"I'd like to talk for a mome— damn it!"
BANG BANG
The masked devil-worshipper — and Sage — raised his right hand toward Ran and Moor, signaling his willingness to talk.
But the man was a Sage. Ran and Moor had no such intention whatsoever.
The Sage barely evaded the silver slash that came off Ran's blade.
And there was no moment to breathe; Moor's mana rounds and attack sorcery came flying in.
Ordinarily these were attacks he could have blocked with ease, but the Sage could feel the casting speed of his sorcery had dropped sharply.
'Oh, no.'
He tried to defend against Moor's attacks with a ward, but the sorcery wouldn't trigger properly; the ward broke and several attacks got through.
"Got you!"
Moor's attacks had thrown the Sage's stance. Ran didn't waste the opening and drove his sword down. But the Sage rolled clear of it, and Ran's blade struck the ground with a roar.
"What is this? Are you a sorcerer or not? Where'd you learn to move like that?"
Ran rested the sword he'd just swung on his right shoulder and looked at the Sage. The man couldn't get up; he was on one knee, breathing hard.
"Damn it all."
The Sage drew his mana up. But it neither gathered to his satisfaction nor moved as it should. Just as it had been in the past, before he met the remains and became a Sage.
He focused harder, called up the feel of those days, and worked his sorcery.
Masses of water formed around Ran. They began to gather in on him, and in the end Ran was sealed inside a great sphere — a prison of water.
Seeing it, Moor concentrated mana in his left arm. But before he could attempt anything the Sage cast first, and Moor ended up in a water prison of his own, just like Ran.
Ran thrashed to get out of it, and the water's outline sloshed slightly, and nothing more.
"It's useless. There's no escaping from inside."
The Sage rose to his feet. He began brushing the dust off his robe. Then he looked toward Moor and confirmed the man was trying to use a ward to secure some space.
"But the sorcerer will need more attention."
The Sage reached a hand toward Moor. Another mass of water formed in midair, and Moor's water prison grew larger than Ran's. The internal pressure rose until the ward Moor had been preparing broke.
"Feel like talking now?"
The Sage asked Moor without sparing Ran a glance. Moor's only answer was a faint smile.
CRRRACK.
An eerie sound of something splitting. The Sage turned his head toward the source.
The water prison holding Ran had crystallized as though frozen. And the crystal was slowly beginning to fracture.
Then Ran broke out through it. Silver energy poured off his whole body.
"What in the—?"
The Sage was badly rattled. For reasons he couldn't identify, his sorcery had been failing him — but he had always been a specialist in water-attribute sorcery, more confident in it than anyone. Which made the sight in front of him all the more incomprehensible.
Under the silver energy pouring off Ran, even the water prison holding Moor crystallized. Once it had, Moor broke out of it easily as well.
In that gap Ran swung his sword straight at the Sage. To block, the Sage summoned water again and raised a wall. Ran's blade shattered it easily, and he closed the distance and cut.
"Aagh!"
The Sage moved again to evade Ran's sword. He didn't clear it completely, and it opened his shoulder. He cried out, and blood began flowing from his left shoulder.
"If your sorcery had been the kind that manipulates matter with mana, it would have gone easier for you. Converting the mana itself into water is what turned on you."
For a sorcerer, manipulating matter with mana is a fundamental skill. Creating matter, by contrast, sits at a very high difficulty.
But silver energy has the power to halt mana itself. Mana turned into matter was no exception.
Moor explained what the Sage might reasonably have wondered about. The man himself wasn't hearing a word of it.
He was drawing mana up to counterattack instead.
"Why......"
But he found that his mana wasn't merely slow now — it was entirely unusable. The mana around him had already been halted by Ran's silver energy. And with the wound Ran's attack had opened, silver energy had entered his body through it, making mana effectively impossible.
The Sage looked shaken by the impossibility of it. Moor did not miss the tremor in his eyes.
Ran raised his sword over the Sage once more.
"Why...... do paladins with no connection to any of this obstruct our revenge?"
Hearing that, Ran stopped his sword in midair.
"Revenge?"
"Damn it...... A little longer and it would have been complete."
The Sage spoke as though it were a bitter injustice.
"Ah, is that all."
Moor drew the Glock as if he'd heard everything he needed. And pulled the trigger at the Sage's head.
Struck defenseless by the mana round, the Sage pitched forward.
"You said you wanted to talk, earlier? So do we."
Moor drew a cigarette from his coat. And set it between his lips and lit it.
"Is he dead?"
"No, unconscious. We need to question him."
Moor put the gun away.
Ran sheathed his sword, and the silver energy vanished with it.
