Episode 46: Everyone Had a Plan (3)
"I do find myself thinking it, now and then. Instructor, I believe you may be a genius."
"???"
Crunch.
He was gently crushing the skull of the bastard still spewing nonsense about bloodlines and the like, when a remark wandered in from entirely the wrong direction.
A genius...?
Me?
It was the first compliment he had heard in this life. No—the first he had heard across both his lives put together. Even the grandfather who had raised him in the last one had told him he had never seen a blockhead to match him, and his middle-school teacher, faced with the boy who forever dragged the class average down, had gone so far as to instruct him in reality. Han, you will never make anything of yourself by studying.
And genius, to a man like that?
"...You're screwing with me. That what this is?"
Lee Han picked up an iron flail one of the holy knight bastards had dropped. A brat teasing his elder looked as if he needed an affectionate switch.
"I am not teasing you. I am sincerely impressed."
The boy did not so much as look flustered. His face held nothing but a claim of honesty.
"I have been fighting the temple since a very long time ago. And every time, I was jerked about by their schemes until I had to swallow the bitter taste of defeat. You, Instructor, do not stop at seeing through their plots at a glance. You are crushing them. And far too easily..."
"?"
"To put it simply, you do with ease what I cannot do at all, and I found that remarkable."
"...Laying it on a bit thick."
"It is not thick in the slightest."
Catching the woman called Hayes Roche had been astonishing enough to begin with. No—how had he known she carried a Dream Fiend's blood?
"She's giving off the same presence as that Pierre brat, isn't she?"
"...Do not say it as if anyone looking would know. A knack like that belongs to you alone, Instructor."
"?"
"...This is precisely the part that makes my blood boil."
Was this how other people felt when they looked at him? Roen was getting a thorough course of mirror therapy, and his blood pressure rose a notch.
"Haha..."
Derek laughed awkwardly and scratched his cheek. He understood how Roen felt, if only a little, and hoping to ease the stiff air, he recounted what had happened before they arrived.
"Um... if I may report first, because you handled it quietly, Instructor, the academy hasn't reacted much. Lady Karin's help is part of it, too."
"I know your woman's capable. You don't have to bring her up."
"Th-that's not what I—!"
"Enough. It hurts to look at. Anyway. You caught all the spies, yeah?"
"...For now, we caught everyone who looked suspicious. What stood out was how many of them tried to kill themselves the moment they were found out. They seemed thoroughly trained."
"Hss. Vicious little bastards."
"Yes... truly."
It only showed now, but scorch marks and blood flecked the boys' sleeves and the cloth over their stomachs, proof of how hard they had been running. Not their own blood, most likely, but their opponents'. Something like evidence—if not quite evidence—of a brutal fight and a chase.
Lee Han clicked his tongue. He felt it all over again. The organization that called itself the temple really did seem to be going mad. They had the air of people who had tried every scheme there was, just to wriggle free.
...And yet.
"Now that we've got these bastards, there shouldn't be a gap left for them to slip through."
"Right. They aren't just anyone. Holy knights—no, we even have the young lord of House Loengrin."
"Loengrin?"
"Ah, you didn't know? This man is Erhin de Loengrin. He is also the current captain of the holy knight order."
"...This guy?"
Lee Han wore a look that asked how a so-called holy knight could possibly be this weak, and Derek answered it with a bitter smile. He did not seem to entertain the thought that he himself was abnormally strong.
"You may not know this, but Loengrin is called the house of holy knights. They are famous for obeying no one but the temple. The holy knights alone would be evidence enough to pressure them, but from Erhin onward, it is decisive proof. There is not even a hole to escape through."
The other holy knights were holy knights, Derek thought, but seizing a man of Loengrin was the decisive stroke. Even if the temple tried to deny it, they would never be able to. Derek was certain—
"I wonder. Think it'll really go that neatly?"
"...Is something bothering you?"
At Lee Han's loaded reaction, Derek grew cautious. Experience had taught him that when the instructor reacted like that, something was usually caught in his teeth.
Sure enough.
"Not trying to throw cold water on it, but you're not going to be able to do anything to those bastards with this."
