Heaven's Leave to Eat
"You believed that?"
"I did."
"Why?"
"Because the proof is standing right in front of me. No mana reservoir. A cultivation method that's a joke. And still the man is walking around in a Master's body. He even took the Marquis's killing technique with his flesh and lived through it. Where am I supposed to find better evidence than that?"
"The Marquis pulled his strength at the end."
"Pull it or don't. A killing technique is still a killing technique."
Chris let out a sigh.
"The whole story was a lie."
"If that was a lie, then explain your body."
"I was born this way. A god's blessing."
"Liar."
"Meeting a monster and finding the sun-herb — that part was the lie. What I just told you is the truth. Really."
"I don't believe you."
"Believe it or don't. That's your affair. So what is it you want?"
"I want the Sun Fruit."
"Even if my story were true, there is no Sun Fruit. I told you I dug it up, roots and all, and ate it. What, you think another sun-herb might be growing in the same spot? Fine. I'll tell you where it was."
"It isn't only the Sun Fruit sitting in your body."
"There's more?"
"A spirit beast's blood, flesh, and sinew."
"Aigoo. So this is why people say not to lie. Fine — let's say I ate all of that too. Then what? Every bit of it came out as shit."
"No. The medicinal virtue is still in you."
"Still there?"
"At your level you could never digest the whole Sun Fruit. If you'd absorbed it properly, you wouldn't be a Master. You'd be a Grandmaster."
"Hah."
Chris sighed.
"The Sun Fruit must really be something."
"It fruits once in a thousand years. Of course it is."
"I wish I'd gotten to taste one."
"I told you. I'm not falling for it."
"Fine. Say the virtue is still in me. What are you going to do about it?"
"Extract it."
"Extract it?"
"I could press you completely dry and wring it out. I could boil it off you. Or I could chew you down, bones and all."
"You mean to eat me?"
The sheer nerve of it left Chris speechless.
"I knew the Magic Towers were a den of lunatics. I didn't realize the Old Mages had gone mad as well."
"Do I look like an Old Mage to you?"
"Didn't you come out of the royal court? I heard most court mages and domain mages are Old Mages. Or are you some wanderer the Tower threw out?"
"Think whatever's convenient."
Chris cocked his head.
New Mage, or Old Mage?
"You're really going to eat me?"
"Yes. The moment I heard the story in the Supreme Commander's tent, I made up my mind. I would eat you. I was racking my brain over how to spirit you away without anyone noticing, and then you walked out on your own. How thoughtful. This is heaven telling me to eat you."
Chris stripped off a glove and flung it at the man's face. Cyril, wary of some hidden trick, sidestepped, and the glove struck the dirt with a flat slap. Chris declared it.
"A duel!"
He drew his sword.
Cyril sneered.
"Throwing a glove to declare a duel. People stopped doing that ages ago."
"I was supposed to slap your cheek with it. A pity."
"Let's keep this simple."
"Meaning what?"
"Drop the sword and surrender, and I'll kill you cleanly. Payment for not wasting my time."
Chris lifted the blade above his shoulder.
"Why would I surrender when I have the advantage?"
"And why do you imagine that you do?"
"It's common sense. Put a knight and a mage in close quarters, and the knight has the edge."
"And might there be a reason I stepped in close, against that common sense of yours?"
"What reason?"
"When the gap in skill is wide enough, common sense doesn't mean a damn thing."
"Oh? So you're confident in your skill."
Chris was already moving as he spoke. The sword came down in a graceful arc, cutting for Cyril's chest.
"That won't work on me."
The staff flashed, and a barrier sprang up between them. The blade struck it with a sound like a boulder dropped on stone.
"You think I can't break a shoddy little barrier like this?"
Chris sneered and swung again. The words were contempt. What he actually felt was admiration.
Hell of a barrier. How did he build it?
Wind-attribute mana, earth-attribute mana, and metal-attribute mana seemed bound together in three layers. He was still picking the weave apart when the staff tipped toward the sky, and he cut the analysis short.
Don't get distracted.
He could take it apart after the fight.
A fireball bloomed above the staff and rose, round and buoyant as a full moon. Then it split into dozens of pieces and poured down on him. Chris worked his feet left and right, slipping some of them and batting the rest aside with quick cuts of the sword — and in that instant the earth crawled up and cinched his ankle. Soil turned to shackles, thickening until it had swallowed him to the calves.
"Shackles of the Earth. You brainless knight."
Cyril pressed in. Another fireball rose, broke apart finer than the last, and came flying. If the first volley had been spears, these were arrows, and some of them bent in the air to hunt his flank and his back.
When a hundred arrows pack the sky and all of them arrive at once, the safest answer is to throw your body clear. Failing that, you raise a shield. Cutting them down with a sword is a poor third. There is a hard limit to how many arrows one swing can answer.
The shackles kept Chris from dodging, and he had no shield to hide behind. Had he trained the sword instead of Iron Body and climbed to Master or Grandmaster, he might have raised an aura barrier and stopped the assault cold. His swordsmanship was not a Master's. He managed only to knock aside a few of the arrows falling toward his head. The rest struck his armor in a rattling metallic drumbeat.
