A Knight's Valor Knows No Recklessness (1)
The first to catch that change were none other than the trout leaping up the waterfall.
Thrash!
As if seized by a sudden convulsion, the trout fainted in a mass. It was an abrupt collapse. They came to almost at once, only to thrash all the harder, desperate to clear the falls by whatever means they had.
They were not even salmon. Anyone might have wondered why they were carrying on like that, but the strangeness was not confined to creatures that lived in the water.
A rush of wings!
Birds beat away in panic. Deer and wild boar that denned in the forest moved in a desperate hurry, and so did the wolf packs. Deer, pigs, rabbits, and foxes ran right alongside the wolves, and the wolves did not so much as look at them, as if they could not spare even the time it would take to hunt.
Flesh-eaters, a wolf pack, crushing their own instinct and traveling at full strength: the sight was alien to the point of wrongness. It was as ominous as ants abandoning the ground before an earthquake, a wretched struggle driven by the instinct of living things.
Rumble!
At last a vast bank of storm cloud took shape overhead, and thunder rolled inside it, deep and furious, as if heaven itself were enraged. Even people who had not yet noticed the animals' strange behavior looked up, and their faces slowly hardened. Humans might fall short of beasts in wild sense, but they had a wild sense of their own.
"What is this?"
What was trying to happen?
…Something ill-omened was about to begin.
The day before, he had heard it from the elder who styled herself a maid: little time remained before the Great Evil Spirit's Seal broke. One reason Lee Han had driven the House of Mordred so hard, scolding them as if to hurry them along, was that he simply had no leisure to wander about searching for where the Great Evil Spirit might be. Less than two days remained before the Seal came undone. When was he supposed to go looking?
…And yet the House of Mordred, who ought to have known this better than anyone, did not look urgent. It was not that they had room to spare. It was more that a long stretch of time still seemed to remain.
Tok.
"They call it the Jewel Hourglass."
"…An artifact?"
"Yes. We obtained it prepared for Mordred's finances to stagger under the cost."
"…"
"Do you see anything unusual?"
"The powder coming down. It feels a little sluggish, doesn't it?"
"Correct."
The great hourglass, of an unusual make in which jewel-dust took the place of sand, looked complicated in its very structure. It was a spiral hourglass. Even at a minimum, the dust ought to have taken a minute longer to fall than in any ordinary glass. But what was happening now was not a delay of a minute. Five minutes had passed, and still it had not fallen.
He wondered if the thing was broken. Then he caught the jewel-dust stirring by the finest degree, and judged that it was not. And sure enough—
"The magic the Jewel Hourglass holds is a single thing. It reports, exactly, the time at a place the user designates. It reckons the twenty-four hours of a day without an error of a hair."
"…But flowing this slowly, it looks like it wouldn't finish falling even after three days, let alone twenty-four hours."
"Then this is correct."
"Huh?"
"You said that exactly five years had passed outside since we vanished, didn't you?"
"I did."
"Then this hourglass is accurate."
"…"
"It earns its price after all. It has been telling the correct time."
"Don't tell me…?"
For a moment he needed time to take in those words. Then Lee Han understood what they meant, and he went a step further.
"This space. Is time flowing slowly here?"
"Less slowly than scrambled. No. We cannot even tell whether time flows at all."
"…"
"Did you know? In the five years we have spent here, our family and the soldiers look exactly as they did five years ago. We have not aged in the slightest."
"…"
"A servant who was once a renowned scholar of the Academy says it comes of a spatial distortion, born when the several currents of power in this Hidden Grotto react together. In short, this place is no different from a prison of time."
"How long have you actually held out in here?"
"I don't know. I don't. I forgot living by questions like that a long time ago."
"Ha…"
Lee Han understood, then, why the soldiers and the others had looked so strangely bleak when he first met them. Trapped in a space where they could not even tell how time passed, reckoning the hours by a single hourglass, it was a mercy that all they had come away with was depression. Anyone else might well have gone mad, and no one would have called it strange.
So that was why their knights stood at that level, and why their armaments were so far along.
He had wondered how their weapons could outpace the royal army's, and how the quality of their knights and the rest of their troops could be excellent to a man. There had been a reason. Perhaps they had not spent five years in this place, but twice that. Someone else might have called it a fortuitous encounter, or luck. Lee Han counted it a curse as well.
…One of the idle gripes he had heard most often in his army days was that the Defense Ministry's clock ran slow. Here, it truly did. Not a term of service measured in two years. Decades. And not even leave, leisure, or any scrap of ordinary life to be had.
…Hideous. Depression would take you dozens of times over.
