The Boundary (1)
The Boundary.
The vast expanse lying between Serzila and the Outer Realm was divided into two zones. The dividing line was the Second Wall, raised by Serzila long ago; everything on its near side was the First Boundary, and the space beyond it, closer to the Outer Realm, was the Second.
The First Boundary lay within Serzila's reach, the Second within the Outer Realm's. Just as Serzila's knight orders scoured the First, the mages of the Outer Realm prowled the Second at their leisure — and every so often, they would slip quietly over the Second Wall to infiltrate the First.
Serzila never did the same. Forget exploring the Second Boundary; it had never even finished mapping the First.
'Because we grew complacent.'
They knew full well that the Outer Realm could invade at any moment, and yet they had never once taken the threat to heart.
Then again, they could afford not to. Serzila had that kind of power. It held five Sword Masters, the Grand Duke among them, and its knight orders outclassed any elite force on the continent.
Five — the same number the Empire possessed. And beyond that stood Elain, a genius without precedent, who would one day remake herself into the strongest on the continent.
Serzila, in other words, had earned the right to its arrogance.
Had Elain been a little less lazy, had the North kept a proper watch, Serzila could handily have repelled the Outer Realm's invasion.
'And if we couldn't stomach that, we should at least have crossed into the Second Boundary and kept watch on the bastards' movements.'
Dominate the Boundary, and they could at least have read the omens of invasion. But they couldn't. Arrogant Serzila. Ignorant North.
So why did the North merely watch the Outer Realm? Knowing the danger it harbored, why never once cleanse it?
"What was there to be afraid of?"
Elain, who had risen above the Grand Duke himself, could not understand. Forget marching on them — she had never even set foot in the Second Boundary.
"The Emperor — what in the hell was that bastard afraid of?"
It was the imperial decree. The reasoning: there was no call to provoke an enemy content to lie quiet.
To Serzila — raided by Outer Realm mages whenever they felt bored — that was a load of bullshit. To the regressed Harad, it was the funniest joke imaginable.
"We should have driven out Enberk. Even if it meant killing the Emperor and his children, we should have usurped the throne. That bloodline was incompetent — so thoroughly, so perfectly incompetent that I half suspected someone, somewhere, had threatened to kill them if they ever showed a shred of ability."
And so, before her death, Elain had carried those regrets. Even as she rued her own laziness and negligence, she burned with fury at having failed to claim the Boundary. She should have defied the decree outright and taken back the Second Wall.
Had she done so, the regressed Harad, too, would have known the Boundary well. Like Elain, he had rarely come and gone here; he hadn't fully grasped even the First, and the Second was all but unknown to him.
'Less torn than I remember, I see.'
But that torn sky — that much he knew intimately. It was the residue of mana seeping and curdling across countless years, and at the same time it was magic. The Outer Realm knew how to wield the corruption of mana.
'That rift runs all the way to Serzila.'
Fifteen years from now, that sky would be Serzila's sky. The sight of every manner of magic plummeting like meteors from those split-open fissures — that, he would never forget...
"Come here."
Harad pulled Ellen to his side.
In the Boundary's sky, only snow never fell. Ice came down instead, and at times lightning poured like rain.
"Poison, this time."
Right now, it was poison that fell like rain.
"Conserve your aura."
"You don't need to conserve your mana?"
"Different efficiency."
The poison evaporated the instant it fell anywhere near Harad, spitting out smoke, and the blade-wind caught that smoke and carried it far away. And yet the mana she could feel from him was faint — an amount almost embarrassing to call mana.
Before long, even that faint thread vanished. The rain of poison had stopped. The Boundary's peculiar chill and razor winds remained, of course, but they had no purchase on him.
"The Boundary is rather refreshing, actually. Serzila ran hot."
A chill that could freeze a person solid in an instant, and Harad found it pleasant. Ellen, standing beside him, felt not chill but warmth.
"Isn't that a bit absurd?"
As far as Ellen knew, even the mages of the Outer Realm couldn't operate in the Boundary without raising a considerable amount of mana. Yet Harad moved through it freely on a trickle. If all it held was chill and wind, there was no need to spend mana at all — simply for having been born with a fine Origin —
"That's what talent is. Like your Grand Duke."
"...I can't argue with that."
