"Master!" Minara Bebe, the apprentice magician, imitating Nakotsumi Mana's style, waved her hand in the air, having finally set her sights on her mentor. The bubblegum-pink color of the young woman's hair and her cheerful attitude seemed like a sweet and inspiring sight for most eyes. Even to her master, who had leather straps connecting separate metal armor pieces and masking his eyes.
After getting her master's attention, the magician's apprentice began rushing to his side. Her master tilted his hand to warn his student not to act like a careless child the first time they went outside and not bother to look to both sides of the road before crossing. There was still a handful of combatants duking it out between the armored magician of orchid-colored hair, who commanded respect from all of his peers, terror, and fearful respect from his foes and star pupil.
The young lady stopped mid-run. Curiously enough, the time went on normally. Even more curiously–she stopped in mid-air, feet dangling in the air in light twitches. Bebe's face shifted from cutesy cheer to a twist of unknown torment, applying a solid hold on her. It was only when one looked down and noticed a golden beam shooting off into the sky that had penetrated her chest and kept her suspended in mid-air as if impaled on it, that the reason behind her miserable wheezing and the splattering blood became known.
"Bebe!" the apprentice's master called out to his pupil. The sight of his treasured friend and companion for a few years now in agony had somehow penetrated the blinding straps of leather and sealed itself into the magician's mind. Without waiting for what was to follow, the sky-piercing golden beam swung like a pole and then vanished, throwing the impaled magician girl out of bounds with a dazed and blank stare.
"Such a ragged and torn thing, stepping in my way. It will take time for me to recover from the idea of such a miserable notion," a man in extravagant and a tad oversized golden armor and strawberry blond curls that spanned over his shoulder and down to the middle of his spine remarked, sifting through his flawless and well-maintained locks with his polished gauntlet.
"Mamosei the Excellent has eliminated Minara Bebe! With this shock elimination and the Conqueror faction getting one-up on the Magicians, there are now 145 competitors fighting it out in the arena!" the announcer didn't skip a beat, catching every trace of this surprising development in a blink and directing the attention of the spectators amongst the audience that may not have noted this outcome from the get-go.
"You…!" the orchid-haired magician with full white body armor and a sleeveless violet jacket ground his teeth. "She wasn't your opponent!"
"Yes, the runt was beaten and ugly. More so, she committed a grave transgression of stepping into my path and falling into my sharp line of sight. And yet… Despite all that, I still didn't crush her to paste, but gracefully eliminated her. They should call me Mamosei the Angelic, for I am so merciful…" the heroic-looking knight dragged his golden gauntlet under his eye to wipe his crystal tears. Something in the praise he uttered for himself had truly struck a sensitive cord with this one.
With merely the noise of cloth rustling in the air, in an instant, the enigmatic magician had sent himself hurling across the stage and delivered himself above the tearful conqueror with his right arm prepared for an open-palm strike. It went down with a thunderous crack, rippling across the audience and spreading slashing halos of compressed air that sliced clean through the debris across the stage and even slashed into the audience stands. Despite the destructive aftereffect, the terrified spectators found that the angle of the shockwave had been measured so precisely that, despite cleaving the arena stands into pieces, it didn't cut a single spectator nor drew any blood from any non-combatants. A follow-up barrage of open-palm strikes overwhelmed the vain conqueror, who blanked out and wobbled to fall down on his back while frothing blood from his mouth. Terrifying, crater-like indentations covered his deluxe armor chest plate where the magician had just struck him.
"Unbelievable!" the announcer bellowed. "Chikurai Jishaku is an elite member of the Magicians' faction! The Magicians are infamous for their expanded understanding of forces of creation and destruction governing our world and uncanny techniques and abilities that seem like magic to other warrior breeds following strict paths and rigid rules! And yet, when push comes to shove, this peerless magician can overwhelm a dangerous opponent like the rising star of the Conquerors–Mamosei the Excellent in a snap with just his hand-to-hand skills!"
While initially, the audience saw little value in the flashy display of speed, mathematical flawlessness, and sheer power displayed by the master magician, once the charismatic announcer pointed out to them what was so stunning about it, more than a few spectators nodded their heads in appreciation of the master magician's skill.
