Dawn of the Dead?
At seven in the evening, Uriel sat in the central hall of Dormitory A with her chin propped on one hand, doing her best to hide how thoroughly out of sorts she was.
“Uriel.”
“What.”
“Sit up straight.”
Had she cupped her chin in both hands, the way a flower sits in its calyx, he might have let it pass. She was using only one. From the seat beside her, Ferzen felt his temper twist of its own accord.
“I’m not your student. Do I have to be lectured on how I sit, too?”
She was right in every particular, and nothing came to him by way of an answer. He shut his mouth and simply looked at her. Uriel glared back as if she had no intention of losing, daring him into a contest of eyes. The corner of his eye twitched. He stretched out a foot and gave her chair a light kick.
“Ah—!”
The arm beneath her chin slipped. Her balance went with it, and she scrambled both legs to catch herself. Her chest swayed in the motion, worrying at Ferzen’s already unfocused eyes and carving one more line between his brows.
“You—!”
Uriel straightened her tilted brimmed hat and scowled. But the moment Ferzen rose, she took a pointless fright and scraped her chair backward.
“W-where are you going!”
“Tobacco.”
He did not so much as glance at her. The hand mirror went into his pocket, and he walked out of the dormitory.
“What the hell, seriously…”
He followed the path lit to a muted glow by streetlamps set with glowstones, making for Lecture Hall A.
The hand mirror had shown him the underground, and the collaborator who had appeared there…
Not a trace of panic. If anything, the man had been calm—at his ease, as though he had been waiting.
The corpses…
Don’t bring them out. What I want is the means of inducing suspended animation. Nothing good will come of provoking the enemy for no reason.
In any case, the collaborator inside belongs to the imperial magic corps. So long as he isn’t a man walking the path of an Aura Knight, I won’t be in any danger even if I don’t prepare to enslave a corpse beforehand.
“You’ve come.”
Step by even step, Ferzen von Schweig Ruerug—direct-line scion of the blood of Brutein—descended into the basement beneath the lecture hall and came to a halt.
“Do nothing foolish. Depending on your answer, I have no intention of handing you over to the imperial house.”
“Ha—ha!”
Babel laughed aloud at that.
“The Emperor’s faithful dog, a man with Brutein blood in his veins. If you say such a thing, who would dare believe you?”
“I am entirely in earnest—”
“One hundred and twenty years ago, an emperor of a mere seven years ascended the throne. The regent entrusted with imperial authority in his stead was the head of House Brutein at the time… and he nursed no ambition whatsoever. The year the emperor came of age, he let go completely and withdrew.”
Ferzen held his tongue.
“The great principle of Brutein is loyalty and integrity toward the emperor alone. That is the history your house has inscribed across a long age. If I am looking at an ancient tree and you tell me it is a reed, do you expect me to let myself be taken in?”
Hiss—!
Violet liquid fell across the five corpses Ferzen had named rats. Flesh and bone melted, and the remains began to boil and bubble.
“My surname, at present, is Ruerug.”
“And?”
“Give me the method of inducing suspended animation, and I can cooperate with you—even if your people mean to level a sword at the imperial house.”
Something seated in him, carved deep, lurched. Ferzen’s own ego thrashed up in violent refusal. But he—no longer Ferzen, and no longer Lee Seojin, a third man—seized that feeling, slammed it to the floor, and ground it slowly under his heel until it lay still.
“I envy you.”
“Envy what?”
“You cast off the name of Brutein, and so you still have the integrity to tear out a seditious sprout, even should you come to wear the disgrace of betraying the imperial house.”
Why was there no man of that quality in his own kingdom? Babel’s smile was bitter.
“That is precisely why I—!”
“And you are clever. However did you come to notice that…”
It felt like holding a conversation with a wall. Irritation flared, and Ferzen took one step forward.
Babel drew out the bottle of violet liquid and raised it above his own head. Ferzen stopped. An Underworld Gate had already been summoned at the man’s back. To move rashly now would be to let the means swallow the end.
“But are you aware?”
“That the disguised corpses are not only here.”
Creeeak—!
The door opened. What it joined to was the second floor of the Netherworld.
“Terms of the bargain: payment on the spot. Term: unset. The article of trade… a descent.”
The Underworld Gate, shifting through a thousand changes, locked the nameplate set upon it into a single form. Ferzen watched, and sighed without a sound.
Ha…
The jackal-like anomalies that lived on the first floor of the Netherworld were one thing. Those that had received names and risen to the second floor rarely agreed to a bargain unless the wealth on offer was considerable, and if what one sought was a direct descent, rarer still. Yet the bargain before his eyes had been sealed at once. The black mage had made his own life the offering.
