RATH 105
TL: Eevee
12. It’s not over til it’s over (3)
#5 Their story: Risen de Roa’s story.
When the light in the sky began to die down, I said yet another lie.
-You nuts?
-I’m probably not going to die peacefully anyway?
I sold out Lady Aris.
But the number of girls I had sacrificed to kill Nerkia wasn’t just a few.
I pulled in a margrave House, and a marquis at that.
One of the Ten Great Families was no big deal.
-Getting ripped apart limb from limb is already a given for me right now, so would I really survive if I got a few different bits torn off instead?
-Kah, you were already the most insane of all my contractors to date, and yet you surpa.s.s that t.i.tle and go even further beyond! I can only respect you for it!
Wow, I got a G.o.d’s respect.
But seeing as I’d gone this far.
“It’s not going to fail, right?”
As if to respond to me words, the ma.s.s of light got bigger again as it shattered the magic barriers and plunged to the ground.
-But, how are you going to dodge?
-It’s alright, I set it up so that they at least wouldn’t die even if they were hit.
It was an attack that contained the power of all the elementals we had.
An attack composed of every element, an attack that was superior to any other element.
If we’d wanted to we could have made that attack vaporise someone’s very existence, but we could not let off Nerkia, the traitor of the academy and the enemy of men, that easily.
So he was to be taken alive at all costs.
And after we dragged him in, to pay for the sins of betraying the academy, we would turn him over to the silver devil.
We would make him face the thing that we knew was more fearsome than death!
-But controlling that move to be non-lethal won’t be easy?
-Well, of course it won’t.
Controlling magic power the way you want it to is a very difficult thing.
Imagining killing someone is very simple.
But imagining an attack that would decimate the someone yet leave them alive is very difficult.
Unless you were a master torturer, how many people knew the exact limit of the human body?
Moreover, that was a grand spell made by a hundred people.
Common sense dictated that an organisation where all one hundred exactly knew the said limits shouldn’t exist in the empire, no, the entire continent.
-But we experienced it personally getting hit by the silver devil!
-Kah, incredible, Yugrasia! Even that became education!
Every day we tasted incredible pain.
A pain to surpa.s.s death.
But we did not die.
On the contrary, our bodies were healed to the point where they felt lighter the next day.
But, it hurts.
It hurts so much it felt like we’d die.
And it was a very simple thing for one hundred people who had experienced that to imagine the sensation where people would just avoid death.
Because all they had to do was remember what had been their daily life!
“Gaaaaahhhh!”
“Kyaaaah!”
“Run, run away!”
“Where? Where the h.e.l.l are we supposed to run away from that!”
I heard the screams of pain begin from down below.
As the slowly descending Elemental Roar began to engulf the castle walls, casualties had begun to emerge.
“This… is going to hurt.”
But I had to endure.
In order to catch that a.s.shole Nerkia.
-You not gonna put up a shield?
-You can’t defend against the silver devil.
You can’t dodge it, either.
So that attack which was invoked in the image of the silver devil would be unblockable.
Letting yourself get hit and waking up quicker would be the best case scenario.
Thankfully, even outside of those hundred, twelve more people were waiting outside the blast radius on standby.
“Well, they’ll get the job done, right?”
I closed my eyes and waited for a peaceful rest… not, but the pain to hit.
And an attack that felt far too weak compared to the siler devil’s attack rattled my entire body.
“Ugh…”
How much time had pa.s.sed?
I felt my consciousness returning.
Was this still Arucia’s main base?
Or was this the healers’ tents?
“You alright, vice-pres?”
“Ow…”
I could faintly hear a female voice.
“Come on, get up.”
Had the event still not ended yet.
The hurried voice urged me on.
I shall indeed, wake up.
If the event hadn’t ended, that meant that that a.s.shole Nerkia still hadn’t been caught!
Light began to stream into my eyes as I slowly opened them.
“Ah, you’re awake.”
And the one in front of my eyes was Lady Aris, breathing a sigh of relief.
“Really, you had me worried there…”
As she saw that I had regained consciousness, she smiled brightly.
“Did you know how much I wanted to kill you, vice-president?”
“Ah…”
Now that reminded me, I even dragged Lady Aris into this, hadn’t I?
“DIE.”
With a smile like you’d see from the King of h.e.l.l, a giant sword aura tore through the air.
#6 Their story: A certain student council president’s story.
“Ugh… are we alive?”
A giant ma.s.s of elemental power dropped onto us from the sky.
I took the people near me and had us shelter underground, and squeezed out all my magic power to form a magic barrier but I couldn’t block it completely.
I honestly thought I was going to die.
But thankfully, it seemed they’d at retained a sense of decency by not killing us.
“First… I need to wake them up.”
Lying around everywhere were the corpse-like bodies of Arucia students.
And as I shook them awake, I heard Risen’s voice from far away.
…Had it begun already?
“L, Lady Aris! Just listen to me!”
“Shut up. Do you think I’d let you freely wag that devil’s tongue of yours?”
Although thankfully it seemed that we had a bit of time thanks to Lady Aris.
I had no idea what he’d done but Lady Aris’s anger was piercing the heavens.
“Oi, oi, Kiir? Wake up? At this rate we’re all going to be eliminated?”
As a start, I grabbed the Arucia student council president Kiir’s lapels and started shaking him.
As he started to make wuhhh~ and other weird noises I started to smack him around a bit.
“Kuhk! What!”
“You awake?”
When he still wasn’t waking up I punched his gut and he woke up, gasping for air.
“Wake the others up. Risen and Lady Aris are nearby.”
“Kuhk… have we not been found?”
“Yep, thankfully Risen did something to Lady Aris and now the two of them are going at it.”
As we heard the explosions and screams coming from outside, Kiir nodded as well.
