by Mamare Touno
Not only that, but destroying his surroundings to this extent could be nothing but defeat for an Ancient, a guardian of the land. Elias felt helpless, as though something powerful that had filled him was leaking away.
However, the despair that clung to that helplessness wasn’t as great as he’d anticipated.
On the contrary, he was smiling faintly, as if he was somehow relieved, as if it all made sense to him. It was unpleasant, self-mocking loneliness, and if put into words, it might have been I knew it.
A sense of rotten comprehension.
It was a disgusted, contemptuous thought. The idea that this really was the extent of his strength.
His sense of time was hazy, so he wasn’t certain, but he thought that several hours had passed since that collapse, at dawn.
In the instant they lost the ground, Elias had tried to end the battle with a huge attack that gave no thought to his own safety. He’d attempted to strike that indigo-steel magus, who boasted fearsome strength, with Quad Aqua Harpoon, the highest-power attack he could make with his sword. It had been a reckless offensive.
The Fairy Arts Elias used triggered phenomena that were almost like magic. In his case, combined with the attribute of the weapon he used, it was an attack technique that manifested as water and ice. However, Fairy Arts was Fairy Arts, not magic. No matter how far you went, it was a martial art and a combat method. After it was launched, magic would have struck home automatically or pursued the opponent, but Fairy Arts had no such ability. It was a sword technique, and so he had to use subtle handling to make his attacks hit home.
Under those circumstances, he hadn’t been able to do that, and the attack he’d steeled himself to make had done nothing except pointlessly spread damage.
On a slope that looked as though there had been a great earthquake or a landslide, Elias smiled, faintly and bitterly. It was an emotion far more vicious than despair.
If it had been despair, he would only have had to fight. If he roused himself, even if he couldn’t win, it would turn into a trial of strength. However, this ironic feeling of understanding and acceptance was coming from inside him. No, this shallow smile was Elias himself.
Somewhere along the way, he’d begun to feel a strange correspondence.
What was the fairy curse?
In a word, it was a cage.
A prison that separated Elias from victory.
“You are unable to inflict damage above a certain level upon your opponents.” Why did a ridiculous curse like that exist in the first place? Wasn’t it obvious that as long as that curse dwelled in him, he wouldn’t be able to score even the smallest victory?
This was what he had sensed, vaguely. Wasn’t he a being who would never have any wish granted? Protection, victory, aid: All these things had been placed carefully out of his reach beforehand. Wasn’t that what he’d been born as?
This doubt had clung stickily to Elias, soaking in, ever since this journey began—no, ever since the night they’d gathered for their assault on the Great Stronghold of the End—and he couldn’t rid himself of it.
Compared with this body, which had most likely been a true counterfeit, how dazzling the Adventurers looked: They could make even their counterfeit bodies real. He envied them so much.
“He was strong,” Elias muttered.
The figure of the indigo steel magus, the mortal enemy he’d crossed blades with, rose behind his eyelids. He’d been a living weapon, and as he attacked, he’d swung that enormous bardiche, a weapon as long as he was tall, like a storm. His strangely shining eyes had held not anger or hatred but simply a grotesque craving.
Elias had probably had the upper hand of that battle from beginning to end.
Objectively, that was how it must have been, but Elias hadn’t felt that way at all.
No matter how much he attacked, all he could do was shave away his enemy’s HP.
HP was life energy. If it ran out, combat would be impossible, and you would die. To Adventurers, death wasn’t absolute, but in terms of winning or losing, it would be decisive. In other words, shaving HP away should have been not a metaphor, but a path to victory.
…And yet, the light in that magus’s eyes had ignored that principle. All he could think was that the other had ignored the difference between their HP and had been focused on something else. If the act of shaving away HP didn’t lead to victory, how was he supposed to wrest victory from his opponent?
“Was that… Did he stretch out his hand and grasp power? Power from where? Twisting the rules…”
Still, if he’d shaved them away entirely, even that magus might have stopped moving.
However, he’d done something strange. It was true that Elias hadn’t seen a vision that would point him toward victory, but he couldn’t imagine that the magus had had one either. On the contrary, defeat should have been the only thing that lay in his future… But that man had extended an invisible arm and grasped some sort of great and terrible power, inviting it in.
The mana that had filled the magus, and that invisible power.
What had it been?
At the very least, it had been something Elias didn’t know, a thing that lay outside the bounds of the laws that ruled all creation. If it hadn’t been for that, Elias’s attacks would have put an end to the magus before the collapse.
“Why is he so incredibly free, when I, a knight of the Red Branch, am bound by a curse? Is that the difference between Adventurers and Ancients? Or, no, is it the difference between him and myself…?”
When his faded fighting spirit had left him, all that remained in Elias was envy.
He couldn’t even struggle. The cage got in his way.
However, even when that man was on the brink of losing his life, he’d had the right to fight recklessly. Since that was something that had been put out of Elias’s reach, it was dazzling.
“Lord Elias.”
“Lord Elias.”
A faint voice came to him on the wind, over and over. When he raised his eyes, vacantly, Enchantress Youren was there, her thin silk streaming in the wind.
