Chapter 33
Abel met the serious gazes of the two people staring at him and calmly pulled a cigar from inside his coat.
As though to show them, he took the cigar and a cigar cutter for trimming its end in hand before speaking.
"We're not exactly the kind of people who can settle this with words, are we?"
Snick.
After checking that the end of the cigar had been cut properly, Abel took out a lighter and lit it.
Kaizen and Bella quietly watched him.
"...Well, no."
Kaizen heightened his vigilance at the sight of Abel trying to smoke a cigar just as the fight was about to begin,
"Haa..."
Bella sighed and rechecked her equipment engraved with mana inscriptions.
After gauging their reactions, Abel looked around at the knights slipping out of the training grounds.
The estate's servants had already begun entering the stands and taking their seats one after another.
"Well, it looks like everyone's mostly cleared out. Shall we begin?"
As he slowly surveyed the surroundings, Abel took a coin from inside his coat.
"We'll start when this coin hits the ground. How about it?"
"I don't mind."
"That's reasonable."
"Good. Then..."
Ting!
At their confirmation, Abel flicked the coin straight upward with his thumb.
Perhaps because he had reinforced his body with more mana than necessary to keep it active after staying up all night, the coin soared quite high.
"Ah, and there's one thing I want to say."
"Hm? Right before we start?"
At Kaizen's words, Abel looked at the coin soaring high into the air and spoke.
"Yes. Since we're right about to start."
Kaizen said that as he faced Abel with a combative smile.
He already recognized Abel as an enemy.
There was not the slightest hint of carelessness in his eyes.
"I wanted to apologize for thinking you were a loafer."
"Ah, I feel the same way."
"..."
Abel instinctively understood the true meaning behind their words.
Sorry for thinking you were a loafer.
Therefore, from now on, I will face you without the slightest carelessness.
Reading between the lines, Abel raised one corner of his mouth and exhaled cigar smoke.
The coin gradually drew closer to the ground.
Ting!
Eventually, the coin touched the ground completely.
"Hup!"
Kaizen made the first move.
A technique made possible by a single-action revolver.
The time required to draw the revolver from its holster: 0.01 seconds.
The time required to fire all the rounds in succession: approximately 0.02 seconds.
Bang!
Although he emptied all six rounds loaded in the revolver, the rate of fire was so fast that it sounded like a single gunshot to anyone listening.
It was rapid fire that bordered on the miraculous.
However, Abel and Bella blocked Kaizen's attack with nearly perfect responses.
Abel released the smoke inside his body to block the bullets,
while Bella deflected Kaizen's rounds with her constantly active shield.
"Haha!!"
At that sight, Kaizen smiled lightly and began injecting mana into the revolver he had emptied.
Kaizen's ability.
[Magic Bullet].
The ability to imprint a phenomenon he understood onto mana and transform it into a bullet.
Naturally, an ability this powerful came with countless restrictions.
There was a limit to the phenomena he could understand, and he could use only about three phenomena in a single fight.
Of course, as long as his mana allowed it, he could fire the bullets he created an unlimited number of times.
Bang!
Unlike the ordinary bullets before, this was a [Magic Bullet] containing Kaizen's mana.
Bella was the first to notice something strange.
'This?!'
Her personal shield, which remained active twenty-four hours a day, even when she was unconscious.
'It's disrupting the mana?!'
It had not nullified the magic.
It was a far simpler and more fundamental phenomenon: a [Magic Bullet] with the power to forcibly scatter the mana gathered to activate magic.
The shield breaks. No, it was not breaking; Kaizen's bullet was slicing through the shield as it went soft like water.
The bullet's destination was Bella's head.
But the instant the shield was pierced, Bella's evasion spell, which she had set up in preparation for precisely this situation, activated immediately.
Fwit!
Kaizen's attack barely grazed her cheek as she forcibly twisted her head aside.
"Hah... hah..."
Bella's pupils trembled as she turned toward Abel at once, still unable to accept the fact that she had nearly died.
