Demon Hunt (3)
Literature often describes transcendents—Sword Masters, Archmages, and their like—in these terms:
Those who have reached the realm of the gods while still wearing human flesh.
Najin realized once more that the phrase contained not a shred of exaggeration. The spectacle unfolding before his eyes was more than worthy of being called a miracle of the divine.
An aftershock that rolled across an entire city.
Vibrations that leapt thousands of meters without effort.
It was a current far too vast to have been raised by a single human being. They were not called transcendents with such grandiose titles for nothing. They performed deeds that shattered common sense, and so they earned the name.
Before that immense power, most people feel fear. They revere overwhelming force, dread it, and regard its wielders as creatures wholly other than themselves. The Inquisitors beside Najin, hands clamped over their ears, were like that; so were the black mages cowering in terror inside the city.
But there are humans who are not so.
The boy standing here was one of them.
Najin lowered the hands that had been covering his ears. He listened to the sword-cry that still echoed through the air. He straightened the knees he had reflexively bent, lifted his head, and with eyes opened wide took the entire landscape into both of them.
The corners of his mouth rose of their own accord. Those wide, almost tearing eyes sparkled. And whatever expression that was, it was not fear.
Excitement. Anticipation. Or simple interest.
The proposal written in Yuel’s letter. Najin had not accepted it without a second’s hesitation for no reason. As he had said before, he considered this a good opportunity.
A chance to loosen his body before departing for the Outer Land.
And because it was a height he would one day have to climb, a chance to witness with his own eyes the battles of the strong he would someday face.
It was an excellent opportunity. Truly.
Smiling openly, Najin started walking. While the Inquisitors still crouched, crushed by the aftershock Yuel had unleashed, he strode toward the city’s main gate.
“I’ll go on ahead.”
Clang! Najin drew his sword.
The streets of Baldornos were dark.
As befitting a city that straddled the Outer Land, darkness lay thick across every corner, and not a single lantern had been set out to push it back.
Dark, damp, and uncanny.
An ordinary human would have gone mad after only a few days here, but black mages were different. The fact that they proudly affixed the word “black” to their own name said everything: they loved the dark.
Dark and damp and eerie and terrifying?
Even better.
Shouting that, they willingly built their workshops in sewers and abandoned cities. There was the minor convenience that such places made excellent bolt-holes, yet black mages simply liked dark, humid places for their own sake.
Does initiation into black magic rewrite the brain? Like mold that thrives in damp and dark?
-There was a mage who wrote a thesis on exactly that.
What? Who would waste time on such a useless topic…
-I did.
…Ah.
Decrepit, half-collapsed buildings. Bricks scattered everywhere. Roughly three hundred years ago the city’s entire population had vanished overnight, and the place still lay silent.
Except for the distant “Screeeeech!” of an executioner’s blade.
Najin walked through that silence.
His footsteps rang out with deliberate volume. Erasing them would have been nothing, but there was no need.
He wanted every black mage hidden throughout the city to know he was there. The executioner who had stormed in through the rear gate was literally carving the city apart. The options left to the panicking black mages were few.
One: kill the executioner.
Two: flee while avoiding her.
If the first had been possible they would never have hidden here in the first place. That left the second—and for that they had to get past Najin somehow. Or climb the walls and run.
Screeeeech!
Najin glanced toward the walls. A black mage who had been scaling them with magic suddenly had his waist snipped clean through and plummeted. He had succeeded in escaping—escaping this life, at least.
Climbing the walls was clearly impossible as well. Scaling bare stone with no cover was the same as advertising “Please cut me down” to a Sword Master whose reach stretched hundreds of meters.
So only the main gate remained.
The only exit was the stretch of ground where Najin was pacing. With Yuel’s presence closing in second by second, the black mages finally made their choice. Presence that had been carefully concealed flared all at once. They had dropped their cloaks.
Abandoned city. Abandoned buildings.
The mages hidden among the abandoned things began to move.
Old walls. Gaps between fallen bricks. Narrow slits in curtained windows. Spaces between roofs and chimneys. Behind pillars. From every corner of the city, pitch-black lights winked.
The harbingers of spell-casting.
The simultaneous flashes were the same color as the darkness itself and hard to catch with the naked eye.
Hard—but not impossible.
The instant the lights appeared, Najin’s pupils flickered. Left to right, top to bottom. The flashes lasted barely three seconds. For him, that was more than enough.
Seventeen.
Seventeen lights. Seventeen mages. Seventeen spells.
One second to count them. Another second to stamp the raised foot down hard. The final second passed as he expelled the breath he had held and kicked off the earth.
Three seconds—the time it took the spells to complete and fire.
From every direction the city hurled magic at him. The moment the spells left their casters, Najin was already running. Pitch-black stakes slammed into the spot he had just vacated with a rapid series of thuds. Blood-red beams melted the ground; more than ten spells tore through every obstacle in their path and surged forward.
