4th Tier (1)
The ground had died pitch-black.
Just as a body stiffens into a corpse when a man dies, so this stretch of earth had hardened, terribly and completely. Pissarro knew that hardness well. When the space had been sealed off, he had considered digging down and moving beneath the ground itself. It had proven impossible. A sword swung with everything he had barely shaved the surface — a file's worth of dust, no more.
And that ground had been chewed to pieces.
Though he stood on the surface, what crunched beneath his feet was not earth but fragments of what had been earth. The smallest of them was the size of a thumbnail.
Which meant the magic of the magician Harad had faced was, at one and the same time, that overwhelming and that precise. There was no room for dispute. It had been 5th Tier. Ground that Pissarro could not so much as dig into, that magician had cut to ribbons as easily as slicing a radish.
"...Vicious work," Pissarro murmured.
But his awe could not settle on that magician. The man was dead. And so the awe had nowhere to go but to the one who had killed him.
In the shattered ground, one very small pit had been bored — no, closer to a hole than a pit. A hole a shade thicker than an ant's tunnel, its far end lost from sight. The hole was still seething. Merely to approach it made the flesh feel as though it would boil.
It was a mark left by Harad's fire. And at the same time, a grave. Where that hole now gaped, a 5th-tier magician had once stood. As proof, beside the small hole a heart still pulsed, faintly. Meaning that everything else — a 5th-tier magician, entire — had vanished without so much as ash remaining.
...Consumed by a flame no bigger than a teardrop.
A 3rd-tier who fights like a 4th — so they said.
Now that he had seen it with his own eyes, wasn't this a 3rd-tier who fought like a 5th? It was an absurd tale, hard to believe even having witnessed it firsthand. It would have been more believable to claim the enemy had never truly been 5th-tier at all. But Pissarro could not say, even as a lie, that the opponent had been weak.
Harad's condition was too ruined to call merely ruined. A burst left eye, a torso carved into a mesh of gashes, a left chest punched clean through... that he lived at all was a mercy. Only at that price had Harad managed to kill the magician. To call the enemy weak, then, would be to belittle everything Harad had suffered for it.
"The man isn't in his right mind."
Harad had held on until he watched the magician die with his own eyes — only then had he collapsed. That willpower. Pissarro clicked his tongue. However many times he replayed it, only admiration came out. But there was no leisure to savor the feeling.
"He's still breathing."
Delic's face had hardened as he examined Harad. The body that had burned like fire was going cold. If not for the faint sound of a heartbeat, they might have taken him for a corpse.
"He'll die soon."
Cruelly, the heartbeat was dwindling. Kubel's face turned urgent as he stared down at Harad.
"The heart!"
Delic's and Pissarro's gazes snapped to the heart the magician had left behind.
"N-normally, when Harad kills a magic beast, he simply burns the heart along with the rest of it," Kubel said. "Because he... he dislikes consuming them."
Because there was a woman who couldn't stand the sight of him eating hearts. Kubel, who had once walked the road of the deep sea at Harad's side, remembered exactly how Harad went about his predation.
"And yet Harad left this heart behind."
The magician had died without leaving so much as a bone, yet the heart alone remained. Sturdy as a magician's heart was supposed to be...
"I believe he judged that absorbing it would not save him. That he would have to eat it directly."
Kubel was certain. Harad was a calculating man. He had left himself a means to survive, and only then collapsed.
"So all we need to do is feed it to him?"
"P-probably."
Kubel's tone lacked conviction. He had never consumed a heart himself.
"I'll do it."
There was no time to weigh how best to feed it to him. Pissarro lifted the magician's essence. It pulsed faintly — a beat that seemed to lend weight to Kubel's words.
Delic took Harad's face in his hands and, with care, tipped it back to part his lips. Above that mouth, Pissarro squeezed, gentle and slow. The life still lingering in the essence trickled down into Harad's mouth.
Harad's throat bobbed. He was swallowing. Watching him, Pissarro's hands grew more careful still. Before long the slow drip ran dry, and Pissarro began tearing the essence into little pieces, like feed for a bird, and setting them one by one into Harad's mouth.
