—Right, then. Target destruction.
The situation, briefly: our turn came dead last, closing out the whole preliminary round. Third years first, then second years, the student council slotted in partway through as a sort of exhibition, and us first years bringing up the rear. Closing the show didn’t mean anything was expected of us, mind you. If anything the gallery had gone cold on us, radiating a general sense of you’re all hopeless anyway, so hurry it up. Provisional fourth place stood at one hundred twenty-four targets, which made beating that our minimum.
“Hey, Ephthal, get a look at the student council.”
I looked. Over in their tent the council had settled in for a leisurely tea break, and their accommodations were plainly not the ones the rest of us had been given. A red carpet laid down under the canvas. Tables, in the middle of a field. To crown it all they had a valet, some butler sort of person attached to the council, and as far as I could tell he was the one brewing the coffee.
Anyway.
“All right. Maria, want to lead off?”
“Okay. I’ll knock them flat, and properly.”
Maria thrust her right palm high toward the sky, closed her eyes, and began building the formula as she worked the magic power up.
Still. Thinking about where Maria had come from, there was a great deal in this. Born to the guardians of the elves, her branch family slaughtered to the last, persecuted by everyone around her. She’d set herself to proving them all wrong so completely that she’d gone abroad to a demon magic academy to do it, and the whole way she’d held herself up alone, straining, bluffing, fighting a war with no army behind her.
I nodded to myself.
Go on. Knock the wind out of the ones who laughed at you, exactly the way you said you would.
Because that was what this was. The spell she was about to fire was a signal flare, the opening shot of the counterattack. Fate had knocked Maria around her entire life, and here she was setting out on the road to success under her own power, on nothing but the work she’d put in. Step one.
And just as Irene-san, the Vice President, brought the cup to her lips—Maria’s magic opened fire.
“Now watch! Level 4, the top tier of the fire attribute—Fire Dance!”
The formula came out clean, the flow of power superb. A hundred arrows, near enough, and her control had sharpened by an order since I’d last watched her work. Elves take up the bow to begin with, so the image probably sits easily in her head. This is her showpiece at the moment, and with it, near enough every arrow lands. A miss was essentially off the table.
The standing record was the student council’s two hundred eight, and that was across four casters. Maria was about to reach almost half of it on her own.
The hundred arrows climbed high into the empty air, turned over, took their angles, and ran for the distant targets. Guided in, to be precise, each one drawn down as though the target were swallowing it.
BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOOOM! The fire arrows struck almost as one and detonated, and something like a hundred targets burst apart into fragments. A perfect finish.
“Splendid.”
Honestly, that was the sort of flawless, unwavering control you’d see at a Self-Defense Force artillery exercise. You could call it beautiful and nobody would argue the point. And when I looked over at the council, sitting there mid–tea break, every last one of them—
—sprayed their coffee out in perfect unison.
“Hack! Hack… hack!”
“Wh-Wh-What was that!? What in the world was that!?”
“Impossible! A first year, casting Level 4… and the top tier of it, no less…”
“Ri… dic… ulous.”
“Ah… am I dreaming…?”
Maria puffed out her chest, radiating smugness, folded her arms, and nodded, and nodded again. Then she came at me with her right palm up, so I put mine up and met it. A crisp, satisfying smack, and a bright, cheerful flower of a grin opened on her face.
“See? I really am a genius.”
Her grin was wide and genuinely adorable, no argument there. Although I had rather thought I’d hammered the whole don’t-get-carried-away lesson home earlier. Some of that must have soured my face, because Maria tilted her head with a puzzled little “Huh?”
Then again, she’s spent her whole life being trodden on, and withholding confidence from her has problems of its own. This kid has worked without stopping to make the people around her admit she exists. Fine. Strutting on this scale, I’d allow.
“Okay, next up, Anastasia—”
She fired before I got the sentence out.
“The wind attribute, Level 4… the top tier! Thunder Storm!”
A roar went up, and violet lightning tore around us like a storm. Her spell burns everything in reach to cinders with lightning, with herself at the center, which meant every target inside a ten-meter radius was swallowed in the discharge and charred black. Call it seventy destroyed, by eye. Either way, the entire close range was cleared out in one stroke.
And ‘with herself at the center’ meant, naturally, that we were inside it too. Nobody got hurt, since I’d scrambled a defensive circle over Maria the instant it started.
