When they arrived at the dueling arena, it had been more or less decided that Solif and Turan would fight first. Their first encounter had ended inconclusively, so this was their chance to settle who was stronger.

Unexpectedly, however, Maysa stepped forward and volunteered to be Turan's first opponent.

["Sorry, but could I go first?"]

["Hm? Oh, well... suit yourself."]

It was not really all that surprising. After all, they had first grown close when her stubborn refusal to lose drove her to attempt magic whose principles she did not understand, until she collapsed. Her upbringing sometimes made her seem rather timid, but her pride in her magic was second to none.

'I wonder who'll win.'

Solif gazed at the blank crystal orb, weighing the outcome in his mind. He would have liked to watch, but that would have let everyone in the waiting room see their fight. Unless they wanted rumors of immensely powerful nobles dueling here to spread far and wide, that was out of the question.

'Maysa has far more mana. They're nearly equal in raw talent, and she's trained since childhood, so she should be skilled at magical combat...'

Looked at that way, it seemed no contest, but Turan had several advantages of his own: the versatility of wielding multiple bloodlines through the Mimic Holy Relic, the physical striking power of his sling, and excellent combat instincts.

Still, with both of them possessing so much mana, the fight would likely be a long one. Solif stood and offered his chair so his parents could sit comfortably while they waited. Just then, a sudden flash of light heralded the pair's reappearance.

"What? You're done?"

"Yeah."

There was no proper clock here to check, but surely no more than ten minutes had passed. If anything, their match had ended sooner than most.

Unlike the composed Turan, Maysa was rubbing her face with both hands. That alone made the winner obvious.

"Are you all right, Maysa?"

"Hm? Oh, yes... This is harder than I thought. I can still feel my head shattering."

As their unscathed appearance showed, all injuries and damage to possessions sustained inside the dueling arena were restored, but the pain was no different from reality. Indeed, quite a few people cried out or suffered from phantom pain even after their matches ended. Without that drawback, a facility this useful would hardly have been managed so carelessly.

After seating the pale-faced Maysa and giving her a cup of water, Solif immediately pressed Turan for details.

"How did it end?"

"I sniped her."

"There's room for that in there?"

"I made room."

Turan described the arena's interior. It measured three hundred meters on each side, with stone floors, walls, and a ceiling all neatly finished in marble. The ceiling was a little over thirty meters high.

"Then it must teleport you. There isn't room for anything that size in this building."

"Right. I couldn't sense anyone else at all."

Teleportation was another major field that modern magic had yet to master. Just as Maysa had been unable to use Decay because she did not understand its principles, no one could use teleportation because no one understood the theory of crossing space. No one even possessed a bloodline ability related to it.

Yet structures from the old empire often contained devices that warped space or transported people elsewhere, just like the Tomb of the Gods Turan had once entered.

"So how did the fight play out?"

"Well, roughly speaking..."

The first clash had been an ordinary exchange of projectiles. Turan fired spheres formed from the Light of Judgment, secretly slipping iron balls among them, while Maysa used Spirit of Fire explosions to dart out of the way and relentlessly rained down lightning. She also launched physical attacks with a shockwave-emitting rapier, modified from a magic tool they had recently taken from a Zahar noble.

As they traded every form of attack at their disposal, they also employed a variety of lesser tricks. They buffeted each other with gusts to disrupt flight, bent light to disguise their positions, and, whenever the other landed, reshaped the earth to trap their ankles or scattered seeds to grow entangling vines.

An ordinary person would have needed years to master even one of those techniques to such a degree, but the two wielded them as naturally as breathing.

Maysa had come out ahead in that exchange. Though several iron balls had grazed her and left her bleeding, Turan had suffered serious injuries, including a broken arm and several broken ribs—not to mention nerve damage from the electrical shocks.

"That sounds like she beat you to a pulp."

"That's why I used my trump card."

Cornered, Turan had absorbed the surrounding light with his light-eating cloth, activated stealth, and hidden underground using the Earthkeeper bloodline's earth alteration. Maysa hastily summoned a sphere of light, but light could not shine through the soil.

Before she could work out where he had hidden, Turan formed a long firing passage underground, opened the exit, and fired a precise shot that shattered her head. Propelled by a wind channel and the Spirit of Fire, with force built up through several rotations of his sling, the attack had been powerful enough to pierce her defensive magic tool.

"So you won entirely through dirty tricks."

"I learned a lot from it. Mana aside, I realized my accumulated skill is still lacking."

Her magical talent was almost equal to Turan's, but there was a considerable gap in how long they had properly trained. Maysa had been educated as an heir since she was twelve, whereas Turan had taught himself haphazardly until seventeen.

Of course, as a genius himself, he was not vastly behind her in technique, but at the highest level of any field, small differences produced significant results. He had not noticed during their usual practice, when they went easy on each other. Actual combat felt entirely different.

