Episode 61 — A Knight Fears People More Than Ghosts (2-5)
The flames still heaved, wild and unrelenting.
Befitting a scroll made to hunt great monsters, its power and its staying force were in a class of their own. Had this been anything but an empty lot choked with dirt and dust, the fire would have leapt and become a conflagration past imagining. The heat was that fierce, and that dizzying.
And yet the very man who had set the blast was blanching, as if he had just witnessed something far more horrible than the might of a Flame Scroll.
Creak. Crrreak...
It—the monster—was regenerating. Arms and legs, head and waist, the whole body had been burned or smashed, and still it was knitting itself back into what it had been. The sight was like time running in reverse. For an instant it called up the phoenix, said to be reborn in fire; but no one looking at that monster now could have thought of a phoenix.
And how could they? A phoenix is a creature reborn in flame, beautiful and magnificent. This regeneration was...
"Simon. Did you lure me all the way out here on purpose? Were you planning to use that dangerous thing from the start?"
"......"
"Well, well. Truly impressive. We've known each other a while—there ought to be some feeling there, and yet how can you be this cold? Dropping frail little me into a trap this cruel... I'm genuinely hurt."
"......"
Crrrrk!
...so alien that no word could hold it.
A revulsion of the body itself. Simon—no, any ordinary human—could not have looked on that thing without the gorge rising. And in Simon, as the revulsion boiled, self-reproach and self-hatred rose with it.
God, I'm such a moron I want to die...
How?
A whole year. I got played by that monster for a whole year and just sat there?
It was a fact so shameful he could hardly stand to face it.
Ten days ago. That, more or less, was when he had first caught the wrongness of it.
"Sir Lee Han. Why didn't you take the twins with you?"
"Hm?"
"If you mean to infiltrate Mordred, wouldn't it be better to bring the twins along? I only asked because I wondered why you were going alone. Taking them seemed the wiser course..."
"Ah, those kids? Forget it. I move more freely on my own. Drag them with me and all I get is a bad feeling. You look after them. I'll pay."
"Ah... yes."
"Why the sour face? Did I say something strange?"
"N-no. It isn't that."
It had been nothing more than a few lines, and a question. The trouble was that the man who asked it was none other than Simon.
Head of the southern guild, and so sharp that even in the Royal Capital he might have ranked among the ten cleverest minds alive. From a conversation that amounted to nothing, and from the logic of the other man's actions, he reflexively read the man's state of mind.
Why? Why isn't he taking the twins? ...No. Before that—did Sir Lee Han even need the guild?
The stem of the question branched without end, and Simon called up a flood of what he knew.
Sir Lee Han tracked down hundreds of Illegal Mages on his own and cut them down, and he smashed a major slave company single-handed. Honestly, his tracking and his ability to break an enemy force are beyond comparison.
Everything the guild had gathered on Lee Han.
So why did he come to the guild and ask for help? He doesn't need the likes of us. For a smoother operation? Was that actually true...?
A contrary mind. Suspicion.
It's probably true that he doesn't trust the nobles of the Royal Capital. It also makes sense that a spy is mixed in among them. But that likely isn't the real truth. And the claim that only the guild is safe makes no sense at all.
The guess widened.
Then why is he still cooperating with the guild? Going so far as to leave even his own people behind...
The organizations the man had torn down. The facts the guild had uncovered in a hurry. And, in the end, the journey to Mordred.
...Wait. This?
We've been steered toward Wales. Haven't we?
!!?
Simon nearly screamed. The shock struck that hard; even the back of his skull went numb with it.
And then, in a single instant—
"Sir Lee Han... have you been protecting the guild?"
"What?"
"There is one. In the guild...!"
"......"
"There is, isn't there?! A vam— a blood—"
A sharp smack.
"—!"
"This is why the quick ones are..."
"......"
"No, seriously. You blanked out for ten seconds. How far did you get in that time? Frightening man..."
"......"
"I get that you're smart. Lower your voice and cool your head."
"...Yes. I'm calm."
"Already?"
"This much is nothing."
"...You're something else. Figures. A man like this is exactly why I meant to use you."
"......"
At that confirmation Simon went dizzy all over again. It was as good as a finishing blow—words that drove the truth back into him.
"Where did you catch on? I thought I was being pretty careful."
"...It wasn't anything impressive."
Simon laid out what he had pieced together and admitted, plainly, that he had read the mind behind Lee Han's actions.
"With your ability, Sir Lee Han, you don't need the guild's help. The fact that you came to us anyway is what felt wrong."
"From that alone?"
"Not from that alone. Behavior like that teaches you a great deal."
More precisely, Simon had investigated the man called Lee Han before, and that was why he could infer it at all.
The reason Lee Han had sought the guild's cooperation, and even paid a commission, when there was no profit in it for him. Anyone else would have suspected some malicious scheme against the guild first. But if the man set his mind to it, snapping the guild in half would be easy.
In other words, he had no need to plot, and yet he was cooperating. That left only the possibility that he was shielding the guild from someone.
And the person aiming at the guild now...
"It could only be the monster you're hunting, sir."
