74. Even If I Roll Across The Floor

It wasn’t because he was my little brother.

Objectively, Arden Arne was a once-in-a-lifetime genius. He’d hauled me up out of the swamp of loneliness I’d been drowning in for ten years.

Arden always finds a way out, even in the most hopeless moments. How can he possibly do that?

No matter the crisis, the moment Arden stepped in, everything sorted itself out just like that. I used to believe he could wield the magic of a god. How else could he have worked such miracles?

But over all the time I spent with him, I came to understand something.

Arden was just a human being, the same as everyone else.

I once read a book. It told the story of an angel who granted humans their every wish, until in the end human greed drove that angel to take its own life.

There was a time I believed that very angel might have taken up residence inside Arden.

No other explanation fit. He’d taken my poison into himself, and Big Bro Lucius’s too, and even after taking in something that virulent, he’d come through unharmed. And so I believed that an angel dwelled inside Arden.

But how could that be true?

If miracles had ever truly existed in the first place…

Arden’s body, with the poison driven into it, was steadily turning pitch-black.

Even though I, of all people, knew better than anyone that no god could possibly exist!

An old resentment I’d buried long ago, and briefly forgotten, reared its head again. There had been a time when I, too, longed for salvation. I prayed and prayed to god, begging him to save Arden. If a god truly existed, then please, please let my little brother live.

I prayed, and prayed again. But what dragged us up out of that pit of hell was no heavenly grace.

Without my magic, I’m a person who can’t do anything at all.

Thankfully, Arden woke on his own.

I never told him this, but no matter what might come from here on…

I want to be of help.

Even if I have to roll wretchedly across the floor, even if I fall back down into hell…

I want to be his strength.

And so I agonized over it.

What is there that I can do?

The answer, I already knew. It was my power to draw out poison, the very venom that had once tormented me and corrupted Big Bro Lucius. Of course, it came with one enormous flaw: the poison had to be transplanted into another living creature.

Surely Arden means to save people like me. Even if it means taking all of that poison into himself.

He was magnificent, far beyond anything someone like me could ever dream of measuring up to.

If he has a plan, I really wish he’d just tell me.

Arden could be chatty one moment and wear a brooding look the next, so all I could do was wait.

…And to think I’m supposed to be the older sister here.

Honestly, I knew full well I made a poor excuse for a big sister. Some days I’d sink into gloom over what a pathetic mess I was.

It’s Arden’s fault for being too brilliant, isn’t it?

I mean, how is anyone supposed to read the mind of someone that far above them? Whenever the anxiety came rushing in, that was how I’d reframe it. And once I’d talked myself into it, my heart always felt lighter.

Not that I had any intention of staying behind him forever, though.

To keep pace beside a talent like his, I’d have to run hard enough to leave my breath ragged in my throat. That much, at least, I understood.

“Is this really the right call? Are you actually serious?”

Still, I couldn’t believe what was unfolding in front of me, so I asked again.

“Yeah. For now, this is the best we’ve got.”

Even so, this really wasn’t the way I’d wanted to run.

.

.

.

“Are you out of your mind? Seriously?”

Only a few minutes earlier, I’d been funneling mana into the magic circle, keeping that monster pinned in check.

“What are you even trying to do?!”

But Arden had interfered, the binding had come undone, and the monster was loose. Wearing that revolting grin, it came toward us, slow and deliberate.

And yet Arden, even as those footsteps closed in, never once glanced its way. His eyes were fixed on me, and me alone.

“Big Sis, listen carefully.”

By the time I’d finished Sis Seraphina’s emergency first aid and rushed over to him in a panic, Arden’s condition was, quite literally, horror itself. I’d managed a stopgap on his crushed left arm, threading my vines tightly through it to wrench the bones back into line and knit them together, but the leg muscles, shredded like rags, and the burnt-out nerves were past anything I could fix.

