63. Before The Heart Freezes Over

She drove her shield forward and kicked off the ground without a single shred of hesitation, and I understood at once why Elli had broken into a run.

Because that’s exactly what I taught her.

A shield-bearer has only one way to fight a mage, and that’s to never give them the gap to keep chanting. So she’d gone straight for the correct answer, just as I’d taught her, because she’d read the dark-red heat-shimmer rising off Valerian as a kind of magic, or else the lead-up to a wide-area attack.

But this one time, my advice was driving Elli straight into a death trap.

She shouldn’t have run. Did that make hiding behind the shield the right answer, then? No. The only correct move Elli had left was to shout that she was forfeiting the challenge.

“Damn it! Stop! Stop right now!”

I hurled my body at the red barrier, but all that came back was a dull thud, and I bounced right back to where I’d started. So I swung my sword like a madman, and the barrier didn’t allow so much as a single scratch, as if it were mocking me.

Of course it didn’t. A barrier that had shrugged off even Seraphina’s swordsmanship was never going to be cut by a sword like mine.

“Call this match off right now!”

I shouted it toward the robed man, who I knew had to be listening somewhere, and as if he’d been waiting for it, he appeared again.

“I cannot. The declaration of forfeit may be made by one and only one — the challenger standing upon the field.”
“Don’t give me that nonsense!”
“Unless they bow their own head, the duel is completed only by the death of one. That is the providence of this arena.”
“Cut the crap and take down the barrier right now, you son of a bitch!”

I lunged to seize his robe, but my hand cleaved through empty air once again. Just as I was about to grapple with him anyway, Seraphina, who had been silent at my side, quietly pointed a finger at the field.

“…Look.”

Her cold voice turned my head, and in that instant I stopped breathing.

Valerian’s greatsword, condensed with black heat-shimmer, traced a single flash.

— SCHK—!

The shield Elli had thrust forward split in two like a sheet of paper. Yet Elli was still running. She gave up the shield, kicked off the ground, and launched herself into the air.

“Haaah!”

Her battle cry carried all the way to me as she drove a punch loaded with everything she had toward the back of Valerian’s head.

But Valerian was far crueler than she’d expected. He dropped his body low, let the punch slip aside, and then, like a crouched beast springing up, drove a kick skyward.

— KWAAANG—!

His military boot slammed precisely into Elli’s abdomen.

“…Kheok!”

Her body was launched into the arena wall, and that sturdy outer wall shattered, kicking up a vast cloud of dust. Buried in it, Elli couldn’t so much as twitch a fingertip. Blood streamed down from the crown of her head.

The robed man watched it all with indifference and murmured under his breath.

“The match will be over soon.”

Leaving those words behind, his figure blurred away like smoke.

When I turned my head, Valerian was slowly advancing on Elli. Bleeding and pinned into the wall, she clearly didn’t have the strength left even to declare a forfeit, and with every second I wasted, the thread of her breath grew fainter.

What kind of grizzled veteran am I, if I can’t do a thing — stopped cold by some lousy red barrier?

Self-loathing surged up in me. An absolute shield, one that absorbed every kind of physics and magic alike. But if I couldn’t get past this one barrier the system had drawn, if I couldn’t protect even a single person of mine, then all that vast knowledge I carried was no better than garbage.

Is it really perfect? Are there really no gaps in the rule the system handed down?

I clenched my fist until it bled. My head was already blazing to the point of overload, and the overloaded brain wasn’t just hot now, it felt like it would burst. Then, in the instant a scream was about to tear loose, my vision flashed, as though the fuse of that burning circuit of thought had snapped.

Ah.

In that fleeting silence, I finally caught the gap in the system.

The moment the method came to me, my heart began to pound in a grotesque rhythm, and I shouted, decisively, at Seraphina standing beside me.

“Sister! Attack, right now!”
“As you know, this barrier cannot be broken by our strength.”
“Not the barrier!”

I looked past the red ward at Valerian, who was raising his greatsword to aim for the nape of Elli’s neck. There was no time.

I jabbed a finger at my own chest, the veins standing out on my neck.

“Attack me — hurry!”

Seraphina’s blue eyes trembled with bewilderment, and I let loose at them a roar like a dying man’s last cry.

“Now!”

Everything before my eyes was crimson.

The blood running down from the crown of my head caught on my lashes and blurred my sight.

…I have to move.

I tried to give a command to each finger, one by one, but my body had already gone cold, as if it belonged to someone else. Whether it was the impact of the wall or Young Master Valerian’s kick rattling my organs, every breath sent a tearing pain through my lungs.

— Thud, thud.

The steady sound of footsteps on sand drew closer. When I barely managed to lift my head, Young Master Valerian, wreathed in black heat-shimmer, was looking down at me.

Ah…

The Young Master raised his greatsword high.

I’m sorry.

I had failed, in the end, to keep my promise with Young Master Arden, and that self-reproach turned into tears and ran down my cheeks. I weakly closed my eyes and waited for the cold touch that would soon bite into the nape of my neck.

But then.

— Shhhk—!

I clearly heard the greatsword slice through the air, yet no pain came. I’d thought that, even for just a fleeting instant, the horrific sensation of flesh tearing and bone crushing would sweep through my whole body, but strangely, I felt nothing at all.

I’m glad it doesn’t hurt.