Ten spells.
Najin’s eyes remained calm.
Before he had become a Sword Seeker, before the battle with the witch in the Outer Land, he might have struggled. Having lived through both, however…
It did not seem particularly difficult.
He sprinted. Spells that could not match his speed struck only empty air. Instant acceleration. Najin began running along the walls themselves.
Whoooosh!
Spells locked onto him rather than guided by passive aim twisted in mid-flight and gave chase. From behind, from above, from the front—from every direction they closed in, yet Najin never broke stride.
While running he swung his sword.
Even with the unstable footing of wall-running, the arc his blade traced was clean. Slash! Spells caught in the sword aura simply ceased to exist. Through the sudden open view he kicked off the wall and leapt.
Of the seventeen lights he had marked with his eyes, the nearest.
He flew toward the black mage crouched behind a ruined wall, sword already in motion. A collapsed wall still stood between them, yet the instant sword aura flashed the wall lost all value as cover.
Slice.
The tip of the blade parted the stone as gently as silk.
A human neck is no harder than masonry, so the head of the mage behind the wall shared the wall’s fate. Najin did not stop.
The swing, the landing, the pivot, the next leap—all happened almost as one continuous motion.
Thus, the moment one severed head hit the ground with a dull thud, Najin was already above his next target: the mage hidden between roof and chimney. He vaulted over the man while swinging.
Pfft.
A single thin line ran from forehead to chin. Najin did not wait for the body to topple. He kicked off the roof and ran on. The speed was excessive; eyes alone could not track him, and even magical pursuit struggled.
Just how was he that fast?
Najin’s physical gifts were excellent, but not this overwhelming. Terrain played its part: a cityscape packed with surfaces to kick from, buildings and cover lined up like stepping stones.
An environment tailor-made for him.
And a familiar one.
He remembered the street battles against the cult’s shadow agents in the underground city and smiled without meaning to. He had grown incomparably stronger since then. Feeling that growth, he pushed his body faster still.
For the black mages it was pure nightmare.
A corpse with a split skull tumbled from a rooftop. The mage hidden inside the building saw his comrade fall and flinched. He almost screamed, bit it back—then discovered there was no need.
Najin smashed through the ceiling and dropped.
Where? Straight onto his head.
The mage’s eyes bulged as he looked up. The scream never left his throat; Najin’s blade had already swept across his neck. Mid-swing Najin released the sword, let it spin once in the air, and snatched it reverse-grip.
The instant his fingers closed he whipped his arm forward like a spear thrower.
The longsword left his hand like a javelin. Not a javelin throw—a sword throw. Longswords are not designed for it, but sufficient strength makes almost anything possible.
Whoooosh!
The blade flew in a perfect line, shattered the window of the opposite building, and buried itself in the shoulder of the mage who had been aiming a staff from cover.
“Grrraaagh…!”
Even screaming, the mage did not abandon his spell. A good decision, but not the best—pain added a full second of delay.
One second. More than enough for Najin to clear the building and arrive in front of him.
Crash.
Najin kicked the already-broken window frame the rest of the way out and stepped inside. The mage’s eyes went wide as he swung the staff around, but it was already far too late.
Once a mage allows a swordsman within reach, the mage cannot win.
Thunk.
Najin’s hand closed around the hilt protruding from the man’s shoulder. Sword aura that had died when the blade left his grip flared back to life. Using the mage’s own shoulder as a scabbard, Najin drew.
The aura-wrapped longsword tore free, splitting the shoulder, and continued upward to cleave the skull.
Rumble…
As if determined to crush him along with the entire structure, the remaining mages poured spells onto the building. Najin was not so slow as to stand and take blind fire. He sliced through an outer wall and leapt clear.
This is almost too easy. Fighting black mages never used to feel this one-sided…
He thought of the Faube subjugation in the sewers. Back then he had taken serious wounds and the danger had felt real. Now everything was smooth. Had Faube simply been that strong? While the thought formed, Merlin’s voice answered, dry with disbelief.
-Hardly. That one was pure artifact and Masterpiece cheese—barely fourth-circle on his own. The ones you’re fighting now are third- to fourth-circle at best.
She clicked her tongue.
-You were only a Sword Expert then, remember?
Yeah.
-No stars either.
Right.
-Now you’ve got stars and you’re a Sword Seeker. Plus you have a certain very great Archmage riding shotgun.
That last one doesn’t seem to be helping much.
-What was that?
While the great Archmage glared, Najin smirked and kept walking. His own growth certainly played a part, but he knew there was another reason the operation felt so easy.
The leader of the black mages entrenched in this city.
Estimated sixth-circle mage, Zarkan.
He and his core forces were busy right now trying to stop Yuel. Even if they threw every prepared sacrifice and artifact into the fray, halting her advance would be nearly impossible.
