Icarus's Wings (3)
Here stands a man named Anton Quijano.
Romanticist. The man who loved a witch. The fool blinded by love. The names for him are endless, but every one of them points only to the Anton Quijano who came after he met Lapis.
Before that.
Before he ever met Lapis—four hundred years ago—Anton went by a rather different name.
Madman Anton.
A hunter who stalked witches alone. A rabid dog that tore into anything even remotely connected to them. Lunatic. Mad dog. The words used for him then were as grim as they came.
And Anton lived up to every one of them.
He killed witches. He killed them, and killed them again. As if testing how much of himself he could throw away for a single purpose, Anton cast everything aside and carried out his revenge. The achievements of a man consumed by vengeance were worthy of being called a legend.
He slew witches by the double digits.
He even hunted down the Witch of Scorching Flame, who held eight stars.
Save for Merlin, no one in history had killed more witches than Anton Quijano.
"…"
Recalling those days, Anton Quijano took up a sword for the first time in four hundred years. The moment his hand closed around the hilt, his eyes sank into a cold stillness. When he opened them again, what filled his vision was a battlefield of stars—constellations colliding with constellations.
Gwoooooooo…
The low, rolling cry of whales. A battlefield where millions of them swam and heaved up waves.
A flash.
Countless stars crashed together, scattering starlight—and among them, clowns had slipped in as well.
It was a chaotic free-for-all in the truest sense. Taking it all in at a glance, Anton curled the corner of his mouth.
"Ahh."
A battlefield so tangled that friend and foe were impossible to tell apart. This—this was the kind of battlefield Anton loved more than anything.
He kicked off a leaping whale and broke into a run. Four hundred years since he had last drawn a blade, yet time had not been enough to rust Anton's edge. With every flash of his sword, a whale's body came apart in clean pieces.
Slaaaaaash!
Blood sprayed in every direction. With a great sweep of his sword, Anton sent the severed fragments flying on a blast of pressure, using them as stepping stones as he leapt and leapt again, cutting straight across the field.
"Ghk—"
"Kh—…"
Wherever Anton moved, stifled groans burst from every corner of the battlefield. He raced on, shearing off shoulders, arms, legs, ankles—whatever he could reach—from the constellations closing in on Najin.
No grand, showy flourishes.
Only restrained, economical motion, repeated again and again.
Killing a transcendent in a single blow was difficult—but carving pieces from a body while its owner's attention was elsewhere was not. And victory, after all, was made of such small things gathered together.
Through the arcs of flying blood, Anton's eyes flashed. Having crossed the entire field, he skated over the sea and flipped his grip, reversing the sword in his hand.
What he left behind as he cut through the battle was a single path.
Anton's starlight lay scattered across the battlefield. He drove the reverse-gripped blade into the ground. Unlike the madman of those old days, Anton was no longer alone. He could use methods far more efficient than before.
"Lapis."
The woman who held half his heart, half his star. His other half. He spoke her name.
A sharp tap.
In that instant, from far away, the sound of a staff striking the ground rang out with perfect clarity. No matter the distance, Anton could feel her now—Lapis's presence, her voice.
The path Anton had sown with starlight.
That path became a fuse. Lapis, who shared a single constellation with him, set it alight.
Ninth-Circle Magic
⟨ Calamity Fire ⟩
Fire surged up.
From the wounds Anton had carved into the constellations, from the path he had taken—across the battlefield, dark-crimson flames roared skyward. The screams of stars burning away, the steam boiling up from the sea, plunged the field into even deeper chaos.
Anton leapt back into a battlefield so choked with steam that he could no longer see an inch ahead.
The madman ran wild.
Blood, flame, and screams rose in turn.
From the deck of the sailboat where he had paused to catch his breath, Najin watched Anton tear through the battlefield and let out a long, disbelieving exhale.
I'd heard the stories, but…
It was beyond anything he had imagined. A single man was turning the entire flow of the battle. Lapis thrust her face suddenly into his.
"Well? Isn't he magnificent?"
She smiled as if showing off her lover.
"You can take the dog out of the fight, but you can't take the fight out of the dog. Even if he's been holding it down since he met me, that man's nature is pure bastard. An absolute masterpiece of a bastard."
Najin could not quite tell whether that was an insult or a compliment—but the fondness in Lapis's eyes as she looked toward Anton suggested the latter.
"A man like that goes soft for me. Watches my face for every little cue. That, kid, is what drives a person completely insane. Hah… it's been so long. Feels good."
"…"
"My, what kind of look is that?"
"Nothing, just… thought it was unique."
Lapis snorted a quiet laugh.
"Love is something unique people do together, kid—people who are just the right amount of crazy about each other."
Kids will be kids, she muttered, and shoved Najin lightly in the back.
"Leave this place to us and go."
She tapped the deck at his feet with her staff. As the magic for a leap took shape, Lapis flicked the brim of her pointed hat with a finger.
"Where you need to be isn't here."
The instant she snapped her fingers, the magic bloomed. Boosted by the spell, Najin sprang high and looked back. From the sailboat, he saw Lapis drive her staff down.
Eight stars rose.
Nine circles locked together in the air.
As the great mage's storm and flame swept the field, Najin turned his gaze forward again.
"…"
He advanced.
"Open the path!"
"Do not let it close. Break through however you must. Did we not gather our strength for this day?"
Borne on the aid of countless transcendents, he pressed on.
"Now!"
"Push! Grab hold and drag them down!"
Past the transcendents, Najin drove forward.
And at the end of all that pressing on waited the greatest whale of all. The mother of every whale—the one that bore the ancient castle of the Wandering Star on its back—roared toward the approaching Najin.
