Carpediem (2)
The Empire's Third Pillar.
Chingsonggak, Akut, put on the mask. Donning that ridiculous jester's mask was proof of his submission to the Revelry Emperor—and a declaration that he himself was a clown.
A Pillar of the Empire had betrayed them.
Having announced his treachery, Akut immediately dropped his gaze. At the end of that look stood an old man: a transcendent who refused to age, yet had chosen the contradiction of growing old—the one being on this field Akut had to watch most carefully.
The Empire's First Pillar. The First Horn of the Empire.
Gerd regarded Akut in silence.
Even with a Pillar's betrayal laid bare, his expression did not shift. That was simply the man he was—cold-forged steel that had long since stopped changing. Gerd spoke, short and flat.
"So you've sided with the Revelry Emperor."
"It has come to that, Gerd."
"I see."
That was the whole of their conversation. No stock questions followed—why the betrayal, how he could make such a choice, how dare he turn on the Empire. Nothing of the sort.
What came next was a sword stroke.
Akut's eyes flew wide as he swung his spear. A roar of steel answered—KRAAAAAANG!—as a blade of sword aura smashed into the shaft. The rebound hurled Akut backward; he let out a hollow laugh. That sword aura was still terrifying. To fire it free of the blade and still pack this density?
Monster of an old man, no matter how you looked at it.
One stroke was never going to be enough. The instant Akut was driven back, three more blades of aura were already streaking toward him. A gale howled; the air itself tore with a scream that punched into eardrums.
Watching the oncoming storm of aura, Akut clicked his tongue.
The old monster had been bad enough before; after claiming his eighth star he had only grown worse. Not an opponent anyone wanted to meet head-on. And Gerd was not alone.
A low, resonant thrum filled the air. Akut knew its source. It was the sword-cry of the Sword Saint's blade. Having two of the continent's most troublesome swordsmen charging him at once was not a situation he particularly enjoyed.
The one mercy was this:
The stage favored him, not them. And it was about to favor him even more.
Clap.
Somewhere, applause rang out.
"If the past holds only regret,
and the future only pain—
what reason is there not to laugh now?
Seize the day! Only today is worth anything."
The ground heaved. Like a rolling tide it swallowed Gerd's sword aura whole. It was not only the earth that rocked; everything in sight began to sway.
The Sword Saint clicked his tongue. Gerd's brow furrowed. They had realized it too late: this place had been a trap from the beginning. They had been hunting the Demon King of Grief in entirely the wrong corner of the world.
Carpediem.
The Demon King of Grief's laughter filled the stage.
In that instant the stage inverted.
The Demon King of Grief's mindscape blanketed her domain. This was her territory. On the sacred ground she owned, her domain swelled without limit.
Crosses erupted from the heaving earth—one, two, ten, dozens, hundreds, thousands. Humans hung nailed to inverted crucifixes; their screams echoed across the stage.
Carpediem, Demon King of Grief.
She was a Demon King who had once parasitised religion.
From the faithful who prayed that present suffering would one day be rewarded, that God would look upon them, that happiness would come at last—she harvested belief. In return she bestowed agony.
A false god. A false prophet. The principal deity of a heretical cult. A deceiving counterfeit divinity.
The devil who had played at godhood and lured humans after her cast every last one of her tens of thousands of followers into hell. Their screams became the nourishment that carried her to transcendence.
Grief.
A hell of rending screams was her mindscape. At the center of the stage its mistress appeared. The devil wore the form of an innocent girl—or of a mature woman. A devil who could become anything in order to deceive humans. The false god smiled.
Kakaka, kaka, kakaka!
The Revelry Emperor's laughter.
Clap, clap-clap, CLAP!
The Demon King of Grief's applause rang through her domain.
"Welcome to my stage!"
Carpediem flung her arms wide to greet her guests. The screams of the humans hanging from the inverted crosses swelled louder still.
2.
Demons are bound by their own concepts.
They possess no self; they live only according to the concept assigned them. Their purpose in life is almost comically simple.
Terror, deception, allure—anything will do.
Inflict suffering on humans with the concept one holds, harvest their souls, and fatten oneself. Every demon lives for that single end.
Yet every so often, in the midst of that process, a demon touches transcendence. Just as a human, through endless tempering, steps into the realm beyond, so too do beings appear who shatter their own limits and surpass their kind.
Demons who have gained a self.
The world calls them Demon Kings.
"Looks like things have gotten tangled…"
Sword Saint Caron let out a sigh. He watched the Demon King of Grief still clapping in the distance. Naturally a Demon King was a troublesome existence; that was why they had assembled a subjugation force of four transcendents.
