"Explode, crush, tear."
With Eudokia's voice, an explosion erupted above Enkrid's head, an invisible hand bore down on his shoulder, and at the same time three streams of wind blades slashed across his body.
A feast of spells. A storm of spells poured down, all of it aimed at a single swordsman.
That swordsman, Enkrid, kept his eyes half-lidded and calmly swung his sword with both hands on the grip.
It was not hurried, yet there was nothing lacking in the speed, so there was no better word for it than calm.
With the first high horizontal slash, the flames that had burst forth with the explosion collapsed and vanished, while the force pressing on his shoulder twisted aside and struck the ground.
Thump!
Where Enkrid had been standing just before, the ground was gouged out to the width of a decent-sized house, a finger-joint deep.
The three short, snapping vertical cuts that followed the high horizontal slash shattered the blades made of wind.
It was vague whether he had caught the flow of mana and severed it, or whether he had simply crushed it down through force.
It almost seemed like he was claiming that no spell meant anything.
Eudokia thought that if he opened even the slightest gap, that swordsman would ignore space itself and charge straight in, and that was not an exaggeration.
I can't give him an opening. He thought.
"Good!"
Shouting, Eudokia grandly gifted the bastard a wave of spells. He formed seals with both hands and recited spells with his mouth, but from the very beginning until now, the speed at which he manifested spells had not slowed in the slightest.
"Flame bird of Merak, fly along Guhinna's stem."
He even mixed in borrowed spells.
"Hold him."
At times he manifested spells with nothing more than a simple trigger word.
Flame became arrows, then spearheads, then transformed into birds and flew at him, and if he cut through all of that and came out the other side, an ice field greeted him. Upon that ice field, black hands rose up again, as though they would snap the ankles of anyone who dared walk over it, but all of it was useless.
With a single cut that tapped the ground, the frozen earth split apart. A few kicks, and the black hands clutching at ankles scattered like smoke.
Did he sever mana links only with a sword? No. He did it with his feet too. Enkrid was proving that now.
The process by which mana worked wonders upon reality was interrupted midway. Even for Eudokia, this was the first time he had ever experienced such a thing, but he was a mage who would not be driven back even against demons.
He poured out everything he had, and the swordsman, meeting that wave of spells head on, butchered all of it with a single sword.
***
-Will you repeat a day like this?
Who are you?
-Was this what you wanted?
Do you know how to handle a sword? Then come at me.
-You are different from me, yet you will reach the same ending.
I don't know what kind of nonsense you're babbling, but you ought to finish swinging your sword.
Enkrid's desire was clear, and the Will dwelling within that desire illuminated the world with utter clarity.
'Come at me.'
Let's speak through swordsmanship. Is anything else needed right now? No. All that remained in the world was the sword and the one holding it.
"I don't think so."
Another voice intruded here.
What is this now?
The simple, lucid world became complicated.
"You should've stopped before you ended up like this."
"Oh, you too?"
"Was this really what you wanted?"
They were all different voices. Even while hearing them, Enkrid crossed swords with the appearing blades and swordsmanship and won. He won, and won again. He cut down everything he saw.
Sword hilts suddenly appeared and endlessly spat out swordsmanship.
His mind was exalted by that repeated joy, and a distant haze came over him. It led Enkrid's mind and memories somewhere else.
***
"...Wake up, Zaiden."
"Is it morning already?"
"Then what, you think it's night?"
Zaiden looked at the friend who had woken him. His friend said,
"Fuck, why do I have to wake up some bastard instead of a woman?"
"Because I'm the boss?"
At Zaiden's answer, his friend's face twisted at once.
"Get lost."
But what was this son of a bitch's name again?
Zaiden couldn't remember the name of the bastard standing in front of him.
All he remembered was:
'The guy who'd been with me since home.'
If he himself had talent for swordsmanship, this bastard was good with a bow. He was good at throwing daggers too.
And so he and that friend wandered the continent. It wasn't like they had some grand goal.
In a harsh world, force was essential, and since they had talent for that kind of thing, they had only thought it would be nice to make a living with it.
