Detection (3)
Think back to the fury of those flames. The magicians whose Origins were a skein of thread and a steel nail should, by rights, have crumbled into ash.
And yet the corpses that met Harad's eyes as he crawled at the head of the tunnel were in better shape than he had expected. They had died — but they had not become ash. They had melted to death instead, which meant they had possessed a certain resilience of their own.
Third Circle.
Harad savored once more the taste he had caught when he first felt their Origins. They had been Third Circle — nothing ordinary, either. Outstanding even among their tier, the sort of material one might call fit to ascend to the Fourth Circle.
And that, despite Origins that were nothing special.
The Outlands sorted geniuses from the ordinary by their Origin, much as one marks the limits a soul is born with. But that never meant the ordinary could not reach the higher circles.
Cassion, whose Origin was that tiny point, standing at the Fifth Circle, was the same story.
A Gu tool, granted.
An Origin was only what its bearer made of it. However wretched the seed, there had been magicians here and there who raised it high enough to Manifest it — and the Outlands cherished such people second only to its geniuses.
So they sent ones they actually cared about.
It meant the Outlands took the burning of the watchtower seriously. Though they were still a little weaker than he had guessed; he had braced himself for a higher circle to come.
The towers act as their own masters.
The three just slain would have belonged to the Ivory Tower or the Tower of Meteoric Iron. There was no telling how the others would answer. There were bound to be towers that loathed the Red Tower, or kept a wary eye on it, more than most. Magicians sent by such towers would be considerable — and among the things to watch for in the Boundary this time, those magicians had their place as well.
Harad reduced the half-melted corpses to ash and crawled on. Hah — hah. Behind him came badly winded breathing. It was Kubel.
"Kubel, are you holding up?"
"Y-yes."
The answer left much to be desired. The tunnel was cramped enough to drive a man half mad as it was; for a man of Kubel's bulk it had to be far worse. Harad could not see behind him, but Kubel was probably crawling with his shoulders forced inward as hard as he could roll them.
"Just bear it a little longer."
"Yes……"
Kubel answered like a simpleton. It was pitiable, but Harad did not quicken his pace.
"Ellen."
"Couldn't you go faster?"
"I'd like to, but there's a problem to settle first."
As if to say hurry it up, Ellen tapped the sole of Harad's foot. She was worried about Kubel too.
"I'm a Third Circle as good as a Fourth. At this pace, I'll reach the Fourth Circle faster than I planned."
They had yet to set foot in the Boundary proper, and already he had preyed upon three magicians. Far ahead of anything he had budgeted for.
"And that poor Kubel there is a Third Circle."
"So?"
"Where do you stand, exactly?"
The Elaine of this life was stronger than the Elaine of the same season before the regression. So long as they met nothing of the Fifth Circle or above, Harad's party would come to no harm in the Boundary. But that was Elaine — not Ellen.
"You've seen me plenty."
"I want to know precisely."
What Harad wanted was not a measure of Ellen's strength but of her mind. Whether, as Ellen, she would fight the way Elaine did — that was what he wished to learn.
She had, against the patchwork beast.
But that had been with her life on the line. He needed to know how she comported herself when nothing did.
"I'm the sort who roughs out a plan in my head before I do anything."
"It shows."
"All the more reason to ask. I can't build a proper plan until I know your exact level."
In truth, it hardly mattered whether he knew. One way or another, Harad was confident he could steer Ellen wherever he wanted her. Which was to say, what he was curious about was how far she had opened her heart. If that Elaine had now come to asking to share three meals a day with him, how much further had Ellen traveled?
"……At the very least, I can match the Grand Duchess."
"Really."
Harad asked again, feigning surprise.
"The Grand Duchess has never once beaten me. And I've never beaten her."
It was no lie.
"So hurry up and move. Kubel's going to die at this rate."
"Understood."
Harad crawled as fast as he could make himself. His body felt lighter than he had expected.
Three more magicians waited at the exit. Strictly speaking, one dying man and two corpses.
"Oh."
Surfacing into the open air, Harad took them in and let a satisfied smile loose. The magicians crawling the tunnel had proven tougher than expected — but the pairing of fire and smoke had proven an even better match than expected.
Harad first kindled flame in the hearts of the two corpses and absorbed them, then turned to the dying one.
"……"
Unfortunately, the man's face had melted. Eyes, nose, and mouth sealed over, the skin congealed into something grotesque — plainly, no one looking at him would call him capable of speech. A single small hole near his nostril was all that kept the magician alive.
Just in case, Harad drew his sword lightly across the place where a mouth should have been, splitting it open.
"I am Harad of the Red Tower."
"……"
"I'd like to ask for directions."
Harad had not come to the Boundary on a whim. He had come intending to find the roads. Just as Serzilla kept its search routes, the Outlands kept its roads — Cassion had said as much. Fourteen years ago, Cassion had slipped into Serzilla by a route the Moon Tower had charted.
"……Do you really have to go that far?"
