Saikyou Mahoushi no Inton Keikaku (LN) - Volume 13 - Chapter 76

Seventy-Sixth Chapter

Promise

Two weeks after the events at the palace, a promise made some time ago was about to be fulfilled on the Institute’s training grounds.

Tesfia’s red hair swayed cheerfully as she stood with an air of importance in the middle of the battlefield set up for them in a corner of the training grounds.

“I will praise you for not running away, Lilisha. I will dye the mat red with your blood,” she said.

There weren’t actually any mats on the training grounds, but she was acting like a villain riling up the audience with trash talk before the match, even though her only audience consisted of Alus, Loki, and Alice.

A few chairs had been set up, and everyone aside from Tesfia was sitting.

They hadn’t reserved all of the training grounds, but they had set it up so that their division couldn’t be seen from the outside, which was probably why Tesfia was getting strangely worked up.

Her opponent for the day, Lilisha, gave her a cold look, then turned to Alus sitting next to her. “She’s a noble’s daughter, isn’t she?”

“Yeah...of the three great noble families at that.”

Tesfia seemed to have abandoned all dignity and manners. Lilisha gave her supposedly highbred opponent a dumbfounded look.

Having realized how pointless their conflict was, Lilisha looked to Alus with a disgusted look. “I don’t care if I lose, as long as I can maintain my own dignity as a noble.”

“Why are you telling me?” asked Alus. “Besides, look at her, she’s so fired up that she’s never going to back down.”

Tesfia’s cheeks were flushed with excitement. Just maintaining that level of excitement must have been quite exhausting.

Alus recalled that it was the small fight between them that had started everything. It had been very emotional and childish, as if it was physically impossible for them to get along.

But perhaps Lilisha had already forgotten all about it. She’d been given the job of reorganizing Aferka and had only just returned to the Institute yesterday. When Tesfia had brought up the duel, she’d spaced out for a moment, desperately searching her memories.

She’d accomplished the most important task of her life and finally felt the weight come off her shoulders. Since this had come right after such a big event, her previous stubbornness no longer mattered to her, so she no longer saw any point in their duel.

Not that there had been one in the first place.

“All right, everyone’s getting fired up!”

As Lilisha sighed, she found Alice standing between her and Tesfia, speaking aloud like a ring announcer.

“Fia is on fire and is determined to finish this! It is a battle of the century with the pride of nobility on the line! Standing up to the challenge is Lilisha!”

Alice suddenly pointed at Lilisha, who looked at her with surprise. “What?”

Alus gave the girl a cold look, as if to ask what she was doing, which made Alice turn red and shrink back. It looked like it was just something that Tesfia made her do. But it was her poor acting that had caused her to self-destruct.

“H-How about it? Will Lilisha face the challenggge...aaaahh I can’t do this anymore, Fia.”

“J-Just do it already,” Tesfia whispered, trying to calm down her friend.

Being given no choice, Alice looked down at the memo in her hand.

“O-Oh, there’s no response! Will the cowardly Lilisha tuck tail and run at the last minute? I-It seems that Fia has a proposal.”

With Alice’s prodding, Tesfia boldly puffed her chest out in a daunting pose.

“If you want to run away, you better grovel on the ground and apologize. Then I might find it in me to forgive you,” she said with a smug look.

Seeing that, Loki added with a blank expression, “What a terrible taunt. This cheap act wouldn’t even be worth paying money for.”

“Don’t say that. It makes just staying here a pain,” said Alus, knowing he could only watch things play out.

Tesfia probably wanted to settle things no matter how. She probably wanted to fight it out with Lilisha and then find some common ground, even if that was what everyone had expected.

Lilisha looked at Alus and Loki, then let out a heavy sigh, resigning herself, and glared directly at Tesfia. “How cheeky! You don’t even know the slightest thing about what it means to be a noble!”

She promptly stood up and pulled her AWR on her hands like a boxer putting on their gloves.

“In the end, she’s petty like her,” said Alus.

“Isn’t that fine? Ms. Lilisha is pretty enthusiastic about it too,” noted Loki.

“Don’t say that either,” said Alus.

But it was understandable. The weight on her shoulders caused by her family, brother, and the rest had finally lifted. What was wrong with cutting loose like a student now that the Institute had finally become the place she felt she belonged?

“Still, is that what your AWR looked like, Lilisha?” Alus asked in a whisper, and she held up a hand to show him.

Her middle finger didn’t have the glove from before but a claw instead. It was as sharp as a bird of prey, and there was a magic formula on its surface.

“Oh, this? Well, a lot happened,” Lilisha said.

“The truth is I owe that to the Fable family,” she whispered after a pause. “It wasn’t like it was for an official apology, but I brought a box of sweets with me. I did attack the place, and we’d always had a feud.”

She whispered in a volume so low that Tesfia couldn’t hear, but Alus couldn’t help but retort. “How casual can you be...? You did try to assassinate their butler.”

“What else was I supposed to do back then?!” asked Lilisha. “What was I supposed to do other than apologize? Well, considering my position, I apologized and explained the vision for my family’s future. Mr. Selva was generous enough to forgive me, and it wasn’t like everything was solved, but with the reformation of Aferka, talks about a code of blood or purging Mr. Selva have completely disappeared.”

