Detection (2)
"The liquor I love most in all the world."
That was what Elaine in the dream had said. In other words — nonsense.
Ellen could have written it off as exactly that: a dream prompted by whatever Harad had said at the Footprint of the Snow Leopard. But... not every dream could be dismissed as nonsense.
Drott.
That damned Drott was the problem. The land where Shura had died in the dream — a place that actually existed, the backwater Kubel had been planning to move to in real life. That dream was unlike any of her usual nonsense.
The dreams Ellen normally had unfolded as warped reflections of what the real Harad said or showed her. But Drott was a land Harad had never once mentioned — and for all that, it matched reality. Which meant it might not be nonsense after all. And if so... then perhaps the other dreams, too.
What am I even saying?
Ellen couldn't answer the question she had asked herself. Not yet, anyway. If she wanted to know, she would have to keep dreaming.
As expected, only one of them had been hiding in the inn's cellar. A magician? The man wore a sword at his hip. They waited a while, but no one else appeared; the tunnel held no one else.
Having confirmed as much, Ellen chose to meet him head-on rather than take him by surprise. The man swung his sword without warning, and the blade proved remarkably hard. In that instant she knew he was a magician — his Origin seemed tied to the sword. Or iron, perhaps?
Either way, it was nothing impressive. He could not produce magic on the scale Harad could.
Projection.
Just as Harad had said, those who could manifest it seemed vanishingly rare — which meant that for Harad, such magic amounted to self-harm.
At any rate, the magician's swordsmanship was considerably better than expected. No surprise there. An Outlands magician moved like any warrior, and a first-rate one commanded combat ability to rival a knight's. More than a few of them honed the blade; the iron-aligned tower, Ellen had heard from Harad, had more than its share of exactly that kind.
Ellen fought while thinking. It was a curious sensation — had there not been such a gulf between her and the magician, she would have found it genuinely useful. There was a difference, after all, between fighting blind and fighting knowing. Which was to say, Harad's value did not stop at the Boundary. Even the bare knowledge he carried had worth. Harad was a magician Serzilla needed.
More than Cassion.
Ellen was privately certain that Harad knew more than Cassion, a spy out of the Outlands. Because Cassion was nothing more than a Gu tool? A flimsy reason. Even granting that, Cassion was Outlands-born — and on the subject of the Outlands, Harad ought to have been the more ignorant of the two.
Yet the truth was the exact opposite. Why? There had to be a reason. Sooner or later, Arika would compile everything on Harad and report — and there had better be a real find in it. The reason Harad was so fluent in magic and the Outlands had better be written there.
And if not... only one suspect remained.
Why is it the dream again?
A measly dream, of all things. It would be far more sensible to suspect the Information Bureau had simply missed something. Ellen couldn't make heads or tails of the conclusion she herself had reached. And yet the old dreams kept surfacing in her mind — Drott, Grand Duke Elaine's regret, Cassion's severed head, the liquor Elaine loved, those nonsense dreams that might not be nonsense after all...
"Clean work."
A voice reached her. Harad. He had come down into the cellar without her noticing and was looking at the magician sprawled across the floor — head and body still apart. Ellen had killed him without even realizing it. That was the size of the gulf between her and the freshly dead man.
"How was it?"
"An iron-attribute magician. 3rd Circle, I'd say."
Ellen kept her answer as short as she could. Being near Harad kept dragging last night's dream back to the surface. The other dreams did it too, but last night's had been uniquely shocking.
Harad seemed not to have heard even that much. He was still staring at the dead magician.
"Gulp."
Swallowing his drool.
"..."
Ellen found the sight equal parts comical and pathetic. Dream or not, really. I'm in love with that? As if. A dream was only ever a dream.
"Shall I feed it to you?"
"No."
That she felt relieved anyway was probably because Harad was her friend. No friend on earth would fail to stop their only friend from eating people.
...Gulp.
