Enrollment Arc, Part I

by Tsutomu Sato

  “That’s because you provoked him!”

  The blades of their words pierced into each other. He’d thought they might not say any more, but each conveniently responded to the other’s questions.

  “This is getting interesting,” muttered Erika, half to herself and half not. He could tell from her tone of voice that she was excited. “This fight would be way more interesting than that farce earlier.”

  “Do you know those two?”

  “Well, I’ve never met them in person,” she answered immediately. She must not have been talking to herself after all. “I just remembered I’ve seen the girl in a match before. Sayaka Mibu. The year before last, she won second place at the national junior high school girl’s kendo tournament. Everyone was calling her stuff like the ‘gorgeous swordswoman’ and the ‘kendo belle.’”

  “…But she got second.”

  “Well, the champion was… Well, not as photogenic.”

  “I see.” Well, that was just how the media worked.

  “The boy is Takeaki Kirihara. He was the champion of the Kanto Junior High School kenjutsu tournament two years ago. He got first place for real.”

  “Didn’t he go to the nationals?”

  “They only have national kenjutsu tournaments starting in high school. There wouldn’t be nearly as many people before that.”

  Tatsuya nodded in understanding and agreement.

  Kenjutsu was a sport that combined sword techniques with magical ones, so the athletes would need to use magic as a prerequisite.

  Although advances in magic studies had brought forth the development of devices to aid in casting magic, only maybe one out of a thousand junior high school students, per grade, would be able to activate magic at a practical level.

  And those who could maintain that magical power at a practical level even after maturing would be less than a tenth of that.

  Course 2 students were treated as leftovers inside this school, but compared to the overall population, they were elites, too.

  “Whoops, looks like they’re starting soon.”

  Tatsuya was also feeling that the string of tension was reaching its breaking point.

  Preparing for the worst, he got the armband out of his pocket and put it on his left arm. Students nearby looked at him, surprised, and their eyes widened again upon seeing the absence of the school crest on his left breast, but Tatsuya was paying attention only to the two confronting each other.

  The female student must have been hesitant to strike at an opponent who wasn’t wearing armor. But as long as they were pointing their words at each other and not stepping down, a clash of swords was unavoidable.

  The boy—Kirihara—would probably make the first move.

  “Don’t worry about it, Mibu. This is a kendo club demonstration. I’ll do you a favor and not use magic.”

  “You think you have a chance with just sword skills? The kenjutsu club uses magic like a cane, but the kendo club has only been polishing its sword skills.”

  “Those are some big words, Mibu. Then I’ll let you see it! I’ll show you the kenjutsu techniques that let us compete on another level past physical limitations!”

  That was the signal to start.

  Kirihara suddenly swung his shinai down at her uncovered head.

  The two shinai violently rang against each other.

  The yelps from the crowd came two beats later.

  The onlookers probably didn’t know what was happening.

  They could only imagine how fierce the sword attacks the combatants were exchanging must be from the violent noises of shinai slamming together, which occasionally even had a metallic ring to them.

  —Save for a few exceptions.

  “Her kendo was pretty high level. If she was second, how amazing must first be?” Tatsuya exhaled in admiration of their sword skills—notably Sayaka’s.

  “No… She’s like a different person than the Sayaka Mibu I saw. I can’t believe she’s gotten so much better in just two years…” answered Erika, taken by astonishment but also giving off a somehow bellicose air, as if she was hiding her face and licking her lips.

  The two of them disengaged, their game of tug-of-war stopped for a moment, and each jumped backward to create distance between them.

  The observers’ responses were split: those who were breathing, and those who weren’t.

  “I wonder who’ll win…” wondered Erika under her breath.

  “Mibu has the advantage, right?” replied Tatsuya with a whisper.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Kirihara is avoiding striking her in the face. It was a bluff, one which anticipated taking the first attack. They’re not far enough apart for him to win when he’s both not allowed to use magic and putting another handicap on himself. Even in a fair fight, if it was just a shinai duel, I think the odds would be in Mibu’s favor.”

