Master of the Spear
Master of the Spear
Rumel had not known Aslan long. In truth, until very recently, she had barely even heard of him.
It was not that Aslan lacked fame. Throughout the Northern Continent, he was a name on every tongue. She had heard the titles, at least.
But what kind of man he was, how he looked, what he actually did—those things she simply hadn't known.
Yet even with such a shallow understanding, she could tell that the fury pouring off him now was far from ordinary.
She had only ridden beside him for a handful of days. A handful of days was enough to grasp his nature.
Gentle with his companions, warm toward strangers. He would play with a hunting dog someone had brought along, treat a surly old quartermaster with unfailing courtesy.
His face had always worn a smile or a shadow of sorrow. This naked rage was something she had never imagined.
Simple anger would not have felt like this. The thick killing intent saturating the air was something else entirely.
A suffocating pressure. A crawling chill across the skin. This was the genuine bloodlust of a martial master honed beyond mastery itself—a transcendent who had glimpsed the far side of human limits.
Rumel caught it only at the edges. Bolen took it full in the face. Both of them froze.
Bolen stiffened under that weight, then opened his mouth as if the paralysis itself were an insult.
A wet crack tore through the silence.
As his lips parted, a dagger slammed into his throat. It split flesh and lodged there, buried to the hilt.
The force behind it was not ordinary. A faint sheen of mana clung to the blade—weight-enhancing magic, the kind a wild mage might use. Bolen's mind scrambled. Wild Magic? He staggered.
Then he saw the violence hurtling toward him, and his hand went to his sword.
Kuo-oh-oh-oh!
A gray wind screamed off the blade as he swung. The killing gale of the Storm Caller—strong enough to cleave a man in two—howled toward Aslan.
Aslan was already charging.
Two deaths closing on each other. An instant before they collided, Aslan dropped low and planted his palm against the floor.
The gray wind ripped through the space where his body had been, a deafening roar shredding the air. Bolen flinched. Aslan's body had inverted—he was up on his hands now, a handstand, the world turned upside down and already collapsing forward.
Forward, straight at Bolen.
A brutal crack. Something gave.
The kick launched from the handstand with a predator's fluid grace. It hammered into Bolen's throat.
The impact punched the embedded dagger clean out the back of his neck. Bolen's crushed cervical spine flopped loose.
Before he could process the move, Aslan was already flowing into the next. He twisted sideways, landed upright, and channeled the torque through his hips into a spinning kick.
Flesh tore. The head ripped free—not cleanly severed but mangled, gouged away as if worried off by something cruder than a blade. Bolen felt his own skull slam into the wall and shatter.
He was reeling. He could not track Aslan's movements. His own unarmed skill was nowhere near the level of a master who had pushed hand-to-hand combat to its peak, and so he had lost the initiative before he had even grasped that the fight had changed.
Bolen gathered mana. Aslan's fist drove into his gut. The impact scattered the half-formed spell before Bolen could finish the incantation. Two more rapid punches buried themselves in his flank. His body lurched sideways.
A sidekick drove the staggering frame back into the wall. Cornered, Bolen saw Aslan draw two more daggers and close in.
The sounds of a body being dismantled blurred together.
Bolen registered his limbs being pinned to the wall by the blades at almost the same moment the beating resumed.
A fist smashed into his side. A second, the right hand pulling back as the left drove forward. It caved in his barely-regenerated skull. His body jackknifed.
A wet snap of separating muscle. Bolen could not clear his head. Something was happening to him.
The body unbent, then bent the other way as the next strikes landed. A relentless, methodical dismantling hammered into him from every angle.
Flank. Skull. Abdomen. Sternum. Jaw. Temple. Forehead. Nape. Back of the knee. Groin.
Fists. Knife-hand strikes. Elbows. Knees. They bludgeoned him in sequence. Somewhere in the fog of impacts, Bolen understood one thing with perfect clarity.
He had to break out of this.
Desperately, he pulled mana. A grand master of magic could incant with his mouth shut. Fearless Bolen, who had conquered terror itself, blindly wove a spell from within the storm of pain.
He never got to finish it.
Aslan's hand pressed flat against his chest. Mana bled from the palm and tore through the spell matrix. Disrupted. Bolen's mind lurched at the sheer technical deftness of the interference. A fist hit him again.
Crunch.
