[Chrono Trigger Novel - Episode 20] The Name on the Broken Sword
Masa and Mune moved in opposite directions.
As the blade on the left drove straight toward Crono, the figure on the right circled behind the altar and split Lucca from Marle. The attacks were not remarkable for their speed, but for the precision of the space between them. Evade one, and the other arrived where the first had driven you.
Crono turned the first blade aside with the back of his sword and ducked. The second passed overhead and cut several strands of hair. He made no counterattack, retreating instead toward Marle.
“They're not looking at each other.”
Marle had seen it too. The masked faces were turned in different directions, but their footwork flowed like the two hands of a single person.
Lucca aimed her launcher beside the altar. A round struck the ground at Mune's feet and scattered stone dust. When he moved aside, Masa's sword covered the opening. Lucca twisted away, but the point severed the strap of her tool bag. Screws and small instruments spilled across the floor.
“Isn't attacking my equipment against the rules?”
“You didn't ask about rules before the fight.”
A child's voice laughed behind the mask.
Lucca left the fallen tools where they were. She unwound the cloth around her swollen wrist and looped it between her fingers, binding the joint so it would not bend when she called fire. Then she waited for Mune to charge again.
When he raised his sword, Lucca breathed flame not at the blade, but at the stone dust on the floor. The heated grit burst upward in a red cloud and blinded him. Mune drove through without stopping, but the heat clinging to his mask forced him to turn his face.
At that instant, Marle lashed out with water drawn thin as cord. The stream coiled around the hilt of Mune's sword and pulled it to one side. Crono stepped in and struck his wrist.
Instead of the crash of metal, a clear bell rang.
Mune's body wavered with light. Across the chamber, Masa clutched the same place on his own wrist.
“Strike one, and they both feel it,” Marle said.
“It isn't two powers,” Lucca replied. “It's one power divided between them.”
Masa and Mune no longer laughed. The two figures circled opposite sides of the altar at speed, tightening the ring around their opponents. Wind from their blades scraped the cave walls, and the scattered screws on the floor slid toward the center.
Crono saw that the heart of the attack was not himself, but the altar. The broken sword trembled in time with the children's movements. It was the object they protected—and the axis around which their power turned.
He ran toward it.
Both blades changed direction at once. One came from the front for his chest; the other swept from behind toward his legs. Crono did not slow. He tore loose his scabbard and hurled it into the rear blade's path, then slid beneath the one ahead. As severed leather spun through the air, his hand closed around the hilt of the broken sword.
Something like a person's breath trembled within the cold metal.
When he tried to draw it, the entire altar grew heavy. It was not the stone pulling him down. Through the hand wrapped around the hilt came the weight of old hesitation, of anger, of someone long gone—all at once. Crono released it.
Masa's blade grazed his shoulder. Cloth tore, and blood spread beneath it.
“Why did you let go?”
“It isn't mine. Not yet.”
“Then the trial is over.”
Mune's voice came from behind him.
The two figures withdrew and stood side by side before the altar. For a moment they seemed to return to the shape of children, but their outlines melted toward each other. The two lights overlapped, throwing a shadow tall enough to touch the cave ceiling.
“But being unable to take something and being unable to protect it are not the same.”
The fused being spoke like a deep wind.
As its enormous body took shape, the cave's air began to turn in a single direction. Stones and broken branches around the altar spiraled upward. Crono drove his sword into the ground and clung to it. Marle seized a corner of the altar. Lucca fell and hooked her fingers into a groove in the floor.
From the heart of the whirlwind, an enormous blade came down.
Crono threw himself aside. The blade missed the altar and split the floor. The impact tore Crono's sword from the stone and flung it into the air. He caught the hilt, but there was nowhere to land. The wind shoved against his back and dragged him toward the new fissure.
Marle reached out. Droplets stretched from her fingertips and became a long strand that wrapped around Crono's wrist. The thin stream lengthened under his weight, on the verge of breaking.
Lucca seized Marle around the waist.
“Pull!”
Their three bodies formed a line. Crono searched for the fissure's edge with his toes. Marle ignored the pain in her wrist and refused to release the water. Lucca hooked her heel into a hollow in the rock and bore the weight of both.
The giant raised its sword again.
“This time, all three of you will fly.”
Through the wind, Lucca noticed an ember circling above the altar. A fragment of stone dust she had heated still glowed red. The whirlwind was not radiating from the giant's body. It gathered along the ring in the floor, then climbed toward the blade.
“Crono, don't swing at him! Break the circle on the floor!”
Crono pulled himself upright and searched for the thinnest part of the vortex. The wind was invisible, but the dust and water droplets drew its grain in the air. Instead of making a great swing, he cut horizontally, close to the ground.
A short line of blue light sprang from the sword's point.
The lightning did not strike the giant. It severed one side of the circle where the wind gathered and buried itself in the stone. With the flow of the whirlwind broken, every suspended fragment fell at once.
