Demon Hunt (5)
Zarkan was a troublesome opponent.
Unlike his first appearance—which had been so shabby it bordered on comical—the power he now unleashed was nothing to dismiss. Even Najin, who had reached the realm of Sword Seeker and claimed two stars, had to acknowledge it.
Annoying.
As the battle dragged on, Najin furrowed his brow.
The force-field magic Zarkan wielded was a pain to deal with. Unlike ordinary spells that only inflicted damage when they actually struck their target, these were different.
One force field per finger.
Ten human fingers plus twenty-one demonic ones—thirty-one force fields in total.
Each and every one of them was a massive, solid bludgeon. Bludgeons the size of a grown man’s torso slammed endlessly into the ground and intercepted Najin’s blade. They served equally well for offense or defense, and they could even harass him from range. And thirty-one of the damned things were floating around.
Their power isn’t anything to shrug off either. Every time I clash with one, chunks of my sword aura get sheared away…
On top of that, the fields were nearly invisible to the naked eye, which only made them more irritating. Najin was steadily carving them down, but his own expenditure far outpaced Zarkan’s. At this rate, he would be the one to lose.
Did that mean he felt a sense of crisis? Well… no. Not really. Najin’s eyes remained calm.
“….”
His pupils narrowed.
He paid no attention to the dull thud, thoom! of the thirty-one force fields. What he listened to was the sound of his own heart. Najin focused on its beat.
Thump. Thump. Thump…
Judging by the rhythm of his heart, he still had room to spare. In the past, this would have been his limit. Push any harder and his body would have started to break down under the strain. It still felt like it might… and yet for some reason he felt he could move even more violently.
Najin trusted his instinct.
Thump-thump-thump-thump.
His heart raced. Blood surged through his veins. Muscles tautened; nerves accelerated. Every muscle in his body pulled tight as a bowstring. Mana wrapped around those fibers that seemed ready to snap at any moment.
Boom!
Najin took a single step forward. The instant he kicked off the ground, intending to move “as usual,” his eyes flew wide. The motion was far faster than he himself had anticipated.
Where a normal push-off would have produced a sharp tap, the sound that rang out now was a thunderous boom, like a cannon shell being fired.
Slash!
He carved through one force field and skidded across the ground. That instantaneous acceleration startled more than just Najin. Zarkan’s eyes were equally wide with shock. Has he been holding back until now? The look on Zarkan’s face said as much. Caught off guard for a moment, Najin soon broke into a smile.
Ah. So this is what it feels like.
It took only a handful of exchanges for Najin to adapt to his new speed. He was beginning to understand how he needed to move this body. He was also starting to grasp exactly how the stars and the dragon’s blood had reshaped him.
This isn’t so much that my body got stronger…
—The vessel itself got bigger. Efficiency went up.
Merlin was right.
It was only natural he hadn’t noticed earlier. The change that had overtaken his body had little to do with raw physical reinforcement. The vessel itself had expanded.
By claiming a star, Najin had earned the right to challenge the heavens. And that “right” was no mere concept or abstract idea—he understood that now.
He still had no clear sense of how to wield this new star’s power, yet his body had already begun to change so that it could handle it. The vessel had grown; he could channel greater force all at once. Simply put, his upper limit had risen. Even when he poured out massive power in a single surge, the burden on his flesh had lessened.
And also…
Najin sensed his own body.
The pathways through which mana flowed had not changed much in size. But fine branches now spread around those channels, like a tree putting down roots. They were still small and unimpressive… yet they were not useless.
Those branches allowed him to wield mana with greater precision and efficiency.
Like this, for instance.
Najin kicked off the earth. Mana that had been evenly distributed throughout his body concentrated into pure leg power. The tiny branches running through his legs and feet flooded with mana in an instant. Zarkan’s force fields hammered the spot Najin had already left behind, not the space in front of him.
In a fraction of a second the distance closed.
Yet Zarkan’s gaze was still fixed on the wrong place; he never realized Najin had already slipped right under his nose. He paid a steep price for that oversight.
Thud.
Najin stamped the ground and redirected his mana. The power concentrated in his legs surged back through his entire body, then poured heavily into his arms, shoulders, and core. He swung his sword.
Slash.
The blade parted Zarkan’s arm with fluid ease. The tip sliced through a force field and bit into flesh, carving through meat and bone before bursting free on the far side.
