A Knight Fears People More Than Ghosts
The arrows came down. Or was it truer to say they were being shot? They were loosed with him dead in their sights, and as Hansel faced them he hurriedly hauled his armor up over the crown of his head.
That judgment proved nothing short of wise. The shafts struck in a rattling storm, and one of them punched through the bone armor, through the exoskeleton. It did not pierce all the way. Even so, the mere fact that it had bitten into a vampire's bone at all was staggering. Not even the blast of a Flame Scroll had managed that.
More staggering still, the threat did not end with a single arrow. They were coming by the dozens, and little by little they tore Hansel's exoskeleton apart.
"Doing something awfully cute, aren't you?"
Hansel muttered it under his breath and scoffed. The scoff was a lie. His pupils shook without mercy, unable to hide what he actually felt. He could not help it. An exoskeleton that had never once been breached by any means was coming apart.
Even so.
Regenerate, and that's the end of it!
He brushed the thought aside. Yes. Regenerate, and it was over. He was a vampire, after all: an immortal who regenerated without limit and did not die. However they attacked, there was simply no world in which he—
A dark, filthy trickle ran from his nose.
"……Huh?"
The instant the black blood flowed, his head spun as if he were dead drunk, and his body trembled. Even through the dizziness, Hansel caught the cause at once.
Poison?
The symptoms of poisoning. It was exactly that, and even with his head reeling he was struck dumb. An immortal, poisoned? A stray cat barking like a dog would have been more believable.
The blood kept coming.
"…This is actually real?"
Believe reality or not, the poisoning was already declaring itself in earnest, and a thin edge of urgency touched him.
"I really shouldn't keep playing."
Ignoring the arrows that poured like rain, Hansel chose to break straight through. He had no idea what trick they were using, but taking any more of those shafts would be the height of stupidity. Better to smash through and finish them.
"Don't think you're the only ones who can hit from a distance…!"
Blood erupted from his body, honed as sharp as a hedgehog's quills, and shot into the air just as it was.
Blood Thorn
Vampire blood, once clotted, could punch through even iron plate by itself. Let them fly the empty sky all they liked. They could not block this—
A reeking liquid sheeted his body. Oil. And it was not mere oil. It was oil that caught fire all too well, and catch it did.
"K-knights resort to tricks like this?"
An arrow crowned with a live ember flew true for him. Even watching the inferno eat his own blood, Hansel could only stare, dumbfounded.
"…You're playing this game like complete shit."
"I'll take the compliment."
He had ended up praising his enemy.
When an ordinary knight order held an entrance trial, it looked at the basics in nearly every case: horsemanship with the lance, a test of stamina, the level of one's sword. Tristan was famous for examining candidates in a manner unlike any other order.
For example.
"We'll give you a single dagger. Bring down twenty wild boars without Fighting Art or any other weapon. Time… yes. We'll give you two days."
"I beg your pardon?"
Hunting.
"We'll give you a bow and three arrows. With only those, capture a second-class wanted criminal—murderers and violent offenders. Oh, and don't kill them. Take them alive. Simply killing them would be too easy, wouldn't it?"
"???"
Arrest.
"Here is a week's basic rations. On this alone, survive in the forest for a month."
"H-how?"
"Well."
"…You've lost your damn mind."
"Swearing is grounds for a deduction."
Survival.
Such was the entrance trial of the Red Blood Eagle, conducted in a peculiar fashion unlike any other knight order. Several theories explained the oddity of the test. The most credible held that the first head of House Tristan had been a knight who came up from the hunters.
Knights who passed, however, came to understand something as a matter of course.
"There's nothing in the world you can't do."
"And no monster you can't kill."
"Agreed."
That they had become superb knights and, at the same time, hunters.
From the moment they joined, they had no choice but to become greater hunters still. Tristan held countless stores of hunting knowledge accumulated over hundreds of years. Lore of hunting monsters. The traits of every mystery-race. Even the methods for handling venom from monstrosities that belonged in legend.
The descendants of the first Tristan—who had become a knight of the Round Table by archery and the hunt alone—had piled up knowledge and ways to use it in order to surpass their founder. It granted them a strength of a different color, one no knight of the South could imitate. Some looked down on the Red Blood Eagles as lesser than Lionel or Galahad. The Red Blood Eagles could say it without shame.
Even if that someone were—
"The Imoogi Venom is taking nicely."
"First time I've used it…. How did the seniors of the old days even haul a poison this dangerous all the way to the South?"
"Must have wanted to try hunting an immortal. Who knows."
Even an immortal.
