30. The Mountain Comes to Them
Illumi's head was ringing like a temple gong, and he felt like he was going to lose his lunch at any moment. Where was he? He opened his eyes, but couldn't tell what he was looking at, everything was blurred, no, it was doubled. He shook his head to clear it, a big mistake as the resulting vertigo threatened to send him back into unconsciousness. He held his head still for a moment, he would have used his hands, but they didn't seem to be connected to his brain yet. As his vision began to clear, he saw a somehow familiar, if unexpected sight.
Lucia was standing with her left arm extended, just as he had seen her in that clearing on Kukuru Mountain ten years ago. And in front of her now, his father, ready to kill her, just as Mike had been. Illumi attempted to get up and interpose himself between them as he had done between her and Mike, but his body wouldn't respond correctly to the command, and he just wound up pitched slightly forward from the wall. He could see now that she had gathered her aura in her left hand, and was closing her eyes in concentration. Silva had stopped his advance as if he too was curious as to what she possibly thought she could do against his unmatched Nen prowess.
Wispy green tendrils snaked up from her fingers as a shimmering field emanating from her palm began to move outward in all directions. The border of this rapidly expanding circle took in Lucia, her father, his father, and rushed up to meet Illumi, then passed over him with a prickling sensation and he too was inside it. As if his concussion wasn't disorienting enough, he now found he was no longer in Luther VerHoffen's study, instead, all around him, he saw the forest of Kukuru Mountain.
At first he thought he had actually been transported, so detailed was the rendition. The smell of the air had changed and he could feel the dampness of the grass beneath his hands. It looked like very early evening, with the darkening sky still retaining something of an azure color but with the moon and stars brilliantly shining. He recognized the clearing where he had caught up with her on that day ten years past by the log benches and the general shape and size of it, but now, night blooming jasmine perfumed the air, and the ground was carpeted with small white star-shaped flowers. Out of the sides of the log benches grew myriad multicolored ruffled mushrooms, and in the branches of the surrounding forest trees he saw several iridescently plumed birds. This was no real place. It was a fantasy, a dream.
And in the center of this En dreamscape, Lucia, the wisps of aura from her fingers appearing in this world as a blazing flame, illuminating the entire clearing. She too had been transformed, her deep gold hair now extending down to her ankles and woven through with strands of pearls, her dress a long sleeved, floor length diaphanous sheath of purest luminous white, crossed at the bodice with an "x" of golden cord, the Maiden Sacrifice. In front of her, his father, the Black Knight, light hair in stark contrast to the nacreous black armor he had been given. Her father, seated on one of the benches behind her, in blood red velvet, a gold coronet on his head, and his body slumped forward from the weighty gold chains of office he wore, an ageing, tired King. Illumi managed to tilt his head down to see how she had chosen to portray him.
An ebon sleeveless silk tabard shot through with bronze thread, emblazoned on his chest a golden sun with a corona of silver pins alongside a silver moon pierced with golden ones, worn over shining chain mail so light-reflective it hurt his eyes to look at it, her Knight Champion. Although it made his head pound ominously, Illumi had to laugh. Wasn't this just like Lucia, to have a Nen ability so alien to any he had ever heard of or experienced? Not for her the impenetrable defense, the deceptive disguise, the lightning speed, the terrifying aura, the crushing blow, the massive blast, or even the clandestine espial. How many years had she spent developing her skill at creating this illusionary fairyland? How utterly frivolous and useless… and of course clever and beautiful, too.
But she had chosen her champion poorly. Not only was he not qualified to be a knight; he hadn't measured up as an assassin. He had failed utterly to protect her in combat against an opponent nearly twice his age, and now, seated mere meters away from the man who had ordered her death; he was unable to throw the handful of pins it would take to save her.
"Fazha, stahp!" He couldn't even speak correctly now, and Silva looked at him with what appeared to be surprise. Whether due to his slurred speech, because he hadn't expected him to be conscious yet, or outrage that Illumi would dare to interrupt him at his work, Illumi didn't care. He was desperate now, past personal pride or decorum. "Ash him…Maybe…nah hab su die!" It was not completely unheard of, to ask a client about something during a job, though usually it would be more along the lines of clarifying how and where it would be done. Her father was right there; although Illumi hadn't seen him make a move for the last few minutes, and his granting clemency was the only chance Illumi saw that Lucia had left. Silva ignored him in any case, turning back to Lucia.
Illumi now regarded her as well. The flame was getting smaller, and she had tight little stress lines between her eyebrows and at the corners of her mouth, she wasn't going to be able to hold this field much longer. Not that it mattered. Illumi had seen in his father's hand one of his own pins, picked up from the floor no doubt, where they had fallen impotently when he had been brushed aside. And tied around the end of it, just under the ball, her mother's ribbon, taken from his wrist while he had been inert and unconscious. There was a message. She was going to die. Die for the unpardonable sin of believing in him, of trusting in him to protect her… him, the man who had killed her own mother.
Lucia turned to look at him then, her face first clouding over with worry, then smoothing to a look of beatific peacefulness even if her eyes were shining with unshed tears. She smiled at him and looked as if she meant to speak. Illumi began to shudder involuntarily. 'I'm going into convulsions,' the detached thought came. Then he was gripped with a sudden wave of nausea, and he realized what she was going to say. No, not now! Not when he was like a discarded puppet on the floor, useless, powerless, with the shameful proof of his ineptitude and failure paraded before his eyes.
But fate had not finished mocking him yet and over the ringing in his ears he heard her dulcet voice, "I love you, Illumi." He lowered his forehead to the ground then, choking back bile but unable to stop even bitterer tears.
