WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Hydrogen B

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Chapter 76: 12. Academy Festival Common Sense (6)

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All so-called "trained" agents put countless intentions into even a single small action, like when an enraged Ivan called Pavel down from beneath the statue.

It was unforgivable to stand before the late king's statue, look down from the platform, and declare that the Royal Guard's years of service had been meaningless.

At the same time, he had to keep the other man's attention on himself and eliminate the variables. When he had no idea what the other side wanted or what move they had prepared, the fewest variables produced the greatest results.

And that meant...

'He has an accomplice.'

The same was true for the other side. Pavel was also a "trained" agent.

The very situation of persuading Ivan, or provoking his anger, carried the intent of keeping him here.

And confronting Ivan head-on implied the presence of an accomplice. Pavel would know well enough that he couldn't fight Ivan and carry out a terrorist attack at the same time.

"..."

Without moving his gaze, Ivan sensed the activity around him. He searched for the alien presence among the passersby enjoying the festival and the crowd surrounding him. More precisely...

'Their gazes.'

It wasn't some special sixth sense. Most people were sensitive to the gaze of others. It was a basic sense everyone was born with, one possessed by every type of prey animal and social animal.

Humans, meanwhile, were a species particularly good at technologically refining the senses nature had selected for them.

'Three.'

Simply sensing someone's gaze did not let him calculate all their positions and directions.

But humans were not still objects. Even when they thought they were standing perfectly still, their breathing, emotions, and surroundings made them move in subtle ways.

With enough training, even those traits could be refined into a technique.

It was a technique of naturally letting his angle of vision shift by tiny increments, analyzing the background through peripheral vision while keeping his gaze fixed on his opponent as though it had been nailed there.

There were three people he had identified as suspects.

Now, there was only one way to confirm who they were.

-Click.

His hand behind his back gripped the pistol. At the cold scrape of metal against metal, Pavel noticed it as well. His eyes followed Ivan's hand as he lowered his stance.

A tenth of a second. A sub-second reaction. Superhuman combat began in such brief instants, through nothing but their eyes and reactions.

-Bang!!

The moment Pavel confirmed that Ivan had drawn a pistol from his sleeve, confusion crossed his face.

A pistol couldn't harm a superhuman. And Ivan had turned its muzzle toward the sky...

'The sky...?'

Pavel's expression froze. Almost at the same moment the pistol in Ivan's hand spat fire, he leaped forward.

The belt around his waist came undone.

-Clink, clink, clink.

With the sound of chains winding together, the belt in Pavel's hand lengthened and hardened into shape. It was a product of magic engineering.

[Dragon-Slaying Spear, Olov's Needle]

By the time Pavel reached Ivan, he was already gripping a fully formed spear.

-Whooom.

The surrounding crowd had not even had time to react. In that frozen, slowed-down moment, when he could see even a passerby's sleeve flutter in detail, the spearhead shot forward, faster than sound.

Ivan's eyes followed the shaft's movement from beginning to end.

A black-painted dagger, an ordinary military knife, spun in his grip and settled firmly into his hand.

-Kagagak!!

The clash between superhumans began.

Between one moment and the next. In the gap where time stopped and an instant stood still.

With their eyes, mana, senses, and rage.

* * *

Superhuman combat was not mythic. It was not the sort of fantastical battle where grand techniques and strange secret arts intertwined.

Its true face was far more desperate. It was a struggle to touch the other person's body even once, between distances, instants, and fragments of time.

It was because of relative time. Even when grouped under the same category of superhuman, there were naturally differences in individual skill.

There was a clear limit to using mana to accelerate the nerves. The time one could seize could not surpass physical limits.

Yet even for superhumans, shortening records by a tenth or a hundredth of a second in a human body meant grinding away at one's own limits every moment.

That was why there were advantages between superhuman intervals. Not everyone could live in the same time. Some could move faster, more precisely, and with greater finesse than others.

-Kang!!

The spear flew in like a shower of rain, aiming for Ivan's nape.

Ivan drew his dagger and twisted the spear shaft away, then turned his gaze.

Pavel's eyes held bewilderment and fury. Its meaning was roughly this.

'Why? And how dare you?'

They were different emotions, but they had the same cause. Pavel was enraged that Ivan had wasted the initiative.

In superhuman combat, the initiative meant something different. It was a kind of strategic ambush, launched before they could even settle their intervals of time.

That was clear from how Ivan had been committing himself entirely to defense after losing the first move. For quite some time after their fierce battle began, Ivan had been unable to escape the defensive.

-Kang!

Fighting a long spear with a dagger was acrobatics. Pavel had to admit it. Ivan's skill had far surpassed the level of the young recruit he last remembered.

That was why he was angry.

How dare he yield the initiative to the captain of the guard? He fired into the sky? Even if there was nothing remarkable he could do with a mere pistol, even so.

