Shepherd Wizard (Novel) - Chapter 120

Chapter 120

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When they arrived at the dueling arena, it was initially half-decided that the first duel would be between Solif and Turan. This was to properly determine their relative strengths, as their first encounter had ended in an ambiguous result. However, unexpectedly, Meisa stepped forward and volunteered to be Turan’s first opponent.

“Sorry, but can I go first?”

“Hm? Oh, well… sure, go ahead.”

In truth, this wasn’t particularly surprising. The initial catalyst for the two becoming close was Meisa’s stubborn refusal to lose, attempting to forcibly use magic she didn’t understand, which led to her collapse. Though she might appear somewhat timid due to her upbringing, her pride in magic was second to none.

“I wonder who will win.”

Solif gazed at the empty crystal orb, mentally predicting the outcome. He wished he could watch the screen, but that would allow everyone in the waiting room to see their fight. Unless they wanted rumors of powerful nobles dueling to spread throughout the neighborhood, that wasn’t an option.

“Meisa’s magical power is much stronger, their raw talent is about equal, and she’s been trained since childhood, so she should be skilled in magical combat…”

From this perspective alone, it seemed like there wouldn’t even be a contest, but Turan had his own advantages. The ability to use various bloodlines through the Mimic Holy Relic, physical attacks using the sling, excellent combat instincts, and more.

Still, given their immense magical power, Solif expected a rather long battle. He stood up to offer his seat to his parents so they could rest comfortably.

At that moment, there was a sudden flash of light, and the two reappeared.

“What? Is it over already?”

“Yeah.”

Though it was difficult to confirm without a proper clock, it didn’t seem like even ten minutes had passed. If anything, the match had ended sooner than average compared to others.

Turan appeared calm, while Meisa was rubbing her face with both hands.

Just from this, it was obvious who had won.

“Are you alright, Meisa?”

“Hm? Oh, yes… it wasn’t as easy as I thought. It felt so vivid, like my head was actually shattering.”

As their intact appearances suggested, injuries and damage inside the dueling arena were fully restored, but the pain remained just as real as in reality. In fact, many people continued to cry out or suffer from phantom pain even after leaving the arena.

After all, if there were no such restrictions, how could such a useful facility be managed so casually?

After seating the pale-faced Meisa and giving her a glass of water, Solif immediately questioned Turan:

“How did it end?”

“I sniped her.”

“Was there space for that?”

“I made it myself.”

Turan explained the layout of the dueling arena’s interior. The overall area was 300 meters in length and width. The floor, walls, and ceiling were well-finished stone walls made of marble, with a height slightly exceeding 30 meters.

“With that size, it must be spatial displacement. There’s no space that large within this facility.”

“That’s right. I couldn’t sense anyone else’s presence at all.”

Spatial displacement was one of the representative fields that modern magic had yet to conquer. Just as Meisa couldn’t use decay magic because she didn’t understand the principles, no one knew theoretically how to traverse space, so it couldn’t be used. There weren’t even any bloodline abilities related to it.

In contrast, such ancient imperial structures often had devices that could warp space or transport people, like in the Tomb of the Gods that Turan had entered before.

“So how exactly did the match play out?”

“Well, roughly speaking…”

The first clash was a normal shooting battle. Turan fired spheres made of the Light of Judgment while secretly mixing in steel balls, while Meisa used Fire Soul explosions to move quickly and dodge, constantly striking down with lightning. Additionally, she used a tri-blade that fired shockwaves, modified from a magical device they had obtained from a Zahar noble recently, for physical attacks.

Amidst this exchange of all sorts of attack methods, various minor techniques were also employed. They used gusts of wind to disrupt each other’s flight, bent light to distort positions, and when on the ground, transformed the earth to trap ankles or scattered seeds to create vines to ensnare the opponent.

An ordinary person might take years to master just one of these techniques to this degree, but the two could skillfully employ these abilities as easily as breathing.

In the fight that proceeded in this manner, Meisa emerged victorious. Though she too was grazed by steel balls and bled in various places, Turan suffered more severe injuries with one arm broken and several ribs fractured. Not to mention the nerve damage from electrocution.

“Listening to this, it sounds like you were completely demolished?”

“That’s why I used my trump card.”

Backed into a corner, Turan absorbed the surrounding light with a light-eating cloth, used invisibility magic, and hid underground using the Earth Guardian bloodline’s earth manipulation. Meisa hurriedly summoned spheres of light, but light couldn’t penetrate through the earth.

While she failed to pinpoint where her opponent was hiding, Turan created a long shooting tunnel underground, then opened an exit and sniped her, precisely shattering her head. The attack, propelled by wind paths and Fire Soul, with momentum built up by spinning the sling multiple times, was enough to penetrate her defensive magical device.

“You won completely with tricks, huh.”

“I learned a lot thanks to that. Not just about magical power, but I also realized that my accumulated skills are still lacking.”

Though Meisa’s magical talent was almost equal to Turan’s, there was a significant difference in the time they had properly trained in magic. Unlike Meisa, who had been educated as an heir since age twelve, Turan had studied independently and haphazardly until he was seventeen.

