Wyvern Hunt
The Affection System.
Critics liked to say this one feature had added a good five years to Legend Route's lifespan, and they weren't wrong—it rivaled any dating sim worth the name.
Legend Route was crowded with characters, and the ones you took as companions—and whether you took them further still, into a lover's relationship—changed the entire shape of a playthrough. Skill inheritance, dungeon clears, boss hunts: all of it tied directly into how the game moved forward.
The cast was anything but cookie-cutter. You could not simply tap the polite options and watch affection climb. There was a shortcut, of course—gifting food that actually tasted like something—but that only opened up once your cooking skill was high enough, so it hardly counted.
Sara Leoris.
A playable character, and a name that never failed to appear on any list of early-game powerhouses. The way to capture this cute heroine's heart was push-and-pull.
Not unconditional attention. Not perfect indifference. Somewhere in the space between, you dangled the bait and let it sway. That was the surest path to Sara Leoris's affection—and that was exactly what I was doing.
We walked the dungeon side by side. Every so often, a mini wyvern came for us.
A cry like broken glass, and the thing dove.
Sara turned it into a roast with nothing more than a glance.
Flame bloomed. Chantless casting, already. She might even have been stronger than the Sara from the original game. She'd been famous there as an early-game tyrant, but I didn't remember her being quite this far ahead.
Five monsters, all hers. Every time she put a wyvern down, her eyes flicked toward me. If she'd had a tail, it would have been wagging—left, right, waiting on its owner.
"Ahem. That's five, then? Nothing much to it."
She dusted off her hands with a vigorous performance of casual indifference. Her whole body was screaming Praise me!
The image of a dog fawning over its owner just home from work rose so vividly that I had to steady my breathing and collect myself. Deliberately ignoring Sara's hunger for praise was not easy.
I wanted to pet her. I wanted to bury my hands in that fluffy red hair and spoil her rotten.
If I clapped and gushed—Ah! That's incredible! So this is the young lady of House Leoris?—she'd square her shoulders and go, Just the usual~!
"Cocky Sara" was one of my personal favorite scenes from the original. The art had captured her bright, unguarded innocence perfectly. I would have loved to recreate it. I crushed the impulse anyway.
Not yet. I still had to endure.
The more I withheld praise, the puffier her cheeks became. The continent's greatest prodigy—the girl they said would rewrite the history of magic—swelling up like a blowfish because a commoner wouldn't acknowledge her. A sight too good to keep to myself.
I want to poke them…
An urge even stronger than ruffling her hair rattled through my skull. Those cheeks, swollen like a squirrel stocking up for winter—I wanted to jab them with a finger. They'd be incredibly soft. Squishy. The way kissing Sierra had been.
The cheek-poke event started at affection thirty, didn't it? Damn… this is too hard.
I walked on, clinging to my self-control for dear life.
Sara had underestimated the man named Yohan.
Like every other commoner who didn't know how the world worked, she'd assumed that a few overwhelming spells would have him clapping, eyes round with awe.
So she loosed an arrow of light. Hurled a sphere of flame. Scattered spears of lightning. Fired a water cannon.
And this man didn't show so much as the first letter of impressed.
"Ahem. That's five, then? Nothing much to it."
At that point, stubbornness kicked in. Even if he was holding a poker face just so he wouldn't lose the staring contest, she wanted to peel that mask off with her magic.
Ugh. Me, the eldest daughter of House Leoris, thinking something this childish…
She knew it was childish. She'd believed her emotional inventory didn't include a need for approval. Other people's praise had never truly delighted her. Maybe it had, when she was very small. Not now. That was why she'd looked down, just a little, on people who scrambled for recognition—people like Arsha Swordhorn.
She had to admit it, though. She had the same primitive hunger to be acknowledged. Until now, everyone had already been lifting her up, so she'd never noticed the desire. She was no enlightened sage who'd transcended selfishness.
Here she was, scrambling because one commoner boy wouldn't praise her—and she'd put on airs in front of Arsha. Looking back, it was empty bluster, and it made her face burn.
Fine. I admit it. I admit it! But after all this, can't he at least pretend to be surprised once?
She wanted to test him. Weren't you surprised by my magic? Aren't you just managing your expression? Asking that out loud, though, would be the same as saying I want your recognition! Her pride would never allow it. Sara hunted for the most natural way to sound out Yohan's feelings.
"Ahem. Listen."
Having ordered her thoughts, she cleared her throat and spoke.
"You said you were aiming for first in class, didn't you? If I keep taking down every mini wyvern, you won't even pass, let alone take the top rank. So how about you hunt the next one?"
Other people's work always looked easy. Do it yourself, and the difficulty was nothing like what you'd seen from the sidelines. This man would be the same. He was taking her magic lightly because she was hunting wyverns as naturally as breathing. Once he realized for himself how hard it actually was, he'd look at her magic differently.
Even she thought it was a brilliant idea. She could make Yohan feel her stature without showing off. Today, her own clever mind struck her as especially adorable.
"I see. Very well. I'll take the next wyvern."
As if it had been listening, a wyvern's cry rang out the instant they finished speaking.
Same pattern as before. A mini wyvern began its descent with that shattered-glass shriek. Yohan drew the dagger at his hip.
A rogue class, then. Not as bad a matchup against wyverns as a warrior—but still nowhere near as good as a mage.
Sara's eyes went wide as she watched him. Yohan didn't move rashly. He tracked the diving wyvern with his gaze and counted under his breath.
"Five… four… three…"
?
Sara tilted her head at the sudden countdown.
"Two… one!"
Three mana daggers formed in front of his hand.
Knife Shot
The daggers flew straight at the wyvern. To Sara's eyes, though, their trajectory was slightly off the creature's path. At that angle, a miss was inevitable. The hunt looked like a failure—at least to her.
Then something astonishing happened. The wyvern, gliding in a beautiful parabola, changed course. Its body plunged almost perpendicular to the ground.
Three mana daggers buried themselves in the head of the wyvern that had just pulled that sudden maneuver.
If the knives had been aimed along the wyvern's gentle curving glide, they would have missed for certain. In other words: if Sara had thrown them, the attack would have failed.
What?
Coincidence? No. Could coincidence be this precise? And if it was coincidence, what had those numbers been—the ones Yohan counted before he threw?
Not coincidence. He timed it and fired the skill. What kind of trick was that?
Every clue said what Yohan had just done had nothing to do with luck. Sara was not foolish enough to look away from that.
"I got one too," Yohan said, looking at the wyvern that had crashed to the ground.
Hunting mini wyverns. For Sara, it was trivially easy—and it wasn't impossibly hard for others her age, either. What startled her wasn't that this Yohan had casually taken one down. A girl who'd been called a genius of the century until she was sick of hearing it had no reason to be shocked by something so small.
What startled her was the uncanny process. A moment ago, he'd looked—joking only a little—like a man who'd seen the future. And the future was a domain even the Eye of Wisdom couldn't reach.
Sara blinked and asked,
"How did you do that?"