Midterm Exam (8)
The world was collapsing.
The angle of my vision bent and twisted on its own, and nausea surged up my throat.
"Hhurgh!"
Her trembling, aspen-shaking legs gave out beneath her, and Eva crumpled to the ground, unable to hold herself up.
"Ulp! Kgh—puhah!"
When she forced open her seized throat, the sharp taste of blood flooded her tongue. Every breath drew the fishy stench of gore into her nose like a needle.
The bleeding would not stop. Her vision was breaking down; even the scenery before her eyes was reduced to fogged, blurry outlines.
Am I… am I going to die like this?
Fear crashed over her in waves. And yet her mind was strangely, unnervingly clear. Beyond the agony of flesh being torn apart, a strange, bubbling elation rose up.
It felt like a heavy set of chains she had worn her entire life had finally come loose—like a bird caged all its days at last soaring into the very sky it had only ever dreamed of. That was the freedom Eva felt.
"Eva! Are you okay? Stay with me!"
Chloe came sprinting over and caught her in her arms. At the sight of the blood-soaked body and uniform, the unfocused pupils of someone half-lost to unconsciousness, Chloe panicked completely.
"Oh my god, what do I do! The bleeding won't stop!"
"Chloe… I'm fine, so go help the others…."
"That's not the point right now! You're actually dying—!"
"Chloe."
Eva was more serious than Chloe had ever seen her. No stuttering, no wavering—she simply stated her wish, straight and true.
"I'm asking you… please."
Her expression was so grave that Chloe couldn't bring herself to argue any further.
"Okay! I'll be right back, so just hold on a little longer!"
While Chloe rushed off to free the people tangled in the vines, Eva dragged her wrecked body upright. She walked, leaving bloody footprints behind her, and at the end of that trail lay a mutilated corpse.
"…"
The man who had introduced himself as Vital. His upper body had been hacked apart hideously—a fatal wound no human being could possibly survive.
And yet what had ended this man's life was not that sword wound. It was the hole punched through his throat. Eva stared, unblinking, at the round, scorched puncture where soot and rain had mingled.
Click.
Her teeth ground together like a person shivering violently in the cold. A chill wrapped around Eva; her hands and feet trembled. The emotion called fear was closing its hands around her throat.
She couldn't understand why. She had never seen it before—and yet, every time she looked at that hole, an inexplicable loathing pressed down upon her. A fragment of a memory she never wanted to resurface began playing inside her skull.
[I'm sorry, my precious little one.]
Was it an auditory hallucination? Or someone's voice?
A headache needled at her again and again, and Eva clutched her head in both hands.
"Khehehe!"
Then—a laugh, right beside her ear.
Eva whipped her head around to see the man who should have been dead, sneering down at her.
"Never thought I'd lose to this. To think you had something besides the Interlocking Gears of Causality."
"…Why aren't you dead?"
"Asking because you don't know? I thought you'd left me alive on purpose."
As if to emphasize the point, Vital tapped his own temple two or three times with a finger.
"The Celestial Clan doesn't die unless the brain is completely destroyed. You do know that as long as there's mana, we can regenerate from anything—don't you?"
"How would I possibly know that! Ordinary humans…!"
"No—now that's a lie. If that's true, then why is it you who carries the Divine Artifact of Kairos, the Great Archmage?"
It made no sense whatsoever. But before the question could even settle, Eva was wracked by a sudden, crushing guilt that squeezed her heart like a fist. The nightmare she never wanted to remember had come back to life against her will.
[Daughter….]
Her father—head severed, gone cold as a corpse. And the hot blood smeared across her own hands, and the thing those hands had been holding—
"Uuueeergh!"
The swirling torrent of emotion churned her stomach inside out. The mass of blood and filth within her surged up her throat. She vomited, and vomited again, and again.
It won't come off.
No matter how many times she repeated it, the guilt lodged in her chest refused to wash away.
"That reaction—so you truly didn't know. The spell that pierced my throat, then. You didn't miss on purpose."
Vital chuckled, mocking her predicament. Taking advantage of her broken mind, he slowly pushed himself upright.
