14. Shiland Hills
All that met the eye was a night sky black upon black, and an abyss so deep that even that sky seemed bright beside it. The shadow of night, if it had to be named.
High above that sky hung a being that took the shadow of night for its wings and pressed down on everything in the world.
Flames burning on the ground, the screams of people, someone's courage — all of it was drawn into a single black point. A girl watched that abyssal maw swallow life and light, and even death, greedily, leaving nothing behind. Midnight-black hair streamed on the wind. Amber eyes, the color of the earth itself, held every last bit of it, as if she meant never to forget.
Thud!
"Huh?"
The shock of tumbling clean off the bed snapped Artia's eyes open. She had the nagging sense that she'd dreamed something, but the dream itself refused to come back. Only a faint scrap of feeling remained, sitting heavy in one corner of her chest.
"What was that?"
Even that heavy scrap soon evaporated, gone like dew on a summer morning. Artia frowned for a moment with the look of someone who couldn't make sense of any of it, then promptly gave up. If she couldn't so much as remember the thing, it probably hadn't mattered.
Hauling herself up, she reached by habit for the stones she'd left by her pillow — the little rite of stone-rolling that counted as the start of her day. The round little things settling between her fingers felt rather nice. Short as the time had been, the training must have been paying off. These cute pebbles had survived an entire day, and earned the right to see the next morning's sun. Artia was confident that if they lasted just another day or two, she could even give them cute names.
"All right. Shall we begin?"
A person ought to have graduated from this level by now, she thought, and rolled a stone with perfect confidence—
Crack—
"KYAAAAAAAH!"
Sadly for Artia, the stone that had survived a day was now nothing but a nameless scatter of fragments.
Stones shattering in the morning were routine. So, for the elves traveling back across the Shiland Hills, was turning the tables on elf hunters and tearing through them in turn — routine, if the word still meant anything. Scorch marks, dead hunters, hunters who had only barely survived: routine as well. Rescued elves breaking into bright, easy smiles would have been routine too, on a routine sort of day.
This time was different.
Different how? Well, for a start — the slaves they'd rescued this time were not beautiful. It felt a little crass to put it that way, but there it was. Ah. Not beautiful by elven standards, to be clear. A harsh measure, perhaps. Hold almost anything in the world up beside an elf, and it would fail to be beautiful.
And also, the slaves they'd rescued this time were short. And burly. Hair in abundance, beards in abundance. Look at them from any angle and the word elf simply did not arrive. Thanks to Elgaia, Artia's knowledge of this other world had been decently updated; she knew elves were not a single people, but four branches. Even so, these were not elves. Not from any angle. Not by any stretch.
"Traitors! Don't come any closer!"
"Y-you bastards! Helio—!"
Small men stood packed tight, blades thrust forward, the slave merchant's wagon they'd spilled out of braced behind them like a wall. They were not boys. They were men. Anyone with a scrap of sense would have taken one look and shouted it on the spot. Dwarves — those were dwarves! Not dwarf dung-sa— no. Fantasy's signature craftsmen. The blacksmith race. Men of stubbornness and loyalty.
Even so, bad blood between elves and dwarves was, sure enough, the oldest grudge in the book. The dwarves were on full guard against the elves, gripping swords, axes, spears and the like they had most likely taken off the hunters, and one spear among those weapons was soaked red.
That blood was not the hunters'. It was elf blood. An innocent elf had been ambushed in the middle of cutting the hunters down and freeing their captives.
"Nngh—"
"Helio! Are you all right? You're all right, aren't you?"
"You dung-sack bastards! This is how you repay a rescue?!"
"Dung-sacks?! You pointy-eared bastards, a dragon ought to eat you!"
The one who had taken the blow was one of the young elves rescued from the hunter raid just before this. Elves fresh out of captivity usually weren't thrown into the next fight while body and mind were still recovering, but a few had insisted on coming even though they weren't fully healed, and now blood had been spilled. Not that their hot blood was the cause this time. Not from any angle.
"Stay with me. It's going to hurt, but hold on—"
Elgaia was swiftly staunching the male elf who had collapsed in a bleed, and even a glance said the wound was nothing light. A spear had taken him in the side. It was luck the emergency treatment had gone in at all; a hair worse, and recovery wouldn't have mattered — he would have left this world without an argument. If the angle of the blade had shifted even slightly and torn into his organs, there would have been no hope.
