The Knight Came to Hate the Ball (3): Checking the Aftermath
Certainty settled on him as if a god had come down into his skull. This dream fiend was the very one who would, someday, make the dark-haired brat of the future eat dirt.
There was no logical proof. Even so, looking at her, he felt he simply knew. So this is a villainess in the sprout.
A drive to act whose conscience was already dead. Shamelessness. A selfishness willing to split off a whole other personality if that was what survival required. And then the brazen poise — like the old line about climbing a mountain because it is there — to announce without a flicker of hesitation that if there was vital essence, she would eat it.
Selfish, shameless, and ready to rationalize every last thing she did. It was nothing short of the posture of the villainess who stalks the pages of a romance.
Right now she only has the makings. Let her lose what little sense she's got... Honestly, at the moment she was only a little vicious, the sort of thing one could wave off as a prank. But let that vicious streak ripen for five years, and a beast gets born.
It was not mere instinct. It was something he had learned by becoming an instructor and teaching students. Take Assistant One. That Taechang kid had said the original Assistant One helped a fledgling mage of the villainess variety pull all sorts of vicious stunts. If that one had never met him, he would have ended up a thug, same as in the original.
Whether or not there was an educator to scold the insolent parts made a fork in the road for students. That was also why the rod of love mattered.
Of course I can't turn into those teacher bastards from when I was a kid, the ones who beat you for not slipping them a bribe, or for having no parents.
The rod of love was what you reached for when a student you were raising went crooked, slid onto a bad road, or needed a beating in the name of manners. A rod swung blindly, for no reason, was nothing but violence and a venting of temper — a shabby little symbol, meant only to show off one's own authority.
And so Lee Han, as an educator(?), felt the weight of a calling.
A person ought to be a person. A beast won't do. Now was the only time. The only chance to make something this ill-bred into a human being. You reformed them while they were young. Adults whose heads had already hardened never turned over a new leaf. If his life had taught him anything, it was that.
"Judia, was it?"
"...Yes."
"From today, you're a transfer student at the Academy."
"Yes...?"
"Also, as of today, your rank remains Intern. Permanently. And the education continues until I say it's finished. Understand that."
"...Yes...?"
"You heard me, so why do you keep yes-yes-ing? You answer once. Got it?"
"Yes, yes!"
"...Haaah. Looks like I've got a lot to teach."
"???"
Judia still had no idea what was happening, and before she quite knew it she had become the first intern ever issued a permanently disconnected number.
......The opening act of hardship and adversity that would have a dream fiend, of all creatures, thrashing through nightmares for the rest of her life.
Precisely afternoon — which was to say, as lunchtime drew near — Judia, no, Pierre, opened his eyes.
And he said:
"...Why didn't you kill her?"
"?"
"That beast was rude to you. You would have been justified in killing her. That is what I am saying."
"You... so you did have a sense of shame."
"!!"
Pierre's personality was, at bottom, like some numb man. Blunt. Almost no feeling on the surface. Cold. An entirely different person from Judia, who was shameless before the world and honest about her own emotions. Even for a split personality, a divide this stark made one thing plain: a dream fiend was a peculiar race indeed.
"You really hate Darkie."
"I hate her to the point of revulsion."
"No wonder. So that's why you try to kill yourself the moment you've got an excuse."
"......"
"Anyway. Something I want to know. Is that Darkie awake right now?"
"...She is not. Dream fiends, like vampires, are nocturnal. By day they are nearly always asleep, and so long as this personality of mine does not lose its mind, she will never wake."
"So right now she's asleep."
"Yes. But we share memory. Whatever I discuss with you, that beast will know all of it."
"Mm. So that's why you're ashamed. The secret you worked so hard to hide is out in the open."
"......"
Was this the first time he had ever held so long a conversation with this block of wood? The thought occurred to him unbidden. Pierre was talking a great deal, which meant he was that agitated.
Fair enough.
From what he had heard, the personality called Pierre had been born to take the torture and the experiments in her place. He would have been with pain from the moment he came into being, so a character like that was only natural. Hatred would be packed in him, stopped up tight as a lump of tar. A somewhat pitiful fellow.
But pity was one thing.
"So how do you use Holy Power? Far as I know, most mystery races can't."
He was asking how two mysteries could coexist inside a single person. He had never heard of such a case.
"......Because this personality cannot use a dream fiend's power."
He had not expected the man to lay out an easy answer, and yet, unexpectedly, he spilled the truth without a fight. Perhaps he had accepted his situation. Or perhaps it was gratitude for the beating Lee Han had given Darkie.
"The beast, conversely, cannot use Holy Power. It is nothing less than God's grace, and His mercy, proving that I and the beast are separate people."
"Hm."
...Or was he bragging? That he was a completely different person from the beast?
...If that's it, he's a childish one. ...No. Could be, I suppose.
Lee Han let the boast pass and listened, and only now did a few things begin to make sense. Why this wooden man had become a priest, and why he had entered the Office of the Inquisition, which followed its god with a fanatic's fervor.
Because Holy Power is the proof that he isn't a dream fiend. That he's a separate person.
As much as he denied the dream fiend and hated her, he was desperate to announce, without end, that he himself was devout. Lee Han could feel a little of that ferocity. ...A complicated set of values. Still, he understood them.
Which was why:
"For the sake of that proof, you'd do any filthy thing. You'll never be able to leave the temple. Even if it means betraying the man who saved you."
"......"
This one would do anything. Anything, if it kept him in the temple. Even if he was a manufactured personality, so long as he remained there he would believe he could still be saved. And so Lee Han disliked him.
With good reason.
"The one who saved you was old man Raphael, wasn't it?"
"...Yes. I owe His Eminence the Cardinal a great deal. He is the one who brought me to the temple."
