Dear Star, Please Let Me Be a Righteous Thief Again Today
The doves banked as one, spiraling down in a single glide, every beak aimed at once for Klein's throat and her eyes.
"Lupin, Klein's a little disappointed."
The Snake-Belly Sword's defense was solid. Clang, clang, clang! A long serpent wound with aura spun counter to the whirling doves and casually batted aside the beaks diving in.
"Irregular aura that magnificent, and your technique is this sloppy? An all-out assault of doves you simply tossed into the air?"
But this was a fight with the Holy Ark at stake, and Lupin's mind was keener than it had ever been—the most brilliant she had been in five years of life. What had she learned, staking treasure chests on fight after fight? That if it became a war of attrition, she could not lose.
"What's wrong with a dove swarm?"
Preshow: Dove Magic (★4)
As Dove Magic's star rank rises, more doves can be commanded at a single time.
— Cumulative Growth Values —
…, Vitality Trade IV, …
With Vitality Trade's efficiency raised, aura that once could barely be used a single time can now be used up to three.
For the moment Klein was turning aside the pouring air raid as if it were nothing. Would that last?
"In the end, you're an Aura User too, aren't you?"
From the very start, Lupin was not like the others, who had only one aura. She was carrying two guns. And that two guns beat one was nothing more than common sense.
Meanwhile, the dance hall was pandemonium around the two specimens that had appeared out of nowhere.
"Run!"
"Aaaaagh!"
The two specimens rampaged through a dance hall already soaked in blood. Corpses lay about with their upper bodies gone, and arms and legs that had lost their owners rolled here and there. Even now, one knight was caught in a specimen's grasp. To save his comrade, another wrapped his sword in aura and leapt with all his strength.
"Damn it, let go of Krak!!"
"Derek! An attack with aura on it doesn't mean anything to them—"
The aura-laden sword collided with the specimen's back. The knight who struck may have expected a sure blow, but the squad leader had already sensed the ending before the blade so much as touched. Ting. The sword bounced away, feeble, having dealt no damage at all. In the next instant the knight's stance collapsed, and he vanished from every eye. They found him against a wall far from the fight, his upper body crushed. Of the knights holding the line, not one had properly seen the moment he was hit.
To a knight order composed of Aura Experts, the specimens were as good as mountains. When the creatures' peculiar blood and skin shut out all ordinary aura, what was anyone supposed to do?
"Hraaah! Hraaaaaah!"
Crunch. Crack. And so, even while the specimens tore their comrades apart and ate them to recover aura, the knight order could not recklessly close in. Most of them only waited, despairing, for the death that was coming.
Yegor, drawn to the hall by the screams, contorted his face at the slaughter.
"Two of them..."
Worse, the specimens had fed on the flesh of Aura Users and were rampaging harder than usual. Across skin mottled red and blue, veins on the verge of bursting squirmed like earthworms.
Honestly. If it just hadn't been for my sister.
The situation was hardly good. Emelin's rampage had started the evacuation early and reduced the loss of life, but stopping Emelin had consumed a considerable amount of aura, so it was six of one and half a dozen of the other. He had felled a specimen before. Taking on two of them by himself was a first.
"I'll have to stop this from getting any worse."
Even so, fleeing because he couldn't handle it would make the name adventurer weep.
By now the specimens, having dealt with two knights, tossed aside the remaining scraps of corpse and peered around.
"Krk."
"Kaaah."
To lure them, Yegor laid aura along his sword—more than the other knights carried, but not so much that it would be wasteful. The specimen whose entire face was caked in blood had senses sharp enough to catch high-density aura at once.
"Grrk?!"
They kicked the floor with a thud and rushed him. If you meant to evade fists with tracking that good, you could not move rashly. At a distance so fine the flying fist could no longer alter its path, you shifted only the exact angle required. And so—whoosh!—both specimens skimmed past Yegor's left and right. The lure had worked, and he shouted.
"I'll take it from here! Fall back, all of you, and protect the guests!"
The knight order moved as if they had been waiting. The wrecked interior finally showed a measure of ordered motion, and the evacuation seemed to proceed, step by step.
Twisting his body in midair, Yegor dodged the fists that came flying again. He was not simply dodging. Already, twice, even while slipping the attacks, his sword had left a definite mark on a specimen's body. From the slightly torn skin, foul purple blood seeped out a little at a time. Only an ordinary strike, bare of aura, could wound a specimen.
The moment I attack, I must not put aura into the blow.
Do not use aura when you meet them. Do not add to the dead, so they cannot recover aura. Keep those two cautions to the letter, and victory would not be hard. What the moment demanded was aura control of a high order: use it while working through footwork and unfolding the sword art, then snuff it in the instant before edge met skin.
But to tell someone who had lived an entire life on nothing but aura to fight without it—the difficulty was akin to putting a man in high heels and ordering him to tap-dance. Even Yegor had aura armor as a habit. Why dodge, when you could simply guard in the time it took to evade? Even now, after landing two strikes with no aura, his wrist was sending up signals. Not going to reinforce me? Hey. Hey. This wrist is going to be wrecked.
How does she do this like it's nothing?
Yegor found himself, all over again, thinking Lupin was incredible. Grant her the Sword Emperor's Lightning Sword and still—how did she crack a Master's hardened body on the strength of a trained physique alone? Ask whether she trained as one ought, and she didn't. Ask whether a sacred relic had blessed her, and it hadn't. The one possibility left was the notion that had surfaced of late: Apostle of the Calamity Star.
