The First Letter (63)

The Hunting Festival was dangerous. It was dangerous even without considering the contents of the letter from the future. After all, it was a festival for hunting monsters.

That day, not only the monsters native to the forest but also monsters captured elsewhere would be released. And monsters were, by nature, creatures hostile to humanity.

Naturally, the monsters would not make special allowances just because the participants were Academy students. The Hunting Festival was dangerous enough that even a moment's carelessness could result in injury, and every few years, someone even died.

Even so, the Hunting Festival was packed with participants every year. Hundreds of people could spread throughout that vast forest without making much of a difference, but it was still a surprisingly large number for a festival that required them to risk their lives.

In fact, most participants came from combat-related departments; students in the Department of Commerce and the Department of Humanities could not participate at all.

In other words, even excluding roughly half of the Academy's students, hundreds of participants appeared every year. This was partly thanks to the Hunting Festival's splendid prizes, but it was also a phenomenon born from the nature of the Academy itself.

The Academy was both an educational institution and a training institution. Whether in the Department of Swordsmanship or the Department of Magic, students had to survive intense competition, and from their third year onward, they were even dispatched to actual battlefields.

Even apart from the Hunting Festival, there were plenty of situations in which one had to risk one's life to graduate from the Academy. If anything, a festival held within Academy grounds under proper supervision was safer. People were bound to feel less hesitant about it.

That was why I initially expected gathering team members for the Hunting Festival to be easy. Seria was an excellent swordswoman, and I had friends like Celin and Leto whom I could trust with my life. There were only four of us, after all.

The journey I had thought would be so simple had somehow passed through numerous hardships and brought me to the present. Of course, I had managed to gather four people. It was just that the atmosphere was not particularly good...