Chapter 284
Chapter 284: Water and Fire (3)
'4th Rank.'
An ambush.
No time to cast Projection, so instead, magic brutishly crammed with magical power.
Therefore the magic was simple.
It froze the target. That kind of magic.
"You picked the wrong opponent."
Harad looked down at the middle-aged mage and sneered.
An enormous block of ice had swallowed Harad whole. Yet the Harad trapped inside wasn't frozen in the slightest.
The true worth of Tempering.
A mage unprepared was weak.
Tempering eliminated that weakness. Ordinary blades couldn't pierce him, and magic was no different.
Tempering -- the enhanced body itself -- served as a form of preparedness for Harad.
Not flaunting the tempered body was also preparation. Feigning carelessness. Thus provoking the enemy's failure and creating an opening from it.
-If the body is sturdy, the mind is at ease, they say.
The Elaine of the past life had described Harad's tempered body that way.
How's that any different from a knight.
Harad smiled bitterly inside the enormous block of ice.
It was different. This sturdier body bought time to prepare magic. Not to swing a sword.
WHOOSH--!
Trusting in the tempered body, the fire was kindled late. Yet the enormous ice melted away in an instant.
"How......!"
The middle-aged mage's eyes flew open.
Because the fire that had devoured the ice was swelling beyond control. As if the ice were oil.
"The Sun."
Harad smiled amid the towering blaze.
To the middle-aged mage, it looked as though the fire itself were smiling.
A hand shot from the flames. HISSSSS--! The middle-aged mage's face sizzled where Harad gripped it.
"You should have cast Projection instead."
That would have been far more troublesome.
The middle-aged mage couldn't answer.
From the face caught in Harad's grip, pallid smoke rose instead of words.
Even with his face intact, nothing useful would have come from him. The man had kept up his innocent act right until the moment he tried to kill Harad.
That made him a profoundly conniving man.
To extract information, Harad would need to capture one of the other mages.
......A blunder, if one called it that.
He should have said so aloud instead of merely thinking it.
Something pitch-black bloomed from the blizzard.
Before he knew it, it had drawn remarkably close to the jet-black he remembered.
The jet-black traced a line of pure darkness. A trajectory.
Trusting that Harad would be unharmed, trusting that Harad would kill the middle-aged mage, a trajectory that carved through the throats of the other four mages.
Its speed surpassed imagination.
The four mages didn't even register that Ellen had drawn her sword. Only Harad had barely caught the trajectory.
But too late. He'd noticed, nothing more; he couldn't stop it.
"Signal!"
By the time Harad shouted, four heads were already rising above the trajectory the jet-black had traced. At the end of that arc, Ellen was wiping blood from her blade in the blizzard.
All the while, her gaze was on Harad, head tilted.
"What's 'signal'?"
"......"
***
The Village of Embers.
It had been when they'd gone searching for that dreamlike place.
Harad and Ellen had encountered Mirenz, a 4th Rank mage of the Tower of Meteoric Iron.
A castaway who'd replaced his left leg with iron.
Back then, they should have interrogated him.
If they had, they might have detected Tower Master Kandenkel's intervention sooner.
But interrogation, let alone further conversation, never happened.
Because the moment Mirenz ambushed Harad, Ellen had killed the man.
Saying she'd gotten angry on Harad's behalf, since he'd looked embarrassed.
"Ellen, you said it yourself back then. Give me a signal."
"......"
"And you said you'd try."
"Ah."
Ellen had the face of someone just now remembering.
"But that was the signal? 'Signal!'?"
Ellen imitated Harad's shout.
"We never settled on one."
For Harad, shouting that had been the best he could do.
The only shame was that Ellen hadn't been in genius mode.
Effort requires memory to be possible.
"Was it important this time?"
"Probably."
"Then just absorb those hearts."
"......"
Ellen said the same thing as that time.
And just like that time, she walked over and offered the back of her neck. She seemed determined to brazen it out.
Harad laughed dryly.
He wasn't angry.
"I wasn't looking down on you. I really did just forget."
"......"
"I'm sorry."
Tilting her head back and looking up at him like that.
"Heh."
Harad had no choice but to scratch the back of Ellen's neck.
***
The middle-aged mage's Origin had been a massive slab of ice.
The Origins of the mages who'd followed him were all water-related as well. As the robes attested, all five had been mages of the Tower of the Deep Sea.
'The Deep Sea crossed over. But this isn't the Deep Sea's path.'
The middle-aged mage had attacked Harad.
"Wasn't it because we got caught?"
Ellen, who'd been listening quietly, tilted her head.
She'd assumed they were attacked because their identities were exposed.
"No. We weren't caught. It wasn't that."
What the man attacked was Wildfire Harad.
Not just Harad.
"He knew I belonged to the Red Tower and tried to kill me."
Or tried to kill him precisely because he belonged to the Red Tower.
"Water and fire aren't on such bad terms, are they?"
"Basele Tuas?"
"Yes."
Ellen pointed to the tunnel guest, Basele Tuas.
He too had belonged to the Tower of the Deep Sea. But that guest hadn't regarded the Red Tower with murderous hostility. And not solely because Eiga was frightening.
"Good point. It might've been personal."
Harad nodded slowly.
The middle-aged mage might simply have despised the Red Tower to a lethal degree.
Still, that was an unsatisfying conclusion.
'Basele Tuas was on the continent.'
The continent and the Otherworld were severed from each other.
News traveled absurdly slowly.
'It wasn't just one -- there were five.'
