Faced with the feather pen that was almost poking him in the nose, Arthur did not even raise a hand.

He only gave Andrew a look full of contempt. In this backward world, where people had to wave a wand and shout a spell just to cast a simple [Lumos], these people knew nothing about what real control over magic meant.

"Sign with a feather pen??" Arthur shook his head, his voice full of deep pity. "That has no mage style at all."

As soon as he finished speaking, Arthur slowly raised his right hand. He stretched out his long, pale index finger and pointed it at the parchment in the air.

In the next second, under the fixed stares of the hundreds of eyes around him, something unbelievable happened.

There was no long spell chant.

And no wand was used to strengthen the magic.

A point of pure, deep Azure Blue light suddenly gathered at Arthur’s fingertip without any warning.

It was a strange kind of Magic Power that no one present had ever seen before. It did not belong to the violent Fire Element, the cold Ice Element, or the heavy earth element. It came from the most basic energy in the DND system... pure arcane light.

As Arthur lightly moved his finger, that point of Azure Blue light drew bright trails through the air.

In less than a second,

a complex Azure Blue rune appeared in the air, so complicated that just one look at it could make a person dizzy. This was a zero-circle cantrip from the DND system... [Arcane Mark].

"Go," Arthur said softly, speaking a single word.

The Azure Blue arcane rune instantly turned into a streak of light and, with a sharp chi sound, stamped itself onto the bottom of the challenge letter. A thin wisp of smoke rose from the parchment.

When the light faded, the name [Arthur], glowing with a faint blue light and impossible to erase, was deeply marked on the paper.

This perfect display of wandless casting and terrifyingly precise Magic Power control instantly threw the noisy square into dead silence.

"Gasp..."

A wave of shocked breathing came from the crowd. Even a few high-ranking Archmagus who had been watching from the shadows were so stunned that they nearly pulled out their own beards.

Releasing Magic Power outside the body??

Forming a rune out of thin air??

How could this possibly be something a Double-F Failure could do?! Even high-level mages needed extremely strong Mental Power to control Magic Power that well.

Andrew, who was standing closest to Arthur, felt it most clearly.

The moment that Azure Blue rune took shape, he clearly felt the terrifying pressure of high-level magic. Andrew’s face instantly turned pale, and his legs moved back half a step before he could stop them.

His throat moved hard. Looking at the blue mark on the parchment, a mark that seemed to be laughing at him, he felt a fear rising in his heart that he could barely control.

But he quickly forced that fear back down.

He kept telling himself over and over that this had to be some kind of trick, or that Arthur had secretly used some expensive alchemy item.

"Y-you better stop trying to scare people!!" Andrew said, forcing himself to sound tough. He gripped the challenge letter tightly and threw out threats even though he was clearly shaken.

"In three days, we’ll see if you can still smile!!"

"I’ll make you understand just how miserable it is to offend a noble!!"

Faced with Andrew’s hoarse threats, Arthur simply picked at his ear like he did not care at all.

He could not even be bothered to give this clown another look. He turned around and slowly walked toward the Dawn Class building.

After taking a few steps, Arthur suddenly seemed to remember something. Without turning back, he spoke in a lazy tone.

"Oh right, Young Master Andrew."

"For the duel in three days, remember to bring a few extra pairs of pants."

"After all, if you wet yourself again in front of the whole school, you’ll completely disgrace the Walter family."

The words were light, but they were like a poisoned dagger, stabbing straight into Andrew’s chest.

"Pfft..."

Someone in the crowd could not hold it in and let out the first laugh. Right after that, quiet mocking voices spread across the square like a disease.

Andrew’s face instantly turned dark red. He clenched his fists so hard that his nails were almost digging into his flesh, and the hatred in his eyes was almost overflowing.

"Arthur!!" Andrew roared in his heart, swearing that in three days, he would crush this bastard under his feet.

...

After leaving the central square, Lilian chased after Arthur like a little tail, still puffing with anger.

"Arthur, are you crazy?!" The little princess grabbed his sleeve, so anxious that tears were almost coming out.

"Do you even know how shameless the Walter family is?!"

"They wouldn’t have made a public challenge unless they were planning to cheat in the duel!!"

"Andrew has definitely spent a lot of money on high-level defensive magic scrolls, maybe even banned potions!!"

Lilian kept talking quickly, analyzing the situation and trying to make Arthur understand how serious this was.

Arthur stopped walking. Looking at the cute girl in front of him, so worried for him that she was almost stomping her feet, he could not help reaching out and rubbing her soft golden hair.

"Let them try," Arthur said, still in that calm tone that somehow made people feel at ease.

"If I don’t completely crush the trump cards they’re so proud of, those annoying flies will just keep coming back to cause trouble."

Arthur looked toward the academy arena, and a dangerous smile rose at the corner of his mouth.

"Good timing. I’ve come up with a few new spell models, and I need some tough sandbags to test them on."

Hearing such unbelievably arrogant words, Lilian froze. She stood there with her mouth slightly open, unable to speak for a long moment.

Even Elena, who had been silently following behind them, felt her heart shake.

This S-Class genius girl, known as the academy’s Ice Rose, had complicated emotions in her ice-blue eyes.

There was worry, confusion, but even more than that, there was a kind of shock almost like reverence.

The image of Arthur forming that Azure Blue rune with just his fingertip was burned deep into her mind. That absolute control over Magic Power, and that strange structure completely outside traditional magic theory, had totally overturned all the magical knowledge Elena had built up over the last ten-plus years.

"How did he do that...?" Elena kept trying in her mind to break down the structure of that rune, but she found that the magical talent she had always been proud of looked like nothing more than a baby learning to walk in front of that mysterious power.

She looked up at the back of the black-haired boy walking ahead of them.

He looked lazy and easygoing, but inside him was a terrifying power strong enough to tear apart the rules of this world.

"The duel in three days..." Elena gently bit her soft lip, and a trace of anticipation flashed in her eyes before even she noticed it.

Meanwhile, Arthur, who was walking in front, had already opened up in his mind that huge magical treasury that belonged only to the DND system.

In a public duel like this, he obviously could not use a world-destroying 9th-Level Forbidden Spell like Meteor Blast, or the whole academy, maybe even the royal capital, would be blown into the sky.

Over the next three days, he needed to prepare a few Low Rank spells that were good for one-on-one combat, looked amazing, and at the same time would not reveal too many of his real trump cards.

"Shield, Magic Missile, Refraction Shroud, Anima Still..."

Arthur silently went through those classic spells in his mind, the same ones that had made countless monsters suffer back in the tabletop games on Earth.

At the arena three days later, he was going to give those narrow-minded country-bumpkin mages of this world a proper lesson.

He would show them what a real [Grand Tactician] looked like.