Romanticist (4)
Most of the humans in the Outer Land were broken.
At least, every one Najin had met so far had been.
Some suffered under erosion. Others abandoned something precious to keep from suffering. Still others simply went mad. The Outer Land was crowded with people shattered in their own particular ways, because the land itself demanded it of them.
“Hahaha! Row! Put your backs into it!”
But this man… well.
Najin watched Anton laugh while pointing at the oncoming storm. He might not have been entirely sane, yet he did not seem broken.
He was already a Transcendent four hundred years ago, so he must be around five hundred. And he spent most of that time hunting for a witch…
For all that, Anton Quijano looked far too intact. There was not a trace of erosion on him, and his power showed no sign of decline. The man before him was unmistakably a Transcendent.
Every time Anton pulled on an oar the waves surged, and Najin, matching that rhythm, had to row until sweat poured off him in sheets.
“Could you… row… a little… slower?”
“Why, tired already? Your voice is short of breath!”
“You’re a Transcendent, but—”
“Can’t hear you! The current’s fierce! The crash of the waves drowns your voice! What good is a rower whose voice can’t carry?”
This man, seriously…
Najin clenched his teeth, hauled on the oar, and shouted.
“You’re a Transcendent, but I’m not!”
“Oh dear. But that doesn’t seem like my problem. Keep up however you can.”
Son of a bitch. Najin swallowed the curse that had risen to his throat and kept rowing. At first Anton had matched Najin’s pace, but the moment Najin punched through a wave with Ramming, the older man had given him a meaningful look and begun rowing at full strength.
You can keep up with this much, can’t you, brat?
That was the look on his face.
“Hah… hahh…”
Gasping for air, Najin rowed until his arms felt ready to tear. The sailboat carrying the two of them sliced the water and shot forward like an arrow.
“Here it comes! We’re ramming it!”
What loomed ahead was a whale with its maw gaping wide open.
Najin had never seen a whale of the Continent, but he was fairly certain those did not come equipped with teeth this sharp and vicious.
“Speed up, rower!”
Anton charged straight at those teeth without the slightest reduction in speed. Najin nearly jumped out of his skin.
“What do you think you’re doing?!”
“What else? I told you—we’re ramming it.”
“This isn’t a warship, it’s a sailboat! Do you not understand that if we hit that thing, common sense says we’ll be smashed to pieces?!”
“Ah. Right, it was.”
“You lunatic, for real—”
The roar of the waves swallowed his voice, so Najin’s volume climbed on its own. Still shouting, he flung the oar he had been using at Anton.
“Oh, an extra oar.”
“Row by yourself for a while!”
Anton caught the thrown oar with a crisp slap and gripped one in each hand. Then he began rowing with renewed vigor. Ssshhh! As the sailboat raced through the water, Najin drew the sword at his hip.
He planted his feet firmly on the violently pitching prow, found his balance, and drew out sword-light. Eyes wide, he let the gleaming edge trail long. The instant the whale’s savage teeth were about to shred the boat, Najin’s blade moved.
A flash.
The teeth were scythed away by the sword-light. The sailboat, still at full speed, drove into the whale’s mouth—yet Najin had not the slightest desire to tour its stomach.
“Hup!”
He exhaled short and sharp and swung again. Sword-light burst from the tip of the blade, mangling the inner lining, then carving clean through the outer hide. The whale, apparently unprepared for its meal to butcher it from the inside, let out a bellowing “Gwooooo!”—but that was none of Najin’s concern.
A hole had suddenly opened along the creature’s spine; blood fountained skyward. The sailboat carrying Najin and Anton shot out through that wound into open water once more.
“Whew. Felt like a little cave tour.”
Anton made a show of wiping sweat from his brow and catching his breath. Najin had to restrain the urge to plant a fist in that face.
“Is there… no slightly more normal method? You know, could we please think a little more… commonly…?”
“What is common sense? It is the knowledge shared by most people. And you and I are not most people! We are Transcendents. Transcendents have a Transcendent’s way of doing things.”
“I’m not a Transcendent.”
“Oh, a minor difference. You’re close enough that we can call you an honorary Transcendent, can’t we? Don’t be bound by common sense, boy.”
Not being bound by common sense—shattering it, even—was something of a hobby of Najin’s. Standing before a genuine madman, however, his own madness looked downright tame. He glared at Merlin, who was snickering at his side, and let out a sigh.
So that’s how it’s going to be.
Najin exhaled, raked wet hair back from his face, tightened the cord binding it, loosened his shoulders lightly, and took the oar back from Anton.
“Hey, Anton.”
“Call me Captain, rower.”
“Fine. So, Captain? You said just now we don’t need to be bound by common sense.”
“Of course. Are you finally understanding me?”
“Then we ought to change the way we row as well. What we’re doing right now is thoroughly common-sense rowing, isn’t it?”
What is he talking about?
Anton was about to tilt his head when Najin, instead of sitting, slammed a foot down on the stern. The sailboat pitched hard; Najin spun the oar once in a smooth arc.
The tip of the oar, set at a slant, pointed at the surface of the sea.
“Hold on tight.”
“Huh?”
Ramming.
Najin drove the technique straight into the water.
“Rower.”
“Yes, Captain.”
“I was wrong.”
“Glad you realize it.”
Looking like a drowned rat, Anton wrung out his clothes and raised the white flag. Before true madness, Anton had lost.
“Let’s save that technique as much as possible. Use it when we need to vault a reef dozens of meters high. No—on second thought, let’s not. Let’s just smash things. I’ll smash them.”
“I thought you said you liked adventure? Flight doesn’t seem to suit your tastes.”
“Listen—there isn’t a human alive whose hobby is launching himself dozens of meters into the sky while trusting his life to a single sailboat!”
