Class Exchange Match (4)
Boom!
A blast like a cannon shell tore through the arena. The sound was the result of my fist colliding with Jackson's blade.
"Kh…!"
Ordinarily, when a fist meets a sword's edge, common sense says the fist loses. Pressing bare flesh against a cutting edge is little better than self-harm. Jackson, however, never got the chance to prove that rule. My dash was so much faster than he expected that he couldn't even react properly—he caught the blow on the flat of his blade instead.
Thud. The impact sent his body reeling. The sword shoved back by my fist, his stance collapsed, and I did not miss the opening.
Whoosh—my other fist drove forward, ripping the air. The target was Jackson's gut: hard to dodge cleanly, and a hit that would definitely stack damage.
"You son of a—!"
A simple feint. If he guarded his abdomen, he wouldn't be able to recover his footing. He'd be too busy scrambling to answer my next strike. And even if he tried to slip the blow, the hitbox was wide enough that dodging wouldn't be easy. Force a desperate evade and he'd only eat an even cleaner shot.
Boom!
Jackson read my intent and yanked his arm down in a panic. The delayed hilt met my fist, and once again he lost his balance.
No more hesitation. Lock him down the same way and beat him senseless. In game terms, it was the classic chip-damage loop—nibble away at stamina until nothing was left.
Boom!
Every time I threw a punch, Jackson was reduced to pure defense. Give him even a breath of space and he might have switched to offense, or at least landed a halfway decent counter. But from that very first dash, he had completely lost the flow and been dragged into my rhythm.
Of course he had.
Jackson Percival. In Song of Sword and Sorcery, he showed up as the seventh-ranked second-year in the Knight Department—a textbook thug whose defining trait was a tough body that let him get away with being an absolute bastard.
His whole fighting style is weight-class brawling.
Which meant Jackson was especially helpless against anyone heavier than he was. He'd lived off pure bulk, so once that failed him, he had nothing left.
I'd learned that playing the original. Act One, Chapter Three—"Establishing Dominance"—where he showed up specifically to torment the protagonist. A veteran like me knew perfectly well what happened once this guy lost the tempo. He turned into an idiot.
Boom!
Another detonation.
"Hah… hah…"
He couldn't even defend properly anymore. Jackson's body bounced hard, and before he knew it he had been driven all the way to the edge of the ring. One wrong step and he would tumble straight off. Clinging to the boundary by a thread, he lifted his eyes to me.
Pupils trembling with pure disbelief. The sneer he'd worn moments ago was gone without a trace. All that remained was the despair of a trash mob that had already smelled defeat.
"Come to think of it—what was it you said again?"
Tap. I took a single step toward him. Jackson tried to back away, realized he had nowhere left to go, and clenched his teeth.
"Whether I forfeit of my own free will, or get thrown out of the ring… you said you'd make me say it myself."
"Kh… uurgh…"
"So how about you?"
Jackson gripped his sword with everything he had left. Sparks of fury lit in his bloodshot eyes. A cornered rat will bite a cat, they say—and his stance looked exactly like that.
"Will you forfeit on your own, or will you roll out of the arena looking pathetic?"
"…You son of a bitch!"
"Well. I think I already know the answer."
Jackson roared, spittle flying, and charged with his sword clenched tight. Compared to my earlier dash it was sluggish—just a last scrap of momentum he'd managed to scrape together. Nowhere near enough to reach me.
I raised my arm. Index finger and thumb pressed together. The other three fingers splayed wide as I drew the joined pair taut.
Tanjigong.
A technique from the Twelve Nebula Fists. Not a pure weight-class slugfest—technique, applied with brains. That was my strategy.
"Guys who talk big on bulk alone—"
The first technique of the Twelve Nebula Fists.
Fingers snap — a crushing physical shockwave erupts.
THOOOM!
The instant my fingers flicked, a monstrous shockwave blasted straight at Jackson.
"Wha—?!"
He never imagined I had a ranged attack. He tried, too late, to twist aside—but there was no way he could abort a full-power charge. Like a moth diving into flame, he drove himself straight into the Tanjigong.
"—Ghk—."
CRACK!
A sound no human body should ever make. The shockwave struck Jackson dead center in the gut and hurled him clear across the arena.
Crash!
He slammed into the dusty ground outside the ring and flopped there in a heap.
