The Tunnel
Regression had to be efficient.
Every word and every action directed at Elaine had to carry meaning — had to be a stimulus in its own right. That was hardly something a hostage could afford with the Grand Duke's daughter, and the problem was the eyes around them.
Twenty. Elaine was still at the age when she minded who was watching.
The expectations of those around her. The moods of Grand Duke Aratus. The Elaine of this era was wound far too tight, straining with all her might to play the ideal daughter of the Grand Duke.
She skipped training because there was nothing left in it for her to learn.
If Harad so much as tried to teach Elaine something, she would punish him for it — because in every watching eye, that would be a line crossed. For the Harad of his previous life, it had never been a problem. He could cross as many lines as he pleased. Granted, only after they had grown close — but still.
And here was yet another nuisance.
Winning a second chance through regression was a gift; having that relationship reset to zero was the tiresome part. Which was precisely why Elaine's deviation was a stroke of fortune he could not have wished harder for.
Harad was a magician, yes — but a hostage whom Grand Duke Aratus had personally accepted. Beside the Grand Duke's daughter, a hostage was a trifling thing; still, the rank sat above that of a rookie in the intelligence service.
She was free to handle him as roughly as she liked.
Harad gave a slight nod. At that, Ellen poured him a drink.
"What are you smiling about?"
"The drink is good, that's all. You're a regular here too, I take it?"
…
"Don't worry. The keeper of this establishment is no magician."
Reassured, Ellen picked up a piece of meat and ate. Her eyes never stopped moving, though.
"What is there to be so wary of?"
"You. That's what."
"Me?"
"…Ever since you came along, I've started suspecting everything."
Ellen drained her cup in one long swallow and let the sigh out with it.
"Whatever anyone does looks suspicious now. Everyone seems to be hiding something, and even the people I'm closest to all look like magicians to me."
No wonder she had looked so foul-tempered when she came to find him.
"And yet look at you — you're practically glowing."
Only yesterday he had been indistinguishable from a ruin of a man. Now light itself seemed to come off the Harad before her. His brittle hair had turned lustrous as gold; his amber eyes had taken on the hue of a sky at dusk, as though fire had seeped into them; where the dark circles had been, a healthy sheen now flowed.
"You can thank my Origin for that."
Thanks to the mana he'd absorbed yesterday, no doubt.
"Must be nice. Some of us can barely stand to live anymore. Is living like this really the best there is?"
Ellen cut straight to the point. She must have been itching to throw that question at him ever since she had stormed into the annex as Elaine.
She caught on fast.
Harad clicked his tongue. Not one full day had passed, and already she looked like she was suffering.
Don't tell me she'd managed to hide all of this in the previous life.
The Grand Duke Elaine of his past life had lived suspecting everything and everyone. Perhaps even that had been an act.
"If you can manage it, keep doing exactly that. Better than being taken for a fool again."
…
"But it is not the best way. The best way is something else entirely."
Harad pointed at himself.
"You?"
"I did tell you. I can tell magicians apart."
To be precise — not tell apart, but remember. Then again, that alone would be plenty.
And his eye for it was sharper than hers to begin with.
If a magician he had no memory of came sniffing about, Harad was confident he would notice before Ellen ever did.
"When you're out with me, you needn't work those eyes so hard. Why wear yourself down solving the questions when the answer sheet is sitting right beside you?"
A magician who could tell magicians apart. Ellen stared at him long and hard.
Then her face twisted.
"You want me to be with you every single day?"
"And then you'd never have cause for suspicion again."
"Anyone who overheard would take that for a confession."
"Regrettably, no. I have the feeling I already belong to someone."
It went in one ear and out the other. What disappointed Ellen was that there was no real cure for her suspicion.
"Don't tell me there are magicians inside the Inner Castle too?"
"Couldn't say. The only people of the Inner Castle I've laid eyes on are the maid who brings me icy soup and bread hard as stone. Ah — and His Grace the Grand Duke and his daughter, of course."
