The City of Mages
The City of Mages
Aslan recognized the priest before him.
And the shock of recognition hit him hard. His hand clamped around Purity's hilt until his knuckles blanched—inward turmoil and hesitation he refused to let reach his face.
Because the high priest standing in front of him had no business being here.
He had expected priests of the Veil of Compassion to come.
This quest always involved them. The soul of the daughter inside Anna's necklace belonged to one.
Two things, however, caught him off guard.
One: the Veil of Compassion had descended near the city before the quest even began. Two: its high priest was already present.
Aslan's body moved. The spin looked sloppy and full of openings—until the Wings of Stymphalos flared around him and the rotation became a seamless blur.
He poured that momentum into the strike. White light flared through the chilling grip of cosmic death, and frozen spacetime split apart, yielding the space it occupied.
Clang!
It was a defensive blow. With a swing meant to turn the tide, Aslan knocked aside the high priest's thrusting spear.
The moment the spear deflected, cold surged through the torn space. Purity sliced after it, barely reaping the aftermath, but Aslan could see the space to his left and right dying—bleached white and blackened into oblivion.
Death by proximity. No salvation if it touched him. He possessed three Equalization scrolls, all stored within his tattoos.
Could he deploy them in time? Even a glancing blow rather than a direct hit left him uncertain that he could survive.
Grinding his teeth until the clenched line of his jaw stood out, Aslan moved again.
He caught the spear with an upward slash, pushed it aside, and as he reaped the dying darkness in its wake he spun once more. Rotating counterclockwise through the frozen spacetime, he cut through it and delivered a diagonal downward slash at the high priest.
Cra-cra-cra-crack!
Sparks flew through the white cold as he deflected the spearhead. The woman holding it watched him with an expressionless face.
When a faint flicker of emotion crossed that blank look, Aslan let out a long breath through clenched teeth.
'Jeojang.'
Eyes closed, the word repeated inwardly. In the decelerated world, death flashed past a dozen times. Aslan died and died again, found a path of survival, and opened his eyes.
Cra-crack, clang!
"Urk...!"
She flipped the spear shaft to parry his descending blade, then thrust the point forward. Aslan extended Purity to intercept the attack he had seen himself die to, time and again.
Claaaaang!
When Purity met the spearhead, white sparks rippled through the blackening, dying space.
Blade locked against blade. His wrist felt ready to snap. Before it could, Aslan released the sword and snatched Purity with his other hand.
Gripping it in a reverse hold with his left, he spun his body wide and swung. The high priest answered by sweeping her own spear to meet him.
'Jeojang.'
Cra-cra-cra-crack!
The sword edge rushed in at a speed that made the reverse grip seem impossible. Blade met spearhead, spear shaft, toes, and legs. With each collision, thunder roared through the freezing space.
'Jeojang!'
Blood streamed from Aslan's nose; his overclocked mind began to grind. He did not stop. Somewhere amid the flurry he righted his grip, layered his left hand over his right, and swung Purity with everything he had.
White light crashed against white light, and Aslan's blood pattered down between them.
Overwhelming strength, overwhelming speed, and a halo that encroached on the surroundings, killing every option Aslan could choose. Faced with this sudden, insurmountable foe, he wore a grimace of frustration—yet he never stopped moving.
Clang, cra-crack!
A brutal exchange. He raised Purity to meet the descending spearhead, caught the kick that followed on the flat of his blade, and redirected it. The shockwave froze the entire plaza solid. Aslan kept moving.
Crack!
Using the momentum from deflecting the leg, he brought his sword up. The spear shaft caught against the rising blade. He pushed into the bind, trapped the shaft with his edge, and spun.
What followed was a horizontal slash.
Outmatched in raw power and speed though he might be, Aslan's technique surpassed the high priest's.
When that skill, honed to its very limit, flashed from his hands, the high priest's arm came away.
Thu-uck!
The blade carved diagonally through forearm and elbow, exiting cleanly. The spear flew into empty air, and Aslan wrenched his sword back to block the follow-up counterattack. He absorbed the recoil with his hips and brought the blade before him.
