Chương 524: 249.Elegant Victory 2

Shimo's Perspective I'd thought I'd already burned through my capacity for watching common sense die today. Emily turning an inter-school relay into a demonstration hunt. Irena treating her entire body as a self-contained combat suit. D running leg five with a shield and a bat, looking like riot control that had wandered onto the wrong street. By rights, my tolerance should have been thoroughly calloused by now. By rights.

Then the tracking drone's feed delivered, without a shred of mercy, exactly what Hedwig was doing. The control room went so quiet it felt like someone had hit mute. Outside the shield, the Spore Mutation Surge was beating the entire sky and ground into a boiling stew of catastrophe.

Lightning thrashed through blood-thick clouds; pillars leaned like diseased bone; crimson fiber whipped into nets across the storm; activated spores slammed the barrier in a relentless crackle, like tens of thousands of acid-tipped knuckles all knocking at once. And inside the shield — Our Third Imperial Princess of the Galactic Empire had laid out a mat, set up a tea service, and was sitting bolt upright, brewing tea.... I stared at the feed for three full seconds without managing a word.

Not because drinking tea was absurd. Because she was doing it so naturally. So naturally that it looked less like an extreme storm on Orpheia's surface and more like the garden had gotten a bit windy that afternoon, the pollen a little heavy, so she'd decided to sit in the glass pavilion a while longer and pour a second cup while she was at it.

"..." I opened my mouth. Closed it. Finally forced out one sentence.

"Should I be suspecting Hedwig didn't actually come here to compete?" Jess answered before I could.

"No." She cradled her own cup, expression genuinely reverent.

"She's here to humiliate the planet." Lan pressed two fingers to her brow, tone as calm as someone who'd quietly given up.

"From a medical standpoint, I'd very much like to confirm whether her stress-response system is wired differently from a normal person's."

"No need to confirm." Emily leaned against the wall, arms crossed, eyes on the woman calmly drinking tea in the center of the catastrophe. She let out a short snort.

"That woman's brain has never been under normal jurisdiction to begin with." I'd been about to nod. Stopped halfway.

"You're in no position to say that about anyone." Emily tilted her head, smirking.

"Right back at you." That line was infuriating. Worse, I had no confident rebuttal ready, because the footage was simply too persuasive — persuasive enough that if the rules had allowed more than two basic barriers, I'd have believed Hedwig would've brought a tiered pastry stand down with her too. Maki hadn't said a word. She was watching the main feed, fingertips tapping the console edge twice, very lightly — her thinking habit, small enough that you'd miss it if you didn't know to look. I knew.

She watched for a long time. Long enough that I started to suspect she was already filing this scene under something like: Leg Six: empirical case study on maintaining composure and hot-beverage logistics during an active storm. Finally, she spoke, perfectly even.

"Good barrier angle." The room paused for a beat. I looked at her.

"... That's it?"

"What else?" Her eyes stayed on the screen.

"She chose the thicker side of the pillar, upwind, which splits the primary impact load. The shield's opening angle also avoids the densest direction of the fiber net. Sitting down to drink tea is a personal choice. Her positional judgment is sound." Hearing that, I felt something genuinely complicated. Half of it was of course Maki would break down an imperial princess's tea ceremony in the middle of an apocalyptic storm into structural analysis.

The other half was is there some kind of frequency shared exclusively between House Kushima and the imperial bloodline that only the upper echelon can access? Emily laughed, low, beside me.

"I like her."

"Shut up," I said.

"I mean it." She added it lazily.

"Managing to live like she's in a VIP lounge in a place like that puts her miles above the trash that only knows how to look tough." I'd been about to say that a compliment coming out of her mouth always carried a faintly unhealthy undertone. Then I thought about it again, and the assessment was actually accurate. Hedwig wasn't posturing. She wasn't faking. She was simply, in her own way, refusing to let Orpheia make her look pathetic. And the most absurd part — she'd actually pulled it off.

The drone pulled in closer, and the crackling of spores against the shield came through sharper. Outside, the sky bled red. The leaning pillars stood out in flashes of lightning like a row of rotting gravestones. Pink and violet light seeped up from the cracks and pores, making the whole surface look overgrown with radiation and ill will in equal measure. Hedwig's hand, lifting the cup, didn't shake once. I felt a sudden urge to laugh.

