The Boundary (2)
The magical beast resembled a human in shape alone. It stood more than twice Ellen's height, and its claws were abnormally long and thick.
And they were strong.
Where claw met sword, aura and mana scattered like sparks.
Evenly matched.
Their power was the same. She had been driven back earlier only because she hadn't been ready for it. The misshapen claws could not snap Ellen's sword, and as her aura drained away, the beast's mana drained at exactly the same rate.
Speed, though...
I'm the slow one.
Ellen found that hard to admit. A mere magical beast — and it was faster than she was.
This is what weakened looks like?
The beast writhed, bone and muscle twisting as though its body knew no limits at all. Then it swung its claws. From a distance that should have been impossible to cover, they reached her — the arm stretching in an instant.
...She had nearly died. Ellen broke out in a cold sweat as she watched stone split like tofu.
Her hair whipped through the empty air. Had her reaction been a fraction slower, it would not have been her hair that flew — it would have been her head.
"It's a 5th Circle."
Harad's words repeated in her mind. When Ellen's sword traced five arcs, its claws flashed seven times through the air. That she could still answer it blow for blow was thanks to her innate Heavenly Might and talent: her God-given reflexes read every trajectory, and her Heavenly Might put power behind those split-second responses.
And so her vision narrowed, little by little.
Ellen's eyes were sharp enough to pick out a snowflake drifting down beside her even in the middle of a fight, but she had no such luxury now. Let her attention stray for a heartbeat, and she would die.
A claw swept past in front of her throat. At the sight, Ellen's eyes flashed, and her aura-honed sword stabbed for its Adam's apple.
...It did not pierce. The thing was tough beyond belief. Instead of giving ground, the beast pushed its head in, and the blade scraped along its neck, sparks bursting over the muscle.
Squelch!
A fang, tearing free of its gums, sank into Ellen's shoulder. Her left hand smashed the beast's jaw upward, and the molar that had punched through her collarbone popped loose with a wet suck. She kicked off its belly with both feet and put distance between them.
"...The damn thing was insane."
Ellen shifted her sword to her left hand. Her right arm hung slack; the feeling in it was gone, but she paid that no mind. She wielded a sword equally well with either.
Her aura had been pierced. That, too, barely registered — she had expected it. Their power was equal, so it was only natural that a direct hit would punch through.
So strength was never the problem.
That indestructible body was.
Ellen could be pierced. The beast could not. Defense was the creature's specialty — and defense wasn't all it had, either. Its weapons were every bit the equal of hers.
My blunder.
It was the beast's condition that had done it. Tattered skin, a left torso hollowed so deep its heart lay plainly bare — wounds grave enough that one might doubt it was still alive. That was what had planted carelessness in Ellen. Who could have guessed a thing injured that badly would be that tough?
I wasn't careful.
Weakened by injury or not, it was still a 5th Circle. She, meanwhile, was in her first real battle, in the hostile environment of the Boundary. There wasn't one shred of justification for carelessness.
And yet she had been careless.
The beast flung its mouth wide. Only now did she see it was no mouth but a maw — a human face, and yet the thing split to the ears. From within, dozens of teeth, grown long as fangs, launched themselves at her. By the time she realized they had been fired, they were already at the tip of her nose.
Grrr.
The beast's cry came from behind her. Ellen flung herself sideways, rolled several times across the ground, and scrambled upright. A hole gaped in her thigh where a fang had punched clean through.
It laughed. She had no room to study its expression, but that was what she felt — laughter. She felt a chill.
Shhk.
A long gash opened across her cheek. Not the beast's doing. The Boundary's.
Harad, who had been holding back the corrupted wilds, was gone. He had, of course, been gone for a while now — but only now did Ellen feel it in her bones. Her aura had already drained that far.
The Boundary's chill did not simply freeze a person; it gnawed at the mind. But Ellen did not go looking for Harad. She spent that time watching the beast instead.
"Then send me out to a field of life and death."
The words she had once said to Moresz, her swordsmanship master, came back to her — words Ellen herself had spoken. Drills had been tedious; sparring had held no tension; seizing victory had come far too easily. So she had longed for real combat. She had wanted to stand, just once, on a field where dying would not be the least bit strange.
