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「With this, that annoying barrier is finally gone. Now, isn’t it about time that you show me your next sorcery?」

After breaking through my barrier, Carol places her hands on her hips and snorts triumphantly. My first impression of her was that of a mature adult woman, but looking at her now, she seems more like an immature adult woman. Considering that it just shows how much she loves sorcery, it’s quite heartwarming to see and at the same time, slightly enviable.

If asked, do I really have the time to think about such rude remarks? I’d answer, absolutely yes. It’s not as if Ciel was running around thoughtlessly, she was actually running to the spot where the magic circle we used during the match with Alejo is. After all, we can easily reuse it after rewriting it a bit. Moreover, we can also change the various written spells used for holding back during the fight with Alejo into more combat oriented ones.

Perhaps noticing that fact as well, Carol becomes vigilant and restarts her bombardment of sorcery. Matching that, Ciel pours her magic power into the magic circle and activates the sorcery. The sorcery here are bullets of wind that automatically intercept the enemy’s sorcery.

In short, she decided to shoot down the ice arrows that the barrier was blocking earlier. And since we can’t win by just defending, Ciel brandishes her hands in front of her body and locks on to Carol.

「Faraalu Entendi Fralie (Bullets of flame, line up, fly)」

Following the chant, bullets of flame flew towards Carol. Just like the ice arrows, they are flying while lined up behind each other. So even if she intercepts the one in front, the ones behind would likely still continue burning. With her eyes widened in surprise, Carol then smiles with delight and mutteringly moves her lips.

Not soon after, a transparent wall of ice appears right before Carol. With a smooth surface that reflects light, it blocked all of the flame bullets with ease. After seeing that, Ciel gracefully moves her arms and makes an earth spike that’s projected under Carol’s feet, but she freezes it to prevent the attack.

In spite of being in the middle of this super flashy sorcery battle that almost seems like it was from a movie, it was probably unavoidable for me to be very excited. I hope that I could be forgiven for being depressed by the fact that I can’t be a part of it.

Anyway, about our current condition, we’re disadvantaged enough that even Ciel seems agitated.

First of all, Ciel’s control isn’t good enough to use the magic circle, chanting, and the Dance Princess’ ability to attack at the same time. And another thing, each attack simply doesn’t have enough power behind them. It’ll be easy to fix this if I use my power as a Song Princess; but since I don’t want to spoil Ciel’s experience, and because I also want to see how far she can go, I’ll stay still for now.

This is just my hunch, but I suspect that Ciel probably has more endurance in sorcery combat while Carol has more firepower.

To win, Ciel would need to maintain the status quo. If she does, Carol will eventually run out of magic power first. However, to keep the status quo, Ciel needs a delicate control over sorcery to compensate for her lack of firepower. Even now I can already see her control lacking. Moreover, even if she has more than enough magic power to keep on going, I can’t be sure that she can keep her focus and force of will.

And while I thought so, Carol’s magic power suddenly swelled up. It seems like she had somewhat lost her mind. Might be an exaggeration, but she’s like a child that was so engrossed in playing that she lost track of her surroundings.

I see, so up until now, she was only keeping herself at Ciel’s level. Because she’s having so much fun right now, she’s beginning to forget to hold herself back. And maybe due to her focusing too much, Ciel hasn’t noticed this yet. Since it seems that we might get overwhelmed, I began singing to give her some support.

Right now, I want Ciel to calm down so I intentionally chose a relaxing song to sing. And after noticing Carol’s current state, Ciel nods with a serious look on her face.

So about the Song Princess’ power, basically a song’s characteristics and its effects will be similar to each other. For example, a cheerful song would make the listener cheer up. It amplifies the effects that can be felt even from a normal song, so singing a relaxing song would calm the listener down and singing a lullaby would probably make them sleepy.

Concerning our Jobs, both Ciel and I are still in the testing stage.

A thick and sharp spear of ice was hurled towards us from Carol’s direction, making the earlier ice arrows seem trivial in comparison. The spear also appeared to be quite intricate, with a unique design that featured a twisted and tapered tip, unlike the simple pointed stick design of a typical spear.

There are roughly ten of them and each of them are taller than Ciel. Carol, are you fighting some large monster right now? No matter how you look at it, that’s too much for a human target.

Sure enough, Carol seemed to have noticed the fact after launching her sorcery. As soon as the spears began flying towards us, though I couldn’t hear her saying it, I could see 「Oh crap」 written all over her face.

At this point, I just want to avert my eyes already, but Ciel stares directly at the approaching spears of ice and concentrates on pouring magic power into the magic circle. The moment one of them entered the magic circle’s range of interception, Ciel’s face flinched slightly.

And after a short while, the first spear was destroyed. Turned to dust by the force of the wind, pieces of the ice spear sparkled beautifully, but this isn’t the time to get distracted by that.

