Revelation
Revelation
It wasn't particularly difficult to tie up the one who'd survived alone, trembling and scared shitless, and haul him back draped over a horse.
Since he seemed like the type to be devoutly faithful, I figured he might try to off himself—checked under his mask, looked inside his mouth, but fortunately there was no suicide capsule or poison. I just gagged him with a strip of torn cloth to keep him from biting his tongue.
I would've loved to loot coin pouches from their corpses, but I couldn't exactly set the plains on fire just to light up the dark, and the sparks I could conjure with magic were barely a step up from a lighter. So I decided to just give up on it.
When I trudged back with the bastard who wasn't even resisting, spaced out like his soul had left his body, the tense group and Asilie greeted me with bright faces.
"Found him on the way."
I dumped the cultist off the back of the horse with a thoroughly unimpressed face, bitter about forfeiting my rightful looting. Kals, who took it with the characteristic nonchalance of someone who'd just wrapped up a trivial chore, asked with a tired expression.
"Good heavens. Is that really all the reaction you have after dealing with twenty men?"
"Not all of them. Looked like a few got away."
I was about to say maybe three or so had escaped, unless they'd accidentally killed each other, when Asilie pointed somewhere far off in the barely visible distance.
"About three came my way, so I shot them. They're probably somewhere over there."
"Ah, then everyone except this one's dead after all. Lucky you got them from a distance. Resting next to corpses is pretty unpleasant."
Unlike me, who just nodded and thought 'ah, that makes sense,' Sen and the others' faces went utterly stiff. Getting spooked all over again.
"S-so, what happened to this one to make him lose his mind like that?"
"I just stimulated his sense of fear a bit."
To people living in the modern world, the countless productions churned out by all sorts of media are familiar to the point of being mundane and unremarkable. But in places where such things are less developed, every little detail is a culture shock. Just because monsters and thieves are a dime a dozen didn't mean people grew desensitized to terror.
The enemy was clearly alone, yet the experience of human presence vanishing from all directions without any sense of distance—that couldn't have been a particularly pleasant experience.
"I moved around pretty hard for that, so I'm tired damn it. Let's delay our departure a bit today."
"O-of course! You handled everything alone, so it's only natural! When should we wake you?"
"I'll wake up on my own."
The effect was good, but repeatedly triggering double acceleration to pull off those vanishing acts ate up way more Magic Power than I'd expected. After properly maintaining my sword by the campfire, I laid out the guidelines for handling the cultist to the group before heading into my tent.
"Don't try too hard to get information out of him. Don't kill him. He's a prisoner, so make sure he gets proper meals. Other than that, figure it out yourselves."
I'd captured him because I had no intention of resolving this quickly anyway. Dealing with the cultist problem would come after we'd finished all our business in Ogwen and those bastards had returned to their own backyard. It was Merdela who cautiously tossed a question at my words.
"May I ask what you mean by 'too hard' exactly?"
"Just don't do anything involving physical violence. Even if you get something out of him right now, the cultist issue is for later. No need to rush."
Fortunately, that was the only question. Grateful that not much blood had splattered on my clothes, I crawled into the tent and lay down.
Then, as naturally as anything, Asilie came in with me, stretched out my left arm, lay down beside me, and tried to sleep.
"...You're sleeping too, big sis?"
"Eldi handled everything anyway, so there's no real reason for me to stay awake. They don't seem like they'll run, and it's not like they're at a level where they could wipe us out in an instant while we sleep."
"I wasn't too impressed by them..."
"Earlier, when we briefly split up roles and I watched them do this and that, I'd say they're at least good enough to be rated as red-rank adventurers."
The adventurer guild's rank assessments have wildly inconsistent standards.
And that was an utterly obvious thing. Because there were people who excelled at party play but had limits in skill and couldn't even take down an ogre, and people who could kill ogres as easily as blowing their noses but had no know-how for one-on-many combat and would be in danger if just ten goblins swarmed them. Trying to judge who was superior between those two was a pointless exercise. They had to be categorized into types like 'red-rank adventurer outstanding against multiple foes' or 'red-rank adventurer outstanding in individual combat,' so the standards couldn't help but be uneven.
Of course, if you could take down a real ogre that easily, you'd crush goblins with nothing but your fists.
In that sense, Asilie's assessment was surely a reasonable and cool-headed one. If a party had been working together in sync for about ten years, that alone was qualification enough. They could probably stroll into a decent monster den, laughing, and walk out after turning it to ash.
That confidence must have been why they'd taken such decisive action, crashing the religious group's ritual and rescuing the person.
"Come to think of it, big sis, since your hiatus was so long, you had to retake the rank exam, right? How far up did you rank in the past?"
"Purple-rank."
The answer that popped out as if it were obvious carried no particular pride, but at the same time, it sounded as if she were saying that anyone who called themselves an adventurer ought to be purple-rank by default. And I knew that wasn't just my imagination.
"You said it before, didn’t you? Up to blue-rank is..."
"Merely a filter the guild created to sift out people without skill. Of course I remember."
Though, she admittedly had a slightly extreme side. By Asilie's standards, adventurers only came in three ranks: red, purple, and silver—meaning novice, intermediate, and master respectively. Anyone below that was in a probationary period, and she held the ideology that if you settled into that probationary period, you were just dead weight. Looking back, that was an incredibly radical way of thinking. Honestly, maybe Asilie had been quite a character in the past too?
