Chapter 77

“…!?”

Instantly shifting his consciousness into combat mode, Lucas scanned the room with a sharp gaze.

“…! Get back! They’re coming from two directions—above and to the right!”

Having grasped the situation in a heartbeat, he let out a sharp command. Irene, still unable to keep up with the sudden turn of events, hurriedly looked up at the ceiling and let out a strangled yelp.

“Wh-what is… this…?”

The ceiling, which should have been adorned with the delicate carvings characteristic of Aurelia, was swirling in a distorted vortex as if it had turned into liquid.

Complex magical patterns pulsed with light around the perimeter, and in the center of that circling vortex, a black mass—an swarming number of insects—wriggled and writhed, seeking an exit.

“Eh…? What is this? No way…”

Simultaneously, a similar hole opened in the wall to their front-right. From it, a vine-like plant that was clearly toxic extended its tentacles toward them, dripping with a repulsive slime.

The sudden tension was more than her brain could process.

Irene froze completely. However, as Lucas and Elma—despite both being in their drab, bespectacled disguises—stepped in front of her, she regained a small measure of composure.

“Wh-what in the world are these things!?”

“Most likely summoning circles for offensive organisms. I suppose this is a ‘rough welcome’ from the Aurelia Academy candidates to us Ludens. Using a sword here might be a bit problematic, though.”

Lucas didn’t seem particularly threatened by the attack itself, but he showed a flicker of hesitation over whether he should draw a blade while disguised as a mere janitor.

In the meantime, the left wall and even the floor began to emit a pale light, their shapes warping and dissolving.

In the center of those swirling masses, there were the distinct signs of menacing flames and the roar of a violent gale.

They were likely summoning spells for man-eating fires or wind-blades—Kamaitachi.¹

At this, even Lucas’s expression grew grim.

“Toxic insects from above, a man-eating tree from the right wall, scorching flames from the left, and wind-blades from the floor. Good grief, we certainly are popular.”

Lucas muttered sarcastically, but facing an attack from four directions at once put them at a disadvantage.

Clicking his tongue, he reached for a concealed dagger—one he could pass off as being for self-defense—when—

“Excuse me for a moment.”

A cool, calm voice rang out.

It was Elma.

She walked toward the left wall with a flat, steady gait and stared at the undulating white surface. Then, using a quill pen she had produced from somewhere, she began scribbling something onto the wall with rapid strokes.

Next, she did the same to the floor.

“E… Elma…?”

“What are you doing…?”

The moment the two left-behind companions spoke up in bewilderment, it happened.

WHAM!

“Kyaaah!”

“……!”

A blast of hot air so intense they couldn’t keep their eyes open swept through the room. When they finally managed to look again, the swarm of insects and the hideous toxic plants had vanished without a trace.

“…Eh?”

The resolution was so anticlimactic that Irene stood there with her mouth agape.

Could it be that what she had seen until a moment ago was just an illusion?

“Elma, what on earth did you—”

She started to ask, only to realize Elma was nowhere to be seen.

Irene looked around in a panic, but in the next heartbeat—

“I have returned.”

A serene voice spoke from behind her, nearly making her jump out of her skin.

“E-Elma! What did you…!? Wait, ‘I have returned’? Does that mean you actually left the room and came back just now? Eh?”

As Irene clutched her head in total confusion, Lucas—who had apparently been able to track Elma’s movements slightly better than she had—asked in an uncharacteristically low voice.

“You… did you just infiltrate the other candidates’ waiting rooms? No, before that, what were you doing to the walls and the floor…?”

“Ah, as for that—”

Elma adjusted her glasses, the lenses glinting as she prepared to answer, but before she could speak, screams erupted from the surrounding waiting rooms.

“Gyaaaaaah! Wh-what is this candy filled with bugs!?”

“When did someone shove this in my mouth!?”

“Uwaaaaaah! My precious poison insects… look at what’s happened to them!”

“Nooooo! My man-eating tree!”

Apparently, these were the screams of the masterminds behind the “rough welcome.”

