Chapter 84
I had hated many things since I was young.
That was because I had a fucked-up personality.
-Caitlyn.
I hated people who were better than me.
I hated people who were worse than me.
I wished every last one of them would just die.
I hated talented people enough to wish them dead, and looked down on the untalented like they were garbage.
-What exactly are you dissatisfied with?
-Why are you so twisted?
Shut up.
You fucking idiots.
-You have plenty yourself.
-You have enough talent to make everyone else jealous···.
What was I supposed to do about being born this way?
I wished they would all just die.
I wished there wasn’t a single person in the world better than me.
I wished everything brighter than me would die, leaving me as the brightest person beneath that night sky.
‘If only that happened···.’
Would I, too,
be able to look at myself a little?
***
Zone 3, where sand whipped through the air.
Golden grains of sand carpeted the land like a sea, making the ground ripple with every gust of wind.
If one forgot it was a field, wouldn’t they absentmindedly lose themselves in the view?
The sun beat down from the sky, and the texture of sand seeped between her toes.
“Haa, haa···!”
Neat splashes of paint.
A landscape that came into view like a painting.
Kzzzt-!
At the center of that canvas, a fierce chase was unfolding.
The girl’s yellow hair streamed as though resisting the headwind.
Caitlyn was covered in electricity from head to toe.
“Kgh···!”
Her breath came in ragged gasps.
Yet she couldn’t stop her racing legs.
High-voltage sparks leaped among the scattering grains of sand.
Kzzzt-!
‘Damn it, my stamina’s running lower and lower···.’
If Zone 1’s concept was a grassland and Zone 2’s was a jungle, then Zone 3’s concept was a desert.
Sand covered the entire field, and the sun beat down without a single patch of shade.
It was an environment that looked as though a section of a real sandy desert had been brought here whole.
And yet, strangely, the temperature within the field was not hot at all.
Whoooosh-.
Far from being hot, it was chilly enough to make her hands and feet ache.
White crystals that had no business falling from the sky drifted down.
Caitlyn pressed forward through the desert snowstorm.
“Fuck··· where do you get off changing the entire climate?”
What a monstrous bitch.
Caitlyn ground out a curse.
A red flag was clutched in her arms.
‘If I can just make it back like this···!’
Swoooosh-!
Just then, something came rushing from behind her.
The girl quickly swung her fist to meet it.
“Hup···!”
Bang-!
A heavy impact traveled through her joints and bones.
What had flown at her back was sword aura chilled to absolute zero.
Ice crystals clung to the back of her hand.
Caitlyn violently shook her hand.
Electricity crackled, melting the hand that had begun to freeze.
“Ugh···.”
“I told you to forfeit quietly.”
Blue hair calmly emerged from the roiling storm.
Lin stood atop a sand dune.
Her characteristic dead eyes looked down at Caitlyn.
The tip of a pure-white sword, its sword aura flashing, was aimed at her.
“······Damn it.”
When had she caught up?
Caitlyn could do nothing but furrow her brow.
She had thought she’d left Lin far behind, yet the girl had appeared only a few meters behind her···.
“If you’re leaving, put down the flag in your hands first.”
“Ha.”
Caitlyn let out a hollow laugh.
Who would have thought things would get this tangled?
‘Why the hell am I suddenly tangled up with this monster bitch?’
A few minutes earlier.
The girl had completed her mission as the Sprinter.
She had gotten past the Keeper at the altar in the middle of the desert and taken the flag.
As she was making her way back, the Keeper had suddenly disappeared, and Lin had burst out in his place.
“You··· weren’t you fighting that lunatic from our side? You looked desperate to fight her, like you couldn’t stand it.”
“That can wait. Winning the match comes first.”
“The match? I didn’t know you were the kind of bitch who obsessed over petty wins and losses.”
“Yes. I have to win today.”
A chilly resonance.
Her voice held not even a trace of life.
“You’d better forfeit.”
“Fuck off.”
“You know it yourself. You can’t beat me.”
