Contract (2)
Contract (2)
The quiet, ordinary park and forest turned hostile around me.
Stone walls shot up to encircle the area, while the ground bucked and rolled beneath me, throwing me off balance.
Rumble!
Tree branches whipped toward me like lashing cords.
Swish.
Roots tore through the earth, twisting upward to ensnare me.
Pollen carried on the wind turned into microscopic blades, slicing fine cuts into my skin.
The moonlight illuminating the night warped out of shape, making it difficult to see my surroundings clearly.
Before I knew it, Balea was nowhere to be seen.
She had concealed herself by manipulating the objects within her domain.
It felt completely different from when we fought indoors.
Then again, there was no way a fight in an open forest would be the same as a fight inside a building.
My feet barely touched the ground.
Kicking off the rising stone walls and parrying the roots thrusting toward me, I launched myself high into the air.
Like someone bouncing on a trampoline in my past life, I bounded around wildly, presenting a sight that was anything but knightly.
"Jumping around to dodge like that won't do you any good. Even if Young Lord is a far more exceptional knight than I anticipated, you can't possibly hold out like that until someone arrives."
Balea's voice echoed around me, but even with it to guide me, I couldn't pinpoint her location.
Unless she was bluffing, she either had a larger mana reserve than I'd estimated, or her ability to construct a domain consumed far less mana than expected.
If it were an inherited ability of the elemental or telekinetic branch, its heavy mana consumption would make her run out of mana far faster than me, who was simply dodging—but her domain seemed different.
I had no intention of banking on the off chance that she was bluffing and trying to stall.
After all, the only reason I was dodging like this was to double-check a few things.
How it differed from what I'd seen indoors, and where the boundary of this domain lay.
And just now, my verification was complete.
Thump!
Leaping about to avoid the attacking objects, I kicked off a surging stone pillar and shot high into the sky.
As if she'd expected it, sharp fragments of stone and broken tree branches hurled toward me as I hung suspended in midair.
Deflecting the incoming debris, I looked down.
It was just as I'd anticipated.
Though the domain's horizontal range was far broader than it had been at the Baron's mansion, its vertical reach was not.
Inside her domain, objects could reshape themselves according to her will, but once I moved beyond its boundary, all she could do was launch projectiles outward.
If that was the case, I could simply escape beyond the deployed domain. But she seemed to have foreseen that and erected high stone walls around its perimeter.
On top of that, she hadn't raised a stone wall on the forest side, clearly trying to lure me in that direction.
Having reached the apex of my jump, I plummeted back down.
I could vividly sense the branches, roots, stones, and earth all preparing to attack me at once.
Without a doubt, Balea's inherited ability was truly formidable.
To turn every single object within the domain into a weapon...
If this were a fully enclosed indoor space or a battleground littered with weapons, she might be virtually invincible.
But in a place like this, her weapons weren't particularly lethal.
Piles of stone and trees. Thanks to her ability, the materials felt reinforced—unlike ordinary rock or wood—yet their core nature hadn't fundamentally changed.
Then again, it wasn't as if she had anywhere else at the Academy where she could sneak me off to fight away from prying eyes.
She didn't have much choice.
And since the sky wasn't sealed off, I could easily buy enough time just by jumping high into the air.
With attacks flying at me from all directions, only an ability user or a knight with extraordinarily honed senses beyond what eyesight alone could provide could barely manage to dodge them.
Still, after experiencing her domain twice now, I felt I had a grasp of how it functioned.
This domain was saturated with her mana.
The objects inside the domain transformed and moved under the influence of the mana filling the space.
When mana shifted, gathered, and surged upward, the roots moved in tandem to impale me.
Tracking the mana before the roots struck, I lightly shifted my body, riding the surging roots as I plummeted down.
"That's truly incredible. How are you dodging all of that? Is it because you have a great Mana Cultivation Technique? Can any skilled knight do that?"
Since I was dodging so effortlessly, Balea finally spoke up.
How should I know? I heard royalty possessed 'Mana Resonance' by default—maybe royals could do it.
Balea seemed confident that her location wouldn't be discovered.
On top of that, she likely believed that even if she were found, any object destroyed within her domain would simply regenerate endlessly, allowing her to block whatever came her way.
But I could pinpoint her location.
Strangely, even with my ability to sense mana, locating her directly inside this domain proved difficult.
Yet by tracing the movements of the mana saturating the domain, I was able to track her down.
Balea had described her domain as a kingdom. But to me, it felt less like a kingdom and more like a body.
The moving objects were her physical frame, while the surrounding mana served as nerves and muscle.
And at the epicenter where all the mana's movement originated—the focal point of all that energy—she was bound to be.
I launched myself toward that spot.
Evading incoming branches and deflecting flying stones, I closed in until trees reared up to block my path.
It was no longer just branches or roots; whole trees, uprooted from the earth, were moving.
She must have been uprooting them continuously so she could move the trees themselves.
I unleashed sword aura from my dagger and slashed through the tree blocking my way.
Slash.
"It's useless. Everything inside here regenerates infinitely."
Just as she said, even though I severed the tree with my sword aura, the severed trees continued swinging their branches at me anyway.
Slash, slash.
Even so, I kept cutting them down.
"I told you it's useless! Doing that— Wait, why...?"
Her startled voice was accompanied by—
Thud. Thud. Thud.
The trees collapsed.
Even if a physical body could regenerate infinitely, severing all its nerves and muscles rendered it immobile until they reconnected.
