Summoner (7)
Even now, that sight refused to leave her mind.
An overwhelming descent of light had erased the world. The earth quaked; the air itself shuddered. Simply standing in the midst of it twisted her insides until she thought she might retch.
And with it came a bone-deep, hair-raising terror.
Her skin crawled. Her body would not move. She could not make it move. She had confirmed the thing had been blasted far away, yet in the next instant a crushing presence loomed before her eyes, looking down on her as though she were nothing. It pinned her in place.
It had nothing to do with strength or weakness. This was a sensation that rose from the very foundation of species itself.
Dangerous. Run. Her head, her brain, her soul all screamed the same warning.
But she could not. She was not allowed to.
Because the thing before her eyes would not permit it.
…She did not know why. She simply felt it.
And so she obeyed that feeling.
At the time, it had seemed the right choice.
Grit…!
That was what she hated most of all.
The object of her hatred was not the dragon, nor the young man who commanded it.
What she could not stand was herself.
Until now, defeat had been the natural order of her life.
Those who stood above her had simply been too exceptional. Her father, hailed as the greatest of his generation; her elder brothers, praised endlessly for resembling him so perfectly… every one of them outstripped her.
Still she had refused to give up, because she could not bear to betray the faint expectations the world had placed on a girl born beneath such giants.
Even if her power never reached their feet, so long as she never surrendered and held fast to the person she was, that would be enough.
Thus the life of Sara Bright had been an unbroken stretch of barren ground.
The storms of the world had worn her down without rest. Trials that sought to chip away every rough edge, scornful gazes that clung to her like a permanent label—those had always been her companions.
That she had never broken was pure luck of family.
The insult she had heard most often since birth was, “For someone born into such a good house…”
Yes. That was true. The Bright family was a great house among great houses. The wealth accumulated across generations defied imagination, and their renown matched it.
Yet more than that, the Brights were warm. Just as the root of their name suggested, they had always wrapped Sara in gentle light.
There had been times when that light shone so brightly it stung her eyes and she wanted to raise a hand to shut it out—but even then it could never hide the goodness of her family.
Sara had never gone astray because her family had always been there: kind when kindness was needed, yet firm enough to draw a clear line when she required scolding.
So Sara had been fine.
Losing was simply part of her everyday life.
But this feeling was new. The form of helplessness, of humiliation she tasted for the first time in her life, made her teeth clench of their own accord.
She had lost. She had stepped back. She had tucked her tail and fled.
Under the pretext of strategy she had forced her trembling legs to move.
It was strange. She had lost her entire life. So she told herself this time would be no different. Her body had merely been startled. She soothed herself that way.
And yet…
And yet the seething inside her would not stop.
This time, she had thought, she absolutely did not want to lose.
…She did not know why.
She only felt that if she retreated before that overwhelming violence of power, there would be nowhere left to go.
Strange. Had she not always lost to overwhelming power?
Because the opponent was different? That made no sense.
Something fundamental was different.
A bottomless abyss of nothing. Darkness that pressed down with crushing weight. A pitch-black terror she had no confidence she could ever overcome.
It was exactly like the day she had asked to be taught real combat and faced her father’s ice-cold expression on the sparring ground.
That day her father’s face had been utterly unlike any he had ever shown her.
The dissonance had made her scream, despair, and feel fear. For the first time she had cried after a spar. Her father had not comforted her. Real combat was simply like that.
Do you already know the answer?
The merciless face of her father that day overlapped with the young man’s.
In looks, in the mana he used, in temperament—nothing about him resembled her father.
Yet somehow that image kept catching on her eyes.
Again the memory flashed through her mind.
Even after creating a spectacle of that magnitude, he had remained utterly calm, as though nothing at all had happened.
The same arrogant, high-handed, utterly uninterested gaze with which he had regarded them from the very beginning.
…I don’t know.
Sara could not understand the man’s attitude—an attitude that went beyond treating the matter as natural and instead treated it as though it held no value whatsoever.
Even she, so accustomed to defeat, knew victory.
Having tasted the bitterness of loss, she craved the sweetness of winning.
Knowing defeat only made her cling harder to the victory that waited beyond it.
No matter how used to losing one became, that never meant one did not want to win.
The will to compete lived inside her.
The dream she had held since childhood.
To become a crusader fine enough not to lose to her father, and to protect her family.
