River of the Flowing Star
Akan fixed his gaze on the Summer standing before him.
Even after the Saintess vanished, even through all the long years he had secluded himself at the highest point of the Tower of Magic and refused to move, his eyes and ears had never been sealed shut.
The seat of a great faction's master was the sort of position that drew information to itself no matter when or where one happened to be — and so he knew Summer's nature well enough.
The countless stars in the sky had spoken: There is no place for you in heaven.
And so those who, despite achieving greatness as humans, could not die and were instead pinned to the earth as lingering ghosts — the ones people called Superhumans.
He had wanted rest, the way she had once ascended to the sky.
The time they had spent together had already scattered like mist, so distant now it barely felt real.
But just as there was no place in heaven, every Superhuman who appeared after her — and all who had come before — had been nailed to the ground the same way.
And now the Disasters they had once slain in the past were rising again, shoving those same faces back into the light.
The wolf and the jackal he had faced in his green years. The Four Seasons. Perhaps even the Demon King.
He remembered Summer.
In the hot-blooded days after he first became a Superhuman — young, reckless, and arrogant — he had fought Summer to a draw.
But he had protected nothing. Not a single thing. Not one.
Everything around them had burned. The soldiers who fought beside him had turned to ash and blown away on the wind.
So the reason this wreck of a man, who had locked himself away in his room like a broken recluse, had finally shown his face again was the existence of another Saintess — one who looked exactly like the comrade he had once fought beside.
Honestly, he could call it curiosity and leave it at that.
He was a mage. There was no particular meaning to it.
Camaraderie — could he even call this longing for rest by such a name?
A mage's characteristically twisted way of thinking had permitted him only a handful of friends, and so he lashed himself with the thought.
Of the few friends and comrades I had, aside from the little one, my disciple, and that bastard's son — there's no one left.
Right.
Akan opened his mouth.
"Do you know me?"
Summer was silent.
"…"
"Yeah. Nothing to say to each other, I suppose."
And then — a blink.
He lightly stepped onto a foothold conjured in midair and looked down.
A very long time ago, he had been the mage of the party that succeeded in killing the Demon King.
And a great deal of time had passed since those years.
The mage's body had not aged; it remained as it was. But knowledge never stopped. It piled higher and higher, flowing without end.
And so the star that had driven a nail through him from the heavens and pinned him to the earth had named him thus: the Flowing Star. The Meteor.
He formed a transparent foothold in the empty air and set his foot upon it.
And he walked.
Below him, those small humans were dying to the enemy.
It was the same as then.
The central front had held firm for a long time, unbroken, locked in a stalemate.
But now it looked on the verge of collapse — and so what was the duty of a man dispatched to the front?
To erase the enemy standing before him.
One step. Then another. Repeated until he was just short of entering the range of Summer, who likewise watched him from the air.
When mages fought each other, they instinctively knew the distance between them.
Akan measured the gap between himself and Summer.
Not enough.
It wasn't enough.
Even when a human transcended humanity and became a Superhuman — was a human still, in the end, only human?
A hollow feeling settled over him.
Was it all meaningless after all?
No.
Some people said a mage's place was always behind the vanguard.
But Akan despised those who thought that way.
People who arbitrarily measured their own limits, who decided that this role produced maximum efficiency with that set of actions, and then stopped thinking.
They were mages, but not scholars. Users, but not seekers.
They lost something essential — the root, the origin, something that mattered — and endlessly shoved magic into a bottomless hole.
As if that would ever fill it.
That was a road he had already walked.
So the man he was now took a different path.
In a world where comrades died, the vanguard vanished, and fighting alone was ordinary — there were those who had learned how to survive amid the absurdity of every malice in the world seeming to move for the sole purpose of killing them.
His disciple. The second person to become a Superhuman in the highest tower.
Lloyd was exactly that kind of man.
He had carved out his own path and created the profession of battle-mage.
And Akan had wanted to be a pioneer, but in the end he had never become a creator — so what he was doing now was only imitation.
Close the distance.
What kind of combat did mages most desperately wish to avoid?
