmanship Department on the entrance exam, went without saying. Even the professors overseeing the evaluations back then had sung her praises until their mouths ran dry, saying she had already ascended to the ranks of a Semi-Knight.
If this Professor Kallen truly were a fraud who'd slipped in unqualified, then subduing such a man would be no strain for her whatsoever.
"…"
And yet Kayden only wore a vaguely unsatisfied expression as he muttered to himself.
"Doesn't feel like he's toying with her, though…"
The fact that not a single clean hit had landed despite all that pressure somehow planted a strange dissonance in him.
"Haa, haa…!"
Beads of sweat had gathered, glistening, along the bridge of Garnet's nose as she pressed her ferocious assault.
"A pathetic nobody… like you…!"
Her ringing voice, too, had begun to show unmistakable signs of fatigue. But Garnet paid it no mind, devoting herself entirely to cornering Kallen.
Her calculation was simple: if she could push herself this hard, the man before her had to be at his absolute limit. More than that, there was nothing in his desperate parrying that suggested the sharp edge of a true master.
—Clang!
Garnet lightly deflected Kallen's listless counter and immediately thrust her blade forward in a terrifying straight line. At the same time, she pivoted her lower body and attempted a kick straight into the man's thigh.
"Wha—?"
Trying to evade both attacks at once, Kallen's balance broke for an instant and his body wobbled.
Now!
Garnet had absolutely no intention of letting slip the opening revealed in that fleeting moment. Kicking off the ground, she leapt and brought her sword — with sword aura now fully manifested — crashing down in a great arc.
—BOOM!
A impact heavy enough to make the bedrock itself tremble rippled outward in every direction. It was her decisive blow, loaded with every ounce of strength she had left. Even a Regular Knight — never mind a drunken puppet of a professor — would have had no choice but to break beneath it.
Yet Garnet, a smile of victory already on her lips, opened her eyes in shock amid the billowing dust.
Kallen was holding his sword flat and extended upward, casually blocking her attack.
Impossible! How could he stop that attack with just one hand—
The sight of him gripping the blade with a single hand was about to spark sheer astonishment on Garnet's face —
when she realized something, and her eyes darted frantically to the side.
"…Huh?"
She saw it a heartbeat later. The man's other hand, clenched into a tight fist, already driving into her lower abdomen.
"Wait—!"
And in that illusion of time crawling past, Kallen's fist slammed into Garnet's unguarded belly.
"Gahk…!"
It was a shock that felt as if every organ in her body had been shaken loose. Letting out a groan drenched in pain, Garnet tumbled across the arena floor. The recoil was tremendous — she had been struck mid-decisive-blow, her full momentum turned against her.
"…The moment you believe you've won is the most dangerous moment of all."
Kallen scattered the lingering dust as he approached her and spoke in a low voice.
"Wicked creatures like the Beastfolk and Corrupted Beings, in particular, love to use tricks like this. They'll show you a losing front, then flip the entire battle at the very last second as routinely as they breathe."
"Kehk, kgh…!"
"Even if an enemy seems overwhelmingly weak, you must remain on guard against large movements until the very end. Keep that in mind, always."
Kallen stood tall, looking down at Garnet where she rolled in her wretched state, and opened his mouth.
"Will you surrender?"
"Don't… spout that nonsense!!"
Wrenching herself upright, Garnet swung her sword about in a rage. Kallen simply slipped out of its path, as easily as dodging a falling leaf.
"I just told you to watch out for large movements."
"Why, you… smug little…!!"
"Good grief… and I even gave you the warning…"
Kallen retreated backward again, glanced down for a moment, and then gave her unguarded shin a light kick.
"Ngh…!"
Swallowing a scream, Garnet crumpled back to the ground.
"Haa, haa…"
She stared down at the dirt through vision blurred with tears, and the infuriating voice came again from above her head.
"Focus too much on your sword, and the balance of your body falls apart. When that happens, even a light counter like this can collapse your posture in an instant."
"You… die…?!"
—Clang!
Garnet shook out her hair and rose, about to throw herself at Kallen once more in a desperate last stand. At once, a clear ringing note spread through the air around them. Her sword, knocked loose at some point, was rolling across the ground with a deep crack running down its blade.
"And dropping your sword on a battlefield is one of the most catastrophic mistakes you can make."
Kallen's voice, having batted the blade away, remained as calm as if he were delivering a monotonous lecture.
"Ngh…!"
"Now… will you surrender?"
