Published at 4th of December 2019 11:03 am

Volume 2, Part V: Chapter 16

This chapter is updated by NovelFree.ml

“Spare us the hackneyed lines of ‘but you should be dead,’ Cornelius. You’re a mage. You know all about bodies. About containers. About the creation of life and the granting of sentience. Don’t disappoint me,” Tōko Aozaki says with a bitter tenderness. Alba is silent and has his eyes affixed only on her. On his hands can be seen a faint trembling.

Tōko drops her bag on the marble floor with an accompanying “That should do it.” The bag is the only thing that proves to be different. Her face, her eyes, her hair, the smug smile she wears; all the same. Only the bag has changed. Yesterday it was just a smallish briefcase, but this one is far bigger. One you’d take on a trip, and where you could conceivably hide a small child in.

“I came as fast I could,” Tōko says, “but from the looks of things, I guess I didn’t make it in time. I believe I made it clear that Kokutō isn’t my apprentice, but you just wouldn’t listen. Never taught him a thing about the Art. And in case you’re wondering, nope, I haven’t changed one iota.”

“But—but you should be dead! I snuffed the life out of you with my bare hands!” Alba shouts, seemingly oblivious to what Tōko is saying. He curls his hands into fists to stop himself from trembling. In his mind he is equal parts unbelieving, mad, and fearful, though he tries his best to hide it. Tōko is placid and continues to refuse meeting Alba’s bloodshot stare, choosing instead to retrieve a pack of cigarettes from her pocket.

Alba watches her every move from where he is. The more the figure before him continues to act like the Tōko he knows, the chill in his spine grows ever worse. Unable to contain himself, he cries out to Tōko. “You can’t be here. It’s a mistake. Yes! Some sort of mistake! You’re lost on the way to your next life. The dead should not linger in this world. Begone, spectre!”

He raises a blood-soaked hand, the same hand that Mikiya stabbed. His blood and the blood of Tōko’s pulverized head are coming together in a mix of red for red. He swings this hand in a wide arc in front of him, splattering wet blood all around. As the scattered liquid flies through the air, they combust and burst into sizeable flames in flight like gasoline. All of his remaining malice, he hurls toward Tōko in that desperate weaving of the Art.

The flames whip in arcs and try to wrap around Tōko, but in an instant, she moves her own hand, as if to pull the flames in. Sure enough, the fire is drawn to her hand, where it comes to a halt right before it. Palm open and the concentrted flame hovering above it, Tōko uses it to light the cigarette in her mouth, and by waving it away with a casual disdain, the flames are dispelled.

“Hey, Cornelius, if you don’t want dead men and women in this building then I suggest you file a complaint with this apartment’s owner. Knock the act off already, can’t you tell I’m the real deal? Pretty big difference between the dead and the living. Like cigarettes.” She takes in a satisfied puff, and frowns. “For example, I can tell that this one’s some bad stuff,” Tōko chuckles.

The casualness with which he throws away her comments finally makes Alba realize that the person before him is indeed a living thing, unchanged from the original. But that only makes him repeat the same question, not in disbelief, but due to being unable to understand. So he repeats.

“But you should be dead,” he says, a note of dejection in his voice. The words force a frown on Tōko’s face, leaving unsaid her displeasure in the trite line, allowing her amber eyes to make her point.

“Technically, Cornelius, I did die. Body virtually destroyed, soul severed from the flesh, the whole shebang.”

“Then explain your being here!”

She sighs. “I thought that would have been obvious. I’m the replacement, fresh out of the package,” she says, no absurdity finding its way into her voice. The statement leaves the red-coated mage blank, mouth half open.

“What do you mean a ‘replacement?’ Are you a puppet when you can be revived so easily? Or maybe—” Alba starts to think of other possibilities, other well-kept lore and arcana of the Art.

The puppets that mages create can never match with the human façade. It can move as a man would, but it will expose itself soon enough, through speech, or action, or appearance; something that seems off or wrong in its creation, something that exposes its true nature. That, and the parts that make it tick are not truly alive, only clever mechanisms animated by the Art. A loss of limb—exposing blood and muscle sinew—will reveal it.

The Art cannot create an automaton that contains the spark of humanity. An old mage saying from the Middle Ages, passed down to become common knowledge. Eventually it became almost a rule. Yet despite this, the woman standing in front of Alba is certainly human. Certainly some kind of replica, but completely lacking the distinctive tell that gives away the fakery of all puppets. Which, to Alba, can only mean that this woman is the real Tōko Aozaki.

