Published at 4th of December 2019 11:13 am

Volume 2, Part V: Chapter 18

This chapter is updated by NovelFree.ml

Shiki stops walking just outside the entrance to the corridor. Sword pointed downward at the floor, she sees the black-coated mage Sōren Alaya from afar, separated from each other by a distance of about ten meters.

“I do not understand. How did you destroy my ward, Shiki Ryōgi?” Alaya says, his face grimacing in pain. It is the question that he has already repeated many times in his mind. And though he suspects knows the answer, he still asks it so that the gravity of it becomes more real.

The girl before him now is the same girl that only last night suffered broken ribs and lost her consciousness at his own hands. In the closed space that lay between the walls of the building, she awoke, breaking the barriers with the arms she used to weave her own variety of sorcery.

What is “ ” is antonymic to infinity. The concept of infinity is twinned with the concept of a finite existence. It is this finite existence, this end of all things that Shiki Ryōgi observes with her Arcane Eyes, and the same end that she cuts to make entropy act quickly, almost immediately. The prison she was contained in was made to be infinite, an inconceivable non-Euclidean space. But there is no true infinity. Only ends, driven by processes both mechanical and mystical. The only denial of the end that exists is the true nothingness of “ ”. To this girl, the space was nothing more than a room with its door unbarred and unguarded. It shames Alaya to admit it as such.

“Someone must have made you aware of it,” he protests. “The injury I inflicted was far too severe for it to have healed already. Why does that body move? Why did you awake despite your wounds? Why did you not stay in slumber for only a precious few minutes more?” Alaya’s voice is rough, the only sign he has yet given of any anger he can present. The barrier never mattered, he thinks, but had she only kept her peace for a few more minutes, all would have been settled.

Did she come back to life by herself, or did someone assist her? The question rings again and again in Alaya’s mind. Did someone wake her, make her aware she was imprisoned, and told her the secret to setting herself free? The damnable Art of Tōko Aozaki? No, she’d have had no time, having to duel me in the first time, and Alba in the second. His face shows him in deep thought, running over the possibilities. He looks at the palm of his hand, the same hand that wiped Tomoe Enjō off completely only minutes ago. Perhaps the most decisive minutes he ever gave.

“It was Tomoe Enjō, was it not?” Alaya guesses, spitting out the name like a powerful curse.

Shiki only shakes her head in disagreement. “Nah, Enjō didn’t have a thing to do with waking me up. No one did. Woke up by my own self. Enjō didn’t even need to come here,” she says quietly. The wind blowing from the open hallway behind Alaya makes his greatcoat ruffle, and Shiki’s hair sway. “But to give him some credit, he’s the reason you failed.”

When Shiki says this, Alaya’s dark eyes narrow in curiosity as he ponders on what she said. Assuming something would be able to stop him, it would have been Shiki or Tōko Aozaki. Not the actor being pulled along on its strings.

“Impossible,” Alaya declares. “He could not do anything. He played his part well as a puppet, to bring you here.”

“True, he may have never had any real chance. But can you let go on the whole ‘he was always a puppet’ thing? You’re like the biggest guy in denial if you just keep saying it.”

Alaya cannot reply, for he knows it is true. When Tomoe Enjō escaped from the cycle he had set, Alaya thought that he could be used. He integrated him into his plan, adjusting it to allow for what he would do. But his escape itself was never part of the original plan. Wouldn’t that agency go against what Alaya had been saying all along? And it had slipped past him, even allowed him to affect the plan that he had long drawn up.

“You saw that little chink in your plan and decided to use it,” Shiki says. “But that one little mistake put a lotta holes in it. I mean, he’s the one that brought me here, wasn’t he? And guess who’s wrecking your party now? Just him escaping was already plenty significant.” She advances one step forward, sluggishly, almost drunkenly, and it throws the black-coated mage off enough for him to hesitate readying his arm as he usually would.

Alaya senses something wrong, something different about her. He does not know where she learned the knowledge of Tomoe Enjō’s destruction, and can only guess. The emotion emanating from her is…hate? A trifling difference, Alaya considers. Mere change in her thoughts does not bridge the gap between our ability. And yet, Alaya cannot help but see her as an entirely different being.

Shiki continues her ponderous advance. She doesn’t even look like she is ready to fight. She speaks again.

“Honestly, I don’t give a damn about you. But you gave me a hard time a few days ago, and I’m thinking maybe it’s time to pay you back. And so you’ll die here, tonight.” Her gaze is sleepy, her eyes less sharp. “But you know what? This is the first time that I’m not really excited about killing someone. Even though I know this round’s gonna go down to the wire, I can’t even laugh.”