Not mockery — the kind that surfaces after a full day of nonstop absurdity, when you finally land on one specific piece of it that's beautiful enough, and even the irritation stops feeling worth the effort.

"Maki." I kept my eyes on the screen.

"Mm?"

"Be honest. You're not the least bit surprised, are you." She didn't look away.

"I'm surprised she only brought one tea set." I went silent. Jess exploded first, nearly spraying tea back into her cup. Lan bowed over her slate, pretending to organize data, shoulders shaking visibly. Even Emily laughed — the laugh of someone who'd finally found something that said this team is beyond saving, but that's actually sort of fun to watch.

I pressed a hand to my forehead, with the distinct sense that if I kept company with this many off-spec individuals much longer, I was going to start treating scenes like this as standard tactical training material. On the screen, Hedwig set her cup down. I sat up without deciding to. Jokes aside, everyone in the room knew: when she moved now, it meant either a second cup, or the start of something that actually needed handling. Hedwig's Perspective The Spore Mutation Surge did not end early.

It kept going on its own near-arrogant schedule — hammering, corroding, multiplying, spreading beyond the shield, the whole sky and ground engaged in a kind of ornate, diseased collapse. Hedwig was not in a hurry. Once she'd finished the cup, she set it back on the tray, gently. Porcelain met the metal edge with a small, very clean chime — faint enough that it had no business existing in this environment, and precisely because of that, it sounded exactly right.

She looked up and reexamined the storm through the shield. Not sightseeing. A very calm observation. The flow of hyphae inside the gale. The adhesion time of spores once they struck the shield. The rate at which the distant leaning pillars were swelling. Which low channels the settled pink haze was now regathering through. Even the handful of small beasts that occasionally flicked past the barrier's edge — she logged each one. She quickly understood that this surge had brought more than a temporary lockdown.

It was rewriting the terrain. The red fibers that had only wrapped loosely around pillars and cracks before were now, under radiation stimulation, growing at a visible rate — pulling at each other, webbing together, sealing off narrow gaps that had been open an hour ago. Some of the low-lying luminous mud pockets were sprouting new sacs, as if someone had thrown one more log under a pot that was already close to boiling. More troubling: a distant official navigation marker was flickering.

Not simply from storm interference. There were extra reflection points around it — ones that didn't belong to the natural environment. Hedwig's eyes narrowed by a fraction. Someone was sheltering inside the storm. Or more precisely — someone had used the hour everyone assumed meant standing still, to reposition something near the handoff line ahead. She didn't get up right away. She poured the last of the tea into her cup and drank it, the motion as unhurried and precise as everything that had come before.

Not delay. Not performed composure. She simply refused to let outside chaos set her rhythm. Only when the storm countdown on her HUD ticked down to 00: 06: 12 did she begin packing up. The tea set, wiped and nested piece by piece into its case. The mat, rolled flat with no creases. Last, her hand on the barrier's release.

The whole sequence was neither fast nor slow, and carried no wasted motion whatsoever — as if she weren't breaking down field gear in the blast radius of a planetary storm, but simply finishing a formal tea and preparing, in good order, for her next engagement. The instant before the shield dropped, the storm still roared outside. The moment it did, heat and the reek of acid, scorch, and spore-sweetness rushed in at once.

The shield's outer surface, once transparent, was now scummed with a pale, etched frost pattern, like a sheet of thin ice just pulled from an acid sea. A standard suit would have been chewed through hours ago. This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. Hedwig rose, spine straight. She pressed the fasteners on the lunchbox and equipment case, confirmed everything secure, and took her first step. The ground beneath her had changed completely.

Black rock that had offered safe footing an hour ago was now half-cocooned in slick new fiber growth. The translucent columnar clusters, already strange before the storm, now bristled with more pores and openings, their blue and violet bioluminescence pulsing like a diseased heartbeat. Around the fallen giants in the distance, countless red threads stretched taut as harp strings — a blood-colored bow-net, waiting for something to walk into it. Hedwig didn't accelerate carelessly. She took a different line instead.

Three sections of the original nav path had clearly been cut off by new webbing — forcing through would mean getting tangled, or burning energy through high-corrosion zones. She moved along the outer edge of a higher, sloped ridge instead, steps small, rhythm still composed. Not slow — the specific precision of someone who couldn't afford a single mistake. Five minutes later, she reached the vicinity of the anomalous marker. The storm hadn't fully cleared.

