A Knight Cheers the Young (6)
The Brass Knight Order. Lee Han had heard the name.
Among the Blood Cross Army—a swarm so vast it held together like an ant colony, cell by cell—they were one of the three largest powers.
His old comrades, men who had once belonged to that very swarm, had put it like this.
"Knight order in name only. The Brass Knight Order is a den of half-fiends. From the start, they were the ones who poured everything into demon-person research. Sure, the Black Apostles ran plenty of inhuman experiments, but don't go thinking the Brass Knights are any softer. No—if it's for an experiment, those bastards won't hesitate to snatch anyone, human or animal. They might be the nastier of the two."
They were all kidnapping people and cutting them open just the same, so ranking which was worse had always struck him as absurd. Even so, he understood the point. If the Black Apostles, back when they were still the assassin order called the Black Moon, had at least watched their surroundings and run their experiments with care, then the Brass Knight Order was a group that could not have been more extreme: cruel as far as cruelty would serve, and not the least bit choosy about the means, so long as the end was theirs.
And so far as Lee Han knew, lunatics who didn't care about means or methods were dangerous.
Because you never know what a terrorist will do.
They were damnably hard to read. Which was why—
"...So they really have slipped into the Royal Capital?"
"Certain. There are already no fewer than fifty in the capital who carry the demonic in them."
The woman answered with a blank face, and a nod.
"They're still slighting the kingdom and the temple. After a beating like that, you'd think they might grow careless. They haven't."
The woman—Pierre—wore a sneer. Her eyes were the eyes of someone picturing rats that had mistaken themselves for the ones in charge, already tensing to scurry wild through every corner.
Even so.
"And you knew, and didn't stop them. What was that about?"
Lee Han snapped at her. If you know, stop it before it starts—why sit on your hands and only start scrambling now? And with that look on your face, why the smugness? The rebuke carried more than one meaning, and at those words—
"......"
Pierre looked away. Her face was still expressionless, and yet, somehow, ashamed.
Lee Han accepted Raphael's request.
Had it come from the temple bastards, he would have raised his middle finger. But this was Raphael asking, and besides, the cult freaks were no longer content to hate the temple alone.
These disgusting little shits...!
Even Lee Han did not hesitate to loathe them. They were vermin, nothing else, and at some point they had become a thing to be exterminated no less than the spell-slingers. That alone was reason enough to take the job.
Taking it, however, was one thing.
"Of all times—you knew they'd mixed themselves into the kingdom on purpose, into a pack of the kingdom's own nobles, and you still hauled them inside. What kind of rotten mind is that, huh?"
"...!"
"Talk. You little shit."
"I-if you'd let go of my collar, I c-could... t-talk..."
"...Ah. Then talk."
In a private room of some rundown inn, Pierre tore free of his grip with a thud and coughed as if she had only just survived. The handling was rough beyond belief. It wasn't that he was being too hard on her for being a woman. She was manpower the temple itself had attached to him, and still he handled her harshly—yet Pierre had no courage to talk back. It wasn't simply that a hand on her collar and a glimpse of death's threshold had frightened her. Pierre, specifically, was in no position to defy him.
...Because she had lost his trust a long time ago.
Lee Han was a man who preached equality between men and women and still kept a scrap of gentleness for women, and the person who had earned, in his eyes, the brand of something lower than a beast was none other than Pierre. It was nothing but what she had coming.
Not killing her is mercy enough.
Pierre had already betrayed the trust he gave her more than once, and disappointed him often enough.
She even threw away her work at the Academy of her own accord and went back to the temple.
To put it bluntly, without Raphael's protection she would already have died by his hand. That was how guilty she stood before him—guilty enough that she couldn't voice a complaint even when he handled her roughly. So Pierre swallowed the pain climbing through her neck and her backside, and went on.
"Hah... To begin with, it isn't as if we're sitting on what we know of the Brass Knight Order with no thought at all. Rather, the upper ranks of the royal house and the temple spoke in favor of canceling this banquet."
"Canceling it?"
"Yes. As you know, they are a dangerous group that cares nothing for means or methods. We've barely held them off until now, but after the vampire's appearance the other day and the descent of a high demon, the upper ranks must have stopped taking them lightly. ...The trouble is that we may have 'stopped them too well.' Petitions have started pouring up from below."
"What are you talking about?"
"...Some people have recognized the crisis. Others still refuse to treat the Blood Cross Army as one."
Lee Han tilted his head. Not because he failed to understand—because he understood, and the words still sounded like bullshit.
At that, Pierre said, "Because you stopped it too well. Most people feel no sense of crisis at all."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Think of the things you've done."
"The things I've done?"
"...And what am I meant to do if you don't even know what you've done?"
Pierre began to name his accomplishments, one by one.
"You captured the illegal mages who were posing as instructors."
"Ah, those spell-slinging bastards? Oh—I heard a few of the kidnapped instructors got pulled out. Lucky some of them are alive, and recovering well, from what I hear.... Hmm. I ought to go see their faces sometime."
An incident in which the Academy's countless students had come within a breath of dying.
"You held off the great host of monsters, the Ghost King among them."
"I didn't hold them alone. Our kids helped, and the decisive part was the old man."
An incident in which not only the Academy, but the Royal Capital itself, had nearly come down.
"You were the first to find the half-fiends in the tunnels, and you wiped out the half-fiends, Mother Worm among them."
"Hot that day. I even got to try being buried."
A matter that, left unknown, would have raised a force strong enough to threaten the kingdom.
"Y-you foiled the sultan's scheme, and brought down the Magic Tower that meant to play its tricks on the capital."
