“I, can’t, anymore…” said Tina, collapsing down onto her knees on the emerald lawn and looking up at me with a pained expression.
The droplets of sweat caught in her red side-ponytail glinted in the sun.
…I guess she has a point. We’ve been going at it for three hours now. It is about time for a break.
“Alright, break time.”
“Yaaay…” she said, sprawling out on the grass, her thighs, covered in sweat, peeking out from underneath her black skirt.
“…”
She’s a girl, so… no, let’s not go there. Mhm.
I wiped the sweat from my brow and turned around in response to the gaze fixed on me from behind.
My eyes met a pair of purple ones.
Luna was sitting in a chair underneath a parasol with an unusually happy look on her face.
Becoming slightly curious as to why that was, I walked over to her.
“Isn’t she cute?” she said all of a sudden as she watched Tina lying on the grass.
“Uhh… sure?”
I decided to agree. Tina was quite beautiful, after all.
“You know her, My Lady?”
Tina was a member of one of the four great noble families, so Luna being acquainted with her wouldn’t have been strange. I just needed the information to understand what was really going on at the moment, since we were currently all located in none other than the garden of the Flame family where I had fought against Claude a while ago. My home, in other words.
After she had made a contract with Athena, I had decided to teach Tina spearmanship.
We trained every day after that, but then…
“Do it in our garden,” was what Luna had proposed, and since it had been something I had been thinking about as well, we changed our training grounds.
In other words, the Solitary Moon had accepted Tina.
“Yes. I’ve known her ever since we were little. Not that I’ve ever talked to her, though.”
“You’ve never talked to her…?” I asked, causing her to turn back to me with a slightly lonely expression on her face.
“She always ran away with a scared look on her face whenever I tried to talk to her…”
“…I see.”
It wasn’t hard to imagine that people would shy away from her, what with the overpowering aura Luna usually exuded, even if the other party had the same social standing as her.
“She’s really… adorable… like a dog.”
“Like a dog?”
“Yes. Like a dog turning around in circles chasing its own tail… I’d love to pet her and just generally be nice to her, but… she’d just run away,” Luna said with a sadistic smile.
“I think it’s because you have that look on your face,” I blurted out before I could stop myself.
“Hahaha”
W-well, at least she laughed.
First Pochi and now this, I can’t help but feel she’s rather fond of dogs.
“She has a rather promising future ahead of her,” said Claude, the butler of the Flame family as he walked over to us, placing a cup of tea on the table in front of Luna and then looking at Tina with a kind expression on his face.
It seems like he feels the same way I do.
Even I, who wasn’t all that well-versed in the art of swordsmanship, had been able to tell that Tina wasn’t very good at it.
Now, however, was different.
I hadn’t gotten the same impression as I watched her swinging her spear around at all.
And while one might say that was due to the skill ‘Spear Arts’ she had gotten through her contract with Athena…
At any rate, I felt like changing her main weapon to the spear had been the right choice.
The only remaining problem left was how much experience she would be able to gain wielding the spear before the fighting competition hit.
No matter how well she might have been able to wield the spear, actually winning would be hard for her if she didn’t know how to use that spearmanship against others in battle.
And that was where I came in.
“Well then…” I gave Luna and Claude a polite nod and walked back over to Tina.
Then, right as I was about to suggest resuming training, Tina stoop up, picked up her spear, and turned towards me––
“Let’s do this!” she said in a voice overflowing with liveliness, and I couldn’t help but smile in return.
…Tina Barrett: A hard-working, kind girl.
With her as a companion, the day when Athena’s name would thunder across the world didn’t feel all that distant all of a sudden.
◆
The setting sun dyed the sky a brilliant red, the red colour of Tina’s hair waving in the wind mixing away into it.
““……””
It was our last battle for the day. By Tina’s request, we were going to face each other in a format similar to what we expected a match in the fighting competition to be like.
“Yunooo, oneeeechaan, do your beeest!”
Luna was still sitting elegantly in a chair a bit further behind me, and standing next to her were Athena, with a worried look on her face, and the devil Eris, cheering us both on, her eyes glittering.
With Eris’ voice as the signal, the two of us readied our stances.
During the training matches earlier, we had only gone through the more basic movements of spearmanship, checking if the other person was doing everything right as we crossed spears.
The next, and as mentioned already, final match for the day, was going to be different.
It was going to be an actual duel, with a clear winner and loser.
“Thank you for everything up until now, Yuno. I hope I became stronger?”
“…Of course you did.”
And that was the truth. Her spearmanship was already considerably good.
So much so that while she might not have been on the same level as Kraim, she would still have been able to hold her own for a while.
Spears were easy-to-use weapons to start with. Some foreign countries even had all their conscripts use spears.
But even then, Tina had shown a huge amount of growth in the past week.
And while the skill ‘Spear Arts’ likely played a large part in that, the rest was all due to her hard work.
