⁂
In front of us, a one-sided beating was unfolding.
“G-G-Give, give u—urgk!”
The Student Council President was already a bloody mess and face down on the ground, and a soccer-ball kick detonated against his jaw.
What had happened was this. Right at the opening, four students of the third-year class had put through a Level 6 ritual spell. It dropped the student council out of the fight in a single blow, and everyone assumed the match was over there. It wasn’t. Going down without managing a thing would disgrace the council’s name, so the president didn’t raise the white flag.
That was the mistake.
The ones already on the ground were beaten and kicked, one-sidedly… no, they were being beaten to knock them senseless. Now the work was growing still more savage against people who had been knocked out and driven past the point of being able to surrender at all. The president had come around for a moment just now, apparently, and been struck again before he could get the words out—knocked straight back under.
“That one was aimed at the jaw, Ephthal. Obviously.”
“Yeah. They knocked him out on purpose. Or rather, they made sure he couldn’t surrender.”
A heavy thud, a wet crunch, another impact, and blood scattered.
“Haha, hahaha…”
“Hahaha!”
“What even is the student council? They’re so weak. And these people were the ones acting important?”
“Hahahaha!”
Whud!
A kick went into Irene-san’s stomach where she lay face down. No mercy for being a woman, then. This was awful.
“Master… those people… are they enjoying it?”
“No. That isn’t it. They’re not enjoying it.”
Long ago I dealt with people who’d fallen into a state much like this one. I still remember how badly it sat with me afterward. That was an adventurers’ guild commission, I think: breaking up some devil-worshipping religious outfit. They used every dark art they could lay hands on, dosed their believers with hard drugs, went into their brains with magic. An ugly battlefield in every sense.
“They’ve lost track of themselves. They were carrying an inferiority complex about the student council to begin with, and it’s blowing up out of all proportion. Probably.”
Then Sheryl called out at the top of her voice to the brown-haired boy on the platform.
“…Brother Brad. Please… please stop! Why…? What meaning is there in this?”
“Brother?”
So the brown-haired one up there—Brad—was a relation of Sheryl’s.
Why they’d put dark-arts enhancement into themselves I didn’t know, but Sheryl’s brother was a man who’d knocked on the underworld’s door to get hold of magic crystals. Not the sort to be choosy about his means when there was a result in front of him.
Either way, at this rate somebody was going to die. And that was when Merlin, finished changing at last, finally came back to us.
“Ephthal-sama? Is it about time?”
“Yes. Stop it right now. We’re getting close to somebody dying.”
Merlin went up on flight magic and became a figure on the platform.
“You have gone too far, you vicious brats—Level 7: Tartaros.”
Chains without number came into being around her and took the students one after another. Two of them leapt clear and got out from under it, though, and the chains chased that pair like snakes with minds of their own, from every angle and every direction, relentlessly. Those two were evidently on a different level from the other students, because it never quite closed on them.
“We can manage Level 6 with a ritual, Headmaster. If you spread your magic power that thin… a sloppy net’s going to be difficult, isn’t it?”
“Why, you—!”
Merlin caught one of the chains in her hand and poured magic power into it, and the chain went at the man at a furious speed and wound him up.
“Guh!”
She’d caught one of them. The other was the problem. Merlin must have noticed it too: from the very start, the quality of the magic power Brad wore was plainly different from everyone else’s.
So every remaining chain went toward Sheryl’s brother, and—
“Level 7: Ice Prison.”
—every one of them was turned aside by an ice ward.
“…Level 7? Brother Brad is…?”
Sheryl had lost her words and frozen where she stood. From her reaction, this was unquestionably the first time she’d seen it. And then—
—Silence.
Not just Sheryl. The whole venue froze at the same moment, wrapped in it.
Which is no more than you’d expect. Level 7 was high magic even in my own era, after all.
After a short interval, voices began leaking out of the spectator seats here and there.
“That’s an illusion… right?”
“…Probably.”
“Well… yeah… right?”
“I mean, surely…”
True or not, interpreting it that way is better for everyone’s mental health.
