The One Who Walks on Water and the Stablehand
Amber's mana settled in a rush.
She'd meant to use it all along, and she still had to make a nuisance of herself.
Only now, it seemed, had he noticed. A god, and look how prompt he was.
I put on an innocent face and tossed the question back at him.
Why? Something the matter?
The Seed of Impurity.
A vicious little joke the Archdemon of Pestilence had strewn across the continent. Driven deep into the earth, the seed took root the instant it touched a body blessed by mana, parasitizing the flesh and sprouting there. So long as the place was a nexus of mana's flow, it made no difference whether that was the dantian or the heart.
And once it burrowed in, what did it do?
It gave you power.
That was all.
More precisely, it overloaded the body so that, for an instant, you could wield force equal to the full size of the vessel you were born with. It could not increase your total mana. What it did was help the flesh endure a stronger output.
The Seed of Impurity itself did no harm. Used well, it was a great help when survival hung in the balance. When Amber's family was slaughtered and the stable burned, it was a Seed of Impurity that saved her from the knights hunting her down. Removal was absurdly easy, too. Tell the Church you had caught the disease, and you could be treated in a matter of minutes. It was not even hard to detect. Because it burrowed into the body's nexus, anyone blessed by mana could not fail to know.
Which is exactly why it's so vicious.
Easy to catch, easy to notice you had caught it, and easy to cure besides. People treated it as a minor illness—or, if anything, as a fortunate encounter it was nice to have. Carry a Seed of Impurity, and however briefly, it amplified your power on the spot.
Of course, if it were only a good thing, the Church would have no reason to bare its teeth and stamp it out. The more a bearer used that power, the more their body was destroyed. The trouble was that no one knew how far you had to push before the flesh shattered. Individual differences aside, every seed of the pestilence had its own threshold. Luck out, and you could burn through it your whole life, the seed vanishing before your body ever gave. Luck out the other way, and a single use left you half-paralyzed.
That, of course, was only a very secondary drawback.
The real problem arose when someone carrying the seed came face to face with the Archdemon of Pestilence. The Archdemon could detonate the Seed of Impurity. It was bursting something seated at the very source of mana in the body, so no strongman alive could stop the mana from surging back. And so, the moment the demons began their march south and the Archdemon of Pestilence showed itself on the field, some five percent of humanity's forces were smashed in an instant, without ever getting the chance to fight.
Every last one of them an outstanding talent blessed by mana. If not for Mion's holy sword, Amber would have died on the spot that day as well.
Damn it! You rotten brat! Hiding a trump card like that!
Ahem. Anyway—can you burn out that Seed of Impurity with the power of the Prime Flame?
If we can, let's try.
The moment the Seed of Impurity was used, the body took an enormous overload, so the time one's power could be amplified was a minute at best.
A mere minute.
But a minute was also plenty of time to take a person's head. For that span, I would have to be careful too. Knights whose inborn talent was as fine as Amber Cutter's could, even for an instant, draw near a Sword Master. A truly, truly special case—but then, weren't the supporting characters of a novel all special people to begin with?
"Please stay focused. If I kill you without meaning to, a commoner like me won't be able to handle the aftermath."
Amber's aura still flickered as if it were dancing. From a distance, you might not have felt much difference. Face to face, though, you knew that even a graze would be dangerous.
Yeah. If anyone had earned the right to swagger, it was her.
The Seed of Impurity—this worked better than I'd thought. At this level, I almost wanted one myself.
"You hate nobles, so you mean to become one, and you hate people who borrow a tiger's might, so you fight a duel on power that was never yours to begin with. Ridiculous beyond words."
"People live inside contradiction. At your age, that may be difficult to understand."
"We're not even a few years apart!"
The instant the edges met—ramp the output or don't, it didn't matter—my sword was sheared through. I dodged hers as if my life depended on it.
"A sword swung blind like that never reaches anyone!"
"It looks as though it will reach you, at least."
The reply came back firm, but urgency bled through her face. Then, as if she had settled on something, she reset her grip and drew her mana up. The aura's turbulence swept along the blade like a wave.
What she was preparing was sword energy. For a Sword User, the art was nothing but imitation—but hers, fed by the Seed of Impurity, came close to a Sword Master's, if only for a breath.
So that was it. Anyone who knew what the Seed of Impurity was would never meet it head-on, so she meant to end things with a blow that could not be dodged. Keeping your head in a fight and answering the moment as it came. Easy to say. Few could actually do it. Her improvisation was worthy of the last knight of the Human Lighthouse Order, the one who had saved humanity.
The sword moved, and the air was cut a beat too late. The shape of the swing alone gouged the earth. Formless, colorless sword energy spread like a crescent moon and rushed in on me.
Yes, yes, I get it—you're supporting-cast, so the character sheet is plastered all over you. Let's wrap this up.
Jin! Now!
