Fire and Water (7)
Water was a demanding origin—Ellen felt it anew. The river was impossibly cold, and heavy besides, like being buried alive beneath the earth. And within that river, another river flowed. Ellen grasped at once that it was magic of unusual density. It was an attack: the ordinary current bound its prey in place, while that denser stream struck the killing blows. So this was how the mage Avery Aquins hunted.
The matchup was better than she had expected. Ellen could go without breath for a very long time, and she had the strength to forget the water's weight; she could swing a sword even in this peculiar deep. A river favored battle against the many, but it was no origin for facing one exceptional foe. The rapids came whirling in and broke on Ellen's blade. Countless though they were, she could somehow answer them or endure them—yet the difficulty was unmistakable.
'Harad only knows how to burn.' A difference of origins, then. Probably the character of each tower. Water was versatile. But it lacked fire's destructiveness. That was why Ellen could hold out even caught in fifth-tier magic.
Currents whirled at her from every side—some blatant, some stealthy. Ellen cut down the blatant and weathered the blows of the stealthy. She could swing her sword, though far slower than in open air. Blood and water ran through the hole punched clean through her palm; bubbles formed in the flow and burst the instant she clenched her fist. She stopped the burst, and her hand came away more ragged than before. So this was magic, Ellen reminded herself—attacks could spring from anywhere at all, and it would surprise no one.
'My breath—' Still holding. Her body, too. Strength to spare. But it was a matter of time: kill before the air ran out, or get out of this river. 'Infuriating.' Ellen felt anew what a tiresome breed mages were. Give one enough time and enough distance, and a knight could only lose. Of course, a gap in realm played its part as well—she was no Sword Master. But even so. Really.
'Does this make any sense?' She could not fathom the depth; she had sunk that deep. A river that could swallow dozens—perhaps more than a hundred—without anyone finding it strange. Magic of this scale, and a fifth-tier wielded it as a matter of course. While a knight killed his enemies one at a time by hand, Avery Aquins could slaughter them by the hundred. If those caught were weak, they would not manage so much as a single act of defiance. Hateful to admit... Ellen, too, belonged among the weak. Measured against a fifth-tier, that is.
'Did I take this too lightly?' She had assumed she could simply raise her aura and swing with everything she had. Small wonder: at the word mage, Harad came to mind first, and at the word origin, the Sun. Harad's Sun was a clear-cut origin. Projection—they called it the realm where an origin's shadow manifests, and Harad's Projection hung in the very middle of the sky. Whether it could be cut, who could say; the plan was simply to swing at that black sun.
'Then what about a river?' Smoke? In place of Avery Aquins, whom she had met only today, Ellen thought of Kubel. If Smoke ever manifested, how would one cut it? 'Could it be cut at all?' However she turned the problem over, she could not picture it. An origin was an abstraction. That was why Harad had once said that cutting an origin was all but impossible. Which meant he bore some of the blame for Ellen now flailing and bleeding in this deep river. He had said Ellen was the exception.
"Then why is that my fault?"
In her head, Harad answered. Not to Ellen—to Grand Duke Elaine. Ellen was dreaming. Flailing there in the river, and still the dream kept sounding in her mind.
"Were you not the one forever finding fault with Heavenly Might?"
"You bade me ponder it alongside you, Your Highness. I wrestled with it desperately, wanting to become a Sword Master—"
"Silence."
It seemed the dream's Grand Duke Elaine had had her own seasons of struggle. Ellen grinned wryly as a column of water like a waterfall slammed into her. It did not feel like someone else's story.
"There lies the problem—Heavenly Might is not a thing to be thought upon."
A dream. It was a dream. But could she dismiss as mere dream a voice that reached her even awake?
"My progress was delayed on your account."
"My deepest apologies."
"You are forgiven."
This was magic. Magic whose beginning she could not place, but whose connection to Harad was unmistakable.
"Twenty? Twenty-five? Any of it—return to those days as I am now, and I could kill Sword Masters and fifth-tiers alike."
...Magic Ellen would do well to heed.
"Anyone could manage that."
"Fool. With the prowess I possessed in those days."
"If I returned as well, Projection, Manifestation—all would be within my reach."
"You? The cripple you were?"
"...Let us say I return at the third tier, then."
"Even so, it would not be the same. Returned, you would strain after flourishes and technique. I would not."
Grand Duke Elaine said this. Ellen could not see her, yet she felt she knew the Grand Duke's expression.
"One merely uses what one was born with, and uses it rightly. Heavenly Might."
Grand Duke Elaine was arrogant, always.
"How does one use it?"
"You must not try to understand it."
"...?"
"Nor must you think on it. It is as the saliva that flows when you hunger, as the sleep that claims you when you tire. Thus: when you wish to cut, you can cut."