Still. I tilted my head, and Merlin evidently thought the same thing, because she was wearing a puzzled look too. He had, to all appearances, fired a spell with no magic power and no formula. Certain schools use concealment arts to slow an opponent’s response. Was it something of that order? If so, he was without question a very difficult opponent to fight. Though a counter exists, and it’s what Merlin was doing right then: concentrate magic power in the eyes and see the concealed power and formula.
Textbook handling, and correct as far as it went. But I felt an unease I couldn’t name, and a bad feeling with it.
On the platform, Brad put a question to Merlin.
“Headmaster? We were only having a match, in accordance with the rules. Restraining us out of nowhere is rather strange, is it not?”
“You went too far, you fools. And besides… you have used enhancement by the lost dark arts, have you not? Though you alone, it seems, are of a different stripe from the rest.”
“As learned as they say. But the dark arts are not legally forbidden. Nobody has prohibited them, have they?”
“They are unprohibited only because they were lost. And do you understand that you are trading away your lifespan? That you are a superhuman for one instant and no longer?”
“I understand all of that as an exercise of free will, do I not?”
“Regardless. You went too far.”
“I am telling you that this exceeds your authority. You have no power to halt a match. Or am I wrong?”
Brad smiled thinly, and Merlin snorted.
“I see. So you are reckless enough with your life to defy me.”
“Reckless with my life? Which of us, I wonder?”
Several veins stood out along Merlin’s temple.
“Very well. If it is what you wish, you shall have special instruction. Though my discipline burns like the fires of hell.”
The chains moved, and the bound students were thrown outside the platform, still trussed. Clearing the stage, in other words.
“Level 7: Dead Blind.”
The platform was swallowed in a dome of black darkness.
“Master! We can’t see inside!”
“…Because it’s going to get spectacular in there.”
The platform, wrapped in dark. I could make out what was happening by the method Merlin uses, seeing the flow of magic power through all creation, but Anastasia and Maria wouldn’t manage that. The thing doubles as a magic barrier against the outside as well as a blindfold.
Meaning Merlin intended to fight without holding back. Which meant that what was about to happen up on that platform would be something this era was never supposed to see.
Up there, Merlin spoke to Brad with a fearless smile.
“Still, that Level 10 of yours is going to waste.”
“Ho,” Brad said, and drew a small breath.
“Well informed, are you not?”
“Sasha-sama sent word ahead. I do not know what method you used, but this is a matter within Sasha-sama’s domain. In which case nonsense of this order occurring is only natural.”
“And… going to waste, how do you mean?”
Merlin let out a small laugh.
“Did you burn magic power off needlessly against the student council? Your total looks insufficient to me. As you are now, you have not a Level 10 or even a Level 7 left—one shot of a Level 6, at the outside. Am I wrong?”
“Ho. To catch that much, you really are the headmaster.”
And there I said “Ah!” out loud, because I’d finally put my finger on the unease from earlier.
No, Merlin. That isn’t it. Brad hasn’t used a single spell in that entire fight.
The bad feeling turned to certainty and I started running for the platform.
“So? What will you do? Do you intend to fight me with your magic power run dry?”
“Yes, that is right. The magic power that looks empty to you is entirely sufficient for me.”
And Brad turned his palm toward Merlin and, without assembling a formula, without setting any magic power in motion at all, simply—declared it.
“Level 9: Blizzard Tyrant.”
This was nonsense.
Merlin and I thought it in the same instant, and in the same instant our faces went the same shade of shock.
Because this was an event outside all reason. It wasn’t supposed to be able to happen. To put it in terms of Japanese history, it was as absurd as this world’s mage corps riding wyverns into the Second World War and trading fire with the machine guns of fighter planes.
This was not a concealed formula. There really was no movement of magic power. No formula had been assembled at any point. A spell had simply appeared, all at once, ignoring reason and theory alike, at the moment of the declaration. And a colossal ice dragon turned tyrant opened its maw and swallowed Merlin whole.
—A direct hit.
Her defense was late, and Merlin took a Level 9 completely undefended.
There’s a reason a caster of Merlin’s standing took an attack with no resistance at all, like an amateur. We mages read an opponent’s next action from the movement of their magic power and the state of their formula, and both offense and defense are built out of that exchange of prediction. But Brad had no movement of magic power in the first place. On top of that came the assumption that it was being concealed. She had her focus pinned on seeing power and formula, and so, precisely because she is an expert, her reaction was catastrophically slow.