Having landed on his feet after a flurry of devastating palm strikes, Jishaku shot his foot up into his opponent's chin, shooting him off into the sky and following up with a shoulder ram that prevented the conqueror from wiggling out of his hold or fleeing to a different corner in the arena. With the head of the arrogant conqueror squeezed firmly in between his hands, the master magician locked the spot underneath his black leathery strap where his eyes should have been on his opponent's eyes.
"You should have known better," he said with deep-seated spite oozing from his voice. "To become someone worthy of the name "magician", one must study every subject under the skies and beyond and gain an intimate understanding of every force affecting every single thing occurring or not occurring in our objective reality. It's an endless journey of enlightenment, doomed to failure from the start. Magician dies unfulfilled, losing to their own mortality, yet their studies make their successors stronger and ever-closer to the golden formula tying every law of nature together. To a magician, nothing is impossible, because anything that is something can be produced through the interaction of some manner of forces, all of which a magician wields. Unfortunately for you, I am a master magician…"
Cracking at the belfry of his opponent, the master magician sent Mamosei crashing down while drawing a circle in the sky with his middle and index finger. "Paradox of Everything: Miletan Horn!" Jishaku chanted while hanging suspended in mid-air as a silver magical circle appeared where Jishaku had drawn it with his fingers. While the fallen conqueror worked on recovery, he froze in place, staring at the magical circuit with an existential dread that stretched his spotless, chiseled face of silky-smooth skin to a horrified and gaunt expression while his eyes became soulless, as if they had first-hand experienced the hopelessness of life.
"What have you done to me!?" the conqueror cried out as if cursing the gods themselves for delivering his doom to him on a silver platter.
"I have taken your ability to fart with the scent of jasmines," Jishaku replied, freaking the armored conqueror out.
"You dare mock one such as me? One that shall cast gods themselves from their thrones once he has nothing of worth to see on Earth?" Mamosei clamored with outrage. "I do not have such an outrageous ability. If you must know, my way of vanquishing my foes is to grant myself the gifts I require for my conquests!"
"Wrong. You do not have it, because I have taken it away from you," Jishaku waved his hand in teasing dismissal. "You have lost it."
"Some blind philistine will not slander me!" Mamosei extended his hand out. "Luckily for me, you are far enough away for none of your filth to splatter on me and stain my cape when my divine lance technique–Sarissa pierces you like it did your frazzled tramp!"
With his hand extended to grasp an invisible lance, Mamosei stood proud of the glorious feat he was about to pull off. He stood proud for far too long, even after it became painfully obvious that no such thing would be occurring. Jishaku slipped his index finger into his ear to pick it up while he waited for the so-called "divine lance" of solid light to pierce him like it did Bebe earlier.
"It appears I remain unpierced…" Jishaku concluded after picking a minuscule pinch of earwax and flicking it away.
"Th… That's impossible!" Mamosei shrieked as if he was ready to pull his hair out. "What happened to the divine spear of light, Sarissa!?"
"I don't know what you're talking about, puff. Your ability was to fart fumes that smelled of jasmines and, as I have told you over and over again, I've taken it away. I'm beginning to think you're kind of dense, honestly," Jishaku crossed his arms and sighed while shaking his head. "Oh, and by the way, I recall you calling me "blind" earlier. Just so you know at least one thing, I don't wear this strap over my eyes because they are blind. I wear it because I don't need them. I have mastered my knowledge of everything in this world to a mathematical equation. I do not need to see the world, because I understand it, everyone in it, and the forces that govern it precisely enough to know all the surrounding happenings."
With a brush of his hand through the golden locks, Mamosei crafted a sly upward turn with the corners of his lips. He looked up at the hovering master magician with a different kind of look, one that seemed to peer straight through the man but one that was also much sharper and deadlier rather than just being full of bloated vanity.
"Your sealing ability has a major flaw. It presupposes that I had the ability that you described in the first place. That's quite the cocktail of different arts you've put together, magician, a sealing technique that is transferred through an illusionary medium but behaves in a ritualistic manner and activates once specific conditions are fulfilled like a curse technique," Mamosei struck a confident and flashy pose, pressing his knuckles to his forehead while he turned his knees to the side and bent his legs to shift his balance. As far as any spectator was concerned, there was no purpose to this posing except for showboating.
