Hawk's Eye, Kaufman Teosis (1)
Platinum symbolizes the stars.
The stars that blaze so brilliantly across the night sky are a platinum hue—pure white threaded with gold—and Excalibur, the Sword of the Stars, likewise bears a platinum edge. So when people saw that color, their minds turned to the stars.
Platinum symbolizes the stars, and it is sacred as well.
Every constellation in that night sky is a great existence, and the churches that revere the stars hold starlight itself as holy. Therefore platinum, which so closely resembles that light, has always been regarded as something sacred.
A thing that resembles the stars, and is sacred.
Because of that symbolism, platinum found its way into every corner of the world. Onto the lighthouses of the Holy Light Church, onto the Platinum Tower that rose at the heart of the Empire, into the crest that stood for the Imperial house itself, and into countless other treasures besides.
Yet there were places it never reached.
The flame that burned souls as its fuel.
Platinum mana. Platinum circles. Platinum sword aura…
Countless people had longed for platinum, yet no mage, no swordsman, had ever succeeded in raising a platinum flame. It was a color permitted to only one person in the whole of human history.
The great hero Arthur.
Only that hero had possessed the platinum flame. Only Arthur had been able to wield platinum sword aura. That was a tale known far and wide, a proposition hardened into truth by the fact that, in the centuries since Arthur’s death, not a single counterexample had ever appeared.
It should have been so.
It ought to have been so.
Pauve’s pupils shook like mad.
She stared at the sword aura burning before her eyes—Najin’s sword aura. Unless both of her eyes were lying to her, that light held platinum within it. Before the searing, unmistakable platinum of that aura, Pauve swallowed dryly.
An illusion. A trick of the light. A mistake.
A dozen possibilities flashed through her mind. Her instincts rejected every one of them.
But even so.
Pauve clenched her teeth.
Even if that truly was the platinum aura of legend, she knew there was only one thing left for her to do. Dropping to her knees and bowing her head now would buy her nothing but death.
The four rings—the four circles—that floated above her back began to spin with savage force.
Having greedily devoured every catalyst prepared in the workshop, Pauve’s circles stood ready to vomit forth their spell. Feeling her mana thrash and heave, she forced the corner of her mouth upward into a smile. In the end, she had only one choice remaining.
Kill the one in front of her.
That was the only way she would live.
She leveled the tip of her staff at Najin, who stood wreathed in platinum aura. This was the most powerful spell she could cast, and with every catalyst packing the workshop feeding into it, its power would… easily rival a five-circle spell.
Four-circle magic: Hunger of the Dead.
A pulse bloomed from the tip of her staff. Following the radial waves that raced outward, the hands of the dead erupted from the ground. Those rising claws raked everything they touched, polluted it, crumbled it, and finally remade it into the same kind of dead that they themselves were.
The dead, flesh rotting and sloughing away, could never satisfy their hunger; they could only pant forever after an unending emptiness.
The power of Hunger of the Dead, fueled by that fierce obsession and by the soul-echoes of corpses and living sacrifices, was far from light. Without the Church’s baptism, a single brush of those hands would rot flesh from bone until the victim, too, crumbled into a corpse.
Rrrrrrrumble—!
Hands of the dead filled her entire field of vision as they surged forward.
There was nowhere to dodge, of course. Watching the spell Pauve had unleashed, Najin clicked his tongue. Sure enough, once you reached four-circle magic, the effects became properly threatening.
—Well, of course they do. From four circles on, you’re dealing with siege weapons.
Merlin whispered.
—You’re not supposed to let someone cast a spell like that in the first place.
—In a fight at this level, the moment a four-circle spell goes off, the match is as good as decided.
Merlin was right, without a doubt.
If an ordinary mage had manifested something of comparable power, he would have had to resign himself to a mortal wound. A spell that offered no room to evade and simply rolled forward in a wide front was, even to Najin’s eyes, a genuine threat.
So this is what it feels like to fight a mage.
With that thought, Najin quietly settled into his stance. Even cornered as he seemed, his breathing and his gaze remained cold and still.
