I Punched a Hole Through the Back Mountain. Not Mountain-Cleaving, Though.
A week had already slipped by after that.
Clang—!
Kaang!
Right in front of me, Linea and a brown-haired male student were trading blows, wooden practice swords locked and scraping against each other.
“Stop!”
At my declaration ending the spar, the two finally halted, lowered their training blades, and stepped back to catch their breath. The students gathered around watching the match broke into successive choruses of “Whoa…” and couldn’t stop showering the pair with admiration.
They’d been almost evenly matched… but Linea held a slight edge?
Her Holy Power was still only faintly coating her blade, but it wasn’t bad at all. Her swordsmanship already stood out among her classmates, the kind of talent that made you look forward to the day she graduated and joined the Holy Knights.
Training the next generation, huh. Hmm.
Once the spar ended, a recovery specialist approached the two to cast healing.
“Erina!? You’re here again!”
Erina stepped right up to Linea, raised both palms, and began channeling healing energy.
“Heh-heh~ Better be grateful, yeah?”
“As you can see, there are other priest professors here even without you.”
“Coming here is my free choice, isn’t it? I’ve got no classes anyway. If my hard work lightens Professor Bloomrain’s load a little, isn’t that a good thing?”
“…Well, I suppose that’s true.”
Linea’s gaze drifted sideways to a blond male student slumped on the ground, gasping for air as if he were drowning. He was receiving healing from a young priestess with long, soft pink hair cascading down her back.
“Ah, Professor Bloomrain, I was hoping to get healed by Erina this time…”
With Professor Bloomrain assigned as the healing specialist for every class, I guess he just wanted to try receiving it from a classmate like Erina at least once.
“Ugh… Leon, you’re such a pervert.”
Erina scrunched her face into a look of pure disdain and glared at him.
“What?! N-no, I just… I honestly just wanted to try the heal with zero ulterior motives…!”
Leon scrambled to defend himself with desperate energy.
“I’m disappointed, Student Leon… And here you always used to praise my healing as the absolute best…”
“N-no, Professor…? I, um, I don’t take back what I said back then, but today is just… circumstances are a little different, sort of…”
“Hic.”
Professor Bloomrain dabbed at imaginary tears with a theatrical little gesture, and Erina immediately piled on from the side with a jeer.
“Booo— trash—”
“Ah, this isn’t what I meant…!”
Meanwhile, still standing and receiving Erina’s healing, Linea spoke up.
“You two really suit each other, don’t you?”
“Huh, for real?”
Leon perked up at the compliment, and Linea, clearly enjoying herself, kept going.
“Yes. Your chemistry feels great, and even your hair and eye colors are similar. You look good together—I really hope it works out.”
If Erina gets interested in Leon and the two of them get together… she’ll naturally drift away from Professor Kyle. And that’ll clear the way for my own romance plans… heeheehee.
“Whaaat? Linea! Don’t say creepy stuff like that! Leon’s just another academy classmate who enrolled the same year as you, that’s all.”
“…Aren’t your standards a little too high, Erina? Someone like Leon is…”
“Whoa whoa, both of you, no fighting… I’m fine either way. I was just playing along with Linea’s comment, okay?”
Both Erina and Leon drew clear lines, leaving Linea privately disappointed. Not much she could do about it, though. If both of them said no, that was that.
“Ufufu… How lovely to watch, you three. Youth really is wonderful, isn’t it?”
The remark came from Bloomrain, who was still glued to Leon’s side while finishing the heal.
“You’re not that much older than us either, Professor Bloomrain.”
Twenty-four, was it?
“…Ah~, true enough. I never graduated from the academy myself—I entered the priesthood early. I never expected I’d end up back here later in a completely different capacity.”
Once recovery had progressed far enough that Erina and Bloomrain stepped away from the two who had just sparred, Leon’s praise for Linea floated over.
“Seriously though, you’re amazing, Linea. Before the match started I was sure I’d win.”
“Weren’t you underestimating me just because I’m a girl, Young Master Leon? Thanks to that, I managed to win this spar by pure luck.”
Pure luck, she says… Was the match just now really something that could be decided by luck alone?
Looking at how relatively fine Linea seemed after the spar versus Leon still collapsed on the ground panting for breath made the answer pretty clear.
The student called Leon was the third son of House Howard, a marquisate famous for producing powerful warriors generation after generation. Unfortunately for this generation’s first-years, Linea simply outclassed him by a small margin.
Linea stood with both fists planted on her hips, delivering lines that sat somewhere between humility and arrogance. Leon scratched the back of his head, looking thoroughly embarrassed.
Watching from a short distance away, I turned to the female professor standing beside me and spoke.
“Looks like our student won this round.”
“Yes, so it seems.”
