Pride
Everyone standing in that place recoiled backward in the same instant. Why, exactly, was hard to explain. It simply felt like something we had no choice but to do.
"Hmmm... it has been quite some time since I last met a human..."
A black robe materialized without warning out of empty air. Nor was it long before a hand emerged from within that robe—along with a bronze ring whose color had faded entirely away.
"...I understand the need to conceal one's identity, but this is cumbersome indeed."
Before long, that gaunt hand turned toward the robe shrouding its owner's face. As he stripped away the black cloth wound tightly about his body, that still skin-crawling voice echoed out—and the face hidden deep within the robe began to emerge into view.
"Hm. It is certainly convenient, I must say."
The old man's face was quite different from anything I had imagined. His snow-white beard and hair were cropped short, and a monocle—the sort of thing that belonged only in the pages of novels—caught my eye. At a glance, there was nothing about his appearance worth taking issue with. And yet, for some reason, he felt deeply, profoundly wrong.
Going purely by what my eyes told me, his frame was no different from mine. No—if anything, he looked smaller than I did. And still, his gaze seemed to exist somewhere above even my own. As though he could look down upon all things.
"Hm. I suppose handling that one's corpse personally would be no bad thing."
Yet he never once turned his gaze upon us, and his body drifted away once more—toward the great hole the Saintess's attack had torn open only moments before.
"Well, he is dead—but that power was mine to begin with."
...
"A human who has received my power makes for one rather fine sample."
Observing the Majin—now reduced to nothing but a head—he began to prattle on about 'my power' and 'samples' and other such nonsense. Even then, he showed no interest in us whatsoever. As if we were nothing more than the furniture of the room. No—to be precise, he seemed to have no interest at all, the way a beast of prey, however weakened and aged, shows none in catching insects. He was behaving as though we simply did not exist.
"...Are you acquainted with that old gentleman?"
Shino Charlotte had been standing right beside the old man only moments before. She too must have sensed that something about his presence was deeply wrong, for she crept to my side and quietly took hold of my sleeve—with a hand shaking like a leaf.
"...I don't know him."
"B-but then how did he get in here...?"
Right—that was strange as well. He wore an outfit that, had you stopped anyone on the street to ask, ninety-nine out of a hundred would have called suspicious, and he had used a method that reeked unmistakably of intrusion. He had entered the estate of a ducal house? That old man, who looked to be quite advanced in years, no less? For an ordinary person, such a thing would have been beyond impossible. That is—if that old man were an ordinary person.
"...There's no way."
"Huh? What did you say?"
An old man who had appeared out of thin air. An old man who, even from that distance, radiated an aura this unsettling. There was no possibility that he was ordinary. None at all.
"It's nothing... let's fall back for now."
"Right—I'll look after the Saintess, so..."
I counted it a mercy, at least. He was not sparing us so much as a single glance. Whether that was genuine indifference or a deliberate refusal to turn his head, I couldn't say—but we had no reason to entangle ourselves with him regardless. I would simply gather up the Saintess and withdraw quietly. After all, my purpose from the very beginning had been nothing more than to rescue Aria. Whatever happened to this mansion from here on out, I did my best to dismiss it as none of my concern.
"And where, pray tell, do you think you are going?"
That was the plan—right up until a hand so gaunt it felt like nothing but bone closed around my shoulder.
"Ghk—?!"
The grip was unbelievable for fingers so slender—overwhelmingly effective against a body already exhausted to its very limits. Even so, I clenched my teeth, squeezed out strength I hadn't touched since infancy, and forced my body to move. This was no act reasoned out in that fleeting instant—it was something committed on pure instinct alone, and—
"Hold still."
My audacious move was smothered in an instant. Without interference or obstruction from anyone.
...?
"You need only stay where you are."
"W-wait a moment. What are you trying to—"
"Verification is something I can carry out quite adequately on my own."
The moment his words ended, the air around us grew heavy. As though weight itself had been laid upon the very fabric of space.
"W-wait, what is the meaning of this—"
"...Hold still."
"Kyaaah...!"
And the phenomenon did not confine itself to me. Not only Shino, who had rushed forward to catch me as I suddenly crumpled, but even Aria, who had been tending to the Saintess after she abruptly fainted—everyone froze where they stood, as though something were bearing down on them from above.
Thud. Thud— The old man alone was still moving in that place.
"Originally, I came merely out of curiosity—to learn who had invoked my power."
"...Haaah... haaah..."
"I never dreamed I would find you here."
"You... know me?"
"Hm...? Pfft— PWAHAHAHAHA!!"
