“You paupeeers!!” As he yelled, the water elemental, who’d thrown aside the harpy, rushed at me.
My grasshopper leaped while I was still riding it.
It slammed into the wall, cracking the surface, before using its hind legs to take its second bound no sooner than it’d made contact. It barely dodged the water elemental’s orbs.
Then having synced with my grasshopper, I straddled its cold head and kept my balance.
“The water left undiscerned, the hunter creeping soundless. The night may be overturned, but thine shall be boundless. Devoured of its morning dew, anon the wetlands may wither. Now, with thine fangs away from view, the false darkness comes hither.”
Even as my breath caught when we sped up, I incanted the summon.
I didn’t say it loudly, but the blue light of my summoning circle took shape as I concealed it with the flash of a Thunderbolt spell and yelled, “Haaa-ha-ha! Bernhart! This is how you aim!”
So nobody in the classroom—particularly Bernhart—had any idea I’d cast a summon.
Well, Cyril and Myfila and maybe Lulua probably caught on.
“Don’t you dare run, Feil Fonaf! Get off that thing! Get down and fight meee!!”
“Poor little aristocrat boy! Can’t even catch one little bug with your big ol’ elemental!”
My electricity spell and his water elemental’s orbs tempestuously collided.
I had agility overwhelmingly on my side. Because I’d been persistent about hitting Bernhart with high-power electricity spells, he had no choice but to continue casting defensive charms, and the giant water elemental couldn’t leave his side. The most he could manage was trying to chase me up with wimpy squirts of water.
Then Bernhart had lost his patience and started to act on it.
“O, beast of the wind-chasers! Clad of dragon scales, one of great incisors! Steal through the woods, indomitable; devour the behemoth of arrogance abominable! Thee, traitorous lion-turned-snake may well slither! For now, the black beast’s time to feed comes hither!”
He started to enchant the summon of a scaled weasel, which Cyril and I could’ve easily extempored.
A gigantic weasel covered in black scales instead of fur appeared.
Anyway, these things were known for being quick, and they were about twice as big as a large dog. As ancient predators, they’d easily be able to hunt down the average bear.
But then a swarm of lice and beetles appeared out of nowhere, surrounding the scaled weasel.
“Why you…, Feil!!”
“That’s what happens when you don’t think before ya summon!”
There were a lot of summoners who didn’t like rote memorization and therefore didn’t use extempores, but far as I was concerned, that carelessness could lead to death. Like now, considering how I’d seen through his summon and struck first with an extempore.
Maybe I was the guy synonymous with bug swarms now.
Just by stopping the scaled weasel with a bug extempore, the classroom was already in an uproar. “It’s Feil Fonaf’s specialty move!” The bell that signaled the start of a lecture had already sounded, but nobody stopped to notice.
When I glanced at the entrance to the hall, some dozen odd stragglers were standing around with the flabbergasted high-order magic professor.
Then I saw that all too eye-catching platinum hair. Sasha Shidoh Zultania was also there, looking grave.
Sasha’s way scarier than the professor.
Regardless, I couldn’t stop the battle at this point.
He’d worked so hard to call forth his summons, only for me to render them powerless, and to add insult to injury, when the grasshopper landed again, it sent a pebble flying right at the guy’s head and made him yelp. With that, Bernhart’s rage had reached its peak.
“Garcfoire, go full throttle on the water!! Wash everything away!!”
In response to Bernhart’s shout, the water elemental crouched. It grasped its water sword’s hilt in both hands and swung the blade to the side with a more dramatic swoop than it had so far.
The sword transformed into an overpowering torrent.
“Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!! Hya-ha-ha-ha-ha-haa!!”
The water surged through the entire lecture hall, with the water elemental at the center. It swept away the desks and chairs, broke apart the levels of the classroom, and even engulfed the students who had been protecting themselves with defensive spells.
Naturally, this wasn’t a development my grasshopper could escape with just its agility.