"Watch your mouth. Ears are everywhere."
"Don't worry. Even if there are ears, I'll be the only one who dies."
"...You have a habit of being careless with your own body, too."
"I grew up on the street."
"Tsk. Say a thing like that and it takes root."
"Haha. My apologies."
The scolding was not unpleasant, but it lasted only a moment. Simon scrubbed roughly at the sweat-soaked space between his brows and called to him.
"...Sir Lee Han."
"What?"
"If my guess is right, that monster is very likely disguised as one of our guild members. And yet I have never once suspected anyone. Me, of all people."
Simon knew his own ability was far from poor. On this point, even that extraordinary knight would surely agree.
And yet, for all that ability, he still could not picture a single suspicious face.
A man proud of his own talent would usually have turned distrustful here—aren't you the one who's wrong? Simon, instead, succeeded in waking another possibility.
"According to legend, that monster—the race called vampires—possesses countless abilities. Among them, I hear, is the power to manipulate the mind?"
"You...?"
"Perhaps my own mind was tampered with at some point. Hmm. Do you happen to know a high-ranking mage, or a shaman? Someone like that could undo mental manipulation, I should think."
"......"
"W-why are you looking at me like that?"
"Nothing. Just thinking the world has no shortage of talented people."
"...?"
After that, the process was simple.
They obtained a shaman's help. In the course of it he found the traces of real mental manipulation, and they released it. Nothing more.
And the moment it came undone, Simon realized something even more horrific than the fact that a vampire had slipped into the guild.
Namely—
"Made me want to retch, I tell you. Who would have thought the secretary I'd kept for a whole year was a fabricated person from the very beginning."
The fact that he had never hired a secretary at all.
"A man like me would sooner hire a mercenary and drag him around as a guard than use a woman as a secretary. Why? Because this rough guild is too hard a place for a woman to last."
Simon was not a man who looked down on women, but the work had a way of showing you ugly things. Shameful disasters that a woman would be hard-pressed to endure happened all too easily.
So after he became guild-union chairman, he had never kept a woman as a subordinate. If he had, it was only when he truly had no choice, and only on a short hire.
And that same man had employed a woman and made her his secretary?
That was his values smashed to pieces. It was his very personality rewritten. Which was why the vampire disgusted him all the more, and frightened him all the more—because it had manipulated not only his memory, but his values themselves.
"Oh my. I rather liked the guild work. It was fun, in its way."
"From where you sit, bitch, we must have looked cheaper than insects, so of course it wasn't hard on you, you monster."
"...So mean. And here I thought we were getting along, in our own way. Do you have to be so cold?"
"Don't give me that shit, monster. You twist somebody's mind and then you want kind words?! If you're saying that in your right mind, go to a temple this instant and get your head examined. They'll diagnose you with a mental illness."
"......"
Fear was fear. But Simon's fury went beyond even imagination—far enough to overrun instinctive dread and terror.
"You spent a whole year glued to a beautiful woman like me, and... honestly, a thank-you wouldn't kill you."
"!!?"
Was it hopeless, after all, to make a monster understand human feeling?
Far from it—the monster only scolded him. Hansel asked:
"Anyway, Simon. That Mordred Secret Grotto you found. Won't you tell me where it is? I've got business there."
"...You think I'm going to tell you?"
"You'd better. I just got hit with this hot little prank, and I'm still letting you live. Why do you think that is? Because there's still something I need to get out of you."
"......"
"Oh, and a word of advice—don't put your faith in those little brats. Puppies, when you get down to it. And that knight is at the castle, isn't he? You'd do well to remember that in the time it takes him to get from there to here, I can kill you dozens of times over."
On the surface she seemed to be smiling kindly, but an ominous pressure rolled off her as she threatened him. If his life meant nothing to him—no. If he wanted to die while he was still a human being, the wise course was to do as she said.
Simon...
Flick.
"......?"
"Eat this."
He had his middle finger raised. Hansel only blinked, blank.
"...More of a man than you look, aren't you?"
She couldn't fathom what he was trusting, to run his mouth like that. Did he not even care whether he lived?
A hollow laugh escaped her at the sheer absurdity, and she had just decided she would have to handle him roughly when—
Click.
"?"
...something depressed beneath her foot.
"She stepped on it?"
"She stepped on it."
"Yeah. She stepped on it."
"...Run!"
"Yeah!"
"Hop on, mister!"
In the next instant Simon, his face wiped clean as if he had never taunted anyone, and the twin brother and sister who had been nothing but bravado, broke into a dead sprint. Hansel was just wondering why they had suddenly—
Fwoooosh!
"...Again?"
Flame detonated.
BOOOOOOM!!
"...I told that man to bury them in moderation."
Watching the pillar of fire climb in the distance, Lee Han blinked. It was a spectacle. It was also not the sort of spectacle anyone had asked for.
"...Did he plant all hundred of them as mines?"
He had only taught the man the basic principle of a mine. And yet.
"Is this supposed to count as remarkable progress, too...?"
A small, unpleasant worry stirred in him then—that he might just have given birth to the greatest bomb maniac of the age.