The Watchtower (1)
There are magic towers in the Outlands.
According to Serzilla's records, there were six of them.
That was what they believed — in truth, there were seven.
Ellen had learned of the Red Tower's existence only recently, and through Harad, no less.
The tower might have been founded anew, or Serzilla might simply never have known. Historically, Serzilla had never cared much for keeping records.
It was no great problem in itself. It was this situation that grated on her nerves.
"Been keeping well, Hervis?"
"Y-yes, yes. A pleasure to see you, Harad."
"Likewise."
They were meeting for the very first time, and yet Harad and Hervis were beaming at one another.
So familiar was the exchange that Ellen half suspected the two of them really did know each other after all.
Harad could understand the suspicion. With Ios, too — the magician who had infiltrated the North — he had worn exactly this sort of friendliness to pry loose information, and the Red Tower's existence had been one of the fruits of that success.
"Have you been well all this while?"
"I have."
Then what in the hell is that bastard supposed to be?
Hervis was delightedly welcoming a total stranger — Harad, who wasn't even from his tower and was, at this very moment, lying through his teeth.
"Hervis, I suspect you and I will have a great deal to talk about."
Now that she looked again, Harad seemed rather taken aback himself. He shot Ellen a glance — it seemed to mean, leave Hervis out of this.
"And why would I?"
She had held off on Kubel for Shura's sake. Ellen had no wish to agonize over Outland magicians as well. Good and evil, guilt and innocence — such yardsticks meant nothing to the Outlands.
"Hervis! You've made a mockery of me!"
Then it happened — Jeshult erupted. In Ellen's eyes he had been the only sane one present, but now, swollen as large as he could get, he came thundering forward with his head scraping the ceiling.
The fist plunging down from above was every bit a falling meteorite, and Ellen had no choice but to step in. Her sword, drawn before she knew it, crossed the fist's path — and the impact shook the tower to its core.
"Give me that one too."
Harad, grimacing at the jarring shock, murmured at her back.
"There's something I want to verify."
He was pointing at Jeshult.
"No."
Ellen scrunched up her face.
Being told to hand over Jeshult displeased her even more than being told to leave Hervis alone. Here was an Outland magician she had only just met, and she was more worked up over him than she had ever been over the patchwork magical beast. She had no intention of surrendering this feeling to anyone.
"Wait your turn. You went first last time, remember."
He meant the patchwork beast. Not that she had meant to — but it had been Ellen who took it on first that day.
"…I hope you lose."
Praying for Harad's defeat, Ellen slid her sword back into its sheath.
So the one who had been lying in my bed with me was Compaso.
Harad recalled the gift from Cassion, Commander of the 2nd Knight Order, and shook his head.
Dead Compaso had handed him a gift as well. The reason Jeshult had seized Hervis by the collar was Ios's death — a misunderstanding born of the fact that Compaso's eye had witnessed him burn.
The Red Tower attacked the Ivory Tower.
That was how the Outlands would read it. The Ivory Tower, neutral until now, would never look kindly upon the Red Tower again. He had, without meaning to, sown discord through the whole of the Outlands.
For Harad, it was a windfall.
"Steel!"
Jeshult howled, as though in lamentation, his colossal fist having been stopped dead by a sword.
Another misunderstanding had just been born — because Ellen had blocked that fist without even raising her aura. It was a misunderstanding of no particular consequence. After all, Jeshult would never carry word of what happened here back to the Ivory Tower.
"Where are you looking? Your friend's killer is standing right here."
Harad addressed Jeshult, who was glaring at Ellen.
Whereupon Jeshult swung his glare onto Harad.
Simple-minded, aren't we. He had expected as much from the moment the man grabbed Hervis by the collar. It would come down to origins. Jeshult's bulk had long since outgrown anything a human being could be.
"Ivory Tower, was it? However I look at you, there's precious little artistry about you."
"The Ivory is a tower without true substance!"
Hervis shouted, apparently out of nowhere.
"Hervis!"
"Jeshult's origin is Muscle."
