Chapter 23 — The Sorcerer And The Cursed Mask (3)

Luis Pérez Martínez was a descendant of the Mexihcah.

His parents had crossed over to the States and borne him there, so that he was, beyond any dispute, a Mexican-American.
And yet, for all that, what ran in his veins alongside his blood was unmistakably the mystery of the great Aztec civilization.

Originally he had been a Rank-Two close-combat ability-user with a power called blade-resonance.
A power that, only when he gripped an edged weapon, amplified his physical capacities and drew the blade’s own ability several times past its limit, so that he could cleave even what should never have been cleavable.

It was an excellent power, yet for some reason its growth had been sluggish, and he had known nothing but frustration with it.
And then, one day, all at once, his power was amplified to the level of Rank-One.
It was proof that he was a descendant of the Mexihcah, an inheritor of the grace of Azteca.

‘The Fifth Sun will soon set. The Sun of the Jaguar will rise again. The chaos he spoke of comes, just as he said it would.’

He looked around the Other Realm he had only just entered.
Close by, the believers who had guided him inside pressed thickly around him.

Had he hurried in alone, he could have reached the interior far faster than this, but he had chosen to come with his god’s true believers.
Only that way could he respond easily if anything went amiss.

‘The atmosphere isn’t right. Has that bastard truly wounded him? Fools. As if delaying his footsteps a little while could turn aside an end already foretold.’

In truth, Luis was convinced this world ought to have perished more than ten years ago.

But the desires of mankind alone had swollen monstrously, the population had grown beyond all measure, and the blood they shed had grown along with it.
On that account the sun that should have ground to a halt was still moving, still burning that blood as its fuel.
Even that reprieve, though, was near its end now.

He who had hauled Luis up from the mire and woken him to his new power, who had chosen him as one of the new humanity that would follow him, outlast the end, and greet the new age.
Before long, he would bring it to pass.

“Our god demands that this man’s heart be offered up to him as sacrifice.”
“If the High Priest declares it, of course it must be so.”
“Mm. But the enemy is stronger than we anticipated. Our believers will have to step forward.”
“Of course, High Priest!”

The believers called him High Priest and exalted him.

The sorcerer who knew nothing of his lord’s grace had, by his foolish resistance, dealt their lord an unexpected blow, and the priests and high priests who attended him in person had all left Japan to aid in his recovery.
The senior figures who remained on-site numbered only a handful besides himself, and so, lest the believers feel the gap in their leadership, he had taken to calling himself High Priest.

“Your lord will gladly accept your sacrifice.”
“Sacrifice… huh?”

Luis thrust his hand into the chest of the believer nearest him and drew out the heart.
He was already a seasoned priest, able to extract a heart in a single motion so that the offered sacrifice felt no pain at all.

The heart, once drawn out, was wrapped in black light and vanished at once.
Even that, though, could not hide the figure of the believer crumpling as the life-force left him.

“Kyaaaaagh?!”
“W-what — what is this?! What are you doing!”
“Run, gkh — !”

The next to be offered up were the flowers who dared, in the presence of a god, to speak the heresy of fleeing the holy war.
Of course there was no fleeing.
So long as the spiritual force their lord had bestowed ran in the believers’ bodies, they could not so much as refuse to be made sacrifices.

“D-deceived… murderer…!”
“He deceives no one. He merely performs what he has promised. You have all been promised resurrection. Do not be afraid.”

Each time a heart was offered up, the god’s powerful spiritual force welled higher in Luis’s body.
To open a new age, to pronounce the end of this one, his god was sending his revelation down into Luis.

— That this man may never resurrect, offer his heart to me directly. By that, I shall be made complete.

“Of course it shall be so, my god.”

Answering the voice of the absolute one, a voice only he could hear, Luis stretched his hand toward the last remaining believer.

A young woman who looked as though she had only just come of age, something childish still lingering at her edges.
She was so utterly terrified that she had frozen in place, trembling all over.

“Are you afraid.”
“God, please save me, I’m sorry, from now on I won’t follow strangers around any more and I’ll study hard, I’ll study the catechism, I won’t go to a shrine and I won’t go to a temple and I won’t stay out on Christmas night either, please…”
“As if anyone is going to save you because you prayed.”

With a sneering laugh, he reached out and drew the woman’s heart from her chest.
Leaving behind the body that crumpled to the ground, he offered the heart up to his god and recited softly.

