They all gathered around to view the sword; each of them, Topher suspected, for different reasons. He knew that Rudo was a connoisseur of magical items, and the blade was obviously enchanted to a level none of them had ever seen before; Topher himself, similarly, found that he hungered to understand how its enchantments were bound to the blade, as a matter of professional interest if nothing else. Zanasha's interest was much more straightforward -- this, after all, was a weapon that made Nethersbane look like a cheap piece of shit -- but Hana's awe dwarfed everyone else's. Topher was sure that something in what the sword represented was incredibly important to the young woman -- some kind of mystical or cultural weight that he didn't understand -- and it was obvious that she was undergoing some kind of intense emotional response to it. Cautiously, he poked at the opening it presented, aware he risked an explosion. "So, I'm guessing this thing is pretty strong?"

Hana shook her head; half-laughed, then swallowed it and choked slightly before wiping tears from her eyes. "You could say that. Takenaka-sama said that it could not be stopped; it could cut through the world, if its wielder wished it." She swallowed again, looking around at the devastation which radiated from the epicenter upon which they stood. "You see the proof of such a claim around you."

Zanasha let out a slow breath. "I have never heard tales of such a blade. Is it very ancient?"

Rudo shook his head. "It appears freshly crafted, and its Status is..." He paused, tilting his head as he peered at the blade, and rubbed his bearded chin contemplatively. "It is very strange. I have never seen its like."

"Takenaka-sama forged it. For Oshima-sama." Hana's eyes stared at the sword, but Topher could tell she was seeing something else, something very far away. "He was a... I don't know his Class, but he could do everything. In the first day after the Summoning, he mastered all the magics. He could heal, destroy, create... and fight, of course. His family were smiths, and I think..." -- she paused -- "...I don't know. But he took one look at all the swords they wanted to give Oshima-sama and sneered at them, and forged this in a day. He could stop time..." she trailed away again.

Topher squinted, flexing the oblique mental muscle which he'd learned would activate his Detect Status Skill. Instantly, a small window appeared above the sword:

Perfect Blade: Kiku-no-Tsurugi

"'Perfect Blade'?" he announced in confusion. "Talk about pretentious."

Hana smiled, slightly self-consciously. "The name is pretentious, too. It combines the names of two legendary Japanese swords -- the Kiku-ichimonji and the Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi -- in a way that implies a great many things. About both it and its wielder." She hefted it again; it seemed heavy. "I don't know what to do with it."

"You could wield it, Hana-chan," Zanasha responded without a moment's hesitation. "You were the only one of us powerful enough to draw it. Surely, it is meant for you?"

Hana considered, then shook her head. "It... rejects me," she said after a moment. "I am allowed to touch it, but no more." She stood there, for several seconds, without speaking; then, abruptly, Topher saw her come to a decision.

She put away her Flux Blade, then raised the sword such that the flat of its blade rested across her palms. Half-turning, she faced them all squarely. "There's only one person who can wield this blade. Someone who has a pure heart; someone great, who lifts up others just by being near them."

Topher groaned internally; his pulse pounded in his ears. Gross. No. You gotta be kidding me.

"Someone," continued Hana, closing her eyes, "who truly understands the principles that Oshima-sama and Takenaka-sama would have forged into the sword. Honor. Respect. Clarity."

And then she dropped to her knees, proffering the sword up to Zanasha with a sweet smile. "Someone like you."

Topher whooshed out a breath of relief; Zanasha, taken aback, just stared for several seconds as a lock of her fiery red hair danced across her face in the hot wind. "Hana-chan... you cannot..." She seemed to squirm uncomfortably under everyone's gazes. "You cannot think...!"

"Hear yourself." Hana's smile grew broader. "You call me 'Hana-chan'. You use my homeland's name for me. For my people..." she shook her head, still smiling, and proffered the sword again. "It matters. You're the one who should wield it, Zee."

"But... Nethersbane..." the half-orc struggled for words. "Its Skills... I already have a weapon!"

"You have two hands," Rudo pointed out smugly.

Zanasha, looking cornered, whirled to Topher for help, but his own face was set in a wide grin too. "Just take it," Topher advised, eyes twinkling. "You're worthy. I promise."