Sssht!
Seizing the moment, he drained the mana of the people still trapped in the vines, forcing his body to repair itself and restoring part of his wounds.
Now's my chance!
Eva was already past her limit, and Chloe was entirely absorbed in saving lives. But it was Vital whose body responded.
Crack-crack!
Wood coiled around his hand, sharpening into a spear. He leveled its blade straight at Eva's head, certain of his victory—
BOOOOM!
A sphere of flame, swallowing black fire, punched through the ceiling and fell.
A ring of crimson blaze in the shape of the sun itself slammed into the colosseum and devoured the earth.
"Gyaaaaargh!"
Vital rolled across the ground within the searing flames. The wooden palisade that had blanketed the arena turned to black ash in the blink of an eye and scattered into the air.
"Wh-what is this?!"
Chloe had squeezed her eyes shut against the fireball falling from the sky. The mana that had filled the arena moments ago was gone without a trace, only dying embers rolling across the floor. In that instant she was certain she was dead—until she realized her body was completely unharmed.
"What…?"
"Everyone okay?"
"Solis?"
"Sorry. I meant to finish it in one shot, but I guess I overdid the power control."
Solis walked over, utterly composed, an unconscious woman slung over his shoulder. Chloe recognized her—the same woman she'd seen outside the wooden prison. From the looks of it, he was the one who had taken her down.
"Hold on—finish it in one shot? That fireball earlier, that was you?"
"Those trees crowding up the arena were suffocating. They were pissing me off, so I cleared them out."
"What is wrong with you! Didn't you see the people tied to those trees! What if you'd—!"
"Relax. I only burned the trees and the enemy. Not a single person died from that blast, so breathe easy. Look."
Solis pointed with his finger. Among the mounds of ash, people were stirring to their feet one by one.
"Ugh… where is this?"
"Somebody help me! I can't move my body!"
They all looked half-dead from exhaustion, but they were alive. Pale as they were, their lives were untouched.
"Weird. Why is nobody hurt?"
"That's because I'm—never mind. Go check on Eva over there instead."
"Wha—Eva!"
Where Solis's gaze had landed, Eva lay collapsed atop a pool made of her own blood. Chloe's face drained white as she scrambled toward her. She couldn't spare a thought for anything else.
Crack!
"So he ran."
Solis scratched his head, watching the rift between dimensions—the passage connecting to another world—as it sealed itself shut.
"I… I made it!"
Vital tumbled out of the dimensional rift, his body burned and pathetic.
The Living Earth. The hidden refuge he had come to inhabit ever since his defeat at the hands of the Great Archmage Kairos. He sprawled flat on his back across the ground and burst out laughing.
"AHAHAHAHA!"
He had meant to cut the sprout of Kairos's child—Eva Amethyst—before she could fully grow, but her resistance had been fiercer than expected. The plan had failed. Still, it hadn't been a total loss. He had confirmed that she was hiding one more Divine Artifact.
Next time, he would never again suffer such a filthy defeat.
"Just you wait! The next time we meet, I'll kill you for certain!"
Vital bellowed until the dungeon rang with it. He swore his victory and promised himself the next round that would surely come—
"Sorry, but there is no next time."
"Huh?"
CRRRASH!
Space warped and split apart. A hand wrenched the fractured shards apart, widening the gap, and a body squeezed its way through.
"Taking that hit and still running. I'll give you credit for persistence."
"Who are you! How did you get into this dungeon!"
"You closed the rift, and right before it sealed I forced it back open."
Making a new door was hard—but catching a door the instant before it shut and pulling it open again? Not so difficult. Catch the flow of mana, adjust it, bend phenomena to my will. For someone like me, who'd honed these senses through training after training, this much was a piece of cake.
"I finally get what the Writer meant when she said the future rarely changes. After all, the outcome came true anyway—the heir of Life, Divine Artifact in hand, opening a dimensional rift and fleeing into the dungeon."
"Answer me! You—!"
"Answer? Why I'm here is obvious without even looking."