She thought he would be in a similar situation.
"Ha!"
But Abel instead pushed Kaizen's attack away with a simple, brute-force method.
Disrupt the mana? Then why not just pour in more mana?
It was the pinnacle of brute force, yet Kaizen's attack was helplessly blocked as though that were the obvious answer.
Clench.
At the sight, Kaizen and Abel smiled and began clashing with each other without either seeming to move first.
Abel defended against Kaizen's attacks with smoke and counterattacked immediately.
Kaizen, too, imbued the sword he drew from its sheath with sword aura and received Abel's attacks, as though the sword at his waist were anything but decoration.
'As expected...'
As he blocked Abel's attacks, Kaizen shuddered at the astonishing strength behind them.
Strong.
Strong enough to easily overwhelm him.
'So it is true that he hasn't slept.'
The tells preceding his attacks were being exposed far too easily.
Whether it was an ability, magic, or even the aura used by knights, every attack had to have a tell.
The tell of mana gathering.
Because of the fatigue accumulated from not sleeping, Abel's tells were visible to Kaizen far more clearly than they should have been.
'Left!'
Kraaaang!!!
Of course, knowing where an attack would come from did not mean one could avoid it. That depended entirely on Kaizen's ability.
'Above, left, left again, and right!'
Abel's smoke closed in from every direction.
Fists, swords, spears, and hammers—the smoke transformed into tens of thousands of weapons, and Kaizen dodged its attacks while looking at Abel, who still had not moved a single step.
Bang!
Kaizen fired another [Magic Bullet], but Abel easily canceled it out with his smoke.
"Ha, damn it!"
...
"..."
Bella stood there blankly watching the clash between the two men.
Both Abel's strength and Kaizen's evasive ability were beyond her understanding.
'I was thinking about it wrong...'
She could understand Abel.
She had never seen or observed Abel's power before.
But Kaizen was different.
'How...'
Earlier, while taking Kaizen's attacks, she had calculated their impact, corrected the margin of error, and estimated his approximate full strength.
'He's different.'
He was different. That was truly the only way to describe it.
Kaizen's ability, strength, and skill before her eyes—all of them far exceeded Bella's expectations.
'Was I arrogant?'
Clench.
At that thought, Bella gritted her teeth and clenched her fist tightly.
In the original history, her fate would have been to die pointlessly in Kaizen's surprise attack.
But the future had twisted with the intrusion of a man named Abel.
The seed that would have withered without ever leaving its name in history had finally begun to sprout.
'No!'
Vmmm.
'Don't make me laugh!'
[Magic Inscription].
To use magic, one had to construct a complex formula.
Magic circles supported that process, while [Magic Inscription] was a technique that went one step further.
As long as mana was infused into it, the predesigned magic would activate through [Magic Inscription].
It was a technique that allowed anyone with mana to use magic without complex formulas or magic circles.
She was a genius of simplification who reworked complex equations and laws into forms that anyone could use with ease.
'I didn't come here to taste this humiliation!!'
As though responding to her feelings, all six pieces of equipment bearing [Magic Inscription] began to glow.
The pair of earrings contained water magic,
the three rings on both hands contained various elemental spells,
and the necklace contained temporary [Gravity Magic] designed to make every attack hit.
All of them activated simultaneously.
Rumble!!!
"!!!"
"!!!"
Their bodies suddenly grew heavy. Kaizen and Abel turned toward Bella at the same time.
"Well then, shall we start properly?"
Bella finally smiled lightly at the two men who had begun looking at her.
.
.
.
Dozens, then hundreds of clashes turned the training grounds into an outright battlefield once Bella joined the fight.
'Hmm... As expected.'
Abel looked at the two people pressing him at once and squinted one eye, stiff from not sleeping.
'They're strong...'
To be honest, after hearing that he had been defeated by the duke, Abel had indeed been looking down on them quite a bit.