The one answering was Professor Serena of the Combat Techniques Department. Compared to the Holy Combat Department the curriculum might differ in the end, but since both departments taught combat and focused primarily on the sword, there was enough overlap that we occasionally held joint classes like this.
She really is the cold-beauty type, just like she looks.
Short black hair cut in a sharp bob, blue eyes, black cloak over a black uniform, and an expression that stayed frosty. She looked extremely strict.
“Still, the semester’s barely been underway a month, so Linea could always get caught up to, right? Haha.”
“Could you… not stand quite so close?”
“Pardon?”
Without another word she strode forward and raised her voice.
“All right! Combat Techniques Department, class resumes! Gather up again!”
Hmm… I’d been genuinely glad to meet someone around my own age and had spoken with a bright expression, but I hadn’t expected to get the cold shoulder like that.
Then the Serena who’d just walked off came striding right back toward me.
What now?
“Um, so…”
“Yes.”
Looking a little awkward, she managed:
“The students… said they want to see the diagonal rising slash that Professor Kyle uses from below… if that’s all right.”
That was it?
“…Couldn’t Professor Serena just demonstrate it?”
“They say they want to see yours as well…”
A faintly troubled look crossed her usually icy face.
“Ah, is that so? Well then… shall we?”
Somehow that cold impression made her look almost cute, so I simply agreed. Showing one demonstration slash wasn’t going to put me in a tight spot. Swinging a sword was swinging a sword—whether it was me or Professor Serena, the core technique side of things wouldn’t differ that much. With my reputation thrown in, the students probably just wanted to study both professors’ diagonal slashes side by side in one place.
So we gathered the students from both departments again and began the demonstration of the diagonal rising slash.
Professor Serena went first.
Left-handed, huh.
“Huu…”
She gripped the sword with both hands, set it at a diagonal by her left hip, and seemed to steady her breathing for a moment.
Whooom…!
It was an extremely heavy strike. Only a single exchange, but completely different from anything the students swung—clean, economical, not a single wasted motion. The wind pressure generated by the blade even reached the people watching from the nearby safety zone as a soft, rustling breeze.
Oh. So that’s how you do it.
It almost felt surprisingly straightforward.
Applause and cheers poured from the students for Professor Serena, and then it was my turn.
All right then…
I stepped into the spot where she had just stood, took the plain iron sword in hand, and set the tip down toward my right hip. As I regulated my breathing, mana and Holy Power began gathering little by little from my core throughout my body, bringing with it a pleasant tension.
I shifted more weight onto my forward left foot and deliberately loosened the rigidity I’d been holding in my body. Soft, glittering mana wrapped itself around the entire blade in a faint glow. Soft murmuring rose from the surroundings, but I was concentrating too hard for any of it to really register.
And at last—
I opened my eyes and, almost without thinking, swung the sword toward the mountain peak visible ahead.
Shuk, shhwaaa—!
Crack!
What the…!
The dense sword aura that had condensed around the blade shot into the sky. Far in the background, the lower part of the academy’s rear mountain peak suddenly looked as if a sword had sliced a clean notch straight through it.
—Whoa, the preparatory stance and the swing itself looked totally casual, but the mountain got cut!
—You can actually see the cut mark with the naked eye? Does that even make sense?
—I guess that just proves how strong he is. But is that really okay…?
—Dunno! The adults will handle it!
—You don’t know who Professor Kyle is? Like some mountain’s gonna cause a problem just because he cut it a little?
Only then did my ears open enough to catch the students’ excited chatter, but that wasn’t the real issue right now.
Right in front of me, the pointed tip of the mountain peak. From a distance the triangular shape of the summit still looked intact, but the slash had passed cleanly just beneath it, carving a sharp gap that now let blue sky show through in a big empty hole.
Anyway… I was pretty sure of one thing.
I was going to have to write a reflection report, weren’t I?
“Professor Kyle—?”
“Ah, yes… Headmaster.”
In the end I had been summoned to the headmaster’s office.
“Would you mind explaining exactly what happened?”
“Ah, well, that is…”
If I just said I was still clumsy with my power and made a mistake, would anyone even believe me?
“Haa… Never mind.”
“Pardon?”
“Well… even though Professor Kyle’s reputation is quite lofty, you’re still only twenty-five. And I, or someone else, should have told you about ‘that mountain’ sooner…”
That mountain?
The way she said it made it sound like something was actually up there. Cutting the top of the mountain in half wasn’t exactly something I could call a good deed, of course… but it was just a mountain. At worst I figured a few wild animals lived there.
…Had something been living there?
Then I was in real trouble.
The headmaster continued.
“I never expected the problem would come back this quickly. This is my negligence.”
“That mountain… is there something on the academy’s rear mountain?”