CHAPTER 1
CONFLICT
“Burst into bloom—Livingstone Daisy!”
“Yaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!”
The young man with bristly red hair—Le Wolfe Black Institute’s tenth-ranked fighter, Bonifaz Pleise, the Mage of the Howling Inferno, alias Vulcanus—let out a terrible cry as a powerful explosion ran across the stage straight toward Julis von Riessfeld.
The rings of fire that Julis had unleashed were swallowed whole, extinguished and scattered across the field.
“Tch…!” She clicked her tongue in annoyance as she moved to dodge his attack, but the wave of heat that followed it was enough to sear her flesh.
To think his firepower tops my own…!
“It’s pretty rare to get two fighters so evenly matched and with such similar skill sets pitted against each other like this, but are we finally nearing the end of the seventh match of this fourth round?! The stage is practically a sea of flame, thanks to the combined efforts of our two contestants—a veritable hellscape!”
“Well, it must be pretty hot down there. I doubt either of them will be able to hold out much longer.”
Julis herself knew the truth of those words. Whether she or her opponent managed to land a direct hit on the other, if she kept putting everything she had into jumping around in this heat, her body exuding a cascade of sweat, it was only a matter of time until she collapsed from dehydration—which was why she wanted nothing more than to put an end to this match as soon as possible.
But that was easier said than done.
“Ah, this is the stuff, Glühen Rose! I just can’t get enough of this seething heat!”
Bonifaz may have been sweating just as profusely as she was, but unlike Julis, he kept getting more and more excited as the temperature climbed. He was standing more than ten meters away from her, but his voice was so loud that it seemed like he was shouting right into her ears.
“…Geez. Not only do I have to put up with this heat, I have to deal with this guy, too!”
Her opponent’s ability to manipulate flames was largely similar to her own, although the number of techniques he had at his disposal didn’t seem to compare to the sheer variety of her own. As simple as they might have been, however, the raw power of his attacks seemed to grow in intensity as he became more and more frenzied.
In other words, his firepower kept rising as he worked himself up. On top of that, his frequent roars were similarly rising in volume—and were no doubt the origin of his alias, the Mage of the Howling Inferno.
“Glühen Rose! It’s clear to me that you’re the strongest flame user in Asterisk!” Bonifaz declared, finger pointed. “So by taking you down here, I’ll seize that title for myself!”
His face was a living portrait of hot-bloodedness. This rowdiness was typical of Le Wolfe students, but at the same time, his directness was decidedly unique among his fellow students.
In any case, the fact that he was still standing was testament to his skill and ability. Julis had fought against several fellow flame users in the past, but none at the level of her current opponent.
“The strongest flame user, huh…? I don’t remember ever accepting that title, and I don’t really care for it, either. I’m willing to give it to you, if you want it so badly,” Julis said as a pair of fiery wings took shape behind her. “But you’ll have to give me this match in exchange, Vulcanus!”
“I don’t think so! At Le Wolfe, we take what we want through victory! This match is mine! Raaaaaaaaaugh!”
At that moment, Bonifaz directed another blast of flames toward her as she climbed high into the air—but the attack flew wide.
They were both most comfortable fighting at long range, but as a result of that, the stage had been rendered a scorching wasteland, with neither party emerging the victor. It would be pure folly to keep fighting the same war of attrition, which meant…
“Burst into bloom—Anthurium Multifluus!”
As she swung the Nova Spina downward, a perfect row of eight flaming shields appeared before her.
“I’ll blow you and all your defenses away! Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaugh!” Bonifaz, flexing both his arms, let out a roar so loud that it would have been no surprise if his throat had ruptured—and as he did so, he unleashed a whirlpool of flame larger than anything Julis had yet seen during their match. The incredible amount of energy contained in that oncoming blast must have been on par with one of Saya’s custom-built Luxes.
“Bloom!”
But before that vortex could reach Julis, she aligned the junction pattern of her mana and prana with the six units of her Rect Lux. As a result, her destructive power greatly amplified, albeit only temporarily.
“Raaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa…!”
Her shields of flame expanded to almost three times their previous size. Bonifaz’s attack slammed repeatedly into them, when—
“…aaaaahuh?!”
—the flow of mana broke as her opponent tore through her fifth shield, causing all of them to suddenly disappear.
“I’ve got you now!” Julis dived forward, lashing out with her blade as she flew past her foe.
Wings of flame melted away as she came to a soft landing. The automated voice began to sound from her school crest, when—
“Damn iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit!”
Bonifaz’s cry of despair drowned out everything else.
“…Phew.”
Only after taking a shower to wash away the sweat and dirt that clung to her body and sitting down on the edge of her bed clad in nothing but her underwear was Julis able to breathe a sigh of relief.
“Gallardworth’s student council president described him as a Dante with multiple personalities. I’d never seen a case like that before, either… What did he call his ability? Invincibility? Maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but his strength definitely does go beyond the norm. I’m looking forward to seeing how the other entrants are planning to deal with him.”