I used it as a shield instead as I focused everything I had on protecting myself from the approaching deluge. The moment I hid in the grasshopper’s shadow, I heard its exoskeleton creak and make a foreboding cracking sound. I could tell from the sharp pain that went through my heart that my summon had died.
“Tsk. Sorry,” I said.
Eventually, the water subsided…but the entire classroom was flooded. The bottom level was submerged to the knees with water, while most of the class was sopping wet up to their bangs.
“That was close. Thought I was a goner…”
As I grumbled to myself, I crawled out from under my dead grasshopper. My eyes worked their way up the legs of the water elemental in front of me, lingering on each part of it as my eyes traveled up.
Bernhart was standing on top of the transparent knight’s shoulders.
“Kneel, pauper. If you do and beg for forgiveness, I’ll at least spare your life.”
This time, he was looking down on me.
I snorted. “No thanks. Don’t think you’ve won just ’cause you defeated a measly grasshopper,” I said as I squeezed the water out of the hem of my conjurer’s robes. The water dribbled down, splashing.
“Huh? What else can you do when all you can manage are insect summons, pauper? What? Are you gonna try pulling another underhanded extempore? Whatever you summon, Garcfoire’ll blow it away anyway.”
“You’ll blow it away? You sure you didn’t mean you’re gonna be blown away?”
“What the hell are you—?”
“Ahh, I dunno how to break this to you…but you’re so frickin’ oblivious, Bernhart. I wanted to make it a surprise attack, but now you’ve got me wantin’ to show you the trick up my sleeve.”
The moment after I said that, a faint shadow spread over Bernhart and his summon…the two who had been so sure of their victory shuddered, likely at the giant prismatic, amorphous life-form that had made its way to the ceiling of the lecture hall.
“Th-the hell is that thing…?”
“Thanks. I really owe you one for helping my chameleon slime grow so big.”
Like a snake rearing, my slime threw itself onto the water elemental from the side.
The little four-mejals-tall giant knight was nothing compared with my slime, which’d taken over a good 60 percent of the lecture hall’s space at some point. It was massive and overwhelming.
The water elemental wasn’t even able to retain its shape as a knight as it was blown to pieces all over the walls of the classroom.
Naturally, Bernhart flew into the air, but bits of his knight cushioned him, and he somehow made it out in one piece. I’d actually been making sure the slime held back. I couldn’t have him dying on me that easily, or I’d be in trouble.
The students in the class were in an uproar about the summon that had “spontaneously” appeared.
“I-it’s humongous! The hell is that thing?!”
“Why, it’s a chameleon slime. It must have fed off all that water the elemental created to have grown this large…”
“Wait, when did he even summon that thing?!”
The chameleon slime, a creature that eerily undulated in an oil slick of colors, was normally tiny and barely the size of a full person. The remarkable thing that was often pointed out about it was that it could shift its body color to blend with its surroundings, but more importantly, it had an abnormal capacity for absorbing water. If you hit the books, you could find countless reports of wild chameleon slimes feeding on an entire wetland and then attacking villages in the mountains.
In other words, it was a water elemental’s natural predator.
And this was just what’d happen with them unwittingly watering the slime lingering next to me the entire time. That last blast of water had been what’d sealed the deal.
“So what was it you said again?” I said to Bernhart. “If you kneel and beg—right?”
I scoffed at the image of Bernhart crawling away on all fours and patted the slime as if it were a loyal hound when it slipped over to me.
“You’ve gotta cut back on the scummy lines. It makes you look like a sleazeball.”
I waited until my slime had finished lapping up the stagnant water at my feet before I started walking over.
“It’s sleazy, and now, what, are you going to get your henchmen to save you? Or will you acknowledge defeat and apologize for all that crummy stuff you said? Which’ll it be? Haven’t got all day here.”
Bernhart remained on all fours.
Instead, the scaled weasel attacked me, still covered in my bugs.
It was fast—what could I say?