Devouring the Demon King's Mana

Chapter 3

Chapter 3

The claws never landed. Ren knelt in the dark behind his own eyelids, waiting for the end, and instead of pain the voice cut through his head, low and furious and very close.

"Get up. You are not dying here."

"I can't," Ren whispered. "I don't know how to do anything. You said it yourself, I'm nothing."

"I said you were weak. I never said you were nothing, and I went quiet on purpose. I wanted to see what you would do when there was nowhere left to run, and now I know." The voice softened, just slightly. "That was all I needed. Sit back and watch this."

The numbness poured over him again, from his scalp to his heels, and this time he did not fight it. His body rose off the sand as though someone had lifted him by the collar. The broken arm no longer mattered, because he could no longer feel it, and his left hand hung at his side while his right hand opened and closed as if testing itself. His eyes opened, and the world looked different through them, wider and slower, every grain of sand suddenly clear.

The laughter in the stands began to thin out. The boy who had been sobbing on his knees a heartbeat ago was on his feet, and when the kegare's claws came down again he simply was not there. He slid a hand's width to the left, and the claws tore through empty air. It swung again and he turned his shoulder, and it swung a third time and he stepped back with a gentle motion that looked more like a dance than a dodge. A faint red haze clung to the edges of his body, moving with him, and from far enough away it looked like nothing more than a trick of the light.

Daichi's grin had gone stiff. Near the front, a few applicants stopped talking altogether.

The kegare howled. It had been missing for too long, and whatever passed for a mind in that thick skull had tipped into rage. It dropped low on all four limbs, gathered itself, and came at him with everything it had, and Ren's body stood perfectly still and waited, arms loose at his sides, as calm as a man watching rain.

The claws were a hand's width from his face when the voice named it. "Shukuchi."

The arena blurred, and Ren was ten paces away, standing behind the kegare with no sense of having crossed the distance. The creature was still lunging at the spot where he used to be. It had barely started to turn when he lifted two fingers to the back of its skull, and the voice spoke again, almost gently.

"Tsuranuki."

A thin thread of mana, packed so tight it made the air ring, drove out of his fingertips. There was a soft, wet sound, and a hole the size of a fist opened clean through the kegare's head. It stopped moving in the middle of a step, swayed once, and fell forward onto the sand.

Nobody made a sound. The whole arena held its breath, and the kegare lay on the ground with a neat round hole through its skull and a wisp of smoke curling out of it. The crowd looked at the body, then at the boy, then at each other, plainly unsure whether cheering was allowed.

Then someone in the back whooped, and the whole place erupted.

That was when the numbness drained out of Ren all at once, and he was himself again. The first thing to come back was the pain in his left arm, so sudden he nearly dropped to the sand. The second was the sound, a wall of cheering rolling down from the stands. He looked around, dazed, at the dead kegare with its ruined head, at his own right hand still lifted, two fingers extended, and slowly lowered it.

He had passed. He had actually passed. Only a handful of applicants ever managed to kill one of these things, and he had done it on a broken arm. He laughed, a short helpless laugh, and then he was laughing harder, and tears he had no plan to shed ran down his face.

"Enjoy it," the voice murmured, and there was warmth in it. "You earned that much."

A healer hurried across the sand and passed a glowing palm over his arm, and the bone knit itself back together with a warm ache that made his eyes water. Then an usher was steering him toward the results office.

The clerk behind the counter did not look impressed, but he slid a slip across all the same. It had a single letter at the top, in red ink: A.

"You wasted the opening," the clerk said, reading from his notes. "Nearly two minutes of running and dodging before you did anything useful. Otherwise it was a clean kill. The pass rate on that kegare is under one in ten, so be grateful."

Ren was still staring at the letter when someone stopped beside him. Daichi held up his own slip so that Ren could read it. A*, with a small star drawn beside it, and under it a note that said fastest clear of the day, single strike. Daichi's smile was thin, and his eyes were not on the slip but on Ren's face, searching for something.

Ren remembered the gum and the loaf of bread, and for a long moment he only looked at Daichi. Then he held up his own slip, so that the red A caught the light, and said nothing at all. Daichi's jaw tightened. He turned and walked away.

By the time Ren stepped outside, word had spread. Applicants he had never spoken to were slapping his shoulders and shaking his good hand, ordinary kids from ordinary streets with patched sleeves and cheap boots, and every one of them wanted to know how he had done it. A girl with a chipped bag told him he was the bravest person she had ever seen. A boy his age wanted to know if the rumor was true that he had once been unable to cast at all. Ren said yes, and they cheered him for it anyway.

The leaderboard went up at noon. A crowd gathered around the board outside the arena, and Ren pushed through it with his heart in his throat. A hundred names had been listed, or ninety-nine, since his was entered twice, and the top twenty would be admitted to the academy. Everyone below that line could go home and eat grass.

He read from the bottom, because he could not stand to start at the top, and the more names he passed, the more his stomach twisted. Then he looked up and saw it. Number one belonged to Itsuki Sakaguchi, a name he had never heard, some quiet boy who had never drawn a single glance all week. Number two was Daichi Kurogane, and the clenched fist at Ren's side loosened just a little when he saw it. Number three belonged to Mio Tachibana.

Number four was Ren Hoshino.

He read it three times, and then he stopped reading and simply stood there.

The academy took only the best twenty, and it was said to be the only place in the country where a promising sorcerer could grow into a real one. Its students trained to fight the Tainted, the outlaws who poisoned themselves with blood magic and spawned kegare wherever they went, and beyond them the tyrants who were swallowing the provinces one at a time. Each year of students was split into four classes, A through D, with exactly five students in each. The top five scorers made up Class A, and the bottom five of the twenty made up Class D. The higher the class, the better the odds of a top squad noticing you, and a top squad was the only road to a commander's coat.

So the class list went like this. Itsuki Sakaguchi at number one. Daichi. Mio Tachibana. Ren. And Emi Nakagawa at number five.

He was going to be sitting in the same room as Daichi Kurogane for the next year. The thought should have soured his mood, and instead it made him grin.

He left the grounds with the slip folded in his good hand, walking fast, and he could already picture the orphanage door. Master Ishida would be at the table with his cap in front of him, and the other boys would look up from their bowls, and Ren would put the paper down in the middle of the table without a word. He had thought about it all the way down the road. He was ten minutes from home when a shadow fell across the path and three figures stepped out from the trees.

They wore plain grey robes with a crest stitched on the chest, a circle cut by a single line, and he had seen that crest only once before, on the wall of the examiners' hall, above the board's seats. These were not the board. They were the people the board answered to.

"Ren Hoshino," said the tallest, a woman with a voice like a closing door. "You'll come with us."

"No," Ren said, and took a step back. "I just passed the exam. I'm going home."

The woman did not answer. He turned to run, and she lifted one hand. He never saw what she did. A pressure slammed into his chest, his legs went out from under him, and the road tilted sideways. The last thing he heard was the voice inside his head, tight and strangely quiet, saying his name.

Then everything went black.