Chapter 163: Rivalry (Part One)
How had Leonardo come to be here? A coincidence, in its way — he'd come for the magical market, something he only made time for once every four years, since this stretch of country came alive during the Plowing Festival and stayed sleepy the rest of the year, when magical materials of every kind flowed in abundance. Tina had insisted on tagging along this time. They'd only just arrived and met with Ortlando, who'd meant to arrange lodging for them — but Tina had pressed to see Evan first, so here they were.
Evan felt his stomach sink at the sight of them. He'd assumed the matter with Andrea had settled itself for the moment. Apparently not.
"Evan, who's this?" Tina asked, some instinctive wariness rising in her at once — a woman's sixth sense rarely lied.
"Evan, and who's she?" Andrea asked in turn, hostility rising in her own voice.
"Let me introduce you both," Evan said, resigned. "Tina — a knight, Viscount Leonardo's daughter. Andrea — also a knight."
Both women spoke at once: "What's your relationship with her?" — though the tone differed sharply. Tina's voice stayed soft, though unmistakably firm underneath; Andrea's carried something closer to raw distrust, edged with real desperation.
Leonardo watched with open curiosity. Evan sighed and gave both women a careful account of how he'd come to know each of them.
"Does she know you're a lich?" Andrea asked.
"I know. Evan told me. I don't care," Tina said softly, her eyes on Evan, full of tenderness.
Leonardo felt a quiet ache at that. Clearly she still hadn't given up hope — and here Evan was, treating her this way, with another woman on top of it, and she still hadn't let go.
Andrea, who'd been on the verge of backing down, found her resolve hardening instead at Tina's words. Evan let out a private sigh, then something shifted in him, a cold sneer crossing his face. "So now you both understand. I have no love for either of you. Get away from me — both of you!"
The sudden change struck Tina like a slap. Andrea's eyes flooded red. "Fine! I'll go, then." She covered her face and ran off. Tina didn't cry — she simply stared at Evan, stunned, as though she no longer recognized him at all.
"What are you still standing there for?" Evan snapped. Tina fled as well. Something in Evan's chest ached fiercely — he hadn't realized how deep his own feelings for her had actually grown — but he kept up the pretense of indifference regardless.
Leonardo blinked, and Evan turned to him. "It's fine. I had no other choice. Better they cool off and put some distance between us — that's the kindest outcome I could manage. Come, it's been a while — let's talk through some things properly. Xiaoshuang, follow them. Don't interfere, just keep an eye on things."
Understanding settled over Leonardo, and he gave a rueful smile. "Perhaps that really is the best way to handle it."
"Don't dwell on it. Give it a couple of days and they'll be fine," Evan said.
Andrea ran until she reached a tree and stopped there, seething, an ache settling deep in her chest. Everything that had happened today seemed to have aged her all at once — no longer the girl who'd never quite grown up under Cecilia's watch. Damned lich. Why does he have to be so cruel? Why does it hurt this much?
She stood beneath the tree in a daze, remembering her handful of encounters with Evan, running her fingers over the boomerang at her hip, and the enchanted sword he'd forged for her, sinking into memory. How she wished she could turn back the clock. How could he possibly be a lich — how could a lich be this compelling? She'd lost herself so completely in thought that she didn't even notice Tina approaching until she was right beside her.
"Sister Andrea, do you really care for Evan?"
"I don't know. Why does my chest hurt like this?" Andrea murmured, half-dreaming, before snapping back to herself. "Don't call me sister. We don't even know who's older between us."
Her temper flared abruptly. "Why do you stay with him, knowing he's a lich?"
"Because I love him. Ever since he saved me, I've cared for him. What does age matter? What does being a lich matter? All I know is that I love him," Tina said, fervent.
"But I love him too. Why does he treat us both this way?" Andrea said.
Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.
"I know his heart. He doesn't want either of us hurt because of him — that's why he forced himself to be cruel just now, hoping to drive us both away," Tina said.
"But I'm your rival. Why would you tell me this? Doesn't that seem strange?" Andrea asked, puzzled.
"I'm not sure why I'm telling you either. Seeing you run off just now — it felt wrong not to say something. I want to compete with you fairly," Tina said. She didn't fully understand it herself, but though she was now a viscount's daughter, some old sense of inadequacy had never quite left her — and becoming a knight, working her way toward Great Knight rank, had quietly given her a way to challenge that feeling without ever consciously recognizing it. Before now, she'd always felt unworthy of Evan, and had stubbornly set herself this challenge as a way of building her own confidence.
Hearing this, fighting spirit lit in Andrea's eyes. "A challenge, then. Don't think I'm afraid."
Xiaoshuang, trailing behind, watched this exchange utterly baffled. Humans were far too complicated.