"And you brushed that benefactor off like he was nobody and attacked me? Thanks. You've made sure I don't regret beating you at all."
"I will not... make excuses."
A funny thing to say.
"Not that you won't. You don't have any. Still, one piece of advice. Whether you kill yourself, put your faith in fanatics, or betray old man Raphael, I won't care. In my eyes, you and the one you call a beast are the same brainless stock."
"—!"
At last his face twisted. To be told that he and the dream fiend were the same breed must have landed as an insult beyond bearing. To a third party, dream fiend and traitor were both nothing but horrible. That was a criminal's mind for you.
One of them's a conscienceless villainess in the sprout, and the other's a black-haired — no, a red-haired beast.
At this point he felt sorry for the old priest. What had possessed him to take in an ungrateful split personality and buy himself all this suffering?
"Stings, getting treated the same, doesn't it? Did I get under your skin?"
"......"
"Good, if it did. I said it so it would. Anyway, you're an ungrateful traitor. I've got a question."
"...Is that to be my title, then?"
"Don't cut me off. The faction that kidnapped you and the other mystery races. You know what became of them? I've taken a bit of an interest."
"......"
Lee Han did not care how this one lived from here on. Whatever the case, if he misbehaved while he was nearby, that was when you picked up the rod. And if he caused trouble after he went out on his own —
Then you pick up a sword instead of a rod.
Simple enough. So his present interest was the ones who had kidnapped the mystery races.
"...I do not know the details. It was already ten years ago, and I was very young then."
"Fine. Try to remember. The faces of the ones who experimented on you, their features, the layout of the facility — anything."
"...Do people usually ask a victim such things?"
"Not other people. But you lot interrogate heretics, don't you? Men who torture people as easily as they breathe can take a question like this."
"We inquisitors punish apostates. We are not madmen."
Pierre was defending the inquisitors, and he seemed to be trying to correct a misunderstanding, but —
"They say madmen never know they're mad."
"......"
"Hurry up and tell me what you remember."
"...I see it now. You should have been an inquisitor, not a knight."
"I'm too soft-hearted for that crap."
"......"
......For the first time, Pierre felt the emotion of being truly wretched.
For all he claims not to remember.
For someone who insisted he did not remember much, the fellow had given more information than expected. Whether he had been born clever, or whether it was a trait of the dream fiend, his memory was remarkably good. Otherwise, recalling something from ten years ago this vividly would have been nothing short of uncanny.
Hss. A spell-slinger mixed up in it again.
Illegal Mages. The breed Lee Han loathed above all others, and the kind whose skulls he cracked from the crown down, without mercy, the moment he met them. Confirming that the ones who had kidnapped mystery races and run experiments on them were of that breed, his head turned faster than usual, sorting the information Pierre had given him.
Raphael raided the illegal mage's facility, but the only one who survived was Red. The rest died. The illegal mage fled... is that it.
What mattered here was that the spell-slinger had escaped, and that the odds he was still alive were very high. Whatever else you could say about those bastards, their grip on life was ridiculously tenacious.
So the face was roughly like this?
Working from what the traitor, Red, had mentioned, Lee Han drew a composite sketch himself. Clumsy, but every distinctive feature was in it. The only evidence he had. One might wonder what could be done with that alone.
The hinge creaked. Even that was enough for there to be something he could do, and he opened the wardrobe standing alone in his room. There were almost no clothes in the drawers. What occupied them instead —
Paper roared out in a cascade. A tremendous heap of it.
"...Been a while for this, too."
He did not think he had opened it once in the half year since he had been chosen as an instructor. Wanted notices, and newspaper articles besides, and most of them concerned the descriptions of people like illegal mages and slave traders. All of it he had gathered by hand, and a good deal of it was useless now, for a reason.
"Ah, this one died, right? These died too.... This one.... Right, I threw him in a goblin cave, didn't I? How did I deal with this one..."
About a third of the newspapers and wanted notices had already been rendered useless by his own hand. Somehow there was a great deal to throw out, and Lee Han had no choice but to rummage through the papers while discarding what ought to be discarded. Was this the punishment for neglecting the cleaning because it was a bother?
Rustle. Rustle. Even so, he searched the materials in earnest. For this moment, at least, his eyes were sharp as blades, and after he had pored over the pile, sticky and patient, for more than an hour —
He stopped dead.
"—This is it."
His gaze halted on a single wanted notice distributed fifteen years ago.
Case closed. Sentenced to death. Reported executed.
The case was already closed, and the notice belonged to an illegal mage said to have received a sentence of death. But unless Lee Han had seen the death with his own eyes, he did not believe rumors, or anything printed in a paper. Spell-slingers were cockroaches. Fail to cut the breath off cleanly, and they came back to life one way or another.
So.
"Assistant!"
"Y-you called?"
"Go to the Guild Union right now. Tell that Simon to find this man."
"...Pardon? S-Simon? Do you mean... you want me to deliver word to Chairman Simon, the head of the Guild Union...?"
"That's what I said."
"......I'm going to lose my mind."
"What's the problem."
"...How is someone like me supposed to demand information from the Guildmaster!"
"Tell him I sent you."
"Then you should go yourself, Instructor!"
"I'm a bit busy right now. Well, if the Guild Union is too much, there are other places."
"Y-you should have said so soon—"
"Galahad or Pendragon. Which do you want?"
"......"
"Which is better?"
"......I'll just go to the Guild Union. Goddam—"
"Hss! Mouth!"
Watching Assistant One, whose mouth had been growing rougher by the day, Lee Han scolded him with due severity. What was wrong with this one.
Why's he getting more delinquent?
So this was why character education was hard. Lee Han clicked his tongue at his disappointing assistant.