His skull bounced off the wall and rebounded forward. Aslan's next punch met it on the way back. Freshly regenerated teeth rattled loose inside his mouth.
"K-kh..."
Bolen took the beating with nothing to offer in return.
He could not think of a way to resist. He could not even summon the will to try. The situation itself had grown indistinct. He did not know what was being done to him—only that it was happening.
Through the haze, Aslan's hand moved.
By the time Bolen realized his sword was no longer in his grip, it was far too late for anything.
A sickening crunch.
"Gyaa-AAAAARGH!"
The Storm Caller—the magic sword Bolen had forged by grinding down countless souls—plunged deep into his chest. The blade should have been sheathed in gray wind. Instead, white flame roared along its length.
The flames of Purity, which cut and burned the soul itself. The power of an Ancient God bored through Bolen's sternum and ripped at the core of his being. He screamed a scream with no bottom.
"Guh... g-khh..."
Finally, the beating stopped.
His hands and feet were still crucified to the wall by the daggers. The Storm Caller still jutted from his chest. But the violence that had felt like it would never end had halted.
Bolen clawed his way back to awareness and, at last, looked at Aslan's face.
He needed to know what manner of heart could deliver such a savaging.
What met his eyes was an expression utterly blank.
It was not the absence of feeling. It was the aftermath of a rage so incandescent it had burned every other emotion to ash.
The blank-eyed man gripped the sword hilt. His other hand closed around the back of Bolen's neck.
He stared down with cold teal eyes.
"Don't ask questions."
The hand on the throat tightened.
"Don't think."
The hand on the hilt tightened too. White flame gouted from the wound and the blade alike.
"Just answer."
Those two frost-colored eyes pierced straight through him.
"Unless you want me to carve up that immortality you got for free and rearrange the pieces."
Fearless Bolen was, for the first time in a very long while, afraid.
The possibility he had thought extinguished the moment he overcame death now yawned before him, raw and undeniable.
The chill that crawled down his spine was naked and absolute.
And the most terrifying part was this: Bolen did not know how, but Aslan knew his secret.
Terrified, he heard his own voice spill words before he could stop it.
"How did you find out— gyaaaAAAAARGH!"
Aslan had permitted no questions.
A twist of the hilt. The soul-carving agony tore another scream from Bolen's throat.
After the scream, he gasped and shook. He realized, with a clarity that chilled him further, that the hand clamped around his nape would disrupt any spell he tried to cast, again and again.
"That wretched woman," Aslan said. "Where is she."
Bolen went rigid at the sound of that voice.
"Answer me!"
The fury in the words made him flinch. The answer poured out before he could think.
"I-I don't know! She never told me where she was going! She only ever told me the great one's will! Nothing more!"
The words came through chattering teeth, his voice frayed by terror.
His slit-pupiled eyes caught Aslan's and constricted with pure dread. Bolen, who had shed his humanity, who had seized immortality and become fear itself, was afraid of a mere man.
Teeth clacking, clicking together, his gaze locked with Aslan's. Aslan stared back into those terror-stricken eyes, reading them for a long, searching moment.
And in that moment, Aslan saw the truth: Bolen really did not know anything.
His face twisted.
Irritation. That was the emotion rippling through the distortion.
He ripped the sword free and hurled Bolen to the floor.
"Gahk—!"
Bolen collapsed with a wet splat into the spreading pool of his own blood and lay there trembling.
"Tch."
Aslan clicked his tongue and raked a hand through his hair in frustration.
His objective here had been to seize this base. This tomb.
Killing Bolen would not accomplish that. He had needed the man alert enough to operate the tomb's mechanisms—needed him functioning while Aslan observed, analyzed the magic, deconstructed the spellwork, and learned its architecture. Only then could he take the fortress for himself.
Now Bolen was completely broken. The brutal beating and the torture that followed had shattered his will to fight. Even with Aslan's back turned, he showed no sign of resistance.
But Aslan could not simply order him to open a path to the surface. If Bolen recovered his nerve partway through, or decided a quick death was preferable to dragging this out, he could crush Aslan inside the tomb without giving him a chance to resist.
He had been too hasty. He had let himself get worked up, and it was unlike him.
But he had not been able to help it.
The name that had fallen from Bolen's lips was the one Aslan had been hunting all this time.
The figure who had appeared in the moment after Aslan had been forced to kill his own wife, Rowena—when grief and despair had hollowed him out and left him empty.