A mage's battle was utterly static.
No conversation. Total focus on calculation.
Multiple rings holding starlight spun and spun.
Thought accelerated. Accelerated again.
Actions repeated, parried, new techniques poured out.
Whoever ran out of things to show first lost.
An extremely simple principle.
Akan looked at his opponent once more.
The man simply existed in that place, still and unmoving.
He was different from the likes of Spring.
There was an enormous difference between a Disaster built for one-against-many and a Disaster capable of everything from one-on-one to one-against-many.
Against a powerhouse past a certain level, mental magic was nothing more than an irritation to the nerves — and the main body's strength, from what he had briefly seen, was something two still-green Heroes could handle.
The reason a creature that never revealed its true form and attacked strictly from behind had confidently shown itself to the Hero and his party was because it had looked down on them.
And that was why it had been caught.
By a Saintess no one had expected.
The next generation — still young — had shown something. So he, too, would have to show something if the Scales were to stay balanced.
Staring down Summer, who still refused to enter range and offered neither answer nor action, as if still dismissing him, Akan raised his wand.
A short staff with a blade attached — the symbol of himself. Originally the tip of a spear, it had failed in that role and broken, and he felt a kinship with it as he brought it to his hand.
Red blood flowed.
A Superhuman who touched a star received one blessing from that star.
The First Saintess had carried a blessing in her voice, so that whatever she spoke came to pass — but she never opened her mouth, and the Word was lost.
And the blessing he had received was the starlight circulating through his body. The Flowing Star.
Blood was a resource.
Nine rings meshed like gears and heated.
Blood circulated through his body, expanding his senses.
The basic thought-acceleration magic spun even faster, stretching the world into infinite slowness.
Everything stopped. A world that held only the enemy and himself.
A battlefield optimized to announce the opening of early summer.
Estas — Summer — no longer ignored him.
His eyes rolled and locked onto Akan.
And then — impact.
Summer clearly showed fluster.
Good news for Akan.
This was an opponent he should have been able to beat under normal circumstances. Suddenly invading the gap was something Summer could not have anticipated.
As expected — that bastard remembered the time before his rebirth.
He was flustered because Akan had changed his fighting style.
A mage's orthodox approach was to fight while predicting everything. But against an opponent already known, prediction became uniform.
Only one path remained.
But Akan had abandoned that path.
He clenched his fist until it seemed ready to burst, and drove it straight at the enemy.
The enemy was stronger than him.
What had to be acknowledged, had to be acknowledged.
Pride bent. The fist extended.
Fire caught on his body.
Magic activated without any precursor — the power of a Disaster.
But he kept closing in as if it were nothing, repeating his attacks.
Summer continually slipped out of Akan's range while trying to maintain a state where Akan remained inside his own.
But that situation had collapsed from the start. The only actions and choices left to him now were to fall back — and to attack.
Fireballs surged forward as if defying reason. Heat that would have burned any ordinary human to death in seconds. But Akan advanced.
Anyone watching would have said Summer, retreating one-sidedly, was at a disadvantage — but the one taking continuous, one-sided damage was Akan, whose body was on fire.
Even as the flames turned him to ash, the blood endlessly flowing from his own body refused to grant him death.
Only if everything withered, twisted, and crumbled to dust would he be allowed to die.
Can't catch him.
Even dredging up the memories of his hot-blooded youth, nothing had ever heated a mage's brain quite like this — and his coldly cooled head had already concluded he could not win.
But pushing him back should be possible.
Akan opened the distance and prepared a proper spell.
He was the star that flowed without cease, without stopping.
Fiercer than a surging river. Softer than the depths of the deep sea.
Summer watched him in stillness, as if the standoff itself were the only purpose.
As if buying time were the only purpose.
"वाहती ताऱ्यांची नदी"
— Bahati Tariyanshi Nadi —
Starlight flooded the world.
At that same moment, the Saintess found a book in the archive.
A pure white cover — a single volume so clean it was hard to believe it had spent so long in an unmaintained library.
She reached out lightly, drew free the book titled The First Divinity, and began to read.