If this was not hell, what was? Had their families not been held hostage, desertion would have been the least surprising thing in the world.
"Which is why I am all the more grateful to you. Thanks to the news of the outside you brought, the soldiers are brimming with life. They have found their strength again, for once."
And so—
"Then I'll have to pay for it."
A soft rush of air.
"Take it. With that, you should be able to reach the Great Evil Spirit. That vermin."
"…I don't have any change."
Lee Han snatched the hourglass out of the air and drew his brows together. A few letters passed back and forth, and the thing was far too precious to take in return. But Margrave Cain shook his head.
"If anything, we are the ones short of coin. It is all we have to give."
"Is it all right to hand over something like this? You need it if you're going to know the time at all."
"It does not matter now. If what you say is true, little time remains before the Great Evil Spirit's Seal comes undone, and once that happens even the most precious artifact is useless."
"You sure… you'll be all right?"
The question carried more than one meaning. They must have burned to bring the Great Evil Spirit down with their own hands. Was it truly all right to entrust him with the one thing required to reach it?
"It cannot be helped. We cannot leave our posts as things stand. If the troops vacate this place, the monsters will climb all the way to the surface in a breath."
"…Then what were you planning to do about the Great Evil Spirit?"
"My father and a few of the knights meant to form an expedition."
"That's elder abuse, isn't it?"
"It was what Father wished. How was I to stop him?"
He gave a bitter smile. The line made plain that the expedition had already sparked more than one heated argument, and the winner would have been the old knight.
"They say there's no parent who loses to their child. Around here, seems there's no child who wins against a parent."
"The sorrow of the weaker."
But the situation had changed. Here stood a man who longed to fight the Great Evil Spirit more than anyone, a man who might be stronger than the old knight himself. Not merely strong. A knight who carried a great pride.
And so.
"It cannot have been half a day since I first laid eyes on you, and yet it is strange. So brief a meeting, and still I feel I can trust you."
"I don't. Not at all."
"Heh."
"Well. I'll take the favor and go."
"Leaving already?"
"I'm the sort who shows up thirty minutes early."
"Diligent."
"…"
"…I pray for your fortune in battle."
"You too."
That was the end of it. Perhaps this would be the last sight they had of each other, and even so the talk between the two men was far too dry. It might have been that their temperaments were too dry, or simply that they were peculiar men. One thing, at least, was clear. Trust in each other showed through.
They had not known each other for half a day, but for men what mattered more than the time spent together was how much of their true hearts they had shown. In that sense, if they were not yet friends, they were plainly something very near it. Different in station and in age, they still looked like close companions.
And so they—
Boom!
"M-my lord! Forgive me for coming in without courtesy! Th-that is…!"
"…Calm yourself. What is it?"
"An urgent report from the scouting party! Th-they say a Monster Wave is expected in three hours!"
"…What?"
Margrave Cain's face hardened fast. Not half a day had passed since the day's wave ended, and now another Monster Wave? Even if the Great Evil Spirit was calling monsters forth, they had killed just as many. There should have been no summoning again so soon. It was only natural that he should cry out that he could not believe it. And yet—
"A-and also…"
The report was not finished.
"Small monsters, one hundred and twenty thousand. Medium, sixty thousand. And twenty thousand large monsters confirmed. In all, two hundred thousand monsters summoned, they… they say…"
"…"
Even the messenger trailed off, as if the words in his own mouth had no sense of reality, and whatever ease had been in Cain's expression was gone. Two hundred thousand. It was no exaggeration to call that a great host, a number to match what a nation might field with its full strength. Mordred's warriors did not fear even ten thousand monsters, but before a figure as unreal as two hundred thousand they were simply stunned.
But—
"…A-and also, the scouting party reports that they have confirmed the being leading the two hundred thousand monsters, they… they say…"
"…Don't tell me."
"Yes. That thing."
Grind.
For the first time the soldier clenched his teeth and let his rage show. It was a disrespectful sight, but even a soldier could not govern his feelings, so fierce was his hatred of that existence.
"The vermin. The Great Evil Spirit has come out of the Seal, my lord."
"…"
For a moment Margrave Cain wore an expression beyond describing. It was as if a vast wave had struck him all at once and left him floundering. But Cain was not so weak a lord as to show a shameful face before a subordinate, and he was an actor who knew how to stand firm before any situation. He barely hid what he felt. The turmoil in his heart, he could not restrain, and his fist closed.
Then, in that instant—
Cain flinched. His head turned at once toward the voice, and so he saw.
"…Ha."
It was a mutter that went past a lack of tension and into sheer fighting spirit, and Cain let out an empty laugh before he knew it. Because it was a mutter that drained the tension even from him.