"Tina, what do you think — how should we get back at Evan once we're home?" Andrea said.
"Why would we get back at him?" Tina asked.
"He's being so cruel — doesn't he deserve it?"
"He's doing it for our sake."
Andrea had no answer to that. Her eyes drifted to the sword at Tina's hip. "Tina, Evan mentioned your swordsmanship is quite something. Let's spar."
"That doesn't seem like a good idea," Tina said, hesitant.
Andrea paid no mind, drawing her enchanted sword and settling into stance. "Come on. To first touch only."
Tina hesitated with her words, but her hand had already drawn her own blade — not enchanted, but a fine sword all the same. "A good blade," Andrea said. "Who gave it to you?"
"Evan had it made for me," Tina said, settling into a stance of her own.
Andrea raised her enchanted sword. "This one, Evan forged for me himself. Watch yourself." She lunged forward, her blade flaring white — not sword-force, but the sigil array within the sword itself, triggered.
Tina held her ground calmly, giving her own blade a shake — sword-force flared to life with a hum — and stepped forward, catching Andrea's blade cleanly. The two sparred beneath the tree, Xiaoshuang perched above, watching with obvious delight.
Tina's swordwork ran a clear cut above Andrea's, and she soon had the upper hand. Feeling herself losing ground, Andrea pulled out her boomerang. "Watch this!"
The boomerang flared gold, spinning toward Tina. Tina fell back, her blade catching and flicking it aside, but it curved and came back around, circling her from every angle — not through Andrea's own guidance, but simply the boomerang's own automatic return.
Tina's swordwork held without a single gap, blade ringing against metal again and again, until the boomerang's initial rush of attacks finally spent itself, and Andrea caught it back in her hand.
Jessica, Emma, and a few others had gathered to watch at some point, unnoticed, and broke into applause. Andrea, embarrassed, stopped at once. Seeing her stop, Tina lowered her own blade too.
"Sister Andrea, we should head back," Tina said, a little self-conscious at having drawn such a crowd — students among them, even.
Xiaoshuang, still watching from the tree, clicked her tongue as the two stopped — she'd been enjoying herself and hadn't gotten her fill. People really were strange. Weren't these two supposed to be rivals? And yet they looked, for all the world, like the best of friends. Impossible to make sense of it.
Evan, meanwhile, was deep in discussion with Leonardo over the jade fragment marked with the number three. He now had five pieces in total, only two short of the full seven, and with the first through fifth accounted for, even incomplete, the general function of the Philosopher's Stone was starting to come into focus.
Their conversation had grown animated. "It's clear enough," Leonardo said, "that the Philosopher's Stone extracts some extraordinarily refined substance from its raw materials. According to Scripture, it's a substance of heaven itself, saturated with spiritual essence — something the earth itself apparently lacks."
Evan nodded along with the reasoning, though he had his doubts about whether this counted as a "substance" at all. "That it holds some inherent spiritual quality — that part strikes me as strange."
"It is strange, honestly — much like the earliest elemental theory, which held there were only four base elements: earth, water, fire, wind. The ancient Xilun philosopher Adolis first proposed the four, and over time, more were added — lightning, derived from wind; light, derived from fire; dark, derived from earth, which itself became earth proper; and space-time, derived from the original water element. Each element carries four qualities besides — hot, cold, dry, wet. And this spiritual substance is held to be a divine material entirely, called the fifth element — not the same fifth element people speak of today, mind you," Leonardo said.
"That's not quite where my thinking runs, though. I don't believe everything is truly built from these few elements at all — I suspect their existence might be something of a misunderstanding. I lean more toward the ancient Xilun atomic theory instead," Evan said.
"How do you explain the electricity you discovered, then? Isn't that simply a form of the lightning element? Your paper was the first real confirmation that mages could sense an element existing outside their own perception."
Evan gave a rueful smile. "I did discover electricity, true enough, but I don't believe it counts as an element at all. It may well be a particle smaller than the atom itself — call it an electron, perhaps. It might even be a constituent part of the atom." Evan knew, in his bones, that he was right about this — even in a world built on magic, there was no reason to deny the existence of atoms.
"That's far too radical a claim. Atomic theory is barely accepted as it stands, and even its supporters hold that atoms are indivisible. And here you are, boldly denying even that," Leonardo said.
"Just a thought for now. Perhaps I'll take up the research myself someday," Evan said, noncommittal.
"You're really considering this? Elemental theory has held up for centuries," Leonardo said.
"And yet it's also the least rigorously proven of anything we work with. It rests entirely on a mage's own subjective sense of things — it explains a fair number of phenomena, sure, but who's to say mages haven't simply built the whole framework on an unconscious illusion?" Evan said, somewhat darkly.