0"What is it?" Alzer asked.
Kuro didn't answer immediately. Instead he reached into his robe and produced a portrait. It depicted a young woman in a blue robe, her fiery red hair giving her an air of barely restrained aggression — and, admittedly, a striking kind of beauty.
"This is Riya Riverbright," Kuro said. "The daughter of Duke Riverbright. I want you to get close to her and bring me her head. Do that, and I'll keep your secret indefinitely — consider it my good deed for the year."
Alzer sneered inwardly. This is what he calls a negotiation? What a load of bullshit. This is a threat dressed up in polite language.
Even so, he turned the assignment over in his mind. Something in Kuro's phrasing gave him enough to work with. "I see," he said slowly. "So the Church handed you a mission to assassinate her because she's a Dark Mage. And the reward for killing a duke's daughter must be generous enough that you couldn't resist."
"Hmph. You really aren't ordinary." Kuro's eyes sharpened. "Based on how you handled the orb earlier, I deduced that your teacher anticipated both your dark and lightning affinities before they even awakened — otherwise, how would you already know to suppress one with the other? Whoever taught you is more mysterious than I initially thought." He let out a quiet snicker.
Alzer kept his expression still, though inwardly he frowned. The old man's guess was nowhere near the truth, and yet it wasn't entirely wrong either. He had only learned about his lightning affinity in the moment he chose it from among the nine Supreme Affinity Crystals. His reasoning for choosing lightning over holy had been twofold: first, lightning was capable of concealing dark element. Second — and perhaps more importantly — if he had awakened a holy element instead, Kuro would have become unbearably persistent about recruiting him. He knew exactly how Holy Servants operated. Once they fixed their sights on something, they did not relent.
Among the Three Supreme Elements, lightning and holy were considerably rarer than dark or ice, for reasons no scholar had ever satisfactorily explained. That rarity had consequences. Within the Holy Church, the number of members with holy element numbered perhaps a hundred at most. Recruiting a Holy Mage carried far more prestige than eliminating a Dark Mage — because killing one was a temporary solution, while gaining a Holy Mage meant potentially cultivating a future Holy Apostle. Kuro would have moved heaven and earth to secure one.
Since the old man had settled on the theory of a mysterious teacher, Alzer was content to let him keep it. It was, in its way, an additional layer of protection he had created entirely by accident. In the short term at least, it would give Kuro reason to tread carefully.
As for the assassination of Riya Riverbright — Alzer had no intention of following through. Getting close to someone took time, and time was the one thing he refused to squander. A vague but persistent instinct told him something was coming, something that would arrive regardless of whether he interfered with the timeline or not. He needed to get stronger before it did.
"I'll do it," he said at last, carefully measured. "Though you can't seriously expect me to actually kill her."
"Keke. I had a feeling you'd say that." Kuro didn't seem bothered. "She has one year left at the academy before she graduates. I'll give you until then."
"Reasonable. I agree." Alzer said it without hesitation, his eyes reading the old man's face. Behind the weathered, ordinary appearance was a scheming creature of considerable patience and danger. If he refused outright, he was fairly certain Kuro would simply take him by force — or worse, end things here before his journey had even started.
"Good," Kuro said, visibly satisfied. "But I think we need some assurance, in case you decide to betray me."
"What kind of assurance?"
Kuro snapped his fingers. A small magic circle materialized in the air between them, then compressed itself into a sheet of paper covered in dense text and clauses.
"A Soul Contract?" Alzer's surprise was genuine, if brief. He hadn't expected a parish priest to know how to draft one.
"You know what this is?" Now it was Kuro's turn to look surprised. He recovered quickly with a shrug. There was clearly a teacher involved who knew things that most people didn't — knowing about Soul Contracts was just another piece of that.
Alzer did know. A Soul Contract was something any Mage could produce, regardless of strength, as long as they had mana and knew the formula. It was constructed using the laws of the world, channeled through the Mage's own power. Any party who violated the terms would suffer punishment exactly as specified within it. No exceptions — the world's laws enforced it directly.
That said, no system was without a loophole. Alzer, as a former member of the Royal Court, was well acquainted with this contract's weaknesses and knew exactly how to exploit them — provided he had enough time to prepare. He wasn't particularly worried.
He took the contract from Kuro's hand and read through it carefully, twice. One couldn't be too cautious with an old schemer. When he was satisfied that no traps were buried in the clauses, he bit his finger and let a drop of blood fall onto the paper.
"Good. That settles it." Kuro took the contract back, bit his own finger, and pressed his blood to the page. The paper ignited without flame and crumbled into ash in seconds — the kind of thing that would have baffled any ordinary witness.
Alzer was not ordinary. He had been a powerful Mage in his past life, and he was a first-level Man Stage Mage now. Whatever he would eventually become was still ahead of him.
"I wish you a good day, young man." Kuro inclined his head in something resembling a bow, then turned and left the room.
When the door closed behind him, Alzer made his way back to his room and lay down on the bed. His mind was wrung out — not from the Awakening, but from the relentless thinking that had followed it. He stared up at the ceiling and made a quiet decision. Three days here, and then he would leave for the academy.