Chapter 61
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Chris left the pond and ran again. He did not put his clothes back on. A roe deer, startled by the sense of him, burst from cover.
He sprinted after it. The deer took fright and put on speed, but—astonishingly—Chris was faster. He caught it, forced his shirt onto the struggling animal, and let it go. Terrified, the deer fled at a dead run.
Once it was gone, he bent his course slowly south. A wild boar crossed his path; he caught that too and tied his trousers around its neck. The beast was too big to dress. Next came a stag, and he knotted his underclothes to one of its legs. The socks went to a wolf, bound around its tail. The wolf thrashed and fought, but when Chris drew up his mana and fixed it with a glare, it turned meek as a lamb and lowered its head.
Naked, he kept on south until a stream lay across his way. He drank until his belly swelled taut, then brought it all back up.
They might have put something in the food.
Training in Iron Body had made him used to commanding his organs, so this much was nothing. He could move his own heart if he wished. He drank again and scoured his stomach clean, then worked his bowels and voided everything—even the food still sitting undigested in his small intestine. Shit bobbed on the water. His own or not, filth was filth.
He climbed upstream and sank his backside into the current. Completing Iron Body had given him a grip on water mana, and back then he had wondered whether he might steer real water with it. He tried. It worked exactly as he had imagined. Set beside a mage who had trained water magic in earnest, it was primitive—but drawing water in through his intestines was no great difficulty. His anus hauled the stream down at a vicious speed, and a moment later blasted it back out.
After rinsing his innards three times, he went a little farther upstream and drank until he felt ready to burst. This time he did not bring the water up through his mouth. He sent it down and expelled it through his anus, and he repeated that three times as well. From mouth to anus, every foreign thing that had lain between was washed away.
Only then was he satisfied. He left the bank and turned west, and there he met a tiger.
The tiger reared and brought a forepaw down on his chest.
Thud.
Chris was fine.
Was that a hit?
He grinned and cracked his palm across the tiger's jaw.
Thud.
The tiger went flying. It slammed into the ground, scrambled up at once, and then its legs gave out. Chris raised his index finger and wagged it from side to side. The tiger did not dare rush him. When he stepped closer, it whimpered and backed away.
Stay.
He said it with his eyes. The tiger stopped retreating.
So you understand me.
It whined like a frightened dog.
Not an ordinary tiger, then.
"Nnngh."
I'm not going to kill you.
Chris seized its jaws and forced them open, up and down.
Keep your mouth open.
He tore the lucky necklace from his throat and closed his fist around it. The hand went in, down the tiger's gullet.
Bite my arm and you die.
The tiger behaved as if it understood.
Spit the necklace back up and you die anyway.
He deposited the necklace in the tiger's stomach, drew his arm out, and gave the beast a pat.
Keep running that way. If you want to live, run.
Chris slapped its back. The tiger shot off, and he ran the opposite direction, turning over his conversation with Donna as he went.
You never made contact? All of this happened without a single word between you?
He did not believe that.
Don't make me laugh.
Tom and Donna aren't geniuses on that scale.
Then how did the message get through?
His mind settled on the necklace—the one Donna had given him, saying it would bring luck. Tom's manner in the prison had changed only after he found that necklace on Chris. He had turned violent enough to frighten him. That was not like Tom at all.
Chris was probably not the first apprentice Donna had gifted one to. A hundred and fifty years is a long time. Over those years she would have handed them out to every sort of trainee: the loyal, the kind, the foul-tempered, the fools, the gifted, the simple. Hoping one of them would reach her husband.
After a hundred and fifty years, a necklace had at last come into Tom's hands. Through it, Tom must have spoken with Donna and refined the plan.
A magic-disruption formation lay over the prison, yes. But if a necklace Donna herself had made was serving as the medium and they still could not get a message through, they would have been damn useless. A century and a half locked away—they would have worked out a solution to a problem of that size.
The necklace that carried his voice to the other side was gone. He could speak freely.
"I've done everything I can."
If they caught him even after this—if, for all his caution, Tom still found a way to use him—then there was nothing to be done. It lay beyond what Chris could manage.
Chris sat beneath a chestnut tree, sorting mana. First he drew out the largest mass—ordinary mana—and gathered it in a knot above his head. Then he pulled free the wood-attribute mana, took it into his body, and sent it circulating along the iron channels.
Water, fire, wind, metal, and earth he sorted in turn. Unlike the wood attribute, he did not run these through his whole body. He sent each to a particular tissue.
Broadly, the brain and nerves took well to water, and the blood vessels and bones took well to metal. The organs got along with the rest of the mana in a general way, but look closer and each affinity shifted by fine degrees. Metal-attribute mana, for instance, fit the lungs like a hand in a glove and grated against the liver. Wood, by contrast, suited the liver perfectly and felt faintly at odds with the lungs.
Chris had spent a long time finding which mana best matched each part of him, and he used those matches without hesitation—metal stored in the lungs, wood stored in the liver, and so on. An hour with a teacher would have covered all of it. He had no teacher and no spellbook, so he had confirmed every piece himself, by trial and error. It had taken a great deal of time.
