The Faraway Paladin, volume 1: The Boy in the City of the Dead.
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Chapter 3.
A gust of icy wind rushed across the temple hill, adding an unpleasant bite to the brisk winter air. The ruined houses by the lake stood stock-still, doing their best to endure the cold air rushing through. Thin clouds covered the sky, not letting much sunlight through, even though it was noon. Even when I looked up at the sky, I felt no warmth from it.
Months had passed, and the day of my showdown with Blood was finally here. Tomorrow, I would become an adult. And in spring, I would probably leave this temple, and travel on my own.
I did some thorough stretches and practice swings with my training sword, which weighed twice as much as my usual weapon. Diagonal slash down the shoulder. Across. Close in and thrust. The sound of the blade tip slicing the air echoed.
I heard Gus’s words in the back of my mind. I put extra effort into focusing and erased them. My body started warming up, and gradually transitioned to a state where I could unleash my full potential.
“Okay.” After I finished my warm-up, I set my practice sword aside, and checked my equipment.
I had my longsword and a circular shield: a wooden board in a metal frame, covered with leather. I had a dagger for use in close combat on my belt. I’d be wearing soft leather armor on top of thick under armor, and for the vulnerable areas of my body, I had metal: a throat plate, a breastplate, gauntlets, and greaves. And to finish up, I had a simple curved helmet. That was the complete list of equipment I’d be using today. I always ended up looking like a heavily armored knight after putting all of this on.
“Will, let me help you with that,” Mary said. This kind of heavy equipment was an incredible pain to equip and check on your own. Mary tied up the strings and fastened the clasps on the armor with practiced hands.
Today would probably be the last time I wore this much armor. In spring, I’d be going on my travels. I couldn’t walk around towns and mountains constantly wearing a full set of armor like a video game character. And since I had no idea how long I was going to be on the road, being well-prepared and well-supplied was going to be a higher priority than wearing too much armor.
But none of that mattered today. I was going to be facing Blood at his most serious. I had Mary’s benediction, but it wouldn’t be any help if one of Blood’s blows killed me instantly.
If I wanted the kind of protection that would save me from immediate death even if Blood hit me dead-on with his most powerful blow, I’d need to search out the most masterfully crafted dwarven items from the city, and face him with an absolutely flawless defense. But this was a contest. A test of skills. Not a fight to the death.
“Hey, Will. You ready?” Blood asked. As a handicap to help me, he wasn’t wearing any armor.
He had a sword belt wrapped around his waist, to which was attached a single-handed sword in a black scabbard. But that weapon wasn’t going to be the star of the show. In his hands, he was holding a long, obnoxiously long, two-handed broadsword. That was Blood’s proper weapon.
I scanned the area. Just the hill, dry grass, and Mary and Blood. There was no sign of Gus.
“Anytime,” I said. “Let’s do this.” I shook my head sharply a few times to remove Gus from my thoughts. I told myself to focus. I had to keep my mind on the battle.
“Okay. Let’s go over it one last time before we start. No magic. Nothing instantly fatal. Other than that, it’s anything goes. If something happens, Mary will deal with it. Winner’s decided on the call of ‘Yield’ or when one of us is physically unable to continue battle.”
As he casually ran through the explanation, Blood stepped back, and held his broadsword at the ready. I’d been told that when Mary got serious, she could repair a limb even if it was crushed or cut off, so these conditions were absolutely merciless.
“Be sure you don’t die,” Blood warned. His low voice sent shivers through me. And so my final exam began.
◆
It was like a storm. The immense weight of the thick steel blade came at me from every direction at unfathomable speed.
I knew it was useless to attempt to block it. Even a single direct hit would break my sword in half and smash my shield to pieces. And I didn’t want to imagine what would happen if I attempted to block it with any of my armor. Wherever it hit, I was sure it would lead to me being permanently sprawled on the ground in a matter of seconds. I desperately tried to avoid taking more than a glancing blow, bashing the side of the broadsword as it came at me, diverting it away from me with my shield, dodging, circling around, trying to hold out.
I’d sort of seen it coming, but all this I was wearing, all my pieces of armor, really were only there so I didn’t die on the spot! The strength and technique of the undead matched what they’d been in life, and Blood had both to spare. He was demonstrating monumental strength as well as the technique necessary to transfer it into his weapon’s blows.
My previous world’s knowledge said that a Japanese sword wouldn’t let you cut through a samurai in full armor, and you couldn’t cut through a Western suit of armor with a Western sword, either. If something like that was possible, all those elaborate styles of Japanese armor would never have developed.
But these attacks of Blood’s—I grunted as I narrowly avoided another—were different. He made sure to pack everything he had into the swings threatening to cut me down: his overwhelming physical size, the centrifugal force of his staggeringly long favorite weapon, and the power originating from the disciplined muscles he’d had in life. Even if he couldn’t cut right through me, the force alone would definitely knock me down.
Get ripped, and you can solve pretty much everything by force. It was the perfect embodiment of what Blood had always told me.
I made a desperate-sounding noise halfway between a sharp breath and a grunt as I quickly stepped back. My longsword had pretty good reach, but the reach of his broadsword was greater still.
He had total control of this fight right now, swinging at me again and again from outside my range. And being undead, Blood never got tired, so outlasting him would be impossible. This sucked. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t prepared any strategies to deal with his way of fighting, but if things continued like this, I couldn’t see myself getting a chance to use any of them.
I cursed at Blood in my mind. Do you really need the win this badly?! Act like an adult!
I opened up a big distance between us and invited the attack. As he came at me, I pulled the dagger from my belt and threw it at him in one swift motion.
“Aha,” Blood said. He held his broadsword flat, like a shield, to deflect the incoming dagger. The dagger clashed off the sword, but I was flying at Blood after it, almost on top of him—
“Whoa!” I slammed on my emergency brakes and leaped backward. I had no other choice.
Blood had held onto the end of the sword’s hilt with one hand, and with the other, he had grabbed the blunted part at the base of the blade, and swept the sword at my shins like it was a polearm.
He chuckled. “Thought you just had to get close?” His will-o’-the-wisps swayed slowly in his sockets. I felt as if a grin had crept across his skull.
Now that I thought about it, I had a faint memory of reading that two-handed broadswords and Japanese nodachi could be used in that kind of way. “It’s not gonna be that easy, I guess… ugh, this is a nightmare.”
Now that I knew that he could hold it with his hands apart and use it like a polearm, that meant that not just shin-sweeps but also short, rapid thrusts were a possibility. If I got too carelessly close, I risked him using techniques one might use with a staff against me.