Four should have been enough to win. That conviction had rested on several conditions: a successful ambush, or at least seizing the first strike, and shattering the Demon King of Grief's stage.
The plan had come apart.
The ambush had failed, the first strike had been stolen, and the Annihilation Horn—tasked with breaking the devil's stage—lay with his heart pierced through. To Caron's eye it was instant death. Even a transcendent, caught unprepared with a hole through the heart, would struggle to survive.
The situation had grown tiresome.
The Annihilation Horn was a grand mage, a constellation with a particular gift for shattering an opponent's mindscape. By rights, now that Carpediem's stage had unfolded, he should have stepped forward.
So they targeted him first. The moment they dropped him, she showed herself?
Caron sighed again and looked at Akut. Of their original four, one was dead and one had turned coat. A Demon King alone was headache enough; now they had an extra transcendent on the enemy side.
Not easy.
Truly not easy at all.
While Caron was still glaring at him, a tiny glint flashed in Akut's hand—and Caron was already kicking off the ground.
Chingsonggak Akut's abilities were well known.
He was a martial artist who wielded a single spear, and his pride was the thrust: the simplest technique, yet the one that best exploited a spear's virtues. A Sword Master might ignore tens of meters when swinging a blade; Akut's range put even that to shame.
Easily hundreds of meters.
It was more accurate to say he fought with a longbow than a spear. The instant the spearhead glinted in Akut's grip, Caron twisted his head. A flash of light grazed his cheek; an instant later a crater punched into the earth behind him with a heavy BOOM.
Another flash.
Of course it did not stop at one. Light streaked again and again. Amid the white lances of radiance Caron adjusted his grip on the sword.
Gerd was the one racing toward Carpediem.
Therefore the Demon King's attacks could be ignored for now; that was Gerd's burden. Caron's eyes saw only what he himself had to cut.
Whiiiiiiish!
With the absolute minimum of motion Caron deflected Akut's strikes—sometimes splitting them, sometimes shearing them away. The clean, efficiency-obsessed movement Najin employed had originally been learned from Caron. Caron pursued restraint and simplicity.
Minimal motion, maximum result.
That was the sword he sought. The way he wielded aura with such thrift looked almost shabby for a Sword Master; at a glance he might even be mistaken for a Sword Seeker. Yet the results that blade produced were unmistakably those of a transcendent.
Bang! KRAAAANG! Bang!
Light-lances that punched multi-meter craters into the earth the moment they struck anything—yet the instant they met Caron's sword they split in silence and scattered.
Flash.
Akut's spearhead flared; dozens of light-lances came in a single volley. Caron's motion remained unhurried. He simply stepped forward, one pace at a time, cutting the beams apart.
Through the dispersing light both Akut and Caron reached the same conclusion.
This would not decide anything.
Akut's spear flashed again. Aura erupted from the weapon and dyed the air around him. He drew his arm far back and swung. For a heartbeat, as a transcendent poured out maximum physical force, space itself warped around the limb.
Flash.
Light flared—and Caron saw it: a spear tearing the air, outrunning sound itself. Not merely condensed aura fired as a projectile; the spearhead itself had been launched.
A thrown spear.
Caron was already moving before it left the hand. The aura he had been rationing erupted like a detonation. He swung a white lance of light of his own.
CRACK.
Spear and sword collided. The rebound shoved the air aside—shoved sound itself aside. The laughter that had filled the stage, the applause, all of it vanished.
Less than a second.
The decision was made.
Caron's blade knocked Akut's spear aside. Its trajectory skewed; it skipped across the ground and rebounded. Where it struck, a vast crater opened and the earth shook. The tremor rocked Caron's stance for an instant, then he kicked off again and charged.
The weakness of a thrown spear is basic knowledge: once the weapon leaves the hand, a miss leaves the thrower exposed.
But a transcendent is not bound by common sense.
The spear Akut had "missed" scraped the ground, pivoted, and shot toward Caron's back. Caron sensed it yet did not stop. He only poured on more speed toward Akut.
In a pure one-on-one he might have answered at leisure; there was no leisure now. If he did not remove Akut quickly the entire battle would tip.
Caron made his judgment.
It was the correct one. Closing the distance favored him. At point-blank range, in the space where steel could touch steel, he knew thousands upon thousands of ways to break an enemy.
The Sword Church existed to plumb the depths of sword technique.
The Sword Saint who sat at its head was a being who had reached the extreme of every art.
Aura output? Number of stars? What did any of that matter? Close the distance and he won without fail. That was Caron's confidence—and an objective fact proven time and again, not mere arrogance.