The moment the wood-attribute mana, after ten circuits through his body, entered the pit of his stomach, it vanished without a trace. Chris guessed it had passed into his Thought Space. For four years he had tried to feel that space, and failed every time. His body stood at the level of a Grandmaster, and yet on the side of magic he had not even reached Jenyeom—Thought Formulation. A grotesque mismatch. Nothing like it existed in the history of magic.
He badly needed a spellbook that held the relevant knowledge, and he could not get one. Word had come that Miklonia was hunting him, and Laphunian and Herman as well. He could not go near any organization tied to magic at all.
He turned his back on his country, crossed into the Albar Kingdom, and settled at a manor well removed from the border.
Calmer Manor.
A manor raised by a vassal of Count Tren's house. Its founder was Baron Fredric Calmer. He had been a knight of great promise under the count, but he never reached the rank of Master. A Master would have received a domain. In the end he failed, and had to content himself with founding a manor. The title he received could not be inherited—a barony for a single life.
Chris tried to change the ordinary mana gathered over his head into attribute mana, failed, and muttered under his breath.
"I need a teacher."
He was turning that need over yet again when Jerry Calmer, the second son, came toward him with a hand resting on his sword grip.
"Yes. You would need a teacher."
Chris smiled on the outside. Inside, he was irritated. In more ways than one, Jerry called to mind Bo, son of the lord of Javier Barony, where Chris had lived as a slave—Bo, the wastrel who had set an apple on his head and shot arrows at it.
He hid what he felt and bowed with proper courtesy.
"Good day, young master."
Jerry smirked.
"Oh, I'm always well."
The cruelty was a carbon copy of Bo's, but where Bo had been short and stocky, Jerry was tall and solidly built. He tapped the grip.
"A round?"
"Gladly."
He wanted nothing less, and he had no choice but to agree. Jerry carried every hope Fredric Calmer held for the manor. Having failed to become a Master himself, Fredric had laid those hopes on his children, and the second son's skill outstripped the eldest's.
"Come on, then."
Jerry drew his sword.
"Gladly."
Chris drew as well and charged.
"Hup—!"
Jerry had not expected the sudden rush. He sucked in a useless breath and thrust his sword out to guard his body.
Clang.
Steel met steel and spat a harsh note. The pressure in his grip made Jerry clench his teeth.
The bastard's sword work is nothing. The strength, though—that's a brute's.
He did not dare take Chris lightly, and retreated two steps. It was the secret footwork his father had taught him.
In the four years Chris had spent at the manor, they had sparred constantly. He knew the Swallow's Dance, the greatest secret art of the Calmer family, inside and out. A push off the balls of his feet and a charge would have caught Jerry at once, but he held back. Closing the distance was part of the Swallow's Dance as well, and he had stolen it in the middle of their bouts. He could not use it.
Footwork was not all he had stolen. He had learned the whole of a sword art called the Tiger's Breath.
His skill with a sword surpassed not only Jerry's but Fredric's, his father, and not a single person knew it. Chris kept that skill hidden.
Clang. Clang. Clang.
The blades met again and again. Each time, Jerry's face twisted.
He doesn't even have a proper mana method. Why is he this strong?
Jerry drew mana up from his mana warehouse and packed it into his right hand. The instant a portion of that force clung to the blade, he struck with everything he had. The sword that had been crashing in, rough and straight, suddenly whipped aside, slipped beneath his opponent's edge, and struck upward where the steel flexed.
Krang!
Chris's sword left his hand and pinwheeled into the air. He put on a sheepish look and held both hands out.
"I lose."
Jerry lifted his chin and spoke with open arrogance.
"You never get any better."
"I don't have a teacher."
"Pathetic. That excuse again."
"It isn't an excuse..."
"If I'd been born with a body as tough as that carcass of yours, I'd be soaring through the sky."
He piled on the lecture as if he were the superior. Strictly speaking, he had no standing to lecture Chris at all. Chris was a formally appointed knight under Jerry's father; Jerry was merely the man's son. Until he inherited the manor there was no bond of lord and vassal between them, but Jerry treated Chris as an inferior all the same. Chris could not afford to be noticed, so even when Jerry crossed the line, he laughed it off.
"Again."
Jerry set his stance. Chris backed away.
"My hand hurts."
"Again!"
He had refused, and the demands kept coming.
I ought to just flatten this brat.
If he followed his temper, he would pound that nose flat. The situation would not allow it, so he endured.
"Oh—the steward's coming."
The steward of Calmer Manor was running toward them, dripping sweat.
"So this is where you were."
Chris asked,
"Who were you looking for?"
"Both of you."
A question mark might as well have been drawn in Chris's eyes.
Why would the steward need me and Jerry at the same time?
I don't like the feel of this.
"What's the matter?"
"The master is calling for you."
They called it the lord's hall, but set beside the halls of nobles who actually held domains, the main hall of the manor was a shabby thing. Someone Chris had never seen sat inside. The table and chairs, dragged out only for the village festival, had been set in the center of the hall.
A man past the middle of his years, with a face that looked somehow wronged, sat beside Fredric Calmer, sipping wine with a sullen expression.