Too Much in Your Hands, and Someone Comes to Gut You
It was a warm, sun-drenched hour of noon when a man in unfamiliar dress appeared in the village where the Larks Free Cooperative kept its seat.
The one who showed himself was a man turned out in a crisp suit. His black hair was slicked straight back without a strand out of place, as if measured with a ruler, and the eyes beneath were sharp enough that a touch might draw blood. The amber irises threw a glare like the blue edge of a drawn blade, cold enough to raise the hackles. He looked to be in his early thirties—a young man with the air of a cold-blooded thing you could stab and never see a drop—and he was Azurik, not Rox.
This was the Larks Free Cooperative, a Rox stronghold, and an Azurik in a suit was a thoroughly strange sight there. The Rox were still measuring him with wary eyes when, without a word of preamble, he seized the throat of a Rox man who had been staring at him and hauled him clean off the ground.
"Where is the iron sphere that seals Irok Dehaja's magic?"
"Wh... what are you talking about..."
The Rox man was built much the same as he was, yet the stranger lifted him one-handed with no sign of strain at all, choking him as he spoke. When the poor fellow only gagged and failed to give the answer he wanted, the man in the black suit frowned.
"You don't know? Then you're useless."
With those words, fire burst from the Rox man's entire body. The heat blew easily past the point where cloth and fiber catch, and climbed high enough to melt steel beams. In an instant a great fire erupted around the spot where he had stood, and the flames swallowed everything nearby.
"AAAAAGH!!!"
Those who had the misfortune of standing close caught fire head to toe, thrashed and ran, and before long collapsed to the ground as lumps of charcoal.
As the place descended into chaos, Rox mages appeared like white blood cells rushing to purge an invading germ. The Magic Armament swords in their hands were old models, but they were military issue, and the men who carried them had been through hard military training. Issued gear to ward off magic as well, they wore reinforced-fiber uniforms of the sort a developed nation's soldiers might wear, and military vests plated with steel.
The moment they saw the man who had burned people alive, they judged him an enemy and cast without a single question. Ironflame magic—the fruit of modern military sorcery—manifested at the tips of their Magic Armament swords.
Streamlined warheads of silver-white metal launched from the sword-tips and flew at the suited man who had harmed the Rox. Each warhead was a grenade packed with explosive—Ironflame magic devastating enough that a direct hit would blow a person apart until not even the shape of a body remained.
Boom! Boom!
The grenades struck and detonated one after another, and the Rox had no doubt the intruder had been blown to pieces. Yet, astonishingly, the man in the suit walked out of the heart of the smoke without so much as a smear of soot, perfectly composed.
Faced with the impossible, the Rox mages reeled. The man in the suit asked the same question again.
"Where is the iron sphere that seals Irok Dehaja's magic?"
"What the hell are you!? Who sent you!?"
Getting no answer to his question, the suited man sighed. Flame gathered over his open palm, then spun at high speed until it formed a disk hollow through the center. The disk of fire was small and plain, no larger than what would sit on a palm. He flicked the chakram-like thing lightly, and it rushed the Rox mages.
They scorned the spell and swung their Magic Armament swords to cut it down. That was a mistake born of too little experience in magical combat. Judging a spell's power by its looks is a novice's habit. A true mage reads not the surface, but the weave of mana, and the will bound inside it. What looked like nothing more than a shining disk held mana and malice so fierce and terrible that an ordinary human could not begin to measure them.
The disk of flame sheared through the mages' bodies along with the Magic Armament swords they had raised to shield themselves. The cutting force of that high-speed spin severed them, and the terrible heat cooked the wounds in an instant, so that—astonishingly—not a drop of blood ran from the cross-sections of the bisected corpses.
With the mages' deaths, a blaring siren rolled across the whole village. A state of emergency was declared, and civilians began to flee. Mages and militia of the Larks Free Cooperative mustered and barred the man in the black suit. He shook his head.
"This will never end."
The moment the words left him, a vast wave of flame began to surge up from beneath his feet.
Meanwhile, Pale and Rekdos were locked in a fierce argument in the office.
"Irok Dehaja's power is more than the Larks district can bear. That cursed mage's strength won't give the Rox their freedom. It will give them nothing but disaster."
"Ha. So it isn't too much for you Azurik, then? A hundred thousand are already dead by Irok Dehaja's hand, and you still talk like that."
"Even so, Irok Dehaja is Azurik. It stands to reason that his magic should belong to an Azurik as well."
Hearing his own name bandied back and forth in other people's mouths, Capra felt a little embarrassed.
Wow... what is even going on... why does someone I've never met know my name this well...
He was having a genuinely hard time adjusting to a world so far from anything he understood.
In the middle of that heated debate, a pillar of fire suddenly rose from the direction of the village. Pale and Rekdos stared through the window in shock, and someone burst into the office without so much as a knock.
"Chairman Rekdos! We're under attack!"
"How many of them?"
"That's... one."
"Only one?"
Rekdos was somewhat thrown by the report, but his subordinate's face was utterly serious, without a trace of a joke.
"You're telling me everything happening out in the village is the work of a single person?"
"He's an absurd mage. Our mages are being driven back with no answer to give."
"Didn't I say so? Hold power beyond your station, and it becomes a danger."
Things having gone exactly as he had claimed, Pale needled him. Rekdos frowned.