"Still, if her head shattered in one hit, it can't have hurt much."

"Thankfully. Though that meant the near-death experience was a failure."

There were two main ways to approach death slowly: choking, as when he had fed her in the past, or inflicting wounds to cause excessive blood loss. Unfortunately, Maysa's death had been neither, so it had yielded nothing.

"But I'm not sure I can do it."

"Do what?"

"Kill you. Even knowing it isn't real, it doesn't feel good."

Turan recalled Maysa sprawled on the floor with her head shattered. He had seen countless enemies in that state, yet the mere fact that it was a dear friend made the sight unbearably unpleasant.

Suddenly, Solif gave him a light punch in the stomach.

"Saying that won't make me go easy on you, you bastard."

"... Same goes for me."

Despite his mocking tone, a faint smile touched Turan's face.

* * *

While Maysa recovered from the shock of death seated between the Baraha couple, Turan and Solif entered the arena next. Their mana was fully restored upon returning as well, so there was no reason to delay.

The arena attendant's eyes widened when Turan said he intended to fight twice in one day, spending two hundred gold coins.

"Aren't you tired?"

"I can manage."

"Well..."

Of course, as long as one kept winning, one could fight any number of times in a day, but few did so because of the fatigue of battle and the pain of injuries. Leaving the attendant marveling, Turan entered his second match—and suffered a narrow defeat at Solif's hands.

He drove Solif into a corner using various tricks learned in his first fight with Maysa, but breaking through the defenses of a powerful guardian-bloodline noble determined to hold firm proved difficult. And unlike ordinary guardians, who were helpless at range, Solif possessed the supremely offensive Sun bloodline.

Solif steadily advanced, knocking aside every attack with the Light of Judgment, while Turan kept retreating and slinging iron balls. After a grueling battle lasting more than an hour, it was Turan who conceded, his mana exhausted.

"I lost."

"Yes! I won!"

Solif stamped his feet in delight, but only briefly. Knowing he would have lost miserably without his awakened guardian bloodline, he clicked his tongue. Of course, by that reckoning Turan had at least five bloodlines, but the Zahar bloodline was hardly suited to combat.

Once the outcome was settled, they began the near-death experience they had not managed in the previous fight. Their method was blood loss. Solif cut deeply into both of Turan's wrists, then sat quietly behind him and waited for death to come.

"How is it?"

"What?"

"Am I bleeding enough?"

Solif grimaced and nodded. Watching his friend bleed and die, he thought he understood why Turan had felt so troubled after killing Maysa. He knew intellectually that this fight was merely an illusion of sorts, that in reality not a hair on their heads would be harmed. Even so, killing a companion with his own hands felt utterly horrible.

"I'm getting a little sleepy... Cold, too..."

Speaking drowsily, Turan gazed up at the gradually blurring ceiling. He had not noticed before, but now the arena ceiling seemed to be spinning like a whirlpool.

Weakness engulfed him, as though his whole body were sinking into an empty void. With too little blood left even to sustain his mind, his consciousness began to slip away, and he repeated the words of the soul-magic book over and over.

'Within every human lies a unique self, and that self is a god. This world is false, and only that self is true...'

Unlike the body, so easily wounded and doomed to wither and die, the soul transformed into one's true self was immortal and unique.

Repeating words he did not fully understand himself, Turan fell ever downward. The moment seemed both an instant and an eternity.

Just as he thought he might fall all the way to the center of the world, he saw something appear below. More precisely, he felt it.

'This is—'

Ash-gray clouds and golden lightning. Pitch-black darkness, and an eye open within it. The instant he saw those four symbols of his own bloodlines, Turan's consciousness snapped back to reality as though doused in cold water.

"Hey! Hey, are you all right?"

"Huh?"

Only then did Turan realize he had returned to the real world, and that what he had just seen was merely a vision on the verge of death. He was now sitting in the lobby outside the arena.

"How long... have I been like this?"

"Nearly half an hour. You suddenly stopped talking and just stood there staring blankly. We thought something had gone wrong."

After apologizing for worrying them, Turan noticed that both his cheeks were burning unusually fiercely. When he asked about it, Maysa lowered her head beside him.

"Sorry. You wouldn't snap out of it, so I slapped you a few times..."

"It's fine. I think it helped wake me up."

Turan patted Maysa's head a couple of times and suggested they call it a day at the arena. Since he and Maysa had each died once, only Solif and his parents could still use it, and there would be no real contest between those three in any combination.

After taking rooms at a small, shabby inn near the arena, Turan laid out cheap beer and sausages and explained what he had just experienced.

"You saw your own bloodline symbols inside yourself?"

"Could that have been because of the Holy Relics?"

