Chapter 133: Remarkably Hard to Kill
Even if this body of his — assembled from worms, sustained by worms — were to be crushed to paste, it wouldn't threaten his life in any meaningful sense.
As long as the brain worm survived, he would survive.
The worst case was rebuilding a new body from scratch. Or simply abandoning the physical form for a time.
Abandoning it wasn't an option right now — he still had too much that required a corporeal presence. So, pressing against the oppressive weight of that alien presence, feeling the basement shake harder with every passing second, Zōken's first and only thought was: get out.
He was furious, naturally. Attacked without provocation. His bounded field — which he had spent decades refining, layering, reinforcing — shattered like it was nothing.
Even a genuinely talented magus would normally struggle to crack a bounded field of that caliber. And yet it hadn't even lasted thirty seconds.
Zōken had a brief, involuntary flash of a thought: what is the point of magic.
He killed the thought immediately.
A magus could not afford to doubt magic. To question something you had spent centuries mastering was to begin the process of breaking your own mind. One step from that edge and there was no coming back.
Zōken understood this well. He did not question magic.
Magic had kept him alive for five hundred years, after all. Normal men died before a hundred and fifty. That alone settled the argument.
The shaking intensified. The cracks on the walls spread faster. Zōken moved for the stairs, faster than before — he could not afford to have this borrowed body buried down here.
Dust and grit rained from the ceiling in a continuous gray curtain.
"Whoever did this," he muttered through gritted teeth, stumbling upward step by step, "I will make certain they understand what it means to strike at a magus family. Attacking a registered lineage's estate, openly — aren't they afraid of the Mage's Association? The audacity—"
A thought stopped him mid-step.
Wait.
Someone brazen enough to attack a magus household this openly must have leverage of some kind. Lunatics exist, but they're a minority.
Had something from his past come to light? Had the Association finally traced back five centuries of careful concealment? No — impossible. He had been meticulous. Half a millennium without a single significant exposure. It couldn't be that.
And he had been keeping an extremely low profile these past years. Nothing but quiet preparation for the next Holy Grail War. He couldn't think of a single person he'd antagonized recently.
The questions multiplied and found no answers, because no one was going to answer them. Not right now.
He reached the top of the stairs and stumbled out — and behind him, the basement entrance collapsed with a sound like distant thunder. The displaced air threw dust across his back. The floor pitched under his feet and he went down hard.
One or two seconds later, and he would have been under that.
Zōken caught his breath and pushed himself upright. Then he looked around — and stopped.
Above him was open sky.
Not a ceiling. Sky.
Blue, wide, almost cloudless. Sunlight falling directly onto his face.
He stood there for a moment, blinking at it with an expression that hadn't quite processed what it was seeing.
He moved quickly to a shadowed corner, away from the light, and surveyed the scene around him with every nerve on high alert.
The estate was gone.
In its place: rubble. Broken walls. Exposed rebar bent and snapped as though torn apart by hand. No trace of human activity anywhere in the vicinity. The air was thick with dust and underneath it, something faintly burning.
He turned toward the smell.
Fire. Active and spreading. And in the middle of it — the blurred shapes of his vessels, his cultivated containers, his worm-craft stores. The insects' death cries layered over each other in a continuous sound that was doing something to his composure.
Decades of work. Hundreds of cultivated strains.
Either knocked unconscious by the pressure wave. Or burning.
He could smell them cooking.
"WHO DID THIS."
The words came out with more force than intended. He steadied himself. "Whoever you are — I don't believe we have any quarrel. Attacking a magus family's grounds openly like this — do you have any idea what the entirety of the mage community would do to you? We can settle this through negotiation. If you have a grievance, state it. If you still intend to continue — I will not be held responsible for the consequences. You may find the outcome less certain than you expect."
Silence.
The fire crackled. Debris shifted and rolled somewhere nearby. The insects went on dying.
Nothing else.
"Hey. Old man."
The voice came from directly above him. Clear, musical, and carrying a chill that had nothing to do with temperature.
"You couldn't just have the decency to get buried down there, could you. Honestly — remarkably hard to kill."
Zōken's pupils contracted sharply. He looked up.
A girl with dark green hair floated in the air above him, arms crossed, expression entirely cold.
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