All the members of the senior class stood in a line. Blade was among them, still looking left, right, behind, and in front of him. It was quite the rogues’ gallery. The junior class students all appeared pretty mature—glad to be here and dedicated to their education—but those in the senior class seemed truly fascinating. The guy who had just called Blade and Earnest over was now standing next to him, and he was a total hunk with long blond hair and his shirt mysteriously unbuttoned, exposing fully half of his upper body. Blade didn’t have a clear standard for other people’s personal beauty, but he was pretty sure this guy fell into the “heartthrob” category.
Blade squirmed. He really wanted to be friends with him.
The instructor was facing the line of students, and Earnest, for some reason, was standing next to him.
“Instructor,” she said, “I’d like to put our new recruit through an examination.” She was speaking to the instructor, but she wasn’t looking at him. Her eyes were focused on Blade instead, drilling into him. Blade, however, didn’t realize she was glaring at him. His only thought was Why does she keep looking at me?
“Well, you know, our curriculum for today, you see…,” the instructor mumbled to the side of Earnest’s face. But she wasn’t about to accept so weak a protest.
“I’m sure you won’t mind,” she said.
“N-no, but um…”
Earnest, annoyed, turned to the instructor and delivered a single, piercing glance.
“Oh…all right,” the instructor said, looking down at the ground dejectedly.
“What do you want me to do?” Blade asked.
He addressed his question to the boss of this arena, and that was clearly Earnest. He was aware enough to realize that when she’d said “Our new recruit,” she’d meant him. He tapped his shoulder with the blade in his hands. He had already picked a sword from the rack. It was a standard-issue type, nothing famous or magical, but having one in hand always helped him calm down. He was a little envious of how Earnest got to carry one around at all times…but he knew that normal people didn’t do that. He had quit the Hero business and become a normal person, so it’d be crazy for him to go around packing a weapon. Thus, he only used swords during practice sessions like this one.
“Anything you want. So long as it demonstrates your training.”
“Anything, huh?” Blade casually accepted the challenge.
Turning around, he found ten or so sets of armor lined up behind him. Each had been affixed to a pedestal, presumably set up by the instructor for the day’s class. In the junior class, they had used plain old suits of metal armor. With the right technique, anyone could use a metal sword to cut through them. But in the senior class, they weren’t playing around with mere metal.
“That’s magic metal, isn’t it?” he said.
“Is there something wrong with that?” Earnest sniffed, a hint of arrogance in her voice. Slicing through magic metal with a nonmagic blade was unheard of. It’d be like trying to cut metal with a wooden sword. To pull it off, you’d need something beyond mere muscle or technique.
Hmm…
Blade readied his sword.
“And you know, if it’s just cutting through that, anyone in this class can do it. So prove to them you belong here. And if you don’t…you know the consequences, don’t you?”
“Y-yes, defy the Empress and she’ll send you flying…,” said the instructor weakly. Was that supposed to be advice?
Earnest glared at Blade, challenging him with her eyes. Inside, her anger at Blade’s “trickery” still raged. As far as she was concerned, Blade had lied and cheated his way into this school. The king she loved and respected was showing him preferential treatment, and she couldn’t stand for it. Forcing him to prove his worth in public like this would expose the whole charade for good—and Earnest couldn’t wait to see it happen.
“This is the senior class,” she advised. “It’s dimensions away from the junior class.”
She’d heard that he caused some sort of commotion back in the junior class. Probably some kind of cheap, flashy trick devised to hoodwink his peers. But that was junior level. If he thinks he can shock the seniors, too…well, let’s see him try.
“Huh,” said Blade. “Dimensions? …How many?”
“What?” The strange question flustered Earnest.
“Like, how many dimensions?”
“Um, two…? No! Wait! Three! It’s three whole dimensions away!” she said boastfully—chest out, hand on one hip, acting as big as possible. She’d padded the numbers a bit.
“Oh… Three, huh…?”
Blade thought for a moment. In the junior class, he’d scared everyone half to death with his overpowered strike. He couldn’t repeat that mistake. Perhaps he had misjudged his performance last time by a dimension or so. And if the seniors were three dimensions away, he’d need to go two above what he tried back then…
…So was it okay if he was a bit more serious this time? Ever since that incident, he had been on tiptoe, taking extreme care with everything he did. It was frankly starting to stress him out. But if the senior class was three dimensions away, that should mean he could let loose a little.
