Cassion (2)
Elaine had first laid eyes on Cassion when she was five years old.
He had the slight, delicate frame that was rare in the North. And yet he was as strong as any of the other knights—only more learned about it. His features were gentle, but he never once let a flicker of emotion show.
—Above all, a man who put Serzilla first.
But his convictions had been clear.
"Anyone who suspected that man of being a magician was the strange one."
"Your father did, my lady."
"Nothing new there."
That, at least, was how Grand Duke Elaine had once reminisced.
"Cassion was even worse."
Cassion had been a stranger creature than Grand Duke Aratus himself.
In the end, Elaine never did manage to figure him out. Neither had Harad. Cassion died at Grand Duke Aratus's hand before Harad could ever come close.
"In my eyes, he was a knight."
But as Harad heard it from Elaine, Cassion had been a knight. A knight of Serzilla—not a magician.
'His acting is beyond belief.'
Harad let out a laugh of sheer disbelief as he watched Cassion, sword drawn. The way the man gripped his blade two-handed was the very picture of a knight.
"If you don't leave, I'll kill you."
Cassion looked ready to swing at any moment.
"Then kill me."
He didn't swing right away.
It was a plain threat. The killing intent was unmistakable, but there was no will behind it to see it done.
'Even now, he won't kill me.'
Because the Red Tower and the Tower of the Moon lived in symbiosis? Things had gone far too deep to write it off that easily. At this point, the correct move was to kill Harad and pretend he had never existed at all.
'The Red Tower has no way of knowing I exist.'
Defecting would be the graceful option, but killing him would cost them nothing either. And yet here was Cassion, urging him to defect.
'The watchtower of fire?'
Nothing else came to mind. No flame of the Red Tower had ever managed to burn that watchtower. Only Harad had burned it—and only Harad had learned where the Red Tower king's outer vessel lay...
"Ah."
Harad abruptly looked up at the sky. The watchtower's smoke stretched in a single unbroken line beneath the standing sun. At the end of that smoke sat the Red Tower king's outer vessel.
"So it shows itself only to me."
Only then did Harad understand.
"It's not that he won't kill me. He can't."
"..."
"And thanks to that, I've learned something."
The watchtower's smoke was visible only to the one who had burned it. Which meant that if Harad died, the Red Tower would never reclaim its king's outer vessel.
It was striking information. A clear merit, too. And merit was exactly what Harad needed—if he wanted more magicians like Kubel.
"Much obliged. Looks like I can afford one more magician-retainer after all."
Harad smiled in a way meant to grate.
That was when Cassion's form vanished from sight.
'More of a shadow type, that one...'
Projection or Manifestation might give something away, but deducing a man's Origin from a handful of spells was all but impossible. Harad simply remembered. And in those memories, there was no magician called Cassion.
Harad's hand raked through empty air. The right one. Flame bloomed from all five fingers and clawed at the void.
The fire did not scatter. It clung, burning something—burning the place where Cassion hid.
Cover blown, Cassion swung.
Harad drew his sword in a reverse grip to meet the blow, then staggered sideways a few steps. His grip had torn open, and the force had slid down through his elbow. It carried real weight. Beyond that, there was nothing to gauge. The power surely sprang from mana, yet Harad couldn't sense a trace of mana at all. Something dull and viscous flowed over Cassion's blade.
Mana, without question—but...
'It feels exactly like aura.'
Cassion's sword was indistinguishable from a knight's. Had he never regressed, Harad would have believed Cassion a knight without a shadow of doubt.
'An outer vessel? Magic?'
Harad remembered an outer vessel that made mana masquerade as aura. It was the very vessel he had suffered under in his past life.
'If it were an outer vessel, I'd have caught it.'
A dull gray-white aura seized his gaze. That blade was aimed at Harad's throat.
Instead of dodging, Harad struck back. He took the measure of its force and texture a second time and was flung several meters through the air. The price bought him certainty.
'Magic.'
That was Cassion's magic. Mana transformed into aura. An Origin precious enough on that count alone—and it didn't so much as betray itself to a magician's eyes.
"Quite the talent, you are."
Harad's admiration was entirely genuine. That the Aratus of his past life had seen through such a Cassion was, anew, remarkable.
Cassion melted from sight once more. In the same instant, Harad exhaled. The breath struck his lower lip and curled upward, stirring his bangs—and before Harad's eyes it became a dazzling blaze, one that lit the already-bright Sacred Ground of Fire brighter still.
The vanished Cassion was right in front of him. Struck full in the face by the light, the man's tightly shut eyes had welled faintly with tears. It didn't hinder him. Cassion's blade flowed on unimpeded.
That sword-path was ferociously rough. And heavy. Even turning it aside with Pater, heirloom of Serzilla, Harad's elbow throbbed.