  “I mostly agree. But how long can Kirihara endure this?”

  He couldn’t have heard Erika’s remark, but…

  “Uohhhhh!”

  …for the first time in the battle, Kirihara charged in with a war cry.

  Each of them swung straight down.

  “Hitting each other?”

  “No, they’re not even!”

  Kirihara’s shinai caught Sayaka’s left upper arm…

  …and Sayaka’s shinai was planted in Kirihara’s right shoulder.

  “Kuh!”

  Kirihara struck Sayaka’s shinai aside with his left hand and took a big jump backward.

  “Defeated because he changed his aim halfway through.”

  “I see—that’s why his stance loosened. It was the perfect timing for a double hit…but in the end, he couldn’t find it in him to do it.”

  Tatsuya and Erika weren’t the only ones who saw that the duel was over.

  The faces of the kendo club members looked relieved.

  And the members of the kenjutsu club, the group that had made its way to the front of the gallery at some point, and wearing different uniforms than the kendo club, were making sour faces.

  “If these were real swords, you’d be dead. You wouldn’t have even reached my bones. Admit your defeat.” Sayaka declared her victory, her expression dignified.

  Kirihara scowled at her. Had he admitted that she was correct as a swordsman though his emotions tried to deny it?

  “Hah, ha-ha-ha…” Kirihara broke out into a hollow laugh. Had he admitted his defeat?

  It didn’t look like it.

  The water level of Tatsuya’s internal danger sense suddenly shot up.

  Sayaka, who was still facing him, probably understood the threat more distinctly than he did.

  She readied her sword again, pointed the tip right at him, and glared sharply at Kirihara.

  “If these were real swords? My body hasn’t been cut at all! Mibu, you want a fight with real swords? Then…as you wish! I’ll take you on for real!”

  Kirihara took his right hand off his shinai and pressed it on his left wrist.

  There was a scream from the onlookers.

  The spectators covered their ears from the unpleasant noise that sounded like nails on glass.

  There were a few who paled and fell to their knees, too.

  Kirihara jumped in closer and swung his shinai down with his left hand.

  Though his one-handed attack was swift, it didn’t have the foremost power.

  But Sayaka didn’t take the attack—she leaped far backward.

  It hadn’t hit her.

  It had grazed her, at most.

  And yet there was a thin line across Sayaka’s armor. It was the trace of where the shinai had grazed.

  He had used a vibration-type close-combat spell called High-Frequency Blade to give his shinai the edge of a real sword.

  “How is it, Mibu? This is a real sword!”

  Once again, he swung his sword down at Sayaka with one hand.

  And before his eyes, Tatsuya got in the middle of them.

  Just befo
re he jumped in, Tatsuya had lightly crossed his left and right arms, with CADs on them, and sent psions into them.

  The tightly bound psionic stream—he imagined pressing the CADs’ keys with psionic fingers.

  By using the noncontact switch, the CADs outputted an activation program.

  In a flash, the psionic wave itself, having been converted into an intricate pattern—the typeless magic was fired from Tatsuya.

  This time, there were those among the onlookers who had to cover their mouths.

  Symptoms not unlike motion sickness chained radically.

  But in return, the unpleasant, high-pitched noise disappeared.

  Kirihara’s shinai and Tatsuya’s arm crossed.

  There was no sound of bamboo striking flesh.

  What resonated was the sound of something falling to the wooden floor.

  And then, what the observers saw, having been liberated from the noise and instability, having finally regained the ability to look and see what was happening…

  …was Tatsuya grabbing the left wrist of Kirihara—who had been knocked away and thrown onto his back—and then pressing down on his shoulder with his knee.

  Hostile whispers broke the silence in the small gymnasium—in the arena.

  “Who’s that?” “I’ve never seen him before.” “Isn’t he a new student?” “Look, he’s a Weed.” “Why’s a substitute getting involved?” “But that armband…” “Come to think of it, I heard the disciplinary committee chose a Course 2 freshman.” “Seriously? A Weed in the disciplinary committee?”