Because his was not mere fire, but the Sun. Ellen felt anew just how singular Harad's Origin was. Just as he'd said, it might be much like hers. When it came to fire, no concept in existence ran vaster than the Sun.
The ground beneath their feet turned soft. Snow crunched underfoot where dark-red mud had been. Glancing back, Ellen saw the poison rain still falling along the path they'd walked — but before her eyes, a snowbound mountain scene spread out instead.
"Was it mutated by the mana of a poison-aligned Origin?"
Ellen asked, pointing back the way they'd come.
"I'd say that's likely, but I couldn't swear to it. It has been left to fester for a very long time."
A Boundary where mutation had heaped upon mutation until everything tangled together. Tracing any of it back to its source was all but impossible. Of course, even in a Boundary like this there were pockets of singular clarity — but that wasn't what they had come to find.
The environment shifted again. As though a line had been drawn across the ground, everything changed at some invisible threshold: in place of the snowbound world stretched stone-hard ground and twisted trees.
The trunks were jet-black from root to crown, and the branches, instead of reaching outward, curled inward until each tree wound itself into a spiral, like a colossal tower. Where leaves should have been, small things like eyeballs hung from the branches, glowing with a light of their own and rolling slowly as they watched their surroundings.
Between the trees, dark-red boulders lay scattered. Their surfaces were pocked with tiny holes, and from those holes came the low sound of breathing.
"...Magical beasts?"
It was a sight Ellen had never seen. Nothing within Serzila's search range looked like this.
"The trees are beasts. The stones are beasts that died."
Harad identified them at a glance.
"Though if any of them had the wits to take offense, I imagine they would."
They were trees and rocks, merely warped by mana. And yet the world deemed everything steeped in mana a demon, or a demon's minion.
"Let's keep moving."
"You're not killing them?"
"Not worth absorbing."
Killing them would yield only a pittance of mana. Better to husband that strength against the unknown.
Then, abruptly, Harad stopped. They had come upon a river of orange fluid — which was flowing upward, from below to above. Harad pointed at the footprints at its edge.
"A person's?"
"A mage's trace. Not an old one, either. There's mana on it."
Ellen could sense nothing from the footprints. But she didn't contradict him; she had already conceded that, in sensing mana at least, Harad was the better of the two.
"So it's nearby?"
Crouched over the prints, Ellen's eyes lit up. An Outer Realm mage. She wanted to meet one. She wanted to fight one.
"It might be. It might not. It may well have gone back already."
Harad gestured toward the Second Wall, far in the distance, then started walking along the river.
Water burst upward without warning. The orange fluid was acidic — it evaporated before it could so much as touch Harad. Through the spray, a reaching arm caught fire.
Keeeyaaagh!
A grotesque shriek tore out alongside the stench of searing flesh. The flames devouring the arm turned viscous, and dragged something up out of the river.
It was a beast Ellen had never seen: all upper body and nothing below, with a head like a fish crossed with a shark. The fire clinging to its freakishly long arm spread, and swallowed the creature whole.
The stench was thoroughly unpleasant. To Ellen, at least. She glanced aside — Harad was drooling.
"Are you going to eat it?"
"No."
His eyes were bloodshot crimson with raw impulse, and yet the man somehow kept his composure. The flames bored into the beast's chest, seized the heart, burned it free, and offered its mana up to Harad's own heart.
"A beast like that — 2nd Circle?"
"On the threshold of it. From the 2nd Circle up, they don't die this easily. Not when I'm still only 2nd Circle myself."
"You said it was a 2nd Circle that fought like a 3rd."
"Meaning its raw power is still 2nd Circle. There's a ceiling on output."
He was simply using the experience and technique of a past life to artfully mask the shortfall. That technique was a 5th-circle technique, to be sure — but he couldn't afford carelessness. There were limits to what technique alone could bridge.
The plain truth was that Harad, right now, had no confidence he could kill or subdue Ellen. However clever his tricks, that monstrous woman would smash every last one of them.
Harad walked on along the river. The water surged at intervals, and each time, he burned a beast down as though he had been expecting it. The scene had played out a good ten times already, yet his mana never dwindled — he was drinking in the beasts' mana with every kill.
"Mages have it good, don't they? Getting stronger this easily."