Kra-kaang! With its arc bent, Cassion's sword slammed into the ground. A strike delivered by a sword, yet it gouged the earth like a fallen boulder. That power put Harad in mind of a mace—the mace, symbol of the Second Knight Order.
Blood from his torn grip soaked Pater's hilt damp. A small flame bloomed and boiled the blood away, searing the torn palm shut.
Cassion's eyes had gone wide enough to tear.
'From blocking his sword?'
It wasn't that. By a magician's measure, he had not Manifested his Origin; by a knight's, he had not donned a trait. Cassion was holding something back in his swordwork—because he stood in no position to kill Harad.
"...That sword..."
Cassion wasn't looking at Harad at all, but at the blade in his hand—as if trying to place what sword it was.
"That's right. It's Pater."
Harad thrust it out proudly.
"Serzilla gave it to me. I'm a talent too, you see."
Cassion Dissar.
His Origin was tied to the moon or to shadow, and so it was stealthy. Thanks to that stealth, his mana could pass itself off as aura. He'd explained his own aura trait the same way, and the story had held together. And so the magician Cassion became Commander of the Second Knight Order.
That was the extent of what Harad knew. The man's habits, hobbies, associations... He'd heard more from Elaine, but it was hard to swallow whole. When the very first button had been fastened with a lie, how much truth could follow?
One thing was certain: Cassion was the only Sword Master who could come and go through the Boundary—because his awakened aura trait was a stealthy one.
'When in truth he's a magician.'
Stealth was stealth either way. Harad had assumed the man's sword would be the same.
It was a prejudice.
The ground Cassion struck caved in. The crack of it was loud enough to split eardrums, and Harad deflected that blade yet again.
'The exact opposite.'
Far from stealthy, it was wanton destruction. If not for Pater, the sword would have snapped long ago. And had he not tempered his body, his body would have given out.
'If this weren't the Sacred Ground of Fire, I'd already be dead.'
Cassion was a Sword Master of Serzilla, and only a 5th-tier magician could pass as one. That Harad could hold out all the same he owed to a famous blade—to the swordsmanship learned in his past life, and to this being the Sacred Ground of Fire. And decisively, to the fact that Cassion was still holding back.
"Swinging that sword is all you'll do, then?"
Cassion's sword was destructive—or to put it unkindly, excessive. It was a style that hoarded stealth upon stealth until it swelled into the conspicuous. Inefficient. It devoured mana by necessity.
'He insists on taking the loss.'
When flowing with one's Origin was the efficient path.
Cassion tightened his grip on the sword. The gray-white aura condensed darker still. An attitude that said he would speak with steel rather than words.
'Swords, then.'
There was no reason to object. No—it was better. Far easier than Cassion using magic. The man's sword was destructive, and precisely because of it, the matchup favored Harad. His swordsmanship had been taught by the master of the most destructive Heavenly Might in the world.
'My body is different now, though.'
Then again, Cassion fell short of Heavenly Might regardless.
The gap closed before he knew it. Cassion's sword came down like a mace, then slid along Pater's blade. Cassion caught the twist in the sword-path at once—he had seen this sight dozens of times by now. His left hand, freed at some point, was sheathed in gray-white aura; it fired from his flank, driving straight for Harad's solar plexus.
Harad swept his raised arms straight down. Pater's pommel hammered the fist burrowing toward his chest. Thud—the instant they met, Harad's lips pursed into a ring. The explosion born from the pommel drove that fist into the ground, and flame erupting from Harad's entire body engulfed the back of Cassion as his stance pitched forward.
Even then, Cassion's right hand was still raised. His sword, its path warped mid-swing as he reacted to the punch, cleaved through the flames. Had the fire not been there, his collarbone would have come off.
'He cuts through fire itself.'
Harad snapped his fingers—and it slipped away soundlessly. Blood. The grip he had cauterized shut had torn open again.
So Harad struck Pater's blade with his fist. The faint friction took the smeared blood for kindling, swelled vast, and exploded between him and Cassion.
The blast never touched Harad. Cassion, on the other hand, was driven straight back. Which meant—it got through.
And not only the latest blast. All this while, Cassion had kept a steady wariness of Harad's sword. On his skin, plainly visible from a distance, blood beaded.
Even granting Cassion's restraint, it was an astonishing sight. In truth, Cassion looked stunned. It was only scraped skin, but the meaning ran deep—because Cassion was a 5th-tier magician.
'To a magician, tier is absolute.'
This was not merely scraped skin. It was a hairline crack running through that absoluteness.
