Island Full of Ghosts (5)
The Valkyrie and I had been shipwrecked in the waters near Tatankur. So where, then, had the souls of the soldiers who fell there that day gone?
They had simply sunk. Straight down into those icy depths of the deep sea.
Their bodies, never even recovered, had not earned so much as the right to a proper funeral. And so only their vengeful spirits drifted here and there like buoys cut free of their lines, until at last they settled upon this island.
“We died unjustly that day. Kill that Saintess and that Valkyrie to vent our fury. Do that, and we will not harm you, Major.”
There was a pleading quality in the voices of the spirits. Every last one of them shared the same will.
To hear my fallen subordinates beg me to avenge them…
“I can understand the Valkyrie, but why is the Saintess your enemy as well?”
“That chaplain cast our souls all the way down into the abyss. Everything that turned us into this is the Holy Kingdom’s fault, yet that woman looked at us and tried to exorcise us, calling us corrupted! She offered no comfort, so we distrusted her. She showed no fairness, so we found her narrow-minded. She gave us no understanding, so all that remains is our rage.”
The moment that single voice finished its long speech, the rest of them shrieked in unison.
“If you offer those two as sacrifices, two of our souls among us can be saved.”
“Sacrifices? Salvation?”
“Major, we have spoken with a certain demon.”
I had been feeling pity for them, but the instant I heard those words my brow furrowed.
“He told us this: for every life of a Holy Kingdom officer who comes to this island, he will restore one of us to life. From that day on we have waited an entire month for shipwrecked souls to appear here.”
I turned my head. In the darkness the Saintess’s eyes flickered with a red light. She spoke in a tone thick with tightly compressed hatred, her voice firm.
“In the end their souls were sold. To a demon. They’ve become evil spirits that harm the living, and still they dare hope for salvation? Don’t you find that shameless? You cursed things.”
“Enough.”
I tried to stop her, but she snapped at me instead.
“Mage, what will you do now? Are you going to kill me and the Valkyrie? You might even manage it, if you accept this monster’s help.”
The reason the Saintess was lashing out so viciously was easy enough to read in her eyes. Red shot through with purple. She was furious and terrified at the same time.
Everyone fears death. The Saintess was no exception. The composed front she put on was only because she was the face of her order.
“I am a vessel who received the descent of the Goddess of Healing. I can serve as a physician as well. If you kill me, you will never receive treatment again. Not for wounds, not for illness. You will be able to do nothing.”
“Major.”
“But it seems neither you nor I have any real choice left.”
Clang!
Sparks flew.
The Saintess, staff raised, was driven backward. A ghost had attacked. Its form was invisible, yet the distance she was thrown showed a terrifying physical force. The purple share in her eyes climbed higher still.
“Ugh!”
“Now, kill them while we have them bound. There is no time. That woman’s divine power recovers far too quickly—you must finish her while her strength is drained.”
I knew little about the ghosts of this place.
I also did not know how strong or how formidable the Saintess truly was.
The only thing I could be certain of was this: the injustice felt by those who had once been my subordinates and comrades had surpassed even her divine power.
And yet.
Even with so little information.
“No. I will not kill them.”
My course of action had not changed from a month ago.
“I’m sorry. I don’t think I can grant your request.”
“What are you saying?”
“I have no idea how many dangers still lie between us and escape from this island. I cannot get through them alone. You could say these women and I are already in the same boat. So I cannot agree to the demand of you soldiers that I kill the Valkyrie and the Saintess.”
The spirits stirred. Several voices immediately began to protest or turn hostile toward me. The murmuring felt as if it were kneading my brain.
“……Major.”
Amid it all, one calm tone cut through with unusual clarity. It was the voice of a soldier named Allen who had fallen at Tatankur that day.
“You always treated even subordinates like us with respect, Major. Even though your rank was high, you took the hard work upon yourself. Your name was famous throughout the Eighth Fleet. Many soldiers looked up to you. That is why we, the dead, are shamelessly asking one more favor.”
“You want me, a living man, to finish off your enemies with my own hands?”
The spirits answered with silence.
“If you know it is shameless, then you should not ask it at all.”
“We died far too unjustly. All our lives we only watched others’ faces, only obeyed our superiors’ orders. Even while we lived we could never do as we pleased—must we still be toyed with and pushed around by others after we are dead?”
“Listen.”
“From now on we will live for ourselves. In exchange for the lives of those two Holy Kingdom officers we will obtain new bodies. And in that second life we will live however we want, as our hands lead us, freely…….”
“Jeriem’s Covenant.”
The moment I spoke those words, every voice fell silent at once.
“Have you forgotten?”
“…….”
“One: Use magic only for beneficial purposes.”
Jeriem’s Covenant. Also called the Mage’s Oath.
That covenant was the greatest verbal binding a great mage had created, even at the cost of his own life, in order to improve the public perception of mages. And for every mage of the Magic Kingdom, it was the constitution above the constitution.
I recited the clauses one by one—clauses they themselves already knew.
“One: Do not harm others with magic without just cause. One: Neither converse with, contract with, nor trade with demons. One: Place morality above every other value.”
“None of that matters anymore! If we offer these women as sacrifices we can reclaim what we lost……!”
“One: Under no circumstances use a burnt offering.”
