Agwi (4)
The aftereffects.
The first thing Harad did was turn a long, contemplative eye on his own body.
Manifesting 5th-Circle fire from within the 4th Circle was a first for him. Nothing of the sort had ever happened in his past life, either—back then he had been an ordinary magician, one who could do nothing but keep faithful to the limits of his tier.
His heart smarted faintly, and his veins felt scraped raw. His whole body throbbed as though stricken with muscle aches.
"Are you all right?"
"You holding up?"
As he stood there in silence, Ellen and Kalinos—having finished off the remaining Agwi—came over.
"I'm better than I expected."
Pain was relative, and by that measure he was in fairly decent shape. Reaching the 4th Circle had been worth the price.
"You're bleeding."
Ellen pointed at his face. Sure enough, when he wiped at it with his palm, it came away soaked in red.
"It only looks this bad. The eyes are among the most fragile parts of the body."
When water overflows, it bursts through the weakest point first. Aftereffects had always shown themselves through the eyes before anywhere else.
"It's actually in better condition than it looks—"
Mid-sentence, Harad crumpled backward.
Ellen had hooked her foot out and tripped him. She caught his falling back with one hand and dumped him unceremoniously onto the ground.
"Shut up and just rest."
"You heard her."
Harad didn't resist.
"You too, Sir Kalinos."
Ellen turned her glare on Kalinos next. His legs were trembling so hard it seemed a wonder he was still upright. The wounds were one thing, but he had also fallen into aura exhaustion.
Even so, he remained standing, keeping watch over their surroundings. It was a truly formidable show of will.
"I'm fine—"
"You'll go down hard, Sir. I'd bet on it."
"......"
Kalinos quietly lay down.
Ellen crouched at the heads of the two men.
"You startled me, Lady Ellen. That was magnificent."
"......"
Kalinos said it quickly. Given the circumstances it might have passed for flattery, but at least his words seemed sincere.
"It was like watching the Grand Duke's heir."
Until now, Kalinos had shown no particular reaction to Ellen. She was a side-branch relation, after all, and Intelligence Bureau besides.
"No—perhaps even more than the heir."
But his gaze now was burning hot. It was the look of a man gazing at Elaine. At the successor, in other words.
Perhaps the phrase contest for succession had taken shape in Kalinos's mind.
"The Intelligence Bureau needs strength too, you know. The next bureau is going to champion power. Every bit as much as the knight orders do."
Harad's eyes widened slightly. Ellen was handling this with real polish.
That's the touch of someone who's been through it once or twice before.
Whenever controversy stirred, Ellen must have slipped out of it exactly this way. Words that bound her to nothing. Ellen was, after all, a person meant to disappear.
"And I'm not magnificent, then?"
"I've known you were magnificent since some time ago."
At Kalinos's artless sincerity, Harad chuckled low. Unlike a magician's, a knight's sincerity carried no envy in it.
"You were magnificent yourself."
"That was your doing, Harad."
"No. You'd have managed without me."
It was no empty courtesy.
In his past life—
Kalinos would have combed the darkness alongside the other knights. Somewhere along that road, he would have been brave for his comrades, and come to know that bravery for the essence it was.
And that is how he would have become a Sword Master.
But it would not have been enough. That would have been Kalinos's death.
The gray Agwi was not a thing one man could have handled alone.
"How did this happen?"
Ellen asked, a little all over the place. But nobody failed to grasp that the question was about Kalinos's realm.
"...It seems to be the result of reclaiming a resolve I had lost."
"So you'd sensed your essence, however dimly, for a long time."
"Yes. I didn't set out knowing it, but as it happened, that was how it went."
Kalinos had chased bravery for a very long time. His essence was bravery. Or perhaps his essence had simply turned into bravery along the way.
Is it something you're born with? Or something life forges in you?
Harad didn't know the answer. Aura was uncharted territory to him.
The world called magic vague and unknowable, but as far as Harad could see, aura and divine power were every bit as unfathomable.
"Then why aren't you getting any younger? I heard you get younger when you become a Sword Master."
