Ch. 19

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"Alright, first competitors, step forward!"

Two men strode confidently to the center of the open field.

The Knight Department student had a fairly impressive build as well.

"The Magic Department's representative is Eomed Lipperk!"

Meanwhile, the person who came forward as the Magic Department's first competitor was a young man with short brown hair and a gentle looking face.

"Whoa... he was that guy?"

Before the regression, this man had headed off to war seeking revenge for his family, entirely fearless about his own body being harmed, an unhinged killer obsessed with nothing but ending his enemies.

Yet right now, gripping his wand with trembling, visibly nervous hands.

The contrast in his demeanor was so stark that I could only recognize him after hearing his name.

"The Knight Department's representative is His Highness Crown Prince Pristin Anderut!"

Across from Eomed, an easygoing, handsome man stepped forward, waving casually to the crowd around him.

The first prince and heir to the current Anderut Imperial line, sweeping back his distinctly imperial blond hair with one hand as he stepped forward, looked as though he'd walked straight out of a painting.

His reputation, as I'd heard it, was flawless as well, praised for lacking nothing in strength, intellect, or character, and his appearance in particular was said to be beautiful enough to be the constant talk of gossips everywhere.

Maybe because of that, I could see several girls nearby clutching at their chests the moment they laid eyes on him in real time.

"He's seriously so handsome... he looks just like a prince out of a fairy tale."

Ignoring Aria's nonsensical comment about him "looking like a fairy tale prince" despite him actually being a crown prince, I turned my attention back to him.

Suddenly, a memory surfaced from before the regression, back when I was twenty one.

'Kill...'

He'd been standing alone, weeping tears of blood, muttering to himself.

'Kill me...'

The place I'd first met him had been the center of a city completely covered in corpses.

Contrary to endlessly begging to be killed, he had been mercilessly slaughtering every single living thing that dared approach him.

And once no one dared approach him any longer, I stepped forward to face him myself.

'Thank you...'

After a fierce, grueling battle, I finally managed to drive my sword through his heart.

Right before he collapsed, he thanked me.

Despite clearly having lost all sense of reason due to the cursed sword, Marionette's Ghost, he'd delivered those words to me as if genuinely grateful I'd finally stopped him.

By this point, you can probably tell that it was by killing him that I became an A-rank mercenary.

"Then we'll begin the two competitors' sparring match now!"

Just as the memory from before the regression threatened to keep flowing, Anna's shout snapped me back to reality, like waking from a dream.

The moment the sparring began, Eomed thrust his wand forward, rapidly completing his formula.

The Crown Prince, meanwhile, watched him calmly, slowly drawing his practice wooden sword.

"I hope, in this life, you don't end up wielding a cursed sword..."

"Hm? What was that? Did you say you're possessed by a ghost?"

Shooting a deadpan look at Aria, who was startled and making a fuss over my muttering, I turned my head away.

A mage driven mad by revenge, and a crown prince driven mad by a cursed sword.

If neither of these two ended up going mad, how much would the future change?

"Spread Flame!"

Eomed began spreading flames around the field to keep the crown prince at bay, but the prince simply cut through them lightly and continued advancing without stopping.

"Burning Hand!"

Toward him, still calmly approaching, Eomed triggered a second formula.

A massive fireball shaped like a giant hand descended from midair, dropping straight toward the crown prince's head, as if trying to swat a fly.

The crown prince, apparently judging that dodging this particular attack would be wiser than blocking it, took a large step backward.

"Aria."

"Hm?"

"Why does he keep shouting the spell names while fighting, though? Doesn't that let the opponent brace themselves?"

"That's only for people already skilled in magic... They said that for those of us who've only recently started learning magic, like us, it's better to shout it out to help solidify the shape of the spell more clearly!"

"Ah, is that so?"

Then were all the mages I'd faced before all just already highly skilled in magic?

That seemed unlikely, considering there'd been at least one who blew himself up on his own.

"Fire Worm!"

As the distance between them widened, Eomed began scattering fire worms across the field to shift the terrain in his own favor.

Perhaps because flames had already spread across the area once, the fire worms burned through the ground at a startlingly fast pace.

It was a deliberate attempt to establish his own territory and prevent the crown prince from getting close.

"Hmm..."

The crown prince considered the fire-covered ground for a moment, then charged forward in a straight line.

The flames covering the ground were effortlessly cut through by his sword as he swung it, clearing a path for him to advance.

"Oh no!"

With most of the field already covered in flames, even a relatively weak fire spell like Blazing Fireball could synergize with the surroundings and become a lethal attack, but Eomed, apparently proving firsthand just how weak he was in real combat, simply froze up, unable to do anything.

Standing frozen like that, the outcome was practically inevitable.

In a single stroke, the crown prince's sword cut straight across Eomed's chest.

But watching him get cut down like that, I couldn't help but smile.

So this was how he'd already been fighting, even back this far.

Since it was only a practice wooden sword, no actual blood was spilled, but despite what must have been a fairly severe impact, the guy only staggered back a few steps and, in the end, never went down.

And, strangely, the crown prince, who hadn't taken a single hit himself, clutched his chest and staggered.

"Ugh!"

The reason behind this odd phenomenon was his own Talent.

A talent called Reflect, which dealt back an equivalent amount of impact to whoever had dealt it to him.

"Blooming Crimson Thorn!"

Just as the crown prince staggered from that unexpected impact, Eomed completed his formula.

It was a conditional spell that could only activate when the ground was covered in flame.

Since it was a conditional spell, it was difficult for the caster to properly seize the opportunity to use it, and since opponents could also prepare for it accordingly, it saw relatively little use in real combat, but if it landed cleanly, it could deal considerable damage.

