White and Grey, the Genealogy of History 〔Part Two〕

Right blade — horizontal sweep.

Left blade — diagonal cut, kesa.

White lightning charged, and a turn behind to Serius's back.

The motions flowed; the speed beneath them was high.

An ordinary man, on the third motion's high-speed pivot, would have lost the figure of Merea entirely.

The closer the range, the more vicious that speed became.

Yet Serius —

"Hah! Fast! So that is the white-lightning equip of the 〈Lightning God (Celesta Barca)〉!"

— was tracking Merea, surely.

Even Serius's body hadn't fully kept up.

But his head alone had run ahead, eyes following Merea — left eye locking onto the trail of white lightning.

And —

"— !"

— as Merea brought the blade down from his blind side, Serius drove the haft of the demonic spear Kurtad up into it.

"Good reaction!"

Merea twisted his torso to slide the strike, and used the momentum to draw the other blade in an iai motion.

A snapping ring.

Resplendent sword and demonic spear meeting.

In that single instant Serius had finished his turn and caught Merea's strike clean.

"What a weapon! It takes the demonic spear's phenomenon-interference and the blade barely shifts! How did the 〈Water God (Seura Euras)〉 manage formula-density that high in a sword!"

Serius's voice carried excitement.

"Noisy man—!"

To the threat-laced volume Merea answered with a thin smile.

He, in turn, was probing Serius's measure.

"Then how about your skill in using it. — Don't think you can run a melee on spec alone…!"

The crossing blades sprang apart with a snap.

Serius had parried the resplendent sword aside; quick on the heels of it, he was driving the spear's tip in toward Merea's centre.

"Says the man wielding a demonic spear…!"

Merea's motion was fluid, minimal.

Without one wasted gesture, on a paper-thin margin, he avoided the thrust and counter-cut.

In, parry, exchange.

In this passage, the fight had drifted into a contest of technique.

There were two separate intents underneath.

After a few seconds of trade quicker than the eye could follow, the balance broke.

Serius pulled Merea's stance off-axis.

Merea's freakish balance-sense had him already correcting — and into that —

"You don't get away."

— Serius drove forward.

He pinned one of the blades down at Merea's feet with the spear-shaft, and the other — sweeping in — he caught with a palm strike, knocked outside. In the same motion, he slipped into range.

— Got him.

Serius was sure. He had Merea's arm in his left hand.

White lightning thrashed inside his palm and burned his skin; he drove every ounce of strength into not letting the arm go.

And then — as Merea, dragged off-balance by the held arm, tilted further — Serius let the demonic spear go from his hand and went for a palm strike.

There, the intent showed.

Not the spear — deliberately, the palm.

And from that hand —

— black, glowing particles were pouring out.

"Hh —"

A graze.

Merea's exceptional balance kept his stance, even now, from collapsing fully.

But not a clean evasion either. Serius's palm grazed Merea's cheek.

"That's a body language I've seen somewhere before. Inherited a martial-system Demon Lord's craft, have you."

Serius pulled back the moment he'd struck, line in mid-recovery.

Any closer in than this, his alarm bells were on.

— But — I touched.

The pull-back was, equally, an extraction because he had completed his initial design.

A graze was — enough.

Across from him, Merea, retrieving the resplendent sword, brought a finger up and traced where the strike had caught.

A strange feel — there along the cheek.

---

Merea felt a clean admiration and a kind of awe at Serius.

True enough —

— he is strong.

Setting aside the Heroic Spirits he had crossed swords with on the mountain, Serius was, of the living, the most skilled he had met so far.

He was beginning to see, properly, why Hasim and the Demon Lords spoke of Serius's talent with that reluctant respect.

"Your motion's gone off, hasn't it. Holding back? — Show me more of that body language. The essence of the martial-system Demon Lord's craft you were drilled in on the mountain. Show me."

"Asking the enemy for that, in this situation."

"It's my disposition. I love the strong."

— Battle-mad.

Merea let the thought run inside, sensed Serius about to keep going, and deliberately waited.

The strange feel on his cheek hadn't faded.

"Father reproves me for these inclinations often enough. Even so, I have a base desire to see those stronger than me. So I want to raise an opponent up."