Of course, being a genius himself, the difference in their skills wasn’t overwhelmingly large, but in any field, at the highest levels, even small differences can lead to significant results. During their usual magic training, they would go easy on each other, so they hadn’t noticed, but in actual combat, the feeling was completely different.

“Still, if your head was shattered in one hit, it probably didn’t hurt much.”

“Fortunately. Though it means the near-death experience failed.”

There were mainly two ways to slowly approach death: strangling the neck as they had done when force-feeding before, or inflicting wounds to induce excessive bleeding. Unfortunately, Meisa’s death this time was neither, so they hadn’t gained any insights.

“But I’m not sure if I can do it,” Turan said.

“Do what?”

“Killing. Even knowing it’s fake, it doesn’t feel good.”

Turan recalled the image of Meisa’s shattered head rolling on the floor. Though he had seen this countless times with enemies he had fought before, the fact that it was a close friend made it incredibly unpleasant.

At that moment, Solif suddenly lightly punched Turan’s stomach.

“Even if you say that, I won’t go easy on you, man.”

“…Neither will I.”

Despite his joking tone, a faint smile appeared on Turan’s face.

While Meisa was recovering from the shock of death between the Baraha couple, Turan and Solif entered the dueling arena next. Since magical power was fully restored upon return, there was no reason to delay.

The arena attendant’s eyes widened at Turan’s statement that he would fight twice in one day, spending 200 gold coins.

“Aren’t you tired?”

“I can manage.”

“Well…”

Of course, one could fight as many times as they wanted if they kept winning, but due to the fatigue from battle and the pain from injuries, few did so.

Ignoring the attendant’s amazement, Turan entered the second match but was narrowly defeated by Solif. He used various tactics learned from his first fight with Meisa to corner Solif, but it wasn’t easy to break through when a powerful Guardian bloodline noble decided to fortify their defense. Moreover, unlike ordinary Guardians who were weak in ranged attacks, Solif had the most aggressive Sun bloodline.

Solif advanced steadily, deflecting all attacks with the Light of Judgment, while Turan kept retreating and throwing steel balls. After a long battle lasting over an hour, Turan declared surrender due to magical power depletion.

“I lost.”

“Yes! I won!”

After briefly stomping his feet in joy, Solif clicked his tongue, knowing that if he hadn’t awakened his Guardian bloodline, he would have been utterly defeated. Of course, by that logic, Turan had at least five bloodlines, but the Zahar bloodline wasn’t particularly suitable for combat.

After the match was decided, they began the near-death experience they hadn’t been able to attempt in the previous fight. The method was excessive bleeding. Solif deeply cut both of Turan’s wrists and then sat quietly behind him, waiting for death to come.

“How is it?”

“What?”

“The blood, is it flowing enough?”

At Turan’s question, Solif nodded with a frown. Seeing his friend dying with blood flowing from his entire body, he understood why Turan had felt uneasy after killing Meisa earlier. Even knowing intellectually that this fight was mere illusion and that not a single hair would actually be harmed, the act of directly killing a comrade was terribly unpleasant.

“This is making me a bit sleepy… and cold…”

Turan spoke in a drowsy tone as he looked up at the gradually blurring ceiling. He hadn’t noticed earlier, but now he could see the ceiling of the dueling arena spinning in a whirlpool-like motion.

A feeling of powerlessness, as if his entire body was sinking into an empty void. As his consciousness faded due to lack of blood flow to the brain, Turan continuously recited the contents of the soul magic book.

‘Within every human exists a unique self, and that is a god. This world is fake, and only that is true…’

Unlike the body that easily wounds and decays to death, the true self, the soul that has become the true ego, is immortal and unique. Continuously reciting these sentences that even he didn’t fully understand, Turan kept falling and falling endlessly downward.

A moment that seemed both instantaneous and eternal at the same time. Just as Turan thought he might fall all the way to the center of the world, he saw something appear below. More accurately, he felt it.

‘This is-‘

Gray clouds and golden lightning, pitch-black darkness with eyes floating within. The moment he saw the four symbols representing his own bloodlines, Turan’s consciousness snapped back to reality as if doused with cold water.

“Hey, hey! Are you alright?”

“Huh?”

Turan only then realized he had returned to the real world, and what he had just seen was merely a hallucination on the brink of death. He found himself sitting in the lobby outside the dueling arena.

“How long was I like this?”

“Almost thirty minutes. You were just standing there blankly without saying anything, so we thought something had gone wrong.”

Just as Turan was about to apologize for worrying them, he felt his cheeks burning unusually hot. When he asked about it, Meisa bowed her head beside him.

“Sorry, you weren’t coming to your senses, so I slapped you a few times…”

“It’s fine. Thanks to that, I feel much more alert now.”

After patting Meisa’s head a couple of times, Turan suggested they finish using the dueling arena for today. After all, with him and Meisa having died once each, only Solif and his parents could use it, and there was no point in them fighting each other.

After securing a small, shabby inn near the dueling arena, Turan laid out cheap beer and sausages and explained what he had felt earlier.