"How does that conclusion follow?"
"Because I wish it so."
"..."
"If it troubles you, call it the will of heaven. Heavenly Might, after all."
What manner of bullshit was that? Harad muttered.
"Put plainly, it means do it however the fuck you please."
Yet Ellen's eyes went soft and hazy. Her senses, meanwhile, sharpened further. So she sank back into reality.
"...You are remarkably fond of that word."
Until the dream could barely reach her at all.
"That is why you live—because I do not wish to cut you."
"Thank you."
"Good."
Elaine Serjilla had been born with Heavenly Might. If anyone asked what that was, Elaine would answer: talent. Asked what kind of talent, she would say: monstrous strength, stamina, regeneration... simply know that her physical abilities and her aura, across the board, were absurdly beyond reason. Ask whether that made sense, or whether that was the whole of it... and she would answer: no idea. Regrettably, it was the truth.
"Heavenly Might is Heavenly Might." Elaine, the Grand Duke Heir of the past life, had been a fool. "Heavenly Might is me." Still, Grand Duke Elaine had reached a conclusion of her own. A vague one, even so. Only, the Harad of that past life could not deny it. It was the right answer. Grand Duke Elaine was a transcendent being who had grasped her own essence. How could one who knew their own essence fail to know their own talent? The arrogant Elaine understood the concept of Heavenly Might, whole and complete.
"So what is it, then?"
"Me. I told you."
She simply could not explain it to another soul. Perhaps that was only natural.
Power sent down from heaven. It was Grand Duke Aratus who had fastened the name of Heavenly Might onto Elaine's talent. Who can know the will of heaven? That, surely, was the meaning he had intended—for it was a power even that Grand Duke could not explain.
"If you are so curious, why not dig into it yourself? You may do anything but dissect it."
"That is quite all right. I would rather not touch it. It is not even magic."
Harad chose to understand it as a difference of birth: Elaine was not human, but something above. It sat easier in his gut that way. It was not, of course, a welcome reading.
'Should I have verified more?' Had he known he would regress, he would have. 'Should I have dissected her, even?' No. Even then, it would have been for nothing. Heavenly Might was that kind of power. Understanding it was Ellen's task.
'I should have dreamed more.' He had called it advice, but it fell short—though there was nothing to be done about that. 'When you wish to cut, you can cut. That is the right answer.' For Harad, there was no fitting way to explain Heavenly Might. So he would simply have to help. Just as Ellen had said, he had to be hurt a little—no, a great deal.
A river vast enough to summon the image of a tidal wave—and through it, Harad fixed his gaze squarely on the origin where Avery lay hidden. It was the intuition of the mage called Harad, something Ellen could not hope to grasp. 'The origin, I will leave alone.' Striking the origin was Ellen's task. Avery Aquins was to serve as a patchwork magic beast; by facing him, by passing through a proper line between life and death, Ellen was to grow.
"So there is time yet before the prophecy," Avery Aquins said. Though he stood a good distance off, it came clear as if murmured at Harad's ear—akin, perhaps, to the dampness of the air. Harad was inside his reach.
"Everyone says that." Having noticed that Harad's origin was the Sun, Psina had been certain of his death; Avery Aquins was no different. He was calculating the years of growth owed to the woman who would one day be born bearing the Sun, once Harad was dead.
'Not one of them imagines the prophecy could be wrong. The Moon Tower's history must be their grounds.' The Moon had never once erred. No wonder they were so certain.
"How does it feel, fake, to have your death pronounced?" Avery Aquins called Harad a fake. By the Prophecy of the Moon, it was a fair word.
"Mm. You must be curious—when you will die."
"Before long."
"You'd say today? A bit stale, that."
Harad smiled and spread his arms wide.
"Come, then. Attack."
"..."
"A chance to return and crow about it. That you hastened the prophecy. Quite the merit, no?"
But the river did not move.
"I will take you back alive."
"I see. The Deep Sea must fear the prophecy."
Harad understood Avery Aquins's choice at a stroke. The King of the Red Tower is born only when Harad dies. For the Deep Sea Tower, that was an unwelcome hour. If the prophecy must come true, they would want that day delayed as long as possible.
"Clever. Very mage-like."
The longer Harad lived, the later the Red Tower's King would come. That was what Avery had his eye on.
"And sinister with it. Befitting water."
But that was not why the river held still. Harad smirked.
"Finding it a burden, bit by bit?"
Even now the raging waves grew rougher by the breath. The magic's power was climbing—which also meant that otherwise, it could not contain Ellen. Deep in the river, unseen, Ellen was changing beyond all doubt. 'Astonishing, truly.' By what means? Harad did not try to understand.
