Chapter 195: Preliminaries 4
Chapter 195: Preliminaries 4
While I was busy resolving Song Ye-na's shadowy desires
and smoothing her path to enlightenment through the tournament,
the tournament unfolding at the Academy was kicking up one hell of a storm.
― Your Incarnation is all hype~
― Monster hunting backwards, huh?
― Science punch! Science punch!
No need to mince words—the internet wraiths had set the whole thing ablaze.
This was a world so obsessed with Incarnations that Constellation otaku existed right out in the open.
Head-to-head fights between Incarnations who normally only hunted monsters? Of course people were going to talk.
And hadn't the Academy deliberately paired like against like for the preliminaries?
Knights versus knights, murim-in versus murim-in, mages versus mages, shamans versus shamans.
An Academy-style duel where you had to excel in one field before you could challenge another.
A fair bit of noise erupted when someone's sponsored Incarnation lost in the prelims,
but everyone from murim-in to mages ended up bowing to a single line of logic.
― No, but if a murim-in loses at swordsmanship to another murim-in, what exactly is beating a mage supposed to prove?
[Murim-in Spearmanship Division Tournament Bracket.jpg]
You got outclassed in your own discipline, so now you want to luck into a draw against some other class and cheese a free win?
What'd you do with all that "cultivation" you punks never shut up about—pawn it off for pocket change?
― Mirror matches are the only ones that mean anything
[Incarnation Han Ye-ji, who apprehended a terror-plot ringleader via sniping.jpg]
These bastards run around yapping about real combat experience and throwing tantrums when they don't get their way.
If you've got a problem with that, how about you sword-swinging punks try taking a tranquilizer round from a kilometer out?
Fight a sniper in an invisibility cloak while the arena's flooded with tear gas, then see if your heads are still screwed on straight.
We're calling it an honorable loss, so learn to crawl already lol
Don't you have to be the best in one field before you can compete in another?
Pirate-ship deck-scrubber versus low-rank cat-finding ninja—
who the hell finds that kind of vague matchup entertaining enough to debate?
Flip it the other way: a knight who lost to a mage, a gunslinger who lost to a shaman.
In those cases they'd have had all sorts of excuses to fall back on.
But you picked up a sword and lost to a swordsman. A mage lost with magic.
Sure, techniques might differ a bit depending on the Constellation you serve,
but the fact remains: you lost to an Incarnation of your own kind.
"So, are you planning to skip the tournament entirely?"
"Yes, it looks like the city's underground sector will be opening soon."
"Says who."
"Huh?"
I was chatting with Kim Ha-eun while taking in the online commentary.
She'd been planning to hole up in the dream city for the whole tournament,
and I'd grabbed her by the scruff of the neck and dragged her out to eat in the real world.
No matter how much becoming a Dream Demon lets you resolve things with dream magic power,
unlike me, her human body still existed in reality.
Skipping meals won't kill her, but if she keeps ignoring her physical body like that,
she'll dissolve into the dream and become fully tethered to it as a dream existence rather than a real one.
Like Persephone eating those pomegranate seeds and never being able to leave the underworld.
'Is this more knowledge the Tyrant passed on?'
I wondered if I'd been nagging and meddling a little too much,
but according to the Tyrant's knowledge, I was in the right.
"Oh, she's winning so easily."
"Right? Guess that's what you get from the personal disciple of The Sword That Severs the Yoke."
We'd set out snacks on the table and were munching away while watching Song Ye-na's duel.
Kim Ha-eun and I are both Dream Demons, so we don't exactly need a balanced diet—
a happy state of affairs where our bodies hold up just fine even if we kill ourselves eating nothing but sweet, salty, and spicy snacks.
Come to think of it, why was Song Ye-na, a murim-in, fighting a knight?
All the other murim-in had matched weapons in the swordsmanship and spearmanship divisions,
but that muscular woman with a war hammer was unmistakably not a murim-in.
"Well, now that I think about it, Song Ye-na started her inner-power training when she was about five... so in terms of years, she's a senior way, way above me."
"Five years old? Though I suppose inner-power training might be possible at that age?"
"Yeah. I saw Academy promotional materials saying kids in kindergarten nap time could feel ki."
"Calling them kindergarteners really drives it home."
In fantasy novels you see lines like "he began his preparations at age five,"
and if you don't start young your blood meridians will harden—I'd always accepted that with a shrug,
but swapping "five years old" for "kindergarten nap time" makes it hit viscerally.
So one kid in the Sunshine Kindergarten Chick Class was gathering ki into their dantian with every inhale and exhale.
Talent like that would make even Constellations jump in shock and come running—it's genuine innate genius.
The highlight reel of Song Ye-na's match flew by in an instant.
I mean, no matter how nicely you package it, the duel was ten seconds long.
Even if you slowed it down for analysis, it wouldn't fill ten minutes.
"Do you actually understand any of that?"
They were explaining Southern Continent shamans using the spell totems that burst in one second,
and analyzing differences between mages using a magic power clash that was settled in three seconds.
For a Constellation otaku it was a dream broadcast overflowing with information,
but for a layman like me, it was about as useful as a late-night educational math documentary.
Kim Ha-eun, for her part, only seemed interested in managing the dream world—
she paid no attention to magic or shamanism, just chewed and swallowed her tiny muffin.
"Honestly, I have no clue. Want me to change the channel?"
"Yeah, put on some variety show or something."
