—Violet lightning detonations run wild as Clind bounds through the battlefield sky, darting freely in every direction.

“—!!”

Chasing the glare of those thunderblasts, dragon claws lash out like a storm, raking the sky; each time, empty air is torn open, and the vacuum waves born of it close off the dragonewt’s escape routes. With his options being shaved away, Clind kept the Dragon’s aim fixed on himself, circling the heights with both care and daring so that even the aftershocks would not reach the ground.

“You’ve exceeded our projections. Astonishing.”

Dodging, diverting, and even meeting head-on the Dragon’s might—each blow capable of reshaping the terrain—Clind could not help but marvel at how deftly the Usurper handled the dragon shell.

As stated earlier, the Usurper has not fully mastered the Divine Dragon’s shell—like giving a newborn the body of the Sword Saint. It is impossible from the outset. Thus Clind was impressed not by any display of the Divine Dragon’s true power, but by the Usurper’s voracious stance of turning even the shell into a tool for victory, and once again he respected that sliver of strength found in frail humans. Yet as the battle dragged on beyond expectation, he realized it: the Usurper, too, was adapting to the shell far beyond what Clind had anticipated—and was continuing to grow in tandem.

“I’ve heard you’ve already crossed blades with the Sword Saint and the Sword Demon before now. Makes sense.”

Through repeated bouts against foes who cannot be casually overwhelmed even with the Divine Dragon’s shell, the Usurper was drawing out the Dragon’s potential to a formidable degree. That much could be felt amply from the gleam of the dragon scales and Dragon Halo guarding the “heart core.”

“Human potential… Respect.”

How absurd, this way of Dragons who would bluster that they are completed beings. Why could Dragons strut about the land as the mightiest lifeform? Clind believed the answer lay in their loud, unabashed footfalls—their presence so overbearing no one could look away. You couldn’t just leave them be. That was what let Dragons throw their weight around more than anyone on the surface.

And so Dragons lost their place on this earth and vanished beyond the Great Waterfall.

——

Even knowing it was a misplaced sentiment, the dragonewt’s heart was awash with the past. As rifts opened across the heavens and boulders and shards of ice, lofted by a thunderous gale, whirled and flew, he bored through them with ten, twenty layered shockwaves; and in Clind’s mind played the scene from four centuries past—his kin driven from the surface, taking wing and flying away.

They say that day, only stragglers and eccentrics remained on the ground, while Dragons with sound judgment went beyond the Great Waterfall—but to Clind, it was the opposite. Dragons were apex beings because life had been designed to make them the strongest. If so, then a Dragon must ever study and keep growing, so as never to cede that throne. The very birth of dragonewts is proof of that Dragon way, is it not?

“Above all, can you really not see it? —wry smile.”

Turning the violet sparks sheathing him into rolling thunder, shattering the hundreds of boulders and ice masses that filled the sky and drawing the Dragon’s focus to himself, Clind looked down to the ground. There—

“—Dragon scales and the Dragon Halo. So that’s the mechanism by which the Divine Dragon neutralized your trump card.”

“‘Neutralized’ is a rather rude way to put it. I’d prefer ‘nullified’ or ‘rendered harmless,’ if you pleeease.”

“Is this the time to quibble over trifles?! …Simultaneous activation of different attributes—is that an application of the two-attribute cross-scheme? But if you mix a third in, how do you control the convergence pressure of fire and wind?”

“It’s simple. Make the convergence pressure itself your core. The imbalance in the formula born of mutual interference can be corrected by matching the third attribute—water to fire, earth to wind.”

“You’re saying you use spiral interference of attributes!? Nonsense—if you clash inverse-phase attributes, the formula cancels itself out and you’ll blow past your gate’s critical deviation in no time and… polar compression!”

“Oh? Reaching that on your own is better than I expected. From the look of it, your construction is novel and you seem self-taught, and yet… no, on closer look, isn’t that the foundational schema our house’s head two generations back left behind?”

“Guh…!”

“By now, Balanced Circulation—which treats the mana coursing through the body as a ring—is the mainstream, and those notes were discarded as worthless… The materials did go missing quite a while ago. Don’t tell me—that was you?”

