Before Death Comes (5)
I comforted the Spear Saint, who looked ready to burst into tears.
She wasn't the type to cry this easily... or was she?
The Spear Saint from before my regression had been an unshakable fortress of a person, someone who never so much as wavered. I couldn't say the same about the girl standing in front of me now.
"I'll look after you from now on, so don't take it so hard. Things have been so chaotic I simply forgot. It wasn't intentional."
"That's a lot of forgetting for something you claim wasn't on purpose..."
I had no comeback for that.
I had no idea how miserable she must have felt, abandoned in a carriage and forced to drag herself all the way to the church while she was still sick. And it wasn't even my fault.
While I was unconscious, shouldn't you two — Franc and Raeli — have been the ones looking after her?
I shot them a look. Both of them casually turned their heads away.
"Ahem. Anyway, we should hurry and go after the Lord of the Black Magic Tower — for Argal and the Bishop!"
"That's the plan."
The important thing hadn't changed. There was just one problem: we still had no idea where the Lord of the Black Magic Tower was. More precisely, the Bishop knew — which meant we would have to go see him again.
"To do that, we have to go to the Bishop."
"...Then we just go and... ah."
I remembered a rather critical contradiction. I still couldn't leave this room, thanks to her magic. And Franc had absolutely no intention of letting me out.
"C-couldn't we just go find out ourselves?"
"...Would that even work?"
If simply making contact with the Bishop was enough to enter his mental world, then maybe it wouldn't matter. But I still had things I needed to discuss with him, and I wanted to be the one to continue that conversation.
It was Besia who asked the conflicted Franc to release me. That was unexpected.
"Just let him go, Franc."
"...What? Weren't you the one who wanted Argal locked up in the first place, Besia?"
Besia stood beside me, her voice worn thin with a faint, weary emptiness.
"That was just a joke. And Argal shared Bishop Revega's curse, remember?"
She hung her head. Everything that had happened seemed to have become another trial piled onto her shoulders. Besia had endured one crushing ordeal after another.
"If he needs to see the Bishop, then we should let him."
"...Alright."
Once Besia put it that way, Franc couldn't refuse any longer. She released the spell.
...At least I won't be spending the rest of my life locked in this room.
I let out a breath of relief and started toward the Bishop.
As everyone filed out into the church corridor, the Sword Saint, who had been standing with her arms crossed the entire time, approached me.
"You didn't finish the Elixir."
So she'd noticed after all.
Finishing the Elixir would have healed me completely, but I hadn't seen the need to drink all of it. I'd taken a little and left most of it. Even that much was potent enough that I could move around just fine.
The Sword Saint didn't seem to care how I used the Elixir. As long as I didn't die, her goal was met. Beyond that, she couldn't have cared less.
"The Hero knows too, I assume?"
"I figured it out. You think she wouldn't?"
So the Hero knew as well. Was she the same — fine with anything, so long as I stayed alive?
I nodded and started thinking about what to do with the leftover Elixir. It was far too expensive to pawn off easily, so I would probably have to use it myself. Was there anyone who actually needed it?
I didn't have long to dwell on it. We were able to see the Bishop again.
The Bishop lay in bed, looking as though death could claim him at any moment. Thanks to my sharing the curse, he was better than before. Before that, he had looked ready to die on the spot.
Besia approached on trembling legs and sank to her knees before him.
"Why... why does this keep happening to me..."
She had escaped the Black Magic Tower, but her fate was still bound to that place.
Besia lifted her hand with difficulty and took the Bishop's withered fingers in hers. Tears spilled down her cheeks. She was still drowning in grief when a fierce light enveloped her.
I shut my eyes against the glare. When I opened them, Besia was sleeping with a peaceful expression on her face.
...The Bishop must have done something.
I approached him as well and laid my hand on him. A brilliant light swallowed my vision.
The mental world found me once more. He must have pulled me in.
The Bishop stood waiting, his appearance restored and vigorous.
"You've returned."
"Everyone's gathered. Tell us where the Lord of the Black Magic Tower is."
The Bishop snapped his fingers, and her location appeared before me.
I frowned. She was about to cross a line that could never be permitted. I couldn't help but be stunned.
"Has the Lord of the Black Magic Tower lost her mind?"
"She very well may have."
The Lord of the Black Magic Tower had scraped together an army and was preparing to invade a city. It wasn't the Capital she was targeting, but she was still about to cross a line the Royal Family would never tolerate. Whether this was fallout from the destruction of the Black Magic Tower, I couldn't say — but the situation was grave.
...If she truly wanted it, the slaughter of an entire city wouldn't be surprising.
A village or a handful of homesteads vanishing — that I could understand. At most, a few hundred people would die. A city was a different scale entirely. Tens of thousands, at minimum. That staggering number could vanish overnight.
Wiping out a city was the kind of thing a black mage only did when they were going all-in. An unspeakable crime attempted once, when transcendence was within reach, or when the goal of a lifetime stood right before their eyes. Because the moment they did, the Church and the state would turn every ounce of their attention toward executing that black mage.
No matter how much they had schemed together in the shadows, both the Church and the Royal Family would move to kill her. The Executioners would probably get involved as well.
