The Telekinetic's Blind Spot
"Whoa~ whoa~ vicious."
Having dodged Meilyn's attack by a hair's breadth, Milena clicked her tongue. A stretch of the fortress wall had frozen over like a kingdom of ice. She slapped her arms up and down to shake off the thin frost clinging to her, then looked at Meilyn.
"Pleasure."
Proper etiquette demanded showing respect to the stronger party. Milena took the hem of her uniform skirt in a light grip and dipped into a bow.
"Milena Hearts, Class G."
"Meilyn Villenne. Class A."
Meilyn spat the reply out curtly, weaving a magic circle up across her palm.
"Wait, Meilyn!"
Behind them, Dick — still pinned motionless by Milena's curse — shouted out.
"Be careful! That girl is definit— Woahk!"
Dick's body rose up onto a sheet of ice thrusting out of the ground. He slipped, fell, and went sliding straight down the slanted surface like a child on a playground slide.
Somewhere along the way, the icy track had formed all the way into the distance.
"You're in the way, so get lost somewhere far away. Commoner."
"No! Just listen to what I—! Aaaahk!"
Riding the ice slide, Dick shot away at an astonishing speed. Milena made a disappointed face.
"I was planning to finish him off quietly. A shame. Still—"
Her eyes, which had been following Dick's receding figure, swung back toward Meilyn.
"Rather than some nobody like that, might as well take down a name, right?"
"Hilarious."
Meilyn sneered, and Milena smiled right back.
SHRAAAAAAK!
There was no opening signal in a battle between necromancers. A lance of glacier ice shot out from Meilyn's palm, and Milena dodged it with nothing more than a light sidestep at a run.
Excellent physical abilities. Aspiring Magic Combat student level.
Meilyn had her assessment done in an instant.
KUUNG!
KUGUUNG!
This time it was Milena's turn. She churned both hands through the air, and bricks torn free from the fortress floor floated up weightlessly before hurling themselves at Meilyn.
"Party tricks."
Meilyn swept her arm with contemptuous ease.
GWADUDUDUDUDUK!
The difference was mass. A wave of glacier ice unfolded from her palm, swallowing the incoming bricks whole and crashing down on Milena.
But once again, Milena slipped aside without any apparent effort.
So you're going to keep dodging like that, are you?
Meilyn rapidly prepared her next move and stepped onto a magic circle laid into the ground.
Magic Combat types — this is the straight answer.
<Ice Field>
Ice sheeted across a wide area centered on her feet. Milena, standing still, wobbled once.
"Ice that drops the friction coefficient this much — amazing! Are curse formulas mixed in there too?"
Meilyn answered that question was useless, raising both arms high. The surrounding ice lifted into the air.
When she brought her arms down, countless shards of ice rained onto Milena. Milena tried to flee in a hurry, wobbled a second time, and finally went skidding across the frozen ground, landing on her rear with a squeal.
The ice came down right on top of her head.
KWA-KWA-KWA-KWA-KWA-KWA!
Watching a mountain of ice pile itself around the point where Milena sat, Meilyn allowed herself a satisfied smile.
Cut off the escape with the ice sheet, then finish it with the stockpiled ice. Even by her own standards, it was a perfect victory.
"Whoa."
The moment she turned her back to leave, Meilyn felt her heart lurch — and looked back over her shoulder.
"Cool."
Milena was still sitting right where she had fallen, and all around her, the shards Meilyn had dropped lay heaped like a mountain range.
As though Milena had been deliberately spared, not a single fragment had touched her.
Meilyn's expression froze, and her mouth shut.
What? Did I mess up my control?
Milena rose with an ominous smile, instantly wreathed her feet in Jet-Black, and charged at Meilyn.
"Kgh!"
Fast. Again.
Meilyn flinched at the momentum and threw up a wall of ice in front of herself.
"Hoit!"
With a bizarre battle cry, Milena leapt with monstrous power and simply cleared the wall of ice on two feet.
"Are you an idiot?"
Meilyn retreated, flinging an ice spear up at the airborne Milena. But Milena, hanging in midair with a cute little pose while gripping her uniform skirt, smirked.
"You're the idiot."
The spear, its target locked in long in advance, passed by — missing Milena by a hair's breadth.
Meilyn's eyes wavered with sheer disbelief.
No, what the hell is going on?!
TAP.
