I Decide My Own Weapon
"……So this is how it feels."
Only his mouth moved.
I looked at Pierre, slowly.
No way.
It was not a power that worked on Iresia alone. Anyone who stepped inside the domain had to take my orders.
"Instructor. Step outside."
Pierre's body moved again. One step back. Then another. He came all the way out of the blue light.
In that instant, a strange tightness closed over my chest.
……?
I drew a deep breath. A weight began to settle across my shoulders, a little at a time. It was the first time I had used the power. A recoil of this degree was hardly strange, and for now I could still bear it.
Pierre worked his arms and legs in turn.
"Ha."
A hollow little laugh escaped him.
"Nasty piece of work."
"An assessment I rather like."
"Wasn't a compliment."
"I'm aware."
Pierre pointed a finger at me.
"And, Altiera."
"Yes."
"Don't kill anybody. The Saintess didn't hand you over so you could slaughter each other."
"Instructor."
"What."
"I nearly died just now."
"……."
"And you failed to stop it."
Pierre closed his mouth.
"So next time, I will move on the assumption that you will fail to stop it again."
"Hey!"
Iresia shouted.
"Why the hell do you keep using me for this bullshit!"
There was a perfectly reasonable explanation. Until a moment ago, she had been trying to kill me.
I looked at Iresia. A good idea occurred to me.
"Die."
If it's a threat even the instructor can't stop, better to remove it while I can.
"Altiera!"
Pierre barked at once.
But nothing happened.
"……?"
Iresia clenched her eyes shut, then cracked one open. Once she confirmed she was intact, she let out a long breath.
"Fuck. I really thought I was dead……."
I tilted my head.
"Cough up blood."
Nothing. She was fine.
"Split in half."
"Hey, you crazy bitch!"
Again, no change at all.
"Hmm."
I touched my chin, and Pierre dragged a relieved hand down his chest.
"So you can't make something that isn't there just by saying it."
"In that case."
I looked at Iresia again.
"Slap your own cheek."
Smack!
"Aagh!"
Iresia's hand cracked across her own face.
"……So that works."
"Hey!!"
A direct order to die, or to ruin her body outright, did not take. Forcing her to perform an action she was already capable of did—and the power did nothing to stop the injury that followed. An ambiguous standard, all things considered. And the more commands I stacked, the harder the pressure bore down on me. My breath grew shallow. My arms and legs grew heavy.
I could still experiment.
"Then, the head—"
"That's enough."
Pierre cut me off.
"Why?"
"Because I'm starting to get scared of how far you'll take it."
A shame.
The moment I went to answer, my breath caught hard in my throat.
……?
The edges of my vision wavered. And then, with a soft fading hiss, the blue light at my feet thinned.
"Wait—"
My head spun. The strength went out of my legs.
I dropped where I stood. At the same moment, the blue light vanished without a trace.
Pierre asked at once.
"How long did it run?"
"How should I know."
"Felt like about a minute."
In that instant—
"Paduk……."
Ah.
I lifted my head. Iresia had collapsed onto her side as well. The backlash from detonating her power of Wrath again and again seemed to have finally caught up with her. She couldn't move her body, but her eyes alone were murderous.
"Once I recover, I'm going to kill you."
Good. She didn't seem able to move at the moment. Neither did I.
"Instructor."
"No."
Pierre stepped between us.
"I haven't even said anything yet."
"I can see what you were about to say."
Iresia scraped her hand against the floor.
"When I recover, I'm killing that bitch!"
"You got the strength to get up?"
"Then help me up!"
"You get up, you're hitting Altiera."
"Yeah!"
"Then stay down."
Even in an unreasonable world, I had gained a power of my own.
King's Domain.
Pierre was the one who named it.
"King's Domain."
"That is painfully tacky."
"Then you name it."
"Too much trouble."
"Then it's King's Domain."
"……Do as you like."
And so it was decided.
Several more days of testing turned up the greatest problem as well. Once a day. After I unfolded it, no amount of effort would bring it out again. Only once a similar hour had passed the next day would it barely activate.
The performance is good. Once a day.
It had to be saved for the decisive moment. Expecting anything more would be unwise. Even so, used properly, it was a power that could reliably buy me one life.
Awakening an authority did not mean training was over.
One day I stepped out onto the training ground and found every sort of weapon laid across the floor. Swords, spears, axes, bows, maces, daggers—and a musket.
"Pick them up, one at a time."
Pierre said.
"Find the one that fits your hand."
From the very start, Iresia's eyes were nailed to a single spot.
"Oh."
A greatsword as tall as she was. She seized the grip without hesitation.
