A Knight Chews on Defeat (1)
A man stood on a platform. His was an ordinary face, the sort you might see anywhere, and yet there was something about him that would not let a gaze pull free. It was not the emptiness where both his arms should have been. It was not the countless burn scars mapped across his face. It was the savage ghost-light burning in his eyes, so fierce it was almost too much to meet.
That haunted gleam gathered in his gaze, and he opened his mouth, setting each word down with care.
"I was the head of a household. I was one woman's husband, and the father of two children, and I was an accountant for an ordinary merchant house."
"And I am a worthless head of house who could not protect his family, a worthless husband who could not protect his wife, and a foolish father who could not protect his two children."
"I was a fool. I was a worthless sinner who simply believed in the goodwill of the world!"
He was no great speaker. The voice was clumsy, the manner of it clumsy too, and taken all together it was not a voice with any particular power to seize attention. Even so, there was sincerity in it — a plea, with his own bitterness stirred through. A voice steeped in long resentment has a way of turning eyes and bending ears.
"I am a sinner. That is a truth I cannot deny! How could the head of a house who failed to protect his family be anything but a sinner? So I do not hide, and I do not deny it. I acknowledge my sin! ...And yet!!"
"Why is it that those who sinned greater than I —!! Those who peddled the name of God and turned their backs on their duty, why...!"
"How can they say they have no sin! How can they walk around smiling, that shameless!!!"
The man spat his rage. More than ten years might have passed, but the resentment he could never forget had not thinned with time. It had only grown thicker, condensed, as if it had been left to age. What he carried was no longer mere resentment. Looked at one way, it was hatred and a hunger for revenge, no different from a furnace that would not go out until he himself was dead.
And so he spoke.
"I! I have no reason to live like this! I've lost everything, so how am I supposed to go on living in this world? Living itself is agony! Living itself is driving me this mad, so how —!!!"
A cry knotted tight with hate. There was something in it past mere chill, something that stirred fear.
Yes. The man was alive, and he was one of the dead. He no longer had a reason to live, and yet he had a goal that could only be finished while breath still remained in him. He was no different from a vengeful ghost, unable to vanish from this world until his revenge was done.
Someone once said that a single person may never change the world, but that one person's anger can ruin a very great deal. One person's hunger for revenge, too, has a way of setting fire to other hearts. Kindling a man never knew he carried — wood in the chest, ready to burn at any moment — can be lit by somebody else.
Thanks to Irene Windler's efforts, the fire that had swallowed the Grand Temple was out. The flames might be gone, but human anger is not the sort of thing rain puts out, and the people with torches were wholly occupied with feeding their rage.
THUD!
Thud...!
THUUUD!
Crosses were burning, and priests were bound to stakes. The faces were familiar. Cardinal Michael, head of the moderates, the man who had burned the hardline faction only the day before, hung his blood-soaked face. Every other figure of the moderate faction was bound to a stake as well. It seemed a cruel enough sight.
"O-our daughter died because of you! You toyed with her like that! She lost her purity, and she died like that! You filthy bastard!!"
Even a misery like that was a luxury for him. An old woman had come, dragging a body worn thin with age, and she threw a stone. Merely lifting one should have been too much for her, and yet she kept picking them up, strength rising from somewhere no one could name.
"Do you even remember me! Do you even know who I am! I am the mother you deceived fifty years ago, you thing worse than a beast! Give me back my daughter, you bastard!!"
Curses poured down on Michael. This was the moment the private shame of a man known even as a candidate for sainthood was laid bare before the world. But—
"You! Do you remember coming to our village! You damned bastard, who ordered us to burn the people of our village when they had the plague — people it would have surprised no one to see drop dead at any moment!"
"Why! Why did you do it, why! We gave you the money! We scraped it together...!! So why did you pretend we weren't there!"
"Aaaah! D-die! Dieee!!"
As if the shame he had committed — no, his evil — were only now beginning, the people threw stones. He might have wondered what the soldiers meant to guard the temple were doing.
Shing.
"Don't move. Move, and I cut you down."
Most of them had already been subdued by Holy Knights — no, by Half-Fiends wearing the masks of Holy Knights. The sight itself explained how people with no strength had made it this far. A place steeped in grudge and rage. Was hell somewhere else? ......This place was hell.
"Eight hundred fifty-nine thousand, eight hundred."
"...?"
"They say that's how many die in an average year. Couldn't pay the offering, so no priest would treat them."
"..."
"Funny, isn't it? All for the temple's authority, they monopolize or stamp out every medical art there is, healing techniques and pharmacy alike, and then they won't treat you because you didn't pay an offering, or because the sum came up short.... Honestly, how does a joke that ridiculous even exist? This is why comedy's dying. The world's funnier."
"Then those people..."
"Right. Families, acquaintances, lovers. Of the eight hundred fifty thousand who couldn't get treatment, or who suffered some injustice at the temple's hands."
"..."
