The Tower (1)
The 1st Boundary.
The knights called that unknown land their front yard.
It was not a thing they had any right to say — not when they had never conquered the 1st Boundary, nor even properly come to understand it... and yet.
Because of all lands, that Boundary lay closest to Serzilla.
Put another way, it meant the 2nd Boundary was the Outlands' front yard.
He had no way of knowing how the Outlanders themselves regarded the place, but hold Serzilla's own point of view up against the map and the answer was the same: the Outlands lay closer than home did.
Arriving in such a land, Ellen's face had gone stiff as stone — and still the corners of her mouth kept twitching.
It was tension. It was excitement.
Ellen understood anew why she kept company with Harad. Only that magician ever manufactured this kind of stimulus and opportunity for her.
How many knights had ever set foot in the 2nd Boundary? Never mind the Knight Commanders — even Moresz Palaz, the oldest of Serzilla's Sword Masters, had never once walked it. As far as Ellen knew, Grand Duke Aratus was the only one.
And she had arrived in that land.
"...The Outlands is over there, isn't it?"
"Don't excite yourself."
"How am I supposed to help it!"
Ellen bounded about like a child. At some point her sword had already left its sheath; she looked ready to sprint for the Outlands at any moment.
"I trust you're no fool." Harad said it to her with a face gone utterly grave. "You've already come within a hair of dying in the Boundary once. Don't forget that."
"..."
"The being that drove off that patchwork beast — the one that very nearly killed you — is somewhere in this land."
Only then did Ellen come back to her senses.
"The fringes of a 1st Boundary are on the safe side. That's why the knights leap down from the Wall without a care in the world. It won't be so different on the Outlands' side, I'd wager."
What Serzilla called the 2nd Boundary would be a 1st Boundary to the Outlands. Its fringe would naturally be safe.
Harad pointed behind them. The Second Wall was not far off.
"That Wall marks the center of the Boundary. It's drawn precisely across the middle — which means the ground we're standing on now is near the heart of the place."
The deeper one went, the harsher the corruption became. And the Second Wall was the deepest point of all.
"Think of a fruit. At a fruit's center sits its seed — the hardest part of the fruit. The seed of the fruit called the Boundary is that Second Wall."
The most dangerous zone in the Boundary. That was the Second Wall.
Harad and Ellen were standing not far from it.
"...I'm sorry."
"No need. It beats being terrified."
Harad smiled warmly at her ready admission.
There was no need to correct that personality of hers. No — it must not be corrected. He had to keep providing Ellen with places to fight, or failing that, reasons to train. Only then would she never grow lazy the way she had in the life he remembered.
"Let's move along for now."
This was a place to die, not a place to fight.
Harad walked with his eyes turned toward the Outlands' sky.
"You want us to head that way?"
"The Boundary is vast. Far vaster than you think."
On a map, the Boundary measured smaller than the North. But corruption was the problem. Endless corruption stretched the Boundary far beyond what its borders showed. Judged by the scale a body actually felt, it would dwarf the North outright.
"What is that even supposed to mean."
"That it defies measuring."
Even Harad, a magician, could only explain it that way. Such was the nature of magic.
"Of course, it won't have ballooned to anything outlandish. Magic is only vague within the bounds of what is possible."
"Whose bounds?"
"In the Boundary's case, the bounds of the mana left behind and of corruption itself. In mine, my bounds — a magician's."
However vague magic might be, limits existed in the end. The Origin refused to permit the outlandish. Even if Harad wished for a true sun, his Origin could not grant it — he simply lacked the mana for such a thing.
"So it would be possible, given enough mana?"
"No one can say. No one has ever held that much mana."
And even if someone had, he doubted it would have worked. How could a human being reproduce the sun? If such a thing were possible, there would be no faiths in this world devoted to the sun and the moon.
Harad carried on with the lecture, but Ellen had stopped really listening. One thing she took away for certain, though: the Boundary was a land far larger than it appeared.
