Echoes
Dust billowed everywhere.
Whether it was the dirt on the ground or the dust caked over the rocks, all of it was sent scattering into the air by the shock of the spear driving through.
Those sharp eyes swept over the source of the dust.
The weapon the girl wielded was dangerous, no doubt about that. But that was all it was.
Set aside the petty tricks and feints, and I had more experience, more know-how, more of everything that mattered.
I had no reason to lose.
“A shame.”
William muttered it under his breath as though tasting regret too late.
If she had met a good teacher, if she had even belonged to the Golden Dawn Society, she might have become a mage no one could afford to ignore. She was raw ore, something that could have been polished into brilliance.
If we had met under better circumstances, in a gentler moment.
…But it was a useless thought, destined to be heard by no one.
William slipped the dagger back into the sheath at his chest.
Far off, the treetops began to shake one after another.
The Origin Species were finally surging in from behind. Ahead of them, through the smoke, little flecks of orange light began to scatter—
“…!”
I drew the dagger again. A chilly sensation crawled up my back.
It wasn’t merely orange light.
Each point was condensed mystery, turned into particles.
Behind the thinning smoke, a massive humanoid shape slowly came into view.
The orange particles were pouring out of that gigantic body, gathering around it and building its form piece by piece.
It was a giant wrapped in black steel from head to limb.
And above its owner’s head, a halo radiated a soft, steady light.
Beneath that, eyes that held equal parts cold moon and burning sun lifted toward me. A fierce smile touched the corners of my mouth.
“You.”
Justina Schumacher turned that haughty gaze on William.
“Looks like you’ve really picked the wrong opponent today.”
▼
For some reason, I didn’t seem to be dead.
More than that, I had the strange sensation of floating upward. When I opened my eyes a slit, my field of view was higher than it had been before.
A mechanical voice echoed from both sides.
The guidance voice of the support AI.
“Generator online.”
“Assist package installed.”
“Automatic posture-control routine synchronized.”
“Tuning interface online.”
“FCS integrity check complete. System online.”
It was black.
I recognized the machine from my memory.
I remembered someone once suggesting that, since it wasn’t meant for combat anyway and there was no one taking it away, we might as well paint it black for style.
Inside the blackened exterior, artificial muscles twitched in response to the movement of my hands, and as though to show it was still unfinished, the thick cables running from both shoulders and the back of the waist fluttered in disarray along the flow of particles.
A mystic armored unit in the powered-suit category.
In other words, a Valkyrie Frame.
And among them, the Valkyrie Frame I was currently wearing had been built to test and operate a new weapon system.
Ironically, the new weapon it had been intended to use had never even been built. It had remained a concept and nothing more.
Only the machine, left without a purpose and nowhere to go, had remained behind in melancholy solitude.
It had never seen the light of day except when it was briefly taken out and modified for testing next-generation generator prototypes.
And yet.
“…It really moves.”
I didn’t even know whether it would respond properly, let alone whether I had any aptitude for using it.
I was stunned once that it moved at all, and then stunned all over again that it moved so naturally, without the slightest sense of wrongness.
Mystery surged and boiled through me.
It was a sensation utterly unfamiliar to me.
Cold steel felt like an extension of my limbs.
They called it an assist package, apparently, but I had never installed one, and I had no memory of making one either.
What in the world was going on?
I didn’t think I’d get an answer any time soon. Still, it was a great deal easier than relying on magic alone.
The feel of the machine woke me from my thoughts.
I lifted my head. Through the dissipating smoke, I saw William’s face, twisted in bewilderment.
“You.”
The Valkyrie Frame curtly projected a spread of information across my HUD, almost like a greeting.
The radar displayed the situation around me.
It was an incomparably richer stream of data than that clumsy little scanner from before.
Origin Species were swarming behind me in a dense mass. It seemed the barrier I had set up had finally failed and shattered.
It showed the distance, direction, and even the species of each one.
Condensed mystery enveloped the machine in a spherical shell.
The awkward, slightly off-balance movements I’d felt before now seemed to be part of one body.
The nozzles that should never have existed in a human body slid naturally into my senses. The feeling of being wrapped in steel was startlingly new.
“Shield recharge complete.”
“Motion feedback optimization complete.”
“Initial setup complete.”
The Valkyrie Frame had two purposes.
One was to crush a broad front through short-range assault.
The other was as a deterrent against special Origin Species.
In other words—
“Test model fifth-generation Valkyrie Frame XVF/5G-001, Astraea.”
“Looks like you’ve really picked the wrong opponent today.”
A mage was, in a way, its perfect match.
“Activation, commence.”
▼
As expected, there were no weapons immediately available for the Valkyrie Frame.
All the lab had ever been developing was the next generation of mystic armored units and their power source.
The mystic armament this machine, Strayed, had originally been intended to operate on a trial basis had never made it beyond the drawing board.
But right now, that didn’t matter.
Because all that remained were the small fry.
“Kyaaaah!”
A heavy creature that could only be brought down by a railgun when I was unarmored lunged at me.
The spherical shield around the machine absorbed the impact in full.
It didn’t even bend, let alone ripple.
