Survival of the Fittest (5)
The field of Verdun, as seen through the eyes of a mage, was dotted with two moons.
Neither one was the physical moon. Both had been born from the corpses of the German Empire army as seeds for Elze Constanze’s **Charm**.
Those irises that looked like human pupils had already swelled to a monstrous size and now hung in the sky like ominous orbs instead of moons.
Not just one or two. From the mage’s vantage, the eye sockets of the earth itself were pierced through with chains, black as pitch from the blood-soaked soil of Verdun.
Elze Constanze glanced at the humans charging from afar. On the west, French soldiers. On the east, German soldiers.
They probably thought the clash was simply their own comrades fighting the most brutal enemy imaginable.
Even in Verdun, where good and evil held no meaning, soldiers still believed the front was righteous and the enemy was the devil.
That was how it had to be. Everyone had been shoved into these trenches by their superiors, just as these men were now.
One by one, the soldiers who had broken through the no-man’s-land and reached the halfway point stared upward in panic.
Because in the sky, people were dangling upside down.
Black water that could have swallowed a man to the waist, floating red eyes, chains threaded through them, and in the center, a pure white Reaper holding a scythe.
Mages who weren’t even mages couldn’t see any of it. To them, Verdun looked exactly as it always had.
Except for the people dangling in the air.
The sudden meeting of the two armies was nothing like the ordinary trench warfare of old.
The true Battle of Verdun had ended long ago. The soldiers now fighting here had either received no news or only half of it before barely staggering back.
They were the walking dead, the stragglers. French or German, it made no difference.
Armed that way, their chances were slim.
Normally a trench fight would have been ended with a burst of machine-gun fire the moment the enemy was spotted. But they had charged anyway because their own guns were empty.
Bullets gone. Or the barrels melted from overuse.
The soldiers who saw the people floating overhead were thrown into total chaos.
Some ran. Some froze. Some, barely sane, raised their rifles.
Every kind of human reaction, regardless of nationality. Some were finally pulling the trigger.
Elze’s Nibelung was not a physical threat. Not completely, but the core was magic.
While Elze herself projected magic through the chains into the split Charms hanging in the sky, the space projected from the witch’s mind could not be broken.
Elze had told the child she was hiding to wait a moment. She watched the girl peek out from the shell crater where the shells had fallen.
Because she had layered protective magic just in case, the girl would be safe as long as she didn’t get hit by grenade shrapnel.
‘Then, shall we begin?’
Elze kicked the ground and ran forward.
Through a mage’s eyes, the black water surged as she trod lightly across its surface.
Elze pushed off lightly and whirled through the air, slashing with her sharp, deadly Reaper’s scythe.
Some of the chains were tied to floating the Charms, so the scythe had to be used to slice them here.
Though she had given form to her mind, the scythe itself was still a magical object. And light as a feather in her hands.
Whipping it around as if weightless, a sharpness infused with some kind of energy shot from its edge.
Anyone with even a little magic knowledge would recognize that the energy of the slash was nothing but a magic trace.
To block the wave of magic traces rushing toward her like a train, the only way was to face it with magic alone.
But on the other side, people who knew nothing of magic, regardless of nationality, had clearly already been hit by the attacks they couldn’t see.
The whoosh of the slash. The physical mark left by the Reaper’s edge was only the wind that had passed.
At the same time, the magical shock washed over the victims’ souls. The scale was enough to literally tear a soul that had been firmly anchored in the body.
The souls that split in two by the Reaper’s edge were swallowed whole into the surging black sea that licked its lips.
In the space the witch ruled, if the chains could serve as a passageway for souls, why shouldn’t a vast black sea stretched across the floor of that space?
The souls that were about to scatter were absorbed in groups of four or five and melted into the black sea.
That was the scene repeating across the entire battlefield.
Or rather, it was no longer even worth calling a battlefield. With a casual flick of her scythe, the witch made people fall one after another.
Boom! — tatatadadadada! — Rifle bullets that had been fired blindly without aiming at all now let out hollow gunshots.
What meaning was there? The humans who had pulled the triggers had already been torn apart soul by soul and sunk into the surging black sea.
