Agwi (3)
Fire explodes.
Fire alone cannot cause an explosion — but a triviality like that can be loosely patched over with mana.
For the regressed Harad, it was a profoundly familiar piece of work: project the Sun into his right eye, aim the Crimson Flame into the Agwi's gaping maw, and let it burst. As the Projection laid over his body proved, this was no full-power strike.
Time had been short, and the Agwi's maw sat mere inches from Kalinos's face — and since the flame had been kindled to save him, its force had to be reined in. Excuses or not, though, it was still Projection magic.
"Hee." The Agwi snickered. The thing had not so much as flinched at the Crimson Flame, nor at the explosion. Instead, it wore an expression of rapture.
This fire.
While the thing babbled, Ellen — who had carved her way through the Agwi pack — drove a kick into Kalinos.
Kalinos went flying, to land at Harad's feet. Kwaaang! A thunderclap heaved the darkness — the sound of Ellen's sword cracking against the creature's neck.
The thunder rung off that blow stirred her instincts. Glaring at the Agwi's utterly unmarked throat, she shifted to Harad's side.
"...?" Ellen glared at her own sword — at the black aura streaming down its edge.
"It isn't your doing. It's mine."
All the more so because the Agwi that had consumed the most fire-crows had now swallowed the Crimson Flame besides. The amount and force were slight, but the Origin behind them was the Sun.
"...It's my fault." Kalinos said. His face was the picture of humiliation.
Harad had chosen Kalinos — and the price of that choice was an Agwi made strong.
"I should have died."
"Enough. Is this any time for self-recrimination?"
Harad turned his gaze on the Agwi that had eaten the Crimson Flame. What had been a thing of faint shadow now carried a dark gray sheen; the more fire it ate, the whiter it seemed to grow.
"This fire!" The Agwi burst out in a cry of rapture.
It sounded like a creature declaring the fire delicious — and to the Agwi pack, it seemed to carry a different meaning entirely. The pack abandoned its advance and swarmed toward the gray Agwi instead, closing around it like a guard formation.
"As I thought. It needs time to digest."
"What?"
"Crimson Flame is 4th-Circle fire, you say? No. It had already eaten fire-crows, hadn't it."
The rest of the pack had charged straight at Harad the instant they ate.
"My fire wasn't shared around — it was eaten by one, alone. Small in amount, granted. Still. The exceptional one would be that thing and nothing else."
That gray Agwi was the prime culprit behind the fire-crows' slaughter.
"It must have gorged itself on fire-crows more than any of them, too. My flame, stacked on top of all that. That's why it needs time now." Harad murmured, half to himself.
"It took no wound from the Crimson Flame. Mightier than 4th Circle, shy of 5th. Had it been 5th, there would have been no digestion time at all."
At 5th Circle, digesting a fire-crow's flame would have been nothing. The thing had already hit its limit on fire-crow fire — and then it crammed the Crimson Flame in on top.
"What happens once it finishes digesting?"
"I don't know either."
"So we have to kill it now, then."
"Precisely."
Ellen raised her sword. She had registered the change in the pack's bearing. Now those things would turn on Ellen and Kalinos — because the digesting gray Agwi had commanded them to shield it.
"Sir Kalinos. This is the hour you prove your Bravery."
The eyes of Kalinos, sunk in self-reproach, flashed keen.
"Fail, and Harad dies. I, on the other hand, will live."
Bravery, after all, shines brightest when it burns for a comrade.
Had he ever proven his Bravery? Asked so, Kalinos could not summon a single moment he could rightly nod to.
It had been that kind of era.
Under Grand Duke Aratus's Imperial Sabbatical, Serzila was barred from the Boundary. Its line of fire had been taken away.
To be sure, no amount of warning could exhaust the danger of the search expeditions, and fallen knights were counted every year — yet it was plain fact that the old steel of that resolve had dulled. No knight would deny that the twenty years past had stretched into complacency.
A rookie might never know, but Kalinos, commander of the 3rd Knight Order, remembered the Boundary of before with perfect clarity.
An era when the unknown ran rampant — when nothing existed but the line of fire.
Bravery was the sort of thing proven in places like that. In those days, Bravery meant the vanguard. It meant advancing — advancing, and gathering up the Bravery of knights who had died pressing on ahead. And so Bravery was carried forward, and carried on.
In those days, Kalinos had inherited a great deal of Bravery. That countless Bravery... he had nearly let slip through his fingers — and that, too, at the line of fire, the first in twenty years, where he was meant to prove it.
'A mistake that could have become an eternal regret.'