"Ah. Right."
With herself named outright, Ellen remained utterly indifferent — meaning she had no curiosity to spare for Harad's opinions.
A long road ahead, then.
The relationship had begun years earlier than in his past life — but that was all it had done. Ellen still loathed the magician called Harad.
"Come find me only when the suspicion becomes unbearable. Think of me as your liquor and your tobacco."
"…That's not a bad arrangement."
"Come as often as you like. Life as a hostage is duller work than one would think."
"Noted."
Ellen answered curtly. That much was enough for Harad. Anything more would be greed; for now, he had to be satisfied simply that the relationship endured.
A lord and her vassal — that was what they were.
And was that not more or less exactly what Grand Duke Aratus wanted? If the relationship with Ellen was to continue, Harad would have to go on proving his usefulness, again and again.
"Where are you going?"
Harad rose from his seat, and Ellen asked.
"To go apply a little stimulation."
Ellen did not understand.
A notice hung on the door of the Flowerbed's Flesh.
— Not Open for Business —
Harad had hung it there the night before.
"So no one came."
He confirmed that the strand of Ellen's hair wedged into the doorjamb lay undisturbed, and opened the door. Inside was exactly as they had last left it the previous night.
"So they cut off the tail."
"I know."
"It was never much of an organization. They'd set men who could lose to intelligence agents at the door as their gatekeepers."
…
What would he know about aura?
Ellen's brow knitted. The men she had faced the night before had been stronger than she'd expected. Weaker than her, granted — but set against Serzila's lowliest knights, they fell short of nothing.
"In that case, it seems I've found myself a dependable vanguard."
Once she had finished explaining, Harad smiled, opened the floor, and started down the stairs into the earth.
After they had walked for some time, black scorch marks came into view on the ground — the traces of where Harad had burned the brokers Ellen had killed the night before. Before those marks, the tunnel gaped open, brazen and unguarded.
At the sight of it, Ellen's face contorted.
"You never reported this, did you."
Had a report gone up to Serzila, the tunnel would never have been left sitting there so undefended.
"I meant to. Once I'd had a taste."
"A taste of what?"
"Have you ever been to the Boundary? I never have."
"Don't tell me you mean to crawl through that tunnel right now."
Ellen's hand came to rest on her sword.
"You're coming with me."
"…?"
"Did I not say it? I've secured a dependable vanguard."
"And I'm supposed to believe that?"
"If you doubt me, kill me. In the Boundary, that is."
Harad looked back over his shoulder. The eyes that met his did not waver.
"I am merely curious about the Boundary. About the magical beasts that make their home there, and the Outlands magicians who move in secret."
"You're not thinking of joining them?"
"Do I look it?"
Flames bloomed without warning and turned the coat draped across his shoulders to ash. Ellen's sword cleared its sheath — but the fire only wheeled about Harad, never straying from his side. It was like watching some pet nuzzle against its owner.
"Throwing a tantrum, this one. 'Feed me,' it says, and be quick about it."
Gulp. The sound of a swallow.
Harad's mouth was watering — the way it had when he devoured the barkeeper's Origin last night.
To a magician without talent, an Origin was a threat.
An Origin was no docile beast. Nor were the magicians who had been dragged about by theirs few and far between. These things played the meek servant in ordinary times, all the while watching for their chance to burst loose. Once upon a time, that was how a servant of Harad's had died.
"We call it a seizure."
Once, the Elaine of his previous life had compared magicians to liquor and tobacco.
She had been wrong. Magicians were a drug — no, something beyond a drug.
A magician who had once devoured another could never again escape that thirst.
"Mine is a fate of killing magicians until the day I die. As of last night, that is what I have become."
A magician who had tasted another was addicted to magicians. He would have to eat them until he died — and if there were no magicians to eat, magical beasts would do.
…
Ellen quietly lowered her sword. It did not look like a lie. Setting aside whether the Origin business was true, there was no crack in Harad's logic —
Just like last night.
