BLOOD CURSE ACADEMIA - PREVIOUS DRAFT EDITION -

Chapter LXXIV (74) Owl’s Respite

Kizu found his mind wandering back to the previous night as he sat in the waiting room with the week’s other combatants. Thankfully, after the initial shock, Emilia hadn’t seemed too angry about almost losing an eye to Anata’s paper lantern. The bruise hadn’t been anything too terrible. But the animosity Emilia felt for the girl definitely grew as a result.

Kizu sighed. Nothing in life could just be easy.

“Worried about the fight?” someone asked him.

Kizu looked up to see a familiar older student looking down at him. Yon, the fifth year in his Music F class. Kizu hadn’t spoken much to him before, usually they let Gregor do most of the talking in their group.

“No,” Kizu said, scooting over to make room for the other percussionist on his bench. “I was thinking about girl problems.”

“Girl problems?” he asked. “You realize you’re about to fight someone, right?”

“I’m fighting at the lowest possible level. I don’t have too much to worry about.”

“Okay,” he said, taking the seat next to him. “I don’t really do girls, but I have an ear if you have something you want to unload.”

Kizu looked over at him. “Shouldn’t you focus on your strategy for your own fight?”

“Not really, it helps more if I think of something else. I get in my own head if I focus too much. Does more damage than good.”

So Kizu started telling him a rough idea what was going on. While Kizu explained, they also watched the other matches compete on the enchanted window up at the front of the waiting room.

Yon nodded along as Kizu told him about his previous night, while they both kept an eye on the fights. Occasionally Kizu paused as a match heated up, but nothing especially impressive was on display today so they mostly went on uninterrupted. Other competitors shuffled in and out of the preparation room around them.

"Listen," Yon said when Kizu finished. "Like I said earlier, I'm not an expert. I've never actually spoken to Emilia, but from what you've said I can tell that this girl wants to change you. Not necessarily in a bad way, but still. It sounds like she doesn't necessarily like you for who you are, but instead likes you for what you could grow into if properly pruned."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, she obviously sees a lot of potential in what you are now, and realizes that if she acts now, she can mold you into what she’s looking for. What's your background? What do your parents do?"

"They're silk traders, what does that have to do with anything?"

Yon scratched his goatee and stood up. "Make sense. I'm up next, so I'll make this simple. Just ask yourself, do you want to be the person this girl is trying to change you into? If the answer is 'yes' then you should be fine. I don’t think there’s any shame in letting someone help you become a better version of yourself."

"And if the answer is 'no?'"

Yon just shrugged as he walked away.

Kizu let himself get lost in his thoughts for a minute. Yon readily admitted to not knowing much on the topic, so it could just be wild speculation. But, if what Yon said was true, if Emilia intended to mold him into someone different…was that someone a person Kizu wanted to be? He thought about everything Emilia taught him and what she where her priorities and passions lay. Then he tried to imagine what his life with Emilia would look like.

Disturbed by the image, Kizu turned his attention to the enchanted screen as Yon was introduced to the crowd by Arclight. He faced off against a student with brilliant red hair. Seeming to decide to end the match as quickly as possible, Yon's opponent struck as soon as Arclight’s whistle signified the start of the match. A stone disk the size of a platter hurled toward Yon’s face. Yon barely managed to duck, the disk narrowly missing his scalp as it smashed into the wall behind him. Then Yon retaliated with a counterattack.

Half a dozen ice knives formed around Yon. He threw his hands to the side, and they launched away from him. But instead of traveling in a straight line, they spun in the air and boomeranged around his opponent, striking from different angles. And as they zeroed in on the opponent, they multiplied. But not as a result of an elemental spell. Instead, Yon created an illusion overlaying and breaking away from the knives. Suddenly five times the amount of ice knives spun around and struck down at the red-haired student.

The illusionary knives were far from perfect as they were simplistic by design, but even Kizu struggled to track them all while in motion and combined with the real knives. When everything spun and flew about, even a bad illusion was enough of a distraction from the real things to overwhelm the opponent.

The red-haired student did try, however. He used another elemental spell to create vertical disks of stone around his arms which he used like shields to deflect the incoming missiles. He blocked both the real ice knives and the illusions alike, obviously unable to differentiate between the two types of knives in the heat of the moment. Despite his valiant effort, one of the knives slipped through his defensives, descending on him from above and slicing a gash in his cheek.

