Knights Call Themselves the Vanquished (4)
Beneath a heavy bank of storm clouds, the forest lay unusually dark, steeped in gloom, and restless with noise.
As if the rain were gathering its nerve, the wind dragged hard across the leaves, and with every pass the eerie, spine-prickling chill grew thicker. A forest at night is dangerous in part because it is dark, but perhaps more because the savagery native to it only deepens after sundown.
And yet.
“—Fine weather for hiding oneself.”
As if that gloom and ferocity were nothing but familiar to someone, a man lay with a rock for a bed, finding the sinister woods perfectly snug.
Drip. Drip.
A thin, persistent rain began to fall, and before long the drops came harder, pattering. Even the rain pleased him. Did it not erase sound and trace all on its own?
“Today my luck isn’t bad.”
He murmured it low, taking the rain and the smell of forest soil in through his whole body.
Squish.
“Having a fine time, loafing by yourself?”
Footsteps splashing mud announced that his solitude was over. He was not startled. He had known those steps were coming for a while.
“You’re back. You’re late.”
“…This is really too much. Some of us work. Some of us take it easy.”
“We simply have different roles.”
“Pretty words.”
“…….”
He did not bother to scold his colleague for the insolent reply. Whining of that sort was something he heard constantly; it reached him like sparrows chattering through an ordinary day. He was not, of course, generous with just anyone.
“You brought it.”
“All I salvaged was the corpse.”
“Even so, what is impressive remains impressive. Well done, Number Two.”
She had recovered, in fine style, the priest’s corpse—the very body he had thought buried underground, bones and all beyond retrieval. The priest was dead, but considering the holy power still lodged in that flesh, it was worth recovering even if danger followed. Treatment and kindness to match one’s ability: that was the man’s motto, and he did not stint on praise for the woman.
…The one on the receiving end of that kindness only looked sour.
“Call me the Second Apostle. How old is that title?”
“Has it already come to that?”
Time does fly…. He muttered another low aside to himself, and the woman called the Second Apostle shook her head.
Now and then he showed a scholarly side. At other times he looked like a priest truly giving his all to works of salvation. To that degree, the man’s gentle air and intelligent eyes did not suit the organization at all. Was he not a figure whose faint smile—charming even at a glance—stood out above everything else? If people who did not know what sort of man he was met him for the first time, they would surely offer their goodwill first and draw near in easy familiarity.
And if they did—
…they’d end up like that.
Drip… drip….
A sound of a different grain from falling rain. Much slower, and somehow a chill straight down the spine.
“How many did you kill?”
“Wouldn’t the better question be how many lived?”
“…Fair.”
The sound was blood threading down and falling from lumps of meat that had once been human, and he only watched it as indifferently as if it were inorganic matter—as if he had not killed living things at all, but had merely played with mud that spoke and bled.
…Even if years go by, I’ll probably still be afraid of that man.
The Second Apostle felt a chill. To bring about a massacre on this scale and still speak so calmly, with a face that soft…. To put it plainly, had they not been colleagues, he was a creepy human she would never have associated with.
And to her, inwardly recoiling from him, the man put a question.
“The Fourth Apostle—is Drak dead?”
The Second Apostle opened her mouth at once, as if she had never been thinking anything strange.
“We couldn’t recover a corpse, for one. So either he was ground to powder so completely there was nothing left to recover, or he was taken prisoner.”
“Hm. Which do you think more likely?”
“The latter. If it were me, I’d have kept him alive and taken him. If only to pull information out of him.”
“Is that so? If that’s the case, it’s fortunate.”
“Meaning he was disposable.”
“You phrase it strangely. Not disposable—merely a coincidence.”
“…I’m sure.”
“You don’t believe me. Dear me.”
When he shrugged as if wronged, the Second Apostle snorted.
Drak. One of the organization’s twelve Apostles, whether dead or alive. For more than ten years he had been set apart from the organization and charged with the grave task of raising troops and monsters alone in the tunnels….
…In truth, they only left him there because he was no help in carrying out the work.
A pitiful wretch who had, in fact, merely been discarded. His temper was so vicious and radical that he had been nothing but trouble—enough that letting him wander outside was the greater worry. So they had pushed him away from the organization under the name of a mission.
And as a result—
The information Drak knows stopped ten years ago.
In ten years even mountains and rivers change, and an organization made of people changes more than a dozen times over. So even supposing Drak lived, and they tortured information out of him—
it would be useless.
At best they might extract something about the Apostles or the Blood Cross Army, and even that would mean nothing.
“If the Drak of now saw us, he’d be shocked. A changed face, build, and voice would already be enough of a shock, and even our sex has been rewritten, every last bit of it.”
“…That would certainly be so.”
Even he, who had been endlessly at ease, faltered for a moment here. When the colleague he called the Second Apostle had suddenly appeared as her, even he had been unable to hide his dismay.
“Why are you looking at me like that? I must be too pretty.”
“…….”
“…Sorry.”
“The apology will do. More importantly… it is time we returned.”
The rain was thinning. Once it did, they would no longer be able to keep the smell of blood from spreading. Therefore—
“Let us withdraw.”
“Now that’s a welcome suggestion.”
“Ah. Did you destroy the tunnel?”
“Thoroughly.”
“Then we are settled. Then….”
The man turned his head without warning. He set his gaze on the place where the corpses lay strewn, a place he had not so much as glanced at until now, and little by little—
“—Leave your last words. You ought not cling to this world. You are bound for hell regardless.”
He granted a final chance, as if bestowing mercy. What was he saying to those who had already gone cold? Was he toying with them?
But the man only went on.
“Is that so. A pity there is no answer.”
He had offered a chance, and they could not even take it. As the low mutter ended, something like black mist surged from his body with a soft rush. The billowing masses clumped together with the rain-soaked earth and gradually took the shape of a beast.