No matter how far they walked, the Outlands' sky showed not the first sign of drawing closer.
...She also learned that the ground behind them was the Boundary's most dangerous zone — by way of the crimson dust falling from the sky in place of rain. No, not dust. The blood of magical beasts.
It wasn't the crimson clouds spitting it down. The clouds weren't red to begin with — above them hung something vast and red, and the blood drifting down was blood it was shedding.
"...Don't tell me that's a magical beast."
Its sheer size was staggering. The clouds hid it from view, but that red bulk was unmistakably in motion — wheeling through the air, bleeding as it went.
"It is. 5th Tier, I'd judge."
"That is?"
Ellen thought of the patchwork beast. It had been a wounded 5th Tier — and even whole, it surely would not have compared to this.
"Not every Sword Master is the same as every other Sword Master, now is he."
"Ah."
"That beast is a true 5th Tier. It falls short of the kind that passes into legend."
"..."
For an instant, that colossal beast had crushed the breath clean out of her. And still, it fell short of legendary.
"6th Tier. Had it been one of the great ones, you wouldn't have managed to identify it at all."
Harad started to explain further, then stopped. A 6th Tier beast was not a thing words could capture.
"Creatures like that don't stoop to such sneaky tricks."
Harad rubbed the beast's blood from his cheek. The mana in it was denser than he'd expected. The thing was scattering its blood to lure in other beasts. A body that size wouldn't be filled by a mouthful here and there — no doubt it meant to round up its meal and devour it all at once.
He tipped his head back until his neck would bend no further, drinking in the sky. In his heart of hearts, he wanted to study that huge red thing — strike at it, perhaps, or let it know this side existed.
Hardly in a position to lecture anyone else, am I.
It was an impulse that made a mockery of how he'd just talked Ellen down. Not that he could help it. A magician was, at root, a creature of inquiry.
The 2nd Boundary was unknown territory to Harad too. He had crossed into it rarely even in his past life, and this region — never, not once. He had no idea what might be lurking nearby.
That was why he had fixed their bearing on the Outlands' sky. However vast the Boundary, reason said this was a direction they should not go — but the curiosity of a magician was spurring Harad's every step onward.
We really ought to stop here.
The reason Elaine had tempered into him long ago whispered its warning. And then the world changed.
The hard ground went suddenly brittle, like soil aged past all its years. The wind blowing past was too desiccated to deserve the name. In a sky without one wisp of cloud, the sun blazed hotter than over any desert.
...And there, far off across that land, something long and narrow stood upright.
To any eye, it was artificial.
I'll confirm what that is, at least, before we go.
Desolation.
Harad could compress this land — transformed without warning, as though that new environment had come crashing down over everything for miles around — into a single word.
Here and there across the crazed, fissured ground, embers yet smoldered, but no fire spread from them. There wasn't a scrap of vegetation anywhere near for a flame to devour. Put the other way round: embers had been born where no fuel existed.
Sure enough, the tip of his nose pricked. The Boundary's signature chill was absent — as though an equal measure of energy had been transmuted into heat.
"Could you keep your distance a little?"
Ellen put space between them. The place was already maddeningly hot, and the air beside Harad was hotter still. It felt like warming yourself by a second fire while standing inside the first.
"Astonishing."
Harad marveled even as sweat streamed off him in ropes. Ellen, who was losing rather less water than he was, let her irritation show plain as day, but Harad hadn't a spare moment to be irritated in return.
"It seems fire is the cause of the corruption here. And a fire of tremendous might, at that."
"Didn't you tell me before that corruptions breed corruptions, over and over?"
The Boundary was land made grotesque by residual mana. Those numberless manas corrupted. Over long ages they sired new corruptions, mingled, and corrupted again. So many eras had passed in neglect that tracing any given starting point was nearly impossible. He had explained it that way once before.
"Every rule keeps an exception somewhere. A clean-cut space like this land, for one."
"..."