They do say a fool with a conviction is a frightening thing…
A black mage’s altar was not bound to any particular form. Why, then, not ink a tattoo into the flesh and take the body itself for an altar? Because of a sight precisely like this. In one last thrashing, a black mage could offer up his life and call an anomaly of the Netherworld down. Captured by an enemy, a man whose altar was a tattoo carved into him would be cut open for it without fail. And of course a life could serve as payment only when one’s station, bloodline, honor, and achievements held a value of their own. Otherwise, in the ages when war ran hot, black mages would simply have been formed into suicide bands.
“Obstinate. Foolish. Stupid. Ignorant.”
“Since you would die feeling wronged, I will spell it out for you. Listen well. Take it as a gift for the road to the dead.”
Sweeping his bangs back, Ferzen opened his mouth with irritation packed into every word.
“I—more than anyone—want desperately to live. Had we only been able to find a point of agreement, we might have been comrades.”
Babel’s eyes went wide. He answered with a thin, bitter smile.
“The transaction is already complete. Perform all you like; there is no means of canceling it. You are a black mage yourself. You know that well enough.”
“You maniac—! You fucking bastard!”
Dignity cast aside, he hurled the curse at the enemy within, that brick of a man walled shut front and back.
“Waaaaah—!”
From beyond the opened Underworld Gate, out of Raurava, a gigantic infant’s head thrust suddenly forth.
Crunch!
In a single bite it took Babel’s body into its mouth.
Crack. A wet, grinding squelch. Flesh crushed, bone powdered. Thick red blood ran from the corners of the child’s mouth, and half-chewed human meat rode in it, drawing a frown onto the face of anyone who looked.
This was the end of a black mage who had not offered his life as collateral, but paid it on the spot.
“Hrrk—!”
Belching, the child crawled out of the Underworld Gate. Some fifteen meters in length, some eight across: the head of a human infant set on the body of a centipede, a grotesque and hideous anomaly of the Netherworld. Ferzen looked upon it, opened his subspace, and set the coffin holding Isabel’s corpse down on the floor.
Boom!
By some unknowable power the child smashed through the basement wall, crawled up into the broad hall above, and lowered its head through the great hole to look down at Ferzen.
“Waaah…”
Contrary to every expectation that it would attack, the child shuddered all over as if frightened, then fled the lecture hall in an instant. The wrongness of it checked Ferzen’s step for a moment. He shook his head at once and followed it out. That it had shown him no hostility was strange, but first there must be no loss of life, or he would be handed a pretext to be dragged into the affair.
There were more corpses in suspended animation, or so the man had said… Those would have been issued to commoners. Loss of life mattered only if it did not befall the sons and daughters of nobles. That was the end of it.
Crunch!
Outside, the anomaly had hauled down the clock tower atop the main building and was eating it with wet, cracking bites. Nor was that all. The iron rods set into the buildings were spearing out through the walls and being torn free.
Gravity… is it?
For a moment he thought the creature’s innate power might be gravity. Then a tree, shattered by the rods ripping loose, flew toward the anomaly and bounced away, and he corrected himself. Gravity was a force of attraction alone. There was no repulsion.
If what that anomaly commands is magnetism…
He straightened his loosened tie, enslaved Isabel’s corpse—bought at no small price—and transmuted mana into electric current. An Elemental Magician who could turn mana to current had one clear advantage: the blow could land before an opponent even recognized the formula. To command current was also to interfere with magnetism. It was not for nothing that the two were bound under a single name.
Crackle!
Thin but even, he spread the current like a spider’s web and charged the objects around him, positive and negative alike.
In the midst of it, a faint thread of that light bent inward, and Ferzen’s eye caught the bend.
Is the body itself a kind of magnet…?
Creaking under the strain, the charged objects drew upon one another and threw off a magnetic field, pushing back against the anomaly’s magnetism. It lasted only a moment.
The anomaly clapped its hands.
The whole of it tore free and went flying.
Boom!
The repairs will cost a considerable sum…
Buildings collapsed into skeletal ruin as the rods were ripped out. Aside from the dormitories, the main building and the lecture halls ought to be empty at this hour. That, at least, was a mercy.
It’s a mess over there as well.
Through the uproar, wretched screams rose now and then from the direction of Dormitory B. The enemy within, with whom no word had gotten through, had made it one of his aims to cut down the sprouts meant to become pillars of the imperial house to come.
For now…
Joining the others looked wiser. Set the grade of Euclid at two, and an anomaly native to the second floor of the Netherworld stood at something like two and a half. If the creature’s body was itself a kind of ferromagnet, then even current—the greatest firepower he could bring to bear—would not get through.
Before anything else, he had to erase the magnetism flowing through that body.