by Funa
She really might win this!
She was, of course, aiming to win. But honestly, she might actually win! Against her eldest brother!
Mavis’s heart was on fire, her soul alight.
She was all out of special techniques. She had used everything they had practiced the night before in her two previous moves.
That said, this “True Godspeed Blade” could probably be thought of as Mavis’s real secret power.
All the practice that Mavis had put in during her six months at the prep school—and even since then—was now paying off. No matter how much the nanomachines increased her synaptic reactions or temporarily tautened the sinews of her muscles, if her existing abilities were not sufficient to handle it, she might suffer muscle ruptures and bone fractures as her body destroyed itself. However, thanks to all of her training, Mavis possessed a body that could withstand such rigors, even if it was only for a few minutes at a time.
Meanwhile, Waylon’s offensive strength was waning. He had to remain vigilant, on the lookout for other secret techniques, in case Mavis was bluffing. Even in perfect form, anticipating each of her moves, he had only barely blocked the last two special attacks. If she tried to perform some other big move, she might launch a third attack in the moment that it took Waylon to guard against her. He couldn’t afford to be careless here.
Mavis’s attack speed was abnormally fast. It took everything Waylon had just to block her volleys, leaving him unable to launch his own counterstrikes. Just like his father before him, Waylon began to grow extremely impatient.
Mavis’s brothers could not use magic. By contrast, though Mavis herself did not realize it, thinking that she was only strengthening her body “by her own willpower,” she was using body-strengthening magic in this very moment. Her fatigue dissipated; her stamina increased. Yet as a young man, tempered by long years of training, Waylon’s base abilities were still far beyond Mavis’s. While Waylon’s combat abilities were declining gradually as his fatigue increased, Mavis was going to hit her limit all at once. Thanks to Mile, who had consulted with the nanomachines, Mavis herself knew this. Thus, she knew she had a very brief window in which her plan could work.
Indeed, while she did not let it show upon her face, Mavis was even more frantic than Waylon in this moment.
Once she reached her limit, it would all be over—and that limit was approaching fast.
Slightly, ever so slightly, Waylon’s reaction speed was beginning to decline.
Yet at the same time, perhaps because he was starting to grow accustomed to Mavis’s speed and moves, and finding ways to fight against them, the force of his attacks was starting to increase again. Now that he was focused on the battle, his hesitation was gone, so his experience was truly beginning to show.
Mavis was gradually being pushed back, her body beginning to approach its limits.
She did not know whether she would hear a warning sound or sign from within her when those limits were hit.
There was no more time.
With this thought, Mavis decided it was time to unleash her final attack, which she had hoped to avoid using, if she could. Her final, special technique, which Pauline had thought up, and whose efficacy against her elder brother had been guaranteed by Reina and Mile. If she did not make use of it now, it would all be over.
For the sake of her own future, Mavis summoned all the strength of her soul and launched her final attack.
“I hate you, Big Brother! Please don’t talk to me ever again!”
“Huh…?”
Waylon froze, dumbfounded, looking as though he had been overcome by a deep despair.
Smack!
For Mavis, landing a blow on Waylon, who was standing stock-still, was simple.
“Wh…”
The audience was incredulous.
“What was thaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?!?!”
They were vexed.
The count, Waylon, and Ewan were all incredibly vexed.
However, in front of this many witnesses, there was not a thing they could do. They could not possibly allow the common folk to see a group of nobles—knights, no less—breaking a promise without batting an eye. Furthermore, Theresa, a representative of the capital branch of the guild, and Santos, a guard who spoke on the king’s behalf, were on Mavis’s side. Their hands were well and truly tied.
Hanging their heads, the Austien family and their underlings plodded out of the arena, powerless.
As Mile saw the Austiens off, she glanced to the side to see Pauline standing nearby, her face dark.
“Oh! Pauline, what’s the matter?”
Pauline wailed in despair.
“If only we’d had more time! If only we’d had more time, we could have made more money off of this match! So much more! I want to go back to yesterday! If only we could go back to yesterday!!”
Just then, a strong breeze blew past them, carrying the smell of flowers to Mile’s nostrils.
Back on Earth, this smell would have been that of lavender blossoms.
Mile patted her fist against her palm in recognition.
“Aha! It’s ‘The Girl Who Leapt Through Money’!”
Chapter 24:
A Triumphant Return
“You did it, Mavis!” Reina cheered.
“Congratulations!” Pauline continued. “Now you’re free until the day your marriage prospects run out entirely!”
“Ugh…”
For some reason, Mavis did not seem entirely thrilled.
“This is all thanks to you guys, especially Mile. Thanks to that special technique, True Godspeed Blade, I was able to stand up to my eldest brother in combat, if only for a short while. And now—and now!—once again, I get to chase…my…my dreams…!”
She began to sob so hard her words were lost.
