Chapter 41

The clash between two candidate teams carries straight on from where it left off, with the forest still alive with dueling spells. Fern trades fire with Ehre, a second-class mage who climbs into the air and rains converted stone down on her. Holding to nothing but elementary attack and shield spells, Fern frustrates her opponent, who reads the restrained style as something out of an older school of magecraft. Ehre warns that Wirbel would have finished Fern already, and predicts the captain will slaughter whoever he is facing.

That fight runs in parallel. Übel shears entire treelines apart with her cutting magic, a deceptively plain spell whose path Wirbel cannot track, and she opens shallow wounds across him before he pins down its roughly five-meter reach. He binds her with Sorganeil, a spell that locks anything held in his gaze, then frees her and offers to trade her freedom for the Stille she carries. Übel catches the flaw in the request: if she were truly helpless, he could simply take the bird. She hurls the cage upward, his eyes flick away for an instant, and she lunges in close, confirming his magic needs a full-body line of sight.

Übel scores a deep slash across his nose, having aimed for his eyes. Wirbel names her a killer who relishes the act and lifts his staff to end her, but she keeps him talking, drawing out his history with the Northern Magic Corps and the brutal wars of the north. She argues that his binding magic, which postpones death rather than dealing it, betrays a man still clinging to his humanity. He grins, admits she is right, and reveals the spell merely buys him the resolve to kill, a resolve he has never once failed to summon. As he charges a point-blank blast, Fern appears behind him and levels her staff at his head. Three mages now hold a deadlock, and Fern proposes terms.

Wirbel's Eighth Party is named for the first time, made up of the captain himself alongside Ehre and Scharf. Fern overpowers Ehre by flooding her defenses with ordinary offensive magic from every direction until her barriers cave inward. Land takes a cut from Scharf's steel-petal spell in the flower field where they duel. Übel and Wirbel reach a stalemate that ends only when Fern slips in undetected, setting up the three-way standoff and her proposed deal.

The chapter carries the title Time for Resolve, rendered in Japanese as Kakugo no tame no jikan. It first ran on March 10, 2021, filling eighteen pages of the fifth collected volume, and belongs to the opening stage of the First-Class Mage Exam Arc. Its events were adapted across episodes 19 and 20 of the anime. Wirbel's casting tool is notably stubby, closer to a wand than the staves other mages carry, and his remark that the Northern Magic Corps has been deployed in wars between nations hints that the lands north of the Central region are mired in conflict.