The words hung between them, fat with hidden meaning; Topher, who normally would have sweated and clenched with fear at having given too much of his inner vulnerability away, was buoyed up on the shared triumph of finding something they could all agree on for once. Lips parted with wonder, Zanasha reached out and took hold of the sword's linen-wrapped hilt.

There was a long pause, followed by nothing much of anything; the sword did not emit an angelic hymn, or blast her for her impudence, or anything at all other than accept being equipped in a fittingly equanimous fashion. The half-orc turned the blade this way and that, testing its balance, then nodded. "I must craft a scabbard," she murmured to herself, turning away; Rudo hustled after her, chuckling.

"Fucking merchants," Topher groused good-heartedly. "Probably gonna sell her a magic scabbard." He turned back to Hana, and risked the most sedate and tentative of pats on her shoulder despite the fact that his flesh crawled at the contact. "Good job. That couldn't have been easy."

"It was not," Hana breathed, staring up at the red sky. "But I'm..." She shook herself, then drew her Flux Blade again, watching it shift between the unassuming forms of various gardening tools in her hand. "I'm beginning to understand what you told me, when we fought Vashyarl."

Topher chuckled. "Wish you'd explain it to me, then. I was pretty out of it at the time." He banished his Stylus and stretched his legs, ready to be on the move again; Rudo's restlessness seemed to be rubbing off on him.

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Hana didn't respond at first; she sheathed her Flux Blade again, then turned alongside him to follow the others. "I can't use your wand; you can't use my Flux Blade." She nodded in the direction of Zanasha, still marveling at the sword in her hand. "I can't wield her sword. It's that simple."

It's not about magic. It's not about power. Topher pondered it, sighed, and gave up; plenty of time to think about it while we walk ourselves to death.

----------------------------------------

They continued journeying south for another three days; to Topher's disappointment, the monsters began to give less and less XP, with Level-ups stopping entirely after the second day. Still, it had been productive for everyone -- Rudo was now Level 46, Topher was 44, Zanasha was 39, and Hana had rocketed all the way up to Level 37, gaining nearly twice as many Levels as everyone else. "I think we're finally starting to be the appropriate Level range for this area," she commented, after dispatching a swarm of Lava Imps with a single spiraling slash of her Flux Blade. "These monsters feel about as difficult as Jelly Slimes did when I first started adventuring, now. I don't know how to feel about that."

"The speed at which we are Leveling is still greatly accelerated," Zanasha pointed out, hacking a great stone tortoise with magma-like limbs in half with a single nonchalant blow. "Even if we are near the Levels of these creatures, this is still quite rapid advancement."

Topher shrugged as he blasted a pair of Firewyrms with Lightning Bolt. "I don't know about you, but I'm not gonna question it. You unlock any Skills from that thing yet?"

The half-orc shook her head. "It does not seem to possess any; it is merely a very fine sword. But, as Hana-chan implied, that is is often its own advantage; it appears to have no limit to the amount of power it can channel, and I has yet to see a foe whose armor it cannot penetrate."

"Huh." Topher wiped the sweat from his brow and eyed the sword suspiciously. "It sure looked magical as fuck when it was trying to incinerate all of us."

"Bailey-sama." Topher felt Hana's hand on his shoulder, and managed not to flinch away. "If Zee is right, the sword has no power of its own; what we were nearly destroyed by was the echo of Oshima-sama's power, ten years later." Topher's jaw fell open; Hana nodded grimly in response. "Yes. Challenges the imagination a little, doesn't it?"

"More than a little," Rudo commented, shattering the skull of another Firewyrm with a well-placed Ki Strike. "How could such power be defeated?"

Topher shuddered, remembering the devastation in Orvale. "The Demon Lord's guys are on a whole other level -- no pun intended. Their lowest foot soldier wiped out most of a city just by throwing a tantrum; I still don't know how we survived that one."

Rudo nodded, but his eyes still seemed clouded. "The demon assassin which accompanied Mister Cloudseeker did seem powerful, but not to that degree. Perhaps she was below a foot soldier?"

Topher pondered this; it didn't seem likely. "I don't know. Maybe there's more we still need to find out." He clambered up on a nearby outcropping of rock (no longer marveling at the fact that he could climb rocks as if he wasn't an obese geriatric) and prepared to take another sighting; but a flicker of motion over the southern horizon caught his eye, and he ducked downwards. "Shit. There's something else coming... could be more monsters."

