The Night the Full Moon Sets
The capital—the outskirts of Ernese, where the crowds thickened far more once night had fallen than they ever did by day. Pleasure houses stood in rows and spilled a suggestive light, while women dressed in provocative finery caught and held the eyes of the men passing by.
Go deeper still, and one came upon the core district where those who walked the shadows had staked their ground on a line that never quite broke the law. It was the place where House Alfred's influence in the capital ran deepest.
"Ha... hnn..."
And at the mouth of those outskirts, Laura stepped in limping, like a woman steeped in drugs. Blood ran from the scrape on her leg, taken when she fell after treading on Perzen's foot, yet she was wound to such an extreme of arousal that she felt no pain at all. The robe she had drawn so low was already shrugged from her shoulders, and her singular beauty filled the eyes of every man who passed.
Hair white as snow—a color no ordinary person could possess. The collarbones bared along the line of her shoulders were so pale and fine that they stirred a sticky want: the wish to leave one's own marks on skin unmarked by so much as a speck.
"......"
The men who had stopped to look at her swallowed hard and followed, spellbound, their steps careful. They did not know that this was an antlion's pit wearing the mask of a wounded lamb, scattering the sweet scent of blood to draw starving wolves in...
Inside a dank alley where people had grown scarce, the men surrounding the halted Laura looked down at her and licked lips gone bone-dry, as if their throats burned. Irregular breaths; pupils gone completely slack as she regarded them—however one looked at it, she was not normal.
"This... looks like a bitch who's properly lost her mind on drugs."
Certain they could loose a pleasure that asked neither price nor responsibility, the men glanced about and stepped in front of her. Up close, her beauty stood out all the more. That frail frame in particular, as if it might snap the moment it was gripped, faintly stirred an instinct to protect—and in the same breath set a sadism boiling, the urge to grind that instinct underfoot.
"Ah, ha... ahaha..."
Taking the full weight of their lust-laden stares, Laura let a sensual laugh spill out and gently undid the front of her robe. Nothing had been revealed but the gauzy garment hidden until now beneath it, and still the throats of the watching men bobbed on reflex.
At last a few who could bear it no longer seized her by the shoulders, shoved her roughly to the wall, and reached to take her body—
A heavy thud. A subspace tore open without warning, and a large coffin dropped to the ground. The overheated air collapsed at speed. Laura, however, went on smiling, her hand closed around the altar at her throat—her rosary.
"......"
A woman steeped in drugs. Set the word mage in front of that, and the meaning one felt changed altogether. Even those born bearing the blessing of mana stood at an absolute remove from one another according to rank. How much greater, then, the difference between one who held mana and one who held none.
And the streets at night were where trouble broke out most. The men who had followed Laura as if bewitched realized that some instinct was sounding an alarm. They scrambled back and turned to run—
"Sh-shit—!"
With the small creak of the coffin opening, the ground heaved up at both ends of the alley, sealing it off at the root. Then, as if caressing the chill night wind, warm water sent up lazy curls of steam and poured down over them. Crack—beside their soaked skin, crystals of ice formed and clung fast, sticky as magnets.
A tongue sticks to ice because warm body heat stands against the ice's cold. So what would happen if one tried, by force, to tear free crystals stuck to skin soaked through with warm water? The skin would come away with the flesh.
"H... ugh..."
A chill pleasure washed through Laura at the mere imagining. She froze their legs so they could not offer even a scrap of resistance, and drew in close. Seizing the loop she had shaped like a handle, she hauled on it with every ounce of strength she had—
"G-gaaah!"
The grip of a body frail from birth was nowhere near enough. So she drove the corpse under her enslavement forward, made it take the loop in her place, and in the instant she meant to rip the ice away, skin and all—
——!
The earth blocking the mouth of the alley sank without warning, and the ice crystals binding the men dissolved back into their original mana, scattering in ripples.
And then—step, step—footfalls rang down the alley, and a man in an elegant suit, wholly unsuited to that decadent, dank air, came slowly in, sweeping a hand across a brow soaked with sweat.
"Laura... de Charles Rosenberg."
Yes. That man.
"Of you..."
He had come chasing the woman who fled after treading upon his left foot.
"I suspect I shall have a great many things to ask."
It was Perzen, who had run the streets of Ernese beneath the fallen night.
"......"
