Holy Fire (6)
The sky went dark, and the sun vanished.
Only a moment ago it had been blazing brilliantly above their heads. Now the world was as black as if night had fallen over everything.
"What just happened...?"
"Master just subdued that black mage, I'm sure of it..."
Er and Jina swept the darkness with voices honed to a knife's edge. The sky had gone black — and with it, Veronica and Deimos had vanished from sight. To protect themselves and the people beside them, the two of them had no choice but to go sharper still.
The sun was gone, but seeing was not impossible. The flames Veronica had left behind had burned down to almost nothing, yet they had not gone out. The light those white fires still threw was enough to hold the deathly quiet at bay, and Ain spoke into it, his voice tight.
"Nobody move. Hold your positions. If the sun's gone, that means we're in that much more danger."
"...Our opponent was a black mage. They get stronger where there's no light."
"Right. So—"
That was when it happened.
No presence. No sound. In that sliver of an instant, Ain threw his weight backward on nothing but instinct — on a gut feeling he chose to trust. If he had not bent the moment that chill kissed the nape of his neck, his eyes would have been looking at his own feet instead of the sky. His head would have been rolling across the ground, cleanly severed from his body.
"Ain!!"
"Everyone watch out! They're coming out of the shadows!"
Ain twisted at the waist again, slipping the next strike. Jina saw the thorn of shadow lunging for his torso and shouted.
Shadow Stalker
A black-magic curse that hunts from the dark.
"It's a black magic curse!"
"When the hell did he even—"
Pierce
Er drove her blade straight through, blue mana flooding the steel. She had felt it the same way Ain had — something black reaching for a vital point — and the thrust she put behind the sword was more than enough to shatter the shadow that had lunged at her.
Ain had no way to strike the shadows himself. He ducked low, twisting out of the way, and shouted back toward the companion behind him.
"Haru! To shut those things down we have to cut the shadows as much as we can! Fire magic...!!"
"Need time. Too much mana around."
"I'll handle that somehow!"
A white-mana gauntlet smashed into the shadow that had come for her. Jina's voice cracked across the dark.
"I'll protect Haru — Er! You protect Ain!"
"I can look after my own body just fine! So—!"
Ain reached to pull up his divine power. That was as far as he got.
"Ain, don't!"
"Er, what are you talking about?! If I don't use it now...!"
"What that man wanted was light!"
"...What?"
Ain furrowed his brow at a statement that made no sense. Er drove her sword through the shadow that had come for his throat from a blind angle, scattering it, and shouted over the wreckage.
"There's a chance the 'light' that damn black mage was screaming about — is you!"
"What are you even saying all of a sudden?!"
"Think about it! The chimeras in the catacombs only appeared when you put your hand on that wall!"
She was right. The wall that had been holding the chimeras had opened the instant Ain's fingers touched it. Other people had pressed it, rubbed it, even attacked it, and it had not so much as twitched. Ain's hand had brushed it — lightly — and the door had opened at once, turning the chimeras loose.
There had been other strange things, too, going back a while. The undead that locked onto him with an almost grotesque single-mindedness every time he used his power. And the necromancer called Deimos had only shown himself right after Ain had laid a blessing on his companions — a faint, almost nothing blessing, meant only to help them pick up a mana-contaminated magic stone.
If Ain's power was the "light" Deimos had been looking for...
"Lady Veronica deliberately pulled you away from this. She... she knew!"
"That's just your theory! If we sit here worrying about that, we're all going to die!"
"That's why she sent you to us! When Lady Veronica told you to stay put, that's what she meant!"
Er slammed her shield into a shadow as she shouted.
"Haru! How much longer on the spell?!"
"...Soon. Possible."
"Jina — the second Haru's magic is ready, pick her up and run. Pick a direction and just go. Getting out of this darkness comes first!"
Jina crushed a shadow under her heel and answered without slowing down.
"Great plan, except these things keep multiplying. If we don't do something fast, we're in trouble."
"Haru, can you go any faster?"
"...One way."
"What is it?"
Er snapped the question out between violent swings of her shield, batting shadows aside. Haru's face, by contrast, was perfectly calm. She lifted a hand — and closed it around the back of someone's neck.
"Wh— what the hell?!"
"Ain. Need help."
"With what?! You just said not to use divine power because it'll pull aggro!"
Suddenly unemployed, Ain snapped it out with his nerves fraying.
"Don't need divine power. Need mana."
"What are you even—"
"...Thanks for the meal."
That was when it happened.
CRACK-K-K-K!!!!
"GYAAAAAAH!!!"
It felt like being struck by lightning. No — more precisely, it felt like lightning that had been living inside his body was being dragged out of it.
A girl was hanging off his shoulder. Not clinging with her hands. Not perched there the ordinary way. Haru had sunk a pair of sharp fangs — hidden until this moment, unknown to anyone — into the meat of his shoulder, and as a rich, flooding fragrance of mana poured into her, she smiled despite herself.
"Yes, yes, yes!! This is enough! I can kill them all! Burn them all, reduce them to ash! What do I break? What do I burn? Huh? Right now — I can do it!!"
"H-Haru! What are you doing?! Ain's turning into a mummy!"
Haru was alight in a way none of them had ever seen. Ain, by contrast, had gone deathly pale in seconds. He sagged, and his voice came out gutted.
