Chapter 32
Chapter 32: Rookie Adventurer Bern (30) - Firefly
Within her blurred consciousness,
Blanca blankly recalled what had just happened.
A dizzying, upside-down field of vision.
A body swaying like a leaf in the wind.
A curse, a plague, a venomous poison. An explosion like oil squeezed out of every evil, filthy thing in the world catching fire.
And the embrace of someone who had wrapped her in that explosion.
The moment she remembered that, Blanca reflexively sat up.
“Ugh…!”
Pain like having been beaten all over her body.
Ignoring it as best she could, Blanca hurriedly looked around.
The collapsed wreckage of the building where the ground had caved in, and dust drifting through the air.
Seeing familiar red hair among it, Blanca ran out, and once she confirmed his condition, she began to tremble.
“Ah, ah….”
Bern's condition was horrific, to say the least.
His right leg had been crushed under a huge boulder, and patches of his skin had turned black as if poisoned, while smoke kept seeping out as though he were burning up in real time.
Once that erosion was completely finished, his body would probably crumble into dust and vanish without leaving even a corpse behind.
Thud.
With her legs seemingly giving out, Blanca sank to the ground and almost crawled over to Bern, using a healing spell.
Again and again, over and over, until his injuries were healed.
But it was a futile act.
The white light she scattered could not push back the black mana eroding Bern's body, nor could it heal his wounds.
Even so, Blanca kept chanting.
“Heal. Heal already, I’m telling you. If I can’t use it at a time like this, then what the hell is the point…!!”
In her childhood.
To protect her powerless daughter, her mother chose sacrifice.
And now.
The only man who understood her, the only one who dreamed the same dream as she did, was once again meeting death because of her.
Just as Blanca's heart was beginning to rot away at that realization.
Then, with a sudden grab,
someone seized her hand.
“—You can stop now, Ms. Blanca.”
Had he come to his senses at some point?
The red-haired adventurer was holding Blanca's hand.
Looking at her with calm, peaceful eyes, utterly unlike someone on the verge of death.
“Since it can’t be healed anyway, don’t waste mana on it. No, more importantly, you should heal your own wounds first, Ms. Blanca.”
At that utterly matter-of-fact tone, Blanca couldn't help feeling a rush of emotion, even though she knew she shouldn't.
“Is this really the time to say that!? Why, why on earth did you shield me!”
“Hmm.”
At Blanca's strangled cry, Bern answered as if it were only natural.
“Because Ms. Blanca’s life is far more important, of course.”
Who was it that made the sound of a swallowed breath?
Facing the speechless Blanca, Bern continued on, looking somewhat embarrassed.
“I had intended to keep it secret if possible, but at this rate you'll end up carrying a pointless burden, so I have no choice but to tell you the truth.”
Bern put on a playful air as if revealing a magician's secret to a child, and said this.
“Adventurer Bern is not a real person. This body and this identity are nothing more than a fake created by magic.”
“The real ‘me’ is somewhere else, living perfectly fine.”
“So there’s no need for you to worry, and no need to feel guilty.”
“I'm sorry for deceiving you all this time, Ms. Blanca.”
Blanca remained silent.
She couldn't force a single word out.
How could she?
‘To comfort me... even me, this pathetic, inadequate me, you're telling a lie like that.’
Her throat burned as it tightened.
She wanted to scream at him right now, to shout that he must be taking her for a fool.
And yet Blanca herself couldn't do it.
The man's final devotion, even while dying, to keep her from feeling guilty.
How was she supposed to turn away from such clumsy, painfully kind consideration?
And so, Blanca said,
“…Yes, really, you're too much, Bern. I had no idea you were such a shameless man.”
Had her voice trembled?
Had her acting been so bad that he had noticed?
Trembling with anxiety inside, Blanca was relieved to see that Bern seemed not to have noticed.
“Haha, sorry. If I had my way, I'd like to offer a long apology, but I don't think we have time for that now.”
Bern's gaze went upward.
He stared at the hole in the ceiling from which they had fallen.
“Just now, he was probably caught in that attack too, but he'll finish reviving soon enough. The lich has a ‘heart,’ some kind of spare life prepared in advance. So we need to move before then.”
“Move? For what?”
Blanca had no choice but to ask back.
With Bern, the only one who could defeat the lich reduced to this state, the battle was all but over.
If that was the case, wasn't there no longer any need to fight?
