Episode 49 — The Most Frightening Creature in the World… (8)
The Grand Temple. The head sanctuary of the faith that upheld the Light of Radiance—an iron fortress that had stood for hundreds of years and never once been breached, a cradle of saints where countless holy ones had been born, a treasure house in which every cultural relic of Pendragon was gathered. It went by many names, and not one of them failed to proclaim the Grand Temple's greatness.
And yet that sacred heart of the faith...
Whoosh!
...was burning. Burning with a cleanliness that promised it would be consumed to the last ash. In this moment the name Kalpa Fire—the flame that ends the world—would not have been wasted on the ruin.
And of all places for it to happen.
"Sh-shit?"
The trouble was that a few wretched souls had been dropped into the middle of that hell of fire. They had no idea why they had been spat outside so suddenly. Perhaps the Sacred Vault had finally worked as it should, now that every enemy—including the fiends of Hell—had been cut down. Or perhaps Narrow-Eyes had only been pretending he couldn't bring his power to bear, and had been toying with them all along.
Whichever it was, they had gotten out alive, and from where they stood that was fortune beyond measure.
Except—
Fwoosh!
"What the—why is it like this?!"
The instant they came outside, a demon of heat surged up to meet them, and the party had no choice but to panic. The Grand Temple—no, the entire mountain—was in flames.
Huuuk!
"We step out and this is the welcome?!"
Lee Han seized the mind that wanted to go blank, yanked a handkerchief from inside his coat, and tied it over his mouth. Catch carbon monoxide poisoning and there would be no coming back from it.
"You two, get something over your mouths, now! We're getting out!!"
Lark and Maximus, struck even harder than he was, were slower to come back to themselves. Only after that barked advice did they jolt awake and cover their mouths with cloth. The heat was vicious, and so was the poison of flame—carbon monoxide.
"You two. Climb on. Quick."
"Oh my. You're looking after us, too?"
"That's our Number Eight. Once the youngest, and still looking out for us."
"Shut your mouths. Bite your tongues and that's on you."
Unlike the knights, who could still move after a fashion, Dina and Yan had burned through every scrap of stamina fighting the fiends of Hell. Lee Han hauled both of them onto his back at once and started down out of the Grand Temple.
Paang—!
His body shot forward like an arrow. Divine Bow, Elastic Shadow flung him, and he cut the wind as he left the temple behind. Then he stacked another art on top of it.
Tak. Tak.
Air Walk turned the flight into something closer to a flying squirrel gliding through empty air—absurd, and fast. He covered a full kilometer before a minute was up, and then he did it again.
Udduk!
Halfway through, an ugly sound came out of his body. Had he pushed too far after all?
On a normal day this wouldn't even register... damn it!
The hundred-minute raid against the fiends of Hell had taken more out of him than he had thought. Stamina was one thing. Pieces of him simply would not answer. Death-qi the fiends had breathed into him still sat in pockets through his body, and the backlash was showing. His regeneration was nothing like its usual self, and his stamina was dropping in real time. Piled on top of that, heat of thousands of degrees, smoke, and carbon monoxide kept gnawing at him, testing the edge of what he could take.
And he was not the only one who had reached that edge.
"Th-this is getting dangerous."
"How much farther do we have to go..."
The other two knights were no better. They covered ground at a pace that did not lose much to Lee Han's Divine Bow, Elastic Shadow, but their bodies were not themselves either, and exhaustion sat plain on both of them. After a battle that size a man was supposed to rest, at least a little. Instead they had launched straight into a desperate flight for their lives. In practice, there was not a soul here who was not being tested to the limit.
No. I can't hold like this any longer.
Lee Han understood at once that running through this fire and enduring it was close to impossible. The heat was bad enough. He was starting to feel as if he might simply black out. He had been careful—he had—but a mass of carbon monoxide was steadily darkening his sight.
Where. Where do I go?
At the knife's edge, in the very instant he thought he would pass out—
—drip.
"?"
...a drop of water struck his head. And not just one.
Tok. Todok.
Tuduk. Tudududuk.
Drops with a momentum that was anything but ordinary. Rain began to fall in a savage sheet, and then it truly poured—a volume like a waterfall coming down. That rain struck the Grand Temple and the mountain wrapped in the heat-demon, and before long—
Shaaaa!
—the flames that had raged as if they meant to burn everything began, little by little, to die. Fast, and certain.
"...Huh."
Lee Han and the others stared blankly at rain falling like a cataract. Rain itself was nothing strange. The sky had already been packed with storm cloud. But rain arriving out of nowhere was one thing. Rain as if every drop in the whole bank of cloud had been driven to concentrate on the Grand Temple—that anomaly he could not accept. It looked like something a person had done on purpose.
An artificial phenomenon. Worked by a mage.
