BlaiseCorvin
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Past Life Hero 2, ch 57
🕑 Added 2024-03-08 18:42:35 +0000 UTCMax was roused from his slumber by Lavinia saying his name over and over again.
“Max. Max. MAX!”
“Thought you weren’t coming in here when I sleep,” he mumbled.
“Normally, no. But someone is knocking at your door.”
“Time?” Max said as he looked at his tablet. It was two in the morning. “Who in the hell would bother me now?” He yawned, still tired from his fights.
Max began getting out of bed, but he wasn't in a particularly huge hurry. He checked the messages on his tablet and saw that some of his friends had met up the previous evening. Most of them had gone to bed early, the same as Max. Due to the sensitive nature of the exhibition match, nobody who had attended was answering questions from friends who didn't. That was going to be a can of worms later, figuring out how to deal with a secret like that. Ultimately, there was probably no solution other than to tell those who weren't there that they couldn't talk about what had happened. Max sincerely hoped it didn't cause any schisms in the relationships within his small, tight-knit friend group.
As he got up and began getting dressed, he also realized that since he was going to be taking one of the senior division Summoner slots for the end of year competition. There might be social fallout from that later too. Lovely, he thought, what a great way to wake up.
"Lavinia," he said out loud, "could you check to see who it is at the door?"
"Of course," she said.
Moments later, she came back, her voice tight. "It's Adjudicator Swan and Professor Munka."
"What!?" He got dressed faster.
Lavinia continued waiting from her respectful position outside the door. Of course, as a spirit, she could easily move through the door or spy on Max if she wanted to, but Max was sure she wasn't, and her relative position was just for Max's sake.
Through the door of his room, Lavinia said, "It looked like Adjudicator Swan was trying to do something to your door directly, but a golem got in her way. It's actually a different golem that's knocking on the door in her stead. They aren’t letting her get close anymore."
"Oh, hell," said Max. "Why is it always something?"
On his tablet, there were several other notices and private messages that he hadn't even had a chance to get to. But based on the deference that the headmasters had shown Adjudicator Swan, he felt like keeping her waiting too long would not be a good idea.
Luckily, it didn't take him long to throw on clothes, shoes, and make sure he had his weapon belt on. All of his many bracelets and anklets that he wore practically never came off anymore, so he hadn't had to even remember to put those on.
Max approached the door and opened it while schooling his expression. He didn't truly respect any of the people involved with running the Quartet at this point. However, he felt like there were still things he could get from the Quartet system, and more importantly, he intended to be fighting in Quartet competitions in the future. After all, without doing so, he figured finding a Path book would be much more difficult. His deal with the Goddess Morrigan hadn’t been too bad so far, but he would prefer to be a free man again one day.
Outside of his door, there were a total of three golems now. Adjudicator Swan stood with her arms crossed, wearing the same formal robe that she'd had on the last time Max had seen her. Professor Munka looked as tired and frazzled as Max felt. The sorceress definitely hadn't taken the time to put herself together.
"Yes?" asked Max.
"Max Cunningham," said Swan, speaking his name like a question.
"Yes, that's me," said Max. "You saw me less than a day ago, Adjudicator, so I believe you know what I look like."
Max carefully dialed his tone and words to be just short of disrespectful. The Adjudicator narrowed her eyes. "I have come for something urgent, and I am doing you a favor, but it doesn't matter to me one way or the other. So if you would prefer an Adjudicator of the Quartet system does not personally help you, then I can easily leave. That would be a pity, since I have taken the time to come here at an odd hour of the night, and even woken up Professor Munka to help."
Max blinked. "You're helping me?"
"Indeed." Swan gave Max a half-bow. "Allow me to introduce myself to you again. I am Adjudicator Swan. Until the end of the selection process, my position comes with a great deal of responsibility, and sometimes I don't get much sleep, like now." She smiled thinly. "If you are ready to step out, could you please come with me, Max?"
"Where are we going?" he asked, but he left his dorm and shut the door.
"There's no time to explain," said Swan. "Professor Munka, could you please create a portal to the location we discussed before?"
"Yes, Adjudicator," said Professor Munka.
Underneath her fatigue and professional tone, Max definitely caught an edge of irritation from Mun ka. So he was not the only one, it seemed, that was a bit frustrated and possibly confused about what was going on. However, since Max had met the Headmasters in the woods before, and he'd just had his exhibition match, he had a few suspicions about what this could be. Having another meeting at this point would sort of make sense. He wished that he'd taken a little bit more time to make himself look presentable, but there was no point in worrying about it now.
Professor Munka made a portal. Swan gestured for Max to go through first, and he did. On the other side, Swan followed him and began fiddling with her clothing as they waited for Munka to come through last. Max briefly glanced around, noticing that the portal had opened up in the Summon forest, almost near the edge of the entire quartet.
