A Knight's Valor Holds No Recklessness (15)
The tide of the battle overturned in a single breath.
The shift was so violent that one sentence could have accounted for the whole of the field, and that sentence, spoken plainly, was this.
Glrrk!?
Kehek...!
!!
It was a calamity for the monsters, and nothing else.
The monsters called evil spawn broke in blind panic and had room for nothing but flight. The insect monsters born of the evil god came charging as if they knew no fear, only to shatter and crack apart like shards of ice, over and over, and the rest of the monsters were no different — simply pounded into mush.
The warriors of the North and the watchmen of the Lake, as if to prove themselves the strongest things on the ground, swept the battlefield in every direction and butchered tens of thousands of monsters in an instant.
Enraged, the flying monsters whose specialty was the air tried to fall upon the knights.
Shhk!
Thuk—!
K-keh......
The flying monsters, sure they held the sky and the advantage with it, had their wings torn and their bellies punched through, and dropped straight to the earth.
Unbelievably.
Kiiik?!!
Humans were flying. That breed called knights was flying.
A knight order, shaking a banner embroidered with a crimson eagle and arrows.
There was no mistake. Had they taken the name of rangers rather than knights, they could have called themselves the finest ranger corps in the South — no, on the entire continent — and not a soul would have had grounds to complain.
"...Why is that knight order flying?"
"M-magic?"
"I don't feel any flow of mana at all. What...?"
"????"
The Crimson Eagle Knight Order.
As if to prove that the victors of the battle in the sky were themselves, they ran across the air and slaughtered the flying monsters outright, and went further still, loosing arrows like a bombardment and steadily thinning the monsters on the ground.
Carpet bombing. The words rose unbidden at the sight of the Crimson Eagles, and though their character differed from Galahad's or Lionel's, they were unmistakably ruling a portion of the battlefield.
Of course, they were not the only ones distinguishing themselves.
Shing!
"If you see monsters using distortion abilities, cut them down at once! Not the slightest sense of wrongness is to be missed. Understood!"
"Yes, Grandmaster!"
The swordsmen of Offen.
Theirs was a peculiar house, one without a knight order, yet no one in the kingdom dared slight them. Befitting a house that bore the name of the sword, their true strength came from the countless swordsmen who would throw themselves into the fray for Offen's sake, and from the instructors who remained with the house.
An instructor of Offen, it was said, could match a Senior Knight or a black-grade mercenary in valor and seasoned skill, and they proved the talk was no mere rumor. No matter how troublesome the monster before them, they cleaved it down with overwhelming force. A lesser monster fell to a single swing. Even the giant monsters classed as mid-to-large never took more than five.
Facing the distortion-types — those armed with illusions, brainwashing, and other peculiar abilities — did take a little longer, but in the end the victors were still Offen's swordsmen.
It was an astonishing sight. A single distortion-type was normally enough to eat up an entire day, and yet here such monsters were being put down one-sidedly, as if the swordsmen were handling children. This was precisely why Offen's swordsmen were held higher than Senior Knights or black mercenaries, and it was a depth of strength worthy of the Sword Duke's house.
BOOOOM!!
A little over three hundred knights, making sport of six hundred thousand. It was an unreal sight, the sort that would draw a scolding even on a film set — tone it down — and yet the heat of the battlefield stayed scorching, and a suffocating pressure crushed the body, as if to prove that this was reality without a single lie in it.
"Wh-why are the monsters swarming like this!"
"This is insane!!"
"Senior! Please, help us!"
"Why do we even have to be in a place like this...!?"
...Well. There was also a knight order with lions plainly engraved upon the armor, whose conduct was more pathetic than a cat's.
The Silver Lion Knight Order, the most numerous of the four, had a hundred and fifty gathered, and still they looked utterly wretched, hard-pressed merely to hold the fortress. One could almost wonder whether they belonged on a battlefield at all. Fortunately—
"G-get the medicine over here first!"
"Bring bandages and weapons!"
"Potions! We're short on potions...!"
They might have been a little short on martial power, but the Silver Lions were carrying out the duty given them with everything they had. They were running about as a supply unit rather than a knight order, and yet, in their own way, they were pulling their weight. Ironic, for knights. Even so—
BOOOOM!!
When one considered that on a battlefield this dangerous the only ones who could take charge of supply were not ordinary soldiers, but a knight order that had properly learned Fighting Art, the sight was a fairly positive one.
And a certain great evil spirit, taking all of this in at a single glance from every direction at once—
"What is this? What is happening!?"
The great evil spirit was past mere panic. Her head was spinning. She had been winning. She had been overwhelming them.
