The Rabbit (1)
There was no telling time in the Boundary.
In one spot the sun might beat down mercilessly, while a few steps ahead torrential rain fell or a moon hung overhead. And so the knight orders trusted nothing but their own bodies and senses — the most dependable of all being the belly clock.
As they neared the end of the rocky terrain, the knights' clocks sounded in one deafening chorus. Harad flinched; for an instant he thought it was thunder.
"Eat up, then we move."
At Harad's words, the knights glanced at Elain. When Elain nodded, Gulen pulled rations from the pack slung across his back. Wherever they went, hauling the baggage was the youngest's lot.
"Young Lord."
"I'll pass."
Elain refused the rations Gulen offered — and not only because his body could go days unfed and stay perfectly sound. Elain liked his food as much as he liked his drink and his smoke. It was a refusal on the knights' behalf: rations spared for whatever might come. Elain always put the knights first.
"Harad. Yours."
Delic held the rations out. It was more than a single share — flattery, unmistakably.
"I'm fine as well."
Harad refused too. Not for the knights' sake; the food simply didn't tempt him. The Origin was why.
Smack.
The Origin was smacking its lips over the lingering echo of a heart. The longer it savored that taste, the more euphoric the Origin became — and the more it hungered. It wanted more hearts.
Horrifying.
The taste was horrifying; the Origin that relished it was horrifying; and so was Elain, who had offered it up. Every time this happened, Harad felt not the reward of his regression but regret over it. It should have been Elain who went back, not him.
"Time to move out."
Elain said it the moment the meal was done. Once again, it was departure, not return.
So his limit hasn't come yet, it seems.
Which meant he could tolerate this much deviation. It also read as a quiet challenge — let's see just how far you'll go. So Harad did exactly that. They had strayed from the search route anyway; he set out toward the Second Wall.
Not in a straight line, though. Harad's steps slanted west, meant to trace where the smoke of that watchtower — the one whose signals ran to the King's Outer Monument — ultimately led.
...If only a magician would come out to meet us.
That one wasn't my thought.
A magician. That craving belonged to the Origin. Harad grimaced and rubbed at the space between his brows.
The reason was that he had swallowed a fourth-circle magical beast's heart while his mana was nowhere near spent. The larger the Origin grew, the stronger its hold on the magician became — and mana, after all, needed to be expended on a regular basis.
Should I have taken the stone beast myself? Of course, there had been a point to yielding — he had watched Elain's growth with his own two eyes.
The rocky terrain ended right before their eyes; from the very next footstep, it was grassland. The grass was stiff as wire, refusing to bend even under the knights' considerable weight. Stamped on with full force, it came up unharmed — if anything, it looked more likely to punch through a boot sole, like walking on a bed of awls.
Harad plucked a blade and put it in his mouth. It was as hard as an awl, yet it chewed like grass, and the sting on his tongue said it carried poison besides. He kindled fire inside his mouth at once and burned the toxin away. The warmth turned pleasant, then perverse — biting cold one moment, sticky the next. More than one kind of blended, corrupted mana was at work here.
"Do you have to taste everything like that?" Elain, who had been watching in silence, asked. Whenever the environment changed, Harad made a point of putting its elements in his mouth — ice, snow, even pebbles, held like candy.
"It's a habit."
It wasn't a particularly meaningful act, only simple curiosity: what corruptions had this land endured, and what mana was left in it? He tasted it because no part of the body was more sensitive than the mouth.
The grassland ended. The vivid blue sky cut off with it — a severance like the world itself drawing a line, and beyond that line the sky was violet. Not a cloud in sight, yet neither sun nor moon showed. Gaunt, leafless trees stood in sparse clusters, and between them dozens of moss-grown skulls lay tumbled about. From the ground jutted things like stalagmites, every one of them a small magical beast.
The instant the scouting party crossed into their territory, the beasts hurled themselves forward. Their speed was startling — like arrows loosed from a bow — and there were several dozen of those living arrows. Behind them, the skeletal trees and mossy skulls advanced. All of them were magical beasts.
Harad saw no need to step in. Delic and the knights were hoping he wouldn't.
"Glory to Serzilla's sword!"
Delic and the knights roared as one. The aura they had hoarded until now wrapped their whole bodies and sheathed their blades. Delic took the center, with Parman and Gulen at his flanks; Tursten and Jambello stretched the wings. Save for Gulen, every one of them was a decorated veteran.
Delic was the second-in-command of the 1st Knight Order's commander, and Tursten had once driven a fourth-circle magician to death's door. Jambello was Tursten's senior; Parman, the junior Tursten doted on.
Gulen is the problem.
That would be why Delic had posted him on the right. Parman stood on the left for the same reason, though he was better than Gulen. As it was, Delic was swinging his sword for Gulen's share too, and Jambello, strongest after Delic, covered the boy besides.
Tight-knit, certainly.
To put it bluntly, Gulen was dead weight. But the knights never let it show. They meant to shield their still-green youngest while giving him the chance to build experience.
The beasts kept coming after that. Every one of them was unfamiliar to the knight order, and Delic and the others welcomed them gladly. Thanks to Harad, they had at last been given the chance to fight at full strength, and properly.
