So in the end the four of us, Merlin included, were entered in the preliminaries. And the method for ranking the top four teams that advanced was, bluntly, target destruction.
Magic academies love smashing targets. I have no idea why. It was the same back in my previous life, and I never did work out the reason. I asked Merlin about it once, she being the headmaster, and got shut down in a single line: “It is the done thing, by ancient tradition. Every other magic academy is the same. Target destruction, one and all.” Hmm. And what exactly is ‘the done thing’ supposed to mean? The mystery only deepens.
Anyway. The venue was a big, big field, as it had to be with the entire school turning out, and it wasn’t only the school in the end. People from the surrounding area had come to watch as well, until the whole affair had turned into something of a local festival. A roaring success by any measure, and the gallery was loving it. Picture a sports day on a modern Japanese high school field, or an elementary school field day scaled up to something absurd, and you have the general idea.
The event ran in the middle of the ground. Targets stood scattered outward from the center in a radial pattern, and each competitor got exactly one shot at them: a single all-out area spell. Win or lose came down to the team’s combined total.
Which brought us back to our four, Merlin among them. Though as for Merlin, I was fresh out of words on the subject. The swallowtail-butterfly mask was the same one I’d seen in the classroom the other day, but the outfit was a student uniform. The same student uniform Anastasia wears. The cosplay energy coming off her was, frankly, off the scale. As for whether anyone would recognize her, she had the mask, and she’d layered the perception-blocking magic assassins favor on top of it, so presumably we were fine.
So there we sat, under the sun-shade tent in the competitors’ waiting area, watching the class representatives work—
“Level 2: Fire Lance!”
“Level 2: Ice Edge!”
“Level 3: Ice Blizzard!”
“Level 2: Lightning!”
Hmm. I’d been watching them knock targets down for a while now, and this looked like the average standard for a second-year class representative.
Just then a murmur ran through the gallery behind the tent.
“That’s a high level, all right. Throwing around top-tier Level 2 like it’s nothing.”
“You’ve got Level 3s flying out there too. That’s the Thunder God Emperor Festival for you.”
I turned to Anastasia beside me.
“What do you make of it, Anastasia?”
“…Am I allowed to say it straight?”
“Go ahead.”
“Um… well… I think… it’s low level.”
“Maria?”
“Same. ‘Low level’ is the only phrase I’ve got.”
At the training camp the other day the pair of them had gotten Level 4 fully under control, so in practical terms, what was happening out there could only look like children at play to them.
Even so. I pitched my voice deliberately heavy.
“That’s how it looks to you now, sure. But from where I stand, the two of you are plainly half-baked. There’s always someone further up, so whatever else you do, don’t get complacent.”
The two of them nodded, and a great cheer went up from the gallery. A group had started out from the competitors’ area toward the center of the field, walking abreast in a single line. One of them I recognized, in fact: the student council member who’d run the representative-selection assembly before the camp.
Riding that roar from the gallery, the student council started in on the targets, fully primed—
“Level 3: Ice Blizzard!”
“Level 3: Elder Lightning!”
“Level 4: Salamander!”
“Level 4: Wind Shelter!”
Top-tier Level 3 as their floor, and up to mid-tier Level 4 at the ceiling. That was about the size of it.
What came from the gallery behind the tent this time wasn’t a murmur. It was a swell of noise, and under it, sounds of open admiration.
“Hey, hey, Level 4 is teacher grade!?”
“The student council, all right… I can’t believe they’re our age.”
“Well, that settles the championship for this year too!”
“Hey, their target count’s… over two hundred!? What are you supposed to do but laugh at that.”
To cheers and applause, the student council came back to the waiting area with what was, as things stood, a runaway score on the board. Or rather, they came back to Maria.
“Well, well? If it isn’t Maria-san. And what is the flattest chest in the first year doing in a place like this, I wonder?”
Irene-san, the well-endowed one. Who, it seemed, had history with Maria.
Next up came a giant of a man, pushing two meters, cracking his knuckles and glaring at me.
“Hey. You. Don’t get cocky just because Headmaster Merlin’s taken a shine to you.”
I had some idea what he was referring to, granted. Still, there was no need to bare quite that much hostility.
Then the man in glasses nodded along, hard.
“Just so. A human of the inferior species, and… a savage elf!”
Several veins stood out on Maria’s temple at once. Knowing the background, I understood the feeling perfectly. That hair trigger of hers is a bad habit all the same.
I was about to step in when Irene-san stopped the man with a raised hand.
“Michael? Headmaster Merlin has said this before. Discriminatory remarks in public are forbidden. In front of people, at the very least, restrain yourself. It puts your breeding in question, you know?”
“But, Vice President Irene—!”
“What? You don’t mean to argue with me, surely? Honestly… when exactly did you become so very important…?”
This one might run on the same instant-boil setting as Maria. Beautiful, certainly, but her angry face was genuinely frightening.
“M-M-My apologies, Vice President.”
Irene-san let out a short breath through her nose, the very picture of so long as you understand.
Maria turned a sharp glare on her.