“W-well, to master the path of magic you need a certain resolve! The text was gathering dust at a street stall to begin with! From there I derived Integrated Circulation and dramatically improved mana-use efficiency in spellcasting!”

“How braaazen, to steal and then crow about it on someone else’s theory.”

“I’ll admit it was the spark of the idea, but refinement and improvement are the essence of progress! Or are you saying you’ve never received any tutelage or instruction from anyone!?”

——

"Don't clam up all of a sudden! First of all, even if I cede a hundred steps, the great achievement belongs not to you but to your predecessor's predecessor, Lady Roswaal J. Mathers!"

"And that, too, is as good as me. — Back to the point. I'd never considered 'Integrated Circulation.' If you understand the problems with the 'two-attribute cross-scheme,' I don't need to explain why 'tripod centroid control' is ill-suited to a 'multi-attribute cross-scheme,' do I?"

"Are you making fun of me? Every time you add one more attribute to co-fire, the turbulence of spiral interference multiplies. With 'tripod centroid control' you can co-fire up to three attributes, but beyond that... no, you earlier pulled off simultaneous control of five attributes. How in the world did you do it?"

"I see. You want the answer. Very well, I'll lay it bare. I believe the true delight of magic lies in testing one's own curiosity and the abyssal essence of sorcery, but if your passion only goes that far—"

"Wait wait wait wait, be quiet...! Five attributes, spiral interference, apex compression... no, his formula uses 'Balanced Circulation'... I see! Parallel superposition of 'tripod centroid control'!"

"—!"

"In other words, you ran two superposed strands of triple-attribute simultaneous activation under 'tripod centroid control'! Of the second strand's three attributes, you used the invoked Yang attribute to assist your own gate, and by setting the convergence pressure produced by spiral interference as the core, you established apex compression between the three-attribute and two-attribute sets, thereby realizing that—"

"Yes, exactly! That's the breakthrough that proves the reality of a 'fivefold resonance point'!"

"Are you insane!? One move, one instant, one minute, one hairbreadth! The slightest misalignment and you trigger 'Spiral Collapse' and it's over! You'll carve a second Agzadd Valley with yourself at the epicenter!?

"But that isn't what happened. — That is the lofty, far-off summit of the mage's path."

"——"

"Are you afraid, Ezzo Cadner-kun?"

"Ah, terrifying indeed. It's my own heart that craves it, Roswaal L. Mathers."

—Yes: on the ground, two mages are pitting their hard-won craft against one another, honing each other.

"Such lively faces. Beyond expectation."

There was a role entrusted from the start. Thus, to fight at the foremost line against the 'Dragon,' wreathed in violet lightning, was something Clind willingly took upon himself.
However, even had that role not been entrusted to him, Clind would, in keeping with his own creed, have chosen to cross violet lightning with his former dragon shell like this.

The give-and-take, the mutual polishing between human and human, is about to bring forth something new.

That, precisely, is the wish of Clind, dragonewt to the Divine Dragon Volcanica—Volcanica, who was branded a heretic by kin that would not accept new values and chose the path of being left behind on the surface.
For it was the stoutest pillar of a mindset that never allowed itself to be consumed by the Witch Factor of Melancholy, which demands the closing off of possibility as its price.

△▼△▼△▼△

Roswaal knew almost nothing about Ezzo Cadner, who had come to stand at his side.

He had heard the name. A new recruit to the Felt Camp, an administrator whose competence quickly made him one of the camp’s central figures—that was the extent of his understanding.
He had, in passing, information that the man was a mage, but he had pigeonholed him as some self-styled, untrained hedge-wizard of unknown tutelage—and given that the man was in fact self-taught, that impression was not far off the mark.
However, that “quasi-mage” impression was overturned the moment he faced the real Ezzo and witnessed his theory of spell construction. — The real thing.

And once each knew the other was genuine, many words were unnecessary.

"Catch your breath for a moment. I’m going to have you pull one more reckless stunt."

Having said so, Ezzo jumped down from the footing he had created to meet Roswaal at eye level, took a step to the front of the battlefield, and looked up at the sky.