“Mavis…”
This was Mavis, who was always so collected, who could grin and bear anything that might come their way.
Reina, whose emotions were wild and volatile; Pauline, who had a dark side; and Mile, always naive, watched gently over
Mavis, who had always watched over them, as her whole body trembled with sobs.
After some time, when Mavis finally calmed down, the four started back to their lodgings to celebrate Mavis’s victory.
***
When they returned to the inn, someone was standing outside the front door: a woman in her thirties, with a kind, soft appearance, but eyes that betrayed a strong will. She stood with a boy around ten years old.
“Pauline!”
“Mother! Alan!”
It was Pauline’s mother and younger brother.
Given her status as the lover of the apprehended merchant, Pauline’s mother had been questioned in order to ascertain whether she was an accomplice to his crimes. So that they could not conspire to corroborate each other’s stories, anyone connected to the case, including the shop’s employees, had been isolated and kept under observation, and because they were all interrogated one at a time, it had taken some time before any of them could be released.
Theresa and Santos, who were both aware of the circumstances, were involved in the actual questioning, so no one was terribly worried. But now, they would be free and clear. After that, Pauline’s mother could act as the provisional manager of their shop until the process to officially hand the rights back over to the family was completed.
Though she conducted herself with a strong heart, Pauline was still a fifteen-year-old girl. Even if one might be considered an adult at fifteen, life had been incredibly harsh for Pauline until now. So much so that, if she did not bury her true kindness and gentleness in shadowy depths and cloak herself in a dark shield, she would never have been able to bear it…
However, those days were over as well.
Leaving Pauline to sob into her mother’s arms, Mile and the others headed into the inn.
“So, what’re we gonna do?” wondered Mavis.
“I wonder what we should do….” Reina mused.
“Whatever shall we do?” pondered Mile.
A few minutes earlier, once Pauline had calmed down, she had come in with her family and offered them her thanks. Then, she told them that she would be spending the night at her mother’s home, and she, her mother, and her brother departed.
“Now that our business here is finished, I was thinking that we should head straight back to the capital,” Mavis ventured. “But…”
For Mavis, who had certainly made a splash in this town, their stay had been a bit too intense.
In just the short journey between the arena and their inn, there had been hordes of hunters and throngs of young girls flitting about her. It would be impossible for her to walk around this area much longer. Besides, it would only be a matter of time before people came around petitioning her to introduce them to her master, saying things like, “Who exactly is Evening-Gown Mask?” and “She has to teach me!” and “No, she needs to join my party!”
“It doesn’t seem like we have much choice…”
“You’re right.”
Reina and Mile were of the same mind and agreed to leave the following day, at the first morning bell.
At dinner, they relayed their intentions to Theresa and Santos, as well as the innkeeper. Thankfully, Theresa replied, “Well then, I’ll go and find us a carriage.” Santos, of course, would be leaving the day after along with the guard wagon, so he would not be coming along with them. It would be rather unfair to make a coachman who had just arrived that day leave without even one day’s rest. Plus, traveling with the count’s party would be less than comfortable, so on the whole, Theresa’s offer was much appreciated.
After dinner, the three continued to discuss their plans for what would come next.
“If Pauline ends up staying here, it’s going to be hard running things with just the three of us. Should we recruit a new member?”
“I don’t think we have much choice. Thankfully, Mile is pretty much all-powerful, so we have a pretty wide field to recruit from… Which profession would it be best for us to look for?”
As Mavis noted, the pool of candidates was incredibly wide.
If Mile fought as a backline mage or slingshot user, them they could recruit a frontline fighter, or, if they recruited a mid- or backline archer or another mage, Mile could continue to act as a frontline fighter, as she had thus far. Since Mile could use healing and utility magic too, they didn’t even need to worry about getting someone with the same magical talents as Pauline.
Mile: the wild card of their deck.
Still, they were all a bit concerned.
Would someone who knew of Mile’s usefulness—no, her talents—become blinded by greed?
Would someone who learned the abilities of these supposed novices and realized the differences between the trio and themselves be crushed or start thinking strange thoughts?
Could they simply teach Mile’s “magic improvement tips” to someone whose true character they didn’t even know?
They couldn’t teach that person their secrets and then have them leave.
“Hmm…”
The three of them thought deeply.
Just then, Mile piped up.
“Um, what do you think of asking around among our former classmates?”
“Oh…”
Indeed, many of their classmates from the Hunters’ Prep School still lived within the capital. Because their class had been gathered from all over the country, most of them had returned to their hometowns after graduation. This was only natural, as they had left their families and friends behind. Even as a matter of national policy, no one would think of locking the graduates up within the capital, preferring to distribute promising young hunters equally throughout the country instead.
Yet for the most part, those who were originally from the capital, as well as those who did not have anyone to care for in other regions, had remained in the city.
