"The Giant of the Arena."
A mage who had reached the realm of tacit consent and Tacitus recitation began chanting in earnest. He wasn't just moving his lips; he even formed hand seals.
In time with his spell, a magical life-form made of rock raised its face from the ground and hauled up its shoulders.
Ragna watched the whole process with indifference and swung Sunrise. It was a carving cut, rotating from upper left to lower right.
The blade traced the arc of a crescent, and the boulder giant caught in it was cut along the exact path the sword drew.
Fire took on at the severed parts and flared with a whoosh.
His sword, Sunrise, was a relic. As a matter of course it hacked and hewed magical life-forms. The severed stone golem scattered across the ground.
He had already repeated this several times. The mage had summoned golems over and over. Some took the shape of giants; others tried to coil like snakes and constrict. Of course, all of it was useless.
Ragna's simple cuts sliced them all apart without even breaking the golem cores.
There was no regeneration. Sunrise is a reaper rising from the east. It performs a miracle that drives back the dark and forces it to hide in the depths.
Darkness, turned into shadow, survives only by clinging to the light.
Ragna drew his blade through the air a few more times. The previous slash hadn't pleased him. It seemed good to take a few more cuts.
"More?"
Ragna asked back. Weren't there too few golems? The thought occurred to him.
Kraiss hadn't pointlessly sent Ragna outside the city. He simply put him in charge of the Border Guard's wall.
The necromancer handling the draugr aimed for populous Lockfried, and the mage raving before Ragna right now aimed for the Border Guard.
There wasn't any grand reason. Deep deliberation or strategic motive? None.
They were mages. They were not people adept at strategy and tactics.
The reason this mage had come here was as simple as could be.
"High-grade iron."
He had mastered magic that handled stone and iron. No—he went around saying he had mastered it.
Like the epithet "He Who Grasped a River," he had one as well: the Master of Stone and Sand. An arrogant sobriquet.
He intended to use the iron and stone here to raise another army. With that army he intended to stand above other mages.
If, after they'd been sapped by facing the unparalleled genius Esther, he then smothered them with his golem army? That simple calculation alone had led his steps this way.
"All of them are just scrambling to fill their own bellies."
What Esther said was the crux. Based on the information he got from her, Kraiss recomposed his tactical map.
He picked out the ones likely to target the city. Of course, he didn't merely scatter the Mad Order like lunatics and call it done.
He wasn't lax about seeding scouts between the cities to check enemy movements, and he even asked Jaxon to set Geor Dagger in motion. He didn't stop there either.
"This borders on compulsion and paranoia."
With those words, Abnaier understood why he hadn't been able to beat this big-eyed friend. The bastard was relentless. No—at this point, it went beyond relentlessness and was compulsion itself.
"What if they aim for Cross Guard? Hit that side and swell their ghostly ranks?"
He had even taken Azpen's cities as part of the domain he had to protect. And as if he had prepared for this, he poured his soul into raising troops.
Under the Border Guard standing army remained power to counter mages.
A portion of Rem's assault unit and ten blades under Ragna moved to Cross Guard. At the same time, the toppled Klemen moved out, leading the elite.
The whole force formed a square with the Border Guard at the center. That was the shape.
"This crazy maniac."
Abnaier marveled countless times.
Kraiss even folded Seiki into these dispositions. Some of that obsessiveness paid off, some of it amounted to nothing more than a futile march. But no one quibbled with his words.
If you asked why—
First, the trust in the man called Kraiss was immense.
Second—
"If you defy him, Enkrid and the Order step in."
To the standing army who had faced Rem and Audin directly, Kraiss was an angel.
Watching Ragna's fight from one side, Kraiss, the angel of the salon, felt a flutter of unease.
No matter how favorable the situation, he always felt uneasy; it was natural. By contrast, right beside him, Anne—master of alchemy and Ragna's lover—had her arms folded, at ease.
They were backed against the wall. Because the mage had appeared near the eastern wall rather than the gate, the number of standing troops nearby was small.
Kraiss ordered such soldiers not to step out.
"It's fine. This is all accounted for."
On the surface, he looked every inch the perfect strategist. Some officers took comfort seeing him like that. Kraiss, too, feigned composure outwardly so he wouldn't spread anxiety to the soldiers. No, only his upper body was composed.
"Stop bouncing your leg. He'll handle it."
"It's a habit."
Kraiss answered Anne. Anne believed in Ragna. The man she'd seen wouldn't die to such shabby magic.
All the more since Anne too, under Kraiss's influence, felt anxiety spike and had made her own preparations. Even so, with him doing this at her side, it frayed her nerves.
"If you can't step in and fight yourself, trusting him is also work. You know that?"
Through Enkrid, Kraiss had learned the importance of study. He didn't take Anne's words amiss. He listened to her, rather.
"She's right."
If you won't step in yourself, you have to trust. He had done all he could. Changing the pips on a cast die is the sort of thing a cheat would do.
"But what if even that kind of cheating is needed?"
The thought came to him.
While Kraiss and Anne traded trivial remarks, Nurat merely watched in silence.
Nurat's discernment outstripped the two of them. Thus Nurat knew just how dangerous and keen a blade Ragna, fighting ahead, was.
"Is it right to fight a knight like that head-on?"
A prepared mage kills a knight. An old saying of the continent. Nurat thought that proverb should be changed.
"What knight you go after is what matters."
Within the Border Guard, Enkrid had preached standards for knights. If it were the threshold stage he spoke of, perhaps.
