Eventually, I landed on the ground with Cyril’s bird. For a while, I just stood there.
At the foot of Pandora’s body, they’d laid out a picnic blanket. The scent of coffee wafted toward me. Cyril and Myfila each nursed mugs as they read tomes to pass the time.
“How about a cup of coffee? It’ll help you unwind.”
“Nah, I’m fine,” I said. “Um, have you seen my— Ah, here we go.”
I took a swig from my leather canteen to quench my thirst. Then I flopped right onto the edge of the picnic blanket. With my legs splayed out across the ground, I looked up at the majestic view of Pandora.
“I thought it was a good idea, though…,” I murmured to myself.
“You shouldn’t have attempted it,” Cyril said to me after hearing me talk under my breath. “You shouldn’t put yourself in danger just to get the attention of a summon.”
I snorted before I could stop myself—the scoff was aimed at me, of course.
“Well, normally, summoners aren’t ignored by their Counterparts.”
I said it nonchalantly, but neither of my friends spared me a laugh. Actually, they were looking pretty serious as they stared me down. That was the look they’d probably naturally ended up with after trying to hide their pity for me.
“Just listen, you two,” I said.
I faced Cyril and Myfila, who were both sitting cross-legged and seemed to be leaning in toward me. With a sigh, I continued, “I’m sure of this now. Pandora’s dead as a doorknob.”
That earned me two sincere looks from them and their silent companionship.
This didn’t feel like any chat over coffee, and every single word took me effort to get out.
“Even after I was in mortal peril right next to him, I never even felt Pandora’s heartbeat. He didn’t acknowledge me in the slightest. So my Counterpart isn’t the Legendary Beast of the Last Realm, Pandora; it’s Pandora’s corpse. Who’s even heard of somebody with a corpse for a partner? It’s unprecedented.”
I tried to keep things upbeat, but I was only met with more silence. Cyril seemed like he wanted to say something, but in the end, all he managed was a slight quiver of his lip. He was speechless.
And naturally so. This was essentially the moment a dark cloud had formed over my future as a summoner. Half-hearted consolation from my friends wouldn’t do anything here. It wasn’t their fault, though. Had the roles been reversed, I don’t think I would’ve been able to find the words, either. I probably would’ve stared with the same grim look on my face, just like the ones they were wearing.
So all I could do was put on a brave face and tell them, “Anyway, there’s no point in me wallowin’ over it. It took me half a year since starting at the Academy, but now I finally know who my Counterpart is. In a way, that’s a win. I have no clue why an inanimate corpse answered my summon, but first things first: I’ve gotta figure out a practical use for it.”
Once I’d rambled on to that point, Cyril’s lip finally twisted up. It was a subtle expression. I couldn’t tell whether his smile was one of admiration or one of pity.
“You don’t let anything bring you down, Feil.”
“That’s just how I am. I gotta make the best of the hand I’m dealt.”
Then Myfila had something interesting to say. “Pandora’s still the strongest summon, even dead.”
I thought over the meaning of those words. “Well…,” I said, producing a small, leather-bound book from my conjurer’s robes and starting to thumb through it. I pinched pages one through one hundred ten between my fingers, showing the two how thick it was.
“He’s dead, but look how many pages he’s filled with his verses. I reckon Sasha’s archangel only takes twenty pages at most.”
A summoner would create one book of Summoner Incantations in their lifetime.
Each summon would leave behind a verse. Or rather, it was more like the words would spontaneously appear in the book once the summon was contracted.
Slimes and fiends would get a few lines at most, and something as powerful as a dragon would claim multiple pages. Anything that took up more than ten pages was basically a monster from myth or legend. Only a few summoners in all recorded history had contracted with summons that took up more than twenty pages.
No matter how great a summoner was, they were limited to what their single volume of incantations could contain. Yet here was my book, already 90 percent filled just by Pandora’s description.
Once summoned, it was over. There was no way to erase the words already documented. Even though the Pandora summon was a bust, because of the way that the summoner world worked, I couldn’t just go and find another powerful beast to take on as my partner.
My only option was to make the best of the few pages I had left.
“What do those hundred pages say?”
“That’s what I wanna know,” I said. “The language either predates Catagmark civilization or was never a writing system used in this world to begin with… All I’ve got is the introduction for summoning him. If I focus until I feel like I’m gonna die, that’s when those words appear in my mind, but that’s it.”
