Chapter 19
The traces of the fire dragon tore apart in all directions and scattered on the wind.
Perhaps shocked that her trump card had been so easily countered, Kariya strode toward Karen, raised one of his chain swords, and pointed it at her neck.
“With this, is my victory in the second spar as well?”
“…Why.”
Karen muttered blankly, as if dazed.
“Why couldn’t I win this time either?”
“You’re not asking because you don’t know.”
“I don’t know!”
Karen shouted at the back of Kariya’s head as he muttered.
“I said I don’t know! I didn’t let my guard down this time! I fought you with the strongest magic I can use right now! Why was it exactly the same this time too…!”
“That is the problem.”
Kariya glanced back and replied in a low voice.
“Even if your opponent had been Instructor Rex, would you have done the same thing you did when fighting me?”
“What…?”
Karen muttered blankly, then let out an incredulous laugh and shouted.
“As if I’d do something so carefree! Against a hero of the Seven Years’ War, firing off a super-tier spell without leaving any mana in reserve is practically suicide…!”
“It’s the same thing.”
Kariya turned his head forward again and said,
“If you’d left even one extra fireball in reserve, it wouldn’t have ended like this, at least.”
“….”
As I watched Karen silently sink down where she stood, I thought to myself.
Mana isn’t MP; it’s stamina.
At least in this world, it is. Mana itself refills quickly no matter how often it is used, but there is a clear limit to how much mana each person can control in a single breath.
And when mana is used beyond that limit, the user falls into a depleted state. That was what had happened with the super-tier spell Karen had just used.
It was no different from her finishing move, used with the resolve to knowingly enter a state of mana depletion.
She had thought it represented her full strength, with no carelessness involved, but the reality was different.
The very act of blindly throwing in her maximum output without considering what came afterward was, in fact, the height of arrogance.
The outrageously conceited judgment that ‘There’s no way my peak won’t bring down my opponent.’
Kariya had pointed out that flaw, and as a result, she had tasted defeat twice.
“So that’s what the principal’s words meant…?”
Rex, who had been watching the spar from beside me, muttered.
=
“…Phew.”
After the spar, Kariya returned to the bench and dropped heavily onto the ground, soot smeared across various parts of his body.
“Hey, sit up here. You’ll get dirty.”
“I’m dirtier right now.”
Kariya replied to the complaining Miriam while brushing the soot from his body.
“….”
Kariya’s face suddenly twisted as he dusted the soot from his shoulder.
A terrible pain seemed to crush his entire forearm, from just below the shoulder to his fingertips.
‘…Tch, is this rebound.’
Subtly hiding his trembling fingertips, Kariya clicked his tongue inwardly.
The hollow state that comes after squeezing out all the mana one can is called depletion.
But what comes after squeezing out mana beyond one’s limit is not some temporary emptiness, but agony.
Rebound.
The backlash inflicted on the body when mana beyond the permitted amount is forcibly controlled.
Among magic knights, this rebound is commonly referred to by the idiom ‘the price of greed,’ and it induces at least five minutes of agony along with a temporary state in which mana is cut off.
‘But I would have lost if I hadn’t done this.’
Kariya recalled the enormous fire dragon he had just seen.
‘A parlor trick?’
Recalling the bluff he had made, Kariya let out a hollow laugh inwardly.
‘To call that a parlor trick—what an absurd bluff.’
Kariya slowly shook his head and thought,
‘I have to admit it. The strength of Magnus Academy’s third-ranked student is no bluff….’
Even in their second bout, following the first, Karen had committed the blunder of letting her guard down.
Seeing through that moment and seizing the key to victory had undeniably been Kariya’s own ability, yet he could not shake the unpleasant feeling that the key had been handed to him for free.
‘As frustrating as it is, if we consider only our total objective strength… I still can’t match that woman.’
Kariya thought as he bit down hard on his lower lip.
If that woman completely discarded her carelessness and arrogance.
And if they were to have a third rematch.
Only then would it truly become impossible to predict who would win.
=
“Go win, Miss By-the-Book!”
“Who are you calling Miss By-the-Book, right now!!”
Leaving Miriam behind as she shouted something that could have been either encouragement or an insult, Charlotte stepped onto the field as the second fighter.
The barrier stone resonated with a low hum, and another apprentice magic knight entered the area within it.
Class A, Igor Ivanov.
Fourth in the year rankings. His magic was standard earth-element magic.
Class E, Charlotte Valliere.
Seventeenth in the year rankings. Her magic was lightning-element derivative Flash Magic.
Igor’s magic equipment was a simple straight sword. It was an utterly ordinary mass-produced one-handed magic sword given to every student upon entering Magnus Academy.
Charlotte’s weapon, on the other hand, was….
“An axe…?”
“Tougher than I expected.”
Sitting beside Miriam, who was blinking at Charlotte’s magic equipment, Kariya grinned approvingly and muttered.
“An axe.”
Igor said after confirming her weapon.
“I believe Sir Ricardo uses an axe as well.”