The crowd cheered as Yon stepped away with his fellow contestant to be inspected by the medical students for any damage.

"Your friend is good."

Kizu turned and saw Harvey behind him, watching the enchanted window with his tattooed arms crossed.

"I suppose so."

"He combined two different schools of spellcraft in a fight. That’s not easy,” Harvey said, as if now an expert on the topic. “He's ranked lower because he never participates. If he fought more often, I bet he could reach the top two hundred easily. Maybe even higher. That's the problem with this system. It takes too long to rank up, and a lot of students don’t bother. Many with talent don't compete at all, which skews the ranking."

"Are you talking about what happened with my leg?" Kizu asked. He didn't feel like beating around the subject today.

"Oh, I wasn't," Harvey said, looking a bit abashed as he glanced down at Kizu's leg. The boy from a few months earlier showed through again for a minute. "Sorry. I was just thinking out loud.” He paused. “Well, I’m up next. Good luck in your match, Kizu.”

A minute later, Kizu watched as now Harvey stepped up on the enchanted image. He squared off against an unfamiliar second year Tainted boy with brown hair and scales who kept baring his teeth at the crowd while slowly turning in circles with his arms raised. The audience apparently loved him as their cheers grew at each turn. Arclight announced them, naming the other boy Bradley, and then they began.

Harvey’s tattoos along his arms thrummed to life, glowing as he rapidly closed the distance between them. But it turned out that Bradley hadn’t been just enjoying the attention of the audience earlier. Kizu realized that while he’d been turning in circles during Arclight’s introductions, Bradley had dragged his foot along the dirt, creating a summoning circle. Just before Harvey reached the other boy, Bradley managed to reach down into the circle and draw out a silver spear.

Bradley used both hands to slam the shaft of the spear into Harvey. The attack deflected Harvey’s incoming blow and knocked him a few steps backwards, putting a couple meters of space between them. That space was obviously not in Harvey’s favor, as Bradly jabbed the tip of his spear at him.

Kizu expected Harvey to dodge. Instead, Harvey grabbed the tip of the spear with his hand. The match should have been over, Bradley having drawn first blood. And Bradley obviously thought so as well, as he visibly relaxed his grip. But the spearhead never broke Harvey’s skin. With the tattoos reinforcing his skin glowing brighter and brighter, Harvey ripped the spear out of Bradley’s hands then lunged forward with his fists and smashed a right hook on Bradley’s face.

Bradley crumbled like parchment under the blow, his bloody face visible to Kizu on the enchanted screen. Harvey had broken his opponent’s nose, completely altering its once normal trajectory into a crooked mess.

Unlike Yon’s bout, nobody cheered for Harvey’s victory as the medical students rushed out onto the field to help Bradley. But Harvey also didn’t seem to care much about that. After getting a cursory check up by one of the students, he walked off.

The room’s occupants continued to dwindle as more competitors went out. Until the only two remaining were him and a scrawny first year girl from Hon. Kizu couldn’t help but feel bad as she visibly shook and avoided looking at him. He vaguely remembered seeing her before, likely from one of his classes, but he decided this wasn’t the time to chat with her.

The two of them exited the room and found themselves facing off against one another. Just like Kizu had remembered from his first visit to the fights in his first week of classes, the students in the crowd shouted down useless tips, mocked, and laughed at them. They were the lowest level of fighters for the day’s performance. He was starting from the bottom of the ladder and making his way up.

Once Arclight’s whistle sounded, Kizu set his plan into motion. He had been wanting to try it out again ever since it had completely failed against the ghost in the gnomish mines. In just a few moments, he had six copies of himself standing in front of his opponent. Unfortunately, he couldn’t jump around to scramble his true self with the copies, as the academy’s beacon would drag him off the moment he tried. Instead, he had to make do with jerky movements and feints overlaying himself and his illusions. Either way though, his opponent seemed just as terrified. His strategy actually wasn’t that different from that of Yon’s earlier in the day. While his illusions all approached from the front, Kizu let himself fall out of view and then cast a separate illusion over himself which camouflaged him with the surrounding arena’s dirt. It took all of his focus to maintain so many complex illusions at once and he noticed with some irritation that his hold on a couple of the copies fizzled slightly as his hold on them wavered a bit. Thankfully, they didn’t need to be perfect, just keep his opponent second guessing herself.

