In that moment, I felt an unpleasant feeling growing within me—rage, irritation, a sense of loss. I used that as my fuel for the final stretch to unleash a summon.
“I’m never! Doing this! Again!!” I yelled from the bottom of my heart. Immediately, another swarm, a new foothold, appeared, and as Zylgar instantly used it as a platform, he dodged another beam.
“We’re through, Feil! You’re done!”
I don’t know what would’ve happened to me if Cyril hadn’t yelled and I’d cast another summon. Maybe the vessels in my brain would’ve busted or my heart would’ve exploded.
The rough landing was probably a sign we’d been going at our fastest speed right before it.
The moment his paws touched the soft turf, Zylgar shook his head and tossed Myfila and me aside. Apparently, Cyril’s quick reflexes had allowed him to leap off ahead of time, so only his beast bore the brunt of the harsh impact, tumbling violently on landing but sparing the rest of us.
I curled up on the grass and started to pant hard. All I could do was gasp for breath. I didn’t even have the wherewithal to feel the pain from skidding on the ground. It was like I’d just come off a race running as fast as I could.
“Good job! Amazing, Feil! I genuinely thought we were done for!”
“I’m pretty sure no one’s done thirty-six successive summons in a row before.”
My friends rubbed my back, but I would’ve appreciated more air than their gratitude.
Using magical energy was as physically strenuous as running a footrace. If you utilized more than a certain amount of it, your heart and lungs would crave oxygen, and your muscles, which store magic, would all tire.
“Haah, haah—wheeze, haah, hah—haah, ah…”
“Slow down! Slow breaths, Feil! Just focus on exhaling! You’ll be fine! We’re not being shot at anymore!”
I couldn’t even move one of my shaking fingers. Still, I gathered everything I had to get myself faceup on the ground. Then I saw the clear blue sky spread out before my eyes. I saw the sun, the drifting white clouds, and even a corner of the hexahedron that had been shooting at us until now.
…Apparently, we’d landed in a relatively secluded part of the cemetery.
“Zylgar, you looked pretty cool, too. How about a pet?” I heard Myfila say.
“Stop that, Zylgar. Don’t lick Feil’s face right now.”
After I focused on nothing but sucking in huge breaths of air for a while, I eventually recovered enough to notice the smell of grass filling my nose. While Zylgar, the Tiger-Saber King, affectionately licked my hair all over, I murmured from the ground, “We made it…”
“Indeed. You have arrived.”
Just then, I heard an unfamiliar voice.
I couldn’t get up, but both Cyril and Zylgar reacted in my stead. Zylgar stepped forward, and I heard his menacing growl fill the air.
I got up as slowly as a turtle—which was actually as fast as I could manage in my condition.
Cyril loaned me a shoulder, so I made it to my feet somehow and saw the clearing up ahead, as well as a girl standing there, legs cemented far apart, just ten paces from us. She wore a white dress that exposed her shoulders.
“Welcome to Zelame, the floating cemetery, you delightful daredevils.”
She looked to be around twelve or thirteen, and she had long, black hair, but the air she gave off was all wrong. Her grin was equal parts joy and mischief, and there was something contrarian about her—some sort of quality only someone who had watched over the rise and fall of human society for many years could possess…
I immediately realized who she was. In a rasping voice, I asked her, “Are you the necrospecter Tory?”
“Indeed,” she replied at once, a giggle in her voice. Instead of scolding us for entering the cemetery, she closed her eyes to the wind that blew by and scoffed. “I do believe it has been two decades since the living have stood before a grave. Now, send that overgrown kitten back from whence it came and let us join hands.”
“You really think we’re gonna let our guards down now?! We were almost murdered back there!”
“Murdered? Ah, yes, I suppose you were. Zelame, the architect of this place, was a rather overzealous fellow—enough to boast that those who did not know their place deserved to die without exception, yes.”
“I see. Then we don’t know our place, either. We were pretty close to bein’ goners ourselves.”
“It would be no surprise. Now, that archangel hanging about outside—that is the level of summoner we seek as a guest in the cemetery.”
“So then, what? Does that mean you’re here to haul off any unwelcome guests who do make it?”
“Not quite. I won’t be doing anything at all.”
“What?”