Sword energy approaching a Sword Master. Approaching, and no more. A killing blow of only that caliber, I could stop well enough.
I had a trump card of my own.
Not some archdemon's scab. The true essence of a god.
Mana the faint orange of dusk flowed along the blade. The sacred fire of myth, governor of the cycle of life and death, spread in a fan. The flames devoured Amber's sword energy like a starving beast, and the fire that surged up washed over her body.
"Wait—what is this?! Hyaaah?!"
Blue flame of mana drove swiftly into Amber's body and vanished. Jin had erased the Seed of Impurity with the Prime Flame. He had not been able to erase the backlash.
Flesh driven past its limit would demand a fitting debt. Blood started from her nose, and Amber's body gave out. She dropped to her knees, trying to steady her breath, but even that would not obey her.
"What... is this..."
"The contradiction of this world."
Her body folded, and with that the duel that had heated the night over Lighthouse Village came to an end.
Amber Cutter was detained on the spot, on the charge of possessing a Seed of Impurity. She had used that power in front of so many people. Of course she was caught. If the charge proved true, she would be stripped of her right to sit the order's entrance trials. One who was meant to fight demons, using a demon's power—that was not a thing that could be tolerated.
"How did you erase my Seed of Impurity?"
None of it, of course, applied to Amber. Even if a priest came looking, they would find not the seed, nor so much as a trace of it. I had wiped it out to the root with the power of the Prime Flame.
She ought to have been thanking me. Instead Amber, haggard inside of half a day, was glaring at me through the iron bars.
"I told you. The contradiction of this world. At your age, it can be hard to understand."
"That was no knight's technique. What are you, exactly?"
The backlash of the Seed of Impurity should have made it a struggle just to stay conscious, and still her eyes were sharp. I had disguised it as sword energy to slip past the spectators, and it still hadn't been enough to fool Amber, who had been right there.
"Am I obliged to answer your questions? Or did you leave the answer with me for safekeeping?"
"Then I'll change the question. What happens to me now? Do I become your sex slave?"
She remembered clearly enough. That she had staked body and heart as the price of the duel, and that both had been taken from her. Hearing it asked outright, though, I was dumbfounded.
"If I told you to, would you?"
"No. I'd bite that thing of yours off and kill myself."
"Then why ask? You were never my type to begin with. I like redheads."
It was true that body and heart had been staked on the duel. It was also true that a duel was a privilege of the noble class, a thing of honor and of life. On the surface, yes. In reality, it had been two brats beating on each other. One of them simply happened to be the eldest son of a northern marquis house, so the knights hadn't been able to break it up.
A normal condition would have been one thing. A duel in which a few words of insult meant offering up body and heart? An ordinary duel would have been thrown out at the witnesses. To even invoke terms like these was a shame on a noble. And this world had no covenant of the soul. Frankly, if you didn't want to keep your word, you didn't. Break a promise here and you don't burst into flame.
Haa. This world was sorely short on fantastical romance. Even if not the soul, there ought to have been at least a spell that set the womb pounding every time a vow was broken. For a man, driving it into the prostate would be exquisitely humiliating. Leak into your underwear every time you broke a contract, and the signatory would keep their word more desperately than if their soul were burning to death.
I was still spreading my wings when Amber, looking utterly incredulous, asked me back.
"What? So you're saying that even if I had won, you wouldn't have left Lighthouse Village?"
"You're the same, aren't you? What was that you just said, you crazy bitch?"
The woman who was going to bite it off and kill herself—was that something she got to say?
"The crazy one is you. Then why did you fight the duel at all?"
She seemed to think she'd been tricked. Grinding her teeth, striking the bars—that was how it looked.
"Two people with no intention of giving what the other wanted went and fought a duel... What was the intent, do you think? Perhaps it was only a knight's love of a strong opponent. The wish to cross blades with someone powerful. Close to instinct. Drawing each other in."
"Cut the bullshit and get to the point."
Tsk. I'd meant to needle her a little longer, and she snapped the mood clean in half.
I leaned on the bars and gave her the point she wanted so badly.
"I hate nobles."
At the sudden words, Amber's face went blank with disbelief.
"From the look of you, you hate them too. Being the plaything of some nameless backwater noble isn't a bad life, if you've got no ambition. Was your talent too good to waste on ending your days that way?"
Her face was not the face of someone wondering how I had found out. What I could read there was closer to as expected of a power in the north—he did his research. In truth, House de Jevitz had no intelligence network capable of uncovering an ordinary tragedy in a commoner family on the southern frontier. I'd been sweating over a plausible excuse, and she jumped to the conclusion on her own. Convenient.
"What are you trying to do? Forge some bond of sympathy? Even if you guessed right, do you think a commoner like me hating nobles is the same thing as you, a noble from the start, hating your own kind?"
She reacted exactly as I'd expected. So exactly that a hollow laugh nearly escaped me.