Munka stepped through her own portal and it winked out. The woods grew darker once the magic dissipated. Adjudicator Swan said, “Pay attention. Our guests will be approaching from that direction.” She pointed. Both Max and Professor Munka glanced curiously in the indicated direction.
Suddenly, Max got a flash of intuitive warning at the same time as Lavinia mentally pinged him, panicked. A wet sound to one side dragged his vision over and his eyes widened in shock.
Professor Munka’s throat had been cut.
In Swan's hand, she held a black blade, a dagger that Max recognized, or at least he recognized its type. Apparently, Professor Munka did too, because the surprise that was already in her eyes as she held her ruined throat turned to absolute terror. A strange mist outlined her body and it was obvious to Max that she could not move a muscle. As she was helpless, Adjudicator Swan slow walked forward, then used the black dagger again, stabbing it into the professor’s heart. Only then did the mist disappear and Munka fell to the ground.
Max couldn't move either. The same mist was covering his body. In the back of his mind, Lavinia screamed in warning, but it was too late. A wave of loathing ran through Max as he realized how thoroughly he had let his guard down. Especially after everything he'd been through in the last year, there was no excuse for this, and he had to put a fresh wave of hatred for himself to the side. Beating himself up in this situation was not going to help him save himself.
At the same time, he realized with shock that an action was open to him, an ability he probably should have used the day before. He opened his third eye and properly examined Swan. The information he saw made his blood run cold. It read:
Ni Na Long Swan
Quartet Adjudicator, rank 3
Aura Sorcery Path.
Champion of Demeter.
She's a freaking champion, thought Max. He remembered the weird feeling he’d had when he’d first seen her. Now he knew what that likely meant.
He cut off his third eye and desperately tried to move his body, but nothing was working. Swan tapped the blade of the bloody dagger on her other palm. Now that the leather case on her side was open, Max could see the handles of several other daggers as well, even some colors he hadn't seen before in his visions.
"This is going to be quite difficult to deal with, you know," said Swan, conversationally.
Max tried to respond, but his mouth wouldn't open. He could feel that the mist around him was slowing down and interfering with his mana. He tried a simple effort of will to create wind by pushing out his mana, trying to push his mana, to blow away some of the mist, but nothing happened. On top of that, his connection with his spirits felt different, fuzzy. They were still there, they knew what was going on too. All of them were asking questions, including Slim, using text boxes, but Max couldn't respond, not even mentally, and he could clearly feel what had happened. His connections with his spirits had been broken, or at least temporarily damaged. As a result, none of them had any power.
Max couldn't do anything but glare at Swan. She noticed his fierce expression and smiled in return. "Oh, don't worry, I'll be fine. I will admit that this is going to bring some heat down on me. After all, an absolutely extraordinary student like yourself would be a prime candidate to be taken to the Tower. And I'm sure the powers that be here will complain once you are dead. But, you have already shown that you are not shy about killing others in the Quartet. Yes? I can merely say that I took you out here to interview you, and poor Professor Munka was your first victim. Then what could I do but fight for my life?
“In the end, I wrested back the transfer tool that you stole from me and ended your life just like you killed poor Professor Munka. And, since we were portaled to an area that I scouted out before and already seeded with my aura, there will not be any spirits around to witness this, except of course your own. Your spirits will be missing, though. There will be no way for your professors to find them, much less bond with them, much less get any kind of coherent story from them." She grinned. "Oh, and just in case you feel like you can do something right now," she pointed at a thin layer of mist that seemed to cover her own body. "I have been doing this for a while. I may not be the strongest Challenger or Champion in this universe or any other, but I'm good at planning, I'm good at taking risks when I need to, and more importantly, I'm good at using the power that I have."
She smiled broadly and took a step towards him. Her hand on the black dagger tightened. "Goodbye, Max. Again, it's a pity, but this isn't personal, and by killing another challenger, I'll be rewarded. Since you are somehow a champion yourself, I shouldn't have to explain this to you."
As she drew her arm back to strike, Max's life flashed before his eyes—two lifetimes—and he was struck by how similar in some ways this situation was to how he died as Chasa de Milo. But even though he'd been much stronger in his first life, he had more varied options now. He wasn't sure if any one idea he'd come up with would free himself, so he did several things at once.
Trill's power was the only one of his spirits’ powers that constantly active. The concealment barrier, the bubble that she could generate, was just under his skin's surface for Max. So although the mana-inhibiting aura around Max played havoc with everything else, Trill's barrier had been unaffected. It was not part of his body, was not outside his body, and the power to maintain it had already been used. It didn't need to draw on any more power.
Max could also utilize the ideas that he'd received from the Remnant spirits. From Tom, he'd gotten a faster, sharper mind, perfect clarity, and better memory, all of which he was using at the moment, making his thoughts race, finding optimal solutions to every problem he could imagine in the space of a fraction of a second.
