The Call for No. 4
"You dead?"
No answer.
"Dead, then."
They say that the higher a mage's realm, the more the flesh itself changes, so if you mean to kill a high mage you're better off destroying the brain and the Thought Space than the organs within. Having just lived through the fight, Chris saw that the saying was true.
"I hear high mages don't die easy."
He set a foot on the man's solar plexus.
"You Sikbae realm?"
The dead have nothing to say. Chris put his weight into the foot and caved the chest in—then sprang back as heat slammed through him. The armor's enchantment had died, and the fire came through unfiltered. He mimicked the spell that had been laid on the armor and tried to resist the flames, but he'd only just grasped it, and his control was clumsy. He tore the armor off and flung it aside.
It hit the ground with a hollow clang, broke apart, and rolled like scrap. A suit famous as a masterwork had become junk in an instant.
Fire leapt to his clothes. Blisters rose on his skin, and his hair caught. A Grandmaster's body resisted the flame enough to keep the burns from deepening, but it did nothing for the pain. Another mage would have lost his mind to it and never managed a spell. Chris was too used to pain to stop doing what needed doing.
He gathered water-attribute mana and sheathed his body in it. Moisture beaded across his skin. Had the caster still been alive and feeding the flames, they would not have died so easily—but Cyril was dead, and fire could not beat water.
After a short rest to settle body and mind, Chris erased the signs of the fight and lifted the ruined armor and Cyril's corpse into the air. He left the road for the forest, and armor and body drifted along behind him.
He worked earth-attribute mana, opened a pit, dropped the armor in, and threw the corpse after it. He was about to cover it over when something about Cyril's skin looked wrong. The flesh beneath the jaw had curled upward.
Why is the skin peeling?
Chris climbed into the pit and touched under the jaw. The texture was different. He pulled at the chin, and the face tore free.
"Gah—!"
Thinking he'd peeled the face clean off, he sat down hard in shock. But Cyril's face was intact. A different face had simply come out from beneath it. Chris looked from the face in his hand to the real one and back again.
It's a mask.
An astonishingly well-made mask. Under his fingers it was as soft as real skin, and he could even feel warmth, as if it held a body's heat. It seemed like a magic tool some great mage had labored over.
Worth studying.
Chris kept the mask, and his eyes went to the robe. Looting a corpse left him a little sheepish, but since he'd already taken one thing, he figured he might as well take the rest.
A winner claiming spoils is hardly strange.
He rationalized it that way, stripped the robe off, and filled in the pit. He meant to search the robe right there, but lingering beside a grave felt unpleasant, so he left. Looking himself over as he went, he was a wreck. Most of his clothes had burned away until he was as good as naked, and every hair on him, eyebrows included, had gone up in flame. He looked ridiculous.
Following the sound of water, he found a valley, peeled off what had become rags, and washed. Afterward he treated the burns with a crude healing spell he'd taught himself. While he was at it he also healed the face he'd altered to hide who he was—but bone takes time to settle back into its old shape, so his face went lumpy and grotesque. His healing magic simply wasn't refined enough to mend bone in a single casting.
He worked fire-attribute mana to dry the water off, then lay naked on a rock. The season carried a chill, and the sunlight was welcome.
After lying there a while he got up and examined the robe. A hole had been punched through the chest—the hole he'd opened with Death's Finger.
The first mage's robe he had ever put on in his life, and it was a secondhand thing with a hole in it. Even so, it moved him. He brushed it off and slipped his arms in. A shock like lightning prickled through him, and a mana that felt uncanny seeped into his body.
"What is this?"
His body ached and shivered as if he had a fever.
"Hup—"
Chris drew mana in and circulated it by the secret of Iron Body. The eerie mana drained out of him, and his body returned to normal.
He sharpened his senses and watched that mana. Something like black thread writhed. All at once the threads gathered, taking the shape of a ghost, and swept in to cover his face.
"Hraaah!"
Chris shouted, and fire-attribute mana burst from his mouth. Stretching toward the ghost, it rearranged, compressed, and changed form. Some of it spiked in heat and threw sparks; the mana around it chain-detonated and became flame.
The fire roared up and burned the ghost of black thread. His ears caught nothing. In his mind, though, he heard it scream.
When the flames died, Chris muttered.
"A curse?"
The robe seemed to have been cursed to harm anyone but its owner who put it on.
"Who curses a piece of clothing? Nasty bastard."
He started searching the robe. It had plenty of inner pockets, and every one of them was empty.
Why isn't he carrying anything?
He took the robe off and went through it inch by inch. Something sat in a pocket near the armpit. Drawn out, it proved to be a spatial pouch.
"Ah. So this is where he kept the valuables."
He started to undo it, then hesitated. This was the same sly man who had cursed his own robe. He had surely left a trick on the pouch as well.
Chris ran Iron Body until his hand was harder still, then, with careful fingers, opened the pouch and reached inside. Something cracked hard against his finger.
"Tss—"
He yanked the hand back. A red line marked the finger. His body was hard enough that it stopped there; another mage would have lost the hand on the spot.