A cry that rode the sea and rolled across the world.
With the echoing pulse of that heart, pillars of water erupted from the surface. The pillars were made of whales, and every last one of them lunged for Najin. The greatest whale among them did the same.
Countless whales, and the greatest whale of all.
Facing the tide that came to swallow his star, Najin tightened his grip on Excalibur. He waited until the distance closed enough—until the moment when all of them filled his vision at once—and opened his mouth.
"Merlin."
He called her name, and drew out the measure he had been saving. As if she had been waiting for exactly this, Merlin laid her hand over his.
Rings unfurled behind Najin's back.
One, two, three… nine rings in all. Because they had been shaped from Najin's borrowed starlight they groaned and shuddered, yet still they locked together and began to turn.
"…"
With eyes sunk cold and still, Merlin looked ahead. Holding the oncoming whales, the sea, the water-pillars, and the stars all in a single glance, she flicked her fingers lightly.
Unique Magic
⟨ Silence ⟩
The whole world turned pure white.
For as long as he held Excalibur, Najin was a transcendent.
Only halfway there, yes—but having stepped onto transcendence, he could now fully transfer his mindscape into reality… which meant the Merlin who dwelled within that mindscape could take solid form.
Of course, it was not perfect.
What rested inside Najin was only Merlin's soul-body; her true body was elsewhere. The power a soul-body could wield was limited, and even that depended entirely on the strength Najin possessed.
The efficiency is terrible, Merlin had said.
In the end, it meant drawing on Najin's power.
"If I decided to really pull on your strength, one or two spells and you'd be flat on the floor."
"You know—the way you used to collapse after using that secret technique of the Triumphant Sword once? Same idea."
In short, the cost-to-output ratio was abysmal.
So she had told him it would be best if she stuck to support.
"But on a battlefield of stars, the story changes."
Except for a few special cases.
"Excalibur has a function that draws in residual starlight from the surroundings."
The starlight Najin himself released crumbled and scattered, so it could not be reclaimed—but replenishing power from the starlight other stars produced was entirely possible.
"A battlefield thick with stars."
"On a field where star crashes into star and starlight is everywhere, you can draw as much as you want without fretting over efficiency."
"Add Excalibur's release function on top of that, and I should be able to put out roughly half of what my true self can manage."
One chance only.
If they gathered every scrap of surrounding starlight and poured it into a single spell, it was possible.
That was what she had said.
"Now."
And now, they were putting it into motion.
Enough fighting had already been done.
Enough starlight had been scattered. They had drawn close enough to the being that had built this stage.
The conditions were met. This was the moment.
Kiiiiiiiiing—!
Centered on Excalibur, nine rings locked together. With a grinding crack they meshed and spun hard.
The starlight that filled every direction.
The residual mana.
Everything the colliding stars had produced.
All of it poured into Excalibur. It was a force the Najin of this moment could never hope to contain. If the power he could use at once was a single cup of water, what was gathering to him now was a vast lake.
Power that would overflow and go to waste.
But Merlin was at his side. She took that wasted force and poured it whole into her own circles. It was more than a soul-body should have been able to handle—yet through sheer processing power and experience, Merlin meshed the circles and set them spinning.
And what took shape was Merlin's unique magic.
By circle-count, it approached the tenth.
With nine circles, Merlin worked the miracle of a tenth-circle spell. Transcendents who witnessed the torrent of overflowing mana in the air went wide-eyed. Even to the stars of that sky, it was a sight to astonish and appall.
Young stars, unable to grasp what was happening, simply stared in a daze. But stars that had lived long ages—or that had known the era when Merlin walked the world—turned and fled the battlefield without a backward glance.
They knew.
Merlin, the Mage of the Lake.
How terrifying the magic of the great mage who, alone, had cast hundreds of stars down from the heavens could be.
"…"
Looking down on the world with eyes sunk cold and still, Merlin flicked her fingers.
Unique Magic
⟨ Silence ⟩
The nine rings shattered. The gathered starlight and mana erupted in a single instant. The torrent of power became a vast wave and swept the battlefield.
And then—a flash.
The world turned pure white.
It was no mere figure of speech. In a single heartbeat, everything froze pure white.
The surging water-pillars, the whales charging at Najin, the greatest whale itself, the stars—even the sea and everything around it—all of it froze solid. And what followed was a silence without a single sound.
In that silence, only a sharp crack of something splitting could be heard. To stars friendly to Najin the magic was little more than a skin of ice—but not so for the others. Stars frozen through and through began to fracture.
Dozens of stars crumbled to dust.
"Hoo…"
Najin looked at Merlin as she let out a long breath beside him. She had said she would be able to wield half the power of her true self.
Turning that over in his mind, he thought:
Half? This is half?
It was a landscape he could scarcely believe even with both eyes open. Recalling the peak Merlin he had seen in the Black Spire, Najin swallowed dryly.
"Admiring is fine, but—"
Having spent too much, Merlin's form frayed into starlight. No longer able to hold her manifestation, she slipped back into Najin's inner world.
—You've still got a long way to go, don't you? Get moving.
She pointed ahead.
There stood the ancient castle the greatest frozen whale still bore upon its back—the palace of the Wandering Star.
Najin landed on the whale.
Perhaps Merlin's magic had slowed even time itself by freezing it, or perhaps the flow of time simply changed at the heart of the stage. With every landscape beyond him crawling by in slow motion, Najin walked on.
A frozen sea.
A frozen whale and a frozen castle.
In a world where everything had frozen to a stop, Najin alone crossed the stage and threw open the gates of the Wandering Star. Toward Icarus, who would be waiting at the heart of the ancient castle, he set his steps.