...And now she stood on one.
Without meaning to, Ellen felt the corners of her mouth curl upward. She had grown complacent and landed herself at a disadvantage — and that was exactly why the laughter came easier. Was this not, at last, more worthy of the name life-and-death?
"Of course you may be arrogant. You are Serzila."
Something Harad had once told her came back to her. Serzila could afford it — and Ellen was Serzila. If the price of arrogance came due on this field, it would not be the North that paid it; it would be Ellen. So she could be arrogant. She could afford to err. All she had to do was survive.
That was what a field of life and death was — and from it, she would grow for the next one.
She blinked once, and the beast was before her eyes. Her instinctively swung sword knocked the claws aside — and that alone shaved away a whole slab of aura.
The beast laughed. Ellen laughed too. Claws swung; sword swung. She even fed into her blade the aura that should have been holding back the chill and the knife-edged wind.
However cold it grew, the fingertips gripping her sword would not go numb — and if they seemed to, she had only to move that much faster. Her skin could tear all it liked, so long as she kept the eyes that watched the beast.
The beast was faster, but Ellen was the more relentless of the two. She did not rest even once. She moved like something possessed.
Her narrowed vision narrowed further. Her mind stopped thinking. She moved on instinct.
And she liked it. She was moving without thought — had that felt wrong, Ellen would have doubted it, for she was no beast. However long she moved, no doubt ever came. On the contrary, only her smile deepened. Her overheated body grew faster by degrees. The beast's claws and Ellen's sword moved at the same moment and arrived at the same moment, and were beaten back at identical intervals.
The collisions grew wilder. The din of claw and blade swelled louder and louder — and to Ellen's ears, it sounded like footsteps.
She had brimmed with strength ever since she was small, and so her footprints had always been deep — prints that would have stayed just as deep without half that force. Hadn't she been born with Heavenly Might, of all things? Even a light walk left them every bit as deep.
Before the walking Ellen, a mist unfurled — a fog that showed not an inch ahead. But now she could see. Precious little, but the ground right before her nose, she could see. That was why her steps were walking toward the mist.
Footprints were strength. Steps were real combat — a life-and-death field where one wrong step meant death. And the mist was the unknown: a realm beyond that Ellen had yet to grasp. She was heading for that beyond. She was drawing near it.
The more her sword swung, the more of the beast's blows came reaching for her, the truer it grew. An unspeakable sense of achievement soaked into her thought-stopped head.
Spring came into her movements. Her faded aura shoved back the beast's claws, and when its other hand twitched, Ellen had already swung. A thin line was drawn across muscles hard as rock.
Bright red blood poured from a throat that had borne not one scratch, and through the split its Adam's apple jutted out.
I can do it. The thought, awakened in a flash, handed her certainty — pointing to the bared left torso, to the pulsing heart.
The weakness and the core of any being that bore mana. So why was such a heart exposed so defenselessly? Whatever had wounded the beast had been aiming for that heart — and that something had failed. Had missed.
Ellen reached it. Her sword shot out — faster than any strike she had made, so fast the beast could not even react.
...Krak!
"Ah."
No footprint was left behind. The sword had touched the heart but could not bite in — because her aura was entirely spent. It had been the final step, and no strength remained to take it.
The blade bounced free. The heart at its end — the beast — vanished. Ellen could not follow the movement with her eyes. The beast had not grown faster; she had grown slower. Her strength had hit rock bottom, while the beast was still very much intact.
Grrr.
She heard laughter. A sneer. The victor's.
"...Fuck."
The left side of her neck was unbearably cold. Death had been added to the Boundary's chill.
Just as Ellen sensed her own death—
"You do have a foul mouth."
A voice.
"Quite unlike your face."
And warmth.
It felt as though blazing midday sun were beating straight down. The world had turned warm; her mind, snug. The wind that had been carving up her skin without a moment's pause had stopped.
Because of Harad. No — this was different from before. If before had been warm, now it was hot. The flame had changed.
"It's thanks to you."