"Kh… hah…"
A clean hit to the abdomen. Jackson didn't even try to stand. He blacked out on the spot, foam bubbling from his mouth in an ugly froth.
"…You never deserved to stand in this arena."
I wouldn't even give him the chance to forfeit on his own. With that declaration, the duel was over.
Act One, Chapter Four—Class Exchange Match: cleared.
Silence swallowed the grounds.
A sight no one could quite believe. Not a single cadet opened their mouth; they held their breath as one.
Jackson, seventh among the Knight Department's second-years, had lost to Heracle—the Mage Department's second-year substitute. And he had done it with nothing but his body.
The Knight Department cadets reacted first.
"What the fuck was that…?! Jackson lost? For real?"
"What did I just watch? Am I seeing things?"
"That was pure brawling, right? He won with his fists—insane!"
"He didn't use a single spell!"
A shocking result. A matchup everyone had assumed was a free win. When the underdog detonated the odds, the Knight Department cadets felt their heads spin.
And Jackson's defeat wasn't just Jackson's problem.
"This… we're not about to lose the championship, are we?"
Someone swallowed hard and muttered it under their breath. A chill ran down every spine in earshot.
Next came the Mage Department cadets.
"What the hell? Why did Heracle win?"
"He didn't cast once. What kind of body is a mage even using?"
"Yeah, but… he still won."
"…Wait. The bottom rank just beat seventh place. That's championship territory…!"
People who hadn't expected a thing from Heracle began, little by little, to revise their opinion. Plenty still wondered how he'd won without magic—but the fact remained that he had defended the pride of the Mage Department's second-years.
Dead last had just taken down seventh. An underdog victory stacked bonus points like crazy. Even if Fenel had lost earlier, the championship itself was suddenly very likely to land with the Mage Department…!
Of course, the cadets weren't the only ones reeling from the result.
Far above the arena, in the upper seats where the instructors sat to prepare and judge the brackets, a heated debate was already underway.
"What was that supposed to be? Was that even magic?"
"What kind of stunt was that? A mage beating a knight with his body?"
"Did you see the finger flick? Could it have been Wind Gun?"
Each of them was dissecting the secret behind Heracle's victory. There was plenty to find interesting: a physique so overwhelming it had shoved aside even Jackson, a man who lived on pure weight class; the instinctive movement that put that body to work. You could pick the performance apart forever.
But the detail that stood out most—
"No."
—was that technique just now, the one that flicked the air from his fingers and launched Jackson clear out of the ring. What on earth was it?
"That wasn't magic. At least, not magic as we've ever understood it."
"What do you mean by that, Instructor Angelina?"
"I saw that technique of Cadet Heracle's recently in Introduction to Elementalism."
"Surely not…! Tell us at once!"
Angelina's eyes lit up. She remembered it perfectly—the assignment she always set in the first week of Introduction to Elementalism: Shatter the Boulder.
"You all know my assignment, yes? The boulder even second-years can barely scratch."
"Famous for it."
The reply came from Diggory, the first-year advisor. He pushed up his rimless glasses and asked,
"A difficulty no cadet has ever cleared in the first week. What of it?"
"What if I told you Cadet Heracle was the student who cleared it in that very first week? Would you believe me?"
"…!"
Diggory sucked in a breath. So did every other Mage Department instructor within earshot.
"Cadet Heracle's technique was unmistakably charged with mana. But it had too many alien qualities to simply call it a spell."
"…"
"I've done some analysis since then. The name I've settled on for Cadet Heracle's magic is…"
There, Angelina gave it a name. Heracle's unique combat style—the power that made the body itself into magic.
"Battle Mage. That seemed fitting. Watching a fighting style that looked like a blend of knight and mage is what put it in my head."
"…"
Silence. Not one of the Mage Department instructors opened their mouth.
Battle Mage.
The concept Angelina had just coined was something none of them had ever heard. An original build that used one's own body as the vessel for magic.
Yes. Olympia Academy had no choice but to admit it now. The cadet they had dismissed so thoroughly—the one they had even arranged a separate interview for, hoping this chance would humiliate him into expulsion—that same Heracle was standing in the Colosseum and declaring it to the world.
Knights who could raise aura along a blade but struggled to wrap it around their own flesh. Mages who could only fling spells from a safe distance like bookish cowards, never learning to move their bodies.
Neither of those. A trendsetter who fused both sides into one.
The arrival of the Battle Mage.