In Search of a Fateful Encounter
The seal lay deeper than I had expected. It was not a depth any ordinary person could dig through in a single night. I, however, was a Sword Expert. A body driven past its limits to bear mana bored into the cave wall as if I were scooping out mud.
How long had it been? Beyond the bedrock, a vast space opened before me.
Long ago, in an age when light had yet to reach the world, this place—forsaken even by the gods—had belonged entirely to the Demon King. Defeated later in the War of the Gods, he fled to the northern pole, but his remnants still lingered across the world. Down here, where no human hand had ever reached and the sun's warmth never fell, demons who had failed to flee with him in those days still hid and lived. The people of this land called such places dungeons.
Blue lanterns. Ice blooming like flowers in every corner. A cold so sharp it seemed ready to steal even the thin warmth rising off my body.
There are demons here.
I held my breath, heightened my sight with mana, and swept the dark.
In the novel Esteria Chronicles, Mion had slipped into this dungeon while fleeing pursuit with the Holy Sword in hand. Cut off for ages and long since lost to the Demon King's control, most of the demons here had died on the spot simply by reacting to that sword. I would not be so lucky.
I steadied my blade and checked what mana remained in my dantian. A knight's weakness was simple: the output ran high, but you could use nothing beyond the mana stored in the body beforehand. In that respect a mage often looked like the better deal—lower output, yes, but able to circulate the mana of nature through the body and cast all day long. Knights, limited to what they had banked, had therefore developed by expanding the dantian, shoring up their staying power. Mages, weak in raw output, had gone the other way, increasing the number of wheels that spun their mana—the Rotura, or, in the parlance of cookie-cutter web novels, their Circles—and thereby raising the firepower they could dump in a single burst.
Which meant that even against an opponent of a wholly different caliber, superior application could still win. The chance that such an opponent would fail to use those towering specs was vanishingly small. It was not, however, wholly impossible.
I could not begin to say how stifling that part had been while I read Esteria Chronicles. Built on exactly this premise, the novel never properly described the gulf in power that each stage conferred, whether for knights or for mages.
Anyway. I was a knight. Boring through the wall just now had already spent a portion of the mana in my dantian. If a fight broke out, thirty minutes of pouring out what I had stored in advance would be the end of it, and after that I would be little different from an ordinary man with a somewhat sturdy body. I would have to hoard every drop and take the demons infesting this place one by one. It was recklessness of the worst kind, but knowing what lay here, I could not turn back.
Besides, if I retraced the novel, this dungeon held nothing but the lowest of demons—the Icicle Hounds—and a Frost Golem long since smashed to pieces. For a seal laid on Jin of the Flame, the defenses were absurdly lax. Then again, if they had hammered a high-ranking demon in here to tighten the guard, it would have been detected ages ago, and Jin of the Flame would already have been loosed upon the world. Hidden, yet still sufficient to protect the sealing formation. They had calibrated it with care. If the Frost Golem was shattered as the novel said, then even I, a low-rank Sword Expert, could manage this alone.
"Grrrr……"
As if they had been told an intruder was coming, the Icicle Hounds came swarming. Pale as corpses, their hides bristling with jagged spikes of ice, they were the lowest of demons. They attacked by launching the icicles grown from their own bodies, and anyone struck fell under a demon's curse and froze solid. Ten of them. A number I could handle.
Mana gathered blue along the blade, a brightness of an entirely different order from when I had bored through the mine wall. Sword aura. The sole difference that separated a knight from a soldier, and a gap that could never be closed. A miracle the gods had gifted their creations ran down the length of the steel.
"Arf! Arf!"
The Icicle Hounds barked, blowing frost from their muzzles. As if that were a signal, icicles came flying. I poured mana through my body and drove my metabolism higher. I went light as a feather. Breathing came as easily as drinking water. The dark before my eyes brightened to noon, and the sword moved as naturally as my own limbs. Icicles streaking in like arrows were no threat. With every swing, a demon fell. Before I knew it, every Icicle Hound lay with neck and torso parted.
"Hah…… hah……"
It was my first real fight, and I had burned through mana too freely. I steadied my breath and scanned the chamber. The sealing formation, though, was not as easy to find as I had expected. What I had met in a novel and what I saw with my own eyes—the difference was vast. I groped through old memory and turned the story over again.
In the novel, the protagonist Mion finds a massive door behind a Frost Golem crushed to death beneath the rubble of the collapsed dungeon. The door itself was easy enough to find. The problem was that no matter how I sharpened my sight with mana, I could not see a golem lying dead under any rubble. Worse, there was no rubble in the dungeon at all.
A chill ran through me. Mion discovers this place ten years from now. Which meant the Frost Golem might still be alive. The body that had been swaggering after a handful of Icicle Hounds folded of its own accord.
A Frost Golem was a high-ranking demon, not to be compared with trash like that. A monster better described as walking drift-ice than by the name it bore: a gigantic golem whose entire body was one colossal mass of ice. Like the hounds, it froze everything that touched it. Its resistance to magic was high enough that a half-formed sword aura could not so much as scratch it, and so long as the air stayed cold enough, even those wounds regenerated at once. An ice-storm spell that froze everything around it came thrown in for free.