It wasn’t simply power. Blood had absolutely mastered the handling of this long, massive weapon. Despite the immense weight of this destructive weapon, his incredible muscular strength was allowing him to keep his distance and chain together swing after swing at breathtaking pace. He was rapid, skillful, and precise. If I got close to him, he would change his grip and handle me at close range. In short, he was desperately strong, and equally so in all ways.
Power, technique, and weaponry—he hadn’t become reliant on any one of these three at the expense of the other two. He had virtually perfected all three. He had no weakness I could take advantage of. No wonder he was called the War Ogre. I really felt like that was what I was facing.
I’d just have to gamble. I steeled myself.
“Oh?” As if he could tell what I was thinking, Blood held his broadsword above his head, ready for a downward strike. His stance was a clear and confident statement that he was going to crush me no matter what I tried.
If I blocked it with my sword, my sword would break. If I blocked it with my shield, my shield would break. If I blocked it with my armor, my armor would break.
I needed something better than half-hearted little tricks, or he’d just change grip and fend me off. How could I survive that strike, and get him within range of my sword? There was only one answer.
Screaming a war cry to fire myself up, I charged in. His response: a switch from the overhead stance to one with the sword held vertically near his shoulder—and into a horizontal slash at my stomach! It was a strike like the full swing of a baseball bat.
A downward swing risked the enemy using their shield to throw the blow off course. A horizontal slash to the neck allowed the enemy to duck, and a slash to the knees enabled them to possibly jump over it. All of these options would leave Blood open to being charged. But the horizontal slash to the stomach left me with only two options: jump back or block.
Leaping backward would save me but put me back to square one. Blocking would mean I’d be crushed by Blood’s sheer physical strength. This move was a logical choice that fit Blood perfectly. Which was why I could see it coming.
If I blocked it with my shield, my shield would break. If I blocked it with my armor, my armor would break. So, as Blood made a short sound of surprise, I slid my shield down the blade to slow the strike, and blocked the rest with my armor.
The broadsword exploded into my shield with enough force to crush it entirely out of shape, and then made a second impact on my breastplate. I groaned as it connected. Whether or not I could endure this was a gamble.
But it was a gamble I won. Roaring again, while Blood was shocked, I charged forward. Crouching low, I bashed him up and away from me with my shield’s remains. His feet left the ground.
I knew that a mysterious force was at work in the undead. Their power and ability to stand firm were preserved the same as they were in life. That was why Blood could swing about his broadsword, and why he could stand firm without being swayed by the broadsword’s huge mass.
But what about his weight? If you simply tried to lift Blood into the air, would he be as heavy as he was in life? No. I had proven that with the vraskus. Becoming a skeleton reduced your weight. That had to be a clue to how I could defeat Blood, who was exceptional as a warrior.
The weight of all a human’s bones, including spinal fluid, is less than ten percent of their total body weight. Even if Blood had been a huge man weighing well over a hundred kilos before he died, now, he could only weigh around ten at the most. Even including the weight of his weapons, he couldn’t weigh more than fifty. I roared louder than ever before. As Blood lost his balance, I thrust my longsword into him with all my strength. I was aiming for his spine. All I needed was one hit—
“Will.” A gently spoken word reached my ear.
An instant later, my longsword was caught and trapped between his ribs.
“Wh—”
As soon as Blood, holding his massive broadsword, had fully caught my longsword’s blade between his ribs, he twisted his body and pulled it away from me. It was the rib-cage equivalent of catching an incoming blade with your hands, only possible because Blood was a skeleton.
Taken by surprise, I didn’t manage to let go of my longsword’s hilt in time, and before I realized it, my arm was being twisted with the full mass of the broadsword, and I was pulled to the ground, slamming against it. The shock of the impact knocked the wind out of me.
“You fought pretty good.” I tried to get up as fast as I could, but a blade was already resting right against my neck.
It was Blood’s spare single-handed sword, the one that had been hanging from his belt. The blade was matte black, and a crimson design ran vividly along its length. Was this a magic sword? I almost felt like calling it a demon sword. Though it wasn’t really the time for it, I admired the sword’s beauty, in spite of its sinister look.
“I yield,” I said quietly, declaring my surrender.
Gus obviously had a number of different thoughts going through his head, but I didn’t even get to the stage of deliberately losing or not. Even after putting together a plan, even after giving everything I had… it pained me to admit it, but in a plain and simple test of sword skills, I just couldn’t beat Blood.
“Good job,” Blood said. “Damn, that was rough. Not having muscles is a real drawback.” The match settled, Blood sheathed his sword.
As usual, I didn’t know how to start responding to that comment, but I got what he meant. Just as I was about to say something, a bone-chilling voice filled the air. “Blood?”
“Ack! Mary…”
“‘Ack?’ That’s not a very nice way to respond to me.”
Mary had both her hands on her hips and was glaring at Blood, her expression clearly indicating how angry she was. Being a mummy, Mary didn’t have any eyeballs. It made her look extra scary.
“I told you not to use that move anymore, didn’t I?”
That move? Anymore?
“U-Uh… what was this again?”
“Don’t you play dumb with me! That move where you catch your opponent’s weapon in your rib cage!”
“Yeah, but… it’s not like I have organs anymore.”
“What?!” I shouted, incredulous. “Blood, you did that while you were alive?!”
“Yes, he did!” Mary was inconsolably angry. “Can you believe this man?!”
I shook my head. He was truly unbelievable.
I’d been thinking that move was only something an undead being could perform, but I suddenly remembered that the undead never advanced. With very few exceptions, all the attacks and so on that they could use conformed to what they knew in their previous life. In other words, he wouldn’t have been able to pull off an insane stunt like that unless he had experience with it from before he died.
“He was facing a demon who had a rapier with the Word Penetratus inscribed on it.”
“Yeah, he was an agile little pest, and good with his weapon. He slipped right by me and looked like he was going for Mary, so naturally I—”
“Naturally?!”
Naturally, he allowed himself to get stabbed in the torso, caught the demon’s weapon in his ribs, twisted him to the floor and lopped his head off? No person in their right mind could call that a natural course of action. Only the War Ogre could do something like that.
“H-He’s lucky he survived…”
“He would have been dead without my benediction!”
“Yeah, and I trusted you! That’s why I did it!”
Wow, the strategies a team can use. And he did it in the first place to protect Mary.
