The Fifty-Fifth Step
Chris was counting in his head.
Forty-nine. Fifty.
He set his foot on the fiftieth step, stopped, and fought for breath. His body hung as heavy as waterlogged cotton. Sandbags seemed lashed to his arms and legs, two boulders sat across his shoulders, and a giant's hand, broad as a cauldron lid, ground down on the crown of his head.
"Hah... hah..."
Even standing still left him gasping.
Elder Perez stood with his arms folded, looking down at him. A glint flashed through his eyes and was gone.
"His limit."
It didn't look as if Chris could climb another step.
"Will that be enough?" a Sikbae mage asked from behind.
"Elder, what do you mean by that...?"
Perez gave no answer.
Lower on the stairs, Randal was looking up at Chris's back.
"He's hit his limit."
"So it seems," Thomas said, nodding.
David stood well apart from his master, among others his own age.
"He'd better not go any higher."
"Why?" Peter asked.
"It's his limit. Put a foot on the fifty-first and he'll be hurt badly."
"True. If he falls, a lot of bones are going to break."
"Looks like he's going up!" Carl said, excited.
Chris's sole was lifting off the fiftieth step. Harvey put malice into every word.
"Fall. Fall. Fall."
Alice scrubbed the sweat from her palms against her clothes.
"Chris, stop! Don't go any higher!"
Whoever held second place was panting on the thirtieth step like a dog that had run all day, and he didn't dare set a foot on the thirty-first.
"Chris, you're miles ahead of second! Just stand there and you win!" Catherine shouted.
Lai, who had quit the contest halfway through and drifted over to her side, watched Chris with his nostrils flaring.
"H-hey, the old guy's going up."
"That's right!" Charles bellowed. "A man of the smithy doesn't know the meaning of quit!"
"I've fallen for Chris," Linne said. "I'm going to marry him."
"Chief, don't make a fool of yourself."
"What's foolish about it?"
"He's young enough to be your grandson."
"I'm exactly the right age for love."
And she laughed, bright and unrestrained.
Andrew had gone past admiration into outright disbelief.
"His body really is that tough."
Alex hated hearing him praise Chris.
"As if that's anything special."
"Right now Chris is holding up thirty-two times normal gravity. That's incredible."
"I could do it too."
"Really?"
He had only snapped it out of irritation. Asked whether he meant it, Alex had no answer and swerved the subject.
"Do you know how high the past winners of this contest climbed?"
"Go back over the last two hundred years, and the highest anyone reached was the thirty-second step, as far as I know."
An overwhelming record.
"Damn it."
Alex's insides boiled.
"Fall and break some bones."
Chris clenched his teeth. The nearer his foot drew to the fifty-first step, the more violently he felt the gravity surge. His toes brushed the step. His legs were no longer merely heavy. They felt as if they were on fire.
"Graaaah!"
His mouth tore open of its own accord, and a howl came out of it. He was hauling up every last scrap of strength in him.
One sole came down on the step with a dull thud. The burning leapt past his legs and took his whole body.
Why does it feel like I'm on fire?
Heavy limbs, he understood. The sense of being crushed beneath a boulder, he understood. So did the crawling dread that the pressure would mash him flat as a dried fish. The gravity was that high.
The burning, he did not understand.
What does gravity have to do with burning?
Snarling inwardly, Chris leaned his torso forward and dragged the other foot up until he stood fully on the fifty-first step. The sensation of flame grew stronger.
He focused on it. Mana of several attributes churned inside him, and among them the wood-attribute mana seemed to be overheating, catching fire.
The wood is burning...!
A line surfaced from the spell Donna had taught him, a phrase he had never managed to understand.
"I am a tree..."
"A tree that burns."
The wood really was burning. That power was what held his body up.
Right. Burn the wood, and the strength comes.
On that strength, Chris climbed. Up. Up. He had clenched so hard his molars throbbed.
"This is impossible!" Alex shouted.
"Agreed," Andrew said.
He shook his head.
"Sixty-four times? Sixty-four! That's practically Grandmaster level."
"Grandmaster?" Alex muttered, dazed.
The pinnacle of knighthood, of which only three existed in all the world. And that pinnacle was being spoken from a mage's mouth.
A sliver of Perez's teeth showed. The mages who caught it went rigid with shock.
Elder Perez smiled.
No one had seen him smile in a hundred and sixty years.
Harvey was struck dumb.
Chris took the fifty-first step? That bastard? How is that possible?
Certain he had seen wrong, he rubbed his eyes and counted the steps again from the bottom. Astonishingly, his eyes had not failed him. Chris was setting a foot on the fifty-second step.
"The stairs aren't broken, are they?"
David was biting his lower lip with his upper teeth.
"If they were broken, the other contestants wouldn't be struggling."
Peter swallowed.
"At that level, he's Grandmaster class, isn't he?"
"Right. In the body alone, he's a Grandmaster."
"How can he do that?"
"That bastard...!"
"That bastard what?"
"He's learned a Body Mage's secret art."
"A Body Mage's secret...?"
"Otherwise sixty-four times gravity is impossible."
"Where would he even find a secret art?"
They turned to look at Harvey.
"You know something?"
"Me?"
His eyes, nose, and mouth pinched toward the center of his face, and an already ugly face grew uglier.
