The Knights' Night Raid (3)

"...Why isn't there anyone here?"

Lee Han had spent thirty grueling minutes swimming his way in, and only once the infiltration of the temple was done did he blink, twice, at the emptiness.

Getting inside ought to have been enough. There was no sense picking at it. But he remembered how brutally tight the watch had been beyond the walls, and for a man with that fresh in his mind, the total absence of a garrison was simply strange. Did they trust ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠the outer troops and thin the people inside? Did that even follow sense? He tilted his head, puzzled—and in the same breath counted it as luck. He had held the Turtle-Breath Great Art the whole way as he swam, and subduing giant crocodiles and water snakes had left his stamina badly broken.

No, really. What kind of river crawled with that many crocodiles and snakes? Afraid the blood would spread, he had been forced to subdue them and nothing more, and with the art still running it was no exaggeration to call the fight the hardest he had faced in recent memory. So the lack of people pleased him, strangely. It amounted to a rest, if only a brief one.

Not that he could take it. Where's the time to rest? There was no slack in him at all. Little of the night remained, and even a pause felt wasteful. There was, however, one minor problem.

"Right. So where am I?"

To say it again: not even royalty knew the Grand Temple in any real detail, and not even the king knew what lay inside. He had broken in. Finding a path meant starting from a blank page. Faced with the predicament of a ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠lost knight who first had to learn where he was, he paced the surroundings for a while.

He might as well admit it now. He had not slipped into the temple to assassinate anyone. He had come, just as he had prayed to the fairy, to commit a piece of righteous theft. What he needed was—

More precisely, it was the Sacred Relic meant to serve as the Indulgence that would be given to Lee Han. As for where the information had come from—

What would make a decent gift for old man Raphael?

Father Raphael. In this barbarous medieval society, the only old man Lee Han considered a true adult, and the benefactor who had tipped him off this time. Thanks to him, Lee Han had learned about the relic destined for his own hands, and he had laid a plan to steal it—no, to borrow it for a little while—and then give it back. The one who had handed him the first thread of that plan, for the record, was the same man.

"Brother. This is only a matter of what-if, but if the Sacred Relic meant for you were suddenly to vanish from the Grand Temple, what do you suppose would happen?"

"...Pardon?"

Absurd as it was, it had been Raphael.

"Ho ho. Nothing to be startled over. It is merely an example. An example. Do not take it to heart. Please regard it as an old man's nonsense. Ho ho."

"......"

Oh, certainly. He would regard it as nonsense. At first he had doubted his own ears. It had sounded like a roundabout way of asking whether he had any thought of stealing a Sacred Relic. And not from just anyone—from the very man about to be raised as the next Pope-King. Why would someone like that make such an offer? Had Lee Han slipped somewhere, and was the old man angling to have him killed by another hand? The suspicion was, in its way, a reasonable one. Shock turned from puzzlement into doubt, and perhaps that showed on his face, because Raphael went on, still leaning on the word example.

"Ha ha. This, too, is nothing but an example. But if the Sacred Relic decided for you were to disappear, a great deal of chaos would likely break out within the temple. The Grand Temple holds a truly vast number of Sacred Relics, and yet every last one of them bears a precious worth that cannot be set in coin. Whether as history, or as a vessel of mysterious power, a Sacred Relic is precious no matter what it is. So the Grand Temple's most important charge is to stake its life on guarding them. Keeping the relics of the past is the covenant that let the temple serving the Light of Radiance put down roots in the South. And the Grand Temple, bound by that duty, loses one? That is a matter that shakes the temple's authority."

For an instant something cracked through his skull like lightning. He thought he ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠understood why Raphael had put a plan to seize a relic into words at all. Right now, the old man meant to—

"Then if the Sacred Relic disappears..."

"First the whole temple will go into lockdown for a time, and a severe inquiry will follow as to whether heretics are involved. In particular, the relic that vanishes will just so happen to be the one decided for Brother, and the only people who know that are myself and a few cardinals. We will likely be put under a hard investigation."

