Black Carnival (1)
The hunched Eleim grumbled the entire way out of the tribunal. “Do you know who that Sapiens is? The one who blew every last coin I had left during the Floating Arena tour! I still doubt the ape’s spawn actually killed Prince Mornid, but he certainly has a gift for infuriating people.”
The peculiar nasal tone that had hardened because no one ever corrected it carried an edge that grated on the listener. “Even that upstart Somnus is out of his mind. Betting everything on a single worthless ground-dweller and demanding to enter the Gladiator Fight? Risking a clash with the Winter King over one measly duel? He’ll do anything just to look special! You agree, don’t you, Wallet?”
Anything just to look special. Hardly words that should come from a fool who wore a livestock feeding trough on his head. Yet the bodyguard called “Wallet” offered no such retort. His master firmly believed the feeding trough of a domesticated dinosaur was an ancient relic, and what this man wanted was not a loyal retainer who spoke the truth, but a mute pet.
The massive lizardian called Wallet answered with perfect deference, using the magical phrase that always left his employer feeling pitiful. “Gyarrrung.”
“Good.”
Yet Siloze, director of the World Museum, nodded in satisfaction. Even as they walked toward the carriage in the parking lot, his tirade continued without pause. The carriage door, adorned with brilliant gold leaf over a crimson exterior, sat slightly higher than Siloze’s diminutive knees. Tired of listening to the complaints, the lizardian promptly lowered his head before the carriage, simply wishing the moment would pass quickly.
Siloze stepped onto the lizardian’s snout as if it were a stair and climbed aboard without lowering his chin. Once inside, he removed his ancient-civilization top hat and snapped his fingers. The waiting coachman immediately pushed the lever on the reins. The carriage began to vibrate quietly. Siloze stretched out on the velvet sofa and savored the subtle tremor.
Siloze liked this moment. The instant when the magitech engine inside the mechanical horses that pulled the carriage ignited smoothly and pulsed. That moment soon exploded.
Crash. Bang. Boom.
Siloze rolled across the ground, flung roughly ten meters with a bewildered expression. Only after a long while did he emerge from his daze and frantically tear off the velvet cloth covering him.
“My 1050-model Vestero carriage…”
It lay in ruins. The expensive mechanical horses had been destroyed along with it, belching black smoke. A defective product that endangered its owner’s life. Face flushed crimson, Siloze rose to his feet, shouting that he would hold them accountable even if he had to file for a Gladiator Fight. Then the shock made him sit back down.
It was not only the magitech carriage that had been destroyed. The sight of the great city sliced in half was horrific. The wealthy highland world that the sewer paupers had so envied and resented had, in a single deafening roar, transformed into a crucible of ash and flame. No—if it had merely been burning, the situation would have been better. The heat rays spewed by the swaying spear reduced everything in their straight-line trajectory to nothing, leaving behind only long, deep pits like the trenches of giants.
The plaza’s electronic billboards. The tribunal dressed in pristine white and majestic gold. The luxury residences clad in ivory brick. The corporate fortresses of the leading companies. All had vanished without a trace or become torn, shattered ruins. Even the thirteen-story World Museum, filled with every treasure stolen from the ground, was no exception.
Staring up at his paradise reduced to rubble, the director of the World Museum shook his head. No, no. Still unaware of his own broken toe, the enraged Siloze stomped his feet furiously.
“I—! How hard I worked to collect them—!”
It was not because he truly loved the relics that carried the breath of the Lower World. He was furious because he would have to steal replacements for everything he had lost. The lizardian bodyguard, who had narrowly escaped the blast, wore an incredulous expression; he knew the truth. Among the items Siloze had plundered with his airship were many that belonged to the lizardians. Of course, Siloze was not the sort of person delicate enough to read the lizardian’s expression. Though he had stolen countless traces of Lower World history over the years, he had never taken any real interest in the daily lives of the actual ground-dwellers.
“Wallet—! Carry me to my mansion. Right now!”
The lizardian, who had been approaching Siloze to help restore order, suddenly froze. Then he began backing away.
“What are you doing? Do you really want to become a wallet, just like your mother?”
Despite the terrifying threat, the lizardian ultimately turned and fled.
“Come back! You half-breed Sapiens-eared mongrel—!”
A cold hand wrapped around Siloze’s ankle. Startled, Siloze leapt up, and in the moment he landed he finally felt the injury to his toe. As Siloze let out a scream, grotesque figures leapt over him.
“Graaaah—!”
“Moooom—!”
The faces of corpses drenched in thick black liquid. Siloze kicked out in terror and scrambled backward across the parking lot on all fours.
“Help me! Wallet! Where are you—!”
