Chapter 190: Tournament 6
Chapter 190: Tournament 6
The story they put out was a friendly pre-tournament spar to check the arena.
The truth was a secret honor duel.
The challenger, naturally, was Flower Atop the Tower.
If it were up to me, I would've thrown hands myself and caved in that delicate little princely skull,
but the Academy comes down hard on anything that turns Constellation feuds into public circus acts.
So instead of me versus Flower Atop the Tower, the match became Han Ye-ji against some female knight.
I wasn't worried, though.
'Huh. What a softhearted little prince.'
Turns out having his chest accidentally glimpsed had sent the sheltered young master into a full-blown fluster,
and his terms for the duel boiled down to: loser apologizes politely to the winner.
A polite apology didn't mean throwing himself into a complete five-body prostration and bashing his forehead into the dirt in front of everyone.
Just some formal bow from their local etiquette—a deep nod, more or less a waist bow.
If it were me, I probably would've demanded my opponent's entire ancestral root system yanked out of the earth, not just an apology.
A difference in mindset between a pampered prince and a nuclear-war survivor, I guess.
Thinking about it that way, there was no downside for us at all.
No matter how you argued it, the fact that Han Ye-ji had seen that prince's bare chest
was undeniable. Nothing to be done about it.
If she had a bit more nerve, she could've brushed it off with a breezy Oh, I was looking somewhere else, didn't see a thing~
but Han Ye-ji didn't have the gall to look a Constellation in the eye and lie.
When Flower Atop the Tower demanded to know if she'd really seen it, her face went beet-red,
and she just hung her head in silence—an answer all its own.
I'd thought she'd gotten used to being around men, but apparently she'd only gotten used to me.
Couldn't even hold a conversation with that pretty-faced bastard.
"So. The duel's set. Feeling confident?"
"Yeah. Even if this hadn't happened, I would've asked you to send me out there. I may not look it, but I earn my living through personnel suppression."
"Well, true enough."
Come to think of it, Han Ye-ji was an ace sniper who'd been dragged into fallen-incarnation cleanup ops
dozens of times, steadily padding her department's payroll.
I'd almost forgotten—she'd been showing me so many dazed-puppy moments lately.
"Did their side pick a date?"
"Yeah, exactly one week from now. They said they can clear everyone out the day before the main event under the pretext of an inspection."
One week. The day before the tournament started.
The official label, as I said, was a friendly spar to test the arena's wards.
True to the Academy's policy of maintaining rigid mechanical neutrality for the sake of Constellation pride,
they clearly meant to lock down information on even the most trivial squabbles between Constellations.
So these last few days, instead of cycling through my time with my other three Incarnations, I'd been glued to Han Ye-ji.
A bit of a guilt trip toward Song Ye-na, who'd only recently become an Incarnation—but what could I do.
BOOM—BOOM!
A weighty sound slammed against my ears.
The percussive crack overlapped and echoed, like an audio filter gone haywire.
"...That's heavy."
"These are armor-piercing rounds made for great knights."
I could see the thick steel plates—easily several centimeters—crumpled inward.
Deep, caved-in craters, as if the Hulk had taken his fist to them.
the thing making those craters was Han Ye-ji—
or more precisely, the bullets she'd mercilessly hammered into them.
'Have I let my brain marinate too long in this fantasy world?'
A Constellation who cycled through human, elf, and beastkin bodies.
A Dream Demon's near-omnipotence inside a lucid dream.
The power to summon objects and people that were only supposed to exist within dreams.
Real elves, beastkin, and every kind of fantasy race.
Armies built on magic, alchemy, and psychic powers,
supplemented by knights and murim warriors.
I'd gotten so used to all of that that modern gunpowder weapons now felt bizarre.
Chain mail woven from riveted links—the stuff you'd only see in fantasy films.
Over that, a black tactical vest straight out of a modern-era FPS.
In this world, it was spec-ops gear rated against bullets, blades, and even anti-magic countermeasures,
but to my eyes the whole outfit just screamed cosplay side-hustle gone wrong.
Wearing a modern tactical vest over a chainmail shirt, toting a shotgun—it only added to the visual dissonance.
'Is that thing even a shotgun?'
Calling it a shotgun—hell, calling it a gun at all—felt wrong for something that beefy.
The grip was gone, replaced by a softly glowing magic circle etched into the metal.
I only called it a shotgun because Han Ye-ji had introduced it as one;
someone who didn't know better would probably mistake it for a freakishly thick iron club.
"Armor-piercing rounds for great knights?"
"Yeah. Technically, they're slug rounds with magic circles engraved on lead balls. So maybe I should call them magic bullets."
The follow-up explanation sent a chill crawling down my spine.
A gun that fired fist-sized metal spheres packed with curses—explosions, freeze hexes, electrocution.
'Wait. Is this world actually just as hellish as it first looked?'