"The mana of fire stomped every other mana flat. It was so mighty that nothing else could so much as meddle."
This land had been corrupted by fire and fire alone — from before anyone called this place the Boundary, down to the present day. It meant the fire mana first left here had been powerful beyond reckoning.
"Perhaps a 6th Tier flame perished here. A very, very long time ago."
"You're telling me this is the residue of a magician who died ages ago?"
"Could just as well have been a beast."
"Either way."
The trace of one death had lingered this long? Ellen couldn't easily bring herself to believe it.
"I did tell you, didn't I — magic runs deeper than that."
"..."
"Failing to understand it is an answer in itself."
That was precisely what made magic magic. No concept defined the art half so well as its own vagueness did.
Perhaps the heat warped the eye, but the distances ran farther than they looked. They walked and walked, and the long, artificial something remained far off yet. It was like crossing a desert toward a distant oasis.
But draw closer they unmistakably did.
"A tower."
The exclamation left Harad unbidden. The long, artificial something was a tower.
He thought of the Magic Towers. Ivory towers — the towers of the Outlands, his own excepted.
Impossible.
Towers stood in the Outlands, not in the Boundary. He had never laid eyes on one in the flesh, but it had to be so. The Boundary was no place for people to raise dwellings and live.
The tower, looming exactly where he'd expected it, looked woefully shabby — riven and broken in so many places that its refusal to collapse was the greater marvel.
An ancient Magic Tower, perhaps.
The Boundary had once been Outlands soil — the empty space left behind when Serzilla drove them out. That tower looked to be a Magic Tower raised in the days when this land still belonged to the Outlands.
The distance shrank by degrees, and with every degree the tower swelled. If this land had possessed clouds, its peak would have vanished among them. It was that tall.
"...Madness."
Its height left Ellen aghast.
"That's a building?"
By anything her common sense allowed, the tower was an incomprehensible structure. True, the spire of the imperial palace in the capital, or the tip of the Holy Land's great cathedral, reached somewhere near that height too. But what stood before her eyes was no castle and no cathedral. It was a single solitary tower — meaning it rose from ground that offered it nothing, no ridge, no support but itself.
Tall enough to brush the clouds, and yet the ground it occupied was no larger than a common peasant's house. And despite all of that, it stood sound. Though countless ages had passed, though it was gouged and mangled all over as if some magical beast had taken bite after bite out of it, the tower stood perfectly straight.
"That's magic."
A continent that spurned magic could never raise such a structure. And was it only buildings? Come to think of it, the Outland relic she carried was something the continent couldn't imitate if it tried. Everything else would be no different. The Outlands' craft overwhelmed the continent's outright.
Past the tower's peak, the sky of the Outlands showed itself. The very sky Harad had once asked about — whether Grand Duke Aratus could tear it open. The Outlands could, hadn't he said.
"They managed it, you know."
The sound of Harad's voice from that day echoed in her skull.
"No harm ever came of being careful."
"..."
"But lapse into complacency, and something bad is certain to follow."
Those words — only now did they truly strike home.
He had been able to see it even from far away, but up close, the tower's condition was a great deal worse.
In places only the skeleton remained; elsewhere it had been punched clean through, as though some colossal beast had taken one enormous bite. That it hadn't toppled was the strange part.
And yet the door was immaculate. Harad gripped its oddly shaped handle and pushed, then pulled. The motion ran silk-smooth, and not a grain of dust had settled on the threshold.
"Looks like there's a nasty bastard inside."
"...You're making fun of me right now, aren't you?"
Even as her eyes narrowed to suspicious slits, Ellen's hand found her sword.
Then it happened — a sound.
"...That wasn't you speaking just now, was it?"
"I heard it too. A voice. There it goes again."
Someone was inside this tower. Which meant — a magician of the Outlands.
"Let's hurry in, shall we?"
Ellen was electric with excitement.
"By all means."
This once, even Harad had no grounds to object.