DING DING DING!

The professor in class abruptly stopped talking as the alarm bell at the magicademy went off. She adjusted her glasses, heaving a soft sigh before directing a sweeping glance at her students.

"That brings us to an end to this period. I can answer a few doubts regarding conjuration before I go," she informed the students with a gentle tone.

"Professor." Serulia raised an arm the quickest.

"Yes, Miss Vritra?"

"I wanted to inquire about any methods there are that can allow me to cast conjuration magic from afar by altering the spell a bit," she asked with an accent native to the Durmen Principality. "I am curious if there are any ways to make it possible for me to cast a conjuration under my illusions from a greater distance that do not require me to engage in sustained practice."

"…That's a rather specific question," the professor replied thoughtfully as she gathered her books and bag. "Yes, there is. Even if increasing your range with long-term practice is ideal, you can increase it by reducing the volume of the actual substance on the inside, making it look identical on the outside but less energy-consuming by a great margin. Stop by my office after classes are over, and I can show you how to do it."

"Thank you, professor," Serulia replied with a smile, before taking her seat.

It took all her willpower to stop herself from looking at Lyarna, who kept an eye on her from across the class. She acted busy and normal, scribbling down notes in her notebook inconspicuously while she hoped that Lyarna had bought her little act.

Later that day, after class ended, she followed up on her little doubt, making sure that it appeared legitimate in case someone from Miranda's team was trying to keep tabs on her to make sure that the doubt was legitimate. Of course, this wasn't itself enough to sell them on the lie that Cæ wanted to get them to believe, but it was one piece among others that Cæ planned to help bolster the probability of success.

Later that day, she barged into Cæ's room once more, where the other three were already present.

"I did it." Her tone was one of excitement. "I think I successfully sold them on the lie."

Her light blue eyes swept the four of them sitting in Cæ's room, poring over the materials. The light of the evening Sun beamed through the windows in Cæ's room. While the chill of the winter evening entered the warm, heated room, it cooled the temperature down.

"Great job." Cæ nodded at her with a serious expression. "We've done everything we can with the plan that we have at our disposal. Looked for any possible hole in our plan that we have missed, and I don't think that we have missed anything at all."

His hands came together as his fingers interlocked while his stormy gray eyes sharpened.

"The match is tomorrow. The outcome will decide who the leader will be, assuming that I'm on the Capture The Flag team instead of combat."

The situation had grown complicated with where he was supposed to be.

He wasn't even certain, given that he was going to be on the Capture The Flag team, given that it was possible that he would defeat Virlyd and go on to become the combat representative of the Colohen Branch of the Elendir Institute of Magic, while Virlyd would become the leader of the Capture The Flag team.

And now, here he was jousting for the leadership position of a team that he wasn't even sure he was going to be on.

He heaved a deep breath.

"Let's do our final preparations for today, and then we're done until the match tomorrow. Make sure that you have memorized everything inside out; we can't afford any delays or mistakes tomorrow," Cæ remarked. "Let us prove that we make a better team than they do."

He directed a sweeping gaze across Serulia, Lorden, Silian, and Hyoken.

"We'll go through it one more time."

KNOCK KNOCK

Cæ turned his attention to the door, finding him face to face with the four trainers who were on his team.

They were dressed in black training suits, as they always had been, appearing entirely professional. The three men and one woman simply stared at him in silence with raised eyebrows.

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"Come inside," Cæ invited them in, opening the door. "I didn't want to meet in public because there was a chance that we could get caught."

The man at the front raised an eyebrow. "You are going far for this little leadership match."

"I'm just taking it seriously," Cæ replied. "I will win this match. And I have prepared a strategy to do just that."

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While Cæ's team refined their rather extreme and unconventional strategy, Lyarna had long returned to her team and Miranda, informing them of everything that she had seen.

"…And then she asked the professor about how she could extend the range of her physical conjured illusions," Lyarna reported with a serious tone. "I followed her after school just to make sure that it wasn't just some red herring to try to throw me off. And sure enough, she stayed with the professor the entire time, taking her time to not just learn what she was sharing with her but even staying up late to make sure that she understood everything. I think it's clear that she's going to be focused on defense, using her illusions to create convincing fakes of their flag."

"…It's possible that she was simply trying to fool you," Kyrell remarked, folding his arms while his dark eyes wandered about.