“Anastasia. Maria’s mind is worn through right now, straight off a piece of delicate casting. Think about the people around you a little more.”
“Ah. I thought Master would protect Maria-san.”
Ah. So that was priced into the casting. She drifts around soft and fluffy most of the time and then turns sharply calculating at moments like this, and I rate that side of her rather highly, as it happens. That particular application was a touch much, though.
Anyway. That put our total somewhere around one hundred seventy. Provisional fourth stood at one hundred twenty-four, so the goal was already cleared, and all that remained was for me to lob something around Level 3 and call it a day.
That was when the voices reached us from the council’s tent.
“C-C-Calm down! We are the student council! What are we doing, losing our heads over that much!”
“Yes—we are the superior, chosen breed who lead the entire student body!”
“Quite so! Their advancement may be settled, but we shall show them the difference in power in the main tournament!”
“Right. We’ll show them that target destruction and real combat are different animals! And it’s only those two who are anything special. The black-haired one is Merlin-sama’s favoritism, nothing more. The rest have to be small fry!”
“Yes. Let us calm down first. Handle this calmly and we cannot lose. We may drop narrow individual matches to those two, but the rest are small fry… yes, the rest must be small fry… they must be… Our superiority in overall strength is an immovable fact, after all.”
Right. Change of plan. No more fudging it with a Level 3. Being called Merlin’s pet forever is genuinely uncalled for, and left alone it starts to touch her reputation as well as mine.
“About time I showed you why exactly Merlin treats me as a special case.”
Within the bounds of common sense, mind. Nothing that throws the world into disorder.
The council picked their coffee cups back up to steady their nerves. And just as Irene-san brought hers to her lips a second time—my magic opened fire. Literally, in this case.
“Level 5: Red Genocide.”
A heat ray in the shape of a small dragon leapt from my palm, and one of the targets went up in a hiss of steam. Left to itself the beam would carry on into the gallery, which wouldn’t do, so I took hold of it. Open hand closed into a fist, thumb cocked upward, and the dragon climbed to match. Up it went, spiraling and spiraling, racing for the heavens.
“Right. There.”
I flicked the thumb over and aimed it at the ground. Obedient as ever, the dragon turned and came down headlong, maw wide, and bit into the earth.
The heat ray struck the field, and—
—BOOM!
Pebbles and dust swirled up in the wash of it. The upshot being a very large explosion and a scorched crater on the ten-meter scale, sitting in the middle of the ground.
As a way of saying abnormal enough that Merlin makes an exception for him, that ought to do nicely. And thinking exactly that, I looked over at the council, who had been steadying their nerves with coffee this entire time, and—
—of course. They sprayed their coffee out in perfect unison.
“Pffffff—!”
“Hack! Hack… hack!”
“L-L-L-Level 5!? That’s the kind of thing you see maybe once in several years, even at the inter-academy tournament. Genuine MVP territory!”
“Wh-Wh-What is happening!? What is going on with those first years!?”
“I can’t believe it… what I’m looking at… I can’t believe it. E-E-Everyone… let’s have some coffee. To calm down…”
They really do love their coffee. I was still thinking it when Merlin took a step toward them and thrust her right palm up over her head.
“What are you—Merlin? You’re not supposed to be doing anything today.”
That was certainly the arrangement we’d made beforehand. So why, Merlin, are you refining magic power? And this shape feels like—Just as the bad feeling arrived, Merlin spoke the name of exactly the spell I’d been afraid of.
“Level 6: Degraded Thunder God Emperor Lesser Ephthal!”
A flash of lightning. Whiteout and thunderclap, arriving a beat behind. Anastasia’s lightning couldn’t be mentioned in the same breath—
—CRASH-SMASH-KRAKAAAAAOOOOOM!
And last of all came a colossal explosion. Which came down to this: the lightning fell, and every single target laid out for the trial was blown clean off the field.
In the same instant, the council sprayed coffee from their mouths again, as one.
“Pffffff—!”
“Hack! Hack… hack! There isn’t enough coffee in the world to calm this down!”
“L-L-L-Level 6!? Solo!? Not even a ritual working by professional court mages!? S-S-Solo!?”
“What in the world!”
“Ah, I’ve finally understood. It’s a dream… this is a dream. Haha, well, in that case… right, let’s try pinching my cheek… wha—Ehhhhhh!? It’s real!? Level 6!?”
