But Suddenly... It Appeared
While the factory's original owner and the men who had come to attack it lay as corpses, tumbled together across the floor in an oddly amicable heap, Pale and Serzif were locked in a peculiar battle of nerves.
Flames were spreading all through the grounds, yet no fire engine came. Fullerene Ghetto was a warren of illegal residents and smuggled-in souls whose very existence was uncertain; a fire station, or a hospital, was of course out of the question.
When Serzif failed to see through Capra's true identity, Pale decided to grow a little more shameless.
"Trying to kill someone else's puppet out of nowhere—rather rude, wouldn't you say? In exchange, I'd like you to tell me what that silver-white iron sphere in your hand actually is."
"You claim not to know what this is? Then what, pray, are you doing here?"
"Someone said they'd pay me if I found it."
"Hah. The rightful heir of House Dragonheart, eyes clouded by coin. Your family's honor has fallen into the dirt."
"Oh, certainly. However low our honor has sunk, set beside the honor of you Guardian Saints it would still hang as high as a star in the night sky."
The moment Serzif dragged his house into it, Pale began to twist the knife in return.
"You lost to a single man—Irok Dehaja—turned tail and ran, and stood by while a hundred thousand citizens died. A Guardian Saint, and you dare speak of anyone's honor?"
"You little—!"
The provocation shattered Serzif's composure. She trembled, shaking with a rage that had broken clean through her face.
"Half of the twelve Guardian Saints dead, and all one hundred and forty-four Holy Paladins slaughtered to the last. Truly pathetic. Not only your honor—your skill has hit the dirt as well."
"What would a wretch like you know! You have never even met Irok Dehaja, and yet you presume—!"
"If I had been there, the outcome would have been different."
"Ha! Before Irok Dehaja you are less than an ant. That thing is the end of the world, wearing a person's shape. Add a hundred of your kind and the result would not change."
Behind her, transparent blades began to take form, until they numbered in the hundreds.
"For the insolence of insulting my comrades, I shall see to it that you can never call yourself a mage again for the rest of your life."
"Whoa. Master, you sure you're all right with that?"
"Capra, we haven't time, so I'll keep this short. That woman's magic takes a microscopic quantum effect and expands it to a macroscopic scale. The result is an interference of probabilities that, by rights, should be impossible."
"Master, I lost you at the first line. Explain it so even a college dropout with a high school diploma and an empty head—like me—can follow."
"In short: Serzif's swords pass through every substance, cut every substance, teleport across short distances, and cannot be stopped by any physical means."
Capra went pale at the explanation.
"That's a complete cheat-code technique, isn't it?"
"It is. She hasn't sat a Guardian Saint's seat for more than a hundred years for nothing."
"That woman is over a hundred?"
"Never mind that. Your sword can still stop them, so we have a chance."
Then the rain of countless swords Serzif had wrought began to fall, and Pale drove Capra on.
"Focus. Miss even one and I might live through it. You will not. Kill a magical puppet and the charge stops at destruction of property."
"Wow... that is harsh."
Capra said it as if she were sick of him, and then she met the waterfall of swords pouring down upon her.
The blades born of Serzif's magic had every probability perfectly controlled at the quantum scale. They were always sharp enough to cut any substance, hard enough that no attack could break them, and by collapsing into a quantum wave they could blink across a short distance in an instant.
The swords themselves, though, were not especially fast. Teleportation by quantum transition moved at the speed of light, yet while a blade was in transit it passed straight through a body and could do no harm. Strip away that transition, and the swords traveled at roughly two hundred kilometers an hour—faster than a pitch from a baseball player at his peak, but only fast by human measure. In the world of mages, where men argue over the span of an instant, that could not be called fast at all.
Capra was a magical puppet wrought from the blood of a Twisted Beast. She could see a bullet and answer it. Two hundred kilometers an hour looked sluggish to her.
She gave ground and swung. The sword that nullified magic shattered Serzif's blades like glass, and with absurd dynamic vision and speed of reflex she dodged and countered, both at once, the swords driving in from every side.
But there were simply too many of them. However keen her eyes, however quick her body, she could not stop a rain of blades boring in from every direction, and wounds began to open along her.
While Capra held the line, Pale moved to support her.