Residual spores drifted through the air like bright red ash, moving very slowly — and precisely because they moved so slowly, whatever figure was hiding among them stood out all the more. Hedwig stopped. She didn't call out immediately. She looked toward the half-fallen cluster of pillars ahead. Then she spoke, very lightly, her voice unusually clear.

"You've been watching long enough. Why not simply come out?" The next instant, something moved behind the pillars. A figure slipped out from behind the scarlet web — positioned off-angle, not close enough for a direct strike, clearly not planning a frontal engagement, waiting instead for her to close on the marker first.

He clearly hadn't expected that the Imperial Princess who'd spent the storm drinking tea would, the moment it lifted, make seeing through an ambush her first order of business — rather than, say, straightening a skirt she wasn't even wearing. Hedwig showed no surprise. She only tilted her head slightly, looking at him, her gaze calm to the point of courtesy.

"I see." Her tone stayed mild.

"In that case, please excuse me for a moment. I'll have to step away." She said it the way one might excuse oneself from one reception to attend another. Hedwig's Perspective The attacker stepped out from behind the half-fallen pillar without hurrying. His AS wore a camouflage pattern, storm-washed patchy, though the disruptive lines had clearly been maintained on purpose. Heat vented faintly from the drive ports on his back, like a beast that had crouched too long and had finally decided it was time to rise.

This wasn't a student's composure. It wasn't the panic of someone forced into an ambush position at the last minute, either. Hedwig stood her ground, posture straight and elegant. She didn't draw first. She didn't speak first. She simply looked at him once — not arrogantly, not dismissively, more the way a noblewoman might wait, with courtesy, for an unfamiliar guest who'd stopped her at a formal function to offer his name.

"No introduction?" Her voice was light, and perfectly clear. He didn't answer. He only raised a hand and tapped the crest on his chest. Hedwig glanced at it and recognized it at once. Orion Iron Guard. Something in her eyes tightened by a fraction. Nothing in her composure did.

"I see." She let one beat pass, her tone unhurried.

"Of everyone here, you certainly aren't short of grounds for vengeance." Not a provocation. A statement. Orion had always been one of the frontier zones where conflict between the Empire and the outer territories ran hottest. To claim no one from that sector held a grudge against the imperial family would have been, at best, a polite fiction. But that grudge, dressed in a student's uniform, brought into a competition, arriving with military-grade steel to settle the account — that was no longer politics.

It was simply bad manners. He was clearly confident. He tossed his rifle aside with the ease of someone finishing a formality, then drew a longsword from his hip. An unusual weapon. A metal tip, but no physical blade — the true edge was a high-energy beam extending from the core emitter, not transparent but condensed into a dangerous, near-platinum line, like a thread of cold daylight forced into a metal frame. Hedwig understood at once. Not student equipment. Military hardware.

"I see," she said again, softer, colder.

"Then—" She unclipped her sidearm and set it aside. Then she took hold of her own sword's hilt. The grip was built on a specialized alloy frame, its surface finished in smooth ivory panels inlaid with fine mineral tracery — elegant enough to pass for a work of art, and carrying not one gram of unnecessary softness. A true noble's weapon was never made for display. It existed to prove that civilization, even at its most beautiful, could still kill. Fzzt... fzzt... Blue light bloomed at the guard.

Not a heavy hum, not a theatrical vibration — the plasma condensing into a slender blade produced only a fine, crisp crackle against the surrounding air, like someone, in a cold and empty hall, gently snapping a string of very thin glass. Hedwig held the sword in her left hand. Her right folded, elegant, behind her back. She lifted the point slightly, her posture as correct as a formal invitation before a classical duel.

"Please. My would-be assassin." He moved first. He wasn't a fencer, and he had no interest in pretending to be one. The beam sword came down from high on his right shoulder in one brutal arc — less a swordstroke than the motion of something built specifically to split armor and bone. The beam hissed through the hot, wet air, and residual fiber strands nearby curled and blackened before it had even touched them. Hedwig stepped back. Half a pace. Only half.

She gave the strike as little room as possible, precise almost to the point of stinginess. The beam swept past her, shearing only a few loose strands of hair and a trace of dust at her shoulder — nothing more. Her wrist turned, and the blue plasma blade thrust forward, not to counter but to stab at the joint gap on the outside of his sword wrist. He snapped his elbow back, wrenching the strike into a horizontal sweep. Fast. Hard.

