Camelot of a Strange World (2)
I shifted us to a spot where Camelot Castle fell within the range of Franc's Spatial Perception, and her lips parted, a soft cry of wonder breaking from her.
"Oh my... Camelot Castle resembles Windsor Castle so very much!"
"Does it?"
I wouldn't have known. I had never seen Windsor Castle.
Camelot Castle occupied the heart of the Upper Town, at the highest point of the city, laid out in the shape of a long rectangular goblet, and beyond the inner wall that ringed the Upper Town it had thrown up yet another layer of fortification. A rough look showed a chapel-like building and a vast manor that could only be the royal palace standing where the river came into view, with a round tower some sixty-five feet high rising at the center. Opposite the chapel and the palace, in the stretch that looked like the base of the goblet, a smithy, stables, an armory, and buildings that appeared to be the knights' quarters were clustered together.
"Mmm... But the knights are all dressed alike. I don't see anyone of outstanding ability, either. The Knights of the Round Table must all be away from their seats..."
"So every knight worth anything has gone off on campaign? I figured they'd at least have left a force to hold the main stronghold."
Beside a disappointed Franc, I swept the interior of Camelot Castle. The ability user with the highest Phase Power was an E-Class at 12,000. Nearly everyone else failed to clear even 1,000 — F-Class or below, and Physical Reinforcement types at that.
"The strongest knight only being E-Class is kind of a letdown."
More than that, most of the knights were Physical Reinforcement. There were knights who weren't ability users at all, but the Elemental types and the Special types were, near enough to say all of them, attendants and maids. There wasn't a single Healing type anywhere in the castle. When we had looked around Downtown earlier, there had been one healer in what might have been a cathedral or a church, and one more in a place I couldn't tell from a clinic or an herbalist's. That was all.
Camelot seemed to be the strongest realm in Britain at present, and if this was all the castle held, the other countries would be much the same at best — certainly no higher.
While Franc drifted through the castle on Spatial Perception, little sounds of admiration slipping from her, I went looking for items imbued with Phase Power.
I wasn't thinking of anything else. Just curious. Curious.
A careful look through Camelot Castle, driven by that curiosity, turned up a treasure vault holding a green cloth sash with a faintly uncanny feel, a suit of armor, and a teardrop-shaped shield that gave off a strange sensation — but nothing so steeped in Phase Power that it seized the eye. Most of it, if I had to say, fell short of my Heavenly Cloud Sword. Excalibur, of course, King Arthur would have taken with her, and the items the Knights of the Round Table were said to carry would all be in their owners' hands.
We strolled the grounds around the castle, and I looked a little deeper inside. In a garden full of roses behind the great manor, I found a blonde woman — no match for Franc, but strikingly beautiful all the same — taking tea in a blue dress heavy with lace. A female knight stood guard behind her, the one and only E-Class Physical Reinforcement ability user in the whole castle. That woman had to be Queen Guinevere.
If you asked whether she was pretty, the face was certainly pretty. But when I looked through her body there was no Phase Power, nothing at all, and her strength looked wretched. A flower in a vase. I lost interest at once. There was a vacant, empty-headed prettiness about her that simply wasn't my type.
Franc, walking the Upper Town and examining the castle through Spatial Perception, ended up thoroughly disappointed, unable to find anyone who looked like a Knight of the Round Table.
"The number of Knights of the Round Table differs from tale to tale, but there ought to be at least thirteen. I don't think there's a single one inside the castle..."
I had never heard of a woman among the Knights of the Round Table, so that E-Class ability user probably wasn't one of them. I did see the great round table of wood that had given the knights their name, up in a tower, and two thrones set upon a high dais amid lavish ornament — but none of it particularly caught my interest. Ah. Behind the thrones hung a spear, a long blade set on a wooden shaft and well suited to cutting, and something uncanny clung to that as well.
It definitely wasn't Phase Power. Then what was it? A spear adorning a throne — Rhongomyniad?
And what was that old man doing over there?
Grandfather Myrddin was inside the walls, in a room hung thick with tapestries of strange patterns and crammed with unknown plants and bizarre implements, and he was not alone. An alluring woman was with him.
She was beautiful, pale-skinned, with black hair grown to about her waist, a white translucent robe on her body and a blue shawl across her shoulders. The erotic charge coming off her was staggering. Her figure was, in a word, a-mazing — a living sex doll, if I had to put a name to it.