Craaang!
Right on cue, a kick crashed into him. He took it on Purity, and the dizzying speed sent him hurtling backward.
Bang, bang, cra-rash!
He beat at the frozen, clotted plaza floor with the Wings of Stymphalos, tumbling backward, then drove Purity into the ground to stop himself.
Breathing raggedly, he looked up at the woman who had not pursued him. She stood staring blankly down at her severed arm. Aslan's mouth twisted.
The twisted smile carried the self-reproach of a survivor who had read the situation wrong.
He had believed this high priest would never reveal herself.
The reason was simple. The Veil of Compassion's high priest, the Curtain's Envoy—Ash—was a hidden boss.
The kind of boss every game has. One you do not need to defeat to progress the story.
A boss you would never encounter unless you deliberately pursued that route.
That was the woman standing before him.
And like every hidden boss worth the name, she possessed transcendent difficulty and power.
The recommended level to challenge her was after the evil-aligned ending—which said enough.
The Curtain's Envoy was the kind of adversary you could barely contest at endgame specs.
Still catching his breath, Aslan studied her severed arm and the stump, packed with freezing energy and the ice that formed the core of her body.
Unlike an ordinary human, her arm was composed entirely of cold and ice.
Only cold flowed from the severed limb, from the exposed cross-section.
As that grisly sight made plain, the Curtain's Envoy was not human.
She was a hybrid—a being born of mingled priestly and human blood.
A vessel better attuned to receiving a god's power. A hybrid powerful enough to be considered nothing less than a demigod.
Such beings possessed physical abilities and divine authority that rivaled full priests themselves.
In exchange for being born with overwhelming power, hybrids were ceaselessly tempted by the evil god whose blood they bore.
Curtain's Envoy Ash was exceptional even among them.
She was the first hybrid, the first hybrid priest, and the first to become a hybrid high priest.
An ancient being who had become a high priest back when the evil gods were only just beginning to reveal themselves—like the Sword of the War God.
A high priest serving the Veil of Compassion, whose power operated on a wholly different tier, and a hybrid who had received that very god's blood.
She was, in short, on a different level entirely.
Aslan could feel that otherworldly strength in the way she regarded him with perfect, unhurried stillness.
She looked at him the way someone watches a bug—utterly unguarded.
In raw tier alone, she stood above the Sword of the War God, above even the Dragon-king he had fought before.
So overwhelmingly powerful that she was always excluded from any discussion of how strong a high priest could be.
Recognizing that no frontal assault could win this, Aslan steadied his ragged breathing.
Tricks and alternative methods would not work either.
There was only one weakness.
Not a weakness he could exploit to defeat her—but the sole gambit worth playing.
Aslan tightened his resolve and gripped his sword with both hands. The woman watched him idly, then picked up her fallen arm and reattached it.
Crackle. The sound of ice shattering as the limb fused back into place. Just as she flexed her restored arm—
Kwaaang! Crack!
Something flew in from the side and hammered against her halo.
It was an arrow. It bored roughly halfway into the halo before halting.
Suspended in midair, it trembled faintly, then froze solid and shattered.
Shards scattered. The woman turned her eyes through the dispersing metal fragments.
In the direction the arrow had come from stood a giant, nearly two and a half meters tall.
"What the hell...."
The red-scaled dragon-kin had discarded his outer coat, baring his upper body. His face crumpled into a scowl, and a curse leaked out as if he could not believe the sight before him.
"Now what in the world is that?"
A girl popped out beside him. Drenched in sweat as if she had just finished breaking something, she stared at the woman who had blocked the arrow with her halo without so much as a blink and let out a horrified breath.
"The Curtain's Envoy?!"
It was not Aslan who answered. A woman stepped out from Tiyamal's right. She pressed a hand to her mouth, white hair billowing around her.
Her pink eyes had widened in shock. Seeing that, the sweat-drenched girl with scarlet hair winced and looked at Aslan.
"Aslan, who the hell is she? What makes her so...."
The rest of his companions had arrived, but Aslan's expression only tightened further, his wariness sharpening.