I had to wonder if you could even fire something like that in a friendly spar—
but then again, this was a world where murim warriors walked on air and knights split mountains.
Hell, planet-destroying weapons roamed around in legions.
When I thought about Tyrant's Incarnation lugging around a laser cannon comparable to a spaceship's fusion cannon—
a cannon that melted the earth—a few magic-circle-engraved balls of lead didn't seem all that scary.
"Most of the time when the military backs up Incarnations, it's because something oversized is charging through the frontlines. Smaller, faster targets—mages can stop those with fire-barriers or poison swamps. This thing was made for the monsters bigger than elephants—the ones whose whole purpose is suicide-rushing to crush your battle line."
"And you'd use that on a person... no, hold on."
If they had any sense, they'd have rigged up some kind of non-lethal mode.
Or layered the stage with impact dampeners or protective wards.
BOOM—CRAAANG!
Done with her explanation, Han Ye-ji cut loose, running reload drills and spraying rounds.
Slug after slug smashed into the same spot, the steel plate tearing wider each time.
Every screech of rending metal made me flinch and hunch my shoulders.
In my defense, ever since I'd awakened my magic power, my five senses—hearing included—had gotten a little sharp.
And also because Han Ye-ji, catching sight of my reaction, had started smiling to herself.
In my previous life, the K3 was definitely a crew-served machinegun.
Yet here she was, holding a shotgun bigger than a K3, rattling off bang-bang shots,
swapping magazines with quick, nimble hands while stealing sideways glances at me.
"...What're you grinning about?"
With the way those shots kept booming, was that thing even a shotgun? More like a grenade launcher.
While I stood outside the range, chewing over pointless questions like that,
the frequency of her sidelong smirks aimed my way kept climbing.
"Nothing. You're cute."
"Huh? Oh...."
Her gaze was fixed above my head.
The pointed canine ears, regrown for my magic-power training.
Now that I thought about it, I was going to have to meet up with that furry-obsessed Incarnation again one of these days anyway.
Anyway, every time a loud noise hit, my ears twitched and flattened—
and that, to Han Ye-ji, apparently registered as both adorable and a tiny bit pitiful.
To be fair, sixty percent of her video watch history was game streams;
the rest was animal content—pet foxes, pet ducks, that sort of thing.
"Can I touch—... you've gotten real natural about this."
"I've had a few days to practice."
A fingerless-gloved hand rose toward my head.
Then it got to work on the base of my twitching ear—gentle but firm, scrubbing in short, rough strokes.
Just that alone sent a cool, soothing sensation through me, like getting a scalp massage.
"Nngh... you're getting awfully good at the most useless things."
"For your information, I'm a regular at the neighborhood cat café."
"Does that even matter?"
"Ears aren't that different, right?"
※
I'd spent several days glued to Han Ye-ji under the pretext of overseeing her training,
but an unforeseen issue cropped up, and I ended up keeping my distance right up until match day.
We still met inside lucid dreams, sure, so it didn't really change much.
Beastman Mode was just ears and tail.
No claws lengthening, no fur sprouting on my hands and feet,
and peeling off my clothes certainly didn't reveal a full Furry One underneath.
My face and features all stayed human—except for the animal ears.
'I just didn't expect the heightened senses to be the problem.'
Maybe it came down to that beastkin-trait hypersensitivity.
The daily gunpowder stink from hundreds of rounds going off,
the concussive roar droning on my eardrums—it left me vaguely nauseous.
Even so, Han Ye-ji, who'd stayed stuck to my side for days, kept her face in a constant beam,
so I went ahead and used my newly freed schedule for a long-postponed meeting.
Right. The meeting with that furry-obsessed Incarnation.
"Good day to you-uu!"
A woman's booming voice.
Maybe she'd been nervous because our last parting hadn't exactly been smooth.
Even after becoming an Incarnation, she'd never once succeeded in getting a man's number—
from her perspective, sure, that was probably maddeningly humiliating. But what could I do?
Just like Han Ye-ji's situation with Flower Atop the Tower—sorry, but you're a woman—
this Furry Incarnation before me had the same fundamental issue: she was a woman. Sorry.
The Dream Demon Constellation had gotten curious and given her a lewd dream (or one that nearly became lewd),
and she'd responded with zero experience and a catastrophic lack of imagination, waking herself right out of the lucid dream.
If she told anyone that story, wouldn't they just call her a hopeless waste of a chance?
"That, last time. About—"
"Let's skip that part."
"Nnnepp."
She gulped, then fixed her eyes on me.
The emotion reflected in her pupils was anticipation and excitement.
Naturally, it was because of my perked-up animal ears.
I felt a tickle of curiosity and skimmed my magic power across her surface thoughts—nothing deep, just fragments.
'If only his face had fur too.'
'Wonder if his dick turned into a dog dick?'
Shouldn't have read that. Fuck.