Death was colder and quieter than I’d imagined. If it was this peaceful, I should have given up a little sooner. I should have just ignored that “good game” nonsense the Young Master mentioned and closed my eyes early on, and then there would’ve been no hellish half-year of training, and none of that desperate fight to the death just now.

But to a soul that had already died, regret was a luxury. So in this cold repose, wishing only to sleep forever, I surrendered myself to the deep marsh of unconsciousness.

But then.

— Tsssssk—!

The sound ringing in my ears was strange. The death I’d believed had come in a single stroke kept dragging me back up into reality, and the darkness veiling my sight began to bleed into a hazy silver radiance.

…I’m alive?

Slowly, ever so slowly, I lifted my heavy eyelids.

“…Huh?”

My mouth fell open.

Young Master Valerian’s greatsword had stopped right before my eyes. And barring its way, catching that massive blade on a single sword, was an enormous back.

The frame was far larger than even Young Master Valerian’s. Across its shoulders, in commanding majesty, rested the pelt of a lion crowned with a coronet, the symbol of the head of the house, and through it silver hair streamed like white snow.

A man who could not possibly be here. No, a being who must never, under any circumstance, appear in this place.

“…The head of the house.”

Under the pressure crushing down on my heart, I couldn’t manage to get out the next word. Then a flood of relief washed over my whole body, and my consciousness sank straight down into deep darkness.

Valerian was clearly being controlled by someone.

Whether the one pulling the strings was Eligos, the master of this arena, or that puppeteer was still uncertain. What was certain was that the controlled Valerian was wordless, like a puppet with its emotions cut away, and not a trace of vitality lingered in his unfocused blue eyes.

“…!”

But Valerian, who had raised his greatsword to sever Elli’s neck, abruptly halted, because a man even larger than he was had suddenly appeared in front of him.

Dark circles weighed down with fatigue beneath sunken brows. A blunt, frigid set to the mouth that seemed never once to have held goodwill toward another. A robe embroidered in fine detail with the lion-and-coronet crest, permitted to the head of the house alone. And, to finish it, a jet-black sword that, even from a distance, made you certain it was a masterblade.

Once I enter a hallucinated state, I create a phantom. Laughably, this skill only became usable when I was out of my right mind.

In the underground training ground, the damp and the total absence of sunlight had let “Illusion Mushrooms” grow all over the place, so I could fall into a hallucinated state simply by chewing and swallowing one. It had been that easy. But there was no way I could get hold of an Illusion Mushroom in this arena.

And so the method I chose was precisely this —

I recalled hearing a story about people climbing the Himalayas who saw hallucinations in the extreme cold. When a human’s body temperature drops below 33 degrees, the brain begins to warp reality and conjure hallucinations to block out the pain.

Endure.

My entire field of vision blurred into white. The cold boring down into my marrow had long since passed beyond mere pain, until it felt as if every sensation in my body had scattered into fine shards of ice. Yet, paradoxically, my mind blazed clearer than it ever had.

As I said before, there was no way an “Illusion Mushroom,” the thing that had guided me into hallucination in the underground training ground, would magically poof! into my pocket. So I’d asked Seraphina to freeze me.

“Are you all right?”

Shivering, I barely managed to nod at her question.

Seraphina’s chill and the heat of my heart held each other in taut opposition. In the same way, the controlled Valerian off in the distance and the phantom Kairon I had created stood opposed.

The instant Kairon turned his head just slightly, at an angle, to fix his gaze on him, Valerian flinched and opened the distance, as if shoved by an enormous invisible hand.

Just as I thought — he wasn’t completely dominated after all.

No matter how powerful the binding curse and brainwashing that had smothered his reason, they couldn’t erase his instinctive terror of the existence carved into his unconscious: “Kairon.”

To Valerian, Kairon Arne was not simply a father. He was a mountain to be surmounted, and a sky that could never be reached.

“Kueaaaaak—!”

A beast-like scream tore from the mouth of Valerian, who had kept his silence until now. Was it a struggle to overcome the terror, or the brainwashing forcibly crushing down on his reason? He re-gripped the greatsword with trembling hands and hurled himself at the phantom Kairon before his eyes.

— KUUNG!

I had no leisure to watch the two of them fight.

Focus.

If I left things as they were, Elli’s life would be in danger, swept up in the aftershock of Valerian’s rampage.

There wasn’t much time left to maintain the skill, either. My body, frozen to sustain the hallucination, was teetering back and forth across the boundary of death, yet even with all this effort of mine, the red barrier still stubbornly stood between us. So while the phantom bought time, I had to wake Elli.

Another form warped into being right before Elli’s eyes. My real body outside the arena was dying, trapped in cold frost, but my phantom inside the arena shouted into her ear.

“…Elli. Elli!”

Elli, who had barely been keeping her head bowed against the wall, faintly opened her eyes.

“Young… Master?”
“Pull yourself together, Elli. If you fall asleep here, it’s over.”

The faintly visible Young Master had no legs. To be precise, only his upper body was visible. And that made Elli realize it all the more: the Young Master was doing something desperately, for her sake.

“Arden. Continue any longer and you will die.”

Just as the two of them said, I couldn’t sustain the hallucinated state for long, because if I did, my own heart would freeze first. The thread of my consciousness was thinning, trembling, on the verge of snapping.

Steadying my fading mind, I gave one last command to my phantom standing before Elli’s eyes.

“Elli, listen to me carefully. Forfeit the challenge — right now!”

“…”
“Hurry!”

“I… for… feit.”