"Take it as an honor." His opponent was that Elaine. Elaine, who overcame whatever the line between life and death put before her. "She is worth several times the Sun." What Harad had to do was keep that line finely judged.
'Old foes.' The Red Tower and the Deep Sea Tower were old foes. No doubt only after the Red Tower's King died had it become so. That was why Avery Aquins sought to delay the prophecy's fulfillment. While the Sun existed, the Deep Sea Tower could not stand as the Red Tower's foe. Beneath the Sun, it could never have been otherwise.
"Did you know?"
Crrrack. A fissure split the black sun. Through the crack spread a light of blinding brightness. And within that light, a singularly black point swelled upward.
"The Sun does explode, now and then."
Harad said it through tears of blood.
A roar rang out. So immense that only Harad could hear it.
I want to cut. And so she cut. Ellen felt a crackling thrill in her grip. She had just severed magic—not a river. A light swing carried the force of a full-powered one; that was Heavenly Might. The lightly drawn blade cut the flowing river apart, and she severed the oncoming magic in succession.
'It works.' The successive thrill was intoxicating. And yet Ellen found it strange. That faint wrongness held her down, kept her from soaring. I want to cut. Think it, and cut, and the cutting went better still. Ellen was aware that her attainment had advanced. But she sensed, too, that it was the wrong answer. This isn't it. You must not try to understand. Nor must you think. The former she had managed; the latter she had failed. Ellen was swinging her sword while thinking I want to cut—when Grand Duke Elaine had told her not to.
'It was a dream.' She had climbed one step higher through that dream, and now she should toss it aside because it was a dream? 'Bullshit.' The dream was handing her the answer. She had to stop thinking and come to want the cut of her own accord—the way the stomach writhes before the thought of hunger ever forms.
'But how?' First, she needed to stop thinking. Yet the very moment she became conscious of that need, stopping grew impossible. Better if she were as mindless as the knights. Ellen clicked her tongue.
It was not that she had gained nothing. Fifth tier—and a river realized by a manifested origin, at that. Magic. Within it, Ellen was free. She felt Heavenly Might suffusing the water more thickly than ever before. No. This was what Heavenly Might had always been. No—even that was wrong. To borrow Grand Duke Elaine's words, Heavenly Might was a power greater still. Ellen simply was not yet using it rightly. Grand Duke Elaine knew more than this. 'The thinking—' she had to stop it. It was then that the world went black before her eyes.
Something indescribable left her ears ringing hollow. Only belatedly did Ellen realize her eardrums had burst. Her vision lurched. As though someone had seized her by the collar and shaken her, her body rocked every which way. No—not her. The world. Avery's river, seized by the collar, was convulsing.
'Harad.' Ellen knew that destructive power at once. Harad's magic. He was taking the blows for her. Perhaps not a little—a great deal. 'I said just a little.' That was not true. Ellen had already sensed he would have to take far more. Harad had foreseen it and stepped in for her.
Her head broke through the river's surface. Not that Ellen had risen—Harad's magic had lifted her. The river was as heavy as ever. Drawing breath after an age, Ellen sensed Harad. The world outside the river, escaped at last, was parched beyond words. And it chilled her—enough that she almost wished herself back inside.
The river was drying up. Replenishing itself fast, and yet its depth did not grow; water came pouring in from somewhere without end, and still the river would not swell. 'So the bastard had to compress it, after all.' Harad's words came back to her. The river was being compressed. Only now had Avery Aquins begun to feel threatened. Proof of it: the river no longer hurled itself at Ellen. He no longer had the margin to spare her a thought.
The river, heavy enough before, grew heavier still. Its current slowed, noticeably—like something being readied. And within that flow, Ellen felt what did not belong. A river ran inside the river. She had seen the phenomenon before: magic, and an attack. But Avery Aquins had no leisure to attack Ellen now. Harad had stolen it from him. Which meant... that thing was unmistakably out of place. That alien river flowed at the deepest point of all. The origin. Ellen smacked her lips without thinking.
'I want to cut it.' By the time the thought formed, Ellen was already swinging her sword. No—she was already cutting the origin.
"Ah."
So this was how it was done.
"Hee."
Ellen broke into a wide grin—because she had cut the origin, because the river she cut had vanished from the world, because she had grasped the proper use of Heavenly Might. But more than that—
"Heehee."
Harad stood there blinking, his eyes gone wide. A perfectly addled face.
"...Your Highness?"
The addled Harad muttered something. She could not make it out—her burst eardrums had yet to heal. She tried to read his lips and failed at that too; his face was caked with blood. But it surely meant he was startled.
"How's that?"
"..."
"I did well, didn't I?"
Harad laughed. She could not hear the sound, yet Ellen felt no lack. For good reason—his expression was eloquent enough on its own.
"Heehee."
It was, truly, deeply satisfying.