Icarus's Wings (7)
Najin had lived Daedalus's life.
As Daedalus, he had traveled with Icarus, forged great deeds, and witnessed Helios rise and fall.
"…"
At the end of that journey, returned to himself once more, Najin looked ahead.
There sat Icarus, bound to the throne.
Icarus's wings had melted in the sun. His flesh was chained; he could not leave this place. The freest adventurer the world had ever known had lost his wings and lost his freedom. All that remained here was the king of a fallen nation called Helios.
Every citizen was dead.
The nation had fallen.
There was nothing left to protect, nothing left to answer for.
And still Icarus was bound to the throne. Hundreds of years had passed since that day, and still he had not found his freedom.
"Ah."
Watching that sight, Najin opened his mouth.
Or perhaps it was Daedalus who spoke.
Stepping into the throne room, Daedalus looked upon his old friend. He beheld the end his friend had met. What he would be thinking now, what he would be feeling — Najin knew it as naturally as breathing. He had lived the man's life, after all.
Daedalus would have smiled bitterly.
He would have sighed.
He would have regretted, entertained the what-ifs, and finally understood how meaningless those assumptions were — and then he would have spoken.
"Icarus."
In the end, this was all Daedalus could do.
"When's the next trip?"
The last words left unfinished that day.
And the question he had always thrown at Icarus.
Najin smiled bitterly as he said it.
"…"
And the Icarus bound to the throne slowly lifted his head. With the hollow eyes of the dead, Icarus looked at the human standing before him. The gaze was directed at Najin, yet it was not Najin he saw.
It was the image of Daedalus overlaid upon him.
Icarus's pupils contracted. Ordinarily, human speech does not reach a being who has become one of the dead. Communication is impossible; drawing any human response from them is a near-hopeless task.
It should have been impossible.
But the Star of Requiem shone.
Icarus, who had forgotten himself across far too many years, could not recall who he was even bathed in the Star of Requiem's light — but it could at least stir his soul.
"I'm tired of waiting. Getting restless."
Najin smiled bitterly. Just like Daedalus.
"Time we left. We've stayed in one place too long."
Speaking words Icarus himself had once said, Daedalus closed his eyes. When those eyes opened again, it was Najin who stood there. Najin clenched his fist upon the empty air.
The Sword of Stars, Excalibur, was drawn.
The throne room, left to rot for hundreds of years, flooded with starlight. Dragging that overflowing radiance with him, Najin leveled his blade.
"Icarus."
Icarus reacted to the starlight Excalibur poured forth. His eyes flew wide, and his chained body began to tremble. The tremor ran along the chains into the throne room, then from the throne room through the entire fortress.
Crack.
As fractures raced across the castle, Najin crooked the corner of his mouth.
"You said you wanted to reach King Arthur."
He amplified Excalibur's starlight.
"Then try it."
Here is the star you so desperately longed to touch.
Reach it, if you can.
Provoking him so, Najin took a step toward Icarus. In the next instant, a monstrous cry burst from the mouth of the dead Icarus. With a roar like the keening of whales, the fortress began to collapse.
The Wandering Star — Icarus.
A ten-star Constellation. A fallen star. The first and last king of the ruined nation of Helios. Helios's sole survivor. The navigator who migrated hundreds of thousands of whales into the sky. The freest adventurer who ever lived.
And Daedalus's dearest friend.
A funeral for the star that forgot itself.
Reciting a eulogy, Najin charged.
Even having forgotten himself, Icarus was a ten-star Constellation.
The number of stars does not guarantee strength — but the wall between nine and ten is vast. That he had broken through that wall was proof enough of what Icarus was.
—Even broken.
Merlin said.
—It still means he's a terrifyingly powerful being. The Constellations of this age fear the "hundreds of thousands of whales" Icarus commands… but you've seen the past. You know, don't you?
Najin nodded with a bitter smile.
Of course he knew.
Icarus had possessed power enough to lift hundreds of thousands of whales into the sky entirely, and he was the origin of every flight-type magic used in the present age. But that alone could not explain him.
—Over the long years, the magic called "Icarus's Wings" was dissected piece by piece, broken down and studied. And in that process, the mages of the Magic Towers had to reclassify magic itself.
Icarus's Wings, and the rest of Icarus's magic.
In his time they had been left in the realm of Mystery, but as the ages turned, Icarus's magic was researched. One fact emerged from the results.
—The core of Icarus's magic is force fields.
Magic that wraps mana around objects and interferes with them.
Most of Icarus's magic had been reinterpreted in the modern age as the magic of the Force Field school, and Icarus's talent itself had been analyzed down to a single word.
Telekinesis.
The act of influencing surrounding objects through one's mindscape. The dearest wish of Force Field mages, the ultimate extreme the Violet Tower still pursues to this day. A transcendent who had reached that height more than nine hundred years ago flicked his hand.
KUUUNG!
In that instant the castle shuddered. The fortress Daedalus had designed for Icarus — walls built to withstand even a Constellation's assault — came apart like puzzle pieces and shot into the sky.
—You remember that black mage you fought before, right? The six-circle one — Zharkan, was it? The one contracted to a demon.
He remembered. Najin recalled the demon contractor he and Yuel had hunted before departing for the Outer Land.
—That black mage could barely manage a force field a few meters across…
Merlin gestured at their surroundings.
—Icarus will be different.
There was no need to ask how. One look around was answer enough.
The fortress ceiling came apart and rose into the sky. And it was not only the fortress. The back of the greatest whale had never held the fortress alone; beneath it, cities large and small had been arrayed in rows.
Of those dozens of cities, nearly half disassembled.
The disassembled cities rose high into the air.
Fragments tens of meters across at the largest, a few meters at the smallest, moved at Icarus's will. Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of such pieces floated in the sky.