"I didn't do that one alone either, you know."
One dangerous sultanate and the empire had fallen with it, and an enemy that menaced the kingdom had vanished.
"...At the Grand Temple you took the enemy's officers, half-fiends among them."
"Didn't the Grand Temple end up burned to the ground anyway?"
The reason it had ended with the Grand Temple merely reduced to ash.
"At Offen you saved the Sword Saint, and you brought demon-humanization to light...."
"I didn't exactly mean to. But yeah, that's right."
Vital information gained, and the Sword Duke kept from a retirement drowned in grief.
"And you've wiped out more than thirty cell-groups tied to the Blood Cross Army, haven't you?"
"The knockoff Hao Sect Leader helped plenty."
"...And at the last you cut down a high demon, rallied the knight orders, and swept away hundreds of thousands of monsters."
"I keep telling you I didn't do it alone."
He had saved the kingdom. No—the whole of the South.
"So? What does all of that amount to?"
"......"
"Why are you looking at me like that?"
"...It feels late to be saying it, but you are remarkable."
Yes. He was the hero who had delivered the South from every crisis. The trouble was that more people didn't know he was a hero than did—but the man himself didn't care. He only liked not being dragged into troublesome work.
And that was what made it remarkable. It was not a weighing of profit and loss. He had made his own mind plain and fought where that mind led him, and this was the result. So he needed no reward. If there was something he wanted, he simply took it himself.
And as a consequence of that—
"...Most people have decided the Blood Cross Army simply isn't that strong, and that this is why all of it was stopped. When the ones who are actually impressive aren't them at all, but you, and a handful of others."
"...You're saying they've never seen blood themselves. They've only heard it's dangerous, so it doesn't feel real. That it?"
"More or less. Fools."
"...No. I get it."
"?"
Lee Han had once been a soldier, and he had even shipped out. Because of that, he knew something: human beings are animals who will never feel a crisis unless the harm lands on them. Shout all you like that a war has broken out in some other country, that the threat might reach your own, that it's dangerous—see whether a single person listens. Until they see blood themselves they feel no crisis, and chasing their own gain is an instinct people cannot help. Wasn't that the very proof of peace, and the proof that someone, somewhere behind them, was bleeding and fighting?
And the one who had bled and fought that way—
"Forget it. So some bastards don't feel the crisis and they're whining that they want to party. And the other opinion is that even if the cult freaks have snuck in, they're small fry, so we ought to grab them and squeeze the information out. Am I wrong?"
"...Accurate. Sharp of you."
"Sharp, my ass. The way the high-and-mighty think is always the same."
He hadn't expected anything else. That was the sort of proposal it was, and watching him, Pierre hesitated a moment.
"...Does it not make you angry? This peace is something you built in blood and sweat. And they ignore it, busy only with their pleasures. Do you not resent them...?"
"Why would I?"
"......"
"You're saying something strange. Why would I be angry? The ones who see blood later will be them."
"?"
"I think you've got something backward. I didn't volunteer for the things you listed by sacrificing myself to help complete strangers. And it sure as hell wasn't loyalty to the kingdom."
"...Then why?"
"I fought because my people were in it."
"......"
"So if we're talking in that sense, I can live with those bastards thinking the cult freaks are easy prey. Them letting their guard down and having their fun? That's fine too. Because anyway—"
"......"
"Sound cruel to you?"
"...No. Rather, I find myself impressed."
In that moment, Pierre was certain. She thought she understood why he had settled so many incidents and never once failed.
He cuts a hard line between himself and everyone who isn't his.
Thoroughly. And coldly.
This man is no hero who simply spends himself. He is a fighter who knows the difference between the place he will fight and the people he will keep.
For the first time, Pierre felt a strange stir, as if she had seen the man's essence.
Then—
Knock, knock.
She flinched. At the sudden presence, Pierre went wary. It was a private room in an inn they had taken in secret, a place neither he nor she had told to anyone else, and out of nowhere a stranger was knocking at the door. Fearing the Brass Knight Order had caught their movements, she was just reaching for her gun when—
Clack!
Lee Han threw the door open in a single motion.
"You only just got here?"
"Haha, my apologies, Sir Lee Han. Finding the materials you asked for took a little time."
"It's fine. You still made the hour we set. As expected of the Hao Sect Leader."
"...I've always wondered. What in the world does Hao Sect Leader mean, Sir Lee Han?"
The man came in grumbling, and Pierre blinked at the sight of him. Whether she did or not—
"The clothes?"
"Here. And this as well."
"Looks expensive."
"It is. I bought it at a high-class salon. Still, an investment ought to return something, haha."
"Bill the temple later. I don't have money."
"Would I demand money of you, Sir Lee Han? Perish the thought."
The two men talked with an easy familiarity, and for an instant Pierre felt uneasy. It wasn't the man who had appeared so suddenly that set the danger crawling over her. The reason was something else entirely.
Fwoosh!
"Change into this."
"...This is?"
"Can't you tell by looking? It's a dress."
"...I can tell. But why do I have to wear it?"
"You said it yourself. The cult bastards are hiding in the capital. Mixed in with the nobles, at that."
"Th-that is true, but..."
"So if we want to catch people like that, what do you figure we have to do?"
"......"
"Don't be dense. They say if you want to catch a tiger, you go into the tiger's den. So we go in ourselves."
"I-I understand that much, but why must I wear a dress..."
"Because if you use that specialty of yours, the job gets a great deal easier."
"Spe...cialty?"
A cold sweat was just breaking under the swelling sense of danger when, sure enough, the words left his mouth.
"......"
A cruel order fell.
The light in Pierre's eyes went out, fast.