"This one's mine."
"Can you even lift it?"
She lifted it in one hand.
"……."
"It lifts, doesn't it?"
"Fine. It's yours."
The others chose weapons to their own taste, one after another. I did not choose only one. Sword, spear, axe, dagger, bow, gun—I took all of them, to start.
Nothing came easily at first. The sword left my wrist floating; at the instant the gun fired, my body flinched.
"Wrist."
I fixed it.
"Left foot."
I fixed it.
"Too much force."
I eased off.
"Don't close your eyes when you pull the trigger."
I didn't.
I repeated it until it worked. Days. Weeks. Little by little, Pierre's corrections dwindled.
One day, as I set the spear down, he muttered as if something were off.
"……Strange."
"Strange how?"
"You're no genius."
"Thank you for the compliment."
"I'm not finished."
Pierre scratched at his beard.
"Whatever you pick up, you're ordinary at first."
"And?"
"A mistake I point out is almost gone by the next day."
"Because I spent the entire day fixing only that."
"Right. And that's what's strange."
He looked over the weapons lying on the ground.
"A long way from anything you'd call first-rate, but the beginner barely shows on you anymore."
"We've been at it for weeks. Isn't that obvious?"
"It isn't."
"Then those people simply didn't do it properly."
"……."
"What?"
"Nothing."
"Say it."
"Because if I keep talking to you, I feel like the only thing that'll go up is my blood pressure."
A strange man.
Find what's wrong. Fix it. If it doesn't work, do it again. Repeat that, and of course you improve. The ones who can't are only the ones who never saw it through to the end. It had been that way in my previous life. It was that way here.
Not once had I ever been wrong.
After I had handled the weapons long enough, Pierre finally spoke.
"Now choose."
I looked at the weapons lined up on the ground. The sword was acceptable. The spear was not bad. I liked the bow.
And then my gaze stopped on the musket.
Having used it myself, the flaws were plain. Slow to load, a nuisance to manage the powder, difficult to attack in succession. In exchange, the firepower was severe. Pierre had pointed out the shortcomings from the very beginning.
"A gun probably isn't a good choice."
"Why?"
"Miss one shot against a demon, and there is no next one."
He jerked his chin at the musket.
"One shot, and reloading takes forever. On top of that, demons don't politely fall over because a single bullet went in. If it isn't a vital point, they come to tear your throat out with that bullet still stuck in them."
He was right. I had heard the same thing a few days ago, the first time I picked up a gun.
But—
He wouldn't know.
In the world where I had lived, swords, spears, and bows had all, in the end, surrendered the leading role on the battlefield to the gun. Of course, the thing in front of me was a long way from that. By the history I knew, this was about the period when guns were only just beginning to take their place in war.
Even so.
I know how far that road goes.
There was a gun. It deserved to be used.
I picked up the musket.
"I'll take this one."
Pierre raised an eyebrow.
"The gun?"
"Yes."
"Already forgot what I told you?"
"You said if I can't kill with one shot, I die."
"Right."
"Then."
I settled the musket against my shoulder.
"I only have to kill with one shot."
"……."
For a moment Pierre said nothing.
"If that worked just because you wanted it to, who'd be out here suffering?"
He folded his arms.
"What if the first shot doesn't kill it, and it runs right up into your face?"
I glanced once over the other weapons on the ground. Sword, spear, axe, dagger—things I had handled these past few weeks until I was sick of them.
"Then I use something else."
"……."
"It isn't as if the gun is the only thing I learned."
"You talk a good game."
"Yes."
"……Not even denying it."
Iresia, who had been admiring the greatsword, cut in at just the right moment.
"Paduk. Why that shitty stick?"
"I could explain it and you still wouldn't understand."
"……What?"
"Getting in close. Banging swords together."
I frowned.
"Smelling sweat."
"……."
"Spit flying."
"……."
"Getting blood on me."
I shook my head, firm.
"I hate it."
"Crazy bitch."
"Not an assessment I care to hear from someone who goes around beating people every day."
Pierre let out a short laugh.
"Well. If you tried them all yourself and then picked, that's enough."
He jerked his chin at the musket.
"Go with that."
And so my primary weapon was decided: the musket.
Training continued after that. Iresia seemed quite taken with the greatsword.
One day—
"Ah, fuck!"
The moment Pierre corrected her stance, Iresia's face twisted hard.
"What the hell keeps being the problem!"
"Third time I'm telling you. Your hips are turning."
"People die even like this!"
"Which is why I'm saying it doesn't work."
"This is pissing me off!"