A spin.
Against the closing Caron, Akut drew a short spear and tried to answer—only to lose one eye in a handful of exchanges. The moment sword and short spear met, Akut's weapon bent along an impossible path. The blade that had clearly been aimed at his arm suddenly leapt and took the eye.
With half his vision gone, Caron's sword only grew fiercer. One exchange, two, three—and Akut's arm vanished.
Whiiiiish!
The returning spear arrived a heartbeat late, aiming to skewer Caron's back. Caron snapped his head aside, twisted, and slammed his blade down onto the shaft.
CRACK—the spear buried itself in the earth.
As if it possessed a will of its own the weapon quivered and tried to leap free toward Caron; he stamped it back down with a raised foot and swung in the same motion. The stomp, the evasion, the cut—none of it was separate. Everything was a single action.
Fwit.
Akut's remaining eye disappeared as well. Even blinded, a transcendent's senses still measured distance. Akut retreated hard. Caron refused to let the withdrawing enemy go and stepped in deeper.
Akut held six stars.
The Sword Saint held six as well.
Being so thoroughly overpowered by an opponent of equal stars—Akut's expression, hidden behind the mask, was unreadable.
But only for a moment.
Caron's blade carved away the eye-holes; the cracked mask fell with a dry crunch. The face revealed beneath made Caron's spine prickle for an instant.
Akut was smiling.
As if he could no longer contain his delight.
3.
It was not the laugh of a madman. It was the laugh of a man certain of victory—the laugh of someone who found the entire situation too ridiculous to bear. Caron's senses screamed warning. Something was wrong; the knowledge climbed his spine.
Caron was a peerless genius.
Close the distance and he did not lose.
But that held only in a pure one-on-one with no third party and no stage-authority intervening.
Thuk.
Hands erupted from the ground, seizing Caron's ankles and calves. He swept them all away with a swing of the sword and took another step.
Whoosh.
In that same instant Akut thrust out a hand—as if trying to press a mask onto Caron's face. A cheap trick. Caron swung and carved Akut's last remaining arm to pieces.
Instead of blood, paint splattered across Caron's face with a wet splat.
And in that moment—
Kakakakaka, kaka, kakakakaka!
Laughter stole Caron's senses. It robbed him of hearing; the paint bursting from Akut's arm like fireworks robbed him of sight.
A transcendent could predict the future with near-perfect accuracy—but that prediction was built from information gathered by eyes and ears. Strip away hearing and sight and foresight becomes useless.
In the brief instant Caron's future-sight went numb, the Revelry Emperor's forces hidden beneath the earth surged into the open. Jesters held back until the absolute last, decisive moment. They drove their weapons into Caron's legs, his torso, his shoulders, his arms.
"Ha."
And Caron laughed.
"Pathetic little tricks."
He did not need to wait for his senses to return. The moment something touched his body he moved. His swinging blade shredded the jesters; they burst apart.
Standing on paint-smeared earth, Caron blinked several times. Sight restored, he glared at Akut.
Akut was gathering the jesters' paint, restoring the arm and eyes he had lost. Caron's own wounds, by contrast, refused to close.
Kaka, kakaka.
And the laughter still echoed in his ears. Everywhere he looked, more jesters kept rising from the ground. Widening his view further, he saw Gerd locked in single combat with the Demon King of Grief—and losing ground.
The situation was deteriorating.
Their odds were collapsing by the second. As the laughter swelled ever louder Caron frowned, reset his grip, and hurled himself into the jesters—intent on carving through them to the recovering Akut beyond.
"Now."
"Aurora."
Cut, cut, and cut again.
He carved through the endlessly rising jesters.
Kaka, kakakakaka!
The more paint that covered him, the louder the laughter grew, stealing Caron's hearing. That was why he never heard it:
Someone punching a hole through Carpediem's stage.
Someone smashing jesters aside as they closed from the flank.
Caron only registered the change when a single line of storm slammed sideways into the jesters and blasted them away.
Ramming.
Storm after storm erupted in succession, sweeping the jesters aside. A spear slammed into the ground right in front of Caron—not Akut's.
"Huh."
A moment later someone slid into a landing before that spear. Recognizing the figure, Caron could not help a short, incredulous laugh. Completely unexpected reinforcements.
He looked up. The Dawn Star was shining in the sky.
No words were needed.
After a brief exchange of glances, Najin took station on Caron's right. Caron took the left. As if they had rehearsed it beforehand, the two of them kicked off the earth at almost the same instant and charged the jesters.
The Dawn Star and the Thousand Sword Star blazed.