LV.11
Slash—!
Adele tore two of the five silver cubes hanging from her waist and flung them forward.
Her ability was moonlight. With moonlight, she could do anything. The closer it was to a full moon, the stronger she became—but by the same token, she was nearly powerless in daylight when no moonlight shone. A finicky condition. That was why she always carried objects she had shaped from moonlight in advance.
The thrown cubes scattered into radiant moonlight midair, then gathered again at Adele’s gentle gesture into a silver golem. Two short legs, a broad torso, and a pair of massive arms long enough to touch the ground even while standing. No neck to speak of.
Snatch!
“Ehk?”
Adele seized Tania—who had been flinging fire beside her—around the waist and climbed onto the golem’s back.
Boom!
The golem, with Tania and Adele on its shoulders, kicked hard off the ground and began bounding toward the mountain summit.
Thud! Thud!
Each leap carried them several meters at a time. And when they reached about the midpoint of the mountain—
“Uoooooooh!”
A man blocking their path bellowed, his body swelling until he looked nearly eight feet tall—
Crash!
—and slammed Adele’s golem with a heavy blow. Crack! Fractures spiderwebbed across the golem’s arm where the man’s fist had landed square.
Seeing that, the man curled his lips in confidence and charged again, shouting as if determined to smash them to pieces.
“Who the hell are you?!”
“Isn’t it a little late to be asking that?”
They had already forced their way halfway up, after all.
Adele smiled faintly, and Tania beside her snapped her fingers with a sharp click.
Hiss—.
There was no sound of fire even catching. A blood-red flame compressed into a thin thread of light punched straight through the charging man’s throat—
Fwoooosh!
—and his upper body melted away without a trace under that overwhelming heat. Adele’s golem followed up at once, swatting the remaining lower half aside, then resumed its climb.
“That was more boring than I expected.”
“Right? If I’d known, I would’ve come alone.”
When Tania said it so flatly, Adele’s face fell with open disappointment.
“…Hmph.”
Tania shot her a look of pure displeasure, then closed her eyes and turned her head away.
Thud! Thud! Thud!
Even so, Adele’s golem never stopped. It leapt hard, sometimes crushing enemies that tried to bar the way, and before long they had reached the very front of the base.
Arms folded, staring the base down, Tania spoke again.
“How are we getting in? Want me to go first?”
“No need.”
“Then?”
Adele looked at her and beamed, then pointed a finger at the surprisingly large facility.
“Charge.”
Thud! The golem leapt once more with all its strength and plummeted toward the base—
KRAAAAAASH!
The outer wall shattered into fragments on impact, and the shock destroyed both of the golem’s arms as well.
“Crazy bitch…”
Tania muttered, staring at Adele with a look of pure exhaustion, but Adele let the remark slide right off. She gave the golem’s back a couple of light pats, and the silver construct—briefly still—started moving again, charging forward.
“…Do you even know where Eli is?”
“We’ll just have to find her from here.”
Tania finally sighed in resignation and shook her head. Normally the girl was meticulous about everything—but the moment anything involved Eli, her eyes spun and she charged in without a plan. She was smiling now, but inside she was almost certainly nowhere near as calm as she looked.
Bang! KRAAASH!
And when the silver golem smashed its way into the center, the sight that unfolded before them was—
“…What is this?”
—so horrific that even Tania went pale with shock.
Everywhere was red and blue. Delicate-looking crystal flowers filled the entire base. And among them, the corpses.
People who had turned to crystal mid-flight, or those whose heads had been skewered by pretty crystal blades, had gotten off relatively easy. There were bodies impaled through and through by thorns that had erupted from the floor without warning; people who seemed to have crystallized while being torn apart by crystal vines stretching from every direction; others whose whole bodies had been shredded to rags by razor vines; and some whose heads were simply gone, replaced by large, blooming red crystal flowers.
“Elysia…”
Adele murmured the name, fingertips brushing her own chin, a strange light kindling in both eyes.
Tania carefully reached toward a crystal flower packed thick along the wall—
Snatch! Adele caught her arm.
