Cassion (3)
"Why do you love Serzilla so much?"
He had been asked that, once. The question had come from the Grand Duke's young daughter. Elain had been composed beyond her years even as a child—every inch the woman she was fated to become: the next Grand Duchess of Serzilla, the idol of the North.
"Answer at your leisure. It's only curiosity."
He remembered feeling nothing of the sort. Cassion had had to keep in mind that this young heir was Serzilla itself, bearing greater potential even than Grand Duke Aratus.
"Why such devotion, then? You aren't even a Northerner."
His mind had gone white for an instant before flooding to the brim. The Outlands. The Moon Tower. The mission. The prophecy. Fire. Had he been found out? How? He remembered his voice failing him—adrift among answers, picking out the most plausible one.
Then his mouth had moved on its own.
"Because it's warm."
Cassion remembered what a strange sensation that had been.
"The North?"
"Yes."
Only then did Cassion realize he was smiling.
"You really are a strange one."
It had started there. No—perhaps even before that...
"You're a spy, you know."
A low, frigid voice hauled Cassion back from the memory. It felt like plunging into deep water. Harad was glaring at him—the magician whom Grand Duke Aratus himself had granted the annex, the magician who had begun to belong in Serzilla...
"You bastard—!"
Harad's gaze was as cold as his voice. No—colder.
Looking back, it had been that way from the very start. From the spot where Ios of the Ivory Tower had died, the man had watched Cassion with those eyes. To borrow a figure: a sword. An ill-fitting metaphor for a magician, perhaps, but that was what Cassion had felt. Those eyes were cold and keen, and they had been fixed on him all this time—as though they had already seen through everything.
...It was unpleasant. Ominous, too. The black sphere hanging in the sky was more so still.
Projection.
As the saying goes, one sees only what one knows—and Cassion knew. He recognized the black sphere for what it was at a glance. No half-baked 4th-tier flailing in its death throes; this was a flawless Projection, without a single seam to fault.
He burned the watchtower.
A forgotten fact bobbed to the surface. Chilling as the man's gaze was, his origin—so ill-suited to that disposition—was fire. No. This was nothing that could be lazily filed away as fire.
Facing Harad's projected origin, Cassion squeezed his eyes shut without meaning to. Blisters rose on every patch of exposed skin. The heat driven into the ground blossomed into flame and bound him where he stood. Each tiny spark leaping off it now burned fiercer than the crimson flame Harad had sheathed his sword in earlier.
Only natural. Magic grows more powerful the closer it stands to its origin.
The sky stretched. The far horizon fled farther still—a mirage raised by the Projection's heat. He had thought he was channeling enough mana; the reality exceeded every estimate. Only with magic layered over his whole body could he remain standing beneath that Projection. Even granting that this was the Red Tower's sacred ground, it beggared belief. The projected origin seemed to rule the sacred ground itself—and it was a threat even to Cassion, a 5th-tier magician.
It meant that within Harad resided an origin vast enough to slip free of the very truth called hierarchy.
"The Sun."
"Nonsense."
But it was not the Sun, Cassion declared.
"The Sun belongs to a woman."
For so had the Prophecy of the Moon decreed.
In any case, to the Red Tower the magician called Harad was a godsend. To Cassion, a calamity.
"Last warning. Get lost."
He had meant to snap the man's limbs and pin him down. Then Cassion realized how badly he had miscalculated. That thing could not be subdued. It could only be killed.
"My last, too."
From a mere 4th tier, no less. Harad's answer was nothing short of arrogant.
"Do die."
The night grew deep.
The wording is a little different.
Our king belongs to a woman.
Such a prophecy existed within the Red Tower—or so Hervis of the Red Tower had once said. Here, "king" meant the origin, for a magician's essence was his origin.
"The Sun belongs to a woman."
That was what Cassion had called the origin.
The Sun.
It was Harad's origin. But he was a man.
Cassion, then, would be the more accurate of the two.
In the Outlands, hierarchy was everything. A 5th-tier Cassion was bound to know more than a 3rd-tier Hervis.
So it comes down to one of two things.
Either the prophecy was wrong.
Or I die.
No two origins in this world were alike. Even fires of the same breed differed in temperament and size. The logic was simple: only with Harad dead could the Sun be born anew.
It feels like the latter.
He knew not who had delivered the prophecy, but Harad judged his own death the likelier truth. His previous life had come back to him. Without the Regression Stone, Harad would already be a dead man.
Without the regression, the next magician to hold the Sun would have been a woman.
And that woman would have become the Red Tower's king. A mercy, Harad concluded. Even if he died this instant and the king was born straightaway, it would take time for her to grow.
I can strike the Red Tower's king from the list.
He had no intention of dying anytime soon—one variable, then, had simply been erased. Not a thing to dwell on now.