And as far as Lee Han knew, there was only one spell-monger alive who could raise a storm cloud and force a weather event this insane. None other than—
A voice that cut through the fog born where rain met fire, and through the curtain of night. Water-bright mana piercing the dark, and a spill of swaying gold hair. Lee Han knew who it was, and for the first time in his life he was glad to see a spell-monger.
"...You. I'll give you this much. The most human, the finest spell-monger I know—that's you, magic chick..."
It was the first acknowledgment he had ever shown a spell-monger, and as if she had heard the mutter—
"Ah! Found you!"
Irene Windler came flying in, joy all over her face.
Today, the word MVP was not wasted on her. Irene Windler chattered without a pause to breathe.
"I was so shocked. Out of nowhere, the Grand Temple's on fire? And the kingdom came looking for me in a panic. I'm the best water mage in the kingdom, so of course they did. I got here and I was getting the spell ready when Young Master Roen told me you'd be at the temple, Instructor. The second I heard that, I dumped every drop of mana I had. I'm wiped, honestly, but you're safe, so it's fine. Hehe!"
"...Thank you for saving us. Really, chick. I mean it."
"Aww, don't thank me! Compared to everything you usually do for me, this is nothing!"
"Have I done anything for you?"
"Uh, w-well, lots of things?"
"......"
For someone who had announced, in her own mouth, that she was exhausted, she had not stopped talking. She looked suspiciously fine. Lee Han had the self-proclaimed-exhausted Irene Windler up on his back, and even knowing the girl was greedily pawing at the latissimus along his ribs, he pretended not to notice. Offering those muscles to today's MVP was only proper. Lee Han endured the molestation with something like willingness.
That was that, though.
"So what actually happened? Why did the Grand Temple burn like this?"
He asked for the cause of the fire. A Grand Temple wrapped in every kind of Holy Law—what could even strike a place like that and leave it like this? That was the question.
To that Lee Han—
"...Uh, w-well, the thing is."
Irene Windler hesitated. Then—
"—Number Eight. Do you know what our mission was?"
"...Number Seven?"
"Call me Dina."
With the fire out, the woman who had climbed down off his back spoke to him. At the oddness of it, his head tilted before he could stop himself.
"Our mission was to hold you. Exactly you... no. All of you."
"...What?"
"Not to kill you. Not to subdue you. Just to keep hold of you. That was the order we were given. ...Looking at it now, I think we were nothing but sacrifices."
"What are you talking about?"
None of it made sense. They had been waiting there just to hold them? Using themselves as sacrifices? ...Why?
What meaning does that even have?
He could not find one. While that question sat on his face—
"The Prophet—the strategist of our organization—said this. The most vicious culprits, the ones who would ruin everything the organization meant to do, were none other than the three of you. So if we only stopped the three of you, we could reach the 'objective' one way or another."
"The Prophet..."
The schemer who had screwed them—no, the entire kingdom. Through her mouth, at last, he learned the man was real. Only for a moment, though.
"The Prophet said that as long as the three of you were outside, you would get in the way of what he meant to do, no matter what. So you had to be removed."
"......"
"So the Prophet moved the Grand Temple. He staged a situation where you, Number Eight, and Galahad and Lionel had no choice but to move. That's why the Pope-King and the hard-line priests died. ...Fools. From the start they never knew this was a purge. Bishop Michael and the rest of those vermin were used, that's all."
"...What are you saying?"
It felt, again, as if they were being played. Lee Han's head could not parse her words. He was not the only one. Confusion sat plain on Maximus and Lark. In the moment they might as well have been made into fools, Dina seemed to lose her strength. She leaned against a tree and murmured, spent.
"You still don't get it? The Prophet's target was never the royal house, or the ducal houses, or the North. The Prophet had only one target."
Seuk.
Dina pointed, and their eyes followed of their own accord. Torches. A great many torches, lighting the night bright. And the people holding them—
Fwoosh!
...were burning crosses. And Lee Han understood what the organization had been aiming at. What the bastard called the Prophet had been aiming at.
"...The temple."
"More precisely, the Grand Temple, and every priest who had rotted."
"......"
"The victims who lost everything to the temple punish the rotten priests. ...Heh. Not a bad story, is it?"
"......"
What came sharp into Lee Han's eyes, sharper than the burning crosses, were people weeping tears of blood, their faces raw with pent fury. Every one of them was only an ordinary person. Farmers, or people who looked like bakers and ordinary merchants. The sort you could see anywhere. And yet, looking at them, Lee Han felt a chill he had never felt in any other moment. A presence more frightening than the fiends of Hell came off them, and the tips of his fingers began to shake.
Dina did not even look at Lee Han's face as it went pale. She said only what she had come to say—the decisive core that might have been the starting point of this entire affair.
"You know what, Number Eight? The Prophet said the most frightening creature in the world is none other than..."