Summoner Sovereign

"The Saint Teresa Academy, huh?" Craig mused, stroking his chin as he glanced at his smartphone. Unlike Harrison, he was grinning in antic.i.p.ation and relis.h.i.+ng the upcoming match. "This will be good."

"We are finally facing one of the big guns this time. This isn"t just any elite academy, it is the Saint Teresa Academy. One of the top four teams from last year. Third, actually, since they won against Crowley"s Grand Arcane Academy in the third-placing match last year after narrowly losing out to Pendragon in the semifinals."

The big guns. One of the big names. Among the most prestigious academies in the Global Federation.

At Harrison"s words, everyone went rigid, knowing that this was no laughing matter. This would possibly be the most powerful team we had faced thus far in the tournament. All the other teams we had eliminated along the way would be nothing compared to the superlative swordsmen and swordswomen of Saint Teresa. Only Pendragon Academy had a better record when it came to swordsmans.h.i.+p and blade magic.

"Well, we came this far and surpa.s.sed everyone"s expectations, so we can"t really complain." Theodore shrugged. He looked as if he found our cirumstances a pity, but understood there wasn"t anything we could do about it.

"You"re right. We came this far." Harrison straightened up and narrowed his eyes. "I"m not going to give up after having come this far."

"Eh?" Everyone stared at him in surprise.

"You"re seriously planning to challenge Saint Teresa Academy and win?" Pearl asked disbelievingly. Harrison nodded.

"Of course. Who the h.e.l.l goes to a match resigned to lose? We might as well give it our all. You don"t seriously think we should just give up and forfeit after coming this far, right?"

"Well, no, but I think it"s unrealistic to expect that we will win against the likes of Saint Teresa Academy," Sheila pointed out glumly.

"The only expectations I have of everyone is for all of you do to your best. Fight like your lives depend on it. Give your all. Leave the match with no regrets – and if we win, we advance. If we lose, we can hold our heads up highly proudly because we gave it our best shot without holding anything back. We have nothing to lose, so we might as well try."

"Harrison"s right!" Craig growled. "Why are we even discussing this? Let"s go kick Saint Teresa Academy"s a.s.ses!"

"If only it"s that easy," Lily murmured softly. She looked at Harrison square in the eyes. "I hope you have some sort of plan."

"As a matter of fact, I do." Harrison grinned and waved at his smartphone, projecting a gigantic holographic screen into the air for us to see. His grin grew wider as he displayed a table of statistics and numbers, backed up by tiny windows of videos featuring the members of the Saint Teresa Academy team. "I"ve noticed a pattern in the way they deploy their team. It appears that they rely heavily on five or so core members, and the reserve members are not even half as good as the others. To the extent that they actually have their members fight two or three matches at once during the individual matches."

Every team was given the option to choose if they wanted to swap their current member out or not after each match, provided that member had won his or her match – obviously defeated members of the team were counted as eliminated and had lost the right to partic.i.p.ate any further in the individual and team matches for that day. However, as long as you won your match, you could opt to stay on stage (or the captain could choose to leave you on stage), and continue fighting the other members of the opposing team. Most teams didn"t do that because they wanted to give their other members experience, or rest their core partic.i.p.ants, or because the other team would choose to send out a member whose magic and techniques countered the current opponent"s skillset. However, a few elected to keep their faith in their core members and leave them in the arena to continue knocking out as many of the opponents" members as possible. It also served as a strategy, so that the core members you had in mind for the team match wouldn"t be eliminated before it even began. For example, Harrison would sometimes have Bu Fan repeat a couple of matches because we all knew he was only going to partic.i.p.ate in the individual matches, so as to minimize the risk of the main party for the team match getting unexpectedly broken up and eliminated.

"They have obviously built their team around their captain, Kureha Franklin." Harrison glanced at me. "I think she"s an acquaintance of yours, Richard."

"We"ve met and worked together briefly," I admitted. "Back when Troy was alive."

"The dragon incident," Dong Fang Yue Chu recalled, awestruck. "The three of you worked together to slay two dragons."

"Something like that."

