Ishura - Volume 5 - Chapter 19

Chapter 19: The Day the Bird Took Flight

Slipping back in time—the day of the eighth match. A faint twilight before the sunrise.

Toroa the Awful quietly sat up in his appointed bed inside Mizial the Iron-Piercing Plumeshade’s residence.

He needed to leave in the early morning while everyone else was still fast asleep.

Sitting in a wood chair, he bent his right leg and then extended it. He repeated the same with the left.

…Fully healed.

Attending to him until both of the knees Psianop had pierced through were healed—and in the end, even risking his own life to protect Toroa—Kuuro the Careful had allowed Toroa to recover his true strength.

In that brief second, there hadn’t been any time to hear the details from Kuuro.

He was able to interpret from the few fragmented words that Kuuro was being targeted.

However, Kaete’s camp was the power that had previously raided the clinic, aiming to acquire Toroa’s enchanted swords. Was it possible that Mestelexil—Kaete’s hero candidate—had fixed his aim on Toroa and caught the uninvolved Kuuro up in the disaster?

“…Enchanted swords invite conflict…”

He couldn’t say for certain that another attack like it wasn’t coming.

His presence in Mizial’s home might bring death to those he cared about.

After Kuuro the Careful, he didn’t want to lose Mizial the Iron-Piercing Plumeshade or Cuneigh the Wanderer as well.

…That’s right. Ultimately, I’m meant to stay inside people’s ghost stories.

He took all his possessions and left his room.

Pulling his hood down low, he hid his own face.

He carried countless enchanted swords with him.

“……”

The room of his sponsor, Twenty-Second General Mizial, was located right by the stairs.

The young boy had innocently admired the enchanted swordsman, who was feared by all others, and extended him a helping hand.

Toroa had long felt envious of the boy’s honest way of being, deciding everything based on his own artless curiosity, unrelated to any political power plays or sense of duty.

“…You’re leaving, Toroa?”

Toroa heard a voice come from over his shoulder as he went to descend the staircase.

So he had been awake.

Toroa answered back over his shoulder.

“Yeah. Going back to Wyte. Thanks for everything.”

“Hmm… Back home, huh. I guess after what happened, it makes sense.”

“Sorry for the trouble. Cuneigh still asleep?”

“…She was still crying when I went to bed, but…… Yup. Fast asleep. Must’ve been exhausted. I put her down in some old clothing scraps—hope it’s comfortable.”

“Can I leave her with you?”

“……”

If Kuuro was going to return someday, he would definitely track Cuneigh down.

“Hey, Toroa, listen! You’re going to back to gather enchanted swords again, right?”

“…Nah. Not going to kill those who wield enchanted swords anymore. I’m going home to Wyte Mountains…to live a quiet life tending to my vegetable garden. I always knew from the beginning what I wanted to do. This sort of stuff’ll end with me.”

“……”

“Disappointed? Listen, Mizial… I’ll tell you the truth.”

A silence stretched out briefly behind him in the dark corridor.

It would have been much better if he had disappeared without saying anything. Perhaps, as part of his duty from inheriting the name Toroa the Awful, he was meant to preserve the enchanted-swordsman illusion, like the children-scaring ghost story he was supposed to be.

However, Toroa didn’t want to treat Mizial like a child.

“I’m not Toroa the Awful.”

“……”

“Take care of yourself. You always leave vegetables behind on your plate. Gotta eat right. It’s good to be enthusiastic about your studies, but you shouldn’t stay up late reading books all the time. You’re a real self-indulgent kid, and it might end up giving someone a real headache. Even then… Ahhh…”

Toroa finally understood.

—What his father had wished for had really been something this obvious.

“…Stay true to yourself. Don’t end up becoming someone else and take care of yourself the most of all.”

“…………Thanks.”

Mizial the Iron-Piercing Plumeshade. The Twenty-Second General had known no fear of anyone nor shown deference to anyone.

With Toroa’s form still concealed in the dark, the boy said his good-bye.

“You really were just like the real Toroa the Awful, you know… Sorry for being so unreasonable all the time.”

“There’s not anything you gotta apologize for.”

“We’ll still be friends even after you’re back in Wyte, right?”

“Of course.”

This was the end of Toroa the Awful’s journey.

He departed from Aureatia on the morning’s first long-distance carriage.

Toroa was familiar with the one sitting diagonally opposite him in the carriage bound for the Mari Wastes.

They didn’t possess a fixed shape, but they had a tiny book open up in the pseudopods sprouting out of them.

“Quite the coincidence, now isn’t this, Toroa the Awful?”

“Inexhaustible Stagnation. That talkative mouth of yours is the same outside the arena, then.”

“My mouth’s just the same as my muscles. If I don’t keep it going, it’ll grow weaker, and I won’t be able to get the necessary words out when the time comes. There’s no reason for an intellectual creature not to temper such a weapon. When I was in the sand labyrinth, I used to speak the words in the books out loud and strove hard to keep my mouth working.”

“Our match together…taught me a lot. I’d even like a rematch if possible, honestly.”

“In that case, I wouldn’t mind going right here, right now. Shall we?”

“Definitely don’t have the strength for that.”

“Me neither.”

Psianop’s expression was unfathomable. Even then, Toroa believed that the slime was making yet another joke.

The scenery outside the carriage, little by little, began to be tinged silvery white.

Toroa’s thoughts went to Psianop’s opponent in the second round.

If he had won his match, they were the enemy he would have gone up against.

Lucnoca the Winter. Among the land’s strongest race of creatures, the dragons, she stood on top as their strongest.

He had heard she was a calamity that exceeded all possible limits of the imagination.

