Afternoon Class (3)
Whoosh—
The wind blew.
A cold, cutting breeze that seemed determined to remind me autumn had long since arrived.
"...I never thought you'd actually accept."
Edger Tristan stood before me.
The man responsible for turning me into a spectacle for the other students on this freezing day was staring me down with a sword in his hand.
"Do you actually think you can win? Against me?"
"..."
"You, who always just ignored everything—you wouldn't have accepted a duel without thinking it through."
Edger was asking if I had the confidence to beat him.
Hearing that, a question of my own suddenly rose up—one I wanted to ask myself.
...Why did I accept this?
What was I doing right now?
Why was I standing here with a sword, ready to fight?
Why, on this freezing day, was I deliberately making myself a spectacle for every other student to gawk at?
Of course I knew the answer. If I didn't know it, no one else would.
But the whole thing still felt strange.
Yes, I was a terminally ill man who no longer needed to care what anyone thought of him—but it was also true that I had resolved to live comfortably from now on.
Live comfortably.
That had been the way of life I'd sworn myself to after receiving my terminal diagnosis.
...This is not living comfortably.
I had clearly made that vow. And yet I hadn't been able to simply grit my teeth and let something slide—something that should have been easy to ignore—and now the whole mess had ballooned into this.
Which had brought us to the present situation.
A thoroughly absurd and peculiar one, in which the person responsible for the action couldn't even understand his own behavior.
And if someone asked me again why things had spiraled this far, I still wouldn't be able to answer.
I could force an answer if I had to, of course.
That bastard had personally insulted me.
That bastard had harassed Aria Tryce—my little sister.
For an ordinary person, that would have been more than enough. Reasons like those would have justified accepting a duel three times over without anyone batting an eye.
The real problem was something else.
...An ordinary person.
An ordinary person.
Right. An ordinary person.
Was Rian Tryce an ordinary person?
No—was the person I was now even ordinary?
Just yesterday I had abandoned every effort I'd ever made.
There was no point in trying any harder. After finally, painfully grasping that truth, I had admitted that everything I'd done until now had been meaningless—and that had been only yesterday.
Could you really call someone ordinary if they treated all their own efforts as worthless?
...Probably not.
No.
At least, I didn't think so.
Someone incomplete. More precisely, someone with something missing.
Wouldn't it be more accurate to call me a person with something lacking, rather than an ordinary one?
But then another sentence floated up in my mind.
Every human being is missing something, each in their own small way.
I couldn't remember who had said it, but I had found it resonant enough to file away.
I was probably missing far more than most ordinary people.
That was all.
I was more incomplete than most—but in the end, I was still human. The meaning hidden in that statement was simple.
I might be missing more pieces than ordinary people, but I still belonged among them.
Which meant that reacting to Edger's provocation the way an ordinary person would was, perhaps, only natural.
"Well, if you won't answer, I'll make the first move."
"..."
"I'll make sure you're too ashamed to even show your face again, Rian Tryce."
And just like that, I was glad I had kept that sentence in my head.
Clang—!
I raised my sword and caught Edger's blade cleanly as it came down straight for my head.
Elice Axstra was currently doubting her own eyes.
"...How on earth did he block that?"
The Rian Tryce she knew had barely ever held a sword properly in his life.
She already knew the man had changed. The delinquent of the past, and the Rian Tryce of the present—she had watched him more closely than anyone, and she understood better than anyone that treating those two as the same person would be an insult to him.
"But even so, I never expected his swordsmanship to change too."
Still, that didn't make it right.
A person's mindset could shift overnight. Physical ability—swordsmanship—could not. Especially not the gap in experience. The gulf between a novice and a veteran was precisely what made it impossible for the novice to win.
There was a reason people talked about closed-door training. The level of swordsmanship that mattered could only be bought with effort that made you bleed.
And his opponent was Edger Tristan.
