Blood & Flag (2)
Meanwhile, at the very hour Go Tae-min and Chae Geon-wook were throwing their modest little celebration, word that the Japanese Amateur League had produced its first undefeated promotee was racing across the world.
The reason the whole world had locked onto the story was simple.
Demon had yet to sign with any legion at all.
An undefeated promotion — a record rare enough on its own — the mystique of an identity still unrevealed, and above all the fact that he belonged to no one, an OA, an Open Asset: those were the things that dragged every eye on the planet toward him.
The great legions of every nation turned their attention on Demon's run at once, and they sat through his final match themselves to see what he could actually do.
The verdict—
"A mere C-rank..."
"Fundamentals were a mess, and his swordwork wasn't anything to admire either. Stamina and raw physicality, though — those looked reasonably complete."
George Miller murmured it while skimming the data on his tablet, and Jack Morrison, standing at his shoulder, answered as if he had been waiting for the opening.
The two of them were scouts for Atlas, one of America's Big Four legions.
Atlas was a colossal organization that even fielded super warriors, and at present it was giving Demon's recruitment serious consideration.
"Which is exactly why we have to lock him down. Climbing to the pros undefeated on skill like this means there's a talent in his play that refuses to be reduced to numbers."
Jack Morrison, silent for a moment, spoke again.
"I agree. If his fundamentals are a failing grade and he still performs like this, I can't even begin to picture the monster we'll get once systematic training and proper care are stacked on top."
George rolled the final sequence back in slow motion.
On the screen, Demon let a ninja's blade slip past by the width of a sheet of paper and drove in through the gap.
"This part especially. The timing when he slips the ninja's attack and flips it into a counter — even I got chills. Like a predator snatching prey."
A sense of distance that held up on a second viewing. That was not something training or endless repetition could buy.
And most of the other legions had surely recognized that same talent in Demon.
"Did you find out who's trying to make contact with him?"
"What's confirmed is Korea's Oath Legion, and..."
"Heh. Forget them."
Miller snorted.
Korea was a backwater that didn't even have a proper system for raising warriors. There was no world in which Demon walked into a legion from a country like that.
"Japan's interested, obviously?"
"Of course. Jin'en, Makazuki, Shiranui, Fudo, Kasaneba. All five of the Big Five have jumped into the race to sign Demon."
"Going to be a brutal fight."
"And Crownfall, Eisenlicht, Robe Noire, and the Heavenly Demon Church are all preparing contracts to lay in front of him as well."
Britain, Germany, France, Canada, China — legions from countries you knew by the name alone were already on the move.
One name among them made George Miller tilt his head.
"The Heavenly Demon Church? You're telling me China's interested? They don't scout anyone who isn't one of their own warriors."
"There's a rumor that Demon is Chinese."
"Tsk. That's its own kind of worst case."
Chinese players slipping anonymously onto Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese servers to stir up trouble was nothing new. He couldn't rule the same thing out this time.
But Miller decided not to care.
Whether Demon was Chinese or Japanese didn't matter.
What mattered was that he was a warrior who could still be signed — an OA.
"I don't care if he's North Korean instead of Chinese. Demon has to be ours. Atlas has to have him. If he wants it, put citizenship on the table. Tell him we'll throw in a gleaming penthouse in Manhattan."
"Understood."
George Miller closed the tablet.
Only one question remained.
Who would reach Demon first, and how much they were willing to pay to take him.
And Legion Atlas was posting a fairly high win rate in fights exactly like this one.
George Miller lifted the corner of his mouth into a deep smile.
"Nova Arena's about to get a lot more interesting."
The next day, the pro license came through without a hitch.
I decided my handle would be Demon — the old characters for an evil spirit — on my senior's advice, the better to leave people guessing which country I came from.
With the legion paperwork and every other administrative headache dumped on him, I could pour everything I had into getting ready for the pro league.
First on the list was studying the league itself.
The rules I would be fighting under, and the shape of the matches, would decide what fundamentals I needed to build right now. If I meant to drag a win out of battlefields thrown at me at random, I had to get how this game actually worked into my head before anything else.
Fortunately, I knew exactly how to study an unfamiliar field so I could grasp it as fast and as cleanly as possible.
"From the pro league on, it's nothing like the amateur league. What do you figure changes?"
My senior had possessed himself with the spirit of a schoolteacher. I answered through an enormous yawn.
"Yes, sir. The name, I imagine."
"...For starters, you can't even enter a match in the pro league unless you receive an offer. It isn't like the amateur league, where you queue into a matchmaking pool and get dropped into a fight."
He tapped the monitor.
In short, if no one came calling, a pro license was nothing but a decoration.
"And the matches aren't simple one-on-one duels. You receive a specific mission and you carry it out. In Ashmoon Night 189, the one just before this, the mission was a castle defense. A thousand participants. The NPCs coming over the walls numbered around ten thousand."
