I Am Prisoner Rihan (2)
Jake, who had been laboring away with a pickaxe and shovel, blinked.
A bad friend had dragged him into miserable work, and yet the moment he was told it was a mission come down from the royal house, he let not a single complaint show. It would not have been too much to call him a rare true knight.
"The Blood Cross Army? Never heard of an outfit like that. No, more than that — seditious filth, coming out of the temple.... I can't believe it."
WHAM. WHAM.
"I feel the same."
Jord, the junior knight who had likewise fallen in with the wrong senior, was still a newcomer, and yet here he was, dragged along to haul dirt. Watching him was nothing short of pitiful. Unlike Jake, he had no loyalty to the royal house and no reason at all to take the mission. He had come mostly because the seniors he respected were going. Even so, he showed no particular discontent. It was his first mission since becoming a knight. He must have been carrying some expectation with him.
"You don't have to believe it. I only heard it from someone else's mouth myself."
And there stood the very man who had hauled friend and junior out to this wretched place. Barehanded, he dug more earth than others managed with proper tools, and at last Lee Han went so far as to smash, with those same bare hands, a rock the size of two watermelons shoved together. Knights, the lot of them, reduced to criminals locked in the Tunnels.
"...Can't you work like a normal person?"
Jake scolded him. The man was going at it as happily as a fish that had found water, so that it looked less like labor than like play. That one, at least.
"The gear's too shoddy to use. If I had the tools I usually work with, different story."
"You're still picking up side jobs?"
"Pays damn well. Good for moving the body, too."
"...Freak."
There was no particular order to the three of them. One moment they seemed to be weighing a grave matter, and the next they had ordinary talk stirred through it, so that most of what passed between them was idle chatter. Their voices were also strangely loud — loud enough that anyone listening closely might well overhear. Which was the point.
No reaction.
Judging by the others, I see no one particularly suspicious. Only... we do seem to be getting treated as complete lunatics.
Because we're talking about some strange religion?
...Isn't it more because of you? For the love of — work like a normal person!
I want to. The tools are so weak they break. What do you want me to do about it?
Control your strength!
...Not easy.
It was a stretch of talk that made plain they were leaking information on purpose, and watching how the condemned reacted.
...But then, who ever filled a belly with the first spoon?
Tsk. Not a single one is biting.
The result was thoroughly disappointing.
By his own measure, Lee Han could sense everything within a kilometer. Five kilometers was possible if he forced it, but he could not hold that for even ten minutes, which made it nothing but waste. A kilometer was the ideal, and used well, it became a fine weapon. Thanks to it, he had roamed the place and read the reaction of every criminal gathered in the Tunnels, and the outcome — that he had failed to sift out a single suspicious soul — was an achievement that hardly deserved the name.
"This is killing me...."
"Endure it. You knew from the start this wasn't an easy mission."
"That is correct, Senior. A faction seeking to overthrow the kingdom — how easy could it be to find the traces of such a group?"
Jake and Jord told him to have patience. This had never been a thing that would move quickly.
"And look at you. You think wrapping up a royal mission in a few days even makes sense? Royal missions run on for years. That's the ordinary way of them."
"We don't have time to drag it out that long."
"Why not?"
"Once the kids' vacation — no, once the academy's closure ends, I have to go back."
Jake could not, for the life of him, decide whether to rejoice that his negligent friend had found his true calling, or to rage at the impious bastard who treated a royal command like a short-term job.
The attack of the day before was being called, variously, a monster terror and the disaster at the Academy. A Demon-King Grade monster and a great host of gnolls had appeared. There had been no casualties, and yet it was a terror for which the fall of the Royal Capital would not have been strange at all. Only Lee Han, the students, and the ability of a capable regressor had kept the damage at virtually nothing. Had it been otherwise, a catastrophe would have struck, one so vast that even reckoning the losses would have been impossible.
The capital had come through safe. The process, looked at alone, was enough to make one dizzy. And if those who led a nation could not foresee what horrific future a single mistake might bring, then they had no business bearing that charge.
This incident can be nothing less than a grand provocation against the entire kingdom. Every effort must be bent to resolving it. Whatever it takes, they will be made to pay the price.
The king was furious, and a royal command came down: punish those who had committed this terror, by whatever means necessary. High officials and countless others had to move at once, and for a time the back alleys of the Royal Capital endured days that set the flesh crawling. Soldiers moved. Knight orders moved. They seized every suspicious soul they found, until at last more than eight-tenths of the criminals hiding in the capital had been hauled in.