I looked at the Bishop.
"How far can your foresight reach?"
"As far as the eye can see. There's no need for a more elaborate explanation. That is the extent of it."
So he couldn't see the future. If he could, every Transcendent would be a prophet. It was simply his unique insight — the ability to perceive what others could not.
"Then the Lord of the Black Magic Tower's intent to annihilate the city is certain?"
"It is."
"Then what advice can you give me when we go to stop her?"
I needed a Transcendent's counsel. I had to stop an entire city from vanishing. It wasn't a matter of justice. If that city evaporated, the Lord of the Black Magic Tower would seize a near-infinite amount of Magi — and there was no telling what she would do with it. If things went wrong, the kingdom wouldn't fall to the Demon King. It would be torn apart by the Lord of the Black Magic Tower.
The Bishop considered this, then answered.
"Do you still believe yourself to be an Immortal?"
"...I do."
"I see."
I couldn't be absolutely certain I wasn't an Immortal. In the end, I thought of myself as one. That hadn't changed.
The Bishop began calculating the situation, piece by piece. A Transcendent being gazed into the far distance, seeking to observe the future. A storm raged through his mental world.
And when he reached the end, he spoke words that were, in truth, no different from a prophecy.
Do not be so certain that you cannot die.
"...What is that supposed to mean?"
Telling an Immortal not to be certain of his own immortality? I couldn't make sense of it.
The Bishop offered one more thing.
"Because that very certainty will lead to a far worse outcome."
"Are you saying I'm not an Immortal?"
"Whether you are or not is irrelevant. The actions that certainty produces will lead you to ruin."
...Is he telling me to stop throwing myself into death, relying on the fact that I'm an Immortal?
I didn't really understand. That was the whole point of being an Immortal — using it properly. Why would he tell me not to? Or was the Bishop still convinced I wasn't an Immortal, and this was his way of keeping me from getting killed?
Either way, I couldn't simply ignore a Transcendent's advice. I nodded.
A crashing wave within the mental world swallowed me whole.
When darkness reclaimed the sky, she rose to her feet.
"It's quiet."
Her mind was a storm, but the world around her was still. It was night. Of course it was.
"My Lord, nearly all preparations are complete."
"Wait a little longer."
"Understood."
In truth, she was the one whose body burned with impatience, barely able to wait. But she knew how to endure when something this important lay ahead.
A massive wall stood before her. An autonomous city near the Capital — a place that could fairly be called a metropolis, with a total population exceeding one hundred thousand. The Black Magic Tower was about to launch a full-scale assault on it.
The reason was simple. Her dearest wish was finally within reach.
"...I've finally done it."
Tiagris's smile was deeper than anything she had ever worn. She would never forget what she had seen three days ago.
The connection with Gaudium had been severed, so she had gone looking for traces of him. When she found him, Gaudium was nothing but a ruined skeleton, a wretched remnant of what he had been.
The Lord of the Black Magic Tower lacked the talent to take something that had already passed from undeath into true rest and make it undead once more. But she did have the ability to read the traces of that day.
To learn who had killed Gaudium, she gathered fragments of the soul, seeking to examine what had happened in the past — and the events of that moment unfurled before her.
And she saw it. The boy she had thought dead... was perfectly, unmistakably alive.
The instant she saw it, her mind raced faster than it ever had.
Gaudium had been on the verge of attempting the Immortal ritual. That was why he had taken the reckless step of kidnapping a noble and a priestess — to experiment on subjects with a high likelihood of becoming Immortals. And that noble boy he had brought in had gone and done something outrageous: sacrificed his own life to bring down the Black Magic Tower and save the priestess.
That was the whole story as she had known it. She had thought it ended there. Until that same boy, perfectly alive, killed Gaudium a second time — after he had already become a Lich.
That left only one possibility.
The Immortal experiment had succeeded. The boy had used his infinite lives to find the power to destroy the Black Magic Tower. He had thrown away even his last life in a contract with a demon — but because he could not die, he had come back.
The moment she realized it, Tiagris laughed like a madwoman.
An Immortal was not the Royal Family's wish alone. It was hers as well.
Even the Demon King would hold no fear.
She had finally completed it. She had finally achieved it. She had ground her entire life down for this — the completion of the Immortal, the very thing she had built the Black Magic Tower to reach.
"His name was Argal, wasn't it...? I'm such a fool. I assumed he was dead and never even bothered to investigate properly. To think I left an Immortal just sitting there."
An ecstatic smile spread across her face. She would take everything the Immortal had. She was so close to true immortality.
That was why she intended to attack the city. She didn't have the strength to strike at an Immortal hiding in the Capital. But if she completed her preparations and offered up an entire city as a sacrifice in a single stroke, she could seize — if only briefly — power on the level of a Transcendent.
She herself might fail to contain the Magi and burst apart. But that was the only way to claim an Immortal's power. Stealing immortality required considerable conditions, after all. And if she succeeded in taking it, that infinite life would make her a true Transcendent.
So she had entrusted the research on immortality to the elders. And she herself had poured every last ounce of her strength into researching how to steal it.
That was why she was certain.
That boy's immortality would become hers.