58. The Arena (2)

The red wall blazed up fiercely and cut the space between us and Seraphina clean in two. No opponent had appeared on her side of it yet, but the air was tense all the same, pointless as that was, and it had Elli at my side anxiously catching the edge of my sleeve.

“Young Master, will it really be all right?”
“Who exactly are you worried about? That’s the Empire’s Knight Commander standing out there.”

It seemed living around Valerian had thrown off Elli’s sense of judgment. However mighty an underling of the Abyss’s third gate might be, was Seraphina, one of the strongest swordsmen in the entire Empire, really worth worrying about?

But Elli glared at me and cried out.

“No! I mean me! What am I supposed to do?!”
“Ahh.”

She shot me another glare and aired her worries.

“Wouldn’t it have been better if I’d gone out first? Strategically, wouldn’t it have made more sense to wear the enemy down, or at least scout their attack patterns?”

Just as I’d misread her worry a moment ago, she had completely misunderstood the rules of this arena.

“Looks like you didn’t quite catch what that robed man said earlier. If even one of the three of us loses, the master of the arena won’t show up no matter what.”
“Then if I drop out and the two of you challenge again…”
“No.”

I cut her off flatly.

“The moment you set foot in here, there’s no leaving. And besides — you’ve gotten stronger too.”

Bloodstains were caked here and there on her shirt, the marks of her fierce battle with the lesser demons in the first gate. Just as Seraphina had done with Lillian and me, Valerian must have put Elli and Leo through the wringer to train them. She’d surely fallen into despair watching the lesser demons swarm in, and she’d crossed the line between life and death more times than she could count, but in the end Elli had survived.

“Then all three of us have to win! I’ll do my best!”
“Yeah, you’d better wring out strength you don’t even have. After all, they say the ones who fail just become the sand of this place.”
“…”

Ironically, she had survived so splendidly up to now that she had no real sense a defeat here would erase her for good. The fact that her life was on the line didn’t frighten her at all.

“Lose once, and there’s no next round. I mean you die.”

Only now did her expression turn grave, as the seriousness of the situation finally dawned on her. She stared at Seraphina with an anxious look and hugged her shield tight against herself.

Still, there’s no way I’m losing Elli here.

I’d only meant to cure her obliviousness to danger, not to frighten her, so now it was time to breathe her confidence back into her. I reached out and gently ruffled her tousled bob.

“Don’t worry. Who do you think I am? I’ve got a plan for everything. You just have to trust me, that’s all. Got it?”

At the touch of my hand she flinched for a moment, then dropped her head low.

“I always trust you, Young Master. The only problem is I’m not skilled enough.”
“No, you’re doing great. More than enough.”

I wanted to shore up her self-esteem, but quite apart from that, I meant it. How could I not be proud of Elli, when she’d taken Valerian’s training just to be of use to me?

“…You haven’t ruffled my hair in such a long time. Hehe.”

She grinned like a fool and nuzzled her head into my hand.

“And watch closely. There’s a reason I sent Sister out first, you know.”

KA-THOOM—! KA-THOOM—!

The instant the words left my mouth, the ground of the arena shrieked and shook, and from the red wall on the far side a colossal hulk slowly walked out. It carried a massive shield wider than a grown man laid out flat, one that towered well past the height of an average adult male. The shield Elli held was by no means a small one, but next to the thing that brute was carrying, hers looked like a toy.

“Elli.”

I jerked my chin toward the hulk striding out from beyond the wall.

“In a place like this, seizing the initiative is everything. And this arena has a fixed law to it.”

She looked up at me with frightened eyes.

“Do you think you and I could knock that shield brute over?”

Her gaze ran along the thickness of the hulk’s shield. A shield on that scale wouldn’t merely absorb simple blows. It would neutralize most attacks outright.

“No… No matter what, I don’t think there’s any way I could break through that.”

There was a clear self-assessment in her voice. I’d never personally seen how she fought, but she stubbornly relied on her shield alone with no secondary weapon, so the outcome was plain as day. One shield-soldier against another meant shoving at each other all day in a tedious test of strength, until whichever side ran out of stamina first fell. And in a contest like that, it was just as plain that Elli was at a tremendous disadvantage against that hulk.

“I told you, didn’t I. There’s a definite law to this place.”
“A law?”
“Yeah. Elli, looking at it right now, what role would you say that thing plays on the battlefield?”
“Maybe the one who stands at the very front and blocks the enemy’s attacks? It looks like a shield-soldier, same as me.”
“Right. And wars are always won or lost on how efficiently you can bring that wall down.”

Eligos’s arena, where the master appears only once every single challenger has seized victory. The gimmick was infamous, a pattern that drew no end of complaints, but complaints aside, it followed a sequence you could deal with.

Eligos was a demon in the shape of a knight. House Arne had a strong flavor of rough, feral private soldiery, but Eligos gave off the thoroughly disciplined air of an Imperial knight. So just as a war begins with shield-soldiers on the first line, spearmen on the second and mages on the third, the underlings Eligos sent out appeared in a fixed order according to tactical deployment. That was why I’d deliberately set Seraphina against that hulk.

“I sent Sister to the front on purpose. Because she’s got the overwhelming firepower to smash that obnoxious wall in one stroke, without leaving it any room to think.”

The hulk hid behind its shield, waiting on Seraphina’s move.

“If you locked shields with that thing, you’d be stuck in a shoving match for a good half a day. And if I went out there, I’d just exhaust myself hammering away at that giant shield. In this game, where it’s over the moment any one of us loses, I can’t take a gamble that uncertain.”

