Ditter

Ditter (ディッター, dittaa) is a competitive sport played by apprentice knights at the Royal Academy.

Ditter is a sport played by nobles and requires mana and a highbeast to take part. Usually it is only the students taking the Knight's Course that play. While there are no rules to forbid others from participating, it is exceptionally rare for anyone to do so.

Archduke candidates in particular are expected to stay off the field, though it is not unusual for them to help with preparations and setting of general strategies prior to a match, before joining the spectators. Usually the teams are made up entirely of apprentice knights, though there are no rules against anyone else participating. So in theory apprentice scholars or attendants and even archduke candidates can play, but something like that is very much out of the ordinary.

According to a comment by Justus ditter is "now" a sport for apprentice knights, hinting that in the past students of other courses were more common to participate.

There is no limitation on the use of potions or magic tools. Injuring opponents is also not punished.

There exist different varients of ditter and the number and size of teams is also variable. In general the number of players is decided by the smallest participating team, leaving the duchies with larger rosters of knight's course students with an overall advantage, since they can choose their best players, while the smallest duchies have to literally put their entire roster on the field.

For weaker members of such large duchies however this arrangement can be a disadvantage, since it can result in them never getting the chance to participate in any matches. Performance in ditter is an important part of an apprentice knight's resume and will decide which jobs they will be offered back in their home-duchies or the chance to become a Sovereignty noble.

The most prestigous and anticipated ditter match is the annual Interduchy Tournament, in which all duchies participate. In the past they played treasure-stealing ditter, but due to the diminished numbers of nobles this has been switched to speed ditter after the civil war, since there are some duchies with too few knight's course students to put up a viable team for the traditional kind of ditter.

Depending on the occasion and the played variant of ditter, matches can either be fought out in a stadium attached to the knight's building or outside over the entirety of the academy's area. In the former case the home-bases are designated parts of the arena, while in the latter case the dormitory buildings of a team's home-duchy serve this purpose.

This form of ditter is the simplest and most straight-forwards kind and thus also the most viable to play with very small teams. The participating teams need to kill as many feybeasts as possible in a certain amount of time. With no objective to defend, there is less strategy and defense involved than in other kinds of ditter, weighing it more toward speed and raw strength.

Spoiler from Part 4 Volume 4 While the switch to speed ditter benefits the lesser duchies to a degree since it addresses their manpower shortage, it has a noticeable negative effect on the abilities of apprentice knights to coordinate and defend charges. It also negatively impacted the cooperation between knight and scholar students, since it was common for scholars to make magic tools for the knights to use in the interduchy tournament, which completely died down after the switch.

Normally this kind of ditter is not played in the stadium, but rather over the entire campus, with the duchy dormitories serving as the home-territory of the respective teams, though smaller matches in the stadium can also be arranged. One such example is a match that was arranged to decide a dispute over ownership of the magic tools Schwartz and Weiss between the duchies of Dunkelfelger and Ehrenfest.

The goal of this varient is to defend a feybeast that is designated as the "treasure" of your team and kill or steal the treasures of the opposing teams. Should a treasure beast be eliminated - regardless of the source - the duchy counts as defeated. The teams actually start without a treasure and each team needs to first capture a feybeast and bring it back to their home-base.

While it is within the rules to capture an opponents treasure by stealing it and bringing it back to a team's home territory, there is no incentive to do so within the rules of the game. Most participants prefer the pracitcality of just killing their opponents' treasure over the prestige and bragging rights of the much more difficult capture, since dragging a beast back home while hounded by it's owners is far more difficult and risky than just destroying it and moving on quickly.

The home-territories of the teams are fitted with a magic cicle that will generally prevent feybeasts from escaping under their own power. In the stadium those circles are set into the floor.

At the start of the match, the feybeasts are summoned by the professors and left to wander completely free. This means they can and probably will attack the students. Thus it is necessary for the students to attack and weaken them, in order to capture one and protect themselves. This requires a careful balancing act, since leaving the beast too strong is dangerous to the defender, but weakening it too much will make it easier for opponents to kill or steal it.


 * One of the most vulnerable moments for a team is when they have just captured their treasure and are in the process of bringing it back to their home-territory. At that moment they are potentially weakened from subduing the beast and at least one member of the team is busy with keeping it under control. Thus one strategy is to ambush the opponent at this very moment, though it is important to stay far enough away from the competitor's home terretory to not get into a crossfire between their capture-team and their base defenders.
 * As Rozemyne learns upon returning to Ehrenfest such attacks were one of the most basic stategies, but with the switch to speed ditter after the purge, much of the old knowledge has become sparse, turning this once completely normal way of doing things into a surprise attack, even if only temporary.
 * A particularly devious strategy that Rozemyne of Ehrenfest came up with was to intentionally feed an opponent's feybeast a feystone infused with strong mana and sprinkled with a foul-tasting potion. This made the feybeast recover it's full strength and grow considerably in size, while also making it rampage around from the terrible taste in it's mouth, throwing the enemy team in disarray and allowing Ehrenfest's students to sneak in a killing blow, while their opponents were busy fending off the rampaging beast.