"This armor of mine is enchanted!"
This time it was Chris who surged, laying his blade into the barrier.
Cyril's mouth curled.
"And how long do you think that armor will hold?"
Fire-arrows poured again, like rain, like hail. Chris abandoned any thought of blocking them and hammered the barrier with stubborn, stupid persistence. Cyril trusted the barrier and kept pouring. Whose would break first — the armor, or the wall of mana?
Neither man gave an inch. They fought like brutes.
Cyril was the first to climb out of that mindless heat.
Do I really need to fight this stupidly?
He did not. He slipped the sword's arc and drew the barrier back about two paces. Chris stretched his arm as far as it would go, but the blade never touched the barrier. The shackles on his feet would not let him close.
"It's over, you idiot."
Chris's attacks could no longer reach him. Cyril's kept landing. Two steps back did not put a man out of arrow range, and the old saying proved itself in Chris's bones: a knight's gift is the close fight, a mage's the far one. The taste in his mouth went bitter.
And I'm a mage.
He practiced all sorts of magic, but none of it was ready for a real fight. Without a single combat spell he could actually trust, he was brawling like a knight.
Cyril jeered.
"Pathetic. At least you had the sense to wear decent armor. Even that has a limit."
He was right. The enchantment laid over the armor was fading.
Chris staked everything.
"Here I come!"
Cyril laughed at him.
"Come where? In your dreams!"
He laughed too early.
The earthen shackles split with a crack, and Chris's foot burst free. His sole kicked off the ground. He was faster than a loosed arrow — fast enough to leave a faint afterimage — and the sword he swung at that speed carried terrible force. The barrier shattered in a single blow. Cyril, who had trusted it, was shocked nearly senseless.
He had watched Chris fight Marquis Dominic in the tent, and from that showing he had taken the measure of the man's strength and speed. The charge at the end had pushed those numbers up a little, but he hadn't taken it seriously. Anyone could see it for what it was: a death-or-glory effort, every last scrap of strength wrung out of him. Against the chance of being wrong, Cyril had added three parts in ten to his estimate. Chris exceeded that estimate by more than four times. Of course the barrier couldn't hold.
Ever since his spar with Bertrand, Chris had shown the world nothing more than strength a shade short of a Master's. It had been the same in the fight with the Supreme Commander, and Cyril had been standing right there. Chris had counted on him expecting exactly that much.
The barrier will be built to match.
Spring a Grandmaster's strength on him without warning, and it wouldn't hold. The guess proved right. The Shackles of the Earth could not stop a Grandmaster, and neither could the barrier.
The sword that broke through drove for Cyril's heart. There should have been a wet punch of steel into flesh. What came instead was a crack louder than the barrier's death, and the necklace at Cyril's throat shattered.
A defensive artifact.
Chris swung again. This time a ring powdered away and vanished.
Shit. How many defensive artifacts is he wearing?
He swung once more, bitter at the waste, and in the space of those two cuts Cyril found his composure. The staff that had pointed at the sky came down and leveled at the sword. Flame poured from it — heat that made the fire-arrows look like sparks. The blade split the fireball, but the fire did not die. Torn in two, it still came on and wrapped the armor.
They were so close that Cyril had failed to answer the charge in time. Now Chris could not answer in time either.
"Hot!"
He recoiled, shuddering, and lost the sword. Unlike the armor, the blade carried no enchantment and could not resist the flame. Fire clung to it and hissed as it burned.
"Now it's really over!"
Cyril had no doubt the man was finished. Chris's hand came in, and he didn't think it especially dangerous.
No sword. What's he going to do?
That was what he thought — and then wind shot from Chris's finger, fast and fierce as an arrow. It punched through Cyril's chest. At the last instant he twisted, saving his heart from bursting, but he could not save his lung from being holed. Bloody froth welled up out of the wound.
"How... the Marquis's... Death's Finger?"
"I stole it while we were fighting."
"That... isn't something you can use... just from watching..."
"You gather wind-attribute mana, rearrange it, compress it, shift its nature a little, and fire. Then you mix fire-attribute mana with metal-attribute mana behind it and detonate the mix to drive the speed up."
"That's impossible."
"I'm a mage. Sorting mana and working it is what I'm best at. Better than most at the Sikbae realm, I'd say."
"Even a mage... can't do that."
"They can't. A mage's channels aren't a knight's, so firing it from a finger like this is difficult."
Another arrow of wind leapt from his finger and buried itself in Cyril's chest. This time it struck the heart dead on, and blood jetted from the hole.
"But the channels in my body are far larger and wider than a Master's. Well paved, too. Mana runs them like a racehorse."
"Y-you're... insane."
His heart had burst, and still he did not die.
"Th-the... fl-flames...?"
Chris was still wreathed in fire.
"You want to know why they aren't burning me, when the armor's protection has already weakened? I studied the enchantment. Just looking at it told me nothing, but I saw how it changed when your fire-arrows struck. Water-attribute mana, and—"
He broke off and unleashed Death's Finger. Wind mana pierced Cyril's eye and tore through his brain.
Cyril toppled backward.