Please, God (4)

The pure white snow packed across the steep mountainside carried Kardia farther and farther down.

To cast a spell, Noi bent her fingers.

But magic did not activate at once. Because a magic circle had to be woven, any spell—no matter which—took time to start.

Noi wove the circle at top speed, rough if she had to be.

Snow heaved up to catch Kardia’s body. However, by the time the snow rose, Kardia had already rolled even farther down. Even the kingdom’s greatest mage had never trained the skill of reading the flow and speed of a moving target.

None of the snow walls Noi sent out in succession made it in time, and at last Kardia slammed into a tree at the foot of the slope.

Kardia sagged with her back against the trunk. Even from a distance, it was clear she had fainted.

“Uwaaa…!!”

Noi ran, crying out. Blood was soaking from Kardia’s abdomen into the white snow. By ill luck, a sharp tree root might have pierced her.

“Kardia!”

Magic did not work on bodies that possessed mana.

Magic could not heal people.

Noi let out a voice close to despair. She racked her brain for what she had to do now.

(Steady—stop the bleeding first. Then check Kardia’s condition, get her on a sled, and take her to a doctor…)

As Noi half-stumbled, half-sprinted down the slope, a strange sound like air swelling inside her ears rose up.

—BWON!

An eerie sound. It began to shake the entire land.

Trees, the earth, the air—all trembled.

When a rumble tore through the ground, birds burst from the trees all at once. Cries like the screams of the mountain beasts rose in a chain, echoing through the gaps between the trunks.

Gooseflesh prickled over her whole body.

From Kardia’s blood-soaked abdomen, a great black distortion was being born.

The distortion swelled as if dragging surrounding things into it, gaining force. Gradually, violently, then sluggishly, it bored deep.

A raging wind and pitch-black darkness swirled around Kardia’s abdomen as the center.

Amid the howling gale, Noi lowered her stance so she would not be blown away. Squinting against the dust, she stared desperately at Kardia.

“—Kardia!”

A feral surge of mana fierce enough to make her shake assaulted Noi.

Faster than her brain, her stinging skin understood: the Demon King.

In that instant, Noi thrust out both hands. Her fingers moved faster than the eye could follow.

What suddenly formed at the center of Kardia’s body was a black void radiating baleful waves. The black miasma that burst from a single point writhed like a living thing and in a blink wrapped Kardia.

That haze blackened Kardia’s body. Something hard like an insect’s shell began to clatter over her skin. It had already crept up to her face.

Fear ran across Kardia’s face—the face of one who had rolled down the snowy path and lost consciousness. She had awoken. Seeing that face twist in terror, Noi narrowed her eyes.

“M—Mas—!”

In a drowning voice, Kardia called to Noi.

“You’re going to be alright!”

Without stopping her weaving fingers, Noi smiled at Kardia.

“I will save you. I swear it.”

But her voice did not reach Kardia. By then Kardia’s entire face was encased in the black shell.

The being that had seized Kardia’s body—a being that was not Kardia—the Demon King—was born.

Thunder crashed. A flash ran, sparks flew.

In the next heartbeat, darkness welled from the Demon King’s body. That viscous dark, strange enough to seem to twist even the gravity of space, crawled and spread into the sky. Astonishingly sluggish—and yet breathtakingly swift—the world fell under the dark.

As far as the eye could see, the sky was wrapped in a black so absolute it cast not even a shadow, and the sun vanished from the heavens.

Sky, forest, sea, earth—everything screamed.

She could not help but shake. For the first time in her life, Noi saw a being whose mana exceeded her own.

The Demon King’s wicked mana was amplifying Kardia’s several times over.

“—I’ve been waiting for you, Demon King.”

Even so, Noi choked down her trembling and faced the Demon King head-on.

Perhaps because it had only just been born and did not even know how to twist mana, the Demon King unleashed power purely on impulse.

The gale battered them.

The clash of colossal mana triggered a tremendous blast of wind. She heard cracking sounds as tree roots tore free of the ground. The land sheared away, the mountain split.

Noi ducked behind a nearby tree on reflex. Her hair whipped in the wind, her clothes snapped and flapped. Branches shorn by the explosion whirled everywhere.

“You can’t even weave a proper magic circle—!”

The outrageous power the Demon King hurled was nothing but a lump of raw mana.

It was not even a spell, and yet its force was tremendous, and Noi’s body was buffeted by the wind.

“Gaaa—AAAHHH—!!”

The Demon King let out a newborn’s wail.

(Almost there—! Just a little more!)

With trembling fingertips, Noi kept weaving the circle.

(My life can end—if it must—)

She prayed with all she had.

(…So please—let that child…)

Perhaps because she was pouring in too much mana, strength drained from her whole body, and Noi’s consciousness grew muzzy.

Her vision blurred. The Demon King’s screams receded farther and farther away. She had no feeling left in the fingers she splayed; she moved only on the memory of the countless spells she had cast hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of times.

-“I wanted to be a mage like you, Master!”

The last image that rose in her mind was her beloved disciple’s tear-streaked face.

Noi’s fingertips reached out.

Above her head floated a magic circle so vast no ordinary person could ever weave it.

A single, overwhelming purification spell—for the sole purpose of erasing the Demon King.

At a sweep of Noi’s hand, that circle rushed the Demon King, who kept vomiting out evil mana.

(—A future where that child can live smiling, as a mage.)

In the next moment, the world was engulfed in white lightning.

The circle spread wide and, blazing with fierce light, bound the Demon King. The light kept on expanding without end, and in that terrible radiance the Demon King melted away.

From a slit in the darkness, a single ray of light pierced down.

The sun shone on the gouged-out earth. On the rock-bared ground, a child was about to collapse—when a man, arriving astride a winged lion, tumbled down and lunged to catch them.

The world erupted into uproar.

That day, both the Demon King—and the kingdom’s greatest mage—vanished from this world.

And thus, the world was saved.

—For a hundred years.