Episode 62 — What Cause Does a Knight Have to Fight? (6)
Looking back on it now—though he was only admitting it after the fact—even before he came to Wales, Lee Han had already been certain a sex fiend was lodged inside the guild. A vampire.
The current had been filthy.
Through the guild and the twins he had chased the vampire's traces and torn down organization after organization, great and small. Sweeping them aside, he could not shake the sense that he himself had been made into a cleaner. His guess was that the damned pervert had meant to use him to mop up every mess the bastard had splattered in his wake.
Infuriating. And yet, even after he noticed, he had let himself be used. There were three reasons. One: the bastard might run. It galled him, but if that thing made up its mind to flee, the odds of catching it were poor. Two: civilians might get hurt along the way—the knockoff Hao Sect Leader among them. There was the chance they had been brainwashed as well, and a greater disaster might follow. He could not deny he had let himself be driven along so the damage would not spread.
But the last reason—the most decisive, in a way—was what had finally turned his feet toward Wales.
What's in there?
Unease. More precisely, Lee Han had come all the way to the margrave's domain because he could not rest without knowing what had been hidden in Mordred to make the vampire act like that.
Why would that thing put up with a nuisance like this?
The reason the sex fiend had lured him was not hard to guess. Send him to Wales, and Simon would naturally follow; then the vampire could borrow Simon's extraordinary mind to find where Mordred's secret grotto lay. By now the schemer was probably getting lynched by the Scarlet Eagle for the very tricks he had tried to pull.
Even so, Lee Han took less pleasure in the sex fiend being caught in his own scheme than he took a nagging over what, exactly, Wales contained. No—grated was the better word. It clearly was not his affair, and yet the itch said that if he ignored it now he would regret it later. Someone might well ask why he would grind himself through that kind of hell over a feeling so absurd.
I ignored a grate like this once, and it cost me dearly.
In his previous life, to be exact. Which was to say...
Was it like the day I died?
You must not look upon an ember and pretend you did not see it.
It was the last lesson his previous life had left him, and even now, long after, he had not forgotten it. How much regret came of ignoring a trivial irritation.
Ganok Douglas de Mordred.
Former Margrave of Mordred; the knight who now kept the captain's seat of the Hundred Ghost Shield, the order of ghosts who bore shields; and, by the look of him, grandfather to the pink-haired brat. He opened his mouth.
"Have you ever heard that the direct line of Mordred possesses the ability to handle ghosts?"
"I've heard they have an unusual ability."
"Then this will be a simple conversation."
A thin, keen hum.
"...First I've learned that a person's eyes can shine like that."
"Oh ho. You can see this? Uncommon senses. Then again, what could a knight who has touched Intent not do? Heh heh."
The old knight let the admiration out, but Lee Han found those eyes—still burning violet—far stranger than anything about himself.
"It is called the Spirit Eye. One may see ghosts, and it makes speech with them possible. Further still, one may subdue them."
"A troublesome ability, then."
"...Sharp. You put your finger on that at a stroke?"
The old knight was impressed in a different sense than when the Spirit Eye itself had been seen through. Most who heard of it cried how amazing it was, what a broken power, and sent admiration and envy. This young knight seemed to pierce, all at once, to the trouble the Spirit Eye actually carried.
"My head starts hurting from the part where you can talk to ghosts. Ghosts aren't all the nice ones, are they. Plenty of tiresome demands—untie my grudge, carry my story to my family. Or threats, until ordinary life is a misery. Ah, and before ordinary life, it'd be a trial from the time you were a baby. An age when it's a question whether you can even look at pretty things, and what you're seeing are ill omens."
"...Heh heh. Were you a peddler, I should be investing my entire fortune in you this very moment. How is it you know so well?"
"Isn't it rather too obvious?"
"Hah! Obvious, he says..."
Those who came to know of the Spirit Eye thought only of its merits and never spared a thought for the flaws. Insight, of course—and a depth that knew how to turn another man's words over.
Not the surface. He can see the underside hidden beneath.
Splendid. Among knights there were plenty who never used their heads, and here was a rare one, not only strong but keen.
Truly...
"I could almost wish to trade him for you."
"Master! I respect you! Your talent may be a shallow puddle beside mine, but this respect is sincere!!"
"...Talk to him, and all I get is my gut bursting."
"Are you hurt somewhere!!"
"......Just shut your mouth."
"Yes, sir!!"
"......"
Worlds apart from that gut-bursting disciple, and a sigh laced with lament escaped Ganok of its own accord.
Why, of all people, did I take a wretch like that for a disciple, only to suffer at this age...
