After He Fell Asleep (2)
Late into the night, the lights of the Royal Capital refused to go out.
Soldiers poured through the streets and would not stop combing the surroundings, and even knight orders of name and standing did not hesitate to throw themselves into the search. It was a rarity beyond rarities, and yet, looked at another way, only natural. A monster terror had fallen upon the Royal Academy. The attack had struck that very day, and the nobles who had sent their children to the Academy could not contain their fury. It was a matter of pride as well. How dare anyone invade the Academy—invade the Royal Capital, where the great nobles gathered? It was an insult to the honor of the royal house and to Pendragon itself, a provocation flung at every blue-blooded line gathered beneath Pendragon's banner. Should word of it reach the neighboring realms, the kingdom's name would be dragged through the dirt, and the culprits had to be hunted down before that could happen.
"Search every inch! Every last inch!"
"Seize anyone who looks suspicious! Watch the mages above all!"
"Anyone who resists may be killed, no questions asked!"
The orders that came down were savage, and the troops tore through every place that looked even faintly suspicious, hunting as if after lice. Above all they went for Parasite Narak, the Royal Capital's lawless slum beyond the reach of ordinary jurisdiction—a den where criminals beyond counting had gathered, a hornet's nest that, on any other day, cost more to poke than it was worth. Tonight, they did not hesitate to poke even that.
"R-run!"
"I—I didn't do anything! I swear I didn't!"
"Clear away the corpse you're hiding behind your back before you lie to me, you worthless little shit, worse than a gnoll!"
"Gyaaaah!!"
An untimely purge of criminals was underway. A rather wholesome butterfly effect, if one cared to call it that. The Royal Capital would stay in an uproar for some time yet, and the criminals, it seemed, would have to live with their eyes on the floor.
And yet, for all the indiscriminate searching, for all that forces on the scale of a division were on the move—
"F-found them! The offerings used in the summoning!"
"...Mad bastards. What the hell kind of people are these?"
"The trail's gone cold. Does this even make sense? For God's sake—"
Catching the culprits, regrettably, remained a distant hope. What they found instead were the traces of summoning magic. A medium. Together with the gnoll pack, they had uncovered the vast quantity of offerings that must have been consumed when the ancient monster was called forth. The culprits themselves, however, had left not a single trace, and not one piece of evidence could be found.
The reason was simple.
"...They killed them all."
Tens of thousands of human bones lay within the building, and nothing that could be called evidence turned up among them. One thing alone was certain: those countless bones were the living sacrifices the terrorists had offered up.
And sure enough—
"Th-this is insane. Every one of these remains belonged to someone who was alive as recently as yesterday."
"What?"
"The summoning was worked from the pain and desire of the living, or from their rage and life force. This place was almost certainly a Human Sacrifice Factory, built to breed countless Grudges. And if they meant to summon a monster on the order of the Ghost King, there's a strong chance they spent no less than three years cultivating Grudge here. ...I don't know what sort of people they are, but they are truly horrific."
"......"
An awkward silence settled over them. If the consulting mage had it right, this was no ordinary affair. In the very heart of the Royal Capital, more than tens of thousands of people had been packed into a single building, and energy for a summoning had been gathered there with patient care—for three years.
"More than a few heads are going to the block..."
For three years there would have been food enough moving through the city to feed tens of thousands, and a great mass of hands working to keep their existence from ever being noticed. And still no one had known? It was as good as openly making a fool of the Royal Capital, a passage that laid the capital's incompetence bare for anyone to read. The soldiers who had patrolled this district would very likely not get off with mere dismissal. They would be dragged to the torture chambers and sent straight on to the guillotine. Someone had to answer for it.
Merely wondering how far that answer would have to reach already sent a chill through him. In the same breath, it was horrifying enough to set his teeth knocking. How mad did a person have to be to carry out a thing like this? These were not merely terrorists. They might well be an organization steeped in a vast and terrible madness. He swallowed hard. The knight could not hide his dread, wondering what storm of blood was about to break over the Royal Capital.
"—Incompetent fools. They still know nothing."
Elsewhere, a certain senior priest who had been watching the whole spectacle at his leisure made no effort to hide his contempt. How could they be so pathetic?
"We took the sin upon ourselves in their stead, and they do not even know it? Foolish. How foolish."
"...Wouldn't it actually be stranger if they did know a thing like that, Captain?"
The other priest spoke as if scolding, as though his superior's words were too absurd to let pass.
