A Headache (4)

“Gnngh!”

Amon shot Leonard a sidelong glare with bloodshot eyes and backed away fast. Getting caught was bad enough, but the bigger problem was how to clean up the mess this had turned into.

The Bracelet of Subjugation only worked if he could fix his mind wholly on the target with nothing to interfere, and Leonard obviously wasn’t going to hand him a second chance.

So there was only one thing left to do.

Amon cast a spell fast with his other hand, the one without the bracelet. Heat coiled around his forearm and gathered under his palm, and in the blink of an eye it had become an enormous ball of flame.

A third-Circle fire spell: Red Blossom.

True to its name, the fireball took the shape of a flower bud and spread four petals wide. Then, with a small explosion, the fireballs arced away and came rushing at Leonard from above, below, left and right.

Leonard Felix might be used to fighting monsters, but this had to be his first fight against a mage. He wouldn’t know how to deal with another person’s magic. That was what Amon was counting on.

On top of that, Red Blossom’s gorgeous blaze filled the whole field of vision, dazzling the enemy and making it even harder to dodge. It wasn’t the kind of magic a mere first-year could do anything about.

“Hmph!”

The attack carried killing intent, yet Leonard charged straight into it. Just as the four flames converged to swallow his small body, he threw himself at the one gap dead in the center.

“Wh—?!”

Amon was thrown into confusion as Leonard passed cleanly between the fireballs without a scratch. Before he could even think of a response, Leonard drove his drawn-back fist forward in one great thrust.

— THWAAACK!

The blow caught Amon on the cheek and lifted him slightly off the ground.

“Gaah!”

He 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?

His consciousness had nearly flown off for an instant. He barely caught hold of it, got his footing back somehow and sprang up. Seeing that, Leonard came walking slowly toward him, cracking his knuckles as a threat.

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

The truth was that he’d been hesitating right up until Amon made the first move.

Amon Vincent did deserve to be beaten to death. But that judgment rested on what he would do in the far future, not on anything he’d done now.

So was it really just to make someone pay for a sin they hadn’t committed yet, and to punish them on one’s own say-so? It wasn’t. The future could be changed by human will, exactly the way Leonard himself had changed it.

That was why, even after he’d caught on to what Amon was after, he hadn’t walked away on the spot but had gone around the streets with him instead. If there was still room in Amon to change, he’d meant to steer him onto the right path somehow.

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

“You monstrous bastard!”

Amon meant that curse from the bottom of his heart. Dodging magic instead of blocking it with a barrier wasn’t how a mage behaved at all. To catch up with that insane speed, he’d need something faster than Red Blossom.

Then—

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

— Fwoosh!

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

Yet Leonard didn’t fall back. The jets bent this way and that, as if something invisible were turning them aside, and through it all he kept advancing, so the distance between them kept closing.

“Enough.”

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

— KRA-KOOOM!

Blue light seemed to blink, and Amon was already hurled several meters backward.

It was Blue Stripe, a third-Circle lightning spell, famed as the fastest there was. Its speed was tremendous, nothing the likes of Amon’s Water Jet could compare with. Pure white steam rose here and there off Amon’s panting body.

Ranged magic really doesn’t suit me at all.

Leonard grumbled to himself.

However low its Circle, a spell taken head-on could still put a life in danger. Amon was alive anyway, and that was only because Leonard had deliberately used ranged magic, which he wasn’t used to.

I can’t win. I can’t win this.

A genius meant, literally, a talent bestowed by heaven.

They had traded only a few blows, but in that short exchange Amon had tasted, if only a little, a realm ordinary people could hardly come near. Feeling the gap in class in his own body made his skin crawl all over.

So what Graham had said about him fighting a monster army and holding it off hadn’t been idle talk after all.

“Now listen to me carefully, Amon Vincent.”

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

“Negotiations and offers are supposed to be built on trust. Seen that way, you got off on the wrong foot from the very start. You lied to me, stabbed me in the back on top of it, and thought you’d just get away with it?”

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…”

When he finally forced the words out after several tries, they carried a resentment from somewhere he couldn’t name.

“What would a brat like you know… What do you know about me? Kicked out of Everforce Academy, dumped in a shithole like this, no future and no hope left…”

Leonard had been born holding everything, while Amon had been thrown away by his own family for lacking ability. Where else in the world was there anything this unfair?

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

But Leonard’s reaction was as cold as it could be.

“Hey. So the world ends because you ended up at Kestral Academy? Your life and everything else is just over?”

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

“You can still make a living just fine!”

— Thunk.

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

“Guh.”

“You pulled a stunt like this over something that cheap? Some punk who hasn’t lived a rat’s a** worth of life has the nerve to talk to me about the future and hope?”

Leonard had seen the moment when future and hope disappeared.

He’d known the absolute helplessness of being one person who could achieve nothing, and the bitter taste of defeat. To someone who’d come through all of that, Amon’s complaints sounded like nothing but whining.

“See, that’s why you’re 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, everybody piles on and tears him apart. So in a world like that, what’s someone like me supposed to do with his life…?”

The moment he finished speaking, he raised his arm and cast another spell. For all that effort, though, Leonard just lifted his foot off Amon’s chest and swatted the hand down.

— Smack!

“Aaaaaargh!”

“Even now you won’t give up, huh. Anyway…”

It hurt so much that Amon couldn’t get words out anymore. While he groaned, Leonard pinned him down again and kept talking.

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

Leonard laid into him.

“Don’t use the environment you grew up in as an excuse when you’ve never once thought it through or even tried.”

“I won’t say the environment you grew up in had no part in how you ended up like this. But you never made the slightest effort either, did you? If you’ve got no talent, you figure out what you can do without it. So why pull a brainless stunt like this?”

“…”

There was no reaction at all, only a blank face that gave no hint of what lay behind it. Leonard snorted. He meant to get the people nearby to help haul Amon in, so he took his foot off Amon’s chest and looked around.

“Heh.”

Amon, holding even his breath silent, 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’d come too far to stop here, and the target was right under his nose.

So just a little more.

Just a little further.

The instant the bracelet’s light condensed to its limit and gave off a brief glitter, Leonard’s voice reached Amon’s ear, some of the strength gone out of it.

“—I’d hoped you wouldn’t.”

— Crunch!

Turning his body just as he was, Leonard brought the heel of his shoe down on the glittering bracelet on Amon’s wrist. He’d put a fair amount of force into it, yet it had only left a fine hairline crack in the bracelet. But that was enough.

“Gyaaaaaaah!”

Green mana leaked out of the crack, welling up like a sticky liquid, then 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 going on, but there was no sign of anyone. They must all have gone off to the market stalls near Everton’s central square, or to a festival or something.

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

Leonard checked on him just in case. He was still breathing, so he wasn’t dead. Whether the mind of a man who’d taken the full backlash of a destroyed Bracelet of Subjugation would be the same as before was, of course, another question.

Leonard looked at Amon with a complicated mix of feelings.

“…What an idiot.”

And how was he supposed to explain this scene, anyway? The thought rose in his head on its own.