“I’ll let you borrow it, so why don’t you read it? You might empathize with Akasha.”
“After the summons festival, sure. I’m a tad busy now.”
“Are you up to another one of your schemes again?”
“Possibly. Might depend on the person whether they think it’s one. Some might get mad an’ call it underhanded. Others might laugh an’ say it’s an impressive accomplishment.”
“I don’t understand what you mean to say. Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Dunno. It doesn’t violate a single Academy regulation, but the temple might have somethin’ to say about it,” I murmured and stopped myself there, which seemed to have more or less given Sasha an idea of what I meant.
“I see…so that’s your Counterpart, then…” She nodded slightly as though she’d come to an understanding. “It seems very like you—but why would you need to worry? The Academy wouldn’t forbid any summons.”
“I’ll make sure it kicks up a fuss. Only thing I got talent for anyway.”
I didn’t know what kind of appalling monster she’d imagined, but Sasha more than likely had assumed I was talking about a devil-type summon from the moment I mentioned the temple. She’d never realized that my Counterpart was the Legendary Beast of the Last Realm, Pandora, who’d killed gods and fought against Zen.
“So it sounds like you’re finally making progress with your Counterpart, then?”
When she sounded happy for me as she said that and I realized I was duping her in a way, I felt a little guilty. All I could do was cross my arms and murmur, “Well, yeah.”
“You had a great match with Lulua, Counterpart or not, so am I to assume you’ll show it off at the summons festival?”
I could only smile awkwardly when she brought up the loss from only four days ago. We’d put up a good fight against Lulua Folicker, but it’d still been a defeat I didn’t want to acknowledge. But wait, she’d been watching?
“Cyril just put up a good performance last time,” I said.
“But you and Myfila managed Lulua’s white dragon.”
“We lost ’cause we didn’t manage it. Shoulda hightailed it outta there the moment it turned into a battle of spells.”
I still felt annoyed even recalling it now. To be frank, we could’ve won the match. Until the endgame, almost all the developments had been advantageous to us—and then everything turned on its head right at the very end.
“It was also a close match for Lulua’s team,” Sasha said. “I think you would have had it if Cyril’s breakthrough had been a slight bit quicker.”
“It’s a bad habit of ours, relying on Cyril’s offensive abilities. We’ve got an obvious and giant weakness in our team, and when things go wrong, that’s where it always starts snowballing.”
Sasha giggled quietly when she heard me say “weakness.”
“By that, do you mean your own inadequate summons, Feil Fonaf?”
That wasn’t even anything to hide. The corner of my mouth lifted as I said, somewhat self-derisively, “Everyone already knows. The first-years and the whole Academy.”
“But you’re not one to stay down, are you? You are participating in the revered summons festival, after all.”
“Yeah…we had our wins and losses, but we qualified to enter.”
The summons festival was held every year in December and included the top five teams of every student year, making it a knockout competition between fifteen teams in total. The merciless single-day tournament allowed no second chances for losers.
Apparently, it’d started off as some fight between strangers when a first-year had challenged an upperclassman to a match, but since then, it’d turned into a thousand years of Academy tradition and was now hailed as a festival. If you won, you’d be established as number one in practical skills, and there was tons of prize money, including auxiliary prizes, too.
“Now you just gotta look forward to it on the day of.”
“I am. I wonder how you’ll fulfill your promise.”
Promise? What promise?
I really didn’t remember for a second, but when I dug deep, I unearthed that memory of when Sasha Shidoh Zultania had practically been undressed in a single thin and clinging robe in the bath, and the alluring curves of her chest, and the slight fullness of her hips and thighs…
When I remembered our chance encounter in the bath, I keenly realized that this was the same person next to me. I stared at her as she stayed hidden under her hood.
Come to think of it…I vaguely remembered getting riled up and telling her to wait until the summons festival in the heat of the moment.
“Well, just you watch. I think even you’ll be in for a shock.”
The line at Tabitha Books progressed slowly. There were several people who came in after us for an autograph, but the employee politely turned them away, and they ended up trudging back home.
“So change of topic—how do ya accurately manipulate electromagic? Do ya set up conduit lines prior to invocation like the theory calls for?”
As Academy students, talking about spells seemed like the safest bet to kill some time. She wouldn’t think twice about it, and there was a chance I’d get some secret pointers from the strongest summoner in the Academy.
“I prefer manipulating it by the root after invocation. Setting a line will increase precision, but it also consumes a lot of magic and creates some invocation lag.”
“There it is. So ya manipulate it at the root. Myfila says she does the same thing, but only geniuses do that.”
“It’s easy once you learn the trick behind it. I won’t say anyone can do it, but I believe you could.”
The next ten minutes were nothing but beneficial.
In the past, Myfila had tried to teach me magic manipulation, too, but she’d mostly made sound effects to explain it, and none of it had made sense. Sasha put what Myfila had failed to convey into proper words and started demonstrating in front of me.
So she’s even a genius at teaching…