The Contract (4)
Every last of the incantations was complete.
Toward the end of the casting, Roy’s eyes remained dyed pure gold whether he willed it or not—as if they were welcoming their true master home.
Even after pouring in a vast store of mana stones and drawing on the mana of the vein itself, he had been forced to empty nearly every scrap of power he possessed.
What the hell are you… just how much of a monster are you?
He fixed his gaze on the enormous darkness that was drinking the air around it dry. The void itself had been torn open; a dimensional rift of a scale utterly beyond anything he had ever seen now yawned before him.
Come on out already!
His heart hammered at a mad pace. Roy stared without so much as blinking.
Then something began to slip through the gap.
Heh-heh-heh-heh… A chilling, unnatural laugh. It still spoke with the voice of a little girl.
“Who summoned me?”
A single golden pupil swept the surroundings and came to rest on Roy. The being was cloaked from head to toe in pitch black; only that eye gave off light.
“I summoned you. Speak your true name.”
“Ah—that’s my eye, isn’t it? Why do you have it?”
“……!?”
“Strange. Come to think of it, I’m missing one of mine.”
“I summoned you six years ago as well! Of course I lacked the mana to form a contract then—but you were the one who gave me this eye as a gift.”
“…Oh? Is that so? Heh heh. Right. If you summoned me, that may well have been the case.”
Roy could not make sense of any of it. In his previous life he had never possessed enough mana to contract a spirit, but he had watched others do so more than once. He had never heard of anything like this. It felt less like calling a spirit and more like dragging a demon out of the abyss.
What went wrong?
Spirits capable of conversation were high-ranking by nature. The reason Lily’s shadow spirit, Shady, could not speak was simply that its rank as a spirit was low. That was why, even as he envied that black wolf, he had harbored a certain expectation of an ancient spirit.
And now look. The creature did not even remember lending him its eye. Was there anything more absurd?
“Spirit. I expended a tremendous amount of mana. I have paid a massive price. If you have fed on that mana, then reveal your name at once.”
Roy wrung out what little power remained and issued the command in a cold, low voice. They were not yet bound by contract—but the one who had opened the dimensional gate was none other than him.
At once, several strands of jet-black chain snaked out from beyond the rift and wound tight about the spirit’s limbs. If it failed to obey the summoner’s order, it would be dragged back through that gap without delay.
“Very well. There is no reason I cannot tell you. Clever child.”
"My name is Noah.
Noah Chrono Nyres."
The voice hammered itself straight into his mind. Only Roy could hear it. Lily and Shady, watching from behind, heard nothing at all.
Chrono Nyres?
Roy seized on the name.
“What kind of spirit are you? Don’t tell me you’re an evil spirit.”
“No. I belong to nothing. If I must name it—nothingness. The void.”
“You mean the null attribute?”
The spirit laughed. Its mouth stretched ear to ear in a smile that looked, for all the world, like a demon’s. The pure black of its body only made the impression stronger.
“Child. What this body commands is time.”
“Time…!?”
The Time Spirit, Noah Chrono Nyres. That was the true identity of the ancient spirit Roy had summoned.
The instant the word time reached him, Roy’s mind erupted with questions.
“Don’t tell me you can stop time—or reverse it!?”
The demon—no, the Time Spirit—still smiled as she answered.
“Heh heh… Child. With that meager mana of yours, could you bear the cost of defying providence itself?”
“…So contracting with you is meaningless, then!”
“Tell me what you think. What do you suppose?”
Roy thought it through. Stopping time meant stopping everything in the world. Reversing it meant flinging everything back into the past. No mere human’s mana could possibly supply the energy those acts required. That was the domain of gods.
But what about stopping a single person’s time for the briefest of instants?
That changed everything. Battles decided in a split second. Spells whose value shifted the moment you could chant several seconds ahead of anyone else. If he could use this spirit’s power to accelerate his own casting and slow an opponent’s—
He put the thought to her exactly as it was. The spirit answered.
“That is an easy matter. Provided the feed is sufficient… heh heh.”