With their wails serving as background music, Elma spoke with a casual air.

“I simply made bug-filled candies for the four groups who welcomed us and went to provide them with a ‘reciprocation.’”

“…What?”

As Lucas and Irene asked for clarification, failing to grasp her meaning, Elma rephrased it politely.

“Toxic insects, a man-eating tree, flames, and wind-blades. In other words: contents, sap, a heat source, and blades. Since the materials were conveniently gathered, I had the wind-blades slice the man-eating tree to extract the sap, placed the insects inside, and used the flames to heat it all up to create candy.”

“……”

The words made sense individually, but the concept was incomprehensible.

Lucas felt his facial muscles twitch.

“No, Elma… why on earth does this situation result in the production of bug-filled candy…?”

“Eh? Well, when one receives a gift, isn’t it perfectly ordinary behavior to use part of it to prepare a small present in return?”

No, even if she put it like that, it wasn’t the same as saying, “I received a lot of strawberries, so I made some jam to share.”

Ignoring the speechless Lucas, Elma smoothly pulled a small package from her pocket and offered it cheerfully to Irene.

“If you’d like, please have some. These turned out particularly large and glossy.”

“I don’t want them!”

Irene rejected the elegantly wrapped insect candy with a scream of pure desperation.

“I mean, that’s not the point! The intention behind the Prince’s question was: how did you neutralize a series of powerful-looking attacks—or rather, turn them into bug candy—just by fiddling with the floor and walls for a moment!?”

As Irene explained the rebuttal on Lucas’s behalf, Elma tilted her head curiously.

“Eh? The circles on the left wall and the floor were in a pre-activation state, so I simply rewrote the targets of the spells.”

At this, the frozen Lucas managed to reboot himself and bared his teeth.

“Why is it that you, who are neither a mentor nor possess Holy Power, can rewrite sacred magic circles!?”

“Eh…? Even without Holy Power, there’s no problem as long as one can decipher the formula. If one can read Ancient Aurian, rewriting a circle is something even an ordinary person can do, right?”

“An ordinary person cannot decipher formulas or Ancient Aurian!”

Magical formulas were things that students at the Aurelia National Academy spent years mastering; if it came to deciphering a new formula, only a handful of Great Cardinals on the continent would devote their entire lives to the task.

“In the first place, how did you even detect the circles, which shouldn’t be visible to anyone who isn’t a holder of Holy Power!?”

“Well, you see, since the circles are drawn with Holy Water, if one detects the air currents that fluctuate due to the minute amount of heat emitted by the Holy Water—”

“How are you supposed to detect air currents!?”

“Eh? Can’t you do that normally?”

As Elma answered with a tilt of her head, neither Lucas nor Irene had any words left to give.

Ignoring the two, whose eyes had already begun to turn into the murky, dead eyes of a fish so soon after entering Aurelia, Elma made her glasses glint with a touch of pride for some reason.

“Also… I immediately tried to put the advice from you both into practice. How did I do?”

They had no idea what she was talking about.

When they stared back with half-lidded eyes, Elma placed a hand over her heart like a student waiting to be praised.

“I did my absolute best not to stand out—which is to say, I ensured I wasn’t visible to the surroundings.”

“That’s not what ‘do things with speed that exceeds the eye’ means!”

Realizing that her sincere advice had actually made the situation worse, Irene shrieked.

Rewriting circles, canceling out attacks with each other, identifying the culprits, and striking back—that alone was extraordinary. But to do it all at a speed that couldn’t be perceived by the human eye was another level entirely.

Contextually, the fact that Elma was the one who struck back would be obvious to anyone—which meant that, if anything, she had only succeeded in demonstrating her unfathomable power.

Elma was smiling with an aura that was clearly happy, even through her glasses.

“Thanks to you two, my journey toward being ‘ordinary’ is progressing well. Thank you so much for your always appropriate advice.”

Before Elma, who bowed as she spoke, the two of them looked up at the ceiling in silence.

That’s not it.

The faint traces of smoke drifting near the ceiling seemed to sting their eyes.