Harad was not the only one swallowing. Beside him, Kubel was drooling in ropes — true to his bulk, the volume was impressive. And it wasn't Kubel doing the drooling; it was his Origin.
"Uh, uh?"
Kubel was flustered, openly so. He plainly had no idea why he was drooling. At a corpse, of all things.
"It's your Origin's appetite, not yours."
Harad reassured him. Some magicians panic outright upon realizing they feel the urge to eat a human — a human heart, to be precise. The shock deals them a heavy dose of self-disgust. It is the self-disgust one can only taste the first time they stand over a magician's corpse.
"It's a perfectly natural thing for a magician. Am I not doing the same right now?"
Harad showed Kubel his own drool.
"It's not to the point you can't resist it. Right?"
"Y-yes."
Kubel answered, drool and all. Which meant his reason was still holding. So he really is different from the man of his past life. It had to be because he had never yet preyed on anyone.
"A magician can take another magician's heart and grow his mana. 'Heart' is just the word for it — in practice, you're absorbing his Origin."
It was the lesson Harad had put off until now. He preferred demonstrating over lecturing.
"There's absorbing it through magic, and there's eating it straight with your mouth. Naturally, the latter works better."
"Th-that can't be."
Eat it? A person's heart? Kubel's eyes shook.
"I've done both."
"..."
"Sickened?"
Even mid-panic, Kubel shook his head hard.
"...I believe there must have been a reason you had no choice."
Harad broke into a bright smile. The eyes that looked down at him wavered, but the feeling held within them did not change. Kubel still believed in Harad.
Then Kubel gave a heavy nod — the face of a man who had decided something.
"I-I'll eat it."
"What?"
"I'll eat too, and get stronger."
It sounded like an offer to shoulder some of the load. An admirable thought — if only what lay before them hadn't been a magician's heart.
"That one isn't your portion. It's mine to eat."
Harad refused, flat and firm.
"And there'll be no portion for you going forward, either. Every heart of every magician we kill belongs to me."
Taken at face value, it sounded like greed.
"Isn't that a little too greedy?"
That, at least, was how it sounded to Ellen beside them.
"Predation is addictive. Worse than any drug. A magician who has preyed on a single heart cannot stop until the day he dies."
Hadn't the Kubel of his former life been exactly that?
"And that hunger only sharpens with every heart you take. Not that it matters for me — I'm going to the very end against the Outlands regardless."
There was no need to imagine what that end would look like. It was still a long way off; Harad knew better than anyone how strong the Outlands was. And Harad, having regressed, carried the duty of overcoming it. Impossible without predation.
"But Kubel — not you. You have Shura."
Kubel's "end" did not mean the fall of the Outlands.
"You're the sort who has to go back to an ordinary life. Wasn't dying of old age your dream?"
"...That's not the least bit convincing?"
Ellen pointed at Harad's face. The drool running from his mouth was several times what Kubel's had been.
"Well. Truth be told, I am rather greedy."
A small flame rose and swallowed the magician's torso. The closer the fire crept toward the heart, the thicker it burned — and the thicker it burned, the hazier Harad's eyes grew.
"..."
Iron. Real iron.
His mouth was full of the taste of metal that had no business being there. The magician's Origin had been long, lithe iron — shaped, if one had to put it into words, like a sword without a hilt.
Not the broker, then.
He had guessed it would be one of two things: a breed like the keeper of Flowerbed's Flesh, or a magician come over from the Outlands. The magician Ellen had killed was the latter.
Which route had they infiltrated by? Nothing to wonder about there.
"So we've been found out."
The Sacred Ground of Fire. The watchtower no one had ever managed to burn had been burned. It was a matter the Outlands could hardly ignore — just as the Tower of the Moon had once issued its order to Cassion: send Harad to the Outlands.
When we met Cassion, there had been no one there. Harad had guessed it was because that place was the Sacred Ground of Fire. It wasn't called a sacred ground for nothing — unless you belonged to the Red Tower, you presumably couldn't set foot inside uninvited.