Alus the Star Runner, thought to be a lock to advance on—and Toroa’s ultimate enemy, having killed Toroa the Awful once before—hadn’t been able to get close to taking the legendary dragon’s life, even throwing everything he had at her.

“…Inexhaustible Stagnation. You going to battle Lucnoca the Winter?”

“If you’re going to speak of her strength, I’ve heard more than enough already. I’m going to see it with my own eyes.”

“I would’ve dropped out of the tournament, probably. What’re you fighting for?”

“……”

Barehanded strikes and all manner of enchanted swords. If the technical apexes they had each honed and tempered on their own shared the same qualities…and if the reason Psianop the Inexhaustible Stagnation had surpassed Toroa the Awful lay within Psianop’s heart and mind, Toroa wished to know what it was.

The loquacious ooze went silent for a brief moment.

“…Willpower and pride, I’d say.”

“That’s the same for everyone, though.”

“And that’s precisely why.”

Toroa didn’t know about the ooze’s past.

Nor did he know the reason why the ooze aimed to be the strongest of all or why he didn’t hesitate to use Life Arts that chipped away at his own vitality.

“It’s a reason that everyone shares, and that’s precisely why I don’t want to lose.”

What about the other fourteen hero candidates?

There were bound to be some who fought carrying reasons unknown to him or ways of life unknown to him.

It was the ones who had reached their strongest peaks who continued to search for the logical conclusion of their life.

Even in this land, where the True Demon King lay dead and all reason to fight had gone away.

“…Well. It appears, during our idle chitchat, we’ve arrived.”

“Looks like it.”

Outside the window, the surface was blanketed completely white.

The cold air seeped through the carriage’s walls. A terrible and abrupt change in temperature.

It was neither a natural phenomenon nor the end result of a long history.

A scenery had been changed in the brief moment of a single breath by a singular creature.

A landscape of ruin.

“Mari Wastes… So this is it.”

In this land rested the final job that Toroa the Awful had inherited.

Toroa the Awful continued to descend down the sheer rock face of the abyssal fissures running through the frozen soil.

The vertical cliff didn’t have the slightest protrusion to get his fingers on. He was using an enchanted sword like a walking stick.

It was called Wicked Sword Selfesk. The arrangement of its blade, composed from countless, floating rivets, could be manipulated with an almost magnetic force. He stuck the rivets into the rock face to create footing for himself. The rivets above him would collect in his sheath again then spread out below into a new piece of footing.

Though it wasn’t the sword’s original purpose, he thought it was much a better way of using it than for killing others.

“…That’s right. This is better than killing,” he mumbled. Despite the fact that he was searching deep down in the unfathomable bottom of the earth and that he was the only one here on this frozen soil.

It was all so much better than killing someone and plundering from them.

The second match—Alus the Star Runner lost to Lucnoca the Winter and dropped down to the bottom of the earth.

Together with the hoard of treasure he had collected from his travels across the land.

Among all the many magical items that were in the wyvern’s possession, Toroa’s objective, from the very beginning, had been one thing and one thing only.

The world’s ultimate enchanted sword, able to sever any and all matter, including dragon scale. Hillensingen the enchanted light sword.

“Real cold out here…”

If anything, he grew more talkative when alone.

His quip at Psianop just might have applied to none other than Toroa himself as well.

…At long last, the end of the tall, perpetual cliff came into view.

Previously in the Mari Wastes, a river had run through the deep crevices in the ground, with a holdover of those times being the road chipped level into the bottom of the fissure.

It was earth, like the frontiers of hell, that no one had ever trodden before.

“……”

The walls rising up on each side of him were so high that he couldn’t see the sky.

The thin, winding path stretched out before him.

Toroa was unaccustomed to carrying a watch with him, but noon should have been approaching soon. He needed to recover the enchanted sword of light and make it back up to the surface before the sun set.

Lighting a lantern, he walked the depths, which the sun’s light couldn’t reach.

Only the sounds of his shoe soles crunching on the frozen soil echoed for a short while.

Although he had generally pinpointed where Alus the Star Runner had fallen, there was no guarantee that he would truly reach the end of his search. He could find the wyvern himself, but there was the possibility that the enchanted sword of light had been scattered into a different fissure.

He continued walking.

Born with a degree of stamina far exceeding the average person’s, Toroa didn’t require any breaks.

Dark frozen soil without end.

Lonely earth, completely isolated.

He continued walking.

And walked some more.

Then finally—

“…Found you.”

A narrow-bladed sword, with a brown, dingy sheath and an equally dirtied wooden hilt.

Although the cross guard was gone, it had been flung to the ground and remained there.

Hillensingen the enchanted light sword.

The be-all and end-all enchanted sword that had been stolen from his father.

The thing Toroa the Awful had sought… The very last fragment to a life of his own.

Toroa approached. Then up ahead along the serpentine path—there was one other presence crouching down in the shadow of the cliff wall.

“…………”

It was silent.

Just like a true dragon would do itself, he did nothing but greedily continue to protect his treasure.

There lay the final enemy the immortal, death-bringing enchanted swordsman was meant to kill.

“…………”

“We meet again. I’m Toroa the Awful.”

He was alive. In exchange, half of his body had been swapped out for metallic machinery with a brass luster, losing even the organs that all living creatures were meant to have…and abandoned by everything here in the depths of this now-frozen land.

Proliferating inside him, imitating living tissue, and forcibly driving his body.

It continued to maintain his bodily function, without any need of biogenic activity and regardless of the will of its wielder.

The name of the magic tool this rogue had used at the very end of his battle was Chiklorakk the Eternity Machine.

“I came to collect the enchanted light sword.”

“………Keep your hands…”

The wyvern champion who had visited countless of the land’s legends.

Alus the Star Runner spread his wings—one living, and one metal.

“…off my treasure.”