“Who says I’m going to fight you head-on? All I have to do here is run away well enough to win.”
“You’re weak.”
“······.”
“You won’t be able to shake me and escape.”
“Fuck, you really do pick only the most fucked-up things to say···!”
Kzzzzzt-!
Caitlyn fired a burst of electricity by surprise.
A high-voltage flash, woven like thorns, lunged for Lin’s neck.
The attack came in without a single wasted motion.
“It’s useless.”
Shaaak···!
Despite the surprise attack, the spear was torn apart in midair.
The roiling cold swallowed the high-temperature sparks.
Lin had merely drawn a line through the air.
“You’re fast. But not fast enough to make my sword miss.”
“······.”
The sword’s tip did not waver even slightly.
That indifference left her with a strange sense of deprivation.
“You won’t be able to move another step after this.”
Whoooooosh-.
Cold condensed over the pure-white blade.
The force behind it was entirely different from before.
The raging snowstorm came to a halt.
More precisely, it was sucked into a single slender sword.
At the instant the noisy typhoon stopped and the desert cried out in silence.
-Lin Glacia Style Domain Swordsmanship, Seventh Form-
‘Snowfield.’
Thud-.
The tip of Lin’s sword touched the ground.
Immediately afterward, the scenery froze outward from the spot where she stood.
The desert’s temperature was disregarded, and pure-white flowers bloomed across the sand grains.
Rumble, rumble-!
Zone 3 no longer looked like a desert.
Instead, it had become a snow-covered mountain, quietly ruined beneath a blanket of snowflakes.
Even if it was a prepared field, she had overturned an entire natural landscape.
“Haa···.”
Lin breathed calmly.
Even that exhalation became artistic vapor.
Caitlyn, frozen stiff as she stared blankly, managed only to mutter a single word.
“······Monstrous bitch.”
“Give up.”
An unreachable difference.
That monster was showing her.
There was a gap between them that could never be bridged.
“From now on, I won’t be holding back.”
“······.”
Kzzzt-.
Regardless, Caitlyn kicked off the ground.
She tried to escape with a burst of explosive power.
But sword aura was already crashing into her back.
Shaaak-!
“Kgh···!”
Cold.
It felt as though thousands of awls were stabbing into her back.
Caitlyn staggered, then lost her footing and collapsed anyway.
The pain made her consciousness recede into the distance.
“Kck, ngh···.”
“I told you that wouldn’t work.”
Lin stood some distance away.
She didn’t seem to have any intention of approaching.
She merely looked down at Caitlyn with quiet, dead eyes.
“F-fuck···.”
Her lips twitched.
Caitlyn barely raised her head.
“Forfeit.”
“Ugh···.”
It had been a long time.
When they were young.
The two had met several times through their families’ connections.
Caitlyn had been trampled by Lin every time.
She had been overwhelmed so completely that she had rolled across the floor in every spar.
Whenever Caitlyn was left frustrated on her own, Lin had always looked down at her from exactly that distance.
Caitlyn clenched her fist.
“Don’t look down on me like that···!”
Kwaaang-!
With her hand buried in the ground, the girl detonated her electricity.
Snow and sand exploded in the aftermath, clouding her vision.
Caitlyn used the opening to get back on her feet.
With her swaying body, she kicked off the ground through sheer stubbornness.
“Haa, haa···!”
Kzzzt-!
She pushed her speed up another notch.
But even that was merely within Lin’s palm.
“Stop.”
Shaaak-!
Once again, pure-white sword aura came crashing in.
This time, it struck the girl’s leg directly.
Caitlyn collapsed face-first into the snow before she could even take a few steps.
“Kgh, kraah···!”
“You know it’s meaningless.”
There was no malice whatsoever in the sword aura.
That made Caitlyn feel even more miserable.
Lin quietly held out her hand.
“Just give me the flag. I have no intention of tormenting you.”
“······.”
Her entire body trembled violently.
Her back and legs were covered in frost.