A few hours earlier—when Lee Han had first entered the grotto—monsters had still been pouring out. Hellhounds, of course, and a great many plant-type and undead monsters; even a high-grade monster like Orthrus, who was even now being hauled along with the group, had shown itself. And yet now, strangely...
Silence. As if nothing at all stood around them.
But Lee Han felt it: the presence of monsters secretly watching him from every side. They could not easily rush in. They only held their ground. Unless a monster was clever, as Orthrus was, it charged the moment it saw a human. Why were these holding back?
The answer came from old knight Ganok's own mouth.
"The spirits I have subdued are keeping the monsters from drawing near. It only takes upon the weaker ones, but it serves well enough. It is useful against people as well. Weigh down the shoulders, send a nightmare—one can force a man's condition into disorder."
"Versatile, too."
"It is hardly omnipotent. It does not work at all upon a knight tempered to your degree, nor upon a high-grade monster. The stronger the mind and the self, the less a spirit's power can touch them."
"...Should you be telling me that? Sounds like important information."
Houses that possessed a Mystery naturally tried to conceal their abilities however they could. Far from concealing his, Ganok was laying the information out in the open, and Lee Han found it baffling. Ganok paid it no mind. If anything, he looked refreshed.
"What use is there in keeping even a trivial ability like this a secret?"
"And if I sell it?"
"I should be grateful if you did. Then I might feel I had repaid even a little of what I owe."
"......"
He piled another spoonful on. Just as Lee Han was wondering whether this was humor, or whether the old man was toying with him—
"But you are not that sort of knight. You are the diligent sort, who earns his money by honest work. Hmm. Is a woodshop's wage really so fine?"
"...Looking at it now, I was a fool to worry about you people. You're stripping my information bare."
Watching the old knight pull his secrets out with the Spirit Eye, or whatever it was, Lee Han felt sour—and, at the same time, impressed. He seemed to be seeing the Spirit Eye's true worth.
An invisible informant. That's what it is.
From who a man was, down to every trivial and secret thing...!
A damned headache of an ability, that.
Turn it into an enemy, and you would never sleep easy again. No other sort of power quite like it.
"If it displeased you, I apologize. If I may offer an excuse, it is not that I sought to know. The spirits at your back chatter as they please, and in listening, one comes to know as a matter of course."
"Mm. So you can hear the stray ghosts talking behind my back."
"Something of the sort. Hmm. How about preparing an exorcism, even now?"
"An exorcism. Interesting, but..."
...shouldn't we see to the guests first?
No sooner had the rest of it formed than presences gathered with a sudden weight.
He had thought it odd. Ghosts or not, the monsters were keeping entirely too far back.
The reek of blood was so thick they lost their nerve.
Thud. Thoom.
A heavier peal than when Felix had first appeared rang through the grotto, one after another, and a bleak force swept the surroundings in a single pass, like a frost-wind before a winter dawn.
Crack.
Frost actually formed across the ground.
"We were so late they came out to meet us, it seems. Really. What was there to worry about."
"...Is that a Mordred ability as well?"
"Ha ha. A kind of application. A usable mount, wouldn't you say."
"That's a bit past 'usable'..."
Watching the knight order's outline draw nearer, Lee Han thought he understood why Mordred's order bore the name of a hundred ghosts.
Rattle. Rattle.
The heavy sound was not coming from men. It was the mass of the horses the knights rode, and that mass looked to be twice any ordinary warhorse. Horses of tremendous size, and anything but ordinary.
"Hieee!"
Made of bone.
The name Ghost Horse suited them well.
The armor's all bone, too. Monster bone for the material? It would not be monster bone alone. Sinew and muscle looked to have gone into it as well, and the whole of it was—how to put it. A reinforced exoskeleton? Armor that called to mind the cyberware from a cyberpunk game he had played in his previous life.
...The hell? Why are these guys the only ones in a different genre?
He had taken it for a night parade of a hundred ghosts. Seeing them suddenly clad in biomechanical exoskeletons, Lee Han felt his grip on reality slip a long way.
And yet...
"Hiiieee...!"
"What is that horror!?"
"A man bearing an evil spirit that tremendous!"
"What in the world did the Captain bring with him...?"
"N-now, don't be afraid, Silvesta, my comrade. You are a brave horse, are you not..."
"...Hiing."
He was the one who ought to have been afraid, and yet somehow he was the one who had frightened a knight order in living cyberware. In that reversed situation, unease began to creep over Lee Han.
Did I really wipe out that many sorcerers?
Hmm.
Doesn't feel like that many.
Like a man who could not remember how many loaves of bread he had eaten, Lee Han tilted his head.