What frightened me even more was the heat pouring off his body. The instant I laid a hand on the wound to check it, I had to snatch it back; the heat was so savage it felt like my palm was searing on sun-baked pavement. Every inch of his skin had flushed a furious red, as though it might split open at any second, and wounds gaped all over where whole chunks of flesh had been torn clean away to the pale meat beneath, the marks, perhaps, of his savage fight to survive. Blood had soaked through layer after layer of cloth and dried black. He looked less like a living person than a carcass freshly hauled out of a slaughterhouse. Honestly, it was a wonder his heart was still beating at all.

And yet Arden spoke.

“Trust me.”

There was an inexplicable power in his words.

“Make it the smoothest wood you can — please!”

I followed the flood of instructions pouring out of him without a word of complaint. Before I knew it, a pair of utterly bizarre shoes had taken shape, four round wheels mounted beneath an L-shaped frame. I’d never seen anything like them in my life; they looked made not for walking on the ground but for gliding across it.

“Big Sis, put them on!”
“These?”
“Hurry!”
“Okay!”

I did as I was told, and fast. The monster was right there, all but on top of us.

“What kind of damned nonsense are you cooking up this time?!”

Sensing we were up to something, the monster hurled its spear from a distance.

“Arden!”

On instinct, I grabbed him tight to keep my balance.

“Go!”

At his shout, I poured every last scrap of mana in my body down beneath our feet.

— BANG!

The black spear punched clean through the patch of floor we’d been standing on a tenth of a second earlier.

“Kyaaaaah!”

A scream tore out of me before I could stop it. I’d never known speed like it in all my life. The feel of solid ground vanished from under my feet as the wheels spun like mad, skating us across the floor. It was nothing at all like riding in a carriage, because every tiny shudder of the floor came shooting straight up into every last joint in my body.

“Woo-hoo!”

Arden already had the speed completely under control. He wasn’t called a genius for nothing.

He’s seriously out of his mind.

Every time he tilted his body, we carved a great circle across the arena floor.

“Big Sis, give me more speed!”
“Right!”

I drew up more mana and clung to him even tighter. Pressed against him as I was, I couldn’t see anything ahead. There was nothing but the warmth of my little brother’s back.

“I believe in you — always!”

Had the words been swallowed by the rushing wind before they could reach him? All that reached my ears was the clash of Arden’s sword against the monster’s spear.

“Back in my day, I was pretty into rollerblading!”

“It’s a thing, okay!”

The world streamed backward, shoved relentlessly out of my sight. A destructive kind of high tore through me, like barreling down a highway with nothing but my bare body and a whole engine strapped to my back. The tension trembled in my flesh, prodding at the base of my skull and touching off a blast of adrenaline.

Truth be told, Lillian joining the fight hadn’t dramatically boosted our odds of winning. No matter how well she pinned the bastard down with her vines, it all came to nothing if we couldn’t land any damage. So I’d rewritten the plan.

“Why?! Why can’t I land a single hit?!”

Every time the bastard’s spear-tip skimmed past, just barely grazing the hem of my clothes, a garbled, furious noise burst out from inside the helmet. The ‘Peak Eligos’ he’d crammed into that body by force was whiffing every strike, and for Beta, watching it all play out, it had to be maddening enough to make his blood boil.

“You went on and on about your ‘Peak Eligos,’ and this is all it amounts to?”
“Kill him, now! Just kill him already!!”

The instant Beta’s spiteful command landed, the Eligos body mechanically shifted its grip on the spear once more. The future-sight Eligos possessed was, without question, a power beyond any ordinary measure.

So long as it stays a one-on-one fight, anyway.

Earlier, I’d walked Eve through it. Once players broke past the third gate and put down each of its minions, they were handed a choice.

There was one thing I hadn’t told Eve, though, and this was it.

— Choose the relay duel and best me, and I shall hand over every last coin of the gold and treasure I have hoarded all this time!

Pick the second option, and Eligos would stride onto the battlefield himself to try to talk the players around.