Kill a man who bore aura, and your aura did not grow. Divine power was the same. Those things were only ever spent, and grew by inches through the spending — like muscle torn and rebuilt. Mana was no different, and yet mages alone had shortcuts like this one.
"It doesn't grow quite that easily."
Harad said, immolating another beast as it lunged.
"And yet your mana hasn't budged."
The flames drank down the beast's heart. The mana he'd spent on the kill came flooding back.
"This is closer to recovery than growth. That beast's circle was lower than mine."
As if to prove the point, Harad let his mana bleed out beyond his body. Ellen's eyes narrowed as she watched. Certainly, nothing about him seemed visibly different. His mana had grown only a hair since he'd killed the innkeeper the night before.
"What you can take from a circle below your own is thinner than you'd think."
A 2nd-circle Harad needed to set his sights on beasts of the 2nd Circle or higher. Only then could he hope to grow.
"Well. Eating a heart straight from the chest — that's not such a bad way at all."
Consuming a heart directly was the most effective method there was. Ellen knew that too. It was why the world called mages demons.
She pictured Harad tearing into a raw heart, and her brow creased. A revolting image. More revolting still if the heart in question had belonged not to a beast, but to a mage.
"Have you ever eaten one?"
"Regrettably, not yet."
In his past life, a few times. Even then, he could have counted them on one hand. Because someone had hated it, fiercely.
"There's someone who hates that?"
Someone who hated it. When he'd killed the innkeeper the night before, Harad had said just that as he burned the heart with magic and drank it in.
"There is."
"How remarkably human of you."
It was not a way of thinking that befitted a mage. Probably the influence of whoever it was he minded disappointing.
Had there been a woman? Perhaps a match arranged for him back in Aigar — though no such bond would have lasted to the present day.
Ellen wasn't particularly curious. To her, Harad was simply that kind of man. What interested her was what he knew — not knowing him.
Then, all at once, the footprints from the beginning came into view. It had been that way since the beasts' ambushes ceased; until now, the prints had been swallowed by the boisterously splashing orange river. They traced the river's course.
Harad had been following them from the very start.
'Not because he wanted to devour the river's beasts.'
That had merely been incidental.
'Footprints.'
Harad had called them the trace of an Outer Realm mage. He was almost certainly right. He had yet to say a single wrong thing, and this place lay outside the search range of Serzila's knight orders.
Who else but an Outer Realm mage would leave footprints in a place like this? Which meant that if they kept following them, they might yet come face to face with one.
Flushed, Ellen rested her hand on her pommel. Excitement. Because in all her life, she had never once crossed paths with an Outer Realm mage. However many times she accompanied the knight orders on their sweeps, all she ever met were beasts.
And her irritation was close to boiling over. It was fine that she had finally made it to the Boundary — but she hadn't accomplished a single thing. The sum total of Ellen's achievements so far was spectating while Harad devoured magical beasts.
'The First Boundary. Mages detected here average the 3rd Circle. The 4th, on rare occasions.'
In terms of aura, that meant seasoned knights on average, and knight-commanders at the rare peak. Put simply: every last one of them was beneath her. She had never lost a sparring match to any knight who wasn't a Sword Master, and the battlefield would tell much the same story. Mid-duel or after, Ellen had always had strength to spare...
'This man is the problem.'
Ellen chewed at her lip, staring at the back of Harad's head. She had confidence. But was she allowed to show it off? The one standing here was not Elain, but Ellen. An intelligence agent — and a rookie at that. Judged as generously as anyone pleased, a cover that had no business carrying the power to kill an Outer Realm mage.
'Who knows.'
Ellen didn't think it through. That was her nature, and the name Ellen was a false identity built for precisely that nature.
'So what am I supposed to do about it?'
There was no real fear of her cover being blown anyway. At worst, someone would grow suspicious — and even that suspicion wouldn't amount to much. No manner of reasoning would connect her to the Grand Duke.
The excitement crested. Her heart slammed against her ribs. And so she failed to notice that Harad had stopped, and walked face-first into his back.
"What—"
"Quiet."
Harad whispered. So low she would have missed it without straining her ears — and the man himself hadn't stirred so much as a finger. Tension radiated off him. He looked almost as if he were deliberating.
Over what, Ellen discovered by stepping back a single pace and craning her face around him.