"As you can see, every one of them is a commoner. A few merchants and soldiers in the mix, sure, but even so, they're powerless, frail people who don't come within a mile of a noble or a knight."
Dina recited the cruel facts in a low voice.
"The organization — no, the Prophet — went up to them quietly and made an offer, they say. 'Don't you want revenge?' Or, 'Do you need a place to die?' ...And surprisingly enough, tell them a chance and the power to take it will be given, and they accepted. They decided to burn their own bodies."
"..."
Lee Han listened, and little by little his fist tightened, the knuckles creaking. It was nothing but the story of people who had not the slightest thing to do with him, and yet the more of it he heard, the higher his anger climbed. She must have seen as much. She did not stop.
"The Prophet said the name of the chance he gave them was Flame Scrolls and gunpowder. An enormous quantity of both...... I couldn't tell you where he got his hands on military stores that precious, kept that strictly, but you don't need me to say what the people who received that chance and that power did with them."
"..."
Lee Han looked at the devastation around them. A little while ago he had been desperate just to get clear of it. Now the shape of the disaster lay perfectly clear. His nose was unusually keen, so even if he did not want the smell, he got it. ......Burning corpses.
"...Goddamn it."
A smell he had breathed to the point of sickness on the battlefield. A wretched smell he had never wanted in his nose again. Lee Han shuddered. ...There was a fact more worthy of shuddering.
"And after doing this, you still call yourselves human?!"
His shout rolled over the surroundings like thunder. It was a great roar flung out as if he did not care whether he was discovered or not, and people turned startled eyes on him, wondering what had come over him all of a sudden. Dina and Yan stayed calm. They knew why he was angry.
In the next instant Lee Han seized Dina by the collar with a brutal hand and hauled her up.
"Ghk—!"
Her body lifted far too easily, and her face pleaded that breathing hurt. Lee Han paid it no mind. Maximus and Lark moved at the same time to stop him.
"What are you doing all of a sudden?"
"Stop. Keep your head—"
"...What?"
At the words that followed, the two knights forgot about holding him back and could only go blank. And as if to make certain of the kill, Lee Han did not stop.
"The smell of people burning is driving me out of my mind! And the oil stinks just as hard! There's a special scent on top of it! And this goddamned scent, as far as I know, is the smell that comes off those Britannia suicide-squad bastards! The smell off those suicide troops who wrapped Flame Scrolls and gunpowder around their bodies, splashed themselves with oil and special drugs, and threw themselves straight at the gates!!"
"..."
A smell, and a nightmare, known only to those who had fought in the Britannia war — and remembered because his nose was keener than any other animal's. The man who remembered the nightmare of war glared at them in fury, as if he meant to kill them where they stood.
"You used those people's hunger for revenge and made bombs out of them! You had them burn the Grand Temple just like that, you bastards—!"
Lee Han spoke as if he were screaming, and little by little the strength went out of his hand. He wanted to kill them on the spot so badly the want of it smoked, but a scrap of reason still remained, and even these people—
"...If I may make the excuse in Dina's place, we only learned of that operation today."
He knew they were nothing but chess pieces, used and nothing more.
"And that suicide operation was never carried out with force or threats behind it. They wanted to do it. That's what I'm saying."
"You call that an answer...!"
Lark shot back. He was about to add that it would have been enough if only they had never been there.
But.
"You don't have the right to say that, Hyungrang. You're a knight. A very strong one, at that. Can you understand how they feel — the weak? The hearts of people who lost parents and children because they had no power?"
"..."
Dina's retort stopped Lark's mouth. She rubbed at her throat and let a sneer slip toward him.
"Arrogant, as expected. Well, it would be the strange thing if you understood. You, who lived as a knight of Galahad, born even with the talent to become a Champion — can you understand the hearts of people with no power?"
"..."
"Yes. I'll say it plain. What the Prophet did, what we did, the world would call it evil. Fair enough. But we held out a hand to those wronged people, and we gave them a chance to take revenge. A chance to punish the ones who stood above the law by borrowing power and the name of God. And that's wrong? If your child died, or your friend, or your woman, you'd take revenge too, wouldn't you? But those people aren't allowed? Is it that terrible a thing?"
"That is..."
"Yes. I know it's a selfish thing to say, and I know we're filthy. Even so, I want to say at least this. That duke of yours, of Galahad, went around killing people just the same, for revenge over his wife. So you and we are nothing but the same breed of villain. Which means you haven't the slightest right to curse us. You and we are villains to somebody. It's the same."
"..."
"Oh, and for the record, I'm not cursing you. I'm just saying it this way. Only our positions are different. You can't understand them. The only one here who can understand where they stand is the one who had to spend painful years because he had no power, and who lived the right way..."
Her finger stabbed out.
"No one but him."
Lee Han, named without warning. Every eye went to his face.
"..."
But even with their gazes on him, Lee Han paid them no mind. He only—
"...Fuck. Lost again."
In a situation where he could take no one's side, all he could do was spit out a curse like bile.
...The next day. Morning.
The world turned upside down.