...And yet.
You still have not caught the true culprits! What in the world have you been doing?!
The true culprits' whereabouts remained a blank, and the king raged. It was not, however, that the royal house failed to catch them out of incompetence. If anything, the culprits themselves could be called competent — so competent that even with soldiers and knight orders in motion, not a trace of them could be found. All the crown turned up was a vast site of slaughter, presumed to have fed the terror. And so the royal house, which had expected a short war with the terrorists, came to understand that the fight had become a long one, and was still pouring all its heat into rooting the culprits out.
...Or had been.
"The Blood Cross Army, ha! A truly laughable organization."
Faster even than the royal house could move, word of the terrorists was uncovered by a certain heir to the throne, competent to a suspicious degree. Isis. Astonishingly, she had seized the outline of those who invaded the Royal Capital.
"The Illegal Mage taken by Galahad was a junior priest, they say. He carried a cross symbolizing the Light of Radiance."
"So the temple is the culprit?"
"The soldiers have already investigated, yet the temple only repeats that no such junior priest exists. Still, there is every chance the soldiers failed to look properly. So many follow that arrogant temple. How could a true investigation have been carried out?"
"......"
"But such things do not concern me."
"Keep that up and heaven will punish you."
"Heaven does not punish. It merely flows as nature flows. Do you not know even that?"
"......"
No. It was not that the royal house was a gathering of fools, lesser than her alone, and so had failed even to grasp the shape of the terror. They knew. Even knowing, they simply could not investigate in earnest. It was the temple. It was the Light of Radiance. The only faith the whole nation believed and followed, and so the soldiers could not dig into it. The soldiers themselves were believers of the Light. They had not dared so much as think of tearing the temple open.
Isis was different. A blasphemous woman who looked to no god for miracles or wishes, and would sooner make use of a god than bow to one. She dug into the temple without rest, and at last she drew the information out — not by sitting still upon a throne as the king did, but by moving in person. In one light, it was rather too extreme a thing for the heir of a nation to show. And yet this was nothing other than the nature of the monarch called Isis.
Thanks to action that extreme, she succeeded, ahead of the royal house, in uncovering the remnants of the past that temple and crown alike had buried.
"Among the mad stock of the temple, there was a faction that dreamed of treason. The late king broke that organization swiftly, and it vanished... yet it seems they have shown themselves again."
"Even after they were wiped out once...."
"Ideology and religion are like dandelion seeds. Destroy them, and still they cannot help but return."
"Hm. So, in short, fanatics went and did fanatic things."
"...I should think you have more cause than I to fear heaven's wrath."
"Why me?"
"...In any case, this is my expectation. Such seeds have sown seed again, and are scattering it through the temple — no. Through the whole of the kingdom."
An army bearing the cross of blood, sworn to overturn the Royal Capital and purify every unbeliever and heretic in blood. The Blood Cross Army. Truly —
"Past absurd, and into the revolting. Vile things, hawking a god's name to stuff their own power and greed."
Isis poured out her contempt for the temple without stint. Lee Han did not particularly share it.
"...You're sure those people actually exist?"
From the moment he heard the name Blood Cross, and whatever else they called themselves, something had sat wrong with him. Fanatic doctrine was one thing. That he had never once heard the name of people on that scale was another, and it nagged at him without end. But Isis was certain.
"They exist. Albert has been ranging in every direction to confirm it."
"So that's where the old man got to.... Quit working your elders so hard."
"He is haler than I am. It will not do to let him rest yet."
"Oh, for—"
She had invoked Albert's name, and he could refute her no further. In that case...
"So I'm to take this as an order to find that blood cult, or Blood Cross Army, or whatever it is, and drag it in?"
He had already guessed, more or less, what command she meant to give. She nodded.
"What I want is two things. The first is evidence proving those fanatics exist, and a list of those who cooperate with them — or their traces."
"Cooperate?"
"To summon monsters, they made sacrifices of tens of thousands of criminals. In the very heart of the Royal Capital. Without collaborators, such a thing could not possibly have occurred."
"...I get what you mean. But how is this any different from telling me to find a needle on a beach?"
He could understand the mission. That did not make it any less absurd. Even she had barely managed to find traces of the fanatics. How was he, a man who was only somewhat good at fighting, supposed to find them and then the rest of the evidence besides? It was no different from being dropped in the open ocean and refused a compass. As far as Lee Han was concerned, the woman had finally snapped under the stress.