The elves who saw it were furious, and of course they were. They had pulled these people out of the hands of vicious slave merchants, only to have the kindness paid back in blood. Worse, they had gone to the trouble of dealing with the elf hunters and found not a single fellow elf among the rescued — only these ungrateful dwarves. Enough to make anyone twice as angry.
"I'll burn you! I won't leave a single strand of that filthy beard!"
Friend of the stabbed elf? Or a lover? A blonde elven woman was in a full rage, lifting several flame arrows into the air around herself, ready to loose them at any second.
"Go on, try it! Cowardly pointy-eared traitors! We aren't afraid of your magic one bit!"
"Graaah!"
Surrounded and outnumbered, the dwarves still didn't lose their nerve. They roared straight back. The one who looked to be their leader — an especially solid barrel of a body, and a memorable thickness of reddish-brown braided hair and beard — knocked sword against axe as if to stoke his courage and haul his fighting spirit higher.
In the end the elven woman, unable to swallow her anger, let the flame arrows fly.
Of the five she had prepared, three shrieked toward the reddish-brown dwarf at the very front — dead ahead, and to either side. Fired across three angles, they had been tuned so their speeds would bring every one of them to impact at the same instant. The remaining two would follow a beat later, hunting whatever opening he left. Genuinely skilled work.
"Hup!"
The dwarf met the flame arrows head-on. Both forearms swelled thick, and the crude sword and axe in his hands tore outward in a pair of violent swings. Even a layman could see the form was clean and fast. Ask whether that was enough to stop magic, though, and the objective answer was no. Hardly a breath of mana came off his body, and what he held was nothing more than an utterly ordinary iron sword and an iron axe.
Under the rules of a spar where neither side used mana — or against a low-rank warrior who had yet to properly awaken mana at all — that dwarf could have beaten his opponent well enough. But meeting magic with raw muscle is a fool's errand. Split an incoming flame arrow on a sword, and the force that launched the spell, and the heat of the fire, do not simply vanish. The split arrows would still run the mage's foe through and burn him, split or not. Unless you had overwhelming power on Artia's level, enough to blow the magic itself clean out of existence, the rule of this world was simple. Mana was answered with mana. There was a reason warriors passed down the maxim: don't take a mage head-on until you're intermediate, at least.
Most of the elves present had already predicted the dwarf's death. It was not one flame arrow. It was five. Stop one or two by some miracle, and that was the end of it. The ordinary weapons in his hands would lose their hardness and go soft from blocking even a single one.
But—
"Huh?"
Sword and axe cut the air fast, the product of considerable training. From weapons that had been utterly ordinary a moment ago, Artia felt something strange. The instant he swung, something changed.
What?
She drew in the attention she had let wander and fixed it on his weapons. The moment she set her mind on focusing, the world decelerated, as if time itself had slowed. In that slowed world she could see the swinging steel in detail. Look however she liked, it was still an ordinary iron sword and an ordinary axe. Look closer, though, and something was off. A faint light was turning through the heart of each weapon. Pure white, and blue. A mysterious light. It was like a picture, and like some special, secret script.
When the light-bearing weapons swept through, the flame arrows that touched them died — a long, thin unraveling, and then nothing.
"Th-that's impossible!"
The elven woman who had been in a fury was aghast, and no wonder. It would have been an attack she had some confidence in. Judging by the elves around her, sunk in the same shock, that confidence had been no arrogance.
"—!"
"Th-that's—?!"
Elgaia, too busy with the wounded to spare a thought, seemed to have caught something in that brief flash. She jolted harder than any of the others.
What in the world?
Artia wanted to know what had just happened, but this was no moment to ask. All she could do was guess from the grab-bag of trivia piled up over years as a hardcore gamer. A sword engraved with a mysterious pattern. Or with characters.
That's rune-letter magic, isn't it? Fantasy's all-time regular?
It showed up so often in games and novels that one glance and it clicked. She couldn't be sure of the precise effect, or of how you set the thing off — even in fiction, those were described every which way — but there was a clear kinship in the simple fact of using an object with characters carved into it.
Whoa. Rune letters. Rune magic.
Runes, huh.
Ugh. My head. Legendary runes, epic runes, mythic runes — one stray memory of the modern Earth's gaming industry and its nastiest cash-shop schemes, and Artia's mind went briefly, miserably blank.