“Excuse me! I thought you had died on the spot! I was actually worried! Now did I or didn’t I ask you never to do it again?!” It was rare to see Mary snap at anyone like this. I understood where Blood was coming from, but I could understand Mary’s feelings, too.
Come on, Blood. Of course she was going to be angry.
I put on a smile and chuckled dryly. There was no better way to respond to this situation. From there, I watched Blood get chewed out for a while. I may not have had much experience with relationships, but I wasn’t stupid. There was a saying about grabbing a dog by the ears, after all.
Blood loudly pretended to clear his throat. “Uhh, anyway. Will, even though you couldn’t beat me, you’ll have no troubles if you’re this good. Even though you couldn’t beat me. Even though you couldn’t beat me!”
“Stop saying that! You’re so annoying!”
Gods dammit! How the hell was I supposed to predict that twisted maneuver?! I put together a proper strategy in advance—how to deal with the huge power of his broadsword, how to exploit his low weight, all that stuff—and I nailed it all, just to have it turned around on me at the last second!
Blood laughed loudly. “Wanna tell me how you’re feeling right now?”
“Gaaahhhh! I’m gonna face you head-on and destroy you next time!”
And then I’ll say, “Well? Well? How are you feeling right now?” Right to your stupid face!
He was still laughing. “That’s the spirit, that’s the spirit, Willie, my boy…”
“All right, that’s enough!” Mary said. She slapped him upside the head.
“Ow!”
Yeah, take that. Serves you right!
“Both of you! Please, will you be more serious?!” She got angry at me, too. “Go on! On with it!”
“All right, all right, I hear you…” Blood said grudgingly. “So, uh, yeah. If I had some killer move or secret tech to pass down, I coulda taught it to you right about now.”
“You don’t?”
“Nope,” he said plainly, and shrugged. “You and me have different ways of fighting. I’m not trying to turn you into a copy of me. So the moves that are useful to me ain’t gonna be the ones useful for you. And anyway, like I said before, moves are situational. You can’t bank on just one.” He spoke confidently and calmly. I could feel the air of a battle-forged warrior about him.
“What matters is the basics. Remember all the stuff I’ve taught you, and be ready to use it any time.” He bumped his fist against my breastplate and held it there. Mary smiled as she watched us. “Me and Mary… We’ve taught you everything important you need to know.”
His skeletal fist had no warmth. But I was sure I could feel something warm emanating from it, filling up my chest.
So I gathered a little bit of courage and replied, with pride and a smile on my face. “Thanks, Dad. Thanks, Mom!”
Blood laughed loudly. “‘Dad’? Never really thought about it. I guess I am.”
“Yes, I believe you are,” Mary said. Her giggle was quiet and ladylike.
I started to feel kind of embarrassed, and unconsciously scratched the side of my face with my finger. The three of us laughed together for a short while.
I felt a sense of belonging. The thought that I’d have to leave them in spring was incredibly hard to come to terms with.
“Okay, what about this,” Blood said, after our laughter had settled. “I can’t teach you any ultimate moves, but, uh, what about something to mark your independence?”
I looked at him, perplexed.
“I’m giving you this.”
He undid his sword belt, and presented me with the magic sword he’d used to settle our match: that sinister, bewitching, matte black single-handed sword. “This is the strongest demonblade I have in my possession.”
The strongest? Of all the ones he owned? But… I mean…
“I didn’t even win…”
“I said it’s to mark your independence. Go on, pull it out.” He pushed it into my hands, belt and all.
I hesitantly wrapped the belt around me, and with some level of trepidation, drew the single-handed broadsword from its scabbard. It was a matte black and double-edged. The weight was distributed toward the end of the blade, which was a little thicker and wider than the rest of it. I thought it would probably cut well. The decorative elements of the sword gave it a kind of forbidding impression, and the crimson pattern running down the blade had a beguiling beauty to it.
“Its name is Overeater. It’s one of the very best demonblades. It’ll cut down whatever you swing it at, even the Echoes of the gods, so long as you can strike true. The Words inscribed on it are very difficult to figure out, but I can sum up the effect in one sentence,” Blood spoke, matter-of-factly. “As you cut down living beings with this sword, it recovers your life force. The more you cut, the more you recover.”
Huh? “Wait, what? Did I mishear that?”
“I’ll say it again. As you cut down living beings with this sword, it recovers your life force. The more you cut, the more you recover. You didn’t mishear. If you’re in a melee, you can just let your mind wander and swing this thing around aimlessly. You’ll still be the last man standing.”
Realizing the implications of this, I went pale.
“You’re smart. I’m sure you already get it, but… I don’t want you pulling out this thing unless you have to. Don’t lean on it,” Blood continued, in the same dispassionate tone.
“It’ll make you feel strong, but this ain’t the type of sword that’s meant to fortify the wielder’s spirit. If you lean on it, sooner or later you’re gonna become dependent on it. You’ll get cavalier about your sword skills, and they’ll become a shadow of what they are right now. It’ll go right to your head, and sooner or later you’ll fight someone who’s just plain better, or someone will poison you, or you’ll get surrounded by archers at a distance, and back you’ll go for another spin ’round fate’s eternal wheel. That’s what makes this a true demonblade.
“As for me, I’m undead. I’ve got no life force in the first place, so this thing does jack all for me. It’s just dead weight. So I’m giving it to you. Despite all the stuff I’ve said, I’m sure you’ll be fine with it. You can tell what it’s useful for.”
Mary nodded in agreement. Both of them had faith in me and believed I could handle this terrifying thing. My old memories flashed through my mind, and my heart ached a little. Was I really as great a person as they believed I was?
“Now, then. When a warrior hands down his demonblade, custom dictates he tells its story! And I’m not gonna be the guy who breaks an ancient tradition. So let’s talk about this sword!” Blood’s voice brightened, as if to erase the gloomy atmosphere that had briefly cast shadows over us. “And, of course, the history that surrounds it. Our history. Your history. The history you’ve been longing to hear.”
I couldn’t believe I was finally going to find out. It had been on my mind for so long.
“Blood…” I said, at a loss for words.
Blood looked at Mary. She nodded, smiling. “You’re your own man now, Will,” she said.
“I promised you I’d tell you when you got bigger,” Blood went on. “And you’re more than big enough now, in body and heart. It’s gonna take a while, but I’ll tell you everything. This is the story of the king among kings of the demons who tried to conquer this continent: the High King of the Eternals. It’s the story of the deaths of many heroes. It’s the story of our defeat. It’s the story of how we died—”
A rush of icy-cold wind blew past us through the graveyard at the base of the hill.
