Episode 44 – The Knight Hates Romance-Fantasy Events (5)
Pendragon had a thing called the weekend.
In other countries, a holiday was a luxury you enjoyed only once you had climbed as high as the nobility. The people of Pendragon, by contrast, were given a day of rest once in every seven.
It was not that the kingdom had invented the weekend out of any benevolent wish to govern for the people's sake.
The reason was simpler.
"I give thanks that so many of our brothers have gathered here again today. May the blessing of the Light be upon you all."
It had come into being for no better reason than that the temple had insisted, and insisted hard.
The temple's gatherings—prayer meetings to some, masses to others—were assemblies the people of Pendragon were required to attend. Even farmers who ought to have been frantic bringing in the crops and grain still came without fail on the weekend, and sat through a prayer meeting that ran past three hours. Would you believe it?
Looked at another way, it meant their faith was the genuine article. There were even households that simply marked the weekend down as the day we go to the temple prayer meeting!, and no one found that particularly strange. More than eighty percent of the nation believed in the Light of Radiance, and missing the prayer meeting was a sure road to being shut out of one's own community.
Merciful Light, please let this harvest prosper.
Please, anything but a drought. I beg you. My son is entering the Academy this year!
Keep my family always healthy. And let me meet a pretty bride.
Money. I need money! So please, in this game, let a good hand come to me!!
Farmer, merchant, mercenary, gambler. Highborn and low, a countless many pressed their palms together in piety, each offering a wish of their own. From that alone, one could see what the people held in their hearts toward their faith.
And where faith overflowed to such a degree—
"Priest, please accept this. It's beer brewed from the first barley of this year's harvest."
"Might you hold our child's hand? We hope our little one grows into a fine person, like you..."
"Priest, there is someone who wishes to make confession. Would that be all right?"
A priest's authority was immense as well. Those who revered them, and those who admired them, were everywhere. A small child, his mother's hand gripped tight in his own, looked up at her with eyes gone bright.
"Mom! When I grow up, I'm going to be someone people respect, just like the priest!"
"Of course you will. If it's our boy, you can do anything. Mother will be cheering for you."
"Yes!!"
The child gazed at the priest with open longing, and the priest let a kindly smile fall in answer to that gaze. Here was the authority of priests who held a power no less than any noble's—and proof that even a noble dared not treat them lightly.
......It certainly ought to have been so.
A sickening crack split the quiet.
"So. Which faction are you with?"
The bound man jerked as if struck.
"Talk. Why won't you open your mouth?"
Something crunched, wet and deep.
He thrashed again, and still no words came.
"Stubborn bastard. Why won't you open your mouth?"
The knight put the question to the priest, got nothing back, and clicked his tongue. The man's mouth was a locked chest. Another hour, then. Just one more—
"Instructor. If he's to answer at all—or do anything—shouldn't the gag come off first?"
"......"
"Instructor?"
"Hahh. Stubborn little shit, this one. Why isn't there an answer...?"
"...Oh."
......So he had meant to torment the man all along.
The boy shut his mouth. Stick his nose in any further, and—
I'll catch a Lion's Roar.
Derek carefully smothered his presence, eyes on the dining table a Lion's Roar had sent flying. He had no desire to end up in the same shape as the furniture.
"So what you're telling me is, the temple's properly gone to hell."
"...That isn't wrong. It is simply far too blunt."
"And on top of that, your masters are calling you in to join the mess."
"I have no such thing as a master..."
"Like hell you don't. They called, and you went wagging your tail. You took a beating like that and still haven't come to your senses—you're a hopeless bastard too. Old Man Raphael's the only one worth pitying."
"......"
"What, you mad? Well, sorry, if that's the case. Facts do hurt. I'll give you that."
"Then please don't apologize. It only makes me angrier..."
"That's why I'm apologizing."
For the first time, a crack ran through Pierre's expression. In an instant his eyes were bloodshot. He looked well and truly furious.
Lee Han only snorted. Ignoring him, he looked down at the two trembling wrecks sprawled across the floor.
Drip. Drip.
One was an Intern, bleeding so freely it would not have been strange if his breath failed at any moment. The other was the man who had spewed abuse at Irene Windler under the name of spreading the faith, and taken Lee Han's boot for the privilege. Fortunately, treatment by holy power had restored that priest's injuries to some extent. Even so, he kept his head bowed deep and did nothing but watch Lee Han's mood.
He had not started out that way.
The moment he came to—
"You impious wretch! Do you even know who I am, to dare a thing like this? I will see you punished!!"
He had raged like a man with an anger disorder, and so Lee Han began treatment. Treating bastards of this sort was his specialty. And so, before even thirty minutes of that treatment had passed—
"I-I'm s-sorry... P-please, just spare me. Just spare me..."
At last he had learned what manners were. Lee Han was confirmed in his belief that an anger disorder was, indeed, a treatable disease. Still, it was an illness that might relapse at any time, so he pressed the treatment on for another three hours. After that, the man could not even meet his eyes. He only knelt there shaking, tears running down his face.