Perhaps she had developed frostbite; she could barely feel anything.
Lying face-down before her, Caitlyn clutched a spark that twitched weakly.
‘My body won’t move···.’
Her stamina was beginning to hit rock bottom.
Caitlyn clenched her teeth.
Her constitution.
A body born with very little mana.
According to the doctor, it was the worst possible body for learning magic.
Her lack of endurance had become a flaw, always holding Caitlyn back.
‘This is my limit.’
The girl thought while sprawled on the ground.
Her consciousness grew hazy, and strength began to drain from her body.
‘······Why am I doing this?’
A thought suddenly occurred to her.
Why had she clung to this so desperately after being dragged here against her will?
If she lost here, she could escape even that demonic bastard.
-Let’s do this.
-If our team loses this match, I’ll settle the bet from before.
She suddenly felt foolish.
Why was she lying face-down in this snowfield?
-Miss Caitlyn? Please take the Sprinter role.
-Because that’s how much I trust you.
Who did he think he was to trust her?
Spouting things he didn’t even mean···.
‘Who would trust someone like me?’
She hated everything.
She was sick to death of it.
Beyond her thickly blurred vision, the blue-haired girl came into view.
She stood there calmly brushing the tip of her sword, without a single scratch on her.
That immense gap lodged in her throat like a thorn.
‘You piece of trash.’
You piece of trash.
You piece of trash.
You piece of trash.
Who had those words been directed at?
With no target to aim for, the bowstring caught in her mouth was pulled taut.
-Caitlyn.
-What exactly are you dissatisfied with?
I hate them.
I hate people who shine brighter than me.
I hate the people who gnaw away at my mind.
I wish they would all be ruined in accidents or just fucking die.
-Why are you so twisted?
I wish you would disappear from my world.
I wanted to curse you with every ugly word I could find.
-You have plenty yourself.
-You have enough talent to make everyone else jealous···.
There are people with more.
There are people who shine brighter.
What use am I in front of people like that?
What meaning does this pathetic, good-for-nothing talent have, when it only looks impressive on the surface?
If I was a bud that could never become the best from the beginning, they should have trampled me from the start and stopped me from ever blooming.
‘Why.’
I hated talent.
More precisely, I hated talent that surpassed mine.
Instead of admiring it, I envied it, hated it enough for murderous intent to boil over, and cried from sheer frustration.
I hated people better than me enough to wish them dead, and treated people worse than me like garbage.
-There probably isn’t anyone as twisted as you in this world.
-You have so much, yet you’re still dissatisfied enough to hate the entire world?
What was I supposed to do about being born this way?
I wished they would all just die.
I wished there wasn’t a single person in the world better than me.
I wished everything brighter than me would die, leaving me as the brightest person beneath that night sky.
-Miss Caitlyn’s legs are the fastest of all.
Shut up.
Don’t pretend you believe me.
Words and praise you don’t even mean.
There’s no way anyone could trust someone like me.
‘Liar.’
You must be laughing at me inside.
You must be calling it a worthless talent and me a trashy bitch.
They’re all the same.
‘Caitlyn Letus.’
The name I trusted least.
The name I resented most.
A hopelessly rotten bitch.
A woman filled to the bone with an inferiority complex, dragging around every form of envy, jealousy, and self-loathing.
-Miss Caitlyn.
-I’ll leave the flag entirely in your hands.
-Why don’t you show us the fastest feet in the academy?
What could she do?
That was how she had been born.
“Kuh, ugh···.”
“······You’re not seriously planning to continue?”
Her body staggered upright.
Lin continued to stare at Caitlyn with an expressionless face.
She merely asked as though she couldn’t understand why Caitlyn was going so far.
Kzzzt-.
Her appearance was utterly wretched.
Covered in sand, with frost clinging between it all.
Even so, Caitlyn stood with her eyes wide open.
‘Why am I going this far?’
That’s right.
You don’t know.
It’s too trivial an emotion for people like you to understand.
