“It is not dull? How can you be so certain?”
Abelard was not startled by the voice that suddenly rang out.
Because he had known all along.
Was he not now a great archmage on the very verge of the 8th Circle?
Kreutzwald’s presence was faint as a ghost’s, but Abelard had already sensed him before he entered the Tower Master’s room.
Only, even now, he still could not accurately gauge his level.
Which meant he stood at least higher than Abelard.
“I am not certain. I merely surmise.”
“You surmise.”
“That I do.”
Kreutzwald approached, leaning on his staff, and naturally stood beside Abelard.
Together, they looked out the window at the sky.
“How does it feel, now that you have climbed up yourself? You must have thought you could seize the sky at any moment, yet in the end, even above here, there is still another sky.”
“That’s true.”
“You thought that once you looked down from above, everything would go as you wished. But the moment you step outside this door, child, are you not ultimately no different from the humans down below?”
“That is also true.”
“That is why you must have found it dull. Bored, listless, and without amusement. Since you still do not know the way to climb higher, it cannot be helped.”
“The way to climb higher?”
For the first time, emotion entered Abelard’s eyes as he had been answering without any particular feeling, and his gaze turned toward Kreutzwald standing beside him.
Kreutzwald was looking out the window with a faint smile.
“The way for you to truly ascend to the sky. Not this plausible-looking false peak, but the way to stand upon the true summit.”
“I have no interest in the summit. What I want is the end of magic, the ultimate magic.”
“You still do not realize that those are the same thing.”
“······.”
Only by standing above the sky could one finally reach the end of magic.
That was what Kreutzwald was saying.
“Let me hear it.”
By that point, Abelard must have grown curious about the being called Kreutzwald.
Curious about the power, ability, and reason that allowed him to come and go so casually even on the top floor of the Mage Tower, where all manner of magical devices swarmed.
And even though Abelard had risen to the top floor of the Mage Tower, as Kreutzwald had said, it had indeed felt hollow.
“First, let us make this clear. How do you think you were able to become the youngest Tower Master?”
“Because I am on the verge of the 8th Circle at an extremely young age.”
“Wrong. You were able to become the youngest Tower Master because the previous Tower Master disappeared.”
“That is also true, but I would have risen to the seat of Tower Master anyway.”
“In about twenty years, perhaps.”
Abelard had also heard of the previous Tower Master.
He had already been the Tower Master when Abelard was still in the underground city, and even back then, it was said he was rarely seen in the Mage Tower, as though no one knew what he was doing.
So from that time on, people had continued to say that the Tower Master should be replaced, but the achievements he had built in his active years had been so tremendous that they could not simply disregard him.
Even so, until then he had at least shown himself from time to time, but in recent years, even that had ceased.
And just then, Abelard had appeared like a comet and ascended to the position of Tower Master.
“Kreutzwald, do you know about the previous Tower Master?”
“Of course I do. I know him far too well, and that is the problem, Pavlenko.”
Kreutzwald said he knew the previous Tower Master, who was shrouded in all manner of veils.
Come to think of it, perhaps that was only natural.
Kreutzwald was a great archmage said to have died three hundred years ago.
“I know far more than you imagine.”
Kreutzwald turned his head and looked at Abelard.
“Do you not wish to know? Are you not curious? You have the right. The right to see the secrets hidden in this world.”
“Secrets, you say.”
How could he not be curious after hearing this much?
Hio, who was experiencing the memory through Abelard’s eyes, also felt curiosity surge within him.
Abelard’s thoughts were much the same as Hio’s.
“I am curious. About these secrets of the world that I do not know, about this way to climb above the sky.”
At Abelard’s words, Kreutzwald turned away from the window and began to walk.
“Heh heh. You should be curious. If you are a mage, that is only natural. That is how one approaches the truth.”
This was the top floor of the Tetradia Mage Tower.
The Tower Master’s room.
Every side was decorated with special minerals that emitted pure white light, and in the center there was only a single chair and desk. Along the walls were forbidden tomes of the age and magic books known to have been lost.
Aside from those, however, it was merely a spacious place that did not seem particularly special.
“First, let us dig into the truth of the Mage Tower.”
Kreutzwald slowly walked toward the wall of that room.
“It looks convincing, does it not? All manner of forbidden tomes and prohibited magic are displayed here as if on exhibit, so most people would simply accept it, thinking, ‘Ah, this must be why it is so difficult to enter the Tower Master’s room.’”
“Are you saying that is not the case?”
The work of managing and sealing magic that Tetradia had forbidden because it was too dangerous, or too cruel.
Was he saying something even more important than that was hidden here?
Kreutzwald turned again and pointed at Abelard with the staff in his hand.
“Pavlenko. Look closely at the room. Do you not feel anything?”
In that state, he slowly turned, pointing with his staff to every corner of the spacious room.
“You should know. You, who sought to learn all magic without discrimination, and who even possessed innate talent, should notice at once.”
Abelard’s gaze also moved slowly, following Kreutzwald’s staff.
