Psina (2)
An Origin was like all creation itself — which is to say, every conceivable thing existed among them.
A Brush.
Psina's Origin was a brush. A brush in name alone, though — its form verged on a short spear, and where bristles should have been, a mass of pitch-black mana sat coiled at its tip instead, shaped like a brush head steeped deep in ink.
Suffocating, that blackness.
It was mana so dark that merely beholding it sent his head reeling. The projected sun spat out light, and the ink paled, if only slightly — but the vertigo remained exactly as before. The culprit had merely shifted, from Psina to the Projection. Projection, in short, still taxed him. And the more flame he drew upon, the heavier it would grow.
"What a shabby vessel."
Psina sneered.
The projected sun was larger than the one that had once shone upon Ios, yet smaller than the one he'd faced Cassion with — this was no Sacred Ground of Fire, after all. Harad didn't much dispute the assessment either. By his own reckoning, shabby it was: still far too beggarly a size to be called a sun. Unfair, really. In his past life, this woman would have been dead long ago.
The atmosphere quivered. One of the strokes the Brush had inscribed upon the world had stirred to life — the very stroke Psina had drawn the instant she Manifested.
So her casting does take time. Well, that was the Ivory Tower for you. The Brush hardly seemed an Origin cut out for combat — but he couldn't afford to dismiss it. Manifestation was Manifestation.
The stroke had been short and thin when first drawn, yet it swelled vast the moment it moved. A line grown large enough to smother his entire field of vision came crashing down on Harad like a cleaving blade.
He couldn't dodge. He'd expected as much. The projected sun had been shedding crimson flame from the start, and that flame now blanketed the stroke — the two annihilating each other.
The trade is ruinous. It had been a single stroke, and he had simply answered with flame worthy of it — yet even that alone left the world swimming before his eyes. His wavering vision ran red; the space beneath his nose went damp. The aftereffects were already rearing their heads.
Through the swimming blur, Psina was drawing another stroke. Or rather, it looked less like something Psina was doing than something the Brush was doing.
"Look down upon us."
What the deified Brush traced was, once again, a stroke.
A completed stroke took time to move. The black sun shed its crimson — more, and more still, the torrent thickening at Harad's will. The ground melted away, opening a pit between Harad and Psina, and the flame pooled inside it like a lake. Not enough. Blood burst from Harad's eyes.
The waterfall of crimson feeding the lake faltered — then, in an instant, was severed clean through. A stroke had cut across it. The lake surged skyward, rising like a raging wave to swallow the stroke whole. Blocking a single stroke cost half the lake, and by the time it did, Psina had already completed another.
"As expected of the King."
Psina murmured the brief praise as she inscribed the new stroke beside the old. A Projected Origin holding its own against a Manifested one — in the Outlands, that was a punchline. But for the Sun, it was truth.
"Your origin is the pathetic one."
Harad said it with blood spilling from his lips.
Psina ignored him. The Brush traced a few more strokes — and then one of the strokes finished moments ago shuddered once and shot forth. Harad failed to react in time. The crude scribble vaulted the lake of crimson and bisected him.
...And scattered like smoke. A mirage. Psina's eyes widened faintly as she noticed him. Clang! A small shock ran through the air at her side.
"Tch."
Harad stood there clicking his tongue, sword in hand and wreathed in crimson flame. The blade had failed to pierce the stroke.
Seven strokes now ringed Psina. Rather than try again, Harad put distance between them.
"How shabby. How vile."
Psina had caught on that the blood he'd spilled earlier had been pure theater, and she seethed.
Harad was every bit as exasperated, though. He had bled with deliberate exaggeration — and instead of attacking, she had answered by inscribing defensive strokes. Seven of them.
"Quite the coward, for a 5th-tier."
"You stab with your tongue, nothing more."
The Brush pulsed like a living heart, slipped free of Psina's hand, and floated on its own. She murmured to it as though in prayer:
"Look down upon us."
The Brush moved by itself, tracing out a stroke — and its aim swung toward Harad. At that moment, the stream of crimson flowing from the black sun weakened. The thread of blood running from Harad's eyes thickened, and the condensed crimson dyed the lake a deeper red.
The completed stroke fired. Six strokes had been inscribed upon the world — yet only one launched at a time. The condensed crimson leapt to meet it, devoured the stroke, and burned out along with it.
The Brush drew still another stroke; in the meantime, one of the strokes finished earlier fired once more. It, too, vanished with the crimson.
By then even Harad was wearing a hollow laugh. Her intent could not have been more blatant.
"You mean to keep this up?"
"..."
Psina gave no answer. Another launched stroke bled away more of his crimson. Such was the way Psina, mage of the Ivory Tower, fought.
The Outlands, indeed. An Origin like that, carried all the way to the 5th tier. No wonder the Outlands had earned its name as a paradise for mages. On the continent, she'd have been caught by the Church and put to death long before growing that strong.