Because every member of her family was stronger than she, it was a dream that could never be easily realized—and that was precisely why it was called a dream.
That clear goal was what had allowed Sara to endure.
…What on earth is his purpose?
But that man was different.
He lacked the desire for recognition any person ought to possess. He was no saintly figure like Ban Taewung either, nor did he move for personal gain or the completion of some objective.
With no merit whatsoever he had simply offered help.
No goodwill, no great cause, not even the common pride of a man. Everything about him was vague and unbalanced. Watching him lurch forward like a corpse that twitched only when poked, Sara felt nothing but questions.
Her father had told her to beware of monsters. And to take no interest in the man who had received a monster’s favor.
Because the moment you entered a monster’s sight and faced it, the only things you would see were your own ruin or the ruin of everything around you.
At first she had tried to dismiss it as a mere ghost story, but her father’s expression had been far too serious. Sara had been forced to nod.
In the end it came to this.
If the result of catching that monster’s eye was something like that man, then no one must ever be allowed near him. That man was the one favored by a monster.
At the very least she had to stop the people around her from walking toward ruin.
Forget it.
That would be better for her, and better for everyone else.
She shook her head hard, trying to scrape the branded memory from her mind. But something pressed so deep in so short a time would not be erased so easily.
Fear made her body tremble. She wrapped herself in mana.
All of this was because she was weak.
She wanted to grow a little stronger. No—she had to grow stronger.
Without borrowing a monster’s power, this time she would handle everything with her own strength alone.
“…Huu.”
She exhaled a long breath.
The energy filling this space was utterly alien. She could clearly feel the power of an outer god—the kind the Church branded heretical—being exercised here.
She shook off the violet-black currents that clung to her, trying to sever the blessing of the Chief God.
Unlike priests and clerics, a crusader stored divine power within the body itself. So long as the body did not die, no force could cut the connection to the Chief God.
That was precisely why crusaders could stand at the forefront, purging the Chief God’s evils and conquering outer gods.
A spark.
“…!!”
From far ahead came a familiar pulse of the Chief God’s power, answering her own divine energy. Every other thought vanished.
Right. This was no time to stand around. Her duty was rescue.
Sara wrapped her entire body in mana and divine power and ran like a madwoman.
Monsters blocked the path, but she thrust her greatsword forward like a shield and simply bulldozed through with raw strength. The massive creatures bounced off like victims of a traffic accident and smashed into the walls.
“Out of my way! Do not hinder me!!!”
She had felt it clearly. She had even felt the familiar wave of mana.
They were alive. It was not too late. At that certainty the corners of Sara Bright’s lips slowly curved upward.
She ran.
This time she wanted to be useful.
She ran again.
When enemies barred the way she smashed them with her greatsword. When tentacles blocked the path she sliced them raw. Tentacles cut by a blade charged with divine power melted away as easily as if acid had been poured on them.
Running, cutting, running again—until she reached the cavern and was forced to stop.
“…Ah.”
Black-gold mana cleaved an ugly monster in a single stroke, as though delivering judgment. The overwhelming martial prowess within that strike soared toward the heavens.
In an instant the sword aura punched a hole through the ceiling.
It was a beautiful trajectory that stirred the heart of any warrior who beheld it. Sara herself wielded a sword; she understood perfectly.
How much power had been packed into that single blow.
And when she saw the blue-haired woman the man held carefully, protectively, in his arms, Sara could only press her lips tightly shut.
And with this, what kind of crusader am I supposed to be?
Once in the previous dungeon.
Twice now.
The number of times that man named Ban Taewung had stolen from her the duty of protecting Narae.
She had been of no help in this matter.
Am I…
…simply going to stand here powerless again?
A throb.
The body she had overworked to reach this place began to tremble belatedly. The aching flesh hurt. Lungs that had only now remembered how to breathe properly sent spikes of pain through her chest.
This stifling, bursting pain in her heart… it was surely because of that.
Narae was safe. That should have been enough.
It should have been enough…
She already knew that the lukewarm emotion seeping up from deep inside her heart was inferiority.
Yet she did not want to admit it, so she denied it with all her might.
Narae was someone she was meant to protect. That was what she wanted to do. And she was jealous over it? Immature. Far too immature. If her father saw this face he would never let it pass.
She knew that, yet one corner of her mind kept fretting over the simple fact that she had been late, like grit caught between her teeth.