When one spends half a year in a group of just forty people, one tends to get well acquainted with the rest of the group. The girls knew a lot about their classmates, and likewise, those classmates knew quite a lot about their group. This, of course, included the fact of Mile’s mental shortcomings, such as they were…
Of course, there were some individuals that they wouldn’t want to team up with. However, excluding those, it wouldn’t be so bad to reach out to some members of their class. That way, they could truthfully remain “a party of fellow classmates.”
Indeed, now and then, they saw some of these classmates around the guildhall and elsewhere. Yet unlike the Crimson Vow, who had recklessly gone it alone with a party of only novices, those classmates had mainly entered into parties comprised of more veteran hunters. That said, it seemed there were many of these cases where the veterans were of the mind that they were “helping newbies to become full-fledged hunters,” and treated them mainly as apprentices. Thus, those newbies’ shares of the profits were considerably lower.
Those veterans had likely been in the same position as the newbies in their younger days, so this was not a particularly cruel move. That was simply the way that such parties were devised.
Still, if the Crimson Vow were to reach out to any of their classmates who were in such a situation, it was possible that said classmates would be happy to join them. They might not be the most interesting choice, but perhaps it would be better than feeling overlooked.
“I’m a little worried,” said Mile. “In our party, there isn’t anyone besides Pauline who has a good sense for money and commerce and negotiating. With someone around who had the calculating heart of a merchant, there was no fear of us getting swindled, but now…”
“Ah!” Just then, the face of a certain person floated through all of their minds.
It was the face of a ten-year-old girl, who was fairly adorable, yet also calculating, and even callous. In the boobs department, too, she would be a suitable replacement for Pauline—at least, in a few years’ time.
“No, no, no! Absolutely not!!!” That was the group’s consensus.
At any rate, that girl had no combat ability, and she was already employed—at her family’s inn.
The three appeared calm as they discussed Pauline’s departure, but on the inside, they were by no means unworried.
The half a year at the Hunters’ Prep School.
The exciting and harrowing days spent afterwards, as fledgling hunters.
In the dorm or in the inn, the four of them always roomed together.
There was Mavis, the only daughter of a noble house, who was raised having little contact with those outside of her own family.
There was Reina, an orphan, who never knew her own mother and whose father, her sole blood relative—along with the Crimson Lightning, the hunters who she traveled with—had all been taken from her.
There was Mile, who, in her previous life, had no one who she could call a friend, and even in this life, had been separated from the very first group of friends she ever made.
And then, there was Pauline, who’d been living her life like a wounded beast.
They were all starving.
They all wanted. For friends. For companions.
And then they found each other: allies bound at the soul, the Crimson Vow.
It was the four of them.
They were true companions.
If they lost one of them, they could replenish their numbers with another.
But it wasn’t that sort of equation.
They knew this. Yet none of the three could bring themselves to say it.
Pauline had her own life, and her own happiness.
Her desperate wish had finally come true, and she had achieved her foremost aim: to live together with her family, and protect, along with her mother and brother, the shop that her late father built.
This was just the same as Mavis aiming to be a knight, and Mile seeking a normal happiness in life—important goals, which they would never give up on, which no one could stand in the way of.
And so
, after a time, as the words hung in the air without anyone working up the nerve to speak them, they all slipped into bed, and the conversation ended, unfinished.
The next morning, the three girls collected their things from the inn and headed to the guildhall along with Theresa.
The carriage that Theresa had arranged for them was not a passenger coach or a hired cart, but a merchant’s cargo wagon… laden with cargo.
“Our schedule didn’t line up with the passenger coaches, and hired wagons are too expensive. Thankfully, the Order of the Crimson Blood can work as guards, and one of the local merchants waiting to depart jumped at the chance of an escort.”
Gathering a number of merchants together in a caravan saved money on fees and bolstered overall security. There was no one who would pass up the chance to employ (and pay the rate of) a group of four hunters who possessed the escorting power of a group of ten—and who could, moreover, leave immediately. The townspeople had seen for themselves that the group’s sole swordswoman possessed the strength of several C-rank hunters on her own, and judged that, by extension, any party affiliated with this swordswoman and her master would be comprised of no ordinary individuals… Of course, these assumptions were correct.
Furthermore, if there were currently bandit spies sneaking around the town, they would be loath to attack this group. That much was certain.
Theresa felt strange about accepting any jobs on the group’s behalf, so she had only made a verbal agreement with the merchants the night before, leaving the duty of formally accepting the job to Mavis. Therefore, they needed to swing by the guildhall.
Since Theresa herself was a guild employee, it was important for her to do everything by the books.
Once the job acceptance paperwork was properly finished, the group proceeded to the merchants’ guild, where their employers were waiting.
When they arrived, they found three wagons assembled in the guild’s established waiting area. Beside them were three merchants, engaged in conversation. They all appeared to be small-time merchants, each with only one wagon apiece.