"......"

Just as his counterpart had done, he meant to flip the board. By hard means.

"...Are you sure that's all right? At your age, if they drag you down to a cellar, you'll be gone on the spot."

It was a considerably dangerous attempt. Not for Lee Han. For Raphael. In truth, if a Sacred Relic vanished, the one under the heaviest suspicion would be Raphael himself: the man who knew which relic was meant for Lee Han, and the only one presently walking a line of his own, apart from the Grand Temple as it stood. Should the relic disappear, the inquisitors would take it as a pretext and question him without mercy.

"This is a bit..."

Lee Han was about to let his reluctance show—

"Ah, that point is quite all right. This worthless old man happens to possess an Indulgence."

"......"

"Live long enough, and they give you even something like this, far past your due. Ho ho."

"...Ah."

Come to think of it, this man was the temple's living legend, wasn't he?

"Ho ho. I am only saying that such a thing exists. I have done nothing, and Brother has done nothing either, so where would there be any cause to use an Indulgence? Is that not so?"

"...Ha."

There was a reason he had lasted more than a century inside the temple. He was not merely diligent. He knew how to set the board.

"You've got the whole plan already, old man."

"Whatever do you mean?"

"...Ah. Yes. I'll take it that way. Hm. Then I'll ask only as an example myself. Is it all right for something like that to happen? For me, sure, it sounds like it would clear my stomach. But if you just sit still, you can become the Saint King without lifting a finger, can't you? ...Ah, for the record, I'm not saying it with some hidden meaning. I'm only talking about the risk if it happens. All right?"

"I know. Aha-ha!"

Raphael let out a cheerful laugh at the question, curious as it was, and he did it without any particular deliberation.

He treated the Saint King as a thing like that, and the force coming off him was strong enough to leave even a knight without a word.

"......Isn't that a little too impressive?"

"There is no need to gild an old man's face."

"No. That isn't what I'm doing."

He had meant it. All over again, Lee Han found that he respected the old man.

And now—

"Ah. So the layout is roughly like this."

Lee Han was working through the steps of stealing the Sacred Relic, one careful pace at a time. It was not particularly for Raphael's sake. He was doing it of his own will. There was no discontent on his face. He simply did not spare the effort, and he did it in silence.

"━━!"

It was the sonic art he had used the day before, fighting the Holy Knights. If one insisted on a technical term, echolocation would do. He had picked up a talent peculiar even by his own reckoning, but peculiar or not, what mattered was that he had one more means he could actually use. Lee Han sent the waves out again and again, let them rebound off the surrounding structure, and from that read the shape of the place: which forms connected to which paths, and whether a trap waited anywhere among them.

"...Roughly, I get it."

He could not know everything. Only the broadest outline—more simply, only where a path he could take might be. As expected, using the art in a fight and using it to search were difficulties of a very different order. Even so. Ransack every place that looks suspicious, and something will turn up eventually. He did not know whether this counted as a specialty, but the thing Lee Han did best was neither combat nor assassination. Been a while since I had repetitive work. When it came to tedious grunt work, he was confident he outdid anyone alive.

At that same hour, while the knight was diligently grinding through his labor, a gray-haired boy sat at a desk, diligently scratching out words. Some people ran about in the field. Others put in their effort by turning their heads over a desk. Which was to say that Derek, too, was doing his own utmost, no less than his master.

Who is it?

The desktop was packed with paper running past several hundred pages, and every sheet was carved with writing so dense there was hardly a gap. Derek had written down every piece of information he knew until his wrist ached, and he kept turning back through it in case he had left something out. And yet, for all that effort—

...I don't know.

The lack of any meaningful result was giving him a headache. In the end he gave up, unable to learn a thing about the unidentified schemer the instructor was hunting.

"Haa!"

The sigh he let out was thick with stress. Eighty percent self-reproach, twenty percent despair, mixed in their shares. Had the instructor seen it, he would have said Derek's luck was running off. Derek, for his part, would probably have produced the typical science-track reply—that research showed a long, deliberate sigh could lower one's stress—and the instructor, in a gentle voice, might well have asked whether he should work Derek's Conception and Governing Vessels out to a hundred digits of pi, and reached for a club.