His head throbbed. It was a headache like something molten crawling along the inside of his skull, searing as it went. The aftereffects of the crimson flame. An unusually dense, clinging fire—the flame of the 4th Circle.
The crimson flame was unlike ordinary fire. It was unlike the flame he had sheathed his sword in against Cassion earlier, too. The Projection was the reason. It reinforced a magician's magic a further degree.
And that crimson flame had poured down like a waterfall. It swallowed Cassion as he charged Harad. Cassion split the falls in two and slipped free; the halved flame swirled back into one and swallowed him again. The swirling flame was cleaved—and from within it, Cassion glared at Harad. His expression was murderous; his skin, grotesquely warped, red and white showing through in filthy patches. Flesh and bone.
So the rabbit was the strange one after all.
Cassion claimed he had yet to fight at full strength. Even so, Harad could hold his own, to a degree, against magicians of higher tiers than himself. Such was the origin called the Sun.
The aftereffects are... bearable, at least.
Several times better than against the rabbit. That was because this was the Sacred Ground of Fire.
FWOOSH!
The crimson flame Cassion had cleaved unfurled through the air. It balled into a crescent and drew a line across the ground—a line dividing Cassion from Harad. Thus the crux of it all was distance. A knight had to reach a magician; a magician had to keep the knight away. Harad found that part galling. True, having regressed, he was fated to play the role of that most hackneyed of magicians, but...
"You're a magician, Cassion. Not a knight."
It was why the man could not close the gap—and why Harad's Projection worked at all. The closer one stood to an origin, the stronger the magic. Which meant a 4th-tier Projection and a 5th-tier Manifestation were no mere stages for parading one's origin. Beneath the shadow of the Sun seeping into the world through the window called Harad, fire burned all the more fiercely.
And... the same held for Cassion. No—more so. Cassion was 5th tier.
"Kindly manifest."
But Cassion only clutched his sword. He had strangled his own origin's defining trait—stealth—and was brutishly condensing nothing but mana, playing knight. Even at the cost of wounding himself.
"That's greed, you know."
A greedy coward. Harad had his guesses about why Cassion clung to his sword. Not that it was any of his business. If the man disliked it, Harad would simply force the Manifestation out of him.
Blood slid down from Harad's eyes. The black Sun shed more crimson flame. The new flame mingled with the old—it should have swelled; instead, the flame dwindled as it mingled, layering and compressing upon itself. Where Cassion's condensation murdered his origin's individuality, Harad's condensed the Sun's peculiar intensity into something denser still.
The deadlocked flame gathered into a single stream. Like some ferocious serpent, Cassion caught himself thinking. Then the serpent's maw yawned open before his eyes. No—he was already inside the maw. That speed. Cassion's eyes bulged. It was a speed a Projection alone could hardly account for.
Come to think of it, the Projection's speed had been formidable in its own right. That young, outrageous man carried the gravitas of one who had spent decades rolling through the front lines.
"…"
The crimson serpent swallowed Cassion whole. And then... vanished without a trace. A jet-black something, very small, floated before Cassion's body.
Manifestation—Harad knew it on sight. Any magician would have. That manifested origin had neutralized the crimson flame. No. Wrong. Not neutralized. Erased.
"A Point!"
The exclamation burst from Harad's lips the moment he recognized Cassion's origin. Stealth was, in the end, the act of erasing presence. It was how the man could pass himself off as a knight. That point erased the presence of his mana—the same principle by which the crimson flame had been erased. When presence vanishes entirely, a thing is as good as dead. The manifested point had simply struck the flame from existence, as though it had never been there at all.
"Magnificent."
Harad marveled without restraint. Because what hung before his eyes was an origin. A Point. Infinitesimally small—but an origin is an origin. To behold a magician's very essence laid so bare, a magician had no choice but to marvel. It was tribute, too, to one who had attained the realm of manifesting his origin into the world.
Hierarchy was a staircase whose steps grew dizzyingly higher the further up one climbed. And the regressed Harad knew that gulf all too well.
Shuup.
Harad swallowed the saliva pooling in his mouth. It wasn't only the Sun that was drooling. It was curiosity—that most hackneyed thing, a magician's thirst for knowledge. Projection and Manifestation. The former was an origin's shadow; the latter, the origin entire. And so a Projection could never overtake a Manifestation, just as a man's shadow could never become the man. That much, Harad had always affirmed. Affirmed it with a scoff—who goes around stating the obvious?
Not anymore.
Even now? Can even I—regressed as I am—not cross it?
He wanted to know. It was why he had forced Cassion's Manifestation.
A Point.
Cassion's origin was minuscule. And utterly imperceptible. Which was why Harad only belatedly registered that Cassion and the Point had slipped from his sight. He paid it no mind. Whether the man came for him or for the Projection, what Harad had to do would not change. Only, a little faster.