Ciel’s reaction was likely because it was strong and sturdy enough that it took time to destroy the spear of ice. By the second and the third spear, the point at which they were being destroyed gradually approached us. When the seventh and eighth ones were destroyed, the point of impact was only a few centimeters away from us. And as she destroyed the ninth one, the tenth spear is already right in front of our eyes.

It’s extremely unlikely that she can destroy it in time, the most she can do is to move our vitals out of the way. Immediately after she barely moved, the spear of ice hits our flank and Ciel falls on her backside as she was swept by the impact. However, the spear wasn’t able to pierce through Ciel’s skin and remained lodged in our flank. Looking closely, it seems that the part where it hit is slowly freezing and is gradually being covered in ice.

After the ice had spread for a while, it was destroyed along with my usual barrier and vanished. I can make another barrier at any time. It doesn’t take much if I only need to maintain it but making a new one consumes a slightly large amount of magic power.

Although it’s exactly for times like these that I made that barrier, I wonder when was the last time my barrier got destroyed like this? When I was still getting used to it, before Ciel turned 5 years old, my barrier was destroyed several times and I even ran out of magic power. But we didn’t face any danger during the five years we spent locked in the book room, so it’s been a long time since this happened.

At any rate, just our second fight with a person and this happens. Are B-Rank hunters strong or is Carol just stronger than the usual B-Ranker?

『Ciel, are you alright?』
『Yes, I’m fine. After all, I had full faith that Ain would be able to protect me.』

Ciel replied so with confidence, but now I realize that being trusted too much might be a problem as well. If I needed to protect her from those ten spears, I doubt that it would have blocked them all. After all, it consumes a considerable amount of magic power and after the barrier offsets one spear, I don’t even know if I can make a new one before the next spear comes. So I still need to improve my barrier sorcery even more.

Since we’re still in the middle of an important match, I end my reflection here. Although I am using detection, I don’t think it’s good to be distracted by other things. But since the barrage of sorcery has died down, maybe the battle is finished? If Carol uses a sorcery that’s more powerful than the spear of ice, I’m absolutely going to lose confidence in my ability to defend Ciel, so please let this be the end.

I notice Carol approaching us with my detection, and she doesn’t seem to be using any sorcery, so it should be safe to think that we’re done.

『Since it seems that the battle is finished, would you mind switching with me?』
『Right, I’ll do so immediately. Still, have we won? Since, you know, we were on defensive from beginning to the end.』
『Although we were on defensive, we would have won if we kept it on until she ran out of magic power, so I don’t think that this will be considered a loss.』

Rather, if Carol tells us that we lost after going this far, I won’t hesitate on having a super-extended battle. Now, speaking of Carol, as she approaches us, she’s awfully fidgety for some reason. Well, no, it’s not as if I don’t understand. With how concerned she looks, it’s surprising that she’s not running towards us.

Come to think of it, we’re still sitting down in the exact position that we collapsed, so I stood up and Carol showed an obviously relieved look.

「You’re alive, right? You’re fine, right?」
「I’m alive. Though I was definitely surprised that my real barrier was destroyed.」
「That last one, right? But it definitely looked like the Glacio Lentso hit you, so you being fine means…」

She was quick to change from being worried. As soon as I talk about the barrier, she begins talking rapidly and slowly draws near me.

Glacio Lentso… so that sorcery had some kind of name… but it’s not the time to think about that stuff. She draws near me with eyes full of curiosity, and as I’m slowly being driven back towards the wall, 「Carol?」 a chilling voice reaches my ears. Shifting my gaze, I see Celia standing with a furious look.

「Geh…」
「Don’t you Geh me. Just when I came to check on you since you were taking such a long time, why were you trying to kill Cielmer?」
「I-I wasn’t trying to kill her or anythi-…」
「Do you think you can convince me after using that spear of ice?」
「No… Nevermind.」

After seeing Carol hang her head down, Celia lets out a deep sigh and shakes her head. As expected, it seems that Carol went too far. A sorcery with that power was definitely not something you should use on people, one mistake and someone would have probably died.

Luckily it was Ciel, so there wasn’t any casualty, but it’s not a problem that you could just brush off as an accident. But at the same time, since this world puts importance on achievements and abilities, I thought that they might push the fault onto the one who died or something, but it doesn’t seem to be that way.

As I thought, it’s difficult to judge things like this if I don’t know the common sense of this world. For now, as I thought about getting a clear answer on the result of the match and the state of the promise we made before, an awfully apologetic Celia led me and Carol to a different room.

Oh, the real one didn’t break… It broke?!
Heya~! It looks like the fight, and the entrance exam by extension, has finally ended! It was quite a long examination, thanks to our curious little sorcery maniac, now our princesses can finally have a rest. Or can they?
Well then, please feel free to comment! I hope you have a wonderful day!