"It worked!"

And apparently his gamble paid off, because the crown prince ended up with fairly significant wounds all over his body.

"Wow! Looks like our Magic Department might actually win!"

Listening to Aria's excited voice, a question started forming in my mind.

The true identity of the person currently on the receiving end of all this.

It was already an issue if he'd just been a regular prince, but this was, of all people, the crown prince, already designated as the next emperor.

As I'd mentioned before, the academy claimed to disregard social status, but in reality, that was far from the truth, which was exactly why I found it hard to understand this kind of reckless attack being carried out against him.

"Hey, but still... isn't it a bit much to beat down the Crown Prince like that?"

"Benjamin, you must have missed it while you were busy throwing up earlier?"

"...Missed what?"

"Earlier, while you were in the middle of throwing up, Professor Marey said something like this to all the Magic Department kids."

Was she threatening to deduct everyone's grades as a group or something?

She cleared her throat and started imitating Professor Marey.

"If you lose to those Knight Department brats, I'll hang you upside down from a tree and let the crows have you, so make sure you handle this cleanly, and with some style."

"..."

"But since I do have some fondness for my students, if you die, I'll make sure to at least cut your head off neatly and send it back to your family."

Hearing that, I looked back at Eomed, currently mid-battle, and I felt like I finally understood why someone who'd previously seemed so innocent, untouched by the harshness of the world, was fighting with such fierce intensity now.

The part where he'd wounded the Crown Prince could at least be excused, or begged forgiveness for, under the guise of it being a mere sparring match, but reasoning or negotiating with Professor Marey clearly wasn't going to be an option.

Sure enough, a fist was always closer at hand than the law.

"Haah..."

Just then, the wounded Crown Prince let out a sigh and glanced down at his own clothing.

"Hmm... this happened to be an outfit I quite liked, too."

Muttering quietly, seeming more upset about his torn clothes than the blood flowing from various parts of his body, the Crown Prince raised his sword once more.

What followed was an attack far more merciless than anything he'd shown before.

"Argh! Ugh!"

Eomed tried to use his Talent to inflict damage and create distance again like before, planning to counterattack with magic, but this time, the Crown Prince showed no intention of backing off and instead began pummeling him relentlessly.

"H-how... I should definitely be taking the exact same impact...!"

Looking down at Eomed, who had barely lasted before collapsing as though he'd fainted, the Crown Prince spoke.

"Looks like I've won, wouldn't you say?"

As the Crown Prince spoke with a faint smile, a massive cheer erupted from the Knight Department.

"How on earth did that happen?"

Hearing Aria's quiet question amid the cheering, I found myself replaying what had just happened.

Eomed had, without question, continued using his Talent throughout.

And that much was evident from the fact that the smiling Crown Prince's arms and legs were now trembling faintly.

"Looks like he just took it head on with sheer physical endurance."

The moment he first struck Eomed and the impact came back at him, the Crown Prince seemed to have already caught on to his talent to some degree.

"Using his Talent to cut off the opponent's attacks, then following up with a spell in that opening."

That was Eomed's prepared combat strategy, and the Crown Prince had figured it all out after just one single exchange.

"The Crown Prince also realized that the moment the attack stopped, a follow-up strike was coming."

Being able to grasp all of this so quickly meant a lot of combat experience.

But since the Crown Prince realistically wouldn't have had much opportunity for real combat experience, it seemed more accurate to attribute it to exceptionally sharp instincts.

And, surprisingly, he also had quite the cunning side to him.

"Earlier, the Crown Prince made that irrelevant comment about his clothes while keeping an eye on his opponent, completely unrelated to the actual fight."

I recalled how, when Eomed, thoroughly exasperated by that comment about his clothes, had flinched slightly and clutched his chest, the prince had watched it all out of the corner of his eye.

"That was probably him confirming, right then, whether his own attack had actually damaged his opponent."

Eomed's Talent could genuinely be considered a difficult one to counter.

But right now, he hadn't gone mad from his family's downfall, nor had he been forged through countless real battles.

"What do you think happens when a mage's body and a knight's body keep taking the exact same amount of impact, over and over?"

There was something I'd learned before the regression, back when I used to torture prisoners of war for information.

Tolerance for pain.

There were some who kept their mouths shut even after I'd pulled out every nail on their hands and feet and shown them what jumping rope with their own intestines looked like, and there were others who'd spill everything they knew after a single slap to the cheek.

Everyone's threshold for pain was different, which meant everyone's threshold for how much pain they could endure before fainting differed too.

Say, for example, you crushed the fingers of a battle-hardened mercenary and an ordinary civilian with a hammer.

Mercenaries, already used to getting cut here and there on a regular basis, would probably respond to a crushed finger not by fainting, but by hurling curses at whoever swung the hammer.

But what about an ordinary civilian?

Seeing their own finger crushed like that would probably rob them of any normal thought entirely, and they'd likely faint on the spot without much surprise.

The shock of a crushed finger was, after all, far greater than most people would imagine.

"Since knights and mages train in fundamentally different ways to begin with, taking the same amount of impact was always bound to produce different results like this."

And the Crown Prince had managed to figure all of that out in that brief instant.

It was a bold approach, but a solid one.

The Crown Prince, who hadn't wielded a cursed sword this time around, was clearly someone with more bite to him than I'd expected.

"Oh no... our Crown Prince got hurt!"

"Hey, but... doesn't him bleeding kind of look really hot?"

"There's something almost decadent about it, isn't there..."

Seeing that kind of reaction almost made me a little irritated.