A week had passed since the Melissa the Spy debacle. And Melissa was still surveilling me. By now, the entire school was abuzz with rumors of the petite female student observing the girl with the Hair of Sulberia and her two royal friends.
And yet, whenever I met her gaze (in other words, whenever she was caught), she would run away. Melissa must have thought her spying was going rather undetected.
“She’s here again today,” Colette groaned. “Goodness, doesn’t she ever get bored…?”
“She is quite dedicated,” Albert agreed. “I don’t see why she doesn’t just watch us bold and in the open.”
No longer feeling threatened by her presence, Colette and Albert smirked as they watched her observing us not-so-discreetly from behind a tree.
Meanwhile, as I swung my practice sword, it occurred to me that didn’t have a good handle on what she looked like. That was because she always ran away whenever I looked at her. It was frustrating—like she was some kind of fairy.
“I’m sure she doesn’t trust us enough yet. Never mind her, both of you—your magic armor is weak.”
“Oops.”
“I’ll be more careful, Miss Mylene!”
When I icily chided their lax magic energy, they both quickly sharpened the mana surrounding their bodies. If you surrounded your body with magic energy, you received a certain degree of protection from attacks. Draping yourself in magic armor throughout your daily life would protect you from surprise attacks.
We still weren’t certain of Gods of the Moon’s endgame, but at the very least, we knew they wanted a world of chaos or whatever. Even a princess was a sacrificial pawn to them, so there was no telling what they might do.
By keeping ourselves in a constant state of magical protection during our waking hours, and by training ourselves to be able to use other spells at the same time, we could raise our aggregate baseline. We also needed to learn to stop expending needless energy so we could learn magic techniques that would be stable in the long term. That was the goal of our current training regimen.
“Well…I do think this training is sensible, but it certainly is tiring,” Albert said.
“Indeed. It’s most favorable and worthwhile, but because of it, I sleep like a log every evening when I return to my room!”
Cloaking yourself in magic armor all day might have sounded like a simple exercise, but it was actually rather difficult.
You had to pace yourself, mindfully expending your magic energy while continuously exerting more strength than normal; it was akin to going about your daily life while training for a marathon in ancient times. How long you could keep this up depended on how much magic you exerted, of course, but most people couldn’t last longer than an hour.
And we had gotten to a certain level of competency in just three days. Now we were starting to get enough mental bandwidth to carry on a conversation (though we slept like the dead at night). Those bloody royals. All those generations of selective breeding had given them talents that should honestly be illegal.
To a guy like me, who was born without the ability to use magic, the powers of the nobility were something to envy. Especially scum like Mylene, born with the divine gift like Hair of Sulberia—it all struck me as grossly unfair.
Then again, I was now one of the gifted few. With the exception of when I taunted my enemies, I wanted to be humble about it and make as few foes in life as possible.
I replied to Colette, “However…I do feel like you’re making distinct progress.”
Setting that aside, I liked to think we’d put in the effort to deserve it. In just the past few days, Colette’s and Albert’s magic capacities had risen to a whole new level. They were still nowhere near Pearlman, but not even the great general of Colorne would be able to relax and think of Colette as a beginner in a fight. And even Albert was in a relatively good place, Eltania-wise. He’d be able to kick the ass of your average punk his age without issue.
“And who was that directed at?” Colette giggled.
“Both of you,” I replied, a dauntless smile on my face.
But that wasn’t all I had meant. To be sure, they were both showing impressive progress. So impressive that I felt a clear satisfaction from having taught them. But that wasn’t the only progress they’d made.
“I’m watching you…!”
Our spy Melissa was still on our tail. That was the main progress I felt.
“She’s clearly gotten much closer to us,” Albert observed.
“Yes.”
Albert was right. Our observer was watching from a closer distance. Ever since her first ambush, Melissa had kept her distance as she watched us, but with each passing day, the distance was getting shorter and shorter.
You couldn’t exactly call her vibe “friendly,” but be it out of carelessness or whatever else, she had clearly lowered her guard around us.
Melissa had chipmunked a sandwich in her cheeks. She likely felt comfortable enough to eat now. No, scratch that…her vulnerability was probably born from negligence.
Colette leaned in and whispered, with a grin on her face (and a hint of sadism in her voice), “What should we do? I think she’s close enough now that we could catch her if she ran away.”
I sensed panic in Melissa’s aura. She must have sensed we were up to something shady.
Colette was right. We were easily close enough to grab her. With the three of us working together, it would be easier than catching a rabbit. And of course, a part of me just wanted this whole stupid game to be over.
“No…let’s not,” I said. “This is the perfect opportunity to undo the misunderstanding.”
It would be a waste to get too hasty. Now that we’d come this far, a part of me wanted to let Melissa tag one of us “it.” Simply nabbing her would be faster, but it would suck if we freaked her out to the point where she didn’t want to talk to us. This just wasn’t one of those situations where we could force her to blab.
“Understood… It’s all right. I’m sure we’re almost there!” Albert said, raising a spirited fist above his head.
“Yes, indeed,” I replied. (Though hell if I knew whether we were almost there or not.)
From the look of things, I really was the enemy in Melissa’s eyes. I wasn’t sure if the animosity came from a prophecy from the Lord Eltania Himself, or from something the other Mylene had done to her in the past. Either way, it had to be something out of the ordinary to make that timid little rabbit approach me with such determination in her eyes.
“This is just so damn frustrating…”
I had my own fair share of animosity, too. And I could tell it would take time to clear up the misunderstanding.
Guess I’ll just wait it out for a while.
I swung my sword and readied my stance. And I stared at the tip of my blade, my eyes sharpening to slits.