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While it feels like nothing has been resolved on the taboo and Elbert family problems, the dust has settled for now. At the same time, the end of each course is in sight. The classes are on their final legs. Everyone is probably looking forward to the month-long break and the athletic meet right after it, but today, our class had their attention on a completely different event.
Long story short, lightning sorcerer Alcrei challenged Hero Juerd to a duel.

The reason was because Juerd dared to stand out despite being a commoner; that he has girls fawning on him, which is unacceptable; and other more dumb accusations.
He could’ve just ignored it, but for some reason, Juerd accepted the duel. Well, Alcrei has been picking fights with him for a while now, so he probably wants to end it here and finally teach Alcrei a lesson.

Since we have avoided interacting with them, we were somewhat out of the loop, but it’s undeniable that this will be a very important battle for our class. And I have a hunch that regardless of who wins, this is going to be troublesome. After all, it’s going to break our class troublemakers’ status quo.
Still, being outsiders to the issue, there’s nothing we can do about it, and for some reason, Princess Leshy isn’t stopping them. While students are officially treated equally in the academy, Princess Leshy’s authority is still overwhelmingly powerful, so she might have thought that careless intervention would just lead to more chaos.
There’s also a chance that she sees this as a good learning experience for Juerd, so she’s letting things take their course.

At any rate, while both are really enthusiastic about it, they couldn’t really fight in the classroom, so they’ve decided to hold their duel on the next combat training period.
We are enrolled in the combat training course, but we’re in a different class, so we weren’t able to see it in action. However, we’ve been hearing whispers of Juerd’s victory.

◇

With the hype of the duel still fresh on everyone’s mind, we reach our last requirement before the vacation: our last outdoor task as a party. With the duel happening just the other day, I frequently see Alcrei with an awkward expression, but luckily the break starts soon. Tomorrow, we’ll be having something to the effect of a closing ceremony, and that’s it. I pray that during this long break, Alcrei will be able to put his feelings in order. Not for his own sake, but for the sake of our peaceful academy life.
Am I being too mean?

Speaking of the outdoor task, in our first outing, we encountered a goblin, and the period ended with Palra and Belltina feeling helpless. Since then, we mainly focused on practicing how to navigate and walk through uneven paths, as well as proper pacing when inside a forest and what to be cautious of.

We did encounter and fight monsters, but only monsters weaker than F-rank, those even regular people can somehow manage, appeared.
These monsters are, at worst, only capable of light scratches, and Ciel and I would usually ignore them, but our party fought some for combat practice as we slowly proceed through the forest.
Though I call it combat practice, since it’s all low-ranked monsters, we only need to be careful of sneak attacks, and even then they can’t cause fatal damage, so it’s apparently not really that nerve-wracking.

After the class period, I would generally see other parties having fun talking about how many monsters they’ve defeated, how many magic cores they’ve gotten, and so forth.
Meanwhile, since our party focuses on avoiding monsters as much as possible, we don’t really have much battle results to be excited about. Since Belltina was generally the one in charge of enemy detection, we have occasionally encountered monsters, but with Ciel baiting them and Palra attacking, they’d die in one hit―when they do get hit.

Now, assessing our battle results―or rather, our party’s overall improvement―for the past few months, I think Palra has gotten quite stronger. She’s gotten more accustomed to her bow, and while she still misses occasionally, her accuracy has greatly improved. Her attacks aren’t really that powerful since it’s just a regular arrow, but as she trains with her Job, her offensive capability should eventually improve.
Ciel does make her fight in close combat occasionally, but she’s less effective with that. Since Palra’s weapon is a knife, she needs to get really close, and she seems to dislike that.

Belltina has improved her physicality, and the number of breaks she takes during class has been slowly decreasing. Her detection capability is likely the best in our year level, excluding ours. Actually, Palra is also very good at detecting enemies, but Belltina is just much better. While she is able to see magic power even through obstacles, her weakness is that her detection is limited to her line of sight and that seeing through objects is taxing for her. It might be good for her to learn how to sense enemies through sound, but that’s Palra’s speciality, and I’ve seen Palra defend Belltina from a sneak attack from out of her field of vision several times.

Well, Palra’s detection rate is a solid 50-50, though.

For now, I don’t know how things will develop in the future, but Belltina’s ability will probably allow her to be the first to sense powerful monsters. The stronger the monster, the more magic power it has, so it’ll likely stick out to Belltina’s eyes.
From what she said before, it took her time to see through my concealment, so that should mean that she can quickly detect less potent concealment abilities. Probably.

Simply being able to lower the chances of encountering or being caught unprepared by strong monsters greatly increases your survival rate as a hunter… I think. There are many careless hunters who intentionally go for strong monsters for a big earning, but the majority choose requests they can handle.
And despite that, many still lose their lives because of unexpected encounters with powerful monsters.

This is why Belltina’s family is incompetent for kicking her out… But that’s not exactly true; Belltina was simply a step ahead of them for hiding her true abilities. Though them not having much expectation from her probably played a part, too.
This same Belltina is now much better at manipulating sorcery than before. Her spells are powerful enough to keep a goblin away on direct hit, and she should be able to defeat one with multiple hits.
She should be able to defeat the weaker F-rank monsters with her sorcery. However, it takes her a long time to finish casting, and her accuracy rate is worse than Palra’s with her bow.
I’m sure this is partly due to inexperience, but much of her difficulty is the result of her short circuits.