Having experienced a flight that was either long or short depending on how one looked at it—courtesy of the storm Ramming had raised—Anton’s face had gone pure white. Even for a Transcendent, it had not been an easy ride.
“Right. For a while we’ll row nice and easy. Chat like we were doing earlier. Yes. Let’s do that.”
Music to Najin’s ears. He kneaded his aching arms and rowed at a leisurely pace.
“Captain. One thing I want to ask.”
“Oh? What is it? If it’s about Lapis from earlier—”
“Not that. When we first met, you called yourself the greatest lover of the age, didn’t you?”
“Ah, of course. There is no lover to match me.”
“Then let me ask the greatest lover of the age—what exactly is love?”
What is love?
It was a question Najin had carried for a long time.
“I just don’t understand what this love thing is that makes people stake their lives and offer up their liver and gallbladder and everything else. You know—fairy tales and heroic epics are full of that stuff.”
Casting everything away for love. Homeland, honor, pride, even conviction. Najin could not quite bring himself to empathize with that chain of actions. And when those foolish-looking acts were dressed up as something magnificent, it grated even more.
“Looking only at the stories, it seems like hypnosis. The moment someone falls in love, the person changes completely. So what is it, really?”
What is love?
It was, in a way, an embarrassing question that might invite mockery—yet Anton Quijano considered it with complete seriousness. He even stopped rowing for a moment, stroked his chin, and opened his mouth.
“Never been in love?”
“Never.”
“Then you’ve never confessed. Have you ever been confessed to?”
“Once.”
“Well, with that face it would be stranger if you hadn’t. Anyway—what is love, you ask? An interesting question.”
Anton crooked one corner of his mouth in a grin.
“Well now. As you say, love may be close to hypnosis. Even the famous geniuses of the Mage Tower turn into the world’s foremost idiots once they fall in love, and the sternest, coldest knights make fools of themselves in front of their beloved.”
It strips away judgment.
It reduces objectivity and rationality to trivial things, and makes even a human frozen solid burn like a hot flame.
“That is love.”
“So it makes you stupid?”
“Ah, that isn’t wrong. But calling it ‘becoming stupid’ is an ungraceful way to put it. Don’t you think?”
Anton Quijano flung his arms wide.
“Some people call those who fall in love fools. They laugh at them as dim-witted, as foolish. Sometimes they even pity them. But I am the opposite. Exactly the opposite.”
“The opposite?”
“I pity those who have never felt this joy. I pity those who have never experienced true love.”
Love, you see—he spoke as if singing.
“Only one person fills your sight, and everything else vanishes. Your heart hammers as if it will burst, and every sense sharpens for the sake of that one person alone. And then you realize.”
Realize what? Najin’s question made Anton smile.
“That I can be this passionate. That I can burn this hot. Only then did I feel that I was truly alive. It was the moment meaning entered a life that had held nothing.”
He seized the oar he had set aside and gripped it hard.
“Life gains vitality. A goal appears. For her, there seems to be nothing I cannot do.”
A boundless sea like this is nothing at all.
Saying so, Anton wore a magnificent expression.
“Love is the greatest magic of all, boy. The most primal and the most magnificent magic that makes the impossible possible for a human being.”
He rowed.
“Even the Witch of Camlann, the most powerful mage in the world, cannot do a thing about it—the supreme magic.”
The look on his face as he rowed was full of life. Najin thought he understood, at least a little, why the man had never become one of the dead, why he had never suffered even a trace of erosion.
Of course. Erosion finding someone who lived so vividly would be the strange thing. Najin laughed as if he could not believe it and kept rowing.
“I’d like to try it myself.”
Najin murmured.
“That thing called love.”
“I sincerely hope that day comes for you as well.”
The greatest lover of the age rows on.
He sails the boundless sea.
For the woman who asked him to find her.
The voyage stretched on for days.
Rowing, hunting monsters, sometimes smashing through reefs—Najin and Anton crossed the sea. Even the finest navigator of the Continent would have screamed and shaken his head at the sight of the Outer Land’s waters, yet a Transcendent and an honorary Transcendent trusted themselves to a single small sailboat and made the crossing.
Of course it was not easy for them either.
“The boat—capsized! That’s why I told you over and over to row more slowly!”
“Hahahaha! Blub—pffah!”
They were flung into the sea when the boat overturned.
“Any true seafarer must know how to sail through a storm. Hey, rower. Doesn’t it make you greedy? The title of first-rate navigator who punched through a storm where lightning struck from below to above, all in a single sailboat. I’m greedy for it. A true seafarer must dream big.”
“You were a seafarer?”
“No? I was a noble. Why would I be sailing a boat?”
“……”
“……”
“I’m firing Ramming.”
“W-wait—”
Boom!
They quite literally “skipped over” the storm of upward lightning and the whirlpools.
“Whale! Whale! Chargeeeee!”
“That’s a kraken, Captain.”
“Anyway, chargeeeee!”
They fought a kraken large enough to swallow an entire castle, severing the dozens of tentacles it swung. Through adventures that were at once ridiculous and grand, Anton and Najin crossed the sea.
How long did they sail?
There.
In the middle of a sea thick with fog.
That’s the destination I told you about.
Najin and Anton could see it as well.
The fog was dense enough to obscure the view, yet shapes still showed through the haze. An isolated island floated in the heart of the boundless sea.
“….”
Without any discussion their gazes rose of their own accord. They looked at a structure built upon the island. It was a tower. A spire soaring as if it meant to touch the sky.
Pointing at that spire, Merlin spoke.
A tower created by the Witch of Camlann. A spire raised to punish sinners. The place where sealed witches are imprisoned.
The Black Spire.
That was the name given to the tower before them.