Inevitable Disaster

 

Now then,

shall we begin?

 

I noticed the anomaly immediately.

"Dad, the bells…"

Chryse clutched the hem of my clothes, her expression uneasy. Bells were ringing from multiple directions.

The alarm bells that signaled disasters were designed so that the one nearest the source would ring, indicating the approximate location. It wasn't unheard of for two or three to sound simultaneously if a disaster struck right at the midpoint between evenly spaced bell towers.

But an endless clamor of bells from every direction was clearly an emergency.

"Nina!"

I rushed out of Chryse's room to find that Nina had already donned her white coat and was fully prepared to leave.

"I'm heading to the clinic. You should—"

"I'm going to Mirel."

Whatever kind of disaster this was, there would inevitably be injuries. If Nina's job was to rush to the clinic, mine was to assess the situation. And for that, going to the head of the Swordsaints was probably the surest bet.

Nina must have been thinking the same thing, because she gave a quick nod, then turned her gaze to Chryse.

"I'll go with Dad."

"I'd rather you stayed home and kept out of trouble… but fine."

Nina hesitated for only a moment before deciding she couldn't afford to argue and dashing outside. I grabbed my staff from my room and headed out with Chryse.

"Chryse, take my hand. —Wind!"

I grasped Chryse's hand and raised the staff with my other arm. Slender and nearly as tall as I was, the staff had been polished from a branch of Ai's grave marker tree, the same one I'd been given long ago to find the light of souls.

I had never realized it until now, but a staff seemed to have effects similar to an incantation. That is, it boosted the output of magic and stabilized its precision. Even when using sorcery, it allowed one to cast at a higher tier than when empty-handed.

However, it wasn't as simple as just holding any staff. There seemed to be a compatibility between staff, wielder, and magic that varied based on the material, length, and thickness. When the staff and spell were well suited to each other, they would amplify one another, but a poor match could yield no benefit at all, or in the worst cases, actively backfire.

And this staff, crafted from Ai's tree, was a perfect match for me.

A gust of wind enveloped Chryse and me, and in an instant we soared high into the sky. Despite acceleration that rivaled a roller coaster, there was absolutely no sensation of pressure or breathlessness. Even in human form, it felt as though I were flying as a dragon.

With this staff in hand, I could wield fire and wind magic with far more flexibility and finesse than sorcery allowed.

"Dad, over there!"

Tucked under my arm, Chryse pointed at the ground below. Several people were fleeing in panic, pursued by creatures I had never seen before.

"Here we go, Chryse!"

"Right!"

I reversed into a sharp dive. We swept in a wide arc right across the creatures' path, and in their surprise, they froze in place.

"Spear of Ice!"

Chryse's sorcery struck true, piercing one through the chest.

"Th-Thank you, Mentor!"

"Leave this to us and run. The school buildings are sturdy, so you should be safe there."

After giving those instructions to the villagers who had been fleeing in panic, I turned my gaze to the creature lying on the ground. It had a wrinkled, ape-like face, hairless and covered in smooth black skin, and it had been running on two legs. It looked almost like…

"Dad."

Chryse stared at the creature, motionless on the ground, and her expression stiffened.

"This creature… doesn't have a soul."

"What?"

According to Chryse's research, all living things possess souls to some degree. Even objects could possess a faint one in certain cases. Our frying pan, for instance, which had been in use for close to five hundred years.

The exception was spirits. Not only the lesser spirits, which were indistinguishable from natural phenomena, but even the greater spirits, whose forms and behaviors were no different from those of living creatures, possessed no souls.

Did that mean this creature was a spirit? But if so, it was strange that Chryse's sorcery had killed it so easily. Spirit sorcery was nearly ineffective against spirits, and killing one wouldn't leave a corpse behind.

"Mentor! There you are!"

While I puzzled over this, Ara's voice reached me from a distance. Turning around, I saw him galloping toward us at full speed on all fours.

"Could I ask for your help!?"

He must have been running hard to get here, panting heavily as he shouted.

"The Swordsaints are fighting, but… they're being pushed back."

By coincidence, he was calling me to the very place I'd been heading. I had been on my way to the Swordsaint estate, but if their leader was already on the front lines, all the better.

"Lead the way."

"Yes, sir. Chryse, hop on my—"

"No, it's faster with Dad. Besides, you look tired, Ara."

At my word, Ara reached out to Chryse, but she declined and clung to my waist instead.

"Fair enough, and thank you. This way, Mentor!"

Ara showed no sign of offense and broke into a run to lead us. I called on the wind again, gliding low to keep pace with him. Along the way, more of the mysterious creatures appeared again and again, and each time, Chryse's sorcery dispatched them.

"Ara. What exactly are these things?"

"I don't know. But Mel said they're a new kind of spirit."

So they were spirits after all. Or perhaps Mel, too, was unconsciously sensing the presence of souls through some method of her own.

"But for spirits, they're odd. They seem almost like living creatures."

"Yes. They're unbelievably weak for spirits, and they die easily. And the way they fight isn't like a spirit at all, it's more like…"

Ara trailed off, glancing down at his own hand.

"Is that from back then? That injury?"

"Back when?"

"You know, on the way home from visiting Grandmother."

Chryse's words jogged my memory. Come to think of it, Ara had been wounded on the way back from visiting my mother. It hadn't been anything serious, so I'd thought nothing of it, but…

"Yes. They didn't have such a distinct form back then, but their nature was the same. Their fighting style was so unlike a spirit's that I let my guard down and took a wound."

"Unlike a spirit?"

Ara clenched his fist tightly and muttered with a bitter expression.

"It ignored me, right in front of it, and went after the weaker target first… it went after Innis."

A chill crept down my spine. He was right. That was nothing like a spirit. Just as the flames of a wildfire or the waters of a tsunami don't choose their victims, spirits don't pick and choose whom to harm.

… And moreover. I had been entirely unaware that a new type of spirit existed until just now.

If they had been appearing since our visit to my mother, that was thirty-five years ago. For thirty-five years, I hadn't encountered a single one of these spirits.

It wasn't as though spirit disasters hadn't occurred in that time, or that I'd been uninvolved. Disasters had struck many times, and I had participated in rescues and the suppression of spirits each time.

Yet Ara knew about these new spirits, and I did not. That fact stirred a nameless sense of foreboding — and a feeling of deja vu.

"Mentor, up ahead!"

Before I could pursue that thought any further, Ara pointed forward and shouted.

"This is…"

The sight that spread before me at the village's edge left me speechless.

Black shadows blanketed the landscape as far as the eye could see. Hundreds upon thousands of the "new spirits" stood arrayed in rows, surging toward Scarlet like a vast, billowing cloud.

The Swordsaints had turned out in full force to hold that tide of spirits at bay.

Corpses were piled upon corpses, and the blood and grease seeping from them defiled the earth, yet still the Swordsaints swung their blades. A few creatures slipped past their swords and infiltrated the village, but the defenders had no room to give chase. The same thing was surely happening all across the village. The ones Chryse and I had encountered were merely those that had broken through.

I knew this scene. I had an idea of what had caused it.

I had no proof. It might have been an entirely unrelated phenomenon that merely resembled what I had in mind.

But in my gut, I was all but certain.

Because I remembered.

"Algernon…!"

That one day, inevitably, it would come.