"That"s right." Harrison nodded. "So you know firsthand how strong and skilled Kureha can be." He then pointed toward the glowing holographic screen that hovered in the air. "She knows how powerful she is herself, and is extremely confident to the extent that she would partic.i.p.ate in at least two or three matches to reduce the opposing team to cinders before leading her party in the team match. And for her to do that, she has won all the individual matches she partic.i.p.ated in."

"Scary," Craig remarked, a mocking note in his tone. He smiled derisively as he turned to Harrison. "So we"re going to make use of her arrogance to create her downfall."

"Well…I was thinking we should showcase some arrogance of our own," Harrison replied jokingly. "But in more concrete terms…as long as we can eliminate Kureha Franklin, Saint Teresa Academy will suffer a huge blow to their strength during their team match against us. We can then take advantage of that."

"She"s not the only main threat in the Saint Teresa Academy team, is she?" Pearl questioned, frowning as she studied the multiple holographic diagrams and replay videos. "You said that they have five core members."

"Yeah, I did. And if I"m not wrong, they have no qualms sending all their core members out for the individual matches if they have to. That"s how confident they are. As you can see from their match against Crowley"s Grand Arcane Academy, Kureha Franklin was confident enough to not swap out after she defeated Chang Cheng, and fought a head-on battle against Cecilia Stuart."

I watched Kureha"s match against Chang Cheng. She had used an anti-fortress n.o.ble Phantasm, ahem, I meant, she used an advanced, highly destructive spell that took the form of a colossal golden beam of devastating mana that blasted out of her sword to obliterate Chang Cheng"s Great Wall and pulverize him.

He never stood a chance. Not because he was weak (in fact, he had won almost all of his individual matches before this, with none of his opponents ever able to penetrate his gigantic barrier), but because Kureha"s anti-fortress technique perfectly countered his fortress spell.

"Is Kureha trying to rip off Excalibur or something?" I asked sourly. Harrison glanced at me, half-distracted from explaining something to Craig, Sheila and Theodore.

"What was that?"

"No, nothing. Just a stupid joke, sorry." I sighed as I studied several more videos of Kureha"s matches. Wow, but she was amazing. Even Cecilia couldn"t defeat her, and I was more than impressed with Cecilia"s skills. She was the person who fought on par with the Grim Reaper, after all. "She"s going to be difficult to beat."

"What about you, Richard? Do you have any confidence in winning against her?"

"No, not really."

"Seriously?" Harrison looked slightly disappointed. When I glanced at him with a raised eyebrow, he shrugged. "I figured that out of all of us, you are the one with the highest chance of winning against her."

"I"m flattered by your belief in me, but realistically speaking, her sword skills are vastly superior to mine. In a duel involving swordsmans.h.i.+p, she would win 99.9% of the time. And I"m not exaggerating. She really is that much better than me."

"What about magic? She might have that anti-fortress n.o.ble Phantasm…ahem, I mean high level anti-fortress spell, but wouldn"t your summoned Soul Beasts be able to defeat her? Even a superb swordswoman like her would have trouble fighting against your five Celestial Guardians, and she doesn"t have the defensive spells or impenetrable barriers that Wilhelm Williams"s Castellan possessed in our previous match. You should be able to knock her out with that magnitude of spells."

"That"s right!" Yue Chu brightened up. "Even the Sword Saint can"t withstand such an onslaught!"

"a.s.suming she allows me to summon them. I don"t know if my lesser Constellation spirits and I can last that long. She"ll just cut me to pieces in minutes with her superior swordsmans.h.i.+p, while cleaving my poor Constellation spirits apart."

"Hmm…" Harrison was musing as he stroked his chin, and he smiled knowingly. "But what if you were already able to summon your strongest Soul Beasts right from the start of your match with her?"

"That"s not possible. I"m not allowed to cast summoning spells before the match. It"s against the rules, remember?"

I knew a lot of readers constantly demanded why I never summoned anything before the match, and whined incessantly about how "stupid" it was, or how this was a ma.s.sive plot hole or a problematic plot point, when it was not. No, seriously…think about it, if summoners were allowed to cast summoning spells before the match and start the match with their Soul Beasts already in hand, why wasn"t everyone allowed to cast magic spells right before the matches? Wouldn"t that be unfair? Why single out summoners for special treatment? Wouldn"t elemental mages, for example, demand that they should also be allowed to start casting their ultimate spells before the match so that they could unleash them right from the start? If all matches devolved into students just flinging their ultimate spells at each other right from the first second, then there was no meaning to holding the duels in the first place. Everyone would just be tested on their ultimate spells, and all the basic and intermediate spells that required less casting time but were a lot weaker would become meaningless.

