Chapter 191: Tournament 7
Chapter 191: Tournament 7
The encounter with the furry-obsessed Incarnation who couldn't decide between a dog and a horse
ended up being a lot less eventful than I'd braced for.
In short, I got booted from the lucid dream again.
'Her imagination is way too narrow in scope.'
Maybe it's because her fantasies about her ideal beastman are just too specific.
She can manifest the body perfectly, but the setting, the episode? Nothing. A total blank.
The second we make eye contact and words start leaving her mouth, she's punted out of the dream in under five minutes.
The only real upside is that I've gotten comfortable controlling a beastkin body now,
and my mana regulation and sensory control have gotten a bit more precise.
On the bright side, no more twitchy ears, so my hair doesn't tickle them anymore. That's a relief.
"Constellation, your ears..."
"Elf ears, beastkin ears — both hate loud noises. What, disappointed?"
"No, not disappointed exactly."
Thinking back on the weeklong barrage of shotgun blasts Han Ye-ji had been hammering away with,
I traded the now-familiar beastkin body back for a human one.
The sharp scent at the tip of my nose and the plush softness of the tail vanished,
and while that left me feeling faintly hollow, it beat the motion sickness the noise was giving me.
I was murmuring back and forth with Han Ye-ji to help her loosen up
when people began trickling in from a distance.
Naturally, these weren't ordinary cadets coming to spectate—
it was Flower Atop the Tower, my Incarnations, and academy staff.
"Are both sides ready?"
"Yes."
"Ready."
A flowing knee-length coat of chain mail that hung like a cloak.
Over it, a multi-pocketed stab vest, a weapons belt, and greaves.
Armor so heavy I couldn't even see her eyes, let alone skin,
layered with chunks of rock sculpture clinging to the plate, making me doubt she could even move.
A sloppy military-cosplay girl versus a walking stone shell — that was the match that was about to kick off.
I gave Han Ye-ji a final couple of pats on the shoulder and stepped back.
Kim Ha-eun was holed up in the dream city again today,
so the only ones waiting at my viewing box were Lee Ha-rin and Song Ye-na.
'Seeing her from here, she really does look solid.'
The Incarnation of a Constellation so closely tied to earth spirits naturally showed an affinity for manipulating stone herself.
She'd plastered chunks of rock all over her metal armor, just like one of those rock-creatures from old fantasy movies.
A body reinforced with mana,
plate armor refined with mana layered on top,
stone shards further strengthened with spirit power crusted over that,
and the moment she flared her mana, a slow-billowing veil of sand-laden wind wrapped around her.
"Are both combatants fully prepared?"
As I stood there, fascinated by the sandstorm-shrouded rock-knight,
a middle-aged man in familiar pristine white priest robes stepped forward.
That outfit—I recognized it. Was he from the same order as Ellis?
Aside from a few embellishments, the robes were a carbon copy.
"This side is fully prepared."
A mellow male voice answered from inside the mass of stone.
Han Ye-ji gave a short nod and a crisp "Yes" in reply.
"Then all who are fair and just shall bear witness to this duel."
At their answers, the priest spread both hands like wings and murmured the words.
Something coalesced over his lined palms — a strangely shimmering mist, or rather, a dark cloud.
If he was indeed of the same sect as water-wielding Ellis,
then those tiny thunderheads rising from his open hands like smoke from mosquito incense made sense.
Clouds smaller than a fist soared endlessly upward,
swaddling the enormous arena in a perfect shroud that blocked every sightline.
'Damn, this arena's fucking huge.'
I've got no talent for eyeballing distances, but it was obviously just fucking gigantic.
Way bigger than a basketball court, at least, but maybe a touch smaller than a sports field.
Maybe because Han Ye-ji used guns, they'd put a solid gap between the two fighters.
Facing down that towering, oppressive stone knight made her look awfully precarious.
"Think those shells'll actually punch through?"
"Shoot enough and they will. It's only rock, in the end."
Song Ye-na, who'd carved out the time to cheerlead and spectate, answered my low mutter.
A short distance away, a crowd in various sets of armor was murmuring among themselves.
They were probably debating how the duel was going to play out, too.
"I mean, her Talent's simple, but it's got a nasty bite."
"What is her Talent, exactly?"
"Doubled projectile speed, and on impact, the target gets hit all over again."
"Ugh, that's a pain in the ass."
At Lee Ha-rin's added explanation, Song Ye-na's brow furrowed.
Yeah, for a swordswoman, that trait had to be an absolute bitch to deal with.
Hadn't that instructor who came at her with a shield passed out cold trying to block a tranquilizer round?
The stone knight would bend the bullets' trajectories with that sandstorm
and charge in while shielding her vitals with rock.
