Inter-Class Tournament (9)
A world drowned in vivid, blood-red light.
The Otherworld.
The colors of this place—called forth by a split-second judgment that had flickered past like a dying lantern—were steeped, in the span of a heartbeat, in black.
Black flame unfurled in every direction, packing the Otherworld so tightly that not a single gap remained. I was no exception.
A sound like shattering glass rang through my ears.
The condition for slipping out of the Otherworld in less than a second: smash every pane of glass on campus. That escape route had just been fulfilled by a single attack.
God, it hurt like hell.
My whole body was burning away. They say the worst pain a human being can feel is the pain of being burned alive, and that was no exaggeration. Past the throbbing, it felt like someone was crushing my skin and bursting it open from the inside.
It really, truly hurt.
It hurt it hurt it hurt it hurt it hurt it hurt it hurt it hurt it hurt it hurt it hurt.
There was nothing I could do except writhe on the ground like a worm, twisting my body through the agony. Every thought in my head was being torn apart. All that remained was the screaming of the pain itself.
"Nnngh…"
I forced my eyes open and stared at the dirt in front of me. A moment later my vision was eaten away by the black flame and went dark, but I shouted down the part of my mind that was doing nothing but howl.
If I die here, it's over.
Not just for me. For this whole world. Alice, Bianca, Rebecca—even Cheonghwa. All of it, over.
I have to live. I have to live no matter what.
"Hahk…"
My vocal cords burned, and a dry rasp leaked from my mouth. Then, all at once, the nerves that had been screaming in pain seemed to lift free of my body and drift away.
Ah—
I wanted to just accept it. The thought of getting out of this pain—of dying quickly and being done—was almost sweet enough to reach for.
No.
Not yet. Not yet.
I haven't even had sex with every heroine in this world yet.
My consciousness receded by degrees, dragged down into some deep place in the pitch-black dark, growing fainter and fainter.
So this is what dying feels like?
Thoughts snapped and sheared away in ragged pieces, twisting loose, unraveling. Little by little, they came to a stop.
A ripple.
I had been sinking into pitch darkness. Then, through a consciousness packed with black, a tide of gold unfurled.
A ripple.
That bright, warm current swayed gently, and began to push the dark back, little by little.
Ah.
The torn threads of thought caught one another's tails and slowly knitted themselves together. The first thing my returning mind told me was this:
It tastes like sweet apple.
Not like any apple I had ever eaten. Sweeter and brighter than an apple had any right to be—almost too rich to call by that name—and yet the flavor blooming across my tongue was unmistakably apple, rising from taste buds that should have burned away with the black fire.
What? I was definitely…
I twitched a finger. The pad of my index finger felt the ground beneath it.
I…
Light.
I opened my eyes. Not pitch darkness—a world packed with every color there was came flooding in.
"Player…!"
I was still staring blankly when a voice rang out beside me. I turned on reflex, and there was Angel, her glittering blonde hair and her tiny, bunched-up, painfully cute face, eyes swimming with tears.
"Angel…"
I started to say her name, glad just to see her—
"Hup!"
—and she jammed whatever she was holding straight into my mouth.
"Mmph—!"
I curled my tongue on instinct, trying to dodge the sudden foreign object. But the very tip of my tongue grazed it, and the flavor that touched me was that same heavenly apple from the black world. I chewed on reflex.
Holy shit.
That was fucking delicious.
Every apple I had ever eaten had been a lie. This—this deep, sweet, fragrant thing—this was what an apple was supposed to be. And it wasn't just the taste. Vitality surged through my whole body, as if the fruit itself were proof that it had just dragged me back from the dead.
"What the hell…"
I reached up and ran a hand over my chest. Skin that should have been burned to nothing met my fingers, smooth and whole.
"Hey."
Someone called down to me from above.
"That apple's good, right? Man~ the first time I had one I genuinely thought I was gonna fly away."
The voice was light and bouncy, but there was a weight coiled inside it that made me lift my head and look at its owner.
Slicked-back, dull-gold pomade. A face packed with mischief that still managed to look faintly savage. I stared at the man and asked, dazed,
"Who are you?"
"Me?"
He chuckled like my slack expression was the funniest thing he'd seen all day.
"Name's Tialfi. Ring any bells?"
He gave the sword at his hip a couple of stylish little taps and watched for my reaction.
"Can't say it does."
I didn't even hesitate. His whole posture sagged.
"That's cold. I even watched your YouTube! You know the one—How to Beat a Flame Demon with a Single Sword? I watched that AND subscribed, and you don't know me? I'm hurt."
"It's not that surprising, Tialfi. Honestly, who even pays attention to you these days?"
Angel looked at him with something like pity.
"What was that?! I used to be the second strongest human alive, you know! I had a reputation!"
I watched Tialfi vent, and then, all at once, a wrongness cut through the unreality of the scene.
Cheonghwa.
What had happened to those black flames?
I shoved myself upright in a hurry and looked around.
And then—
"Huh?"
I stared straight ahead, blank.
The world was tilted.
The ground under my feet and the landscape a few steps away sat at a slant to each other, as if someone had torn a painting sideways and shifted the pieces. An absurd, impossible sight. And inside that tilted world, black flame writhed, devouring everything it touched.
"Pretty cool, right? I did that, buddy."
Tialfi grinned at me, mischief written all over his face.
"Th-that. How did you do that?"
"Eh, you know."
He said it like it was nothing.
"I cut the space. No other way to stop that thing."
"You cut space?!"
Insane.
I had wondered, but that tilted landscape had actually been carved out by a sword.
The top three coolest fantasies of every Swordsman. Spatial Severance. Temporal Severance. Soul Severance. One of those supreme techniques was unfolding right in front of me.
