The Royal Military Academy's Impostor Owns a Dungeon [BL] novel Chapter 1176

Chapter 1176: The Support Sign

A deafening roar of cheers, like that of a packed stadium moments before the championship match, rolled across the arena as Owen Mylor finally stepped into the stands, craning his neck in search of his assigned seat.

He scanned the crowd casually at first.

Then his eyes landed on something so threateningly impassioned that he couldn’t even properly react.

He blinked.

Once.

Twice.

Then so rapidly that it was probably a new personal record in his admittedly short life.

Because there, right in the middle of the brightly lit arena where countless spectators had gathered in eager anticipation...

Was a monstrosity.

Owen stared.

His brain slowly began putting together the horrifying implications until, after some admittedly simple calculations, he raised his most pressing issue.

"..."

Wasn’t he supposed to be sitting somewhere near that?

He refused to accept it.

Surely he had counted wrong.

Maybe he’d looked at the wrong section.

Maybe that thing belonged to someone else entirely.

Clinging desperately to hope, he looked again.

Only this time, he really took it in.

And immediately let out a tiny yelp.

Holding up that magnificent disaster were two people who couldn’t have contrasted more if they tried.

On one side stood Luca, practically glowing with excitement, his smile so bright it looked as though he’d personally been waiting his entire life for this very moment.

On the other...

Was Xavier.

The older cadet’s face remained as unreadable as ever, only this time his eyes were another matter entirely, carrying the unmistakable look of someone silently begging for rescue while accepting that no such rescue was coming.

Owen felt every hair on his body stand on end.

No.

Oh no.

"..."

But what was that in the first place?

__

To call it a support sign honestly wouldn’t do it justice.

Not because Luca hadn’t poured his heart and soul into making it. Quite the opposite.

The problem was that he’d apparently poured every ounce of artistic talent he possessed into it as well, and somewhere along the way, those two things had become mutually exclusive.

The end result was an explosion-shaped monstrosity so aggressively handcrafted that even the event staff instinctively slowed as they passed, visibly trying to determine whether they were looking at a support sign or some elaborate public safety warning.

To begin with, the thing was enormous.

Not merely easy to spot from the stands enormous.

No.

This was the sort of enormousness that looked perfectly capable of catching the attention of someone taking an examination on another planet. If Ollie somehow failed to notice it, then it wouldn’t be because the sign wasn’t large enough.

It’d be because he’d somehow gone blind somewhere between leaving the waiting room and walking into the arena.

The lettering, however, was what truly elevated the whole thing into a category of its own.

Owen couldn’t quite explain why looking at it made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.

If there’d been another Tesserian nearby, though, they would’ve recognized the feeling immediately.

Rather than simply writing "GO OLLIE!!" like every other supportive sibling in existence, Luca had painstakingly cut individual letters from old magazines and newspapers he’d long since accumulated in his cabin, then glued them onto the board one by one.

Unfortunately, because the alphabet differed, none of the characters could simply be cut out as they were. Instead, each Imperial letter had been painstakingly pieced together from several completely unrelated magazine cutouts.

The O was thick and looked as though it’d been made out of images ripped straight from the cover of a true-crime magazine.

The first L was assembled from cutouts taken from an expensive perfume advertisement.

The second L had apparently once promoted fertilizer.

The I glittered with metallic foil for reasons nobody, including Luca probably, could explain.

The final E was predominantly bright yellow, proudly borrowed from what looked suspiciously like a supermarket bread discount flyer.

Individually, none of the letters looked particularly alarming. But together, they looked exactly like someone demanding ransom.

In fact, the first time Xavier saw the sign being made, he found himself glancing once at his earnest little wife—whose cheeks were streaked with marker and dotted with bits of colored paper—before staring at the project far longer than was socially acceptable.

He figured that had something like that ever landed on his desk, his first instinct would’ve been to launch an immediate investigation.

Though without others knowing what his beloved was making, he wasn’t sure if anyone else would be able to identify the rather peculiar mugshot that occupied nearly half the entire sign, which was allegedly a rather realistic star.

Not the five-pointed shape that even they were used to calling a star, but the one that was generally burning, spherical and yet bulging in places.

He apparently wanted a star that the people of the Empire could recognize.

"..."

GOOD LUCK, BROTHER!

YOU CAN DO IT!

YOU’RE THE BEST MECHANIC!

I BELIEVE IN YOU!

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