The two Mimic Holy Relics Turan possessed—the mask and the necklace—allowed him to see other people's symbols when used together. But he shook his head at Maysa's suggestion.

"It's hard to put into words, but it felt different. With the Holy Relics, I'm actually 'looking inside,' whereas this was more like... 'feeling' that those things were me."

Even as he said it, he knew how vague that sounded, but he had no other way to explain.

"Maybe our bloodline abilities are part of the essence of our souls. The gods do move their symbols to use special powers, after all."

It was strange that soul magic, supposedly a human power, might be related to bloodline magic originating from the gods. Still, in light of what they had seen, it was not an unreasonable notion. The gods—specifically Ymir and Arabion's House Head—had indeed shown such phenomena when revealing their true strength.

After listening quietly, Solif asked in a low voice, "So, can you feel this spiritual awareness at all?"

"Not yet. But I think we're heading in the right direction. It's very faint, but I feel like I'm making progress."

They could scarcely dare attempt this kind of training anywhere without a dueling arena. The closer he approached death, the stronger that unidentified sensation—presumably spiritual awareness—became. But one mistake resulting in actual death would be the end of everything.

"Anyway, I'd like to stay a few more days and keep using the arena. I've learned quite a lot from fighting at full strength like this. Haven't you?"

"That's true."

Maysa lacked combat instincts, Solif lacked magical talent, and Turan lacked both total mana and experience employing his varied abilities. Having each keenly felt their shortcomings through full-strength clashes in the arena, they agreed to stay a few more days and continue dueling and experimenting with near-death experiences.

They set a limit of one week. If they dragged things out too long, Baraha might finish regrouping and locate them.

* * *

Five days after their first visit to the arena, Turan was sitting quietly waiting his turn when he heard people nearby whispering as they looked at him and Solif's parents.

It had nothing to do with Baraha. They were simply talking about the lunatics who had spent over a thousand gold coins using the dueling arena obsessively over the past few days.

Perhaps it was time to leave before those rumors spread further and became a nuisance. As he considered it, Maysa and Solif suddenly reappeared.

"I won!"

"Damn it! I lost again! I can't even land a hit anymore!"

Maysa cried out with both arms raised, while Solif stamped his foot and grumbled. Their joy and dismay could hardly have contrasted more sharply.

"How many losses does that make?"

"Three. How the hell do you beat her? I can't see a way to win no matter what I try."

"I just do my best."

With so many variables in combat, the outcome was never fixed, but a pattern emerged when they reviewed the results.

Amusingly, the three of them were like rock, paper, scissors. Turan had the advantage over Maysa but struggled against Solif; Maysa had the advantage over Solif but struggled against Turan; and Solif had the advantage over Turan but struggled against Maysa.

Each time a match was decided, they practiced soul magic by putting the loser to death. Experience had shown blood loss to be the most reliable method, so they stuck to it.

Solif's parents expressed some concern at the way they kept killing one another, but fortunately, the three had grown strong enough to watch each other die without flinching. Humans were creatures who readily adapted and improved through experience.

These duels also contributed greatly to their fighting ability. Their tangible assets—mana, magic tools, and the like—had not improved at all, but they had learned to make better use of their powers. By their estimation, each of them could now defeat their pre-arena self without much difficulty.

In his subsequent duel with Maysa, Turan beat her face to a pulp until she conceded, then put her to death. When the duel ended and they returned to the lobby, he sensed an unusual presence a short distance away.

'This is...'

Three nobles in the upper tier, five in the middle tier, and one in the top-ranking tier. An elite force capable of easily wiping out several ordinary wizard houses was waiting outside the arena.

"It seems we have visitors."

"Visitors?"

"I'm not sure who they are. If they're from Baraha, they've brought far too few people..."

Anyone who had witnessed their strength back then would have to be mad to come with such a small force. Any one of the three could sweep them aside in an instant.

Had they been waiting for the duel to end? Sensing them approaching the arena, Turan immediately told the others to take up a fighting formation.

Solif stood in front, with Maysa and Turan to either side, shielding the Baraha couple. Then Solif suddenly pointed at the approaching figure in astonishment.

"What? You...!"

"Been a while, my friend! I heard you were spending a fair bit of coin at the arena, so I thought I'd stop by and see you."

A massive man approached, speaking cheerfully. He stood nearly two meters tall, with thick arms that looked about as big around as Maysa's waist. The abundant hair covering his body, along with his bushy sideburns and beard, gave him an almost excessively masculine appearance.

Somehow, Turan could guess who he was without an introduction, but he asked to be sure.

"Who is he?"

"Kalais Ruban. I met him once years ago, at a gathering meant to foster friendships among heirs. This is the first time I've seen him since."

As expected, the man was the next House Head of the great house that ruled Frostwind Forest and the surrounding region.