"If past the threshold to novice—no, even intermediate—"
Enkrid divided the standard for knights into threshold, novice, intermediate, and advanced. The categories were broad. He couldn't set detailed criteria; that was why.
Threshold is unconsciously handling Will; novice is using techniques through that Will.
Intermediate must achieve changes in the speed of Will. It means going beyond unconsciously handling Will to reaching the level of consciously handling it again.
Even that much—
Wouldn't you have the knack to slip the mage's preparations? Of course it would differ by temperament and traits.
Not all knights are the same kind of knight.
This is what Enkrid and every member of the Order said with one voice. Though not a seer, Nurat felt as if the end of the mage chanting in the distance were visible.
"Esther was right."
They were arrogant. The result of arrogance was horrific.
Even as the three watched, the mage was busy murmuring spells. Sweat beaded on his brow; his eyes reddened. The vessels inside swelled, turning the whites bloodshot. While the mage chanted, every summoned thing was carved apart and strewn across the ground.
This was truly absurd. Why?
Because his golems had no cores.
He kept the cores that moved them in his spell-world and controlled them from there. Naturally, he had told no one this secret.
Yet it didn't work.
"Murdering spells."
Long ago, a dragonkin once fought to kill every mage. What that dragonkin showed then was murdering spells.
A cut that severs the pulse of a spell.
Was the man before him doing that?
Half right and half wrong.
Ragna had watched Enkrid's cuts and learned, and by accepting Esther's training regimen he grasped the concept of murdering spells.
Only, it wasn't something you could do just by deciding to do it. This wasn't solved by talent alone.
You have to sense and read the form of the spell. So he needed a track of talent different from the ones Ragna already possessed.
Even so, he could imitate. Now, Ragna swung his sword morning and evening. Watching Enkrid, he had learned diligence.
To others—especially a bastard like Rem—it would still be far from "diligent," but compared to before, Ragna was a different man.
Half of it was that diligence; the other half was the weapon in his hand. The reaper born in the east became a shard that could suppress and cut spells.
"Tempratio, Tempratio, heed my words."
The mage, cold sweat running, completed his spell.
A filament burst in his eye with a pop, and bloody tears flowed; from his nose blood gushed in streams.
Even offering up half his mana to an otherworldly being wasn't enough; he tore off a piece of his spell-world as tribute.
To a mage, the spell-world is the soul itself. He did something no different from tearing off a piece of his soul and offering it.
Ragna didn't think about why he was here. He didn't know the backstory Kraiss had worked out. He didn't care. He simply knew it was time to swing his sword, and did so.
A faint light spilled from his red eyes. It was the phenomenon that occurred when Will filled his whole body to the brim.
"The human mind is not perfect. I borrow the name of the one who rules dreams to proclaim this. You will see only me and hear only my story."
The mage stretched out a hand. The magic he brought forth was a kind of curse. He was greedy to the very end.
"If I could keep a swordsman like him under me—"
Thus, as his last card, he cast a spell of temptation.
Ragna planted the soles of his feet and dragged them, lifting his blade upward. The tip of his sword aimed for the sky as if to pierce it. He had only to bring it down—yet the sword halted. In that instant, Ragna saw a vision: a most beautiful lady in a mesh dress beckoning from before him.
And in that moment, he recalled the freckled woman who had forced a potion into his mouth and made him drink.
"Do you know Esther enchants the captain's clothes every night?"
The woman spoke.
"I can't lose."
That woman spoke again.
Anne—the name of the woman he called his lover.
"You're going to look away from me?"
Anne was angry. Ragna did not want that. The illusion shattered. Beyond the broken illusion, the mage was no dream beauty but a shabby crone hiding her body in a robe.
"…You push through that?"
It was magic the old witch had chanted even while cleaving off her spell-world. It didn't take. There were several reasons.
First, he had recently experienced the Salamander's mirage, giving him resistance.
Second, a knight's mental strength runs on a different track from ordinary people.
Third, Sunrise was a relic that blocked any middling mental intrusion.
Fourth, he had a lover with whom he shared his heart.
Later, Anne would say getting through this moment was purely thanks to her beauty, and Ragna didn't deny it.
Even though Esther knew the other three reasons weighed heavier, she kept her mouth shut.
Ragna shattered the illusion and drew his blade. Sunrise cleaved the spellmonger.
***
I know the enemy, and the enemy does not know me. There is no strategy finer than that.
Kraiss, through Esther, sketched and studied the opposition, while they made no such effort.
Indeed, all of Astrail thought Esther would hide behind the city as a shield.
So they only expected hassle. No one imagined they would be intercepted en route, fail to link up, slip away to secretly target the city—and be killed.
"Penadex, this is as far as it goes, right?"
The Child of the Star spoke his name. The mage who had been with Astrail from the start until now stared straight at the witch who had driven him into a corner.
Had she not been cursed and turned into a leopard, Esther would long since have become the thrall of the mage called Penadex.
He had the power for it. He was also the plotter who made someone target his own teacher.
But even a mage like that cannot necessarily excel at strategy and tactics.
Penadex's ruin included arrogance and ignorance, but the decisive cause was the existence named Kraiss.
"Perfectly checkmated."
In chess there was no escape. So thought Penadex. He could see, on one side, another mage just barely enduring a beating.
"What? Huh? Hm? What are you saying? I can't hear over the idiot who can't even chant a spell."
A barbarian was subduing a mage as strong as himself. It was a truly pitiful sight.
So was he simply going to take it like this?
Chess is a fair fight. There are rules. Thus if this were chess, it would be over—but mages are those who overturn the order of the world and cheat.