The Return
One, two, three, four...
I counted the Immortals wandering the canyon. By a rough estimate, there were a little over twenty of them.
The corpses of monsters slain in the last battle lay rotting across the ground. Shattered boulders tumbled haphazardly in every direction, squeezing an already narrow pass even tighter.
"So even creepy monsters like these exist..."
I frowned as I watched the Immortals draw closer.
I'd seen reanimated-corpse types of monsters before. But the Immortals were far more unsettling than skeletons or zombies — they still looked exactly as they had in life. Save for a pair of empty sockets blazing with fire, their flesh hadn't even properly decayed, and they still wore the same gear. The only difference was that any wounds they'd taken when the monsters killed them remained unrestored as they moved.
The most horrifying part was that they looked so little different from the living that I could recognize their faces. I didn't know their names, but they were faces I'd definitely seen before. Even if we'd only briefly belonged to the same subjugation force, a face left unchanged was bound to look familiar.
The monster army Bloodstain had led into Horn Canyon had been far larger than the kingdom had anticipated, and the subjugation force's casualties had been inevitable. But watching these Immortals wander before my eyes, denied their rest, I felt a strange sense of responsibility. If I, who'd been serving as Mireia's proxy commander from behind the lines, had made my calls a little faster — could I have reduced the number of dead?
A moment later, one of the Immortals raised its sword and charged. This was a type of monster I'd never faced, so I needed to start conservatively and take the measure of its strength first.
Clang!
I blocked the Immortal's sword with my own, packed full of mana. A sharp metallic ring filled my ears. The force of the downward strike traveled through my blade, up my arm, and into my body.
Hmm. So that's about how it feels.
Surprisingly, the Immortal's attack wasn't all that fierce. The next strike came immediately, and I sidestepped it.
Krrrk—!
The Immortal's blade sliced through the boulder behind me. It was a fairly large rock, but it split as cleanly as if it were timber.
"What? That destructive power..."
A cold sweat ran down my back as I watched the boulder get cut in two. The attack I'd just blocked with my sword definitely hadn't felt like it packed that kind of force. I'd even thought it was nothing special, because I'd stopped it without much effort. Apparently I'd been wrong.
Yunoa was thrown off by how vast the gap was between the strength he believed he possessed and the strength he actually had.
The discrepancy was so enormous that the very scale he used to weigh power had broken.
That was when the Narration suddenly spoke to me.
The gap between the strength I thought I had and my actual strength was too big? What was that supposed to mean?
"Whoa!"
The Immortal's next slash came for my waist, and I quickly jerked back. The other Immortals nearby were starting to close in on me as well.
Power was a relative thing.
Yunoa, who'd grown insufferably cocky just from learning to apply a little mana, was still as dim-witted as ever. There was no need to flinch just because an opponent's attack looked strong. The denseness of failing to realize it even after experiencing that very attack firsthand with his own body.
What good was placing a dragon-slaying sword in someone's hand? If he treated it like a blade for catching rats and never used it, it was worthless.
The Narration spoke to me, mixing in her usual venom.
Relative power. A strike powerful enough to split a boulder, yet one that hadn't felt all that strong when I'd actually taken it head-on. That left only one answer.
The Immortal was going easy on me, specifically?
Obviously not. If I'd reached that conclusion, the Narration would've been waiting to call me an idiot — but I wasn't quite that stupid.
It wasn't that the Immortal's attacks were weak. It was that I, on the receiving end, was far stronger. The unusual mana I'd gained from Einblad's Magic Stone Prison was apparently having a tremendous effect.
If my old self had taken that Immortal's strike, I never would have blocked it cleanly. But now I could. And easily, at that.
To confirm the conclusion I'd reached, I decided not to dodge this time. The Immortal's sword came for my neck.
Clang!
I raised my blade and blocked it.
If the Immortal had inherited its abilities from life, then the sword it swung would be packed with mana. But the mana filling my blade far exceeded his. That was why the attack's destructive force was canceled out, and I could stand there feeling only a slight jolt through my body.