From the grip of his sword-staff a blue bolt of lightning burst forth once more and rushed in upon Serzif.
She formed a net of swords before her and turned the lightning aside with ease. But in the brief moment she gave to her own defense, the assault on Capra grew monotonous, and Capra slipped free of the crisis.
Pale smiled at the sight.
"As I thought. If the swords can be stopped, this is worth attempting."
By rights, with Pale's skill as it stood, a fight against Serzif could not even take shape. She was one of the summits of human magic, and before the absurdity of an invincible sword swung without so much as a hand upon the hilt, the mages who could endure could be counted on the fingers of one hand.
But with Capra's magic-nullifying blade in play, Serzif's tactical advantage shrank by a wide margin. The moment the invincible sword ceased to be invincible, Pale had a chance as well.
And it was then, just as the battle between them was drawing taut and even—
A tremendous noise crashed over them. It was something like a sharp edge dragged screaming across iron plate, and something like hundreds of sheets of foil being crushed all at once. Crack. Boom.
Pale and Capra, and Serzif with them, turned toward that grotesque sound, and there an impossible sight lay open.
A colossal black dragon.
"What?"
"Huh?"
Foolish sounds escaped both Pale and Serzif. The scene was that far beyond sense.
A dragon. King of the Twisted Beasts.
Even among Twisted Beasts, a dragon's body and its magic stood alone. Its strength brought a concrete building down with ease, and its scales stopped grenades.
Most living things on this earth had already lost the power to stand against humanity. Even so, three beings remained that could still threaten mankind.
Dragons. Immortals. Ents.
They were the mighty Twisted Beasts that still remained humanity's enemies upon this star—the lingering possibility of mankind's extinction. Fortunately their habitats lay far from human lands, and the border was held by the allied armies of humanity. For a dragon to appear in human territory, and in the heart of a great city like Fullerene, was not a thing that belonged to common sense.
It had crushed the factory building underfoot like a tin can as it emerged. Its body ran some thirty-five meters, with four solid legs and a pair of wings, the whole of it sheathed in black scales. A membrane of scale guarded the vital point at its nape like a muffler wound about the throat, and in its bright amber eyes the pupils were split vertically.
Pupils brimming with draconic greed and the hunger to destroy swept quickly over Pale, Capra, and Serzif. Then the gaze fixed on Serzif—and on the silver-white iron sphere in her hand in particular.
Having confirmed its target, the dragon moved at last. A vast breath gathered. Its chest began to glow.
"This is bad...!"
Serzif hastily recalled every sword she had summoned for her defense. Even the blades that had been encircling Capra returned to her and knit themselves into a wall. A moment later, enormous flame poured from the dragon's mouth.
A dragon's scientific name means the serpent that swallowed the sun. Later ages would call that name an insight beyond its time, for the creature's peculiar biology was uncovered only long after the name had been set down.
Scholars who studied the body denied it without end, and at last were forced to admit a fact they could no longer refuse: there is a sun inside a dragon.
What dwells in a dragon's heart is a living fusion reactor, a thing modern human knowledge cannot even comprehend. Magic can make the impossible possible, and still humanity's nuclear physicists cannot begin to gauge how such a heart can exist, even when magic is taken into account. To this day the secret of the dragon's heart remains under a veil.
The energy pouring from that reactor sustains the vast body and lets it move. An adult runs twenty-five meters and more; keeping so ponderous a frame by any ordinary means is impossible, and the heart is the answer. The energy it sheds reinforces the scales until a commonplace weapon cannot so much as scratch them, and it makes flight possible for that enormous bulk.
But the heart's energy is most terrible when it is spent another way—when that immense power of the sun is spat at an enemy. It is akin to the storms of plasma that sometimes erupt from the face of the sun. It varies with the dragon's growth, yet a dragon's breath is a weapon of annihilation: a plasma storm of ultra-high heat, approaching tens of thousands of degrees, slamming into its foe at hypersonic speed beyond Mach 7.
KRAAAAA-BOOOOOOM!
The moment the power of the sun burst from the dragon's mouth, a flash lit the world, a vast explosion followed, and the whole of the factory grounds came down.
When Pale came to, he was grateful to find his arms and legs still attached. To take a dragon's breath head-on and survive—had some god lent a hand?
But it was not a god who had saved him. It was Capra, lying at his side.
