V2Ch63-True Conviction

Mina avoided looking at Yulia and Leo. She had to make her final preparation for the fight.

“I’m ready, Jose,” she added quietly after her announcement. “You can stop casting now.”

“Right,” he replied. The Mana dissipated from around him.

“The main event comes early,” Charon said, sounding interested. “We knew you were the one who would best be able to accomplish this task, but I personally thought you would wait a little longer. Gather more information, perhaps.” The last sentence came out almost as a question. A suggestion?

In any case, Mina ignored the implications the hound was trying to convey.

She quickly read the description for the Soothing the Beast (Partial) Skill.

[Soothing the Beast (Partial): Music can calm even the most savage beasts. Using a musical instrument, alter the mood or state of consciousness of a monster. You lack musical Skills, which are required to make use of this ability.]

Okay, I think I might be able to pull this off. Plan A was to get hold of that flute, and then get some distance from the monster. If she could learn a new Skill in such a short time with Quick Study, she was betting she could also learn how to play a simple melody. If that happened, she could put the beast to sleep, as Daltry had, and use Silent Spellcasting to light all of the candles from a distance. The snake wouldn’t be able to spray her with acid that way.

It was a plan that only Mina could carry out, with her very particular set of Skills.

If Plan A didn’t work, there was a Plan B and a Plan C, of course. Plan A was only Plan A because it kept her the farthest away from the chimera.

“I’m ready,” she reiterated, raising her voice to be heard over the gentle murmur of the crowd. Other participants in the Orientation, both on the stands and in the field alongside her, were muttering conspiratorially in response to her and Charon’s exchange.

“She could have ended this earlier,” went one snippet of conversation Mina caught.

“Before anyone else died,” came the reply.

Mina wanted to yell at the people muttering to themselves in the background. None of them had volunteered. But she forced herself to focus on the challenge at hand.

She remembered something James sometimes said: “Victory excuses everything.”

That would have to be true, since apparently her heroic reputation was taking some dents.

“You may begin!” Charon barked down. His booming voice silenced the murmurs.

Mina stepped carefully in a wide arc around the crowd of other people, putting them between her and the chimera. As long as they were around her, she was protected by Charon’s shield. It would be like she hadn’t started the challenge yet.

Once she had worked her way around to the back of the other competitors, she climbed up onto the stadium, and she began chanting, gathering wind Mana. The chimera seemed to take notice of her chanting. The lion head’s eyes narrowed, it rose from the corpse of the previous contestant, and it let loose a fierce roar.

Mina almost lost her focus. The roar seemed to be a Skill of some sort intended to achieve that result.

But not quite. Her focus was made of stronger stuff. She had passed so many tests in her life.

She judged the Mana she had gathered to be sufficient, and Mina released it. Wind whipped around her and then swirled around in a concentrated movement toward the chimera. It found the flute lying discarded at Daltry’s side, and it began to pull at the instrument, trying to lift it into the air.

Mina’s fists were clenched tightly as she watched and directed her Mana. The flute began to pick up off the grass, took off like a tiny rocket—and then suddenly the chimera was there, pouncing, trying to crush the flute under its massive lions’ paws!

The paws missed, and Mina thought she could guide the flute quickly through the air to her, but then the tail struck. The snake caught the flute in its jaws and snapped shut hard, crushing the instrument between its teeth.

Well, that’s Plan A down the drain, she thought. She tried not to let that discourage her. Although her backup plans were not her preferred solutions, one of them should still work.

She began walking around the stands, trying to work her way toward where Charon sat next to the first candle she needed to light. The chimera followed her with its eyes, and it took a few steps in the general direction she was moving, but then it seemed to hit some invisible border it was unwilling to cross. Instead of following her up into the stands, it returned to where it had sat near the beginning of the challenge, beside the reflecting pool. Sat down. And waited.

