A Knight Fears the Living More Than Ghosts (III)
The gray-haired boy raked his fingers through his hair like a whimpering puppy and shook his head.
"Mordred, huh. Hmm. I'm sure Team Leader Two had that one...?"
The boy—Derek—looked thoroughly sheepish.
He was fairly certain he had once told his instructor, bold as anything, that there was nothing in this world he didn't know.
People really ought to stay humble.
He had to admit it, plain and simple. What he didn't know could fill the sky.
This is what you get for building a setting that's too damn big...
Games were like that. Even in development, everyone had their own slice of the work, and the planning team itself was carved up so finely that each person owned a particular region. A title aiming at big-budget AAA scale needed a staggering number of side stories branching off the world, and that meant dozens—no, hundreds—of people had to be thrown at it. One man among a few hundred planners was bound to know only so much. Blaming himself for that was nothing but a contradiction. If anything, it was remarkable that a single person had carried as much as he did.
Knowing that, however, did not help.
When none of it is actually useful, it just feels pathetic.
He couldn't even help the man he thought of as his benefactor. Feeling like a fool was unavoidable. If it were up to his heart, he would have moved his own body and gone to help.
But I can't leave this post either...
He was in the middle of a quest—no, an operation of staggering importance—so Derek was in no position to abandon it for Lee Han's sake. And no wonder. He would only get one chance.
A Unique-grade item. The chance to obtain a Grail Fragment does not come twice.
The colossal side story, Memories of the Autumn Fairy. He had to satisfy the double the autumn fairy had left behind, and if he managed it, he could take the Grail Fragment the double carried about like a hairpin. Meeting the conditions, though, meant "playing" with that double for a full twenty-four days so it would not grow bored, and because of that Derek had already spent fifteen days sleeping only two or three hours a night, playing the clown.
...A horrific ordeal, born of the simple fact that a fairy does not sleep, even when it is only a double.
Truly an extreme situation. If only to keep all that effort from going to waste, Derek could not step away from this place now.
So the only help he could offer was this much.
Should I at least send what I know?
More precisely, what he knew of Team Leader Two, the man who had owned the side story tied to Mordred. He didn't know much else, but he knew how most of the scenarios that man had planned came out, and he judged that Mordred's story might well share that same tendency.
That guy was a little twisted. No...
To put it plainly, he was a pervert.
For the record, "pervert" here meant there was something perverse in his approach to game design, not that he went about committing socially reprehensible crimes.
...Though Derek suspected that anyone who had actually played a game Team Leader Two had touched would want the man dead.
His skill is the real thing, and I do respect him as a senior, but the man is just...
Team Leader Two. The endings of the games he touched were, for the most part—
...either a massacre ending or a ruin ending.
Hmm. What was it he used to say?
Right...
"No, that's the best part, isn't it? You go in expecting some cathartic payoff, and no matter what you do, everybody dies or ends up ruined! The users get annoyed, they get furious...! Whoa, just imagining it, the dopamine hits like crazy, doesn't it?! I can't stop developing because of this—keh heh heh!!"
"...Is he just a pervert after all?"
Looking back on it, Derek realized afresh that Team Leader Two was a pervert unworthy of respect.
Hooong. Oooh, ooooh.
"...?"
Ooooh. Oooong, ooh.
"...What is wrong with these things?"
He frowned, looking thoroughly put off. If someone were playing a recording of ghost-voice sleep ASMR right in front of his face, he imagined it would feel about like this. The sound had the quality of a tune played on glass, so it wasn't exactly grating. Not grating, and yet...
Ooh, oooong.
"...Don't cling to me."
The sound might not have grated. The beings making it certainly did.
Wraiths. Not the ones Lee Han had already dealt with, but others, subdued elsewhere, now drifted in circles around him.
And why do they look so different?
Part of what grated was precisely that change in appearance. At their first meeting their eyes had been red, and an ominous aura had bristled from their whole bodies like thorns. Now they were endlessly docile, and their shapes had turned strangely cute. Creatures that belonged in a horror game had suddenly gone super-deformed, like characters out of something meant to soothe you.
"You weren't like this before, were you?"
Woooh?
"Your voices used to sound like nails on a chalkboard..."
Wooh, woooh.
"...Why is this so damn annoying?"
They were monsters that had threatened him. He could hardly treat them kindly. And yet their looks and their voices had swung a full hundred and eighty degrees—not merely changed, transformed—until they could have passed for the mascot of some province without anyone batting an eye. Cute was cute, but in all his life Lee Han had never once left alive a monster that had threatened him. He wanted them gone this instant, badly enough that the urge smoked in him like a chimney. And yet—
"I-I like them! Th-they're cute!"
"...Is that so?"
"Yeah! They're cool and smooth, and touching them feels refreshing! So nice and cool..."
"......I'm glad they please you."
"Yeah!! I really like them! Thank you, Santa!"
"......"
