Chapter 353 |
Skirmish (5)
His body was a wreck. Excalibur's regeneration could not keep pace with the injuries piling up, and without Merlin's emergency treatment he would have been flat on the ground, unable to move.
Before becoming a Transcendent, he would have died a hundred times over by now. But not anymore.
He could still hold on.
A little further. A few more steps before the limit. That fact tugged the corner of Najin's mouth upward. Since the fight with the Carnival King, he had never had a real chance to test where his body's ceiling truly was.
"But now..."
He could feel it. Where his limit was. With that threshold fixed in his awareness, Najin stamped down the foot he had raised. Thud. He planted it into the ground, steadied his breathing, and then...
He kicked off and ran. Dropping low. Center of gravity pushed to an extreme, head nearly skimming the earth, Najin poured on speed.
Siegfried ran like this, didn't he?
Acceleration. Najin closed the distance in an instant.
With Siegfried between them, Bedivere and Najin locked eyes. No words were needed.
Spin. Crack!
Bedivere's polearm slammed into Gramr. Using the rebound, he leaped far back and swapped out. Najin did not miss that moment, thrusting his sword forward.
Siegfried had been glaring straight ahead. His back was open. Najin drove his sword at that back, adding every ounce of momentum to the thrust. The blade cut through air and shot forward...
Thud.
Stopped. Just like that. As if eyes grew from the back of his head, Siegfried did not even turn around. He swung his sword and caught Najin's attack. There was not a shred of exaggeration in the word "caught."
A shockwave swept the area, yet Siegfried's body did not budge a millimeter. Neither did Gramr in his grip. The result looked as though nothing had happened at all.
"..."
Without appearing to have taken any damage whatsoever, Siegfried turned his head and fixed his gaze on Najin. Against that face swallowed and blackened by the Abyss, only two eyes gleamed.
Eyes that seemed to pull you in.
The moment their gazes met, Najin felt a chill shoot through him.
His spine prickled. His instincts screamed. Louder and more frantic than they ever had before. His body, gripped by fear, instinctively tried to let his jaw clench and his teeth chatter.
Click.
He could not afford to look that pathetic. He bit down hard and moved at once. Siegfried moved too. In that instant, Najin had to swallow a short, involuntary laugh that rose in his throat.
...He could not see the future.
He could not predict anything.
The talent that had let Najin hold his ground against powerful enemies, that had kept him from losing to anyone.
Dynamic vision and reaction speed.
Both were meaningless right now. His opponent moved at a level comparable to Najin's own. And his opponent could move faster than Najin.
He turned his eyes away from an unreadable future.
Watching only the present, Najin moved. He swung on instinct. He slotted Excalibur into the sword paths traced by Gramr as it came at him like lightning.
Clang.
His body was lifted off the ground. The shockwave blew his sweat-and-blood-soaked hair back. Even with the wind pressure battering his face, Najin did not close his eyes.
Watch. Move.
Even within the stretched-out sensation of slowed time, Siegfried moved fast. A dark crimson rain was falling, whether actual raindrops or fragments of shattered dead, and Siegfried's sword was faster than every one of those drops.
Tsssss.
Droplets that touched his body evaporated. Droplets that touched his blade split apart without a sound. The sword aura Siegfried had poured into Gramr across a thousand years of life elevated what was already an insane level of cutting power by another degree.
Click. Najin bit down and kept moving.
Striking the flat of the blade to redirect its trajectory the way Bedivere had done was beyond him right now. That was something only Bedivere, renowned even among the Round Table for his monstrous strength, could manage.
"Instead..."
Najin held Excalibur. Even Gramr, which hacked through any renowned blade with ease, could not cut through Excalibur. His eyes darted rapidly, reading the path of Gramr's movement.
Tracing a path that bent, curved, and reversed in the span of a single instant, his eyes were shot through with red.
Clang, claaaang!
His arms went numb. His body groaned with every clash. A crushing pressure bore down on him, as if something enormous were grinding him flat.
The strength was simply insane.