Even under Jeshult's crushing menace, Hervis did not cower. That unbowed bearing kept him from looking like a mere toady.
He's friendly to an insane degree. Is it because they share the same fire? Did those born of the same origin feel a sense of belonging? Even toward someone whose identity they didn't know?
CRUNCH! Jeshult's interlaced hands smashed through the ceiling and drove downward. The floor caved in, then caved in again — several floors' worth of ground vanished in the space of a breath.
Harad looked at Hervis as he plunged. Ellen had knocked the man cold and touched down on a slab of the tower's wreckage with Hervis held by the nape. Jeshult, meanwhile, had already landed; looking up at the falling Harad, he cocked his fist back like a weapon being loaded.
Harad snapped his fingers the instant that fist fired. That tiny scratch of friction stretched out into a lance of flame. Its girth was exactly the size of the bastard's forearm. It swallowed Jeshult's fist whole and burned the arm away to the shoulder.
"Hrk!"
Instead of a scream, Jeshult's eyes bulged wide and he choked down a ragged breath.
By the time Harad's feet found the ground, the smell of melting protein was stinging his nose. The arm that had been big to the point of idiocy had burned away, and through the ruin of it, bone showed. The bone was exactly the size it had always been. Artistry aside, magic was, in the end, magic — just as Hervis had said, Jeshult's origin did seem to be Muscle.
FWOOSH! The remaining shoulder blade unraveled muscle in thick cords. While the arm was still regrowing, Jeshult leapt — and the leap itself was the attack. Harad flung himself out of the way.
CRASH! A foot caved in the floor yet again.
Harad rolled across the ground and then felt weightlessness claim him. Landing atop countless shards of debris and looking up, he found the drop considerable. Moments ago they had been on the thirtieth floor; now they stood on the first.
So every punch, every kick — each one of them is its own spell. Harad gave a hollow laugh at that brainless magic.
Magicians whose origins resided in the body were a rarity. Jeshult was both a rare breed and a precious 4th Circle besides; the strength — no, the mana — radiating off his enraged muscles was genuinely formidable. To so much as graze him would have been enough to leave a body ruined.
Hand-to-hand combat had been a burden in his past life, too. Elain was the reason — that man had been strong and sturdy to an absurd degree. This was no time to be dredging up such memories.
For the regressed Harad, even Jeshult was still a burden. He would need the firepower to keep the man from closing in at all — and that sort usually came packaged with equally ignorant durability. Matchup for matchup, Jeshult was a harder opponent than Ios.
And yet he didn't feel the least bit troublesome.
"Die."
BOOM! Jeshult's fist blew the wall apart. The outside showed through — crumbling ground, desiccated air, a ferocious heat. The land of fire.
"I don't think you'll be dying."
This land would see to that.
In his past life he had crossed deserts and the cities that ringed them. Compared to this place, those deserts had been downright cold. And that didn't simply mean it was hotter here, or drier.
Fire flowed through this land. That wasn't literally true — but that was how Harad felt it. Pull me out. From the moment he set foot on this ground, he had been caught in the illusion that the sun was murmuring those words. This land was unmistakably goading his origin awake.
Whew. A breath of mana let out without a thought became a great fire demon. Jeshult's arm turned to ash. With a soft roar, flames boiled up from the floor his boot sole had scraped, beating back the lunging Jeshult.
In other words — it was one-sided. Jeshult could not lay so much as a finger on Harad. His fire was ceaselessly burning through Jeshult's muscle, and his magic along with it.
Astonishing.
Harad was a 3rd Circle who might as well have been a 4th. But right now, he was awash in the sensation of having genuinely crossed into the 4th Circle. Trivial spells turned respectable, and weighty spells became his full strength. Jeshult's muscle — the kind that should have cost Harad his everything just to melt — was melting down without much effort at all.
This land was what made fire that way.
So that's why Hervis stood so proud. The fire Hervis had conjured had been quite something indeed. Ordinarily, it wouldn't have been. It was this land that had made his magic strong.