— If you betray the spirit of chivalry, you shall return home with nothing but a contemptible victory!

Such was the bizarre threat he’d tack on.

— Hahaha! Next!

To cut to the chase, the players who chose the relay duel didn’t even break even. There was simply no beating a future-sight boss one-on-one in the first place.

And if you chose instead to gang up and bring Eligos down?

— Cowards! Not a single coin for the likes of you!

Then you walked away with nothing to show but the bare word “victory” itself. So the players never spared Eligos’s Abyss a second glance.

Anyway — point is, he’s weak to getting dogpiled.

Future-sight only ever locks onto a single target.

“Why?! Why am I missing again?!”

The bastard was plainly reading my future, and that was exactly why his spear could never reach me.

Well, that’s because I’m not the one moving the rollers.

The force spinning the wheels under me wasn’t my muscle but Lillian’s mana. In other words, the one he needed to be reading wasn’t me at all. It should have been Lillian.

“Gah! It won’t reach! Why won’t it reach?!”

Sneering at the black spear slicing through empty air, I bore in close to the bastard.

— Clang!

But he was still reading the path of my sword, so he turned it aside without effort. On top of that, one question still gnawed at me.

I definitely ran my sword clean through the bastard’s chest.

I’d stabbed him in the left side of the chest, no question about it. And yet he’d risen perfectly fine and gone tearing off toward the waiting room where the patients were.

— Clang!

As I met the spear head-on, the right arm gripping my sword juddered hard.

Instinct told me it would all be decided soon.

“Don’t get so cocky! You can’t draw a single drop of blood off me, same as I can’t off you!”

Just as he said, my own attacks weren’t landing as clean hits either. But there was a single hint buried in Beta’s words.

No blood on it?

I glanced down at the sword in my grip. I was certain I’d run it clean through the bastard’s heart, in which case the blade ought to be drenched in hot, fresh blood. Instead all it carried were old bloodstains, long since dried and smeared filthily down its length.

— Clang!

I deliberately aimed for the right side of his chest, hammering down a barrage of lightning-fast combos. At that, the Eligos body, reading my intent, twisted sharply aside.

Just as I thought — his heart’s on the other side.

I’d seen through his vital point, but the bastard was no pushover. Every path my sword could take fell within reach of his foresight. The smooth shaft of the black spear flicked my blade away with ease.

“How did you figure it out?”
“I’m just naturally quick on the uptake. Though, well — thanks to that, I never did have much of a knack for making friends.”
“Heh heh heh… But as you can see, you can’t kill me either.”
“You really think so?”

The instant I answered, I kicked off the floor. No dodging, no mind games. I just ran, full speed.

At my reckless charge, no different from suicide, the Eligos body raised its spear-shaft with a sneer.

“You madman — coming to die on your own two feet!”

With a shriek that ripped through the air and seemed to scorch it, the spear-tip took dead aim at my heart. The black spear, loaded with everything he had, came surging in without a shred of hesitation.

— CRUNCH!

It wasn’t the sound of flesh being pierced. The charred-black spear had lodged itself not in me but in the base of a massive old tree that had thrust up out of the ground. Using that ancient trunk as a stepping-stone, I was launched up over the bastard’s head like a loosed arrow.

“You fool — there’s no running away in midair!”

The bastard scraped the bewilderment off his face and thrust his spear up. But behind me was Lillian.

“Big Sis!!”

To shoot me up into the air, Lillian let go of the hand that had been holding mine. She lost her balance and went tumbling across the floor, her delicate skin scraping raw against the rough stone.

Even as she rolled across the floor, painted head to toe in blood, she didn’t let out so much as a single groan. Through the swirling dust, her gaze stayed fixed on one single place and one alone: me, up there in the sky.

Lillian lay sprawled flat on the floor, and light came pouring from her fingertips.

“Let’s go home already, you son of a bitch!”

Along with her shout, the thorned vines coiled around my left arm shot out and pierced clean through the right side of the bastard’s chest.