Well, whatever Asilie's past was like, I'd also gotten a brief taste of adventurer work and found myself sympathizing with her argument. It wasn't that normal, good people didn't exist, of course, but those who remained blue-rank adventurers for over three years were usually people with some kind of issue.
Setting aside things like being an insufferable ass-troll or disgustingly incompetent, they failed the red-rank exams for all sorts of reasons—starting with those who'd experienced some major incident and couldn't move forward from it.
People who kept repeating only thoroughly safe requests, not 'adventures,' to sustain their livelihoods. Still, since their skills or character weren't lacking, others didn't view them particularly badly either. But it was extremely common practice to describe them as 'guild employees' and not consider them fellow adventurers.
"Teaching Eldi is rewarding, you know. Even if he's impossible to figure out sometimes."
Asilie, who had lightly pinched my cheek while I was briefly lost in such thoughts, wore a satisfied smile as she tried to sleep.
Because of the conversation that had flowed so naturally, I missed the chance to separate from Asilie a little, so in the end I just gave up on everything and closed my eyes.
◈
Even though my eyes had opened on their own and I'd gotten up, not much time had passed—it was only just now dawning. Maybe three hours, roughly? It seemed the fatigue I'd felt was more related to Magic Power consumption than a physical issue.
Since I didn't particularly feel any more drowsiness coming on, I woke Asilie and stepped out of the tent. The group came into view, damp with dew on the misty plains as they prepared breakfast. Perhaps because it was so quiet, even the slight noise I made moving around sounded loud. Sen, who had been in the middle of boiling soup, spotted me and spoke.
"You woke up earlier than expected?"
"Just happened that way. How's the cultist?"
"He wasn't very cooperative. But I did find out he has no intention of committing suicide."
"Really? That's unexpected."
"It's their doctrine, apparently. They say if you commit suicide, your soul is left to wander the mortal realm forever like other heretics, or something?"
For cultists, they were bastards with some peculiar aspects.
"Then what about when you're captured like this?"
"They say if you're tortured to death, it's martyrdom."
"Huh."
Did they not even consider the possibility of betrayal? They were useless as hell right now and just kept amplifying my questions. When I turned my head and looked at the bastard, he had been gauging what Sen and I were discussing and cautiously averted his gaze.
"Right. Wait with a pounding heart for that day of martyrdom that will someday come. For now, the kid's more important, so I'll let it slide."
"Kid?"
"Bellesica. When I briefly talked with the cultist bastards, they said she was a high-grade sacrifice or something. Do you know anything?"
At my question, Sen crossed her arms, furrowed her brow, and started racking her brain intently.
"I've never seen them follow like crazed lunatics this way, but actually, similar cases are more common than you'd think. Offering a virgin's blood, or a warrior with more achievements receiving the god's love—that kind of thing exists everywhere."
"So in the end, nothing but those common cases comes to mind, is what you're saying."
"Unfortunately, that seems to be the case. Just how great a sacrifice is she, that they'd send thirty people to capture her?"
Fuck. Now that I heard it, yeah? Thirty warriors? I tilted my head at the question that had arisen far too belatedly, and changed my question.
"Hey. You said you stopped those bastards' ritual and rescued her, right? What kind of people are they, that they had thirty combat personnel? Isn't that too big a force for cultists?"
True to Itisel, which was fundamentally based on the Pantheon, the kingdom could be called extremely open-minded in terms of religious views. But it wasn't a country that extended tolerance even to those outright branded as cultists.
On top of that, since gods genuinely existed in this world, forcibly abducting non-believers to offer them as sacrifices was a huge problem. Atheism was practically a mental illness in this world, so everyone was bound to live believing in at least one religion. So ultimately, it meant they'd freely offered someone else's believer to their own god.
It wasn't just a matter of saying, 'Let's follow the law.' It could lead to catastrophes where people claiming to be their gods' Great Warriors raced to wage religious wars against one another.
"Ah, these guys are the Demon God Church."
"...What?"
The Demon God Church? The god of the Demonfolk? I was so dumbfounded for a moment that I reflexively blurted out.
"Crazy fuck. They don't do human sacrifices."
"Wow! You know about the Demon God Church! Eldmia, are you actually some kind of noble? Usually people just react like, 'Ah, well, that could be the case then.'"
Sen stared at me with her eyes wide open as if something was greatly surprising her. When I glared at her, she burst into an awkward laugh and continued.
"They're a pseudo-cult, I said. Pseudo. They went crazy because of the war. It's a group formed by surviving mercenaries or deserters from the battlefield who gathered and gradually grew in force... but lately they've been going so far off the rails that even our local region is racking its brains over them."
As expected, war is never the answer. All sorts of crazy bastards spawn in this world.
"What a real shitshow. Now that I think about it, could this kid be a saintess candidate for some religion or something?"
"Hahaha."
Sen laughed heartily at the words I'd muttered while shaking my head in disbelief. I'd said it because I was dumbfounded myself, but with the cultist bastards charging in so ravenously like that, it could be called a reasonable suspicion.
In the end, I couldn't suppress the hollow laugh that escaped and looked back at the cultist...
"...You, fuck, what's with that reaction."
The cultist, who'd been eavesdropping on our conversation, was having his pupils dilate wildly.
What the hell, these motherfuckers?