That alertness was so dense that the girl stopped mid-sentence, choosing silence rather than asking again as if it were nothing.
"High priest of the Veil of Compassion. A genuine monster."
When he finally answered, Tiyamal clicked his tongue.
"Another high priest? Seriously?"
Clicking his tongue, the dragon-kin drew a fresh arrow, his scowl deepening as he stared at the woman.
He had only fired a single shot, but Tiyamal could already gauge her impossible strength.
The next arrow would likely meet the same fate—grinding to dust against that halo.
His hand fumbled over his quiver, counting the few arrows he had left. A sigh escaped him.
Angie ratcheted her tension higher at the ominous mood radiating from the group, and as Tiyamal found his arrow and settled into his stance, Ereta pulled down her two-handed axe and readied it.
Aslan spoke—whether to them or to brace himself was anyone's guess.
"Everyone, give it everything you've got. Even if we brought every able fighter in this city, we couldn't beat her."
The group's attention swung toward Aslan as he gingerly touched his nearly shattered wrist and added,
"We just need to buy time. I have a plan."
So far as Aslan knew, the Envoy had exactly one weakness.
Her humanity, long since extinguished as the price for an eternity bound to her god.
Just that one thing.
He glanced toward the direction Fay and Anna had run and let out a heavy breath.
The rest was up to them.
*
Anna and Fay ran. They entered the largest building in the city and immediately headed underground.
A long subterranean passage brought them to a small room with an old-fashioned door.
Frantically, Anna rummaged through her clothes, produced a key, and with trembling hands worked the lock.
"From here on... no magic. If powerful mana or divinity touches her, my baby's soul will be damaged...."
The words spilled out in a ramble; it was impossible to tell whether she was talking to herself or offering Fay an excuse.
Fay blinked, listening to Anna—consumed as she was by panic and terror.
My baby's soul. That clearly was not referring to Fay's soul. She must have meant the soul of the daughter she wore around her neck.
"If it gets damaged, the only place I can restore it is the lab. So...."
Fay tilted her head at that.
The only place she could restore it was the lab—yet Anna said she must not use magic or expose it to divinity.
If it could be restored, wouldn't magic be irrelevant?
Then Fay understood: Anna was already operating on the assumption that the lab had been destroyed. She let out a small, considering hum.
Anna was out of her mind.
Fay touched the hilt of her sword. Anna flung the door open and rushed into the laboratory.
Fay quietly followed her inside and was met immediately by a piercing scream.
Anna Heleminus's wail of despair.
Taking in the wrecked state of the laboratory, Fay nodded to herself. The screaming seemed about right.
The shattered magical apparatuses all bore the marks of brute, straightforward physical force.
She quickly identified the handiwork as belonging to her companion, Angie. Her lips pushed forward in a slight pout.
'They could have left it to me. I would have done just as well.'
Aslan had left it to Angie even though Fay could have handled it, and that fact displeased her.
But what was done was done. The girl retracted her pout and glanced sidelong at the shrieking Anna.
Tilting the hilt of her sword idly, Fay narrowed her eyes.
Before Anna had led her away, Aslan had spoken to Fay alone, in confidence.
If Anna tries to harm you, you may kill her.
You matter more to me than she does.
And as Fay saw it now, Anna's state was that of a madwoman who might turn on her at any moment.
Fay's hand tightened unconsciously around her hilt, ready to draw at the slightest provocation as she stared at Anna's back. Blinking at that view, a thought slowly surfaced in her mind.
It was not a thought typical of Fay.
Normally, she would have dismissed such uncharacteristic behavior with distaste. But emotions were rare for Fay.
Curiosity outweighed the distaste, and in the end, she released her sword hilt and approached Anna.
The click of heels ceased. The girl looked down at the woman who had collapsed, sobbing. The woman raised her head.
There, she found the elf girl's blue-violet eyes—dark and settled like deep water, yet holding a faint, sunlit warmth.
Fay gazed at her with those eyes for a long, quiet moment before she spoke.
"Why are you sad?"
The question held no malice—only pure, simple curiosity.