[335] A Midwinter Night (6)
4 a.m.
The Ice Queen's domain.
A brown liquor bottle hit the castle wall and shattered.
"You bastards! Come out! I dare you!"
Drunk, Jokre bellowed at the top of his lungs. His pupils were glassy and his steps staggered in zigzags.
Rudvans and Vivian supported him on either side.
"Jokre, don't. What if you get caught? You're not supposed to be in here at this hour."
His melancholy, amplified by drink, turned into rage.
Jokre needed someone to pick a fight with, and that urge to battle the world had pushed him past the forbidden line.
"Ha! Who's gonna touch me? I'm a mage! A proper mage! Come on! I'll blast the guards away with a single spell!"
Jokre shook his friends off.
Vivian and Rudvans couldn't hold him—both were swaying, drunk enough that their judgment wavered.
Rudvans, who at least wasn't as wasted, clung to Jokre and guided him into the keep.
"It's freezing. Let's go inside. If you keep yelling here we'll be in real trouble."
"Drinks! Rudvans! Let's drink! Let's drink our fill!"
"All right. But be quiet and follow me."
The hall they left behind felt bleak.
Objects that had seemed ordinary by day now gave off an uncanny, almost living chill.
The Ice Queen's likeness in the cold moonlight that poured through the windows was especially eerie.
Vivian brushed at her shoulder and said, "Light magic."
Jokre was in no state to cast, so Rudvans and Vivian put up illumination.
They were drunk too, and after several false starts they finally succeeded.
With a pop, two lights rose to the ceiling and the hall brightened at once.
Jokre scrambled up the slippery ice stairs.
On the mezzanine corridor he started taunting the waxen mannequin of the Ice Queen trapped in a block of ice.
"Hey, Ice Queen. You sleepin'? Want to drink with me?"
There was no answer.
"Ha! See? Even the legendary mage's nothing special. Just stuck in ice, taking a nap! Is that even magic?"
- Magic. The Law that twists phenomena. Ice Queen. Mage.
Jokre's words fed into the mental entity.
Optrus, materialized by Lilia's necromantic soul, instinctively fled to the place where the most familiar thoughts were concentrated.
That place was the Ice Queen's domain.
Among the information vomited by tourists, the Ice Queen accounted for the largest share.
From that mass of data, Optrus adapted to this world with startling speed.
At some point, cognition arose within the spirit that had been only sensation.
Sensation and cognition began to communicate, and mere knowledge preservation moved into the realm of thought.
- I think. Therefore I exist.
Optrus concluded it needed a form to prove its existence. It found a special vessel that could materialize its thought.
The Ice Queen's eyes snapped open.
Jokre wasn't surprised—he knew the wax mannequin opened its eyes when someone stood on its base.
The Ice Queen's beauty only made the ache of being tossed aside by women sting more sharply in him.
Jokre rapped the ice as if knocking on a door.
"Hey, Your Majesty. Want to date me? Huh? Heh heh heh."
Vivian clicked her tongue at Jokre's drunkenness.
"He's completely lost it. Hey, pull yourself together. If you pass out here you'll freeze to death."
Jokre rolled up his sleeves and readied himself to fight the Ice Queen.
"All right, bring it on. A duel between mages. If I win, you date me."
The information he'd gathered so far was being sorted into experience, and Optrus had reached a stage where it judged the world by its own criteria.
- What is strength? A superior ordering of qualities. Control of nature. Distortion, transformation, change in the physical order.
Then a question surfaced.
- Then... am I strong?
"That's enough. Let's go back. Let's sleep. How long are we going to stand here?"
Seeing Jokre's eyes half-closed, Rudvans grabbed him from behind and began to drag him away.
Vivian, arms linked and sighing, glanced once at the Ice Queen and followed.
The moment she took a step, she snapped her head around with a look of horror.
"Uh, uh—?"
The Ice Queen's pupils, which should have been looking straight ahead, were looking at her.
Vivian thought she must still be drunk.
But no matter how she tried to steady herself, the Ice Queen's gaze was unmistakably turned toward her.
A chill ran down her spine; her heart pounded so hard she felt it might burst. Shock washed over her.
"Um, um, guys..."
Jokre's voice faded down the stairs.
"Mmm? Date me... mmm?"
Don't leave me!
Vivian was so terrified she couldn't make a sound.
The waxen Ice Queen's eyes—clearly made of wax—now turned and scanned the surroundings freely.
It felt as if it were analyzing the material that imprisoned it.
Vivian felt like she would die, though nothing was physically wrong.
No—what she felt was even more terrifying than death.
As the distance from her friends grew, the instinct to live forced air into her lungs.
Vivian screamed at the top of her voice like never before.
"Yaaaaaah!"
The hall rang with her scream.
As Rudvans, descending the stairs, turned his head in surprise, a flash of light burst from where the Ice Queen stood.
"What the—?"
Rudvans abandoned Jokre and rushed up the steps.
The Ice Queen was wreathed in radiance, and pale-faced Vivian watched, jaw trembling.
"Ru, Rudvans... this, this..."
The waxen skin of the Ice Queen cracked and light leaked through the fissures.
Her body trembled and the ice block split, dividing into what seemed like thousands of shards as if it were about to explode.