But the abilities of the two he experienced firsthand were by no means something he could afford to underestimate.
They were powerful people who had received recognition from [Dark Shadow].
Abel judged Kaizen to be at least the vice commander level of a knight order—in other words, upper Expert level.
Bella possessed even greater magical ability than Heros, whom Abel had faced.
Bang!
After blocking Kaizen's attack once more, Abel sighed as he felt his body grow heavy from Bella's [Gravity Magic].
He was already not in peak condition because he had not slept.
Moving his mana and moving his body both involved a momentary delay.
If there had only been one of them, he could have finished the fight instantly.
But perhaps because they both knew that, they ignored each other and focused entirely on attacking Abel.
Zzt.
'Urgh.'
Moreover, continuing to fight while using mana despite being deprived of sleep was a problem in itself.
Even if Abel did not move a single step from where he stood,
using smoke to attack and defend simultaneously was no different from engaging in strenuous exercise.
Abel frowned again as his head throbbed.
Kaizen did not miss the opening.
Bang!
Kaizen used his signature rapid fire to stop Abel's counterattacks in advance and took every attack at the front line,
"Fire, wind, strike my enemy!"
while Bella stepped back and pressured Abel with firepower.
It was an ideal formation.
Just then, Abel took out a new cigar to replenish the smoke consumed by Bella's attacks.
"Now!"
At Bella's signal, having spotted him taking out the cigar, Kaizen immediately retreated.
[Black Magic — Decay]
Psssh.
The cigar began crumbling and scattering on the spot.
"Huh...?"
Abel stared blankly at the cigar as it was blown away by the wind.
"The trigger for your ability is probably the smoke from that cigar, right?"
Watching him, Bella raised one corner of her mouth and spoke.
It was truly an incredible ability.
If Abel had been sufficiently rested, they would never have been his match.
"Then naturally, we should stop you from smoking that cigar, right?"
Having learned countless spells, Bella had at least laid the groundwork in black magic through practical experience.
Black magic had originally begun as a means of preserving food, so its opposite—decay—was naturally possible as well.
And a cigar was a product made by processing fermented tobacco leaves.
Even with Bella's limited mastery of black magic, she could decay something as simple as a cigar.
"It's over."
"We won't kill you, at least."
Eventually, Kaizen and Bella charged at Abel once more.
.
.
.
Kaizen, who had been moving violently and consuming Abel's smoke, was the first to notice the anomaly.
'What is it?'
The temperature gradually fell, and the surroundings grew chilly enough to feel like early winter.
At first, he did not notice it.
There had been no room to pay attention to such things in the middle of the fierce battle.
Hoo.
But the moment he noticed the pure-white breath entering his view with his exhalation, Kaizen was momentarily flustered.
'Why?'
Bella was feeling the same question.
'What?'
***
"Hahaha"
The duke ordered Sebastian to bring him a magitech viewing screen that would let him see what was happening in the knight order's training grounds.
Watching the two illegitimate children struggle, he smiled lightly.
They had once faced death because of his ambush, but he knew they were by no means weak.
The situation had unfolded far more interestingly than he had imagined, and the duke looked at Kaizen and Bella, who had paused for a moment.
"I fell for that trick too, you know. Kheh-heh-heh."
When the duke first fought Abel, the very first thing he did was stop him from smoking his cigar.
It was only natural to block such an obvious starting point for an attack.
An ordinary ability user would naturally try to compensate for such a weakness.
"I never imagined it would be such a massive trap."
But by the time he realized it was actually a massive trap, he had already suffered internal injuries from Abel's attack.
***
Fwoooooosh.
The two men stopped attacking.
I quietly smiled as I looked at the breath streaming from my mouth.
The fight had suddenly fallen into a lull.
As the two men stared blankly at the smoke coming from my mouth, I casually ran a hand through my hair.
"Hmm. Yes. Naturally, you'd eliminate the cigar. But..."
Since when did you think my ability only controlled cigar smoke?