She was right. Of course it was different. I liked being a noble, for one. Be born a noble and tell me you wouldn't like it. But for the sake of my comfortable future, I had to keep Amber under me and raise her. Once the demons swept everything away, what use was a noble? For the future, I could lie as much as I needed to.
"And once you pass the entrance trials and become a knight? Will you take revenge on that noble you hate so much? You'll get a chance to restore your honor, and if you take that bastard's head, at least you'll feel better."
"I've been listening and listening. What do you even know..."
"I don't know your anger. I've no way of knowing your thirst for revenge. But I am a noble, so I know nobles better than you do. I know that even if you take your revenge, the people somewhere else living through something like yours will not disappear. They'll be more wretched than you, if anything. Unlike you, they won't have a scrap of talent for the sword."
"So what is it you want to say? That my revenge is pointless?"
"Hardly. If anything, I'm willing to help you with it. But I'd like you to look a little higher. You're aiming at the neck of a single noble. I'm going to erase the class system itself."
See what the other person wants, and offer a value greater than that. A basic virtue in anyone who means to lead.
Beyond the bars, in the pitch-dark cell, her eyes alone shone clear.
"My mother was collateral blood of the imperial house. She died the moment she bore me. To the world I was the heir who would carry the family, and because I lack the blood of the north I was, at the same time, a burden to be cleared away. My stepmother tormented me every day. My father thinks of nothing but how to take my head. Within a few years he'll kill me and seat my half-brother as heir of House de Jevitz. The noble yoke you're so eager to put your neck in is that sort of thing."
"......"
"To stand over other people's heads, they invent myths, carry themselves as if they inherited noble blood, and cull the stock so the line will hold for the generation after. And once that is done, the people who weathered every hardship beside them grow busy bowing—to the nobility of that blood, to its sanctity. Without ever treating a person as a person."
Only a bleak wind and my voice sounded in the cell. The prison was too dark for a frail candle to light, and her eyes, so clear a moment before, soon sank under heavy shadow and blurred.
"I am going to break that yoke. I will bring the end of an age in which one person stands atop another's head as if it were only natural, and dresses the fact up as something innate. To do it, I need talent. That is why I challenged you to a duel. To see what you were worth."
Bjorn—what an unspeakably romantic piece of recruitment. A lie about remaking the world, spat out without a blink, all to get a single knight in hand.
Wait. Do I actually have a gift for recruiting talent, too?
He couldn't read a room, and he threw cold water on the moment. It was already as good as done—what was there to see?
Letting his words go in one ear and out the other, I went on.
"Amber Cutter. As you said, you and I are different. I am a noble, and you are a commoner. You can't feel what I've lived through, and the same goes for me. But both of us hate nobles. I'll lead that anger. Come with me, and we'll turn the world into a sea of fire."
When a knight swears loyalty, iron bars are no obstacle. I reached a hand through the cold grille.
Amber did not move.
Only after a long while did a faint sound drift out of the dark.
"Pfft—puhahahaha!"
The faint sound soon swelled until it grated on the ear, and it wasn't hard to tell what it was. At her sudden laughter, I felt that something had gone wrong.
"What's so funny?"
"Puhahaha! If it were you, could you keep a straight face while some brat announced he was abolishing the nobility? You lack charisma. If you want to captivate someone that way, you need to be at least several times more dependable than you are now."
I worked hard to swallow the surge of irritation. It was a night when I ached for those cookie-cutter knights who pledge a lifetime of loyalty for a single scrap of bread tossed their way in their beggar days.
I ignored Jin, who was scratching at my insides, and sank into thought.
Now what. Like some pathetic lover who can't accept being dumped, was I supposed to ask for time to think? I'd already been told I lacked charisma. Pull that on top of it, and things would only get worse.
A shame, but Amber was a loss. Time to look for other talent.
My thoughts had reached that far when she opened her mouth again.
"I do like that you'd join my revenge, though. With the power of House de Jevitz, it would clearly help. A sinking ship, of course, but I'll have to stomach hardship of that degree. So allow me to amend the proposal. If you promise to help me take my revenge."
She did not take the offered hand. She knelt until she was level with it.
"Bjorn de Jevitz, my lord. I offer you my body and my heart, and swear my loyalty. My sword is yours, and my allegiance shall turn toward you alone. Your enemies will all wither before me."
Between the guttering candles, her face showed. What peeked out beneath the bowed head was not the face of a knight swearing loyalty. It was the face of a vengeful ghost, blind with revenge.
Only then did I understand that nothing I said had mattered. The instant I moved to win her over, she had already chosen her answer. She would use me—use House de Jevitz—for a private revenge.
Then I would use her in return.
In the future, when the demons came crashing in, I would drive her onto the front line. I would not grant her the peaceful end of dying on a battlefield as nothing more than a knight.
And so a knighting empty of loyalty and empty of honor was carried out in a little cell in Lighthouse Village.