It was a poison extracted, long ago, from a peculiar bird. On the eastern continent, had they not called it the Imoogi? The venom of a bird styled king of poisons—the Venom King, and by other such names. The records went so far as to say that even immortal-type monsters, once poisoned by it, had been reduced to a handful of bloody water.
Three hundred years ago, the Red Blood Eagles who learned that such a venom existed crossed mountains and seas and succeeded in bringing the Imoogi Venom home. Studying it, and producing it by artificial means, had taken some fifty years. All of it solely to prepare a countermeasure against immortals.
"Enough chatter, all of you. The enemy is not neutralized yet."
"Yes, Sir Vale!"
He was vice-captain of the Red Blood Eagle Knight Order, though at present he carried out the captain's role in truth. With cold eyes he watched the vampire burn. It would have been pleasant if this much killed the thing. Power surged instead.
As expected. This won't be enough?
Before coming to this place, Vale had read the records on vampires. None had shown themselves in the four hundred years since a certain point, and the accounts of that age said they could not be killed by any means—that sunlight alone was the answer. But.
It's moving in broad daylight. Which means even that sunlight is no longer its enemy.
He sensed at once that this was a far more troublesome foe than the vampires written down in the records. Even so.
Well. A fine chance to test what four hundred years of records have piled up.
Vale decided to spend the opportunity to his heart's content.
A tremendous impact erupted, with the vampire at its center.
"Sir Vale!"
"I see it."
The vampire was stirring some unwholesome change, and Vale ordered the arrows loosed. Obsidian, coated by a special method, with fighting-energy laid over the shafts. The edges were keen enough, but it was the penetrating force that boasted a power past all improvement.
And yet blood-red stalks surged up as if to snarl do not ignore me, and batted the arrows aside. The stalk was not one. As though multiplying, countless of them burst through the earth.
"A vampire's tentacles…."
They looked to be tentacles kneaded from the vampire's blood and exoskeleton, and they looked like the vampire's hidden hand. But was that, too, a hasty judgment?
The ground split with a wet rupture. What came up through the soil was not only the vampire's tentacles. There were also the wretched remains of those who had failed to return to earth, shrieking as they came.
"…Ghouls."
Ghouls. Monsters born of corpses, or of living humans, that had absorbed a vampire's blood. According to the records they ordinarily possessed five times a human's strength, and were known to carry a potent corpse-poison. And the number of such ghouls was, at a glance—
A vast, hollow roar rolled out of the host.
"Ten thousand. No. Closer to twenty thousand."
They poured forth in such numbers that no one could guess where they had been hiding. Truly…
"Playing the game like shit."
"Thanks for the compliment."
The words he himself had spoken a moment ago were returned to him in full, and the detestable monster's voice came through.
"I've heard a great deal about Tristan. You're quite something. But for a knight order, aren't your methods a little cruel?"
Shielded by the tentacles, the vampire hid its form inside something like an egg sac and spread a bewitching voice. A voice somehow sticky and unpleasant. Vale's brow furrowed of its own accord.
"What fool would fight with honor against a monster like you?"
Mental Manipulation
To the very end the monster was using a loathsome trick, and Vale laid his contempt bare without limit. A creature that did not even know honor had dared this filthy stunt, imagining it could manipulate knights. He felt a sharp contempt at that, and anger with it.
"I will see you erased!"
"Oh my, how awful. A man who gets that persistent isn't popular, teehee."
"…Hearing a man say it only makes it more revolting."
"You son of a bitch!"
"……It reminds me of something Sir Lee Han said."
Steel clicked. Vale quietly took up spear and sword.
"The truth hurts, doesn't it?"
Keeping up the fight from the air with arrows would not have been bad. But—
"It wouldn't be bad if we ourselves were loosed like arrows."
Vale had not even given the signal, yet the knights had long since raised their lances and were charging the ground in the same breath as he did.
The target was the vampire, and a great host of twenty thousand ghouls. For someone, no doubt, a foe to despair of. But—
"Better than sparring Sir Lee Han, wouldn't you say?"
"Agreed."
"Ten times better than fighting that man."
"Puhahaha!"
They could laugh with everything they had. Under the name of sparring, they had always fought an opponent harsher than that creature.
It was the prelude to a great battle that would one day leave its mark upon the history of Wales.
A deep rumble. The ground heaved.
"…They starting a war out there?"
Lee Han blinked at the quake, then promptly decided an earthquake was nothing to fuss over. Whether a war broke out beyond these walls or not, he, for the moment—
Something slammed into him.
Grrrrrl!
"…What kind of mutt are you supposed to be?"
Graaaang!
"A Chihuahua?"
Because it seemed he was going to have to start with a wrestling match against a two-headed dog.