A Headache (4)

“Gnngh!”

Amon shot Leonard a bloodshot sidelong glare and backed off fast. Worse than the dismay of having his scheme found out was the question of how to clean up the mess this had turned into.

The Bracelet of Subjugation only worked if he could fix his whole mind on the target with nothing interfering, and Leonard was hardly going to hand him a second opportunity.

That left him only one course of action.

With his free hand, the one without the bracelet, Amon swiftly cast a spell. Heat coiled around his forearm and gathered beneath his palm, and in the blink of an eye it swelled into an enormous ball of flame.

Red Blossom, a third-Circle fire spell.

The fireball lived up to the name, taking the shape of a flower bud and spreading four petals wide. Then, with a small burst, the fireballs arced away and came rushing at Leonard from above, below, left and right.

Leonard Felix might be practiced against monsters, but this had to be his first taste of fighting a mage. Faced with another person’s magic, he would never manage a proper response. Or so Amon figured. On top of that, Red Blossom’s signature blaze packed the whole field of vision, dazzling the enemy’s eyes and making evasion harder still. No mere first-year could do anything about magic on this level.

“Hmph!”

The attack carried killing intent besides, and Leonard charged straight into it. In the instant the four flames converged to swallow his small body, he threw himself at the single gap dead in the center.

“Wh—?!”

Leonard slipped cleanly between the fireballs without a scratch, and the sight threw Amon into confusion. Before he could find the slack to respond, Leonard drove his cocked fist forward in one great thrust.

— THWAAACK!

The blow caught Amon in the cheek and lifted him slightly into the air.

“Gaah!”

Amon rolled away, kicking up a cloud of dust. Graham’s hints had already told him Leonard was no pushover, but this much force from a single punch?

For an instant he nearly blacked out. Barely clinging to consciousness, Amon somehow got his stance back under him and sprang to his feet, and Leonard came walking slowly toward him, cracking his knuckles in threat.

“Still awake? Good. That’s why I held back.”

The truth was, he had been hesitating right up until Amon moved first.

Amon Vincent might well deserve to be beaten to death, but that verdict rested on acts he would commit in the far future, not now. Was it truly just, then, to make someone pay for a sin they had not yet committed and punish them on one’s own authority? No. Human will could change the future, exactly as Leonard himself had changed his.

So even after catching on to Amon’s intent, he had gone around the streets with him instead of leaving on the spot. If there was still room in Amon for change, he had meant to lead him somehow onto the right path.

But the moment Amon drew out the Bracelet of Subjugation, Leonard’s mind turned all the way around.

“You monstrous bastard!”

Amon poured out the curse in earnest. Dodging magic instead of blocking it with a barrier was no way for a mage to fight. To catch up with that insane speed, he needed something faster than Red Blossom.

Then—

As Amon gathered himself, blue particles collected in his hand and soon formed a cluster of small, swirling beads of water.

— Fwoosh!

High-pressure jets burst from the beads and sprayed in every direction. Their accuracy was wretched, but they hit hard enough to punch through the paving stones underfoot and the walls of the surrounding buildings like jelly and break them apart.

Leonard did not fall back. The jets bent this way and that, as though something invisible barred their way, and through all of it he kept advancing, closing the distance between them.

“Enough.”

Amon faltered slightly, pushed back by the sheer force of him, and in that moment Leonard cast something and sent it at him.

— KRA-KOOOM!

A blue flash seemed to blink, and Amon’s body had already been hurled several meters back.

Leonard’s spell was Blue Stripe, a third-Circle spell of the lightning school, fastest of all the schools, and so tremendously fast that the Water Jet Amon had cast could not begin to compare. Pure white steam rose here and there from Amon’s panting body.

Ranged magic really doesn’t suit me at all.

Leonard grumbled inwardly. However low a spell’s Circle, taking one head-on could put a life in danger. Amon was still alive only because Leonard had deliberately used ranged magic, which he was not used to.

I can’t win. I can’t win this.

Genius, in the literal sense of the word, meant talent bestowed by heaven.

Few blows had been traded, but in their course Amon had tasted, if only a little, a domain ordinary humans could hardly come near. Feeling the gulf in class in his own body made his skin crawl all over. Graham’s talk of Leonard fighting a monster army and holding out against it had been no idle boast after all.

“Now listen to me carefully, Amon Vincent.”

The polite speech was gone. Amon lay sprawled on the ground, thrashing as he tried to get up, and Leonard looked down at him with an ice-cold gaze.