Even if one had a skill, one still needed to put in effort to be able to use it.
Now then.
Making the tip of my spear wave around in tight circles, I tried to imagine what the first hit, and then the rest of the fight would look like.
No matter how I looked at it, I was going to win.
As if to cut through that vain thought, I waited for Tina to move, focusing on the tip of my spear.
“Can I… ask you a question?” Tina asked, looking me straight in the eyes.
“Sure,” I answered, causing Tina to look a little perplexed.
“Are you… going to fight me seriously?”
“……”
It was an unexpected question.
“What do you mean?” was all I could respond with.
“Don’t look down on me. I know very well how strong you are. I became sure of it the moment I acquired ‘Spear Arts’.”
“……”
“I’ve been observing your movements for the past week. Every single one of them was a perfect, beautiful, textbook example.”
“…Thank you.”
“But, that still doesn’t explain it.”
…Explain?
“If Lloyd-sama acknowledged you, you shouldn’t be at just that level. You might not know this, but it is impossible that Lloyd-sama would be fooled by someone. After all, he is…” she shook her head as she trailed off, then continued again. “So, I’d like you to come at me for real. I have to surpass you, after all. I want to know how high the wall is.”
Her sincerity had me at a loss and a half.
I had been trying not to think about it. My number one goal had been to leisurely win the fighting competition and join the student council. But, in order to fulfil that goal, I would have to defeat her. Tina had the same goal as me, after all.
…And then, somewhere along the line, I had changed my mind.
The moment she had made that contract with Athena, part of me had begun to want to let her win.
The thoughts of that part of me went like this:
Having worked hard, Tina would win, and join the student council.
It was more natural, and it went along with my goal of spreading Athena’s name. Additionally, I would also be happy.
I didn’t even know the name of the skill that had given me this huge power of mine.
To me, both effort and practice were ineffective and equally dazzling.
“…Tina, I––”
“Do you know my goal?” Tina asked, cutting through my weak attempt at an excuse as she lowered her spear.
Tina’s goal, huh… what she wants…
“Of course. You want to win the competition and join the student council, don’t you?”
“Yes. I suppose. But, you’re wrong,” she said, a smile indicating she was close to tears appearing on her face.
“I wanted to be acknowledged. I wanted to be told I wasn’t incompetent.”
……
“I was born into one of the four great noble families, but I wasn’t fit for it,” she said extremely sadly.
“And in comparison, my big sister was amazing. Top notch in both swordsmanship and magic. Everyone always compliments her. My parents too, of course. And then… there was me.”
……
“So then I thought to myself: I don’t want to lose. I’ll catch up to her, and then overtake her. So, I decided to give myself a goal. I’d show I was stronger than anyone else at the fighting competition, which everyone would be watching, and join the student council. …So don’t misunderstand me, I don’t want to win, I want to be stronger than anyone else.”
Her resolve was plain to hear in her words.
I want to face her head-on. I have to.
––Even though I don’t even know what my own power is?
……I suppose, even then.
“Tina, you said you wanted to know how high that wall is?”
“…Yes.”
“What would you do if it turned out that that wall rose far, far, far up above you?”
Her red eyes glinted as she looked at me.
“Isn’t it obvious?” she said, a defiant smile appearing on her face.
“I’d climb it, even if it took a whole lifetime.”
And –– there’s my answer.
I didn’t want to expose my inner ugliness any further than that.
Let’s begin, then.
I glanced over my shoulder.
“…Fufu,” Luna giggled to herself, then gave me a small nod.
Everyone present, excluding Tina, knew how strong I really was.
She would just be being added to that group.
It was quite simple, really. And the possibility of her seeing my strength and connecting it to the evil god Noah also looked low.
“Let’s do this, Tina.”
“Sure. Come at me.”
We both readied our spears again.
There would be no start signal. The duel would start the moment one of us moved.
And the one who moved first –– was Tina.
“…!”
She came at me earnestly and seriously, without a battle cry this time.
It took her only a short moment to get into range and stab her spear towards me.
It was quite a sharp jab.
The sight of her running at me with that strange sword stance of hers flashed through my mind like a flip book.
And so, I put some power into my toetips and sprang off the ground. I was behind her in an instant.
I held out my spear.
Tina’s spear stabbed through air.
“––Eh?”
She slowly turned round, towards me.
She began to tremble slightly as she gazed at the spear-tip pointed at her in silence.
So, I––
“Tina, do you want to be friends?”
I felt like I had to say it.
I felt like I would never be able to say it otherwise. I wanted to be friends with her.
Her spear fell to the lawn, now dyed red in the light of the setting sun.
“…I refuse.”
“Eh!?”
I panicked. Hard.
An amused smile appeared across her face as she watched me panicking.
“…Silly. We’re already friends. I really don’t understand why you’d say something like that after all this.”
Her shining smile was one that wouldn’t lose out even to the red sun slowly sinking in the sky.
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