The giant's descending blade slowed for a heartbeat.
Marle released the water around Crono's wrist and sent it beneath the giant's feet. It ran through the cracks in the floor and widened the broken ring. Lucca's fire swept across the wet stone and burst it into steam.
White vapor coiled around the giant's knees. He lost his balance and shifted one foot, but found only the void in the wind Crono had opened.
The three needed no words to decide the order.
Marle saw Lucca lower her hand and withdrew the water. The instant the steam cleared, Crono plunged through it. He ducked beneath the giant sword and drove his own blade between the two lights in his opponent's chest.
He did not thrust.
He twisted the blade, forcing the two lights apart.
The clear note of a bell rang twice. The enormous body split down the middle like cracking glass, and Masa and Mune tumbled away in opposite directions.
The wind in the cave died.
Crono dropped to one knee and caught his breath. Blood from his shoulder ran down his arm. Marle hurried to him and washed the wound with water, while Lucca searched among the scattered tools for a usable bandage.
The two children lay before the altar, gazing at the ceiling and laughing.
“Did something move before the sword?” Mune asked.
“Three things did,” Masa replied. “Eyes, trust, and stubbornness.”
“The stubbornness may have come after the sword.”
“Not Lucca's.”
“I can hear you,” Lucca said.
Masa and Mune sat up. This time, they did not block the way. When they placed their hands upon the altar, light peeled the rust from the broken sword. Only half the blade remained, but within it ran a clean, straight grain of metal.
“This isn't a finished weapon,” Masa said.
“It broke long ago, and our power was divided in two,” Mune continued.
“Can you tell us whose hand it broke in?” Marle asked.
For the first time, all mischief left the children's faces.
“That isn't the sword's story to tell.”
“It's a story that must be told by someone still alive.”
Crono remembered Frog's underground dwelling and the closed chest.
Masa lifted the broken blade from the altar. Crono held out a hand, but the child did not give it to him at once.
“Are you going to use this?”
“No.”
“Then who will you give it to?”
Crono could not answer. Frog saying he had no right to climb the mountain; Tata's hand hiding the Hero Medal; the bread the soldiers had saved upon the bridge—each came back to him in turn.
“I'll ask first.”
Apparently satisfied, Masa handed him the blade.
On the way down, the children opened a path of light above the waterfall. The three travelers rose as lightly as feathers and settled in the grass at the mountain's foot. The road Tata had fled over for hours vanished in the time it took to close their eyes.
Night had fallen by the time they returned to Dorino.
The gifts piled outside Tata's house still sat in the rain. Through the window, they saw the boy and his father facing each other across the table. Tata had placed the Medal from his neck between them.
“I found it.”
His trembling voice carried beyond the door.
“A man named Frog dropped it in the woods. People saw it and started calling me the Hero... At first I said I wasn't, but everyone was so happy.”
For a long time, his father said nothing. At last, he reached not for the Medal, but for his son's injured knee.
“You came home. That's enough.”
When the three knocked, Tata greeted them with a face still wet from tears. He saw the cloth bundle in Crono's hand and caught his breath.
“You really found the sword?”
“Half of it,” Lucca said.
Tata picked up the Medal from the table. His was the hand of someone who wanted to put it down, yet believed there was one last responsibility to fulfill.
“This isn't mine. Take it back to Frog.”
Marle accepted it.
“Wouldn't it be better if you returned it yourself?”
Tata shook his head.
“I can't go yet. But someday I'll tell him. I'll tell him I wasn't trying to steal it, and that I'm sorry I pretended to be the Hero.”
“Then keep those words until you can give them to him. We'll take only this for now.”
No lamp burned in Frog's underground refuge in the Cursed Woods.
He sat where they had left him, but the instant the door opened, his eyes went to the objects they carried. Marle placed the Hero Medal on the table. Crono set the broken blade beside it.
The color drained from Frog's face.
“Thou hast climbed the mountain.”
“We met Masa and Mune,” Lucca said.
At their names, Frog closed his eyes. His shoulders sank ever so slightly, like those of a man who had spent years avoiding someone and now heard his own name called from beyond the door.
Crono looked toward the closed wooden chest.
“You have the other piece.”
Frog did not deny it. He knelt before the chest and opened the latch. Inside, wrapped in cloth, lay a hilt and the short remnant of a blade. It bore the traces of years of polishing, yet it was cold like an object seldom touched.
When the two pieces were brought close, a low note sounded, as though they recognized each other.
Frog reached for the hilt, but could not lift it. His hand withdrew.
“This was my friend's sword.”
He said no more. Yet the single word friend held a story longer than all the Hero's songs they had heard below the mountain.
Lucca examined the underside of the hilt. She wiped away grime and rust with a cloth, revealing tiny letters—the mark of a craftsman upon his work.
Marle brought the lamp closer.
The three of them already knew the name.
Melchior.
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