“Wh-what was that for all of a sudden?”
Startled, Tania snapped at her, but Adele said nothing. She simply tore another silver cube from her waist. In an instant the cube scattered into moonlight, then re-formed above the crystal flower into the shape of a mannequin. The moment it landed on both feet—
Crack-crack-crack-crack!
The crystal flowers shifted, vines growing out to wrap the mannequin’s entire body—
CRUNCH! CRACK! CRRRACK!
—and in a heartbeat tore it apart, shattering it to pieces. The spent mannequin dissolved back into mist and vanished into the air.
“….”
Tania shut her mouth in alarm. Adele pointed a finger at the door on the far side of the room.
“I think Elysia is through there.”
“The problem is how we get over there.”
There was nowhere in the room the crystal flowers hadn’t bloomed. Floor, walls, ceiling, pillars—packed so densely you couldn’t even tell what the original room had looked like.
Fwoosh.
Tania kindled a deep crimson flame on her palm and swept her hand. The fire followed her gesture, struck the crystal flowers, and tried to swallow them to melt them down. Adele watched with interest, then turned to Tania with a smile.
“Not working, is it?”
“…I know. Shut up.”
In truth, Tania’s flames hadn’t melted Elysia’s crystals even a little. Brow faintly furrowed, Tania raked her falling hair back once.
“This is weird. Eli’s ability isn’t supposed to be this strong.”
Ordinarily, if Tania wanted to melt those crystals, she could do it without much trouble. But this…
“Well, she’s not her usual self, is she?”
“…?”
Tania looked at her as if to ask what that meant. Adele, still watching a single crystal flower wreathed in fire, answered flatly.
“Obviously. Elysia is LV.11.”
“…Eli is LV.11?”
“Mm.”
LV.11.
At first glance, with the maximum level at 10, it might sound like a title for transcendents stronger than that—but it wasn’t. Strength at LV.9 and above was all classified as LV.10 to begin with. LV.11 was a level granted only to ability users of a special case.
The criteria for assigning levels varied by the nature of the ability: what trigger or condition activated it; how versatile it was; how long it could be sustained; how finely it could be controlled; and, for combat abilities, how much power it could output—or for non-combat abilities, what they could actually do. Levels were decided by those five measures.
And LV.11 was given to ability users for whom those five rules simply did not apply. For example, when an ability’s power kept changing in fundamental ways. Of course other Awakened weren’t always consistent either—output rose or fell with condition all the time. But LV.11 was different. It wasn’t that the output fluctuated with condition; it was fair to say the very quality of the ability itself changed.
Elysia’s ability was Crystallization. The activation condition was her tears. And that ability shifted wildly according to her emotions.
Ordinarily, control was easy. The strength dropped a little, but she could harden her tears into whatever shape she wanted. When a particular emotion grew too large for her to contain, though, the ability began to run wild. When she was happy or having fun, the surroundings filled with crystal flowers. When she was angry or grieving, impossibly sharp thorns grew instead.
That didn’t mean control became completely impossible in those states. But Crystallization would take a form a little different from what she intended. If she tried to make a weapon while happy, the result would be a blade so beautiful anyone would stop and stare. If she tried to make a flower while furious, she would get vines thick with thorns. Depending on her emotional state, power, hardness, even how large a single teardrop could swell—everything changed.
And the most special trait of Elysia’s ability was something else entirely. When it touched blood, it absorbed that blood and became more gorgeous, sharper, and harder still. The result of that was the red crystal flowers filling the room before their eyes.
But that wasn’t why Adele was looking at the scene with such interest.
This isn’t normal.
She looked again. Beautiful crystal flowers everywhere, and sharp thorns that had run people through. Vines bristling with spines that had torn people apart, and elegantly designed blades that had split heads in two. Which meant she was feeling joy and rage, happiness and sorrow, all at once?
Her current state was clearly abnormal.
“Haa… Elysia.”
Adele covered her own face with one hand and murmured the name on a small sigh. But the faint smile that rose at the corner of her mouth was something she couldn’t help.