  The unrest was spreading with the kenjutsu club’s position at its center.

  Both boys and girls were whispering about him.

  Half of the circling crowd of people launched unfriendly stares at Tatsuya.

  The other half was holding its breath.

  Being oppressed by an overwhelming away-game atmosphere, Tatsuya, still holding Kirihara down, took out his portable terminal’s voice communication unit. His calm expression didn’t seem like a bluff, at least as far as anyone could tell. His bearing resembled the bad guy—used to being booed at.

  “—This is the second gymnasium. I’ve arrested one person. He’s wounded, so please bring a stretcher just in case.”

  He hadn’t said it very loudly, but his words reached the edges of the throng.

  After a moment, right when what that meant sank in, one of the members of the kenjutsu club in the front row shouted angrily at him, confused.

  “Hey, what’s the meaning of this?!”

  He’d probably lost his head. His question didn’t really mean anything. Or maybe it wasn’t a question, but a threat.

  “I am asking for Kirihara to come with me, because he used magic improperly.”

  Tatsuya responded to his angry voice with honesty. Although his gaze remained fixed on the disabled Kirihara. He hadn’t looked up, so while his answer might have been honest, it was hard to call it polite.

  Depending on how you looked at it, it was making fun of him.

  That was how the upperclassman in the kenjutsu club thought.

  “Hey, you bastard! Don’t give me that shit, you Weed!”

  He reached his hands out to Tatsuya’s collar.

  Tatsuya let go of Kirihara and, still half down, slid backward.

  He kept his eye on Kirihara, who had fallen down to the floor, his legs and back stretched out.

  He must have felt pretty hazy to fail to fall gracefully when flung away like that. There wouldn’t be any concern of him getting away like this. So judging, Tatsuya finally directed his eyes toward the upperclassman who had flared up at him (and was still flared up at him, in the present tense).

  In response to Tatsuya’s attitude—he seemed not even to be paying attention to him—the kenjutsu club member facing Tatsuya was grating his teeth with such force he thought he could hear the grinding.

  Support fire from the crowd. “Why just Kirihara? Isn’t Mibu from the kendo club guilty of the same crime? Both parties are to blame here!”

  Of course, it was the support for Kirihara and the kenjutsu club member who had tried to grab Tatsuya, and criticism toward Tatsuya.

  In response, Tatsuya answered in a level tone, again honestly. “I believe I said it was because of improper use of magic.”

  Erika, staggered, gave him a look that told him he should have just ignored them. Then, the thing that she feared happened.

  “Bullshit!”

  The upperclassman, now in a complete frenzy, went to grab Tatsuya again.

  He swiveled his body like a matador to flee from his hands.But all that did was fan the flames.

  This time he came at him with a fist, but once again, Tatsuya dodged it.

  The kenjutsu club member madly threw punch after punch, but he was clearly out of his element when it came to empty-handed combat, and so his movements were sloppy. He may have been in a frenzy, but it didn’t take someone of Tatsuya’s skills to be able to easily dodge him.

  He continued to evade the wide punches with light steps until their positions had reversed. The upperclassman, tired of getting nothing but air, stopped, and Tatsuya stopped with him—and just then…

  A second kenjutsu club member came out of the crowd and rushed at Tatsuya’s back.

  His stance, with his arms stuck out oddly—was he going for a full nelson?

  Erika tried to shout Look out! but before the words came out…

  Tatsuya’s body swung around.

  His outstretched arm drew an arc through the air and swallowed up the body coming to grab him.

  The second kenjutsu member collided with the first one, and the two of them rolled spectacularly to the ground in a pile.

  Silence visited them again.

  All noise had disappeared from the arena. No one even coughed.

  But if veins popping out of people’s heads made a noise, it would have been piercing the eardrums of Tatsuya and Erika right now.

  In the next moment…

  …the kenjutsu club members all charged Tatsuya at once.

