Ios of the Ivory Tower (2)
Ios.
From the Ivory Tower.
His Origin: Painting — or perhaps Pen, or Ink.
Fourth Circle when he first infiltrated Serzila; a Fifth Circle by the time he was finally exposed in the far future.
The ringleader who, in league with the tunnel-diggers, had set about multiplying tunnels for the Outer Realm in earnest.
The true hand behind the murder of Serzila's chief of intelligence.
He must have claimed far more lives.
That, in any case, was the extent of what Harad knew. He had thought it enough.
He had been wrong.
There is far too much I don't know.
He had believed he knew as much as there was to know — and for all that he had regressed, what Harad knew was a mere sliver.
"You bastard...!"
Ios's face twisted with pain.
His severed right arm stained the pristine snow crimson.
Paintings covered that arm — no doubt his entire body was papered with them.
Excuses, all of it. He had anticipated this, and he could have killed him.
A body finished with tempering, magic risen to the Third Circle, a strike from out of nowhere — as an opening to cleave through the man's torso along with his paintings, it had been more than enough.
And yet... he had failed to kill him.
Because he had realized his own ignorance.
So he had hesitated — and ended up settling for capture.
I could simply have taken the next magician alive.
If the first piece of intelligence had come from Ios, the second could just as well have come from someone else.
How arrogant of me. I'm not at that level yet.
Harad clicked his tongue and swung the sword of fire once more.
The flame lost its sword-shape mid-swing and scattered. A painting. Magic resembling ink was embroidered across the empty air, and its shape looked for all the world like a shield — a shield made of water, at that.
"Glory to the sword of Serzila!"
It was Gulen who suddenly bellowed, from somewhere above.
Leaping, the young knight vaulted clean over Harad and the ink-drawn shield, his blade swinging as heavy as his body.
CLANG!
The sword came down on the crown of Ios's head and rang like iron striking iron. Unable to bite through, Gulen's upper body pitched backward with the rebounding blade.
He painted his scalp, too.
At that thoroughness, Harad clicked his tongue again. Reminding himself anew just what breed of creature a magician was, he hauled Gulen back by the nape — and ink speared down like a lance where the boy had stood.
"Your sword won't get through. Fourth Circle, that one."
"......"
Gulen's teeth grated. The sword still shuddered in his grip, and the hand that held it trembled without pause.
"It wasn't pointless, though."
Ios had taken the blow rather than dodge it — which meant he had gone to the trouble of spending magic on it. It had been no display of the gulf between them.
When Gulen swung, Harad had been watching Ios's eyes. They could not keep pace with the blade's arc.
A bookworm after all.
Some magicians never train their bodies. The Ivory Tower, for the most part. It simply wasn't elegant — they would rather spend that time studying their Origins.
"Calm now? Let's have a little chat."
Instead of answering, Ios slipped his left hand into his breast. The motion looked distinctly awkward.
Still not pointless, then.
A flame that had darted up to seize the opening was barred by the ink shield — and in the same instant, Harad stepped off Gulen's shoulder and lunged. His fist sank into the man's cheek.
It was a fist packed with fire, yet the head didn't even turn. Up close, he could see it: a painting the same color as skin, writhing.
"Tenacious bastard."
He had spent his time painting, not conditioning his flesh — that much was certain.
Ios's left hand, still fumbling awkwardly in his breast, emerged at last. Harad snatched what it drew out and put distance between them.
Not a pen. Drawing paper — with something like a chestnut painted on it.
Ios's lips flickered.
Harad flung the sheet away at once, raising fire before it. Ink shot up from the paper like thorns, bored straight through the flame, and stopped a hair's breadth from Harad's nose.
"A shapeshifter who can't even paint."
Not a hedgehog — a bundle of thorns, as it turned out.
Harad laughed, touching a fingertip to the ink that had come within a breath of his eye. As expected, the magic he could feel was considerable.
"Truly Third Circle."
Ios smirked back.
Origins have affinities. But those affinities only hold sway between equals in Circle — and right now, ink was superior to fire.
It was proof that Ios's magic exceeded Harad's.
"Not that it's a gap worth preening over."
The air turned scorching hot.
No — the range was fiercely localized. Where his fire had spread wide until now, it now erupted narrow and concentrated. A tongue of flame darted out, pierced the painting, and kissed Ios's cheek. A wound of a drop or two of blood, perhaps — but a wound all the same.
A wound that should never have been possible.
It meant Ios had already spent no small amount of magic in the Boundary.
"How long were you in the Boundary? A day? Two?"
Harad smiled thinly. Ios did too.
"A country bumpkin. A bumpkin who wasn't born in paradise."