The figure who had told him the fall was eight stories high, then vanished with Rowena's body.
A horned woman who did not belong in this world.
She had introduced herself like this:
Valerie, daughter of the Mountain Goat.
Aslan suspected she was connected to whatever had dropped him into Geladrion—or that she was the entity itself.
That was why he had lost his composure. Why he had let uncharacteristic rage boil over.
Should have been more careful.
A glimpse of a clue about how to get back, and he had grown reckless without even noticing.
Aslan turned away from the trembling wreck on the floor.
He picked up the hammer he had dropped when he threw the dagger and stood there, thinking.
Now he had no idea what to do next.
For the moment, there had been only one way out of this tomb: seize the stronghold from Bolen and force a path open.
Now that the plan had crumbled, Aslan ground his teeth audibly before he realized he was lifting his gaze.
Rumel stood there.
She was looking at him with pity in her eyes.
Aslan frowned, puzzled by her expression, while Rumel's face deepened with regret and sympathy.
She had overheard the name Valerie moments before and leaped to her own conclusions—that Valerie was the one who had driven Aslan's master insane.
Her imagination raced further.
Aslan, she thought, was enraged at the woman who had erased every trace of his teacher, and grieved that the teacher recognized him yet could not truly know him.
She mistook it all for a man realizing his master—preserved only in drifting memory and fleeting recollection—was utterly gone, leaving nothing but a hideous monster behind, and feeling a bitter, desolate fury.
Rumel had endured her own tragedies, but she had no idea how to approach an epic grief like this.
So she kept that pitying look on her face and was about to offer consolation—
"This won't do."
The bizarre voice made her head turn.
Both Aslan and Rumel looked toward Bolen, who was rising in a grotesque, contorted posture.
The voice did not belong to Bolen. It was something between an old man's croak and the cry of some unknown creature.
When Bolen—the source of that voice—tilted his head, his neck bent at an unnatural angle.
Aslan felt a chill ripple through him as he watched. A deeply familiar sensation.
His Luck, a full ten points, captured every nuance of that feeling and fed it to him; he swiftly deduced that the familiarity came from having experienced it before.
The instant he understood, he moved. He gripped the Storm Demon Sword and poured mana into it, stoking the wind.
He swung it wide, unleashing a gale that blazed white yet churned with gray—a storm that could tear even souls apart.
But before the storm could reach Bolen, his eyes flooded black.
"Getoutof here."
The tomb shuddered with that grotesque voice. As it shook, it warped. A wall surged up in front of Bolen, blocking the wind.
A heavy boom echoed, and the scattering gale whipped Aslan's hair violently.
At the sight, Aslan remembered what a certain Ancient God had told him.
That god had warned him: if the board broke, they would take measures.
Without the ability to strip the magic from Bolen, there was no conventional way for Aslan to leave this tomb.
No way out meant the quest would stall. If the entity that had pulled him in wanted him to complete the quest and survive this world, it would intervene to push things forward.
Just like now.
Aslan realized it at once and hesitated for half a heartbeat—less than an instant. Then he shouted.
"Rumel!"
"Y-yes?!"
"Protect me!"
Even knowing this meant going along with the entity's will, Aslan could find no other way than to seize the opportunity before him.
So he pressed his palm to the ground at once and closed his eyes. His mana tattoos flared blue, and his magic surged, threading deep into the tomb.
While Rumel readied her spear and took in the sudden shift, Aslan's consciousness sank inward.
Within the spreading current of mana, Aslan thought.
Normally, the Transmutation School modified flesh. Changing physical objects was the domain of the Transformation School. For an underground structure to reshape itself, launching spikes and raising walls, Transformation magic should have been required.
Yet the spell laid over this stronghold-tomb was unmistakably from the Transmutation School. Amid the storm of flowing mana, Aslan could discern it clearly.
And trailing that transmutation magic was precise Restoration School magic. But it was not merely trailing. The two were inseparable, flowing as a single spell. That combined magic transformed the tomb and sustained it.
Why?
Aslan focused, thinking it through even as spikes and stones tore past his hair.
Ordinary Transformation magic could not achieve this kind of mutability. Transmutation targeted only flesh. Restoration magic specialized in repairing physical damage.
The answer was close. A sharp intuition—the wide-ranging instinct granted by Luck 10—whispered the solution to him.
