173. Clash of Fire and Rock
173. Clash of Fire and Rock
The air was muggy and oppressive.
Before her stood the enemy she had to face right now: Edgar Lemnos, swinging his sword and radiating a blazing heat.
From the moment they first met, Lucia had disliked Edgar Lemnos.
She'd disliked how rude and rough he was right from the start, but what she truly hated was that he was a big man.
-Chaeng!!!
The blazing demon sword and the two-handed sword clashed.
Edgar's attacks, enhanced by his elevated realm, carried a heat so intense it was hard for an opponent to endure.
Even after parrying the blade, the suffocating heat would drain additional stamina.
But not a single drop of sweat ran down Lucia's face.
The heat from Edgar could not invade the space around Lucia, a space she had already completely dominated.
Right now, Edgar Lemnos was standing before her eyes, but Lucia's gaze was fixed on a point much farther away.
At the end of her gaze was Atlas, surrounded by a horde of students.
She wanted to end this quickly and clash swords with him.
There was no particular reason she specifically wanted to cross swords with him.
It was simply because, for Lucia Russell, who was not good with words, this was the most certain way she could express herself.
She hoped that through the thing she was most confident in, Atlas would finally look at her.
'Do you seriously have the leisure... to look elsewhere?!'
Offended that she was staring at someone else while he stood right before her, Lemnos's demon sword blazed even more ferociously.
'...Why do you want to fight Atlas so badly?'
'Is a reason absolutely necessary to want to fight the strong and prove oneself?'
'...I suppose not.'
In the end, they were thinking the same thing.
But that fact did nothing to improve Lucia's mood.
Once more, Lucia brought her sword down.
Lemnos tried to meet her strike head-on, but doing so was impossible.
The space around her Aura Blade was distorted.
An invisible force field constantly seized his body along with the heat he emitted, hurling him far away.
The sense of distance was impossible to grasp.
Just moments ago, Lemnos had been caught by that force field, hurled, and crushed multiple times.
'It's so slow, yet I can't dodge it... how annoying!!!'
Realizing instinctively that if he kept being pushed around like this, his stamina would be chipped away until he lost to Lucia, Lemnos decided he had to use a rapid succession of powerful techniques to take her down quickly.
Making a half-baked decision like conserving his stamina to fight Atlas later would be a foolish move.
He drew out a huge amount of internal energy from within his body, causing an intense heat to erupt around him, warping the very air.
'Haze!!'
Swinging his sword, Lemnos began charging forward, his figure wavering before splitting into eight duplicates.
The multiple Lemnoses all rushed toward Lucia in unison.
This was not a mere optical illusion.
Each of the wavering afterimages was akin to a sword aura possessing actual mass.
'That... I saw it last time... so...'
Even seeing that brilliantly blazing display, Lucia was not surprised in the slightest.
She merely calmly sought a way to counter it.
Lucia raised her sword high, took a deep breath, and swung it down.
'....Falling Rock.'
The floor of the arena burst apart.
Thick stone slabs shattered and flew into the air as shockwaves reverberated in every direction.
The aftershock wiped out all of Lemnos's heat-wave afterimages that contained the real sword aura, leaving only the main body behind.
If he had slackened the power in his body even a little like the afterimages, he would have been blown away too, but Lemnos broke through the impact of the Falling Rock.
'To use a countermeasure similar to that bastard's!!'
Though he had taken a fierce blow, the flames of the Flamberge were still raging violently.
'I'll end it with this attack!'
The intensity of the red flames grew fiercer and fiercer until they began to burn with a blue light.
'Lightning Flash!!'
It was not only the Flamberge that burned blue.
Lemnos himself became engulfed in the blue flames and turned into a single beam of light, rushing at Lucia.
He had anticipated that the Haze would be broken from the start and had prepared a follow-up technique.
Watching the blue bolt of lightning close in right before her eyes, Lucia concentrated her aura into her sword while simultaneously drawing up a massive amount of energy from the earth's veins beneath the ground. She circulated it, uniting it with her body.
In this single moment, Lucia was not just a single person, but the very earth itself.
The space around the Aura Blade she was holding became distorted.
'....Heaven-and-Earth Flip.'
Lemnos's blue lightning and Lucia collided.
The single strike that overturned heaven and earth shook the entire arena.
The shock was powerful enough to reach even the protected spectator stands.
A thick cloud of dust soared high into the sky, and no one knew what was happening in the center of the arena where the two techniques had clashed.
Who was it that stood there at the end?
A black silhouette was visible through the dust, but because both of them were tall, it was hard to distinguish them by silhouette alone.
However, one thing was certain: there was only one person standing in the center.
One of the two had been eliminated and expelled from the arena.
'...!'
The dust settled, and the figure standing in the center was clearly revealed.
It was Lucia Russell.
A cheer erupted from the spectator stands at the fact that a hierarchy had finally been established between the two swords.
The reaction was as if she had won the entire tournament.
Even though it was just a test.
'See... I'm stronger.'
Although she said that, Lucia was not unscathed either.
She had been unable to fully manifest the Heaven-and-Earth Flip against the attack that followed right after the previous technique, a literal lightning-flash strike.
As a result, she could not properly suppress Lemnos's attack.
She had taken quite a lot of damage, but regardless, it was Lucia who was standing at the end.
If this hadn't been the arena, it looked like the lightning would have passed from her left arm to her side, leaving her with burns.
And the test was not over yet.
She had merely earned the qualification to finally have him all to herself.
Lucia caught her breath and looked around the arena.
She had not worried for a moment that she might be left alone during that time.
