Dawn of the Dead
"It isn't only the B dormitory that's gone to hell...!"
Word had come in a rush that corpses were up and walking, killing as they went, and a third of the forces held in reserve had already been sent that way. A short while later a grotesquely shaped anomaly of the Netherworld burst from the A education hall, and the color drained from Uriel's face.
Why, of all nights, did a thing this damned have to break loose on the night she stood watch?
Turning over in her mind the man who was not beside her—Perzen, gone off to smoke—she took the remaining two-thirds of the knight order and the mage corps and mustered them before the A dormitory.
"Y-you...!"
And then, as Perzen came walking in from far off, Uriel screwed her face tight and raised her voice.
"How long does one smoke take—!"
"I stopped by the lavatory on the way."
"More pressing than that. The mage corps will remain. The knights will withdraw."
"I beg your pardon?"
"I said withdraw."
Enslaving Isabel's corpse, Perzen loosed a current of electricity toward the Netherworld anomaly. Drawn into the magnetic field coiled about the creature's magnetized body, the current flew, then wheeled and climbed into the sky, and vanished, leaving only a faint ribbon of light.
"If you will not withdraw, then at the least you must cast aside armor and arms. That anomaly seems to command magnetism. Charge it as you stand and you will be flung back before you ever touch it—or dragged in against your will, and served up as a fine meal."
"Ah..."
Seeing that it had been counsel and not contempt, the knights, whose tempers had soured, let the misunderstanding go and began to strip their armor.
"What are you doing...?"
"Did you not say that to face it, we must shed our weapons and armor?"
Right. For a moment, Perzen had forgotten. Their bodies were already a kind of sword and shield. What did armor and weapons have to do with them?
"Ah...!"
The Netherworld anomaly lifted torn rebar on its magnetism and hurled it, without mercy, toward the A dormitory. Perzen, Uriel, and those among the imperial mage corps who could interfere with the earth heaved the ground upward into a great barrier.
"Your courage is admirable, but torn rebar lies over there without number. You have not yet reached the Extreme Realm, so there will still be parts of you that mana has not remade..."
Strike such a place—an Achilles' heel of a sort—and even one walking the path of an Aura Knight would die a wretched death.
"Have you some better method, then?"
"If the magnetism is the nuisance, one has only to do away with the magnetism."
Opening his Subspace, Perzen drew out a coffin engraved with the crest of Brutein and, for a moment, severed the thread of mana controlling Isabel's corpse. Then he enslaved the body of the twenty-seventh head, Bayern von Griel Brutain, and raised him from the coffin with all due courtesy.
Isabel had been a superb Elemental Magician, but she bore one flaw: she could not convert mana into fire.
"Uriel."
"What."
"You will be the axis. I and the imperial mage corps will link our mana to the formula of your spell and resonate with it."
"And what's gotten into you..."
Thud! Crash! Crack!
Incoming rebar hammered the barrier raised from the earth, smashed it, bored through, then went back to begin the same cycle again. The Netherworld anomaly used nothing like mana. There was no point dragging this into a useless war of attrition.
"Convert it into what?"
"Fire."
"Fire?"
"You will understand once you try it. Put the curiosity away and do as I say."
"Hah—!"
The moment would not bear it, and still Uriel kept biting at the tail of his words. Perzen jabbed a finger into her navel. She let out an unseemly moan, flushed to the ears, chewed her lip, and wrenched herself around.
A spell formula of Euclid rank was a plane. To stitch those planes together without end, unfolding them into a kind of vast diagram—that was the principle of joint magic. And because Uriel, the axis, meant to convert into fire, any mage who could not transmute mana into flame could take no part.
"Now—!"
The joined mana resonated. Uriel, controlling it, opened a narrow breach in the barrier, sighted the Netherworld anomaly standing beyond, and in a single breath converted the mana—already brimming toward saturation—into fire.
Fwoosh—!
Flame born of mana did not burn by binding with oxygen. It was a combustion raised by binding with mana itself, and so not only the core but every part of it underwent complete combustion. Every wavering tongue of fire showed a vivid change, from black-red into red, from red on toward orange.
At that point the temperature of the flame was roughly 1,727°C.
——!
At first a scream like a dolphin's cry slammed against the ear. Then the decibels climbed until they crossed into a range no human ear could hold, and it became, quite literally, a soundless scream. The anomaly tried to lift the unmelted rebar and strike, but the bars would not rise.
Impressive, I'll grant it...
A ferromagnetic body loses that property at a certain temperature. They call it the Curie temperature, and the anomaly before them had not lost its magnetism until it reached a Curie point fully 2.3 times that of iron.
"Uriel. Close your eyes."
"Are you mad? To keep firepower like that from touching anything around it, I have to be looking straight at it!"
Mana converted into fire could be nullified. Mana converted into ice could be nullified. But the steam born where such fire and ice met could not. That was the most basic understanding of Elemental Magic. In a word, if that flame caught somewhere else, the fire would no longer belong to the domain of magic—and so Uriel was pouring every nerve she had into holding it.
At that, Perzen gave up on speaking and enslaved Isabel's corpse. The anomaly had lost its magnetism. There was no longer any need to keep the twenty-seventh head enslaved.
Crackle!
He spent eight-tenths of the mana he held. He could have poured it out as it was, but he reached for one more trick, charging the clouds overhead fully negative and the space around the Netherworld anomaly positive.