But it was not only the bodyguard lizardian who had fled. Everyone who should have been attending Siloze had run off with their tails between their legs. The coachman, the museum staff waiting outside the lot—some of them had clearly heard Siloze’s screams. As teeth sank into his back amid the monstrous cries, Siloze sobbed harder and begged for help. Yet all that came were more jaws. With every additional weight pressing down on his back, Siloze’s voice grew thinner. Dragged away by dozens of hands, the Eleim whispered softly.
“I’ll… raise your salary.”
That innocent final wish would never have escaped his lips had he understood what was happening. But he never saw it. Behind him, from the pitch-black pit that was the scar of destruction, hundreds—thousands—of the dead were crawling out.
----------
The surprise attack had succeeded. Santra lay motionless, face buried in the ground. An ambush. And the suppression of the hand that would form the magic seal. The basics of facing a mage. The attacker knew them well.
Nathan glared at the culprit. Morbi, the Protector Lord who had suddenly appeared and opened fire with arrows, was shouting something at them from dozens of meters away. Whether it was a warning or a provocation, Nathan could not tell. He could barely make out anything over the screams and explosions flooding the city. The only fragment he managed to catch was this:
“The northern Protector Lord says he cannot allow us to escape.”
Benny, covered head to toe in dust, cried out in disbelief. “The city’s barely turned into this mess and he suddenly shows up saying what? What the hell is that lunatic thinking?”
Benny, dazedly clawing at her head at the unbelievable sight, was shoved behind the wall by Aspen’s hand gripping her cheek.
“Eek—!”
“Didn’t you hear? Get behind cover! Nathan, take the Director somewhere safe!”
Director? Nathan’s eyebrow twitched, but he said nothing. He scooped up the fallen Santra and quickly moved out of the exposed space. Just as Nathan slipped into a gap between the remaining corridor walls, several more arrows came flying after them. The barbed arrowheads with vicious harpoon-like tails slammed into the inner wall, shattering it. Aspen, who had caught the concrete-splitting force on his blade, clenched and unclenched his numb hand and muttered.
“A repeating crossbow. And those barbs are a nightmare to pull out. Nasty bastard.”
“The building’s already wrecked, so maybe he just wants to finish the job. He’s really letting them fly.”
“Why are you two so calm? I feel like my lungs are about to burst.”
Unlike the knights whose nerves had thickened on the battlefield, Benny’s breathing was ragged, her chest heaving rapidly.
“By the way, why did they suddenly attack Santra? Do they have a grudge against the Great Arena owner?”
Nathan peeked over the wall. Thud. Thwack. As more arrows came flying, he quickly ducked back.
“Either they have some personal connection, like you said, or they were just shooting randomly and happened to hit Santra. If neither of those is true… then they’re trying to stop us all from escaping by taking out our means of retreat first. My gut says the last one’s the most likely.”
If Santra had opened the door, the four of them could have left the scene immediately. Nathan quietly asked the woman he was carrying.
“Can you open the door again? If not, we’ll have to run on foot.”
Santra’s veil, barely lifted, brushed horizontally across Nathan’s neck.
No.
She looked too pained to speak, but Nathan felt no sympathy. He looked outside again. Morbi had apparently left the rooftop; he was nowhere to be seen. Nathan’s gaze suddenly dropped to the dizzying depths below the building.
“Nathan. I understand how you feel, but don’t drop her.”
“I was checking the height. I didn’t realize how high we were when they dragged me here blindfolded. How many floors is this, anyway?”
“Ninth floor. Roughly twenty meters.”
Benny’s voice trembled. Nathan let out a sigh.
“Obviously we can’t just jump. Where’s the exit?”
The building shuddered with a low rumble. A sign of collapse. Even without Morbi, it was time to run. Benny pointed down one end of the corridor. A neon sign flickered.
Emergency Exit.
“Easy enough to find. Good.”
The four of them raced down the emergency stairs. Every few steps Santra let out a pained gasp as Nathan carried her, but he had no time for consideration. The arrow buried deep in her flesh would cause massive bleeding if removed. What Santra needed right now was not emergency treatment, but a proper doctor.
“Honestly, I’d love to just throw her.”
“I get it, but please don’t. We don’t know what the Peres family will suffer if you do. Hey, Pink Hair.”
Benny, panting as she followed, looked startled.
“Pink Hair?”
“Yeah, you. That incident just now—was it really the Winter King’s dragon that did it?”
“Uh… I’m not sure.”
Nathan barely swallowed the scream that threatened to escape.
“Not sure? Then are there other dragons in the Heavens capable of this kind of bullshit?”
“No. As far as I know, the only weapons with that kind of destructive power are the Heavenly God’s lightning and the swaying spear.”
The Outer Wing Knight gladly erased all the horrific images that had been rising in his mind. For example, a green hill where “hundreds of meters” long dragons frolicked together. Just as Nathan was about to feel relief, Benny continued.
