Kimi to Boku no Saigo no Senjo, Aruiha Sekai ga Hajimaru Seisen - Volume 10 - Chapter 4.3

3

Nebulis palace, underground.

Until minutes before, this had been a subterranean lake. The once-overflowing spring had dried and turned the place into nothing more than an underground cave of exposed rough bedrock.

And in that space…

“Come on out, Founder!” Alice was yelling so loudly her throat became dry.

She couldn’t see the Founder anywhere, but she knew her voice had to be reaching outside. Her surroundings were obscured by a pitch-black curtain-like barrier.

“I know you’re there! Let me out! Let me out of this sickening barrier!”

Four black spires rose from the ground. The black light emitted from the tips of those structures had spread around her like a curtain, isolating her from the surroundings she stood in.

She had been fully captured.

…She called this the Readvent Barrier?!

…I can’t believe it absorbs astral energy. This is a crisis!

As for the towers that made up the barrier, they apparently absorbed all astral power, no matter how strong. It was a mage’s worst nightmare, as far as prisons went.

…And I feel so strangely dizzy.

…Staying in here is putting me in danger. It’s messing with my senses.

She needed to get out of there as soon as possible.

“Ice Calamity—” Alice thrust her right hand up, aiming it toward the curtain of light. “Ice Calamity—Blizzard of a Thousand Thorns!”

Hundreds of ice blades appeared, from the ground she stood upon and from midair. The daggers that Alice had created through her astral power aimed their points at the black barrier.

“Pierce!”

At her command, all blades took aim at the curtain and fired off. They were like a machine gun. The shards of ice punctured the barrier like a dense rain of bullets.

Every single one of them vanished instantaneously.

“But…?!” she cried out.

She couldn’t help but feel alarmed after learning this was a prison that could seal away astral power. Could even she be so easily rendered powerless? Her astral powers disappeared as soon as they touched the barrier, just like snow melting in the sun.

This prison was, without a doubt, an astral mage’s worst nightmare.

“…Am I really powerless to do anything?” she muttered unconsciously.

Her words echoed back to her in the isolated space.

“This is no joke!”

She chided herself for almost losing heart and falling to her knees as she fixed her posture to stand at her full height.

For Alice to have a mental breakdown—

That was likely the Founder’s aim, at least.

…That’s right, Alice. You already knew that. You prepared yourself for this.

…You’re dealing with the Revered Founder!

She knew she would never be able to reach the ancient mage’s level, even if she used all her abilities. This was the Grand Witch. And had Iska not been by her side back then, when they had been near the neutral city Ain—

…If he…

……hadn’t been there, I wouldn’t have won?

………Then what about now?

…………If he’s not here, it’s fine if I lose, is that it?

But it was the opposite.

She needed to face the Founder on her own because he wasn’t here. If she had really prepared herself for that, she couldn’t balk now.

“…So what if you’re a hundred years old. So what if you’re the strongest astral mage. Because you aren’t! You’re just a cheeky little brat!”

She clenched her fists.

She gritted her back teeth and punched the barrier before her eyes.

“You better not underestimate me!”

In the underground cavern, the Founder Nebulis absentmindedly stared at the black barrier.

“…In the end, all I’ve done is imitate the Astrals. It’s far from perfect.”

The barrier had a flaw. Although it might be invincible against astral mages, there was one fatal weakness. However, it wasn’t particularly relevant to the princess who was currently imprisoned within the cage.

If it was applicable to anyone, that would be the Imperial swordsman who had been with Alice in the neutral city of Ain.

“I don’t know how you’ve acquired them, but those cannot be used by anyone except Crossweil.”

“Crossweil?! …That’s the name of my master.”

Crossweil Nes Lebeaxgate, the first master of the astral swords—the name was simply contrived wordplay.

His true identity was that of Crossweil Gate Nebulis, her foolish, mad younger brother.

The Founder began to speak to herself softly. Directing her words toward her brother, who had taken a different path a century ago.

“Crossweil…why did you give away your astral swords to a complete stranger? They are our secret weapon to help restore the planet. You were the one who told me that.”

The two blades weren’t actually swords. They were vessels in the shape of sabers, required to restore all the astral powers to the planet’s core.

So why had he given them away? Just how much potential had he seen in that Imperial boy?

“Well…no good will come from thinking about it.”

There was no use in discussing it. Her brother and the Imperial swordsman weren’t here. There was only the princess, floundering in the astral power cage. And she could never break the prison.

“I’m sure you have nothing but dreary thoughts in your head,” she said as she stared at the black barrier.

The princess was desperately trying to think of a way to escape. Probably wondering whether there was a limit to the energy the barrier could hold. Or that it could withstand.

And the answer to both was a resounding no.

No matter how Alice attacked it, the black barrier would never crumble.

“Do you understand? Your attempts are futile.”

Furthermore, being in the prison would distort any human’s conception of time. To the princess, it likely felt as if tens of hours had passed. She should have come up with and failed at many plans by now, realizing it was useless.

That was more than enough time to break her.

“You can watch from there, girl.”

The Founder turned around. She looked up, in the direction of the Empire.