Then Han Ye-ji would backpedal, check the advance with the shotgun,
and pull a pistol from her waist to fire a paralytic or a taser round,
trying to neutralize the person inside the stone shell—
or so I imagined. Once again, my fantasies betrayed my inexperience with this world.
The duel began while I was distracted, and—
"She flew?!"
"Yes, well, her opponent does command earth spirits."
Han Ye-ji kicked off the air and launched upward. No—she flew.
She jumped, but she never came back down, so "flew" was the word.
Wait, her Talent was nothing but marksmanship. What the hell was this?
Maybe they caught my wide-eyed shock at the absurdity of it.
Lee Ha-rin and Song Ye-na, who'd been chattering at my side, both glanced at me.
They clearly didn't understand why I was so floored.
The duel churned on while I stood there gaping.
Kwoong—
The sandstorm began to thrash like a living swarm, like a hive of furious bees.
Then that huge frame sprang into the air—Kwoong—with an earth-shaking boom,
launching off the solid flagstones as if they were a trampoline.
Han Ye-ji kicked off the air again, dodging the overwhelming assault.
Her shoes gave off a faint glow. Must've been using gear, not her own Talent.
She weaved through the raging sandstorm and the gravel screaming toward her,
and somewhere in that motion, the shotgun came up smooth and spat fire for the first time.
Kwaaang—!
"Tch, this is—!"
That ferociously fast slug wasn't aimed at the knight, who was landing heavy with her guard high.
It was aimed at the unyielding stone floor where she was about to touch down.
A fist-sized steel ball sheared into the flagstones like they were butter.
Unlike the ear-splitting blast of the shot, the impact rang out as a soft, low Wuum—.
No—not butter. It was more like a stone dropped into a lake.
The marble-like flagstones had turned swampy-soft.
"What the hell is that...?"
"Ah. She stuffed that slug with every annoying trick. Probably swamp sorcery from the Southern Continent."
Hardly anyone had thought to use a gun not on the combatant, but to wreck the ground beneath her.
My people started murmuring, and so did the knights observing from the far side.
The fight was shaping up not like a gunslinger's duel, but a clash between a knight and a mage.
The knight's landing and the swamp curse hit almost simultaneously.
She caught her balance even on the muck by stepping on stone shards,
but there was one thing that hulking stone knight had failed to fully gauge.
Han Ye-ji's bullets hit twice.
Wuum— The floor liquefied again.
The arena floor, now churned to mud, and even the stone guarding the knight's lower body softened with it.
It didn't matter how great a knight was. If the ground beneath her vanished, she couldn't move.
"It's over. She's a knight who commands earth spirits, so she won't have any special tricks up her sleeve."
"Surely she has some kind of ranged ability...?"
"You think a knight can pin Ye-ji down with a handful of pebbles? She might not look it, but she's been shattering academy shooting records."
When had these two gotten so chummy?
Lee Ha-rin clicked her tongue softly and shook her head as if the outcome was already a done deal.
The look on her face wasn't dissatisfaction with Han Ye-ji's victory—
it was annoyance that a fun spectacle she'd made time for was ending far too soon.
True to her Constellation-otaku nature, her analytical eye for duels was sharp,
and sure enough, the fight came to a hollow end a few minutes later.
The knight, both feet glued in the swamp, whipped up a gravel-laced sandstorm,
but Han Ye-ji fired off a volley from what looked like an air rifle, the rounds detonating in midair
and blowing away every scrap of stone the knight could wield, completely neutralizing her.
'She's just straight-up battering her. Ye-ji's way better in a fight than I expected.'
A chunk of rock bigger than a man's fist came screaming at her head like a baseball.
Not a "that'll sting" level of threat. A "that'll crack her skull" level of worry.
She dodged every single one like a taekwondo master humoring a grade-school dodgeball game—whiff, whiff, whiff—
head tilting, body kicking off the air and spinning while she punched bullets on-target.
Watching her, she didn't move like a sniper. She looked like some acrobatic shooter game character.
Honestly, picturing her usual slightly-spacey self,
I'd half expected a dramatic loss—a miss, a snagged ankle, something like that.
Doubting my own Incarnation. Kind of a dick move, but Han Ye-ji's default setting was what it was.
A girl whose idea of a luxury is buying convenience-store potato chips just toppled a two-meter stone knight.
"Constellation! I won!"
Boing, boing, boing—
Han Ye-ji bounced her way through the air and landed in front of me, beaming.
The knight, shed of her stone shell and crawled free of the mud pit, also approached in lighter attire.
I'd been mentally preparing for a little consolatory sex in case she lost.
Guess we're celebrating with some victory sex instead.