The sword in Shiki’s hand clicks as her previously lax grip on it suddenly changes into a more firm, more secure purchase on the grip. Advancing slowly, she maintains her forward gaze as the sword rests beside her, hilt at waist level and pointing downwards. This finally makes the mage raise his hand, deploying the three circular lines that traditionally surround him in a perimeter.

“Very well. If this is what you desire,” Alaya says as he readies himself. “Killing you will only delay me shortly in the grand scheme of things. I should never have hoped to capture you alive from the very beginning. I will find a way to revive you, and transfer my soul. Though this body may expire, it is a small price to pay to reach the spiral of origin.”

Shiki doesn’t answer, but instead stops her advance when she sees the circular perimeter. The distance between them has closed somewhat. The outermost circle in Alaya’s threefold perimeter extends a four meter radius from him. Shiki stops two meters beyond the perimeter. Briefly, the mage can sense Shiki’s thirst for blood shift from winter cold to summer heat, feels it wrap around the corridor and make his hair stand on end. But even sensing this intimidating change in her, even knowing the age, quality, and pedigree of the sword she holds in her hand, he is confident in Shiki’s defeat. Her swordplay will not avail her today.

But Shiki senses something different. If the mage no longer thought that letting her live would be an option, he would not have allowed Shiki to close the distance the way she did. No, he would have killed her from afar outright. Alaya still holds out hope that he can still take her alive, and it is that little detail, Shiki thinks, that gives her the advantage.

Halted just outside the wards that Alaya deployed, Shiki readies herself. Her second hand grips the hilt of the sword. Her back lowers slightly, and her center of mass along with it, arching herself in a stance ready to spring. All traces of the languor that possessed her previously is now well and truly gone. She brings the sword front and center, pointing it angled with the tip leveled at her enemy’s throat. The most basic stance of any discipline of swordplay.

Facing the mage, she closes her eyes and nods in understanding. “Now I know,” she says softly. “I don’t really want to kill you. It’s just that I can’t stand the thought of you existing.” Her last thoughts for Tomoe’s killer.

The scent of murder is high in the air, and both Alaya and Shiki smell it, letting it pass over their entirety in one sweet instant. In the next, the invisible signal for battle is given, and the duel begins.

A flash, then Shiki’s eyes open.

Alaya channels his mana into his outstretched hand, his motivating force in this fight not the confidence which infused him in previous conflicts, but instead the rare, almost foreign emotion that gripped him since he saw Shiki walking the lobby: the emotion of dread. Which is why he feels he must kill her here, now.

“SHUKU!” he roars angrily, clenching his hand into a fist, defining a space around Shiki that he would crush. The lag between the lorica and the weaving of the spell is so small as to be nonexistent, and one casting of it should be enough to dispose of the girl.

But Shiki is fast, anticipating his spell. In a flash the sword is raised high above her head, the speed blindingly fast. With the swiftness with which she raised her sword, she lets it fly downward in a vicious slash. The spell manifests only for a moment, but Shiki kills it, just as surely as the ringing sound of her blade cutting air seems to cancel out Alaya’s booming voice.

The mage attempts to repeat the spell. He need only open his palm again, and then close it. But it is too slow for him to react properly. He hasn’t even spoken, hasn’t even entered the spell’s weaving in his mind, when Shiki displaces from her position. She shifts the sword to her side at waist level—a side stance that allows for wide swings—and sprints to her target. Before the fight, Alaya considered the loss of one ward to be acceptable, thinking to take Shiki with the second. But now her blinding advance eliminates two of the wards in quick succession; two steps forward and two slashes swung gracefully from both flanks. And still she advances. She has just closed the previously six meter gap into zero. One more step, one more breath, timed with one more strike to end the game.

The sword comes from Alaya’s right flank, and he sees the blade flow in a diagonal cut. Her speed almost seems to make time flow in discrete events rather than arbitrary measurements of seconds. The attack is similar to her previous two blows, and its telegraphed nature allows Alaya to dodge it by jumping back deeper into the hallway, widening the distance between the two. A brief pause as the mage studies his opponent with a glance.

From Shiki’s lips, a single, straight line of fresh blood runs from mouth to chin. But Alaya knows she has taken no blow yet. Then it must be yesterday’s wound. The broken ribs, the internal organ damage. Still in their fragile healing state, they must have been reopened, and even walking forces blood from her throat. She is clearly injured, and yet she dances with such single-mindedness. Alaya lets the right arm rest at his side.

That is, until he realizes there is no more arm. From the top of his shoulder all the way to his right chest, the clear traces of a clean strike can be seen, and on the floor lies his missing arm. His manipulation of space made the backstep he performed faster than any normal human, yet Shiki was still able to cut him with a strike so perfect that even the owner of the arm never noticed it until after the fact.

