The First Duel (3)
The decisive blow in a duel between mages could take any number of forms.
But in Ellie and Rahel’s match, the most primal method of all had proved enough: a tightly clenched fist.
With one hand, Ellie seized Rahel by the collar.
“Bite down.”
With the other, she drove a punch straight into her jaw.
CRACK!!!
The sound of violence ripped through the dry autumn air.
“Ghk…!”
The light went out of Rahel’s eyes.
But Ellie wasn’t done with just one strike.
“I told you to clench your teeth. Unless you want to bite off your tongue.”
Ellie’s fist slammed into Rahel’s face again. This time, her nose bone snapped, and bright red blood sprayed through the air.
Rahel could no longer gather her thoughts. Why. What did I. Why.
Even if she tried to control her mana and cast a spell, her mind was in tatters—and even if she managed it, would it have made any difference? How had she just extinguished her fire? How on earth had she—
In the midst of those bewildered thoughts, Ellie’s fist drove into Rahel’s body again. This time, it was the pit of her stomach.
“Ugh….”
Rahel learned, for the first time, what it meant to have the air knocked clean out of her lungs. And the moment she barely managed to draw breath again—
“I-I surrender! I surrender!!”
There was no room left for judgment. If one wanted to be precise, survival instinct had chosen surrender in order to live.
And then, the rain of violence stopped at once.
The fist that had come so close to Rahel’s face slowly withdrew, and the hand that had held her by the collar finally let go.
Thud. Rahel collapsed onto the grass.
“As the witness, I declare the winner of this duel to be Student Ellie.”
At Teleman’s words, Ellie finally tore her glare away from Rahel, who she had been staring down the entire time.
Then she recited, “Wound, heal.”
But the mana Ellie sent flowing was not for herself—it wrapped around Rahel instead.
“…Huh?”
Rahel felt a confusion even greater than when Ellie’s fist had first struck her.
Why.
Right now, you’re healing me? Why? For what reason?
Their eyes met.
“Ah….”
In Ellie’s dark eyes, Rahel saw pity. And in the next instant, she felt a ferocious killing intent more intense than anything she had ever experienced in her life.
“Aaaaaaaaaaaah!!!”
It was a complicated killing intent. A desire and impulse knotted together by countless emotions.
Inferiority, defeat, contempt, disgust, the pain of cognitive dissonance, anger, revulsion, self-loathing, envy, humiliation, the anguish of seeing one’s whole world shatter, sorrow, shame….
And beyond those, emotions so tangled and twisted that neither she nor anyone else could ever hope to unravel them.
Perhaps human filth, if it passed a certain threshold, made purity itself painful.
What was clear was that Rahel was in agony now, and in order to escape that agony, she had to kill Ellie. That, too, was driven by the same survival instinct that had made her surrender a moment ago.
“Mahr—”
But.
Teleman’s hand came down on the back of Rahel’s head, and he murmured a single magic word.
“Tranza.”
In the common magical tongue, it meant sever.
“…Ah.”
The medulla—the part of the brain indispensable for survival—had been severed. Before Rahel could even hit the ground again, she was already a corpse.
Screams erupted from the students gathered around them.
“Eek!”
“Ahh!”
Many of them were seeing a corpse for the first time. And no student had ever imagined that someone would die on the grounds of the Academy.
“The duel is over. Everyone, disperse.”
At Teleman’s words, most of the students vanished from the spot as though fleeing for their lives.
Still, not everyone left. Some children kept sneaking glances at the grotesque curiosity of a body, and one girl remained there waiting for Ellie.
So before speaking to Teleman, Ellie sealed off the area with magic so they wouldn’t hear.
“Professor Teleman.”
The victor’s gaze turned to the witness.
“That was a little excessive, wasn’t it?”
“Student Ellie, it was not excessive in the slightest.”
He pointed at Rahel’s corpse with one hand.
“Not only did she refuse to yield in a sacred duel, she also tried to kill you. The price of death can only be paid in death. It was the proper punishment.”
“I said it was excessive in two different ways.”
“And what are they?”
“First, Professor, you have more than enough power to neutralize someone like this without killing her. I think I already heard your answer to that one, though.”
“It is factually true, yes. And the other?”
“The other is—”
Teleman and Ellie looked into each other’s eyes. Through that gaze, each tried to read the other’s depths, their essence.
“I understand wanting to observe me, but if you look this openly, then I’m free to observe you too.”
One who wished to examine another should be careful. The other party might be examining them just as closely.
“Ha ha.”
Teleman smiled thinly.
