Heaven's Punishment
Freesia had scraped by in the back alleys her whole life and had never once been taught magic.
The closest she had come was accepting a professorship at the Academy not long ago and, out of sheer boredom, leafing through the magic tomes in the library to teach herself. If one absolutely had to name a master for her, it would be the tiny stars that glittered across the night sky.
And so Freesia followed no established system of magic at all. She simply wished. The girl's talent was such that a wish cast upon the stars was enough to weave magic that belonged to her alone.
Any mage who had witnessed her power even once never dared attempt to copy it. Whether they could or not was beside the point—they simply would not. For in her magic there was no chant, no circle, no discernible pattern in the flow of mana.
She merely wished.
Yet what others saw as chaos possessed its own order. Its own rules.
If you wish to glimpse that order of hers, then catch up to her talent.
Can you, I wonder?
Even as Balikan staggered back to his feet, Freesia merely watched him with serene composure.
That silence of hers was a deeper humiliation to Balikan than any insult could have been.
"You little brat..."
True to the epithet of Pride, Balikan delighted in looking down on others. The fact that a child who had lived barely a dozen years was looking down on him was something he could never tolerate.
Yet for all his arrogance he was no fool. He admitted that the brat before him held a card he had not anticipated.
He assessed the damage to his body and weighed the possibility of continuing the fight. He measured the force of the impact to determine from which direction the attack had come. And even while doing all that, he checked whether the barrier of demonic erosion he had spread across this place still held.
Among all those calculations, the option of fleeing never once entered his mind. That was why he was Balikan of Pride.
While he moved with such caution, Freesia simply stretched one hand out to the side.
In that instant Balikan doubted his own eyes.
One of the tiny starlights floating behind the mage seemed to settle into her palm.
It was no illusion. Of all the countless lights embroidering the heavens, one had truly come to rest in the girl's hand.
Whether the act was realistic or not no longer mattered. The only thing that mattered was that Freesia had wished for it.
She closed both hands tightly around the captured starlight.
A flash.
Light so brilliant it seared the eyes flared outward, then vanished in the blink of an eye.
As the radiance caressed Freesia, the gash on her forehead where she had struck a stone sealed shut, and the bones broken from tumbling across the ground knitted themselves whole again.
Once the light had finished examining her, it turned and enfolded the fallen Elicia. Faint breaths grew steady; a face that had been draining of color regained its warmth.
Unlike the crude first aid of moments before, this was complete healing. Even so, Elicia had spent every last scrap of strength and showed no sign of waking.
Freesia had never expected her to join the fight in the first place. The demon before her was something she could handle alone. She had simply wanted to ease Elicia's pain as quickly as possible.
Even arrogant Balikan, after witnessing Freesia's magic a second time at such close range, began to sense that the situation was turning strange.
Stay and defend his pride, or flee in disgrace to fight another day—the two choices finally took root in his mind.
Freesia, however, kindly decided to spare him the trouble of choosing.
"All right. Time to finish this."
With the girl's words, the countless starlights that had been painting the night sky began to take shape.
They became arrows of pure light. Each differed in brightness and size, yet every star hanging in the heavens had become a shaft of radiance aimed squarely at Balikan.
Fwoosh!
The first arrow flew.
Balikan swung his hand as before, intending to bat it aside—but these arrows of light were nothing like the ones he had faced earlier.
Thuk.
The arrow performed its duty with perfect fidelity. Neither larger nor smaller than an ordinary shaft, it simply punched a neat hole through Balikan's hand.
Ordinarily a wound of that size would have meant nothing. But—
Thuk-thuk-thuk-thuk-thuk!
Arrows of light as numerous as the stars themselves rained down upon him. There was no grandeur to it. Only the soft whisper of wind and the repeated wet sound of holes being punched, over and over.
"Still alive, huh."
After dozens, then hundreds of arrows had buried themselves in him, Balikan's condition was wretched.
Looking for all the world like a porcupine, he could only twitch like a crushed insect as Freesia approached. No counterattack—no reaction at all.
"I need to get Elicia back soon, so I'll end it here."
