Chapter 555:
The Bear Cheers Shia On
Part 2
AFTER THE TARGET practice was over, the teachers made a crowd of dolls from earth. They then put white and black flags in each of the doll’s hands. There were more white flags than black. A teacher explained the rules. The combatants were supposed to avoid the white flags and only hit the black ones.
Ah, they couldn’t just try to hit as many as they could this time. They’d need to be precise. I remembered a shooting game that was like this. It was a game where you played as a policeman, who had to shoot at criminals. Sometimes regular people or hostages would show up, and you couldn’t shoot them.
Compared to something like that, it wasn’t like people would appear suddenly on the screen, so this should be a lot easier. But games and reality are different, after all. In the game, you’d just get a lower score for hitting a regular person, but in real life, you could really hurt or, worst case, kill them. Maybe this was the teachers’ way of showing the participating and spectating students that not being able to control your magic properly could be dangerous.
Soon, they started.
A lot more students started to use air shots for the wind portion this time. A wind blade would end up hitting any nearby dolls with white flags, so the participants swapped their strategies. Some students still hit a few of the dolls with white flags, but since they’d been specially selected for this, most of the shots hit the ones with black flags.
Over time, the difference in the students’ skills started to show. Some of them were careful and used their time to ready their aim. These were mainly the students who had used a scattershot tactic earlier in the first part of the competition. They had to finish within a certain amount of time, so the students who took longer fell behind.
Thinking about it, the target correction my bear gloves gave me was kind of like an aimbot cheat. If I even focused slightly, as long as the target wasn’t moving, I’d always hit it.
When Shia came up for the fire round, she hit the black flags while keeping to a nice tempo. She ended up losing to Seleiyu by one, but she was still a top ranker. She might have been able to get the highest score if Seleiyu weren’t here, which must have stung a bit.
Seleiyu scored amazingly in all four of the events, but she was still lower in rank in water because of the two prodigies from the capital and Yufaria who had beat her before.
The competition continued and next, the students had to hit earth clods the teachers threw into the air. It was kind of like shooting clay pigeons with rifles. I’d played a game like that before, but I hadn’t ever done it in real life.
I guess these were supposed to mimic flying monsters? I’d fought volkrows and wyverns before, so I knew it was really hard to defeat flying monsters with a sword. That was when you busted out your magic. Of course, you could also use a bow and arrows, but bows were hard to control. I’d heard that just pulling the string taut could be tough. So if you had mana, using magic was a lot easier.
The clay pigeon competition began. The students were a lot more accurate than I had expected. Whenever they hit one, the students all around would cheer. When they missed though, they’d all go “Aww” and sigh.
Some students shot at them one at a time, but others just released shots of magic in quick succession like they were shooting a machine gun. I guess their mana stores let them do that, but it was also a bit wasteful. This may go without saying, but hitting one at a time used a lot less mana. Maybe those students had gotten careless because they had a lot of mana on hand.
While I was watching the competition, my ex-gamer sensibilities took over and I started to get the itch to participate.
“Yuna, you don’t want to do that too, do you?”
It seemed like Noa had noticed. Was it that obvious? I rubbed my face with my bear puppets.
“I was just thinking it looks like fun.”
Honestly, since my bear puppets had target correction, it might actually not be much fun for me. But I had the heart of a gamer. I couldn’t help but want to try it out myself.
Soon, the clay pigeon event ended too.
“Shia and Seleiyu both did really well.”
They had both hit a lot of targets and had each ranked. But once again, it felt like Seleiyu was overall more polished than everyone else.
“I want to learn magic soon too, just like my sister,” Noa said.
“Maybe Cliff gave his permission for you to come here because he knows you’ll be learning magic soon.”
It was easier to learn things if you were already interested in them, after all. It was really common for people to have subjects they excelled in because they already liked them, but some people could just never get the hang of learning certain things no matter how passionate they were.
You could be bad at things you love, after all. But if you had to learn something anyway, it was better to like it than to not.
The morning events had ended, so we had a break to eat lunch. The students were served meals that the academy had prepared for them.
“Okay, how about we have lunch too?”
“Yes.”
I pulled some bread from my bear storage.
“I have tons, so eat as much as you want.”
“Thank you.”
While we were eating the bread that Morin had made, Shia came up to us.
“Great work!” I said.
“Shia, you did amazingly,” Noa said.
“Thank you. Even though you rooted for me, I still lost to Seleiyu though. I’m sorry.”
Noa shook her head.
“You don’t need to apologize. You were so impressive. I’m so proud that you’re my sister.”
“That’s right. You may have lost, but it was still a close match.”