Cowardice Is Not a Villain's Monopoly (5)

It is easier to ask forgiveness than permission.

…A saying that fit what they had done all too well.

"Haah…. Could you not at least have consulted me, Your Grace? Even the barest consultation?"

"I am sorry to say it, Raphael, but if I had consulted you, this matter could never have gone forward. You would never have allowed such a thing."

"…I will not deny that, Your Grace."

"No. And it is precisely because you hold so fast to principle that I could not tell you."

"……That, too, is so."

"…I would rather you were angry. That would sit easier with me."

…Raphael did not launch into a righteous lecture.

He offered none of the appeals to conscience one might have expected. Not this is wrong. Not if you do the same as the men you have condemned, how can that be just? Not a word of it.

It was not that Galahad's authority had crushed him into silence, nor that disappointment in Pierre had driven him to despair.

He simply knew.

"Why should I be angry? Your Grace, I may be nothing but a powerless old man, but I am an old man who has lived a long while. I am not so naive as to believe that living kindly is what brings good fortune. How could the world turn on right argument and good intentions alone? And how am I to preach morality and ethics at men already named our enemies?"

"……."

"I will not pretend there is no sorrow in it. But that sorrow comes from my own incompetence. Had I been more capable—had I been someone great—then Your Grace, and my brother, and those children as well… I might have kept them from walking a path already condemned. So let me rage and despair at my own uselessness. I have no intention of blaming Your Grace, or my brother."

"……."

"If anything, I am sorry. If hands had to be dirtied, mine should have been the ones. Instead I let Your Grace and my brother soil theirs…. I can only be ashamed."

"……Ahem."

Listening to that quiet lament, Blake—rarely—looked at a loss.

No. Worse than that.

"…Please, just be angry. This has gone past discomfort. It feels as if a lump of lead has settled in me."

Not since he was five years old had Blake felt the ache of conscience. He was feeling it now.

I would rather crack my head on the ground the way that knight is doing.

No one had ordered it, and yet a knight had driven his own forehead into the earth as if punishing himself, and Blake envied him. A saint's eyes, reflecting not only his face but the heart behind it, were more frightening than any scolding.

More even than a rebuke from his father the king, the man they had called the Martial God….

…Raphael went back.

He had come in the small hours on a body already failing with age. The fatigue had to be considerable. Shadows escorted him toward the temple, and only once the knight was sure he was truly gone did he quietly lift his forehead from the ground and call off that full-faced prostration.

"…Terrifying."

"……."

"Nothing scares me more than a kind old man getting angry…."

"……."

"What? That look. If you've got something to say, say it."

"……It's nothing."

Pierre stared at the knight with something like a glare. No—like jealousy.

And well he might.

He scolded him….

Raphael had scolded the knight.

It was a strange thing to say. All Raphael had done was sigh in the knight's direction, or pat his shoulder. The only thing he had added came as he turned back toward the temple.

A light tap.

He tapped the knight once between the shoulders and went. That was all.

No one else would have found it strange.

But Pierre knew. That was how Raphael scolded. A pat on the shoulder, a tap on the back—Pierre knew those were the greatest rebukes Raphael was capable of giving.

…Only Pierre, tended by him across long years, knew it.

And so he was wretched, and jealous. To be scolded meant that, at least for now, there was still faith.

Whereas he himself….

"……What, exactly, is the difference between you and me?"

"What are you muttering?"

"Have I really done so wrong? I—"

Smack!

"!?"

"Oh, for—look at this. Now that I'm seeing it up close, something's wrong in your head. Did possession scramble your mind?"

"W-wait, that isn't—"

Thwack!

The knight struck the back of his head again, and each time Pierre felt a pain past believing. It was only the skull, and yet the blow rang through every bone in his body. The pain was worse than imagination.

Truly, horribly so.

When tears sprang to Pierre's eyes before he could stop them, the knight spoke as if he did not care whether the man cried or not.

"If you feel your mind going, say so. We'll need to run a check."

"A ch-check…?"