"You're head of the Evaluation Office. You've had dealings with Chris."
"That bastard hasn't come to the Evaluation Office in ages."
Their masters were no less astonished. William could not take his eyes off Chris.
"When the contest ends, we grab him and interrogate him."
"Interrogate him about what?" Randal asked.
"Sixty-four times gravity is a load I'd struggle to endure even if I staked my life on a spell. You cannot withstand it by tempering the body alone. He has definitely learned an Ascending Body Art. We need to find out from whom, what, and how."
"Agreed," Thomas said with a nod. "Honestly, I was suspicious from sixteen times. Sixteen times isn't a level a mage at Spirit Awakening can bear."
"An interrogation..." Randal murmured.
In truth he had wanted to interrogate Chris for a long time. An elder had been watching, though, so he had never touched him.
I still can't, can I.
He glanced at Elder Perez, who had bared his teeth, if only for a moment.
What is it you want?
Chris raised a foot toward the fifty-third step and staggered.
"He's falling!" Lai shouted.
"Shut your mouth, you brat!" Catherine snapped.
Lai's eyes went round with shock.
An angel just cursed at me.
His humiliation did not end there. Furious, Alice seized him by the mouth and yanked.
"Young, and already rotten."
"Ow, ow, that hurts."
"I'm pulling so it hurts. You nasty little wretch."
Chris was staring at the back of his hand, flushed a furious red.
As it burned, the wood-attribute mana was giving him the strength to resist the gravity. It was pouring muscle into his legs. And as a side effect, it was driving his body temperature up. The heat had climbed into dangerous territory, hot enough that an ordinary person would have stopped breathing long ago.
The body hardened by Iron Body was enduring that temperature. Even that, though, was nearing its limit. Real steel melts in high heat too.
Chris felt as if his brain were boiling. His mind went hazy. The foot he had lifted lost its aim and wavered. His heart, however, kept shouting.
Up. Up. Up.
Up. His right foot planted on the fifty-third step.
Up. His hair stood on end, then began to curl.
Up. His mouth was so parched he could not swallow.
Up. The fine hair on the back of his hand crumbled as if it had been singed.
Up. He drove his strength into the right foot and hauled the left up beside it.
Up.
Chris stood fully on the fifty-third step. In that instant, his hair caught fire.
"They said Chris never had his attribute judged, right?" Andrew shouted, seeing the flames.
Alex kept his mouth clamped shut.
"Look at that fire. Chris is fire attribute."
A similar exchange was passing lower on the stairs. Carl turned to Harvey.
"Chris never had his attribute judged, right?"
"Right."
"Look at that fire. Fire attribute."
Harvey tilted his head.
"But you can't use magic on the stairs, can you?"
"That's right."
"So how did a guy who hasn't even learned magic manifest fire magic?"
"Oh. Yeah."
"Is that even fire magic?" David said.
"If it isn't magic?" Peter asked.
"I don't know either. But whatever it is, I don't think it's magic."
Alex laced his voice with malice.
"Burn to death. Burn!"
Even in the moment his hair caught fire, Chris's heart was still shouting.
Up. Up.
Then the flames ate into his scalp, and his muddled mind snapped back into place. Keep going like this and he was going to burn to death. Like Jack of the barony. Like Smith in Lion Pavilion. Like Faye. Like Tony.
He had thought it for a long time.
If I'm going to die, I'd rather have my head cut off than burn.
He lifted a hand to put the fire out. He needed to beat the flames from his hair, but the gravity was so monstrous the hand would not rise above his head. Merely keeping his feet planted on the step was already all he could manage.
His thoughts circled back to the beginning. Why is there a fire? Because the wood-attribute mana inside him was burning. And what do you do when something catches fire? You put it out with water.
Chris searched for water. His insides were bone-dry. Even his blood seemed to have no moisture left.
Strange that I'm still alive.
Finding no real water in his body, he searched instead for water-attribute mana.
He possessed a wood-attribute seed, and he had used a wood-attribute mana stone for three years, so he felt wood-attribute mana with perfect clarity. The other attributes were faint. Every time he searched for them, it felt like groping along a floor in the dark with his hands.
Now, with the wood-attribute mana blazing, that faintness thinned. The first presence he recognized was the fire-attribute mana burning the wood's mana. He had never felt the mana of fire so clearly.
So this is fire.
On any ordinary day he would have been thrilled to have picked fire-attribute mana out of the blur. He had no room for that now. What he needed was not fire. It was water.
Water!
He searched with everything he had.
Where are you?
The presence of the mana seated opposite fire began to emerge. Faint at first, then whole and distinct.
So this is the mana of water.
He had no leisure to be moved at having felt it. Chris sent the water-attribute mana toward his skin, a great deal of it toward the scalp that was burning. The scalp stopped burning. His hair was already nearly gone, and the flames sank. Even after the fire died, the water mana moved over his skin and cooled his body.
Only then could he catch his breath.
He had felt wood, fire, and water. Earth or wind ought to come next. Neither attribute came easily to hand, and the situation allowed him no room to chase them. Gravity kept gnawing at his body.
Chris swayed as if he would collapse, then caught his balance. He fixed his eyes on the fifty-fifth step.
Just two more. If I can climb just two more!
They felt impossibly far.