Elain's face, meanwhile, darkened by the hour — because the wounds kept mounting on those still-smiling bodies. Gulen carried the fewest; Delic the most. Nothing demonstrated Serzilla's tight bonds more plainly.
Harad raised his head. He'd thought they had come quite far, yet the Second Wall showed no sign of drawing closer. Only its faintest outline was visible, and the smoke of the watchtower that ran on to the King's Outer Monument lay farther off still.
Past the 2nd Boundary, then.
He had allowed himself some hope, but the King's Outer Monument appeared to lie beyond the Second Wall — which meant they would have to approach by the tunnel connected to the 2nd Boundary, not the knight order's search route.
"Let's rest here."
At Harad's word the knights looked to Elain; when Elain nodded, they sank onto the ground, looking distinctly awkward about it. It was the first time a scouting party had ever sat down to rest inside the Boundary.
"Hey, Jambello."
"Yes, Sir Delic."
"What do you say we make the Commander into the Vice-Commander?"
"That's... going a bit far..."
"If you do it, I'll back you!"
Jambello balked, but Gulen — the commander's own son — approved. Harad, feigning deafness to Delic's mutinous scheming, pressed steadily down on the ground. This stretch of the Boundary lay under a pitch-black, moonless night. The soil was soft, and — uncharacteristically for the Boundary — free of poison. The chill and the wind persisted, but no snow fell. This much, he could fix.
"Lie down now."
The seated knights stared up at him with blank faces.
"So we can sleep?"
"Sleep?"
"In the Boundary?"
They had been told in advance that sleep might be possible. But now that it was actually happening, the knights found it hard to accept.
"I'm not sleepy."
So Delic spoke for them all; to his ears, "you may sleep" sounded like "you can sleep when you're dead."
"Sleep anyway. Sleep is essential."
"Rest alone will satisfy us."
A search's time limit was ordinarily four or five days, and for that entire span the knights could take neither sleep nor rest. They had to stretch an aura that drained even in stillness as far as it would go and simply wait for the search to end.
"No. I'm not satisfied."
By Harad's standards, it was consummate foolishness.
"Searches with me are mostly like this. If you want to stay at my side, you'll have to get used to it."
"..."
"If you can't sleep, say so now. The 1st Knight Order won't be joining my searches."
At that, Delic flopped flat onto his back. Once the vice commander set the example, the other knights reluctantly lowered themselves to the ground as well. The act of lying down in the Boundary looked hopelessly awkward — but their bodies were honest. Before long, thunder cracked in a rolling string. It was the knights snoring.
"And they said they weren't sleepy."
Harad breathed a hollow laugh and settled in at the knights' heads. His presence was their campfire. Elain leaned against a tree by their feet, so that the knights lay in a line between the two of them.
"If you and they fell into the water, I would save them without a moment's hesitation."
Elain said it out of the blue. "At least, for now."
A goad to do better — so that Elain might come to trust him more. But that didn't seem to be all of it. Elain was looking down at the snoring knights — at their wounds, rather. Wounds that could never have been earned on the search route alone. However much the knights had wanted this too, Elain had not wished to see them hurt.
So this is where it ends.
Elain had reached his limit. He would not have the knights hurt any further to feed his own ambition.
"When they wake, we head back."
The knights counted death in the Boundary an honor. Elain hoped they would never get to claim it.
"You're rather fond of the knights, it seems."
"I have no choice but to be."
Elain respected Serzilla's knights. They were the sword that staked their lives daily through the Boundary, guarding Serzilla's peace. And Elain was Serzilla's heir — as the one soon to be their lord, it was his duty to weigh the blade's edge and its burden. The ravening cold, the fatigue that withered aura, the shadow of a death no one saw coming. Elain had wanted to taste that life, if only briefly, if only secondhand. Which meant this day of hunting had not come about merely because Elain craved real combat.
"They're forever saying they'll give their lives. For Serzilla."
And not the knights alone. Every vassal in Serzilla's service was the same. Every one of them stood ready to die, should Serzilla will it.
"Could you do the same?"
"I have no intention of dying for Serzilla."
The reply came without a beat's pause, and Elain smiled thinly at it.
"And that is exactly why I cannot help but trust them more. I..."
"But."
Harad cut him off.
"I do intend to die for you."
Any time. For Elain, Harad could do it.
"Just not for the you of now."
"..."
Elain's eyes went round. He stayed like that a long while, lips parting and closing, parting and closing again.
"Harad. You..."
At last he spoke, his expression wavering between belief and doubt.
"Could this be... a dream..."
Kyiii—!
All at once, some beast's cry rang out. Elain's words were swallowed by it — no, severed outright. Elain, who had been sitting right before his eyes a heartbeat ago, was gone.
KWAAANG—! A tremendous impact sounded in the distance.
Harad's eyes went glassy. His mind, meanwhile, whirled at a furious pace and produced a conclusion too absurd for words: ...that impact was the sound of Elain being slammed into stone, a tree, or the ground itself. He could see nothing at all — but the culprit was the beast that had cried kyiii. It had hurled Elain far beyond the reach of sight, at a speed neither Elain — nor even Harad — had managed to register.
Kyiii—!
...Which meant. That rabbit.