The Duel
“...Big brother? Why in the world—?”
At the sight of Crown Prince Ricardo stepping forward as Eli’s proxy, a startled voice rose from behind me.
Cartesia probably hadn’t imagined, any more than I had, that the prince himself would be the one to stand in this place.
“Why? Is it really so strange for a black knight to step in on someone else’s behalf in a duel?”
Crown Prince Ricardo answered Cartesia with a breezy, almost amused tone.
He was right. Most of the students at Lutra were nobles, and since it was a place where teenagers were forced together under one roof, tempers flared often enough that disputes and the duels they spawned were hardly rare.
That didn’t mean the people involved could simply march up and start swinging their fists every time, though.
That was because Lutra also had a considerable number of students from the scholarly track, people completely removed from any sort of physical combat.
For students like that, a duelist could find someone to fight in their place. The so-called black knight.
But that was a rule meant for people who either lacked the ability to duel themselves or thought the gap between themselves and their opponent was too great to bother handling things personally.
Neither Eli nor I fell into either category, so Ricardo stepping in here made little sense to me.
“Well, I’m simply showing a little mercy. If I’m not mistaken, Eli and Sian aren’t blood-related, but they are siblings, are they not? However much this duel is supposed to prove Sian’s innocence, forcing a duel between brother and sister is... rather cruel.”
“Since when did you become such a paragon of mercy, Your Highness?”
“If you dislike the word mercy, then call it my own consideration. Besides, I think this isn’t such a bad thing for Sian either.”
“...What did you say?”
“For a man like Sian, who’s famous for doting on his younger sisters, fighting me will actually help him bring out his full strength. And though I may be lacking compared to Eli, I’ve still honed my swordsmanship as a warrior in my own right.”
Ricardo’s words left me feeling a little stunned. So the prince thought he was far beneath Eli in skill?
No way.
In one sense, Ricardo wasn’t entirely wrong. Eli truly had been born with an absurdly violent talent, unmatched by anyone in this age when it came to pure swordsmanship alone.
But Ricardo had something Eli lacked: money, power, and an absurdly vast background to draw upon.
I’d heard that when he was very young, he’d been given procedures by a great mage to increase his body’s mana adaptability, and that he’d swallowed mana-enhancing elixirs more often than he drank water.
If Eli had been born with talent, Ricardo had forcibly hammered talent into his body after the fact with money and authority.
For that reason, he was absolutely not someone I could afford to dismiss lightly.
“Eli also gave her prior approval for me to stand in as her proxy in this duel. Isn’t that right, Eli?”
“Yes.”
Eli, who had already taken a step back behind the prince, gave a slight nod with a faint crease between her brows.
However I looked at her, she didn’t seem to be the one who had chosen to put Ricardo forward of her own will. She looked more like someone being forced by another hand.
What is this?
Could the prince really have pressured Eli into letting him fight as her proxy?
No way.
Still, it was hard to make sense of. I only knew Ricardo by face, and frankly, we were practically strangers. More importantly, there was no benefit whatsoever for a man of his station to involve himself directly in a duel like this.
Then why was he so eager to fight me? What was the hidden reason?
And then, all at once, I thought I understood one of those hidden reasons.
“.....”
Ricardo was looking at me now, and the faintest killing intent was leaking from him.
He wanted to kill me. Or, if not that, then at least hurt me in some way.
I see.
I didn’t know the specifics, but if this was being done by Ricardo—by his own will, and no one else’s—then the details didn’t matter.
All I had to do was treat Ricardo as an enemy. It was that simple.
“If there was prior agreement between the parties, then I’ll acknowledge Ricardo as the proxy in this duel. Is there anything else you need to report to me?”
“No, there isn’t.”
At Ricardo’s firm answer, Cartesia, who had been standing behind me, seemed about to say something, but the swordsmanship professor simply nodded, as if accepting everything.
“Good. Then I shall begin the duel between Sian and Eli’s proxy, Ricardo.”
And so, the duel between me and the prince began.
****
Worthless vermin.
Ricardo had never liked Sian.
There were many reasons for that.
He disliked Sian’s lowly status. He disliked that such a filthy nobody was the older brother of the beloved Lobelia. He disliked how he clung so closely to Cartesia, another member of the imperial family.
But more than any of that, what truly grated on him was that Sian did not know his place.
Despite being nothing but a pitiful orphan from the streets, he always walked with his chin high, and on top of that he constantly earned excellent grades and stood out in class.
If he was a stray orphan from the gutter, then he should behave like one and keep his head bowed—not act as if he possessed the pride of a noble.
That was why, when Lobelia asked if he could serve as Eli’s proxy in today’s duel, he had agreed without hesitation.