'Are you done now?'
She heard the voice she had wanted to hear so badly.
She turned her head toward the sound and saw Atlas standing there calmly, waiting for Lucia.
Before she knew it, the figures of the other students were nowhere to be seen in the arena.
While Lucia had been competing against Lemnos, Atlas had cleaned up every other student.
Now, only two people remained in the arena.
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Sindi Reu Ga had received the proposal the day before.
It wasn't the tiger beastman she often saw, Bol Te Jin, but another beastman who came to her directly and spoke.
He brought information that the 'sparring' test format, which had only recently changed and was already chaotic, was going to change once more, and said that everyone needed to combine their strength.
She was curious how the beastmen knew that, but he said they had their own sources.
She wanted to question why she, as a member of the Reu Ga family, was on the targeting side rather than being targeted... but once she confirmed the opponents they had to aim for, she understood.
Without exception, the targets were powerhouses who had reached or were close to reaching the upper-tier Expert level or higher.
Or they were nuisances who would get in the way of a fair test.
Joining forces to take one person down together would certainly be a huge help.
'To get a good grade on this test... I have to assume I'll need to fight that human.'
Sindi, the second daughter of the prestigious Reu Ga family of the Forest, clearly remembered the events that had transpired since she came to study abroad in the human empire.
Large and small incidents that broke out not long after enrollment; at the center of every single event, there was one human.
Atlas Nemea.
He was an incredibly small human male, but his skill alone was greater than any of his peers.
He had easily defeated Edgar Lemnos, who had been close to the upper tier of Expert at the time of enrollment, and had faced dozens of students alone, winning without a scratch.
And during the Hunting Festival, he had shown himself subduing the legendary monster, Cyclops, with incredible ease.
She was absolutely certain he was no ordinary student.
He coasted through lectures, but when he picked up a sword, even his seemingly insignificant movements were incredibly fluid.
He was so skilled that she found herself speculating that maybe he was actually quite old and just looked young because of his short stature, or perhaps he was some kind of secret agent infiltrating the academy.
Sindi, having accepted the beastman's proposal, had to prepare to take down the Experts, led by that monster Atlas.
'Atlas took down the legendary monster Cyclops in an instant during the Hunting Festival... Even if gathering this many people only amounts to a desperate struggle, it's far better than facing him alone.'
She began to prepare to hunt him, a being stronger than a Cyclops at the very least.
She might not have known much else, but having lived in the Forest, she was confident in one thing: hunting.
To her, Atlas had already become a single prey animal she had to overcome.
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'Your arrogance ends here! In the end, you're nothing but a mere human!!'
Before Sindi's words had even finished, the ground I was stepping on turned into a bottomless quagmire.
It changed in an instant, leaving no time to react.
I was sucked right in, buried up to my ankles in the soft earth altered by earth elemental magic.
If I didn't take some other measure, I would sink all the way up to my head like this.
No matter how strong a warrior is, without a foothold, they can do nothing.
Unless they are a mage who uses levitation magic, a warrior without a foothold to step on cannot use any power at all.
'A typical warrior, that is.'
As I sank up to my knees in an instant, the mages quickly began their second attack.
Dozens of spells were launched at me all at once.
They were just sniping from a distance; it seemed they had no intention of coming close until my lower body was completely buried.
It was the right judgment.
If they had gotten ambiguously close, I was planning to send them packing first, but it seemed they were trying to wear me down safely.
Tying up my feet with a trap and picking away at me from a safe distance until my strength ran out before going for the kill—this was a method only used by hunters catching beasts.
Having confirmed that they had no intention of coming closer even if I 'pretended to be stuck' and played around, it was time to get started for real.
If I delayed any longer, I was going to end up taking all those spells head-on.
'Huuup..!!!'
I gathered my internal energy into the legs sinking into the quagmire and released it all at once.
-Peong!!!
An explosion erupted on the ground that had turned into a quagmire, and my body shot up into the sky.
I had escaped the quagmire by detonating my internal energy.
Once you reach around the upper tier of Expert, this much is doable.
If I were just in the normal upper tier, the higher viscosity of the quagmire might have made it difficult, but it would be hard for them to distinguish that.
Perhaps only Sindi might have noticed?
A beat late, the spells that had lost their target slammed into the ground in a cluster.
'That guy flew into the air!!'
'What are the mages doing, attack!!'
'He's moving faster than magic, how are we supposed to hit him?!'
'You picked a fight without even being able to do that, are you crazy??'
'You guys started this fight when you can't even land a hit either!!'
'Hey.. hey hey hey, he's coming!!!! Raise your swords!!'
'Uwaaaaaah??!!'
Perhaps because my escape from the quagmire had been a major shock, while they were clamoring loudly amongst themselves, I arrived right in front of them.
They each tried to raise their weapons and resist me, but before they could, my sword flashed first.
'Alright then, you guys can leave first.'
In an instant, five students vanished.
The magic cast on the arena had activated, automatically expelling the students who had taken a certain amount of damage and been eliminated from the arena.
The names of the eliminated students appeared in red on the scoreboard.
There were about fifty to sixty students in one round, so that single sword swing had wiped out roughly one-tenth of them.
That meant if I swung my sword like this about nine more times, an entire round would be over.
'Now, what are they going to do?'
If they had no countermeasure, they were nothing more than a disorganized rabble at this point.
I could clean them all up in about a minute.
I glanced over at Sindi, who was glaring at me from afar.
'Everyone, keep your distance and don't try to fight him alone!!'
Sindi pointed her finger at the chaotic students and gave out orders.
It seemed she hadn't given up yet.