Shocking the audience, a wall of men made of ethereal golden light lined up behind Mamosei with bows aiming at the sky and released a flurry of rays of solid light blitzing toward the airborne magician. The beams of light ripped clean through the magician's body, though they spilled no blood, just punched, and left gaping holes. It was just a matter of time until the gruesomeness of the light ray barrage had demolished the magician's body and thus left just an empty cloak filled with holes flapping in the air, while Jishaku's smiling head remained static and unharmed above it.
"You must have thought me some sort of simpleton, merely because I am superior to every other human being. That is the fatal mistake of your limited mind, charlatan," Mamosei laughed out, leaving himself wide open while his army of golden light archers froze with loaded bows ready to beam rays of decimating sunlight at the paradox magician.
"Naturally," Jishoku's head attached to a hole-riddled cloak smiled with a full-teeth grin. "It takes an exceptional imbecile to be vain."
"What you perceive as my vanity is merely a defensive mechanism meant for your feeble mind to help cope with the reality that I was born better than everyone else. So much better, in fact, that it is my natural calling to rule over the unimpressive lot and bring about a Golden Age. It is a cumbersome burden and this prosaic cattle of my era is the last bunch of strays to deserve prosperity I shall bring about, but I am indomitable and beneficent, therefore I humbly accept that burden as my destiny," Mamosei wiped another genuine wet crystal rolling down his cheek. By now, his spotless and tanned complexion had received a pinch of swelling because of his excessive rubbing of the face with armored gauntlets.
"It is evident that you've studied under a magician. Any other breed of warrior would be too rigid to comprehend this paradox, let alone overcome it. Who was your tutor, pup?" Jishoku wondered with an excited smile. It was difficult to say which of many flames rustling in him scorched him the hottest–the prospect of a genuine challenge in a world he had reduced to mathematical certainty and understood beyond his need to experience any of it or the inevitable punishment that awaited one who so crudely dispatched of his pupil.
"You misunderstand the nature of my relationship. I am Mamosei the Excellent, I do not study under, I demand lesser folks show me their secrets and I claim them as my own, if they are worth my attention, of course," Mamosei pointed out, snapping his finger, and blinking out the row of golden archers out in a cascade of synchronized flashes. The golden conqueror clacked his armored heels together, rising from the ground on something very real yet, for now, invisible.
A nova of blinding light shot out to every edge of the world, burning the eyes of undeserving beholders. With a playful clang of his boots, Mamosei mounted a steed of golden light and flowing mane of tiny stars interconnected by nebulae, the true color of which was impossible to tell because the sparkling stars colored every aspect of the tall stallion bright as starlight itself.
"Behold Buthessalus, the finest steed you shall ever lay eyes upon who shall place its hooves on every inch of my boundless empire!" Mamosei the Excellent clapped his hands over his head, saluting himself.
"Hmm…" Jishoku hummed while his unscathed body revealed itself behind the ruffling black curtain by simply pushing it aside like a bothersome flap of a cape. "You say you are above your tutor, yet you only manage a feeble Armor spell? It's inherently flawed too. The whole point of armor magic is that it coats you and protects you from harm."
"You live!?" Mamosei gasped.
"Verily," Jishoku snickered, striking a pose of a magician who had just completed a trick. "Usually pointless theatrics like these were Bebe's fascination, though it seems like a fitting punishment for you to lose to that which you berate."
"How can you remain unscathed? It wasn't as if you had replaced your body with that cape and I saw it skewered with my own eyes!" Mamosei the Excellent seethed, forcing his steed to stand on its hind legs while the conqueror raised his hand and produced a beam of light that stabbed into the heavens above. Dragging the entire colossal beam down, the golden conqueror aimed to obliterate the magician whole rather than just strike his body.