"——"

With great spells and super-spells being fired in rapid succession, and the clashes between the 'Dragon' and the dragonewt layered atop that, the sky—once a broad expanse of blue—was churned by the dramatic effects of the pooled mana into a rainbow-shimmering abnormal weather pattern. There, the chain of violet detonations still ran in countless links, and the dragonewt's solitary duel streaked across the sky.
Even after Roswaal fell for lack of strength, Clind continued to fulfill his role—

"Why is he fighting alone? You're thinking about this the wrong way."

"...What did you say?"

"You think mages cannot intermingle with others? No—harmony is the very marrow!"

In front of the wide-eyed Roswaal, countless water orbs rose around Ezzo as he said this.
The orbs had taken in several shattered rock chunks within, and with those contained, they surged upward all at once—diving into the intensifying battlefield of Clind and the 'Divine Dragon.'

"That's—"

Reckless—no, pointless, Roswaal couldn't grasp Ezzo's intent.
Skilled as he was at casually handling something approaching a hundred instances of single-attribute water control, those water orbs, even hurled with the rocks inside, wouldn't so much as draw the 'Dragon’s' attention.
If anything, they might even wreck Clind’s tactics, with which he was going toe-to-toe with the 'Divine Dragon' single-handedly.

“I’ll say it again, Roswaal. — You’re laboring under a wrong assumption.”

At Ezzo’s declaration, the sight that followed made Roswaal catch his breath.
The countless water orbs he had set afloat were not meant to attack the Divine Dragon. — The detonations of violet lightning blew the orbs and boulders apart, creating footholds; Clind whirled through the sky off them, his speed kicking up another gear.
As Clind accelerated, the water orbs dispersed wide as though to guide his course, and with those launchpads under him, the dragonewt’s strikes grew sharper, heavier, more vivid, punching through the Divine Dragon’s scales.
Thunderclaps and shockwaves reached the ground, wind washing over Roswaal as Ezzo went on.

“Granted, he has standalone aerial combat capability. But as I read it, the original spec of that magic light isn’t that at all; it’s the eye‑opening defensive performance. He’s a seasoned powerhouse, so he can fight with it in unorthodox ways, but if you eliminate the dissipation of power, its intended potency is beyond comparison.”

“—But if we prepare footholds in the sky, won’t that make his movements easier to read, make it harder to throw off the enemy’s aim? Wouldn’t that risk killing Clind’s edge of being able to kick through the air at will?”

“Do you take him for an amateur who can’t switch modes and master what’s needed as the situation demands? If so, what you lack isn’t only consideration; you also lack an eye for people.”

“——”

“Roswaal, fighting alongside someone isn’t the same as trusting them and then refraining from thinking about anything. You leave what should be left to them, and you make up where you should make up. With your way, two hundreds that don’t get in each other’s way might add up to two hundred, but you’ll never reach the thousand born when two hundreds elevate one another.”

Even as he set out his credo, Ezzo did not ease his hand supporting the battle overhead.
It was a rocky plain with no shortage of boulders to float. The water orbs multiplied until they seemed to fill the sky, and even though Clind burned through them as footholds faster than the eye could follow, the rate of increase overwhelmed the rate of consumption.

“Tch, so that sly trick was yours, Sensei!”

Tracing the source of the footholds being used, the Divine Dragon spotted Ezzo and roared. Its claws shattered a hundred water orbs at once, then it loosed its breath down at the mages on the ground—

“I wouldn’t recommend looking away. As you can see—proof.”

Clind sprang and drove both feet up through the Dragon’s jaw from below. The breath it couldn’t release detonated inside its maw; fangs burst away under the shock.

“Y-you…!”

Reeling from its self-inflicted blast, the Divine Dragon warped and twisted the air around it; an unstable yet undeniably immense magic light swelled as the Dragon tried to fire off a copycat grand spell.
Clind could turn violet lightning into a barrier, and the Divine Dragon could rely on the Dragon Halo for defense, and they might endure it—but if it fell to the ground, Roswaal and the others wouldn’t stand a chance.

“—In that case, we just make it explode in the sky.”

Fortunately, there were countless water‑orb spells based on the Integrated Circulation I’d been able to watch up close, and plenty of mana randomly vented into the air. — I cut into the construction of those spells and rewrote their specs.