'I need to get out of the way. I need to—'
The ice exploded with a roar. At the same moment Rudvans grabbed Vivian and hurled them both aside.
Fragments of ice scattered to the far end of the hall.
Jokre, still on the stairs, hastily covered his face as shards flew, then lifted his head, startled.
Even after landing hard on her backside, Vivian couldn't take her eyes off the Ice Queen.
Within the smashed waxen shell burned a golden, phosphorescent light.
It began to move slowly and approached the railing.
As the light faded, a version of the Ice Queen appeared far more alive than before.
Vivian muttered in disbelief.
"The Ice Queen... resurrected?"
Watching the rebirth up close, she had seen the waxen mold crack and a new Ice Queen fill the space within it.
Jokre, who had reached the corridor opposite, started to run toward Vivian but abruptly froze.
Like Vivian, his face went white.
"Ice Queen?"
Could the legend be true?
If this wasn't a dream, he was standing opposite the mage who had once brought so many to death.
"Haaa."
The Ice Queen opened her mouth and exhaled. Frost seeped out and the air began to freeze like brittle glass.
"This is the freezing phenomenon."
Her voice was beautiful.
But meeting the Ice Queen's unfeeling eyes made Jokre feel as if the blood in his veins were turning to ice.
The Ice Queen glanced at Jokre without concern and said, "If you defeat me, I'll do it—I'll date you."
"Ugh... aaah!"
Jokre's nerves shot toward death.
The desire to live, however, swept the alcohol from him in an instant and unleashed the spell he had practiced longest.
A fireball bloomed in his palm.
Jokre's specialty was short-range fire magic.
It wasn't the fastest to cast, but in raw power he prided himself on being unmatched.
"Jokre! No!"
Vivian shouted. From any neutral perspective it was a reckless, utterly foolish move.
But faced with the Ice Queen's gaze, she might have done the exact same thing.
"Die, die!"
Jokre hurled the fireball straight at the Ice Queen's head.
Perhaps he never intended to dodge. With a bang, the area above her neck was engulfed in flames.
"Kyaaaa!"
Knowing it had been a waxen mannequin, Vivian screamed at the image of a human candle.
Whatever had been begun was already done.
Rudvans, the more rational of them, watched the Ice Queen carefully and muttered, "Is she dead?"
The Ice Queen did not flinch. Sensory input was concentrated in her brain.
Sensation was new to her since taking form, and it fascinated her.
Having given the Law a living body, the pain of her face burning was excruciating.
But to one who could not clearly define pain, it was merely an abnormal sensory state.
'Is this heat? Absorb the energy to suppress it.'
By drawing in energy through the Law, the fire vanished in an instant and the surrounding air froze.
The Ice Queen's face, grotesquely distorted, revealed itself.
Jokre—the cause of this—felt his legs go weak and he landed hard on his rear.
"Ugh, p-please..."
The Ice Queen savored the convulsion of the nerves gathered in her face.
Pain was a truly unpleasant sensation.
'The brain—'
The Ice Queen's face, advancing on Jokre, began to regenerate bit by bit.
"I nearly melted."
If the brain melts, you die.
That is what it means to be alive.
"Please! I was wrong!"
Jokre lay flat, begging for his life. Standing against a mage who remained alive even after having his face burned was madness.
"Jokre!"
Vivian and Rudvans rushed over and stepped between Jokre and the Ice Queen.
They could never match her, but to Jokre, his friends protecting him felt like salvation.
Vivian dropped to her knees and pleaded.
"Please spare him! He's drunk—it's the alcohol! He never meant to attack Your Majesty."
"Alcohol?"
Alcohol. Brain. Disruptive substance.
"I see."
Once she understood that the pain had been caused by a disruptive substance in the brain, the Ice Queen lost interest.
"Absorbing alcohol doesn't seem beneficial to living beings."
"Yes! Yes! We're sorry!"
"Then what will you do now?"
The Ice Queen asked with innocent curiosity.
Born human and having met humans, she was curious what they would do to her.
Purity and madness overlap in places, so the Ice Queen's blunt question filled Jokre with terror.
"I'll do anything you order. Please, just spare my life."
"Anything I order?"
"Yes—anything..."
The Ice Queen cocked her head.
"Why?"
Jokre stared up at her, stunned.
Now sober, he noticed how odd her tone and behavior were.
But if the legend was true, she had slept for eight hundred years. She could well have lost memories.
"Of course—Your Majesty is the ruler. A great mage. You must rule again."
"Rule?"
The Ice Queen's head tilted further, then she frowned as if something displeased her.
Though she had borrowed a human form and gained personality, her information-processing speed was noticeably slow.
Yet that mismatch in neural function was just another trait of a living being, not something she found unpleasant.
"I see. I rule because I am strong."
Jokre let out a relieved sigh.
So she was still the Ice Queen. Had he tried any tricks, he would have surely lost his life.
"You're absolutely right. There's no comparison between you and us weaklings."
Jokre kowtowed profusely.
He had spent his whole life struggling and had only just seen his first success.
To die senselessly before he could enjoy life as a mage would have been unbearable; even as a corpse he wouldn't find peace.