Just as when he had grown suspicious of the barkeeper and tracked down the tunnel's mouth. If he had truly meant to defect, Harad would have given her the slip on the way here.
"…Even so, no. You are Serzila's hostage."
Ellen's tone had gone soft at the edges. She did not sheathe the sword. Hers was not a position that allowed sending Harad off alone.
"I'll be back before sunrise."
"And who would believe that?"
"You're coming too, no?"
"I can't. If I'm caught, I'm discharged. No — executed."
"Then don't get caught. I won't be."
…
It was a fair point.
"This tunnel connects to the 1st Boundary. It should emerge beyond the garrison's patrol radius, so there's little fear of being seen."
Beyond the Great Wall, facing the 1st Boundary, lay Serzila's garrison, and the knight orders stationed there swept the 1st Boundary on a regular cycle. The tunnel's exit would sit outside those sweeps.
"Nor is it so very dangerous. Deeper in, granted — but it is still the 1st Boundary, no?"
Ellen nodded before she knew it. True enough. Meeting an Outlands magician in the 1st Boundary was about as likely as stepping on a needle scattered across a beach. Elaine had joined any number of sweeps and had never once laid eyes on an Outlands magician. At most, all she had ever turned up were 2nd-Circle magical beasts — sorry specimens that could not withstand a single stroke of her blade.
"At worst it would be a 3rd-Circle magical beast. That is the ceiling of it."
…A 3rd-Circle magical beast.
Elaine had never seen one.
"You needn't fight at all. Simply watch me from somewhere safe."
"Why."
"Hm?"
"…Nothing."
Startled by her own slip of the tongue, Ellen gave her head a hard shake, and her long hair slapped both her cheeks five times over.
"A touch more dangerous than a Serzila sweep, and a touch likelier to run into a magician. That is all."
A touch. Dangerous. Higher.
Ellen found herself turning the words over and over.
"Just a taste. Only a taste."
"Tsk."
…It had been cloyingly sweet.
"Defection. You aren't going to do it, are you?"
"If I do, don't hesitate — kill me."
At best, a magician. At worst, a 3rd-Circle magical beast.
"…I'm coming."
Ellen's heart was beating fast.
The tunnel was narrow. Once inside, there was no turning around. All they could do was crawl straight on, and the darkness that blinded them a hand's breadth ahead made the suffocation many times worse.
"Are you quite sure this passage was made for people to travel?"
Defection, nothing. As far as Ellen was concerned, this tunnel had been built for torture, and she could think of no finer method of it than burying a man in this hole and jabbing at him with spears from the entrance.
"If it were easy, it wouldn't be called defection, would it?"
"It can't be that hard, though."
"For a magician, everything is hard."
…
For the first time in her life, Ellen pitied a magician. The tunnel was exactly that dreadful. Had she not disciplined her mind for the sake of her aura, she would have gone to pieces long ago, squealing.
"Are you all right?"
"Never better."
It was no bluff. Harad was crawling along ahead of her, and the feet that pushed against the narrow floor advanced at the steady pace of a machine.
"Is that the Sun's doing?"
"That would be my exceptional mental fortitude."
…
"My Origin is of little use to the mind. If anything, it only gets in the way."
"In the way?"
"A magician's temperament usually follows their Origin. Well — there are exceptions."
Ellen's eyes gleamed in the dark as she crawled. Here was information she could verify back in the Inner Castle; no small number of knights had crossed blades with Outlands magicians. Not that it seemed like anything remarkable.
"I take it you're one of the exceptions, then. There's nothing fiery about you."
In Ellen's eyes, Harad was ice-cold calm — the sort to work his head first and move his body after.
"I am very much fire, I'll have you know. I merely keep it leashed."
"Is that so."
Ellen dismissed it and kept crawling. Harad's temperament was no wildfire — but his mana was, in truth, something more than simple flame.