"Yes! Yes! That face! That's the one! Man, I have been waiting a long time to get some proper worship out of you humans again!"
Tialfi beamed, stroking his sword a couple of times the way other people crack their knuckles.
A dry crackle. Another.
Along the tilted cut, the black flame shivered and began to eat its way through.
"Nngh. Temporary fix after all! Damn it."
He looked at the black fire like it personally offended him, then turned to Angel.
"Hey, Fourteen. How much Causality am I allowed to burn?"
"Use as much as you need. I'm not putting a cap on it. Those are His orders."
"Heh heh heh. That so?"
The playfulness in his eyes flashed savage.
"That's why I like you, Fourteen. You're a lot more fun than that stickler 1101."
Tialfi walked up to me, casual as anything, and picked up the beloved sword that had fallen at my side. Levatein.
"Gonna borrow this for a sec, buddy. Replica or not, nothing else comes close."
He spun the hilt once, twice, then drew the blade through empty air with the ease of long habit. The gentle sunlight that had been flowing through Levatein went pitch black in an instant—black as the fire endlessly burning in front of my eyes.
A harsh crackle. Another.
The black flame along the cut roared up, and the tilted world began, slowly, to grind itself back into alignment.
Tialfi slid his left foot back and settled his weight over his right, sinking into a swordsman's stance.
I swallowed and watched him. A man who could cut space itself. I wanted to see the strike he was about to throw.
The black fire swallowed the cut whole and came surging into our side of the world—
—and Tialfi moved.
The flames rushing toward us were sucked away in an instant and vanished somewhere else entirely.
"Huh?"
What just happened?
I had been watching with both eyes wide open, and I had seen exactly two things: Tialfi starting to move, and Tialfi already in a different stance. Like two photographs of the same landscape spliced together. Of everything in between, I saw nothing at all.
"Did you see it?"
Tialfi turned and smiled at me. I shook my head, blank.
"Heh. Figures. If you could see that, you wouldn't be human in the first place."
"How did you do that?"
How do you even end a black flame that keeps amplifying itself?
"Ah. Nothing fancy. I just cut the space holding the black flame. Cut it and cut it until there was nothing left."
"Sorry?"
"You know. Keep cutting and it converges to zero. Something like that."
So in that sliver of an instant, this man had swung his sword enough times for the result to converge on zero?
A different league. This man was something that sat entirely outside anything I had ever thought of as "strong."
With the black flame gone from my field of view, I could see Cheonghwa. Pitch-black eyes. A face emptied of feeling. She turned her head toward us, slow and vacant.
"Cheonghwa!"
I clenched my teeth and shouted, but she didn't react at all. She only tipped her head a fraction and looked not at me, but at Tialfi.
"God, I hate that son of a bitch."
The playful look was gone. Tialfi stared at Cheonghwa with a beast's face and snarled.
"#@$!"
Cheonghwa's small lips parted, and a language I had never heard spilled out of them.
"Father… the dream… the stars…"
"Nngh?!"
Strangely, fragments of that alien speech resolved themselves inside my head. I didn't know a single word of it, and yet the meaning sank into my mind on its own and made itself known.
"Give it a rest already. What's left for you to suck dry from a world you already ruined? And you're pulling this shit again?"
Tialfi's grip tightened on Levatein like he'd had enough.
"Wait!"
I stopped him in a rush.
"Hm? What's up, buddy."
The eyes that turned on me were packed with killing intent. My nerve buckled for a second under that pressure, but I clenched my teeth and forced the words out.
"Cheonghwa… you can't kill Cheonghwa."
"Ah. The pretty one?"
He pointed at her with one finger. I nodded without a word.
"Humm~. That's a descent. Killing her would be a lot cleaner."
Pressure poured out of the look he gave me. My breath caught in my throat. My body started to shake. I held on and said it again.
"Please spare Cheonghwa. I'm begging you."
"Humm~."
He spun Levatein once, as if actually thinking it over, then glanced at Angel.
"Fourteen. We saving that? Keeping her alive burns a lot of Causality."
"I already told you. Don't worry about Causality. The one above you gave the order, so stop fussing."
"That so?"
The force in the eyes that had been pinning me vanished all at once. He clapped a hand on my shoulder and grinned.
"Fine. It's been a while since I met a kid I actually like, so I'll do you a favor."
"Hah—!"
The pressure that had been crushing me lifted. I sucked in a useless gulp of air and managed to get the words out.
"Thank you."
"Sure, sure. But you're class-changing soon, right? When you do, you take Swift Swordsman. No arguments."
Tialfi jerked a thumb at himself and added,
"I'm the model for that class. Watch close. This is the power of the job you'll be taking."
"In the… end. The stars always find their way back to their places."
Cheonghwa's lips parted again, and the alien speech spilled out once more.
"Shut it, !@#$—"
"Don't!"
Angel clapped both hands over my ears like I absolutely could not be allowed to hear what Tialfi had been about to say. Judging by the flow of it, that had probably been the name of whatever had descended into Cheonghwa.
After another brief exchange, Tialfi's face settled into something serious, and he took his stance. A strange posture, the sword raised at a diagonal above his head.
Cheonghwa saw it and twisted her neck at a grotesque angle. From the seven horns that had grown from her skull, black fire roared out.
And then Tialfi drew the blade down, slow.
His eyes were calm and still, emptied of every feeling, fixed on what lay ahead. A single stroke, traced out unhurried, nothing like the last one.
The thought surfaced unbidden—why was the man who had inspired the Swift Swordsman moving so slowly?
And in that same instant, the space in front of Tialfi's cut vanished.
All of it. Every last scrap, gone.