"Hah."
Najin let out a hollow laugh. Having seen Daedalus's memories, he knew. Every last one of those things was a structure Daedalus had built. Which meant they were materials solid enough to endure a transcendent's power.
And there were tens of thousands of them.
Feeling as though tens of thousands of spears, arrows, and blades had been leveled at him, Najin sighed.
"Somehow there's never an easy fight."
—So?
Merlin shrugged.
—You going to run? That's an option, I suppose.
"After coming this far?"
Najin adjusted his grip on the sword.
"Maybe if it were the old days."
The seven stars carved into Excalibur blazed. As the stars lit one after another, amplifying his sword aura, Najin spoke.
"Things are a little different now."
Almost the same instant Najin moved, pillars shot toward him. KUUUUUUUNG! The ground heaved and dust billowed high into the air. But by the time the pillars slammed into the throne room, Najin was already gone.
A leap — and then Ramming.
Driving a Ramming into the earth and using the recoil to spring high, Najin exhaled a long breath. Eyes wide, he took in the battlefield. Mapping the positions and sizes of the pillars floating overhead, he moved.
SWEEEEEEESH!
Pillars tore through the air. Twisting his body mid-flight, Najin drove Excalibur into one of them. Just as he had once stepped on a dragon's scales and climbed onto its back, he planted his feet on a protruding section of the pillar and mounted it.
The pillar bucked and veered at tremendous speed, but what might have been too much before was a pace the transcendent Najin of now could handle.
Bang.
Najin kicked off and sprinted along the pillar's length.
The pillar's trajectory snapped without warning, plunging nearly vertical — but to Najin it was no different from level ground. Of course, Icarus was not about to simply watch.
Pillars closed in from every side, packing the space around him tight. Above, below, left, right — a seamless cage of stone hurtled inward. There was no gap to squeeze through, or so it seemed—
KUUUNG.
Najin drove his feet into the pillar and made no attempt to dodge. He swept his trailing blade. Starlight flashed, and a single line was drawn through the empty air.
SHRAAAAAAAAAAK!
The pillar split. Solid enough to withstand a transcendent's assault, it still could not endure Excalibur's cutting edge. Najin raced along the path the split had opened.
Dozens of pillars lunged for his back. Dozens more for his front, dozens more from either side — hundreds, thousands of spearpoints leveled at him, and still Najin did not hesitate.
The Star of Breakthrough shone.
Eyes narrowed to slits, Najin punched through gaps thin as threads. He leveled his sword at Icarus, who was swinging tens of thousands of blades.
At the chains coiled around the man's body.
As if he meant to cut those first.
Najin felt as though he were fighting an entire nation.
The cities that composed Helios had become one, barring his path, turning into spears and blades to strike at him. Parrying, batting them aside, weaving through, Najin thought:
No — this was no easy fight after all.
A single pillar a few meters across? He could cut it. Even dozens of such pillars raining down, he could shear through them all. He had the skill for that much.
But not dozens — hundreds.
Hundreds becoming thousands, tens of thousands.
From there, the story changed. Cut and cut and there was no end. Tens of thousands of blades moving exactly as Icarus imagined them were a genuine threat.
And the worse part…
was that cutting them down did nothing to reduce their number. Slice a pillar, shatter it — and the fragments themselves became smaller blades, shooting straight at him.
It was, needless to say, a stage stacked against him.
From ancient times, a duel between a Sword Master and a Grand Mage had always been decided by how thoroughly the Grand Mage had prepared, and whether there were artifacts nearby the Grand Mage could exploit.
And now?
This was Icarus's country. An entire nation. Wherever the eye fell, it belonged to Icarus; everything was a weapon he could wield. Even weakened by forgetting himself… here, Icarus was a being comparable to a god.
PABABABABABABABAK!
The shards Najin had split with his sword became a rain of tiny arrows. He cut them down — but to shear through the dozens-of-meters pillar crashing in from ahead, he had no choice but to take the hits.
Thuk — several fragments punched into his body.
Ordinary arrows or projectiles would have either punched clean through or lodged and stopped. And damage of that degree was no serious injury to a transcendent like Najin. He had allowed the hits thinking exactly that — but—
Najin's brow twitched.
Because the stone fragments lodged in his flesh were moving.
Fragments driven by telekinesis were nothing like linear thrown weapons. Even after embedding, they did not stop. Angling themselves like living things, the shards tore through Najin's body.
Khk — blood sprayed from his mouth.
Feeling the fragments churn through him toward his heart, Najin let out a hollow laugh. In that moment he felt more astonishment than pain. This was, without question, a method he had not anticipated.
In that case.
KUUUNG — Najin stamped the ground and drew up his mana.
Mana surging from his heart boiled through his veins. The mana circulating his entire body pulverized the foreign matter that had invaded his flesh. And having drawn the mana up, of course he had to use it. Najin spread the seething power in every direction.
What he poured into that spreading mana was his mindscape.
The landscape kept in the deepest place of his soul.
Najin's stage began to unfold.
If this place was Icarus's front yard — if this was Helios, the nation he owned, and that made him the one with the advantage—
Then I simply open my own stage.
In the heart of a nation built upon the sky.
Flash.
An underground city built beneath the earth unfurled.
"…"
The king of a nation built closest to the heavens, who had always looked upon the stars from nearer than anyone, gazed at Najin.
"…"
The hero of a city built farthest from the heavens, who had never been able to see the stars, gazed at Icarus.
Their eyes met.
In that overlapping gaze, Najin felt something.
"Ah."
And then he laughed.
He could not help but laugh.
Because Icarus was reaching a hand toward him. Just as he once had, out on the plains, reaching toward the sky.
Even as one of the dead, he was still yearning.
To touch a star.
To reach — a star.