“What manner of creature—” Alaya leaves the question unfinished. Unmindful of the injury, he focuses on his enemy. The strike could have been fatal. If his third ward had not been present, the slash would have dealt him a blow that would no doubt cut him in two. But it had instead slowed down Shiki’s strike enough to save him. But Alaya is instead simultaneously fascinated by Shiki’s complete difference from the night of their first duel. Is it anger from what he did to Enjō? No, surely not. He narrows his gaze at the girl in the white kimono.

Suddenly, she straightens herself and recovers a hand from the grip of the sword, releasing her tensed stance, suddenly turning back into the girl of last night. The recovered hand cups her mouth, and she coughs twice. The hand drips regurgitated blood. If she did not have to fight such severe wounds, Alaya ponders, she would give me no respite.

“You change with the weapon you hold,” the black-coated mage observes in astonishment. It is the reason she seems so different. Her extensive training in the dance of the sword changes her, forcing her into an almost trance-like state. Her mind compartmentalizes much like, as Alaya suspects, the past warriors did by training their mind to shape their bodies as a weapon. The fight was killing and survival, outside it was normalcy. “Hmph. A form of autohypnosis, as mages do when working the Art,” he mutters, his voice struggling to hold back the pain from his right arm.

Shiki shrugs. “Whatever you wanna call it, I guess.”

Alaya curses his own dismissal of her sudden shift in demeanor. When she opened her eyes; that’s when it must have occurred. To think the Ryōgi dynasty would still teach such vulgar disciplines. He knew too that Shiki bridging the space between them in what almost seemed like one step was no coincidence. Her movement, the sway of her sword, her attention, all focused and refined to make her a deadly living weapon, and she was the only one who knew about it. He had thought her tools to be only the Arcane Eyes of Death Perception and her knife, but in truth, her skill with the sword is far greater.

“You have fooled me, Shiki Ryōgi. I had thought you had revealed all you could about your skill in combat when you danced with Fujino Asagami. But I see you have this one last trick.” Shiki shakes her head slowly in reply. Whether it is an affirmative or a disparaging negative, Alaya can’t say. “And so we meet properly at last,” he shouts as he pressed down on the gaping wound of his former right arm.

The girl in the white kimono reveals a smile, the first truly gentle smile she has performed; a smile that signals the end. Returning to her original hard posture, she runs toward Alaya like a loosed arrow. He knows that Shiki can read him now, knows what to expect, and so he won’t be able to dodge this next strike. But he won’t allow her to press the advantage so easily, not here in his sanctum. He gambles his chances on meeting Shiki’s advance. He steps forward, and shouts.

“DakatsU!” In time with this, Alaya raises his left arm in an attempt to block Shiki’s attack. He hopes that the sarira—the sacred remains of devout masters—embedded within, will ward away most of the damage the slash will inflict. Even she will not easily be able to see the lines of entropy. Shiki’s sword impacts his arm, and in an instant, Alaya can see that the blow has been checked.

As soon as he realizes this, he wastes no time in his next move. He animates his severed arm with an improvised working of the Art, making the arm move toward Shiki with unnatural speed. It slithers along the floor until, when it nears Shiki, it springs up and grabs her by the throat, pressing hard and choking her.

Shiki drops her guard at the move she couldn’t anticipate, and Alaya presses the advantage he has momentarily gained. He retreats one step to pull back the left arm that warded off Shiki’s previous attack, and extends it again with open palm right in front of Shiki.

“Shuku!” He clenches his fist, and tightens space yet again. Shiki feels her body crumpling with a compelling force seeming to come from all places at once, and an audible grunt of pain finally escapes her lips. The leather jacket is torn away, and she is forced away from where she stood, Alaya having manipulated the space to compress to a size far smaller than it appeared to be.

At first, Shiki actually looks like she will fall hard to the floor from the attack, but she catches her footing just in time. Quickly, she redoubles her attack, the corridor funneling her into a singular path directly toward Alaya again and again. For a moment, she seems to disappear from Alaya’s sight, but she has only bent low and run fast toward him, getting under his guard more quickly than he can react. The sword moves in a blur, and it instantly strikes Alaya right in his center of mass.

The mage can feel his accumulated life ebbing away for only a fleeting instant. “Fool!” shouts Alaya as he attempts to deliver a kick towards Shiki’s midsection to ward her away. It’s an move easy to see, and so Shiki handily dodges it by jumping widely to the side, but the blade slides out of its shallow cut as she moves.

Alaya now understands. If I want to stop her, the structure will have to go with it! The mage opens his left hand to crush space for the third time. Having gained some distance from the jump, Shiki easily sees the spell coming. A quick but violent slash prevents it from manifesting any further around her. But after the slash, she stands stock still.

Alaya has completely vanished, black greatcoat and all.

Nothing I can do about whatever magic he uses to move around, thinks Shiki. If he wants to run, I’ll let him run. She runs to the edge of the hallway, with the view of the outside, and puts a hand on the railing as she casts her eyes below to find her target.