"Okay. What's been fun lately?"
Still eating her muffin, Kim Ha-eun picked up the remote right away.
She pressed the buttons without a moment's hesitation, landing on a variety entertainment show.
Though given the nature of this world, the scale was incomparable to anything from my old life.
"This one's been pretty fun lately. They gather only pure espers and—"
A game show where espers whose output was too ambiguous to fight monsters
gathered to play hide-and-seek or water-gun fights and took these childish games dead seriously.
An esper who could turn invisible by holding her breath was creeping up from behind with a paint gun
when she sneezed and lost her stealth, her face a mess of paint as she was dragged off—
Knock, knock, knock—
Three crisp knocks cutting through the entertainers' laughter.
I had a powerful premonition that something annoying was about to land in my lap.
※
Let's be real about who'd be knocking on my quarters' door.
If it were my Incarnations, they'd just make eye contact with the guards and walk right in.
So a knock meant an outsider who was about to be a pain in my ass.
The door opened to reveal Lee Ha-rin and an unfamiliar face.
Seeing the ID badge dangling from his neck, I figured he was Academy administrative staff.
The Board of Directors was small in number and I'd gotten a rough look at their faces last time—they were pretty old,
so a young guy in a suit instead of the instructor's training uniform had to be admin staff, sure.
What mattered wasn't him, but why a low-level Academy employee
was coming to see me the moment the tournament preliminaries wrapped up.
An encouragement speech for the main-tournament qualifiers, or a meeting with them.
"Sounds like a pain. Do I really have to do that?"
"Well, it is a tournament that you, Constellation, are hosting..."
Maybe the male staffer lacked the nerve to explain things smoothly while face-to-face with a Constellation.
When he saw my scrunched-up expression and started hemming and hawing,
Lee Ha-rin let out an eheheh laugh and aimed a coquettish plea my way.
Given that Lee Ha-rin was a tangle of fierce loyalty, possessiveness, and a need to serve,
there was really only one thing she'd push this hard to ask of me.
"Constellatiooon~"
"Is there an Incarnation you want to meet?"
"Hehe, yes."
The male staffer had almost scowled on reflex at seeing a woman past twenty acting cute,
but he immediately remembered his place, averted his gaze, and shot me a desperate look.
From my perspective, a twenty-something woman acting cute was adorable and the male staffer's eyeballs were annoying, but still.
He came from a gender-reversed world, so I couldn't exactly threaten him to stop acting manly in front of me.
They say no parent can beat their own child—something like that.
Still, how many contestants could have made it to the main tournament anyway?
Wasn't this the first time she'd ever asked me for something?
Thinking along those lines, I gave a small nod.
"Ugh... Fine. So what do I have to do?"
"Thank you!"
"Alright, got it—you can go now."
I chased off the male staffer, who promptly bowed his head low, right that instant.
And so the ones left in my quarters' living room were me, Lee Ha-rin, and Kim Ha-eun.
Kim Ha-eun waved a casual greeting like it'd been a while, then sidled up and handed me some documents.
Murim-in: 32. Knights: 20. Mages: 18. Shamans: 10. Espers: 4—
"This is the list of everyone who advanced to the main tournament?"
"Yes, these are the people who made it through the preliminaries."
Murim-in and knights topped the list with their hunger for fine armaments;
mages and shamans came next, wanting magic reagents or materials.
I guess the espers had nothing specific to gain and entered half out of a thirst for glory.
There were also spirit mages, druids, and such that had run something like side-exhibition matches.
They'd filtered out anyone below instructor-level and cut the field in half with the prelims,
and still nearly a hundred people remained—that was honestly impressive.
So I just had to go around to them, offer a generic greeting, say I was looking forward to a good match,
and feed them some cookie-cutter lip-service flattery, and that'd be it?
"But why are you showing me this list?"
"Could you draw up the tournament bracket?"
"???"
What came out of Lee Ha-rin's mouth was a completely different story.
"Why would I be the one making the bracket?"
"Well, the Academy came asking because it looks like some subtle power struggles are about to break out among the Constellations."
Once again, the problem was the Constellations and their goddamn pride.
The kind of thinking that goes: sure, my Incarnation got unlucky with the draw, but I still think she'd beat that one—
Even if the Incarnations themselves accepted defeat gracefully, the issue was the doting, blindered Constellations who doted on their own.
Even if you ran a program and drew lots to make a random bracket,
some Constellation or other could still pick a fight with the Academy over it.
It made me wonder whether these were supposed to be noble-born Constellations
or a bunch of toddlers corralled together as kindergarten class presidents.
"So if the Constellation who put up the prizes—that's you—just declares, 'This is the kind of match I want to see!' and sets it firmly, no one can complain."
"These so-called Constellations, fuck."
"Well... there have been a lot of, um, rather childish pride-fights, yes."
If even Lee Ha-rin, a Constellation otaku, was admitting it,
just how infantile had the bickering been among past Constellations?
Then again, these were the bastards who wouldn't even handle private trades because of their pride.
Anyway, the reason Lee Ha-rin had barged in with those documents and the staffer was obvious.
She wanted permission to set up the dream match she'd been hoping to see, wasn't that it?
"So."
"Yes?"
"You've got a bracket already thought out, haven't you."
"Heheheh—"
"Enough laughing. Take it out, fast."
And sure enough, from inside her jacket came a fully completed bracket—ta-da!