He worked the keyboard and pulled up a video.
The frozen screen brightened by degrees until the silhouette of a massive rampart emerged.
"...Whoa."
Beyond battlements of gray stone, nearly a thousand people moved in a rush, every one of them dressed with a personality of their own. In armor and weapons of every cut they shouted themselves into formation, and inside the walls smoke boiled thick off enormous cauldrons of oil. The camera climbed past that smoke and dropped to the ground below the walls. Soldiers blackened the earth all the way to the horizon, and the ground shook as they advanced.
Then a vision of hell opened.
Catapults in the rear roared and hurled boulders the size of houses, and on their heels a rain of arrows blotted out the sky and poured down over the ramparts.
I watched with my mouth hanging open.
"This is insane."
I understood in a single breath why people lost their minds over Nova Arena.
Soccer? Baseball? Mixed martial arts? No sport on earth could produce a scale like this. Tens of thousands colliding in one overwhelming spectacle — you could see that nowhere but Nova Arena.
"Well? Not a joke, is it?"
My senior paused the footage and asked it lightly.
I nodded, half out of my body. At the same time my heart was already starting to pound.
Five hundred thousand people had watched that match. Before long I would be standing on a stage like that myself. Depending on how things broke, I might even be the one at the center of it.
For someone who had lived his whole life like a shadow, it was a picture I couldn't make myself imagine.
"All right. Want to see the match after that? Match Seven was... oh, a monster subjugation."
"Monsters?"
The word came out of nowhere and snapped my daydream clean in half.
"Yeah. Goblins, orcs, ogres, that crowd. You don't know them?"
"I know them, but... those things show up too?"
"Hey. You think Nova Arena is called Nova Arena for nothing? In there, you should assume anything that can be built out of data is going to come crawling out. If all we ever did was fight other humans, they never would have stuck a fantasy tag on it in the first place."
He answered as if it were obvious and went back to the keys.
The ramparts vanished, replaced by a dense, humid jungle.
"This is the Match Seven footage."
The moment it played, a shriek like something tearing an ear open punched through the speakers. Hundreds of orcs poured out in a mass, each forearm as thick as a grown man's thigh. Behind them a monster the size of a house swung an enormous wooden club and leveled the trees around it.
So that was the shape of it from the pro league onward: you carried out all kinds of battles and missions inside the fantasy world everyone already knew.
Watching people tangled up with monsters in a fight to the death, I let out a hollow laugh.
"Ha. Unreal. At this rate you're going to tell me there's magic and everything, right?"
It was a joke. Obviously.
The answer that came back missed my expectations by a comfortable margin.
"There is."
"...There actually is?"
At my double-take he nodded, perfectly matter-of-fact.
"Yeah. There's an energy called mana. Shape it through an incantation or a magic circle and fire it, and that's magic. Condense it inside the body and load it onto a weapon, and that's aura."
"And how are we supposed to fight people like that? That's completely unfair!"
I wasn't exactly a scholar of fantasy settings, but I knew the basics. Magic, as I'd met it in films and games, threw around supernatural power, and a swordsman wrapped in aura moved past human limits at superhuman speed. No ordinary person could be expected to handle beings like that.
My senior went on as if my worry were funny.
"You can use it too."
"Huh? Us? Really?"
"Inside that world it's a concept that plainly exists. So of course the laws apply to anyone moving inside that setting. The problem is that just because anyone can use it doesn't mean just anyone can feel it."
He tapped the screen and kept going.
"For the record, from the World League up, handling mana is standard equipment. People who can't sense it hit the wall called the pro league and never climb past it."
"Then what about me? Do you think I could sense it?"
At the question he pulled his eyes off the monitor and looked straight at me. Then he huffed a laugh and nodded.
"The you I've been watching all this time? You'd sense it with room to spare. Your senses are ridiculous."
"Right?"
"If a guy who slips an incoming attack by the width of a sheet of paper can't feel it, who can? That isn't something effort gets you. You need an instinct you were born with."
At his certainty I scratched the back of my head.
The truth was, it wasn't possible because my reflexes or my senses were as good as he thought. I had only been moving my body along the red lines that no one but me could see.
What if I can't sense it?
Unease was just starting to close in when a thought flashed through my head.
Wait.
My senior had said mana was an energy that actually existed in the world. A power that became magic when you incanted it, and aura when you condensed it.
Turning those words over, I slowly lifted my head and looked around.
The truth was, my vision held countless lines besides the red ones. They simply didn't mark an attack's path the way the red did. They only drifted through the air, billowing like ghosts, and so I had gone out of my way to ignore them.
Tens of thousands of threads, transparent and yet dyed with some strange color. Even now those white lines brushed my fingertips, streamed past my senior's shoulder, and packed the air of the room itself full.
Don't tell me these lines I can't identify are mana.