‘Just having too many numbers doesn’t help…!’
Elze clicked her tongue and kept slashing.
She had projected a virtual scythe in her mind to serve as a medium for casting magic more precisely, and thanks to that the precision had only grown, though the range had clearly shrunk.
It meant the slash could only cover a smaller area, but that was the price of using the scythe more times.
Elze preferred to make sure souls were fully torn apart, even if it was a little more troublesome now that she had started.
While she was doing that, another eye suddenly flared in the sky.
A bloated sphere of flesh, re-inflated from the first German soldier’s corpse threaded on the chain, became the new launch point for another **Charm**.
Now the number of eyes hanging in Verdun’s sky like moons had reached three.
Excluding the pair already embedded in the witch’s own eye sockets, she had released half of all the split **Charms**.
Elze thought it was obvious why she bothered with this when she could easily take down humans without threading extra eyes in the sky.
‘Calling me a frog again.’
She could accept racial discrimination. Elze Constanze herself was a human of the nineteenth century, so she had no particular grudge.
But tormenting someone she claimed to know closely was unforgivable.
Right now, that foolish child was buried somewhere in a shell crater, waiting for the situation to pass.
Just a little longer. I’ll finish it and come back.
BOOM! — A huge explosion erupted somewhere. At the same time, one corpse rocketed upward into the sky.
The witch confirmed that the corpse slicing through the air had been the grenade pin yanked out and tossed too late.
It had been struck by the Reaper’s slash and hadn’t been able to throw the grenade, so it had exploded right there in her hands or pockets.
Even with grenades, humans were still trying to bring the witch down. Swish! A rifle bullet sliced past Elze’s hair from the east.
The east meant the German Empire army.
The west was no different, but Elze lightly blocked the bullet with her protective magic and added a little more power to her swing.
After a dozen more such efforts, the human movement dropped noticeably.
The remaining humans didn’t even need to swing the scythe. Harvesting souls through the wide sea would do.
Again, success. Success on an unprecedented scale if one simply counted the souls taken.
Elze felt a rare sense of pride.
As the age advanced, the way to quietly gather dozens of souls at once had gradually disappeared. Finding such a harvest after so long made her feel good.
Should I wrap this up and head back to Verdun?
Yes, that was the decision. And since her mood was good, she would take that child back to Königsberg at least.
She didn’t know what her sister would say, but she wouldn’t refuse.
Elze began storing the magic she had pulled out earlier. The **Charms** full of **Charm**, the surging black shallow sea, the scythe she had been swinging.
Well, people who weren’t mages would wonder what sorcery this was, but the child who had been quietly watching from the shell crater would probably think the same.
Elze slowly approached the crater.
For some reason, the memory of the first time they met came back. Back then too, she had been crouching in a crater when the witch saved her.
Only her head peeked out, and the witch’s eyes widened in disbelief.
“———?”
Why… blood?
The child was gone, and only blood was scattered. Or rather, following the blood trail, the child’s figure finally appeared.
Elze was so startled she nearly ran to the child as if flying through the air.
“You… why…!?”
“Ah… Lady Witch…”
No. Questions later. Right now, how to deal with the blood.
Elze mobilized every magic she could summon at that moment. Hemostasis through telekinesis, bandaging the wound with regeneration magic, and so on.
The fact that she hadn’t been able to push regeneration magic to its extreme was strangely frustrating, since it was rarely used.
The external wound was healed, but the real problem was blood loss. The blood spilled by the child in the crater was enough to worry about massive hemorrhage.
The child slowly opened her mouth.
“I was hiding… and suddenly someone rolled in here…”
Blood, blood. Is there enough? What if I substitute something else? But I remember that blood has types and I can’t just pour any kind in…!
“Be quiet. Don’t speak.”
She shut her up. It was obvious that talking would make things worse.
“…It was a German soldier. The moment he saw me, he came at me. But Lady Witch… cough, you cast magic on me.”
Blood came out with the cough. Even with regeneration, internal wounds hadn’t healed or magic was still lacking.
“Shut up…!”
“Then, since the guns wouldn’t work, he immediately tried to pull the grenade pin, right…?”
The witch didn’t answer. She simply lifted the child onto her back.