In the novel, a section of the dungeon had collapsed under the weight of years, so Mion never had to face a living Frost Golem. Even if he had, a golem stripped of its controlling will would have been shattered by the Holy Sword. I had neither advantage. This was no enemy a low-rank Sword Expert could face alone. A disaster. I had never imagined a mere difference in timing from the novel could throw a butterfly effect like this.
The one mercy was that, for all the hounds' barking, the Frost Golem had not yet found me. If I wanted, I could still run. But the seal-door was only about a hundred meters away. Drive my mana at full output and sprint, and I could reach it in an instant. After a span of time near to eternity, the door was as ruined as the formation itself. Slip through that half-open, groaning gap, and I could meet Jin of the Flame. Break the seal quickly, and after that she would handle the rest somehow. A gamble worth taking.
Go back now with nothing to show, and I would die exactly as the novel's course ordained. I was afraid. I could not avoid it.
I steadied my breath. The decision had taken a long time. The action had to be fast. Checking the mana running through my whole body, I kicked off. With every step the ground drove deeper beneath my feet. The seal-door was right in front of me.
With only a few strides left, something came flying. A massive chunk of ice.
"Ghk—!"
The Frost Golem's attack had been within what I expected. Its reaction speed was far faster than I had thought.
It dug a trap and waited!
Too late to loose sword-energy, and the drift-ice was enormous. I wrapped mana around my body and met it head-on. With a grinding shriek, the wall of mana held the ice. Even so, it was barely enough to keep a body flung back by the recoil in one piece.
KAKAGANG!
Fortunately, it was only a glancing blow. But even with mana wrapped around me, the place the ice had brushed began to freeze. Like a flower, icicles bloomed from my side. It was not the worst. The link to the Demon King had been severed long ago, and the Frost Golem's power was greatly weakened because of it. Otherwise that single strike would have killed me on the spot.
KROOOOO!
Giving me no opening, the Frost Golem cast its ice storm. My body went cold as a corpse. Sensation dulled. No amount of mana wrapped around me could stop it. Every step the golem took made the dungeon shudder. It was not all that fast. My body, though, was moving slower still. Ignoring the Frost Golem and breaking Jin's seal was no longer possible. I had to find another way.
"……Khack! Fuck. I'm screwed."
The ice-flower in my side was boring inward. I could not even breathe properly. My dantian was already wrung out like a dry rag—not a handful of mana left. Breathing a freezing mist, I squeezed out the last of my strength. A little more. Please, body. Just listen to me. With the mana I had wrung dry, I heightened my sight.
Years from now, the Frost Golem dies crushed beneath rubble from the collapsed dungeon ceiling. Then by now there ought to be a crack up there. Give it one good push, and it might become the breach that breaks this crisis.
"……Found it."
As expected, there was a fissure—a huge one, ready to slump and give way at any moment, stitched across the ceiling directly over my head like an ornament. I focused every remaining scrap of mana into the sword and hurled it. The blade flew like a bullet and buried itself in the stone.
Seeing that the sword's path was not aimed at it, the Frost Golem paused in brief confusion, then came toward me to finish the job. That was its mistake.
Crrrack. Crrrack. The fissured ceiling split wider. Small stones pattered down onto the Frost Golem's face. By the time it sensed something wrong and looked up, it was already too late.
KOODOOM!
A vast wind of dust swallowed my vision. Coughing, I sank where I stood. Throw the sword even a little wrong, and I would have been caught in it too. A boulder had, in fact, fallen right in front of my nose. But the risk I had taken paid out just as surely. When the dust settled, I saw the Frost Golem crushed beneath enormous rocks. Repeating regeneration and destruction, the eyes glaring at me were chilling. Someday, when the mana in its core ran dry, it would be nothing but a shattered lump of ice.
Even as my body grew cold, I let out a sigh of relief.
"A fateful encounter, my ass. How the hell is this a fateful encounter? This is the price of my life."
If my body had been whole, I would have put a boot through that smashed face. The ice storm was gone, so that was something, but my condition was still a wreck. The ice grown from my side was a demon's curse. Unless it was purified, it would cling to my flank and torment me until the moment I died. Once I was done here, I would have to find a church and wash the curse away. Even so, I supposed I ought to be grateful just to be alive. Replaying the fight, it was dizzying beyond words.
Of course, that dizziness and the pain melted clean away the moment I stood before the seal-door. I opened a door already half-destroyed, no longer fit to serve its purpose, and unlike the cold outside, warmth filled the space. Where the dungeon had been nothing but a biting blue, scarlet light now flooded everything, wrapping my body as gently as the haze of flame that rises, faint, at dawn. Unlike the dungeon, where not even an insect had lived, the inside of the sealing formation was full of blue, tenacious life that had grown straight through the cold rock.
I turned my head and fixed my eyes on the center of the chamber. Enormous chains stretched out in every direction like a spider's web, and on the floor a vast runic sealing formation had been drawn in blood. There, bound in those chains, was a great crystal of ice. Within the crystal brazier, a flame was burning.
That was Jin of the Flame. One of the Three Gods who had descended to the earth in person from the divine realm to slay the Demon King. Stronger than any other god. An absolute whose flame could extinguish even a fellow deity. She had been deceived by the Demon King and sealed away through a near-eternity, but her strength was not something to be measured against a mere mortal.
I stepped toward the sealing formation.