The secret was the soul. The tomb itself functioned as a living creature, endowed with a soul. It was slathered in fresh souls dredged from the afterlife, transmuted by Transmutation magic, and endlessly restored by Restoration magic.
The moment Aslan grasped this, Rumel's spear whirled. Clang!
She spun her spear, thrust, extended, and lightly deflected—parrying Bolen's attacks in a continuous flow. She shattered incoming boulders with spiraling stabs and knocked aside high-speed stone shards with the shaft.
Blocking, striking away, counter-thrusting—Rumel protected Aslan. He was too deep in concentration to mind his surroundings.
Rumel, who could not have known that, stole a glance at him as she worked her spear and bit her lip.
Aslan was not even deflecting the shrapnel aimed at his own head. He kept his hand pressed to the floor, perfectly still in the face of death approaching by inches.
Because he trusted her to block them? Did he not even consider the possibility of a mistake, or that she might betray him? He simply kept his eyes shut tight and his lips moving faintly.
Rumel had been deceived and betrayed so many times in her mercenary life that she had been forced to grow hard. She knew trust was never given lightly. Yet here Aslan was, concentrating wholly, trusting her without reservation.
Not a hint of doubt. If it had been Rumel herself, she would have flinched or dodged, half-expecting error or treachery. He did not move at all.
Absolute trust. A warmth spread through Rumel's chest, and she swung her spear even faster.
The white-iron spear whirled in a blur, leaving ghostly afterimages as it retracted after three rapid thrusts. Three wedges rushing toward Aslan's head shattered at once.
She moved to repay that trust. Meanwhile, Aslan analyzed the magic.
Observing the flow, intensity, and composition of the mana coursing through the entire tomb, he dissected and reconstructed it, gradually seizing control of the spell.
It was a method no Master of Magic could replicate. Normally, even Aslan could not. Only one thing made it possible: his perk.
Taking Root—the final magic-tool proficiency perk, a mana tattoo. The symbol and mark of an ancient imperial legion commander.
Gaining this perk and engraving the tattoo rendered the user incapable of casting magic independently. Only wild magic that bypassed the tattoo could be used.
No matter how well one understood ordinary magic, it could only be cast through scrolls or tools. Lesser magic was the sole exception.
Acquiring the perk cost much, but in exchange, it granted a powerful ability.
Unconditional successful activation of magic tools, doubled effectiveness, and ninety-nine percent suppression of side effects.
At the end of his analysis, Aslan understood. This stronghold was no different from a magic tool.
And if it was a magic tool, then it might as well already belong to him.
His root-like tattoos glowed blue. From them, mana burst forth and spread across the tomb like veins of light. As the surging mana wrapped the tomb at terrifying speed, every spike and rising wall halted simultaneously.
In that tableau, as if time itself had frozen, Aslan kept his eyes closed and looked beyond—past his dominion over the stronghold, trying to glimpse the entity that was puppeting Bolen, forcing him to wield magic.
The tomb shook violently, and the attacks subsided. Behind closed lids, Aslan's eyes quivered faintly.
His mana extended like a thread. A connection that should have been impossible, but Taking Root and the precognitive reaches of high Luck guided him.
A sensation like his very soul being drawn out washed over him, and his vision blurred. Beyond the haze, a vision shimmered.
A ghostly, pale mirage: a field.
A field of strange, shadow-drenched brightness, as though the sun neither rose nor set there.
The grasses had lost their luster as if dead, yet they writhed, teeming with unnatural life.
A gentle plain spread between blades that all bent in different directions. Upon that plain and field stood countless beasts.
Sheep. Sheep with black eyes. A host beyond counting, all gazing at Aslan in perfect silence.
They watched him from every corner of the plain. Their pupils were not a sheep's. They looked almost human.
Their legs were gaunt, skin peeled away to expose black bone that gleamed wetly. A closer look revealed their entire bodies were composed of black bone.
Only agony and emptiness drifted in their pupils, and Aslan felt a chill crawl down his spine.
These things he thought were staring at him—they were not sheep. They were something crushed, molded, and carved into the shape of sheep.
Even in their anguish, they watched him in silence. Perhaps from the very beginning. Perhaps before that.
The instant Aslan understood, the name escaped his lips.
The Twilight Flock.
With that, the vision peeled away. It vanished. What appeared before Aslan was nothing remarkable.
Blackened, desiccated bones. Bolen, dead without a trace of spirit left.