“—and it’s the reason why you grew up here.”
◆
Though numerous titles existed to refer to that king of demons, there was no one who knew his true name. He was called the Undying Bladefiend, the King Among Kings. The Purest Evil, the Inexhaustible Darkness, the Rider of Warstorms, the Cackler…
The High King of the Eternals.
Two hundred years ago, the continent of Southmark, which had been enjoying long-standing peace, was invaded by a demon king who went by that title, and who commanded an army of innumerable demons.
“It was global pandemonium stirred up by the demon kings of the Abyss,” Mary said. “They had designs upon this plane, and they had been biding their time, awaiting their chance.”
“High-ranked demons you really don’t wanna see often. Kings, Generals, all those guys—they all came crawling out of the woodwork.”
The demon kings had conspired together to launch one hell of a riot. To give an idea of the sense of scale, the vraskus, who I had defeated before, was classified as a Commander. General was the next rank up, and King was the rank above that.
Based on my experience with the vraskus, I thought I could possibly handle one General surrounded by Soldiers, if I were prepared to accept significant risk. Against a King, though, I probably stood no chance, not without making some completely unrealistic assumptions like fighting one-on-one.
If those kinds of demons had poured out like an army of ants, well, it wasn’t hard to understand just how terrible that would be. Society wasn’t entirely made up of people like me who’d undergone combat training. And dispatching a group of Soldiers took time and physical energy, even if you did have that experience.
“On top of that,” Blood continued, “those Generals and Kings that spilled out into our world conducted a number of grand rituals to their god, the god of dimensions. They offered that god huge amounts of flesh and blood. You probably learned geography from Gus, but, uh… my advice is, don’t go thinking it’s still the same today. Wouldn’t surprise me if there were massive holes blasted in the land and now it’s sea, or if the sea dried up and now it’s land.”
“As if they’d been waiting for all of this to begin,” Mary said, “the minions of the god of tyranny, Illtreat, and the god of undeath, Stagnate, also became active all over the world. The good gods expended a lot of energy to oppose them. There were many such battles, which raged fiercely enough to change the map forever. Information became quite confused and chaotic. The different regions completely lost contact with one another.”
I found it a little difficult to imagine chaos on that scale. Anyway, basically, the world became a confusing mess.
“So… thanks to that, we’re pretty much clueless about what the other continents were like back then,” Blood said. “The only stuff we know is about the High King, who was the main one going berserk in Southmark.”
“He had some pretty worrying nicknames,” I said.
“Yeah. Don’t get me started. That guy was so screwed in the head, I wanna add a few more. He didn’t look like much—just a brat with cruel-looking eyes. But…”
But?
“First off, when his blood was spilled, it’d turn into Soldier demons. When his flesh was sliced off, it’d turn into Commander demons. He could keep on making them forever.”
“Again, are my ears playing tricks on me?”
“I could say it all again if you want.”
“Hax…”
“Hax?”
“I mean… he’s a cheater!” He could just keep multiplying his forces infinitely? What kind of a bad joke was that?!
“Nothing but blades could hurt him, either. Blast him with magic or shoot him with arrows, he wouldn’t take so much as a scratch. And not only that,” Blood sighed, “but his favorite sword was Overeater here.”
I blinked.
“You get the point. He was insane. He was constantly cackling as he cut down his enemies and got cut himself, multiplying his army as he did.”
“I’m speechless.” What a freaking cheater.
Mary took over. “The reason that he came to be called the High King, meaning the King Among Kings, was because of his performance in battle, which was outstanding even among the King-ranked demons. It was far above and beyond the norm.”
Her voice dropped to a mumble. “Many cities were consumed by the demon hordes. This was one of them. It was an important hub for lake transportation, but even with the combined determination of the humans and the dwarves to protect it, it was barely a few days before it fell.”
She gazed over the ruined city with distant eyes. “And it was this city where the High King remained, producing demons. They took control of all of the nearby water transportation. Vessels full of Soldier and Commander demons used the water routes to invade settlements in various places. It was day after day, night after night of bloodshed and arson. Because there were so many refugees, the cities which were still safe had to deal with internal struggles. Sometimes they couldn’t take them all, and had to turn people away. There were riots. The rioters were slaughtered in droves…”
I felt sick just listening to it.
“No one could kill him. The collapse of Southmark was thought inevitable. And not only that, but the High King’s reach would easily extend across the strait and intervening sea separating Southmark from the continent of Grassland to the north. Everyone had almost accepted it,” Mary smiled, “when Gus—the Wandering Sage Augustus—declared that now was the time to strike, and put forward his plan to destroy the High King.”
My eyes opened wide. “Now was the time? Wait a second. The High King is surrounded by an infinite horde, he can’t be killed by arrows or magic, and the only thing that works on him, the sword, causes demons to be born from his spilled flesh and blood. And he has a demonblade that heals him when he counterattacks back.”
“Yes.”
“Destroy him… How? In the first place, who’d even be capable of killing—hm.” I stopped mid-sentence. A light bulb was flickering inside my head. I felt like I almost had something.
I thought it over. A demon army. Arrows and magic don’t work, only swords. Blood and flesh become demons. Demonblade. City. Underground city. Blood’s battle techniques. Mary’s benediction. Gus’s strategy…
“Aha.” An idea shot through my brain like an electric current. “I’ve got it.”
Yeah. Yeah, this was it. There was a chance this way. He could be killed, if it was done correctly.
“Whaddaya mean, you’ve got it?”
“Have you really figured it out?”
“Yeah. Probably.” I touched my hand to Overeater, which was hanging from the sword belt around my waist. In theory, this should work. It should be possible to kill him this way. “Gus probably planned to have an elite team infiltrate the city through the underground.”
This city had a complex underground quarter filled with dwarves. There were likely secret passages there, too, though I lacked the talent to find any. If they could get inside through one of those, it was possible that they could slip by the demon forces and strike directly at the center.
“And he’d probably use some locating magic to pinpoint the location of the High King beforehand. That’d probably be really easy for Gus.” I got the sense that Mary and Blood were surprised. It looked like I was right so far. “And then—”
My chin in my hand, I went over the idea that had flashed into my mind one more time. The question was how to kill him. Arrows deflected off him, magic couldn’t scratch him. He could be slashed with a sword, but demons would well out from him infinitely, and if you took a single hit from his demonblade, all the wounds inflicted on him would be healed. There was probably only one way to do something about that.