Then Harad's tongue stirred. It found what had entered his mouth and gulped it down. Pissarro fed him slowly, steadily, and with every piece heat rose from Harad's body.
When he fed him a slightly larger chunk, teeth closed around it and chewed. Thump. The heartbeat grew a fraction louder. Bit by bit, Pissarro's hands quickened.
At some point, the essence in his hand was gone without a trace. The eyes of the knights and Kubel all converged on Harad's face.
Harad was letting his breath out in long, slow draws. Each breath he drew back was even. A palpable warmth had gathered around him before anyone noticed, and that heat seemed altogether particular to Harad — a tenderness difficult to put into words was spreading through his entire body.
The blood seeping from every inch of him slowed, then stopped. The butchered flesh began to knit, little by little — very, very little. At that pace, fresh skin would come in within days.
"...Astonishing."
Only then did they let out their relief. Tension spent, Delic and Gulen sank to the ground. Kubel was weeping without a sound.
"It's still too soon to relax."
Only Pissarro kept a cool head on the situation. The danger of death had passed, but Harad's condition remained very near the worst it could be. And this, of all places, was the Boundary. They had to carry Harad out — safely, and as fast as possible.
"Kubel — can you make a stretcher of smoke?"
"Y-yes. I can."
Kubel answered through his tears.
"Not the slightest shock is to reach him on the way back. Focus on that and nothing else. The fighting is ours to handle. I'll promise you this much — we will stake our lives on it."
Delic and Gulen nodded, faces grave. Without Harad, they would have died on this search, every one of them. That was the kind of being a 5th-tier magician was.
Kubel hastily clamped a cigarette between his lips, then spat it straight back out. Without Harad, there was no lighting a fire in the Boundary. He channeled his mana directly and breathed out smoke. The smoke congealed into form — sized precisely to Harad's frame, and in a shape that looked for all the world like a coffin.
The remaining smoke lifted Harad, gently. And just as he was being settled into that coffin of smoke—
"...What do you think you're doing?"
A voice rang out. It belonged to no one present. It came from behind. Pissarro, Delic, and Gulen tore their swords free and squared their stances toward the rear.
"...Grand Duchess?"
"Commander Cassion?"
Ellen and Cassion stood there.
Ellen, daughter of the Grand Duke, respected knights. She knew the lines they walked and the weight they carried, and so she never once dealt with them carelessly. Her eyes and her voice, when turned upon a knight, were always quiet. She had spoken harsh words in her time — but never once with feeling in them.
The Grand Duke's daughter did not let emotion sway her. That was what made her perfect: talent she was born to, skill honed to a razor's edge, and on top of it all a firmness that drew an unyielding line between duty and the personal.
...And that daughter of the Grand Duke was angry right now.
"I asked what you were doing."
Her voice was frost. Her gaze, colder still. Today, Delic and Pissarro learned that an enraged Ellen turned into a slab of ice — for no knight had ever seen the Grand Duke's daughter lose her temper before.
"Gulen. You'll explain."
"Why is Harad in a coffin?"
Coffin. At the word, Kubel winced. He had shaped the thing as a litter to carry him on — but there was no denying it looked the part. To anyone who didn't know the situation, it would read as a corpse being moved.
"Make it short."
Ellen added it with her eyes on Harad. Anyone could see the state he was in.
"Quickly."
Her voice was colder than the Boundary.
Gulen flinched hard and opened his mouth. It had been an exceptional search; they had reached their destination, but the ground had gone strange and every one of them had ended up alone, and Harad alone had crossed a 5th-tier magician, and...
It was less an explanation than a panicked ramble. But every point that mattered made it out of his mouth.
"Harad killed a 5th-tier magician, you say."
For an instant, Ellen softened. A very brief instant. Her expression went cold again at once — colder than before.
"And that is how he came to be in that state... yes?"
"Yes, ma'am!"
Delic and Pissarro bellowed it like green recruits. Such was the presence Ellen carried.
She crossed the distance and studied Harad's condition at close range.
"...He's alive."
Alive, and nothing more. That was how he looked through her eyes.
"And yet..."
Her gaze slid away. It took in Delic and Pissarro, Gulen and Kubel in a single sweep. Every last one of them clean. Not a wound to be seen.