The reply came from somewhere entirely unexpected. Ellen, having climbed out of the hole, was hauling Kubel up after her like a farmer pulling a radish.
"Serzilla does not toy with the defeated."
It was not the asking of directions that displeased her — it was his introducing himself as the Red Tower.
"It isn't mockery. It's sowing."
Kubel, at last free of the tunnel, flopped face-down onto the ground and gulped air.
"Sowing what?"
"If we simply kill them, they will have died to a magician of unknown identity. The only clue left behind will be that the man's Origin was fire."
Serzilla would never be numbered among the suspects. There was no such thing as a magician in Serzilla, after all — it was the very reason Harad had been able to offer his own tail to Grand Duke Aratus with a straight face.
"And so the grudge drifts, with nowhere to settle. Who knows — with luck, it might even turn its aim on me."
Of course, merely killing Outlands magicians was gain in itself. But Harad wanted more out of it.
"Ah."
"Right. Introduce myself as the Red Tower, and the direction of the grudge changes."
The grudge would bend toward the Red Tower.
"The Red Tower, attacking the magicians of other towers."
"Exactly. It has already succeeded once — at the watchtower."
"……Jeshult of the Ivory Tower."
At Ellen's murmur, Harad broke into a broad smile. Her head was quicker than she let on.
Jeshult. The magician who had died to the Red Tower had belonged to the same Ivory Tower as Ios. Men like that hardly seemed the type to slip quietly into a land named the Holy Land. They would have filed their report up the Ivory Tower's ladder.
To borrow the words of Ios, who had once crossed the Great Wall: the Ivory Tower was neutral. Neutral between the towers that favored the Long-Cherished Wish and the Moon Tower and Red Tower, which opposed it.
"Nothing will change on the surface. But they will have begun to take notice."
Someday, the Ivory Tower would abandon that neutrality. If things went well, it would move against the Red Tower. Harad intended to make it so — he wanted the towers whittling each other down.
"A line of thinking Serzilla could never allow itself."
It was thinking the North despised. The North was a land that had to seize its victories with its own two hands.
"You dislike it?"
"No. The more ways there are of looking at the world, the better."
Even so, Ellen raised no objection. This, too, was a fruit of the regression. As fast as the two of them had grown close, Ellen's thinking was changing faster still.
Step. Ellen walked over to Harad. The sword, drawn before he had noticed, drove into the throat of the gasping magician.
It was a familiar blade. Serzilla's heirloom swords numbered three in all. One hung at Grand Duke Aratus's hip, and another — Pater — was in Harad's keeping. Which meant the one in her hand was Elaine's sword: the blade the Grand Duchess wore at her side, brought along by Ellen.
"Isn't that the Grand Duchess's sword?"
"I borrowed it."
"I see."
Was she being brazen about it because there was no chance of being caught? Or had she grown comfortable enough not to think about it at all? Harad decided to believe the latter. Given the choice, better to take the kinder reading.
Squelch. Ellen's hand plunged into the chest of the freshly dead magician and came out with the heart. Steam curled off it. It looked delicious.
It was an utterly dreadful sensation. Not Harad's own impression — the will of his Origin.
"Eat it."
"I'll pass."
Scarcely had he answered when Ellen threw the heart down onto the ground, wiping the blood from her hand with a cloth she had brought along.
"Was that a test?"
"A person eating a person is an unsettling thing."
A person. Ellen counted even the magicians of the Outlands as human. Cassion deserved much of the credit — if she denied that Outlanders were human, then Cassion, whom she had gone to such pains to save, would not be human either.
"Still — if you want to eat one, go ahead."
It unsettled her. It did not move her to forbid it. And that much alone was still a reward.
"Absorption is quite enough for me."
"Because there's someone who'd mind?"
Harad nodded. And as he did, he braced for what Ellen would say next.
"How very human of you."
Ellen had said that once — after the regression, the first time they had gone out to the Boundary. The answer this time would surely be different. The Ellen of back then and the Ellen of now might as well have been two different people.
"Who is it?"
"What?"
"Who is it that would mind if you ate a heart?"
He had expected the answer to be different, but this was different in a whole new direction. A question he had never seen coming.
"There is such a person."
Harad stalled for time. If he had to answer anyway, he wanted to give one that would sting.
"So — who is it?"
Harad met Ellen's eyes and knew at once.
I'm a dead man.
If he spouted nonsense just to provoke her, that sword was liable to come swinging.
"A woman."
Harad answered vaguely. It was not entirely untrue, either.
"A woman?"
"Yes. A woman."
"……There was a woman?"
"I never thought of her as one. But she was."
Beyond Ellen's shoulder, Kubel was visible. He was wearing a strange expression — one very hard to put into words.
"Well. It's nothing so important. I did break it off once, after all."
"……Because of me?"
The only time Harad had ever taken a magician's heart directly had been the encounter with the patchwork beast.
"Not because of that. It's you, after all."
"……"
Beyond her shoulder, Kubel smiled fondly.