What a soft way of thinking it had been.
"Leave me, you idiot."
His friend died. The bastard he had grown up with since birth, someone it would have been fair to call half a brother, died.
They had picked a fight with a bandit gang, and in the sword fight his side had completely overpowered them, but the witch's spell hidden among the bandits had been fatal.
Zaiden repeated running and fighting, and in the end slaughtered the bandits to the last man. In the process, he killed the witch too.
Only then did he barely recover his friend's corpse, but because he had spent over half a month on the run, maggots were boiling in his friend's chest. Thousands of insects crawled over the skin of his dead friend.
He vomited, cried, and spat curses. Even so, he got up again and kept living.
After that too, this was the only thing he knew how to do and the only thing he was good at, so he took up the sword. He cut down bandits and cut down monsters.
"Why does your face always look so gloomy?"
It was a city reeking with stench and blood. A place where a number of criminals had gathered and lived behind fences.
She was a woman he had met in a place he had entered on a bounty job.
"That's not a face that belongs here."
She said it casually. That she liked his face, or something. As if. Zaiden himself knew better than anyone that after living such a rough life, he had a vicious look to him. She was from some guild or other, the adopted daughter of its guildmaster.
"Help me out."
Was this what people called fate?
They had not even seen each other three times before they suddenly grew close, and she revealed her true feelings. She said she wanted revenge for her mother. The guildmaster was the target.
He helped her. And then he was hunted again. This time too, his luck was rotten.
A mage the guild had kept hidden stepped forward. They said a lucky man could go his whole life without ever meeting one real mage.
So why did he keep running into them so often?
Was his luck just that filthy? He didn't know.
Zaiden survived again. He wiped out an entire guild in the process, and his name spread.
He built a mercenary company with the woman who became his lover. Good people gathered around them, and he dreamed of a stable life.
He had children. A son and a daughter. The two of them grew up wonderfully.
"I'll become the godfather of your children."
There were many good people around him.
"Not a godfather. Seems to me grandfather would suit you better."
Zaiden took an old mercenary who had joined the company from the very beginning as his adoptive father. The man cried, saying he had never had a family even once in his whole life. Zaiden was the same.
Their daughter reached out and wiped away the old man's tears.
In summer they went to the stream to play in the water, and in winter they lit bonfires and grilled meat.
The world was harsh, but Zaiden's skill was enough to give even fairly capable people several moves' handicap, so at least this group could make a living.
Once he had some room to breathe, the unjust and the weak began to catch his eye. His hand reached out first to those who wanted help.
"Please help us."
He did not turn away from those words. Where had it all started to go wrong?
Didn't they say that happy times always felt short, no matter how long they were?
Zaiden settled down and enjoyed eight years of happiness, but in his life that was far too short. A mere instant. That was how it felt to him.
"Please help us."
People in desperate circumstances somehow kept finding him, and Zaiden could never turn away from such people.
"This feels strange. Maybe I'm just worrying too much, but somehow more and more people have started coming to find you."
His adoptive father had said that. Back then, they didn't know. Back then, they truly didn't know that someone's malice was aimed at this place.
After that, his memory broke in fragments. Someone came and offered to spare one of the two children if he handed over the other.
He told them to stop spewing bullshit, but one of the people he had helped betrayed him and kidnapped his daughter. His son tried to stop them, was stabbed in the stomach, and died after suffering for three days.
"It's not my fault. This was the only way I could live."
Someone else's betrayal followed. Ah, those dogshit bastards.
How pitifully small was human goodwill.
And why was human malice so vivid?
No matter how vast the shadow cast over the city was—
"If we'd joined forces and fought, we might've won!"
His adoptive father raged, but it was useless. Bloody tears flowed from the old man's eyes. His eyeballs had been gouged out, so tears could no longer flow from them and blood came in their place.
"If everyone died, the city would be finished. Even if the city was ruined, I was only looking for my own way to survive."
The traitor spoke. The vile bastard wagged his tongue so well.
Those were the words of the same man who had said this was a free city, that they should settle here and build a new life together.