“Steal his demonblade during the fight.”
I’d been told that Overeater recovered your own life force when you cut your opponent. Judging by the name, it probably sucked life force from them or something. The point was, the whole problem started because the opponent had that sword.
The enemy could only be damaged by slashing, and that blade let him keep hitting you while recovering his wounds and generating an endless stream of little guys. There was no way to win. But the demonblade, which was one of the premises of this “unwinnable” situation, was just an object like any other, and could be handed over or stolen. It wasn’t one of the abilities inherent to the High King. It wasn’t something he’d been born with.
“Once you stole his demonblade, the High King’s own peculiarities would be his undoing.” The more you cut him, the more little guys would spring out ready to heal you. And hadn’t Blood told me that in a melee, you could just swing this sword around brainlessly and be the last man standing?
You’d be able to keep slashing at the High King, using the weaklings flowing out of him as a source of healing. The High King, on the other hand, wouldn’t be able to recover anymore, having lost the demonblade, which was his healing item.
“If it came down to an endurance contest, the High King should be the one who’d give up first…” I muttered thoughts incessantly. “As for how to steal it… First, Gus would clear out the guys around him with a large-scale magic spell. The High King can’t be hurt by magic, so that’s perfect for us.”
We’d just need to get him into a one-on-one battle, even temporarily. “Then Blood, you’d go in for the attack. Mary would heal both you and the High King with benediction. That would stop any more demons from appearing.” If his flesh and blood would turn into demons, then healing the wounds themselves should stop that. The aim of this first phase wouldn’t be to injure him—it would just be to steal his weapon.
“We’d probably need some help stopping the demons coming in at us from the outside. A few dozen… Actually, maybe a hundred or so?” These people, too, would probably be pretty talented elites, but the numbers I imagined surrounding them couldn’t be underestimated. Our forces would presumably be gradually whittled down.
“Then you, Blood, you’d use your rib-cage trick, or grapple with him, or cut his fingers or hands off, basically whatever you have to do to get the demonblade from him. This part definitely worked.”
“Hey, hold it,” Blood said. “How can you be so sure?”
“The fact that you have the demonblade in the first place proves you managed to steal it from him, right?” Silence from Blood. I thought I was right. “And that’d be checkmate.”
The High King’s abilities were so unfair he was basically cheating, but theoretically, he could be killed this way. There was no way Gus would’ve overlooked an opportunity like that. He’d have gathered a team of elites together somehow, and pulled through.
“The High King… died, I guess. But there’d still have been hordes of demons left over. Enough to crush our small squad…” And everyone died. Basically, a mutual defeat. What a sad conclusion. But even so, the continent was saved—
“No, Will,” Blood interrupted.
What?
“You really are a genius. I’m surer now than ever. But your conclusion,” Blood said bitterly, “is wrong.” Blood looked disgusted with himself.
“We… I… couldn’t kill the High King.” His words were filled with deep despair and resignation.
◆
“You… couldn’t kill him?”
Blood’s head was cast down, toward the floor. Mary nodded in answer to my question.
“Will, you imagine things correctly. All your guesses have been astonishingly accurate in describing exactly the strategy Gus decided on. Just as you imagined, Gus clawed back the possibility of killing the High King, making use of every factor visible to him. And in fact, his plan was successful,” Mary said calmly.
“But…” Her voice sounded distant, as though she was gazing at something without substance far away. “But the High King had more to give beyond the factors visible to Gus. He was a monster beyond even Gus’s expectations.”
Now I really was lost for words. I didn’t even have it in me to call him a cheater again. What was this guy?
“The High King tore away his childish appearance, and revealed his true nature, taking the form of a hideous and grotesque warrior. And, um… well…” Mary faltered, as if it was hard for her to say the rest.
Blood finished for her. “When the High King got serious, he was a better swordsman than me.” He was looking into the distance. I wondered if he was remembering his fight with the High King.
He spoke again. “Nothing worked. I’d fought big guys like that a bunch of times before, but this was the first time in my life that I just could do nothing.”
It was beyond imagination. Blood was no match for him? What level of skill must this guy have had? What would a person need to amass, and how much, to have a hope of reaching such dizzying heights?
“My demonblade was slicing nothing but air, and he was cutting me apart with some lousy demonblade he pulled out with the Word of Dispatch. Meanwhile, farther out, our allies who were acting as our wall from the demons were getting crushed.” He spoke of it with a feigned smile, like it was a cheap nightmare. “I can make excuses till the cows come home, you know? He was the boss of the demons. King Among Kings. His body’s abilities were like nothing I’d ever seen. The demonblade I stole was a single-handed sword, handled different to the greatsword I always used. And so on. But you know what? I had enough support. I had Gus’s magic, Mary’s benediction. The High King was injured enough, too, from his kid form.”
His opponent could make excuses just as he could. Battles were often like that in the real world, he told me glumly. “And he wasn’t a lot better. Just a little. Probably just one step higher, that’s all. One step further up, to a height I couldn’t reach while I was alive.”
It probably cut a terrible wound deep into Blood’s heart. I’d never heard him sound this depressed before. He was normally so bright.
“I still think about it. What I was lacking, what I could’ve done…”
Mary lowered her eyes in silence. It looked like nothing she said would be any comfort.
“But it’s too late now. You know it like I do. This is as far as my sword will ever reach.”
The undead didn’t progress.
No matter how much Blood thought about it, no matter how much he swung his sword, he would never be able to climb that one last step, where the High King stood above him.
Blood fell silent. After a short while, Mary sensed that he didn’t want to talk anymore, and continued where he left off. “When it seemed likely that we were going to lose, Gus and I used all the techniques available to us to place a seal on the High King. It was at least something we could do.”
That meant they’d abandoned the possibility of Blood winning. I knew well that the three of them deeply trusted one another, and had respect for each other’s personalities and skills. This was the moment when they should have been most relying on Blood’s full potential to do what he was capable of doing. To go ahead with an action that was as good as telling him, “You’re incapable?” How must he have felt?
“Fortunately… it succeeded. A miracle from Mater split the ground, and with the High King bound by Gus’s arts, he was swallowed into a giant chasm. We sealed him deep beneath the earth.”
That was the end of the High King of the demons, who had conquered the majority of this continent.
“We knew that it was nothing but a play for time. Among the demons, there were a lot of sorcerers proficient in the use of the Words, and powerful priests who served the god of dimensions. The people we had in charge of the outer wall had already been taken down, and it was only a matter of time before the demons closed in on us.”