After all, a four-circle spell was only truly dangerous when the opponent was casting an “ordinary” spell.
The woman before him was a black mage, and as black mages always did, Pauve’s magic belonged to no righteous path; it was the sort that defiled the natural order. That being the case, he decided, it was no problem at all.
Tap.
Lifting his sword high, Najin took a step.
Without retreating an inch, he charged straight into the forest of dead hands. The instant the stretching claws were about to touch his body—
Ssshk—Najin’s blade sheared through a dead man’s hand.
Pauve’s eyes flew wide.
Cutting a spell was not, in itself, impossible. But this was different. The hands that touched the platinum aura were burning away as if cast into a fire.
Hssssssssssss—!
They burned. The spell burned.
The dead hands, the moment they met Najin’s sword, were severed and simultaneously consumed by starlight. Wherever the platinum aura touched, the claws crumbled as if shadows were recoiling from the dawn.
…Platinum symbolizes the stars, and it is sacred as well.
The platinum sword aura that only Arthur had ever possessed in human history had gone by many names—the Dragon-Slaying Blade, the Sword of the Stars—but among demons it was known by another.
The Aura of Judgment.
It burns the aberrant. It severs them.
And thus it judges all that is twisted and unclean. It scorches demonic flesh, disrupts regeneration, and rejects polluted mana at the root.
—It’s just a matter of compatibility from the start.
Looking at the scene unfolding before her, Merlin let out a short, incredulous laugh. Even she found it hard to believe.
That day, when she had first seen Najin’s platinum aura.
At the time she had only suspected; she had not been certain, so she had put off her judgment, telling herself she would check again once he became a Sword Seeker and the true nature of his aura revealed itself. And now that Najin stood on the threshold of the Seeker’s realm… Merlin had no choice but to admit it.
He had only poured in a fragment of his mindscape.
It was still incomplete.
And yet it already carried the nature of a star.
The sword aura of the stars that demons feared, that witches and dragons hated, that fallen stars cursed. The aura blooming along Najin’s blade was of the same kind as Arthur’s.
Did he gain that aura because he pulled Excalibur?
Or was it something else?
Did he gain that aura because the star he longed for, the star he painted, was Arthur’s star?
She could not know which.
She could not know—yet, gazing at the desolate radiance of Najin’s star, Merlin smiled bitterly. The starlight coiled around his sword resembled Arthur’s… and did not.
The spell was being carved apart. The hands burned away.
Pauve’s gaze wavered, and the staff she had thrust straight forward wavered with it. In that moment she felt true fear.
Her four-circle spell was being butchered.
The strongest magic she could manifest was being cut down with absurd ease. Every time Najin swung his sword, whole swaths of hands were swept away; every time he took a single step forward, the distance between them collapsed in an instant.
How…?
She could not understand it.
By every rule of common sense it was impossible. Yet the hands that crumbled to ash under starlight screamed at Pauve that this was reality.
Ssshk.
What rang out was a chilling sound of cutting.
What echoed in her ears was the hiss of severed things burning. Starlight advanced, setting the dead ablaze.
By the time she came back to herself, every last one of those countless hands had been sliced away. From the tip of the staff she still held outstretched, only spent mana rose like a heat haze.
And then—tap.
Footsteps sounded right in front of her. Having shattered a four-circle spell head-on and closed the gap, Najin had finally stepped to within a breath of Pauve’s face.
Ssshak!
Najin swung. The blade sheared through Pauve’s staff. Carving the staff apart, the sword rose and then fell on a slant. The descending edge parted the barrier she wore as gently as silk.
There was no resistance. No repulsive force rose to meet it.
The blade that had cut through the barrier came to rest against Pauve’s throat. Even in the dark, the platinum aura shone with a desolate light. That was the last sight Pauve ever saw.
Ssshk.
The end of a black mage who had dreamed of lofty goals was pitiful. Her severed head rolled across the floor. Leaving Pauve’s collapsing corpse where it lay, Najin let out a long breath. A draining weakness flooded through him as the strength left his limbs.
