Chapter 394: Debuff (4)
"Bring that one to me."
Myrddin's voice came again, and Lancelot's brow twitched into a frown. With his free left hand he rapped the Blue Space Wall, the gesture plain enough. Undo this.
He said nothing.
It felt, somehow, like losing. I withdrew the Space Wall. Lancelot set his clothes to rights, shot me one hard glare, and turned to walk inside.
There was real discipline in that bearing. Real dignity. They called him everyone's knight, and everyone's lover — and that wasn't exaggeration. If anything, they'd undersold him.
I followed the quiet clink of his steps and privately resolved to stop taking the ability users of this world lightly. A Blue Space Wall that even Franc could hardly break, and he'd shattered it with a shout and raw strength. What kind of power was that?
And the longsword at his hip — was that the blade that would one day be called Arondight? I glanced at the back of his head and quietly turned Spatial Perception over the sword. Something about it felt familiar, as if I'd seen it somewhere before.
...?
What? Where have I seen that?
I was still turning the question over in earnest when Lancelot, already at the door, looked at me in silence and stepped aside.
Was I meant to go in first? I looked away from that blank stare and opened the door — and the room was not a whit different from the last time I'd come. Two people sat in the chairs before the fireplace.
One was Myrddin, of course. The other... who? If Lancelot had called them a distinguished guest, they had to be someone of rank.
She wore an elegant moonlit gown lavish with frills. Hair like flowing honey was swept up and bound, and she was a beauty of a remarkably gentle, soft impression. I nearly examined her with Spatial Perception before I caught myself. Myrddin was here, and Lancelot had sensed it before. I crushed the impulse down.
"It's been a while, Grandpa Myrddin."
"Why are you back."
"Why shouldn't I come back?"
The beauty and Lancelot both looked thoroughly startled at how casually the two of us were talking. What was with them?
"You are the one who swept off as if you would never return. And now, the moment you have business, you come trotting back. Your nerve is as fine as that face of yours."
...Was that a compliment or an insult?
"You told me to leave, so I left. What are you talking about?"
"And so, having taken your first revenge, do you feel as though you might fly?"
Myrddin, saying only what he felt like saying. As always. And how did he know, again? Instead of answering, I threw the question back at the mischievous old man.
"So Grandpa Myrddin's taken revenge before, too?"
"At this age, what one has done outnumbers what one has not."
At that, I answered with a mischievous look of my own.
"So it felt good, then?"
"Kehehe. Revenge is usually thus."
"It wasn't, for me."
I answered the snickering old man with a straight face, and he shook that pitiful beard of his and cackled.
Lancelot, who had followed me in, watched me trading jokes with Myrddin with a sunken gaze. The woman in the chair, by contrast, studied me with open curiosity, so I met her eyes with a look that asked what she was staring at.
A faint blush rose to her cheeks, and she lifted her fan to hide her face with old-fashioned grace.
But if this was a woman Lancelot was escorting... wait. Wasn't she the woman I'd seen reading in the palace garden where the roses were in bloom? Then this was Queen Guinevere?
I was still uncertain when Myrddin cleared his throat — a pointed ahem — clicked his tongue, and spoke.
"Well. What was so urgent that you came charging in like a colt with its tail afire."
A colt! I almost snapped that he ought to know without being told, then remembered I was the one who needed something, and smiled obsequiously instead.
"Hehe. I did catch him, but before he died he offered up his own life and laid a curse on me. I'm fine. Franc was with me, though, and she got caught in it too, so I came to ask how to undo it."
"Hoh. That young lady? Small wonder you ran like a colt."
"Right?"
"A curse paid with a life, and laid down as sorcery..."
I watched him close his eyes and stroke that tangled, patchy beard, then caught the noblewoman staring at me again.
"Why do you keep looking at me?"
She startled prettily and once more hid her flushing face behind the fan in her hand.
"Ahem."
Not a scrap of dignity on me, and there I was talking bluntly to a noblewoman. Lancelot, displeased all over again, wrinkled that picture-perfect face and cleared his throat.
A signal to mind myself.
The way he looked at me, thoroughly unimpressed — he really didn't like me. And yet even that disapproval overflowed with dignity. Honestly...
I'd heard that a handsome man is a magazine spread no matter what nonsense he pulls, and I'd called it bullshit. It was true...