And once the three of them were defeated, what then?
“Then all the demons would gather, and they would have all the time in the world to break the seal on the High King. Our desperate, last-ditch attempt would achieve nothing.” Her tone was laced with despair and deep regret. “When it came down to it, at the very end, we weren’t able to trust in Blood.”
No matter how low the probability, they should have kept believing in the chance that Blood’s sword would find its mark, until the last possible second. Mary’s voice clearly communicated that.
“And then…”
A frosty wind picked up. We’d been talking for so long that I was chilled to the bone.
“And then, as if to mock us…”
A shiver ran through my body.
“An Echo of the god of undeath, Stagnate, appeared before us.”
An Echo. An incarnation of a god…
“The evil gods are not a monolithic entity. They all operate under different philosophies, and will cooperate if it’s in their interest to do so… and vice versa.”
“The High King probably wasn’t great for the god of undeath.” Blood seemed ready to talk again. “That guy was too strong. Godly Echo or not, the High King with Overeater in his hand could’ve cut him down and killed him, cackling as he did it.”
The High King would conquer the entire continent of Southmark as Dyrhygma’s minion, and his greedy fingers would extend to the next. His army, which would only swell as time went on, would probably accomplish the conquest of a second continent, and maybe the entire world. And the demon, the monster capable of this, was one that even the gods struggled for a way to kill.
“If anything, it was good news for the god of undeath that the High King got sealed. So he came to us with a deal.”
“What did he say?”
“He said we were skilled, and asked us to become undead and join his forces. In return, he’d wipe out the horde of demons all over the city. And then we could watch over the seal as undead for as long as we liked.”
“The god of undeath, Stagnate, was once allied with the forces of good. He strayed from that path when he could no longer stand seeing the tragedies of life and death. His desire is to create an eternally stagnated world without tragedy, by turning talented souls of all kinds into the undying. He scouted us out,” Mary said, voice positive.
“We got picked on, more like,” Blood corrected her, shrugging. “We were basically forced. He told us to choose, but like hell we had a choice. We accepted his ‘offer.’”
Mary had told me once that they were “traitors to the forces of good,” and that she had betrayed Mater the Earth-Mother, the very god she had faith in. That referred to the contract made at that very moment.
“And so we became undead. I’d had my flesh cut up by the High King, and became a skeleton, nothing but bones. Mary became a mummy, probably ’cause she got roasted by Mater’s flames as she became undead. And Gus became a ghost. I guess he had no attachment to his old man body anymore. We all got to keep our intelligence from when we were alive. Top-of-the-line undead, we are,” Blood said, not sounding the least bit happy about it. “Then he wiped the city clean. There was no way the lower demons could resist the authority of a god. Their bodies got reshaped, and they all got turned into undead. Not the way they normally go, that’s for sure.”
Which explained why undead demons were roaming this city even now. It was all linking up. The reasons behind everything I’d seen up until now were becoming clear at last.
“And as for us, we became the protectors of the High King’s seal, with these undying bodies.”
They explained to me that, for a time, the city was periodically visited by underlings of the High King attempting to break the seal, but the three of them repelled those demons in every instance. The three of them never tired, never slept, and unless they were completely destroyed, even their wounds would heal on their own. Now that they were perfect immortal beings, who didn’t even have to fear sunlight, no one was a match for them.
“And that began our next two hundred years,” said Mary. “We buried our allies, who had taken on the High King with us. Gus set up a magical early-warning network covering the city. And then, we simply stayed here, continually protecting the seal.”
“Wasn’t like we had much else to do. We were bound to this place by contract. We could only go so far from the city, and we couldn’t even check what was going on outside using magic. Did all the human habitats of Southmark get destroyed? What happened to Grassland to the north? We were stuck here not knowing jack. A few times, we even said to each other that humanity might’ve gone extinct. And then one day…”
“One day…?”
“You came, Will. Or, properly speaking, a bunch of demons came, and brought you with them.”
Oh, so that was it.
“I get it now.” All the information connected in my head. “So, I was a human sacrifice, meant to break the seal on the High King.”
That was why a baby was here, in these faraway ruins, miles from human civilization.
I laughed brightly. “No wonder you couldn’t tell me! It must have been way too hard to tell me I was originally meant to be a sacrifice for a demon when I was just a kid.”
The atmosphere around Blood and Mary softened when they saw how I was taking it. “Yes. Blood may be crass, but even he knew to restrain himself on this topic.”
“Oh, crass, am I?” They were back to their normal selves.
“After we dispatched the demons, we had a little bit of a debate with Gus over what to do with you, Will. In the end, we decided to take care of you and raise you.”
Maybe the reason Gus treated me brusquely was because of the argument they’d had then.
“And the fact that the demons were able to bring you here means…”
“That somewhere, somewhere pretty close, there’s gotta be a place where humans are living.”
Babies were weak and frail. Even though demons could use magic, there was still a limit on how far they could have transported me.
“We don’t know what things are like out there. The situation could be quite grim…”
“But we figured, okay, so we’ll just give you the strength you need to get through a situation like that. I think we did pretty good.”
And that brought me right up to the present moment. I finally understood how I’d gotten to where I was. The mysteries were solved, and the past and the present were connected with a single straight thread.
From here on, I was going to be heading to peopled lands that had likely suffered and survived a time of tempestuous upheaval. I’d use the strength the three of them had entrusted me with to embark on my new life. And one day, I decided, I’d return to this city. I would bring my new family and friends with me, and introduce them to Mary, Blood, and Gus.
Maybe we could even rebuild this city again. One day…
“Forget about us, and have fun living with the living, okay, bud?”
“Will, be happy, and don’t forget to pray and be good.”
Huh?
“I couldn’t have wished for a better disciple. Even in today’s exam… I mean, content-wise, you beat me hands down. You’re a whiz kid and a smart-ass, and I love you, my son. Keep on getting strong.” Blood ruffled my hair roughly.
“I was happy that we could be a real family, if only for a short time. Will, my darling boy. Never forget that your mother loves you.” Mary held me gently.
“Huh? Wait…” Wait. Why? You guys—
“You’re… speaking like we’re never going to see each other again…”
Just then, the sky was suddenly covered by thick, dark clouds. The way they moved was unlike any cloud I’d ever seen. The wind began to spiral noisily above the hill.
A laugh echoed through the air. It was a disturbing laugh, obscured by noise, echoed and overlapping itself many times. Something jet-black, like pure darkness, belched out of thin air. That unsettling black smoke, like you might expect to spout from a volcano, started to coalesce into a human form.
