Fire and Water (8)
It was Elaine. The sword of Grand Duke Elaine, with whom he had died in his past life.
That Grand Duke had cut down Origins no one else could so much as touch, as casually as slicing fog.
Harad slapped his own cheek. Ellen's eyes went round.
Right. It was Ellen. The one before him was not Grand Duke Elaine.
...In hindsight, calling it the sword of Grand Duke Elaine had been far too generous. It merely resembled it.
He had no idea how it had come to pass, but... Ellen seemed to have grasped Heavenly Might. She had drawn one step closer to the Elaine of his past life. And that delighted him.
So Harad laughed without a word for a long while.
"Are you laughing right now?" Ellen, lips jutting in a pout, chided him.
"You're laughing too."
Ellen tilted her head — and only then did Harad realize she couldn't hear a word.
That was the most trivial of her injuries. Ellen was a wreck, her whole body torn to shreds, her left hand in particular pounded to pulp. An ordinary knight would have been well within his rights to be dead.
"Are you all right?" Harad wiped the blood roughly from his face and asked with his lips alone.
"I'll be fine once I rest. And you?"
"I'll mend once I use the orb."
Harad was in no state to call himself fine, even as a lie. He was far better off than after Psina, but serious was still serious. The muscles across his body had half-melted, and his insides were worse — organs practically cooked, blood vessels shredded to rags.
It was the price of forcibly manifesting 5th-tier magic. Had the culprit been another's Origin instead of the Sun, he would already be dead. An Origin, by its nature, is mindful of its vessel — when Harad had forced a 5th-tier spell into being, the Sun had known its vessel's limits and refused to cross them.
Of course, that held only when the vessel was to its liking — but regardless.
The heat still smoldering in him tormented Harad even now. Amusingly, that same heat was shielding Ellen — drained of every last drop of aura — from the Boundary's killing cold.
"It's quiet."
It was anything but. Avery Aquins, whose manifested River had been severed, lay crumpled in the corner, screaming himself hoarse in spiteful agony.
"That's thanks to you."
Harad saw no need to tell her. Ellen had already accomplished more than enough. What remained was his to finish.
"Can I sleep just a little?"
"……."
"I won't die."
"I see. The way you said it, you sounded half-dead already."
Harad laughed, letting his stern look dissolve. He had only been playing along for a moment. For anyone ordinary these would be grave wounds; for Ellen they were scratches. Most of it would mend with sleep.
"Get some proper rest."
Ellen lay down on the bare ground as though she had only been waiting for the word. The moment her eyes closed, her breathing steadied. The trouble was not her wounds so much as the exhaustion of having burned through every last ember of her aura.
Put the other way around: if only her aura had remained, Ellen could have kept fighting.
Then as now, a monster is a monster.
At the thought, Harad let out a hollow laugh. Whatever her age, Elaine was Elaine. The glimmer of his past life had always shone through her — and today it had grown a shade brighter.
"How dare— how dare you...!"
Avery Aquins, who had been gasping and shrieking, glared at Harad and Ellen with bloodshot eyes.
"Quiet down. She's sleeping."
The distance between them was not great. He could kill the man where he lay. And he had to.
But Harad settled down at Ellen's head instead. He looked at Avery Aquins and, with one hand, fingered the orb in his pocket.
So the Origin itself had not been severed.
Harad found one small disappointment in that. What Ellen had cut was not the Origin but something closer to the magic called Manifestation. As proof, the vessel known as Avery Aquins still functioned.
A mage who loses his Origin loses his mind — for the core dies, and only the vessel remains.
It meant that for all her grasp of Heavenly Might, Ellen had not become a Sword Master.
Well. Grasping the essence is another matter entirely.
Come to think of it, her aura was not yet dark enough to be called jet-black.
"A mere fake..."
Avery Aquins somehow managed to spit the words out, feigning composure.
"Full of vigor still, I see."
Of course, beneath the voice his insides would be a ruin. Far worse than Harad's own. The backlash of a shattered Manifestation could hardly be anything but lethal — the more powerful the magic, the greater the risk it carried.
"Serzilla. You've joined hands with Serzilla, haven't you, you fake."
Avery Aquins laid his defeat at Ellen's feet. It was a fair accounting.
What struck Harad as stranger was that the man knew of Serzilla's aura at all.
So he doesn't call it vermin.
The man sneered at aura as something verminous, and yet he still spoke the name Serzilla. The name of that Wall carried currency even in the Outlands, then.
Different from my past life.
