How to Steal the Enemy's Female Knight
After promising to take him on as a knight and talking down the guy still seething with betrayal toward Elysia, we headed for the sparring grounds to attend our first lecture.
Monday morning's opening class was practical swordsmanship sparring.
"All right, gather up. Since this is the first lesson, we'll do things a little differently today."
Ordinarily this was the sort of man who'd wave the students off to clack wooden swords together halfheartedly and call it a day. Today, for some reason, he had already raised a sparring barrier as if he meant business. A low hum rolled through the hall as the barrier came up, and a murmur broke out among the students, but the professor paid it no mind and pressed on.
"Ordinarily you'd just mess around with some half-baked swordplay among yourselves and that would be the end of it... but the gap in skill among you is so extreme I figured we could change up the sparring format."
Then his gaze flicked toward me.
...What is this, a gang beating?
The students whispered among themselves, glancing my way, but the professor waved a hand as if he couldn't care less what they thought.
"If anyone among you lands even a single clean hit on that northern monster of a kid, I'll throw in a hefty extra credit. I won't be taking questions. That's all."
The classmates who already knew my skill hesitated, breaking into a cold sweat—but Theodore, of all people, planted himself squarely at the front of the pack, his eyes blazing with a half-mad, hungry anticipation.
...Guess I should at least warm up.
"Begin...!"
Before the professor had even finished shouting, Theodore exploded off the floor as if he'd been waiting for nothing else and brought his wooden sword down with golden aura packed into it so brutally it was almost crude. The blows fell like a battering ram against a castle gate, heavy, weight-laden slashes crashing toward my head and torso.
The pressure of his aura crushed even the air around us, shrinking my room to move, and the others behind him didn't waste the opening, driving at my gaps from every side.
Coming at me in a pack, they almost look the part.
But for someone whose daily life had been getting thrown into the middle of a beast horde, punching through this shoddy encirclement was as easy as drawing breath. I flicked Theodore's brutish frontal slash off-course with the tip of my sword and let the sloppy strikes pouring in from all sides slide harmlessly past. Wooden swords clacked lightly; their auras wavered, shattered, and scattered into fragments in every direction.
"Kh...!"
"H-how...!"
Some twenty people had tried to press me with numbers, but just by lightly redirecting the paths of their strikes, that very advantage became poison, and the encirclement collapsed on itself. Shoulders collided, feet tangled; the crowd that had rushed in became obstacles blocking one another's movement and line of sight. Watching his classmates flail, Theodore's face went blank with shock.
Even if you close the space, you're not a proper knight order that's trained to fight as one. Individually you might be prodigies for your age, but without a head to command you, as a group you're just a rabble.
There was no need to drag this out any longer. The way I used to on the northern front lines when a beast horde came crashing in, I condensed dark-blue aura taut at the tip of my wooden sword—and swung it wide.
Dark-blue aura surged in like a tidal wave, and with that savage energy an overwhelming blast of wind crushed the air of the entire sparring grounds. The students lined up against me couldn't even resist; they tumbled across the floor one after another as if they'd taken a gale head-on.
"I-I have no intention of giving up like this...!"
Theodore, the only one still standing to the last, showed no sign of backing down. He wrung every last drop of aura from his body and poured out golden fighting spirit, then charged head-on once more, like a beast slamming itself against a northern fortress wall.
I let his charge slide past with a single leisurely step, and as the mass of aura wrapped around him like armor brushed by, I honed the aura at my sword's tip to an extreme edge and drove it in deep, as if piercing the weakest joint. With the explosive crash of aura on aura, the aura he'd been wearing shattered like glass, and the rebound hurled him into the barrier wall.
"Gah...!"
He bounced off, hit the floor again, and collapsed on his face, gasping. Less than two minutes had passed since the sparring had begun.
"Huh..."
The professor let out a hollow laugh, looking from Theodore panting on the floor to me standing there as if I'd just done a warm-up.
"Northern kids really are monsters... No, with skill like that, why are you even at the Academy? Why not just go back north, or graduate early?"
He shook his head in disbelief and deactivated the sparring barrier.
As far as swordsmanship went, I'd get several times stronger rolling around among beasts... but I still had a long way to go on the magic side, and more importantly, every last one of the novel's protagonists was here. Whether I wanted to or not, I'd have to sit tight at the Academy for a while.
Once the barrier was down, the professor waved a hand with his usual couldn't-be-bothered expression.
"That's it for class today! Don't just lie there on the floor—get yourselves to the infirmary!"
Among the students staggering to their feet, I spotted Sienna, who had been watching the whole thing from one side of the sparring grounds. I called out to her as she stood frozen, her pupils trembling.
Because of my duty to escort Elysia, I'd had to match even my major and timetable to hers, so I—not even a student of the swordsmanship department—had been quietly watching the spar from the shade. But the moment class started, it was over, and the absurd spectacle left me frozen in place.