Zaiden did not laugh. A father who has lost his children and his parent loses laughter. That was like a law of nature.
He cut down the city's mayor. Factional fighting broke out. Those who followed him and those who said the city had to be protected shed each other's blood.
By the time that fight ended, a group of mages appeared. They were bastards called the Masters of the Golden Thread, who claimed they would shape the world through magic. They were the ones who had meant to offer up his children as sacrifices. Naturally, every last one of them was a true mage who used spells.
"So it was you. The one who killed a mage from our society?"
One of them said that. Zaiden regretted everything.
He should never have picked up a sword, never have come out into the world, never have met people, never have given his heart to anyone, never have killed a mage, should have refused every plea for help.
His wife died, and his adoptive father and children died too. His comrades, his friends, there was not a single one left alive.
Zaiden endured for three days and nights in that state, then fled into the mountains and survived by chewing the flesh of beasts and drinking the blood of monsters.
The magical society called the Masters of the Golden Thread did not concern itself over a mere swordsman.
They were people meant for greater things. Zaiden dragged himself into survival. Then he went back into a city and hid. When he gained a brief moment to catch his breath, lament, sorrow, grief, regret, all of it blended together and became a single emotion.
Hatred rose up. He hated everything in the world down to the marrow. He hated the world that had taken everything he possessed, and he hated every god, but the thing he hated most of all was—
'magic.'
The city itself was spoils won by the Masters of the Golden Thread. His daughter and son had been sacrifices in the scheme they had intended.
Mages. Kill them.
It was almost laughable: even the small city where he had briefly taken refuge was half wiped out by crazed bastards who came to kill people just so they could measure the power of his spells.
The moment the thread of reason snapped, Zaiden's world was no longer the same.
"Take revenge for me."
A dying woman pressed a small talisman into his hand. At some point, the talisman vanished as if it were melting into his palm.
After that, Zaiden lived in a world unlike the one before. His body was too ruined to face mages who came to train themselves on him.
That was how he experienced his first death, and how he began repeating this day. In that day that had started over, his world changed. Not just in words. Truly, everything in the world looked different. To him, the world held only two colors.
White or black.
And his goal was to cut, stab, and erase the black thing. So he did. He did not know how many days he had repeated, or how much time had passed.
Whenever he opened his eyes, he searched for black things, and while looking at them, he honed his swordsmanship.
'I can feel spells.'
Spell detection had become natural to his body simply because he had died so many times. The white things were those who knew nothing of spells, and the black things were those who wielded them.
Only that mattered. Reason did not. He had thrown it away. He was given the name Spell Butcher. Ordinary people feared him just the same.
Among mages he was called the Spell Butcher, but ordinarily he was called the Lord of Rage, the Berserker.
He was the first on this land to entrust everything to the Will called rage.
In an age when the very concept of knights did not yet exist. He was a man who had tried and failed to kill every mage living on the continent.
"I desire peace."
Because he had lived his whole life surrendering himself to hatred, he wanted a day where nothing happened. He wanted neither happiness nor unhappiness, wanted nothing at all, wished only to remain in a day where he did nothing.
"A peaceful day. That alone is all I want."
Enkrid looked at the Ferryman, whose expression was gloomy.
His original name was Zaiden. Inside the mindscape, he revealed his true form.
A clean cut face, black hair that covered his shoulders. His eyes were black too. Both his atmosphere and appearance were dreary. As his wife in memory had once been entangled with him, his features were decent enough to look at.
He asked,
"I saw the world in black and white, but you put more weight on swordsmanship. Even so, it changes nothing. If you remain there, you too will become the same as me."
Was this a threat? Or was he saying it was over now?
It was neither.
"I desire peace."
He said it like a habit, then opened his mouth again.
"Wake up, Enki. If you stay there, all that awaits you is to fight and fight until it ends."
The Ferryman woke Enkrid from sleep. He told him not to become drunk on that exalted state, but to remember what he had to do in reality.
"Protect those standing behind you, as you desire and as you wish."
The moment he heard those words, Enkrid reached the deep memory of Zaiden.