Week 7 Mentoring, PvP Assessment (2)
After class.
By the time I arrived at the Arena, Dang Gyu-young was already there, waiting while slouched at a crooked angle against the spectator stands.
"Good afternoon."
"Oh— there you are—"
Dang Gyu-young answered my greeting with a listless wave of her hand, then stretched out a finger and pointed toward the arena floor.
"Go get your first match out of the way. The others have already gone in."
"Yes, senior."
This week's quota came to three matches in total, and the first of them was to be fought without any intervention from our mentor. The Crystal rule had only been unveiled this week, so it was still unfamiliar to most students. Lee Sudok had given us a brief explanation, but a hundred hearings were worth less than a single seeing—however long you talked, one real collision with the thing taught you faster.
Besides, the academy wanted to preserve at least a bare minimum of fairness between the students participating in mentoring and those who weren't. If mentors were allowed inside, they could spoon-feed their mentees everything from start to finish—what was hidden where, which way to go, how to shape the strategy—and the match would be lopsided regardless of skill. So while dispensing advice and tailoring training to each individual could wait until later, the idea was to draw everyone's first starting line in the same place.
I scanned my student ID at the terminal, and a match was made almost the moment I finished waiting.
Kim Ho — 513 pts VS Cha Hyun-ju — 510 pts
The instant I stepped onto the teleportation circle, my field of view flipped—and the next moment I was standing in the heart of a forest packed dense with vegetation.
The Sanctuary's location needed no effort to find; it leapt out at a single glance. A colossal tree towered there all on its own, flaunting its presence—and that tree was the one steeped in mystical light. And as for the crystal—
Which meant it was time to go find it.
It would be hidden somewhere in this forest, and whoever found it first would claim the right to charge it. Cha Hyun-ju, my opponent for the match, was nowhere in sight, but like me she must have finished her preparations somewhere on the far side of the woods, because the countdown began.
I kicked off the ground and started running immediately. No wandering, no circling—straight in a single direction.
If it's a forest layout, it'll be around there.
The spots where a crystal was likely to be hidden were all but fixed, and I was heading for the one my veteran instinct pointed to. Driving Thief's Step up to its very limit, I ran until the trees went whipping past at the edges of my vision. Before long a small clearing opened up, and there, atop a crude altar-like structure at its center, sat a palm-sized crystal.
I snatched it up, jammed it into my uniform's breast pocket, and was just about to bolt when—
—Shreeee!
Two streaks of light came flying at me with a sharp whistle of split air. I twisted aside just enough to evade them and saw that they were a pair of very thin, very small daggers. And where they had come from stood a girl. A mask covered the lower half of her face, enough to blur her overall outline, but the two eyes left exposed were glaring at me with a ferocity that wanted me dead.
Cha Hyun-ju tipped her chin at the crystal tucked into my breast pocket and spoke.
"Put that down."
"Would you put it down if you were me?"
Her hand blurred, and two more streaks of light came tearing in.
—Shreee!
I tilted my body, and the daggers grazed past me by a hair's breadth. So this was someone who threw daggers first and sorted the rest out later.
I whirled around and broke into a run—toward the tree steeped in mystical light, toward the Sanctuary. Behind me came an unbroken stream of daggers, and a voice brimming with killing intent.
"Stop right there."
"Would you stop if you were me?"
If anything, I sped up. After a few more cycles of dodging and running—
—Vweee—!
a pillar of light burst from the Sanctuary and pinned me in its glow like a spotlight, and the crystal in my shirt pocket began to fill with mystical radiance, little by little. I had entered the Sanctuary's effective range, so it had linked with the crystal and was charging it.
The charging speed was a great deal slower than in Lee Sudok's classroom demonstration, though. He had deliberately set it fast for the sake of the example; out here, the connection had to be maintained for at least several minutes. And for all those minutes, it went without saying, I would have to keep darting every which way away from Cha Hyun-ju while guarding the thing.
It would be so nice if I could just stash it in my inventory.
Unfortunately, an inventory counted as a space sealed off from the outside world, so the connection would sever the instant the crystal went in—charging would become outright impossible. What's more, to teach a lesson to any fool who tried that trick, the crystal came enchanted with teleportation magic. The moment you tried to pocket it, the crystal would zip off to some other spot entirely, and you'd lose your first-claim advantage and start over from the beginning. So breast pocket it was.
—Shreeee!
I leaned away from yet another volley of daggers. Cha Hyun-ju clicked her tongue.
"Tch."
Apparently concluding that throwing wouldn't settle anything, she pinched a dagger in each hand and closed in fast. I leveled Root at Cha Hyun-ju with a flick.
Wind Force ⟶ Twister
—Whoooosh—
A whirlwind laced with physical force coiled around Cha Hyun-ju and held her rooted to the spot. She fought it desperately, wrenching her body against the gale, but all she managed were small, stuttering twitches. Then—seemingly invoking some movement-type skill—she slipped free of the vortex in one smooth motion. But by the time Cha Hyun-ju had barely escaped the whirlwind, I was already within arm's reach of her.
—Whump!
The compressed air detonated, and Cha Hyun-ju went sailing off toward the far end of the forest. I took stock of the spot where she'd vanished from view, then checked the scoreboard for a moment.
—Shreeeee—!
Cha Hyun-ju came charging back at a terrifying speed, flinging daggers the whole way. I cast Twister a second time, but she caught the telltale prelude of the whirlwind and darted clear in a flash.