By “feed,” she meant mana. Spirits lent their power to a contractor in exchange for mana; that was the nature of the bond.
“Spirit of Time. Will you form a contract with me—Roy Greenhilt!”
“That is the question I should be asking, child. Are you confident you can handle me?”
“…Of course. I wouldn’t have summoned you otherwise!”
“Hmph. Then proceed with the contract.”
Roy activated the spirit-contract magic. It was not a spell. Understanding one another’s terms and linking their mana circuits was all it took. Pay mana; borrow the spirit’s power. An extremely simple, lucid contract was about to be sealed.
I, Noah Chrono Nyres, form a contract with Roy Greenhilt.
Roy agreed. Then the spirit agreed.
In that instant the magic circle on the floor began to blaze with ferocious light. The enormous circular formation he had drawn in advance to gather ambient mana for the summoning had activated of its own accord.
“Child. Your mana is still insufficient to contain me. But you are a wise child. I praise you for calling me forth in a place such as this.”
Whooooosh— Drawn by the circle on the floor, the mana of the vein poured violently into the center of the formation.
What? What the hell is happening?
Roy had almost nothing left. The summoning had succeeded, but he had been fretting over how to secure the mana required to complete the contract. He had been on the verge of reaching for the stones in his bag—especially the massive mana stone of the corrupted unicorn.
From the spirit’s reaction, though, it seemed intent on covering the entire cost of the contract with the mana of this vein.
If that’s possible, I’m grateful, but…
The Golden Eye set in one of Roy’s sockets flared to life again on its own. Through it he realized that the flow of mana through the surrounding earth was utterly different from before.
This is…?
The spirit stood at the heart of the circle. Mana was being sucked into her at a terrifying rate. Her frame was smaller than he had expected. Despite the name Nyres, not a single tail was in sight. Her entire body was pitch-black as pure darkness—a form that would have suited the name “evil spirit” all too well.
But the vast mana of the vein flooding into that being brought on a rapid transformation. Above the childlike girl’s frame, the shadow of a colossal beast was cast. What took shape there was a four-legged monster of enormous size—in one light a wolf, in another a fox or a cat. It was large enough to fill nearly half the vast cavern where the giant unicorn had once rampaged. It might have been several times larger than the ogre he had hunted four years ago.
“What in the… this is absurd….”
But what truly stunned Roy was something else. Every last scrap of mana from the vast vein that wound through the forest around the witch’s house—every bit of it—was being drawn into that spirit’s body without remainder. No: it was already being drawn in.
“……”
And at a certain moment—
A tail that had never been visible on the creature before went pop! and sprouted from the spirit’s rear.
CRACK—!
Like shattering glass, the magic circle blazing light from the ground broke into pieces and was destroyed. Having at last absorbed every scrap of the mana vein’s power, the Time Spirit materialized the form of the enormous shadow that had loomed above her head.
Anyone could see it was unmistakably a magical beast, and its appearance was utterly terrifying. Had he not known it was the spirit he himself had summoned, he would surely have wet himself.
In the form of a four-legged beast-type magical creature, the spirit gazed steadily down at Roy.
“Child.”
The manner of speech was the same as before, but the quality of the sound was not. It was not merely that a young girl’s voice had changed. It felt like standing before a being of an entirely different order—a resonance that seemed to arrive not through the ears but from within the mind itself.
Clenching both trembling hands tight, Roy answered without fear, standing tall.
“Speak.”
“The contract between you and me is complete. As a commemorative gift, I will give you a present.”
“A gift?”
It was nothing more than the creature’s breath. A pure white sigh exhaled from the magical beast’s mouth soon enveloped Roy’s entire body. He stood rooted to the spot and did not retreat so much as a step.
A moment later, Roy’s other eye as well began to fill with golden light.
“……!”
Both eyes had now been handed over—yet on the spirit’s face, golden eyes of the exact same form as Roy’s still shone brilliantly. This was different from before. Until now it had been a loan; from this moment on, it was a sharing through the contract.
This is…
As both eyes shone gold, a small change came over Roy as well.