What in the world could be so funny? The old man roared with laughter, so overcome with mirth that a few tears even began to gather in the corners of his wrinkled eyes.
"You might perhaps fail to know me—but that I should fail to know you? Impossible!"
...?
"Ah... could it be that you never heard?"
"...What are you talking about?"
"Hm... that hardly seems plausible. The mouths of Envy and Greed were never sealed so tightly..."
...
Something uneasy began to smolder up from deep within my chest. This filthy feeling—as though I must not listen to another word he said. It was the first time in my life. The first time a single remark from another person had filled me with such revulsion.
Through that brief stretch of silence, I debated covering my ears, over and over again. But alas, it did not take long for his mouth to open once more.
"Did they never tell you?"
...?
"That your mother's death was never mere coincidence. Nor destiny."
I had heard those words before. Distinctly, I had. And—bitterly, unforgivably—I was beginning to guess at who he was.
"...Hm. Even now, you do not know?"
...
"Can't be helped, then."
With those words, the old man flung the black robe still wrapped around his body up into the sky. Even so, a profound sense of wrongness continued to radiate from him.
"Pride, of the Seven Deadly Sins. That is both my title and my name—and..."
In that instant, a single scene flashed through my mind. Jeal—the bastard who had been my junior, the son of a bitch who had usurped the seat of Envy. I had heard that name before, unmistakably, in the conversation I'd shared with that bastard.
KWA-BOOOOM— In that instant, the ground burst apart, and a violent surge of dirt and dust erupted skyward.
"Oho...? How are you still able to move?"
...
"Hm. Have you already let go of your reason?"
...
"Come to think of it, your mind had already reached its breaking point some time ago."
A small dagger dances—driven by a single, all-consuming resolve to kill him outright. The eyes, the nasal cavity, the heart, the carotid artery. Points that would mean certain death if even one strike landed true. The small blade hurtles toward those targets—toward, at the very least, points that would leave him crippled for life—but it never once makes contact.
The length of a single finger joint. That is the distance between the old man's skin and the blade at this moment—and it is a distance that has held in the past, and will go on holding for all time to come.
"Why do you suppose that is?"
...
"Ordinarily, you could have killed me any number of times."
...
"So why can you not reach me now? Are you not curious?"
He takes a single step forward—paying no heed whatsoever to the small blade poised before him.
"Because you are weaker than I."
...
"You killed those two, and thought yourself grown somewhat strong?"
...
"Did you believe yourself something special, something mighty, something tremendous?"
The corners of the old man's mouth climb skyward once more. The expression of a man so amused he hardly knows what to do with himself. He seems to try to hold his laughter in and fails; looking down at the boy before him, he laughs until his belly aches.
"Kukuku... you must at least say things that make sense."
...
"You are a thing that need only quietly offer up its body—nothing more."
...
"A Sacrifice—nothing more, and nothing less. How could a thing like you possibly be strong?!"
...
"And as proof of that, behold—"
At last, a bead of the old man's blood wells upon the boy's blade. However slight, it is unmistakably the old man's blood. And yet the boy feels no joy whatsoever. For this single drop is nothing more than what the old man has granted him—on purpose.
Brushing lightly past the boy's blade, the old man draws closer still—paying no more mind to the people still sprawled across the ground around him than to the dirt beneath them.
"Your mother's killer stands before your very eyes, and you can do nothing at all. Isn't that right?"
"You... you son of a bitch—!!"
"How tedious."
KWA-BOOM— The boy's body is slammed flat into the ground. As though gravity itself had been multiplied for him alone.
"I even went to the trouble of providing you with motivation..."
...
"And yet not a single thing about you has changed. How dreadfully boring."
"Ghh... ugh..."
"...Tsk. At this rate, I shall not even manage a proper test."
Stroking his chin a few times and savoring the feel of his beard, the old man draws a single glass bottle from within his cloak—a bottle filled with a liquid so blue as to be suspicious. Judging by how firmly it is sealed with a cork stopper, its contents must be every bit as dubious—and the old man proceeds, unhurried, toward the boy who still lies pinned to the floor.
"The reason your mana will not budge an inch is because of my power."
...
"Feeble and broken as you may be, you were still a Majin who once wielded my power."
...
"...Hm. What a vicious killing intent burns in those eyes. All that—from a thing that cannot do anything at all."
With a faint sneer, the old man derides the boy without reserve—and in the same breath, he presses the glass bottle between the boy's lips. The bottle filled with that suspicious liquid, drawn from his suspicious cloak mere moments before.