“Of course, you are an exception — you, who saved me. The primordial chaos shall come. You, master of order, shall unite the ages and become the one and only sun…”

Having offered up the last heart along with that pious prayer, Luis felt with certainty that his state was now utterly transformed from what it had been before he entered the Other Realm, and a smile rose to the corners of his mouth.

‘I can even take down a great yokai.’

The weapon he had drawn into one hand was a sword of pure obsidian, its blade some eighty centimeters long.
Obsidian was by nature brittle and hard to work, but this was an article handed down directly by the god.
Its line ran long and smooth without a single warp or twist, and its edge was exquisitely sharp.
What was more, with his ability-user power now heightened a further degree, this sword turned extraordinarily hard and extraordinarily keen the moment it lay in his hand.

“With the sword you have bestowed upon me, I shall split open the enemy’s chest, draw out the heart, and offer it up.”

Reciting in a voice full of confidence, he advanced with a sovereign stride.
Inward, further inward, past the mists that the desires of men had spun, to the very heart of the Other Realm.

His god had called down rain and wind and struck with lightning to make the adversary’s presence visible.
Now it was Luis’s turn to cut the enemy down with the fangs of the jaguar and with violence.
Yes, like the very ruler of the new age that was to come.

“Uh… aaah?”

But the adversary he met on finally arriving there was a little different from what Luis had pictured.

A body slender on the whole, yet with curves pronounced enough to leave him certain it belonged to a captivating woman.
Jet-black hair stretched long down her back, flowing like silk.
It seemed the very rain falling from the sky had fallen in love with her, the drops swerving aside and missing her body, unable to wet it.

Regrettably, the face that would have set the final accent on the woman’s beauty was hidden behind a mask shaped after Japan’s distinctive oni.
Even so, Luis, as a man, felt an instinct surge up in him that he could scarcely hold back: the urge to peel that mask away.

“A… woman?”
“…Aah. So you’ve come.”

At Luis’s stupidly blurted, dazed voice, the masked one’s gaze turned toward him.
Even the voice that came reflexively from her lips was so clear and so beguiling that the listener’s chest could not help being shaken by it.

What he met was only the oni mask, and he could not even see her eyes, yet Luis was certain he had fallen in love with her.
The only thing that kept him from kneeling on the spot and confessing his love was what sat in her hand: a sword as black and transparent as his own obsidian blade, smeared with red blood.

And, on top of that, two Rank-Two ability-users who must have arrived ahead of him both lay sprawled on the ground, sliced to ribbons in equally ghastly fashion.

“You’re a little late. As it happens, my mood is not good — let us be quick about this.”
“D-did you… did you kill them? Why — someone like you?”

People are often labouring under a delusion.
The delusion that a person more beautiful than others must, in truth, also be more intelligent than others, that they will exercise wiser judgment, that they will carry more grace.

Luis, who as a Hispanic had taken his share of discrimination in America, had always loathed those who judged people by appearance.
Yet even he could not escape that prejudice in this moment, and so out came a stupid line.

“Why did I kill them? Because you lot are evil.”

In the face of the woman’s resolute, dignified voice, he felt for an instant as though he really were a villain, as though he really had spent his whole life piling up sins, and just as he took a step back.

— Your enemy is close at hand.

Thunder cracked inside his head, sweeping away every base thought and inscribing the god’s will in their place.

— Offer up the heart.
— For the new sun.

“I… am…”

Only then did Luis come back to himself.
To think a single woman he had met as an enemy had jostled him so badly that he had made such a fool of himself.
Laughing inwardly at himself, he braced his legs firmly, planted his feet, and ground the words out through bitten lips.

“I am not evil!”
“Yes — those who deny the universal, who deny society and even the nation, invariably argue that good and evil too are only relative concepts. Then let me say it another way.”

The woman kicked off from the ground and lunged at Luis.
Closing the gap between them with a swiftness that looked almost like teleportation, she came within a breath’s reach and informed him.

“I killed them because they were my enemies.”
“Khah!”

The instant he frantically raised his obsidian sword to ward off the long blade swung down with force enough to split him clean in two, the black trajectory that had cut even the falling rain in half snapped his obsidian sword clean through. A blade that, up to this point, had never so much as taken a chip against any opponent.

“Ah!”