Ios's left hand drew out sheets of paper. There were dozens of them, and still his breast bulged — it seemed he had at least that much more.
"You ignorant worm of the continent, who knows nothing of the absoluteness of the Circles."
Three sheets unfolded before Ios. Five veiled the moonlight, and ten spread at even intervals, encircling Harad in a wide ring.
"Allow me to personally enlighten you in the ways of the Circles."
"How thrilling."
Harad replied with a face utterly devoid of anticipation.
Aura is likened to fire, and magic to water.
Because fire's heat can be felt even beyond a wall, while water betrays neither its presence nor its measure until the door swings open.
It was not knowledge he had always possessed — it was something Harad had taught him while they waited for midnight.
"Only when a magician casts can you feel his magic."
And from that magic's quality and quantity, one could guess at his level.
"He may hold some of it back, or lay it all bare. Reading that is the opponent's job, you see."
It wasn't terribly important, Harad had added.
"You can simply fight on the assumption of the latter."
"And if it turns out to be the former, aren't we in serious trouble?"
"That would already mean trouble, lad. It would mean he's going easy on you. So just do everything you want, and die easy. You were never his match to begin with."
Now that trouble had arrived.
Ios — an Outer Realm magician of the Fourth Circle — had revealed everything. And Harad had revealed everything too.
That was the problem. Even Gulen, still a stranger to magic, could feel the gulf between them with unmistakable clarity.
"Aren't you the same?"
"If I were facing a Fifth Circle right now, I would be."
"You're Third Circle."
"A Fourth Circle, I can find a way past."
"That's not what you said earlier."
"It works because it's me. Don't you go copying me."
And yet, despite all that... Harad's magic was being overwhelmed by Ios's.
His fire, thinned to a needle's edge, was sharp — but it could not pierce the ink the paintings spewed forth. The flames that rose wild and raging as if to swallow the world were doused by the ink.
That magic.
Gulen felt a helplessness he had never known. He was a knight of Serzila — he should not have felt this way — and yet he could feel that nothing lay ahead but death.
That was what a Fourth Circle magician was.
Knight Tursten's claim — that he had once driven a Fourth Circle to the brink of death — might have been mere boasting. Such thoughts even crossed his mind.
And that was why Harad looked all the more tremendous.
Unlike his earlier confidence, he was doing nothing now but taking hits — and yet he was, unmistakably, holding.
He evaded the magic he could not withstand, and for the magic he could not evade, he shaved its force away with fire and endured with his body. And through it all, he never stopped attacking.
He looked every inch a seasoned warrior who happened also to be a magician.
Harad seemed more experienced than Ios — more than most knights, for that matter. The duel Gulen had witnessed by daylight had been but a fragment of the man.
Gulen could not even dream of imitating him.
He could not dream of stepping in, either. It was not fear.
He was ready to lay down his life for Serzila at any moment; he had the grit to march forward knowing he would die.
But not now.
If he stepped in... he would be nothing but a hindrance, let alone a help.
It felt as though he would brush against the tightrope Harad was walking and send the man plunging.
FWOOSH—!
From three sheets of paper spread across the air, savage beasts burst forth.
A wolf bared its claws; another yawned its maw wide. An elephant plummeting from the sky came down to trample Harad.
Harad rolled across the ground and out of the way. Fire surged up where he had tumbled, driving back the ink beasts, and the wavering flame flowed into Harad's hand.
To Gulen's eyes, it looked like recycling.
Squeezing magic he had already drawn out until nothing remained — because his magic was lacking—
"What impressive scavenging."
Ios sneered.
Fire shaped into a sword cut the beasts down at the neck. They bled ink instead of blood; their carcasses became ink that splashed black across the ground. Unlike Harad's flames, they did not flow back into Ios.
"So you can't manage it. And it isn't even that difficult."
Harad smiled thinly.
Was he that kind of man? Gulen tilted his head.
Except when he was playing a part, Harad's attitude toward Ios was all edge — nothing but mockery and provocation.
"If you want, I can teach you. As payment, you need only give me your head. Ah — and the information with it."
Ios's face writhed.
His hand flung out sheets of paper. They spread wide across the sky and poured down ink like rain, each and every stream keen as a blade.
There was nowhere to run. The ten sheets encircling Harad in their wide ring had sealed the space shut.
Harad moved within it. That he did not even attempt to break out made the gap in their levels look stark.
Fire bloomed over Harad's body. The ink blades falling like rain grew thinner as they closed in — but they did not vanish. They bored through the flame and raked across Harad's skin.
A fresh sheet unfolded directly in front of him. A colossal palm burst out and swatted him; his flung body struck the barrier sealing the space and dropped.