Proof: the castle that had to be their workshop was shaking almost without pause.
From the black mages’ point of view it was enough to make a man go mad.
A Sword Master rampaging at the rear gate, and at the main gate some unknown boy methodically butchering every mage sent to secure an escape route. The Sword Master they could understand—but what in the world was that boy?
Blink and his position changed. He moved always one step ahead, as though he could see the future. He closed distance in the most outrageous ways. How he even knew their hiding spots was a mystery; he simply smashed through walls and cut throats. He dropped through ceilings, thrust through solid masonry, and finally started throwing the damned sword. Every time a spell left a caster’s lips another comrade vanished. It was enough to make a ghost scream.
“Is that bastard even an Inquisitor?”
“What kind of Inquisitor fights like that?”
“A knight, then? No… that doesn’t fit either.”
“What knight in the world, fuck, throws his own sword?”
The black mages howled.
They were supposed to be the ones who fought dirty, yet their opponent was fighting dirtier and more underhandedly still. For the first time they understood how the knights they had ambushed must have felt.
Of course their misery was none of Najin’s concern.
He strolled the corners of Baldornos at a leisurely pace, hunting every black mage who tried to slip out of the castle.
BOOOOOM!
And then it happened.
The old castle at the city’s center—the fortress the black mages had seized and converted into a workshop. From its highest tower, accompanied by a thunderous crash, a human figure came flying. Falling? The word felt inadequate. There was a better one.
Yes. A person was being shot.
In a perfectly straight line—straight toward the spot where Najin stood.
“Did you know?”
“Guh… hah… hurgh…”
“If you divide Baldornos by a seven-to-three ratio, the place where you and I are standing right now belongs to the seven.”
Yuel spoke in a calm, almost conversational tone.
Hair like the first snow of winter, pure white and smooth. Half-lidded blood-red eyes between long lashes, languid and bewitching.
A beautiful woman. When the empire discussed its great beauties her name was never omitted; Yuel’s face was almost cruelly lovely. Even that perpetual blank expression only added to the allure.
The black mage currently held at arm’s length—Zarkan—nearly found himself thinking she was beautiful.
“Guh—guhk!”
If only this madwoman were not throttling him, if only she had not just carved every last one of his subordinates into pieces, he might have completed the thought.
Sixth-circle black mage Zarkan.
Leader of the force that had occupied Baldornos.
He stared up at the woman crushing his throat with trembling eyes. The gaze that met his remained utterly indifferent, as though the creature in her hand held not the slightest interest.
“And I made a promise. I would take the seven; you would take the remaining three. Ah—when I say ‘you,’ I do not mean the you whose neck I am currently holding.”
He was not curious. Not even a little.
But when a Sword Master has her hand around your throat, you listen even to stories that do not interest you.
“So according to the promise, killing you is my task. You were standing in the seven, after all. Still… it feels a little wasteful.”
Yuel’s lips parted in a soft hum.
“I would like to watch that boy fight a little longer. I want to see him bleed, want to see him win by the narrowest of margins. Yes, killing the man in front of me would certainly be entertaining, but…”
She nodded once, as though a decision had settled.
“I suspect this will be more enjoyable.”
The highest floor of the occupied castle.
The rooftop where the whole of Baldornos lay spread out below. Yuel walked toward its outermost edge.
“Demons are extraordinarily resistant to physical trauma. I tested it once. Without any magical assistance whatsoever, how many pure physical impacts does it take to destroy a demon? The results were rather interesting.”
She spoke while strolling at an unhurried pace.
“Three thousand seven hundred sixty-one. A blade entered the heart three thousand seven hundred sixty-one times and the demon still lived. Did it die on the three thousand seven hundred sixty-second blow? Surprisingly, no. The moment the count reached three thousand seven hundred sixty-two, the demon took its own life. A pity. I had wanted to learn the absolute limit.”
She tilted her head slightly.
“I’ve talked too long. The point is this: demons are sturdy. Naturally the body of one who has contracted with a demon will be sturdy as well. A fall from this height will not kill you.”
The very edge of the roof.
When Baldornos was divided seven-to-three, this spot still belonged—just barely—to the seven. One more step forward would cross into the three.
Tap.
Yuel stood on the boundary line and raised her arm.
“Humans have always wanted to fly. Most of them look at the word ‘flight’ with longing. I hope you will prove no exception.”
Then she swung her arm.
Exactly as one might throw a ball.
“Have a pleasant flight.”
Yuel hurled Zarkan.
From the highest tower of the castle, straight toward the ground—more precisely, straight toward the place where Najin stood.
Whoooooosh!
The method was rather rough, and the direction pointed earthward rather than skyward. Yet if “flying” simply means moving through the air with both feet off the ground…
Then Zarkan was, without question, flying.
“Guh—uwaaaaaaaaaaah!”
Zarkan screamed.
Regrettably, there was no one left to hear it.