My strongest blow cut through the air and cleaved the ground. Nike had vanished right in front of my eyes. Illusion magic... I usually wouldn’t have missed his body wavering for a split second, but rage had gotten the best of me and I’d let him slip from my grasp.
A blade whizzed through the air from my side, heading straight for my throat. “You didn’t do anything, yet my spells vanished and my attack was parried. What’s more, you look completely unscathed,” Nike observed coolly. His complete nonchalance made my blood turn to ice...and then his mood morphed into something else entirely. “Excellent!” he screeched euphorically. “Your durability and speed allows you to keep up with the Armor of God’s full power, and the strength of that attack was sublime!”
I turned in front of me and saw the mark that I’d left from my earlier strike. No normal person could’ve possibly left such a massive gash in the ground.
“Perfect! Yes! This is the vessel that I’ve been searching for!” Nike cried. “I’d love to make you into my test subject!”
Nike ecstatically made to resume our fight when something fluttered in the air in front of our eyes.
“Huh? What is this?” he asked.
Upon closer inspection, it was clear—it was Agard’s memoir. I recalled borrowing it from Sita in front of the statue—I must’ve had it on me this entire time. His attacks that’d grazed my body earlier had evidently sliced through my clothes and ripped the book to shreds, causing its fragments to fly away in the wind. It was an old book to begin with, requiring delicate care just to maintain normally, and my rough battle with Nike had destroyed it.
While regret over all the lost memories flooded into my mind, Nike disinterestedly grabbed one of the pages.
“Are these letters?” he wondered.
“Letters? Are they?” the armor asked.
I was so disturbed by the armor I couldn’t help but interject into their carefree conversation. “What are you saying?!” I cried, recalling her memories that I saw earlier. “That’s a precious language that only the two of you shared! It was how you tried to leave a part of you with him so that he wouldn’t forget you!”
“Me? To Agard?” the armor asked dully. For a moment, the armor turned stiff, creating an opening for me to utilize. I wasn’t one to miss it and jumped forward. “I...don’t know...” the armor murmured.
“Tch! What a needless trifle at this juncture!” Nike spat vexedly.
Their clues gave me an epiphany. “Oh... The transfer to Noa was a success...”
“Well deduced, Argent Holy Woman!” Nike shouted back. “Oh, I was shocked, I admit! When the Argent Knight had left the island, I’d wanted to continue my research, but the moment they’d disappeared, I no longer had the right to use this island! Those pesky fairies got in my way and hindered my experiments. However was I to return to work under such conditions? My only recourse was to collect the soul residue from the remaining armor and attempt to construct a facsimile from it!”
He spoke as though his thought process had been a matter of course, but I couldn’t help but feel like that wasn’t the case at all.
“It was difficult to do, even with my skills!” he continued. “But one day, I made a tiny, ever so infinitesimal soul. Indeed, this was nothing short of a miracle! For the Armor of God, a suit of armor apotheosized by imbuing it with a soul, to have been reduced to an empty shell was surely an affront to God’s designs—therefore, I am certain beyond all doubt that God offered me providence so I could restore the natural order! The fundamental principles of the result were completely beyond my comprehension, and I knew I could never reproduce it. Truly, it was a gift from God! A marvel beyond marvels!”
By this point, Nike was so exultant he seemed to have forgotten that we were in the midst of a battle. “However, even after having been blessed with this miracle, the soul was unstable and I was struggling to maintain it,” he went on. “In order to preserve the soul, I decided to home in on its capacity to hold strong beliefs and its capacity for intense passion and amplify them by imprinting the soul with every document and record I could think of. Of course, my prioritization of the soul’s emotions led it to becoming filled with contradictions—surely God will forgive me for my errors borne out of a lack of experience.”
I honestly wasn’t able to wrap my head around all his prattle about God’s providence and the natural order and whatever, but one thing was clear to me: He’d taken advantage of the Argent Armor and Noa entirely to serve his own ends. “You... You re-formed the Argent Armor and pitted her against Noa all so you could keep your dumb island?!” I shouted.
“On the contrary, I had no interest whatsoever in pursuing my failed experiment—I merely put up with it because the armor insisted. Now then, let’s end our discussion here. I have new possibilities I seek to explore.” He gazed at me with glee, seeming like he’d satisfied his urge to ramble on about himself and was ready to fight again...only he couldn’t move a muscle. “Wh-What’s going on?” he muttered.
“I... I... I...” the armor murmured.
Did he really not think there’d be consequences to saying all that in front of the armor? I guess not. He’s so self-absorbed about his research that he has no concept of being considerate. Now that the Argent Armor had learned about her birth, she was hung up on squaring reality with the fantasy world she’d created for herself. That was Nike’s hubris: He relied on the Argent Armor for power, yet he acted like he had absolute control over it.
I had no idea Agard’s memoir would cause all this... Come to think of it, maybe Agard had been aiming for something like this to happen all along. With that thought in mind, I clenched a piece of paper that had fallen before me back when the memoir had fallen from my clothes. I hadn’t seen this page back at Eneres, but here it was now that the book was in shreds. Did the two of them come up with these magic words together? In accordance with Agard’s wishes, this was the spell they would first use when drawing on the armor’s power. The details she’d hoped to convey to Agard were written in a way that resembled the long, embarrassing chants the Argent Knight had used. I imagined that the Argent Armor had, as a considerate act of kindness, intended for Agard to one day be able to conceptualize this magic and use it even without relying on her power...and thanks to her thoughtfulness, even I, who knew nothing about their past together, could use this spell.
“What’s going on?!” Nike roared. “Come on, move, damn you!” He’d completely lost his cool and was cursing the armor as I plunged my sword into the ground.
“Mother Nature and her kin, look kindly upon these souls,” I chanted. A massive magic circle rippled out from my blade along the ground, then a torrent of light gushed forth from it. The light focused into a pillar around my sword as I used both hands to remove it from the ground. I confidently raised my weapon high above my head.
“Father Sky and his kin, embrace their wishes, embrace their being, and guide them. O father, O mother, all your kin, I solemnly swear, they shall know your sanctifying light!” I shouted.
A second magic circle appeared in the sky directly above where the tip of my blade was pointing, parallel to the one on the ground. Rays of light like the sun showered upon me, surrounding me with light from above and below. Another magic circle was deployed between the two, above my head, and a pillar of blinding light shot out to connect the three magic circles into a cylinder. The ground began to shake terribly, and I saw cracks stretch throughout the surrounding land, but I braced myself and stood tall.
It felt as though even the air itself began to tremble as the pillar of light gradually condensed upon my blade, transforming it into a massive sword of shining light.
“I want...to sleep...” the armor murmured faintly. Her feeble plea reached my ears, and I clenched my weapon even tighter.
“Move! Move, damn it! Gah! You useless imbecile!” Nike roared angrily. Fear had clearly claimed his heart, overwhelmed as he was by my intensity and the awesome light. He desperately tried to move, but he couldn’t budge an inch.
“The Light That Blesses All Souls!” I bellowed.