"There has to be a spell that lifts the security..."
Chris studied the spatial pouch, pouring every nerve into contemplation, then contemplating it again. He felt a current of power in it that didn't look right, and he pushed his own mana into that current. The moment the foreign substance entered, the flow turned violent and crushed his mana.
He kept forcing mana in without pause. The pouch's power tangled and turned sticky, until at last there was no gap left to push through. The security spell had broken. It could no longer be undone by any proper method—the same as jabbing holes at random to pick a lock and wrecking the lock entirely.
He would have liked the hasp to spring open when the lock broke, but no such luck arrived. The pouch itself wasn't ruined. Only the chance of releasing the security by magic was gone. A crude method remained. One unbecoming of a mage.
"I can just take it with my body."
As before, he ran Iron Body and put his hand in. It stung, but he endured, pushing in and pulling out again and again. Past ten attempts the blows on his fingers weakened, and after ten more the interference vanished altogether. The power stored in the pouch had been spent, and the security measure could no longer trigger.
"Power you stuff in a pouch is bound to have a limit."
Having brute-forced the security, Chris reached deep and groped around. His hand closed on a mana stone.
"Oho."
He took it out and looked it over. A standard mana stone, but pure enough to count as high-grade. Grinning, Chris lined the high-grade stones up on the rock. There were more than twenty.
"High-grade standard stones go for fifty gold apiece, so that's a thousand. Ha. Cyril was rich."
Aside from the stones, nothing worth noting turned up. A few gold coins and a few silver, that was all. Chris swept the stones and the money back into the spatial pouch, grumbling as he did.
"Shouldn't a mage have at least one magic tool worth using?"
Cyril had owned expensive ones: a defensive necklace and ring, the sort meant to save your life when things went bad. Chris's savage cutting had simply shattered them.
There was a staff, too.
He looked for it too late, and it was gone. He must have lost it while moving the body.
Should've paid more attention.
Grumbling, he realized one magic tool remained.
The mask.
Chris looked at the mask he'd tossed onto the rock. The longer he looked, the less ordinary it seemed.
"Why did Cyril go around in a mask? Was he wanted by a magic tower, like me? Is that why he put himself under the royal house?"
He moved to try it on, then set it back down. Like the robe and the spatial pouch, this probably had security on it too.
"Then again, I can touch it fine. Maybe there isn't any."
Even thinking it might be dangerous, he couldn't let the mask go. He needed something like it desperately. Reshaping his face was never the end of it. A Grandmaster's body recovered so well that, even without a healing spell, time alone tried to return it to its original face, so he had to keep working on it at regular intervals. A mask like this would erase that nuisance, and the pain with it.
"If this works, I won't have to make a new face..."
Chris pressed the mask over his face. In that instant his skin stung as if pricked by needles. The mask sank roots into him, then warped of its own accord and seated itself.
He climbed down from the rock and looked at his reflection in the stream. A face he had never once seen stared back at him from the water. The features weren't Cyril's. The mask seemed to fashion a new face to match whoever wore it.
Chris stroked it. It felt like touching his own skin. There was almost no sense of something foreign.
"This is really something."
The admiration came out of him on its own.
He was walking, intent on crossing into another country, when a voice reached him. It didn't come in through his ears. It seemed to arrive directly in his brain.
No. 4? What's No. 4?
Bewildered, he let the moment pass.
Only then did it dawn on him that No. 4 meant Cyril. Someone was calling him.
The source of the voice was the mask.
The mask could do this? That's incredible.
Why call Cyril No. 4? That bastard—what was he even doing?
He must have been mixed up in something shady as a matter of course. When no reply came, the other side kept calling.
Damn it. How do I answer this?
Chris stopped, folded his legs, and sat. Then he closed his eyes and turned every nerve onto the mask.
Contemplating it again and again, he felt formless mana descending from around his forehead. It wasn't simple mana. Too loosely compressed to be called true power, yet tangled intricately enough that it was hard to grasp.
Can I send something, too?
Chris analyzed the shape of the mana flowing from the mask. He kept splitting it open and going deeper, until he could feel the grains of mana. He worked out which attribute was tangled into which form, imitated it as closely as he could, and set a voice on top of it.
"I was busy."
Damn. My words aren't getting through.
The mask relayed only the other side's words. It did not relay his.
Words? Is this even speech?
He had called it speech in the ordinary sense, but strictly speaking it wasn't speech at all. The other person's words never struck his eardrums as sound.
Something like telepathy? Then this is telepathy magic? How does it work?
Chris set his will into the mana he had imitated.
When Chris manifested magic, he ordinarily used the force of will. He had never been taught magic properly, so he didn't know the incantations. That had forced him through endless trial and error, and his power was crude—but because of it, he was thoroughly practiced at driving mana by will alone.
From the reaction, he realized the meaning had gotten through.
It works. It worked!
But answers came from other quarters as well.
His handling of the mask was clumsy, and it seemed his words had carried to the other ends as well—and at a shout.