With a smile on his lips, Blade assumed his battle stance.
“Haaaaaaah…”
His body filled with power. But he wasn’t just tensing his muscles—he was summoning his “life energy.” That would take him one dimension higher. He refined this energy, transforming it into what people called “fighting spirit”—that would raise his attack one dimension further.
An aura was already leaking out from within his body, forming a glow around him.
“Huh?”
Earnest blinked in surprise. She’d asked him to prove himself, sure. But what was this guy trying to do? It was almost like…
“Haaaaaaah…”
More energy continued to gather around Blade’s body. Now it wasn’t just Earnest. The entire senior class was starting to tremble with fear. Only Sophie looked cool and unaffected as usual.
“Haaaaaaah…”
Blade’s spirit seemed to rise up without end. The sheer pressure of his energy made pebbles on the ground around him float into the air, defying gravity. Lightning crackled around him, arcing between the small stones.
“Whoa! Whoa?! Whoaaaa?!” Earnest panicked.
This move… She had never seen it before, but she had heard of it. This must be a skill of the “dragon-destroying” type—one meant for combating those gigantic beasts—said to be the greatest skill a person could muster on their own.
Her face twisted in fear. Sophie, next to her, showed no expression. But she wasn’t uninterested—she was watching, quietly astonished in her own way.
“Wha— Stop!” Earnest flung herself forward to put an end to this. But she was too late.
“Haaaah!!”
Blade brought his sword down.
This was Dragon Eater, the second of his dragon-destroying skills. A superpowered spiral of fighting spirit whirled and roared as it shot out ahead of him, extending as far as the eye could see. It was a double whirlpool of lethal force, strong enough to pierce even the tough skin of a mighty dragon.
The magic-metal armor caught in this twin whirl instantly disintegrated. The technique, designed to consume even a dragon, smashed against the Proving Ground’s outer wall. There it was stopped by several layers of defensive barriers, but only for a moment, before it sliced through them like they were made of paper. The stone wall of another building was crushed—and still the whirling beam shot forward.
Eventually, the plumes of smoke began to clear, and the pebbles and bits of earth fell back to the ground. Earnest finally dared to open her eyes after shutting them during the attack.
“Ah!”
That was when the wind blast from Dragon Eater hit her. Parts of her outfit were torn off—she rushed to cover up her body.
The other students had crouched and taken refuge as well. Only Sophie was still standing, looking on in her unaffected way; but the whirling dust was starting to get all over her face.
Blade’s blast had gouged through the ground in a straight line nearly a hundred feet long. Beyond the circular hole in the wall, they could see the next school building over—and another circular hole in that wall, revealing the bottom half of an upstairs classroom and the top half of a downstairs one. They were both unoccupied, thankfully…but the fountain in the courtyard below had been torn apart and was now spraying water haphazardly into the air.
Earnest looked up and turned, aghast, to Blade.
“Hmm… Not my best,” he said.
Blade hefted up his sword, tapping it against his shoulder. On the third tap, it crumbled apart. The metal collapsed into its component molecules, disintegrating into ash from the raised tip down.
“Oh… Looks like it couldn’t take it.”
He’d just unleashed a marvelous skill, and his only comment was about his sword’s durability. And when he’d said “not my best” a moment ago, was he talking about the force of that strike…? He probably was, wasn’t he? Just how much further could he take it…?
Blade, however, was stunned by his lackluster attempt. Normally, he could do a lot more damage, but…ah, well. He was still recovering, he told himself.
He turned to face the crowd and just happened to make eye contact with Earnest as she looked up.
“Ah…”
Blade had finally noticed. Starting with Earnest, he looked at each of the other students in turn. All of their expressions said the exact same thing. Once he had checked all twelve or so of their faces, Blade broke into a cold sweat.
Oh crap, oh crap, I… Oh crap…
Apparently, he had overdone it once again.
“Ah, um… I’m normal, okay? I’m just an average, normal person.”
He really wanted them all to see him as normal. But he was a little too late for that.