Contrary to its appearance, the hulk was cautious, and it kept to its defensive posture behind that shield. Watching it, I went on as though foretelling what was about to happen.

“Watch closely, as a fellow shield-soldier.”

As if my words were the signal, Seraphina raised her left hand.

Jiing—!

The air of the arena screamed in an instant. A magic circle formed at her fingertips and began to glow, bluer and bluer. The hulk must have sensed the danger by instinct, because it tucked itself even more tightly behind its shield, and I pointed a finger at it.

“Just holding out isn’t the answer.”

The deep-blue mana condensed at her fingertips tangled together like a skein of thread, then struck the hulk’s shield dead-on.

KRRRK! KRRRRRK!

White frost spread across the giant shield in an instant, but this wasn’t merely ice freezing over a surface. Seraphina’s magic was riding along the grain of the shield and forcibly warping the very density of its interior.

“…!”

The hulk sensed the crisis a beat late and stamped its foot to fling the shield away, but by then it was too late. The arm gripping the shield and even the massive torso had already become one with it, frozen into a pale blue-white taxidermy.

Seraphina slowly approached and lightly tapped the shield with a finger.

KAWHAAANG—!

It was like bringing a hammer down on a colossal tower of glass. The hulk and its shield burst into thousands of shards of frost, which scattered in every direction. Not a single drop of blood was shed, not from Seraphina and not from the hulk.

“…Ah.”

Elli stared at the spectacle, utterly spellbound. This was an attack you couldn’t block by throwing your weight behind it, and you couldn’t weather it with sheer muscle either.

“Well? Could you block Sister’s attack?”

She shook her head, her eyes full of shock.

“…No way. What shield-soldier in the world could ever block that?”

Her voice was trembling, because Seraphina’s attack denied the very reason a shield-soldier exists: holding the line.

“You can’t block it.”
“…Huh?”

The look on her face was priceless. It said something like, you tell me to watch closely as a shield-soldier, and then you say that?

“You can’t block it by just standing there holding firm like that.”

I went straight into reviewing this one-sided battle for her.

“That thing saw Sister’s sword and naturally assumed she was a swordsman. So it figured it’d become an unbreakable wall and drag things into a long fight, doubling down on defense. But Sister’s a magic-swordsman who’s taken both magic and swordsmanship to the very top.”

In battle, an error in reading the matchup leads straight to death.

“Just because you’ve got a shield doesn’t mean you should commit purely to defense. That’s flat-out handing your opponent the time to cast a powerful spell. Of course, if your side had a skilled mage to cast resistance magic on you, or you were wearing armor woven with magic resistance, that’d be another story. But pin all your faith on the shield with no plan at all, like that thing did, and you’ll end up just like it.”

Elli listened to my review, sank into deep thought, then asked again.

“Then what if that shield-soldier had figured out partway through that Lady Seraphina was a mage? What should it have done then?”

What she was asking now was how she, a shield-soldier, ought to survive when she someday faced an overwhelming mage like that.

“What else would you do? There are two ways.”

I held up my fingers as I added,

“Either you hurl your shield before the spell fires and cancel out the cast, or you throw the shield away entirely and charge the mage.”
“Throw away… the shield?”

Her eyes went wide. To her, the shield was something like a lifeline. No, it surely meant more than that. In modern terms, it might sound about the same as telling a soldier to head into battle without even a gun. But I nodded firmly and went on with my explanation.

“That’s right. You throw away the shield, close the distance, and force a melee. Driving the mage so hard they don’t get so much as a moment to chant — that’s the only way a shield-soldier can deal with a mage.”
“…”

“If you’d rather cling to your shield and end up smashed to pieces like that thing, then by all means, hold on to it.”

At my venom-laced advice, Elli agonized for a long while.

Agonize, and then agonize some more. That’s how you get stronger.

In shounen manga you often run into that whole expression about breaking past your limits and growing stronger, and right now Elli was face to face with that very limit.

“I understand what you’re saying, Young Master. But it’s not like a mage can’t fight in melee. Like the Lady.”

Somewhere along the way she had cast Seraphina as her imaginary opponent. What if the opponent were someone like Seraphina, wielding both sword and magic?

I answered her with a heart full of pride.

“Then you just die cleanly, I guess. What else can you do?”
“…”

Elli lost her tongue, her face going blank.

“Humans like Sister, who are good with a sword and have taken magic to the very top, are rare in this world. On the off chance you run into one on the enemy’s side, you just have to accept it.”

What can you do? It’s not as if an ant could kill a human no matter how hard it tried. Though I think I’ve heard there’s an ant in some book that pulls it off.

In any case, Elli ignored me and called out brightly to Seraphina, who was on her way back from the battlefield.

“Well done, my lady! You were truly amazing!”

Seraphina had walked off the battlefield with utter indifference, and she straightened her collar, which hadn’t so much as caught the smell of blood, as she came over to us.

“Arden is right. People skilled in both sword and magic alike are rare even across the whole of the Empire. We do put the knights through parallel training, but most of them hit a wall and give up.”

Her hearing must have been sharp too, since it seemed she’d caught the advice I’d given Elli all the way from over there. At her words, I shot Elli a triumphant wink.

“Hear that? So your odds of dying in a melee against a mage are really low.”
“You’re right. Hearing it from the Lady, I can finally relax.”
“You’re saying you don’t trust me?”

Only now did Elli let out a comfortable laugh at my joke. The air had grown so much lighter that I was about to let my guard down too, and at that very moment the robed man’s voice rang out.

“Let the next challenger step onto the battlefield.”