The translucent robe hid none of her curves. Her nipples stood out plainly, and through the sheer fabric a neat, dainty growth of jet-black pubic hair lay fully exposed. Dressed like that, any man would have had to look at least once. The star-shaped beauty mark beneath her right eye was the finishing stroke. Was that what made the sex appeal detonate?
Huh. She was an ability user too. An F-Class Physical Reinforcement type, 617 Phase Power.
Yeah, figures. Without a Physical Reinforcement boost carrying her, there was no way a body like that existed... but damn, the raw sex appeal was unreal. A status my lovers had nothing to do with, and my eyes kept drifting back to it.
Her clothes didn't look like a knight's, though. Judging by the face and the dress, wasn't she a witch?
"...!"
For an instant the black-haired woman whipped her head around to look exactly where I was, and I startled. If there hadn't been a wall between us, our eyes might have met. Myrddin clicked his tongue at her. Whether she heard the sound or not, she turned her gaze back to him and said something. It wasn't English, so lip-reading got me nothing.
"Let's head back."
It had only been a moment, but a strange light had flashed in the black-haired woman's eyes, and my mood soured for no reason I could name. I took Franc's hand and turned our steps toward Myrddin's house.
In any case, Franc had wanted to see the city, so we had wandered — and walking a medieval city with her turned out to be more enjoyable than I had expected. We had no coin, so we couldn't buy clothes or even a snack, but sightseeing with her eyes alone was enough to delight her, and it lightened the gloom sitting in my own chest more than a little. Still, the look that woman had given me at the end kept catching on my mind.
Myrddin came back late in the night. He gave Franc and me a mischievous look where we sat side by side before the fireplace, then settled into the rocking chair with a wheezy laugh.
"Heh heh heh. A woman is a harbor, and a man is a ship. Aye."
Franc hadn't done a thing wrong, but she went red and hid behind me.
"Would you keep it down. Spouting perverted nonsense in a dignified voice like that. What a waste of a voice."
Watching Franc burn red as a beet, I snapped it out in a foul mood — but Myrddin paid me no mind at all. Stroking his tangled white hair, the ugly untrimmed beard, the face creased deep with wrinkles, he spoke.
"And how did it feel, touring Camelot Castle as if it were your own house, Sir Legend?"
"You put on such a show of knowing things, and you don't even know that?"
"It is no show. It is the truth, you impudent brat. Has your world no respect for the elderly?"
"...!"
At the casual remark from Grandfather Myrddin, leaning back in the creaking rocking chair, Franc — gathered in my arms — stared at him in shock.
Our world. He was talking as if he knew reality itself.
Franc's eyes had gone round as a startled puppy's, fixed on Myrddin as if to demand how he could know, and I sighed inwardly. Act like that, and he would catch on to everything. I lifted a hand, toyed with Franc's hair, and asked the old man.
"But why do you keep calling me Legend? I'm just an ordinary..."
Not ordinary anymore. I shut my mouth mid-sentence, and the old man opened his with a dry chuckle.
"Keheheh. A human body, carrying the spirit of a half-blood born of human and demon, and still you have not lost your humanity. If you are not a legend, then what is?"
I gave the old man and his irritating way of speaking a faint glare, then frowned. Better not to keep dragging this subject. I ought to just ask what I had meant to ask yesterday, and hadn't.
"What's going on with this world?"
"What do you mean?"
Asking when he already knew. I nearly launched an assault on the elderly, but the kind soul that I am decided to hold back, and I kindly reworded the question.
"Walking around Camelot Castle today, I noticed a few notions that don't fit this era. Water and sewage treatment. Public baths. Streetlamps. The whole place divided into districts like a planned city, neatly laid out..."
Myrddin offered no particular reply. He just sat in the old rocking chair and rocked.
"So what is this? Whether a way exists to cross here from the world I was in, how this thing called Root Energy came to be, how it connected to our world — I want to know that, too."
"Hoh."
Grandfather Myrddin kept giving me nothing but empty laughs, so I opened my mouth again.
"In the world I lived in, Myrddin is called Merlin, and King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table exist only in stories."
"To think of us as beings in a tale. Impudent wretches."
Clicking his tongue and raking a hand like a claw down that disastrous beard, Myrddin didn't actually look wounded.
"That's not all. I listened to the conversations people were having as we walked the city, and if I set the history we've written down and built up against this world, it feels like the same place and a different world. So if you know something, please teach me. If that legend is fact and not fiction, then Myrddin is a sage, a great mage, and a druid besides, isn't he?"
Myrddin, who had only been listening in silence, let out a deep sigh and finally spoke.