That eliminated one of her alternative plans, then. She wouldn’t be able to get it to chase her and thereby lure it away from the targets it was guarding. That was fine, she supposed. The idea of making the chimera chase her had made her nervous in the first place.

But that only left the option of her going to it.

First, she lit the candle that stood next to Charon. Although she hadn’t practiced Basic Elemental Magic: Fire, she found it was just as easy as handling water had been. It did feel different, though. There was something more pleasant about the way fire Mana felt. A warmth that seemed to radiate everywhere. Maybe it was just because she’d spent the last few weeks cold much of the time, but she immediately liked fire magic better than wind and, she thought, better than water too.

The hound stared down at her curiously as she moved. She took a moment to examine the stand the candle sat on before she left.

Yep, confirms I could have carried this away with me if need be. But the difficulty wasn’t the candle by Charon anyway. There was no point in moving this candle. It was the other two that it would have benefited her to move. And they were guarded.

If she tried to move the other candles with magic, the chimera might destroy them. Then she would have failed the challenge for certain, and possibly for everyone else, too.

Mina descended the stadium and prepared to execute her riskiest, yet perhaps most likely to succeed, plan.

She began gathering Mana around herself as she walked. Water Mana.

She had noticed the reflecting pool beneath the candles almost as soon as she reached the stadium. Although she didn’t think she could do much offensively with water, the fact that there was some already there gave her a real advantage. Since the chimera was right between her and the water, it was ideally positioned for her to try something with the pool.

I can do this, she told herself. No. I will do this. No one else will die here.

As she approached, with the Mana growing thicker and denser all around her, the chimera rose to its feet. It looked apprehensive. Defensive.

Mina hopped down from the steps back into the field, and she yanked a torch free from the sconce closest to her. She intended to continue using water Mana for most, if not all, of the challenge remaining. Having a non-magical source of fire nearby could be valuable.

At this movement, the chimera pounced toward Mina, making a huge leap through the air. Simultaneously, Mina released her Mana.

She seized control of the entire pool of water behind the chimera, and she pulled the water forward. With all the Mana she had infused into it, the liquid outpaced the chimera and surrounded it in an instant, grabbing it mid-pounce and pulling it to the center of the body of water.

The beast thrashed about with its paws and its heads, trying to find purchase in the water, to break free somehow, but Mina kept a firm grip. And she tightened it.

She kept the water in a similar shape to when it was in the pool: a rectangular prism, but one that grew smaller and smaller as she concentrated it.

Water molecules, close in, she thought. Closer and closer together in the area surrounding the chimera. Slowly, the molecules condensed around the chimera. The air around them grew colder, as the pool turned into a massive ice cube surrounding the chimera. The creature still tried to move, but very slowly. Its energy was quickly fading as the water around it turned more and more solid. The snake head was already completely still, perhaps unconscious.

Mina kept her mind on making the ice colder and colder, but her body was already walking past the chimera. Her Mana would run out in the next few minutes, after all. She had to make each second count.

The pool water was now completely wrapped around the chimera, and the candle and the lily pad it had been placed on had fallen beside the chimera. She approached it, still giving the chimera as wide a berth as she could. She stood the candle up, keeping one eye on the chimera and the ice cube and only taking quick glances at what her hands were doing. Then she lit the wick with the torch in her hand. It took only a few moments to light.

Then she looked up at the candle that hovered off the ground, six feet in the air. That was the only thing she hadn’t specifically planned for.

I could throw the torch at it, but what if I miss? I’d have to get another torch and keep trying, and at the same time, my Mana’s running out. She looked around herself to see what she could use to get a better angle.

If she went back into the stands, she would be too far away. Besides the stadium itself, there were the dead bodies. She could pile them up and use them as a kind of stepladder, but her mind recoiled at the thought of doing something so disrespectful to the dead.

I wouldn’t get high enough anyway, she told herself.

That just left—Oh, duh!—the frozen water from the pool.