This settled something else, too: the ice attack on our carriage a while back was probably Brad.
And at that time, Merlin had made exactly the same mistake in reasoning that I had. Which is why she took the hit square. Back then, I concluded that the caster who’d kept us from noticing the spellwork was Sasha. Because the very premise of a person able to do that is a fantasy, so surely only something equally nonsensical could manage it. That was what I told myself.
But what Brad is using isn’t magic in the first place.
This is… a Skill.
You can’t possibly respond when you think you’re playing by the rules of chess and your opponent attacks with shogi.
“Kah… hah…!”
Blood scattering, flesh torn open.
Thanks to the defensive spell she’d thrown together on instinct while the dragon took her, Merlin seemed to have escaped instant death. Her own formula broke the ice dragon down into water at once, but a pool of blood was spreading across the floor where she lay.
The wound was deep. Her organs were damaged, in all likelihood.
“You… what… did you… do?”
Merlin’s head had to be nothing but question marks.
Honestly, I was shocked myself. This isn’t supposed to be possible.
But I know it. The one way there is to explain the phenomenon in front of me. Because it can only be accounted for by that power outside all reason.
What I don’t know is why Brad has that skill, or how he reached that space. Which is to ask: why is Brad wielding a reincarnation skill granted by the goddess?
The phenomenon Brad had just produced was Skill: Devil Resource, beyond any doubt.
It was just before I was reborn as Ephthal in this life. I was curious, so I asked the goddess a great many things about skills, and I remember hearing about this ridiculous one—ignores magic theory, produces a spell out of nowhere at zero cost—and saying oh, come on in sheer exasperation.
And there Brad turned toward me and smiled thinly.
“Haha. Surprised, are you not? It was one of my trump cards against the Thunder God Emperor, and now it has been seen. The result is the same either way, though. We have one more card over here—a Level 10.”
“That one’s ice as well, is it?”
“Yes, exactly so. And though it is likewise a Level 10, it outranks your Thunder God Emperor Ephthal. I can wield the Ice God Emperor Isaac.”
I didn’t engage any further. I put my palm to the wound on the fallen Merlin.
“Level 10: Perfect Heal.”
Her organs were damaged, as expected. Anything involving lost body parts has to be treated at once, or even my recovery magic can’t put it back the way it was.
“Perfect Heal is a nuisance, certainly. But the Ice God Emperor Isaac freezes everything in an instant and takes the target’s consciousness. Whatever else Perfect Heal is, it means nothing if you cannot cast. Or am I wrong?”
I kept working on Merlin and glared at Brad without answering.
“I think it would be entertaining to begin the finals here. What do you say?”
“If you want a fight, I’d have thought the finals were the place for it. Wouldn’t you?”
“I have no objection to right here.”
I took that provoking look, and—
“Ho. Picking a fight with me. That’s a pretty interesting thing for a brat to say. You’re the first one to run his mouth at me like that knowing exactly who I am.”
“So you have come out at last. An honor to meet you, Thunder God Emperor.”
“Then let’s settle it here, to the death, since that’s what you wanted.”
“Yes. That would be its own amusement.”
And at that moment, Sheryl came running up onto the platform.
“…Brother. Please… please stop. Truly… please stop.”
An appeal with tears standing in her eyes.
Brad’s expression shifted into something a little shaken, and the fight went out of him on the instant.
“All of it is for your sake, Sheryl.”
“…I do not understand what Brother is thinking… or why it has come to this. I no longer understand… any of it. But I understand this much.”
Sheryl gave a small, unsteady shake of her head.
“…Brother is rushing headlong… in a bad direction. If it is for my sake, then please stop doing these things. I was truly against Brother walking the underworld’s road as well. It is enough… you need do nothing more for my sake.”
And the pressure coming off Brad thinned out all at once.
“My appetite for this has gone. Very well. The finals are in a week regardless. Let us say that enjoying you will keep until the festival’s last day.”
And Brad smiled, sweetly.