A Junior Mage Pays His Respects
The last bandit crumpled to the ground with a heavy thud. No blood spilled from him. The flame of life that had dwelt in his body had simply gone out.
Absorbing a person's life force was never something I relished. But taking another man's vitality only to erase it for nothing was not right either. Better that it serve as someone's life, at least. If their malice could become justice — if it could save someone — that would be a kind of atonement.
An old remark of Dreygan's surfaced unbidden, and I shook it off.
"Insolent brat. Tsk, tsk."
Twisted ideology or not, it was still better than being a mindless killer. Better than the men lying in front of me, who had murdered for nothing but their own greed.
A groan rose behind me.
The only man among them I had not killed. Mele's father.
I turned. Mele was dragging him back with everything she had. The moment her eyes met mine she flinched and began to tremble, then hurried to shield him with her own body and bowed her head with careful deference.
"H-Haren— n-no, Lord Mage! My father killed people, but he's not a bad man! He told the villagers over and over that we should give up banditry and find another way to live!"
I had no way of knowing whether that was true. What I could feel was how desperately she wanted to keep her father alive.
This village would never function again. Most of the grown men were dead. At this point, it was fair to say the village's life was over. Surviving by banditry was no longer possible. They had been powerless to begin with.
"Please. Please spare us and the children. We were wrong."
My gaze drifted past Mele to the children behind her. The village elders were one thing, but the children had committed no crime. Mele, who had smiled so brightly at me only moments ago. The children who had teased and played around me. All that hung over them now was fear.
They looked just as I once had — staring up at the mage who had killed my father.
The justice I became a mage to uphold...
Was this even justice, in anyone else's eyes? Not in theirs, at least. But I would not let myself become the mage from that day. I would not grow drunk on power and swing it around like a fool, without a shred of responsibility.
So I resolved to take responsibility for the power I had wielded.
In the end, the root of the problem was the mage's servants. To be honest, something about them smelled wrong too. I didn't know much about mages — but I had become one myself. A mage was a being who created a world of their own. What a mage needed was mana stones, not human corpses.
If a mage really was involved...
I had sought power to stop mages and those who harbored malice. Today might finally be the day I saw my justice through.
"I— I know where."
Mele's father opened his eyes, cradling his ruined jaw. He looked over the dead with a grim, unsettled gaze.
"...Yeah. I figured a day like this would come eventually."
There was no guilt in those eyes. Only the look of a man who had known this was coming and had finally accepted it. He, too, had killed people and lived off what he took from them. That much was fact.
I had not spared him for any particular reason. He had simply been the first one I ran into, and I had not had the chance to use Instant Death Magic.
"Our villagers were only coerced by us. Won't you take my life in exchange?"
I had already shown them goodwill. The moment I saved Carlson, they would have understood I had no intention of killing them all. If that had been the plan, I would never have saved him in the first place. He knew that perfectly well.
"Father!"
Mele cried out, but he looked only at me. It was the face of a man prepared to carry the weight of his sins. Selfish — but still better than the kind of man who sneered at the price of what he had done.
"I have no particular intention of doing anything to the rest of the villagers."
"...That's a relief."
Ease washed over his face. He pushed Mele's supporting hands away and rose to his feet.
"Making an enemy of a mage's servants is the same as making an enemy of the mage himself. Are you sure about this?"
Picking a fight with a mage was insanity. But—
"I have no intention of fighting a mage either. There's a chance a mage isn't even involved."
"...Not involved?"
His eyes flew wide.
"B-but they used Magic Tools! Ones you couldn't even find in the capital!"
"Magic Tools, you say?"
That made things a little less certain. But there was no reason not to check. More than that — mages did not go out of their way to make enemies of each other. That was something Zorbanof had taught me.
Mages usually had backing. That was why mages of lesser standing avoided fighting one another — a personal spat could easily swell into something far larger. I had taken every scrap of Zorbanof's advice, figuring it would serve me well. That was why I wanted to confirm the facts this time.
If it really was a mage, I would back off, or simply observe the courtesies. But if it was something else...
My eyes gleamed quietly. I could not just leave it. Impersonating a mage and using that to prey on people — that was evil. It was unjust.