It was arrogant. And now Ivan was paying the price.

-Kang! Kang! Kadeudeuk!!

The spear swept, cut, and thrust. It stabbed at his nape, both shoulders, heart, solar plexus, abdomen, and both thighs almost at the same time.

It was the pinnacle of every technique a person could master with a single weapon. Skill that had reached its essence.

Yet Ivan's eyes followed every trajectory of those strikes.

-Kwadeuk! Kiiing!

Pavel admitted it. Ivan's mana-enhanced nerves were superior to his own.

At times, Ivan watched attacks that even Pavel, wielding the spear, could not follow with his dynamic vision. He responded to every strike. His nerves were monstrous.

But the difference in their prepared armaments canceled all that out. Pavel had the initiative and a long spear, while his opponent had only a dagger.

Even if that opponent were Hero Maximilian, he could discuss his odds of victory...!

-Kang!!

The dagger that had knocked away the spearhead shook violently.

It was not an issue of reach. It was an issue of power.

Long weapons did not produce greater force because their wielders had superior physical strength.

In the process of concentrating strength at the tip, a long weapon could fully utilize centrifugal force and thrust. With sufficient technique, the potential a dagger could draw out was something he could dismiss as insignificant.

The fact that Ivan had blocked the spearhead with a single dagger until now was better called a miracle.

-Kadeudeuk, kwajik.

With a chilling sound, the lower part of the dagger blade snapped off and fell.

Freed from superhuman time, the blade slowly traced an arc as it plunged toward the ground.

"It's over, Ivan...!"

Unlike a standard-issue dagger, the Dragon-Slaying Spear was the Olov family's heirloom. The quality of its construction was on an entirely different level. In other words, Ivan's defeat had been decided from the moment the battle began...

-Click.

At the tip of the incoming spearhead, the pistol's muzzle rose lightly.

"I've seen everything now, Pavel."

Ivan took his eyes off the spearhead and stared directly into Pavel's.

Seen what? What had he seen?

Pavel's eyes shook. Ivan's gaze had followed the spearhead throughout the battle, of course. It was incredible dynamic vision, but...

-Bang!!

Sparks burst from the pistol muzzle resting on the spearhead.

The bullet struck the spearhead, making it shudder and twisting its path.

It grazed past Ivan's cheek and struck empty air before coming to a stop.

Even then, Ivan stood still, staring into Pavel's eyes. As though he had known that strike would miss.

Though he stood within range of a single sideways flick of Pavel's wrist that could blow his entire head apart.

With cold, vivid blue eyes, he looked deeply at Pavel.

"Under the Royal Guard Code, I, Ivan Petrovich, will demand that former Captain of the Guard Pavel Sergeyevich Olov answer for his betrayal."

-Click. Metal scraped against metal as Ivan raised the pistol, gripped it tightly, and glared at Pavel.

"I hereby strip Pavel Sergeyevich Olov of his position as Captain of the Guard."

-Bang!!

* * *

Enrika had often told her disciple Lucia about the Hero Party from those days.

The one who walked furthest ahead, Maximilian.

The one who stood straightest, Gilles Ver.

The fiercest one, Einar.

The biggest bastard, Beolgreen.

The slightly unsettling woman, Patricia.

The most beautiful assassin in the world, Enrika. That was her own claim.

And then,

"The one with the sharpest eyes."

"Sharp eyes?"

"Yes. He was like that even when he was still inexperienced. A normal person's instinct is to close their eyes when they're in danger."

That was why they trained reflexes from the basics, making people insensitive to blades and fists so they would not look away from a blade rushing at their face.

Ivan had never needed that.

"Even when every other skill of his was unremarkable, he had an inborn talent for seeing."

Because he was good at seeing, he learned quickly too. There was no need to demonstrate survival techniques or combat methods twice in front of him.

His other talents had not stood out. He was not particularly strong or particularly fast.

But his "vision" was almost transcendent.

He was the kind of person who could do his part just by seeing.

"That was why we all thought he was part of the party."

They had come to count seven members in the Hero Party, including Ivan the scout.

Once they reached the Demon King's Castle, they had panicked more than once over the absence of a scout.

It was all a memory now.

"But Master, what does it mean to be good at seeing...?"

"Once he sees something, he learns it."

It was not that he learned it. Nor could he reproduce it perfectly. If he had possessed that kind of talent, he would have become the Hero.

Ivan's talent was closer to never forgetting something he had seen once. From the moment he truly saw it, the same attack and the same trick would never work on him again.

He sometimes used strange words like "figuring out the pattern," but that was beside the point.

"And do you know what he says after that? 'A trained agent is never fooled by the same thing twice.' Like that!"

"What sort of agent received training like that?"

Enrika had laughed loudly as she said it.

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Footnotes:

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