"...Heh!"

Remembering his master wiped the gloom for a moment, and a laugh came out of him. The man was the most entertaining person Derek knew. At the same time, I don't think I'm any help at all... He felt his usefulness running out, and the laugh died as quickly as it had come. Every piece of information he held seemed to be twisting out of true.

"......All right."

Admit it. ...Almost everything I know has used up its worth. The blow that made him feel it was spent was none other than the appearance of Hayes Roche. The instructor had said Lady Irene Windler believed the woman was the duke's hidden daughter, but when Derek had seen her the day before, Lady Irene Windler had only tilted her head, as if to say this was not the person. In other words, most of the information the girl possessed had gone crooked as well. Derek's case was the same.

The heroine... isn't here.

All of it was useless beyond words. The heroine. The main heroine, the center of the world. The person who, from the moment Derek became a second-year, was supposed to begin unraveling the main story in earnest was nowhere to be seen. For Derek, who had held a fair store of anticipation for her appearance ever since he fell into this world, it was a bolt from the blue. A year ago, the fact that there was no heroine would probably have pitched him into something like panic, his face gone bloodless. It's a mercy the instructor is here, at least. An irregular, and a Hero Class. The master and guide he could trust more than anyone. Because that man was here, Derek's thoughts might be tangled, but he was neither in despair nor truly lost.

Also—honestly, maybe some corner of me expected it might turn out like this? Perhaps he had predicted it. That there might be no heroine. And well he might. I can't remember her face... She had certainly existed. But neither her face nor her name would come clear, as if a fog lay over them. Was the heroine too much of a convenience, and so deleted from this world? The instructor said it often. Do not treat this world like a game. This world was one where real human beings lived and breathed. By those words, the heroine's very existence was a bug. Merely by being there she disordered the ecosystem and turned the genre of the world into romance. And with a being like that gone—this isn't a romance fantasy anymore, is it? Didn't that leave only fantasy? ...No. Maybe I have to stick dark, or dystopian, in front of it.

Derek knew. If the story went on like this, he knew what it meant for the heroine—buffer and fixer both—to disappear.

And once it did—

"...Should I really emigrate with the instructor?"

A bleak future was all that seemed left, and leaving grew desperate. So long as it was not the South, wouldn't the world at least be livable? He was thinking exactly that when—

"Having strange thoughts again, aren't you, Derek?"

"...My lady?"

"Brooding isn't bad. But don't sink into it. It will only torment you."

"......"

"Hehe. Well? Does being like this lift your spirits a little?"

"Th-that's..."

"Honestly. You look as innocent as a rabbit, but you're a man all the same, aren't you. Hehe."

"M-my lady!?"

Karin's teasing blew the worry away in a single stroke, and all Derek could do was feel his face go hot.

But then, from her—

"Ah. Now that's a Derek expression. I like you better awkward like that than all serious. It's cute."

"......"

"And I told you to call me Karin, didn't I? You really don't listen, do you."

"Mmm..."

Derek swallowed a groan, and still caught himself thinking that prim little pout of hers was pretty. He would have to give up on emigrating. For an instant he had dreamed the emigrant's dream, and then he let it go. And well he might. She would never abandon this kingdom. So he, too—

"Derek, do you want my lips that badly? Your eyes are hot."

"N-no, it isn't like that...!"

"Come here. Quickly. There's something I want to try."

"W-wait...!?"

He would have to steel himself. Children are born even in wartime. Just so, however despairing a future might be set in advance, romance had always been there all the same.

Of course...

"What is this? Why do I suddenly feel so foul?"

Far from any romance, there was also a knight doing grunt work in the middle of the night as if he were staging a one-man show. Some knightly instinct abruptly wanted to beat the gray-haired boy to a pulp, and the knight tilted his head, unable to tell why he felt that way.