34. Summer Vacation (3)
Summer vacation had begun.
And when one said ‘summer vacation’ in a fantasy youth romantic-comedy dating-sim academy genre, there was, above all else, one thing people naturally expected:
a beach trip event.
Aither World Online definitely had a summer-vacation beach trip event too.
It definitely existed, but…
There was one word I had left out in the genre description above.
Namely, reverse harem.
Aither World Online was a very strange game.
A lot more male gamers played it, but its fundamental genre was a female-oriented reverse harem.
In the game, Flame would rent some luxurious villa somewhere and go off holding a whole group of five or six men around her while some festival-like event unfolded, and apparently the subtle tension between the male leads—or the collar-grabbing fights that broke out behind the scenes—were part of what made it so entertaining to watch…
or so women said.
I wouldn’t know.
I never watched it.
Anyway, that wasn’t the important part.
Under the assumption one was not taking seasonal classes, summer vacation was the only time Stella cadets could stay outside for a long period.
Students like me, who had no hometown or hated their hometown, would stay at school, but most people went back home.
Even if I stayed at school, it wasn’t like I’d be studying, and there weren’t any episodes there either, so I was thinking of going around outside for a bit too.
Dungeon exploration, hunting, training, side events, and so on.
There was plenty to do.
Of course, the most important thing was Episode 8, [Dark-Magic Encroachment], which was scheduled to unfold near the end of this summer vacation, along with the Inter-School Tournament.
The Inter-School Tournament.
By the time players who had learned 1-vs-1 magic battles during the first semester were getting used to PVP, this was the event where they learned large-scale PVP.
It ranged from small 3-vs-3 tournaments to one-hundred-person survival matches.
The tournament I was planning to enter was that very one-hundred-person battle royale survival match.
One hundred magicians would be dropped into random places on the field, then gather magical equipment, win fights against their enemies, and survive until only one person remained.
A simple rule set, but brutal.
Back on Earth, battle royale games had been released in all kinds of genres, and every time, they had become hugely popular, which was exactly why so many players had taken part in this event too.
Of course, there were no players in this world.
Still, since it was an Inter-School Tournament, elite magic warriors from many prestigious magic schools would surely be participating.
“Yuseol. You applying for that too?”
As I stood looking at the Inter-School Tournament notice on the class bulletin board, Ma Yuseong came over and asked.
“Yeah.”
“Isn’t it a bit rough for first-years?”
He had a point.
There were relatively few first-year participants, since they generally lacked combat experience, and that was true anywhere.
But then again, as befit our protagonists, they were going to make a grand show of participating as first-years anyway.
Including Ma Yuseong, the one talking to me right now.
“You’re doing it too.”
“Well…”
“Hm?”
But Ma Yuseong gave an answer I hadn’t expected at all.
“My father suddenly summoned me. I think I have to return to the main house.”
“What? Hey, no. I was planning to enter with you.”
“…Really?”
He only smiled with a tinge of regret and quietly looked at the notice.
‘He’s going back to the main house…’
Why all of a sudden?
Was there some sort of variable?
The last time he returned to the main house, I heard it had been by his own will.
But this time it was different.
He had clearly said it was his father summoning him.
He probably thought I knew nothing about his family situation and mentioned it casually, but I actually knew quite a lot about it.
At the main house…
Ma Yuseong was not treated very well.
One might think, ‘Wait, isn’t he the successor to the Dark Mage King? Shouldn’t he be treated like a prince?’
But that only applied to the outside dark-mage factions.
Inside, Ma Yuseong was despised and called all sorts of names—mongrel, traitor, filthy thing with tainted blood, and so on.
Within the Dark Mage Empire, only pure blood and overwhelming power proved anything.
And the current Ma Yuseong satisfied neither of those conditions, so there was no helping it.
On top of that, his mother had already wasted away when he was young, and even his father refused to acknowledge him and only treated him more harshly…
so I didn’t even need to see it firsthand to know how much he would suffer once he went back to the main house.
“Uh, well… have a good time, then.”
Since it would’ve been weird to say ‘good luck suffering’ to someone going home, I just offered him a vague blessing.
“Thanks.”
Seeing him say that with a bright smile made one corner of my chest feel heavy, but there was nothing I could do for him.