"Some people are actually sick in the head. And then you've got the idiots who play at being sick. Classic type: temper under perfect control, right up until they're in front of their parents or somebody weaker, and suddenly they've got a rage disorder."

"……."

"If your head's wrong, tell me fast. Beating it—no, fixing it—doesn't take long."

Crack. Crack.

"……."

An ugly sound came from the knight's hands, and that alone made Pierre feel as if his body were warping out of shape. He was suddenly certain that this so-called treatment would be far harsher, and far more painful, than a blow to the back of the head.

And so—

"No. I'm fine. Truly…."

"You sure? Don't go pretending it doesn't hurt."

"Mm. I'm certain."

"…Hhh. Still doesn't sit right."

"……."

The Heart Demon inside Pierre was forcibly resolved.

By a treatment that went by the name of a fist.

Without even realizing he had just set straight a man one step from turning dark, Lee Han got around to what mattered.

"All right. If your head's on straight, talk. Where exactly are those bastards?"

The reason he had carried out a plan dangerous enough to lay hands on a great noble was one thing only: to catch those bastards, the Brass Knight Order hiding in the Royal Capital. He knew Roses would not open his mouth of his own will, and so Pierre's role had been essential. What mattered was how much of the memory he had managed to piece back together.

"…First, to say it plainly, it does seem certain the Brass Knight Order was staying with House Loengrin."

"Uneasy way to start."

"It is accurate. Even Roses does not know where the Brass Knight Order is now. No—more precisely, he never cared."

"……."

"D-don't look at me like that. I-I'm only repeating what was in Roses's memory…."

Pierre gave up as much of that information as he could.

"C-Count Roses spared nothing in supporting illegal mages and illegal alchemists, all to achieve his purpose. The drug trade was how he raised the money for the research."

"I could lose my mind…."

"And somewhere in the middle of it, Roses seems to have killed his own father, once he decided the man was in the way. He must have thought that if he were caught, everything would come to nothing."

"……."

"…Stop looking at me like that. I am not Roses!"

"Why are you having a fit over a look?"

"……I felt killing intent."

Certain he might actually die if this went on, Pierre let out a long sigh and barely managed to continue.

"…In the course of all that, the Blood Cross Army, which had once hidden inside the temple, contacted Roses and offered to work with him. Roses judged they would help him reach his purpose, and he took their hands gladly. And…. that appears to be how matters stand."

"……."

"……."

"…?"

"What?"

"That's the end…?"

"What point are you trying to make?"

"No…. You said they were partners. Shouldn't he know something that matters?"

The Blood Cross Army's purpose. Where they were hiding. Failing that, a face composite of the Brass Knight Order, here and now. Lee Han needed the rest of it, plainly put. Unfortunately—

"…Roses didn't seem interested in any of that."

"……."

"It isn't a lie. I absorbed this man's memories, and I am certain. Count Roses is profoundly indifferent to other people. He will work with any criminal if it serves his purpose, and he cares nothing for that criminal's particulars. In the usual phrase…."

A sociopath. Not emptied of feeling the way a psychopath is, but antisocial, and arrogant besides because he held power—a sociopath so near a psychopath that the difference hardly mattered.

And one thing more.

"Count Roses was born face-blind. Prosopagnosia. An ordinary person with a condition like that would find ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠some way to remember others, whatever it took. Roses, arrogant as he is, seems never even to have tried. Which is to say he wasn't only a sociopath. He was an extreme egoist as well."

"Already talking like you've claimed the body for your own…. So he's just an idiot with a pile of character defects?"

"……."

"…Useless. This bastard."

For all the trouble Lee Han had gone to in stirring this up, the man called Roses was so little help it was absurd. What kind of wretch was this? A sociopath, face-blind, and a moron who had not even looked into his own suspicious partners.

"Hey, dream fiend. Think you can wake that bastard up again?"

"Why?"

"So I can hit him more. What I already gave him doesn't even come close. He's worse than dirt—no, filthier than a spell-monger. Completely."

How did one man manage to collect every trait that could give someone else an ulcer? For the first time in his life, Lee Han had met someone worse than a spell-monger, and his face curdled with disgust.