"And not one of you is hurt."
"Pardon?"
"Why is that?"
"Pardon?"
Ellen had always stood on the knights' side. There had never been an exception.
"So why are you all perfectly fine? When Harad is lying there like that?"
...With today the sole exception.
A magician's essence is the Origin. The Origin is born anew into the world through the vessel called a magician, and the heart is the center and core of that vessel — the seat where the Origin dwells.
To borrow Serzila for an example: the Inner Castle. To borrow a person: Grand Duke Aratus, or Ellen.
While Ellen lived, Serzila's fall would be no true fall. It could be raised again one day. Grand Duchess Ellen could manage that much — the Harad of his previous life had thought so once.
Magicians were the same. If the heart survived, a magician's death was no true death. That one might rise again — Harad had seen it, lived it, in his previous life. An exceptional case, to be sure; an ordinary magician died when the body broke, heart whole or no. But exceptional or not, it had undeniably happened. It was living proof that a magician's essence was the Origin.
And so it was only natural that Harad — heart intact, body less than wholly ruined — had not died.
I lived.
Magicians do not dream. Harad realized he was in his inner space; the absence of pain all but confirmed it.
They must have fed me the heart, thankfully. Kubel, most likely.
If it had been only the knights... the mere thought made his breath catch. Pissarro might have worked it out, perhaps, but still. Harad did not much care for uncertainty. If he himself held the deciding hand, well and good — but in another's grip? He did not trust many people beyond Ellen.
And it won't leave anything ruined behind.
Harad remembered the exact state of his body from before he blacked out. One 5th-tier heart would be more than enough for that. The Origin, having fed on that mana, would restore his flesh. Other magicians he couldn't speak for, but Harad was built that way — the Sun granted a diffuse, boundless vitality, and his recovery had always been exceptional.
Waking will take a while.
He had stilled his will, yet his consciousness did not rise. His body was not yet in any state to wake. Harad remained in his inner space, within his heart — and the Sun hung before him. The last time he had seen it with his own eyes, it had been bearing down on Ellen's mansion.
A Sun half the size of the Inner Castle greeted him now.
Now that finally looks like a Sun.
It cut a proper figure at last. Compared to his previous life it was still a long way off — but any more than this would be greed. Fair enough, too. Harad was still twenty.
At twenty, in his previous life, he had been a wretched husk who couldn't even cast magic properly. One of the flames rippling like a rolling boil shot suddenly upward — that flame alone a deep, blood red. It was one of the colors Harad knew better than any other.
The Crimson Flame wound itself across his whole body like a pet. That gesture: to the ignorant magicians of the continent, a seizure; to the Outer Realm magicians who deified such things, praise — the homage a god bestowed upon its vessel.
To the regressed Harad, it was affection. A word of thanks, even — thanks to it, he had reached the 4th Tier. Truth or not, that was how he had to think of it.
"Your Origin is the Sun? Who fed you that nonsense?"
"Everyone but Your Grace."
"Then you need only listen to me. And it seems I am the only one who never spouted such nonsense."
"...?"
"From this moment, your essence is you. You were not born for the Sun. You were born to rule it."
"And if I can't?"
"Then I will kill you. You, and the Sun both."
Because that was how Ellen threatened him.
"You're awake."
...Ellen — the real one — said. A voice identical to the one in his memory and yet still somehow distant. Cold, at that. A familiar coldness. That was Ellen, before the nagging started.
"I haven't woken up."
"...Have you lost your mind?"
"A joke."
Harad moved to rise, then thought better of it. There wasn't a spot on him that didn't hurt; one careless motion and he felt his whole body would come apart at the seams.
"Stay lying down. Get up now and every wound will split open."
It was a matter for time to settle. His field of vision had widened again — his left eye, it seemed, had regenerated whole.
"Did I dream?"
"...You wake from the dead and that's what you wonder?"
"Just asking."
He asked just in case. He hadn't hoped for anything. This time, nothing had arrived to trigger it — he and Kubel had been the only ones who made the search.
"You've just come back from the dead, you know."
Ellen sounded utterly incredulous. She had registered the mention of a dream, no doubt — but to her, reality plainly mattered a great deal more.
"Still, I did dream."