Harad broke into a bright smile. In his hand was a sword — a sword made of fire — and it held the beast's claw in its grip. Though that sword was flame, it did not waver in the slightest. Its shape held fast like a true blade; from far away, it would look like nothing but a sword, never fire.
...He was no longer a 2nd Circle that passed for a 3rd. The fire in the shape of a sword was the proof of it. Harad had ascended to the 3rd Circle.
"I had to eat it. I ask your understanding."
This, after swallowing the corpse's heart with his own mouth. Ellen couldn't fathom why he was asking her leave, and it wasn't as though that mattered.
Fwoomp.
A small bursting sound rang out, and in time with it the beast pulled back. Its claws were scorched black.
A weakened 5th-Circle beast. By her own assessment, Ellen was a 4th Circle — and even she had failed to wound the thing until she had fallen into that selfless state. Yet Harad, who had only just reached the 3rd Circle, had wounded it.
Looking again, it wasn't only the claws that were scorched. Blood ran from the last joint of its fingers — the work of the explosion just now.
How?
"It was a 2nd Circle that passed for a 3rd, no?"
"...And now it's a 3rd Circle that passes for a 4th?"
"You really do catch on fast."
Harad smiled brightly. It was the same smile as before — and yet to Ellen it looked all the more infuriating now.
"You drained its strength for me, too. That helped."
In the beast's eyes, Harad was food. But it did not lunge straight in. As it had with Ellen at the start, it held its distance and studied him. That was Ellen's doing — she had sapped it so thoroughly that the beast was now wary even of its own food.
"So you were just watching, weren't you?"
Heart Devouring did not take long. It never had before. This time, though, slow was far too mild a word — which meant he had deliberately stayed out of the fight.
"How sly of you. Now that's a magician for you."
"Did you hate it?"
"...No."
Ellen could not have denied it even as an empty lie. Had he cut in midway, she would have raged. It was the first real battle of her life, a field of life and death — the first time she had ever been so absorbed in anything. The result was thoroughly displeasing, but the process itself had been beyond exhilarating.
"Do you even know how to use a sword?"
At that, Harad looked her full in the face.
"Better than you're managing right now, I'd say."
A vein stood out on Ellen's forehead. Harad had a true gift for getting under people's skin.
The beast seemed to feel the same. Perhaps it found the idle chatter distasteful with him right in front of it, for it loosed a shriek — and the mana behind it rattled Ellen's skull.
Through her shaken vision, the beast lunged. Claws swung — met the sword of fire. Light flashed where the fiery blade and claw touched. An explosion. That was how Harad had wounded it earlier.
The claw that slipped free through the black smoke swung again. Harad's sword flowed like water; the claw tangled in that trajectory and lost its force. Freed of the claw, the fiery sword swung for the beast's neck. Again, not one scratch.
But—
KWAAANG! The blade exploded once more. Blood poured from the beast's throat, bared through the black smoke — the jutting Adam's apple had been torn away.
It was thanks to Ellen gnawing down its strength — thanks to her, the beast had slowed enough for Harad to react. And it was thanks to his having eaten a 3rd-Circle magician's heart as well. That was how the gap had been closed.
Harad's eyes, fixed on the beast, thinned — then, at once, he let the killing intent go.
As I thought — it won't do.
The gap had narrowed, but it remained. Magic was a vague thing, and that vagueness carried a price: with the mana he had now, he could not burn the beast to death.
The Magician of Waves. The beast that had resembled a fish. Those he could burn to death, for his circle stood above theirs — he hadn't needed to bother with tiresome added finesse. But that one was different. Not an opponent to be simply crushed beneath raw mana.
The stronger the opponent, the more cunning you must be.
Magic was cunning. The simpler it was, the more absurd the mana it demanded — much as a blade kills a man more easily than bare fists do. Rather than burn the thing to death, he needed to forge the means to kill it.
The sword realized in fire was the means of enduring attacks he could not otherwise endure. It was flame, and yet it resembled water. That was the swordsmanship Harad had learned. The beast's claws swung without pause, yet never touched him; they met the fiery sword only to be deflected off into empty air.