It didn’t matter how she had ended up like that now.
She sensed that regeneration magic would not solve this problem. She needed help from the scholarship the humans had developed.
Where to go? The nearest was the French field hospital. The child was French, so that would be best.
With **Charm**, she could take the child straight to the doctor and get immediate treatment.
Whether other patients lived or died was none of the witch’s concern. As long as this child was saved, that was enough.
“You, be quiet… I’ll take you to the field hospital right away…!”
Carrying the child on her back, the witch rose into the air with telekinesis. Whether the wind sliced through her body at high speed or not was irrelevant.
“I miscalculated the time I could hold you… I got too close and it exploded right there…”
“……”
“If Lady Witch hadn’t cast magic on me, I would have died right away…”
Elze Constanze kept her mouth shut tightly and focused only on flying.
It had been too long since she last flew, so her direction control was clumsy. Plus, carrying two people on her back made speed adjustment difficult, but somehow she managed.
She had to manage. She had made that vow just moments ago. She would save this child and come back with her no matter what.
“Hey… why didn’t you kill me right there?”
She probably doesn’t know why. Please, be quiet. Just stay still.
“…Thinking about it, in that hell it didn’t matter when I died anyway. While my squadmates were all dying around me, the fact that I was the only one who survived was actually weirder.”
“If I hadn’t met Lady Witch, I would have frozen to death or starved. Verdun was that kind of place.”
“So… in a way, I was already dead once. Lady Witch saved me for a little while.”
“Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”
Please. I’ll save you one more time. Just a little more, just a tiny bit more.
The witch instinctively knew it was impossible to reach the French field hospital in time.
The body heat behind her was growing colder. Even with magic warming her body against the cold winter wind, it wasn’t enough.
She hadn’t wanted to do it this way, but there was no other choice. Too desperate.
If she couldn’t use her own magic to recover blood, then she would use her own magic.
Her own magic path would adjust to her perfectly the moment it opened.
In that case, she would turn this child into a mage.
A sufficiently skilled mage could invite another person’s magic path by offering a tiny bit of her own.
Normally, this would be something that shouldn’t be done to a sickly child. The giver and receiver couldn’t guarantee a complete baptism.
But right now, there was no time for cold or hot water. No matter how her own magic twisted, the most important thing was to save the child.
Damn it, rationally she should have left her alone. But she couldn’t do it.
She couldn’t allow it.
Elze descended to the ground with a loud thud, landing as if falling.
All the shock was absorbed by the witch’s own protective magic.
And then—
“Lady Witch…?”
—she pulled the child tightly into her arms. To transfer her magic path, the souls had to be closest possible. The larger the contact surface, the better.
“Please… just stay like this for a little longer.”
She hoped the child would listen as usual. But especially now?
The baptism ceremony took place.
The witch, who had been determined to devour the child she had raised, resolved to end the ceremony even if it meant evaporating more than half her own magic path.
“Why… why… can’t it…!?”
But as she had feared, the baptism did not complete properly.
The reason was the recipient’s refusal.
“You… why…!”
The child, hugged in the witch’s arms, buried her head and answered.
“…I don’t know what Lady Witch is trying to do to me right now. But no matter what it is, I think it would be too much for me to receive.”
“Shut up! I said I saved you for a little while, didn’t I? Now I’ll save you forever, so just stay quiet!”
The anger welling from the heart. Beside the anger, regret and loss followed.
The child slowly rubbed her head against the witch’s chest. The golden hair that hadn’t been well managed in the war still shimmered back and forth.
“It’s okay. Really.”
I… I don’t want to be okay. This selfish human.
Elze Constanze realized that further persuasion was meaningless.
She had realized, but she didn’t want to give up.
And she didn’t want to give up, but the witch was powerless.
The next moment, the slow voice brought tears.
“Thank you, Elze.”
“Ah…”
How cruel the saying “the survivors are the righteous ones.”
How bitterly she regretted that the survivors were strong.
January 1917, Verdun. In the crater at the center of the shell field, countless rivers of blood flowed, and at the same time, the tears of one witch flowed too.
The tears of the survivors, the righteous ones, and soon the fittest.