“Lady Ellie is indeed extraordinarily excellent.”
“Professor Teleman.”
Ellie recited again, slowly, expressionless as she met his eyes squarely.
“I’d like to continue being your student, and you my professor. Nothing else.”
“Don’t worry, Student Ellie. I know how to keep the distance between professor and student.”
“Good. I hope that continues to be true, Professor. Then I’ll take my leave.”
Leaving the cleanup to Teleman, Ellie finally walked away from the site of the duel.
And approached Stella, who had been waiting the whole time.
“Sorry. It went in a somewhat different direction than I expected.”
“…Ellie.”
Stella was always trying to be a dignified girl.
And yet now, as she stared blankly at her friend, tears were gathering in her eyes.
Ellie gave a wry smile and opened her arms.
“Come here.”
Stella took one step forward, then another.
And then, all at once, she rushed in and threw herself at Ellie, bursting into tears.
“Sniff, E-Ellie… h, huu… Ellie…!”
Ellie’s wry smile deepened at the sight of her friend like that.
“I’m the one who fought. Why are you the one crying?”
“B-but… but….”
“Haaah.” Ellie sighed and patted Stella’s back with one hand.
“Hic, sniff… ahh, sniff, hic….”
Even Stella herself didn’t know why she was crying.
Perhaps it was pity for the strong. The one who stood at the summit was, after all, every bit as pitied as the one at the bottom.
Perhaps she was shedding tears in place of her friend, who hadn’t been shaken by the battle. Or perhaps the intensity she felt because of Ellie had simply spilled over in the form of tears.
Ellie didn’t know, and Stella didn’t know. But what was certain was that those tears were for Ellie, and that they were warm.
“…Haaah.”
So Ellie smiled softly too, continuing to pat her friend’s back.
In fact, comforting Stella made it feel as though she herself were being comforted.
It was contradictory, but then Stella crying for her in the first place had been contradictory too, so turning it upside down had somehow made it right again.
“Huu, sniff, huu….”
In the end, the two of them stood there locked in an embrace on the academy grounds for quite some time, neither sure who was crying for whom, nor who was comforting whom.
It was the season when autumn was growing colder by the day. And yet the two girls, pressed together in each other’s arms, felt no chill at all, for the warmth of the person they held had driven the cold away.
.
.
.
Several days after the confusion caused by Rahel’s resignation and death had been settled, someone knocked on the headmaster’s office door.
“Come in.”
“Yo. I’m here.”
Scathach recognized the voice instantly and, still looking down at her paperwork, said, “Student Ellie, is it? I see your classes are all finished for today.”
“Yep, that’s right. Oh, Headmaster, I brought my friends today too!”
“…Hm?”
When Scathach lifted her head, she saw girls with red, blue, light green, and yellow hair standing behind Ellie in that order.
“Pardon the intrusion.”
“Excuse us.”
“Good afternoon…?”
“Wow, so this is the headmaster’s office… Hello!”
Scathach knew of the four who always went around with Ellie, but seeing them in person made the sight feel new all over again.
How very strange, to have gathered only children with stories like these.
Coincidence?
No. It would have to be fate.
Ordinary noble children usually had one or two friends before even entering the Academy.
Ellie, among the students who had not managed that—whether by choice or not—had simply gathered with those she got along with. That was not coincidence, but inevitability.
Stella was the same. If she had been the wrong sort of girl, she would have remained nothing more than a classmate who shared a room; they would never have become friends.
And then there was this.
“…So what brings all of you here?”
Why had she brought all of her friends along, exactly?
Yet Ellie, instead, blinked her eyes round and asked back, “Huh? Didn’t you tell me before, Headmaster? You said to bring my friends next time.”
“…”
She had said that, yes.
But who in the world actually did something like that—no, right, it was Ellie who did things like that.
“Girls, did you know? If you sit here, tea and snacks appear semi-automatically.”
“What’s semi-automatic? And not fully automatic?”
“No idea. Headmaster, what does she mean?”
“…She means they don’t appear just because weight is suddenly placed on the sofa at any random moment. Anyway, since you’ve come all this way, make yourselves comfortable.”
Scathach herself decided that, since it had come to this, she might as well seize the chance to talk with the students.
“Well then, is anything difficult in your classes? Or perhaps there are complaints about the Academy, or things you feel are lacking?”
Twenty minutes later.
Melitt, who had been summoned by Ellie but had only come down belatedly from her own study because there was still one paragraph in a paper she absolutely had to finish, looked into the headmaster’s office and was horrified.
“…Ellie? What exactly are you doing right now?”