It really is hard, isn’t it.
—You’re not a Sword Seeker yet.
Merlin said.
—Your aura hasn’t even settled into a form fit to hold a mindscape, and you’re just shoving one into it anyway. Of course it’s going to take a toll.
Letting Merlin’s muttering wash over him, Najin flicked the tip of his blade clean and sheathed it. She was right; because he had not yet reached the Seeker’s realm, the time he could maintain an aura charged with mindscape was short.
Feels like it lasts several times less than the white aura.
An aura holding a pure-white star drained far more slowly than one holding a platinum star. This was still a power beyond him. With that thought, Najin looked around.
“What a wretched place.”
Kephalon’s workshop—the one where, decades earlier, that man had supposedly plotted something in this city. Taking in the sight of it, Najin frowned. Even he, whose stomach was hardly delicate, could not entirely suppress the nausea at the “things” laid out there.
—Black mages never change, do they? Hundreds of years go by and they’re still at the same disgusting work. Still just as foul.
Merlin reacted with the same open revulsion.
I’ll have to go up and report this separately, Najin thought. Nothing good could come of something like this remaining beneath the city.
“Hoo…”
Letting out a long breath, he pulled the bone stake from his body. He sprinkled a trauma potion from his pouch over the wound, then tipped back a potion stamped with the mark of Dieta’s trading company and swallowed it down.
—Looks like you only packed the high-grade stuff?
Seems so. I think I can already feel it working.
Najin dragged Pauve’s corpse after him.
He would need to show it to the client. Searching out the passage he had come through, he set off. The tunnel that led upward. The door was sealed tight, but when he pressed Pauve’s face against it a few times it ground open with a heavy rumble.
Tap.
The first thing Najin saw as he stepped out through the open door was Kaufman, crossbow leveled straight at him.
Najin met Kaufman’s eyes as he emerged from the passage. Kaufman, who had been aiming the crossbow, lowered it at once and walked toward him.
“I expected Pauve to come out. Instead it’s you.”
“I told you I’d handle it, didn’t I?”
“I figured that was just bluster. Who the hell charges a four-circle black mage when they’ve already got holes punched clean through them?”
“Apparently I do.”
Kaufman let out a short laugh.
He pointed at the corpse Najin was dragging.
“So you won.”
“It turned out that way.”
“Hah. You’re something else, kid. How’d you do it?”
“What’s so special about the way a swordsman fights? I ran in and cut her down.”
“Plain and simple. I like that.”
Kaufman exhaled a long, long breath.
“Well, thanks to you the job got a lot easier. Once Pauve was gone, mopping up the rest was simple enough. See that over there? The ones I put holes in.”
“I see them clearly.”
“Now all that’s left is to go make the report…”
Kaufman rubbed the back of his neck.
As if it itched. Letting the sentence trail off, he looked at Najin.
“You remember what I asked you last time?”
“About what?”
“Whether you were with the Church’s shadow division.”
“I remember. Do you need an answer?”
A question Kaufman had said needed no answer back then.
A question he had waved off as mere muttering to himself. Kaufman shook his head.
“No need. Watching you fight, I could tell you weren’t.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“The Church’s shadow agents don’t fight the way you do. Separate from that, though… you do seem to have some kind of connection to them. Mind if I ask just one more thing?”
Najin nodded.
Kaufman asked his question.
“The underground city of Atman. How’s it doing these days?”
An unexpected question from an unexpected man.
Najin’s thoughts froze for an instant. Why this man was asking him. How much the man in front of him already knew. A flood of questions tore through his mind.
At the end of them, the conclusion Najin reached was only one.
Immediate response.
He dropped Pauve’s corpse and drew his sword. But the time it took him to get the blade free… was a full second slower than the speed at which he usually made decisions. His mind had been in chaos.
And one second—
“Somehow I figured it’d be like this.”
—was more than enough time to lose the first strike.
“Damn bastards, the lot of you.”
An arrow buried itself in Najin’s body.