Her thin blade traced a fine blue arc through the air, cracking once against the white-gold beam. Not a crash — a sharp, tooth-aching burst of sound. She used the contact to slide sideways, boots skimming over ground newly carpeted in red fiber by the storm, her form still carrying that near-choreographed cleanliness. He gave her no room to reset. A second stroke, a third, pressed in, one after another — wide, open, relentless. If Hedwig's swordplay was a musical phrase, his was a hammer coming down on piano keys.

No interest in refinement — only the ugly, practical efficiency of a real battlefield: force her to block, force her to retreat, force her to choose between her form and her life. Hedwig kept fighting one-handed. She never met his force directly, keeping her arc as small and short and elegant as possible. Left hand steady, shoulder relaxed, wrist controlled — the blue plasma blade tapped, deflected, flicked upward, again and again, each contact landing exactly on the node of his attack. Fzzt. Crack. Fzzt.

That careful, dangerous sound, like a string of precisely trimmed lightning, extending from her fingertips. Her swordsmanship was noble fencing. Built not only to win, but to preserve the completeness of form within that winning. He clearly noticed. So he deliberately drove the fight into a cluster of half-collapsed pillars. The ground there still held storm-overgrown fiber netting — one wrong step, and a blade this precise would lose its rhythm entirely. He wanted to drag her into something ugly. Hedwig saw it.

She didn't retreat. Her left foot stepped forward. The blade tip dropped. Her whole posture drew in, tighter, quieter — like a white flower stem bowed by an evening wind, all its strength gathered down into the root. He misjudged, exactly as she'd expected. Thinking he had her cornered, he weighted his next stroke and charged, both hands on the hilt, a heavy downward cut aimed to split her clean across the shoulder. Hedwig shifted at the last possible instant. This time, she didn't fully avoid it.

The beam caught the outer edge of her left armor, shearing the plating open. The bright edge left a long diagonal scar; sparks scattered, fragments flew, and the impact drove her shoulder line down a fraction. His eyes lit. He thought he'd finally found a real opening. It was only the price she'd chosen to pay. She rode the angle of that cut nearly into his chest. No panic. No ragged breath. Her guard hadn't collapsed at all. She simply looked up, calm, at his pupils widening at this close range. Then she struck.

No large motion. Barely any visible wind-up at all. The blue plasma blade simply moved forward one inch, very quietly, at close range. But that inch was too precise. Precise enough that his guard arrived a beat too late. The point slid through the gap his own movement had opened in his chest plate — a clean, cold, merciless needle of blue light, straight into his heart. A sharp fzzt, the air around it ionizing instantly, a ring of fine sparks flaring inside his chest guard. He went rigid.

He looked down at the small, sufficient wound in his chest, then back up at her. Hedwig's expression stayed composed. No cruelty. No satisfaction. Not a trace of the ragged posture of someone who'd nearly been cut open. She simply looked like someone who had, at last, delivered the final thrust a formal duel had been owed.

"Your sword was heavy," she said quietly.

"A pity it was so straightforward." She withdrew the blade and stepped back. He swayed forward once. The beam sword slipped from his fingers and struck the ground with a dull, metallic clatter. Then he fell without a sound — the kind of abrupt, graceless ending only the stage itself has the authority to call down. Hedwig lowered the blade tip, letting the plasma dissolve in a quiet series of crackles. She raised a hand and looked at the scar on her own left plating.

Deep, but not deep enough to reach the frame beneath — the AS had absorbed most of the impact. The cost was a very visible diagonal gash across armor that had, until a moment ago, been flawless. She let out an almost imperceptible sigh. Not for having nearly been cut in two. More as if she were noting, with mild regret, that this armor was going to take some real effort to restore to a standard she'd find acceptable. Then she stepped over the body and kept moving. Her stride hadn't changed.

Her back was as straight as ever. As if the duel that had just held an entire room's breath had been nothing more than an improperly timed interruption, corrected cleanly between one engagement and the next. Shimo's Perspective When the death notice came up on the main screen, the cabin was quieter than I'd expected.

"Takumi Saito, deceased. Orion Iron Guard, eliminated." No protests. Not from the houses still on the course, and not from the ones already eliminated either. Everyone stayed silent — a wordless, collective agreement to treat this one as a formal duel and leave it there. The reason was simple. Hedwig had won it too cleanly. Not by luck. Not by a cheap angle. Not by catching someone's mistake at the right moment.