To participate in the Inter-School Tournament, there were a few conditions and a screening process.
At a minimum, you had to rank within the top 600 of your year, and to check combat ability, applicants had to duel one another and achieve a high win rate.
This was where most first-years got eliminated in droves.
Since most applicants were second- and third-years, there was no way first-years could normally beat them.
Fortunately, I was starting to have some confidence in this area.
With the derivative skill of the Mana-Leak Constitution, Mana Concentration, plus the Taeryeong Divine Art, I could smash through mana shields up to about the 4-Class level as much as I wanted.
To do that, though, required enormous concentration, and I had to enter battle with the determination to kill my opponent if necessary.
But, well, what could I do.
The Inter-School Tournament was an event I really wanted to participate in.
‘I want that victory reward.’
Of course, I wasn’t dreaming of actually winning.
This was an event where all kinds of monsters gathered from across the nation, dangerous enough to threaten even the protagonists.
Still, just taking part would let me gain a lot, so for now my plan was simply to squeeze my way in somehow.
“First-year S-Class Baek Yuseol, second-year C-Class Ji Oden. Step onto the dueling stage.”
The Stella Dome was packed full of applicants who had come to be screened for the Inter-School Tournament.
On the dueling platforms set up through subspace manipulation, countless applicants were fighting one another.
My first opponent was a second-year senior.
‘C-Class… so maybe around rank 400?’
Not a difficult opponent.
“Tch…”
Apparently my notoriety had spread pretty far, because the senior who’d drawn me looked far from pleased.
He’d realized there was no way he could win.
There was no need for him to be that scared, though.
I had absolutely no defensive ability, so if he got even the slightest opening, he could win in a single blow.
“…Baek Yuseol wins!”
Of course,
grabbing an opening on me wouldn’t be easy.
“So annoying…”
The senior I’d beaten stepped down from the dueling stage with his shoulders drooping.
Thanks to the fact that my abilities had been exaggerated a little…
no, a lot…
he probably wouldn’t become some laughingstock for having lost to a first-year, but it still had to feel pretty awful.
“Hm…”
About now should’ve been the time when Hong Biyeon, Flame, and Eizel were climbing fast and shocking everyone.
In the original game, the Stella Dome sky displayed the names and win rates of the top-ranking students, and that board filling up with first-years was supposed to stun everyone.
It was an obvious cliché, sure, but clichés are fun for a reason.
And yet—
“…They’re not there?”
No matter how I looked, I couldn’t find their names.
Hong Biyeon.
Flame.
Eizel.
All three of them.
Gone.
‘What? What happened…?’
If things were following the original, then by now they should’ve been crushing upperclassmen with overwhelming power and climbing fast.
Had they lost to seniors?
No.
That couldn’t be right.
At worst they were stronger than in the original, never weaker.
There was no way they were at a level that couldn’t even get their names onto the board.
‘Then… they didn’t enter at all?’
What are they doing right now?
“Next! First-year S-Class Baek Yuseol, second-year B-Class Bemillea. Step up.”
But for the moment I still had to finish the screening, so I had no time to go looking for them.
“Look over there. That’s Baek Yuseol, apparently.”
“Woooow…”
Anella,
a subordinate of Blackkingdon and a forty-something girl (?) who had infiltrated Stella under the identity of an exchange student.
At present, she was inside the Stella Dome together with teenage girls who could, in a sense, even be considered her peers.
“Amazing… How can a first-year do that?”
“No way.”
Since Ma Yuseong, Hong Biyeon, Eizel, and Flame—the four who had originally been expected to receive the most attention among the first-years—were all absent, all that attention ended up concentrating on Baek Yuseol alone.
‘A first-year defeating second- and third-year cadets one after another.’
It wasn’t as if he won against every single opponent.
When he faced third-years, or second-year S-Class students, he occasionally lost.
But even then, those losses always looked frustratingly close, so people couldn’t stop marveling.
Whoosh—!
“Wow…”
“Ooh…”
Watching Baek Yuseol vanish like the wind, close in on his opponent, and swing his sword, the exchange students let out gasps of admiration.
There was even a saying that went, “If you ever get the chance to come to Stella as an exchange student during summer vacation, make sure you watch the Inter-School Tournament screening!”