I wrapped my entire body in rippling golden mana.
Solar War Body. Solis's secret technique that pushed the body's performance to its absolute limits—and I had pre-heated it in advance.
"To let the future flow in a better direction, I'm going to kill you here and take your Divine Artifact. If you understand, hand over the thing you've got planted in your heart. Now."
"You want my relic too? But you've made a mistake, setting foot in this place!"
GUUUUUM!
The pale-green mana that symbolized life—symbolized Vital—erupted outward, and as if answering its call, the grass and trees of the dungeon withered while the monsters collapsed into gaunt husks of bone. He had stripped the very life force from them.
The Divine Artifact that steals life: the First Heartbeat. The thing embedded in Vital's heart blazed with green light.
PAT!
Trees sprouted around his body. He entwined himself with the growing wood and became one with it—until he burst up through the earth and took his place at the very center of the dungeon, a divine tree whose transcendent presence stole the breath of anyone who beheld it, swallowing the entire region.
The pinnacle technique of the First Heartbeat, wieldable only by those who bear a Divine Artifact and carry the bloodline of the God King.
Vital's hidden trump card.
"This place was once a sacred ground where the footsteps of my mother—the God King—remain. Here, even in my incomplete state, I can draw out power close to my prime!"
"So this is the Celestial Clan…."
"Yes! This is the fate-born ruler destined to dominate the world—!"
"—specifically, the weakest of them, right? Below expectations."
"Wh… what did you say?"
"All size and no speed. Can't even move. No technique to speak of. Is that your doing, or the relic's?"
"You insolent—!"
Vital raged. Scratching at his Celestial Clan pride with sandpaper was bound to get that reaction. But really, what could I say? No matter how I looked at it, the man fell short of the bar. I was simply being honest with my assessment.
"Still, you'll make a decent punching bag."
I released the mana I had been holding coiled in my heart. Not drawing out only what was needed—I raked it out like emptying a bowl down to the very bottom, using every last drop without holding anything back.
At my will, a halo rose behind my back. Around the ring of light, three pairs of white wings—the symbol of an angel—unfolded.
Pure white light, the embodiment of purification, flooded the dark dungeon with brilliance.
SHUUUU!
Scorching heat. Armor forged of golden eternity—gold that symbolizes forever—sheathed my whole body.
Against the darkness, that figure blazed like the sun descended upon the earth.
The pinnacle technique of the Divine Artifact Solar Halo—standing upon the same plane as Vital himself.
"Aaahh…!"
Bewilderment, shock, astonishment—a dozen expressions surfaced across Vital's face all at once. I left his trembling behind and quietly took my stance.
"No point dragging this out. Let's end it in one. I don't feel like wasting time on trash like you."
"AAAAARGH!"
Vital shrieked with mad desperation.
KUUUURUM!
Tens of thousands of roots and trunks erupted from the ceiling, the floor, and every direction. Each and every one of them carried the bulk of millennia. The pillars of wood formed forests and mountains, and pressed on, shaping a world of their own.
A recreation of the primordial power by which the God King shaped the world in ages long past—the sea of trees that once blanketed the earth surges forth at its wielder's desperate will.
The sea of trees that had once covered the world crashed down upon me, driven by his will and his fervent wish. And I answered in kind: to beat the tree-man before me to death.
Pouring that will, that yearning into every fiber, I spread both arms wide.
FWOOOOSH!
Beginning from the ring of light at my back, my whole body radiated blinding brilliance. A radiance that lit up space and dyed even the shadows white.
It recreated that very moment when the God King first raised the sun into the sky of a darkened world.
The light of beginnings filled the sea of trees, filled Vital, filled the dungeon beyond—until a gentle warmth, serene and merciful, embraced them all.
SHAAAAA!
The world flashed white. And when I pulled the veil of light from my eyes, nothing remained where it had all stood.
The man's final words had long since been buried in the light, erased without a trace.
Drip.
"I'll put this to good use."
In the empty clearing where the light had faded, I picked up the sole thing left behind—a green jewel—and murmured to myself.