Chapter 33
Abel met the serious gazes of the two people staring at him and calmly pulled a cigar from inside his clothes.
Holding the cigar and a cigar cutter for trimming its end as if to show them, he spoke.
"We're not exactly the sort of people who can settle this with words, are we?"
Snick.
After confirming that the end of the cigar had been cut cleanly, Abel took out a lighter and lit it.
Kaizen and Bella quietly watched him.
"...Well, that's true."
Kaizen heightened his vigilance as he watched Abel try to smoke a cigar just as the fight was about to begin,
"Haa..."
Bella sighed and rechecked her equipment, which was covered in mana engravings.
After confirming their reactions, Abel looked around at the knights discreetly leaving the training grounds.
The estate's servants were already filing into the viewing stands and taking their seats.
"Well, it looks like everyone has mostly cleared out. Shall we begin?"
As he slowly surveyed the surroundings, Abel took a coin from inside his clothes.
"We'll start when this coin hits the ground. How about it?"
"I don't care."
"That's reasonable."
"Good. Then..."
Ting!
After receiving their confirmation, Abel flicked the coin straight upward with his thumb.
Perhaps because, after staying up all night, he had reinforced his body with more mana than necessary to invigorate it, the coin rose quite high.
"Ah, and there's one thing I want to say."
"Huh? We're about to start."
Looking at the coin soaring high into the air, Abel spoke in response to Kaizen's words.
"Yes. Because we're right about to start."
With that, Kaizen faced Abel with a combative smile.
He had already recognized Abel as an enemy.
There was not a hint of carelessness in his eyes.
"I wanted to apologize for thinking you were a layabout."
"Ah, I feel the same way."
"..."
Abel instinctively understood what the two of them truly meant.
They wanted to apologize for thinking he was a layabout.
So from this point on, they would face him without a moment's carelessness.
Understanding their true meaning, Abel raised one corner of his mouth and exhaled cigar smoke.
The coin gradually drew closer to the ground.
Ting!
At last, the coin landed on the ground.
"Hup!"
Kaizen was the first to attack.
A technique only possible with 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!
Even after emptying 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 both fended off Kaizen's attack with near-perfect counters.
Abel released the smoke within his body to block the bullets,
while Bella deflected Kaizen's rounds with her constantly active shield.
"Ha-ha!!"
At that, Kaizen smiled lightly and began infusing the spent revolver with mana.
Kaizen's ability.
[Magic Bullet].
The ability to imprint a phenomenon he understood onto mana and transform it into a bullet.
Of course, an ability this powerful came with numerous restrictions.
There was a limit to the phenomena he could understand, and he could use no more than roughly three different phenomena in a single fight.
Of course, the bullets he created this way could be fired endlessly, as long as his mana allowed it.
Bang!
Unlike the ordinary bullets before, this [Magic Bullet] contained Kaizen's mana.
Bella was the first to notice that something was wrong.
'This is?!'
It was her personal shield, maintained twenty-four hours a day, even when she was unconscious.
'Is it disrupting the mana?!'
It had not nullified the magic.
Rather, it was a much simpler and more fundamental phenomenon: a [Magic Bullet] capable of forcibly scattering the mana gathered to activate magic.
The shield cracked. No—it had not cracked; Kaizen's bullet was advancing through it, slicing through the shield as though it were soft as water.
The bullet's destination was Bella's head.
But the moment the shield spell was pierced, Bella's evasion magic, which she had set to activate in case this happened, immediately triggered.
Sst!
Kaizen's attack merely grazed her cheek after she wrenched her head aside and barely dodged it.
"Hah... Hah..."
Bella's pupils trembled as she still struggled to accept that she had nearly died, and she immediately turned toward Abel.
She had thought he would be in a similar situation.
"Ha!"
But Abel had instead pushed Kaizen's attack away with a simple, brute-force method.
Disrupt his mana? Then why not just pour in more mana?
It was the height of brute force. Yet Kaizen's attack was stopped so helplessly, as though that were the obvious answer.
Grin.
At the sight, Kaizen and Abel smiled and began clashing, neither waiting for the other to make the first move.
Abel defended against Kaizen's attacks with smoke and counterattacked immediately.
Kaizen, too, drew his sword as if it were no mere decoration, infusing it with sword aura to block Abel's attacks.
'As expected...'
As he blocked Abel's attacks, Kaizen shuddered at the astonishing power Abel displayed.
Strong.
Strong enough to overwhelm him with ease.
'So it was true that he hadn'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 inevitably had a tell.
A tell caused by mana gathering.
Because of the fatigue accumulated from not sleeping, Abel's tells were visible to Kaizen so clearly that he could read them.
'Left!'
KRA-BOOM!!!
Of course, knowing where an attack would come from did not mean dodging it; that depended entirely on Kaizen's ability.
'Up, left, left again, and right!'
Abel's smoke closed in from every direction.
It transformed into tens of thousands of weapons—fists, swords, spears, hammers, and more—as Kaizen dodged its attacks while watching Abel, who still had not moved a single step.
Bang!
Kaizen fired another [Magic Bullet], but Abel easily canceled out the round with his smoke.
"Ha, damn it!"
...
"..."
Bella watched the clash between the two of them in a daze.
Abel's strength and Kaizen's evasion ability were both beyond her understanding.
'I was thinking about this wrong...'
She could understand Abel, at least.
She had neither seen nor observed Abel's power before.
But Kaizen was different.
'How...?'
She had previously calculated the impact of Kaizen's attacks while blocking them, corrected the margin of error, and estimated his approximate full strength.