The Avery Aquins of his past life had called Elaine a vermin. A worthless cur who had frittered away the North through sheer incompetence.
Why? Ah. Because the North hasn't fallen yet.
Serzilla had not yet crumbled. And it never would. It had been a regression made for that sake.
"Kill me."
"Hm."
Heart predation was good for injuries, too — for Harad's injury was an aftereffect. It was the same principle as his convalescence after Psina. Replenish the drained mana, and the Sun would surge with vitality once more.
Harad touched his own face. Blood came away in thick smears; his whole body was drenched in it just the same. He saw no need to wipe it clean.
"Not yet."
He had won, but could move no longer. In truth, he could move perfectly well. That was simply how it had to look.
From the orb palmed in his hand, a chill seeped out slowly, quietly cooling his body from within.
"Do as I say, and I'll let you live."
"And trust you on what?"
"What have you left to trust?"
"……."
Avery Aquins bit his lip. And there he held his silence.
Harad knew at once that silence for what it was: a yes. Even in this era, it seemed, Avery Aquins treasured his life.
"Is the Deep Sea Tower's lord 6th-tier?"
"He is."
"And?"
"...? Only the king stands at the 6th tier."
As expected. Harad's eyes gleamed.
In my past life, the Deep Sea Tower counted two 6th-tiers. Now it has one.
It was the same logic that made the Avery Aquins before him a newborn Star. There were mages who would reach the 6th tier in his past life who had not yet arrived. The regression had caught its moment perfectly.
"I hear there is one whose Origin is a glacier."
"……?"
Avery Aquins's brow creased. It was the face of a man hearing a name for the first time.
He doesn't know?
Newborn or not, a Star was a Star. There should have been nothing the Deep Sea Tower did not know.
So, for now, he does not exist.
A glacier. Which meant the mage who would one day reach the 6th tier was not in the Deep Sea Tower. And if not in the Outlands — the continent, then.
Did he defect?
Harad let out a hollow laugh. In casting out its mages, the continent had managed to produce a true demon.
"Hurk."
Harad abruptly retched up blood. Avery's expression turned grotesque at the sight, but he did not seem to be nursing any schemes. His condition was far graver than Harad's.
"Sorry. The backlash is rather severe."
Harad said, his hand trembling.
"So you weren't 5th-tier after all."
"Still 4th-tier."
"...So even a false king is still a king, is that it?"
Avery forgot his own predicament and marveled. It was an admiration no mage could help — much like the time Harad himself had marveled at Cassion's Manifestation. No, this would be the greater wonder still, for the tiers were akin to truth itself.
The admiration was brief. What surfaced next was self-reproach. If only I hadn't been careless. Such thoughts seemed to gnaw at Avery's mind.
It was a warranted regret. Had the man been a little more careful, he might have carried off one of the two. Ellen and Harad were still at that level.
Of course — that was without the orb in the reckoning.
"It came down to a hair's breadth. I can't speak for her, but I very nearly died."
Harad gestured at Ellen while secretly working the orb a little more. The slow-flowing chill was quietly erasing the aftereffects.
"I hear fire is precious even in the Outlands."
The Red Tower lacked more than a king. It was short of mages, too.
"Why is that? There are no orders in the Outlands."
Fire was precious on the continent because the orders hunted it down with singular zeal.
But why in the Outlands?
It was a question Harad had carried since first learning of the Red Tower.
"You know nothing at all, like the continent-crawling worm you are."
Avery sneered.
"Keep this up and I won't be able to save your life."
"……."
It was a promise made of nothing, but Avery was in no position to disbelieve it. The severity of their injuries was not in the same class. However long they lay here, the first to move would be Harad — and the sleeping Ellen after him. For Avery, there was no road to survival but through Harad.
"It is precious because it is Paradise."
Avery corrected him. Not that fire was precious even in the Outlands — it was precious because the land was the Outlands.
"What do you mean?"
"There is no sun in Paradise."
"The Red Tower's king?"
Harad took him to mean the Red Tower's king — that the woman bearing the Sun, the one the Prophecy of the Moon pointed to, did not yet exist.
"Both."
"……?"
"There is no sun in Paradise's sky, either."
That, he said, was why fire was born precious in the Outlands.
The world drew its line between continent and Outlands, but in truth they were one and the same land. Did the sun not rise even over parts of that grotesque Boundary? And yet the Outlands had no sun.
"How does that make any sense?"
Harad laughed in sheer disbelief. Avery said nothing, only staring at Harad's chest. His heart — where an Origin dwelled.
It meant the Outlands answered the sun's absence with magic.