The creature, driven only by instinct and with no intelligence to speak of, kept gnawing at the shield with all its might.
Its sharp fangs and spined forelegs, once used as weapons, crumpled.
They crumpled, then bent beyond repair, or snapped outright. And yet the thing paid them no mind and kept doing its job.
More of them poured in from every direction.
Thunk. Thunk.
Only after several of them slammed their heads against the shield at once did I feel the force of the impact.
I tilted my head slightly.
Beyond the horde of Origin Species clawing at the shield with everything they had, I could see Yggdrasil.
I didn’t know whether it was instinct or command, but it seemed to have identified me as a real threat.
“Hoo.”
Unlike before, my mind was calm.
Since I knew they couldn’t break through, there was no reason to be afraid out of reflex.
I studied the situation with a much easier heart.
If I had to, I could smash my way through with my bare fists, but I didn’t want to subject a machine that had finally seen the light of day to something like that.
Besides, fistfights never suited a bookworm in the first place.
So then.
“Main booster, side boosters online.”
I broke through by force.
The boosters mounted on my back lit up, then erupted into a brief burst of flame.
With a single surge of propulsion, most of the Origin Species clinging to the shield lost their footing and tumbled away.
Some of them, unable to withstand the sudden shock, spat up chunks of their mashed innards.
I set that trivial mess aside and fixed my gaze ahead.
The blood spear that had sprouted beside William shot toward me.
Of course, it was utterly useless.
One spear skidded off the shield and flew wide.
Another struck head-on, but all it did was shave a little off the shield gauge.
The rest never even made contact, flung away by the evasion maneuvers the support AI executed automatically.
I’ll admit it was clumsy. But I couldn’t suppress the exhilaration surging in my chest.
“Too young? Me?”
“Tch.”
The hand reaching for my collar grasped empty air.
William’s figure slipped nimbly to the side. As I watched, his back slipped through the trees and receded until the trunks swallowed him from sight.
It wouldn’t take me long to catch him.
The machine accelerated.
It charged straight through the conifers blocking its path without hesitation.
Tree trunks that collided with the shield snapped miserably, spun through the air, and came crashing down.
After breaking a few more trees like that, I caught sight of William’s back as he fled in a panic.
He’d reinforced his body with magic, so grabbing him all of a sudden wouldn’t snap his neck.
I seized the back of his neck and hurled him in the opposite direction, just as he had done to me.
The sound of several trees toppling.
Then, after that, the dull thud of a body slamming into the ground.
The machine hovered a few centimeters above the earth and slowly advanced toward him.
William did not look well.
He was bleeding from all over, far beyond the wound he had made himself.
If he could still use magic in that state, he’d be dangerous, but judging by his condition, he probably had no strength left for it.
A coughing fit, wet with blood froth, burst from his mouth again and again.
“…”
In the end, I couldn’t kill him.
It was a laughable thing, really.
The man had tried to kill me despite knowing nothing of parents, and yet I had refused even to twist his throat once.
The moment I realized that, the seething heat in my head ebbed away.
All that remained was a chill, burnt-out feeling, like ash after a fire.
I spoke in a low voice.
“It’s not too late yet. Stop.”
“Cough, cough.”
“Nothing will come back just because you do this.”
Only more people would die. I swallowed the rest. He would never understand it anyway.
“…No. Magic will return. It must return.”
“Listen to yourself.”
“Have you ever seen Yggdrasil fill the world? Have you ever faced evil that surpassed even the greatest mage our world ever knew? Have you ever stood by while the world burned before your eyes, realized there was nothing you could do, and tasted the bones-deep helplessness of absolute despair?”
A faint laugh echoed through the forest.
“You don’t know. You cannot know. Can you understand this thousand-year obsession? Can you comprehend the bitterness of it, so saturated it overflowed into poison?”
“…”
“Answer me. What is best for you? Will you throw yourself into the fire even knowing the odds are hopeless, or will you sit where you are and wither away?”
Ha.
My hand moved before my head did.
My steel hands seized him by the collar.
My delayed thought was that I might not be able to hold this in any longer.
This, as always, comes too late.
“Do you think I don’t know?”
“You—”
“I came from the future. I came here to set right what had gone wrong from the very beginning—after the future you threw into the fire. Because people die, because the world is destroyed! You can close your eyes and sleep easy, thinking you’ve done your duty, but I’m not the one left behind!”
So then,
so then.
A hot breath mixed into the words I kept turning over in my mouth.
“Please stop. I won’t ask for anything more than that. Please, just stop.”
“…”
The thin line of his mouth, visible above my sightline, moved.
His voice, after spilling a handful of blood, was strangely serene.
“…From listening to your words, I have corrected one thought.”
I lifted my head.
“I was too naïve. I had unconsciously placed my own safety first. If one wishes to achieve something truly necessary, one must be willing to sacrifice even one’s life.”
What?
“Let me offer my thanks at the end. Because you scattered your mystery across this place, I was able to use this move.”
The dagger, drawn somewhere in the midst of it, slid softly toward its owner’s throat.
A line of blood spilled from his neck and ran down. His lips moved in a chant.
In response, Yggdrasil’s true body trembled violently.
─The Gate of Yggdrasil bloomed open.