Moor bound the fallen Sage with sorcery. Then he summoned the black sphere and compressed him into it.
"What he said back there. What do you make of it?"
"Which part? The revenge?"
Having finished tidying up, Moor leaned against a fixture on the wall. He looked thoroughly drained, and smoked fast.
"Yeah, the revenge...... I've met a lot of Sages since we started this work. That's the first one whose mind was intact."
"His mind was intact? What makes you say that?"
Moor looked at Ran with an expression that said he could not relate to that at all.
"Out of all the Sages we've dealt with, the killers and the rest — has one of them ever had a normal reason like revenge?"
Moor fell to thinking at that. At first he couldn't follow Ran's point. Today's Sages were garbage who used remains to obtain a Sage's mana and formulas. And who killed people as the price of using them. Whatever they did with that power, they could not be considered sane.
And the Sage they had just fought would have been no different.
'Ah...... revenge.'
Moor understood, once again, what drove Ran's actions. He had lost everything to a Sage, and to that Sage's curse.
Ran's joining the Order, and everything he was doing now alongside Moor, was for revenge.
"Hm?"
Just then the black sphere Moor had rendered invisible appeared before them.
And began, at length, to shake.
CRRRACK.
A strange sound came from the black sphere. Cracks began running through it.
"Oh, no!"
With a bursting sound, the black sphere disgorged everything it had absorbed most recently.
The shockwave that followed slammed into Moor. Failing to defend properly, he was flung backward.
"Ran, stop him!"
The first thing to fill Moor's eyes inside the blast was the Sage he had believed unconscious.
The moment he escaped the sphere the Sage cast, detonating the area around him fast. And in the same motion he lifted the other devil-worshippers rolling on the floor and the stone bowl into the air.
Then he moved to escape the spot at once.
Ran leaped at the Sage to catch him.
But before Ran's fist could land, the Sage teleported and vanished.
"Goddamn it!"
Having lost the Sage right in front of him, Ran punched the wall beside him in frustration.
***
"How's your body?"
Afterward, Ran and Moor combed the area again and again searching for the Sage, and found no trace. They gave it up and returned to the lodgings the Order had arranged, to treat their wounds and rest.
Moor, his injuries treated with the Benediction Arts, was going through the additional documents that had come from the Order. He spoke to Ran with his eyes still on the papers.
"I'm fine. Anything turn up?"
Ran, who had come out after resting in his room, rolled his arm as he spoke.
"For a start, I understand how the client knew there was more than one Sage."
Moor compared several documents and let out a short sigh.
"How?"
"According to this, she's already fought one. And the result was a total defeat. It says the Sage she faced mainly used water magic — so it will be the one we just faced."
"What? Does that make any sense?"
Ran found the explanation dubious.
Their opponent was a Sage, certainly, the so-called pinnacle of the magic path. But the client was a disciple of an Immortal, and a hero who had saved the world from a Demon King.
Sage or not, it was hard to imagine Rea losing.
"Am I actually stronger?"
"As if...... She's a disciple of an Immortal."
Moor snorted and answered Ran's earnest muttering.
"But it's certainly very strange. Mind you, it says the devil-worshippers who were there — everyone but the Sage — mostly had their heads split open by her."
"What? So did she win or lose?"
Ran spoke as though he couldn't make sense of it.
"It says she took a serious injury from the Sage but didn't die, and that her companions actually forced the Sage to withdraw. It's possible he retreated because he couldn't pay a price sufficient for the power he'd spent."
Moor scratched his head with a pen, looking troubled.
"And devil-worshippers on top of it. This seems to be tangled up rather badly."
The more Moor read the material, the more he kept thinking the heart of this business wasn't Sages but devil-kin — which is to say Hell.
"Our opponent is a Sage! So whether he's murdering people or summoning devil-kin, isn't it our job?"
Moor lifted his head at that, his face registering surprise.
"That's a fair point. And in any case the Order got back to us saying no support is possible — they're short-handed."
"So you already asked."
"Naturally."
Ran went over to where Moor was sitting and took the chair opposite.
"So what do we do now?"
"Ran, aren't you taking it a little too much for granted that I know the answer?"
Moor set the documents down and spoke with a smile playing on his face. Seeing it, Ran smiled too.
"Then you don't have one this time?"
"Ah! Of course I have a method this time as well."
At Moor's words, it was Ran's turn to look nonplussed. And Moor summoned something and set it on the desk.
"Get some proper rest until tomorrow morning. From tomorrow it's going to get loud."
"Of course. When did you even manage to pocket that?"
It was the stone bowl they had thought was taken from them — the one that had been giving off miasma in the underground waterway.