Even if this hadn’t come up, he had planned to find an opportunity someday to crush Sian underfoot.
Besides, as the Crown Prince, he couldn’t very well dirty his hands directly on some orphan without concern for appearances. He had simply been biding his time.
It was a chance to score points with Lobelia, to owe a favor to Eli—the future successor recognized by Duke Orphega—and at the same time to put Sian in his place.
It was, in every sense, a triple reward, so Ricardo had entered today’s duel in a very light mood.
...Yes, that was what he had thought only moments ago.
Claaang!
“Kuh!”
The one who charged forward boldly, sword raised, was Ricardo.
And the one who was forced to retreat first was also Ricardo.
What...?
For a moment, it felt as though all his memory had been wiped clean. What was this? What had just happened?
He understood up to the point where he had met Sian’s sword and traded blows with him.
But... the next instant, when he came to his senses, Ricardo was stumbling backward in a humiliating mess.
Could it be that he had been driven back so disgracefully without even properly receiving a single strike from Sian’s blade?
Splurt!
The right arm holding Ricardo’s sword split open with a sharp crack, as though it had been shredded by something razor-edged, and blood burst out.
There was no pain. But the lack of pain only made Ricardo feel colder.
How dare that lowborn bastard!
In that instant, Ricardo realized with fury that he had been frightened by Sian, the very man he had so thoroughly looked down on, even if only for a moment.
Suppressing the fear that was rising in him, Ricardo drew up every shred of mana in his body and forced it into his blade.
Whoooosh!
The sword in Ricardo’s hand was enveloped in a blaze of white magic and began to burn. The professor and the students around them stared wide-eyed at the sight.
“T-that is—!”
“Aura? Isn’t that Aura?”
“But don’t you have to reach the rank of Master to use Aura? Ricardo isn’t even twenty yet...”
Feeling the students gazing at him with admiration and awe, Ricardo was secretly pleased with himself.
Yes, this was how it should be. This was the way other people ought to look at him—not with the insolent eyes Sian was using now.
End this quickly!
The Aura Ricardo was using now was nothing more than a crude imitation, forcibly concentrating the elixirs he regularly consumed and the mana in his body into one place. Compared to the Aura used by true Masters, its power was far inferior.
But it would be more than enough to deal with Sian.
Even if it was a degraded version of Aura, it still had more than enough force to crush a mere student like him.
Suppressing the fear of Sian that had flickered in his chest, and the odd sense of wrongness that came from not noticing the attack that had just cut into his arm, Ricardo swung his sword with everything he had.
And then.
Chrrrk!
“...Huh?”
The instant his all-out strike collided with Sian’s blade, Ricardo realized something was wrong.
And not only Ricardo, but everyone watching the duel stared as well.
The swords were locked together, yet there was no sensation at all in his fingertips.
It was as if he had swung his blade against water or air... a sticky, insubstantial feeling.
The next second, Sian’s sword traced a neat circle through the air.
Ricardo’s blade then slid silently down along the path of that circle, along Sian’s sword, and... drifted uselessly away, far off target.
“N-no way...”
Ricardo finally understood what he had just seen and experienced. That was why he couldn’t make sense of it.
The spectators, too, erupted in shock, as if they couldn’t believe their own eyes.
Impossible! He actually deflected an Aura-clad blade with nothing but pure technique!
However fake Ricardo’s Aura might have been, it should never have been so easily neutralized.
Any ordinary attack—no, any ordinary sword—should have shattered the moment it touched Aura.
Just how vast was the difference in skill between these two that Sian could perform such a feat?
As far as anyone knew, the only human who could suppress Aura with nothing but bare technique was Duke Orphega, the very man who had once taught Ricardo swordsmanship!
When the mind wavers, the body follows, and when the body wavers, it exposes a great opening.
And Sian was not a swordsman so incompetent that he would fail to notice even a momentary lapse in his opponent.
In a split second, Sian slipped lightly past the trajectory of Ricardo’s last-ditch slash, shot toward him like a cannonball, and—
Thud!
“Ghk!”
He drove a fist packed with all his mana straight into Ricardo’s face, while one hand seized his right arm and the other grabbed a fistful of his hair. It was such a complete and flawless suppression that it looked almost like a painting.
“This is as far as you go. Surrender.”
“Surrender? Hah, what do you mean by—”
“Can’t do it? Then there’s no helping it.”
“Cut the nonsense and let go of my arm! Just who do you think you’re grabbing with that filthy hand of yours—”
But unfortunately for Ricardo, he never got to finish his sentence.
Bang!
Because Sian slammed Ricardo’s head straight into the ground.