Episode 61 — A Knight Fears People More Than Ghosts (4)
…What was this supposed to mean?
Simon had handled no small amount of information since becoming chairman of the Guild Association, but it had been a long while since anything this mysterious had landed in front of him.
Ghosts manifest on a sixty-year cycle.
The ghosts tear human souls out of their bodies.
Whoever swears loyalty to Mordred is cursed.
"Hmm…"
His subordinates had gathered it with real effort. Plenty of it was solid intelligence, more than anyone could reasonably have assembled in a single morning, and yet the scraps that snagged on Simon were these—mysterious, and oddly small.
There was a reason Simon had become the youngest chairman of the Guild Association. His gift for getting at the heart of information was simply unlike other men's. That was how he had climbed past people more talented and more powerful than himself, all the way to this seat, and it was why he did not ignore the instinct peculiar to him. He trusted it. When he judged that he ought to dig harder, he dug.
"…I need to hear it myself."
"Hear it?"
"Living information is always out on the ground. If I go and run around in person, something will come loose."
"Isn't that a little optimistic?"
"Optimistic or not, we have to try something."
"Haa… understood. I'll get you ready to leave at once."
"Mm. Thanks."
"Don't mention it. This is my job."
The secretary smiled as she fetched his coat. Simon meant to run until the soles of his shoes wore through. If a knight's battlefield was the place where sword met sword, then his was wherever information flowed.
Thud.
"Some battlefield…"
The boldness of those first steps was gone. Worn down to the bone, Simon sagged in the middle of an empty lot. Dust caked his shoes and the hems of his trousers from all the walking, and he had almost nothing useful to show for it. A full seven hours of wandering, and what he had learned amounted to nothing.
Then—
"You really didn't find anything, Simon?"
"Hm?"
"The Simon I know isn't a man who gives up over something like this, so I'm asking. If it were you, I would expect you'd found something."
Simon said nothing.
"Simon?"
"I really did pick the right secretary."
They had spent years together. Fooling her eyes, he decided, was not going to be easy.
"You know my way of getting information is a little different from other people's."
"Ah. That quackery— no, the puzzle theory?"
"…Quackery? Even you…!"
Puzzle-style assembly of information. It was Simon's specialty, if one could call it that—an ability that had raised him to this seat no less than instinct had. It would not be too much to say so. The method itself was simple. Within a single region, he remembered every trivial, unimportant, miscellaneous scrap of talk. All of it. Why the couple next door had fought. Which man had committed adultery. Every petty story there was.
"From there, you take those stories and assemble them."
The things he had casually stored broke into pieces inside his head, came apart in every direction, and out of them he drew a single piece of information.
"I actually found the real culprit in a murder this way."
"…And how, exactly, do you get that out of someone else's marital fight, or an affair?"
"The fight and the affair aren't the point. You read the process that produces them, and the psychology behind how people act. While you're reading that psychology, you pick up still smaller things, and you assemble those, and assemble them again. Keep at it, and eventually one plausible puzzle piece of information turns up."
The secretary was silent.
"Pretty simple, isn't it? But when I try to teach it to anyone, all I get is cursed at. I go to the trouble of teaching them, and honestly, it's unfair…"
"What is unfair about it?"
"?"
People only ever saw Simon getting beaten like a drum as he went about, but for all that, he was a man who belonged among the geniuses. Of course he could pull off a trick this absurd. In a certain sense, he really is remarkable. The secretary clicked her tongue, impressed.
The admiration did not last. More than the ability itself, she wanted to know what he had found.
"Haa. Simon. So what is this important thing you learned?"
"You don't know? You were walking around with me."
"I am not abnormal, the way you are."
"…But I'm normal."
She said nothing.
"E-easy, easy. D-don't get mad."
Before she could get any angrier, Simon cleared his throat and told her what he had found.
"Mmm. Where should I start…"
She waited.
"Right. If I give you only the result, cleanly, then what I found isn't anything like the principle behind how the wraiths occur. There is something else, though, that I'm sure of."
"What?"
"The location of the Hidden Grotto that Mordred's bloodline entered."
Her eyes flew wide.
"Yes. That much, I could manage."
"H-how on earth…?"
The secretary stared, round-eyed. It was worth the shock. No matter how they investigated, the one thing they had never been able to learn was Mordred's Secret Grotto—a place whose location no one knew, save Mordred's direct bloodline. That was why, even now, with Mordred's head of house and knight order vanished, no one could so much as think of going after them. For Simon to declare that he had found it left her no choice but astonishment. Had anyone else said such a thing, she would not have believed them. The man in front of her, though— It's Simon. She was not fool enough to doubt the ability of the man who oversaw every guild in the South.