Several of his illusions attacked with different elemental attacks. One with a palm of lightning, another with a fist made of pure stone. His opponent tried to strike back. But instead of using any spell, she just swatted at the illusions with pinwheeling arms.

She was completely oblivious to Kizu as he approached her from behind and slid a small shard of sharpened ice across her back shoulder, slicing the academy uniform and drawing blood as he just barely pierced the skin.

Arclight called an end to the fight, and they separated from one another. As Kizu looked at her across the field, he felt really bad for the girl. Honestly, he could have just sent a few pebbles flying at her and ended the fight without complex spellcraft. Instead, she looked utterly humiliated as she slinked off stage and the medical students quickly repaired her shallow cut. He thought he saw a tear on her cheek, and he doubted it was from any physical pain he had caused.

Emilia had instructed him to be flamboyant in the fight and make his victory a spectacle. And while the crowd certainly seemed to approve of his display, the victory felt hollow to him.

He was starting to wonder if he should keep listening to her. Especially if her advice led to more situations where he felt like this.

Kizu looked up at the crowd and spotted Ione dozing beside Anata and a strange woman whose hair had been split down the middle, left being red and right being blue. Kizu assumed that must be Basil. He noticed Kizu’s stare and gave a lazy thumbs up. Despite his mixed feelings about his victory, Kizu couldn’t help feeling a stab of disappointment as he found no trace of Emilia in the audience.

Walking over to the sidelines, Kizu stood next to the other competitors who had decided to stick around until the end. Yon sat on a bench and gave a small wave as Kizu approached.

“Kind of overkill,” Yon said. “But nice job. You put my illusions to shame.”

“I wanted to go all out. But I feel kind of bad about it.”

“You rank up according to how effectively you win. What you did was probably smart,” Yon said. “But I’m not really one to talk to about ranking up. I just showed up today because I need a passing rank to graduate. I don’t really care about climbing any higher.”

“Isn’t there a tournament at the end of the school year as well?” Kizu thought he remembered someone mentioning it before.

Yon made a face. “Don’t remind me. Yeah. There is. The entire student body is forced into participating. It’s part of the reason I’m out here padding my ranking a bit now, just in case I end up facing Weston or Sene in the first few bouts. That could hypothetically knock my combat ranking down more than a few pegs. Thankfully we had half a year before we need to worry about that.”

Kizu opened up his mouth to ask more about the tournament’s process but was interrupted by Arclight as she started down the list of updated rankings. Yon moved up thirteen spots, from 320 to 307. Harvey moved from 372 up to 351. After about a dozen more people, Arclight finally reached Kizu’s rank. From 674 up to 643. Not a hundred rank jump like what he had received after technically beating Ulrich, but Kizu wasn’t about to complain. Passing more than 30 ranks from such an easy combat was more than enough for him.

After Professor Arclight finished listing the new rankings, the students began to disperse. Kizu said goodbye to Yon and made his way over to his friends.

Ione stretched and yawned as he approached. Beside her, Anata looked ecstatic to see Kizu. The woman with red and blue hair, that Kizu assumed to be Basil, waved as he approached.

“Did you win?” Ione asked.

“She’s joking,” Basil said, rolling his eyes. “She didn’t actually sleep through your fight.”

Ione glared at him. “Well, it’s hard when you and the vampire lord girl kept harassing me by jumping and shouting.”

“Anata shouted?” Kizu said, surprised.

“No, that was me,” Basil said. “Nothing gets people talking quite like a beautiful and passionate fan. But Anata was incredibly jittery throughout the entire fight.”

“I don’t need you spreading more rumors about my life, Basil. I have more than enough to deal with already.”

But, while he acted exasperated, it felt good to have friends supporting him. Anata grabbed his hand and held it as they continued walking down the path.

“By the way.” Basil pulled out an envelope from his uniform’s inside pocket and held it out to Kizu. “This came for you earlier today. I noticed you haven’t been showing up at the room recently so I thought I’d bring it down to you.”

Kizu took the envelope. It had the academy’s seal on it.

“And speaking of not showing up at the room-”

“I found a new place to stay,” Kizu interjected, before Basil could continue. “I needed a place where I could keep Anata safely.”

“And you found one?” Ione asked. “Are you staying in your family’s villa now?”

“Hardly. I found an abandoned ship down in a cove by Hayashi Forest.”