A blood-red aura surged up and wrapped her body. A familiar sight by now.
But—
"……?"
The red energy flowed down both arms, past her hands, all the way to the greatsword's grip. A low thrum rose, and the whole of the blade was swallowed in a blood-red haze.
Pierre raised a hand at once.
"Hold it."
"What?"
"Stay just like that."
Iresia looked down at her own greatsword.
"Oh."
Pierre studied the blade for a while.
"The power crossed over into the weapon."
"Is that good?"
"Probably."
"Then we're good!"
"Hey, wai—"
Iresia swung the greatsword straight into the iron plate beside her.
The impact crashed through the yard. The thick plate tore—not dented. It split wide open along the path the blade had taken.
"……."
Pierre stared at the plate, then turned his head. His eyes met mine.
"Altiera. You try it too."
"Try what?"
"That."
Pierre pointed at Iresia's greatsword.
"Whether your power applies to a weapon."
I looked down at the musket.
"And the method?"
"Don't know."
"……."
"What."
"I'm not even surprised anymore."
Pierre shrugged.
"It's not like anyone taught Iresia how, either."
That was true.
I raised the musket.
King's Domain. A power that forced my will on whoever stood inside a space I had made. But a gun was not a person. I could not tell it to kneel. I could not tell it to shut its mouth.
Then what was I supposed to command?
I looked down the barrel for a moment, and a thought came to me. Inside the King's Domain, I forced an action upon an opponent. This was different. The gun in front of me was not an opponent resisting me. It was in my hand—a weapon I had chosen.
It's mine.
Didn't that mean I was the one who decided what kind of thing it was?
An old musket. Slow. A single shot. If that one shot failed to shatter a demon's vital point, I would die before I ever got a second round into it. I did not like that.
Then I would change it. At least for as long as it was in my hand, I would decide what kind of weapon this gun was.
I slowly raised the muzzle and aimed at the thick iron plate standing at the far end of the training ground. And I spoke to the gun in my hands.
"Stronger."
A low hum answered. My fingertips went cold, and then a blue light bloomed—from my fingers, into the wooden stock, along the iron barrel. A thin blue pattern spread across the whole of the gun.
"……."
Pierre held his breath.
This felt different from the King's Domain. Upon a person, I forced an action. But if it was an object in my hand, I defined its nature itself. I was not forcing power into it. I had simply decided that it would be so.
This gun was, more than it had been—
stronger.
The hum deepened. The blue light thickened.
It works.
Stock to the shoulder. Aim. Breath. Trigger.
The report slammed through the training ground. It was not the usual gunshot. Beyond the smoke pouring from the muzzle, the iron plate shuddered hard.
Silence held for a moment. Pierre went first. I followed with the musket still in my hands.
Dead center of the plate, a single clean hole had been punched through.
"……."
Pierre traced the hole with a finger.
"Is it normally about this much?"
He let out a hollow laugh.
"That, I wouldn't know either."
Figures.
"Name of the technique?"
"This time, I'll name it."
"……You did call King's Domain tacky."
"Precisely."
I had commanded the gun, and the gun had become exactly that.
"Declaration Shot."
"……."
"What do you think."
"Same difference."
I could fire only one shot. If that shot failed to kill, I died. Then I only had to make the shot itself stronger.
Far better than I expected.
I took out the powder again.
"What are you doing?"
"I have to do it again."
"It just worked."
"Why would succeeding once count as success?"
I reloaded. A second time. A third. Soon I could confirm several things. The declaration held for only a single shot; reload, and I had to lay it on again from the start. In exchange, the burden on my body was almost nothing. Unlike the King's Domain, it did not choke my breath or weigh down my limbs.
I was not the one paying the price.
After the third shot, I checked the inside of the barrel. Between the blackened metal, a hairline crack had formed.
Ah.
Only then did I understand. The gun was not becoming what I decided. It was enduring what I decided—by force. If it failed to endure, what burst would be the thing in my hand.
How far I could push the declaration. What I could declare. There was a great deal left to confirm.
Pierre watched me for a while. Then he muttered, quietly.
"……The Saintess is going to like this."
"What did you say?"
"Nothing."
The dark cloister of the monastery, adjoining the training ground. Behind one marble pillar, someone was quietly watching the yard. Pink hair, vivid even in the dark.
The Saintess.
She watched in silence for a time. The iron plate split along the path of a blade. Another plate, pierced dead through the center. The musket, blue light still clinging to it. And Altiera, loading powder once again.
Ever so slowly, those once-guileless eyes narrowed.
A satisfied smile settled at the corner of her mouth.