“Now I see it! Then the one I killed is surely the fake!”

“Just keep lying to yourself, Cornelius. That also means that the mage that bested you yesterday was nothing more than a pale imitation of me, correct?”

“Hmph. Fine, then that was the real thing. But here we have a paradox. You’re saying both are real. How do you explain this inconsistency away?!” Alba cries out to Tōko. But from the look on his face after he says it, it seems he solved the answer by himself. He shakes his head rapidly, still doubting, still thinking it impossible. But how else can he explain it? Can it be possible? “Aozaki, don’t tell me you’re—”

“Ding ding. Both the one you fought yesterday, and the me standing before you today, are fakes. I don’t even know the point that the real became the fake. I don’t even know if it matters anymore.” The mage in the orange trench coat dons a cruel grin.

“Then what are you? Not an original? Was there even an original? But you call yourself Tōko Aozaki, don’t you? With a soul to work the Art, and granted sentience! But all the puppets granted fleeting sentience up to this point have been unable to grasp the existential dilemma of their artificial nature, and end up terminating themselves. How do you break the rules? How do you continue to function?!”

“Everything before me was but second rate sentience, I’d say. I really don’t see the need for how scared you are right now, Cornelius. You call me fake, yet there’s only one Tōko Aozaki. As a parting gift, I’ll even tell you how that came to be. Maybe it’ll be a good learning experience.” Losing a bit of her calm façade, she finally meets Alba’s eye to eye.

“Listen, Cornelius. The me you’re seeing right now is something I kept in my sanctum. It activated itself once you killed Tōko Aozaki. Only been an hour since. I am a mage that traffics in pawns and puppets, so I experiment on them as well. In one of these experiments, I crafted my foremost creation: a perfect puppet imitation of me. No more, and no less than myself. I looked on it, and allowed my thoughts to wander. I thought that having created such a thing, maybe there is no longer any need for me.”

As the puppeteer relates the story to her like a layperson to a priest, Alba gulps. He can’t believe his ears. Heresy to the laws of the Ordo Magi, pure and simple. Why would she not be happy that she achieved this, instead of throwing away her existence?

“Ridiculous,” Alba spits out. “In the end, what you created couldn’t be anything more than an automaton. Assuming you could even make such a thing as you described in the first place. And if you have indeed performed it, then why does it not…why do you not seek ascension? Why do you not aim higher? Mages are never satisfied by the status quo. We seek, manipulate, create, and destroy only for the final step in that ladder.”

“Hey, you’re looking at the state of the art of the Art here, and even when I was gone, it still went on doing the same thing I did. How does that give any puppeteer hope for ascension?”

“But it’s all just supposed to be theory! I wouldn’t allow myself to be cast aside for something new, yet similar to me. Even if it was an achievement that would make my name ring throughout the history of the Art, it is not enough. I must be there to observe it, or else there is no meaning!” Alba screams incoherently as he wraps his arms around himself as if it would protect him from something he didn’t quite yet know. Anyone can discern the difference now between the two mages; between the one who preoccupied himself on the matters of revenge, and the mage that threw herself away for the path of gnosis. But Alba refuses to acknowledge it.

“Call it a difference of opinion and philosophy, Alba. Still, no need to blame yourself. To tell you the truth, I’m sort of jealous of you, actually. I don’t know when I became the way I am. I don’t even know which of me was real anymore. I just woke up when the previous me died. The soul remembers everything, and it’s all there in my head, everything I know. Determinism and entropy kinda says that I take the same action as my predecessor would. After all this, maybe I’ll make another puppet to convince myself that I’m the real thing. The real thing might be the one you killed. It might already be dead. But it’s all the same thing, isn’t it? No way to distinguish us. It’s a quantum superposition like that cat in the box problem. No one’s ever gonna know. But I think what’s important right now for you and me is the fact that I’m here, and that for now, for all intents and purposes, I’m Tōko Aozaki, and if it brings you any measure of comfort, you can think of the one you killed as the fake. We clear? Good! Now we can get down to real business.”

She reaches down for the bag she’d placed on the floor. Alba stares at her opponent, more terrified of her revelation than if she had woven a dozen curses at him. “That’s right,” he says in a low voice. “That’s why Alaya kept you alive. As long as you remained alive, the next iteration of you wouldn’t trigger and come alive.”

Tōko keeps her silence now, only maintaining her harsh glance at the red-coated mage. Alba had long since stopped trying to hold back his trembling. For him, the cold grows stronger as he looks into Tōko’s sterile eyes. He sees no warmth in that amber color, only an efficient intent to kill buried inside them. He never knew Tōko to look like the way she did now. Not even in their time in the Collegium did she show anything as bloodthirsty as she is at this moment.