"W-wait, please! Ah—I'll look through the memories a little further. There must be something useful!"

Cold sweat pouring off him, Pierre ransacked the memories in a panic. Eyes that said useless were gathering, and from where he stood, all he could feel was the crisis. If he meant to prove he was worth anything, he had to drag out information that helped, and he pulled at the memories as hard as he could.

"Th-there's memory of the process for making half-fiends. Also a list of the nobles working with Roses, and of the alchemists and mages."

Decent information. No—plainly high-grade. None of it was what he needed now.

Disappointment had begun to soak into Lee Han's face when—

"…And what is this purpose?"

"……."

The duke asked it, doubt threaded through the question. They had been sliding past it for some time, and strangely, he had never once heard Roses's purpose stated in plain words.

"……."

…To the duke it was only a lightly tossed question. Pierre locked up again and began to sweat. Already pressed by Lee Han, and now by the duke as well, he poured sweat as if dehydration might take him on the spot.

"…I believe I said it a moment ago. Count Roses has congenital face blindness, severe enough that he could not remember even his own parents' faces. There was, however, one woman whose face he alone could recognize."

"……."

"Recognizing another person's face for the first time in his life was already alien to him, and the woman he recognized first was beautiful besides, so he fell in love. But that woman had a lover. A lover more excellent, more extraordinary, than Roses himself…."

"What… are you saying right now?"

Pierre had to force the courage to keep speaking. He felt the duke's air growing colder by the moment, and still he had to go on. The truth would surface someday. Hiding it would not do, and a beating due eventually was better taken now.

So.

"…Even now, decades later, ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Roses still loved that woman. And at some point the feeling stopped being love and became something closer to obsession. His purpose was nothing else: to make the woman he loved his own, by restoring the body of a woman already dead. For that purpose he committed countless evils, and he achieved results that were, to some degree, meaningful…."

Drip. Drop.

"H-he found a way, at last, to bring that woman back. N-namely… the other self she left behind. By taking the daughter she bore as a sacrifice, and restoring the woman's body."

"…!"

"C-Count Roses completed, through endless research, a method that can tell blood kinship from a single hair. That is how he succeeded in finding the woman's daughter. And that daughter, as it happens, had been taken in under Galahad. S-so they say."

"……."

Pale enough to faint where he stood, his body already failing him, he wrung out the last of his strength and set the period.

"…Your Grace. The adopted daughter you took in is indeed the child left behind by the woman you loved. Irene Windler. That girl is your own daughter. And Count Roses is not the only one after her. The Brass Knight Order as well, for the sake of fairy blood. Th-they are after her, too—"

He dropped.

With that, Pierre's eyes rolled white, and he collapsed into a dead faint. He could not endure the rage pouring off the duke, and his consciousness simply went out.

…The duke, however, did not care whether the man had fainted, and still he said nothing.

Then—

"My child. …They mean to bring my wife back to life? They mean to take my child? Heh."

"This isn't even funny. What in the world is going on…."

Crack—krsssh!

The wind around him—no, space itself—began to break. The Magic Sword answered his rage and breathed fire.

And then—

…Duke Blake had awakened.

"…Now there's a late drumbeat, if I ever heard one."

Drop every hint in the world that she was his daughter, and he wouldn't believe it. The enemy who hates him most says the same thing, and suddenly he believes?

There was late, and then there was this.

Honestly….

Before a momentum too fierce to stop even if he tried, Lee Han's whole body went numb, and he shrugged, as if he had no wish to rub a whale the wrong way for nothing.

"…That sunfish of a chick. Marriage is off the table for her now."

Facing a father-in-law that terrifying, who would ever come to pay their respects?

At least—

I couldn't manage it.

The in-laws alone would be enough.

She flinched.

"Wh-what was that!"

"Y-yeah. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠It was horrible. I dreamed I lived my whole life as an old maid. What kind of dream is that…."

"Y-yeah."

Irene felt an unease she could not name, and still she closed her eyes and slept again. Please, this time, let the dream be of falling asleep inside the instructor's muscles….

Exhaustion crashed over her all at once, and Irene was snoring again, soft and even.