We were lucky that time. There had been no Outlands magicians inside the Sacred Ground of Fire, but they were scattered all around it. Then they must have found the tunnel and crossed over.
And then it came. Something pale and threadlike slipped softly through the mouth of the tunnel — as thick as an earthworm, and it was magic. It lifted its head like a serpent and swayed in the air, in a motion that all but begged: pull me.
"A signal."
He couldn't know how many of them there were, but it meant the magician Ellen had killed had been the lead. With iron for an Origin, he'd have been the vanguard's hardest point.
If it was safe, he would seize the thing and shake it; if not—
"I'll cut the tail."
Harad caught the magic on reflex and shook it with leisurely ease. It scattered like dust. There was no reaction after that.
Instead, before long he sensed people — inside the tunnel, crawling slowly toward this side.
"Shall I go up and wait for them?"
Ellen asked, running a thumb over her pommel. She meant to hold her ground alone, as before, and take them by surprise. The Sun was an Origin incapable of ambush.
"No. I doubt they'll come straight out."
They'd send magic in first to check the interior — a cautious lot, then, not the sort to come bounding out the moment they arrived. They'd double-check near the entrance: call out to their comrades, maybe, or fling a few spells in ahead.
"Then what? Shall I go in there and take them?"
"That would be even more of a hassle."
Harad gestured to Kubel, his fingertip pointing down the tunnel.
"Feed your smoke down there. Think of it as a chimney, and blow hard enough that it comes pouring out the far end."
"P-pardon?"
"Flammable... in other words, smoke that takes fire easily."
Smoke was, surprisingly, an Origin that paired well with fire — a fact Harad had come to realize in the very act of teaching Kubel.
"Color doesn't matter, with or without. Do whatever's comfortable. Whatever costs you the least mana."
Harad lit the cigarette between Kubel's lips. Kubel drew on it in a single pull, down to the very end.
Before long, a volume of smoke no human lungs could ever conceivably produce came billowing out of Kubel's mouth. It was the same grayish white as cigarette smoke — and it was Kubel's magic. The magic rode the tunnel's mouth and flowed inward. The amount was already considerable, yet Kubel's mouth still hadn't closed; he kept pouring out smoke.
Watching him, Harad kindled a small spark atop his finger. The spark flashed up, then swelled large. Just as ordered: smoke that burned readily.
"You really are a genius."
Having emptied out his smoke, Kubel scratched the back of his neck with an awkward grin.
The tunnel's mouth had gone hazy with smoke. The inside would be far worse. Harad pushed his hand into that haze and snapped his fingers. Ignition.
Snap. With the sound, flame surged upward.
The fire devoured the smoke and poured inward at a terrifying speed. The ground shuddered faintly, and when he inclined an ear, the vibration was tremendous — the sound of flame racing down the tunnel. A low rumble. Somewhere within the echoing roar, he thought he caught thin screams.
How long had it been? The flames guttered out. He could have sustained them by keeping his mana running, but there seemed no need.
Acrid smoke drifted from the scorched mouth of the tunnel, laced faintly with the smell of seared protein. And the clincher: Harad's mouth was smacking.
A skein of thread and nails of steel.
The magicians crawling the tunnel had been two.
"I think we can move now. Quickly — their comrades may still be waiting at the far exit."
They would have felt the flames too. Given time, they would certainly become a nuisance. Just as Serzilla had at least grown familiar with the 1st Boundary, the 2nd Boundary was ground the Outlands knew well.
"...You mean through there?"
Ellen pointed at the tunnel entrance, utterly dumbfounded. Its whole surface was scorched black, and here and there the melted ground still glowed with live crimson embers.
"Kubel."
"Yes?"
"Cold smoke this time, if you would."
"..."
Kubel smiled awkwardly. Even Harad wasn't perfect at everything. He had, unexpectedly, his careless blind spots.