Mouths and clothes soaked through with coffee, the council fell out of their chairs from sheer shock, and there they stayed, mouths opening and closing, bodies arched backward, exactly like fish washed up on a beach.
No—hang on. This had genuinely turned into a disaster. Merlin. I pushed right up against the real line to use that Level 5, and the one person who wasn’t supposed to do anything at all has gone and cast a Level 6. Why?
Whether or not she noticed how stunned I was, Merlin turned a hard glare on the council.
“You there, Student Council President! There is something I must say to you!”
“T-T-T… to me? Something you want to say?”
Merlin fell silent. Then she drew in a great, great breath.
“This mask is not in bad taste! It is decidedly not in bad taste—you witless knave!”
Ehhhhhh!?
That!? That’s the part, Merlin!? That’s what made you snap and do all of this!?
I brought a fist down on her head without a moment’s pause.
“Merlin?”
“What is it, Ephthal-sama?”
“I’m actually going to get angry. Don’t tell me you did that in a temper. You do realize this is going to cause problems, don’t you?”
Merlin shook her head, quick little movements.
“…I merely taught those damned brats their place. I’ve thought that part through, Ephthal-sama. Be at ease.”
The snap of Merlin’s fingers, and a formula built itself immediately after. Level 8: Repair Matter, and Level 4: Illusion.
First came glittering motes of illusory light. Then a drift of them, a swarm like fireflies floating up into the sky. Follow the motes with your eyes, look up, and there was a rainbow standing across it. A distraction, in other words, built out of Illusion. The staging pulled every eye on the field, gallery included, and held them. And while everyone had their faces turned up, Repair Matter was quietly putting the targets back, one after another. What she actually intended to do with all this, though, I had no idea.
Then, at the exact instant the restored targets matched what her Level 6 had destroyed and not one more, Merlin drew a deep breath and called out to the whole field at the top of her voice.
“That Level 6 just now… was no true Level 6! As you can all see, it was a Level 4 Illusion!”
Merlin had altered her vocal cords, incidentally, with an application of disguise magic, so her voice wasn’t going to give her away. That part was covered. At her announcement, voices went up all over the gallery.
“W-Well, yeah. Obviously. A Level 6 is impossible.”
“R-Right. A Level 5 on its own is earth-shaking… a Level 6 would be pushing it, wouldn’t it.”
“Still, that first-year class really is high level… no, too high. Has anything like this happened since the age of the first Four Emperors?”
“For that matter, that class has been strange from the day Headmaster Merlin took it as homeroom teacher. There’s something going on in there. Has to be.”
“And that black-haired first year wasn’t favoritism after all. All sorts of ugly rumors were going around, but the truth of it is probably that he’s Headmaster Merlin’s prize pupil.”
Good, good. Our reputation was settling right up against the line and still inside what common sense allows. There had genuinely been rumors flying about Merlin having a thing for little boys, so it looked like we’d get that misunderstanding cleared up into the bargain.
In the council’s tent, silent against the buzzing of the gallery, the president simply stared at nothing and muttered to himself.
“And yet… I cannot believe that was a mere Level 4 Illusion. The finish on it… and to put a hallucination in front of this many people at once… Anonymous Hope… what on earth are they…?”
If you’re asking what she is… she’s the headmaster.
So one way or another we were through the preliminaries. And just as we started back toward the competitors’ tent, our classmates came rushing over in a body.
“That was incredible, Ephthal-kun! I always thought there was something out of the ordinary about you!”
“Maria and Anastasia too! Absolutely unreal!”
“You were recruiting representatives, right!? Can I join as a class rep too!?”
“No, let me compete! Let me ride the winner’s coattails! Take the championship, pick up a medal, and it does wonders for you! Monsters like you guys are a lock to place at the inter-academy tournament!”
“Just being on the roster would be huge! Put me in!”
What a beautifully transparent bunch. Maria had evidently arrived at the same conclusion, the evidence being that she was watching this magnificent about-face with her mouth hanging open far enough to unhinge her jaw. A bit too convenient, though. We were of one mind there as well, because her face slid straight into a mean little grin.
“The class-rep slots are—closed♪”
Maria waved a hand behind her and started back toward the tent, then stopped for a single moment and, without turning around, tossed one more line over her shoulder.
“Well. If that last person I’ve got in mind turns me down… I might deign to use one of you.”
And so we walked back to our seats with that thoroughly convenient chorus of “Let me ride the coattaaails!” chasing us the whole way.