The Young Raven Spreads Its Wings for the First Time
"Goddammit!"
That lunatic was finally going through with it, so I had started running too late, and whether I had cracked a rib when I slammed into that tree earlier or not, every breath was pure agony and my legs refused to build up any real speed.
But my opponent was stronger than me, faster than me, and knew this mansion inside and out. Hesitate for even a moment, and it was over.
In the end, dragging my aching body behind me, I had no choice but to force out every last ounce of strength I had.
That said, though, that was a surprise.
Running on through the pain, I looked down at the fist that had just torn into Dorothy's stomach.
"Who would have thought it would actually land."
It had been a full-power swing, sure, but the gap between her strength and mine had been obvious, and I had been desperate. Honestly, I had not expected it to connect.
Yet Dorothy, far from simply shrugging it off, had taken it so deep that an ugly blood bruise bloomed across her stomach, an injury severe enough to flip in a single stroke the condition gap she had spent the whole fight building.
What the hell was that?
If she possessed that kind of power, why had one punch left her critically wounded? Strength was the product of a sturdy frame; wringing force like that out of a weak body should have been all but impossible.
Was there some bizarre training method I had never heard of, or a way to generate power entirely independent of one's physical condition?
If I could just learn that, I could overcome a difference in build too.
Power that transcended the body. Now that I thought about it, one thing came to mind.
How did Grandpa always swing that sword with those scrawny arms of his...?
Maybe in his youth, but by the end there was not a muscle to be found on the man, yet he had always sprinted around full of vigor and snapped trees with nothing but raw strength, and I had simply taken it on faith that Grandpa's body was special.
But thinking about it now, perhaps Grandpa had drawn his strength the very same way Dorothy did.
"Hah, hah... Right. If I can't have you, then I'll just have to crush everything that isn't me."
Meanwhile, Dorothy, who had broken off her fight with Gul to run and kill Perry, was in exactly as bad shape as Gul had predicted.
"Khhack!?"
She had somehow forced her way up onto the roof of the mansion's main building, but the moment her tension eased even slightly, she doubled over, vomited blood, and crumpled to the ground.
No aura at all, so where in the world does he get that monstrous strength...!?
Just as Gul had guessed, Dorothy had merely used a special power known as aura to temporarily amplify her physical abilities; strip the aura away, and her raw physicality fell far short of Gul's.
The strength and speed that had surpassed him were likewise temporary enhancements, aura activated only at the moment she needed it. Caught by Gul's surprise strike before she could trigger it, she had taken his fist with nothing but her bare body, and the wound that followed had been grave.
"Kheh...!"
Aura manipulation included techniques for hastening one's own recovery, but Dorothy's injuries showed no sign of closing; if anything, her head only grew dizzier.
She really doesn't have aura!?
Gul had spent the whole fight stunned by Dorothy's physicality, so dismissive of her slight frame, but the truth ran the other way. In a pure contest of flesh, the presence or absence of an awakened aura was supposed to be an insurmountable wall, and it was Gul, fighting as an equal while ignoring that wall entirely, who looked to Dorothy like the monster.
"Hehe... Fine. Whatever. Now I want him even more. No matter what it takes, I will make him mine."
Muttering that nothing of the sort befitted a talentless young lady with no abilities to speak of who had simply been born to the right parents, Dorothy somehow hauled herself together and pinpointed the location of Perry's room.
Perry or Karma. Kill either one, and the victory was hers.
Leave just one of the two dead, and Serpe would hold Gul accountable, and with his parents held hostage, he would have no way to escape that reckoning.
From there, once she learned where those parents were kept and came to Gul with the knowledge, he would have no choice but to bow his head to her, options or no options.
"How utterly stupid. What are parents, that anyone would hang their neck on them like that?"
Perry was no different, but Dorothy had not a single good memory of her own parents, and she could not understand Gul at all: charging into Serpe because his parents had been taken, declaring himself their slave.
"So what?"
Understanding him was irrelevant. She knew his life hung on his parents' safety, and all that mattered was that she could use it.
Dorothy had just caught her breath and moved to storm Perry's room when a voice stopped her cold.
"And what, exactly, are you trying to do?"
A man in a black robe and a mask barred her way, his voice betraying considerable age.
"...Why are you here? This job was assigned to me."
"Don't you dare climb any higher, girl. Even if the master has taken a slight shine to you of late, you are nothing but a green little whelp, and barely past being written off as a failure at that. Did you truly believe you were free?"
"You've been watching me? You lecherous old pervert."
Tsk. Clicking her tongue, Dorothy made no effort to hide her revulsion at the old man's grating voice, but he paid it no mind whatsoever.
"Under ordinary circumstances I would have no intention of interfering. The task is yours, in name at least. But I find I cannot look the other way. What is it you intend to do now? Have you forgotten the order not to lay a hand on Serpe's boss or his family?"
"Since when is that your business? All that matters is the boss stays breathing. What's the big deal about killing one sniveling daughter who's barely ten? If he needs an heir, he can marry some woman and breed. Hatch twenty or so of the brats, and one of them is bound to turn out useful."
Dorothy flayed the very concepts of children and heirs with boundless cruelty and venom. Her words carried not simple mockery but a hatred with no visible bottom, and the old man, who knew where the roots of that hatred lay, offered no reply.
"In any case, do not cross the line. The moment you fall out of the higher-ups' favor, you go straight back to being the clan's failure."
"I'll decide my own path. Don't come meddling now, of all times."
Despite the old man's warning, not a hint of Dorothy bending appeared.
Looking thoroughly sick of him, she shot the old man a single glare, drove her blade into the roof, and, chain in hand, leapt down to shatter the window of Perry's room. And in that instant,
"Safe! That was way too fucking close, safe!"
"Kyaah!?"