Wouldn't it be better to stay by his side until the very last moment he disappeared?
“For victory.”
But as if cutting off Blanca's childish plea, Bern said firmly,
“We haven't lost yet. There are still other adventurers up there, including Renya... and above all, there is you, Ms. Blanca.”
Blanca tried to shake her head.
She tried to deny it, to say that it was impossible, that someone like her couldn't face the lich without him.
“Having watched you from beside you, I can tell you this for certain: you can do it, Ms. Blanca. And if you win, that will be my—no, ‘our’—victory.”
Even so, Bern told her it was possible.
That she could do it.
So Blanca nodded up and down rather than side to side.
Because that was the least she could do in return.
Bern smiled in satisfaction.
Holding back tears that felt about to spill, Blanca smiled back as well.
Blanca stood up.
Sword in hand, she used the fallen debris as steps and climbed upward, and upward.
To offer victory to her companion.
To make his final adventure a success, not a failure.
Step.
When she stepped back onto the level they had originally been on, she saw the adventurers, who had somehow gathered together again in one place, and the lich fighting against them.
Even if the lich had reclaimed the purple mist while using high-tier spells, that would not make the damage the adventurers had already suffered from touching it disappear.
With the effects of the various negative spells carried in the mist and the fatigue, most of the adventurers were already as weakened as they could possibly be.
By contrast, though the lich had lost all of its death knights—its main force—to Bern, it still had plenty of mana and minions left.
Since they had already tried to flee once and been crushed so miserably, they were fighting only because they had no choice; there was hardly any fighting spirit left on the adventurers' faces.
“Oh? You've crawled out of your own accord to die? If you'd waited until the cleanup was done, you could have kept your lives going a little longer.”
Had it realized that Bern had been defeated?
Somehow, the lich's tone had once again returned to its previous ease.
A cheap fake charisma that only shows when one has an overwhelming advantage.
She had once been afraid of something like that, even to the point of having nightmares.
Because of such a creature, she had lost someone precious twice.
Something surged up from deep within Blanca's heart.
Blanca did not try to suppress that emotion.
She took a step. —The swordsmanship and movement he had taught her were there.
She clenched her fist. —The ring gifted by him asserted its presence.
She felt her heart pounding. —It was a life he had protected by sacrificing his own.
The nature of mana is the trajectory of life.
How one lived, what one did, and where one looked.
The countless fragments she had carried on her back began to merge and form a great tower.
“Tch, has she thrown everything away and gone mad?”
Whether annoyed that Blanca said nothing or thinking it troublesome to let Blanca approach again, the lich fired a black sphere imbued with curses and malice from its hand.
A high-tier offensive spell strong enough to seriously wound even a knight in heavy armor if it hit dead on.
Blanca intercepted it with 『Rock-Burning Spell』, but there was no way a high-tier spell and a mid-tier spell could truly be a match.
The black sphere, only slightly weakened, still rushed straight toward Blanca, and Blanca swung her sword at it.
KWAAAANG!
With a violent explosion, Blanca's body was blasted backward and rolled along the floor.
Watching Blanca dying from burns and the erosion of a curse, the lich burst into loud laughter.
Thunk!
Blanca planted her sword in the ground and, leaning on it, rose to her feet again.
“You’re trying hard. It would be easier if you gave up.”
Watching that struggle as if it were amusing, the lich fired another spell.
Blanca tried to intercept it again this time, but once more failed to win the contest of strength, and her body rolled along the floor.
And then, she got back up again.
“No…?”
At first the lich had attacked Blanca as if toying with a toy, but soon it felt a strange sense of incongruity and hardened its face.
No matter how brutally the lich rained down attacks or tried to cut off her breathing, Blanca never fell.
Even while coughing up blood and rolling on the floor, she somehow avoided fatal wounds by using her sword and spells, and kept the fight going through enhancement and healing.
If it happened once, one could call it luck.
If it happened twice, one could call it grit and tenacity.
But what if it repeated three times, four times—no, more than that?
“You bitch, what the hell did you do!!”
With a roar, a spell filled with murderous intent shot toward Blanca.
Blanca countered with fire again this time, and the two spells clashed.
At a glance, the situation looked exactly the same as before.
BOOOOM!
However, the flames that completely negated the lich's spell proved that the result was entirely different.
The lich's eyes shook violently at the absurd sight of a mid-tier spell fired by a mage who should have been only Tier 3 matching a high-tier spell fired by a Tier 5 mage.