He had no idea how to win this, let alone actually do it. Was this thing even built to be beaten? The opponent felt that absurd. Still, Najin had no intention of retreating.
This was a wall he would have to clear someday.
A wall he would face again before long. Even if he could not win now, he had to adapt to these movements as much as possible. He was going to be fighting beings like this from here on.
"And..."
Najin watched. He watched through the blood.
He watched how Siegfried swung his sword. How he moved his body. And how he used Gramr, which functioned in a way similar to Excalibur.
That greatsword, roughly three meters in length, vanished without warning and reappeared alongside lightning, over and over again. Siegfried had sublimated even that process into part of his swordsmanship. The result was grotesque and beautiful at once.
The most perfect swordsman in the world stood before him.
Someone whose style was more complex, harder to read, and more beautiful than anyone Najin had ever seen. He could now steal even the Absolute Techniques of Transcendents, yet even to him, Siegfried's swordsmanship was incomprehensible.
He could watch the same motion a hundred times and still not understand it.
Footwork, breathing,the simpler things, perhaps,but the path Siegfried's sword carved was something Najin simply could not imitate.
Even so, Najin did not stop watching.
So that someday he might reach that place.
2.
Blood burst. Flesh split. Bone broke. Even as she watched Najin's entire body get carved apart, Merlin stayed silent.
She looked at the scene unfolding before her.
Najin swinging his sword with gritted teeth, Bedivere supporting him in sync with every movement, and Constellations providing covering fire from a distance. The sight brought back the past, and Merlin pressed her lips together hard.
Siegfried.
Arthur's rival, and someone she had always bickered with,a bad friend you could not quite call an enemy. The image of Siegfried acting however he pleased among knights who prized honor and pride, not caring a thing about appearances, flickered across her mind.
Undignified. Arrogant. Foul-tempered. Selfish to the core.
Yet Siegfried had been their comrade.
A companion she could grumble at and still trust her back to.
He had held no ideals, no great cause. But at the end of the journey, Siegfried had made a choice more heroic than anyone. The fact that the result of that choice was the form standing before her now left a bitter taste in her mouth.
...She set that feeling aside for later.
Swords exchanged blows. The spells the Constellations fired were sliced apart by Gramr, yet they still struck the ground. Mana accumulated steadily in the space around them.
Merlin calculated its flow.
Even through a battle that only demanded blood from their side, the accumulation built reliably. And then that moment drew near. Calculation complete, Merlin's eyes narrowed.
"Merlin."
Najin's voice sounded inside her head.
"Going."
Najin steadied his breath and shifted his stance. Bedivere readjusted his grip on the polearm. The Constellations who had been charging at Siegfried changed their approach as well.
This was not an attack meant to endure.
They scattered their Absolute Techniques without hesitation, as though intent on finishing him. Amid the onslaught, Siegfried cut through every single one with terrifying ease.
Sword aura dozens of meters long, sword aura that dismantled anything it touched, a sword strike like a thousand blades falling at once, a sword that had brought victory to the Empire, polar lights, a killing blow that had ended dozens of witches, unique magic forged from entire lifetimes of effort by countless Constellations...
All of it was cut down.
Gramr cut through the very cohesion of mana itself. Mana stripped of its cohesion scattered uselessly into the air.
And Merlin,
She had read all of that flow. She had sorted, calculated, and prepared to claim for herself the oversaturated mana of every color flooding the area.
"Now."
Merlin materialized. The sword strike immediately aimed at her was barely deflected by Bedivere and Najin throwing themselves into its path.
Time flowed slow.
She raised her hand. Mana across the entire area trembled at the motion of her fingers.
Not mana in its natural state. Mana already processed through the hands of Constellations. It was no different from a collection of instruments, each with its own distinct form and color. And mages spent their entire lives studying a single instrument.
Merlin was not one of them.
She used her fingers as a conductor's baton and tuned dozens of instruments at once. Instruments that had been clashing in dissonance fell into harmony at the sweep of her hand.
Using Excalibur and Najin's body as a medium, Merlin unfolded her circles.
Ten rings.