It was the form of a young man. He was slender, his proportions unnaturally perfect. His skin was pale as could be, as if no blood ran through it at all, and his eyes were dark and lifeless.
“Satisfied with your farewells, heroes?”
The mere sight of him, the mere sound of his voice, caused me to freeze up like something was holding my soul in an iron grip.
“Yeah.”
“Please, go ahead. We’re ready.” Blood and Mary dropped their gazes, neither of them seeming to offer any resistance.
I felt as if my entire body had turned to ice. I couldn’t do a thing. My soul understood that the being in front of me was a being of absolute power that humans were helpless to resist.
“At long last, you two have lost your attachment.”
I had no idea what was going on. But I had to move.
“In accordance with our contract…”
I had to move.
“I hereby claim…”
Blood and Mary… I had to…
“…your souls…”
Why couldn’t I move? Move, move! Move! Please… mo—
“…as my own.”
My brain froze. I watched in horror.
“Vastare!”
There was a deep boom. A shock wave directed at the pale man sent earth and sand flying.
“Hmph.”
That whole area of the hill was ravaged. It briefly rained dirt and sand.
But it hadn’t hit him. The man had spontaneously changed location, and was now standing ten meters from his previous spot, that single, dismissive grunt his only comment.
It hadn’t been me. I hadn’t managed to move. I was still frozen there, trembling.
“Will, take Blood and Mary and get out of here.” A person’s semi-translucent, spectral back was in front of me. It was a sight I’d seen so many times before.
Crotchety, miserly, offensive… And he nearly killed me once, too.
“Don’t worry.” Mana swirled in a thick vortex around him. His hands were open and spread wide apart, in preparation to cast heavy magic. He spoke decisively. “I’ll take him down.”
My beloved grandfather, Gus— the sage Augustus had arrived.
◆
A nostalgic memory came back to me.
It was a faint memory, from my previous life—childhood, I thought. I was reading a children’s story in the library.
I was a quick learner as a child. I read through books one after another, even the ones with difficult vocabulary, meant for people of high school age. My parents must have been pleased with this, as they often took me to the library.
The library was a very big place for me as a child, and covered wall-to-wall in books everywhere I looked. It was a dizzying experience. I searched out all kinds of books from the shelves of the kids’ reading corner. I devoured them as quickly as I could get my hands on them.
Among them was my favorite book. It was an old and tattered fantasy novel. It had sorcerers in it. At this point, I could no longer remember what that book had been called. But the old sorcerer with his arms spread wide—him, I remembered, and he was very cool.
“Ligatur, nodus, obligatio…” A colossal amount of mana converged and darted at high speed. Words flew at the pale man like shooting stars.
“Ha ha ha! Were you not a wise man? Knowing all, you still resist?”
The man, emitting an unhallowed and unearthly aura, mocked Gus. Then, in the blink of an eye, he crumbled into a black mist.
“…conciliat, sequitur!” Gus was alert.
As the thick cloud of mist dispersed to avoid being bound, leaving numerous trails of darkness behind it, the Words spread out in all directions, as though they had been yanked backwards. It looked like nothing special, but Gus had just performed an extremely high-level technique, fluidly appending the appropriate Words to react to his opponent’s sudden change. This was very difficult to do in the middle of battle without stumbling.
Even in ordinary language, the impression of a sentence could be completely changed at times by adding one or two words to the end. Like a poem crafted with technical skill, or a novel studded with foreshadowing and plot twists, Words, when chained together, sometimes changed like a blossoming flower.
The man, who had once again regained his shape from the black mist was now surrounded by layer upon layer of cages and chains made of fluctuating mana. It was a strong and multilayered magical formation of binding and sealing.
“Hmm…”
It looked as though the now-restrained man of mist felt nothing in particular about being bound. Without the slightest loss of composure, he looked at the cage-shaped masses of mana surrounding him, and tiresomely cast a Word at them.
“Vastare.”
The Word of Destruction created a vortex of violent devastation even greater than the one Gus had cast. It looked certain to shred the cages to pieces, but by that time, Gus had finished inscribing his Signs.
His right’s Word of Guardianship obstructed the vortex. His left’s Word of Erasure wiped it out. And by that time, the chain of Words he’d deployed were themselves inscribing another Word. The restraining power of the cages was strengthened further.
“…!”
Quadruple casting.
I was standing beside Blood and Mary, still frozen, my eyes bugging out. The two of them were collapsed on the ground, almost entirely drained of strength.
Gus spread open his hands in a way I could have called elegant, and glared fixedly at the pale man, in determination. “Pallida mors aequo pulsat pede…”
Upon recognizing the lengthy Word being recited, the man’s face twisted for the first time.
“You dare…!”
The man uttered Words in quick succession. The air shuddered. The surrounding ground cracked and swelled upwards. A barrage of magic was thrown at the restraints, each impact blasting against them with the force of a bomb. But the Words held fast.
This incantation—
“…pauperum tabernas regumque turres!”
This incantation, being strengthened by Signs on both sides, was a ritual spell intended to be cast by a team of several people working in tandem. It was one of the ultimate magics, which was virtually impossible to perform on your own.
“Damnatio memoriae!”
It was a colorless, invisible pulse of destruction. As it traveled, it tore to shreds the connections between all of Creation’s Words, dividing them apart. Matter, phenomena, souls—it rendered them all meaningless, and returned them to mana. The ultimate destructive magic, the Word of Entity Obliteration, gouged through a large part of the hill.
A conspicuous blank space was left where that part of the hill had once been, as if a humongous creature had taken a full bite out of it. Strong winds blew about the hill, as if to fill in the void that had suddenly formed.
No one spoke. Even after perfectly connecting with the Word of Entity Obliteration, Gus hadn’t dropped his guard. He remained alert to his surroundings, and carried out checks with a number of Words.
After a while—perhaps he had at last satisfied himself of his opponent’s obliteration—Gus relaxed his posture. “Blood, Mary, your souls have not been taken, I hope?”
“Yeah… Still here.”
“W-We’re okay, somehow.”
Gus let out a sigh. “Then do something for Will, would you? I can’t touch him.”
Gus glanced over at me. I’d never seen him look at me so kindly.
“I’m sorry you had to go through that,” he said softly. “You must have been terrified.”
I hadn’t realized until he said it that my body was still stiff with tension. Mary gently held my hand. Blood rubbed my back clumsily.