He had lost his first resolve. Forgotten the vow of long ago. However much he trained, however strong he had become, the core of him had soaked in stale habit and rusted through.
And so the man who had made that mistake right — Harad could only be his comrade.
There is no such thing as a weak Agwi. Only Agwi toughened by even a mouthful of fire-crow remained, and they were guarding their leader, the gray one.
Their stance had shifted as well. What had been a charge fixed only on Harad now took up unmistakable guard. Arms swung wide had sharpened into things like blades — and that killing premonition filled his sight.
Kalinos did not hesitate. He bored straight into the heart of the pack instead.
"Sir Kalinos!" Ellen's voice, calling him back from behind, never reached him. Bravery does not look back.
Thump! In the middle of the Agwi pack, Kalinos struck his own heart with his fist.
It was a declaration: my heart, offered. Only, his shirt had long since been torn to nothing — there was no armor graven with Serzila's crest left to bare.
Thump! Kalinos struck his heart a second time.
It was a rite for one's comrades. In this moment, Kalinos would lay his heart open for Harad — the man who had saved him.
"Come!" From the heart of the Agwi, Kalinos roared.
Agwi on every side. Their number, still, was beyond counting.
Arms transformed into colossal blades came pouring down from beyond his reach. Their attacks made no distinction between friend and foe — when they landed, they simply passed through, as water slips past water. And so the Agwi's assault was indiscriminate, and all the harder to read for it.
Kalinos did not dodge. He swung his sword like a madman instead — so ceaseless and so fast that, seen from afar, it looked less like swordwork than some vast ball of thread set in motion.
Agwi arms that entered that sword-path fell away; Agwi bodies too. Thud, thud — the sound of them striking the ground rang without pause.
As those sounds piled up, Kalinos's breathing grew heavier. But the ball of thread remained. However ragged his breath became, his sword moved exactly as before.
At the sight, Harad's breath caught in his throat.
'Has he lost his mind?' After Harad had gone to the trouble of saving him. With enemies that numerous, who leaps into the middle of them? And calls it a countermeasure — swinging his sword without pause so the enemy cannot close in.
Bravery. That was Ellen's word for it; in Harad's judgment, it was foolishness carried to its purest extreme.
"Ellen!"
"I know!"
Jet-black aura cleaved through the hardened Agwi without restraint. And so she advanced, stride by stride. Her line ran diagonal — and at its end stood not Kalinos, but the gray Agwi.
'She knows what she's doing.' Ellen was treating the uproar Kalinos had raised as her opening.
No — he could state it flatly: it was not only that. Ellen was honoring Kalinos's choice. She had no wish to disturb the line of fire of that knight who dressed his foolhardiness up as Bravery.
'This place is maddening.' A land where recklessness is a virtue and death is glory. 'That damned North.' Harad understood, anew, why in his past life he had never been able to love this land.
'The exceptional one was that creature, and that creature alone.' The others would fall short of it — duller of mind, and their obedience to the gray Agwi's commands was proof enough. It had been the only one to seize him hostage and make threats.
And so the Crimson Flame would surely work.
Harad's right eye blackened over, deep as night.
"I'll be the one to win this!" Just then, Kalinos bellowed without warning.
It meant: do not interfere. He seemed to have caught the flow of mana in the Projection.
Harad had no intention of honoring it. Kalinos had to be saved — he was one of the rare knights who knew how to bend.
'...In the middle of all that?' A question surfacing from nowhere stalled the Crimson Flame's manifestation.
A number of Agwi arms thrust up into the air — a few heads mixed in among them. Kalinos's indiscriminate blade was rending even those to fragments.
Meaning: he had no leisure to glance about and cull only the Agwi attacking him.
"Comrades!" Kalinos cried out — half battle cry, half breath.
Until moments ago his breathing had been that ragged, and now he was forming words. Crisp ones, at that.
The eye that had released its Projection took Kalinos in. The intervals between his breaths were stretching, little by little. But the sword still raged, every bit as ferocious.
Before — Kalinos had failed to fell a hardened Agwi in a single stroke. The cutting force of his aura had been overmatched by the toughness of an Agwi that had fed on fire-crows. Not anymore.
Down a single sword-path, Agwi body parts scattered every which way. The speed was climbing by the breath; the ball of thread his blade traced had tightened. And... it was sharpening into clarity.
Aura is a mirror.
That mirror shows itself only to those whose growth of body and spirit has pressed flush against its limit. Only then are they granted the right to reflect their true essence.