The moment the massive magic circle spread, her short hair grew long. For just an instant, a different form overlaid her body. The form she had worn in the past, during the days when she reigned as the witches' nightmare.
The woman who had drowned countless stars while her hair,nearly white and tinged with a faint blue,streamed behind her. The being who had stood alone against hundreds of stars and killed every last one.
She hated the Witch of the Abyss.
Yet she was the one who had resembled the Witch of the Abyss more than anyone.
The cool eyes of the mage the witches had called their nightmare fixed on Siegfried. The spell completed in less than a single second blazed with light.
"Sorry, Siegfried."
She could not end him now. The ending he had hoped for had not come yet. But she would make him this promise. The day he wished for was not far off.
Before long, he would meet the ending he desired.
That was her silent thought.
"So just a little longer."
Just wait a little longer.
Flash.
The ten circles spun, scattering a pale blue burst of light. The time that had been flowing slow found its speed again, and in the instant Siegfried moved to ready his next attack,
Snap. Merlin flicked her finger.
She did not particularly like this spell. And precisely because she did not like it, she had given it this name.
Abyss.
An inescapable fall.
The spell, cast at roughly eighty percent of her True Form's power, swallowed the entire area. Sound vanished first. Then light. Oxygen grew thin, and every trace of mana that had saturated the space evaporated.
What replaced all of it was water.
A fathomless deep swallowed Siegfried. No matter which direction he looked, there was no sky. No stars either. Only pitch-black darkness occupied that place.
Siegfried experienced a fall.
Into a deep where his feet found no ground, he was dragged toward the bottom of a sea without end.
...In terms of sheer rank alone.
Siegfried and Merlin were equals. Both held the same standing as Constellations. The only difference was that one was a mage and the other was a swordsman. Merlin was at a disadvantage only because of the matchup,because Siegfried held a sword that could cut through anything.
There was no gap in standing between them.
It was said that Siegfried could do everything Merlin could, but the reverse was equally true.
"..."
The mages watching from a distance were struck speechless. They could not even manage a gasp. They fell silent. Even Constellations who had transcended after reaching the pinnacle of magic could neither comprehend nor conceive of countering Merlin's spell.
There was a spell before them that violated every principle they knew.
"Ah..."
Of all of them, only one person recognized it.
Lapis.
Until recently a witch herself, she knew this spell.
"I called it Abyss, an inescapable fall?"
Seventeen witches had drowned at once beneath that single spell, without managing any proper resistance.
"I'll give those words right back to you."
"If you burned humans alive, then I'll drown you slowly."
Lapis had witnessed that scene from the front, so forgetting it was impossible. The engraved terror made her body tremble. She trembled,and yet...
In the next moment, Lapis's eyes went wide.
Pit.
A single line was drawn across the Abyss.
Slash.
What happened next was beyond Lapis's eyes to understand. She only registered that a single streak of light fell, and the area turned completely white.
Najin, who had watched from closer in, saw more than she did.
What he guessed was one of Siegfried's Absolute Techniques. A flash of light that burst from deep within the fathomless dark,which swallowed even light and sound,swept the entire area.
"What the..."
It was a technique that made Najin doubt his own eyes, but this was not the time or place to analyze it.
He had something he needed to do right now.
Najin simply gathered his strength. He steadied his breath so he could sprint out at any moment.
Shhhhhreeeeeeeeak!
The aftershock of the technique swept the area. The Abyss shattered into fragments. Cut and cut and cut until the fathomless deep was swallowed by sword aura. Siegfried came into view between water droplets scattering in every direction.
He had not come through unscathed.
Crushed by the water pressure, his body was gouged. One arm was nearly half-shattered. The tattoos across him glowed red as they worked to recover the damage, but the pace was slow.
What Najin had asked of Merlin was one thing.
Force Siegfried to use a major technique.
Merlin had done it beautifully. She had unfolded a spell he could not escape without using an Absolute Technique, draining Siegfried's stamina and stacking injuries on his body.
Therefore.
"Now."
This was Najin's chance.