The Master's Brother Never Forgets What He Learned Through Him
Increase the number of Transcendents.
Sera had devised and carried out countless plans in her efforts to save the world, and of course a plan to raise more Transcendents had been among them. The results, to put it bluntly, had not been good. Raising Transcendents was nowhere near as simple as it sounded.
No one alive had more firsthand experience of the Transcendent realm than Sera. Even so, teaching alone was not enough to turn a master into a Transcendent. The siege ram required to smash through the gates of that realm—the thing called enlightenment—was not something another person could simply hand over. The reason was simple. If a hundred masters stood before you, each of them would need a hundred different answers to reach that enlightenment.
For some, a crushing thirst had led to enlightenment. For others, a feast more lavish than anything they had tasted in a lifetime. Somewhere out there, someone might even have found enlightenment through thievery. Enlightenment was not a problem you could solve simply because you wanted to solve it. And so, however appealing the plan to multiply Transcendents had been, it had ultimately been discarded for lack of any realistic path forward.
"A bigger reason was realizing that a few more Transcendents wouldn't be enough to deal with the Demon King anyway."
He was, quite literally, the being in this world closest to the strength of a god. A handful of extra Transcendents were never going to be enough to stop him. So Sera had thrown herself into growing stronger on her own, searching for a way to strike the Demon King down—and what she had finally arrived at was Anti-Aura.
That was why she understood better than anyone: helping another person reach enlightenment for someone else's sake was something ordinary effort and ordinary devotion could never accomplish.
Which was exactly why she could not help but be astonished.
"…You've reached the Transcendent realm?"
"Yeah. Thanks to Big Brother, I finally cracked a problem I'd been beating my head against for ages."
She had arrived at her master's hermitage with treats the dragon egg would like, only to find Balik sitting quietly with his eyes closed. The moment she saw him, Sera understood.
Balik had reached the Transcendent realm.
And the fact that he had managed it at all surely owed a great deal to Jade's help.
"Anyway—care to go a round with me?"
"Did you know I was coming?"
"Just had a feeling."
"……."
Among those who reached the Transcendent realm, some displayed abilities of an entirely different order from what they had possessed before. In Sera's view, it was a kind of bonus born from the upheaval of shattering the wall through enlightenment.
In Balik's case, his head had never been the sharpest, but his instincts had always been excellent—so perhaps that was where his bonus had landed. If someone whose instincts were already outstanding received a further buff on top of that… wasn't that practically the same as being able to sense the future?
Shiiing!
Sera drew her sword as she spoke.
"I can spar with you. But I'd rather not disturb Master's sleep."
"No need to worry about that. He's out cold. Besides, we're both Transcendents—we can sense Big Brother's condition just fine."
From their previous conversation, Sera already knew how deeply Balik respected Jade, so she decided she didn't need to be overly concerned. Sensing Jade's presence inside the hermitage, she could tell he was sleeping so deeply that nothing short of an earthquake was likely to wake him.
Did something wear him out?
She hadn't done anything in particular, yet he was sleeping so soundly it struck her as odd. Or perhaps her repeated efforts to keep him in deep sleep had finally broken his old habit of resting only lightly. She wanted nothing more than to go check on him right away, but she put it off for the moment.
I need to confirm this first.
Mercenary King Balik had successfully stepped into the Transcendent realm. She needed a clear measure of just how strong he had become. If her goal had simply been to defeat the Demon King and be done with it, it might not have mattered—but her aim now was to save the world as completely as possible, which meant she needed a firm grasp of the strength of every powerhouse who would be fighting on the front lines.
"Here I come."
"Bring it."
Tiiing!
Sera's sword clashed with Balik's greatsword.
Krrack!
"……!"
In that instant, a massive crack split Balik's greatsword.
The result was only natural. This had not been a clash of Aura Blade against Aura Blade.
Sera's sword blazed with an Aura Blade, while Balik's greatsword held nothing more than ordinary aura. A blade sheathed in Aura Blade against a weapon carrying mere aura—of course the greatsword would shatter.
"Hrrraaagh!"
"……!"
And then something truly astonishing happened.
Balik's fist flared with light and came crashing down on Sera.
Without hesitation, she raised her sword to block. A human fist colliding with a blade wrapped in Aura Blade? For a split second it seemed as though she had made a catastrophic mistake—but—
Tiiiiing!
Fist and sword met, and the sound that rang out was the clear, ringing cry of steel on steel.
Sera had not made a mistake. In that fleeting instant she had felt it with perfect clarity: the Aura Blade condensed in Balik's hand.
BOOOOM!!!
Skrrrrrt!
The force packed into Balik's fist drove Sera backward, carving a long scar into the ground as she was forced to give ground.
"…I'm genuinely surprised."
Sera had lived through a great deal.
Which meant there was very little left in the world that could still catch her off guard.
Even so, in this moment, she could not help but be stunned.
What Balik had just shown her was that extraordinary.
He had poured an Aura Blade not into a sword, but into his fist.
It wasn't simply aura wrapped around his knuckles. He had overlaid a true Aura Blade onto his fist itself. The result was that Balik's bare hand had become a sword in its own right.