'Different.'
He was different. That was truly the only way she could describe it.
Kaizen's ability, strength, and capacity before her eyes—all of it far exceeded Bella's expectations.
'Was I arrogant?'
Crk.
The moment that thought occurred to her, Bella gritted her teeth and clenched her fist tightly.
According to the original history, her fate was to die pointlessly in Kaizen's ambush.
But the future had twisted with a man named Abel intervening.
The seed that would have withered away without ever leaving its name in history had finally begun to sprout.
'No!'
Vmmm.
'Don't make me laugh!'
[Mana Engraving].
To use magic, one had to construct a complex spell formula.
Magic circles supported that process, while [Mana Engraving] was a technique that went one step further.
Simply supplying mana to a [Mana Engraving] would activate the magic designed in advance.
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 principles into a form anyone could use with ease.
'I didn't come here to taste humiliation like this!!'
As though responding to her feelings, a total of six pieces of [Mana Engraving] equipment began to glow.
The pair of earrings contained water magic,
the three rings worn on both hands contained various elemental spells,
and finally, the necklace contained temporary [Gravity Magic] designed to make every attack hit.
All six activated simultaneously.
Rumble!
"!!!"
"!!!"
Their bodies suddenly grew heavy. Kaizen and Abel turned toward Bella at the same time.
"Well then, shall we really get started?"
Bella finally smiled lightly at the two men who had begun looking at her.
.
.
.
Dozens, then hundreds of clashes. With Bella joining the fight, the training grounds had become a veritable pandemonium.
'Hmm... Just as I thought.'
Abel looked at the two people pressing him at the same time and narrowed one eye, stiff from lack of sleep.
'They're strong...'
To be honest, after hearing that the duke had beaten them, he had indeed been underestimating them quite a bit.
But the abilities of the two people he had experienced firsthand were by no means something he could afford to underestimate.
Powerful people who had earned [Dark Shadow]'s recognition.
In Abel's judgment, Kaizen was at least the level of a knight order's deputy commander—in other words, upper Expert rank.
Bella possessed magical abilities even superior to those of Heros, whom Abel had fought.
Bang!
After blocking Kaizen's attack once more, Abel sighed as he felt his body grow heavy under Bella's [Gravity Magic].
On top of that, he was not in peak condition because he had not slept.
There was a momentary delay in both moving his mana and moving his body.
If he faced either one alone, he could kill them instantly.
But perhaps because both of them knew that, they did not bother keeping each other in check and instead focused entirely on attacking Abel.
Twinge.
'Urgh.'
Moreover, continuing to fight while using mana without having slept 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 strenuous exercise.
Abel grimaced once more as his head throbbed again.
Kaizen did not miss the opening.
Bang!
Kaizen used his signature rapid fire to preempt Abel's counterattacks, absorbing every attack from the front line,
"Fire, wind, strike my enemy!"
while Bella stepped back and pressured Abel with firepower.
It was a truly ideal formation.
It was at that moment, as Abel pulled a new cigar from inside his clothes to replenish the smoke consumed by Bella's attacks,
"Now!"
that Kaizen immediately retreated at Bella's signal.
[Black Magic — Decay]
Crackle.
The cigar began to crumble and scatter on the spot.
"Huh...?"
Abel stared blankly at the cigar as it was blown away by the wind.
"I assume the trigger for your ability is the smoke from that cigar."
As she watched him, Bella raised one corner of her mouth.
It was a truly incredible ability.
If Abel had been sufficiently rested, they would never have stood a chance against him.
"Then naturally, we should prevent you from smoking that cigar, right?"
Having learned numerous spells, Bella had at least laid a foundation in black magic through experience.
Black magic had originally begun as a means of preserving food. Naturally, its opposite, decay, was possible as well.
And a cigar was a product made by processing fermented tobacco leaves.
Even with her limited mastery of black magic, Bella could decay something as simple as a cigar.
"It's over."
"At the very least, we won't kill you."
At last, Kaizen and Bella charged at Abel once more.
.
.
.
The first to notice that something was wrong was Kaizen, who had been moving intensely and consuming Abel's smoke.
'What is this?'
The temperature had gradually fallen, and the surroundings had grown chilly enough to feel like early winter.
He had not noticed it at first.
There had been no room to worry about such things in the midst of their fierce battle.
Hoo.
But the moment he noticed the pure-white breath appearing in his view as he exhaled, Kaizen was momentarily flustered.
'Why?'
Bella was wondering the same thing.
'What?'
***
"Hahaha"
The duke ordered Sebastian to bring him a magitech screen showing what was happening in the knight order's training grounds.
He watched the two illegitimate children struggle and smiled lightly.
Although his ambush had once brought them face-to-face with death, 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 momentarily stopped.
"I fell for that trick too. Kheh-heh-heh."
When the duke had first fought Abel, the first thing he had done was prevent him from smoking a cigar.
It was only natural to block it, since it was such an obvious starting point for an attack.
A typical ability user would naturally try to shore up their weakness.
"Who would have thought it was actually a gigantic trap."
But by the time he realized that it was actually a gigantic trap, he had already suffered internal injuries from Abel's attack.
***
Fwooooooosh.
The two people stopped attacking.
I quietly smiled as I watched the breath rising from my mouth.
The fight had suddenly entered a lull.
In front of the two people staring blankly at the vapor coming from my mouth, I lightly brushed my hair back.
"Hmm. Yes. Naturally, you'd eliminate the cigar. But..."
When did you start thinking my ability only controlled cigar smoke?