“You cur— that’s my magic!?”

“Magic belongs to no one. The path is always open. — My master’s teaching.”

In an instant, I bundled the water orbs whose control I’d seized, drew in the surrounding mana, and compressed it to a polar extremum—then injected my own interpretation into the grand magic the Divine Dragon was trying to assemble, deliberately botching the build before it could reach completion.
What that triggered was the Spiral Collapse Ezzo had feared—an auroral cataclysm where the sky, shattered again and again in this battle, collapsed once more.
Scorching heat and killing cold raced in alternation; the rocks suspended in the air melted, froze, and blew apart. Lightning burned even the remnants to nothing, and the blast winds hurled ash and dust several kilometers away in a calamity.

“Are you out of your mind!? You almost wiped our ally out with it!”

“But you protected him. — This is what you call harmony, isn’t it?”

Roswaal closed the Yellow eye in a wink and shut the blanching Ezzo up.
In truth, it was Ezzo’s skill that wrapped Clind—caught in the cataclysm aloft—in layer upon layer of water bands, suppressing that annihilating firepower to the utmost and bringing the defense to bear.
I’d figured Ezzo would read my intent and do exactly that. Had our roles been reversed, the gap in skill and consideration would have made such apt division of labor impossible.
I really am a heartless villain—only, one with room yet for improvement, refinement, and progress.

“That said, this deed made me doubt your sanity, My Lord. Fiend.”

Or so it seemed he could already hear Clind’s grumbling—spared a crash by Ezzo’s quick wits—ready to lecture him with that icy face. That scolding, too, would have to wait until the battle was over.
And then—

“Ezzo Cadner-kun.”

“—What is it, Roswaal L. Mathers.”

It amused him that, when addressed by name, Ezzo answered back with a tone to match. He hid that feeling behind makeup half ruined by blood and sweat and exhaled.
Then, fixing his gaze anew on Ezzo Cadner the Gray—

「――手伝ってもらいたい。この世で一度も起きたことのない、新たな魔法の開闢を」

Roswaal brazenly admits to himself that it’s an underhanded line.――For one who is steeped in the path of magic, there is simply no way to resist such a temptation.

△▼△▼△▼△

――In the midst of constructing the formula, Ezzo Cadner found himself, before he knew it, on the verge of tears.

「馬鹿め馬鹿め馬鹿め、このふざけた涙腺め。今は働くな、怠けていろ」

Scolding his own bodily functions like that, he tightened his cheeks and dammed the tears about to spill.
Ezzo hates slacking. That’s because the smallfolk are blessed with neither superior physical ability nor a fine gate, and many of his kin must exert themselves more than other races to reach their goals. The one racial trait smallfolk do have is that they are prone to receiving blessings, but unlike someone like Camberley from the Felt Camp, Ezzo missed out on that lottery too—an easy-to-understand have-not.

Ezzo hates slacking. Not because he’s been forced into a harsher life than others――that’s not it. It’s because being scorned with an “Ah, figures,” just for being smallfolk, is, well, something he simply cannot stomach.
Even if Ezzo were to fall short of a goal he set, it would not be because he was smallfolk.
He knows full well that once you allow a single excuse in life, sloth and negligence rush in at once and turn you into a soggy, gooey softie.
In fact, that was how his brothers and sisters were. Ezzo was the youngest of ten, and every one of his siblings but him had been granted a blessing, which they leaned on as they reveled in slack, indulgent lives.
He won’t call that bad. It’s his brothers’ and sisters’ lives. He wants to call it bad, but he won’t. He’ll endure.

Only, if that were to become his own life, he couldn’t abide it.
So when Ezzo Cadner discovered a dust-covered magical treatise stashed in the back of a peddler’s crate, he dedicated his life to that thrill—and swore he would never make excuses.

「貴様もそうなんだろう、ロズワール。……見ればわかる」

Holding the post of the kingdom’s Court Magician and bearing the title of one of the “Color”-titled who have mastered the attributes, yet famous for not teaching, guiding, or mingling with others—that was Roswaal. Competent as a margrave he might be, but his status as a mage was bought with pedigree and political clout.――Suspecting Roswaal like that and challenging him was a mortifying black mark Ezzo cannot forget.