"This isn't one of your companions doing this, is it?"
"Sorry, but my companions are all dead. Irok Dehaja killed them himself, on Blood Christmas."
"......"
"Anyway, enough of that. First let's help put down the fool playing with fire in the village."
Rekdos hesitated at the offer, but he had no choice. Their strength was limited, and the help of even one mage was urgent—all the more if that mage was the renowned Pale Dragonheart. There was no reason to refuse.
Pale stopped him as he made to rush out of the office.
"Before that—there's something I need to prepare."
"What is it?"
"I'd like to see that silver-white iron sphere of yours."
"You... you're using the opening to take the sphere, aren't you?"
"Hmph. The sphere you showed me is a fake anyway. What would I do with it?"
"......"
Pale spoke as if he had already seen through everything.
"If you knew it was fake, why do you need it?"
"I think I can do something interesting with that fake sphere..."
Pale wore a meaningful smile. Rekdos looked as if he didn't understand, but he handed over the fake sphere all the same.
Pale, Capra, Rekdos, and the dozens of mages under his command hurried toward the village that had become a sea of fire. The moment they reached the scene, the terrible heat caught in their throats.
Half the village was already ablaze, and through the middle of that sea of fire a man in a black suit strolled at his ease. He walked the flames without shedding a single drop of sweat. His ominous amber eyes glittered, and his face was sharp as a snake's.
Unlike in games, magic in the real world does not distinguish friend from foe. A blade made of magic will cut the mage who cast it, and if you raise a sea of fire with magic, you yourself burn and die in it. Yet in the heart of the blaze the man walked as leisurely as if he were strolling through a park.
When Pale, Rekdos, and their party arrived, the man in the black suit ran his eyes slowly over them, then spoke.
"Where is the iron sphere that seals Irok Dehaja's magic?"
"......"
Rekdos drew from his coat a sphere of silver-white luster, engraved with a complex pattern. Seeing it, the man in the black suit scowled.
"You had better pray this one isn't a fake."
"......"
Rekdos answered with nothing but silence. This time Pale was the one who spoke.
"Who are you? How do you know Irok Dehaja's magic?"
"You take the fact that I can speak your human tongue as grounds to treat me as your equal. Deeply unpleasant."
Over the man's open palm, a ring of fire formed once more. The bright blue-white ring was small and plain, small enough to fit in a human palm. But Pale, a seasoned mage, broke into a cold sweat at the immense mana dwelling inside that ring of flame, and at the intricate formula of magical composition that bound such power.
Whether Pale sweated or not, the man in the suit spoke without expression.
"Oh? So if we hand over the sphere, you'll let us live?"
"Yes. I don't care what becomes of your lives. Give me the sphere, and the rest is none of my concern."
At that, Pale glanced at Rekdos. Rekdos sighed, then produced the iron sphere engraved with the strange pattern—the one he had drawn from his coat a moment ago—and threw it to the man in the black suit.
The man caught the sphere, examined it closely, and spoke.
"A fake."
With a crunch, he crushed the sphere Rekdos had thrown by nothing but the strength of his grip, and black powder leaked from inside. He coughed, as if he had breathed a little of it in, and anger gathered on a face that until then had been blank. As if answering that anger, the disk of flame he had made lunged at Rekdos at once.
"Capra!"
The instant Pale shouted, Capra dashed in front of Rekdos and struck the disk of flame aside with a sword. The sword of unknown make that nullified magic extinguished the disk just as it had before. The brow of the man in the black suit twitched, and his anger showed.
While Capra held off the attack, Pale's magic flared. He stamped the ground with an old-fashioned sword-cane and cast, and luminous characters spilled from the scabbard to unfold a three-dimensional formula of magical composition in the air.
The word summon means to call something forth, but summoning magic was not magic that called anything. What it actually did was manufacture an elaborate imitation of life.
Magic is the art of realizing information as reality. But humans—no, even dragons, whose intellect far surpasses humanity's—cannot perfectly understand this world, and so the products of magic become something other than the real. This is especially severe with living things. A creature made by magic is only a lump of flesh mimicking the functions of life, incapable of speech or rapport. In a word, a life created by magic is a shell without a soul.
Even without anything like a soul, summoning magic is extremely useful, depending on how it is used. One can summon small mice or crows, as he had done before, and have them gather information—or call forth a creature to fight in one's place, as now. The most threatening of these is the making of Twisted Beasts, mankind's old enemies.
What smashed through the three-dimensional circle as if breaking out of an egg was a beast like a gigantic lion. It had a lion's splendid mane and four sturdy legs tipped with sharp claws, and its whole body was white stone reminiscent of marble. A heavy mass of rock hung at the end of its tail, like a flail, and its overall size was beyond any comparison with an ordinary lion—on the scale of a large truck.
It was a kind of Twisted Beast called a Riexzar. Though it resembled a lion, it was genetically unrelated to lions entirely. A Riexzar cannot use magic, but in exchange it reinforces its body with mana to the utmost limit, and in sheer physical hardness it is a Twisted Beast threatening enough to be compared to a dragon. With absurd defenses that could even deflect the main gun of a battle tank, it was a terrible monster that, once it appeared, claimed countless victims.
The summoned Riexzar stared at the enemy before it with empty, soulless eyes—and then it charged.