Cassion's expression turned complicated. It lasted only an instant before he moved again—and there was nothing stealthy about it. Far from concealing himself, he charged head-on. The gray-white mana disguised as aura piled on layer after layer, gathering intensity. So this was the Sword Master stealthy enough to walk the Boundary.
'He wouldn't be like this normally.'
To Harad's eyes, Cassion looked like a man denying something. Denying what? His Origin? Wind rose across the desiccated Sacred Ground of Fire, and the blade tearing through it swung for Harad's forehead.
Harad snapped his upper body backward to evade. To his sky-turned eyes, the sword came into view: Cassion's blade had cut empty air and then stopped, frozen upright. The moment he saw the evasion, he had forced it to a halt.
'What a brutish way to fight.'
The sword suspended in midair came back around. Edge leveled at Harad, it dropped like a guillotine. Harad's right eye, fixed on it, flushed crimson—and above that eye bloomed a flame, unusually dense and clinging. Crimson Flame. The blaze dammed the guillotine.
It did not stop the blade outright; it only slowed it. For all his claimed stealth, Cassion's sword was heavy enough to evoke Heavenly Might. But that much time was enough.
Harad threw himself aside at once. Kra-kaang! The ground where he had stood caved in as though hammered by a mace. Riding the momentum of his roll, Harad came up onto his feet—and somewhere in that roll, his blade had tasted flesh. Blood streaked Pater's edge; he had opened Cassion's calf as he tumbled.
Tasted flesh, though the wound itself was nothing: a shallow slice of muscle, seared shut at once. But that tiny wound carried unmistakable meaning.
'It lands better than I expected.'
Everything has a grade. In the Outlands, they call that grade talent—for no matter how much mana you amass, the concept of your Origin never grows. Cassion's grade was low. A 5th-tier with a staggering reserve of mana, yes—but the quality of that mana was nothing special. Which meant his Origin was mediocre.
'Vast mana, a shabby Origin.'
Two things that could mean. A fanatic of effort, or...
Harad recalled the magician Horn had dragged in. When the word Gu passed Harad's lips, that magician had flown into a rage—and it had not been the man's own rage.
"So that anger was yours."
"..."
"You were a Gu, weren't you."
Cassion's sword trembled, ever so slightly. A bull's-eye—and unmistakable rage. He came on, purely emotional.
That was what fascinated Harad.
'A Gu rich with emotion.'
Harad thought of Horn, Vice Commander of the Second Knight Order—that brutish knight who charged through fire without a care. Cassion's behavior resembled Horn's. Only, in every respect, he surpassed him.
Cassion was papering over his poor quality with sheer quantity. The mana gained as a Gu and the mana piled up across the years pressed down on Harad. Harad, in turn, made up his lacking quantity with quality: Crimson Flame, symbolized from his left eye, coiled around Pater like aura.
Kra-kaang! Sword met sword and a thunderclap burst out—even though he had deflected the strike. Every clash sent Crimson Flame spraying in all directions. His footprints drove backward, deeper with every step; the hand on his sword grew heavier and heavier. Each impact jolted his whole frame. Cassion, who had held something back, was slowly unwinding his full strength.
The Sacred Ground of Fire. Here, Harad's tier rose a step—and it was still only 4th-tier in the end. There is a limit to the power finesse can handle. And decisively, Harad's current body was frailer than his past one.
Ka-kaang!
Pater was knocked flying far away. This damned body was the problem. Or rather, its grip. He raised his palm: blood had pooled in it like a puddle, and as it spilled to the ground, white showed through the red-drenched fissure. No longer a problem that searing could fix.
"Well, now."
Harad stared down at his bone-bared palm with a stricken face. By his own reckoning he held the pose a good long while—yet Cassion did not charge.
'He really won't kill me.'
Cassion said something strange instead.
"So you've learned the sword."
"..."
Was that what mattered now? Even thinking so, Harad humored him.
"You only just noticed?"
Stalling suited this side just fine.
"I knew from the start."
Cassion seemed to have his pride where the sword was concerned.
"..."
Cassion's lips twitched—then he shook his head hard. To Harad, it looked like a man shaking off a pointless distraction.
"Now get lost."
"And if I refuse?"
"I'll break your limbs and leave you."
It sounded to Harad's ears like: and the Outlands will collect what's left.
'Ah. So that's why.'
Harad recalled his past life. He had wondered, once, why they had shoved him down into that tunnel.
'It was to send me to the Outlands.'
But to defy the Grand Duke's orders to do it? Not a move a spy would choose.
"Why go that far?"
"Your existence makes trouble for Serzilla."
Harad opened his eyes wide in exaggerated surprise—then laughed as scornfully as he could muster.
"Since when do you worry about Serzilla?"
"..."
"You, of all people."
Over the Sacred Ground of Fire, a pitch-black sun rose.