A problem student by reputation, yes—but no one had ever dismissed his skill with a blade. Elice had assumed Rian Tryce's defeat was a foregone conclusion. Even if the man himself had changed, there were still walls of experience you simply could not climb over.
Everyone had thought so.
She had thought so too.
"...A genius, then."
"..."
Unless, of course, something completely unforeseen had broken the pattern—exactly as the Imperial Princess had just murmured under her breath.
Genius.
The word that had first planted the emotion of inferiority in Elice's heart. And that dreadful word was now spilling from the lips of Laila herself—the very person who had planted that feeling in her.
"It seems I underestimated him."
"...Underestimated him?"
"Yes. Let me state it clearly this time: Rian Tryce will win this duel. Without question."
Certainty.
The same look of absolute conviction Elice had witnessed earlier was now flowing out through the Imperial Princess's own voice.
...Haa. One more piece of information to file away.
Elice still had no idea how to organize this astonishing fact. All she could do was watch the duel that had yet to end.
Swordsmanship.
A word that had never needed to cross my mind in the life I'd lived before transmigrating. Of course it hadn't. In twenty-first-century Korea, unless you took up kendo or fencing, you almost never found yourself holding anything you could honestly call a sword.
Most people lived that way. And so had I, as ordinary as anyone.
But the setting here was a novel. A novel in which I might, at any moment, be forced to use a sword I had never once wielded before.
...And sure enough, the need came up.
That was why I had trained in swordsmanship in secret. You never knew when you might need it. In a novel where the protagonist's greatest strength was the sword, the day would come eventually.
Preparing for a future that hadn't arrived yet. That was what I had spent the past year as Rian Tryce doing—and sword training had never been left out of that work.
Clang—!
The two blades collided again, and a strained sound tore from Edger's throat.
"...Ghk."
"..."
His face said he couldn't make sense of what was happening. That he refused to accept he was being pushed back in swordsmanship—of all things—by the likes of Rian Tryce.
...It was still a face I didn't particularly care for.
I figured it was about time to end this. I had already carved the gap between us deep enough into him; after this, he probably wouldn't pick another fight with me.
Honestly, I had expected Edger to give up much sooner. Even in the original story, Edger Tristan had been someone whose swordsmanship earned a certain amount of respect.
Wasn't that how it usually went? Real experts sensed the difference in skill quickly and surrendered fast—or so I'd heard. I was pretty sure those had been the Imperial Princess's words in the original, offered as comfort to a protagonist who had just realized how far he still had to go.
...The Imperial Princess wasn't exactly normal either.
Whether it was the author's taste or simply what sold well in web novels, looking back, every one of the original protagonist's heroines had been missing a screw somewhere.
"Even in the middle of a duel, you're going to ignore me?!"
While I was thinking that and standing still for a moment, a roar of a shout came with a surging arc of steel.
The path of the blade. The line that told me where the sword was coming from—and the line that made it possible for me to stop it.
Was it talent? Or just good eyes?
For some strange reason, those trajectories were always clear to me. The path of a sword coming at me stood out sharper than anything else.
And in a duel between swordsmen, being able to read that path clearly meant—
Whoosh—
"...You dodged?"
"..."
—that you held an advantage larger than any other edge your opponent might possess.
Dodge the opponent's sword. Then drive your own in at a timing they never see coming.
I moved exactly according to that sequence—the most basic of basics in swordsmanship.
Beep—!
My blade sank into Edger's side, and at the same instant an alert chimed from the Dueling Activity Suit he was wearing.
The death-processing warning tone.
A function the Sacred Academy itself had built into the Dueling Activity Suits to keep enrolled students safe during practice. The fact that it had triggered meant, in other words—
"...You lose, Edger Tristan."
"..."
—that the owner of the suit that had just gone off had lost the duel.
Tweet—!
"What on earth do you all think you're doing?!"
With the belated blast of a whistle from the afternoon class professor, who had finally returned from the restroom to get the situation under control, the duel that had started so abruptly came to an end.