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Interlude, A Tale (2)
Anton Quixano had eight stars.
Najin was startled when he heard it, but when he thought it over, it wasn't really that strange.
'Anton is a being of Transcendence who has lived for at least four hundred years.'
On top of that, Anton had spent decades hunting witches and killing the Transcendents entangled with them. He'd mentioned once, offhandedly, that the witches he'd personally killed numbered in the dozens.
Even the weakest witch possessed strength on par with a Transcendent, which meant the numbers only added up if Anton was something considerably beyond ordinary.
'And...'
Najin thought back to moments ago.
Anton, flipping his middle finger at the Carnival King's star with that look on his face, what are you staring at? If the information Anton held about La Mancha was truly a threat to her, the Carnival King should have killed him or turned him into a jester long ago.
Yet for four hundred years, Anton had walked freely through the world.
"Hah."
Najin laughed like he couldn't believe it.
"So the Carnival King didn't choose not to touch you. She couldn't."
"Well, if that demon had come at me in earnest, I'd have had a hard time too. But the Carnival King is a coward at heart. The kind who pulls back the instant she thinks she might take even the smallest scratch."
Anton shrugged.
"To kill me, she'd have had to accept losses, and she didn't want that. So she left me alone. Besides, I fight dirty."
"Dirty... you mean?"
"Not every fight can be honorable, or fought with pride. Sometimes you just have to win, even if it means throwing all of that out the window."
Do you know that kind of fight?
Anton asked it with his eyes, and Najin nodded. He did. More times than he could count.
"Fighting in the mud. Dragging the opponent into the mire, into a brawl where you can't tell front from back, can't even tell where to step. That's my specialty."
"You were famous for that, weren't you? The witch you killed, the Witch of Blazing Flames, she also had eight stars."
Lapis, who had been listening, added it with a worried look at Najin.
"The Carnival King, though. That's quite the opponent you've chosen for yourself."
"Do you know about the Carnival King?"
"I've lived quite a long time, you know. Long enough to know what the Carnival King looked like before she was called by that name."
Lapis closed her eyes as she spoke.
"Was it seven hundred years ago? Eight hundred? I once watched a certain demon go hunting. No name to speak of, and the weakest demon I'd ever laid eyes on, and yet... it was trying to hunt a demon at the very top of the hierarchy. I was curious, so I watched."
The lowest of the low, below even that, a creature barely maintaining the shape of what could be called a demon. That was what the Carnival King had originally been, Lapis said.
"Demons are fundamentally the same kind of being as dragons. Their strength is decided at birth. And that strength is absolute, so even with growth, it's all but impossible to overturn the gap in rank. A lower demon cannot beat an upper demon by any means."
But, Lapis continued.
"The demon I watched was the lowest of the low, and yet it tried to hunt a demon at the very peak, and it actually succeeded. Can you imagine? A being without even a single star, hunting a demon who held seven."
"...Is that even possible?"
"Impossible. The number of stars doesn't guarantee strength outright, but there's still a fundamental gap between ranks. It's as absurd as a Sword Expert defeating a Sword Master."
And yet.
"But that child did it."
"......"
"It laid traps, corrupted concepts, incited humans, guided a procession of star-devouring beasts, and brought down the highest demon's star through sheer persistence. Then it devoured the corpse greedily."
Ugh, Lapis grimaced.
"Made my skin crawl. Time passed, and before I knew it, that demon was being called a mid-tier demon. More time passed and it was upper-tier, then top-tier, and now it's called the Demon King, the apex of all demonkind."
Born weak.
From a race where rank gaps cannot be crossed.
"Anton called that child a 'coward,' didn't he? Yes. The Carnival King, empress of merriment, is indeed a coward. But that doesn't mean the Carnival King is weak. If anything, it's the opposite."
Lapis warned.
"A cowardly being is thorough by necessity. It prepares against everything that frightens it, and through that preparation, it finds its means. After a thousand years, I've learned that truly frightening opponents aren't the overwhelmingly strong."
She said it looking tired of it all.
"Humans who can throw everything away. Those who cling on no matter what. Fiends who will fight to win by any means necessary. Hunters who lay every trap imaginable before going in for the kill."
Listening, a certain figure surfaced in Najin's mind. The one who had given him the hardest time on the continent. The Techo Mountain Ranger, Kapman Theosis.
"The Carnival King's nature is that of a hunter. A schemer."
And then Lapis stopped. A short "Ah" escaped her, something had just surfaced in her memory. Her face went pale. She shook her head.
"Actually, no. Let me take that back. Hunters like that are frightening, but there's something worse."
What is it? Lapis's answer was to raise a finger toward the sky, as if she couldn't even bring herself to say the name aloud. Both Anton and Najin looked where she pointed.
Eleven stars hung in the sky.
The Wizard of the Lake, Merlin.
Lapis, pointing at Merlin's Star, had gone white as chalk. As if she were terrified.
"It probably won't come to that. But."
Lapis said, her voice trembling just slightly.
"Best not to catch the eye of that... no. Grand Constellation Merlin-nim. Really."
Merlin-nim. Najin caught that, and shot a sideways glance at Merlin standing beside him. Merlin blinked, then let out a short, incredulous huff.
-Would you look at this? She gets a few pieces of ice jammed into her and treats me like I'm a complete lunatic.