I jabbed a finger at the empty air and raised my voice.
“The moment you tried to offer sacrifices to a demon, every one of you violated the Covenant! Under criminal law that is a capital offense! No matter how unjust or how bitter your deaths, there are things you must never do if you wish to be remembered as human!”
“Human or demon’s lackey—what does it matter! In time no one will remember us anyway!”
Whoooosh.
A chilly wind brushed past my cheek.
“Ah……!”
The Saintess let out a short gasp. In that brief instant her eyes had turned orange. The spirits must have done something I could not perceive. My own body felt no change at all.
Either way, the answer I would give was already decided.
“Kids.”
In wartime, mental patients appear almost as often as the physically wounded. That was why, outside of duty hours, I would sometimes call in struggling soldiers and counsel them.
I had comforted the living more times than I could count. Why should the dead be any different?
“I was born and raised in an orphanage. The director beat me whenever he got the chance, so the bruises on my body never had a chance to fade. Even so I studied hard and made it all the way into graduate school, only for the mentor I had thought of as family to die of diabetes right before my graduation review, nearly delaying my degree.”
I continued.
“Right after I somehow finished my studies I spent two years in the army to fulfill my military service. When I was about to make sergeant I thought the hardships were finally over. But they weren’t. War broke out, and because I didn’t want to die I re-enlisted as an officer, got posted to the front lines…….”
The path I had walked. The life I had lived. I laid it all out in a continuous stream.
I was not asking them to pity me.
“……And then I lost even you, whom I had thought of as brothers, to the enemy’s hands, fell onto this island, and am suffering through all of this—how could I not want to do exactly as you ask?”
Everything had been for this single line.
“You endure. Just as you always have, you simply keep living while enduring.”
“…….”
“That is my choice.”
Where is there an easy life? Where is there a life without regret, a person without some injustice? No matter how uprightly you live, a single traffic accident can snatch you away, or an incurable disease can cut your years short. That is a human life.
I think it is a waste, yet there is nothing to be done. But.
“Even if we mages use Whieon, offering a burnt offering to a demon is absolutely forbidden. That is the path that leads you into your own destruction. If your lives were wretched, then at least your souls should find salvation. Follow the Covenant, kids.”
“Salvation?”
One spirit spoke in a dissatisfied voice, and the others began to chime in one after another.
“We’re already too late. That woman cast us into the abyss!”
“The soul of a friend I knew for ten years vanished at that bitch’s hands!”
“Was not believing in the Holy Spirit Church such a great sin? They killed people just the same—why do they get to go to heaven while we have to fall into hell!”
“If the Valkyrie kills the body and the Saintess is destined to kill the soul, then leaning on a demon is better, isn’t it?”
“We had no choice either.”
“We receive no comfort. We leave no memory. No one understands us. If only there were even a tower built of mana…….”
“I will.”
The chorus of grievances stopped the instant I moved my hand. I took from my pocket the magic stones I had prepared earlier and began to walk.
“I will pray for the repose of your souls.”
The spirits closed their mouths.
“I will raise a memorial and pour liquor over it every year.”
I did not believe in the grace of gods or the existence of heaven, yet there was no room to doubt that those who had died innocently in war deserved mourning.
“I want you to know that there are people who understand your bitterness as deeply as you feel it. So forget the affairs of the living world, and let us meet again far in the future. Let us be reborn in an age without war, and then truly live doing the things we want to do.”
Ah. Even I no longer knew what I was babbling about.
This spot would do.
I found a sunny place and sat down right there. Then I began stacking stones one by one, building a small tower.
Tiria, who had heard every word of the conversation between the man and the evil spirits without missing a single one, could not hide her dismay. These souls were not long-festering monsters. They were the spirits of Magic Kingdom soldiers who had fallen in the naval battle of Tatankur.
The man had said he would not kill her.
Disappointed, the spirits swung heavy fists at him, yet the man did not so much as blink as he took the blows.
No—more precisely, the vengeful spirits’ punches passed straight through him without doing any harm at all.
“That can’t be.”
A person might not be able to see evil spirits, but they could not simply ignore their attacks. At least, that was what the scriptures said. The contents of the holy book were flawless—how could something like this happen?
And so the devout Tiria arrived at a different answer.
These souls do not regard the man as an object of their grudge.
Having received education from the Holy Spirit Church that bordered on brainwashing, Tiria even briefly thought: Then is this man in league with the vengeful spirits? Could this entire situation be a collusion?
The thought reached that far before she shook her head.
No. That could not be. If this mage had been acting all along, he would have turned on them the moment Rachel was asleep and Tiria was pressed into a disadvantage by the grudge.
Instead the man was preparing the spirits’ release for the sake of saving Tiria.
The mage carefully stacked the stones he had personally infused with mana into a geometric form and smoothed them. It was the work of someone who had done this more than a few times.
“……Ah.”
Come to think of it, she had heard that in the Magic Kingdom they raised stone towers as a way of saying they would never forget the dead. Because rock might be chipped or broken, yet it neither died nor vanished.
Tap.
Having placed the final stone, the man rose from his seat and opened his mouth.
“Kids.”
In a gentle voice, as if he truly had been their commanding officer.
“Come forward one by one and report for discharge.”
At those words the spirits that had been so sharp only moments before all began to sob at once.