The Knights and the Night of the Bonfire (2)
The back of his head prickled.
"Mm."
Not in any physical sense. These days it would take a power drill to make the back of his head actually sting, and under ordinary circumstances he had no business feeling a prickle at all. It prickled anyway, and the reason was simple enough.
Why are they like that?
Eyes. Eyes resting on him without a blink.
They were not even sneaking their looks. Stares drove in from every side, open and unashamed, and Lee Han felt the weight of them settle on him. He was not a man who enjoyed being watched, nor one who fed on other people's interest. He did not savor loneliness either. He was only an ordinary fellow chasing an ordinary life, and so—
Four hundred... no. Feels like a thousand of them are looking at nobody but me.
A thousand gazes gathering in one place was bound to wear a man down. Mordred's troops, faces he already knew, had been joined by the knights who came as reinforcements, and every one of them was looking at him. Honest to a fault, at that point it hardly mattered whether you liked attention or hated it. You would sweat.
"Spearman. Let me ask you one thing."
"My name is Lark, you ruffian."
"Sure. My name is Lee Han. Spearman."
Lark had no answer for that.
"I'm not picking a fight. I just have a question."
"A question?"
"Yeah. Why have those people been staring at me like that?"
Again, nothing.
"It isn't only now, either. Even while I was mowing the monsters down, I could feel eyes on me the whole time."
Still nothing.
"Some of them I've never met in my life. Why are they looking at me like I'm a problem?"
"...You did all that, and you hoped not to draw the eye?"
"Huh?"
"If you bloomed a flower that enormous and still wished people would pay you no mind, then it is your conscience I ought to doubt, ruffian."
"...Ah. So that was it."
All that commotion over that?
Lee Han looked out across the distance, where the lotuses were still drifting on the air—no, not a lotus. A whole field of them. A water plant, blooming out of bare earth: a sight that made no sense at all. They were only flowers sprung under the influence of his Intent, which was to say they were not real flowers. They were also a sight that would not fade until the wraith's soul had been broken down completely.
What were they, then? A return of life? The wraith had stolen the strength of countless lives, and now that strength was being given back to nature. The field would dwindle by degrees, and at some moment the light would die.
Except—
A deep hum rolled out of the horn, low and endless.
Until that horn wore away, the wraith's suffering would not end.
It was only instinct, but Lee Han did not believe the wraith would vanish simply because the flowers lost their light. Between the horn the bull had left behind and the power of the Sacred Relic called the Star Song, the thing would likely keep its form and writhe in endless pain upon this land. Instinct alone, yes. Even so.
Mine tends to be right.
Trusting, with no small pride, that his instincts usually were, Lee Han took his eyes off the lotuses.
"But what is that, anyway?"
Lark did not answer. Lee Han was still only asking, honestly puzzled.
So what? What about it was supposed to be marvelous?
"I'll grant you it's a flower you don't often see in the South. That's all there is to it, isn't it? Unbelievable. They hand over every scrap of attention for nothing."
"...You are saying something ill-omened."
"Ill-omened, my ass. Spearman, think for a second. There are spellcasters out there who flip the ground over. What's so amazing about that?"
"That is... yes. Certainly...?"
"Right?"
As expected of a man who had suffered the same four-hundred-year-rotten spellcaster, his comprehension was excellent. There were mages who dropped meteors, overturned the earth, and raised waterspouts. All Lee Han himself had managed was to kit himself out with an item and exorcise a wraith.
I went through the whole strategy guide. What kind of person can't even do that much?
What he had done was something anyone could do, provided they had the will to see it through.
Lark was glaring.
"And why are you looking at me like that?"
"Hm. Watching you this way forces me to reflect upon myself. Is this how others have been looking at me?"
"?"
"Hah. They say there is a thing called mirror therapy. This must be precisely it."
"...?"
Why was this great lump of a man picking a fight out of nowhere?