Then there were people who claimed this was not realistic at all and said that I was stupid for making the comparison to realism or the education system or paper tests. Well, if you want to talk about realism, let me point to a more accurate a.n.a.logy them. When you play card games or computer games, for example, were you allowed to bring out your most powerful card or unit right from the first turn or start? When you partic.i.p.ated in a Magic: The Gathering tournament, do you tell your opponent and the organizer to allow you to summon your 11/11 Darksteel Colossus "before the match" and then place it on the table on your first turn? When you watched professional Starcraft 2 esports matches, do you see players already building their highest tech unit in the first second? Do they tell their opponent to allow them to sp.a.w.n a Batltecruiser right from the start of the match? Why should a Terran player be allowed to construct a Battlecruiser before the match and then bring it right from the start of the game, just because he refused to build Marines or h.e.l.lions and wanted to rush straight to Battlecruisers?

A lot of the readers were just looking for ways to exploit the system, or they just hated the ideas of the protagonist they wish to project themselves onto having to face obstacles and challenges. They wanted him G.o.dlike and overpowered right from the very start, and if he loses or faces difficulty, they start complaining about why the system doesn"t go his way and how it was stupid. Then they claimed it was a flawed plot point when it actually wasn"t. No, seriously, go to any Magic: The Gathering tournament and ask them if you"re allowed to "pre-summon" a big creature or "pre-cast" a powerful spell before the match just so you can use it right from the first turn. You"ll get kicked out.

In any case, I didn"t have to worry about this for quite a while now because I had developed my own swordsmans.h.i.+p and created smaller and weaker Constellation spirits that took a lot less time to cast. Of course, the trade-off was that these smaller Constellation spirits were vulnerable to being wiped out by areof-effect spells, and each of them was so fragile that even the most basic spells were able to destroy them near-instantly. That was also one of the reasons why summoning wasn"t popular. Even if you managed to summon cheap hordes of monsters very quickly, the opponent would just incinerate them all with a cheap area of effect spell (think Breath of Darigaaz or something). They didn"t even need anything as powerful or expensive as Wrath of G.o.d because of the low durability of these cheap Constellation spirits.

Even so, I still believed in them and swore by them. By G.o.d, I had made them work and I was going to continue making them work. I had already proven that I could do it. It was just that, even with all these improvements and progress in my skills and magic, I still wasn"t confident of delaying a swordswoman as excellent as Kureha long enough for me to summon my trump cards to level the playing field.

However, Harrison was smiling, as if he knew something I didn"t. He merely placed a rea.s.suring hand on my shoulder.

"Of coruse you"re not allowed to summon anything before the individual matches, but that"s not what I mean. I"m just thinking of creating a situation where you already have those summoned Soul Beasts in place before you specifically face Kureha Franklin herself. Knowing her, she would usually wait until the last moment before she steps in."

"Ah…yeah. I see what you mean."

I was beginning to grin as well when I understood Harrison"s intentions. That sly fox…I never thought of that strategy. As always, Harrison was always one step ahead of me.

That was why he was the team captain.

"All right then. I"ll leave her to you then."

"I"ll do my best, but no guarantees." I swallowed. "Even if I somehow summon all my most powerful Constellation spirits or Celestial Guardians, that doesn"t mean I will definitely win for sure. She"s the Sword Saint. I"m sure she"ll have something up her sleeve even when pitted against giant monsters."

"Yeah, I understand." Harrison nodded sympathetically. "But it"s fine even if you don"t win. As long as you do your best…even someone of Kureha Franklin"s caliber will be exhausted and injured to the point where her performance during the team match would be negatively affected. That will be our best chance to take her down."

"I see." I was beginning to see the big picture that Harrison had envisioned long before he approached me with this proposal. Straightening up, I struck myself in the chest. "Leave her to me."