Filthy black sludge—demonic energy—stretched from the severed stump, trying to reattach the arm.
Najin’s free hand clamped around the falling limb. He kicked off the ground again, putting distance between them, and severed the stretching sludge with a downward cut of his sword.
The entire sequence happened so quickly that, from Zarkan’s perspective, Najin had merely brushed past his side—and then his arm was simply gone. The pain arrived a beat later.
Sssshhhk.
Najin landed in a smooth slide, flung the severed arm behind him, and said lightly:
“That’s one.”
A smile spread across his lips.
2.
Instantaneous acceleration created by concentrating mana into a single point. The motion itself exceeded the limits of flesh, yet because mana acted as a cushion, the load on the body remained manageable.
Once he grasped that fact, Najin exploited it without mercy.
For Zarkan, who had been barely managing to track Najin’s movements until now, it was as if a bolt from the blue had struck. He had lost an arm. The silver lining—if one could call it that—was that the arm belonged to his human half rather than the demonic one…
Even so, the loss was severe.
Five force fields had vanished with it. But Zarkan was a mage of rich combat experience. He did not panic at the blood spraying from the stump; he simply crushed the wound shut with a force field and stopped the bleeding.
Crunch.
Pain twisted his features, but only for a moment. He fixed Najin with a glare and swung his remaining fields.
Krrrrrrrak!
The force fields scraped across the ground as they surged toward Najin. Transparent cubes of pure force. The power radiating from their surfaces shattered anything they touched. A single contact would have pulverized arm or leg alike.
But they never touched him.
Was it simply because Najin had grown faster? Not only that. He did not move at full speed constantly. He advanced at the same pace as before—then accelerated only in those brief windows when Zarkan left the slightest opening.
Splat!
Blood fountained from Zarkan’s shoulder; he gritted his teeth. It almost felt as if his opponent were toying with him. The irregular changes in speed were enough to drive a man mad.
With every exchange the wounds multiplied. Blood flowed.
Until now, dragging the fight into a war of attrition would have favored him. No longer. The situation had reversed, and Zarkan knew it.
This is fucking ridiculous. Truly.
He brought out the card he had been holding in reserve.
A technique so costly he had intended to use it only at the decisive moment: the authority of a demon. The demon with whom Zarkan had contracted—Marphos—governed refraction.
Refraction. To bend. To twist. To warp out of true.
Demonic hands sprouted from Zarkan’s spine and moved of their own accord. Force fields that had maintained perfect cubic shapes suddenly refracted to match Najin’s evasions. The abrupt shifts in form made Najin’s eyes fly wide.
Crunch!
He reacted even then—but not perfectly. One of the fields punched into his shoulder. Flesh tore free; blood poured freely.
And the assault did not stop at one blow.
Twenty-six force fields ran wild, changing shape from moment to moment as they crashed down on him. Fields that bent and folded and refracted without warning. Controlling them was no easy feat even for Zarkan.
Blood dripped from his nose. Veins stood out in his eyes. He was pouring the entirety of a 7th-circle mage’s computational capacity into moving the fields, and even that was not enough; he had off-loaded part of the calculation to the demon’s hands.
Every time he altered a field’s size, mana vanished in great chunks. He had to end this before his reserves hit bottom.
3rd-circle spell: Fragmentation.
6th-circle spell: Force-Field Storm.
Twenty-one fields split apart. From twenty-one to forty-two, then to eighty-four. The shards spun along irregular trajectories, scouring the area. Buildings that touched them crumbled into powder with a dry crunch.
A force-field storm born of a 6th-circle spell.
There was nowhere to run. Najin exhaled a long breath and charged straight into the storm. Within the howling tempest, white flashes of light flickered several times every second. With each flash the storm shrank.
Then—
Whoosh!
Najin burst free of the storm. His body was far from unscathed; flesh had been torn from shoulder and leg, and blood ran freely. Yet none of the wounds were fatal. He raced straight at Zarkan.
In that instant Najin saw it.
Zarkan’s arm stretched out toward him.
Of the twenty-six remaining fields, Zarkan had used only twenty-one to create the storm. Then what of the other five—the ones held in his human hand? As if to answer that very question, Zarkan rubbed his middle finger against his thumb.
Snap. He flicked his fingers.