At this point, a sense of shame finally resurfaced inside Elias. Even if he couldn’t feel regret for his own sake, he had Ancient comrades on this mountain.
“Is your body all right?”
“Yes. I’m fine.”
Elias got to his feet as he responded.
So that it could carry out Elias’s thoughts, his body was sturdy. The damage he’d taken in that fight was already recovering. Even Crystal Stream, whose blade had been chipped and cracked, was being repaired by Elias’s own mana.
“Is that so…? What a relief. For a little while, I was afraid you had been swallowed up by the magus’s dreadful plot.”
The Enchantress had approached across the unstable slope in slow, curious motions, and she thanked Elias with a respectful curtsy. Her long, glossy black hair slipped free of the thin silk, fanning out, and the transparent light of the mountains illuminated a beautiful, bewitching sight. Elias, an elf knight, wasn’t from the sort of culture that would make a woman kneel, and he hastily caught the Enchantress’s arm and helped her to rise.
“I’m sorry. I failed to kill the Genius—the magus.”
“I saw.”
The Enchantress’s casual words sent an unpleasant twinge through Elias’s chest. It felt as if someone had thrust an iron rod into a festering wound, and while it was nothing he couldn’t endure, the pain held an uncomfortable heat.
He didn’t know its true identity, and he apologized again.
Elias was the leading member of the Knights of the Red Branch, and a user of Fairy Arts. On top of that, right now, he had to be the most elite of the surviving Ancients. That was the equivalent of an absolute mission: He had to rescue his comrades without fail and banish the darkness from Theldesia.
Now, when he had failed to do that, the only thing Elias could do was apologize.
Watching Elias, the Enchantress thought for the space of ten full breaths
, then spoke. “No, there was some sort of extraordinary power at work in that battle.” Maybe she wasn’t confident, either—she spoke carefully, choosing her words.
“He must have used some wicked technique and toyed with his own life force. That was the power of the rainbow.”
“The power of the rainbow…?”
Her response triggered an association in Elias’s mind. Those fragments of light the magus had radiated in the last stages of the battle… The fragments had looked as though the colors that hung in the sky after rain had been hardened, then shaved thinly; they must have been the Power of the Rainbow that the Enchantress meant. As if in exchange for that, all of the crazed warrior’s abilities had skyrocketed.
The murmur that had escaped him was one of confirmation, rather than doubt.
However, the Enchantress seemed to have heard it as a question. She answered it in an admonishing tone:
“It is the inborn power that gives life to everything in the space between heaven and earth. It is the power that creates and raises everything, the strength that helps one to overcome difficulties. It is also the power that links people with the earth, and the enchanted lands with the moon.”
“Why is a Genius able to use such a power?!”
If what the Enchantress said was true, that power could be called the ultimate energy. It was linked to mana and physical strength, the earth as represented by volcanoes, the sky that encompassed lightning, and every other great power.
“By rights, that power belongs to the enchanted lands—in other words, to you and the rest of the chivalric orders. That man has acquired it simply because he unfortunately gained control of the fairyland on this mountain. As a result, many martenfolk were lost…”
“Rgh!”
Now that he thought back, the light emitted by the Spatial Teleportation Device that the technical knights had repaired had been iridescent as well. Deep down, that light and the cowardly power the Genius had used were the same. That realization led to a further memory. The great magic tree in the fairy village, and the alv ruins at the bottom of the sea, and the missing Sacrament Sword, which had been stolen—hadn’t they all been cloaked in rainbow light?
Elias realized that the iridescent light was something like the world’s mana. He had been taught that the techniques the fairies used were far closer to the world’s foundation than crude skills like magic and sorcery. However, it was said that ordinary humans could never learn them. To Elias, who had mastered fairy techniques that were that difficult, rainbows also meant the power of fairy blood.
When it came to the world’s mana, Elias—the fairy swordsman who borrowed the natural powers of earth, water, fire, and wind—was inferior to a magus.
That rainbow radiance was also the light that appeared when lives were lost.
Did that mean the man was a god of death?
“That man made further use of that power to control the kin of the wolves. There’s no doubt he’s plotting to search for the ruin, the television station, that lies hidden in this mountain. If he takes the altar in the television station, the Ritual of Coronation will occur. Once that happens, this entire area will fall under the dominion of the magus.”
“…”
Elias bit his lip.
His combat power was first-rate. He prided himself that his equipment was also made up of first-class articles, imbued with magical abilities.
But he remembered the indigo-steel man’s wide, crazed eyes. The eyes of a starving beast who sought only combat, who would use both victory and defeat to fuel the flames. Elias admitted that those eyes had overawed him.
In the first place, Elias was bound by the chains of a hero. Even though he had the strongest abilities, the fairies’ curse ate away at him, distancing him from victory: That was Elias. He’d had everything. Was victory the only thing he lacked, and the one thing no amount of wishing would ever get him?
Inevitably, even if Elias defeated that man, would it lead him to victory? He, the strongest. He, the head knight of the proud Thirteen Global Chivalric Orders.
“…Do you lack confidence?”
“That’s not—!” Elias shouted reflexively, feeling something claw at the pain in his chest.
