Devouring the Demon King's Mana

Chapter 2

Chapter 2

It was eight in the morning, and Ren had not slept. He was not tired either, at least not in his head, because he had spent the whole night on his bunk while faint memories that were not his own drifted through him. A stone hall with a ceiling so high it vanished. A woman laughing somewhere out of sight. A long room full of people on their knees, and a feeling of looking down at them that was so calm it frightened him. None of it lasted long enough to hold on to, and by the time one picture faded another was already rising behind it.

He was on the road to the test grounds before he realized how late it had gotten. The session opened at nine, and after yesterday he could not afford to walk in even a minute behind. The plan he had settled on during the night was a simple one, and it made his stomach turn. He would go straight to the examiners and beg. He would drop to his knees in front of the whole board if he had to and plead until they gave him one more try, and he began to hurry down the road, rehearsing the words as he went.

"Stop."

Ren froze in the middle of the road. The voice had gone quiet after he woke on the shore, and part of him had started to wonder whether he had imagined it. "You're back," he whispered.

"I never left. Now listen carefully, because I'll say this once. No vessel of mine will grovel."

"But if I don't beg, they'll never let me..."

"Begging tells them you're weak, and people who think you're weak will never hand you anything. The mana you're carrying is the strongest there is, and it's time you started acting like it."

Something warm spread through Ren's chest. The strongest there is. He stood a little taller without meaning to, and the memory of Daichi's smirk suddenly felt very small. He could walk into that arena and...

"Don't get ahead of yourself," the voice said, dry now. "I said the mana is strong. I never said you were. Among the boys in your year you would leave every one of them behind, but any top-level sorcerer would take your head before you finished blinking, so learn where your lane ends."

"Top level? Who, for example?"

"Koboyashi, for one. He could cook you in under five seconds and hardly lose his breath."

Ren knew the name, because everyone did. Koboyashi was the strongest sorcerer alive. The stories said he could see moves that hadn't been made yet, which meant every attack you planned had already reached him before your muscles did. He could reach into a mind and rewrite whatever he found there, and only a solid physical barrier, one that stopped both bodies and spells, could keep him out. Worst of all, he could copy any ability used against him and throw it right back, so the harder you fought him the better you armed him. And then there was the black hole punch, a single strike that erased whatever it touched, and the more mana behind it the more it erased.

"That's the man you'll be measured against someday," the voice said. "Not Daichi."

Ren swallowed. "Okay. Okay, I get it. So how do I get them to say yes if I can't ask nicely?"

"You don't. I do." The voice paused, and when it went on it sounded almost regretful. "You've spent your whole life being taught that you're nothing, Ren, and it shows in every word you say. You have no pride to stand on, and I don't trust you to hold your ground in that building. So I'll take it from here."

"Take what?"

He felt himself slide backward, as though someone had reached in and pulled him out of the driver's seat. His mind drifted to the back of his own head, and his body kept walking without him. "Borrowed Seat," the voice said, and now it came out of his own mouth. "Your mind steps back and your body stays where it is. You'll feel what I feel and touch nothing. Think of it as a lesson."

Ren tried to shout, and nothing happened. He could see his own hands swinging at his sides and hear his boots on the gravel, but it was all numb, like watching someone else's life through a window. His legs carried him up to the gate of the test grounds, where two guards stepped into his path.

"Applicants who've failed don't get re-entry," the older one said. "Go home, kid."

"Step aside," said Ren's mouth.

The guard's hand had started toward his sword when a pulse rolled off Ren's body, a pressure that pressed on the air itself, and the hand stopped halfway. Ren felt none of it, but he saw the guard's face change. Whatever his body had sensed coming off a sixteen-year-old boy had told him to move before his pride could argue, and both guards drew back to the sides of the gate.

The examiners' board sat in a long room at the far end of the grounds, five of them behind a table stacked with slips. Ren's body walked in with its chin up and its shoulders back, and he had never seen himself move like that. "I'm here to retake the exam," his voice announced.

The chairman didn't even look up from his paper. "Hoshino. The results are final. A failed test is a failed test."

"I'd like a retake."

"And I'd like a quieter morning. Get out."

The others began to murmur and shake their heads, and Ren felt a hand rummage through the back of his mind, like someone digging through a drawer. It stopped on something. Two officials by a gate, talking low. Still nobody for the Vessel Rite?