Was she serious?
Harad stared at Ellen.
"Why?"
"Are you asking me that in earnest?"
"Am I not allowed to ask?"
Even though it was aura she herself wielded, Ellen appeared to know less about it than Harad did.
"You were never taught?"
"Nobody ever offered to teach me."
"Ah."
Elaine's teacher had been Moresz Palaz. That great old knight had rarely deigned to explain the realm of the Sword Master to Elaine. Preconceptions take root, he had said once. That height had to be grasped purely, through one's own power alone.
"A Sword Master's body returns to its prime."
In truth, it was less a return to one's prime than a hardening into something stronger and sturdier. Their prime began only at that point.
"They do grow younger in the process. But the change is never abrupt. It comes on slowly."
Kalinos, in middle age, would yet grow younger still.
"It won't be a dramatic change, mind. He'll simply settle into looking youngish. Unless one's reserves of aura are enormous, a marked return of youth is rare indeed."
Toremote, the 1st Knight Commander, looked to be in his thirties.
"Sir Palaz looked twenty-something, though."
"His aura reserves are famous, as I understand it."
Measured in sheer quantity of aura, Moresz Palaz was a knight second to none.
As he explained, Harad tilted his head.
Then what about Grand Duke Aratus?
By any eye, the man looked every inch Elaine's father.
Think it through, and it made no sense at all.
The aura he carries must be staggering.
Heavenly Might aside, the Serzilla line had always been built that way. Their reserves of aura were every bit as prodigious as their martial skill. The Elaine of his past life had worn the face of a twenty-year-old even at forty.
Why, then? Deliberately? Is such a thing even possible?
He had never once heard of it—and this was not a feat of magic, either.
And Grand Duke Aratus was hiding more than that.
He was still turning it over when Ellen's eyes lit on Kalinos.
"The quality of your aura has changed. Was there another change too?"
"...I honestly couldn't say."
Kalinos still wore a dazed air. No knight ever expects to arrive, this abruptly, at the realm every one of them yearns for.
"Disheartening as it may sound, you'd best not hope for anything more special."
"Why not?"
"A Sword Master is special simply by existing. Wanting more than that is greed."
Of course, such beings did appear now and then—superhumans who awakened an aura capable of shaking the world.
"Special among the special. Aura of that kind cannot help but be rare. You will have to be content with having your aura strengthened."
"This alone is more than I deserve."
Kalinos seemed content enough with what he had attained.
"Tell me more."
Ellen's curiosity glimmered.
"I don't know all that much myself. To borrow magic's terms—try thinking of the trait as the Origin."
"Then yours must be something special?"
"More special still, I'd wager—and my trait likely is as well. Aura like that belongs only to those born clutching one of the rarest spoons. People like me."
Though whether, as with magicians, one was born with the spoon in hand, or carved one out over a lifetime, he couldn't say.
Harad gazed straight at Ellen.
The Elaine of the past had been uniquely, singularly special. That was why Elaine had been entitled to arrogance. No—she had been obliged to be arrogant. The aura she would come to know in herself later was precisely that kind of thing.
"Harad, you're remarkably well-versed in aura as well."
"That he is."
"...I knew you two were in the dark. I didn't realize quite how dark."
No wonder the world considered magic the harder discipline. Knights, after all, managed greatness all the time without knowing a thing.
Harad pushed himself up with a hollow little laugh.
"I told you to stay lying down."
"Rest any longer and the gray Agwi's heart will go cold on me."
Harad had not burned the gray Agwi's heart.
The gray Agwi had been a magician.
And it could not have been the only one.
It had been an unusually strong specimen among the Agwi—which meant the others, too, must once have been magicians.
Not an unusually strong specimen. A magician who must have been strong in life.
There were occasional cases of magicians reduced to monstrous shapes not unlike magical beasts. The term for it was being devoured by one's Origin.
Jeshult of the Ivory Tower, whom he had faced once at the fire watchtower, had been one such example.
"Then why were you so startled?"
"Because it was nothing like the usual case."