Two minutes. That was all the time that man had needed to completely wreck twenty-odd students who could have been thrown into a knight order this very day—Theodore, one of the South's finest swordsmen, included.
...Insane.
Well. A man who'd been cutting down charging beast hordes would find a pack of Academy students coming at him about as threatening as children at play. A shiver of goosebumps ran over my skin.
Theodore had been right. Southern swordsmen, trained only by the book without a scrap of real combat, whose entire experience was crossing blades a few times among themselves, couldn't even be compared in class to swordsmen who'd been ground down again and again in the North's bitter cold.
"Sienna...!"
The shout calling my name snapped my head up. That man tapped his wooden sword lightly and hooked up one corner of his mouth.
In that instant, my heart slammed hard in my chest. Instinctive fear drained the color from my face, but inside, a hot, unfamiliar heat was rising instead.
...How long could I even last against that man's sword?
A realm you could only reach by being thrown into a killing ground past life and death. The greater the fear, the greater the hunger to glimpse even a fragment of it.
"Ha..."
All right. Gladly.
I let out one trembling breath and walked toward Caelus. The moment I took up a wooden sword, he lowered the one he'd been slinging casually over his shoulder and gave a short laugh.
"Your stance isn't half bad."
That easy attitude set my competitive fire boiling. I clenched my teeth and began drawing up every last bit of aura in my body. It would be paltry compared to his monstrous reserves, but I raised my sword with the resolve to at least clash head-on and prove my pride as a knight.
"Then I'll make the first move...!"
I kicked off the floor hard and closed the distance, driving in on him. To bring down the massive wall that was Caelus Hatelion, I slipped into his blind spot in a single breath and unleashed a relentless flurry—a chaotic barrage wrung out of the single-minded will to land even one clean hit.
But Caelus, still looking bored, lifted his wooden sword at a minute angle and let my blade slide off.
Huh...?
Feeling my center of gravity collapse, I flung myself forward again out of sheer stubbornness, not wanting to lose like this, and launched a surprise slash at him. But as if he'd predicted my sword path, he stepped once and slipped lightly out of the blade's arc.
"Ngh...!"
The neutralized slash sent the recoil flooding straight back into my hands; they began to tremble with the pain. And in that moment, filling my vision were those cold gray eyes of a predator hunting its prey.
With the same hands that had cut the throats of giant beasts rampaging on the front lines, he now aimed his wooden sword, one after another, at every lethal vital point on my body. Near the carotid. Beneath the right ribs. All the way to the solar plexus. Before an assault so overwhelming, so brutally efficient it allowed not a single lapse, even breathing was a struggle, let alone a counterattack.
And at last, the wooden sword that had been leveled at me was withdrawn in an instant, and Caelus's heavy kick slammed into my abdomen.
"Ghk...!"
The wooden sword flew from my grip, and my body was launched into the air before being dumped unceremoniously onto the sparring-ground floor. Clutching my kicked stomach, gasping, I lifted my head—and there was Caelus, standing there without so much as a wrinkle in his collar.
What is it with that northern bastard? Does he just kick everyone he meets? That's a seriously nasty hobby.
The thought slipped through, and I let out a short, involuntary laugh. I'd been wrecked as thoroughly as the others, and yet my chest felt strangely clear, as if something had opened wide.
A whole wretched year of waiting on that damn Elysia like a servant. A so-called escort knight who'd never even had occasion to swing a sword, wasting time crawling into the magic department because I'd picked the wrong master. I was rolling on the floor with a kicked gut... and somehow, for the first time, I felt as if I were actually alive. Not Elysia's servant—Sienna Lamantia, who'd been chasing the path of the sword. That was the feeling of finally coming home.
And in the pain, a memory I'd all but forgotten suddenly surfaced.
The night I had hauled the carriage myself in a downpour, and the morning after. I'd come down with a raging fever from the rain, and even as I lay sick, buried in my bed, I'd secretly hoped someone would come. My liege, Elysia. I had devoted myself to her—surely, if I ended up like this, she would look after me a little. That empty hope.
But time passed, and she never even set foot near my room. Around the time I was staring blankly at the ceiling, too hurt even for tears in that neglect, the door opened.
The one who came in was, unexpectedly, Caelus Hatelion. Before I could even be surprised that Elysia's fiancé had walked in, he sighed, then set a glass of water, a fever medicine, and a bowl of porridge down on the table.
"You'd better get well soon."
The man who had come to look after me first—when even my liege Elysia hadn't.
...And now.
"If you keep lying there, it'll hurt more. Get up."
The voice was brusque, but he was holding a hand out toward me.
He's really got a talent for getting under a person's skin...
My stomach still hurt like hell, but somehow the corners of my mouth kept lifting. Without hesitation, I took that large, solid hand and stood.
I wanted to keep crossing swords with that man. I wanted to grow stronger as a knight under him.
And...
...I wanted to stand at his side.