To Ios, an opening. To Gulen's eyes, a crisis.
And then the attack stopped. A thin red line had been drawn across Ios's face, from the corner of his eye to the bridge of his nose. From the shallow cut, smoke rose as though seared by a hot iron.
"My, my. And that was an opening, too."
Gulen saw death in that wound.
If that strike's angle had been a hand's width to the side, Ios would have died. Harad had let slip what might have been his final chance.
"Next time, I'll be sure to land one."
Yet Harad showed no regret. He provoked Ios instead.
Rising from the ground, he spread his arms wide and offered up his body. Blood trickled down in threads, but there was no grave wound.
"So the Fourth Circle is nothing special after all."
Then Gulen met Harad's eyes.
"Don't you step in. I can manage without you."
"......"
Harad was smiling.
When anyone could see that death stood right before him.
Fascinating.
That was the impression that struck him each time a sheet unfolded.
And that was all it amounted to.
Every Origin carries its own indefinable quality.
Harad could not imitate the vagueness of that painting. His Sun did not work that way.
If it can be expressed in paint, can anything be made real?
It must be so. Even as he felt certain, Harad could not grasp how such a thing was possible. He could only realize, yet again, how vague a thing magic truly was.
—What in the hell kind of nonsense is that.
Had Elaine been standing here, she would not have tried to understand. She would have swung her sword and torn the man to ribbons.
The efficiency is absurd.
Sheets spitting out paintings flew every which way. There were already more than twenty of them — and for all that, Ios looked hale as ever.
Had it been Harad, he would have dropped from exhaustion long ago.
Painting costs magic too, then. He paints in advance to cut down what he spends in battle.
Harad understood the magician called Ios.
The man's preparation was undeniably thorough — the paintings etched into his whole body, and more besides. An utterly magician-like way of fighting.
Had I not tempered my body, I would be dead already.
Thanks to that tempering, he could pay the difference in magic with his own flesh.
In the end, he had survived because he had regressed.
Though, of course, it was also because he had regressed that this fight had come to pass.
His clothes were hanging in rags.
Riiiip.
Harad tore away the flapping sleeve and bared his skin. Thanks to the tempering, muscle to rival any knight's stood out in sharp relief.
"Ridiculous. Utterly ridiculous."
At the sight of that bare skin, Ios let out a hollow laugh.
"You truly have nothing at all. You've no right to be called a magician. Arrogant wretch."
It was a fair accusation.
For a magician, preparation was everything. The one who had prepared more held the advantage — that was simply the law of it.
Ios had etched paintings across his entire body, and he had completed dozens of painted sheets in advance and stowed them in his breast.
Harad, by contrast, had nothing. He knew how to use a sword and had brought none; he had prepared no tinder, no oil to kindle his fire.
"I have that right."
"Blustering, are we?"
Ios's eyes gleamed with killing intent.
"Aren't you blustering as well?"
Ios's left hand was empty. But his breast still bulged; paintings surely remained within.
And Ios did not take them out.
Harad understood what the remaining sheets were for.
"Not taking them out?"
At that, Ios flinched.
Harad read the deliberation churning inside him.
"You must have a great deal to think about. How was I discovered? Where did the information leak? Kill him, or take him alive?"
"......"
"If you draw out the remaining sheets, this escalates. Serzila might catch wind of the magic and come swarming. That's what you're thinking, isn't it? I understand all of it."
He needled at that deliberation.
"Your pride must be wounded, too. Why are you still standing, I wonder? The Circles are absolute. But Ios — you haven't the time for that."
"......"
"Still haven't worked it out? Why would I have come alone? I gave warning in advance. To the Commander of the First Knight Order, no less."
Harad tipped his chin toward the south.
Toward Serzila.
Ios let out a long, slow breath.
"I acknowledge you, Harad."
Ios called him by name.
"I, of the great Ivory Tower, acknowledge you — you, born of the continent. Your arrogance is no failing of yours. It is the continent's sin."
He raised Harad up.
"Magician Harad. You should have been born in the Outer Realm."
"High praise, that."
It was not sincere admiration. It was self-defense — an excuse to himself, for having been forced to give his all against a mere Third Circle.
Ios's left hand seized his breast and tore it open.
Twice as many sheets as before came fluttering down. All of them blank. Not magic prepared in advance — canvases awaiting paintings yet to be drawn.
The pristine white sheets spread in every direction. They clung to the ground; they clung to the empty air. They stuck to Ios's body, and rose to plaster themselves against the sky as though it were a ceiling. Each held its own place, each different, without pattern or rule.
Ios, standing at their very center, grew.
No — it was presence that grew. And not Ios's presence.