“Are you sure it’s not just a trap?”
“It’s Risen?”
“…It’s probably real, then.”
Even other schools knew of Risen’s reputation!
Indeed, not only in Yugrasia, Risen had caused numerous incidents in other schools as well.
“Now is the chance when they’re infighting due to Risen’s stupidity. Let’s wake everyone up and gap it.”
Risen and Lady Aris undeniably the strongest fighters in Yugrasia.
The only ones that could fight the two of them individually were me and Lady Nermia.
But judging by the scale of the previous bombardment, there were at least several hundred Yugrasia students here.
We couldn’t fight off the silver devil-trained Yugrasia students with just these people here.
As time went on, Lady Nermia and I would only be more and more isolated and all that would remain would be defeat.
That would be very, very problematic.
“d.a.m.n it, I get it.”
As if Kiir realised that we had no hoped as well, he clicked his tongue and started waking up the others students fainted on the ground.
“They’re not waking up very easily.”
“Normally it wouldn’t be weird for them to be dead after that attack. The shock was probably that big.”
Not even ten people got up after five minutes of us trying to wake people up.
If the Arucia students, famed for being st.u.r.dy were like this, then I could a.s.sume that the Marcis students didn’t even have a chance.
“This isn’t going to work. Kiir. Leave the people behind that can’t move properly, and get everyone else that’s awake out of here. You need to round up everyone outside that can move properly.”
“What about you?”
“I’m going to join up with Lady Nermia and stop Yugrasia for as long as possible.”
“…Although this might sound awkward coming from me, but I leave it to you.”
Kiir nodded, and I left him and peeked outside.
The castle was in ruins.
The marks that had been left behind by sword aura and not elemental’s magic were very noticeable.
“Ah…”
And where the marks of sword aura ended.
On the top of the flagpole which had the flag that symbolised Arucia, a very ragged Risen had been tied up.
[This man is a bulls.h.i.tting liar.]
“Just what the heck did you do…”
“Do you want to know, president?”
“Kk?!”
The moment I heard someone speak, a sword swept through the s.p.a.ce where my neck had been moments ago.
An ambush? Was that Risen fake as well?
“You seem surprised, president. But no, that isn’t a fake. Simply the true fate of one bulls.h.i.tting liar.
Shhing.
With one sword in her right hand already, with her left hand she drew a second sword from a scabbard on her back.
“Now then, I shall be displaying the fate of a traitor right beside him, president!”
“O King!”
Sword aura blazed on her twin swords.
Instead of the spear she normally used, she had brought out her original specialty, dual-wielding swords.
There were two reasons why Lady Aris had used a spear instead of her favourite dual swords.
The first was to distance herself from the silver devil as much as possible, and the second was to reduce her mana consumption as far as she could.
Forming sword aura on the tip of a spear required far less magic power than forming it down the entire length of a sword.
Lady Aris had originally trained for a drawn-out fight to defeat a G.o.d and a Spirit King after fighting through countless teachers.
The fact that she had pulled out her dual swords meant that she was not going to be spending too much time on me.
In that case, I also needed to use my full power to defeat her.
“Roar, thunder. Run rampant, tempest!”
I added the power of a highest-rank wind elemental to the power of the Lightning Spirit King.
The sheer power behind that move was beyond imagination.
Officially, there were only five people in the Karuan Empire that had contracted a highest-rank elemental.
Just having a contract with one meant that the Empire would give you the t.i.tle of viscount.
That was how much power a highest-rank elemental had.
And the power of a King was added to that.
This was a power that wouldn’t lose to sword aura, on the contrary, it was even stronger than sword aura in dealing with multiple enemies.
“Haahhhhhh!”
Although using it on a newly enrolled first year girl had an extremely poor sound to it from that description alone.
“Just, that much!”
The enemy was a genius who had broken the record of the empire’s youngest swordsmaster.
And she even had the talent to generate sword aura on not just her main weapon of the sword, but a spear as well.
If I took her as just a small girl, my defeat was all but certain.
“Flames of the beginning. The origin of life, water. The eternally free wind. The earth that embraces all.”
As the lightning and wind collided with the sword aura, I prepared my next spell.
Fire, water, earth and wind.
I drew on the power of what was called the four base elements, and fused them together.
Combining the power of multiple different elements was something only I could do in Yugrasia, or for that matter, very few summoners could do at all.
Because I could do it, I was called the Elemental Army.
“Elemental Burst.”
As Lady Aris cut down the lightning-infused tempest and charged in, I fired my strongest attack of the power of four highest-rank elementals.
“Burn, flames of the apocalypse.”
And a ma.s.sive shockwave rocked the arena!
The attack containing the power of four different elementals collided with a powerful burst of fire!
…Huh? Fire?
“What!”
Lady Aris was a swordsmaster and a G.o.d-cla.s.s summoner.
But her summon is the G.o.ddess of wisdom and war, Athena.
She had nothing to do with fire.
But a white fire had blocked my attack.
It was a white flame, one of the two flames that surpa.s.sed crimson and blue flames, white and black.
“Why?”
As the Elemental Burst and the white flames died down, what appeared was Lady Aris, and.
“Why is Lady Nermia over there?”
Marcis’s Lady Nermia, who I’d thought was my strongest ally.
“The same as you, President of Yugrasia. Just like you… I have a reason why Yugrasia must win.”
Lady Nermia brandished her flame sword at me with a serious expression.
Beside her, Lady Aris pointed her dual blades imbued with sword aura at me.
And.
“Sinner, Nerkia.”
Men draped in black clothes suddenly appeared around me.
“Judgement has been pa.s.sed. Your sentence is.”
The surroundings of almost a hundred people draped in black robes made by Reedan flashed as they summoned their elementals.
-Death.
It seems, there’s no way for me to live.