The Battle for Main Wife Begins at the Academy
"Our master is the kindest man alive! Even right now, he's taking on requests to protect children in a count's domain that has nothing to do with him!"
BOOOM!
Yuri's fist whipped up a gale, tearing through space and splitting apart Tia's fireball.
"And how would you know that? Did you send a spy to snoop around?!"
"They couldn't get into the estate. Apparently his personal knight is quite skilled."
"Luca too?! Wow, unbelievable. I told you to send a letter asking how he was doing, not to stalk him. When did I ever give you Master's address?"
"What good is a letter I can't even get a reply to, all because of their precious 'security' and 'confidentiality,' forcing me to write nothing but lies! Better to receive reports firsthand!"
"She has a point. Yuri, did you see Master's face?"
"Oh, I saw it, I saw it~. My spy sketched it with clairvoyance. It was blurry, but he was still so incredibly handsome…."
"Those three airheads."
"Look who's talking. Master was always going to grow up that big!"
Tia swung her staff, and the ground split open as a curtain of flame surged upward.
Luca fired her sword, igniting a blue frost aura to neutralize the blast.
"Hehe, you know it too, Tia."
"Oops."
"Yeah. My spy reported a familiar lurking around the estate. Good thing it wasn't a demon."
"Ha! Ensuring Master's safety is a slave's duty."
"Then keep watching all you like. I plan on never leaving Master's side from now on."
"Yuri, since when did you lose all sense of shame? And weren't you calling Master 'Orabeoni'?"
"Th-that's a name reserved just for me and Master! Why is your memory so good?!"
"Hey, look at these magic circles. You'd need a memory way beyond ordinary to draw all of these out."
"True enough."
Luca nodded. Behind Tia, magic circles of intricate design were being drawn one after another in unbroken succession.
The higher the tier of a spell, the more subsidiary circles it demanded. Hundreds of complex figures, more beautiful than any work of art, linked together with engineering precision, operating as a single living organism.
The outermost ring was packed dense with formulae, and the countless auxiliary circles carved in to circulate mana each fulfilled their role exactly where they belonged, like pillars holding up a massive furnace.
Every element placed at maximum efficiency, and not a single stroke or character out of place as she cast — Luca honestly admitted that the title of Sage was no more than Tia deserved.
"Hngh!"
Luca, cancelling Tia's magic with aura-laden sword energy, and Yuri, vaporizing it with fists that belched fighting spirit, had long since shattered the boundaries of common sense as well.
And the longer their conversation stretched on, the graver the problem on the ravaged battlefield became.
It looked for all the world like the end of the world.
Had an ordinary person been standing there, they wouldn't have lasted two seconds before being ground to dust.
"You're tough, but you're way too tough. How long do you three plan on holding out?"
"You're telling me. I honestly expected Tia to drop out first."
"That would be Yuri's fist. It grants allies wide-area healing and mana recovery, so that's the effect at work."
Luca said it flatly. Only then did Tia and Yuri realize why this fight refused to end, and their jaws dropped.
"You could have mentioned that sooner!"
"You knew and kept going anyway?"
"Figured I'd win eventually. It's called grit."
"Master will die of old age before that happens, you know."
Tia sighed. Yuri, who had been glaring at her own fist in dissatisfaction, suddenly pricked up the ears atop her head.
"Oh, Goddess? Yes, yes. I'm listening. Could you please stop breaking the continent? Come on, it's not like we did that much…."
Only then did Yuri look around at her surroundings.
The land within roughly ten kilometers of the Demon Castle — the size of an entire city — had somehow been rendered completely, irrecoverably ruined.
"…We did do a bit."
"Haah. Yuri, would you ask the Goddess if she has any good ideas?"
Exhausted, Tia withdrew her magic circles and made the request.
"Ah, sure. Um… the newspaper?"
Yuri went searching for the meal tray that Sword Saint Aisha had brought that morning. Spreading out the newspaper that lay beside it, she began to read.
"Luca, Tia, look at this!"
Luca and Tia leaned in on either side of Yuri. Their cheeks pressed together on both sides, puffing out like steamed buns.
"Master is a professor now?"
"Yay, that's great…! A Chair Professorship at Caesus Academy is an incredible position. Everyone is bound to respect Master so much from now on!"
Tia read the article and flushed to the tips of her ears, glowing as if it were her own achievement.
"Really?! I want to congratulate him right away! …Hm? What did you say?"
"What is it?"
"The Goddess says she never appointed Master as a Chair Professor…."
"What? Then Master got deceived by some bad guys?! No wait, Master's too smart for that, there's no way…."
"I'm sure he has a plan."
"Ah, apparently he's going to challenge for the Chair Professorship. He's got it all figured out."
"A challenge? Then since leaving the rest to luck and time would be reckless… does he intend to get this year's entire class through 'Opticulum'?"
"Opticulum?"
"Yeah. It's the academy's highest-difficulty graduation exam."
"Ooh… Ti-ooh? Tia, you really know everything about the academy."
"She said she wanted to go there ever since she was little."
"Mm-hm, I always dreamed of it. Oh! Then how about I apply for an instructor position too, to help Master out? A former Hero should get a slot somewhere."
"That position is mine."
"It's mine."
The three glared at each other again, annoyed. Just as each began to reach for her weapon, Yuri's ears twitched once more.
"Hm? Ah, yes, yes. O-okay."
"What did she say?"
"She says to stop fighting physically."
"Do you think we fight because we want to?"
"Ah… hngh."
Midway through relaying the Goddess's words, Yuri suddenly went bright red.
"What is it now?"
"Sh-she just asked why we don't simply all marry him…. She says she didn't permit polygamy and polyandry for nothing…."
"N-no way! Absolutely not! Luca and Yuri sharing Master together… that…?"