The underground chamber where the tunnel's mouth lay had been filled with a chilling cold and a blade-edged wind, both born of the Boundary beyond. By rights, the deeper they crawled, the fiercer that cold and wind should have grown. Yet Ellen felt none of it — thanks to Harad, crawling on ahead of her.
It doesn't even feel like manifested magic.
The cold lurking in the Boundary froze intruders where they stood; the wind pierced skin and carved its way down to bone. That was why only knight orders were garrisoned before the Boundary — those without aura could not set foot in it. And that cold, that wind, Harad was bearing simply by existing.
The Sun.
The grander an Origin's concept, the higher its potential — she had only ever half believed that saying, but it might be true after all. It was probably why Harad had resolved to sneak into the Boundary. He knew the strengths of his own power well.
But how?
Think about it, and Harad carried himself like a man who knew the Boundary intimately.
Because he's a magician?
Something about that explanation didn't sit right. The continent knew little of the Boundary. Even Serzila knew only so much, and its sweeps covered a mere sliver of the whole.
"Don't tell me you think the cold and the wind are all the Boundary has to offer? It isn't just the magical beasts and the magicians that are the problem there."
"That is what I am counting on. It was Outlands ground once, was it not? I expect it to be peculiar and grotesque in equal measure."
The Boundary.
The land lying between Serzila's Great Wall and the Outlands had once been Outlands domain. Just as the ground around a desert magician's tent might turn to lake, that land had undergone countless transmutations at the hands of the magicians who lived there — until Serzila had no choice but to give up the very ground it had finally taken. They abandoned the Second Wall they had raised there and withdrew behind the old Wall. Left to fester, those transmutations bred yet others; some merged into one; something underwent something not unlike evolution.
"Even Serzila doesn't fully understand the Boundary. Never mind the 2nd — they don't have the 1st down either."
"That is what I assumed. Past the sweep range, one would be guessing from old records."
Ellen, who had meant to warn him, found her words dying in her throat. Harad was indeed no hothead. He seemed cautious enough.
"By the way — are you worrying over me?"
"…If you die, it's my neck on the line, that's all."
Ellen frowned. She could not see his face in the dark, but she was certain he was smiling.
"Worried is worried all the same. I'll take it kindly."
"It's not worry for you, it's worry for me—"
"We're here."
Where the soles of his feet had been, she now saw heels. Harad, mid-crawl, was standing.
"No presence of magical beasts. Plenty of miscellaneous something, mind you. I'll go up first."
Ellen had no time to stop him. With the sound of something catching fire, a hazy glow spilled into the tunnel — and in that glow, Harad's feet were gone. He had already climbed out. Ellen scrambled after him.
It was a sky she had seen any number of times before. Night, but no moon to be seen; vast ash-grey clouds smothered the heavens, and between them red light flashed without cease. And beneath those clouds, something floated and drifted across the sky — not stars, for stars had no business being under clouds. They looked like tiny living things swimming through the dark.
At the far rim of the heavens hung a fissure, white and blue. It shone like a beating heart, ceaselessly warping everything around it. The rift felt near, and at the same time impossibly far; even with her sharp eyes, Ellen could not begin to guess its distance.
"Do you know what that is?"
Harad asked, then.
"It's the Outlands."
Ellen answered as if it were nothing. The Outlands lay beneath that sky. The rift in the heavens, her father had told her in person, was the scar left where the mana of magicians who worshipped the outer gods had wounded the world's order.
"Is that all it is?"
Harad looked at the fissure. In his previous life, that rift had made him shudder — and Serzila had tensed, and kept its watch. That was all. It should never have ended there.
"Could His Grace the Grand Duke tear open the sky?"
Serzila should have measured itself against them.
"What are you even saying?"
Ellen took it for a joke.
"They managed it."
Harad pointed at the Outlands sky, his face blank as still water. It was the work of uncountable magicians' mana across uncountable years, true — and even so, they had done what Serzila could not.
"There is no harm in vigilance."
…
"But let complacency set in, and something terrible is certain to follow."
To Ellen, those words sounded as though they were meant for her.