The apostles were never stupid the way she is.
An Apostle of the Calamity Star was a peerless genius in every field, force and intellect alike. They had appeared three times, and each appearance had raised an enormous calamity—so vast that stopping even a single one had required the cooperation of the whole world. A fool who would not so much as hear out a long explanation. A fool who grew tired even when you made it simple. That was an Apostle of the Star?
Not a chance.
Aura was finite, and spending it produced a clear visual effect. That was common sense to Lupin, who helped Yegor's training every day and had hammered his aura armor. Even a mark that looked like a mere scratch scattered a faint light the moment the sword bit in. Klein was hardly different. Every time the Snake-Belly Sword turned a dove aside, things like shards of translucent glass scattered, shedding a soft light.
"Aaah~ Planning to burn through all of Klein's aura with a flock of doves? Mmm, good! This is fun!"
There was a reason Aura Users, after a few exchanges left them thinking they understood the fight, would suddenly drag out their single strongest blow. Let it become attrition and it turned into a contest of quantity over quality, so it was easier to finish matters first with one outrageous strike. Lupin had grasped the pattern of combat between Aura Users—something Tasili had never taught her—from three fights alone.
But would Klein be ignorant of that? As she saw it, Lupin was just as finite.
"Except the doves Lupin called won't last forever either. Push this into attrition, and who comes out ahead? Think that short sword of yours can break into Klein's domain?"
Ku-hu-hu. Klein laughed and looked up at the sky, certain that with a dove bursting every time she blocked, their numbers must have fallen off sharply by now.
"...Hm?"
A good while had passed, and still the dove host whirled and dove. It was not even that they had thinned so slightly the change was hard to catch. They were simply the same as before.
Why hasn't the number dropped?
Even a spirit body required ample aura to keep its form. Stack up the damage and it lost that aura and had to return to the spirit realm. Such was Klein's common sense.
Something... is wrong.
Klein fixed on a single dove. Bzzzt—the wavering tail of the Snake-Belly Sword tore the air with a bang and burst the creature. Feathers whirled in every direction, as if to announce that it had been extinguished.
Coo.
A moment later, the form restored itself. The dove that had been struck was flying the sky again, perfectly whole. For a spirit to manifest in the human realm, aura was required, and restoring a spirit whose form had been broken by an attack took the same amount of aura as summoning it. In other words, Lupin was dumping in that much aura simply to hold the dove host at its number.
Klein flung the words at her.
"Lupin. Are you in your right mind? Waste aura like that and you'll be the one who drops first."
But Lupin found the remark strange. That vitality was aura—that was her common sense. And when she commanded the doves, she spent vitality once, then paid no further cost within the time limit. Even the vitality the trade required had lately fallen to about seventy percent of what it had been, now that Vitality Trade had hit rank IV. She was fighting with remarkable efficiency.
"Waste? What waste?"
At that idiotic look, Klein heaved a great sigh and cast aside the defense she had maintained all this time. The coiled snake became an enormous whirlwind. Blade-fragments strung on threads of aura raged in a savage sweep, and the doves in the air lost their shapes, pop after pop. It lasted only a moment. The instant Klein drew the Snake-Belly Sword back in and hardened her guard—
Coo. Coo-coo. Coo.
As if none of it had happened. Not a single dove was gone. Every one of them had recovered its original form.
"Lupin! Just try fainting and keeling over! Klein will drag you back to the cult!"
Lupin launched another strike at the confident Klein. Kakang! Swift Edge sheared in until it hung a mere two handspans from Klein's skin. A chill ran the length of Klein's spine. Not since her veil and her hair had been cut had a blade come this close to her body. As if she knew exactly how deep she had reached, Lupin smiled—thin, and fleeting.
"Starting to run your mouth... so there isn't much aura left now, is there?"
"This is driving me insane! All because Klein loosened the defense a little, out of consideration for you!"
"Oh, yeah?"
Lupin flicked her fingers again. At once a new flock, equal in number to the doves already aloft, was summoned and shot into the sky. The typhoon of doves swelled to twice its former size, grown so immense that Klein could scarcely handle it.
"A-are you sane?! Klein gave you a clear warning to keep it reasonable! I'm really going to drag you to the cult!"
The doves in the air were a calamity now. The night sky, which ought to have been dark, was bright enough to seem lit by the glow pouring off the spirits' bodies.
That was when it happened. From inside Lupin's pupil, a violet flash sparked into light. Fear engraved in instinct shook Klein's body.
"That just now was—!"
Reach the level of a Master, and when aura was released to its limit a tremendous current of it ran through the blood vessels and the eyes shone. Formed or irregular, it made no difference. Most of that light fell somewhere between red and white, and the closer one came to Grand Master, the closer it came to white. But there were those in the world who gave off a strange, vivid radiance not from the eye, but from inside the pupil itself—thick with the influence of a patron star. Elysium's most powerful nuclear bomb. Touch it, and you called a catastrophe down upon the entire world.
The reason astronomy had advanced in this world was to recognize these walking nuclear bombs in advance, and to manage them. They could not be dismantled by human power anyway. The best anyone could do was keep someone from removing the safety. But if that safety had already been released, then there was nothing left but to pray.
"How is a fool like you an Apostle of the Star?!"
Please. Just don't let it detonate in our country.