“I’m going to the Empi—”

“I said I’d never let you.”

Crack…

Behind the Founder Nebulis, a giant fissure had formed in the curtain.

She heard it rupture. When she realized there was something wrong, the Founder spun back around and witnessed the barrier being broken into pieces like glass.

“…Impossible.”

She gulped. She thought it had been unbreakable. It couldn’t be broken from the inside, at least. There shouldn’t have been any astral power that a mage could use against the barrier, as it would absorb everything.

“Girl.”

“…Uh…tsk… How’s that? Are you scared…yet…?”

The princess didn’t even have the strength to keep standing. Alice pitifully crawled along the ground on her knees, but even so, she grinned boldly as she looked up at the Founder Nebulis.

“…Who said that…I can’t do anything without astral power?”

“How did you escape?”

The Founder narrowed her eyes. She glared at Alice, who clung to the wall in order to pull herself up.

“It can’t be……” The Founder’s eyes stopped at Alice’s hands. Her skin was broken and bloodied. “So you smashed through it?”

“Yes. I gave it a good smack with my fists. I couldn’t break through with my astral power, so I had to use my own body. “

She had fought her hardest.

The four spires had supported the cage. If any of them were damaged, that barrier would be destroyed. Because Alice’s astral power had been rendered ineffective, she’d had no choice but to dismantle them using physical force.

“I’m not sure whether you’re an absolute idiot or an absolute genius.”

…Whew.

It was the first time the Founder Nebulis had sighed.

“If astral power won’t work against it, all one needs to do is destroy it by hand. But a powerful astral mage wouldn’t simply come to that conclusion. Since they would have relied on astral power since birth, after all.”

“Yes, that’s right…,” Alice said. “I lost my way in the dark for a while.”

She placed a hand on the wall and stood up. Her shoulders heaved up and down as she said with a self-derisive smile, “But then I saw the light. I wondered just how hard the black pillars that supported the barrier could be. And after I kept punching them for a while, I thought that maybe something would come of it.”

Alice had arrived at that suspicion at the eightieth hour, according to her internal clock.

Then she had continued to punch at the pillars for another ten hours.

First with her right fist, then her left. Then with her right leg, and then her left. She had even tried banging her head into them and body-slamming the pillars toward the end.

“Looks like I can do it if I set my mind to it. Those black rocks were a lot more fragile than I thought.”

“That’s exactly right.”

“……What?”

Alice doubted her own ears.

The Founder had so easily agreed that Alice was taken aback.

“The pillars you destroyed are stones called astral crystals that exist in the planet’s core. They’ve always been fragile. Even when I have summoned them.”

“Y-you can’t be serious?”

“The only ones who know the processing technique to strengthen these crystals are the Astrals, who live at the edge of the continent. You know of the perfected form already.”

“What?”

“Oh? You hadn’t realized?”

The Founder brushed away her pearly bangs. She looked straight up at the cavern’s ceiling.

“The astral swords.”

“The black crystals you broke would normally be purified to the utmost degree so they can be tempered into their perfect form. Which is what the black steel of the astral swords is.”

“The astral swords?!”

The shock sent a cold shiver through Alice’s whole body.

She hadn’t needed to be told, nor did she need to go confirm it. Without a doubt, the black astral sword was indeed one of the swords Iska had in his possession.

“It’s not my power. It’s my astral swords’ abilities.

“The white astral sword can release what the black one intercepts.”

She remembered he had said something like that when they were in the Nelka forest. The astral swords were a black and a white blade. Whatever the black blade cut, the white could release.

…So that’s what they are. If the white blade can release astral power…

…the black blade must be storing it?!

The sword wasn’t actually cutting astral power.

Rather, one was storing the astral energy while the other was simply unleashing it—that was how the weapons truly worked.

The black blade would absorb the astral energy, which was why the astral power would temporarily disappear. To an observer, it would look as though it had been sliced through.

“Did Iska know that?”

“No idea,” the Founder replied bluntly. “I doubt Crossweil told him. I’m sure he probably said that the sword can cut any astral power, and the boy believed him.”

“Very likely…”

Based on how Iska acted, that was most likely the case. He had no reason to doubt and no means to suspect what the true workings of the black blade were.

“Though I couldn’t care less.” The dark-skinned girl turned her back on Alice. “It won’t change anything.”

“Huh! Stop right there!”

“I think you should be more concerned for yourself.”

“……Huh?”

“What do you expect to do? You’re already pale from blood loss.”

Alice’s vision blurred. She couldn’t feel her hand resting on the wall. By the time she realized that, her slender body was already falling to the ground.

“…Wha…?”

She needed to get up. But she couldn’t get her arms or legs to respond.

“Without astral power, you can’t do anything. I take back what I said. I didn’t think you’d break out of the astral power cage.”

The barefoot girl walked away. Her pearlescent hair fluttered as she went.

“You used your whole mind and body to fight against me. I’ll grant you that.”

“…Wa…it…ri…ght…there…”

As her vision blurred more, she looked up frantically at the Founder. She reached toward the girl’s small back. Alice gritted her teeth.

“…If you do what you want to this world…… I won’t…be able to face Iska again…!”