A flare—
And in the instant the beast finished taking shape and its eyes flashed—
“W-wait! P-please, wait! N-no, s-spare me, I beg you…!!”
Corpses lurched upright—no, men who had only been pretending to be corpses. The moment they felt the beast’s presence, terror took them. They knew how many had already died to that beast, and how vicious and cruel it was.
“Why weren’t you killing them?”
“I was not trying to toy with them. A few simply pretended to faint before the fight even began. Or they ran.”
So he had left them. He had been curious what sort of last words they would leave once they got up.
“…A nasty hobby.”
At the Second Apostle’s flat verdict, he gave a light nod of agreement. A nasty hobby. She was right.
However—
“—Mustang de Varga. One of the ringleaders who destroyed Britannia. I have a question for you.”
“A-ask! A-ask anything you like!!”
Mustang de Varga. A man who had once risen as high as general of Britannia, yet so incompetent that the enemy nation itself had graciously dubbed him an honorary citizen of Pendragon—the very author of dozens of defeats. Even Britannians shuddered at the name Mustang, but Mustang himself was always shameless. And with reason. Why is it my fault we lost? We lost because the soldiers were incompetent! Why should I take the blame? The knights should take the blame!—he never hesitated to spew countless outrageous remarks that enraged even the people of the enemy nation. Honestly, considering how many bore him a grudge, it was astonishing he had survived this long. A man so arrogant and shameless that Aren could not even be compared to him, a man who did not know his own faults in the slightest. Now he was on his knees, weeping and wailing, begging for his life.
And to such a man, the other spoke.
“You really do survive well. Roy Bant, was it? I never dreamed you would throw that man away as a shield and run.”
“…….”
“I thought you might have some camaraderie, dragging around a wreck on the verge of death as you were. Seeing that, I realized anew there was nothing in you worth expecting.”
The reason he addressed Mustang was that the man had given him certainty. Ah—these people truly were existences with no value in living. Certainty of that sort.
Therefore—
“I thank you. For teaching me that my choice was not wrong in the slightest.”
“S-spare me! I-if you only let me live, I’ll do anything! A-aren’t you curious where House Varga’s hidden fortune is? D-don’t you want the secrets of the Britannian royal house, and the slush funds they hid?! Say the word, and I’ll tell you all of it…!!”
—Crunch!
“Gyaaaaaaah!!”
But Mustang could speak no further. In that instant the beast had bitten into his lower body. Mustang thrashed in agony, yet the man, as if he meant to play with him before killing him, leisurely savored the screams.
Crunch-crunch! Crack! Squish!!
“Ah… aah?! …Agh…!!”
The span of pain was no different from an eternity, and at some moment Mustang’s body went slack. Death—the thing he had wanted so badly to escape—was coming.
Patter.
…The rain was stopping. Driven by an already fierce wind, the storm clouds retreated in short order, and a faint moonlight showed through. Only at the very last of his life could Mustang see the face of the man the dark had hidden from him.
And then—
A choked gasp. Looking upon that face, Mustang understood a great many things. Seized by something like enlightenment, by the feeling of having drawn near a secret no one in the world knew, he called to the man as if leaving a will.
“Haha. A name I haven’t heard in a long time.”
Splurt!
What mattered was that the other had not the slightest intention of listening. The beast bit through Mustang’s neck without hesitation.
Thud….
Mustang died in vain, eyes wide, and the man gave a light shrug.
“To think someone still remembers my face. Hm. Was he a man of higher standing than I thought?”
“…House Varga was the pinnacle of Britannia’s military, wasn’t it? You probably crossed paths at one function or another.”
“That possibility isn’t entirely absent.”
“…Honestly. You were born Britannian, so how do you know even less than I do?”
“It could be that way.”
Crunch!
Again the sound of the beast biting into prey. The survivors died as Mustang had a moment before, their necks torn through in an instant. The two of them, however, gave not the slightest attention to whether those people lived or died.
Only the Second Apostle spoke.
“Still, we went to all the trouble of raising them. Is it really fine not to use them?”
She seemed to regret the half-fiends they had raised over the past ten years. But he shook his head, firm.
“What would we do with failures like those? What matters to us is the experimental data taken from their bodies. With that alone, we can produce soldiers whenever we please. Time is ours. So rest easy, Second Apostle.”
“…Well. If you say so, then it must be so.”
The Second Apostle let her regret show, but she decided to believe him. He was the wisest person she knew. And so—
“Right. Let’s go back, Number One.”
“Haha. Mischievous. It’s First Apostle.”
The two of them vanished in the blink of an eye, like storm clouds that come and are gone again in a moment. It would be a little later—four days on—that a hunter found the half-fiend prisoners reduced to meat, and word of it reached the knights.
……Lee Han was swallowing a groan.
Why? Why, the moment he returned, could he not rest at home, and had to be standing here like this?
…I want to rest.
Unfortunately—
“—This princess is disappointed.”
…the other party seemed to have no intention of letting him rest.
“Failure of the mission is acceptable. Nor do I care that you brought down something like the tunnels. But to think…!!”
Isis Irene de Pendragon flashed her eyes, clenched her teeth, and took him to task.
“That you struggled against some northern brute and could manage nothing but a draw…! How mortifying a thing!!”
“…No. I don’t even think it was a draw.”
“I told you that, vodka aside, you must not lose to the North! And this is how you disappoint your sister!!!”
“……Why does the vodka get a pass?”
“Ahem…!”
“…….”
…Lee Han decided to keep his mouth shut. He knew a superior’s scolding did not end until the superior was satisfied. And as he endured it—
I’ll have to try some northern vodka later.
He was a little curious just how strong a drink had to be before even she would admit defeat to it.