"Next..."
The Immortals were swarming in. It was about time to clean this up.
I took a step back and assumed a horizontal-slash stance. If simply filling my body and sword with mana gave me this much defensive capability, what about offense?
Focusing my mind on the mana packed into the blade, I swept my sword in a wide horizontal arc. At the moment the blade traced its great trajectory, I forcefully released the sword's mana into the air. It was the first technique I'd learned after becoming an adventurer: Sword Qi.
Shhhk—!
The Sword Qi generated along the wide horizontal arc punched straight through the Immortals' waists. The color of it wasn't the blue it used to be — it had taken on a strange hue, closer to violet.
A few of the Immortals raised their weapons to protect themselves from the incoming blast. Those in the back even generated magical barriers. But the violet Sword Qi, streaking at blistering speed, punched through all of it.
BOOM!
The power far exceeded my expectations. Even after piercing through the Immortals, the Sword Qi kept flying until it slammed into the rock wall and vanished with a thunderous crash. A gouge easily more than ten meters deep had been carved into the massive cliff face.
The Immortals hit by the Sword Qi all collapsed to the ground, their waists or legs severed.
"Wh... what is this."
My hands trembled at the unfamiliar power. I'd known the strange mana I'd gained in Einblad would have an effect, but I never imagined it would be this much.
The fact that the mana I could wield had grown stronger was one thing — but the fact that even I hadn't adapted to it yet was a bit of a problem. Dealing with these Immortals had become easy enough. But when I'd launched that Sword Qi, I'd felt like I'd put far too much force into it, because I hadn't properly adapted to my own power.
Was it because I'd taken in this alien mana that my body had never accepted before? This might turn out to be a surprisingly troublesome problem.
Right now I was alone, and the only things in front of me were Immortals that needed to be put down, so it wasn't an issue. But if I had allies beside me — or if friend and foe were mixed together — a failure to control my mana would be fatal.
If there had been an ally at the end of that Sword Qi's trajectory instead of a rock wall? Just thinking about it was horrifying.
Yunoa had finally come to understand the new problem that had taken root in him.
The mana wielded by Ludmila, queen of the Pureblood Demons, and the mana wielded by humans were of radically different natures. The mana he had taken into his body was powerful enough to rewrite even the nature of the mana he had previously accumulated through Mana Conversion.
The Narration added certainty to my thoughts.
When I'd been trapped in the Magic Stone Prison, the mana that had felt red had been beyond my control no matter how hard I concentrated. So I'd passed the blue mana I could handle through the prison and fused the two natures together. The result was stronger mana — but apparently it wasn't only the advantages that had merged.
"Looks like I'm going to need a lot of practice..."
I adjusted my grip on the sword and looked at the remaining Immortals. From here on, I'd take them down one at a time, with restrained mana.
"Hahh..."
I took a deep breath, focused my mind again, and filled my sword with mana. This time, instead of launching Sword Qi, I closed the distance and cut an Immortal directly.
Slash!
The Immortal's body split on a diagonal as easily as cheese. The thing I'd been worried about — losing control of the swing and cutting somewhere I didn't mean to — didn't happen. My center of gravity was solid, and the sensation of swinging the sword felt the same as always. The cutting power, though, was on a completely different level.
Good. So the mana-control problem only crops up with the technical applications, then.
This time I tried converting the mana in the blade into flame. Normally, mana-fire would ignite along the edge, putting it in a state I could use like a Flame Sword.
FWOOOOSH!
Violet flames erupted violently from the blade, stretching several meters beyond the sword itself. The fire pouring from the steel swirled and swallowed the Immortal in front of me before I, startled, let go of the hilt. The sword hit the ground, and the flames that had been raging wildly from the blade scattered into the air and vanished.
"Th... that scared me..."
Okay, this is a real problem. I have zero control over this.
Thinking that I somehow needed to find a way to technically control this tremendous mana, I picked up my sword again and charged at the remaining Immortals.