The Boundary was a desolate land. To be precise, only the patch of ground where Kubel now stood was. Far off in one direction, torrential rain was falling; in the far distance opposite, something like strange bones came pouring down. Every direction bristled with menace, yet to Kubel the west — calm on its surface — looked the most frightening of all. Unfortunately, it was the direction Harad was walking.
Since coming to live in the Inner Castle, Kubel had heard a great deal about the Boundary. Mostly from the knights of the 1st Knight Order. Whenever their duties brought them down to the Inner Castle, they would take their meals at Kubel's annex before climbing back up — usually because Harad was there. If Harad's instruction was the transfer of objective knowledge, their testimonies had been vivid to the point of leaving marks.
The Boundary changed its face from zone to zone, and every zone without exception was fucking miserable, but the stories all came down to a single conclusion: a land of killing cold, killing pain, and killing hardship. That was the Boundary.
"Doing all right?"
"Yes, I can manage."
For all his preemptive dread, Kubel was unexpectedly fine. No pain, no exhaustion — and above all, it was pleasantly cool. Were it not for the impossible scenery, it would have been no different from an ordinary walk across a snowy field.
"You have me to thank for that."
Kubel understood firsthand now why the 1st Knight Order was so fond of Harad. Merely staying beside him turned the Boundary into an ordinary snowfield.
"Which is exactly why the Boundary must never be taken lightly."
Harad wanted to make certain that point landed.
"I'm keeping it firmly in mind."
It was closer to a reaffirmation than a scolding. Kubel was not the sort of broad-natured man who could grow complacent just because things were easy. From the moment they had reached the Boundary, his head had not rested once; even now he kept checking their surroundings again and again.
Harad smiled to himself. It was a good habit. Timidity had its advantages — this among them.
Not that it would amount to much, with Ellen along. Born with Heavenly Might, her handling of aura ran on a different track entirely, and that handling included the sensing of presences. By the time Kubel registered a magical beast, Ellen would already be fighting it.
"Kubel — I intend to bring you out here often from now on."
"I'm ready."
He had been admitted to the Inner Castle, but that was not the end of it. If he did not want to be cast out, Kubel would have to go on proving his usefulness — and the more he did, the safer Shura would be.
"It isn't only to give you experience. If it were, I'd have asked the 1st Knight Order."
If Kubel's experience had been the point, Harad would have sent him out with the 1st Knight Order's search parties. That would have been the more effective way to build it — without Harad there, he could taste the Boundary in its raw state, and it would have given him occasion to bond with the knights besides.
But Harad had not done that. He had gone out of his way to bring Kubel — and not merely to the Boundary, but to the Second Boundary at that. Not the treatment a beginner deserved.
"Because I may find myself in need of your help."
Kubel, who had been sweeping his eyes around them, tilted his head.
"I don't see how I'd be much help to you……"
"I don't mean help with a sword. You're weak, after all."
At the blunt verdict, Kubel's face fell. He knew exactly where he stood; he had not yet come within a mile of Harad's and Ellen's heels. It was why he had been moved by Harad's advice earlier — do not eat the heart — and disappointed by it at the same time.
Kubel wanted to be strong. And the reason was no longer Shura alone. He wanted to be of use to Harad.
"A magician like me does not see straight. I can't perceive it myself, but my judgment is certainly slanted somewhere or other."
Everyone carries prejudice. Harad believed he had none of it — and that belief was itself a prejudice.
"But you are different. A beginner whose first real fight is today. You couldn't have a prejudice if you tried."
He had set foot in the Boundary for the first time today, and he had yet to see a single magical beast.
"New things carry no dust. To your eyes, the world shows itself straight and plain."
That the first Outlands magicians Kubel had ever met were already corpses — in that, too, his eyes were still new. It was why Harad had passed on his knowledge as objectively as he could while teaching him. He had no wish to rub his own dust off onto Kubel.
"I know a great many things, and yet I am wrong from time to time. I was opened long ago, and the dust has had time to pile up."
Harad could feel the answer at a single glance — with magic, that was true more often than not. But the possibility of being wrong existed always, and in the Boundary that possibility acted with fatal consequence.
"If anything strikes you as strange, or makes you curious, or sits wrong with you — say so, all of it, holding nothing back. That purity of yours will be the thing that catches my prejudices for me."
What Harad brushed aside as simple, or familiar, might look entirely different through Kubel's eyes. That gaze would wipe away the dust that had settled on him.
Kubel bowed his head in a heavy nod. Then his gaze snapped to the side.
"There's something over there."
A wave was breaking across the snowfield — rolling toward them.
"What does it look like to you?"
"It looks like magic."
"It looks that way to me as well."
Flames already burned above Harad's hand. Ellen had her sword drawn too.
"……You knew already."
"Don't be rattled. That's exactly how you keep doing it."
This part was about the sword — about not counting on Kubel.
"Hold your breath. I'll raise the smoke."
Fwoosh!
The wave broke over them.