Come to think of it, weren't Guinevere and Lancelot that kind of pair? What business brought them to Myrddin at this hour? And was she even Queen Guinevere?
"By any chance... Queen Guinevere?"
"You know of me?"
Queen Guinevere smiled, slender and gentle as a single bowed blossom, and gave a slight nod.
The moment I took in those soft eyes, that smile, that clear voice, I nearly blurted, Beg King Arthur to let you marry Lancelot.
I nearly caused a disaster. I barely forced my face into a smile and nodded — and that was the moment it slipped out.
"Yes. Grandpa Myrddin stole Queen Guinev— ghk!!"
Thwack!
Eyes that had been shut flew open. Myrddin roared like a thunderclap and brought something crashing down on my skull!
"You wretch! What filth were you about to spew!!"
"Ow! Why'd you hit me! You're the one who— kehhek!"
"Silence! How dare a thunder-blasted wretch speak so without dignity before the Queen! If you mean to say such things, get out!"
From somewhere he produced an oak staff taller than he was and whirled it in whistling arcs, as if he meant to smash my head apart!
He was the one who'd be stung by what I was about to say, and he was beating me for it. Too much!
I crossed both arms to block, but he kept stabbing and striking through the gaps. I shouted and seized the staff.
"I won't! I'm sorry!!"
"...Pfft."
Perhaps because Queen Guinevere was giggling with her face entirely hidden behind the fan, Myrddin stopped. Panting, he glanced at her, dropped into his chair, and glared at me with a groan.
"Nngh. Impudent brat."
"Right back at you."
I glared right back, not to be outdone, and then came a laugh like jade beads rolling across a silver tray.
I turned. Queen Guinevere had folded her fan and was bent at the waist, laughing, a single tear clinging to the corner of her eye.
"I cannot say how long it has been since I saw the Queen laugh so."
She elegantly dabbed the tear away with a fingertip and answered with a warm smile.
"Ah. I am sorry, Sir Myrddin. The two of you seemed so like a fond grandfather and grandson that I forgot myself, and was rude..."
"Ho ho ho. The matter that has befallen His Majesty's person, I shall resolve upon my honor as court magician. Do not trouble yourself. Return, and rest."
Gentle, and an unmistakable dismissal. Queen Guinevere bent her knee to Myrddin, gave me a smile as white as a camellia, and left his tower under Lancelot's escort.
From the window I watched her go — a fine, close-woven veil embroidered with flowers, riding away with Lancelot on a spotless white horse — and then I turned to Myrddin, reclining in the rocking chair before the fireplace.
Did he know Lancelot and Guinevere were committing adultery?
I considered asking. Prying into another household's affairs rarely ended well. And there was no guarantee this world ran the way the books and legends of our era said it did. Poke the wrong place, and I might be hauled off for lèse-majesté.
"Grandpa?"
"There is a way difficult and swift, and a way simple and long. Which do you prefer."
Asked to choose out of nowhere the moment I called him. I answered with a feeling that was becoming familiar.
"Let me hear both, first."
"Keul. The difficult and swift is to kill the being to whom your first enemy paid the price. The root of sorcery rests upon the power of that from which it is borrowed."
...Kill the Lord of the Great Sea? I was still reeling at the absurdity when he offered the other path.
"The simple and long is for you to heal that young lady yourself."
"Me? I don't know the first thing about healing."
If I did, I wouldn't have come. Myrddin pointed at the firewood stacked beside the hearth, then at the hearth itself.
He could have just told me to put some wood on the fire.
I fed a few logs into the dying embers, and his explanation came from behind me.
"The persona you possess is a power of a thousand faculties, able to bind and unbind the knots of law. As you, though cursed, unravel the curse upon yourself, so may you turn that power to dissolving the curse upon the young lady."
Law. The knot of law. So that was it — Mana Sieve was a power skilled in a thousand things, and that was why a curse like this could be undone.
"How long will it take?"
"That will depend on how skilled you are with your own ability."
Relief went through me at how simple the answer was. I bowed my head to him.
"The hard way's impossible, so I'll have to undo it myself. Thanks for telling me."
"Give what you came to give, and be gone."
...Did he actually read minds? I opened Subspace Storage and rummaged out things an old man could manage — Choco Pies, soft sponge cakes, plenty of tender chocolate bars and the like — and asked something that had just occurred to me.