"…You found that through the puzzle assembly as well?"
"Something like that."
"That's incredible, Simon."
"Incredible. Sure."
"So where is it?"
"The location? Well…… w-we're a little close, aren't we?"
"…Ah. I'm sorry."
For a moment the secretary flushed, embarrassed. Curiosity or not, pressing in this close was a little crude.
"N-no. It isn't that I mind."
"Simon?"
He said nothing.
"You…"
A man, she decided, was still a man. Even at an hour this urgent, he was looking at her with eyes that tempting. She did not mind. It was not as if she had no fondness for him, and she could not deny that he was a man of considerable charm. If he was going to offer a passionate look first, she had no reason to refuse.
"Come here."
He didn't move.
"Quickly."
"But…"
"A man shouldn't be that shy. If you're a man, you ought to be a little bolder."
"A-all right. Then…"
Softly, Simon raised his arm. The hand seemed about to cradle her head. The secretary took the touch with no small pleasure and gently closed her eyes. Simon looked at her from far away.
Truly…!
Thock.
"!!?"
From somewhere she had not even seen him draw it, Simon produced a cloak and wrapped it around himself. In the next instant, the Flame Scroll stuck to the secretary's head—
BOOOOOOM—!
It ignited with a violent roar and blew apart in a tremendous explosion.
WHOOOSH!
Even among Flame Scrolls, the Large-Monster Flame Scroll was difficult to obtain. A Flame Scroll already carried fierce destructive power, but this was nothing less than a special-grade scroll, smeared with an alchemist's water of explosion and packed with the compressed mana of ten mages. In the military, only a tiny few held the authority to use one. By rights, no amount of money should have been able to buy it. Fortunately, a knight Simon knew had shown the dignity of procuring such a thing as if it were nothing, with the incomprehensible remark that he worked a spell-slinging slave hard enough that they simply made them.
It was the sort of thing one would rather never have cause to use. The situation being what it was, Simon had been left with no choice. And the result…
"I-I really… I died and came back…"
He shuddered, gasping for breath. If not for the defensive cloak the knight had given him, enchanted with barrier magic, the blast would have caught him and burned him to death on the spot. The cloak itself was proof enough. It had burned away to nothing long since. Simon, for his part, had been thrown some ten meters by the force of the explosion, then forced to roll across the ground without mercy. There was not a place on him that did not hurt.
What mattered, though, was that he was alive. He drank the potion kept inside his coat and barely managed to quiet the pounding in his chest.
In the midst of that came a soft step.
"That was reckless, mister."
"Yeah."
"…Wh-what else was I supposed to do? When you see an opening, you have to gamble."
The beastkin twins, who had been escorting him in strictest secret, looked at Simon as if he were pathetic. Being looked at that way by children so much younger than himself made something surge up in him. Unfortunately…
"Mister Knight is going to be angry."
"Knight Oppa said not to do anything dangerous."
He flinched. The one whose weakness had been seized was him.
"C-could you keep it a secret?"
"For free?"
"Don't wanna."
"……Now I see why Sir Lee Han says the two of you roll over and bare your bellies."
Simon grumbled. The twins stuck out their tongues, the very picture of spite. Even while they teased him, though, they did not take their eyes off the empty lot, where the blaze still climbed.
"Tina."
"Yeah."
"It's still alive, isn't it?"
"It's alive."
"…Persistent."
"I really hate that thing."
"Me too…"
Both twins knit their brows. It was not the smell of a person burning that made them frown. The reason was something else.
"Disgusting…"
"The smell of rot…"
A stench more vicious than burning garbage. It was all they could do not to be sick. How to put the smell? Fouler than the reek of a corpse, and it turned the stomach besides. What was shocking was that this severe, nauseating stink was not coming off a dead person. It was coming off a human who was still alive.
…Well. Considering what the other party was, a smell like this was only to be expected. Nothing other than—
…that was a creature one ought not to treat as human.
Fwoosh!
Flesh was coming out of the fire. Even as it burned, it repeated its regeneration without pause, until at last the head was restored. Little by little the monster showed its outline, and with it a killing intent so chilling that even a full-grown adult would go cold in the gut and feel his legs shake.
But—
"All of it."
"The stench starts in its character."
The twins were not ordinary humans. They could meet the monster's killing intent without so much as a blink. Simon could not. He had frozen solid, rigid through and through.
…Sir Lee Han was right. Hadn't he said it the day before? That people were scarier than ghosts. At the time Simon had taken it for a joke. Faced with a sight like this…
Scarier than a ghost. That's the truth. Enough that a monster would look cute by comparison.
……Though whether a vampire even deserved to be counted as a person, he couldn't say.