“You just found a ship? Randomly?”

“It was part of a quest from the town’s notice board. I just decided to convert it into a place to stay after I finished clearing out all the skeletons.”

“They’re letting you accept them now, then? And did you say skeletons?” Ione perked up. “Any other monsters?”

“Not on the ship.” Kizu paused. “But there is a giant jellyfish sea monster in the water underneath.”

“We’re going now,” Ione decided.

“As interesting as a jellyfish monster sounds, I think I’ll pass on diving down to visit it,” Basil said. “I don’t really like swimming all that much.”

Kizu looked at the three of them, realizing something. He remembered what Ione had said when trapped in the World Dungeon flooding trap. “Wait. Can none of you swim?”

“I can swim,” Basil said indignantly. “I just choose not to. There’s never a reason to get wet. It messes up my perfumes, hair, and makeup. Everything. It takes hours for hair this length to properly dry in this humanity.”

“Can’t you just grow new hair?” Ione asked. “And why do you even bother with makeup?”

“That’s beside the point.”

“Anyway,” Kizu said. “I already plan to start giving Anata swim lessons this week. If either of you want to join, you’re both welcome.”

Anata's face lit up and she looked at him with wide, mismatched eyes. Then, out of nowhere, she hugged him around the waist.

Not knowing what else to do, Kizu patted her on the head.

Despite Basil’s claim to be uninterested in the sea creature, he still joined them as they walked down to the ship. Though, he did complain about the lack of a real pathway through the forest.

“I’m just saying, a couple controlled fireballs and suddenly, bam, a decent footpath in a matter of minutes,” he said.

“I’ve seen your rankings,” Ione replied. “There’s no ‘control’ to your fireballs. We’d be safer throwing ourselves in the kitchen’s ovens.”

“Uncalled for,” he huffed.

They reached the cove and Ione started inspecting the black water, as if expecting the sea monster to immediately rise up from the depths.

“How do you get over there?” Basil asked Kizu, gesturing over to the ship. “Please don’t tell me we all have to pile into the rowboat.”

“No, that’s Aoi’s. I just jump.”

“Aoi?” Basil blinked. “What do you mean? Kotei Aoi?”

“Oh, yeah. I, er, forgot to mention. She actually uses the ship as a research lab.”

Basil suddenly became very flustered and fascinated with his current body, as if inspecting it for any defects.

Kizu realized that this was actually a really great opportunity for him to test out his spatial spellcraft. He had never transported more than two people and a monkey before. Three adults and a child would be a great challenge.

He gathered them up and clasped Basil and Ione by the shoulders while Anata held on at his waist. In a moment, he transported all of them across the cove and onto the ship. The effort of the jump made him woozy for a minute. Anata noticed and immediately reached for her knife, but Kizu stopped her. He would be fine. And he didn’t necessarily want everyone watching as she used her blood on him.

“Impressive,” Basil said as he walked around on the deck. “What’s the ship’s name?”

“It doesn’t have one,” Kizu admitted.

“It doesn’t have a name?! That’s straight up abusive. Everyone knows every ship needs a name.”

“I’m guessing you have any suggestions?”

“The Defunct Jellyfish,” Ione said. She was leaning over the railing, looking down into the water.

“You just have jellyfish on your mind.” Kizu sighed.

“If I could summon a massive jellyfish, I wouldn’t even need to learn to swim. It could carry me everywhere underwater.”

“It has to be a name worthy of carrying a princess,” Basil said. “How about- The Silken Cradle?”

Ione gagged and even Kizu couldn’t help wincing at the suggestion.

“That’s vetoed,” he said.

At that moment, Mort peeked up from the crew quarters. He gave a big yawn before dashing across the deck and leaping up onto Anata’s shoulder. She giggled and scratched under his chin.

“If you hate my idea so much, you could name it after your lemur,” Basil said.

“He’s a monkey,” Kizu said absentmindedly. But that did give him an idea.

The ship was still pretty weathered and beaten down. It lacked a sail and Kizu doubted his repairs would hold up to seaworthiness. Instead of acting as a means of transportation, it served as a sanctuary for him, Mort, Anata, and Aoi. Anata lurked as an astral phantom while others slept and Aoi practiced a secretive and dark spellcraft. They were nocturnal creatures, the four of them.

“Owl’s Respite,” he named it.