"What a shameless brat. Trying to gulp the truth of the world down raw."
"..."
"Hrrrm. You are not unrelated to it, in any case... From your station, this would be a distant past, and a past, and the present."
"This place is the past?"
"Heh heh heh. From my station, you and the young lady there are the future. I am the present. That place is the past."
So three places were connected? I felt as if I roughly understood. The place we called the Phase World would be an Earth whose history had been reset once. Recalling Lake Asumpre in the Phase World, identical in shape to the Great Lakes of reality, I asked.
"Do you know why something like this happened?"
"Of course I do. I heard it from a firebrand of a fellow who came looking for me once. Your world has become an absurd place."
A firebrand? Our world — don't tell me...
"That firebrand's name wouldn't happen to be Jeral Packard, would it?"
"You knew?"
"Wow. So he really was here. Where is he?"
Myrddin snorted and answered, listless as anything.
"That firebrand came charging at me out of nowhere like a madman, so I flung him off somewhere."
I spared a brief moment of silence for Jeral Packard, who had likely been caught in a spatial phase shift and blasted off to who knows where, then asked Myrddin again.
"Anyway, why did the world end up like this?"
"Are you not trying to hear all of this for nothing? If you think living in this world is that easy, you are sorely mistaken."
"You've got a rough sense of my ability, haven't you? Once we're back in reality, I'll look after the Britain of the future in my own way, so won't you tell me."
Myrddin ran his fingers through his hopelessly tangled beard and stared at me as if I were an unbelievable fool. Then he looked at Franc, whose eyes were shining, and shook his head. Rocking the chair again, he spoke.
"It is all because the lot of you grew too clever in the head, and living grew far too comfortable."
To put the explanation that followed in brief, the reason people in reality had begun to be forcibly summoned was a dimensional warp born of an imbalance in Phase Power.
"There are many causes by which Root Energy comes into being, but if one were to name the chief of them — fear of the unknown, and faith."
The unknown? Did he mean the unknown — that which is not known? Why would that...
"One who holds longing and awe for the unknown, who strives, and who fears, comes to take the Root into the body. Should that bloom, one comes to wield superhuman power."
Uh... was he talking about ability users? When you awaken, you take in Phase Power and become one, so...
"And when death comes, the Root accumulated in that body spreads out into the world. That is the very power that sustains the world. The Root thus spread circulates without end through this world, and is spent restoring a world that has twisted and warped."
The unknown, Myrddin said, is born in darkness. I wondered how he knew of electricity and light bulbs... but I didn't interrupt him. For the moment, I only listened.
Into a world that moved by such a principle, he said, a single bomb had fallen: the discovery of electricity, and the invention of the light bulb. Darkness, which had cradled the unknown, steadily lost any place to stand as the light bulb was invented and electricity advanced. People stopped fearing the dark and turned away from tradition and superstition, and science developed. The unknown drew its driving force from human imagination and fear, and its shrinking led, intact, to a decrease in the Root.
Computers were made, the internet connected, mobile phones appeared. As science advanced at a breakneck pace, people ceased to fear the unknown at all. The result was a sharp decline in Root Energy — in Phase Power.
"The unknown dwindled, and divine wonders vanished. Supernatural powers and miracles were forgotten in the memories of men, dismissed as mere stories and legends, and even their divinity was erased."
"So because science developed and the internet spread, fear of the unknown and faith in it decreased, and that's what brought this on?"
"Yes. Your world, which achieved such rapid advancement in so short a time... the Root withered before the world could even put forward a countermeasure. The Root withered, and so the twisted, warped places went unrestored. The situation ran from bad to worse, twisting and twisting until it stood on the verge of snapping."
And the result of that was the link between the Phase World, where Aberrants appeared, and the world we lived in?
"When a thing called science advances and knowledge piles up, fear of the unknown lessens of its own accord, does it not? The humans of this world call the lightning that falls from a clouded sky the wrath of God, and they fear it. What of you?"
"You mean an electrical discharge in the air, between the clouds and the ground, brought on by bad weather."
"There. You see? Not a damn scrap of fear or longing for the unknown."
"Then what do we have to do to stop the forced summons?"
"Leave it be."
"...What?"
"Leave it be, and it stops. Someday."
That leisurely attitude made me scowl. Far too indifferent, just because it wasn't his problem.
"What is that supposed to be. Maybe I ought to fire a magic bullet and bring Camelot's walls down."
"Tsk!!"