Selva had left Aferka due to personal emotions in the past and been on a list of targets to be killed for the longest time. But it seemed that he’d been removed from it. Moreover, the Frusevan family had come to serve the ruler directly, so they couldn’t casually fight with one of the three great noble families.

“Does Fia know?” Alus asked.

“Who knows? Well, even with the problems around Mr. Selva resolved, she probably doesn’t know the details. Like your passionate approach and standing against the ruler to save me,” said Lilisha.

“Now that’s some misconception. But seeing how you survived and are free to be stupid like this, maybe there was meaning in that supposed passionate approach.”

“You can fall for me if you like, but I’m a problematic woman,” said Lilisha.

“I’ve been made well aware of that,” Alus shot sarcastically, to which Lilisha could only give him a bitter look to acknowledge his words.

Looking back, she realized it must have been a big mess for Alus, who’d been dragged into it. While she was grateful, he’d ended up learning everything about her, whether they were things she wanted to hide or not. It was like she had been fully exposed, and for some reason she felt a little frustrated.

Frowning a little, she said, “Well, I digress. Still, it would be better if that simple-minded girl continues to stay a little stupid in the future.”

Alus had secretly felt that the two were starting to get along, but it seemed that had been a hallucination. He thought she’d matured, but that side of Lilisha wouldn’t change so fast. Lilisha had instead gotten the claw-type AWR she was wearing.

“Well, all of that happened and then I got this.”

The Fable family had returned the favor; or rather it was a gift from Selva Greenus. However, exchanges of gifts weren’t standard in the noble society. It was more of an investment in Lilisha, seeing as she had gotten close to the ruler.

A bribe if you would.

Lilisha had checked in with Cicelnia about it, just in case, but had gotten a carefree “Sure, why not just accept it?” in response. So Lilisha had had no choice but to accept the symbol of noble cunning with a wry smile.

The only saving grace was that the Fable family was unlikely to raise any objections against Cicelnia’s current regime. Frose was rather close with Governor-General Berwick, and her daughter was attending the Witch Sisty’s institute.

Lilisha figured that the gift was also a show of their intentions. Frankly, she wasn’t sure what to think.

It wasn’t like yesterday’s enemy had become a friend today, so she was a little apprehensive of the Fable family’s cleverness and the calculating nature of nobles. As a noble family of assassins, the Frusevans had lived in the shadows. As a result, they still had much to learn in terms of political maneuverings.

When she thought about how little nobles openly showed, she found it hard to believe that the redhead in front of her was likely to become the next head of the Fable family.

In any case, Lilisha gave up on trying to convey all of her circumstances and summed it up in a brief sentence. “Well, the point is that I was given it.”

She was neither boasting nor acting embarrassed, thus ended up imitating Cicelnia’s way of saying things with a complicated, bitter smile. It was like a right of passage: her first bittersweet adult smile.

Alus and Loki looked on with disinterest as the primitive method for reconciliation that went by the name of a duel was about to begin. As the two girls faced each other with AWRs ready, Loki turned to Alus with a topic completely unrelated to the duel.

“I wasn’t sure what to think at first, but this must have been what Lady Cicelnia was after.”

Loki was half-right. Cicelnia’s attempts to put the rampaging blade that was Aferka back in its sheath through a reorganization looked like it had indeed been successful. But Alus couldn’t agree right away. He had misgivings that wouldn’t go away.

Was that really all that she was after? What would the scenario have looked like if I hadn’t saved Lilisha...? No, just thinking about it feels like entering a maze full of dead ends. I’m sure it would have always ended up favoring her in one way or another in the end.

Just thinking about it was a pain, and Alus flashed his own small, cynical smile.

“That would be nice. But there’s no telling what that woman is thinking. There’s even a chance that she’s playing by ear and has no real intentions,” he said.

“If you say so, that might be that case. But it’s still a good time to settle down a little, isn’t it?” asked Loki.

“Yeah, we’ll be able to move ahead with a bunch of things now,” Alus said after a pause. “It’s a little annoying, but even Lilisha is back safe and sound, so now everyone’s gathered at the Institute. I can only hope this is not all according to somebody’s plan.”

“Sir Alus, it’s not good to overthink things. Nobody can tell what will happen in the future, no matter how much they think about it. You have to settle eventually. So look,” Loki said with a small smile and pointed to the center of the training grounds, where the two girls were about to finally begin their duel. “I was losing interest, but looking at those faces, it looks like it will be worth watching. The two of them have definitely grown.”

“Yeah.” Alus nodded at Loki’s point, throwing his concerns in the trash and looking over to the pointless duel.

Even so, the image of the mystical smile of the beautiful ruler remained in his head. In one moment she had spoken about her plans with godlike wisdom, and in the other, she’d worn an innocent face as she slept on Alus’s back. She was a goddess and a devil at the same time.

Did her plans all come to an end? he wondered. No, that’s enough thinking for me. I will just have to believe that for now. 

He could only pray that the goal they had reached was not just a checkpoint...

The buzzer signaling the start of the duel finally began, and Alus quietly watched the two hotheaded Magicmasters take shots at each other. And he saw them taking their first steps on the path to further growth.