The other four had maintained uniform silence.
Following the middle-aged mage's will.
'Or the will of someone higher.'
Harad surveyed the surroundings.
No corpses remained.
All had been reduced to ash by Harad's magic.
The ash had mingled with the crimson desert, leaving no trace. Above, the blizzard still raged. No one in this place could discover evidence.
"Let's check elsewhere."
Harad scanned the channel.
"What about these?"
Ellen pointed at the blankets.
She clearly wanted them.
"I've memorized the location, so we'll retrieve them later. Hide them under the sand for now."
The blankets were thicker than expected.
Ten of them.
"And these?"
Ellen smacked her lips in regret and pointed at the blue robes. Harad had set them aside before burning the mages' bodies.
"Put them on."
What Origin should they go with this time.
***
Traces left by a Magical Beast.
That had been Ellen's guess regarding the channel. The work of a dim beast, at that. There was no other explanation.
No reason to leave such conspicuous traces in the Boundary otherwise.
'A stream of water across a desert.'
A channel.
The Tower of the Deep Sea had made it. There had to be a reason. The snow shelter would be their staging ground for it.
The blizzard melted away before it could touch Harad's eyes. His vision held firm. Harad was gazing clearly at the channel. A depth no greater than a middle finger.
A trench of that depth had been carved across the crimson desert. The water that crossed it was cold. Unaffected by the desert's heat. By any measure, this thin, long stream was magic.
'Magic with a purpose. No one would come all the way here to do something pointless.'
The Snowfall Desert.
Either this place was the objective, or the objective was located here.
The thin, long channel stretched remarkably far.
Harad walked along it. More precisely, it was the path the five mages had taken.
Harad was tracing their footprints back to their origin. The five had followed the channel all the way to the snow shelter. That shelter had been their base.
'Are they building a path?'
Harad shook his head.
Each Tower had its paths. Paths forged through exploration and research of the Boundary, extending into safe corridors.
Those paths left no trace.
Because a traceable path could no longer be safe.
So this channel couldn't be a path.
It was thoroughly man-made. Almost as if begging to be noticed.
"This is as far as it goes."
After walking for some time, Harad reached a dead end.
The desert was vast, but the channel simply stopped.
The five mages' footprints ended here too.
They'd been here, then returned to the shelter.
"What were they doing."
Harad murmured, rubbing his throat.
The answer was predetermined. In the Snowfall Desert, the only man-made traces were the shelter and the channel.
No shelter here, so it had to be the channel.
The five mages had been building this channel, then returned to their base.
"Let's continue it ourselves."
He had no means to create water, so footprints would have to do.
"How? You don't even know which direction."
"The channel was curved. It's tracing a massive circle."
If he followed the curvature as walked, it should work.
Harad walked onto the desert where the channel had ended. An immensely vast zone. And immensely dangerous. Something foreign pressed against the sole of his foot.
He dug it up. A scorpion Magical Beast's tail jutted out like a bamboo shoot. A violet liquid beaded at the tip like a droplet. Without a tempered body, the tail would have pierced through, and that poison would have done the rest.
Harad laughed dryly.
This was normal. The Boundary was land where anything could happen at any time. He was only now realizing that anew.
Which meant the path he'd walked so far had been the anomaly.
The Tower of the Deep Sea was carving channels into this desert.
And in the process, it was clearing away Magical Beasts as well.
'The beasts must be in the way. Whether during channel construction or after.'
His pace slowed.
Not from wariness of beasts, but from the nagging worry that someone might be watching.
The channel's length was considerable.
It seemed poised to encircle the entire desert. The mages deployed couldn't number just five.
No reason to stir up trouble.
Especially now, dressed in blue robes.
"How about Snowflake?"
"Nice."
"Icicle?"
"Also nice."
Many Origins came to mind.
Naturally so. Origins were as myriad as all creation. Finding one that didn't exist was harder.
"You'd say anything's nice."
"Because it is."
"Who's nice?"
"......"
Ellen grinned mischievously. Then stopped walking. Harad did the same. Far off, beyond the blizzard, someone was there.
'The channel.'
That someone was beside the channel.
There was nowhere to hide. A desert without obstacles. The blizzard was falling, true, but Harad and Ellen could see through it.
And the same went for the Tower of the Deep Sea's mages.
As this side had seen, so had the other.
Harad assumed their eyes had met. Here, he needed to play friendly. So he quickened his pace.
As the distance closed, it became clear. The woman, her blue robe half-removed, hadn't been standing beside the channel -- she'd been building it.
"Hard at work."
Harad called out to the woman bent over the channel.
She raised her head. She looked at Harad and Ellen, then at the path they'd come from, and frowned.
"What about the traps?"
The channel was apparently a trap.
A trap for whom.
"Back there, it's coming along well. We'd been clearing Magical Beasts ahead of time."
Harad looked back the way they'd come and pointed as far as he could.
"If it's beasts, on our side too......"
The woman's eyes narrowed.
Beneath those thinned lids, the freckles scattered across her face were striking.
"Who are you? I've never seen your faces."
"That's a hurtful thing to say. We're colleagues, both dispatched from the Tower of the Deep Sea."
Harad tugged at his robe.
The woman snorted.
"Nonsense. This deployment is an Aquins operation."
"Same difference."
"You don't even know it's unsanctioned?"
The water in the channel erupted like a fountain.
"Should've led with that."
Harad clicked his tongue.
Then whispered to Ellen.
"Signal."
Meaning please don't step in.