Reunion
“How did things end up like this…?”
Seo-hyun watched the unfolding situation with a blank expression.
The three people facing off against one another were all far too familiar to him.
One was his former master. Another was the hero who had come from another world. And the last was the regressor.
Even knowing they were taking the same exam, he had never expected to see all three of them in the same place at once.
“Ah… most of the traps I worked so hard to set up are gone…”
Because of the wide-area annihilation technique Iris had used, every crude trap he had built with makeshift tools had been reduced to molecular dust.
They had proven fairly useful so far, but considering the effort that had gone into making them, he would have liked to get a little more mileage out of them.
Well, it can’t be helped. Against real powerhouses they were never more than a way to buy time anyway.
For now, the most reasonable course of action seemed to be waiting until the three of them finished fighting.
There wasn’t much time left in the exam to begin with, and for some reason the unmanned military-academy robots that should have reached this place by now were running late. Holding out was a perfectly viable answer.
“So… shall I just wait for now?”
There was no need to rush.
The only ones who could still be scoring points were Iris, who had already racked up a massive haul with her wide-area attack, and the regressor, who would have used any means necessary to raise her score.
“Haa…”
“Kh…”
“You refuse? That doesn’t seem like a very wise choice.”
Yeona drove her blade even deeper against Iris’s throat.
She couldn’t actually cut the neck, of course, but the pressure of a sword pressed right against one’s throat—and the instant-death damage it would deal to a force field on impact—were very real.
If not now, when else am I going to get the chance to threaten a hero?
No matter how quickly a regressor grew stronger than ordinary people, she would always lag far behind a hero blessed by a goddess.
By the time they graduated from the academy, even if Yeona rewound time as much as she liked, she would never reach even the tips of Iris’s toes.
In that sense, savoring the superiority of standing above the hero for a moment wasn’t such a bad experience either.
“Ugh…!”
“Hm? Ah, Julia Wittelsbach.”
“Where in the world did powerhouses like you even come from…!”
From the very beginning the hero had been thoroughly shielded beneath the vast curtain of Lucifer’s existence, so almost no information about her had leaked outside.
Yeona, on the other hand, had been a soldier skilled in information control even before her regression; she had swapped out her own identity and blocked every possible avenue of exposure as thoroughly as she could.
Even when she did act, she usually did so in her true form, so almost no one had reason to suspect the woman who was publicly known as a man.
Even the counterintelligence agencies of every nation either had no inkling of her existence or possessed nothing more than pure speculation. It was only natural that the Wittelsbach family’s information network had failed to detect either of them.
“…Well, just remember that there are plenty of things in this world even your family doesn’t know.”
The answer felt oddly evasive, but that wasn’t what mattered right now.
Iris let out a sigh and spoke.
“…Fine.”
“You’ve made up your mind?”
Iris rummaged inside her clothes and pulled out a pouch.
It was a specially crafted bag meant to hold magic stones, and even at a glance it was packed full.
Yeona reached for the pouch that had fallen to the ground.
Even in that moment she kept her guard against Iris airtight, so Iris could not easily seize an opening for a counterattack.
What Yeona had failed to account for, however, was Julia’s presence.
Kwaang—!
“Ugh—!”
A sensation like a hard blow to the semicircular canals slammed into Yeona, and she lost her balance.
The shockwave that had erupted in an instant raced up her nerves and rattled her inner ear.
Shiiing—!
Accompanied by the whistle of a blade cutting the air, Julia charged at Yeona at high speed.
But Yeona’s reflexes far transcended the ordinary as well.
Tick—
The pocket watch turned, rewinding time by a single second.
It wasn’t much, but it didn’t matter.
What mattered right now was buying enough time to deal with Julia’s attack…
Why is the dizziness still here?
Rewinding time had stabilized her semicircular canals, yet the dizziness those canals had produced still lingered beyond the boundary of time.
Shiiing—!
“Kh!”
The sword strike Julia unleashed grazed Yeona’s cheek as it passed.
At the same moment Iris, freed from the blade that had pinned her, mass-produced replicas of the Holy Spear.
I should have finished this quickly—I got careless!
Yeona used Maxwell to freeze the surrounding terrain.
Under the lingering influence of Iris’s Judgment, the exam grounds that had been burning now froze over at terrifying speed.
In the process most of the students who could not resist the cold were disqualified, but that did nothing to stop the exam itself.
Sword met sword; sword met spear.