“Vice President Irene. How about training your pet dog properly?”
Irene-san laughed at that. “Fufu.”
“Training? Well, quite. However—thanks to certain people trading on the headmaster’s reflected glory, our General Secretary has been confined to his room. Naturally, there isn’t one person here who thinks kindly of you.”
Ah, right. That had happened. The General Secretary, if I remembered rightly, was this man in the glasses, and Merlin had brought the full weight of her office down on him on a charge of throwing discriminatory remarks at Maria and me.
“Besides, it is a fact that you are not thought well of among the forest elves.”
“…”
“You know that. You have made your peace with being talked about behind your back, and you still mean to walk out onto a public stage like the Thunder God Emperor Festival, do you not? Then acknowledge reality first. Show them power and silence the peanut gallery. Fail at that, and you will be a loser for as long as you live. And I will never grant a loser standing on the same stage as myself. That is simply my nature. Though personally, I would recommend a loser behave like the beaten cur she is: one yelp, then a quiet, modest little life.”
Ah. This was bad. Maria had begun to tremble where she stood, eyes gone half-lidded, the whites of them starting to show. This was well past five seconds from snapping. Her anger had gone straight up through the roof, and by the look of her she couldn’t hold the overflow back anymore even if she wanted to.
“And you there, the black-haired one? It is likewise a fact that, unlike us demons, you belong to the species called human. The ones they call inferior. If you intend to get by at this academy, choose how you mean to live, and choose early.”
“How I mean to live?”
“Whether you live in the shade with your head down and draw no attention, or silence the peanut gallery with overwhelming power. We, the student council, welcome anyone with real ability. Human, or a pariah among the elves, it makes no difference to us.”
Irene-san threw out that ample chest of hers and smiled, sharp and challenging.
“If you can, of course. Should you ever wish to know the celestial realm of magecraft—a stage entirely apart from the one you live on—then force it all down by strength and crawl your way up to the student council’s ground.”
Hmm. Confidence is a fine thing, I suppose, and what she was actually saying wasn’t unreasonable. Unpleasant logic, but not unreasonable. A doctrine of the chosen, resting on pure meritocracy, in short. Though the first Four Emperors had no shortage of self-assured people in it, and I don’t think a single one of us ever talked quite that big. Myself included.
Maria shrugged, thoroughly fed up.
“So you came over to be snide because your General Secretary got grounded? That tells me the size of you, Student Council President.”
At the end of Maria’s glare stood a man with long blond hair, androgynous enough that if you were told he was a beautiful woman in men’s clothes, you’d find yourself nodding along.
“…”
He gave Maria’s words no reaction at all. He simply swept a single glance across all of us, ‘as though we were scenery.’
“Hey—! Why aren’t you saying anything?”
That, finally, got a response: a small, amused laugh.
“We are… no. The Vice President and I are a chosen people, able to handle Level 4 while still students. Which makes you, let us say, pebbles at the roadside. Come now, think about it. Do you take an interest in pebbles? Do you go so far as to speak to them?”
“…Meaning what?”
“Meaning I hold no feeling toward you whatsoever. You asked just now why I was silent, didn’t you? If you want a proper conversation with me, kindly come back once you can manage top-tier Level 3 at the very least. Even the student council’s own members, the Vice President aside, keep their words with me to the bare minimum.”
The Student Council President, it seemed, had quite a lovely personality.
He waved a hand behind him without turning and started off toward the competitors’ seats.
“I opened my mouth today as a special service, but time is finite, and I keep no mouth for conversing with breeds of no value. Ah, and one more thing. The masked one there is in dreadfully bad taste. A ridiculous outfit and a ridiculous name. I had a look at the entry list, and ‘Anonymous Hope’? That is on the level of doubting your sanity.”
The president walked off, and the rest of the council followed after him. Some wore contempt, some a confident smile. That was how the remaining four of them left.
The short version being that we were thoroughly looked down on and thoroughly mocked.
This was absolutely going to turn into trouble, I thought, and looked over at Maria, and I was right. Shaking from head to foot, veins standing out all over her face, eyes rolling back, gnawing at the thumbnail of her right hand. Ah. This one was definitely past saving.
“Hmph… I always did think they were insufferable, but honestly, those people really do have—lovely personalities.”
Everything she said was entirely correct. Then Maria prefaced her next question with a “surely not, but,” and asked it.
“You’re not going to say something useless at this stage, are you? Like ‘don’t use your real strength.’”
I was on Maria’s side, as it happened. Putting Merlin on the targets would be cheating of the highest order, so competing was off the table for her, which left the three of us. Doing with three what every other team was doing with four is a serious handicap. If the two of them fell short it would land on me in the end, but I could hardly cut loose with a Level 10 Thunder God Emperor Ephthal, and even if I did step in there’s a ceiling on what I can show. Those two, meanwhile, stay comfortably inside what the world thinks possible even at full power. So honestly? I wanted them to go all out.
“No. I’m not stopping you.”
“Good. Then let’s give them a shock, shall we. With Anastasia’s Level 4 and my own.”