A dozen pairs of eyes had watched through the drone as she took that entire engagement, in that terrain, in the immediate aftermath of that storm, and turned it into something that looked like a very well-mannered execution. Elegant enough to make your skin crawl. I was still staring at the replay when I realized — Maki hadn't been in the room for most of this. The moment that Orion Iron Guard student had drawn his weapon, she'd already seemed to know what she was looking at. She'd left immediately to make a call.

I'd assumed she was going after the committee, or deploying that particular Kushima brand of pressure that makes people reconsider their career choices. Instead, she walked back in exactly as the screen showed the final thrust landing. She needed one look.

"That was an assassin." She said it the way you'd read a supplementary clause you'd already drafted in advance.

"A physical sword with a beam edge. That's military hardware. Students don't carry that." Jess, arms crossed, eyes still on the frozen frame, asked, "Doesn't that mean Her Highness broke the rules too?"

"No." Maki answered too fast for it to be anything but premeditated. Fast enough that I genuinely wondered whether that call outside hadn't been about gathering information at all, but about drafting the defense in advance. Her expression settled, her tone went precise — in that instant she looked exactly like a very Senpai attorney who specialized in extremely expensive problems.

"Our position is: Her Highness faced a clear and immediate threat to her life, from an opponent carrying military-grade close-combat equipment that exceeds the scope of student competition. Her response constitutes necessary self-defense." I looked at her when she finished.

"You just said 'our position.'" Maki didn't blink.

"Because the committee is about to perform a great deal of surprise, so I've done them the kindness of organizing their key points in advance." This woman was genuinely terrifying. Terrifying in the specific way that makes you grateful she's on your side, while some instinct still keeps you half a step back — just in case you ever end up filed, cleanly argued and conclusively worded, under one of her folders labeled cause.

Emily, leaning against the back wall, arms crossed, watched the frozen final frame and let out a low laugh.

"Beautiful." She said it with pure appreciation. Not the dangerous excitement of wanting to be the one doing the cutting. Not the unpleasant satisfaction of recognizing a kindred spirit. She genuinely meant it — like a veteran who'd drifted far off the standard path, finally watching a finish that met her aesthetic standard without wasting a single motion of the blade. I'd been about to tell her to stop talking like a judge.

Then I traced the last inch of that blue blade in my head one more time, and swallowed the line instead. Because she wasn't wrong. It was beautiful. Beautiful enough that finding fault with it would have just looked petty. Not long after, Hedwig cleared the last of the fungal forest. The drone pulled back, and the tangle of crimson and blue-violet fungal hell finally began to slide away behind her. What replaced it was a horizon so open it made the chest feel hollow. The Singing Clay Barrens.

A flat, grey-brown expanse, its surface a crosshatch of cracked and half-damp texture. From a distance it looked like sand; up close, heavier and stickier than sand. Whenever the wind crossed it, the surface let out a fine, continuous hum, as if countless hollow chambers and thin membranes lay buried under the whole plain, all vibrating together in a low, sustained note. I stared at that new terrain and knew exactly what it meant: leg six wasn't over, but leg seven was almost here.

Sure enough, the referee ship cut in right on schedule.

"Leg six: Orion Iron Guard, eliminated. All vessels, prepare leg seven." Nearly every head in the cabin turned toward the same person at once. Lan Weiss. Leg seven. Lan had been standing nearby, reviewing data. At the sound of her name, she simply set the terminal down, gently. Her expression didn't change much — still calm, still clean. But I knew that wasn't the absence of nerves. It was all of it, already compressed into something she could use.

Watching her, I felt a very specific kind of absurdity settle over me. We'd just finished watching something that played out like an instructional recording of a courtly execution, and now the next leg was going to the woman on our roster who looked the most like a medical malpractice manual — and who somehow always kept her hands steady exactly when it mattered most. How did this roster even come together. I genuinely wanted to ask, sometimes.

Then I thought about who might actually answer, and understood I wouldn't be getting anything that counted as a normal response. So in the end, I just set my cup down and let out a long breath.

"... All right." I watched Hedwig's marker still advancing toward the Singing Clay Barrens, and beside it, Lan already beginning her leg-seven prep.

"Let's hope the universe still remembers to leave us at least a recognizable corpse of common sense."