“You saw the symbols of your bloodlines inside yourself?”

“Could it be because of the Holy Relic?”

Turan’s two Mimic Holy Relics, the mask and necklace, had the effect of peering into others’ symbols when used together. At Meisa’s words, Turan shook his head in denial.

“It’s hard to explain in words, but the feeling is different. With the Holy Relic, it’s like directly ‘looking into’ something, but this is more like just ‘feeling’ that it is myself…”

Even as he said it, he felt the explanation was terribly vague, but there was no other way to describe it.

“Maybe the bloodline abilities we possess are one of the essences of the soul. After all, the gods also move their symbols to use special powers.”

It was strange that soul magic, claimed to be human power, was related to bloodline magic originating from the gods, but given the circumstances they had seen so far, it wasn’t unreasonable. In fact, the gods, or more precisely Ymir and the Arabion family head, had shown such appearances when revealing their true abilities.

Listening quietly, Solif asked in a low voice:

“So, can you feel this spiritual awareness?”

“Not yet. But I think this direction is correct. It’s very faint, but I feel like I’m progressing somehow.”

This kind of training would be difficult to attempt without a dueling arena. The closer one got to death, the stronger this unidentified sensation, presumably spiritual awareness, became, but if one made a mistake and actually died, that would be the end.

“Anyway, I’d like to stay for a few more days and keep using the dueling arena. I’ve learned quite a lot from fighting at full power like this. Don’t you feel the same?”

“That’s true.”

Meisa lacking combat sense, Solif lacking magical talent, and Turan lacking experience in utilizing his vast magical power and diverse abilities – all three had keenly felt their shortcomings through full-power clashes in the dueling arena. Thus, they decided to stay for a few more days, continuing to attempt duels and near-death experiences.

They set a limit of one week, as lingering too long might allow Baraha to regroup and locate them.

Five days after their first visit to the dueling arena.

As Turan sat quietly waiting for his turn, he overheard people around him whispering about him and Solif’s parents. It wasn’t anything related to Baraha, just talk about madmen who had been frantically using the dueling arena for the past few days, spending over a thousand gold coins.

He wondered if they should leave soon before rumors spread further, when Meisa and Solif suddenly appeared.

“I won!”

“Damn it! I lost again! I can’t even land a single hit now!”

Meisa raised both arms triumphantly, while Solif stomped his foot and grumbled. Their contrasting reactions were stark.

“How many times is this now?”

“Three. How do you even beat her? I can’t figure it out no matter what I do.”

“Just try hard, I guess.”

Although combat naturally involved many variables and outcomes weren’t always fixed, a pattern of relative strengths emerged as they tallied their results. Interestingly, the three formed a relationship like rock-paper-scissors.

Turan was strong against Meisa but weak against Solif, Meisa was strong against Solif but weak against Turan, and Solif was strong against Turan but weak against Meisa.

With each match, the three practiced soul magic by inflicting death on the loser. Based on experience, excessive bleeding was the most stable method, so they stuck to that approach.

Solif’s parents expressed some concern at the sight of them constantly killing each other, but fortunately, they had grown strong enough to calmly face each other’s deaths. Humans were beings that easily adapted and developed through experience, after all.

Additionally, these duels greatly contributed to improving the three’s combat abilities. While their tangible abilities like magical power and magical devices didn’t improve at all, they became much better at utilizing their strengths.

Presumably, if the current three were to fight against their pre-dueling arena selves, they would all win without much difficulty.

After dueling Meisa, Turan beat her face to a pulp to force her surrender, then inflicted death. When he returned to the lobby after the duel, he sensed a strange presence from a distance.

‘This is…’

Three upper-rank nobles, five mid-rank nobles, and one top-tier noble. An elite force capable of easily overwhelming several ordinary mage families was waiting outside the dueling arena.

“It seems we have guests.”

“Guests?”

“I’m not sure exactly who. If it’s Baraha coming after us, this force is too small…”

If they had witnessed their power back then, they wouldn’t come with such a meager force unless they were insane. Any one of the three could easily overwhelm them in an instant.

Had they been waiting for their duel to end?

Sensing the presence of those approaching the dueling arena, Turan immediately instructed everyone to form a battle formation.

Solif stood at the front, while Meisa and Turan positioned themselves on the left and right, creating a formation that shielded the Baraha couple.

At that moment, Solif, who was standing at the very front, pointed in shock at the approaching figure.

“No way, you…!”

“It’s been a while, good sir! I heard you’ve been spending quite a fortune at the dueling arena, so I thought I’d drop by to see your face.”

A large man approached while cheerfully muttering.

His height reached nearly two meters, and his thick forearms seemed about the same circumference as Meisa’s waist.

Moreover, his entire body, including his sideburns and beard, was covered in such abundant hair that it excessively emphasized his masculinity.

Somehow, Turan could guess the man’s identity without an introduction, but he asked to be certain.

“Who are you?”

“Kalaise Ruban. We met once long ago when all the heirs gathered for some social networking event.”

As expected, the man was the heir to the great family that controlled this Frostwind Forest region.