“Arise, O beast that thwarts despair, over darkened sea your wings claim the air… Was that it?”
“Yeah, and I’m the one despairin’ here.”
I rested my chin in my palm as I slouched over crossed legs. But then it occurred to me that there was no point to being bummed about it again so soon. “Well, anyway, puttin’ that aside, I need to figure out how to use Pandora,” I said, bringing us back on topic. “If he’s dead, he can stay dead. But is there a way to get him to move?”
Cyril looked dubious. “You want to treat him like a puppet?”
I snapped my fingers and pointed right at Cyril with the same hand.
“The issue is how big and heavy he is. I could use a fettering spell to manipulate his limbs, but human and beast spells aren’t even gonna work on his fingertips.”
“How about botanical spells? If you just keep feeding them magic, you can grow as much ivy as you need.”
“But all they’ll do is grow. A vine’s resilience is proportionate to how thick its stalk is. First, I’d need to find a plant that can lift Pandora.”
I crossed my arms, and Myfila matter-of-factly offered a suggestion. “Then just summon the World Tree. It’s bigger than Pandora and wouldn’t collapse under his weight.”
Cyril and I both forced smiles for her.
“That’s basically summoning a piece of the world. If I could summon the World Tree, I wouldn’t be worryin’ about Pandora in the first place.”
“But you might be able to summon a branch. There’s a slim chance.”
Myfila might have actually been earnest about her suggestion. Since Cyril and I hadn’t taken her seriously, she pouted (rather cutely) and let out a sulky “Hmph.”
I wasn’t trying to get on her good side by saying it, but I asked her, “Actually, thinkin’ about it, since we’ve got a corpse, this seems like the perfect time for necrospecters. What does our resident genius necromancer have to say to that?”
“No can do,” she said without missing a beat. Even after Myfila crushed all hopes of the most practically feasible method I could think of, I still couldn’t back down. I couldn’t just accept Myfila’s assessment right then.
“How about if four or five of ’em worked together? I know it’d be rough for one to move Pandora on its own, but if each of ’em took a limb or somethin’…” My words were naturally speeding up as I went.
Myfila looked up at Pandora’s giant body, then said, “Even if Pandora’s soul is gone, I’m pretty sure you summoned him immediately after he died. He has too much vitality left in him for a necrospecter to enter the body. They’d die the moment they touched him.”
“So what you’re tellin’ me is that I’ve gotta let his body rot completely first?”
“If his insides completely liquefy, then they might be able to manage possession of a finger.”
“I see. So basically, that’s a dead end, too. Summons compulsorily disappear when their summoner passes out. And Pandora isn’t gonna rot in one or two days, no matter what kind of spell I use. Even I’d probably die after four all-nighters.”
“I doubt Pandora would rot even if you waited a whole century.”
I looked over at Cyril and said, “If only we had time-manipulation magic.” Suddenly, he burst into laughter.
“I think it’d be easier for you to do a hundred years of all-nighters, Feil.”
“You could summon the origin elemental of death. An origin elemental would be able to enter Pandora.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. They’re as legendary as the World Tree, if not more so,” I said.
I was fresh out of options. When Cyril saw me hold my head in my hands, he couldn’t help but try to pitch yet another idea. “Uh, right. How about you treat summoning him like a spell, instead of forcing him to move?”
“So, like, summon him in midair and let him fall or somethin’?”
“Well…is that something you’ve considered already?”
“Well, I can’t do that around other students. If Pandora’s giant body came falling from the sky, I’m pretty sure we’d end up with more corpses than just his. Not exactly a strat for Academy ranking matches.”
“Yeah, you’re right. They’re just academic duels in the end.”
I really felt backed into a corner now. Three heads were better than one, but it wasn’t like putting our heads together would make us geniuses. We couldn’t come up with any better ideas as the dry winds of the wildlands filled the silence.
Eventually, Myfila sipped from her mug of coffee and murmured, “It won’t be an origin elemental, but would you like one of the greater necrospecters to take a look at Pandora?”
Cyril and I had no idea what she meant at all.
Myfila just pointed up at the blue sky and squinted at the expansive emptiness and glare of the sun.