“He’s my grandfather.”
“Really?”
After hearing Charlotte’s answer, Igor continued with a surprised expression.
“To think your grandfather is that hero of the Seven Years’ War. I’m envious. He’s the person I respect second only to my father.”
“Thank you.”
“But that doesn’t mean I’ll go easy on you.”
Igor spoke coldly and drove his straight sword deep into the ground.
Crack…!
The stones and gravel buried in the ground writhed as they were drawn toward the sword, then clung thickly to it.
“If I were to show you any half-hearted consideration simply because you’re his direct blood relative, it would be a great insult to him as well. Besides….”
Lifting the straight sword, which had transformed into a massive club, and swinging it lightly, Igor declared in a low voice,
“Surpassing the person I admire is also my goal as a knight, after all.”
“So I’m a stepping stone?”
“Who knows.”
-Stomp.
“Whether you’ll even become a stepping stone….”
-Bang!!
“!!”
“We won’t know until we actually fight!”
Even while holding the enormous club, Igor stepped down with astonishing speed.
Igor shot forward like a bullet and swung the club straight down, while Charlotte barely managed to roll across the dirt to evade it.
“Starting with a Naryeotagon?”
“Tch…!”
Charlotte clicked her tongue at Igor’s use of the difficult old term to taunt her.
-Crackle…!
Lightning crackled over the axe.
I muttered without thinking when I saw it.
“Huh, that’s….”
“Ordinary standard lightning-element magic.”
Rex said matter-of-factly.
Igor asked Charlotte, who was breathing heavily,
“Aren’t you going to use Flash Magic?”
-Bang!!
Instead of answering, Charlotte kicked off the ground. By then, crackling lightning had coiled around both her legs as well.
I watched closely and realized a beat late. She had wrapped lightning around her legs not to move quickly, but to kick off the ‘empty air.’
Unable to properly control the weight of the enormous axe, she had devised a way to somehow change direction freely while leaping uncontrollably high…
a desperate measure
.
‘I’m sorry, Charlotte, but I can’t see it as anything more than that.’
If anything… I even found myself thinking that Charlotte was being tossed around by the weight of that enormous axe.
-Crash!!!
The enormous axe and club collided again and again. Yet it was obvious that Charlotte was the one being pushed back.
Against Igor, who kept a firm hold on his center of gravity while displaying near-perfect swordsmanship, she seemed hard-pressed even to block his attacks.
Even that did not seem to be working properly, as small cuts continued to multiply around her forearms.
“You’re slow.”
After subtly leaning aside to dodge the axe, Igor lightly waved his fingertip through the air.
“And full of openings.”
Following the trajectory of his fingertip, the dirt floor surged upward and formed an earthen wall.
-Crash!!
“Ugh…!”
Charlotte’s back struck the earthen wall as the weight of the axe threw her off balance. At that moment, Igor deliberately collapsed the wall inward.
Charlotte’s body tilted visibly.
As Charlotte bit her lip and forcibly raised her stance, the sharp tip of Igor’s straight sword, stripped of its coating of stone, was already pressed against the nape of her neck.
“It’s over, Charlotte.”
“….”
“You couldn’t even become a stepping stone. What a shame.”
Charlotte clenched her teeth as though they might break. Feeling the tension drain out of me, I closed my eyes and let myself slump backward.
It was a spar for which there was no more fitting description than one-sided.
‘I was thoroughly toyed with from beginning to end.’
I glanced sideways at Charlotte as she returned with a dazed expression and trudged over to sit down, then thought to myself.
‘More than anything else, what stood out was… that axe.’
To a magic knight, a weapon—in other words, magic equipment—is both a lifeline and an alter ego.
In my case, it was this Formless Sword. In Igor’s case, it was the pair of chain swords whose handles were connected at the ends by a long chain. Karen did not seem to have any magic equipment in particular, but judging by the studded gloves she wore, those must have been her magic equipment after all.
At any rate. The important thing was that magic knights each chose the weapon they could use best as their magic equipment. It was such basic common knowledge that it hardly needed to be mentioned—something even I knew.
But Charlotte’s axe was strange in several ways.
To insist on using a large axe as one’s magic equipment despite being unable to handle it properly and merely being tossed around by its weight? Unless there was some special reason, it made no sense.
Of course, considering that she had risen as high as sixteenth in the year rankings with equipment she could barely handle, she was not entirely hopeless.
Perhaps the comparison with Igor, who could freely wield a club as tall as himself that he had formed on the spot, had made her shortcomings stand out excessively?
‘No, but even so.’
Just as I was lost in thought.
‘I believe Sir Ricardo uses an axe as well.’
Igor’s passing remark just before the spar began continued to bother me.
‘…Hmm.’
I folded my arms and let out a low groan.
‘I’ll have to ask Charlotte directly about this.’
I briefly set my thoughts about her aside and turned my gaze toward the next fighter, who was hesitantly stepping into the area within the barrier stone.
The next fighter for our class was Miss Roxanna Gatling.