At the far end of the orange river, before a small lake, something like a doll knelt. It was draped in what looked like rags, which made its shape hard to make out. Before it lay a corpse — a fresh one, by the look of it. Steam still curled up from the body; its belly, seemingly, had been slit open.
"A mage? The one in the rags, I mean."
Ellen asked, hopeful.
"The corpse is the mage."
"A mage killed a mage?"
"Look closely. That is no human."
A beast. The rag-draped doll's neck turned with a dry creak, and bluish glowing eyes fixed on Harad and Ellen.
In the same instant, flame surged upward. Harad's magic. It rose like a wall, plainly meant to bar the beast's path — and it was too late. The thing was already inside the fire.
The bluish gleam flashed before Ellen's eyes.
KWAANG!
A crack of thunder burst from a sword swung before she knew she'd swung it. Claws massive beyond anything human batted Ellen away, sword and all, and hurled her far off.
'Insane—!'
Ten paces. Ellen, gauging the force of the blow against the distance it had thrown her, went cold with horror. She hadn't even had time to retch. The beast was already standing where she had been.
Its gaze swung to Harad. The massive claws came around, and Harad wrenched his body backward at a staggering speed. The instant those claws grazed beneath his chin, flame roared to life at his fingertips. His five fingers caught the beast's ribs and shoved, hard — buying distance even as he drove fire deep into its body.
Extraordinary reflexes. Extraordinary presence of mind. Even through Ellen's eyes, there was not a flaw to find — and yet she couldn't simply admire it.
The fire was weak. These were the flames that had erased the innkeeper of Flowerbed's Flesh, and beast after beast after that, without leaving so much as ash — and against this creature, they meant nothing. The fire blooming along its ribs grew no larger; when the beast brushed a hand across it, the flames guttered out, pathetically.
...The positioning was bizarre. Harad stood at the beast's left; Ellen stood directly before it. Harad was by far the closer of the two. And yet the beast's burning eyes were fixed on Ellen. Strangest of all, it did not lunge.
"It's 5th Circle!"
Harad shouted then.
Ellen couldn't answer. The beast wouldn't take its eyes off her. The moment she opened her mouth, it seemed certain to spring.
"Don't answer. Just listen. It's deciding something."
She had plenty she wanted to say. 5th Circle? In a knight's terms, that was a Sword Master — one of the mere ten superhumans on the entire continent. And a mere beast was that being's equal? In this situation, the question was a luxury.
"Look closely. That isn't rag. It's skin."
The beast stood the way a human stands. Two legs, two arms, and a face shaped like a man's. Its skin sloughed off as though molted, torn here and shredded there, ripped loose and carried off on the wind — that was why it had looked like rags. Flesh hung in ribbons, muscle lay bare, red tendons tangled like spiderweb. A profoundly grotesque sight. The right half of its torso was muscled like stone; the left was not.
Never mind muscle — the ribs, too, bore unmistakable marks of tearing. And in the gap, a bared heart gleamed, beating like a war drum.
"It's wounded. That's why it fled into the First Boundary. And somewhere along the way, it found that mage and killed him."
Harad pointed at the corpse by the lake. The corpse still had its heart.
"But magical beasts are the Outer Realm's minions, aren't they?"
The question left Ellen before she could stop it.
"Is now really the time for that bullshit?"
...No? Ellen's eyes went round. Staggered by the new knowledge, she didn't even register how sharply Harad's language had turned.
"It takes in mana to heal. And then along came a nuisance by the name of you."
A beast eats only when it is safe. That was why it had gone for Ellen first — even now, its eyes never left her. Because to the beast, Harad was food as well.
"Then why won't it attack?"
"It's weighing whether to heal first. You didn't die, you see. A nuisance it would normally have killed in one blow."
"...One blow?"
Ellen's brow furrowed; she was listening properly now.
"Yes. One blow. Had that thing been at full strength, its first strike would have killed you."
"Me?"
"You. So run. Quickly, if you want to live."
"Bullshit?"
"Not bullshit. The truth. I said run, didn't I?"
Rrip — something tore inside her head.
"...Once I'm done with that bastard, you're next."
Muttering it low, Ellen launched herself at the beast.
Watching her go, Harad allowed himself a hidden smirk.
Before him lay the mage's corpse.
The heart was still warm.