Enchantress Youren’s delicate lips tightened, very slightly. That expression was one Elias had never known before, and it was something he feared more than anything:
Distrust and disappointment.
Elias finally understood the meaning of the festering wound in his chest that spit out miasma: It was the terror of being abandoned by the world. The darkness that lay there was the complete opposite of the indolence the Geniuses had beckoned him to, and yet, in essence, it was exactly the same.
Would the strongest knight be discarded as something unnecessary?
In the first place, why had a “strongest” anything who’d never once been victorious been considered necessary up until now?
What on earth had Elias misunderstood? He couldn’t possibly be the strongest if he’d never won, could he?
Elias, who’d bitten his lip so hard he’d gone pale, was currently in the very midst of terror. It was the first time the fact that he couldn’t win had cornered him this badly.
“Lord Elias. Listen carefully, please. Your strength is still necessary to save this world. I am aware that you harbor pain in your heart. However, that pain itself is a qualification. That’s right: It qualifies you to rule heaven and earth.”
With a gesture that made it look as if she was praying, the Enchantress whispered to Elias with nearly intolerable slowness. It was a guidepost as thin as a needle that showed the way to salvation, so that Elias could retake his qualifications as a knight.
Elias grasped a proposal that he would have been able to brush aside if it had had the mercilessness of an ultimatum.
“Conduct the Ritual of Coronation. If you do, a portion of the power of the rainbow will be yours, Lord Elias. It is the spiritual power that is the source of all creation. It will surely remove any curse, and I am certain it will soothe your anguish.”
That’s right. Elias nodded with a bitterness that smelled like iron.
He didn’t need the curse that bound him anymore.
This was the first time he’d heard that term, the Ritual of Coronation, and it held a gloomy attraction for him, as though a fragment of the world’s secrets had been sealed into it.
As far as Elias was concerned, he hadn’t put his full trust in this sorceress who whispered to him, but her tempting words had a powerful magnetism, and they seemed to hold a glimmer of truth. If that was the power at the source of the world, then it was sure to be able to shatter and discard even the curse that bound him.
Elias nodded, his face pale.
In order to slay his enemy, he would obtain the power of the rainbow.
1
“Dweaaah?! Whoa, hey, slow down, Fluffers!”
As she chased after Gumon the enormous wolf, Kanami lost her balance and swung her arms around as if she were swimming. Due to its canals, which were like the type in terraced fields, this huge, deep subterranean cavern was awash in enough water to get the soles of their shoes wet.
Without turning to look at her companions, Gumon casually scaled the terraces with the grace unique to creatures that traveled on four legs.
Apparently, this was a regular cavern.
According to what he’d heard from Hua Diao, there were several hundred small-scale limestone caves in this mountain, a few dozen of which could be traversed by humans. It wasn’t a large-scale dungeon; Krusty suspected that countless instance-type dungeons might have been fixed in place this way by the Catastrophe.
The floating Magic Light was something Kanami had summoned from a Lamplight Scroll. It was technically a noncombat spell for Magic Attack classes, but convenient, low-level spells were often provided as consumable magic items anyone could use. They didn’t cost much, so seasoned Adventurers invariably slipped them into their belongings.
Even though it w
as illuminated now, the damp cave still held darkness, but Kanami didn’t seem to care one bit. She was a Monk, her body encased in skimpy light armor, and she moved through the gloomy cave lightly. She peeked into the shadows and branch tunnels here and there like a restless child. Phrased diplomatically, she was confirming their route; considered normally, she was satisfying her curiosity.
Krusty watched her without comment.
It wasn’t as if there was any particular advantage or disadvantage for him, and if she cleared the way for him, that was just fine.
His thought on the situation was It looks as though trouble just got started. In Krusty’s life, this was a familiar premonition.
When he was small, he’d thought of himself as a small boat, floating on a stormy ocean.
To Haruaki Kounoike, the outside world was something unreasonable he couldn’t fight.
When he was old enough to go to school, he’d learned the phrase haran banjou, “the vicissitudes of life.” The ran in haran meant “big waves.” Banjou meant being incredibly high, or very deep. The whole phrase meant big waves that came over and over, and—with what was in a way a very boyish, reckless obstinacy—it secured a special place for itself in his heart. When he bluffed inwardly, Hey, this is perfect for a surfer, the world of stormy waves became a problem he needed to ride.
By the time he entered middle school, he was able to dance skillfully on top of the great waves, and by high school, he even felt that most quarrels weren’t stimulating enough.
Bohemian. Debauched.
That was what his relatives had begun to call him.
Of course, as far as he could tell, this wasn’t a fact. He’d never burned through the family’s assets with wasteful spending, and he didn’t feel as if he’d shirked his duties and done just as he pleased.
On the contrary, he thought he’d always been considerate of his relatives. As the son of a mistress, he was someone who was easy to view coldly, and the Kounoikes were a distinguished family with relations all over Japan. There was nothing harder to deal with than a rich, prestigious family who lived in rural areas. Not only that, but when their main business was moneylending, the difficulty boggled the imagination. Haruaki Kounoike had been a clever young man, so he’d been more than willing to live without causing them trouble or getting in their way.