Three hundred thousand monsters had been annihilated.
However strong the knights might be, a number that vast should have taken not three hours but three days and three nights, and even then they might only just have finished the work. It was no exaggeration to say heaven had lent a hand. Luck had followed them—no, not luck. Inevitability. And because of it, the horde had come down with ease.
A clear tone rang. The Star Song, which purified evil and drove back demons, weakened the monsters without limit. Then the leader vanished—the wraith that had, in practice, summoned the monsters and mingled them—and from that moment the monsters destroyed themselves before the knights so much as needed to lift a hand. They tangled together and fell to hunting and being hunted.
"A Monster Wave is rare for a reason. Monsters, in truth, cannot cooperate. Unless a king of their own is born, or some overwhelmingly powerful monster seizes control of them, there is no rabble more hopeless than that."
The old knights nodded, as if this were only the natural order of things. Even beasts of the same kind turned hostile and attacked one another. Monsters went further. When one creature differed from the next, hostility was not enough; their instinct was to exterminate. Inanna's Fear and her domination of the mind had pressed that instinct down, but whether from the rebound of everything so long suppressed, or from the unprecedented power dwelling in the Star Song, the slaughter among the monsters themselves grew savage. Past a certain point their numbers fell faster by their own claws than by anything the knights were doing.
However much they hated their own kind, hostility toward humankind ought to have been the first instinct of all. How were they holding even that down?
In the next instant, the knights understood that as well.
"Aging? Well. A demon's power does not trouble itself to tell friend from foe."
"They forced the creatures' strength upward and drove them through mutation into a higher form. A price was only to be expected."
Equivalent Exchange. Every power exacts a cost. The monsters that had evolved without cease beneath Inanna's Mystery took the whole of that reaction upon themselves and died a natural death. Their lives simply ran out, and they dropped where they stood. Even the way they were killing one another was surely a last struggle to survive: devour kin, or some sturdier monster, and wring out a little more life by force. Monsters or not, it was a wretched thing. Almost pitiable.
"Ah! Don't ruin the hides!"
"Mm. That one's claws and tendons are usable. Shame to waste them."
"Take the grizzly's liver and gallbladder, without fail. Eat those alone and your tonic for the year is done."
"We have to draw the living blood from the trolls and the ogres. Do you have any idea what that's worth?"
"I know, I know."
Truly, how pitiful did a thing have to be before the tears started running out of a man's mouth?
And so the monsters were, at present, annihilated. A shout of victory would have been entirely justified.
The knights kept their silence.
No. It would be truer to say they were watching someone's mood.
Whose?
"Hah... uh..."
"We won... we did win, didn't we?"
"They aren't... they aren't coming again, are they?"
The six hundred and thirty warriors of Mordred, who still could not believe in their own victory, or in the reality set before them.
They could not accept that they had won. The daze on their faces was plain to see. Outside this place, those six hundred and thirty had been gone for little more than five years. Inside it, where Inanna's power had twisted the flow of time, they had fought for decades. Thousands of battles. More than ten thousand. For men such as those, the notion that this single fight had brought decades of war to its end was simply not a thing they could believe. It felt as if they ought to be making ready for the next battle even now. So they were neither glad nor roused. They were only bewildered, like children who had lost the road.
"...Wretched."
The veteran commanders of an older time felt their eyes sting just looking at them. They knew that feeling of having nowhere left to go. You win, and still you are convinced the next battle is waiting. No. Their hearts had worn down so far that they no longer even recognized victory when it stood in front of them. They had lived too long amid blood and the smell of gunpowder. Accepting what was real would take a very long time. The old soldiers pitied them for it: men whose feelings were still astray, with no place to settle.
Then—
"Hey. Your Highness the Crown Princess."
A clear voice cut straight through the quiet.
"...Were you addressing me?"
"Is there another crown princess here?"
"...It is unfamiliar as well, hearing you address me with courtesy. Heh."