But when he actually saw the perfect economy with which Roswaal constructed his magic, the beauty of the formulae he drew, Ezzo was ashamed to his core.

Ezzo and Roswaal are of the same generation.
And Ezzo had been conceited enough to believe that, among their peers, no one had worked harder than he had. He’d poured every hour of his life into it and thought he’d finally brushed a corner of what magic truly is. But not even close.――Between Roswaal and Ezzo, in the pursuit and honing of magic, it felt as though there were a gap of more than a hundred years.
That was an absolute truth that allowed no talk of differences in talent, race, or birth.――And so Ezzo Cadner was so happy he nearly burst into tears.

「――っ」

He was glad that the one standing in the realm he yearned for was a person who had worked harder than he had.
That understanding, respect, and gratitude set Ezzo’s heart rippling, and made Ezzo—who hates slacking more than anything—order his tear ducts, for the first time in his life, to slack off.

Holding those feelings to his chest, Ezzo too focused his mind, to show the inquiry he had stacked up.
Magic demands that you intensely imagine the result to be brought about. It is tantamount to baring everything about who you are—what you think, what you desire, what shape you define your wishes to take.
That is why magic does not lie.――Look at a person’s magic, and you can know their entirety.

「――なあ、わかるだろう、ロズワール」

Were those words actually given sound? Or was it a mirage shown by a gate being taxed as never before, and a focus so intense it shaved his life away?

「……ああ、わかるとも、エッゾ・カドナーくん」

Yet contrary to the doubt that it was illusion or hallucination, there was an answer.
In the extreme swell and interplay of mana the world turned white; he could not even hear the thunderous roar of the violet lightning fighting to protect them, and yet their presences felt so close it seemed even their heartbeats might carry across.
Through the magic being woven up, the consciousnesses of the two mages, laying themselves bare, intersected.

Roswaal’s piled-up days, the fruits of his single-minded inquiry, the time he kept walking alone toward the summit with no one ever catching up to him—these all came through.
Outcomes taken too far, unasked-for, make a person lonely. Roswaal, too, had remained lonely.
But by the tears he did not shed, Ezzo must say this to Roswaal.

"I don't know how far you intend to go, all by yourself. But no matter how many people try to make you a distant existence, I alone will be different."

If effort and hard-won refinement brought him there, then I can do the same—no, surpass it.

"Even if you love solitude, even if you choose to die alone, even if you try to go somewhere no one can reach, I alone will sink my teeth in and keep up with you."

I can't say I understand the urge to give up, but Ezzo understands the urge to lament.
I only ever did everything I could to the utmost, and before I knew it, there was no one left around me.—No one wants to think that's their own fault.

"You were appointed the titles of those who have mastered attributes—Red, Green, and Yellow. Yet you yielded the seat of Blue to Mr. Felix Argyle, and you still leave the seats of White and Black empty.—Do you know what that means?"

"――――"

"Do you know what I'm called? Ezzo Cadner the Gray. What colors do you think make up gray?—Roswaal, I can reach you."

So he offers to the great mage the very same gratitude Ezzo Cadner has tasted.

"—You will never be alone on this path."

△▼△▼△▼△

The color of the sky had already been lost.
Blue had vanished from the clear firmament, a faded gray-white curtain stretched ever wider, the very worth of the air itself thinning as if it would flicker out and vanish.

A flash cleaved that washed-out sky. Clind, lightning-tracing with a belt of violet arc, tore across the heavens with a force no longer akin to “leaping,” but to kicking a hole through the sky.
Facing him, a giant silhouette whose shimmering dragon shell danced aloft, guarded by dragon scales and a Dragon Halo—each flash of its talons ripped the void, and strata of vacuum, with thunderous roar, came crashing down upon the dragonewt.

"――――"

There was no room for words. Only violet thunder spoke.
Next, the dragon wings beat; amid the gale, countless bolts of light were loosed to slash the sky. Strewn across the ashen vault like stardust, their feral tracks raced for Clind—closer, closer, closer. A peal of thunder blinked; the rain of hundreds of lances of light was pierced through, and myriad gleams painted the desolate sky. The blast’s aftershocks skewed upward as they diffused, and not a single fleck of starfall reached the two mages on the ground.

