Radiance (2)
There was no device for catching demons—and yet, unmistakably, this was a guillotine.
Vast and slanted, its snow-white blade came down upon the demon's neck.
Where the blade had fallen with a rush, the severed head dropped quietly to the ground. Ceria stood before it.
Gazing down at the head in silence, she lifted both hands and offered a prayer to Laan, the sun god—a report that one more demon had been put to death. Her voice as she prayed was soft as anything, and the expression with which she regarded the severed head was serenity itself.
'Calmer than I expected.'
For the past five days, Ceria had clamored for demons. The stress of being unable to lay a hand on anyone so much as suspected of being one had sent her tumbling into divine frenzy time and again.
'And this was supposed to be her long-awaited harvest.'
She had finally run down the magician she had hunted so desperately, yet Ceria was not in frenzy. The satisfaction showing through was nowhere near vast enough to tip her over the edge.
'She looks like someone who just finished her homework at last.'
Watching her, Harad was reminded of a magician. A magician addicted to hearts, more precisely—the kind who wandered half-mad searching for a magician to hunt, and knew relief only once he had finally devoured one. Save for the ecstasy of taking that heart, Ceria looked very much like such a magician right now.
"How do you feel?"
"I feel that my faith has deepened."
"Vague."
So the vessel grows. That, too, was a very magician-like answer. Just as a magician swelled his mana through magic, it seemed a priest's faith—the vessel that held her divine power—had simply grown.
'Hard to make sense of, that.'
Faith. Devotion to a god was, in the end, a human heart, and you could hardly call the deepening of one person's heart a phenomenon.
'Not that it's any of my concern.'
Divine power. The strength interested him; burrowing into it did not. With the Church, one should think only of using them—never of keeping their company. You never knew when they would drive a stake into your back. To Harad, that was all the Church was.
He didn't want to carve the world into black and white, but with them he had no choice. Harad was no mere private man. If he went down, Serzilla went down with him.
At some point, Ceria's face had gone flushed and bright. She seemed to grow excited while hunting demons, and to settle again once one was dead.
'Usually it's the other way around.'
It was the exact opposite of the priests he had seen in his past life. They had felt euphoria at the deaths of demons—or of anyone suspected of being one. Ceria was, without question, a priest who belonged among the exceptions.
"I believe you two should be heading back now," Ceria said.
"My, my. Tired of me already?"
"How wicked of you."
Ceria smiled faintly, then turned serious. "It is surely a trap. It's dangerous."
Because it was dangerous, she would go alone. Ellen looked quite taken aback—put another way, it also meant since it's dangerous, keep out of it. When had Ellen ever been told such a thing?
"Besides, it is my duty. There is no reason for the two of you to come along."
Of course, Ellen was only surprised. She did not press the matter further. That was the sort of relationship they had.
Harad, however, was cut from different cloth. "Is that so? The ones they're coming to catch are me, though."
Ellen's brow creased slightly. "I'd be more help, you know."
"I appreciate the sentiment, but you wouldn't find them. The Great Plains are simply too vast."
The ones those bastards had in their sights was Harad. Without him, Ceria would never so much as spot them.
"The Demon Pillar is hostile to the Church. If I go, they will come for me."
The Liberation Magic Tower. The Church sneered at it as the Demon Pillar. "Liberation" was a name far too generous for demons.
"No. There's such a thing as priority, and I'd wager mine runs higher than yours."
She was, after all, a single priest. All the Liberation Tower would gain from killing one was a magician's pride and a boost to the group's morale. But if they killed Harad, they would win the trust of Psina, 5th-tier of the Ivory Tower—trust they absolutely needed if they hoped to bind the Ivory Tower close. All of it, of course, was Harad's own design, but no matter. To the Liberation Tower, ignorant of the truth, there was no reason to waste effort on Ceria. Their situation demanded they aim that effort at Harad instead.
"The Demon Pillar values Harad more than me?" Ceria looked genuinely stung.
"Now that I look at you, you rate yourself rather highly. Or is it the god you serve that you hold in such esteem?"