“But the most recent record of the swaying spear’s flame was said to be made of pure mana. It didn’t leave behind black flames and destruction like that.”
A dragon’s breath was conveniently called flame. A metaphor for a means of destruction without fixed form. What a newborn dragon emitted was pure mana. What determined the nature of that breath depended on what the dragon came to yearn for as it grew. If it longed for fire, it gained heat; if it longed for winter, it gained cold. Just like elemental mages chosen by the elements, they gained one type of weapon they would carry for life. However, the swaying spear, a dragon imprisoned and dying, yearned for nothing. That was why, during the last war in the Heavens hundreds of years ago, the dragon’s breath fired by the swaying spear caused no unnecessary collateral damage. It only evaporated more than half of the southern and western legions advancing toward the north.
Nathan groaned.
“I don’t even know what to be shocked about first. That a dragon that lived long enough to reach that size had no attribute? Or that someone fed it the Abyss, a ridiculously dangerous thing to do?”
He had some idea why they had fed it the Abyss to corrupt the dragon. The power of the Abyss dulled the intellect and spread poison. Just as the ancient human monarchs had proven while destroying one another. Like coating a blade with poison, they had tried to turn it into a more long-term and efficient means of destruction. Without considering the side effects.
“And there’s something even more ridiculous.”
Benny tensed. “What?”
“The fact that the emergency exit still hasn’t ended even though we’ve been talking this whole time. What is this? Did we fall into a mage’s trap?”
Benny barely managed to hold onto the tension that had almost slipped away.
“Well. A long time ago, there was a Gladiator Fight league over the remodeling contract for the tribunal. That vain fool named Siloze won it. He was the kind of Eleim with such an ego that he even poured his philosophy into the emergency exit stairs.”
Nathan, who had stopped, shoved his head through a small window and looked up and down the stairs. The stairs, stretched out horizontally in several sections, had their entire outer wall lavishly decorated with opal-colored tiles. Don’t tell me… he extended them just because he wanted to use all those tiles?
“Philosophy? What philosophy? A sense of solidarity where everyone dies together if there’s a fire? Can we even get out before this building collapses?”
“…This is the only way out without going through the middle. Jumping from a safe height partway down might work too.”
Aspen, who had stopped to massage his sore ankle, chimed in.
“I can’t imagine what kind of idiot built something like this as stairs and still managed to win.”
“When everyone else only sent one gladiator, he ground through dozens of his own. Everyone tried to stop him, but what could they do? How it gets built is solely the right of whoever wins the Gladiator Fight—”
Rumble.
Benny, who had been walking ahead while panting, pushed past the two stopped knights and looked down at the source of the sound beneath her feet. Then she simply fell through.
A sudden crisis. Benny only avoided falling thanks to the knights’ reaction speed. Nathan and Aspen leapt like lightning and caught her. Seeing Nathan holding her left hand, Benny brightened. Then her eyes met Aspen’s, who was holding her right hand, and her face went pale.
“Don’t… don’t let go. Don’t let go. I’m sorry.”
Aspen, jaw clenched tight, barked at her.
“I’m not letting go, so stop making that face. Pull—!”
The knights heaved Benny upward with all their strength. Benny’s feet, which had been scrambling in empty air, kicked Aspen in the solar plexus the moment she was pulled up.
“Aagh—! I’m sorry—!”
“Shut up, you’re making me dizzy. Nathan, did you see what happened?”
“I saw. Roughly.”
Nathan had seen it. A massive shape passing through, shattering the opal tiles to pieces. The floor beneath Benny had not collapsed naturally. Something heavy had struck and severed it. Before he could even guess what it was, a tremendous roar echoed through the air, as if eager to inform them.
“Benny. Has there ever been a dinosaur the size of a house that died around here?”
“A dinosaur? Uh, there was that time an Imperatosaurus and its handler were beheaded at the tribunal. Someone ignored the handler’s warning and entered the dinosaur enclosure, and it turned out to be the princess of the southern kingdom of the Heavens—”
Benny’s face turned the color of her hair. With an expression as if she were suffocating, she asked back.
“No way. Come on, that’s not it, right, Nathan?”
Nathan gritted his teeth as he looked beyond the broken landing.
“Looks like it is.”
An Imperatosaurus weighing at least ten tons was walking down below. Its entire body drenched as if painted with the black liquid of the Abyss, its neck cleanly severed. It was a bizarre sight. A beheaded dinosaur should not have eyes, yet it seemed to be glaring at Nathan. The exposed neck bones on the severed neck were pointed this way like eye sockets. The grotesque corpse bent its knees. As if preparing to leap and collide.
“That lizard spewed out enough Abyss to bring the dead back to life.”
Nathan muttered with resignation.
“Looks like the world can’t stand the sight of me being alive.”