Why?
How...!?
"Why are we suddenly losing—!?"
A shriek like a death cry. Inanna could not hide her rage, nor the sense that she had been wronged.
"Why isn't the curse activating!"
Part of why Inanna was thrown was that reinforcements had come to Mordred, of all things. And well they might throw her. Someone coming to Mordred's aid was supposed to be an impossible thing.
"The curse is clearly active, isn't it!?"
Long ago, around the time she was sealed, Inanna had hastily carved several curses into Mordred's land, and the strongest among them was none other than the Curse of Severance.
The Curse of Severance had a single role. It was to cut Mordred — no, the whole of Wales — off from the outside world.
Even Inanna, who thought humans infinitely insignificant, could not deny that the South, a land overflowing with Mystery, might hold beings capable of threatening her. If such beings came to Mordred's aid, it would be a grave crisis for her; she might be struck down before she had recovered her strength. And so, for these past three hundred years, she had poured tremendous effort into maintaining the Curse of Severance above all the rest, and thanks to that Mordred had been forced onto a path of isolation.
That was how powerful the Curse of Severance was.
For example...
Those who come to Mordred's aid meet with sudden, unforeseen incidents or accidents.
Not incidents on the scale of death or plague, but troubles, one after another, that kept anyone from leaving their post on a whim. The harder one tried to ignore those troubles, the greater the incident that followed, until at last a vast calamity came calling.
And so Inanna had never even kept outside help in mind. They absolutely could not come. Coming itself would be impossible.
...Or so it certainly should have been.
"......Why?"
The curse was running, present and ongoing, and still the reinforcements had arrived. Without suffering a single incident or accident.
For Inanna it was a situation past bewilderment and into outright displeasure, a state of affairs her mind could not catch up to. How was a thing like this even possible?
A stabbing throb.
"Right... it's you again!"
But perhaps a god was a god, however rotten. In a single instant Inanna seized upon exactly who had ruined her curse, and her resurrection with it. It was only intuition, yet a god's intuition never erred. It found nothing but the truth.
And so she declared it. The meddler wrecking every plan of hers, every long-cherished wish, even her very resurrection, was none other than—
—that one.
"Hmm..."
Scratching at his ear, Lee Han cocked his head. The itch had come out of nowhere, but the question pushed ahead of it.
"...What is this? Why did so many come?"
He was sure he had told them to send only as many as could actually help. So why were there this many?
...Was the whole lot of them on holiday?
"And what are those White Cat brats doing here? This isn't a place they should show up."
Gigigik!
"...I'm not talking to you."
Lee Han delivered a last, absolute punishment to the nuisance interrupting his thoughts.
CRUNCH!
The Heavenly Bull, mystery of the great evil spirit, thrashed to the very end, but the thrashing meant nothing. Caught in Lee Han's hand, it was crushed where it stood. Not a part of it was whole. The four legs, the ribs, and the horns besides had been gone for a long while already. At the last the Heavenly Bull drove in a headbutt, and Lee Han turned even that final struggle aside as if it were nothing, and crushed the skull. He ground it down to sand so it could not so much as regenerate, and in the next instant—
Fwoosh!
The powder scattered, and began to burn away at speed.
——.
...with those empty eyes fixed on Lee Han until the very end.
"......"
Lee Han did not look away from the Heavenly Bull's eyes. It was only a skeleton, without even a will of its own, and yet the stubborn uprightness of it was not something he could bring himself to dislike—
"...What, you could talk?"
The voice rang inside his skull, and Lee Han blinked. This bastard had been pretending, all this time, to be a mute fool.
"...That is not so, warrior. I was merely controlled by that demon. But now, as I at last depart the world of the living, I have gained complete freedom. Ho ho. To take freedom, and not bondage, by the ending of a life — an ironic life it was."
"......"
"Warrior. You who freed the soul of one who had no choice but to live unfree. Please, defeat that demon. If it is you, it will be possible."
"If you're going, just go. Why are you sticking me with some burden?"
"Ho ho, a burden? As if you were the sort to feel such a thing. A wise warrior, not half so foolish as your face."
"...You little shit?"
"Ahaha! May you seize the victory."
Srrr...
With that hearty laugh as his last word, the Heavenly Bull, Gugalanna, burned completely away and vanished, as if nothing in existence had ever felt so refreshing.
Lee Han, who had watched until nothing remained—
"...Drops a burden on me and goes, that bastard."
He looked at the enormous bull horn now left upon his hand, shrugged, and came down off the "mountain."
...A mountain made of thirty thousand monsters.