63. Before The Heart Freezes Over

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

Because that’s exactly what I taught her.

The only way a shield-bearer can fight a mage is to deny them the gap to keep chanting, and she’d executed the correct answer just as I’d drilled into her, reading the dark-red heat-shimmer rising off Valerian as magic, the precursor to a wide-area attack.

But this one time, my advice was driving Elli straight into a death trap. She never should have run.

So was the right answer to duck behind the shield instead? No. The only move Elli had left was to shout that she was forfeiting the challenge.

“Damn it! Stop! Stop right now!”

I hurled myself at the red barrier, but all that came back was a dull thud as my body bounced right back to where it had started. I swung my sword like a madman, and the barrier wouldn’t allow so much as a single scratch, as if it were mocking me. None of it surprised me. A wall that had shrugged off even Seraphina’s swordsmanship was never going to fall to a blade like mine.

“Stop this match at once!”

I shouted toward the robed man, certain he had to be listening somewhere. As if he’d been waiting for the cue, 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.”

“Quit forcing this garbage and take down the barrier right now, you son of a bitch!”

I lunged to seize the man’s robe, but my hand cleaved through empty air once again. Just as I made to grapple with him, Seraphina, silent at my side until now, quietly pointed at the field.

“…Look.”

Her cold voice snapped my head around, and I stopped breathing. Valerian’s greatsword, wreathed in black heat-shimmer, traced a single flash.

— SCHK—!

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

“Haaah!”

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

But Valerian was far crueler than she’d expected. He dropped low, slipping the punch aside, then uncoiled like a crouching beast and drove a kick toward the sky.

— KWAAANG—!

Valerian’s military boot slammed precisely into Elli’s abdomen.

“…Kheok!”

Elli’s body was launched into the arena wall. The sturdy outer wall shattered, throwing up a vast cloud of dust. Buried in the rubble, she couldn’t so much as twitch a fingertip, and blood streamed down from the crown of her head.

The robed man watched the scene with indifference and murmured under his breath.

“The match will be over soon.”

With those words, his figure blurred away like smoke. When I turned my head, Valerian was advancing on Elli, slow and deliberate.

Bleeding, pinned in the wall, she plainly didn’t have the strength left even to declare a forfeit. 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. The barrier was an absolute shield, swallowing every kind of force and magic alike. If I couldn’t get past this one wall the system had drawn, if I couldn’t protect even one of my own, then all the vast knowledge I carried was worth 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 past the point of overload, and my brain wasn’t merely hot now; it felt ready to burst. In the instant a scream was about to tear loose, my vision flashed white, as though the fuse on that burning circuit of thought had finally 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.

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 lifting his greatsword to take 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!”

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

“Quickly!”

Everything before my eyes was crimson. The blood running down from the crown of my head caught on my lashes, blurring my sight.

…I have to move.

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

— Thud, thud.

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

Ah…

The Young Master raised his greatsword high.

I’m sorry.

The self-reproach of having failed, in the end, to keep my promise to Young Master Arden turned to tears and ran down my cheeks. I closed my eyes weakly, waiting 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 had braced for it: for the horrific sensation of flesh tearing and bone crushing to sweep through my whole body, if only for a fleeting instant. Yet, 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 ignored all that “good game” nonsense the Young Master kept talking about and closed my eyes at the very start. Then there would have 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. In this cold repose, wanting nothing but 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 thought had taken me in a single stroke kept dragging me back up into reality. The darkness that had veiled my sight began to bleed into a hazy silver glow.

…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 there, barring the way in front of me, catching that massive blade on a single sword of his own, stood an enormous back, a frame larger even than Young Master Valerian’s. Across the shoulders draped the pelt of a lion crowned with a coronet, the crest of the head of the house, resting there in commanding majesty, and through it silver hair streamed down 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 that crushed down on my heart, I couldn’t manage to get the next word out. A flood of relief washed over my whole body, and then my consciousness sank straight down into deep darkness.

Valerian was clearly being controlled by someone. Whether the hand on the strings belonged to Eligos, the master of this arena, or to some other puppeteer, I couldn’t yet say. What I did know was that the controlled Valerian had gone wordless, like a puppet with its emotions cut away, and not a trace of vitality lingered in his unfocused blue eyes.

“…!”

But Valerian, greatsword raised to sever Elli’s neck, abruptly halted. A man had appeared in front of him, one even larger than he was.

Beneath sunken brows, dark circles hung heavy with fatigue. His mouth was set in a blunt, frigid line that looked as though it had never once held goodwill toward another, and his robe carried the lion-and-coronet crest, permitted to the head of the house alone, embroidered into it in fine detail. Down to the jet-black sword at his side, unmistakable even from a distance as a masterblade.

Once I slipped into a hallucinated state, I could create a phantom. Laughably, the skill only became usable when I was out of my right mind.

Down in the underground training ground, the damp air and the total absence of sunlight had let “Illusion Mushrooms” sprout all over the place. Chewing and swallowing one was enough to drop me into a hallucination. But there was no way I’d get hold of an Illusion Mushroom here in the arena.

And so this was the method I chose.

I remembered a story about climbers on the Himalayas who saw hallucinations in the extreme cold. When a person’s body temperature drops below thirty-three degrees, the brain starts to warp reality and conjure hallucinations to block out the pain.

Endure.

My whole field of vision blurred white. The cold that bored down into the marrow had long since passed beyond mere pain; 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, there was no chance an “Illusion Mushroom,” the very thing that had guided me into hallucination down in the training ground, would magically poof! into my pocket. And so I’d asked Seraphina to freeze me.

“Are you all right?”

At her question I managed a shivering nod. Seraphina’s chill and the heat of my heart strained against each other in taut opposition, and in the same way, far off in the distance, the controlled Valerian and the phantom Kairon I had conjured stood locked face to face.

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

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

However powerful the binding curse and brainwashing that had smothered his reason, neither could erase the instinctive terror carved into his unconscious toward that one presence above all: 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 Valerian, who had held his silence until now. Was it a struggle to overcome the terror, or the brainwashing forcing itself down over his reason? Either way, he re-gripped the greatsword with trembling hands and threw 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, caught up in the aftershock of Valerian’s rampage.

There wasn’t much time left to hold the skill, either. My body, frozen to sustain the hallucination, was teetering back and forth across the boundary of death. And yet, for all my effort, the red barrier still stood stubbornly 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, locked in cold frost, but my phantom within it 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 had formed. And somehow that made Elli understand it all the more clearly: that the Young Master was desperately straining at something, all for her sake.

“Arden, if you keep this up any longer, you’re going to die.”

Just as the two of them warned, I couldn’t hold the hallucinated state for long. If I did, my own heart would be the first thing to freeze. 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.”