But he’s not gonna get away this time. Without hesitation, Shiki leaps over the edge.

Away from Shiki, Alaya begins to crush the building itself. It might damage Shiki’s body, the same body he planned on using, but as long as he can still restore it to some semblance of a human function, then let its shape be damned. Even if the skull is shattered and the gray matter scattered, it can be replaced. What matters to him is that the body not expire completely until he works upon it, so that he can tap the soul connected to the spiral of origin.

The loss of his arm and the stab on his chest are nothing compared to the ultimate goal, the ars magna to which he has struggled toward these many years. As long as he reaches the spiral of origin, where everything begins and ends, all is well. What he must do remains the same, only delayed now.

This seems to be the only option now to prevent a stalemate between us, Alaya thinks. Had I only killed her outright, it would not have come to this. Still, it has come, and I must close this chapter of her life.

Weaving the Art and relocating him through space, Alaya has placed himself in the garden outside the building, which as far as he is concerned, feels like stepping out of his own body. He sees the greenery that surrounds the building often, but it has been so long since he has set foot in it. Though a part of the grounds, the dominating will of his subjective reality that strengthened him so much inside has little effect here. After he emerges from his relocation, he wastes no time. He looks up and extends his remaining arm skyward to point to the very top of the cylindrical structure, opening his palm.

The next thing he knows, a vicious cut goes straight down and through his left shoulder.

The next thing he knew, a vicious cut went straight down and through his left shoulder.

“Shiki…Ryōgi,” he manages to gurgle out with difficulty as he looks up at the night sky. “You damned…fool of a woman.” He coughs, and blood emerges red and blooming from his mouth. Not given a chance to land on either himself or Shiki, the droplets of blood are carried away on the wind only a few feet away, but now a distance he can no longer traverse. “All this…impossible.”

Alaya had emerged in the grounds outside the building, looked up at the structure to work his spell, only to meet the fleeting sight of Shiki Ryōgi falling rapidly from the tenth floor. Which means there was little interval between the mage’s weaving of his relocation spell, and the girl’s thoughtless descent from the highest floor of the building. What confidence possessed her at that moment, he will never know. He suspects he would never be able to know. How could Shiki have known that he would appear in the grounds outside? And even given this, who would even think to jump off and think they would land safely? To aim and hit a lone man from that height at that nearly uncontrolled fall is an act that has gone well past recklessness and into the realm of some miraculous foresight. As if she’d known.

And yet she did it. Without Alaya not having even completed the spell, having not even manifested in the garden yet, she jumped and did it. And at almost the exact same time as he appeared, he was struck by Shiki’s blow. The arm that he had extended upward very quickly became an improvised shield, but it was not enough to stop the slash from landing in his left shoulder, reaching all the way to his abdomen. Even the arcane shield that the sarira in his arm had afforded him was not enough to stop the sheer force of it.

As for Shiki, she is unconscious and still, standing but leaning on the blade inside Alaya’s body. Ironically, for all the defenses Alaya put up—his arm, the protection of the sarira, and the last ward that he had managed to erect at the last moment—Shiki broke through all of them and they served only to cushion her fall. Without them, the fall would have been fatal at worst, or aggravated her internal damage and killed her eventually at best. Another miracle.

Her grip on the sword is tight as rigor mortis. Alaya’s brow clouds his already anguished face as he looks upon the unconscious Shiki. “You were prepared to risk it all on one gamble to kill me. No, if not through this, than through another way, surely. You could kill me. Perhaps it was no risk at all. It is a poor sight to see Sōren Alaya defeated by a neophyte such as you.” His words this time finally ring without his previous posturing.

Alaya’s left arm is virtually severed, and the right is long gone. The mage, still standing, kicks the unconscious Shiki away, striking her chest. Her body flies away from him and a few feet deeper into the grounds. But Shiki continues to cling tightly to the sword hilt, even as it is still embedded in the mage’s body. So the blade, having also been weakened by the impact of the fall, is now forced into two: one half remaining embedded in Alaya’s body, and the other half in Shiki’s possession. And with that, the four hundred years of its history come to an end.

Shiki, now collapsed on the garden soil, remains unmoving. Looking at her with displeasure, he mutters. “You lie there finally wearing the look of a girl your age.” The mage, too, is unmoving as his face grows dark. The last bit of his energy has been expended in kicking Shiki away, and now he can’t do anything. For he feels that the slash has struck more than just the body: one of his lines of death must have been cut. “Through that appearance, I know we will never do battle again.”

The mage dispels the ward that is already fading fast, and whispers to himself in a sort of prayer. “My origin is known to me. It is quiescence. Those whose origin is awakened returns soon to the spiral.”

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