"I figured it out thanks to Big Brother. The Transcendent realm, Aura Blade—at the end of the day, they're both unknown territory no one can fully explain. So I just draw them however I damn well please! Like painting whatever picture I want on a blank canvas! I decided I'd make my own Transcendent realm and my own Aura Blade—and I pulled it off! With one single conviction: If I turn this toughest, strongest body in the world into a sword, that'll be the strongest weapon there is!!"
…I've never heard an enlightenment that crude in my life.
Most people found their enlightenment so abstruse that they ended up describing it in hopelessly abstract terms—hard to parse, maybe, but always with a certain depth to them. An enlightenment this cheap and blunt was something even Sera had never encountered.
But maybe that simplicity is exactly what makes it stronger…? He's absurdly powerful for someone who just stepped into the Transcendent realm.
She hadn't taken any real injury, yet both arms that had withstood Balik's Aura Blade were screaming. The sheer, unadulterated destructive force had been that overwhelming.
"Putting an Aura Blade into your fist… I can hardly believe something that outrageous is even possible. But yes—that's definitely an Aura Blade. Still, isn't that reckless? My Aura Blade cuts through aura and mana alike, you know."
"And yet you still went flying! Kahahahaha!"
He was right.
In the collision a moment ago, Sera's Aura Blade had sliced through Balik's Aura Blade the way it always did. And yet she had still been blasted away by the force behind it. The reason was simple. Before her Aura Blade could fully reach his fist, Balik had detonated the colossal energy packed into his hand and hurled her clear. It was an application so brutal it was hard to believe he had only just learned Aura Blade.
In a word—
Genius.
There was no other word for an ability this monstrous.
"But you're still short on experience."
"Can't argue with that."
Balik checked the ruined state of his own fist and nodded. Detonating that much power to throw her back was never going to leave his hand unscathed.
"More than that—you held back, didn't you? That's the only reason I managed to send you flying."
"I don't know what you mean."
"Your Aura Blade could've cut through my explosion too. But if you'd done that, my hand would've been shredded for sure—so you went easy on me. It was obvious. No point hiding it."
"Caught me."
Anti-Aura was a technique Sera had developed specifically to cut down the Demon King—a power designed to sever anything. Slicing apart the force of an exploding Aura Blade would have been trivial. But doing so would have turned a spar meant to gauge strength into a bloodbath, so she had deliberately pulled her power and taken the hit.
"I never thought this would be enough to beat you anyway."
"You're not disappointed?"
"Not really. I didn't want to reach the Transcendent realm so I could beat you in the first place."
"Then what for?"
"Once I climbed into the ranks of the masters and people started calling me the Mercenary King, I figured I'd gotten strong enough to protect the people around me. Then I met you—and realized that wasn't true at all."
"Because you lost to me?"
"No. Because of your eyes."
"……?"
"It's a look you see every so often if you spend long enough on the battlefield. The eyes of someone who knows a living hell is about to unfold right in front of them—and still grits their teeth and fights to spill even a little less blood. That's exactly the look you had."
"……."
"I don't know what kind of future those eyes of yours are seeing. But if someone as strong as you wears a look like that, it means one hell of a nightmare is coming. And if I'm weaker than you and I just sit around satisfied with where I am, there's no way I can protect the people around me. So I decided I had to push past the Transcendent realm."
As a boy, Balik had never understood a heart like that. As long as he himself ate well and lived well, nothing else mattered. That was how he had swung his fists. Becoming a mercenary hadn't changed a thing. If anything, he had swung his fists and his sword even harder, telling himself that looking out for number one was all that counted. Then Jade had appeared in front of him. At first, Balik couldn't make sense of the man. For all the irritating things that came out of his mouth, Jade never acted like a mercenary. He refused to abandon anything. He never simply walked past what needed doing. Sometimes he even took the path that cost him personally, without a second thought, for someone else's sake.
But watching that man's back, Balik had thought—
That's damn cool.
To everyone else it might have looked like pointless effort.
But a man who pushed all the way down the path he believed was right—that kind of back was something Balik couldn't help but find magnificent.
From Jade, Balik had learned what it meant to live as a man. How a man ought to live. What kind of man's back looked the finest of all. He had learned those things from the person he idolized. And because he had learned a man's way of life from a man like that, Balik too had thrown himself into protecting the people around him—and that will was what had carried him into the Transcendent realm.
"I didn't want to lean on Big Brother… but thanks to him, I made it to the Transcendent realm. Big Brother really is something else."
"Of course he is. Master's greatness goes without saying. So how exactly did he help you?"
"Well, you see—he pushed himself to spar with me, and…"
Only then did Balik think—
Ah, crap.
"I'm sorry—what was that? I didn't quite catch it."
Even monkeys that live in trees sometimes fall out of them. And even Balik, whose sharp instincts had pulled him through countless brushes with death, sometimes had an ah, crap moment where he fumbled the thread of life and tumbled straight into the swamp of doom.
Sera was closing in on him, murderous intent rolling off her in waves. For all that he had become a Transcendent, Balik's back was soaked through with cold sweat.