The seeping humiliation made Garnet grit her teeth. When the duel had begun, she never could have imagined this tableau unfolding. Her mind raged in total refusal to accept the situation before her. That she — who had sharpened herself to death's door day after day to reclaim her family's honor — should lose to that sham of a professor, that slovenly good-for-nothing of a man, was something that could never, ever be allowed to happen.
"Shut… up…?!"
She had forced herself upright, and was just reaching for her fallen sword again —
when a rough grinding sound reached her ears, and her eyes were drawn helplessly to her own lower body. Her ankle, the one Kallen had kicked, was bent at the exact opposite angle of its joint.
"Gghh…!!"
Garnet rolled across the ground once more in searing agony. Even when she tried desperately to rise, her broken ankle no longer had any intention of obeying her.
"Being rendered helpless from head to toe — on a battlefield, that is the worst situation there is."
As she inched along the ground like a snail, forcing her fingers around her sword's hilt, the man's quiet voice drifted down from above once more.
"If you have comrades to help you, things improve somewhat. But most of the time, you end up in a state worse than death."
"?!"
In an instant, a heavy weight pressed down on Garnet's wrist as she clutched her sword. Kallen set one foot on her arm and asked again.
"Will you surrender?"
"Shut up, I said… hnnnngh…!!!"
—CRACK!!
A single, simple press of his weight, and the thin bones of Garnet's wrist were crushed outright. The sword she had struggled so hard to grasp slipped from her fingers again, and she rolled across the arena floor in fresh agony.
"Nnn, hnnk…!"
"Becoming a witch's experiment subject, or a meal for the Beastfolk… and worst of all is being dragged off into the Illusion Realm by demons."
Kallen walked over once more to where Garnet lay crawling across the ground, weeping amid her disheveled hair.
"You'll either twist into something like them after an eternity of torture, or your soul will be annihilated outright. It's not a bad idea to arrange a means of suicide in advance, just in case. Tucking a vial of poison behind your molars, for instance…"
He stood before Garnet — eyes rolled nearly white, tears and drool streaming down her face — and asked.
"Will you surrender?"
"Shut it! Shut up, I said…!! Ngh—?!"
And as she flailed, swinging her fist wildly in defiance, he calmly stomped down on her other wrist and crushed it too. Garnet could no longer even scream; her body only shivered uncontrollably.
"Female students especially will need to be careful. Demons and witches use a maiden's womb as a primary vessel, after all. Now then…"
Kallen, still holding Garnet by her twisted wrist, spoke again without even looking at her.
"Will you surrender?"
"…"
Still, no answer came. Kallen let out a deep sigh.
Did I go too easy on her…? No, that can't be it…
Garnet's ferocious resistance had far exceeded his expectations. If anything, Kallen found himself harboring a hint of genuine admiration for the skill and spirit she had shown.
…Is this the level of kids these days? I must have underestimated her far too much.
Though brief, the duel had taught him a great deal as well. Judging by how the explanations kept spilling out of him unbidden, he supposed he wasn't so entirely without a talent for teaching after all.
But even as Kallen basked in the unfamiliar swell of pride, he shook his head and clenched his fist once more.
Impressions were impressions; business was business. Besides, if he wanted to keep needless noise out of his classes going forward, the time had come to bring things to an unequivocal end.
And so, seizing Garnet by the hair and hoisting her up, he prepared to deliver the final blow.
"P-Professor!! No!! Stop, please!!"
A tiny male student had popped up out of nowhere, blocking him with a face on the verge of tears.
Kallen could only wear a baffled expression.
"The duel's over! G-Garnet already passed out…!"
"What…?"
Only then did Kallen whip his head around. The Garnet held in his hand lay crumpled like a corpse, bloodied from head to toe, utterly motionless.
"…"
A dead silence had settled over the surroundings.
"Huh? Wh-what…"
As Kallen stood there stammering, face frozen, a commotion suddenly stirred through the crowd.
"Move! I said MOVE!!"
Someone was shoving students aside roughly, shouting as they forced their way through.
"What in the world is all this commotion…!"
And then Kallen found himself locking eyes with the newly arrived Professor Jiya. What was reflected in her gaze was the sight of Kallen — fist clenched tight, holding up a bloodied female student.
"Y-you… what in the world are you…?"
Shocked to her core, Professor Jiya could barely force the words out. Kallen, belatedly grasping the situation, let out a long, deep sigh.
"…I'm screwed."