He donned simple casual clothes, even if he looked out of place in them, even if they were in the corner of the training facility, hanging out together in a secluded area to ensure that nobody could spy on them.

It would have been easier to do so in their dormitory rooms, which were armed with anti-espionage enchantments to ensure that the students had their privacy within their rooms. But none of them had been able to invite the others to their room, even if it made sense. Many of them had only grown more distant from each other with the subsequent infighting, making it difficult.

Dranst and Seol had stopped showing up because of how much they didn't like Miranda and her style of leadership.

"It's as I told you, they're going to use her exactly as Coach Sorwell plans to." Miranda shook her head as she shifted a tuft of her violet hair to the back, playing with the curls. She wore a single-piece blue dress that went down to her knees with sleeves that stopped at her shoulders.

"What if you're wrong?" Kyrell sharpened his gaze.

She glared at him. "Do you want me to be wrong?"

He closed his eyes, heaving a deep breath. "There's no point in even talking to you about this."

He simply walked away from the two of them, fed up with her nonsense.

"They'll see when we win tomorrow's battle," Miranda huffed, turning to Lyarna. "Good job, get prepared for tomorrow. When we win, I'll make you my vice-leader."

Lyarna hesitated, like she wanted to tell Miranda something, before simply shaking her head. "Understood. Good day, then."

Miranda was left alone in the training facility as a foreboding sense of uncertainty wore down on her.

—————————————————————————

"I've been in the Capture The Flag niche my whole life," one of the trainers in Cæ's room remarked as he skimmed through the documents detailing the strategy that Cæ had come up with, refined by the entire team. "But I must say, I don't think I have ever seen any strategy quite as crazy as this one."

"You're not supposed to offer any input," Cæ reminded him, directing a sweeping gaze over the four of them who had taken their spots in his living room. "Just read, assimilate, and be ready to execute it tomorrow."

"Even if we were to offer you advice, you wouldn't take it, not at this point," the woman remarked as she skimmed through the pages of the document. "So I think I can tell you that leaving your flag with no defense or cover is probably the most insane strategy that I have ever seen."

Cæ huffed lightly, sipping some water as he glanced across the tea table in his living room. It was completely covered with documents across the entire surface. The tube lights in the room illuminated them brightly while dusk arrived, darkening the skies outside the window.

The four trainers on his team were as surprised as he expected them to be, so much so that they couldn't stop themselves from commenting about how about insane his plan. However, he could see them growing more serious as he presented them with a more detailed plan of how he was going to accomplish what he wanted to.

Cæ had thought it well in the past two and a half days, ironing out a rather concrete plan for them and covering every possibility.

"This is more thorough than I would have expected," one of them murmured. "This might actually work out."

"I have reason to believe that it will. I wouldn't have used this plan under normal circumstances, but I believe that with my opponent and what I've seen of her, this is the best way to completely catch them off-guard," Cæ replied with a nod.

They stirred at his words.

"Still, I don't think I've ever seen anyone play Capture The Flag like they play Poker," the woman replied. "Everything would need to go according to your plan for this to work. Or at least, anything that goes wrong would have to be within the margin of error that you have accounted for."

"I have strong reason to believe that it will," Cæ replied with a serious tone. "And if anything does go wrong, I will personally handle it. After all, that is my role in the original plan that Mr. Sorwel gave me."

He was meant to be an all-rounder, making him flexible and allowing him to change his role in the game depending on the enemy team.

"Let's go over the plan together now that every single member is here," Cæ remarked. "I want to make sure that we are all on the same page."

They spent the next hour ironing out every detail so that everybody knew exactly what they needed to do. Each member had a clear vision of what their role looked like, especially since, while the plan was extreme, it was not that complicated.

They would convince their opponents that the real flag was a highly convincing fake while Serulia and Hyoken would join them, hidden with Serulia's invisibility magic. All nine of them would attack their opponent's base in the forest environment, and while the actual attackers fought the defenders, Serulia would steal the flag and replace it with an illusion.

The illusion would eventually collapse once she got far enough, but by then it would already be game over.

It was a strategy that cut through the strategy of their enemies, which was most likely going to be highly orthodox, although it was possible that Miranda had put her creative hat on and come up with something different. Cæ had taken measures to prepare for every eventuality.

Soon enough, the time for the match had arrived.

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