"Uh... uh..."
But under the fierce heat pouring from the flame, it was the relative ground—the hair of the people near Perzen—that began to lift and drift into the empty air. Left like that, where the lightning would fall was plain. Perzen spent still more mana, guided the point of attraction true, and then sharply raised the strength of the electric field he had formed.
"Kyaa—!"
And in that instant, covering the eyes of Uriel—the only one looking through the single breach in the wall—Perzen ducked low.
Flash—!
The dark sky went bright in a heartbeat, and a streak of light, blue past blue into pure white, fell from heaven to the earth. Those who were not ignorant called it lightning, and marveled. Those who were called it the punishment of heaven, and feared.
Boom!
Shards of earth shattered by the falling bolt sprayed outward. The positive charges upon the ground surged up into the sky, flashed bright once more, and discharged clean.
Rumble...
Only afterward, once everything was already over, did sound—slower than light—break the quiet.
"You were quick. Well done, Uriel."
He was praising the way she had scattered the formula and drawn the flame back in the instant countless bolts came down on a single point. Uriel could not be glad of it. She had only lost her focus, startled, because he had covered her eyes and drawn her into his arms.
"M-move."
She shoved him off with both hands. Putting distance between them, Uriel set her brimmed hat straight, sank the barrier to see to the aftermath, and started toward the central avenue—only for the ruined body of the Netherworld anomaly to begin contracting at a furious speed.
"Ah..."
The process took all of three seconds. Then a vast magnetic field formed over the avenue, sucked in every bar of rebar around it, and burst.
Boom!
In that moment the countless bars staining the sky were like a rain of arrows loosed en masse across a battlefield, and not only Uriel but everyone nearby went rigid to the bone.
Crackle!
Perzen alone took a step forward. Enslaving Isabel's corpse, he used the rat's tail of mana he had left to charge the rebar nearer the center and the rebar farther out with opposite charges.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Then, like some uncanny trick of a circus troupe, the bars scattering in every direction wheeled back toward the center, clumped, and fell.
Thud—!
They struck the ground as one enormous hedgehog. Plenty of bars, of course, could not be caught that way, but those were flying toward the education hall and the main building, where no one stood.
"Hah... ah..."
And right in front of her, the clump of rebar that had embroidered the sky let out a creaking, skin-crawling shriek. Uriel belatedly drew her step back.
Crash!
But a body gone stiff moved far too slowly. The magnetism that had formed for an instant vanished, and amid the pouring rebar Uriel—without a handful of mana left—squeezed her eyes shut...
"Khek—!"
She never had the chance. Perzen caught her by the nape and slammed her backward. At the same time the knights moved fast, throwing themselves in front of him, batting the bars aside and knocking them away.
Screech! Thud!
By the barest hair of a margin, a single bar took Perzen's body and threw him to the ground.
"...Kh!"
At first there was no pain at all. Then the right arm pinned beneath the bar delivered its agony late to his mind, and Perzen's brow tightened.
Fuck...
A faint relief and a thick regret existed side by side. He had meant, quite naturally, to recognize this as the moment House Alfred's strength would diminish, and simply stand by. But the part of him where Lee Seojin's self still weighed heaviest—his moral sense—had moved his body without his leave.
Then again...
The knights had answered quickly enough that even had he stood aside, Uriel likely would not have died.
"Are you unharmed?"
"Hard to say..."
At the knights' courtesy in clearing the rebar he got to his feet, but a throbbing pain kept climbing his right arm. It did not seem broken, yet a crack had certainly gone through the bone. The essential problem, however, was not that.
A cracked right arm. A whole left arm. That broken symmetry grated on Perzen terribly.
Eleven at night.
Late as the hour was, countless people went endlessly in and out of the Imperial Academy.
And Uriel Wayne Dana Alfred stepped carefully into the sickroom, glanced at Perzen where he lay quiet, and bowed her head low.
"Huh...?"
She had not been there long before bewilderment filled her, and she stared at him as if she might bore straight through.
"What is it."
Feeling her gaze, Perzen turned his head.
"N-no, it's..."
The arm the rebar had crushed had clearly been the right. So why did Perzen have splints on both arms, and casts besides?
"Th-that's..."
"If you have something to say, don't stew over it. Say it."
"Sh-shall I fetch you some water..."
She could not bring herself to ask whether the left arm hadn't been perfectly fine. A question that sounded so much like suspicion was more face than she had, so she turned the subject.
"O-or else... if you need the lavatory, say so."
"Uriel."
"A-alone! Y-you can't manage it by yourself!"
"Have you forgotten that I am a black mage?"
"Ah..."
Perzen let out a short, quiet breath of a laugh.
"Even so, if you still mean to attend me..."
"I—! The l-lavatory—! I'm going!"
Uriel shot to her feet, hiding a face gone scarlet, and left the sickroom. At that, Perzen's brow creased, faintly.
He had been given a painkiller, but the pain in his left arm was no small thing. And how could it not be? How foolish a thing it was, how difficult, to harm oneself while carefully arranging not a break, but only a crack.
"I am truly not in my right mind..."
Cracking the left arm because the right had cracked. Finding comfort in a state of things like this. Not one part of it was sane.
Surely...
Had he walked the path of an artist, he would have reached greatness. The more famous the artist, the fewer among them who were not mad.