"……"
"If it's the latter, best give it up. That one isn't you." A god was a public good—at least, that was how Harad saw it.
"The Great Plains. I don't know what they're preparing out there, but I doubt there's only one demon waiting. They'll have planned for the knights I'd be dragging along."
"Why do you think so?"
Ceria, for her part, seemed to have assumed a magician or two.
"They'll have judged there's no chance I'd come alone. I have no strength, after all." When he had posed as Psina and wielded the quill, Harad had never once given away his own information. They could not begin to imagine he was a magician, and they wouldn't take him for a knight either—for Harad had never shown his aura.
"Then why would the demons dig a trap at all? By that same logic, they'd have concluded Harad would never come to the Great Plains either."
"Perhaps. But that was my judgment. Serzilla's judgment, having heard it from me, is another matter." There was no reason to walk into a trap you knew was a trap. But Serzilla would go anyway.
"Serzilla will order me to deal with it. Vermin have taken up residence in the front yard, and given my position, I won't have many troops to spare." Which meant the trap on the Great Plains was, all things considered, a rather rational choice.
"Of course, they did overreach. Enemies or not, those are Serzilla's knights they're baiting."
"……"
"Your killing those five demons probably played a part too. They'll have concluded they can't kill me inside the territory." Ceria looked as if she could hardly believe it. To her, Harad was nothing more than an intelligence agent.
"Am I truly that important to them? Important enough to risk a fight with Serzilla's knights?"
"Important enough to stake their lives on. The details are classified." Ios and the tunnels, the pair that had given him such headaches in his past life, were gone. The Liberation Tower would have to forge a new point of contact with the Outer Realm.
"So if you truly want to catch demons, you'll have to bring me along."
"……"
"Or I'll bring the knights myself. Oh—do you see over there? The 2nd Knight Order. We're quite close." Harad flashed a grin and pointed at a passerby. He hadn't the faintest idea who it was.
Before taking the field, those who bore divine power offered prayers. When there was time to spare, that time ran long, for they believed the longer the prayer, the stronger they became.
Of course, divine power did not grow. But neither was it a meaningless act. Put in Serzilla's terms, it was much like the gesture of striking one's own chest—steadying the will, honing the heart.
Faith honed through prayer gives birth to miracles. So said the Church. In Harad's eyes, it gave birth to fanaticism. They never feared death. No—they welcomed it. Martyrdom was the most devout prayer a believer could offer a god.
Tap. Ellen flicked her ash and set a fresh cigarette between her lips. It had been a while since Harad had seen her smoke. He lit it for her.
"Careful. What will you do if you're caught?"
"While she's praying, she wouldn't notice if someone carried her off."
Up on the eastern wall, Ceria was deep in prayer. Harad stood before the gate; Ellen leaned back against the wall.
"Haven't seen you light up in a while."
Ellen was no chain-smoker. When drinking, perhaps—but ordinarily she only smoked when something had displeased her.
"Something happen?"
There shouldn't be. Harad had been at her side the whole time. If anything had happened, he would have noticed.
'At the trap, then?'
Hard to say. Setting Ceria aside, Ellen had been with her. He didn't know what the trap was, but it could hardly be anything that threatened Ellen and a 4th-tier magician. The Liberation Tower's strength did not run to that.
'No telling how many 5th-tiers they have at this stage, but they'd never send their core strength.' That would amount to introducing themselves to the Outer Realm as weak. The Liberation Tower was in no position to prove its usefulness to Psina with anything less; business of this size they were meant to settle without their superiors.
"Is a woman like that your type?" Ellen asked, flicking her ash. It came out of nowhere.
"A woman?"
"Ceria. I'm asking whether a madwoman is your type."
A madwoman. Harad looked at her steadily. "Well, I don't dislike it. Better than a meek one, anyway."
"So that's why you're helping her?" Ellen snorted.
