Chapter 88: What's the plan?

"Now I'd like to announce the strategy for the survival battle."

Sophie said on the training field the next day. We've only just gathered today, but it looks like she’s going to announce the strategy first.

"I'm sure there will be times when you'll want to interrupt me, but I'll give you a good explanation, so please just listen until I'm done."

Is it the kind of strategy that makes you want to interrupt? More importantly, no one said anything about the fact that Sophie; the deputy leader, was in charge instead of me; the leader, but is that okay?

"A lot of survival battles take the form of protecting something in your army while taking or destroying something in another army."

It's not easy because you have to do that while against four schools at the same time. If any of the schools were to collude with each other, there would be no way to win, but would that be okay?

"I'm not going to lie, the purpose of the survival battle is to understand the strength of your opponent, and it has little to do with winning or losing the school battle itself. The main aim of the inter-school competition is the brute-force battle."

I was about to interrupt, but I held back. Sophie was getting to something, but I didn't think there was no reason for the survival match.

"But the countries that took third and fourth place in past survival matches have never won. And other countries won’t think about such things but take the survival match seriously. In such a situation, if we cut corners and focus only on the brute-force matches to win, we won't get a good evaluation from the people around, so we’ll aim for first place in the survival match as well."

In conclusion, it was a simple matter of aiming for first place in the survival battle as well. I wondered why she’d gone to such great lengths to say this, but I guess it was so that everyone won’t be too nervous about it.

"It's important to know who and how many people will be in charge of the offense and defense."

That's certainly important, if you're too much on the offensive or defensive, you won't win. But that doesn't mean you have to have both equally. And I'm sure the other countries will try to defeat us first since we don't have any foreign students.

"If it's easy to beat them, we want to beat them before the other countries do. Considering this I’d like Zero-niisama, who’s also the leader, to take charge of the offensive. While we're defending, you'll have to defeat all three national teams."

Ah, Sophie's getting reckless again…

"I think the strongest of the foreign students will probably go on the offensive, and the relatively weaker ones will be in charge of the defense."

No, even if that's the case, it doesn't change the fact that I'm in a tough spot.

"You don't have to fight with anyone. You just have to do something about what the other person is protecting. Can you do that?"

I think I can do that. Sophie says I just have to keep dodging all the enemy attacks and that's what I'm good at. I suddenly realized that I'm not the only one having a hard time with this plan.

"I can do it."

"Thank you. The time limit for the survival battle is three hours. We don't want to spend three hours defending ourselves, so we'll have Zero nii-sama finish within an hour."

Whoa! The moment she got my approval, she became even more demanding! I think Sophie would make a good con artist. Hmmm? What's a good con artist?

"That's all from me. Do you have any questions about the plan?"

No one said anything when Sophie asked that. Well, I guess so. How could I complain?

"So let's go with this plan. Then let's start training."

At first glance, you would think that I would have the hardest part of this mission. However, the most important and hardest part of this mission will be Sophie and Shana. They have to protect something while dealing with multiple foreign students. I had told them that I wouldn't take much time to defeat the other team, that I would do it within an hour. But the truth is that they can't defend for three hours, so I need to finish as soon as possible.

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