She had cruised to victory in all three of her matches during the preliminaries. On top of that, having made it into the main tournament, she had managed to emerge victorious without suffering any serious injuries, even though today’s fourth-round match had been difficult. Given that so many extraordinarily powerful individuals had entered this year’s Lindvolus, it was probably fair to say that Julis had been incredibly lucky thus far.
But despite all that, she didn’t feel lucky.
Of course, she couldn’t say she was unhappy about winning her matches. She couldn’t afford to lose if she was going to reach her goal—if she was going to reach Orphelia. According to the recently released tournament brackets, she had been assigned to a different block than Orphelia. That meant she didn’t stand a chance of facing her unless they both made it through to the championship.
Also in Orphelia’s block were Saya and the two autonomous puppets from Allekant, and perhaps most importantly, Sylvia Lyyneheym, the runner-up from the previous Lindvolus. No matter how secure Orphelia’s crown might seem to be, she was going to face some particularly strong opponents.
But…what do I do if Orphelia loses to one of them…?
If that happened, Orphelia’s plans—no, the plans of whoever Orphelia had spoken about—would no doubt be pushed forward. Julis couldn’t allow such a worst-case situation to occur.
That said, the likelihood that Julis herself would lose before making it to the championship was much higher. After all, her opponent in the next round was Xiaohui Wu.
If she tried to think about it rationally, she knew she had little chance of winning. And even if she managed to pull through, even if she made it all the way to the semifinals, the person she was most likely to face was—
“Ugh…”
She pressed her fist against her chest, as if to restrain her surging emotions.
The inevitable grew closer with every match she won; she wanted to scream in desperation. Perhaps, she considered, things would be easier if she could bring herself to bawl her eyes out, as Bonifaz had done at the end of their match.
“No, that won’t help…”
This wasn’t the kind of predicament that could be solved with tears. No matter what course of action she chose to pursue, tragedy would be unavoidable. As things stood, all she could do was choose the option that seemed the least bad from her own position.
And right now, that meant pushing through all the way to the championship and killing Orphelia with her own hands. If she was being honest with herself, she wanted a different way to fix this, and she was willing to remain hesitant until right up to the very end. Even so, she had prepared herself for the worst should the time come.
Julis was willing to give up everything—but would she really be able to go through with it? Perhaps, she thought, she would be better off revealing everything she knew to the city guard, or even to Claudia, and letting others handle it.
But if the people Orphelia had told her about were serious, even the integrated enterprise foundations probably wouldn’t be able to stop them. Those people had already prepared for all such outcomes and had undoubtedly readied any number of contingency plans.
Julis didn’t know who was involved in their plan, nor did she have any idea what their motives were, or any sense of the true size or power of their organization. All she knew was that they were trying to use Orphelia to achieve their own ends and that Orphelia herself didn’t have the will to defy them (although Julis was a little doubtful about that—after all, Orphelia was already resisting by informing her of things in the first place, and she no doubt had some further scheme in mind).
Still, Julis was the only one outside the organization who knew about their plan. Her alone. That being the case, she had a responsibility and a duty to do everything she could.
“He would do the same thing in my situation, I’m sure of it,” she said with a weak smile as she thought about her most reliable partner.
He was also fighting his way through the Lindvolus with the need to score victory—after all, failure for him meant forfeiting his sister’s life.
Julis hadn’t heard the details about what had happened to Haruka, but she’d known at once that the reason Ayato hadn’t told her was because he didn’t want to get her caught up in it. She knew, however, that Haruka had put a stop to some gargantuan conspiracy several years ago. She knew, too, that that group’s accomplices were still lurking in the shadows even now. It wasn’t hard to infer that there was most likely a connection between the two situations.
Given her limited information, she could do little but speculate, though she suspected the organization was the same one Orphelia had told her about, or else closely affiliated with it. At the very least, Julis saw them both in precisely the same way. If she were to share what she knew with Ayato and the others, there was every possibility that it would be enough to quickly expose their identity once and for all.
And yet there was nothing she could do about it. Orphelia had warned her not to tell anyone else what she had been told, and Julis knew her well enough to know that it was no idle threat.
“Well, it looks like Claudia and Kirin are making a move, so maybe they won’t need what I know…”
Her precious friends.
Unlike those back in Lieseltania—or rather, at the orphanage—her friends here in Asterisk were people with whom she could fight shoulder to shoulder, comrades who would always have her back. Surely they would be able to find a way to help Ayato. She might have put some distance between herself and them, but she believed that from the bottom of her heart.
“So…I just need to take care of what’s in front of me, one step at a time,” she murmured as she turned her head, tapping her mobile and opening an air-window.
Tomorrow held Round Five—she needed to do everything she could to prepare for it.
Seidoukan Academy had supplied her with a certain amount of data on her opponent. She already had a general grasp of his battle style and tactics, but it would be wise to read every scrap of information to increase her odds of victory.
“Things haven’t been too bad up till now, so why did it have to be Hagun Seikun…?”
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