"Haru... you... don't tell me..."
"...So that's what the blood thing was about?"
"Ain? Jina? What are you two talking about?"
Er was the only one who had not caught up. She stared at them with her eyes round. Jina answered for both of them.
"It means Haru is Blood Clan."
"Blood Clan? Wait. You don't mean..."
"Not the vampires from the stories. Just a unique constitution."
The one who said it was Haru — who had just dumped a nearly deflated Ain into Er's arms like a spent balloon.
Why did that childish face suddenly look so strangely grown? The robe that had always swallowed her whole now sat on her as if it had been cut to fit. Long, clean lines of arm and leg; a woman's curves that even a heavy robe could not quite hide. If Haru simply grew up from here, she would look like this — that was how well the sky-blue hair suited the person wearing it as she spoke.
"Ain's blood. So rich with life force. Life force is mana. Lots of mana is good. Kill and kill and kill and it never runs dry. Burn and burn and burn and it never ends! Ain, I love it — let me burn everything!!!"
"Y-you damn brat... quit losing your mind and just cast the spell...!!"
Ain had, in his heart of hearts, filed Haru under a little strange, but harmless. The backlash of having his blood and mana siphoned out of him while he was still standing put a particular wobble in his voice.
"Fuck me. So now I'm a boxed lunch on top of everything else..."
"Haru's about to cast! Can you run?"
"Like hell I can. I can barely stand..."
At this rate he would not be blessing anyone. He would be lucky to walk.
"Haru! We have to run, and if you're like this...!"
"...Sorry. Got carried away. Tasted too good."
"Haru!!"
"I'll make up for it."
Haru's sky-blue hair fanned out. On a plain with no wind at all, threads of that same blue scattered like silk. What gathered in her two hands was the glitter of life itself — the life force that every living thing under the light carries inside it. Mana the color of her hair poured into her palms, and in the instant it took a shape, she closed her eyes and spoke her companions' names.
"Er. Jina."
"...Run!"
Scarlet hellfire burst outward as if the ground itself had exploded. The shadows that had been reaching for their throats and vital points went up without leaving so much as a stain. Their kin, stripped of the darkness that was their only road, lost all sense of direction — and in that sliver of chaos, Er threw herself down the one path Haru had deliberately left open.
"Well done, Haru!!"
"Limit, exceeded... hungry..."
"Aaagh! She shrunk back down again!!"
Haru had already folded back into the small, familiar girl they knew, hanging limp. Jina slung her over a shoulder, clenched her teeth, and ran. The flames had already slipped Haru's control. They no longer knew friend from foe. They burned everything they touched, and even the shadows were nothing more than kindling — red fire feeding on them, swelling larger with every swallow.
"Fall behind and we'll be barbecue."
Drained of blood and mana, Ain had gone completely limp on Er's back. His voice had no weight left in it at all.
"Cooked to a perfect well-done. Should be tasty."
"Don't talk nonsense at a time like this! You're making me lose my strength!!"
Even as she snapped at him, Er found herself glancing back. Jina was closing the gap fast with Haru on her back; if it came down to speed, Jina had her beaten, so falling behind was not the worry. There was only one thing Er could not stop thinking about.
"...It's fine. She's not the type to die from something like this."
He had read her mind, apparently. The humor was gone from Ain's voice.
"So don't waste worry on nothing. We need to get out of here first."
"...Will she really be okay?"
"Of course. So..."
The rest of it never came. But in that moment, Er saw it anyway — the worry caught in his golden eyes. The way a man's fist had closed, hard, on empty air.
What was Veronica to Ain?
Someone who knew him well had once named that relationship in a single word.
A love-hate.
"That's my disciples for you. I do love how quick on the uptake they are."
The woman with the silver longsword curled the corner of her mouth. In the wake of that exploding wall of fire, her only real weakness had left the field. Wipe out the paths the shadows could travel with a sea of flame, then use the opening to get clear of the black magic and the mana it rode on — it was a clean operation. She would need to look into where firepower like that had come from, of course, but for the moment she could not have cared less.
Because the black mage was looking at her, recycling that same tired line.
"You... are not... the light..."
It no longer had a shape that could be called human. One of those unpleasant eyes had been gouged out and was pouring blood. One arm was already gone; a shredded sleeve fluttered from the stump. From a side torn hideously open, steaming viscera spilled in a slow slide. It was less a man than a corpse — and still it could not breathe properly, could not even see.
"Where... is the light..."
"...Black mages really are out of their minds. Did he do that to his own body?"
It was still alive. Whether that was black magic or some necromancer's secret art, she could not say. But two things were certain.
"...This isn't the time to think about taking him alive."
Alive — and yet not living. It was no different from a corpse walking on mana, a dead thing that would not stop moving until it had what it wanted. The plan to drag it back to the temple in one piece had been impossible from the start.
"It's been so long since we got a lead on the Black Magic Tower — plenty of people were looking forward to this. Shame. I would have preferred to haul him back breathing if I could."
"You cannot drive out the darkness... That is the role of the light. A half-baked silver like you has no right to even reach for it..."
"...Still. It won't be completely meaningless."
Veronica's smile was gone. In its place, a cold killing intent settled over her face. Her eyes came as sharp as a drawn blade, and her voice dropped to something like ice.