6th-circle spell: Refraction.
The five fields ground against one another, fused, and came hurtling at Najin. A spell that bent and refracted anything it touched. Because of his contract with the Demon of Refraction, its power approached that of a 7th-circle spell.
There was, however, one thing Zarkan had overlooked.
The characters for “bend” and “break” had always had wretched compatibility with Najin. The sword aura of a boy who had never once bent, never once broken, blazed with light. Najin kicked off the ground and settled into a stance—a stance whose meaning was the exact opposite of refraction.
A sword meant to strike down demons.
Atanga’s blade shattered the force field head-on.
3.
Zarkan. Once, his name had been Zarkan Blen.
He had been a promising talent.
Just as everyone carries some story of their own, Zarkan too had a past. Whether that past was heavy or light did not matter; he had lived a life.
Zarkan Blen, rising star of the Force-Field School.
He had possessed talent. That talent had carried him to the 6th circle at the age of sixty-seven. Considering how many spent their entire lives unable to break the wall of the 5th circle, Zarkan had been gifted.
Having talent had been a blessing.
Having a clear ceiling had been his curse.
Zarkan walked the righteous path until the age of ninety-seven. Yet he never advanced beyond the 6th circle. Thirty years of devotion produced nothing. Around that time he finally understood: his talent ended here.
No one called him a promising talent any longer. He was merely an old man who had grown old. And yet his body remained fixed at the prime of his life—the body of a man at his brightest.
Those who reach the level of Sword Seeker become free of aging. They live out their days in the flesh of their most radiant years. At first glance it seems they have been granted eternity. Reality is different. The world never permits the word eternity.
The world grants a human one hundred twenty years.
One hundred twenty years—the absolute limit of an ordinary lifespan.
Any human who lives beyond that span is, from the world’s perspective, an error. Something that does not fit the proper order. And so what must be done?
They are pushed out of the world.
From this life into the next. From the near shore to the far shore. Yet those whose bodies have overcome aging refuse to be pushed. They refuse death; they reject the natural cycle. And so the world shoves them beyond its borders.
The Outer Land—outside the world.
Those who refuse to be driven there find their bodies and souls crumbling until death takes them. The speed varies, but Erosion always arrives. That is the death allotted to those granted eternal flesh.
To escape death, one must leave for the Outer Land.
That is why countless Sword Seeker-class powerhouses walk into the Outer Land of their own free will. They speak of saving the world, of becoming heroes, of purifying the Outer Land—grand ambitions all—but it is only self-justification.
They are simply those who no longer belong to the natural order.
Those who can no longer live on the Continent.
Here stood one such old mage.
Zarkan Blen was no different.
Erosion began for him at ninety-seven. The moment he saw his own body crumbling, despair seized him. Death was approaching. He would have to leave the Magic Tower and head for the Outer Land. Yet death waited there as well.
The Outer Land swarmed with monsters.
Beasts that resembled the cursed things of Kamran, transcendent beings that shone in the night sky, demons that hungered for human souls, and greedy hunters who sought to become constellations—all of them thrived there.
He had no confidence he could survive among them. Nor did he wish to become a soldier and fight them. Zarkan was a mage and a seeker of knowledge. All he had ever wanted was more knowledge, more research.
His allotted time was finished.
Zarkan had to choose.
What he would remain as.
And so he chose.
He cast aside his convictions. He cast aside his conscience. He broke the oath he had sworn long ago before his master. He offered all of it as the price of a bargain with a demon. He set foot upon the “next realm” he had so desperately desired.
The 7th circle. A demon’s hand. Knowledge of a higher dimension.
He could do more. He could know more. The realm of transcendence he had longed for his entire life shimmered before his eyes. Everything he had spent a lifetime yearning for.
It was, at a glance, magnificent.
And it was also pitiful.
“Ah.”
Zarkan watched. He watched the magic he had devoted his entire life to studying being torn apart. A sword aura that resembled a constellation—an aura that never bent, never broke—shattered his force fields and came for him.
Driven from the Continent.
Driven even from the Outer Land.
Forced to cling to the borderlands.
The last thing the obsolete mage saw was pure white light. A flash of white brushed past Zarkan’s throat. Immediately afterward a golden radiance burst before his eyes like fireworks.
Slash.
Zarkan’s head fell to the ground.