"Do you know anything about the Four Divine Beasts of the Phase World?"
"And what would you have me answer?"
He came over, leaning on his staff, picked up a Choco Pie, carefully unwrapped it, and put it in his mouth.
Huh? How did he unwrap the plastic? I never even taught him how.
"Do not seek answers from one who lives in a time not your own. Have you not your own bonds?"
I was staring blankly at Myrddin chewing the Choco Pie when he lifted his staff and poked the tip into the inner pocket where Darky was.
"Your future is a thing you must unravel by your own power and your own bonds."
He says my bonds, so why poke Darky? I patted the quivering, sniveling slime through my clothes and answered sullenly.
"At least give me a hint. Every place I could have found information has been wiped out. I'm going to have to start from scratch."
"I have enough weighing on me, you brat. More to the point, you have something further to offer, do you not? Set it out and go home. And if you wait, you will come to know."
Better than the non sequiturs of last time. He was as cryptic as ever, though.
I'd already taken out every snack fit to give as a gift. What else did he want? A piece of Baekcheong's corpse?
While I hesitated, Myrddin took a soft chocolate bar, ate it from his hand, opened a drawer, opened a cabinet, then pulled a box from under the bed and spoke.
"From now on I must hone and gather my arts for a matter of importance. You have something that would aid in that, do you not?"
Huh? Did he mean a Blue Stone?
"This?"
"You mean to give a stingy one?"
...This felt an awful lot like being shaken down.
Still, I was grateful he'd told me how to fix Franc and Darky, so I took thirty Blue Stones from Subspace Storage. Myrddin swiftly swept every one of them into his robe sleeve and grinned.
"Two or three would have sufficed, and you give me this many. I shall use them well. Keh heh."
...Oh, come on. I'd handed over thirty. I was about to demand a clearer answer when he spoke first, as if he'd read the thought.
"I can help you no further than that."
"Why not! Thirty of those could buy a country where I'm from!"
I snapped at him for cutting me off as if he'd read my mind. He wore the indifferent look of a man wondering where a dog was barking, and said nothing.
With no choice, I sat in the chair Queen Guinevere had used and picked through my thoughts.
I was curious about the place the aberrant races called Orvinci, and about where the peoples who served the Beast King and the Master of the Earth among the other Divine Beasts might be found. But if Myrddin said he could help no further, there had to be a reason he could not tell me.
Just looking at Langue Dran and Amin-La, it seemed those who possessed power also bore constraints to match it.
...Wait. Langue Dran had told me not to hate them, hadn't he? Not understanding, I'd said I wanted Baekcheong punished.
Don't tell me that counted as a contract too?
No way. We never formally spoke of a contract, and I was still hating them just fine. It couldn't be.
More importantly, first I'd use Mana Sieve to lift the seal debuff on Franc and Darky, and after that... just wait? Go home and wait, and I'd naturally connect with them? How did that connection even work?
Hmm. Of my two goals, I'd already achieved one: bringing Baekcheong down. I'd lift Franc's and Darky's seals and watch how things developed.
If that failed, I could enter the Phase World, use the Summoning Conch, and try calling Album Cetus.
While I turned all this over, Myrddin opened the lid of the box he'd pulled from under the bed — a thing like a treasure chest from a game — and put on a gloriously tacky robe of deep navy, embroidered with a golden star, moon, and sun. From beneath the table beside the dry-straw bed, he took up a wide-brimmed hat with a curled point, the sort one could only call a wizard's hat.
"Pfft."
The pint-sized Myrddin in that robe and wizard's hat was endlessly funny. Like a clown— yipe.
"Impudent brat," he grumbled.
I laughed sheepishly, then asked something that had just come to mind.
"Queen Guinevere coming with Lancelot at this hour — it must have been something important? Gathering your arts is for that too, right?"
"Important. A great matter, besides."
"Did something happen to King Arthur?"
I offered what I'd pieced together from what I'd overheard. Myrddin coughed as he beat the dust from the wizard's hat, checked which way was front, pulled it on, and spoke.
"Not so ill-starred as the curse upon the two of you, but it is certainly a curse quite bewildering for a man. And so he remains shut within the palace, seeing no one."