"That's not why I'm helping. Strictly speaking, she's the one helping me." From where Harad stood, Ceria was disposing of the Liberation Tower's Rebel Faction on his behalf. It was a shame he couldn't take the heart, but as it happened, he had just begun to sense the danger of addiction.
'About time I gauged how bad her fits can get.' The paltry hearts he could afford to throw away.
"I'm going to keep watch. Who knows what the Liberation Tower might let slip." Psina. The tunnels. Either one was a dangerous topic, and nothing good could come of it reaching the Church's ears.
"It would hand them a pretext. If even one of the two got out, they'd be sure to start meddling with the Great Wall." The Boundary might be opened. That much he had to prevent at all costs. Harad still had plenty of business in the Boundary—and the same went for Ellen. Her growth required it.
"And besides, Ceria isn't my type."
"Then what is your—"
"Shall we be off?"
At some point, Ceria was standing right beside them. She had finished her prayer and come down from the wall, and now she pointed at the gate.
"……"
Ellen flung away the cigarette she'd been smoking with real violence. Crack! It rang out like a cuff upside the head.
The Great Plains to the east. Serzilla called that snowfield stretching to the very edge of sight the front yard; the snowy peaks to the west were the back hills. That was how familiar it all was. Tending the front yard and the back hills had been Serzilla's charge for generations, and they periodically exterminated the dangerous beasts and magical creatures that bred there.
'Come to think of it, there's not much time left.' The new year had the subjugations and the festivals lined up one after another. To the regressed Harad, they were familiar events. These Great Plains were his front yard too—because Elain had insisted he see them that way.
"It's enormous," Ceria marveled loudly—loudly, because that was the only way her voice would carry. The sky had gifted the bare plain with snow and wind. True, that wind and chill were nothing beside the Boundary, but that was a judgment only someone who could enter the Boundary had the standing to make. The winter Great Plains were, beyond argument, a cruel land. Without her divine power, Ceria could not even have kept her eyes open, and only by feeding it more could she hold her vision at all.
"Can you see?"
"I see just fine." Ellen answered as if it were nothing. To her, the Great Plains were the front yard.
"Over there. Head that way and something's bound to show itself. It's wide enough, but there's hardly anywhere to hide."
Ellen was the heir who had committed the North's every road and ridge to memory. She could walk the Great Plains with her eyes closed.
'The Liberation Tower would hate to hear that.' To them, Ellen would be a greater wildcard than Ceria. Who would ever imagine the Grand Duke's heir of Serzilla traipsing about in this state at Harad's side?
"As expected of you, Ellen!" Thanks to having her skull cracked open on Ellen's fist more times than she could count, Ceria knew full well that Ellen was a strong one worthy of Serzilla.
'She'd be useful, and yet I told her to stay behind. Because I'd rather not owe Serzilla a thing? Or because I mean to devour every demon myself?' The latter, most likely. Ceria's nickname was the Guillotine, and she was cautious in a way no priest had any business being. The heads she'd sent falling had mostly belonged to magicians—he'd wager she staked her blade on magicians to that degree.
None of it changed how he felt. Ordinary person or magician, they were all the same to Harad.
"Are you all right, Harad?" Ceria asked. It was a gentle voice that had no business on the Great Plains—her divine power carried it whole and undimmed to his ears. The concern was offered because she took Harad for an ordinary man with a good head on his shoulders.
"I'm fine!" Harad bellowed back, playing his part.
"Your coat seems awfully thin, though?"
Harad's coat was thin—less a coat than an outer layer that merely passed for one in other people's eyes. It was to avoid drawing needless attention, and thanks to it, Harad sweated constantly inside the territory.
"I run hot!" In truth, he was hot even now. The Great Plains' blizzard could not cool him; if he wanted to feel a chill, he had to go to the Boundary.
"Pardon?" Ceria protested at full volume. Then she took hold of Harad's forearm with both hands and went round-eyed. "He really is warm!" she cried, turning to Ellen. "Come feel too, Ellen!"
Ceria folded her arms and waited.
"……"
And then, quite suddenly, Harad felt a chill.