"Pardon?"
"...And why do you think so?"
The last question, gone stiff, was Roen's. He was not about to let the instructor's certain tone pass him by.
Lee Han answered in an even voice.
"Way I see it, the temple's a pack of lunatics."
"Pardon?"
"And they aren't mad in any clean way. They're filthy-mad. In my experience, filthy bastards like that never admit a wrong of their own."
"...Even with evidence this obvious?"
"The obvious evidence is exactly the problem. It means this."
"Means what...?"
"This."
That they meant to flip the board.
He had no choice but to know. In his previous life he had been a soldier deployed for a full year into a region where a religious war had broken out, and he knew how cruel a human being could become, and how insane, once they took religion for a shield. Which was why, when a force that claimed to follow a god set about its work, it was, quite literally—
They commit madness beyond anything you can imagine, and they don't even blink.
For the first time in a long while, a shudder ran through Lee Han. He was not shaking from fear. This was only—
A sewer rat would be cuter...
A tremor of loathing, dragged up out of a bodily revulsion.
Thunder rolled through a sky packed solid with black cloud. This was the South, a land famous for autumns without rain, and yet on a rare day the heavens had gone sullen, and storm clouds swollen with thunder were throwing their weight around.
Not that it amounted to any great problem. Rare was not the same as disastrous. Storm clouds in autumn were hardly a crisis.
"There's a temple prayer meeting today. Why's the weather like this?"
"Let's grab seats before anything else. Linger, and we'll be caught in the rain outside."
"I don't want to go today..."
"Hey now! That's impious!"
It bore saying again. In Pendragon, the weekend was not a day of rest for the people. It was nothing more than the day they went to the temple's prayer meeting, and so the meeting had to be attended whether rain fell or snow. Among those bound for the temple, it was common enough to see folk resigned to a soaking, umbrellas and rain cloaks already in hand.
And yet.
"Hm? What's that?"
"Eh?"
"...A knight order?"
And it was no ordinary knight order. Armor washed in turquoise, shields and plate engraved with a unicorn, caught the eye with ugly clarity, and the people's faces went pale as paper.
"Th-the Turquoise Unicorn Knight Order!? I-it's Galahad's knights!!"
"!!!?"
Galahad.
Pendragon's only ducal house, and its highest noble line. They belonged to Pendragon, and yet they held the power to break away and found a nation whenever they pleased. In scale and influence they already matched a fair minor kingdom, and because they were composed of nothing but elites, the strength they possessed was of another order entirely.
And now the greatest armed force that house could boast, the Turquoise Unicorn Knight Order, was on the move. Every last knight carried a spirit that looked ready to set the air itself on fire.
There was one presence, though, that overwhelmed even an order like that. Mounted on a black horse three times the size of any ordinary steed, he gave off a momentum that set the sky shivering. Someone among the people dared put his name in their mouth.
"D-Duke Blake...! Your Grace!!"
"!?!!!"
A noble of dragon blood, whose face a commoner was never meant to see. And Duke Blake was no mere scion of dragons. Set aside the Knight King, Pendragon's founding king, and the man called the greatest great king in the kingdom's history had been—
"The Martial God..."
...and this was his blood.
Thud.Thud. Some were already on their knees. Those of middle years and older who remembered the Martial God bowed their heads in pure reverence the instant he appeared. Anyone who remembered the great king in life could have reacted no other way.
There had been a time when the incompetence of the king two reigns back left the kingdom the poorest in the South—no, the poorest on the continent—until people judged it would have been better to found the realm anew. The man who disposed of the incompetent courtiers and royals, took the throne by his own hand, and even while steadying the kingdom not only turned back hundreds of foreign invasions but wrung victory from them, raising the realm back onto its feet, had been a giant among giants. That man was none other than the Martial God.
While he lived, every royal house on the continent was said to have paid Pendragon its respects, and foreign lands remembered him still, and honored him. An enemy, they said, and still a man worthy of respect. If even foreign nations were like that, what of the kingdom's own people?
"You wretches! What impiety is this!"
"O-old sir?"