But the mirror is not kind. It does not show itself unbidden; only when you hold yourself up before it does it finally reflect.
And when one thus grasps their essence and holds fast to it, that essence is projected into reality through the aura.
It was a principle Harad knew poorly. But... he knew well the strength of those who had succeeded in grasping their essence and casting it upon the mirror. Such people were called superhuman.
"O Bravery!" Kalinos, who had cast Bravery upon the mirror, swung his sword. Aura red as blood sheared the Agwi pack before him in twain at a stroke.
An Agwi arm left behind raked across Kalinos's back. The cut was not shallow. But Kalinos advanced.
"O Bravery! For my comrade!" Kalinos cried again.
To Harad, it was an engraving — a gnawing repetition, so as never to forget the essence once reflected.
'Unbelievable.' A Sword Master, born just like that, out of nowhere. Harad let out a hollow laugh.
In his head, Elain of his past life snickered.
"See, Harad? This is who we are. Simple, and so honest; trite, and yet one of a kind. And therefore — peerless."
That was how Elain had been unable to keep from loving the North.
"Is it not lovely?"
"Huh?" Young Ellen, however, was jealous.
I killed more of them than he did. So why?
Of course — not jealousy, but envy. And Ellen knew she had no time to go correcting that thought.
Because the number of Agwi was visibly falling.
The Agwi she and Kalinos had killed numbered a great many — but even making allowance for that, the arithmetic refused to add up. Going by Ellen's first tally, half the pack should have remained. Yet not even that half remained.
And even that was still dwindling. Instead... the gray Agwi was growing. No — becoming gigantic was the fitting word.
The Agwi crowded toward the gray Agwi. They seeped into the gray fiend like liquid.
By the time Ellen noticed, the gray Agwi already dwarfed the fire-crow. Even in this moment it was swelling larger.
Agwi that had leapt up clung to the gray Agwi's hands. Some to its feet, its calves, its neck. That was how the gray Agwi inflated its bulk.
Was she to seize the Agwi rushing to it? Cut down the thing grown giant? Before she moved, Ellen turned her head toward Harad. He had always known the answer.
"...?" Harad's eyes were stretched wide.
"Magic." Harad murmured, as though bewitched. Those eyes were pinned to the gray Agwi.
"It's magic."
A magical beast, casting spells? Ellen's brow creased. Harad had noticed her stare — but he had no margin to spare it a thought.
That was — Manifestation.
'No. It is not.'
Manifestation refers to an Origin unveiling itself upon the world. A phenomenon possible even for a 5th-Circle magical beast. Projection is magic. Manifestation is not called magic — because it is a great phenomenon.
What that thing wrought was not Manifestation. It was magic. Only, heterodox — because of the Origin it possessed.
Though it was no Manifestation, Harad could feel the creature's Origin. What it was, however, he could not tell.
The gray Agwi's Origin was crumpled every which way, crushed and mangled. That was not what mattered. What mattered was that it had an Origin at all.
Yes — an Origin. A 5th-Circle magical beast has an Origin. The gray Agwi is not 5th Circle. And yet it held an Origin. And... it had brought forth magic that devours Agwi.
"You were a mage, weren't you." Harad smiled, bitter. So even for a mage, there were words like these....
"That one." The pity was brief. This was no one to pity. Harad remembered the humiliation from before.
"That's the one we must strike." Aiming at the Agwi waiting on its absorption would only be granting it time.
"O Bravery!" Kalinos cried, trite as ever. Aura gone redder than blood swept across in a level line.
It sheared through both knees of the gray Agwi turned giant. The giant, robbed of its legs, pitched forward.
The giant planted both hands against the ground and rose again, turning its knees into soles.
Ellen stood at exactly that eye-level. Her aura, drawing ever closer to true jet-black, split the face in two, crown to chin.
The face cloven in half sagged left and right. Even so, the gray Agwi did not die.
"Buuooool!" The mouths, split in two, wailed. Its two eyes, set far apart, turned to Harad as if pleading. And then... it lifted its head.
In the sky, an alien darkness had gathered into a perfect circle. It gave off a sliver of light, and a monstrous heat.
"Ahh." The gray Agwi, gazing up at the projected sun, opened its cloven mouths. It stretched its hands toward that black sun. They did not reach. Had its knees not been cut — would they have?
"Try eating this one, too." Blood ran from Harad's eyes.
The jet-black sun wept white fire. It flowed thin, and trickle by trickle, like water down a ditch — and so it bathed the gray Agwi.
"O light......" And the gray Agwi melted away, slowly. Like tears.