“I will not hinder you, nor will I help you. If you wish to rummage through the graves, then you are welcome to do so. However, the defenses that protect the dead cannot be compared with the outer net that you slipped through.”
Cyril and I shared a puzzled look with each other at exactly the same time.
We had probably both concluded that it would be best not to get on the wrong side of the greater elemental. Cyril started to recall Zylgar, but I immediately stopped him and threw another question at her.
“Aren’t you the gravekeeper of this cemetery?”
“No, I am not a venerable servant of the dead, but simply a pensioner here to rest. I sleep as I wish, lose myself in my thoughts, and travel as I please.”
As she was talking, she suddenly yawned deeply. She didn’t even try to hide it with a hand, instead opening her mouth wide to show us the back of her throat. Once she was done, she lightly slapped herself on the cheek. She acted kind of like an old man on his day off.
She didn’t seem anxious in front of us three summoners or Zylgar.
“I simply came here to speak to some interesting people who made their way to this place. If the master of the archangel were to enter, I would have found the event so commonplace, I never would have bothered appearing.”
The black-haired girl, the necrospecter Tory, seemed completely defenseless, and we lowered our guard.
The decisive blow was when Myfila piped up, “If Tory wanted us dead, she would have killed us already.” This time, I didn’t stop Cyril from recalling Zylgar. We whispered to each other.
“Seems like it was all rumors. She’s not capricious at all. She’s even easy to talk to.”
“Nah, this whole thing was just a miracle. She only came out here ’cause we caught her eye.”
“So you’re saying she’s capricious because she normally doesn’t appear?”
“Maybe we should consider that the defense systems might be run by elementals.”
I looked at Tory again and found that Myfila had gone over to her. Myfila was practically ogling the necrospecter’s flesh, which was more or less a suit Tory was inhabiting.
“What a pretty body,” Myfila said.
“Isn’t it? I came upon it a thousand years ago. It previously belonged to a girl who took her own life because of failed love.”
Cyril and I walked over with me still hanging off his shoulder. I nodded at Tory, her frame small and delicate.
“I’m glad we met you. It was worth riskin’ our lives to get here.”
“Oh? So you were looking for an old spirit like me? How commendable.”
I didn’t like the look on her face as she stared up at me. When she smiled, she bared her teeth on only one side of her mouth.
“Then tell me your name.”
“I’m Feil Fonaf. This is Cyril, and the cute one is Myfila. We’re students from Raddermark.”
“If you are students, you ought to make use of your instructors, then. Or are you here to hear fables of yore?”
“We need to know the limitations of the necrospecters.”
“What did you say?”
She seemed taken aback by my directness.
I might’ve damaged her pride as a great greater elemental, but I wasn’t planning on going into a long preamble. I pulled out my leather-bound book from my inner pocket and opened a random page to thrust before Tory.
“My Counterpart is the corpse of the legendary beast Pandora, and I need to somehow get him to move.”
Pandora—the name of the being who had once fought the gods in ages past seemed to have caught Tory’s attention, though that was only natural. After showing a moment of shock, she read through the pages at inhuman speed, whispering to herself at her lowest volume.
I’d never heard any of those words in my life. It seemed like Tory, greater elemental that she was, had the knowledge to read the text I couldn’t. So what the hell was written in those pages? But that wasn’t our goal right now.
“This does look like Pandora’s description…but is it true? A human, able to summon Pandora?”
Even though I could hear the shock in Tory’s quivering voice, that didn’t make me any happier. A strained smile wormed its way onto my face in due course.
“It’s Pandora immediately after being killed by the gods,” I said.
“And he cannot move?”
“Not a finger.”
It seemed that’d been enough for the sagacious necrospecter to more or less figure out what was happening. She let out a large sigh and composed herself. “So this is why you wish to know the limitations of necrospecters. I suppose I cannot be so discourteous as to become upset now that you have brought up Pandora.” A dull smile crept onto her face.
She casually took my hand and started to walk off.
Once I was separated from Cyril’s support, I had to do as Tory asked. I stumbled, but I managed to walk.
“I once admired Pandora while he was alive. This was when I first separated from the origin elemental and was led by the hand, just as you are now… Pandora was more heroic than any god. Why, he could mold the very mountains like soft clay. A taciturn fellow, he was. The goddesses and sprites would ceaselessly pester him, and he often seemed annoyed.”