The three-way free-for-all that could so easily devolve into chaos twisted the surrounding landscape into grotesque shapes, and the force fields began to strain under the pressure.
Then the very situation they had feared arrived.
Kwajik—!
Unable to withstand the surging flow of mana and raw physical force, a crack spidered across Julia’s return stone.
Yet the roar of the fierce battle buried the fact that something was wrong with the stone far too easily.
Kagak—!
Kiiiiiik—!
Sparks flew every time Yeona’s curved blade and Iris’s holy spear clashed against steel.
Julia stepped back one pace at a time from the flying sparks, gauging the situation.
Overall, her weapon skill was the inferior one.
Her swordsmanship was rated on par with a veteran who had spent decades on real battlefields, yet compared to the two in front of her it was clearly lacking.
Iris pressed the attack with a spear technique Julia had never seen in her life and an overwhelming difference in reach.
Yeona, without a single secondary weapon, used an extremely efficiency-focused sword path and maintained a defend-first, counter-later stance.
Both were mountains the current Julia could not easily climb.
If I’d been using only one sword like everyone else, I would have been pushed back without even getting a chance to try anything.
For now she was covering her insufficient skill with the unique speed and off-beat rhythm of dual blades.
But at this rate a mistake was inevitable.
As if sensing her growing impatience, Yeona switched targets.
Instead of the hard-to-subdue Iris, she decided to take Julia down first.
Since it’s come to this, I’ll finish her in one blow.
With the return stone there was no need to worry about lives. Yeona poured every scrap of energy Maxwell had produced into her sword.
The characters engraved on the blade lit up, and starlight glittered in the sky.
Bright enough to be visible even above the fading sunset, that starlight condensed into a single streak of radiance and sank into the blade.
“!”
Julia instinctively recognized the power packed into the sword.
She swiftly summoned a storm with one hand, trying to throw the blade’s trajectory off course, but raw wind pressure alone was not enough to move the curved sword Yeona held.
If wind pressure can’t change the sword’s path, then I’ll change the terrain!
Julia shifted her aim and tried to collapse the ground.
The fierce storm slammed into the earth; the ground heaved and Yeona’s center of gravity seemed about to break—yet Yeona reacted with quick wit and froze the ground beneath her feet.
Once the earth hardened into ice, an ordinary storm could no longer inflict even minor damage. At last Yeona finished preparing her technique.
“Well then—see you in the lobby, young lady of House Wittelsbach.”
With those words Yeona brought the sword she held crashing down from above.
The radiance exploding from the characters on the curved blade bloomed into starlight that formed a vortex and hurtled toward Julia.
Having drawn every scrap of energy sleeping in the surrounding atmosphere, that single strike easily tore through the curtain of wind and shaved away Julia’s force field in an instant.
Yeona had fully expected this much.
A fully grown Julia might have been different, but the current girl still lacked the overall experience to overcome someone who had spent ten years on the battlefield.
Once Julia was sent back by her return stone, Yeona could simply use the move she had prepared to subdue Iris.
That assumption collapsed the moment Julia’s force field shattered under the impact.
“Huh?”
Why isn’t the return stone…
When the return stone—designed to activate the moment force-field energy exceeded a certain threshold—failed to work, Yeona hurriedly stopped her blade.
Even so, she could not halt the rampaging starlight that had already been launched into the air.
The storm of starlight that had formed a vortex streaked straight for Julia’s heart. She raised her sword too late in an attempt to cancel it out, only for the blade to shatter; the resulting fragments were swept along with the attack.
Julia squeezed her eyes shut against the approaching terror of death.
Ah.
Am I going to die here?
I haven’t even enrolled in the academy yet, and I’m going to die in some meaningless accident like this?
If only Seo-hyun were here right now…
Everything that had happened until now flashed before her eyes like a revolving lantern.
The memories of training so she could enter the academy. The memory of losing her oldest friend in a single moment of carelessness. The memories of idle chatter with the friend she could no longer see.
The further back she went, the more frequently Seo-hyun appeared.
And then, at the very first memory—
when she recalled her first meeting with the Seo-hyun who had been sold as a slave—she realized she felt no pain.
How is this…
Slowly she opened her eyes. The familiar silhouette of a person stood before her.
Compared to a year ago the figure’s build had changed a great deal and seemed considerably more mature, yet there was no mistaking who it was.
“Seo-hyun…?”
“…It’s been a while, my lady.”
There stood her closest friend, reunited after a full year, having blocked the attack with her entire body and looking at her with a faint smile.