Milena landed, malice flaring from her eyes, and came charging in.
As she ran, she swept her left hand — and the handful of Meilyn's ice she had just scooped up scattered, reshaped into throwing stars.
"How dare it — that's my ice!"
"Heehee."
Milena charging head-on from the front. And the ice stars scattered through the air spinning in slow circles, flying at Meilyn from every direction.
There was no gap to dodge through. Walling herself in on all sides would take time.
"My win~"
The curse magic circle rippling on Milena's right hand turned toward Meilyn's face.
KUGUGUGUGUGU!
But at the decisive moment, Meilyn vanished before Milena's eyes.
"Ah!"
Meilyn was already standing atop a pillar of ice that had erupted from the ground. Milena's right hand swung through empty air, and the throwing stars thudded harmlessly into the pillar.
Not left, not right — escape straight upward.
Looking down at Milena from above, Meilyn irritably lifted one leg.
"Ugh!"
Then she stomped the pillar. With a mighty CRASH, it collapsed, and the ice wreckage buried Milena.
"FALL!"
KUGUNG!
KUNG!
KUKUKUKUKUUNG!
And of course, this time too—
"You see, you see, I've been in the High Squad this whole time—"
Not one fragment out of all that ice had struck Milena.
"You're the first opponent this strong I've ever faced! Meilyn!"
Meilyn leapt down from the pillar, hit the ground, and glared at Milena while gasping for breath.
Well, it's my first time facing a necromancer whose specialty is the telekinesis school too!
From Meilyn's standpoint, nothing could have been more troublesome. Milena was simply twisting the trajectory of every projectile that flew at her.
Granted, she wasn't at the level of seizing control of Meilyn's own magic — spells packed with force and mass — but by bending the paths of incoming projectiles by just a degree here and there, she was all but immune to ranged attacks.
Worse, this Milena girl wielded not only telekinesis — a Jet-Black Mechanics discipline — but Magic Combat and curses at a high level too.
Why on earth was a monster commanding three subjects at major-level proficiency not a Special Admission student?
"Here I come, coming through!"
PA-BA-BA-BA-BA-BAT!
Milena came running, both arms whipping furiously. Knowing it was futile, Meilyn still had to hurl ice to slow her down.
Bit by bit, her Jet-Black was draining away.
"Uuuurgh, I'm dying."
Dick walked, gasping for air. Soldiers flanked him, holding him up on either side.
"A-are you all right, sir? Squeak!"
"Yes. My body is just absurdly heavy, that's all."
They were heading for the battlefield where Meilyn and Milena were fighting. The closer they drew to the fierce spectacle of ice surging and shattering, the darker the soldiers' expressions became.
"Chik! Chik! You're injured as it is — isn't it dangerous to go any farther?"
"I have information that has to be delivered right now."
Within Group 7, Dick and Meilyn were always butting heads over everything. Their personalities were fundamentally incompatible — and so were their fighting styles.
Dick's method was to dig relentlessly into an opponent's weaknesses with his own brand of information-gathering and analysis, and bring them down through those cracks.
Meilyn, on the other hand, was a one-woman army. She valued nothing but her own strength.
Sure, she'd use intel on an opponent if she happened to have it, but her basic philosophy was that as long as she herself was strong and stood tall, nothing else mattered — and that the time spent analyzing an enemy was better spent raising her own capability.
But if Meilyn knew that the technique her opponent Milena was using belonged to the telekinesis school, Dick believed, she had no chance of winning.
Against a telekinesis user, Meilyn will never use Jet-Black flame.
Fire could be scattered by telekinesis far more easily than ice.
Its color and heat made it easy for a telekinesis user to read at a glance. Carelessly unleashing a Jet-Black flame spell meant the caster herself could be burned in return. In short — it was a counter.
What actually worked against a telekinesis user were wind, which gave itself away so poorly, and earth, which rose from below and was hard to answer — but Meilyn was still a beginner in both of those affinities.
So she would keep firing nothing but ice, on and on, until her Jet-Black ran dry. And that would be her defeat.
But Dick knew the truth. Milena was not using telekinesis at all.
She didn't know the first character of the word, her Jet-Black Mechanics grades were bottom-tier, and the only subjects she excelled at were Magic Combat and curses.
"Please don't be late— hmm?"