Mele's father flinched at the look in my eyes, but he stayed still. He had already offered me his life. If this was for the sake of the village, he had no grounds to object.
"Let's go."
To confirm the truth.
The Eldark Mountains. The largest mountain range in the Runheim Kingdom. Packed with monsters, and just as packed with reclusive mages and hidden mountain villages. I had never heard the exact length, but they said it stretched across the entire kingdom and all the way to the Empire. That said enough.
We were following the ridgeline. Before I knew it, the sun was setting again. It was a full day's walk through the range to reach our destination.
"That's quite a distance."
"We'll be there soon enough."
My guide was Mele's father, Melen. He moved through the mountains with a bandit's ease, and thanks to him our pace never flagged.
Before long the range bent. After we crossed one more peak, the ground sank away into a naturally formed plaza of enormous size. A fortress of timber and stone stood at its heart. Lights burned here and there — the marks of long habitation.
"That's the place."
I studied it for a while, slowly stroking my chin. Even at a glance, it was far too crude for a mage to live in. It did not look quite right for a mage's servants either.
"Is this really it?"
"It is. We've been offering corpses here on a regular schedule."
If this was the place, I only needed to check.
"Going down to look?"
"No. No need."
I did not have to inspect them one by one. I had a reason not to.
I had the Third Eye, after all.
I raised my arm, and the eye opened.
Third Eye
I turned the Third Eye on the plaza.
With a low roar, countless murky white flames bloomed straight through the walls.
Melen looked on in confusion. I swept the flames for a long time, and at last I had my answer.
"There's no mage in there."
Not a single one. Everyone inside was human.
"Th-then the mage could be somewhere else—"
"That's something we'll have to find out."
Confirming there was no mage on site was enough for now.
"You're not seriously going down there? There's two hundred of them at the least."
I had not expected him to worry about me.
"Melen. Do you remember what Miss Mele called me earlier?"
He blinked. Then the meaning of my words hit him, and his face went deathly white.
The title Mele had used for me. Mage.
"Ah."
That was all he managed. I started down the slope.
I reached the bottom with a soft tap of my boots. The fortress stood directly ahead. I walked toward it openly, with nothing to hide.
A sentry on the wall spotted me and shouted.
"Hey! Who the hell are you!"
He leveled an arrow at me.
"I heard there's a senior mage residing here."
"You show up out of nowhere talking garbage? You out of your damn mind?"
"You even know where you are, crawling up here?!"
Another sentry appeared beside him and joined the shouting. I looked at them for a moment, then began to put strength into my legs.
As long as monsters roamed these mountains, the people who lived here came in two kinds. Small villages, like the one I had just left — or the opposite, settlements that raised enormous fortresses and stood their ground against the beasts.
The walls they had built were high. They had made them tall and thick enough that no monster could break through. Anything less would have been overrun and torn apart long ago. The height was dizzying.
And still I dropped into a crouch, preparing to jump.
A human being can barely leap their own height. That is the limit of the earth's pull and the elasticity of muscle. There are exceptions — creatures like Dreygan, who barely qualify as human — but for most people, that is the ceiling.
A body that held mana was a different matter.
Mana poured into the muscles of my legs. Mana I had created by constructing a world of my own. I could flood it into any part of my body I wished. Mana, true to its name, was power. A power human beings had never originally possessed.
Most mages were born as mages. They had no need to train the body; they only needed to learn magic. I was not like them. I had lived a life with absolutely no talent for magic, and I had spent far longer as a monster hunter than as a mage.
Which meant converting mana into raw force came more easily to me than magic itself.
A sound like a bomb going off — and my body shot into the air.
It was a leap no human body should have been capable of. That leap carried me over the wall, and I landed on the far side.
"Gah!"
"What the—?!"
The sentries, caught utterly off guard, sat down hard on the stone. In the torchlight they stared up at me as if I were a monster. Of course they did. A normal human clearing that wall was unthinkable. The only things that could do it were monsters — or something close enough.
Fear flooded their eyes. They hurried to level their spears, but they knew perfectly well how meaningless that was.
"Tell them inside."
A chilling smile wandered across my face as I looked down at them through the moonlight.
Let's see just how well you people can lie.