From the walls of the room to the decorations of pure white mineral.
And once he had taken in the whole circuit, there was no way he could fail to know.
That brilliant talent, that memory surpassing the bounds of humanity, had detected the oddity created by the room’s structure.
“······This is.”
“Heh heh heh. As expected, you noticed immediately. Yes, that is right.”
The structure of the room was the language of dragons.
It was a form composed of that very thing.
How could that be possible?
Had dragons been involved in the construction of the Mage Tower?
If he thought of it that way, it seemed to make a certain amount of sense.
Was the Mage Tower not, from the beginning, the greatest mystery on the continent?
A tower with no records of when it had first existed or how it had come to be.
If there had been dragons behind that hidden history, Abelard thought, in that instant, that it was entirely possible.
But Kreutzwald’s story went far beyond even that expectation.
“Every Tower Master throughout history was a dragon.”
It was a story ordinary people would be better off never knowing.
“We were being ruled by dragons under the pretext that they were protecting the world.”
The word “ruled” was somewhat provocative, but it was not particularly wrong.
There was no place on the continent where the power of magic did not reach.
There was no place that did not need mages.
And the place that controlled those mages and governed magic was this Mage Tower.
The Master of the Mage Tower was, in effect, the final destination of power.
“···Let us say your words are true, Kreutzwald.”
Abelard quickly shook off the shock and regained his composure.
Every Tower Master throughout history had been a dragon.
That single fact alone sent all manner of hypotheses and thoughts he did not even want to imagine racing through his head, but that was not what he needed to think about right now.
“Then is that all?”
It was shocking, but it was also paltry.
For all his talk of secrets of the world and the like, it was meager.
So there had to be more.
This was only the beginning.
Was there truly something more hidden, something so tremendous that even this secret was merely a beginning?
“No.”
As expected, there was no way that was all.
“First, let us go see the previous Tower Master who disappeared.”
Kreutzwald drew up his mana.
The special minerals that had made the room pure white began to tremble.
“Originally, it must have been the exclusive domain of dragons, but not anymore.”
The light emitted by the minerals grew stronger.
More precisely, it was the ores that formed the shape of the dragon language, the shapes of those characters.
“I made it so.”
Thus, the language of dragons began to be inscribed in the center of the spacious room.
It was completed as light in midair.
“It is the path to the Dragon Temple.”
The previous Tower Master.
The path to the place where the vanished dragon resided opened.
* * *
Kreutzwald and Abelard headed toward the passage that had opened in the middle of the Tower Master’s room.
The Tower Master’s room they had been in moments before had also been spacious, but the place they arrived at as soon as they passed through the passage was so high and vast that it could not even be compared.
Even so, there were only two kinds of sounds.
The footsteps of Abelard and Kreutzwald as they walked forward.
And.
—Grrrrr···.
A low rumble, as though made by a beast.
They soon saw the owner of that sound.
Its body was so enormous, and the presence it exuded so immense, that there was no way they could fail to notice it.
“This is··· the previous Tower Master?”
“That it is.”
It was a dragon.
A gigantic dragon.
How many people in their lives had ever seen a dragon so close before their eyes?
Moreover, it was not even in a normal state.
He did not know what its original color had been, but its scales had lost their luster, its entire body was stained black as pitch, and its two vertically slit eyes had lost all profundity, containing only destruction.
“Even its soul has been completely tainted. Not only this one here, but every dragon in the world must be in the same state.”
All of the dragon’s legs, its tail, and even its wings were bound in chains as enormous as its own body, and besides those physical restraints, Abelard could clearly sense with his eyes that all manner of magical devices were pressing down upon the dragon’s body.
They were suppressing the dragon to an excessive degree.
“Are you saying every guardian is in the same state?”
“They must have suffered the same thing, but they are not in the same state. The rest likely sensed their fate and chose to annihilate themselves. This one had research value, so when it tried to cut off its own life, I personally stopped it and kept it here.”
“···The rest of the dragons all annihilated themselves? Are you saying the dragons have gone extinct?”
“A few young dragons slow to judge the situation may have been tainted by the Abyss like this one and ended up being controlled for the rest of their lives, but that amounts to the same thing. In practical terms, you should consider them extinct.”
Abelard could not understand.
No matter how much of a genius he was, even if he was the first human Tower Master to appear in hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, comprehension could not function without information.
“I suppose I must first tell you about the Abyss and the war that is to come.”
“······The Abyss?”
He did not know what the Abyss was, why the dragon had become like this, or whether he could fully trust Kreutzwald’s words, so he could not know just how dangerous the current situation was.
But Hio, who was inside him, was different.
He knew what the Abyss was, and because of that, he knew why the dragon had ended up like this.
He still did not know how it had come to this, but what he could know with certainty was—
“The war will begin with the extinction of the dragons.”
This place was a gate.
A gate that led to the Abyss.
That was what had existed on the top floor of the Mage Tower, surrounded by the dragon language.
“Pavlenko, in this war, you will become a god.”