"You are thinking something impious. It is plain on your face."
"Ah. Caught me."
"Impudent wretch."
Thwack!
Her fan struck the crown of Lee Han's head with familiar ease. What differed from usual was that she had not struck him herself. The fan had flown, and hit him. Hitting him was obviously going to hurt her wrist, so now she was throwing it, he thought, and then—
Thup.
"...?"
A slip of paper fell from the fan.
"...I had the bones of those made into sacrifices examined. We invited countless experts, and learned where the bones had traveled, and even which regions the dead had come from. We succeeded in recovering their personal details as well."
"......"
"Thus we could narrow the prisons that held most of them to three. And of the three, the place where my instinct stirs is—"
A tap.
"There. Look into it properly."
"...If you've already learned this much, you don't actually need me, do you?"
What was she even telling him to find? Faced with the sheer madness of fitting those hopelessly jumbled bones together until even hometowns and movements came clear, Lee Han had to wonder whether he was necessary at all. Couldn't she simply finish the whole thing herself?
"Power, even held, does not let one do all as one pleases."
A murmur of unclear meaning, tinged with a little bitterness. To a woman like that, Lee Han said:
"That's only because you aren't trying hard enough."
"......"
"Let's put in a little more effort. You and me."
"A sworn younger brother who earns the rod."
Thud!
Her foot, in a pointed shoe, slammed into Lee Han's shin, and that day Isis sprained her ankle.
"...I mean, you're not a barbarian. What are you hitting people for."
"What did you say?"
"Nothing. It's nothing...."
"?"
Lee Han forced the talk aside. How was he supposed to say it? That he had injured the ankle of this country's crown princess. Jake would grab him by the collar and ask if he had lost his mind. Lee Han had no wish to start a bit of collar-grabbing and end by wringing his friend's neck.
Then—
"Senior. There is something I wished to ask. What exactly are these tunnels?"
"Hm?"
"You're asking that now...?"
"W-Well, I simply followed along for the time being, so...."
"......"
Lee Han scratched his cheek. This one really was a hopeless fellow.
If he asked me to vouch for him, I'd probably do it....
Jord Decker. A diligent junior knight who had come along without much complaint, simply because they were going. Diligent, and his skill was decent enough to remind Lee Han of the trio he taught. Perhaps that was why he was, in his own way, kind.
"Hmm. What kind of place do you think these tunnels are?"
"Ah, um... they appear to be a place where one digs the earth for no reason...."
From the moment he had been imprisoned here today, Jord had gone on digging without a single proper explanation. And there did not seem to be any particular reason for the digging. Move this much earth, and he had assumed they were after ore, but it was not even that. Only the repetition of hauling soil and breaking rock. What purpose could the work have? For a moment he even wondered whether, true to the name, they were digging a passage clear through to another country.
But—
"That'd be entertaining enough, actually. Trouble is, there are a lot of rivers around here. Dig carelessly and you might all drown."
"Then it is not meant for an invasion."
"Right."
"Then, through meaningless repetitive labor, they mean to reform the criminals. That sort of—"
"No. Reform is something the temple does. What reason would the kingdom have to reform anyone?"
"Then...."
"Ah. Good timing. You can see for yourself."
"??"
He had been about to ask more, but Lee Han turned his gaze. There, some distance from them, Aren had been reduced to a beggar's state and had been venting for a while already.
"Why must one so noble as I be brought to so wretched a state!"
Jord was just wondering why he was supposed to look at the man when—
"Here they come."
CRRRK.
"!!?"
Something came pouring out of the mound of earth Aren had been digging.
"Keeee!!!"
"S-Sandworms!?"
"Not quite sandworms. Sandworm young. More to the point, get ready. We have to catch all of them. Ah, and—"
A soft shift of movement.
"D-Don't bite! W-Where is my sword?! Give me a sword!"
"...And haul that dumb bastard out while you're at it."
"......"
Shovel in hand, Lee Han strolled toward the sandworms at an easy pace, and Jord stared after him in sheer disbelief. No, what kind of—!
"...Can we even catch all of those?"
Dozens. No — hundreds. Watching the mass of young sandworms keep swelling, Jord swallowed dry, and at the same time counted himself lucky.
Thank god all I ate today was water....
It was a sight so revolting that looking alone turned the stomach.
The Tunnels were the kingdom's greatest sandworm breeding ground, and at the same time its greatest fertilizer works.
...That a human digested by a sandworm occasionally became the fertilizer was a secret the world was never meant to know.