"King Arthur is cursed? Wasn't Excalibur's scabbard supposed to protect its master... Did it only ward off wounds of the flesh?"
"Hmm. You know a great deal."
"It's a popular story, in more ways than one."
Famous enough to star in well-known adult games, for that matter. A curse bewildering for a man, though — had it turned him into a woman? Or was it impotence?
I was snickering at the idle thought when Myrddin, in that gaudy robe, narrowed his eyes, snorted at me, and waved me off as if to say get out already.
Oh — I'd heard Morgan once hid King Arthur's Excalibur and left him in a real bind. Was this a continuation of that?
Thinking of Morgan reminded me of something I still had to do, so I put a question to Myrddin to confirm.
"Oh, right. I was curious — what's your relationship with Morgan le Fay? Master and apprentice? Or something improper?"
Thwack!!
"Gyaak!"
"Even your nonsense is of a very high grade. A passing mutt would hear it and follow you about, calling you boss. You brat."
Where had that attack even come from?! I was more than five meters from Myrddin!
Tears stung at the pain, as if the crown of my head were splitting. I muttered as I stroked my head with Healing Touch.
"Nngh. They say a fierce denial is as good as a confession."
Thwack!!
"Keohek!"
A heavy pain burst from below my navel and rode the blood out through my entire body...!
"That child is... no. It is no affair of yours. Pay it no mind."
"Why isn't it my affair? If she's a woman with nothing to do with you, then I've got a score to settle too! She made some strange fog and chased us, threatened us outright, and pulled a nasty trick besides!"
I shouted, madly rubbing my lower belly with the hand still wreathed in Healing Touch. Myrddin shouted back, swinging his staff up and down with a look that said he had never seen such a blockheaded brat.
"It began with you, you rockfish of a fool!! To peer into a witch's bedchamber is, by their reckoning, a humiliation, and you turned the place over as if it were your own house! You looked straight upon her naked body besides — what is it you find so unjust!"
Demoted from colt to rockfish?!
"S-so because of that, the justification is on her side?"
With a face that said he didn't even want to speak, Myrddin tapped the dust from the wizard's hat, jammed it onto his head, and began poking my waist with the staff, herding me toward the door.
If you're going to tell me, tell me properly!
"You've no more business here. Go home, you brat!"
"Stop reading my thoughts and just tell me! Otherwise I'm kidnapping that black-haired flasher auntie!"
"Oh, splendid! Kidnap that child, and should the boundary fall, how very— damn!!"
He'd been speaking in that mocking way, then his face went oh no, and a moment later, as if his temper had boiled past enduring, he roared and began beating me with the staff!
"You tiger-snouted wretch! I cannot live for the trouble you bring! If you have so many questions, then just live here! Just live here!!"
Thwack-thwack-thwackthwack-thwack!!
"Ow. Seriously!"
Every blow sent a sharp pain up from where it landed. Flinching as I blocked the full of his temper, I found myself driven all the way to the door.
"Hey, wait—!"
"Go home!"
"Urk!"
There was clearly no one there, yet the door flew open. I felt myself shoved hard and went sprawling onto the dirt.
"Oh, come on, that's too much! ...Huh? Dirt?"
I jerked my head up and looked around. Familiar standing stones, and a hut. ...Wasn't this the hut at Stonehenge? I was standing there, dumbfounded by the sudden change of place, when Myrddin's low voice flowed into my ear.
The right of this place is not yours. Even so, should you insist on fighting that child, this world will turn against you. Forget that grudge, and walk the path you are meant to walk. Have you not matters of greater weight?
"Grandpa?"
I ran and flung the hut's door open, but what met my eyes was not Myrddin's room. Only the spare interior of a hut, rich with the smell of wood.
What was this... Had he flung me here by spatial transfer? So I wouldn't get into a brawl with Morgan le Fay?
"Grandpa!!"
I called for him at the top of my lungs and waited. After that, Myrddin's voice did not come again.
The places he'd clubbed me throbbed, and my head was a tangle, so I sank onto the wooden steps before the hut and let out a sigh.
He'd said he couldn't help any further, and then gone and told me all sorts of things. Even that fighting Morgan would put me at a disadvantage.
More than that, I had a faintly hollow, sad premonition that I would not meet Myrddin again.
Why was I getting a feeling like this all of a sudden?
...Hah. I don't know what any of it means.