Having a kind family had kept her from going astray. But put another way, it also meant she had never even been given the chance to vent the emotion called inferiority.
It was like loneliness itself—rotting and pooling inside the jar named Sara Bright, never disappearing, still being boiled down even now.
Drip…
Sara’s visibly stiffened face was quietly reflected in a fragment of eyeball that had been torn free by Ban Taewung’s attack.
It was a terrible expression, one she never wanted her family or her friends to see.
Without realizing it, Sara swallowed the metallic taste of blood and the pain that leaked from her tightly bitten lip.
…As always, the taste of defeat was nothing but bitter.
“…Six secured. That leaves four, then.”
Confirming the information relayed by the shadow crows, I let out a sigh.
The ground around me was already littered with the corpses of orcs that had charged in only to become corpses. The reason their blood had not reached me was simple: every last one of them had been frozen either in the moment of death or immediately after.
“Haa…”
Thanks to the plummeting temperature, every breath I exhaled turned white and scattered into the air.
Some had frozen solid mid-charge toward me; others had been frozen while still trying to move under the control of tentacles even after death.
The one responsible for that scenery was none other than the white-haired girl perched atop Kallion’s head.
“Amazing, dragon-dragon.”
“Grrrr…”
Hopping up and down while clutching Kallion’s horn, she looked every bit the little child. Seeing her face flushed with excitement and even smiling—something so unlike her—I had to wonder if this was really okay.
Still, she was getting the job done, so I supposed it didn’t matter.
There was only one reason Riri was this worked up. Whenever she cast magic, Kallion imitated it and converted it into his own dragon magic.
To Kallion, Riri was an excellent textbook of magic; to Riri, Kallion’s magic offered a new direction. They stimulated each other perfectly.
And as a result of that experiment, orcs were dying in droves—that was the current situation.
Whatever else, having those two holding the line was reassuring. That was why I could relax and focus on training Keres like this.
“You must remember Master’s words carefully and carry them out. Understood?”
“Kakakat…”
More precisely, I had left it to Echidna.
Whatever else, Echidna’s divine power worked on Keres exceptionally well. The girl who never listened to a word I said obeyed Echidna without complaint.
Of course, at first she had been just as willful as when I tried to teach her, doing only what she wanted.
Every time that happened Echidna would pour divine power into the folding fan I had handed her and swing it; the previously deadpan reaction turned into convulsions and pure terror.
True to her undead nature, her reaction to divine power was consistently excellent. It was almost refreshing to watch.
Looks like the education officer is decided from now on.
Not just this time—I would probably leave nearly everything to Echidna. The Doctrine of Rest contained within her [Self-Faith] had been laid as groundwork with my summons in mind as well.
As they spent time together teaching and learning, knowledge would naturally be passed along too.
Just then a signal came from a crow hidden in the shadows: one more person had been rescued.
“Three left.”
“Fast?”
“…Fast enough that I’m starting to think it’s going too smoothly.”
To be honest, it was going so smoothly it felt unnatural. They had already joined up, split into two teams, and decided one side would bring the rescued people here.
With the numbers involved, moving everyone at once was probably judged too risky. I agreed with that call and guided them to the closest safe point.
Kii, kiiiiik…
But it seemed the sky itself could not stand to watch us have it easy. Far above, the heavens split open as though tearing, and a maw began to yawn wide.
Riri, who had been playfully toying with mana atop Kallion, went expressionless and looked up. I likewise stared at the black hole opening in the sky with a thoroughly unimpressed gaze.
“Get ready.”
At my words Riri quietly began constructing magic; Kallion loaded his own spell alongside her. I flicked a finger charged with mana and called Growl.
Thud, thud-thud-thud!!
At the same time a black tide began pouring from the sky. The moment it struck the ground it raised enormous noise and clouds of dust.
“Chwik…”
“Kuiik, chwik!”
Orcs were only the beginning.
Monsters of every kind, their bodies overrun by tentacles and eyeballs, waited inside the darkness.
So many of them spilled out of the hole in the sky like filthy water that I had to wonder where on earth that many had been hiding until now.
A few failed the landing and died on impact, but after a while even those began to twitch and rise again.
I sighed at the blatant anomaly and drew a spear of shadow, reshaping it into a bow.
Seriously… not a single day ever goes easy.