Chapter Chapter 86: #20 Their story: Ria el Nermia’s story. (1/2)

RATH 86

TL: Eevee

#20 Their story: Ria el Nermia’s story.

A chaotic battlefield.

Rallying allies that were gripped in fear and horror was an incredibly difficult ordeal.

“H, how are they moving? They shouldn’t be able to move with that?”

I saw a female student backpedal with a scream.

Damn it, as I thought, she was wearing a Marcis uniform.

“Go, go away…”

The moment I saw that student was wearing a Marcis uniform, I could no longer hold back the scowl from appearing on my face.

She was a student whose skills were highly rated even among the students of the Magic Tower faction, yet she still lost her will to fight.

“Kahahahaha! Did you think, this was all it would take to stop us!”

The girl in the Marcis uniform was perfectly fine.

But the boy in the Yugrasia uniform that was approaching her could not be said to be the same.

He looked bad enough that I wondered whether if this scene could actually be shown to the young children watching this over the broadcast right now.

The uniforms that were designed to be extremely resistant to magic was torn to shreds to an extent that his upper half was essentially bare.

And he was also bleeding through the gaps of his torn uniform.

Very, very profusely at that!

“Do you call this pain? Did you think you could stop us with just this level of an attack!”

Perhaps his injury to his lower body was quite critical, yet his appearance as he dragged one leg across the ground in his approach, to be honest even made me scared.

“Senior, fall back! His leg’s wounded so he can’t even approach properly! If you fall back and attack him again, you can beat him!”

“N, no… that’s what I’ve been doing, but he just doesn’t fall down.”

Although the distance between us was a bit far, I used magic to communicate my words to her, yet all my senior did was shake her head and cry.

“Kahahaha!”

“N, nooooooo!”

In the end, entrapped in fear, my senior couldn’t even flee and was done in just like that.

“Damn it all…”

The problem was these occurrences were happening everywhere on the battlefield.

“Damn it, we need to at least recover a bit until the final day, but it just feels like there’s less and less hope.”

This event was one where you had to protect a ‘king’ centered around a base of operations.

As it was a similar event to the final day’s event, which used castles as bases in a siege battle, I selected a hundred of Marcis’s key personnel to get some practice in advance, but this was the result.

-I’m back owner.

“Coming from someone who just returned from a creaming, what are you all shameless for?”

-Honestly, they are warriors. Before my status as an archdevil, as the leader of warriors, it is of no shame to be defeated by them.

“Damn it, that’s not at all reassuring to me.”

I felt a migraine coming on as I watched my forces dwindle in front of my eyes.

Although it went without saying, Marcis’s king was me.

As a king, I wanted to command others instead of leading the charge myself, but not a single person could follow orders properly.

“I should have just left the main base to the president, and fought on the front lines myself.”

-That’s probably for the better. I cannot see anyone in owner’s academy that is capable of stopping them.

As I looked over the battlefield from afar, my evaluation of Yugrasia was completely overturned.

When you looked at them one by one, they each seemed like a zealot under the influence of a berserker spell, but when you looked at them as a group over a wide area, rather than zealots, they were closer to undead.

The legendary evil existence born of the infusion of dark magic into corpses, that undead!

-That’s… very true. Their appearance as they approach their opponents despite their injuries is the very picture of the undead!

As I looked at the monsters that even an archdevil acknowledged, I could only come to a single conclusion.

“They can’t be beaten with Marcis’s current education methods. We need to go back to the old style.”

The current paradigm of magic was a combat-style which could also deal with close-quarters combat.

The magic swordsmen of the olden times, or the development of combat mages which would later come to be called battlemages was actually older than the history of the empire.

And following their footsteps, even magicians who used to focus entirely on their firepower, were trained to raise their individual capabilities in order to be able to fight against enemies in close range, and that educational dogma was what was taught at Marcis today.

But the majority of today’s Marcis students had their hearts shattered by the Yugrasia students.

No, they were actually becoming a trauma for them.

And so, we need to return to the old methods, focusing purely on firepower from range.

The old form of human artillery that rained down in the enemy from a range where they weren’t even visible.

“But we need a vanguard in order for us to be able to do that.”

Even if we could build around an actual castle as a defensive fortress for the last day’s event, we couldn’t completely stop the enemy from approaching us.

No, it wasn’t an undoable prospect if we were slightly ahead in points, but right now, we were overwhelmingly behind.

That gap was probably going to increase over the course of today, and the current situation was that we had to topple Yugrasia’s castle for us to even stand a chance.

“Can we win this…”

But this was the only thing I couldn’t guarantee.

Each and every one of the enemy force were formidable opponents, yet my allies were nothing more than disposables who could do nothing aside from long-ranged support.

-Do you have to win this year owner? Can’t you make your move next year?

“If I don’t win this year, I think it’ll be impossible.”

I came to one of the Four Great Academies in order to become the strongest, but even my own heart was as broken as it ever could be.

The school deemed the weakest of the four, Yugrasia, changed completely over the course of just a single year.

If it were just the student council or a few other students, or an improvement surrounding the fourth years as the core, I could aim for next year as well, but each and every one of Yugrasia’s students have gotten stronger.

Moreover, the swordsmaster and five god-class summoners were all first years.

I couldn’t even imagine how much stronger they would get next year.

“Lady Nermia!”

“Haa, already…”

And said strongest among the first years, no, the one evaluated as the strongest in Yugrasia as the festival went on, Aris of the Letia family was pointing her spear towards me.

“People that can stop her… there’s no one.”

I barely defeated her last time using Laevateinn and Surtr’s suicide attack, but that was a one-time thing.

If I went up against her in close combat again, I would probably lose.

“Why the hell is she even using a spear despite being a swordsmaster…”

And the most difficult thing for me was that he was using a spear instead of a sword.

The range of a spear that was twice as long as a sword’s was even more unfavourable for me, who was already at a disadvantage in close quarters.

By the way, the reason she’s called a swordsmaster despite using a spear was that anyone who could use the skill named ‘aura’ were all called swordsmasters with the exception of archers.

Other martial artists raised a complaint that this discriminated against users of other weapons, but since the majority of martial artists used swords, they were ignored.

-Uh, owner. Who’re you talking to?

-Dunno, it’s the will of the world.

Surtr asked me why I made such an explanation, but I don’t know why either.

“And besides, the enemy in front of us is a higher priority.”

I chanted a spell, summoned Laevateinn and prepared myself for close combat.

In a pure 1v1, the magician is at an advantage at range.

Indeed. In a pure 1v1.