This ground itself was, for Harad and Hervis, the finest preparation there was. Any preparation they might have labored over would have fallen short of this place. It was as though this land existed for the sake of fire alone.
If only he had known of this land in his past life — here, even for a single hour, might he have become a 6th Circle?
Harad shook his head. He doubted it. In the end, there was a limit to what vagueness could do.
Even so, this much was already an unbelievable phenomenon. Never before had he met an environment that worked on a magician so powerfully. Even that boundless sea could not grant this much strength to an origin of water.
Harad gripped his sword and, with his other hand, hauled the scabbard back as he drew. The blade scraped roughly along the sheath's length as it came free. Outside, that friction would have ended as a scatter of sparks; here, it became a roaring torrent of flame.
The sword swung to its very end left only a hilt behind. The scabbard was gone without a trace. In its place, a fire like a typhoon swallowed Jeshult whole.
"Gaaah…!"
Jeshult, who had not let out a single scream until now, loosed a horrific shriek. The muscles of his whole body ran down him like thick oil. From within the melting flesh, new magic — muscle — quivered and surged upward.
It wasn't that his power had run short. Harad had, deliberately, burned only Jeshult's muscle. It was the peculiar curiosity of a magician: how far did this land reach — and how, precisely, did it act? Harad no longer regarded Jeshult as an enemy. He was a kind of test subject.
The moment Jeshult realized as much, his face warped into a vengeful demon's. His freshly rebuilt muscle swelled larger still. Larger, and larger. The expansion repeated itself over and over, and with every writhing pulse his frame grew, a considerable torrent of mana spilling out into the world each time.
Muscle. It was the sound of an origin forcing its way out through the window called Jeshult. It was the sound of that window breaking, too. His friend's killer. The humiliation. Jeshult had resolved himself to annihilation.
Krk. He heard something splitting.
The sound of the vessel of the origin called Jeshult cracking apart. It wasn't a sound truly heard — it simply felt that way. The sensation came at the very moment the swelling stopped.
Jeshult no longer looked human. He hadn't before, either, but now less than ever. He had grown to half the tower's height; his grip could have closed around the entire tower in one hand.
And at the crown of all that muscle, there was no face. Something hard and dreadful — magic, presumably, shaped of muscle — had taken the face's place. No nose or ears, no eyes or mouth could be seen. And yet, faceless as it was, it looked down at Harad. It was not seeing Harad as an enemy. It was sensing Harad as prey.
"Well, look at that. It's swallowed him whole."
The essence of a magician is not the magician. It is the origin. At least, that was what Harad believed — the tyranny of origins was one proof of it.
An origin was no eternally docile creature. They were always straining to burst out. Always watching for a crack. Goading fits of frenzy, seeking to shatter the vessel called a magician.
Harad had seen magicians broken in exactly that way more times than he could count. He knew how their stories ended. Jeshult had become one of them. That thing was, no longer, human. The magician called Jeshult no longer existed.
"What's the good of breaking apart over an emotion? I hold mine in, you know."
Harad clicked his tongue.
It wasn't that he pitied him. Jeshult was no one to be pitied. He was a magician of the Outlands. Harad merely felt a flicker of kinship, that was all — merely carved his vigilance in fresh. He must not forget that this was what a magician, at bottom, was.
"Do you want this one?"
Harad looked over at Ellen, who stood off at a distance, keeping the unconscious Hervis pinned.
"So I'm on cleanup duty?"
"You like fights, don't you?"
"Never mind. You handle it."
She said it, but Ellen was disappointed. All the same, her eyes glittered — and Harad caught on that she wanted to see the magic that had killed Ios.
Pull me out. The sun whispered again. Harad dismissed it as an auditory hallucination. But he did intend to. Here, it seemed, he need not fear the aftereffects. He was curious what sort of sun would be projected into this land. If anything counted as a stimulus, this would.
Harad lifted his head. Jeshult — no, the magical beast — moved, and Harad's gaze rose above its head. Something dazzling and dark hung there.
But — just a little brighter than last time. The sun.
"Ah."
Hervis's eyes, turned up toward the sky, melted into a hazy glow.