The line was provocation, and at the same time it was proof that, in his head, Serius placed Merea somewhat below him.

Merea caught that scent too — but, watching Serius grow talkative the deeper into the fight he went, chose not to argue and let him keep speaking.

The intent Merea had brought into this melee had been, exactly, to draw words out of Serius.

"In which case the darling child of the age of war fits less than expected. Heaven-sent child of combat itself might suit better."

"That's right. War would prefer a weaker opponent."

This was the calmest Merea had been able to read the situation since the start of all this.

The wrongness he had picked off Serius before they'd crossed swords — that was what was steadying him.

"You, however, are running a wide range of formulae. Even when it looks like you're using nothing — through the magic eyes, I see things glowing around your body. Threads?"

What Merea's eyes saw, around Serius, were faintly drifting glowing thread-like things.

Vanishingly thin, but giving off a peculiar magical sheen. When the magic eyes looked at a formula directly, the spell-elements making it sometimes shone in this way.

"— You'd see that much, of course."

And during the exchange just now, those threads had looked very much like they were manipulating Serius's body. As if he had turned his own body into a marionette under the threads.

"〈Light Threads of the Doll King〉. A formula a Demon Lord of the past produced — special threads for puppetry. The Doll King's true craft was the puppetry itself; that side I'll skip — hard to put into words, anyway."

"Awfully relaxed — laying out your hand to an enemy."

"Because it's over. From here, you won't show better movement than the movement you've already shown."

He pulled the light threads off the five fingers of his right hand and pointed at Merea with the freed hand.

Around the pointing, his face — for some reason — carried a small gloomy note. Almost regret.

"My palm grazed you earlier. Right cheek."

He pointed.

The exact spot Merea had been feeling that strange sensation on.

"Truthfully, I could have toyed with you longer. My body just reacted. It's your fault for being half-strong."

He no longer hid the disappointed colour, even let a small sigh out.

"— Just now, it reached. The thing that breaks the core of your combat ability — it's just landed inside your head."

"What are —"

Merea started to ask, and in the next breath caught up to all of it.

Without his intending —

— the white lightning sheathing his body had vanished.

The pack of bolts crackling around him weakened sharply, then withdrew.

Then — gone, completely.

"How long do you think Mūzeg has been at war against Demon Lords. — There is no country that has crossed swords with Demon Lords more than Mūzeg has. And, since a certain incident in the past, Mūzeg has researched in particular counters to formula-system Demon Lords. What I just put into you is the result. A 〈Sealing Formula〉."

While Serius spoke, Merea was moving on his own end to read what had just happened.

He brought up the right-hand resplendent sword's blade in front of his face.

In the bright water of the blade, he just managed to catch his own cheek, and looked for what was on it.

"Black —"

Pattern. — A spell-circle.

The palm strike was, in fact, for this. Merea was sure.

He dropped the 〈Magic Eyes of the Technique God〉 onto the array on his cheek and unwound it.

A difficult and idiosyncratic array, but his stacked experience caught it cleanly and reversed it.

He was about to fire the reverse back into his own cheek when —

"Don't bother. Reversing it won't lift the seal. Because that — was prepared for the man who uses Reverse Formula."

Merea understood at once.

"It's a Sealing Formula that uses Inherent Nucleus to obstruct formula-handling at the source. Not at the formula itself — at the processing area in the head that builds the formula. I know you stack multiple Demon Lord formulae using inhuman processing capacity. For someone like you, this Sealing Formula is the worst kind of trouble there is."

I see.

So this was the trump card Mūzeg had spent the long years brewing as a Demon-Lord counter.

Merea understood.

The reason his white lightning had cut out on its own — the processing block he'd been dedicating to it had been disabled by this seal.

— Inherent Nucleus.

A formula whose inverse cannot lift it.

True enough — inherent-formulae that don't fire without the matching nucleus cannot be reversed. Read, yes. Cast, no. The same as Lilium's Living Flame.

"Using inherent nuclei yourselves — the more it goes on, the more you start to look like Demon Lord kin."

"We weren't born with them, of course. Implanted later. A small distinction from people like you, who are Demon Lords from birth."

If anything, the deliberate later-implant version felt even more warped — but Merea didn't pursue that.