Perhaps that was why Psina was so prudent. No — faint-hearted.
"What is it you fear? Me? Or the fighting itself?"
"..."
Instead of answering, she fired another stroke. Just one. Safely, one step at a time.
Thus Psina's scheme was flagrant and simple. His tier — and the blood his aftereffects kept drawing from him — must have supplied the inspiration. Harad coughed up blood and replenished the crimson; the heart that pumped out his mana flinched once under the burden.
And so, with every stroke he broke, Harad bled and burned mana — the price of a tier and a reservoir beggarly beside hers. Which was why Psina never narrowed the distance, never taxed herself without cause: whittle each other down, and the victor would be her either way.
It was a war of attrition that would have made Ellen burst a vessel watching — no way at all for a 5th-tier to conduct herself against a mere 3rd.
A born shut-in — flawless on paper. Not that he could deny its certainty. That was why Harad needled her without pause. He could see no winning hand. Somehow, a variable had to be manufactured.
"And that's why the Ivory gets dismissed as a cripple."
Blood came pouring out with the taunt — more than before. The jibe had carried no weight to begin with; now it carried less. And the more he bled, the higher curled the corner of Psina's mouth.
"The tongue is all you have. You will destroy yourself."
Psina seemed to read his every intention — hardly surprising, given the state of things. Harad was destroying himself under Projection's aftereffects, and Psina was spectating from a comfortable remove.
If a 5th-tier played it this stingily, even the regressed Harad had no route through. No — in truth, one existed. The flame that had melted away Cassion's Point. That flame was a 5th-tier flame.
The white fire comes but once. At his present level, the white flame was his final card. But it was slow — his tier remained too lowly for haste — and so it had to be spent at the one moment of absolute certainty.
No closing in. Seven strokes ringed Psina, and the white flame had to fall not upon those strokes but upon Psina herself — upon the Brush.
Standing still is suicide. It was a matter of time. Wait, and he would die soon; the one who stood to lose, right now, was Harad. And the one who stands to lose is usually the one who moves. Very well. Time to try something.
He had no intention of dying in a place like this. His regression was for Ellen. If he was to die, it had to be for her. For now, he had to live — however wretchedly.
Harad bolted. Psina's pupils widened a fraction, wrong-footed. The completed strokes could not turn; they carved through the empty air where Harad had been.
The Brush hurriedly began a stroke — then abandoned it mid-line and started another. Again. And again. The reason was obvious: Harad would not stop running. His speed matched a knight's without aura — nothing remarkable — yet it was enough to leave her Brush, over and over, drawing strokes into empty air and leaving them unfinished.
She cannot anticipate. Seen up close like this, her inexperience was plain. And then...
Strokes. Literally strokes. Straight lines.
"My lord is the almighty Stroke." So Psina had said. But her Origin was a Brush.
"A brush that can draw nothing but strokes."
And even a stroke's course was sealed the instant it was first drawn. That was why the Brush kept abandoning half-drawn lines to start anew.
"Truly pathetic, your origin."
Harad grinned as the truth of it settled. "Ios must have envied you."
The Ivory Tower was, at bottom, a tower of inquiry and art. In Psina's eyes, Ios's paintings could only ever have been beautiful.
"You don't even feel anger? Some master you were. Ios is cursing you from hell as we speak."
That one landed, Harad knew in his gut.
Psina's hair lifted off her shoulders into the air. The Brush's mana-forged tip grew thicker and longer — and then, as though driven mad, the Brush hacked the sky to ribbons. Its sweeps were colossal yet immaculate. Countless strokes completed themselves upon the world.
His vision drowned in black. Horizontal and vertical strokes stacked upon one another, woven as tight as netting — and the net of finished strokes took the shape of a sphere. The strokes firing off its surface made it seem to balloon outward, except the scale was monstrous. It looked fit to sweep away everything in sight; the air above and the ground below were targets alike. So dense was the weave that Harad could find no gap.
What he found instead was the thing he had to do. His eyes locked onto the black sun hanging in the sky. The projected sun resonated with the pupil that met it — and vanished. When Harad blinked, his left eye had been dyed pitch-black.
The small black sun darkened further still. The light encasing its surface flared — and breathed out wind. A wind unknown to the world, one that swept up nothing but raw mana.
To sweep it all away would be greed. The solar wind slammed out straight ahead of Harad, striking down the strokes meant to reach him. Erasing them outright was greed as well; he had to keep strength in reserve. Survival was the true purpose. Killing that woman came after.
The ground split into an exquisitely fine, net-shaped mesh — and those same strokes reached Harad too. He clenched his teeth. It felt as though his whole body had dropped into a net of blades. Yet unlike the ground, Harad did not come apart. The strokes bored through his body, then stopped, and were gone. A third of the way in. No — a shade deeper. Because he had shielded with his arms, his head and heart alone remained whole. He owed that to the strokes the solar wind had blunted.