Myrddin flared at my words, smacking the armrests of the rocking chair as he glared at me — but I didn't give ground, and glared right back, until he turned his head aside.
"Bah. You brazen, thick-skinned brat. Have you any notion how great the gap in Root Energy is between your world and the world joined to it?"
"...I can't even compare them. What I can feel right now is about tenfold, but..."
"That is precisely it. The wider the gap grows, the longer that gulf becomes, and the shorter the cycle. There ought to be a limit to how bad a state of affairs can be. The amount of Root has diverged so greatly from the past that your world has joined to the time-axis of the past — no, not joined. A hole has been punched clean through, Root has flowed in, and together with a self-purifying process the restoration of the world has begun. Do you understand what that means?"
"...Don't tell me?"
"That very thing you suspect."
So that was why a rainbow droplet formed in the place of a person forcibly summoned to the Phase World at set intervals, and why a rainbow-colored droplet appeared in reality and burst when they died? That was how Phase Power was passed along?
"Then if Phase Power from the past keeps flooding into the present, and the past runs short of Phase Power, what happens?"
"Heh. Humans are the greatest generators of Root Energy there are."
"...This is a damned state of affairs."
So long as people kept dying in the Phase World, there was no reason for the Phase Power of the past to disappear.
"So if you wish for things to return to what they were, simply wait. Wait long enough, and it vanishes. Whether that takes five hundred years, or a thousand."
Wait until Phase Power had spread enough to reach a balance? Did he have any idea how many people would die in the meantime? Once Phase Power saturated reality, animals would absorb it and turn into Aberrants, so even if the passage closed, humanity would be fated to fight Aberrants forever. If ability users died fighting the Aberrants that appeared in reality, people would come to harbor a fear of the unknown, and Phase Power would keep on swelling. As it swelled, some would awaken even in reality and become ability users, and those ability users would fight Aberrants mutating in the real world, building their Phase Power ever higher. Die, and the Phase Power stored in the body would scatter into the air and stabilize the world.
Was this the price of science advancing far enough for people to reach space?
"Haa..."
This was no trashy morning soap, and yet I had been handed an out-of-nowhere secret of my birth, and the truth of the world besides. I felt strange. Remembering that I was a demon's child threatened to drag me back down into gloom, but Franc, looking up at me from beside me with worried eyes, let me hold the gloom down.
"But how did you know I was... a half-blood with a demon? That you saw something in my eyes — that was a lie, wasn't it?"
"...Heh."
Myrddin just clicked his tongue and shut his mouth. He had spoken readily enough of things as secret and heavy as the secret of the world, but there seemed to be some reason he didn't want to say this.
"Do you happen to know what became of my mother?"
"I don't know."
"..."
At Myrddin's I don't know, my chest clenched tight. Surely Mother isn't dead...
That aside, a question about Myrddin himself had started to nag at me.
"Why would you tell something like that to complete strangers like us?"
"It is not for your sake. It is for the future of Britain."
"...?"
"That premonition of yours is the most wretched art among those that peer into the future."
I inclined an ear toward whatever Myrddin would say next, but the senile face, its mood sunk deep, brought out no further topic. I looked at his slight body as he sat with his eyes closed, stroking his beard again and again, then rose and spoke.
"Thank you, Merlin. When I get back to reality, I'll at least do what I can so England doesn't pull some disastrous stunt and collapse."
"That firebrand, and now you — why do you persist in calling me Merlin? My name is Myrddin! M Y R D D I N E!!"
"I know. Your face was so grave I thought you'd only get more senile, so I tried the name. May I ask just one more thing?"
"..."
Myrddin, who had been staring at me in disbelief — what kind of fellow was this — soon sneered as if I were pathetic and waved a hand. A senile face wearing a look like that hit harder than it had any right to.
"If you think I am about to tell you that the young lady, like you, has already set one foot in the otherworld, and that there is no way for her to return to being human — you are sorely mistaken."
Said he wouldn't tell me, and then told me the whole of it.
"Are you an omniscient being, Myrddin? I didn't even say it. How do you know all of it?"
"I am not omniscient, but myriad-knowing — that much, yes. The waves of emotion you send up... Ah, enough. Now go your way. There is nothing left to tell you, and thanks to that idiotic curiosity of yours, a troublesome child has set her eye on you. Lingering here long will do you no good."
Hearing something serious delivered in that deep, weighty voice, I suddenly thought of the black-haired woman I had seen in Camelot Castle that afternoon... the witch in that erotic, indecent outfit.