One devoured by their Origin looks, to any observer, exactly like a magician devoured by their Origin. The Origin and its mana could be felt.
The Agwi had been different. Harad had sensed no Origin from them at all, and so had naturally taken them for magical beasts.
"So only the gray one was special?"
"No. The Origin made itself felt all at once—the moment it ate the crimson flame."
As though the fire had gone and repaired the creature's Origin.
The others might have recovered too, had they only consumed enough fire.
The Agwi looked so alike that one could mistake them for a single species.
Which meant every last one of them had become what it was for the same reason.
And their Origins would all have been similar besides.
"Recovery is a matter of removing the cause. The way you would plug a hole torn open in the body."
The gray Agwi had recovered by eating fire. It had reclaimed the Origin that magic required, and the intellect needed to implement it.
"So fire is what made it an Agwi in the first place?"
"To be precise—the absence of fire?"
Harad answered as though asking. He lacked certainty himself.
Deprived of fire, it sank into the shape of a beast. Fed fire, it recovered.
Fire was only shorthand, though—wasn't it truly the Origin, or magic itself?
A magician that needed another's Origin, another's magic. Even for the regressed Harad, this was a first.
I'll know once I eat it.
Absorb a heart, and you learn its Origin. The gray Agwi's Origin had been crumpled and crushed, but once absorbed, its original shape would come to light.
He had felt nothing of the sort from the other Agwi's hearts. They were like the hearts of low-tier magical beasts—a sensation of seeds in which an Origin had only just begun to sprout. Because they, unlike the gray one, had eaten less fire.
It had been a singular specimen. It must have taken in a vast amount of flame even before the crimson fire. The fire crows would have been only a fraction of it.
The gray Agwi had swelled to the size of a giant. Yet the dead creature's heart was no larger than an ordinary human's.
"You're going to eat it yourself?"
"You don't like that?"
"Well. It's your call."
She said it, but Ellen's reluctance was written plainly across her. It was a welcome feeling—and yet even Harad was helpless this once. The cause of the creature's becoming an Agwi, and the reason it had returned to being a magician, was fire.
The Agwi's heart was still beating faintly. Resting in his hand, it was distinctly cold.
And yet it had recovered by eating fire.
Which meant this—this faint pulse in a heart gone cold—was all that "becoming warm" had ever amounted to.
When an Agwi ate fire, its body brightened. And warmed.
The reason it had become an Agwi must have been the reverse.
It grew cold and dark? No. It grew cold and dark because the fire was gone.
That was how this magician had become an Agwi. Dying for want of flame, it had yearned for flame. But no matter how much it ate, it would never have gone back to being human.
Miraculous recoveries by Origin-devoured magicians certainly existed—but that was no perfect restoration. Sometimes it was only the intellect that came back, and the like.
The blood left in the heart ran down his hand, drip by drip.
Light leapt from his breast pocket at just that moment—while he was drooling without meaning to, and scratching at a chest gone itch under the heart's impatient urging to hurry up and eat.
"The orb?"
There was only one thing in his pocket. He fished it out, and sure enough: the orb. The one the Moon Rabbit had given him once upon a time was shedding a faint glow.
And that silver light was trained squarely on the Agwi's heart.
Giving it to the orb seemed the right call.
It was self-evident that the Agwi's heart would refill the orb's mana.
"I don't want it."
Harad said it without thinking.
It was not his will. The Sun wanted to eat this heart. And bending that will was no easy thing. Harad's hand, still gripping the heart, was drifting toward his mouth.
That, surely, was what addiction was...
"I don't want it either."
And then—
Clap! Harad's left and right hands smacked together as if in applause. The Agwi's heart and the orb, held one in each hand, struck against each other.
The heart and the orb.
Ellen folded Harad's hands—both of them, cargo and all—firmly over one another, and grinned wide.
"Sneaky, aren't you."
"Didn't you like it?"
"I did."
Kalinos, watching the whole thing from where he lay sprawled, smiled contentedly.
Somehow, it felt as though that was exactly how it was meant to be.