Then the figures broke over the horizon, and his blood froze.

As if speaking of such creatures had summoned them, Topher watched in terror as nearly thirty Capras, led by a great vulture-headed demon who dwarfed them, marched in perfect synchronization over the black lavaflows. Choking on his fear, he slipped back off the rock and muttered a Feather Fall spell on the way down, alighting near the others and making shushing noises. "Our luck continues to be shitty," he confided in them.

"More foes?" asked Zanasha with quiet enthusiasm, bringing her blades up into a ready position. "Perhaps you can conserve your --"

"No," Topher interrupted, sensing that decisive action was important. "Demons, a whole goddamn army of them. What the fuck are they doing here?"

Nearby, Rudo had crept to a cluster of obsidian which had formed from some long-ago pyroclastic flow; using a black-bladed dagger which seemed to reflect no light, he silently cut a strangely perfect line into the volcanic glass and pressed his face to it. "I can see them," he whispered in the barest of voices, gesturing to the others. "Let us observe. We may learn something valuable."

As quietly as possible, the other three clustered around him; Topher was terrified for a moment that Zanasha's weapons or armor would clang against the hard surface of their cover, but she managed to squeeze in with them with no more noise than a light rustling. That's right, she said her new armor helped her scout and move more freely, Topher remembered. Jostling the three of them lightly, she eventually managed to settle in next to Topher; he fought down the tsunami of feelings this gave him and tried to focus on what he was seeing as the demons marched into his line of sight.

As they all watched, befuddled, the towering vulture-headed demon produced a large glass object which looked vaguely spear-like, then plunged it into the earth and gripped it with both bony claws. Concentrating, it began chanting in a horrid, croaking voice, and the other demons formed up around it in a protective formation and began to prepare for battle. Some of them drew weapons; others raised their claws, either for combat or for spellcasting. For a moment, Topher couldn't see what they were preparing to fight; then the ash-covered plain erupted around them in fountains of lava.

At first, the flurry of activity was too hectic for them to see anything; but eventually, the tumult of combat receded sufficiently for Topher to see that a great host of the local monsters had burst from the terrain (presumably in response to whatever the vulture-headed demon had done) and that the smaller Capras demons were destroying them with gusto. Though they were clearly in no danger from the creatures' attacks -- he saw several demons take hits that would have crippled or killed him without so much as flinching -- they fought with significant concentration and discipline, and the vulture-headed demon occasionally snapped out orders and commands which the demons obeyed with great alacrity.

"What are they doing?" fretted Hana in the quietest whisper she could manage. "Gathering resources?"

Zanasha shook her head. "They are training, Hana-chan. If one knows what to look for, the signs are... very clear."

After a half-hour of tireless combat, the flow of monsters slackened, then dwindled to nothing; the vulture-headed demon withdrew the glass spike from the ground, stowed it away, and barked another command at the Capras. As one, they all moved simultaneously with uncanny precision to assume a formation of rest and attentiveness; Topher gawped. "Jesus. Are they all robots, or something?"

"I do not believe so," whispered Rudo, looking contemplative. "They move well, but there are slight differences in each. I believe it is merely very great discipline."

"I concur." Zanasha's fist clenched tightly around the hilt of Nethersbane. "If this is the level of coordination they --"

At that moment, a horrified wail split the air.

To Topher's total disbelief and horror, a young human boy burst from behind the ranks of the Capras, shouting and gibbering in a language Topher did not understand; he was clutching the seat of his pants with one hand and pointing back the way he had come. Without thinking, Topher summoned his Stylus and began spinning it, his blood thundering through his veins. Jesus Christ. We gotta get that kid out of --

The demons all erupted in laughter.

Topher couldn't believe what he was seeing. They all pointed, jeering, at the boy; several of them doubled over with mean-spirited mirth, while several others shook their heads in disbelief. There was a brief moment of unruliness, sharp in contrast to their previous strict regimentation, before a barked command from the vulture-headed demon quelled them all in an instant. As they all watched, flabbergasted and confused, the largest demon strode over to the boy and towered above him, looking down with seething fury. Topher winced, expecting a sudden bloody explosion of death.

What happened next changed everything.