Harad thought of the fire watchtower. An absurdly tall tower, the like of which the continent had never seen — and in Paradise stood magic towers taller still. But surely they were more than mere height. The Outlands' craft overwhelmed the continent's, the product of that vague, boundless thing called magic.
"All things have an Origin."
He did not mean what dwelled in the heart. Avery was speaking of something more fundamental still.
"Beneath the Deep Sea, water is born."
Beneath other towers, other Origins would be born. Avery spoke from the Outlands' own view of the world. Strictly speaking, the continent was probably little different.
"All that remains in Paradise are the embers left behind by a onetime king of the Red Tower. That is why fire is precious in Paradise."
And so fire in the Outlands was dearer than any on the continent.
"Then the sun's absence from the sky is no great calamity, I take it."
"It was always so."
The Outlands had long since finished adapting to their world. Only the Red Tower and the Moon Tower still yearned for the sun.
"Then why covet the continent? You seem to live well enough as it is."
The Outlands called the conquest of the continent their Long-Cherished Wish.
"Does one need a reason to seek the homeland of one's ancestors?"
The Outlands was a land of exile. Long ago, they had been part of the continent, until they were driven to the very end of the brutal North. The continent raised a crude wall to keep them from ever crossing back. That was the first Serzilla.
"Well. It's hardly my place to judge."
Every people believed its own cause just. Harad did not bother to deny the Outlands its Long-Cherished Wish — not out of any complicated sympathy. Simply because it was none of his concern.
Why the Outlands had been cast out long ago, what the Outlands or the orders liked to prattle about it, who was right and who was wrong — all of it was trivia to Harad. What mattered to him was Elaine. And the North she loved.
"One last question... oh."
From far off, Buldongi came flying in. Pweeeek! The little creature cried out, long and loud.
"Hurk."
Harad vomited blood as he watched the fireball approach. It was dead blood — but to any eyes that knew nothing of the orb, it would read as a mortal wound.
"Speak, then."
Avery urged him on, vigor kindling in his eyes. The hope that he might yet live. And fire was laid over that hope.
Flames burst from nowhere and swallowed Avery's head. Their shape was that of a campfire. Avery lay where he had fallen, his head burning, and within the fire his mouth opened. His vocal cords had melted; no scream came out.
"Ask me instead."
Someone said, but Avery, whose ears were melting within, could not hear it. He was glaring at Harad. What reached him, through it all, was betrayal.
Clap! The sound of applause rang out. It might as well have been an incantation. The fire surged fiercer. And so Avery Aquins died — in the belief that the flames consuming him were Harad's own.
Buldongi, perched on Harad's shoulder, nuzzled its face against his cheek. Harad paid it no mind.
"Are you all right? You appear to be badly hurt."
Stepping over the dead Avery's back, Aroshu was walking toward them.
"Badly, yes. And you? Are you unharmed?"
"Perfectly safe! All thanks to the Star's protection, of course."
Aroshu approached at a leisurely pace.
"As expected of the Star. Still 4th-tier, and yet you have dispatched a false Star!"
"Thanks to my wife."
"When the Red Tower hears of this, every last one of them will be astounded. And then, I daresay, ecstatic!"
His narrow eyes, as ever, seemed to be smiling. Harad smiled back.
"How is your condition?"
"I believe I'm about to lose consciousness."
"Oh dear!"
Aroshu cried out in alarm — and yet the distance between them shrank, slowly, steadily.
"So, what was it you wished to ask?"
"Ah. Ah. Can you hear me? Speaking is... difficult."
One more step. Harad smiled without letting anything show. And then—
"By the way — so you truly are the Sun."
"So you believe me now?"
"Yes!"
The narrow eyes opened. The slivers of pupil thus revealed darted up and down without pause, raking over Harad's blood-soaked body again and again.
"Your sex, if I may ask?"
"A woman."
"And your wife?"
"My husband, in truth."
"Haha."
Still water on the surface — and fire beneath.
At the flagrant nonsense, Aroshu took an unwitting step closer, chattering all the while.
"You do spout a remarkable load of bullshit."
Aroshu's palms drifted together. Before they could touch, Harad drew the sword he had worn like a mere ornament all this while. Pater, the sacred heirloom of Serzilla, sheared horizontally through Aroshu's hands.
Eight fingers and pieces of both thumbs spilled into the air.
By then, Harad was already standing before Aroshu.
"What good is distance to a mage who gives it away so easily?"
Pater, its arc flowing seamlessly onward, drew across Aroshu's throat.