"When someone offers you the courtesy, just take it."
"Hoho."
A conversation between a man and a woman that had no business in that stillness. Light to the point of play, and yet no one there could find fault with it. Small wonder. One of them was a princess of Pendragon. The other—
"We don't actually need every last person here for the cleanup, do we?"
—was, by any honest reckoning, the foremost contributor on this field, the knight at the heart of the victory. Who was going to click their tongue at him, or pick a quarrel?
Even setting that aside, a princess and a knight speaking together so lightly had a certain unreality about it, and that alone kept people from cutting in. Their daze made no difference. The two of them simply went on.
"Hmm. And what do you mean by that?"
"I'm just asking. There are already plenty of lofty personages about. No need for that many officers in charge of the ground."
"...You are not wrong."
"Then let's send those gentlemen on their way. Quickly."
"Oh?"
"Do you agree, or don't you?"
"...I suspect I am about to be shown something amusing again."
"I'll take that as a yes."
What was that conversation even about? They had heard the knight and the princess from a few steps away and still could not follow a word of it. The knight, as if permission were all he required, went straight to the people of Mordred.
"You there. Don't stand scattered. Gather up. We'll finish this in one go."
"...Me as well?"
"Quickly."
"...??"
Rude enough to set even the Margrave moving. The Margrave obeyed like a gentle sheep. Somehow, it felt as if he ought to listen.
And so—
"Listen carefully. No resisting. I'm trying to send you home safe, so just take it quietly. Understood?"
"?"
"And don't thank me. Thank the little mage chick who lives next door to me. She sent this along as a gift."
"??"
"Well. To put it simply..."
The parchment ripped.
"These are express discharge papers."
Express Discharge
Water-aspected mana erupted in a blinding flood, vast enough to rival an Archmage.
"What—!"
Cain clenched his eyes against the enormous blaze of light. A magic scroll, here, out of nowhere? He was struck dumb. If this was a joke, it had gone too far, and he meant to say so—
Chirp. Chirp.
"...Huh?"
The moment he opened his eyes, the will to protest left him. Cain and the others were, this time, truly struck senseless. They had no choice in the matter.
Water roared.
"...The waterfall. Of Wales."
The sight spread before them was one they could not forget if they tried: a landscape they had seen only in dreams. The falls. A curtain of water through which their homeland lay just as they remembered it, there to welcome them. The waterfall's chill, cold enough to ache in the bone, wet their heads like rain, and still they could not find their tongues. They only stared.
A hallucination? Illusion magic? They entertained the reasonable suspicion that the scroll had been nothing more than a thing for showing phantoms, and then—
"What are you doing there?"
He could not answer.
"Did you come to look at the flowers too, mister?"
Still nothing.
"Oh, right. Santa said so. When you talk to a grown-up, you greet them first and say your own name. So, hello, mister! I'm Louise! Louise Aipera de Mordred! What's your name?"
"...Cain."
"Wow, that's the same as my dad's! Your hair, too. That's amazing."
He could not speak.
"...Mister?"
Nothing.
"Why are you crying?"
Nothing at all.
"...Hmph. Weird. Why are so many grown-ups crying today? The weather's so clear and nice."
The child grumbled it like a complaint, and he wept. She was the image of the woman he had loved, and her hair and her eyes were the image of his own. No. Even if none of that had been so, he would have known. His body was being drawn to her. No—his soul. Drawn in a way that proved this was no illusion.
He sobbed, and set thanks upon his tongue without rest. To heaven, or to his ancestors, or else—
—toward a certain knight who worked miracles.
Again, and again.
"Heh. You might have explained before you sent them."
"Isn't a surprise gift more moving when you show it instead of talking about it?"
"...You are not wrong. But did that truly serve as a gift?"
"You don't know the first thing about it. The surest gift for a soldier sent out on deployment is..."
The warmth of family. What else could it be?