Serius had let an emotional line slip; Merea was setting his attention on those small interior beats.

By sealing a portion of Merea's ability, perhaps, he had begun to feel a small relief.

That relief was opening his mouth, drawing Serius's own words out.

"You're the reason this had to happen. Demon Lord from birth — that's something that should never have existed in the first place."

Merea spoke evenly.

He was not shaken.

— Your read was right, Hasim.

Hasim's words came back to him.

That Serius would catch the weakness Merea had laid out. That Serius would attack it.

In fact, here Serius was, attacking the weakness exactly.

And to Merea, that was —

— the planned move.

"The instant a person is born into a titled house, they're a Demon Lord. We made that custom and that habit. — Want to change it? Then change it. Overturn Mūzeg, and you change it."

Serius was beginning to mix in a lighter, almost flippant air.

The serious heat of the duel was draining out; he was beginning to sound bored with the situation.

In that posture Merea, oddly, saw something childlike — naïve, almost.

"Anyway. — A self-killed prisoner is troublesome. Let me seal another processing block or two, immobilise you, and take those eyes. You are the first I've met whose processing area I couldn't take down in a single shot. Two or three more, though, and you'll be empty."

Serius took a step toward Merea.

In his left hand, at some point, thick light-threads had materialised — thick enough to be visible even without the magic eyes.

The threads ran along the ground and stretched to Merea's feet.

"Late to notice. — I've already bound you with the 〈Light Threads of the Doll King〉."

His body had, from the feet up, been wrapped in them.

Merea looked down to see — and did not raise his face.

Even when Serius took a further step in, his eyes did not return to him.

Merea's body, threads fattening and tightening, was lifted slowly into the air.

His feet left the ground.

A heretic crucified to the sky.

"Lost the will to fight."

Serius, still cautious, closed the distance to about three steps — confirming, as he came, that the 〈Resplendent Sword of the Water God〉 had vanished from both Merea's hands.

And there, finally, a voice came from Merea.

That voice — in the next breath — unsettled Serius's interior in a way he had not foreseen.

"— I see. It wasn't that you wouldn't say it. — It was that you couldn't."

With the look of a man who had at last found the answer to a question carried for years, Merea — eyes utterly clear of cloud — had his gaze on Serius.

The figure — strung up in the air with the open sky behind him — carried not a particle of resignation.

Serius, who had read Merea's steadiness as bravado, began, around now, to feel a small wrongness.

What it was, he could not place.

---

Merea had, at last, found the answer for the wrongness he had felt since he stood across from Serius.

When he had brought up the resplendent sword's blade and seen his own face in the water of it, the answer had floated up.

— This man — vivid as he is — is fragile.

The feel was almost like looking at himself, not so long ago.

The reflection inside the bright water — wrapped in rising bubbles, in the blade's soft sway — carried a strange fragility.

Even believing that he himself no longer had that fragility, the unstable mirror surface had brought back the shape he'd been not very long ago.

And on that, Serius's outline overlapped strangely.

He's strong.

Probably the strongest of the living he had met so far.

He runs an anti-Demon-Lord-specialised inherent Sealing Formula. He has dismantled past Demon Lords' formulae and folded the elements into his own use.

There were probably more formulae he had that Merea hadn't yet noticed. When he kept up with the white lightning's pace, both of Serius's eyes had carried the brief flicker of formula-arrays. Possibly a special pair of magic eyes himself.

Either way, Serius was wielding the cores of a sizeable number of Demon Lord powers, with craft.

Each individual formula wasn't large — but the element of each had been pulled out and used cleanly.

Unlike Merea, perhaps, Serius held a rare formula-sense.

And yet —

— he ought to be strong, ought to be shining —

— there was, in him, a thinness, as if he were not really here.

The instant he noticed it, he saw why Serius had ducked the question.

Where are you aiming, after victory.

Serius had dodged.

The wrongness had been there.

It had been Merea's guess.

But, recalling Serius's reaction to the leading lines he'd thrown out, he was sure of it now.

This man —

---

— is aiming nowhere.

---

Serius Brad Mūzeg —

— is chasing only the phenomenon called victory, nothing else.

"A broken beast."

Compared to that, you —

"— are the monster."

Strung up in the air, Merea said it dead-straight.