Even as he let out a single yelp, Luis hurriedly rolled along the ground and pulled back.
The broken-off half of his blade, as though guarding its master to the very last, ricocheted toward her and granted him a moment’s grace.
But seeing even that fail to land a meaningful blow, seeing it caught instead in one of her hands, Luis’s eyes flew wide.

She was gripping the blade barehanded.
The edge should naturally have cut her hand open, and yet the blood that ran out from there flowed down to the underside of the blade, pooled there, and was, moment by moment, fashioning itself into a new hilt.

“It can’t be. You — are you —!”
“Die.”

Regrettably, the woman seemed to have no further intention of trading words with him.
Having taken even the blade turned against her and made it her own fresh weapon, she came charging at Luis again with a black sword in each hand.

‘I can’t lose. I am Rank-One! The High Priest, who has received his lord’s power!’

He could not die here.
So swore Luis, hurling everything he had, no, even the power his lord had given him, into his sword and swinging it in resistance.
Yet inwardly he already sensed his own defeat.
In the yokai aura rising off her body, in the artistry with which she wielded her weapons, she surpassed him in every respect.

“I’ve cut you… kuhakk!”

However he swung his sword, she shifted her body and slipped aside before it could land, and whenever a fleeting opening showed in him, she found it and tore through it with her blade without fail.
The high-grade sorcerous implements he had laid up through sacrifice were stripped away one after another, leaving him bare.
He who had received his lord’s grace and gone strutting about as Rank-One, cutting down anything that did not suit him, felt now as though he had been turned into a child.

“There’s no way someone like you could have gone unheard of until now…! You know, surely — you must also know our lord’s will!”
“Cult vermin.”

More flamboyantly and more boldly than even Luis the blade-resonance ability-user, and more beautifully too, the woman wielded her two swords, and in her sword-dance Luis’s flesh and bone and blood scattered through the air, and he was whittled away, piece by piece.
He dared not bring his blade against hers, fearing another clash would shatter it.
He tried somehow to incapacitate her by attacking an arm, a leg, whatever seemed to be an opening, but every one of those attempts came back at him as a counter.
The more desperately he swung his sword, the more sharply her strokes sliced through his vital points.
He was no more than a moth dancing as it dived gladly into its own death.

“This is the end.”
“Not yet… aaagh!”

In a single beat, balance lost, his field of vision tilting, yokai aura and spirit-power scattering.
Seeing that even the droplets of blood flung from his wounds did not so much as reach her mask, Luis sighed and thought.

Did his god truly not know her power.
Did his god think that he could defeat her.
Or else.

— That this man may never resurrect, offer his heart to me directly.

‘Aah, only now have I understood. Why I had to meet her.’

With his right leg severed, Luis flung blood as he went and rolled backwards to dodge the strokes still coming after him.
At this rate he was going to die anyway, and his god had said he must kill her without fail.
Until then his god would not pluck him from this place.
Then there was only one course of action left to him.

— That this man may never resurrect, offer his heart to me directly.

‘I am his priest. It must be so.’

Whose heart was it that he must offer up.
Only now did Luis know the answer.
For some reason, the eyes of the last believer, the one who had only moments ago made him a gift of her own heart, rose into his mind, and he could not help a bitter smile.

— That this man may never resurrect, offer his heart to me directly.

“This is the heart that I offer up for him; therefore, he will save me, and strike down the enemy.”

Pronouncing words that were not in his heart at all, he raised his broken sword and stabbed his own heart with it.

The god’s force that had been swollen to its limit by the hearts the believers offered up as sacrifice.
That force which had not reached the enemy in the slightest now devoured even his own life, and only then bloomed into a single savage tongue of flame and shot toward her.

By a sorcery for which he had paid his life, he had been able to reach her at last.
Should he be satisfied with that?
Or should he rejoice that, even dying, he was at last able to go to his god?

— That heart, to me, directly…

‘There’s no chance of that.’

Seeing the woman draw a talisman from her bosom and turn the flame aside with it, Luis closed his eyes.
If even a flame forged out of the lives of countless souls could be warded off, was she perhaps already not a human, but a being closer to a god?

‘In the end, the wish was never granted.’

It was as though everything of him was being torn out by the roots.
His heart, his will, the authority innate to him, and even the power his god had bestowed upon him.
His soul had already burned away, and his body, in its wake, only fell away naturally after it.

If this was death, then beyond it nothing would remain for him.

Aah, this is the worst.

The end was, simply, the end.