The severed trees had endured because of the mana flow. Severing that flow entirely meant the trees couldn't move until it reconnected.
With the blocking trees collapsed, I burst forward in a single bound and slashed my blade at one of the remaining trees.
It looked like an ordinary tree, just like the others, but before my blade could touch it, it transformed into a person.
"I surrender!"
Balea stood there with both hands raised.
My blade ground to a sudden halt.
The dagger stopped mere inches from her neck.
Blood dripped from her raised wrist, nicked by the lingering sword aura.
Drip.
And the moment she declared her surrender, the surrounding environment shifted.
The squirming trees reverted to their original forms, and the towering stone walls sank back into the earth.
The mangled stone path returned to its former state, and the moonlight reclaimed its original luminescence.
The domain had vanished.
It was back to being an ordinary park and forest. But the traces of battle hadn't vanished completely, which promised to be quite a headache if Academy officials caught sight of them.
"Didn't you say I was your father's enemy?"
I asked, keeping my blade pointed at her.
Would she claim she'd mistaken me for someone else? Or was she planning to attack me again later?
"You are my father's enemy."
Guess not.
"But I don't think I can win against you. So I'm giving up."
Ugh, I really couldn't fathom what went on inside this woman's head.
"I've done as much as my duty as a daughter requires of me. Honestly, if I weren't his daughter, I wouldn't have fought you at all—I would have rejoiced that you killed him. You know how thrilled I was when my father died."
Balea continued, her blood-stained arm still held up in the air.
"I have no intention of sacrificing my life for someone I didn't even like."
"Still, you tried to kill me."
"Yes. That was the plan."
"And you think failing to kill me and declaring surrender settles everything?"
As I spoke, I caught myself before trying to argue that she'd attacked me because of a misunderstanding. No matter what I said, she wouldn't listen anyway.
No, more than that, it was becoming increasingly difficult to just kill her. Should I have not stopped my blade?
"I couldn't help it. Call it a conflict between my sense of duty as a daughter and my desire to live."
She was utterly shameless.
Up until we came here, she'd put on all sorts of fake, innocent, sweet acts. Seeing her true nature now, I almost wished she'd go back to pretending.
"You tried to kill me. Why should I spare you just because you surrendered?"
Reporting her to the Academy instead of killing her was an option, but I couldn't do that because of what she knew.
I already had more than a few covert incidents on my hands; I couldn't let rumors spread right now that I'd assassinated the Baron.
Which meant killing her seemed like the only option.
Just as the scales tipped back toward killing her, she spoke.
"I'll become your companion. I'll even save your life. As you know, I'm not exactly weak. It must have been difficult to handle dirty work given your position as the illegitimate son of the ducal house, so I'll handle all the covert tasks you can't bring to light."
She spoke with sparkling eyes.
Hmm. That actually sounded surprisingly tempting. Still, trusting her was another matter.
"Let's go to the temple and make a contract. If you'd like, I can even call you Mas-ter."
Her voice turned honeyed and sweet. But her seductive tone didn't resonate with me at all.
Instead, the word contract caught my attention instantly.
"Are you serious?"
"Of course. I pulled this stunt fully prepared for that much. Besides, I don't think Master will put me through hardship like my father did."
"I don't need a 'Master' title."
I sheathed my blade.
"We'll make the contract tomorrow morning."
"Yes!"
She lowered her arm as well.
In the end, I decided to spare her life.
I didn't fully trust her yet, nor did I know how things would unfold in the future.
Unlike other people, however, I had the ability to undo this decision if needed.
With the tension easing somewhat, I asked her about something I was curious about.
"What were you planning to do if you actually killed me? You'd definitely have been caught."
That reason was precisely why it had been difficult for me to kill Balea, too.
"I was going to run away immediately. My father knew a mercenary. I was planning to find him and flee to the Empire or another kingdom."
She lacked any deep forethought or coherent plan.
She seemed to place little value on her status as an Academy student or her position as a baron's daughter.
Should I call her a free spirit?
Yet hearing her offer to sign a contract made me think that wasn't quite right, either.
No matter how much I pondered it, she was utterly incomprehensible.
While I was lost in thought, she tentatively raised her hand.
"Um, more importantly... I feel extremely dizzy. Is it alright if I faint for a moment?"
With those words, Balea collapsed backward.
Her sleeves were drenched in blood, and a pool of blood had formed on the ground beneath her.
Looking down at the fallen Balea, I let out a sigh.
Pulling out a handkerchief, I tied off her wrist, scooped her up, and walked toward the infirmary.
The next day was a holiday.
She and I left the Academy grounds and headed to a temple.
Although there was a priest at the Academy infirmary, he wasn't specialized in contracts, and making a contract inside the Academy would make it difficult to keep things secret.
After traveling by carriage for a good while to find a contract priest, Balea and I drafted the contract in front of him.
It was skewed as much in my favor as possible.
It stipulated that she had to keep my secrets confidential and barred her from harming me.
While it was difficult to formalize a requirement that she protect my life or act as a true companion, those clauses alone made the contract overwhelmingly one-sided.
Because the mana embedded in the contract had its limits, it wasn't a lifelong pact, but it was bound to remain in effect for a sufficiently long time.
The priest was astounded as he reviewed the contract and questioned Balea several times, but she simply smiled and signed her name.
She wasn't a companion, nor was she someone I could easily trust, but nonetheless, it felt as if I'd gained someone who shared a secret with me.