The two girls, now overheated in their battle, had left the fortress wall at some point and were fighting in the residential quarter between the outer and inner walls. Leaping from rooftop to rooftop, they were furiously exchanging dark magic.
"Ah. We're screwed."
Watching the two of them make it all the way to the houses, Dick's face went hollow with despair.
The three-stack Exhaust showed not the slightest sign of wearing off. The formulas had been deliberately twisted, it seemed, because even his crude Cancellation couldn't dispel it.
This was exactly why he hated curse specialists.
What do I do?
While Dick was pacing and wracking his brain, his head snapped up with a jolt.
"Adjutant! Go to Simon right now — no, to the Commander-in-Chief — and deliver my message! As fast as you possibly can!"
"And what message shall I deliver, sir? Squeak!"
THUD.
Meilyn landed on the roof of a weathered shanty, breathing hard.
Milena, by contrast, wore an utterly relaxed expression as she drifted lightly onto the roof next door, smiling.
"Getting close to your limit, hmm? I wonder how I should cook you."
"You—!!"
Meilyn spread her palm, and a hail of ice spikes flew out one after another.
"Predictable."
Milena brushed the attack aside with light, economical movements, bending only the ice that would actually have struck her.
That said, Milena was human too, and her control wasn't perfect — every so often a spike grazed her body.
Ironically, Meilyn — who had always trusted in nothing but her own strength — was now pinning all her hopes on her opponent's mistakes.
How humiliating!
She clenched her fist.
Telekinesis, on top of Magic Combat! The matchup was bad — and too bad to even be fair. If her opponent had been a pure telekinesis user, Meilyn was confident she could have simply buried her under sheer mass and won.
"Shall we wrap this up, then?"
Milena crouched low against the roof, about to charge—
SHWAAAAAAAA!
A shriek of split air came out of nowhere.
"Oh my gosh!"
Her balance thrown, Milena ducked flat to evade.
A jet-black arrow, dyed through with Jet-Black, shot past Milena and thudded into a nearby wall. The gust of its passage knocked Milena clean off the roof, and she had to roll across the ground.
"Aaargh! What now, out of nowhere?"
Milena's irritated shriek rang out, but Meilyn wasn't listening.
An arrow?
Meilyn's head turned. There stood Simon — the man who was supposed to be defending the main gate — holding a drawn bow, a picture out of a painting.
He was too far away for her to make out his face, but he was already turning back toward the fortress wall, directing his Skeleton Mages.
Simon's clothes!
Tied to the arrow was a set of Simon's clothes, with a single note attached. Meilyn hastily unfolded it and read.
"……"
The reason he'd fired an arrow instead of simply using a communication spell.
She grasped Simon's intent in an instant — and immediately fixed her poker face in place. The moment she folded the note away into her breast, the roof burst open with a bang and Milena climbed up through the hole.
"Forget the pest, let's get back to it!"
As Milena came charging, Meilyn leapt off the roof and ran down a narrow, empty alley.
Milena was obviously faster, and Meilyn deliberately lured her in to point-blank range.
The instant Milena spread a curse across her palm, reaching to slap it onto Meilyn's body—
<Dark Blaze>
FWOORORORUK!
For the first time in the entire battle, Jet-Black flame radiated from Meilyn's palm in a dead-straight line.
And—
"AAAAAACK!"
Milena took the most obvious attack imaginable head-on.
She writhed in the burning fire, rolling across the ground in agony.
It was bitterly ironic. The girl who had refused Meilyn a single clean hit all this time had been swallowed by nothing more than a straight blast of flame.
"Strange."
Meilyn walked toward her, step by deliberate step.
"If you were a telekinesis user, the moment I breathed fire you could have turned it back on me and burned me instead. Couldn't you have?"
"I-it was a mistake."
Milena wove a fire-suppression curse, barely choked the flames out, and rose to her feet with a strained smile.
"There won't be a second mista—!"
<Dark Whisp>
Small balls of flame came bounding out of Meilyn's hand.
POOM! PO-BO-BONG!
The girl who'd sworn there'd be no second mistake scrambled frantically to dodge the fireballs — and even took a few on the shoulder before face-planting into the dirt.
"Doesn't it strike you as absurd? Why can a telekinesis user control ice — but never turn the direction of a flame?"
Meilyn wore the smile of a hunter whose trap had finally sprung.
"……You dared to play with me, huh?"