"If there were even hides left, maybe. But how are people who've got nothing left but bones supposed to announce they were sinners who deserved to die? Wish I had a talent like that myself, haha."
"You flippant wretch! With faith alone, one can discern that much!"
"I'm pretty sure that's impossible..."
The two priests went on in perfect ease, seated on the building's roof and watching the people below, as if no number of troops, however great, could ever possibly find them.
"Well, they'll figure it out before long. That the prisoners in the jails vanished in droves. ...If they can't even grasp that much, we may be rating the kingdom too highly."
"They are not incompetent to that degree. Had they been, they would have collapsed long ago."
"Hmm. You really think so?"
The junior priest did not seem to agree. Distrust sat plain on his face. On any other day the senior priest would have roared at him, but he only looked at his subordinate for a moment, and then kept his silence.
The quiet held for a while.
"Captain. In the end, we failed today."
"Mm."
"The reprimand won't be a light one, I imagine."
"I suppose not."
"But if we keep going forward one step at a time like this, the day will come when we reach salvation, won't it?"
"Of course it will."
"Really? Then that's enough, hehe!"
The junior priest knew the captain he served was not a man who told lies. His words, then, would surely come to pass. And so—
"Then that's enough. I'll trust only you, Captain."
The priest passed on his resolve with a bright, easy smile, and in the next instant—
Crackle—!
Space warped. The Mystery the junior priest had laid was torn apart, and the intruders who had broken it from the outside closed in around them.
Thud, thud, thud!
Dozens of shadows appeared, displaying an art of covert movement.
Whoosh!
The presence they gave off kindled heat haze, and as those hazes overlapped they formed the bars of a cage. Presence made tangible. Every one of the more than fifty proved himself a powerhouse who had earned the name of Champion within his own domain—fifty men, each skilled enough to serve as captain or vice-captain even in a knight order kept by a considerable great noble. It was a force that could massacre the territory of a so-called margrave in half a day and still have strength to spare. Who in the kingdom could raise so many experts in such numbers? And yet the kingdom held no fewer than two powers capable of cultivating men of this caliber. And the one who led one of those powers revealed himself in person.
The one who showed himself was a handsome young man. Young—yet only to the eye. His years had long since passed sixty. He had inherited the noble blood of dragons, so that youth and spirit alike had not yet gone to seed, a swordsman who had not once set the sword aside in sixty years of life. At the same time he was one who had refused that dragon blood and succeeded to the guardian of the sacred lake.
"—Duke Blake."
The senior priest murmured the name low. Blake Vivian de Galahad. Head of House Galahad in this generation, and the finest compatible among every Duke of Galahad in the line's history. The chief who bore one corner of the kingdom's three great powers had come to this place himself.
"When your foster daughter was in danger you didn't so much as show your nose, and only now you appear."
"He cannot be anything but incompetent. Well—that must be why he lost his woman so incompetently."
Yet the two priests, faced with a duke of that stature, only snorted. No. They sneered. It was a sight to make one wonder whether fear existed in them at all, in a moment when dying would not have been the least bit strange.
Wooooom!
The shadows' presence turned sharper still. Words that dared insult their master—and, beyond him, the late lady—were more than enough to set the loyal shadows' rage boiling. But on the other side—
"Yes. I must be an incompetent man."
The duke showed no change of feeling. He was only excessively cold.
"I am an incompetent man who could not protect even one woman of my own, a merciless father condemned to doubt even his own daughter and put her to the test. I am nothing but a vengeful wraith, clinging only to revenge, never knowing when I may go mad...!"
Grind.
His face alone was cold. The presence he gave off was anything but. A dreadful killing intent, fit to burn everything around him, scorched the building and melted it down.
"Even if I must stake all that I am, I will uncover the truth."
Creak. Creak.
"......"
"...Khk."
As if the provocations of a moment ago had been a lie, they did not open their mouths. They could not. The pressure the duke emitted, like a demon of flame, did worse than crush them. It tore flesh and shattered bone. It was a sight wrought by presence alone, and only then did the two priests truly understand what stood before them.
"...They said his quality was the highest among every compatible of the Magic Sword across the ages. It was no lie."
That he was the strongest Galahad in history.
Wooooom!
The heat haze shimmering about the duke was mightier than the presence of more than fifty men combined, and still that presence climbed. And at some moment a sword rested in his hand. A longsword bare of all ornament, with nothing upon it but a lingering blue light. But this longsword was precisely—
"I have a great many questions for you."
—the Magic Sword said to grant the power to ruin nations.