To a third party, it would have looked like nothing but a strong man tormenting a powerless priest. Lee Han, however, had already heard the bastard's entire life story over the course of treatment, and all that rose in him was a hollow laugh.
"A priest running a usury racket... Priests these days are really something, aren't they? Bleeding the people dry, forcing them to borrow, or driving them into a corner where borrowing is the only way left...... and you call this a priest?"
Really something.
That a priest was working the loan-shark trade was shocking enough. That the point of the money-lending was to line the pockets of high-ranking priests was something else again, and sending a piece of trash like this after Chick was a farce piled on a farce. Did the temple—no. Did the faction this usurer-priest belonged to want a war with Galahad?
I will never understand how a madman's head works...
Lee Han gave up on understanding. The bastard who had taken the order and actually tried his filthy tricks on Galahad's adopted daughter, and the bastards who had given the order—
...Not one of them is right in the head. Not one.
Stripped down to what he had been told, the temple's factional war had been running hot of late. Add the great factions to the small, and some seventeen of them were locked in a vicious struggle in the shadows.
The reason for the fight?
Well. There were several.
A difference of views, a debate in the course of interpreting the words of the god one believed in—that alone was enough to start a quarrel. There was uproar, too, because they disliked how Isis had been distinguishing herself of late, and pressing down on the temple's influence. An accord stood with the current royal house, but a view had emerged that should Isis take the throne, she might cut the temple's agreement away.
...All of that was why the factions had split, on the surface. The heart of the matter was something else entirely.
"So it's a political fight over the Pope-King's seat."
"...It is not so simple a matter as that."
"Bullshit."
A sneer settled on Lee Han's mouth. From what he had heard, little time remained before the current Pope-King retired, and the hour to choose a new one was drawing near. Were the high priests who coveted that seat not simply waging a political war?
And this bastard.
"Right now you're testing the waters. Deciding which faction to crawl into."
"...I will not deny it."
The photographs the dark-skinned one had shown explained why the man had met so many officials of the temple. Lee Han only looked at him, face blank.
...Should I kill them?
Until now he had spared them, if only to save Old Man Raphael's face. But these bastards were beginning to step over the line. One of them had thought so little of him that he turned coat, sold what he knew to the temple, and had the gall to collapse afterward. The other was feeling out a change of faction.
They say man is a creature of forgetting. Right now, I understand that saying far too well.
No matter how much fear one planted, people forgot it quickly. Those who carried a madness like conviction, or like faith, forgot it faster still. He did not particularly mean to deny conviction or faith. But feeling the harm of both reach even him, Lee Han hardened his resolve by degrees.
Steel whispered. The moment he finished that brief deliberation and opened his eyes, a blade of wind ripped through the air—honed sharp enough to part skin.
"W-wait..."
"Wh-why us...!"
The killing intent was not aimed at the fallen alone, nor at Pierre alone. It crashed down upon the Interns—no, upon every last inquisitor—and despite their protests, Lee Han drew his axe with a perfect calm. In that instant the whole of the ground around them lay inside his reach, and there was no road left by which they might flee. The axe of a knight who had set his mind would split a crown even if its owner ran.
"Kh—!"
The inquisitors ought to have thrashed like animals if they meant to live. They could not move. The knight, whom none but an Aura User or a wielder of the highest Mystery could withstand, had taken killing intent into himself. It was not an energy the likes of them dared oppose. Had there been not nine inquisitors but more than a hundred, they still could not have slipped free of him.
"Last words?"
They locked rigid.
"None? Good."
Steel hissed. As if even the time it would take to hear a will were a waste, Lee Han hurled the one-handed axe exactly as it was—into the forest, where there was nothing at all.
"W-what...?!"
The men who had just watched their lives flash before their eyes blinked. Their heads could not catch up. Why had the axe they were certain would come down on their skulls flown off into the trees? And why, in a forest where there had been no one, was a person collapsing?
None of it made sense to them. Lee Han scoffed.
"You're just scared. Would I kill people left and right over a trifle like this? I'm not a murderer."
Lee Han was no butcher who cut a man down the moment he got a little pissed. If anything, he was an excellent actor—good enough to fool even his own side.
Well......
He sniffed the air.
...Though it seemed that being too good at the act was a problem of its own.
A fierce reek of ammonia spread through the air. Lee Han caught it, blinked, and for a moment was plainly thrown. Surely not. Even so—
"...Inquisitors, of all people. Don't tell me..."
No one answered.
"They didn't. Right?"
Still nothing.
His brow creased.
A wet, miserable sob was all that came back.
"...Hmm."
Met with those vacant, ruined stares, Lee Han felt a prickle of embarrassment and scratched his cheek.
Hmm.
...All things considered, his passionate method acting seemed to have been a little too much for them.