Steadying as best I could a breath so rough it felt as if my lungs might burst, I loosened the stifling tie. The looseness did not satisfy me. I took the tie off entirely, tucked it into an inner pocket, and looked at the Laura before me.
I could make no sense of this situation at all, and so, for the moment, I cleanly gave up on making sense of it.
"Get out."
On the night streets there was an unwritten rule of a kind: look the other way at those intent on crossing the line, so that the moment they crossed it they could be cleared away at once. This was the capital. If Laura killed those men, the matter would tangle more than a little—jurisdiction itself would pass to the imperial house. And this was a place thick with the influence of House Alfred. I had no wish to let the affair grow large.
"Th-thank... you!"
Did it feel like kindness to them? They scrambled up and poured out of the alley in a rush. Whatever grudge she held, though, Laura had no mind to let them leave. She raised a surging flame and barred the way ahead.
"......"
Laura's rank was Kether. Even if the corpse she enslaved was an elemental magician of Euclid grade, the limit of what could be drawn from it could not surpass the one who enslaved it. I nullified the phenomenon—magic whose nature had been turned to flame—and slowly closed the distance.
The concept by which I perceived magic was not a formula, so I nullified it at twice the speed of other mages. When the corpse under her enslavement cast at a level equivalent to Kether, its compositional formula showed itself to me as nothing but a single line. To undo it, I had only to grant mana exactly the length of that line and join it the same way. That was all.
In exchange, as a black mage, interference of that sort could do only one thing: return the magic to the state before its nature was converted—a pure mass of mana. Laura, enslaving an elemental magician's corpse, could take that very state, a breath before the pure mana scattered, reverse it through a concept of her own, and convert it once more into whatever element she wished.
And in fact—
Crack. The mana that had become billowing blue smoke was turning into countless shards of ice, intent on running me through.
Ten minutes or so... I suppose.
However quick the nullification, close the distance too far and the spell would strike my body before I had even recognized its formula. So I advanced no farther. From a proper distance I nullified Laura's magic without pause, and waited quietly for her mana to run dry.
My rank was Euclid. The concept one might set beside it was the plane—more precisely, four planes. A rise in mana equivalent to two planes more, and that would be a solid. I would be able to step across into Apollyon. Set against a total of mana such as mine, Laura's—mere Kether—was the difference between a lake and a sea. There was no need to open a subspace and enslave Isabel's corpse simply to put her down.
"Hhk...!"
Before long Laura, showing the signs of mana exhaustion, staggered and leaned against the wall. The corpse she had been enslaving had long since slipped her control and collapsed to the ground. I knew how paltry her mere bodily strength became once her mana was spent, and I walked to her side without concern, step by heavy step.
Is she on something, even now...
Pupils slack, unable to hold a focus. A drug of this strength could be had only in the world of the shadows, so I could understand her coming here. But what could the young lady of Rosenberg possibly lack, that her circumstances should be dark enough to steep her in drugs to this degree?
"H... hnnk!"
Even drained of mana, she reached out with both trembling hands and seized my throat, as if she meant to choke the life from me. She was plainly not in her right mind.
With a dull thud I put a measured strength behind the blow and struck her in the solar plexus.
"Kek! H...! Cough...!"
She did not faint. Spit ran obscenely from the corner of her mouth, and with eyes bloodshot more vividly still she bit into my forearm in an instant.
"Kh...!"
I had not expected it at all. On reflex I tensed the arm and seized a handful of her hair with the other hand, wrenching her head roughly back—and between the tooth marks carved clear, bright crimson blood ran down.
"......"
Could this truly be called the withdrawal of a drug? Brow furrowed at the stinging pain, I pressed my other forearm to the mouth of Laura, who was screaming like a beast.
"Ah... hn!"
Without the slightest hesitation she opened that small mouth and bit into my forearm with a ravenous hunger. I allowed it, of course, only until the same wound as the first was carved into this arm as well.
"Laura."
"H, ugh... aah!"
I caught her hair again, drew her head back, and called her name. Again, no proper answer came. The slender girl before my eyes was nothing more than something wearing a human mask, and imitating a human being.
"......"
Tomorrow was the day of the lecture. It seemed I would not be making it back to the mansion. I let out a sigh and quietly set my right foot forward.
Laura, who had been thrashing with all her might, pressed down upon the top of my foot with a perfectly natural ease, grinding softly, again and again. Amid a situation in which she was nowhere near her right mind, it was the one thing that steadied me—mind and body alike.
A deeply satisfying moment.