  There was a scream.

  Everyone besides the kenjutsu club—not only the gallery, but even the kendo club members as well—scattered like spiderlings, afraid of being caught up in the brawl.

  Among them, only one person, Sayaka—who could be said to be the cause of this incident—readied her stance, probably about to charge in and lend Tatsuya her support.

  “Wait, Mibu!”

  But a senior male member of the same club grabbed her arm and stopped her.

  “Ah, Captain Tsukasa…”

  She tried to resist for a moment, but when she saw the face of the person grabbing her arm, she obediently pulled back and left with him.

  Her face was filled with guilt, but even still, she didn’t bat away the hand of this senior—the captain of the boy’s kendo team, Kinoe Tsukasa.

  As Sayaka was dragged away from the brawl by the boy’s captain, Tatsuya became the focus, and he met the attacks of the kenjutsu club members. However, in meeting the attacks, he didn’t counter them—he continued to handle the Blooms by sidestepping and dodging them all.

  His carriage was more steady than splendid—or perhaps the term reliable would have been best here. He only moved exactly as much as he needed to. He had to have known the precise order of the attacks of the upperclassmen, who were coming at him from all directions. He wasn’t making a show out of it, dodging everything by just a hair, but rather he slipped past them with enough room to get himself out of danger. As part of his coordinated attempt to hold them all here, he would fake attacks and cause allies to hit each other, or become a wall and expertly wheel around to the outside in an arc, out of the way of opponents closing in on him. Despite ten people attacking him, the kenjutsu club couldn’t even get him out of breath much less stop him from moving around.

  Not a fragment of haste or unrest showed on his face. Not a scrap of sloppiness or stagnation showed in his movements. The disrespectful Weed didn’t counte
rattack, not because he could not but because there was no need. He was making these kenjutsu club Blooms come to terms with that fact.

  In the back of the group, a furious, red-faced kenjutsu club member tried to fire magic at Tatsuya. The leftover psionic light shining one after another must have meant that he had expanded an activation program and tried to use a spell.

  However, his magic never went off.

  Whenever Tatsuya directed his gaze there, along with tremors that brought forth nausea as if by motion sickness, the clumps of psions that couldn’t form a magic program fizzled out into the empty air.

  As they cursed angrily, their faces betraying their incomprehension, they again came at Tatsuya and tried to grab him and punch him, continuing to only hit air.

  Sayaka didn’t realize until the end that the boy’s captain was watching this all with great interest.

  To be continued

  AFTERWORD

  Nice to meet you all. My name is Tsutomu Sato. Thank you very much for reading this book.

  The Irregular at Magic High School is my debut work, corrected and revised from the serial version I began putting up on an Internet novel submission site in October 2008. Receiving the good fortune to publish something like this that I wrote purely for fun began with a single e-mail from the website’s administrator.

  It was a forward of an e-mail from ASCII Media Works, and in it was an invitation—a request for a meeting to discuss publication.

  I honestly doubted my own eyes.

  Novels are my biggest hobby. I love both writing and reading them for pleasure. So I had known before that I would like to reveal my works as a novelist in the arena of physical books. Once, as a side thing from my dead-end salaryman job, I submitted a novel I’d written in my free time to a publisher’s new author award contest. But I thought to myself—this The Irregular at Magic High School was the sort of thing that would only be accepted as an amateur work on the free Internet. Wasn’t it a bit adventurous for a big-name publishing company to handle?

  Those were the things I was thinking—it would never work.

  In reality, the publication company I’m referring to was ASCII Media Works, and it was for the Sixteenth Dengeki Novel Award, but the work I submitted was rejected outright. If you’ll forgive me for sounding like a poor loser, I had to compress the work’s contents by 50 percent to meet the application guidelines. Even I felt that there were some issues inherent in doing that, so I wasn’t surprised when it was rejected. The world isn’t that nice—that was one of the few useful teachings I had gotten during my life as a salaryman.