Whump. A stone came flying at tremendous speed, and Dorothy halted mid-leap on reflex to avoid it. Gul seized the opening in the same breath and hurled his blade from his other hand straight at the roof.
CRASH!
Gul's gurkha smashed through the roof, and the dagger Dorothy had planted there tore loose along with it; Dorothy, hanging from her chain, dropped helplessly through the air.
"A gurkha, is it? An unusual weapon for a boy to favor."
The old man, who had been watching Gul's fight at his leisure from the rooftop, marveled at the boy's body, capable of such power at so tender an age without a single trace of awakened aura.
"Who the fuck do you think you're touching, you rotten bitch!?"
Whether the old man mused or not made no difference to him. The moment Perry, the thread tied to his parents' lives, became the target, Gul's eyes went wild, and he hurled himself at Dorothy and Dorothy alone. Dorothy, her stomach wound now compounded by the fall, could no longer muster against Gul's furious onslaught the composure she had shown before.
Shk. Gul whirled his gurkhas with both hands like a man possessed; Dorothy barely turned them aside with chain and dagger, but thin cuts began opening one after another across her cheek, her legs, her arms.
"Ugh...!"
Dorothy's face twisted, but not because she was being driven back, and not from the pain of her wounds, either.
"Why? Why! Why does everyone spoil that bitch rotten! What is she, anyway!"
The cause was inferiority.
Perry, doted on by everyone around her despite having no talent and making no effort, was hateful beyond bearing, and so was the indignity of Gul blocking her, right to the very end, for Perry's sake.
"Ahh. Enough."
When inferiority and hatred crossed the line, Dorothy finally gave up on her desire to possess Gul.
Thunk.
The moment Dorothy stopped blocking Gul's attacks, one of the gurkhas buried itself in her shoulder.
"!?"
It won't come out...
But it was Gul who panicked.
A blade that should have torn her collarbone out whole had been stopped by nothing but muscle, and like an axe sunk deep in a tree trunk, it would not budge no matter how desperately he wrenched at it.
"Ahh, what a waste. I wanted you, you know. I wanted to be a princess protected by her knight, too. I could have been so very good to you."
Even with a blade buried in her shoulder, Dorothy did not so much as flinch; she gazed long and hard at the flustered Gul and mourned him with what sounded like genuine regret.
And in the next breath, before Gul could swing the gurkha gripped in his other hand, she lunged her dagger out and stabbed him through the chest.
Aimed with an exact understanding of human anatomy, Dorothy's blade slipped between his ribs and pierced his lung dead-on.
"Gahk...!"
Thunk. With a blade in his lung and the air hissing out of him, Gul could not even manage a scream; the strength drained from his hands, he dropped the gurkha meant for Dorothy's neck, and sank to his knees.
Blood sloshed and welled from the wound in his chest, and Dorothy stroked the cheek of Gul, who writhed, unable to breathe, with something like pity.
"None of this would have happened if you'd just followed me... Oh, come to think of it, I answered you earlier, didn't I? Who was I after? It was you, Gul."
As though to say that unless he followed her, this fate had been his from the very beginning, Dorothy made no effort to hide her regret.
Shluck. When Dorothy wrenched the blade free, blood burst from Gul's chest all the harder, and he collapsed where he knelt.
"If you love her that much, then at the very least I'll send you to the same place. Get along well over there without me, with that useless bitch you're so fond of, and your parents."
The instant Dorothy turned her head to finish Perry off, the strength draining from Gul's eyes honed itself anew, sharp as a freshly whetted edge.
Shff.
The very next moment, Gul, who by all rights should have died with a pierced lung, kicked off the ground and carved a diagonal line across Dorothy's back.
"...Huh?"
Ah.
A crisis in which his life drained away moment by moment, like an hourglass with a hole punched through it.
This... this power.
Paradoxically, Gul's senses had never in his life been sharper.
Dorothy, certain that Gul was finished, had thrown this word and that at him, but not a single one of them had reached him.
All Gul heard, all he saw, all he felt was the blade wedged inside his body. Or rather, the energy smeared along that blade: an energy he had never known in his life, and yet somehow found familiar. Aura.
Just as Dorothy had surmised, Gul had not yet awakened his aura.
Aura awakening took a different shape in every person, but one thing held true across them all: it was achieved by perceiving, with senses honed to their absolute limit, the energy of life flowing through one's own body, and then learning to control it.
And now, with another person's aura driven directly into his lung, Gul had met that condition.
A perception that, by all rights, should have taken specialized training to grasp even after one learned the very concept of aura. Gul skipped the entire process, taking it into his body with his life as collateral, and acquired the sense for aura in a single stroke.
Had he been nothing more than a genius with unusually sensitive talent, even a lucky perception of aura would have been the end of the road.
If that woman, weaker than me, has it, then there's no way I don't...
But Gul was no fragile boy with nothing but talent to his name.
He had simply lacked the trigger. The training he had kept up since the days he was first learning to walk had long since finished preparing his body to produce aura.
Like Dorothy... so can I...!
Vmmm. And then he felt it: a power he had never once felt before in his life, flowing through his entire body like blood through his veins.
Thunk. The moment Dorothy, certain Gul was utterly dead, pulled the blade from his lung, Gul did exactly what she had done when she wrapped aura around her shoulder to stop his blade: he wrapped aura around his torn lung and compressed it like a bandage.
It's working. I've stopped it!
The bleeding stopped before he crossed the line of no return.
And Gul, snatched back from the jaws of death, threw himself at once upon the foolish enemy who had turned her back on him, the one who, in a strange way, might even be called his teacher, and repaid her in full.
Shff.
"...Huh?"
"Hah, hah... Thanks, you fucking bitch..."
And with that final word of thanks, Gul reached his limit at last and slipped into unconsciousness.