That was close. Blood ran soaked from every part of him. The strokes had been so dense that no spot on him went unpained — but his form held, and the strength to move remained. The projected left eye had burst. And still Harad smiled. Beyond the flying shards of earth, across the sunken ground, Psina was bleeding.
"You overreached."
It was her first bleeding, and the volume was considerable. Blood from her eyes drowned her cheeks; blood from her nose and mouth hid her jaw.
"You're the one who's dying."
True enough. And Harad smiled again — because she had answered at all. Proof that she was rattled.
"My mana is meager, and so is your experience. It shows you've never truly fought."
Harad's eyes stole to the right. Shrrk. A strange sound. Harad put the question to it aloud:
"Whittling me down. A sure road to victory, I'll grant you. But it is not the method to choose in the Boundary — you never know what may happen."
An Ivory Tower mage, and battle experience scarce. That was why Psina had never crossed the Great Wall — why she had waited here instead, praying that Ios's killer would come to her.
"If you're Ivory, you might at least have stayed buried in your ivory den."
Harad sneered at her without ceremony, and with it seized her nerves. Her viperous gaze fixed upon him.
"...And how many have you stabbed with that tongue?"
"Plenty. The Ivory Tower Master was among them."
"Do not mock me, vile thing."
With his one remaining eye, Harad drew a smile — then pointed a finger to the right.
"My, my. Something is happening."
Space hung torn open. Just as Cassion had once unraveled this region's corruption with his Point, the Brush's strokes had cut clean through space that had already been severed.
"Harad!"
A voice rang through the stroke-scars, through the torn seams. "That would be Delic. The 1st Knight Order's Vice Commander." And the seams were more than one. Psina had been ruinously free with her strokes.
"Harad!"
"Pissarro. Delic's classmate, I believe."
Again.
"Harad!"
"Kubel — the smoke mage. Pairs beautifully with fire."
"Harad!"
"And a boy called Gulen."
Shrrk. The sound swelled from every quarter. Space was tearing — the sound of them hammering at its seams. However sturdy a thing may be, the moment a crack appears, it grows frail. Delic and Pissarro would reach them soon.
"Ever fought many at once?"
"..."
Psina glared at him as though she could kill him with her eyes alone. Harad swayed on his feet. A body minced so fine it might come apart at the lightest touch. A single eye left. His inside was surely a worse ruin still.
"Harad!"
The voice grew louder — no, nearer. A knight of Serzila cleaved through space and showed himself. Their eyes met. Two pairs of them.
Psina bit her lip. She could see him plainly now. Dying as he was, the man was smiling. Yes — soon he would die. But he lived still. For how long, exactly? Her head swam. The image of the man dying refused to form. She had failed to kill him even when he stood alone — and now the knights were being added to the scale...
"Here we come!"
A gravelly voice rolled across the field like a roar. That was the signal. Psina ran.
Strokes. What drew them was the Brush — the bristle at its end. That the bristle itself must outmatch any trace it left upon the world was the plain order of things.
The distance closed. No — it had closed already. Had he always been standing this near?
"Found you!"
Another roar cracked the air — and scoured every thought from Psina's mind. She gripped the Brush like a sword and drove it into Harad's heart.
Thk. That revolting feel of a point sinking through something soft... The sensation was brief. It got no further than parting flesh. The tip of the Brush's bristle stopped dead, just short of his heart.
How? Psina's eyes bulged. It was impossible. Not a sword — the Brush. My lord. My Origin.
"Got you at last."
Harad murmured it like a whisper. And then Psina saw it — the ring threaded onto his little finger. That was what had made his flesh harder than steel.
"A foreign object. Quenched in my own sun."
The King — Harad had claimed the sun as his own.
Psina could not even summon her fury. Harad's hand folded over hers, over the Brush she gripped. She could not pull free. Even in this state, strength remained in him. No — perhaps it was because of this state. Harad looked down at her. Dying as he was, the man was smiling.
"A mage who grows impatient fails."
His one remaining eye blazed and blackened — weeping fire instead of blood. ...Pure white fire.
Psina's eyes went wide at the sight of it. That was no Projection's flame. It was a Manifestation's. Not the fire of the Sun's shadow — the fire of the Sun itself. That the Sun's flame was white by nature... she had known it. Only now did she truly understand. Harad was neither 3rd-tier nor 4th-tier.
"F-Fifth tier...!"
And even that tier was incomplete. That was all — he had simply deceived her. Until the chance lay cradled in his arms. Even while dying.
"Despicable...!"
"There is no such thing in war."
His one remaining eye curved with a smile. The white flame ran down along that line and fell toward Psina's face like a tear.
Drip.