『――――』

In the next instant, in the truest sense, everyone saw a star in the heights flicker.
From beyond the faded sky, drawn by an overwhelming gravity, a star’s light fell straight toward the earth—the hesitation lasted less than the span of a blink.

"—!"

A particularly fierce violet bolt erupted; chaining thunderbursts launched the dragonewt upward into the sky where the star was falling.

『――――ッッ！！』

The Divine Dragon’s breath—unleashed, the torrent turned white-hot and scorched the sky, yet leveled its aim at neither the dragonewt aloft nor the mages on the ground, but streaked toward a distant land.
Violet lightning bursting and the Dragon’s roar intermingled; the star, shattered at the edge of the sky, blazed and blazed, flooding the washed-out world with a searing brilliance—

"――Al Sextet"

The chant made the horizon tremble, and the firmament held its breath.

All the mana that shapes the world was assigned the roles of six different colors; the powers set in motion crossed and fused. Interference that should normally collapse in an instant generated a single rhythm, and, using the colorless world itself as its medium, formed a beautiful ring.
In time, the six-colored torrents converged into one, becoming a pillar that severed the boundary between heaven and earth.
The pillar favored none of the six, choosing as its own hue the aurora in which the very root called magic manifested, and the column of light was refined into a power that devours all.

—At the center of that pillar of light, the massive silhouette of the Divine Dragon was caught.

Claws of defiance, wings, breath—each was swallowed by the void; the Dragon’s power became fuel for the magic as-is, and the pillar grew thicker, shining ever stronger.
The light that reached into the heavens punched through the cloudless sky, bleaching the upper atmosphere and the reaches beyond the horizon. In that instant, the laws of heaven and earth were rewritten for a heartbeat.

—It was an absolute miracle that, since the system of magic began, neither the First Mage nor even the Witch of Greed had ever achieved.

『――ah』

In a world where sound had vanished, that feeble murmur rang out—a praise far too trifling beside what had been wrought.
But it was enough to make certainty bloom.—Here, the Divine Dragon’s Dragon Halo was shattered.
And then—

"――Sealing Shackles, Third Release"

Rending the sky, scorching the earth, in the very midst of a world where the six attributes held balance and became a pillar—piercing that auroral maelstrom, the one and only color-borne violet lightning fell from the heights.
Like meteoric iron that shatters stars as it drops, his body, wreathed in lightning, plunged in from beyond the sky. His air-stepping feet detonated, as he turned himself into the supreme single arrow to pierce a single point.

The target was the reverse scale. — The sole vital point carved into the Divine Dragon’s neck, the single chink in armor that boasted absolute defense. Swallowed by the pillar of light, the Dragon had its Dragon Halo stripped away; the reverse scale was the last barrier leading to its heart core.

"My thanks. — My thanks."

The violet lightning, like a comet trailing a tail, punched through both the sound barrier and the dragon-scale defense, and the fist slammed home.
The pillar’s radiance and the torrent of violet lightning overlapped; the shock made the void tremble, and with the sound of shattering, bands of light raced across the Dragon’s entire body.
The all-out blow, joined to the apex of the miracle called a spell the likes of which history had never seen, now pierced the innermost of the innermost of the Divine Dragon’s dragon shell, driving through to the heart core that slept there.

——

Pierced by that certain strike, the Divine Dragon, wings spread in the mid-heavens, slowly cast its gaze down to the ground. There, recognizing a tiny existence truly on its last breath, the Dragon’s claw swept through the air near its own head—like a hand, out of ingrained habit, reaching for the chin strap of a helmet it thought it was still wearing.

"Tch, pathetic... After getting propped up every which way, I can’t even pin it on the stars."

Thus, with an irritable, utterly banal bit of cursing—so far removed from the Divine Dragon’s accustomed solemnity—the absolute that had ruled the sky was seized by gravity and fell to the earth,
trailing wavering remnants of light, rending the void, and plunging down with a thunderous roar.

—That was the end of the battle with the Usurper who had stolen the dragon shell of Divine Dragon Volcanica.