A small sound escaped my throat. I suddenly realized that I’d hardly been breathing, and even now, my breath was held in suspense. I gasped, and let my lungs have the oxygen they were demanding, my breaths quick and deep.
A cold sweat started to cover my entire body. Next came violent trembling. My eyes brimmed with tears. I was so scared. So scared! So, so scared! I’d never known anything so terrifying.
I’d felt as if I’d gotten reasonably strong. Even if I wasn’t as good a fighter as Blood, as good a sorcerer as Gus, as strong in spirit as Mary, I still felt proud of myself for working hard and for the results I’d achieved. But when that man of black mist stood in front of me, I couldn’t even move. I became absolutely convinced that there was no way I could beat him.
“So you were right all along,” Blood said to Gus. “Sorry I kept blowing you off when you brought it up.”
“I was hoping we could last until Will set out,” Mary concurred in a repentant mumble.
“It was what you decided,” Gus shrugged. “I’m not so unreasonable that I’ll criticize the mindset behind your choices.” It was a gentle, considerate voice.
“Besides which,” he continued, “it went surprisingly well, after all, didn’t it?”
“Yeah,” said Blood. “Gotta say, you were cool.”
“Thank you so much,” said Mary. “Honestly. You do so much…”
“No more than you.” Gus exchanged pleasant smiles with the two. It felt as though some kind of rift had been closed between them.
Then, Gus turned to face me. “Will. Oh, Will. What a fine mess you found yourself in. Not to worry, though,” he laughed. His expression was bright, as though he had been freed of a worry that had burdened him for years. “So. I would say we owe you an explanation. Not that it requires much of one.”
“Yeah. Now that this has happened, I guess we can’t keep it buried any longer.”
“I think it would be best to tell him. Ah… Shall we go inside first? Will must be cold. I’ll make some herbal tea.”
“Sounds good,” Blood said with a laugh. He headed for the temple ahead of the rest of us.
Gus shook his head and turned to me as we followed him. “All right. Let’s have a talk around the fireplace. It’s time we stopped our worrying and relaxed.”
After seeing Gus with such an uncharacteristic smile on his face, I started to feel happy as well. The knot of tension untied at last. I thought about sitting in front of the warm fireplace, with a cup of herbal tea warming my hands, listening to them talk. Yeah, that sounded good. Spending time with all my family around me was something I’d enjoyed my whole life.
“Somehow, everything just worked,” Gus said. I turned to grin back at him.
“ou…t…”
The smile froze on my face. An arm made of black mist was sticking out of Gus’s chest. A groan of pain barely escaped his throat. And before I could do anything… Gus’s body was effortlessly torn in two, into top and bottom halves.
“Granp—”
“Blood!” Unlike me, standing there blankly, Blood and Mary acted immediately. As quick as Mary could speak, Blood was in front of her as her guard, and Mary was posed to invoke benediction.
“Ghahaha.”
In an instant, the two of them were crushed against the ground. A long wordless groan of pain came from Blood. I could hear the sounds of all his bones cracking and crunching to pieces. He was being compressed by the black mist. A fragment of bone flew off with a sharp snap and hit me in the cheek.
From Mary came the sound of air escaping. The black mist had gouged out her windpipe, and both her arms broke like twigs. She couldn’t pray to her god anymore.
“Surprising. I didn’t expect you to destroy my splinter…”
The black mist had once again taken the form of a person.
A voice obscured by noise. A slender body, its proportions unnaturally perfect. Skin as pale as could be, as if no blood ran through it at all. Dark and lifeless eyes.
“If I hadn’t divided my strength and splintered into two beforehand, that would have caused me lasting interference.”
The man turned to Gus’s top half, which he was still gripping in one of his hands.
“I praise you, Wandering Sage. You are indeed an exceptional Grand Sorcerer.”
His body torn away below the chest, Gus’s eyes were locked on the man, and they were bloodshot with fury.
The man laughed it off coolly.
“Sta…g…nate!”
Stag…nate. Stagnate. The god of undeath. An Echo!
“Destroying you would be too much of a waste. I will wait until you lose your attachment.”
Having said his piece, the Echo of Stagnate tossed Gus’s upper half roughly aside.
“As for you…”
His gaze turned to me. My heart jumped into my throat. My legs started shaking. I wanted to look away, but couldn’t even do that.
I saw, clearly, his lips slowly creep up at the corners. He walked toward me. I couldn’t move.
Mary and Blood might have noticed him coming towards me. Still half-destroyed, they tried to grab onto his feet, but were pressed down even more strongly. Again, I heard the sound of bones breaking all at once, too many to count or even make out.
He was right in front of me now. In that instant, I sensed my own death. But the words he spoke next with a smile on his face were, unmistakably, words of praise.
“Well done. You helped immensely. You have my gratitude.”
“For… what?” I somehow managed to string some words together with my quivering lips and tangled tongue.
“These heroes you see before you…”
The god of undeath spread his arms as he spoke, as if he was enjoying this very, very much.
“They became the highest-ranked among undead by entering into a contract with me, on the condition that when their attachment to the High King was lost, they would meet with me again, and become my servants fully.”
This man, who emanated an unholy aura, was he… saying that… “I…”
“Yes.”
The man laughed. At me?
“Thanks to you, the Sage’s attachment has waned, and the War Ogre and the Beloved Daughter have lost their attachment to the High King completely.”
The words didn’t register. I couldn’t process them. I—The reason I—
“Thanks to you, these great heroes will at last become mine.”
He looked thrilled.
“Thanks to the good life you led as their son.”
But I—
When I was reborn, I—
I said to myself I—
I was going to live… this time…
Live right, this time…
“Ha ha ha! Too shocked to speak? Understandable.”
I couldn’t think.
“But my gratitude wasn’t a lie…”
His voice came in through my ears.
“And although inexperienced, you are an apprentice to three great heroes…”
I couldn’t understand.
“What would you say… about joining my forces and serving me?”
I couldn’t comprehend.
“I will allow you to remain in harmony with these three forever.”
“—!”
“Hah hah hah. Interested? I assume so… But forcing an immediate answer would be insipid.”
A pause.
“I will give you time to consider with your precious family.”
He laughed.
“Appropriately, tomorrow is the winter solstice. When that accursed sun is at its weakest…”
His form crumbled into a black mist.
“After dusk, I will hear your answer.”
There was a rush of wind. He disappeared.
Standing there like an idiot, I could only watch him go.
Diamond. diamond. diamond.