Excellent reaction speed, too.
She stuck tight to me and slashed alternately with her two daggers. I evaded the first and caught the second blade on Root; then, as the first dagger came arcing around again, I rapped her wrist lightly and knocked its trajectory askew. But Cha Hyun-ju, as though she had budgeted for my dodging and parrying all along, recovered the dagger without a hitch and flowed straight into her next attack.
Not bad at all.
Dual daggers were a far trickier weapon to wield than most people realized. Handling them as freely as her own limbs, the way she did, took effort—plenty of it—but it also took a certain inborn gift. It was a glimpse of the talent Cha Hyun-ju possessed. Of course, talent was talent, and the match was the match.
No holding back, though.
There was a side quest riding on this week, after all. I kept up the pretense of barely hanging on—then abruptly took one long stride forward and thrust Root out. The short metal rod slotted exquisitely into the seam between the two daggers' arcs and locked against them both.
—Clack!
We froze like that, rod braced against twin blades. But here was the thing: I had been swinging Root one-handed. I raised my other hand—holding nothing at all—and flashed it at her.
"Guess what this is?"
"Kgh—!"
Her eyes blew wide, having divined what came next, and she scrambled to react—but the compressed air detonating was faster.
—Whump!
Cha Hyun-ju's body went flying once more, tracing a parabola into the distance. I'd put a little more force into Wind Force this time, so she had probably flown a little farther, too.
Feels like this is already over, honestly.
We had clashed twice at point-blank range and traded full exchanges, and both times had ended with Cha Hyun-ju launched far away. She had seemed to be fighting at nearly her whole strength, so no matter how many more times we collided, the result would be the same.
...Or so I thought. I was wrong.
—Shreeee—!
Another streak of light came darting in. I started to slip aside the way I had all match—then felt a strange wrongness and threw myself into a hard lateral dive instead. And it soon proved to be the right choice.
—CRACK!
The streak that had grazed past me punched clean through the tree that had been standing at my back. If it had been a dagger like all the ones before, it should have buried itself there—instead, a fist-sized hole had been bored straight through the trunk.
—Shree-shree-shree—!
This time, three beams of light came rushing at me. Looked at closely, the shape of the incoming projectiles was nothing like a dagger, either: long and slender, wickedly pointed at the tip.
Arrows.
Arrows drenched in mana, at that. Cha Hyun-ju's main class was an archer. Apparently she was the type to hide her true strength, same as me. She had played the dual-dagger rogue convincingly enough until now, though—so why suddenly pull out a bow?
Guess she got good and angry.
My best guess was that rage had simply overruled reason. Getting blasted into the horizon twice by Wind Force would do that to anyone.
—Shree-shree-shree-shree—!
Every arrow came loaded to the brim with emotion. And she wasn't showing herself at all anymore, which suggested she had revised her objective for this match as well—from taking the crystal, to putting me out of commission. Since defeating your opponent did count among the victory conditions, she wasn't entirely off course.
—Shree-shree-shree-shree—!
Of course, all of that still required actually hitting me. I kept Thief's Step running to hold my speed, threading in subtle changes of direction to slip the arrows. Left to my own preferences, I would have loved to hunt Cha Hyun-ju down and launch her one more time, but if I strayed outside the Sanctuary's radius doing it, the link to the crystal would break.
It had charged up a fair amount already, so I would simply keep diligently running. As if she had read that very thought right off my mind—
the deluge of arrows held its breath for a moment, and then—
—Skreeee—!
a whole sheaf of arrows came screaming at me at once. Even the whistle of split air sounded distinctly different from before. Keeping Thief's Step up as ever, I wove a zigzag through them.
—Skreee—!
But the arrows that should have whizzed past me and thudded into the nearby trees bent in mid-flight and came chasing after me, trained on my back once more.
She can use homing shots, too.
That was a fairly high-grade skill in its own right.
—Skreee—!
Cha Hyun-ju loosed still more homing shots. The intent was plain: to keep stacking their numbers until dodging became impossible outright.
Time to scatter them once and for all.
I gathered wind at my fingertips, spun sharply around, and chained Twister into Wind Force. The vortex bloomed outward in reverse, wrenching the chasing arrows' trajectories wildly off course, and thuds rang out as they buried themselves in trees on every side.
And in that exact moment—
Oh, now this—
a single, exceedingly slender arrow punched through my own whirlwind, closing on my solar plexus in a dead-straight line. A move to occupy my attention with the homing shots while this one slipped in unseen.
That was genuinely good.
Admiring it even as I moved, I loaded Root to the brim with mana and swung to meet it head-on.
—CLANG—!
For a stealth shot, the force packed into that arrow was no joke; the impact ran up my arm and left my hand half-numb. If my skill had been even a shade lower, the shock might well have torn the weapon clean out of my grip. I shifted Root to my other hand for a moment and shook out the stinging one.
That came close to triggering Distortion, for crying out loud.
This year's first-years really did seem to have no shortage of hidden gems tucked away among them.
Still, this is where it ends.
Much to her chagrin, the charge was already complete.
—FLASH—!
The crystal flared with one intense burst of light, as if announcing that the match had been decided, and the result rose onto the scoreboard.
I waved brightly in the direction Cha Hyun-ju had to be.
"Good game, then~"
—Shree!
Cha Hyun-ju kept loosing arrows right up until the moment I stepped onto the teleportation circle and left.
[118] The Support Ate It All