The Origin.
The Origin, having devoured every scrap of Ios's remaining magic, stirred. It climbed over the small window that was Ios. Not all of it made it across — only a part came through.
Yes. Only a part.
To borrow the Outer Realm's phrasing: only its shadow.
Every nerve in Harad's body plunged into that fragment of the Origin.
The Origin was a line. A point, and then a plane. A painting. And within it was packed a will — Ios's, perhaps, or perhaps not.
"Harad!"
Gulen's cry came ragged with alarm.
The will painted along the sheets spread to every corner of the world. Those dozens of sheets were not backdrops. They were vertices.
Passing through and through dozens of vertices, the Origin became a painting — and manifested into the world, however partially.
It looked like a sphere; at times, like a tetrahedron. Like a prison. Like a storm.
Ink was streaked across the world. It painted over a small world countless times over. It was a typhoon; it was a tidal wave.
"Now, at last, I see you as you truly are."
Ios stood behind that painting.
Though he stood shorter than Harad, he looked down upon him.
"The Circles are absolute. They are a kind of staircase."
One who stands high sees far — and looks down upon those below.
The height of that gaze only deepens the higher one climbs, for with every step the breadth of the staircase expands without end.
"This is my Origin. The height I have climbed all my life."
The blank margins of the painting were vanishing. Ink layered over ink without pause, and Harad stood at the very heart of it. The world around him turned pitch black. The onrushing ink swallowed Harad whole.
"I will tear you to ribbons and kill you. Such is my Origin's wish."
Ios's voice rang out with perfect clarity.
He could see Harad distinctly — but Harad could see nothing at all. In a world where nothing but ink remained, the ink churned on without end.
"Genius of the arrogant continent — die cursing the fate that kept you from being born in the Outer Realm."
Ios left those final words for the Harad who should by now have been shredded finer than dust.
And then he simply gazed upon his Origin for a long, long while.
The painting that had seized a piece of the world kept swirling on — as if to kill its enemy.
...As if he were not yet dead.
"No. He isn't."
A voice. Faint, barely there.
But to Ios it was thunder. It rolled through his Origin like a thunderclap.
"That isn't what genius means to us. Is it."
The painting swelled.
As though it had swallowed something it could not digest — like a serpent gorging itself — its belly bulged.
It was not Ios's will.
Nor the will of his Origin.
Tap.
The sound of a footfall — from inside the swollen Origin.
Sizzle.
Smoke rose like mist. The ink that had been black as night grew thin. No — the color had not paled. It had diminished.
Impossible — and yet it was evaporating. Beyond it, Harad came into view. He drew nearer. Ios had been looking down on him; now the distance between their eyes was shrinking.
...It was not the sound of walking. It was the sound of climbing.
Third Circle. That was what he had been — and he had stepped onto the fourth stair. To be exact, he had set one foot upon it.
Ios realized that Harad's gaze had risen level with his own.
With only a single foot placed.
Harad looked at Ios.
On the staircase of the Circles, their eyes now stood side by side.
...Side by side?
There are those peerless in understanding, in judgment, in the handling of magic. They are called geniuses.
Not in the Outer Realm.
That great land does not call such things talent. Swift achievement? Wrong again.
To a genius, those things are utterly to be expected.
To the Outer Realm, talent is the Origin.
The size of that concept alone decides whether one is born a genius — or not.
"This is what genius means to us. Isn't it."
Yes. This was what the Outer Realm called genius.
It was why, with only one foot on the stair, his gaze had risen level.
Ios's eyes flew wide open.
His blown-wide pupils shook violently — because the fragment of his Origin that had manifested was evaporating, every last bit of it.
No — that much had become a trifle. What had unraveled it — that was the problem.
...Harad's Origin.
That Origin, manifested alone in a world scrubbed clean of ink, was indistinct.
But Ios could see it with perfect clarity.
It was unfathomably remote.
Like gazing into darkness — and at the same time, it might blind him. That dazzling darkness took the shape of a sphere.
Light shone from its surface. Within that faint glow, fire flowed, and fluttered, and surged upward.
Magic is a vague thing.
But an Origin that bursts forth into the world grows somewhat concrete — concrete enough to divine what the Origin is.
Ios dimly understood what Harad's Origin was. And so he distrusted his own eyes.
"Dear God."
His astonishment that a mere Third Circle had reached Fourth-Circle Projection had long since burned away.
Even with an agony like his eyes melting, Ios could not tear his gaze from Harad's Origin. Entranced, he murmured:
"...The Sun."
The master they yearned for — the one the Red Tower desired above all else.
It drew Ios in.
And swallowed him whole.
Without a trace.