'You jammed ice into her?'
-Hm? Ah, yeah. Not that many, though.
Merlin spread her hands open. Counting down from the thumb, one, two, three... she nodded.
-About six? She had six stars at the time. So I only put in that many.
'......'
-What. She's a witch.
'It's nothing.'
Fair enough. By Merlin's standards at the time, not gouging out her eyes and tearing out her heart had probably been quite generous. The Merlin Najin had seen a thousand years back was terrifying enough in her own right.
'Gouging out eyes, dragging people around by the hair, piling corpses into mountains...'
And she hadn't been any gentler with him. The moment they'd made eye contact. Who are you? Do you want to die?
'Fairy Merlin really was something else.'
While Najin sat there recalling the fairy version of Merlin who'd once grabbed him by the collar, the human Merlin narrowed her eyes.
-Fairy Merlin?
Merlin tilted her head.
-What's that supposed to mean? Are you saying I look like a fairy?
'Not you.'
-...... Then where's another Merlin?
'There is one. Something like that.'
Merlin started shouting that there was no such thing, that there was only one Merlin in the world, that the real Merlin was standing right in front of him, but Najin let it go in one ear and out the other.
A tower built on a solitary island in the middle of the sea.
They needed to make it back to the coast, so Najin and Anton had huddled together on the island's shore, whittling wood to patch up their battered sailboat.
"This is a bit awkward to say, but."
Lapis watched them with a flat expression.
"What are you two doing?"
"Hm? Cutting wood."
"Whittling it."
"And why?"
"The sailboat got damaged."
Najin and Anton pointed to the vessel they had arrived on. After the rough voyage it was half-wrecked. Broken things needed fixing, didn't they?
"You're going to ride that? Across this sea?"
"We rode it all the way here."
"And we made it just fine."
The oarsman and the captain nodded in unison.
Lapis pressed a hand to her forehead and sighed.
"You haven't forgotten who I am, have you?"
Lapis snapped her fingers.
Trees along the shore pulled themselves free of the ground, and within seconds a full boat was complete. Najin and Anton stared in silence, looking back and forth between the sailboat they had painstakingly whittled plank by plank, and the boat Lapis had conjured with a single snap.
Then, like primitive men seeing fire for the very first time, they smacked their own foreheads.
"Damn it, Oarsman. In the face of magic, we're nothing but ignorant savages."
"I really should have learned magic, Captain."
A ship carrying two primitive swordsmen and one great mage set sail. No oars needed, no need to set a heading. Magic handled everything.
"......"
Robbed of their purpose by magic, the captain and the oarsman huddled glumly in a corner of the ship.
"Oarsman, what can we even do?"
"I wonder, Captain."
Deep-sea magical beasts and reefs blocked the path every now and then, but unlike the first voyage, Najin and Anton had no need to step forward. Lapis sat perched on a chair at the bow, and every time she waved her fingers, whatever stood in their way was shredded to pieces and sank to the bottom.
"By the way, Oarsman. What have you been sorting through this whole time?"
Anton pointed at the bundle of letters in Najin's hands. Ever since leaving the tower, Najin had been steadily sorting through what looked like a sheaf of them.
"Ah, these?"
Najin held up the bundle.
"When we first met, Captain, do you remember what you said when you introduced yourself?"
"What I said? The greatest romantic of the age?"
"Not that."
"The fool who lives for romance. One of only three fools in all of human history stupid enough to fall in love with a witch?"
"Yes, that last one."
Najin nodded.
"The two remaining, excluding you, Captain. These letters are connected to one of them."
"...What?"
"What does that mean?"
Lapis leaned in beside Najin, curious, and peered at the letters. When she saw the name written on the paper, her eyes went wide.
"Rena?"
As though hearing a name she had long missed.
The words Lapis had spoken inside the Black Spire.
Among them was this:
「I never imagined I, who had looked at Rena, the witch who loved a human, and laughed at her as a madwoman, would make this same choice. It's all your fault, Anton.」
Rena. The witch who loved a human.
Like Lapis, and even before her, a witch who had broken the Taboo of loving a human. Laughed at by other witches as a madwoman.
Hearing that name, Najin's mind went back to a certain witch he'd encountered while climbing the tower.
The part glossed over amid Anton's story.
The time it took Anton to complete his Breakthrough to the final floor was roughly thirty days. During those thirty days, Najin hadn't stayed only at Anton's side. Thirty days was a long time to just wait around.
'What's this, Merlin?'
-Ah, that?
Wandering the Black Spire, Najin would consult the Merlin encyclopedia and listen to old stories. Exploring the spire one day, he found a hidden room.
The Black Spire was fundamentally a prison.
A prison naturally held prisoners.
In that hidden room was a prisoner who had been confined far longer than Lapis.
"......"
The prisoner's hair was red.
Her eyes, the same.
"Roselin."
In a voice dried out and cracked from long years of neglect, the prisoner stared into empty air and murmured a name.
"My dear child, Roselin..."
The witch, murmuring ceaselessly, turned to look at Najin. In her red eyes, he recognized someone.
Roselin Ascalo. The red-eyed mercenary.
A witch who looked just like her stared up at Najin and murmured:
"Let me see Roselin."
The red-eyed witch pleaded.
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