“I, Danna Ryl the One-Horned, Keybinder of the tower, request the consent of all Grand Magisters who serve as keys. Dispatch gatekeepers to the Forbidden Land with all the mana at your disposal.”
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“You know, when I first got that message from Zero to move everything originating in the New World up here to the North, I kind of thought she was kidding.”
The Grey Plains─the most desolate part of the northern reaches of the Forbidden Land, where every living thing had been ravaged into nothingness. There, Chief State Mage Albus of the Kingdom of Wenias stood looking up at the countless fish blotting out the sky, which Zero had called gatekeepers. They had appeared so suddenly─Albus had yawned with boredom, and when she opened her eyes again, there they’d been.
“Boy, even I shrink at the thought of what might’ve happened if this school of fish had shown up in the Kingdom of Wenias.”
“You’ve got nothing to shrink, my lady.”
“I was speaking metaphorically,” Albus shot back without even turning around. “I know you weren’t talking about testicles just now, were you, Holdem?”
At her icy rejoinder, the lupine beastfallen wordlessly bowed his head, and, equally wordlessly, Albus elbowed him in it.
“So what now?” she asked. “They make a big racket and spit water out of their mouths, right? What kind of countermeasures do we have in place?”
“Using Etorahk, we’ve raised the earth to create fifty high platforms and stationed small squads on each of them, my lady. The one we’re on will serve as relay base, connecting all the other platforms.”
Albus took in her surroundings. She had only just stepped through the witch’s path connecting the Kingdom of Wenias to the Grey Plains. Alongside her and Holdem stood about a dozen Mage Battalion soldiers with Mage Commander Amnir herself at their head. Atop this columnar pillar of earth, towering over the surrounding plains, three large tents had also been set up, two of which were intended to house casualties.
“So…are they not gonna come at us? Do you think we ought to make the first move, Amni─”
Before Albus could finish, part of the world around her was suddenly swallowed up.
“─Huh?” Albus stood staring at her own dumbfounded reflection, mirrored in the giant fish eye that now floated just a few paces before her. The gatekeeper had swallowed Amnir and her troops whole.
There was a massive bite taken out of the earthen platform; it was as if nobody had been standing there to begin with. Albus’s eyes darted to the other columns─all of which were beset by gatekeepers, devouring the five hundred-odd mage troopers along with the very ground they stood on.
“C-Crap! Holdem, protect me!” Albus screamed, pushing Holdem in front of her.
A moment later, the head of the gatekeeper that had swallowed the Mage Commander and her troops exploded in a great shower of blood. Holdem’s body sheltered Albus from the deluge, which dyed his white fur a dark, lurid crimson. He glared reproachfully back at his master.
“Thanks, Holdem. You really saved me.” Albus shot him a cheery grin, then locked eyes with Amnir as she gracefully alit among the chunks of fish meat despite having been inside the mouth of a gatekeeper just a moment before.
One after another, similar explosions rung out from the other platforms. Their heads blown to smithereens, the gatekeepers fell to the ground, and the smell of iron mixed with the rotten stench of oceanic decay wafted all around. Fifty of the giant fish went down in the span of an instant. At that same time, the gatekeepers still swimming through the sky set up a fearsome cry.
“Gaaah…! It’s way louder than I expected!”
“My lady, look!” Holdem pointed down at the fallen gatekeepers. Their scattered innards had begun to writhe and squirm, knitting themselves back together again.
“They’re regenerating…? No, wait, they’re─”
“Multiplying! Does that mean unless we finish ’em off, there’s gonna be more of them?!”
Zero hadn’t mentioned anything like this in her reports…but she had said the New World was suffering from a severe mana shortage, speculating that something unexpected could well occur when the creatures from the New World made contact with the abundant mana of the Forbidden Land.
“Amnir, think you got this?”
“…Disgusting.” Amnir wasn’t answering Albus’s question so much as expressing a deep-seated revulsion. She covered her mouth and furrowed her regal brow, turning pale and beginning to mutter to herself. “I can hardly stand the horrid sight… These are the gatekeepers…? I would rather die than live under the protection of such monstrosities… But, what’s this? Spare me… The ones on the ground have sprouted legs…? I’m not sure if I can physically handle this…”
Raul, her loyal righthand man, tapped her on the shoulder. “Princess, we’ve got a job to do.”
At this, Amnir managed to get ahold of herself, and glared up at the sky. “All forces! Annihilate them!”
The mage commander’s voice was transmitted directly into the minds of her troops. No matter how far apart they were, even if they were standing beside a cannon or had lost their hearing completely, her words would always reach them.
At Amnir’s command, the battle began in earnest. Though in truth, no bard who sang of the events that day could in good conscience call what followed a “battle.” It was so one-sided that it could only really be described as a kind of extermination. After years spent in the North battling Remnants of Disaster, the Mage Battalion, pride of the Kingdom of Wenias, were the elite of the elite. Compared to monsters created by demons with the sole aim of annihilating humanity, the gatekeepers were nothing more than endlessly proliferating sitting ducks. And so long as they had mana potions, the mage troopers would never run out of magical power.
What’s more, the Forbidden Library’s laboratory had in recent days developed a new product: the “azure flask.” Albus had suddenly received a large shipment of them from Ulula, who had taken over the laboratory after Saybil’s departure. The shipment had been accompanied by a letter: “Mass-producing mana potions is so terribly tiresome, I just can’t stand it anymore. I’ll be making them rechargeable from now on.”
How very Ulula, thought Albus.
Each azure flask was a tiny stella octangula about the size of a river rock, with shimmering bluish-purple liquid sealed inside. Despite the name, they had no mouth nor stopper, and so could not be opened and closed─but simply by touching the flask, the bearer could draw out as much mana as they desired. Ulula had already begun fashioning them into accessories, touting them as an indispensable item to be worn at all times: “They do contain roughly a hundred times the capacity of a regular mana potion, after all. Once the contents have turned back into a simple piece of gold, return it and I’ll send you a new one in its place.”
In the battle against the gatekeepers, each and every soldier of the Mage Battalion had one of these azure flasks with them. Those mages capable of using high-level spells were even permitted to equip themselves with several at a time, and soon enough the day would come when the measure of a mage was evident in the number of blue stars they carried. Ulula, too, would come to be known by a different name, and it would be said that, like the Abyss Sorcerer, the Blue Star Witch had changed the history of magedom forever.