She quickly ordered one of the frozen sides of the cube to form itself into stairs. The side that had the most space separating it from the chimera.

Then she walked up, her body bent, walking almost on all fours, to avoid slipping and falling on the icy steps.

She managed to get to the height of the candle. Then she reached out with the torch and lit it.

Multiple notifications streamed in at once.

[You defeated Tri-Headed Mountain Chimera Lv. 22 and passed Hecate’s challenge! You gained 1200 exp!]

[Mage leveled up!]

[Mage leveled up!]

[Mage leveled up!]

[...]

Victory! She slowly walked back down the ice stairs, glowing inside.

I did it! I saved everyone. Thanks in significant part to the example of the ones who died, but I did it!

Yet there was something strange. The crowd was completely silent. No cheers.

As she reached ground level again, she finally allowed herself to look around.

She found Yulia and Leo’s faces in the crowd. They looked strange. Their faces were in the middle of changing expressions. From worried to happy, it seemed. Raised eyebrows, mouths shifting into big smiles. But they were completely still. Unnatural. Impossible. What’s going on?

She looked around, and she let out a sigh of relief. It wasn’t just them.

The crowd was frozen. Not frozen in ice, like the Tri-Headed Mountain Chimera. Just still. Utterly still.

“Congratulations on your victory, Ms. Danailova!” Charon’s voice boomed down at her. There was an obvious undertone of respect in his voice that she liked. “The goddess knew that you would triumph. You have saved every one of your fellows!”

“Um, what’s happened to them?” Mina asked. She could barely raise her voice above a whisper. She found herself very suddenly, unaccountably tired. She released her control of the water, and she felt only very slightly better.

Charon’s hearing seemed to be excellent, though.

“They’re simply frozen in time,” the hound replied. His voice showed a sign of strain as well, and Mina noticed that the letters around his body were lit in a different color this time. A strange luminescent shade of gray. “Everything in the arena is frozen in time except you. I will repair the damage done to your colleagues, and then I will explain what you’ve done to everyone.”

“Repair the damage?” she echoed. “You mean you’re going to bring back the dead?”

Charon winced visibly. “No,” he whined. “Bringing back the dead from the underworld is impossible, of course. But this is the in-between. No one dies here without the goddess’s say so. Their souls remain in this space, unless the Gatekeeper should release them. As long as the souls have not passed on, they are not dead. And so it simply remains to reverse the flow of time a few minutes for each of them and put their bodies back together.”

“That sounds difficult,” Mina said carefully. Charon looked as if he was under a strain with every moment he spoke. She didn’t want to make him use mental energy on her while he was supposed to be reviving her semi-dead colleagues.

In her peripheral vision, she saw movement, but she didn’t turn. She could tell it was in the area where the bodies of the fallen challengers lay, and she guessed they were pulling themselves back together, something she wasn’t interested in seeing.

“Honestly, out of every magic I have learned in the goddess’s service, this one is the most difficult,” Charon replied. “It becomes more difficult to manipulate time if I try to do something beyond my capabilities, or if I engage in more than one manipulation at once.”

“Oh.” Mina realized that Charon was engaging in two such manipulations as he spoke. He was reversing time for the dead, and he was freezing everyone and everything else. “Why do you need to freeze the others?” she finally asked.

“To give you private time with the goddess,” he replied, speaking each word carefully as if they required great labor. “Go down those stairs.” He pointed with his muzzle to the stairway that had been blocked by a translucent magical barrier earlier. It was unobstructed now. “There you will encounter the goddess. Lady Hecate has been waiting for you for longer than you know.”

Hecate, Mina thought. I finally learned the name.

She dropped the torch at her side, turned, and without a word, began walking toward the stairs.

When she reached them, she descended without hesitation, though they led into a pitch black darkness that swallowed her whole. It felt like stepping into a deeper darkness than she had ever known, endless and black. A true night.

Mina smiled.