Caitlyn clenched her reddened fist tightly.
“I···.”
Her throat was hoarse.
She muttered through her slurred speech.
“······I hate losing to people who think they’re better than me more than anything in the world.”
Kzzzzzt-!
The next moment, electricity coiled around the girl’s entire body.
Bright yellow sparks shone clearly against the snowfield.
She had scraped and scraped at her depleted mana, gathering even the last handful.
She looked ready to pass out at any moment, but her tenacious consciousness refused to break so easily.
“To cast magic in that condition? It must feel like your muscles are melting.”
“Hwek, huff···.”
“You’ll hurt yourself. Don’t overdo it. Give up.”
“Go fuck yourself.”
Her middle finger rose clearly.
The girl gritted her teeth.
The next moment, her feet kicked off the snowfield once more.
The electricity surged to several times its previous output, tearing apart the cold surrounding her.
Kwaaakakak-!
“Hng···!”
Caitlyn raced across the snowfield.
She was almost at the end of Zone 3, with the passage to Zone 2 right before her.
She pierced through every obstacle in her way and ran only in a straight line.
Of course, Lin wasn’t the type to simply watch.
She immediately raised the tip of her sword and sent several more slashes flying.
Shaaak-!
Shaak-!
The sword aura struck without missing its mark.
The cold stiffened her body, making her limbs feel as though they were crumpling.
“Krah, ugh···!”
But Caitlyn did not fall.
If anything, she sped up and pressed forward.
She was suppressing the pain of absolute zero through sheer willpower.
For the first time, bewilderment appeared on Lin’s previously expressionless face.
“You’re ignoring it even after being struck by sword aura···?”
It was insane persistence.
Whether the blade stabbed her or not, she simply ran without reacting.
Lin had clashed with Caitlyn several times, but she had never seen her so stubbornly tenacious.
Kzzzzzt-!
Her back gradually grew more distant.
Only belatedly did Lin chase after the girl.
But Caitlyn was already crossing the zone boundary.
“That won’t do.”
Shaaak-!
Shaak-!
Shaak, shak-!
The instant she stepped across the boundary, several sword auras exploded against her.
Even Caitlyn, blinded by desperation, couldn’t ignore a barrage layered one over another.
“Ah···.”
In the end, her body could take no more.
Caitlyn was knocked away and sprawled at the edge of the snowfield.
“Haa, haa···.”
The pain she had briefly forgotten beneath the adrenaline.
The backlash from scraping her mana dry.
Her hands and feet, frozen bright red.
All of it pressed down on the girl’s body.
Her vision spun, and she felt as though her consciousness might cut out at any moment.
“Kgh, hngh···.”
The girl lay collapsed with Zone 2 right before her.
She was in no state even to hold on to consciousness, let alone move.
She had no strength left to cross that boundary.
And yet, even in that situation, Caitlyn wore a ragged smile.
“Ha, haha···.”
Her right hand.
The hand gripping the flag was the only part that extended into Zone 2.
And someone was looking down at her from in front of that flag.
“Miss Caitlyn.”
The masked boy.
He stood before the boundary as though he had been waiting.
The needle-sharp cold faded, and the warmth of a human body wrapped around her.
“Hey···.”
He had been waiting.
As though he had known she would come.
-Miss Caitlyn? Please take the Sprinter role.
-Because that’s how much I trust you.
Stupid mask.
Why did seeing that face make her feel strangely reassured?
The pursuer must have been close behind, yet she felt neither fear nor even worry.
“I brought it··· the thing you··· asked for···.”
She stammered out a few words.
As her consciousness faded, the girl barely held out the flag.
“If we lose this, I’ll kill you···.”
“You’ve done well.”
A hand gently took hold of hers.
Caitlyn was laid down in a soft patch of brush.
Just before her vision went black, the boy’s voice was the only thing that rang in her ears.
“I’ll make sure we win.”
Now that she heard it, he had quite a lovely voice.
The girl lost consciousness with that foolish thought lingering in her mind.