She was in a state beyond words. Both hands had not merely been burned; they were carbonized outright, lumps of charcoal. She had taken the breath in his place, there in front of him.
Even the sword that nullified magic had not been able to stop the breath entire. The fire had rushed in more fiercely than the blade could erase the magic, and the heat had left severe burns over the whole of her body and turned her hands to charcoal.
Had Capra been human, the burns alone would already have meant certain death. Only the resilient body of a puppet made from Twisted Beast blood let her cling, barely, to life.
A magical puppet is not invincible. Left as she was, infection could still kill her, so she needed treatment at once.
But Pale realized a chain was wound about his hands. More than that, his magic armament sword was gone, and the two of them were shut inside a narrow, damp room.
"Someone knocked us out in the dragon's attack and locked us away."
If they had gone to the trouble of imprisoning them, then they at least meant to talk. That much could be called a mercy.
What he truly could not understand was why a dragon had burst out in the middle of a city.
"Don't tell me the dragon is after the silver-white iron sphere as well. What in the world is inside the thing?"
A Guardian Saint had not been enough; now a dragon had joined the fight. Pale's thoughts tangled further still.
Someone outside seemed to have noticed he was awake. Two people came in with magic armament swords at their hips. They were dressed much like the men who had been defending the factory in the battle, and though their faces were hard, they showed no particular hostility.
Leaving the badly wounded Capra where she lay, Pale walked with the men who wore the swords. The passage was dark. He could not tell whether they were underground or still above it. The room they reached beyond that passage looked like an office.
"I never thought I would be meeting a mage of the proud House Dragonheart."
The one who greeted him from behind the desk was a lean man. He looked young, early in his thirties, and wore an eyepatch, as if blind in one eye, with tan skin and short white hair.
Blue eyes and dark skin are the marks of the Rox, a wandering people who roam the whole of the European continent. Their original country, Rox, had been a nation of Europe, but it was destroyed in the Second Continental War, and its territory has since been carved apart and swallowed by the great powers.
Fullerene Ghetto, too, had once been part of the Rox homeland, and so the Rox naturally accounted for some forty percent of the ghetto's population. Their lives, even so, were barren in the extreme. The land of the Rox had become Fullerene Ghetto, a dumping ground into which the Azurik Free Federation shoveled refugees and illegal entrants, and they were not treated as rightful citizens.
"I'd heard rumors of an armed group claiming autonomy for the Larks District. The Larks Free Struggle, or whatever it was called."
"Kind of you to remember. The proper name, however, is the Larks Free Cooperative. We are the ones who fight for this Larks District—the place you call Fullerene Ghetto."
The man rose from his chair and offered his hand.
"My name is Rekdos. I am chairman of the Larks Free Cooperative."
Pale took the hand he offered. Seeing the cumbersome chain still wound about Pale's wrists, Rekdos gave a belated, embarrassed smile.
"My apologies. I told them there was no need for such a thing, but my people are exceedingly cautious..."
At a gesture from Rekdos, his subordinates quickly unwound the chain. Pale rubbed the hands that had been bound and felt the numbness in them.
"So. Why did you imprison us?"
"Imprison? We merely brought you in from where you had collapsed in our smashed hideout, and treated you."
"That abandoned factory, you mean."
"Yes. I would like you to tell me what happened there. Too many people died."
"Before that, there's something I want to hear. About the silver-white iron sphere you had."
Come to think of it, he wondered where the sphere had gone. The last to hold it had been the Guardian Saint Serzif, and he had no idea what had become of it after they met the dragon.
Thinking on it, he did not even know whether Serzif was alive. A direct hit from a dragon's breath would be hard to survive, even for a Guardian Saint.
"Is this the silver-white iron sphere you have been chasing?"
To Pale's surprise, Rekdos drew the sphere from inside his coat. Seen up close, it was sheathed in metal with a silver-white luster, and across that metal glowed lettering charged with the power of a powerful magical seal.
"The last time I saw it, someone else had it. Did you recover it?"
"No. The real one was here from the start. Making a good number of convincing fakes is an excellent method of security."
"Hah... What is that sphere, that all this chaos should come of it?"
"When you think about it, it is not so very great a thing."
Rekdos smiled, a meaningful curve of the mouth.