"Then hear this," the voice said, cool and clear. "Let me retake, and if I do anything less than pass with a strong grade, I'll be your vessel for the Shōmetsu."

Inside his own head, Ren screamed. Nothing came out.

The room went so quiet that he could hear a pen roll off the edge of the table. Then the five examiners put their heads together and began to whisper, and because Ren's ears were still his, he caught almost all of it.

"This is a gift," said one of them. "A free gift to society. We can't turn it down."

"And how many resources do we waste testing a boy with no mana?" another hissed back. "It's a formality."

"There's a cost," said a third. "It's the last day of exams. If we give him a slot, one of today's accepted candidates has to be struck from the roll and rewrite next year. But if it means someone finally takes the Rite, it's worth it. Society would be saved."

Ren and the voice listened to all of it. Not one of them asked what would happen if he earned a strong grade. Not one of them so much as glanced at the possibility. In their minds he had already lost, and the only question left was how to arrange the paperwork.

The board un-huddled, and the chairman finally raised his eyes. There was something almost pleasant in his voice. "Very well, Hoshino. If you'd like to be a gift to society, we would be more than happy to let you retake this exam."

A clerk crossed a name off the roll without so much as a glance at whoever it belonged to, and slid a slip across the table with a registration number scrawled on it. Ren's body took it, bowed neatly, and walked out.

At the mouth of the arena tunnel the voice let go. The numbness drained out of his limbs all at once, and he stumbled, catching himself on the wall. "Wait," he gasped. "Wait, what did you just do? You can't just..."

"The rest is yours," the voice said. "I'll be watching."

"What can I even do? I don't know what I have!"

There was no answer. The voice had gone completely quiet, and the tunnel ahead was full of noise.

The arena was already packed. Applicants who had finished, parents, and instructors filled the stands, and Ren spotted Daichi in the front row with his arms folded and a grin already spreading across his face. In the center of the sand stood a heavy iron cage, and behind its bars something was moving.

The test was simple to state. Emit your energy and duel one kegare. Kegare were what happened when blood magic was used without care. Blood magic was mana that had been contaminated and poisoned, which was exactly why outlaws loved it: cheap power with no discipline. But the poison stuck to whatever it passed through, and when a caster lost control of it, it took shape and hunger and walked. Ren had learned all that in school, but he had never stood within thirty steps of one.

Yesterday he had run. That was the part that made his cheeks burn as the cage door rattled upward. He had walked into this same arena with an empty body, taken one look at the thing, and bolted for the exit with the whole crowd howling. What had he been thinking? Then Daichi had gone in and finished his kegare in under a minute, with a single negative burst, a blast of inverted mana that pulled instead of pushed and cancelled the living mana in whatever it touched, until the creature's own body fell apart from the inside.

Today was his turn to prove them wrong.

The kegare came out of the cage on all fours, a hulking mass of black hide threaded with wet red veins. It had no eyes at all, only a slit of a nose that twitched and swung toward him. It only knew one thing, and that was the smell of live blood. It charged.

Ren threw himself sideways and felt the wind of its claws pass his ear. It was fast, but it moved in a straight line, and it turned clumsily. He could work with that. He would dodge again, wait for it to overshoot, and then hit it with everything the old man had given him.

It was at that exact moment that he realized he had no idea what that was.

He reached inward for the power he had swallowed and found only a heat with no handle on it. Before he could try again, the kegare's backhand caught him in the ribs and sent him flying, and the wall of the arena came up much faster than he expected. He hit it hard enough to see white, and his left arm bent in a place where arms did not bend. The stands roared with laughter.

Ren scrambled up, clutching the arm to his chest, and ran. He ran along the wall with the kegare crashing after him, sand spraying, his lungs on fire. Ahead of him, past the last curve, the exit was open. He could get out. He could live to fight another day, and the crowd could howl all they wanted.

Then he remembered.

Let me retake, and if I do anything less than pass with a strong grade, I'll be your vessel. The blood drained from his face. The exit meant nothing. If he ran out, he would fail, and if he failed, he would die on the Rite's table with the whole city nodding. There was no door in this arena that led anywhere but death.

His legs stopped working. He sank to his knees in the middle of the sand while the laughter rose around him, and his shoulders began to shake. Who was he to think he could ever be a sorcerer? Who was he to dream about a commander's coat? Daichi had been right about everything. He was air. He had always been air.

Behind him, the kegare's claws tore up the ground as it charged, and Ren shut his eyes.