The beam passed through Jishoku's body, engulfing the master magician in a wave of all-white, and when the beam moved under Jishoku's location, nothing remained. Once the Sarissa lance reached the ground, it allowed the tiles of enforced sandstone to scatter the beam of light, rather than obliterating the arena whole, showing that the one who considered himself above all things could effortlessly control how his spear of light behaved.
The sky where Jishoku once was bent and shifted, becoming a camouflaged stack of boxes that opened up one by one, revealing the concealed body of the master magician hiding inside. The moment that Jishoku had left the stacked magical boxes, they disappeared without a trace, as if they had never been there, to begin with, and were just a twisted hallucination of a weary beholder.
"This is another one of your paradoxes, isn't it?" Mamosei the Excellent shook his fist at the unscathed master magician hovering in mid-air.
"It is. I always say the truth. And yet I do not exist. That would be why you cannot end me," Jishoku said, looking down at the arrogant conqueror.
"Tsk, if you do not intend to fight me, just hide behind your paradoxes, you will never avenge that stumbling little urchin I threw off the arena," Mamosei taunted his opponent with a smug grin. Since Jishoku tsked with his tongue and crossed his arms out in front of him, this seemed to have hit an emotional mark when the gold-clad conqueror failed to scrape the master magician physically. "By shuffling me into the deck of worthless waste of paper that is livestock around me, you have made a grave error, Paradox Magician. One that will cost you gravely."
The cavalier subjugator of all raised his hand and seized a spontaneously combusting, bursting, and a sizzling spark of unstable light. The same light that once formed the divine lance, Sarissa, now forged a javelin with a jagged trident-like end that produced colorful miniaturized stars of ruby, sapphire, and emerald shades that orbited around each of its tips.
"You wish to depose my majesty, yet all you do is deny you your own death. You state you are always honest, yet your vengeance is the greatest paradox of all!" Mamosei taunted the master magician by flinging his spear with the mightiest spear throw history had ever known. Riding the sunshine itself in a desert where rays of light were ample, the spear seemed to plunge through the chest of the Paradox Magician instantaneously, having traveled the entire distance between Mamosei and his target in stopped time because of severe time dilation caused by its speed.
Jishoku spat out a mouthful of blood, losing his cool expression in a twist of torment. The miraculous spear plunged clean through his core and sent him for a downward ride, slamming the trident end into the ground outside the arena. A few times gravity demanded its toll by forcing the body of the motionless, impaled Paradox Magician to jerk on the spear while Mamosei rode his victory lap and thrust his fist of triumph into the sky.
"Salute my greatness, peasants. The majesty of Sarissa is that I can imbue it with my conqueror's will. Not even a lowly universal paradox of a liar's existence can hide from subjugator's justice!" Mamosei sang the melodies of his own glory while the audience rustled in unease, trying to discuss how the gold-clad conqueror had deposed the paradoxical existence of his opponent. "That poor wench. The mightiest guardian of her honor didn't even realize that his paradox presupposed his very self, making it flawed from the get-go. All I needed to do was instill my intent on illuminating that fallacy into my spear, and his trick was undone. Make your proclamations, manservant!"
"Ahem…" the announcer cleared his throat. "Competitor Mamosei the Excellent would be wise to note that, technically, the Paradox Magician Jishoku hasn't hit the area out of bounds, for his body remains suspended in the air while it is the spear that is embedded into the ground."
"Hmph…" Mamosei clenched his fist, undoing Sarissa into a flash of dissolving light. The audience clamored in shock as, despite the spear's disappearance, Jishoku remained floating in mid-air.
"Madness, what sorcery is this!?" Mamosei cursed, throwing a fit at the sight of his opponent, who appeared to be slowly descending to the ground at a leisurely pace that suggested he would never truly touch the ground.
"When one is moving toward a pursued point of shifting space, one cannot overtake any given point in space-time, since the one falling must first reach the point where its direction started in so that the direction must always hold a lead. Naturally, Earth is always moving, causing an infinite space paradox…" Jishoku twitched before flipping in mid-air to return to a hover, much to the audience's excited cheers.
"You are simply insufferable…" Mamosei grumbled, pulling off his golden gauntlet and throwing it into the ground as a proclamation that he would end the paradoxical existence of the master magician even if it costs him his life and his destiny.