He could not bring himself to touch them. Not with this young lady beaming like that.
She's taken a real shine to them.
They weren't cats or dogs. What, exactly, was there to like about monsters that were only cute on the outside? Honestly.
"They're really cute."
"I want to adopt just one."
"Right...?"
...Or was he the odd one out?
Am I the only one who isn't friendly?
The whispers around him reached Lee Han's ears, and a hollow laugh escaped him. It was simply absurd.
And then, in a single instant—
Wooooh...
Wooooh...
The wraiths swept in around Louise all at once.
"Whoa!"
They gathered as if to bless a child, forming a circle—a sight so grand that, taken simply, it might have been a performance. Strange to look at, yes, but magnificent enough to pass for a circus troupe singing and dancing.
"Good heavens..."
"Whoa!"
Everyone marveled, and Louise's eyes sparkled, so the scene might have seemed nothing but heartwarming. To Lee Han's eye, though, it was something else.
...Worship?
The wraiths seemed to regard that small child as a king. The way they adored her and abased themselves put him in mind of the ancient Egyptians, worshiping their pharaoh as the sun god's proxy. And it was not a pleasant sight.
"Why are they doing that to a kid. Honestly."
Expectation a child had never asked for was not responsibility. It was coercion. That was Lee Han's belief, and the whole display looked like an omen that the girl's fate would not be a smooth one. It sat wrong with him, down to the bone.
"...Am I overthinking it?"
"Not at all. It is only that you are a proper adult."
"Pardon?"
"You understand that an adult's duty is not to marvel at a child's ability, or to think of how to use it. You are a fine man."
"...Th-thank you, m-ma'am?"
"Ho ho. Please, just call me an old crone. Important people do it all the time."
"I, at least, can't do that. It would sit wrong with me."
"Ohoho. A proper gentleman."
"......"
...He had missed her presence.
When he focused, Lee Han's hearing could catch a leaf falling anywhere within a hundred meters, and his sense of smell matched a dog's—or perhaps surpassed it. And yet he had not even known she was there.
Tension settled over his face. He looked at the old woman, who had appeared from who knew where, and did not lower his guard.
"Please don't be so tense. Without this staff I can't even walk. I'm nothing but a powerless old woman."
"...You don't happen to read minds, do you? Just now, and before that—you read what I'm thinking far too well."
"Your face is that easy to read. What would I need mind-reading for?"
"......"
"You're thinking you've heard that one before, aren't you."
"Is my face that simple..."
"Pfft—!"
The old woman burst out laughing and covered her mouth, laughing on as if she were thoroughly delighted.
She introduced herself as a maid.
"To be precise, I retired fifty years ago, so calling myself a maid is a little embarrassing now."
"E-excuse me, ma'am. If I may—how old are you?"
"One hundred and three this year. I've lived rather a long time, haven't I?"
"...I had you at seventy, at the outside."
"Why flatter a woman as old as I am? Not that I mind."
"No, I mean it..."
For someone past a hundred, the elder maid looked remarkably hale. Lee Han scratched his cheek. Surprise was surprise, but he offered her a seat all the same, and tea with it.
"You'd serve even an uninvited guest?"
"If you were an uninvited guest with bad intentions, maybe not. You don't seem like a bad person, ma'am."
"On what grounds?"
"You don't smell unpleasant."
"...?"
"If anything, you smell thick with medicinal herbs. There's a trace of blood, but the smell of disinfectant alcohol comes with it, so I'd say you handle blood for the sake of treatment. Apothecary, then, or healer—or else an alchemist."
"......"
"What is it?"
"...I am surprised. I thought there was almost nothing left, at my age, that could surprise me. That, too, was arrogance. Pendragon, as ever, keeps producing exceptional knights."
"You flatter me..."
"It isn't flattery. Honestly, I took you for a criminal, since you're hiding your true appearance. That doesn't seem to be the case either."
"......"
"Your original face looks far more charming. Handsome, besides. I can't imagine why you'd wear that one. Is there a reason?"
"...Before that, perhaps you'd tell me who you actually are."
Lee Han's heart gave a hard jolt. She was no ordinary person. He looked again at the first elder who had ever seen clean through his methods, and the tension rose in him once more. She, as if unaware of it, wore a sudden look of oh dear.
"Ah, this old woman has no manners. An introduction ought to have come first, of course. Do try to understand. Live as long as I have, and the joy of finding someone to talk to makes you ramble on about every little thing."
"......"
"Let me see. I shouldn't keep wasting a young man's golden hours, so where ought I to begin..."
"......"
"Ah. I should start with this."
Should the full moon rise, Wales will perish.
"Pardon?"
"Take the outsiders and flee at once. The natives have already entered a contract, so nothing can be done for them—but those who can live ought to live."
"......"
"......Excuse me."
"Yes. Go on."
"That's..."
Y-you're moving through the material much too fast, ma'am...