BOOM!
Unable to bear the turmoil rising in her mind, Tia detonated her magic.
"I don't mind."
"Luca?!"
"On the condition that I marry first, and then the rest of you, about a year later? I want to properly enjoy married life."
Luca declared flatly. Tia and Yuri, by contrast, felt a strange, forbidden thrill at the idea of sharing Wicker with the other two they'd thought of as blood sisters.
"W-well, if even Luca feels that way…."
"Even Yuri? Unbelievable."
Watching Yuri's tail sway meekly back and forth, Tia smacked her forehead.
"I didn't want to marry Master right away — I wanted to da-da-date him first! But… it's not like I hate the idea of all of us being together…."
"Hmm. Then it's really just a question of order, isn't it?"
"Is… is it?"
"It is."
Before anyone noticed, the three had reached a tacit agreement to share Wicker — though all of them, swept up in the moment, had temporarily forgotten their embarrassment.
"Luca and Tia both want to be Master's first, don't you? My feelings are exactly the same."
"So how do we decide?"
A brief silence fell.
Partway through, Tia snapped her fingers.
"Let's settle it with a contest."
"How?"
"We enroll at the academy as Master's students. He'll need plenty of help challenging for the Chair Professorship anyway."
"How do we get in?"
"The Goddess can recommend us, can't she?"
"She says to stop using her however we please…."
"Anyway — and then?"
"Master surely won't recognize us, right?"
"Ah, probably not."
"Exactly."
Luca and Yuri nodded, convinced. All three of them remembered how, when they'd reunited two years ago, they hadn't recognized each other until they'd read one another's nametags.
"Master doesn't know our real names. To him, we're only Yellow, Black, and White."
"Same species, but our appearances have changed completely."
"He probably has our species wrong too. I'm supposed to be a wolf beastkin, but…."
"Then don't tell me he even thinks I'm a boy?"
"With those conditions, we can truly test which of us Master chooses. If we make him fall for us and become his first woman fair and square, none of us can complain, right?"
"Clever."
"She's right."
The two nodded.
"Or, alternatively — whoever's past bond with Master runs deepest, and is the first to see through his true identity, wins. That works too, doesn't it?"
"True. We can hide the slave link by masking it with our mana."
"And if none of us manage it by the end?"
"Then whoever earns the best grades at the academy wins. Master's a professor now, so an excellent student suits him."
"Fair. But on the condition that we each compete outside our current specialty. We'd all get perfect marks otherwise — no way to compare."
All three nodded in agreement with the terms of the contest.
"Ah, what about our nametags? We can't walk into the academy wearing Hero or Sword Saint."
"Ask the Goddess."
"Goddess, would that be possible? …She's scolding me for wasting her power on pointless things."
"Then keep fighting, all three of you."
"She says she'll do it! Deal's sealed."
The three stood facing one another in a triangle. Tia, the most articulate of the bunch, summarized the terms in a clear, ringing voice.
"The slaves Lucas, Testia, and Yuri hereby commence a contest to determine the rightful main wife of our master, Wicker Phedia. The three shall enroll at the academy and become Master's students."
"Victory is achieved by becoming Master's lover first, or by Master seeing through our identities and calling us by our childhood names."
"Naturally, revealing our identities ourselves is forbidden."
"If the contest is unresolved by graduation, the one with the best academy grades wins. However, each must compete in a field outside her own specialty."
"And the victor shall become Master's first wo— lover!"
On the very last sentence, Tia's face went scarlet with embarrassment.
"Not lovers. Wives."
"A wife is one thing, but… our ma-mating partner, too…."
Hearing Luca and Yuri correct her one after another, Tia squeezed her eyes shut and shouted,
"Whatever it is! We become his first woman! Dismissed!"
With her declaration, a colossal pillar of light descended from the heavens and enveloped the three of them.
It was the moment the Goddess's miracle became reality.
"Ooooh…."
Soldiers gazing at the Demon Castle Ruins from a distance stood frozen, mouths hanging open in a daze.
One by one, as if bewitched, they turned their eyes toward the sky. The dark clouds that had smothered the heavens parted, and light poured down onto the earth.
At its center stood a colossal pillar of radiance.
Drawn by the warmth they could feel even from afar, the soldiers sank to their knees without thinking and clasped their hands together.
"We witness a miracle…."
"To see the Goddess's miracle with my own eyes…."
A sacred presence wrapped around every regiment on the field.
It was, in every sense, a perfect reward.
All this time they had fought for the sake of the countless races living on the continent — all of them with death at their elbow, cleaving down demons on nothing more than sheer spirit of sacrifice.
Now the soldiers had been given proof that none of it had been in vain, and the relief of that recognition welled up in them until they wept and bowed their heads in reverence.
"What a tremendous flash of light…."
"Ah, it's just like…."
Holding one another, the soldiers began to sing hymns praising the Heroes.
At long last, the long war had come to its final curtain.
"General. Shall I issue the withdrawal order to the whole army?"
The unit commander put the question to the general who stood at the very front, watching the pillar of light with a commanding presence — Sword Saint Aisha.
"Do so."
"Sir!"
The commander bowed in salute, then allowed himself a moment to study Aisha's profile.
Despite bearing the title of one of the Three Swords of the continent, she never once grew arrogant, always standing aloof and dignified. Even now, witnessing the Goddess's miracle, her expression remained perfectly composed, without a flicker of surprise. Each strand of her fluttering silver hair was as beautiful as a brushstroke on a masterpiece.
That is the presence of the Sword Saint. I find myself respecting her just from looking at her.
Offering a brief inward admiration, the commander turned with disciplined precision and marched back toward his troops.
And as for Sword Saint Aisha—
I finally get to go home!! YESSS!!
she rejoiced inwardly, in the most useless of victories.