"Do not block His Grace's road, you fools!!"
Young, sturdy men actually fell back before the spirit of a thoroughly aged elder. Or perhaps it was not spirit so much as loyalty.
"What in the world is happening?"
"W-where could His Grace the Duke even be going?"
"That direction... d-don't tell me...?"
A few of them realized what lay along the knight order's course, and the blood left their faces.
The order was moving toward the head temple that enshrined the Light of Radiance. Their faces went a sick blue-white, and yet—
"...How are we supposed to stop that..."
Unable to find either the courage or a reason to bar Galahad's way, they could only stand and watch them go.
Commoners were not the only ones minding their step before a ducal progress this rare. Even the knight order that had sworn loyalty to Duke Blake was reading his mood.
Is His Excellency truly that enraged?
He must be furious beyond measure.
Who could have known the temple would pull a stunt like this.
They didn't just cross the line. They trampled it.
They too had been aghast, and after the shock came fury. How dare anyone manufacture a thing like a fake daughter. That the fake had been meant to deceive His Grace and make a fool of Galahad—there was not one knight among them who failed to burn, and to bare his anger at the temple.
If it had been up to their hearts, they would have stormed the temple that very moment. But Duke Blake was holding to his cold composure, and so they did not act as they pleased. It was no different now.
"......"
His Grace kept his silence, and the peculiar rigidity of him looked like a fury too large to master, barely pressed down. Just how deep a rage was he carrying?
"...I think they've read him wrong."
Hearing those whispers, however, Lark muttered to himself and shook his head. Everyone else seemed convinced the man was in a rage, and yet—
That isn't how I see it.
He knew, because he had served the man for a long time. When that man grew angry, he flared hotter than Lark himself and let the anger show. He did not stay this cold. So a coldness like this meant—
It isn't anger. That is...
"...Lark. I have a bad feeling."
"!!"
"You know already, don't you. That I am not particularly angry."
"That..."
"Ha. Raising you was worth something after all. You can even read your master's heart."
"Y-you honor me too much, Your Grace."
"...Your Grace, those are merely the words of a common ruffian."
"I wonder. I rather think him an excellent strategist."
"??"
"I expect he had a reason for saying so."
"......"
The duke turned it over, what trick the temple might attempt, and Lark felt something sour. Watching His Grace rate that ruffian so highly, he suffered a defeat he could not quite name.
...Except.
Clop. Clop.
"......"
The nearer they drew to the temple, the more a shapeless wrongness pressed in on Lark. How to put it.
The air...?
Unpleasant air. Slovenly—no. In that ruffian's manner of speech—
Filthy.
Face set hard, Lark drew closer and closer to the Grand Temple, and when at last they arrived—
"——."
"If it isn't Duke Blake, Your Grace! We were just about to send a man to the ducal residence, and here you come in person. How shameful of us, Your Grace."
Flame leapt.
...and he understood what that unpleasant air had been.
"When word came that there were heretics who dared make a mockery of Your Grace and drag the temple into crisis, you cannot imagine our horror.... Haah. We are swiftly purifying the temple, though we have yet to finish determining how many apostates remain. But do not worry, Your Grace."
Something wet ran. And ran.
"The temple, as it always has, will root the apostates out."
The fire rushed and roared.
"...M-madmen."
Someone's mutter broke the stillness and spread wide. But not one of them could deny it. And how could they.
"You. Just how many did you kill."
"Pardon? Kill them? We have merely purified the apostates."
"......"
The garden of the Grand Temple. Hundreds of heads, robbed of their bodies and jammed onto stakes, and hundreds of trunks, robbed of their heads and burning down in the fire. And among the heads on the stakes—
"Haah. To think His Holiness the Pope-King would do such a thing. A man with so little time left before his retirement—what possessed him to commit an act like this..."
The head of the reigning Pope-King hung there, threads of blood pattering from it, dead in a face twisted with agony.
The duke, Lark, and the knights held their silence before that scene of madness. No. They had no choice but silence. Before a frenzy that could not be understood, and must not be understood, not a single question would come.
"......"
...Lark no longer denied the words of his lord.