And Alba comes to the idea that, for him, the Tōko he had known until now was the only real one. Not this cold, standing figure that hides so many secrets even from herself. No, not this side of her that is the ruthless mage that is peer to none. And as he entertains such thoughts, he finds what reason for revenge he holds start to become less significant, less pressing. For he didn’t know what monster he had aligned himself against, or if he really hated it. Because, at the very least, the Tōko Aozaki he knew was very much different.

“Are you real?” he whispers one last time like a confession. Tōko snickers.

“Now what meaning does that question have on something like me?” she hisses, her face a portrait of sweetly ringing malice.

Tōko brings the cigarette held between her fingers back to her mouth. “Now, let’s return to our more pressing problems,” she says as she puffs out gray smoke from her mouth. “You hurt my friend pretty badly with your teasing. Probably didn’t even notice the hour go by.”

Alba, for his part, does indeed remember Tōko saying that it took her an hour to get here. He looks at the boy collapsed at the foot of the stairs. The wounds in his knees remain unchanged. But mysteriously, the wounds in his head and the blood that those wounds are supposed to have spawned are gone.

“What—what manner of sorcery have you done, Aozaki?” Alba asks feebly. All the bluster of his earlier displays have left him, and whatever will he had left to attack Tōko is gone in the face of her greater proficiency.

“Tsk tsk. We mages shouldn’t use that word so lightly. Remember: this is the third time I’ve been in this lobby. The first time I was here, I placed my own spell. On a delayed trigger, if you will. A little trick I placed in advance that I could play in tonight’s party. Think back to the time of your surprise when our boy Kokutō here lunged at you with the knife.”

“That was the trick?” Alba moans in regret, remembering that exact time. There is a void in his memory, something missing that connects what happened before and after the boy’s attack on him. A momentary lapse? Some illusion the puppet master had set up beforehand that manipulated his perception? He laughs in futility.

“So I was playing right into your hands from the very start, you witch. You must have enjoyed yourself immensely, Aozaki. Though I am loathe to admit it, I must have seemed quite the fool.”

“Oh, don’t blame yourself overmuch. After all, I never thought I’d end up dying. Rest easy, though. I didn’t come here again to pay back that particular act, but for something else. That you and Kokutō happened to be here is a mere convenience.” Tōko gives a slight nudge to the bag placed beside her feet and makes it fall to the ground. Or roll over, more like. Its shape is approximately that of a cube, and its size intimidatingly large.

“If you are not here for revenge, then what is your purpose?” Alba asks. “To stop Alaya’s mad attempts at experimenting with the Art, no doubt.”

“Not by a long shot. Why should I when that thing takes care of itself? No, Alba. My business is with you alone.”

As though he’d arrived at the same conclusion, Alba nods. But, he wonders, why him if Tōko says she bears him no ill will, or any intent to interfere in Alaya’s experiments? Why does she look so tensed and prepared on spilling blood? “Why? I’ve done nothing else to you,” he says in protest.

“Nothing much more than a trifle. I mean, I’ve pretty much gotten over your irrational hatred of me. To tell you the truth, I rather preferred it that way ever since our time in the Collegium together. It was proof that I was always better.”

“Then why?!”

“Still don’t remember? It’s a very simple reason: you called me by a moniker far too old to be funny.” The sound of Tōko’s suitcase opening rings out in the lobby, and within it Alba can only see a dark mass which somehow remains untouched by all the light. And within that there are two things—

“Come now, recall those words in the Collegium,” Tōko declares. “Recall the name “Wild Red.” Recall how I swore to destroy anyone who said it. And how I did.” —two lights— or two eyes.

And upon seeing it, Alba finally understands. He chastises himself belatedly for not realizing it sooner. This is a box for sealing magical familiars inside, similar to what Tōko used before, only larger. And the creature in it now, whatever it is, emerges from the seemingly infinite depths of the box with baffling speed to capture Cornelius Alba with thorn-lined tendrils. He feels a thousand tiny mouths chewing and consuming him in small portions as he is dragged into the box, being eaten alive. When only his head and neck remain visible, Alba and the puppetmaster’s eyes meet for the last time before he is completely consumed. Her eyes are eyes of laughter. And he finally realizes his foolishness in ever thinking that he could rival such a monster. He remembers Alaya’s last words to him. Perhaps he should have seen this coming after all. The last thoughts in the mind of a mage slowly being eaten.

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