The placid fiery blade turned violent whenever it touched the beast's body — seething, then bursting. The bursts were minute, because before the Sun, Harad had imagined a needle: a means of boring through mana that no 3rd-Circle-level power could pierce. If burning a thing to death was spreading power wide and flat, the needle compressed all of that spread-out mana into a single point. And so the beast's mana was pierced. The wounds were tiny — but it was the piercing that mattered.
Its intelligence isn't high.
Unable, it seemed, to grasp why its own body was being wounded, the beast charged like a brute. Against a magician rather than a beast, that trick would have worked only a few times — but the beast went right on allowing it.
"Keep this up and you die."
Harad, bursting flame against its collarbone, murmured the words quietly. Ellen couldn't hear them. The beast's ears caught every one.
"Kyaaak!"
Once begun, the shriek would not end. The beast's mouth had closed, but the cry stayed lodged in Harad's ears like a ringing, shaking his head.
Thud.
Muscles like rock swelled further still. Its five claws fused into one, reshaping into a colossal greatsword.
Its intelligence isn't high.
Which meant there was some. Realizing that, left as things were, it would be gnawed hollow until it died, the beast dragged out every last thread of its remaining mana.
Harad felt a chill like thousands of ants crawling over his skin — the beast's mana bearing down on him. It was the creature's Origin, too. Unlike magicians, who are born with an Origin, magical beasts build theirs over the course of their lives — and such Origins are usually intuitive.
In the beast's mana, Harad saw a great tree: a giant that proclaimed its existence through the rustle of its leaves and would never, ever fall. It was dim, hazy — but it was, unmistakably, an Origin.
Had it not been wounded — had it been a whole 5th Circle — that tree would have rooted itself in this space. It would not have been this slow, and the one dying would have been Harad, not the beast.
Before the branch could even swing down, Harad drove into the beast's chest. The fiery sword touched its heart — and the blade, on contact, lost its form, crumbling from the hilt down and pouring into the beast's heart.
KWAAANG—!
The beast's body shuddered faintly, went limp, and toppled over on top of Harad.
"…"
It was dead.
Ellen stared blankly at the sight. She had no idea what magic he had used, but the beast's death, at least, was vividly clear.
Circles. The system the Outlands had established was not precise. It was, from the very start, a concept foreign to the continent; only because Serzila bordered the Outlands did they measure aura and sacred power against it. And that measure was not exact.
They rated the 4th Circle as Knight-Commander class, yet there were precedents of a mere Tower member killing a 4th-Circle magician; Knight Commanders had died to 3rd-Circle magicians, and a 5th Circle was not necessarily the equal of a Sword Master. For knights, then, the Circle was inexact — error crept in. But among magicians, there was no such error, because the Circle had been born solely to sort magicians from one another.
For a magician, the Circle is absolute.
No magician could overcome a circle above their own. As far as Ellen knew, that was one of the Outlands' truths — a truth that counted magical beasts among its subjects.
...And that truth had just snapped before her eyes. It was a truth of the Outlands, not of Serzila — but the shock was anything but small. The beast was a 5th Circle. Injury may have dragged it down to the 4th, but it was a Predator no freshly minted 3rd-Circle magician had any business opposing. In knightly terms, wasn't that a brand-new Knight cutting down an injured Sword Master?
Because I drained its strength?
As if. Sharing a border with the place, Ellen knew the Outlands' true weight — a power none but Serzila could bear. A land less formidable than Serzila, yet mightier than the Empire or the Church: that was the Outlands as she understood it. Which meant the Circle was not a system such a thing could shatter. Would it have been called absolute for nothing?
And yet what Ellen believed in was not the Circle's absoluteness but Harad's exceptionality. Otherwise, she could never have made peace with her own defeat.
"Hey."
No answer came. The dead beast still lay over Harad, its bulk so great that it looked almost as if it were cradling him.
"Don't tell me you're dead?"
"…"
"You are dead, aren't you?"
"I'm not dead."
The answer drifted up, exhaustion plain in it.
"Then why are you lying there like that?"
"I've used up every last drop of mana."
"…"
"Flip this thing off me, would you?"
He had emptied himself so completely that he couldn't even crawl out from under the corpse.
"You're an idiot?"
Ellen laughed before she knew it.
Because somehow, he looked human.