Only then did the lich realize the strange flow of mana occurring around Blanca's body.
When the mana in Blanca's 『The Spell That Makes the Body a Little Stronger』 and 『The Spell That Heals Light Wounds』 touched other mana in the surroundings, it shone, and before long the spells' effects increased.
Mana Trait, 『Firefly』
It causes Blanca's own mana to react with other mana present in the surrounding environment, amplifying their effects.
The more mana there is around her, the more violently the reaction becomes, and the spells produce effects beyond their original limits.
...For a mage who inevitably has to spread mana around in battle—and especially for Lich Mortius, whose specialty was turning mana itself into mist and scattering it everywhere—it was practically a perfect counter.
Realizing the danger, Mortius tried desperately to finish Blanca off quickly, but something that had already been impossible before her enhancement began had no chance of becoming possible now.
No, the more Mortius strained himself to kill Blanca, the more mana he fed her, and the more her stats rose.
Mortius also realized that vicious cycle, but that didn't mean he had any other option.
If he, a mage, didn't use spells, then what on earth was he supposed to do?
The only possible answer would be to send in a warrior type who could keep mana stored inside the body while using it, but the usable warriors among his subordinates had long since been crushed by Bern.
Before long, when he reached the point where he could barely block even Blanca's low-tier spells, let alone her mid-tier ones, Mortius attempted to flee while hiding his body in the mist.
Naturally, Blanca wasn't going to just let that happen.
KWAAAAAAANG!
The ball of flames, which had first been only the size of a small child, reacted with Mortius's mist and grew to the size of a carriage before blazing forth.
Mortius tried to somehow summon a barrier to block the attack, but the enormous flames blew him away together with the barrier.
His body, burned completely black, was reformed around a heart-shaped object that flew in from somewhere.
Blanca fired again without a word, and Mortius turned into a lump of charcoal again the moment he revived.
Mortius, revived once more, shouted in desperation.
“Stop, stop right now!! That heart is your mother’s! Her life and soul are inside that heart! Are you really going to shatter it with your own hands!?”
He froze.
Blanca's movements stopped.
Mortius seized that as his chance and desperately continued.
“Girl, become my disciple—no, my collaborator! Then I'll make a proper body for your mother and revive her! It’s perfectly possible if you reach Tier 6! But if I fall here, your chance to reunite with your mother will be gone forever! Are you really saying that's fine!?”
Mortius had several disciples under the guild.
He naturally knew all about Blanca, the guild's famous figure, and had also figured out that she became an adventurer to save her mother.
There was no way a girl like that would not take the bait of reuniting with her mother, was there?
First he'd stop the fight with sweet talk, and then deal with her by some means other than a direct showdown.
He had no doubt that this was the best plan.
As for the result.
“—I fought to ‘liberate’ my mother. Do you really think I'd let two people see me swayed by that kind of sweet talk?”
Mortius didn't know who the "two" she was talking about were.
He had no time to think about it.
Because the sword that had somehow pierced his chest had already carved out his heart.
For a lich, a heart is a kind of 'wedge' used to remain in this world.
When the last heart that kept him bound to this world was forcibly separated, Mortius's soul left the mortal realm and headed for the underworld.
No, it had to head there.
[—Thank you for the clown act! Too capable to be third-rate, too small a vessel to be first-rate—this was the perfect stage for a second-rate act.]
A voice seductive yet light, mature like a woman and yet fresh like a girl, full of contradiction.
Someone who could even make a mage who had transcended death feel instinctive fear seized Mortius's soul.
[The mage girl's share is the life and vitality in the body. My share is the soul itself. It’s a shame I can't eat innocent human souls because of our splendid Crown Prince's nagging, but that's none of your concern, is it?]
Mortius tried to scream.
But such a luxury was not permitted to him now that only his soul remained.
At the very end, only after becoming a helpless soul itself, the evil lich that had toyed with the souls and lives of countless people finally understood its sin.
The woman's ruby-red lips. The abyss-like darkness opening within them—
[—Then, I'll enjoy the meal.]
Gulp.
***
After everything was over.
Blanca returned to where Bern had been.
The red-haired adventurer who had fallen to the lich's evil spell had vanished without even leaving a corpse behind.
Holding the heart that had once belonged to her mother, and following the traces of the man she loved, the girl finally burst into tears she had been holding back.