Her tone sounded almost merciful, yet the mana rising from her fingertips was vast, violent, and merciless.
That mana called down the brightest star among all those hanging high in the night sky.
"Heaven's Punishment."
The judgment of the heavens themselves.
KRA-KOOM!
The brightest star, the greatest meteor, plummeted from the heights and drove itself into the motionless Balikan.
And after that, the demon once called Balikan of Pride no longer existed in that place.
"This way! You, report upstairs—everyone else, follow me!"
The thunderous roar that had rolled out of the slums beyond the walls brought every guard running: those standing watch at the main gate, those on patrol nearby, even those who had been snatching a brief rest. They poured toward the poor quarter in a flood.
Most of them could not use mana and so could not grasp exactly what had happened, yet the sheer scale of the blast told them something far from ordinary had taken place.
Forming ranks as they pushed deeper into the slums, the guards discovered two girls—more precisely, one unconscious girl and a smaller girl carrying her in her arms. It was the classic princess carry, yet because the one being held was taller, the picture looked both fitting and faintly absurd at the same time.
"Halt!"
The foremost guard leveled his spear at Freesia and barked a warning.
Freesia, however, had no attention to spare for Guard A. Every scrap of her focus was fixed on Elicia alone.
Even though she had already healed every wound with her own magic, even though she knew Elicia was no longer in danger, she still moved as carefully as if she were transporting a fragile patient.
"Hey, hey—lower the spear. That's her. The one who's been restoring the barrier these past few days."
Fortunately several of the guards recognized Freesia, and Guard A's spear tipped skyward again.
The most senior among them, Guard B, stepped closer and addressed her.
"Lady Mage, can you tell us what happened here?"
Only when the voice came from right beside her did Freesia finally react. She answered, but she had no intention of granting the request.
"Later. Come find me at the Academy."
She had no desire to weave her way back through the guards in front of her or the reinforcements still flooding in behind them, so she simply took a light step forward.
Step. Step.
As though climbing an invisible staircase, she walked upon empty air.
One step, then another, Freesia strode across the night sky, carrying Elicia in her arms over the walls and back toward the Academy.
Naturally the upper echelons of Felches and the Academy erupted into chaos.
There were several reasons. First and foremost, an Academy student had been injured. Second and third, a hole had been punched through the barrier and a demon had slipped through it. Fourth was the overwhelming residual mana still saturating the crater in the slums.
Each carried a different weight, yet every one of them was enough to give the leadership a splitting headache.
Elicia was admitted to the Academy infirmary at once. Freesia's magic had left her without a single lasting wound, but she had yet to regain consciousness, so the measure was taken. She would remain hospitalized—by force if necessary—until her strength returned.
The breach in the barrier through which the demon had entered was examined by the elderly professors of the Magic Faculty, who had been dragged from their beds in the dead of night. Finding no suspicious traces, they settled for punishing the previous restorer and moved on, though a lingering unease remained.
Then there was the appearance of a mid-level demon and Freesia's subjugation of it.
According to her testimony, the creature had been a mid-level demon bearing the epithet of Pride. Unlike the more numerous low-level demons that acted on whim, mid-level demons and above moved with a measure of organization under the Demon King's command. That one of them had targeted the Academy meant the Demon King's forces had begun to act in earnest. It was no matter to be brushed aside.
And the girl who had erased that mid-level demon without leaving so much as a corpse behind left the Magic Faculty professors stunned. Until now they had known almost nothing of Freesia's true strength. They knew only that the Emperor had granted her a noble surname.
Her magic was a little unusual, yes—but that was all. It had seemed only natural to assume that the still-young Freesia possessed some ability, yet that the noble title and the professorship had been offered more for her future potential than for present power. The Emperor's recognition, however, was never so lightly given.
The fact that she had annihilated a mid-level demon without a trace, together with the lingering mana that still blanketed the slums, was more than enough to shatter their misjudgment.
While the high and mighty fretted over one headache after another, Elicia—who had been resting comfortably in an infirmary bed—finally opened her eyes, only to find herself troubled for an entirely different reason.