He applied Dura's concept of disruption to Trill's barrier, then expanded it. He also detached several explosive beads that dropped. The blast from each bead hit Max at almost the same time. If he hadn't been a three-star mana body, that might have taken him out of the fight. As it was, it just threw him to side and hurt like hell, but he began regenerating immediately. Granted the healing, it was slow, but he would be able to fight.
His efforts allowed him access to some of his mana. He dumped legs into his leg muscles, helping him absorb the shock of being blasted away, and to keep his balance. His mana body fluctuated wildly, affected negatively by Adjudicator Swan’s power. Using his mana was like walking a tightrope while running. But Max was extremely experienced with mana management. Instead of burning himself out, he navigated the danger and came out the other side, strengthened and focused.
Swan screamed. The explosions hurled her backwards, and Max was gladdened to see that she was missing at least part of one bicep, and half her hair had been burned away. One eye was closed, too. She wasn't on the ground long, though. A new, red aura flared and she floated up. Now there were more auras gathering around her. Another shade of red appeared.
Max figured that as both a Champion and an Adjudicator, she was no slouch. She had caught him unaware and had been toying with him before out of arrogance. It would be a rookie move right now for Max to fight defensively. Nobody was going to save him. Swan needed to die–fast. After all, not only was she likely much more powerful than Max, but she also had an incomparably superior social standing in the Quartet.
Braving the rapids of his stabilizing mana body yet again, Max pumped power into Trill's bubble, extending it a bit further, just past where Swan was standing. It didn't affect her growing auras much, but they did flicker, which was something. At the same time, Max threw a handful of beads at Swan that included explosive beads, freezing beads, and shock beads. Elemental beads had opened up for him after reaching his three-star mana body. He didn't have as many of them as his explosive beads, but they could be used in a more versatile manner.
This was not a well thought out, strategic attack. He was just throwing a whole bunch of beads and hoping for the best. Luckily, the extra work he’d put into his mana body helped him settle the power raging through his body a bit, which was good because without some sort of reprieve, he was probably going to destroy himself with the next thing he did.
Max pulled mana from his mana vault, supercharging his body and empowering Blackmist Incident until his sword hummed.
Power shone from his blade as Max sprang forward. With a sneer on her face, visible through the smoke of Max's bead atack, Swan directed clouds of aura at Max. When he ran through them, it felt like he was hit by a train over and over again. But his mana body held. Each time an aura struck him, he lost a bit of his power, but he'd been so saturated with energy that by the time he reached the astonished Swan, fear in her eyes, he still had plenty to spare.
His sword flashed down savagely, cutting off Swan's arm at the elbow. Then, he reversed his swing, coming back to hit her in the ribs with the pommel of his sword. He put all of his strength and body weight into the strike. Multiple things broke, and the would-be killer flew to the side, rolling in the undergrowth, blood spraying from her mouth.
Max had lived too long and too dangerous a life to stop there. He bent down, picked up the black dagger that was still held in Swan's clenched hand, and ran at where the woman lay in the undergrowth before slamming the dagger home into her chest. The strike was true; it found her heart, and her one open eye almost immediately glazed over in death. The various auras surrounding Max winked out as quickly as they’d appeared.
Once all of the alien magic was gone, Max sat down heavily on the forest floor in the darkness.
This was probably the closest he'd come to death since he'd been reborn, and all because he let his guard down. He shook his head at that thought. It pained him to admit it, but perhaps having his guard down and seeming like such easy bait had actually saved his life. If instead of holding him helpless to stab him, Swan had attacked with everything she had, he probably wouldn't have been able to turn the situation around.
He noticed that Professor Munka's body hadn't begun disappearing yet. She was dead for good, just like Max had seen in the vision. So was Swan. But the system didn't seem to know how to deal with it right away. Finally, a screen popped up in his vision.
Congratulations! You have triumphed over a would-be murderer. Mana units awarded. Error. Title awarded. Error. Notifications sent to quartet officials blocked, unsent, error.
Max quirked his lips tiredly as he dismissed the windows. It seemed that Swan had been very thorough in her preparations to kill him. She'd acted quickly, and Max figured that this was the fastest that she'd been able to come retrieve him after making sure she'd given herself an alibi and blocked any potential witnesses, even doing something to block the system itself. As an adjudicator, she probably had some sort of moderator privileges that she'd abused.
Suddenly, another window popped up.
Eternal struggle reward system. You have...
The rest of the text was garbled. A new window from the quartet system popped up that just read:
Error.
Max closed out the unfamiliar window that he assumed was from the alien champion system, courtesy of the Morrigan.
"Damn it, damn it, damn it," he whispered. He let his head roll back and rest against a tree. There were two dead women on the ground nearby, and Max was not naive enough to think that he could just tell everybody what had happened and come away from this situation unscathed. It was time to enact his contingency plan–a daring one at that.
But for now, he wanted–no—he needed to rest for a few seconds.
Comments
Tetsu-nii
Was honestly kinda expecting that twist, but stillgreatly enjoyed the chapter! ^_^
