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"Can't I simply think Luke's performance was satisfying to watch?" Registering the scrutinizing look in Moira's eyes, Selene's heart lurched in secret, but her face held perfectly steady, and she fired a question straight back. "Sister Moira, if you ask me, it's your reaction that's the abnormal one. Aren't you being just a touch over-suspicious? Don't tell me you didn't find that scene just now thoroughly cathartic?"
"Is that so? Then perhaps I really was overthinking it." Countered like that, Moira finally shook her head. Selene's words weren't wrong. Luke's showing just now genuinely had been satisfying to watch, and Preston Huxley's little speech, above all, had trampled straight over her own bottom line as well.
The Academy's policy treated candidates from all four Regions with perfect equality, but that hardly meant Moira could simply ignore what Preston had said. If anything, that speech of his had already stripped away every last shred of her goodwill toward him.
Even if Preston managed excellent results within the Trial Road, once he formally enrolled, there would likely be precious few instructors willing to show him a pleasant face.
Under circumstances like those, Luke making off with Preston's Trial Crystal, indirectly cutting his assessment short ahead of schedule, and even gifting him the achievement of a zero-point enrollment, had genuinely left Moira feeling avenged as well. She simply hadn't shown it as directly as Selene had.
And the most crucial point of all: Luke's method violated not a single rule of the Trial Road. Even if Preston learned it had been Luke's doing, he would have no avenue of appeal whatsoever. To say nothing of the fact that the Preston on the screen remained entirely in the dark, still circling round and round inside his stronghold, hunting for a Trial Crystal that had long since been carried away.
Seeing that Moira had stopped digging, Selene finally let out a quiet breath, hurriedly pulled up Iris's screen, and made a great show of studying it.
A pity, then, that while Iris resolved the deployed mimic beasts with clean, crisp efficiency, set against Luke's proactive offensive, her showing read as thoroughly middle-of-the-road, without a single dazzling note to it. It drew a sigh out of Selene despite herself. Both of them were her own juniors. How had the gap grown this wide?
"Tobias? What leisure brings you looking for me?" While Selene and Moira had been matching wits, Tobias had already connected a call to the Head of Northmarch, Warrick Shepard. Unfortunately for him, Shepard's face was a portrait of bafflement, entirely unable to work out why Tobias had sought him out.
Even so, a thread of wariness sat in the depths of his eyes. They were old rivals of many years' standing, after all, and by his understanding of Tobias, this old man coming to find him could not possibly mean anything good!
"Shepard, I've come across something rather entertaining over here, and I simply wanted to share it with you." Before Moira's and Selene's dumbstruck faces, Tobias replayed the footage of Preston Huxley, from his confident monologue all the way through to the moment he was robbed of his base.
Good grief! The two women had very nearly forgotten that their Head was not only a man of passions, but also the most famous old scamp among the four Great Academy Heads.
In that moment, watching the Northmarch Head's face grow uglier and uglier within the call screen, Moira and Selene were abruptly struck by a pang of sympathy for the man. To be toyed with like this by a direct competitor was genuinely hard to stomach.
The sympathy, however, evaporated almost as fast as it came, and in its place a dark satisfaction flickered through both women's hearts.
The Four Great Academies had always existed in competition, and the contest among their several Heads had never once come to an end, with their own Celestial Head ranking as a genuine heavyweight in it.
Now that a chance to properly needle his opposite number had landed in his lap, Tobias was never going to let it pass, and given his character, an act like this drew not the faintest flicker of surprise from either woman.
"Old man Wren. You sought me out just for this pointless nonsense?" Shepard hadn't been provoked to genuine fury, but neither did he spare Tobias a single pleasant look, and even his form of address had changed outright.
Damn it all! I knew this old bastard never comes bearing good intentions!
"How is it pointless? I'm finding you a bit of fun, aren't I? Lest you spend every hour from dawn to dusk with that face of yours pulled board-stiff." As though he hadn't seen the change in Shepard's expression at all, Tobias pressed on, his tone earnest and grandly long-winded. "And not to be that sort, but those students from your Northern side, their temperament really does leave something wanting. That's an area that could stand some proper discipline."
!!
Hearing this much, how could Shepard possibly fail to grasp that Tobias had sought him out purely to preen in front of him? "I have matters to attend to. I've no time to idle away here with you."
With that, Shepard cut the connection outright. Knowing Tobias as he did, if he genuinely let this fellow build up steam, the man could likely talk clean through to the following day.
Though Tobias had quite deliberately rubbed the loss in his face, Shepard hadn't truly flown into a rage. This was merely the small-stakes sparring the few of them had always traded among themselves.
Tobias plainly understood as much too, which was why the whole exchange had carried no real sting to begin with.
"Have Howard Huxley come over for a visit. Let us have a proper look at exactly what sort of goods their Huxley family turns out." That said, it hardly meant Shepard could swallow this mouthful of humiliation whole, and so, naturally enough, Howard Huxley, who likewise hailed from the Huxley family, was elected as the outlet for his temper.
Granted, which academy a student chose to attend was the student's own freedom. But for a student of the North to lose face out in the Eastern Region like this, the fellow genuinely deserved a thorough educating.
Home-field advantage or not, to be robbed of one's base and then take that long to belatedly notice was, by any measure, an outright disgrace.
"Hah! Satisfying!" Though Shepard had hung up on him, Tobias's face was the very picture of contentment. "That will teach you to dare put on airs in front of me the way you did last time!"
At Tobias's words, Moira and Selene both looked away, unable to help themselves. Put charitably, this Head of theirs was a man of passions. Put plainly, his temperament was simply that of a small child.
Then again, getting to watch the Head of Northmarch eat a loss was, they had to admit, rather satisfying in its own right.
---
Time flowed on, and the whole of the Trial Road had by now boiled over into genuine uproar, because no small number of the assessment's new students had discovered an utterly infuriating problem: the Trial Crystals they relied upon to tally their points had vanished into thin air, and the discovery was fast driving them anxious and half-mad.
After all, if the Trial Road concluded without them recovering their Trial Crystals, then even if they held out all the way to the very end, they would in all likelihood walk away with an abysmal result, and that was something none of them could accept.
Only in that moment did the students who'd been robbed of their bases truly grasp that the Trial Road's assessment ran far less simple than they had ever imagined.
A pity, then, that before they could so much as find a solution, every new student within the Trial Road was abruptly dragged into the battle space. From the Trial Road's opening until now, exactly two hours had elapsed.
"So the moment we're pulled into the battle space, every summoned card spirit gets forcibly teleported back as well?" Space wrenched and shifted, and by the time Luke's senses settled, he was already standing within the battle space. What surprised him was that Sistermon Ciel, whom he'd dispatched to operate outside, had likewise been forcibly teleported back to him.
A measure to prevent base-theft, then? Luke mused inwardly. At this very moment, every last stronghold out there sat in a completely undefended state. A slight pity, that~.