Krrk! Every muscle in his body wrenched. Blood sheeted from his eyes across his face. Seething blood climbed his throat, evaporating the instant it passed his lips.
The Sun is red. Or yellow, or near orange—or so the world says. But Harad knew it was wrong. Because a Sun crouched in his heart. In truth, "crimson flame" was a misnomer. Only at low tiers did it look that way; in essence, that fire was not red at all. It was white. That white fire writhed within the projected Sun. Within the Sun's shadow, the true fire of the Sun was coming into bloom. Blindingly white, it poured down over the Sacred Ground of Fire.
Cassion, who had vanished, was flayed of every concealment and laid bare to the world. Right in front of Harad. Cassion's sword was at Harad's throat. It moved no further. No—it couldn't. The man's origin floating overhead, the Point, was being crushed under the clinging, dripping white fire. The Point could not erase the flame. Instead it was straining with everything it had, just to endure. Cassion's mouth opened, both eyes scarlet, and blood gushed forth.
Bathed in that blood, Harad smiled.
It works.
Even a Projection could withstand a Manifestation. Granted, it was a result bought with the Sacred Ground of Fire's favor and his own life as surety... but still.
Could I even kill him?
He could not test that with his body. Like Cassion, Harad could not move. His state was far worse than the other man's. Let his focus slip for an instant and he would faint—or die. But the white fire did not go out. It flowed on, ever so slowly, yet unmistakably—soaking into the Point. Somewhere along the way, the resisting Point had melted halfway into the flame. If the other half went, Cassion would die. Which would come first—that, or his own death—Harad could not reckon. His head no longer turned over. He had no intention of stopping regardless. He wanted to see, through to the very end, the possibility he had glimpsed. After all, Cassion had to die.
It was then that he heard the sound—a hiss of parting air, beginning far away and closing in fast. What it was, Harad could just barely turn his eyes enough to confirm.
…Elain.
Harad's mind went cold.
"You needn't be like fire. Your origin may be like fire, but you needn't be like fire."
Memories of his previous life flickered past unbidden.
"Do temper that spirit of yours. Your origin may be fire, but you needn't be."
It had been a leash. It was why Harad had ceased to be like fire.
"Truthfully, I don't like it. My temperament is wretched. I need someone to hold me in check. And I would like that someone to be you."
He had not managed calm every time, though. This time was no different. He had never actually meant to kill Cassion. He had planned to buy time, nothing more.
"I came here to kill you."
He had said so—but Harad had never truly intended it. It was a remark to wipe away Cassion's suspicion, in the same vein as leaving no note for Ellen and offering Kubel no explanation.
Cassion must die at Ellen's hands.
That was why Harad had brought Ellen along on this investigation into the mastermind. He had hoped that, by seeing everything with her own eyes and living through it, she might change in just that way. It had borne fruit. Ellen had come within a hair of believing that Cassion was a magician.
He had even anticipated that Ellen, woken from sleep, would come running like this. He had engineered even that—it was why he had stolen Pater. Why he had answered Cassion's knightly fighting blade for blade, and his true reason for pressing the man to Manifest. Stall for as long as he could, wait for Ellen, and show her with her own eyes the proof that Cassion was a magician.
Half of that plan had come true.
And there—Elain was sprinting toward him.
…Not Ellen.
Elain and Ellen. Harad could tell the two apart with perfect clarity. They were the same person, and not. At least, not yet.
Elain closed the distance fast. Her expression was ferocious, her sword already drawn—it looked certain she meant to kill one of the two of them, whoever it was.
The day of the hunt surfaced. And that night—Elain's voice, too.
"If they and you were both drowning, I would save them without a moment's hesitation."
For Elain, this had to be that very moment.
"Grand Duchess!"
Cassion—the one drowning—shouted it.
"That bastard is a defector—!"
He fought like a knight, did he. Now a quick-witted magician stood before his eyes. The manifested Point, too, had vanished at some point. Desperate to that degree, then. Harad understood the man's heart. He was a coward. It was not a becoming sight. Outrageous, plain and simple—as if his position weren't bad enough, the man had stolen the initiative too. But since Cassion had fired the first shot, Harad had to open his mouth as well.
"…"
No voice came out, though.
The price of conjuring the white fire.
Before he knew it, Elain had reached point-blank range. Her face was set, resolved on something—and yet Elain's sword stood leveled at Harad.
Their eyes met.
Elain's eyes flew wide. And in those widened pupils, Harad saw his own face. A mask of blood, his features all but erased.
Elain's sword swung even in that state. Eyes locked on Harad's face—swung toward Cassion.
"Huh?"
Wearing a face Elain herself did not understand.