That was how famous the screening for prestigious schools’ tournaments was.
It showed an exceptional level of skill that ordinary schools simply couldn’t produce.
Most exchange students came from schools that would be a bit embarrassing to call prestigious.
They were, at best, fairly ordinary schools.
So scenes like this weren’t something they could easily witness.
“How can a first-year…?”
“I still can’t believe he’s the same age as us…”
The cadets who had come as exchange students had each, in their own way, already mastered 1-Class as first-years and were called prodigies wherever they went, while some had even reached 2-Class and were treated as the most precious talents in their schools.
But Stella’s first-years had 2-Class mastery as a baseline, and some even had 3-Class.
Apparently the top S-Class cadets had even reached 4-Class, so there was no comparison at all.
Unfortunately, most of Stella’s first-year S-Class students were nowhere to be seen at the screening grounds.
But the chance to watch Baek Yuseol—the one currently making the biggest name for himself—fight in real time was a tremendous stroke of luck.
“It’s the first time I’ve ever heard of anyone controlling Blink.”
“I was expecting him to present on Blink Magic at this Aslan.”
“Same. Maybe it’s some secret technique of his family or something?”
“Could be.”
Baek Yuseol’s fighting style—ignoring terrain, instantly leaping in and striking his opponents where they least expected it—didn’t have flashy explosions going off everywhere.
But it definitely had an impact that captivated people’s eyes.
Anella watched Baek Yuseol in silence and sank into thought.
‘That can’t be the full extent of Baek Yuseol’s combat ability.’
She had already received information on him beforehand.
They had warned her to be careful, saying he possessed power on the level of a 6-Risk dark mage.
Even if he currently seemed to be intentionally losing when facing third-years,
he had to be hiding his true strength.
“What a pity. Is a third-year A-Class just too much for him after all?”
“He looked like he was fighting for his life.”
“Still, isn’t the bigger deal the fact that a first-year fought a third-year that well in the first place?”
“Exactly.”
Fighting for his life? What a joke.
Anella scoffed inwardly.
‘It’s all an act, you idiots.’
The others didn’t seem able to see it, but it was plain as day to Anella.
Baek Yuseol was deliberately pretending to struggle in order to hide his abilities.
Which only made him more frightening.
Her mission was to completely exclude him from the equation—or, if that proved impossible, eliminate him.
Honestly speaking, her pure combat ability only amounted to about 5-Risk at best, and even that had been weakened now that most of her dark mana was sealed, leaving her little better than an empty shell.
Meaning that if a proper battle broke out, she would have no choice but to lose.
But that was all right.
Because she possessed the supreme trait [Nightmare Recurrence].
No matter how powerful a magician might be…
once they were dragged into their trauma and made to flounder there, they would be unable to resist at all.
“Hey, hey, look at Anella. She’s completely spacing out while watching Baek Yuseol.”
“You interested in him?”
“Huh? Wh-what? N-no, I’m just…”
“Come on. Be honest. He is kind of handsome, right?”
“He’s way too pretty. Not really my type as a guy, though.”
“Guys like that become dangerous once they grow up, you know?”
“U-um…”
Anella tried to make some excuse, but her exchange-student friends ended up giving her one very sweet piece of information instead.
“Oh, right, come to think of it, I heard from a friend who lives here. Apparently there’s a café Baek Yuseol goes to every weekend?”
“Really?”
“Yeah. They say paparazzi always wait there too. But if he still goes anyway, I guess the coffee there must really be good.”
“Then if you wait there, could you see him?”
“Well, probably… but if you try talking to him, he’d probably find it annoying.”
“That’s true.”
It was a chance!
Before the topic could shift elsewhere, Anella hurriedly asked,
“Um, where is that café…?”
“Hm?”
At that, the girls started letting out suspicious little laughs.
“Heheheh.”
“Ohohoho.”
“So even though you were pretending you weren’t interested, you were curious after all?”
“N-no, no… it’s not that…”
“It’s not? Then we won’t tell you.”
“It-is that, but, I mean, it is, but…”
“See? I knew it.”
Anella felt profoundly wronged,
but there was absolutely no way for her to explain herself.
— Read only on MugenCodex —