“Negotiations and offers are supposed to start from a foundation of trust. Seen that way, you got off on the wrong foot from the very beginning. You deceive me, stab me in the back on top of it, and you thought that would just pass?”

Amon couldn’t answer a word. The punch had split the inside of his mouth, and it hurt too much to move his lips or tongue properly.

“You… goddamn piece of…”

The words he finally forced out after several attempts carried a resentment whose source he could not name.

“What would a brat like you know… What do you know about me — thrown out of Everforce Academy, shoved into a shithole like this, with my future and my hope both gone…”

Leonard had been born holding everything, and he himself had been thrown away by his own family for want of ability. Where else in the world was there anything so unjust?

Leonard’s reaction, though, was as cold as it could be.

“Your whole mindset’s rotten to begin with.”

“Hey. Does the world collapse if you come to Kestral Academy? Is your life and everything else finished?”

With the tip of his foot he shoved Amon’s half-risen upper body back down to the ground. The sky had begun to redden with the setting sun, and beneath it Leonard’s face was twisted with rage.

“It doesn’t get in the way of making a living!”

— Thunk.

Leonard planted his foot on the middle of Amon’s chest and bore down.

“Guh.”

“You pull a stunt like this over a reason that cheap? A punk who hasn’t lived a rat’s a** worth of life dares to lecture me about the future and hope?”

He had witnessed the moment when future and hope disappeared. He had come through the absolute helplessness of one person who could achieve nothing, and the bitter taste of defeat, and after all of that, Amon’s complaint sounded to Leonard like nothing but whining.

“That’s exactly it — that’s what makes you a brat…!”

Amon glared up at Leonard with bulging eyes and forced his mouth open.

“In noble society, birth and ability decide everything. Anyone who can’t pull his weight gets torn apart by everybody piling on. So in a world like that, what is someone like me supposed to do with his life…?”

The moment he finished speaking, he raised his arm and cast another spell. But Leonard simply lifted the foot resting on his chest and swatted the hand aside.

— Smack!

“Aaaaaargh!”

“Can’t give it up even now. Anyway…”

By now the pain was so bad Amon could not even get words out. While he groaned, Leonard pinned him down again and went on talking.

“If it galls you that much, then leave the house! Just graduating from the academy makes you a noble, so join a mercenary company or a pioneer corps, pile up some achievements and build your own house from scratch — you could do that, couldn’t you? And if you don’t like that, then go and open a corner shop!”

Leonard laid into him.

“Don’t make the environment you grew up in your excuse when you’ve never once done the thinking or made the attempt yourself.”

“I won’t say the environment you grew up in had no part in how you ended up like this. But you didn’t make the slightest effort either, did you? If you have no talent, then you ought to be working out what you can do without it — so why pull a brainless stunt like this?”

“…”

No further reaction came. His blank expression gave not even a hint of what lay behind it. Leonard snorted. Meaning to get help from someone nearby to haul Amon in, he took his foot off the chest he had been pinning and looked around.

“Heh.”

Silencing even the sound of his breathing, Amon aimed the hand with the bracelet at the back of Leonard’s head once more. As he wrung out the last of his strength, the bracelet’s fading light began to brighten again.

He had come too far to stop here, and the target was right under his nose.

So just a little more.

Just a very little further.

The instant the bracelet’s light condensed to its limit and glittered for a moment, Leonard’s voice reached Amon’s ear, some of the strength gone out of it.

“—I’d hoped you wouldn’t.”

— Crunch!

Turning where he stood, Leonard smashed the glittering bracelet on Amon’s wrist with the heel of his shoe. He had put a fair amount of force into it, and still the bracelet took only a fine hairline crack. That was enough.

“Gyaaaaaaah!”

Green mana welled out of the crack like a sticky liquid, ran down Amon’s forearm and seeped into his skin.

Amon screamed and went into convulsions. By now one or two people might well have come out to see what was happening, yet nobody stirred; they must all have gone off to the market stalls near Everton’s central square, or to a festival or something.

Even so, Amon kept twisting his limbs and flopping about, until at some point his strength seemed to give out and he went limp. A single thread of drool ran from his slightly parted mouth, and his unfocused pupils stared into empty air.

Leonard checked him over just in case. He was still breathing, so he wasn’t dead. Whether the mind of a man who had taken the full backlash of the broken Bracelet of Subjugation would ever be what it had been was, of course, another question.

Leonard looked at Amon, his eyes full of tangled feelings.

“…What an idiot.”

And how exactly was he going to explain this scene? The thought surfaced in his head on its own.