Liars (2)

Raul’s first hard-won truth in this world had been composure.

In front of him, a wolf with six eyes burned with predatory light, while behind him a monstrous bird with two pairs of wings looked down as if deciding where to rip him apart first. That was the situation the moment he opened his eyes in this world.

Knowing nothing, he had of course gotten his arm bitten off. He had screamed too, and ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠in the middle of that skull-splitting agony he had blacked out so many times he no longer even remembered how often.

And yet, through all of it, Raul’s eyes had kept moving. He had mapped the hawk circling overhead and the wolf trying to sever his arm, and the battlefield had assembled itself in his mind with merciless precision. That had probably been the frozen Saint’s instinctive reflexes, not Raul’s own.

He had poured everything he had into one desperate move, driving the wolf straight up toward the talons of the diving raptor. And that was how he survived.

Blood had gushed from his torn arm, the metallic stench had drawn in more beasts, and the situation had only grown worse from there. But the Saint, for all that soft, blessed, long-lived name, had been a warrior at the root of him. He had a mad battlefield judgment, a grotesquely creative instinct for turning one thing into another, and above all else, composure.

The reason Raul was Raul now was not the Saint’s skills, nor his mediocre stats. It had been the Saint’s terrifying, innate composure. That had kept him alive then, and it kept him alive now.

Gwaaaaaaah—?!

Raul’s halberd drove through the neck of a merchant, the weapon grinding through flesh as the creature emitted a sound no human throat should ever have been able to make. The head came away as neatly as a piece of soft tofu, but in that split instant a long, thin larva of a demon shot out with impossible speed from the severed body and caught the flying head before it could fall.

Then the demon’s thin, lengthened flesh began ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠stitching the split human body back together, threading the two halves into one as if sewing cloth with needle and thread.

“Khaaaah!”

They had already died once, and yet the demon that ruled their bodies did not permit them even the courtesy of a clean death.

“H-help me, I’m not—! It wasn’t me, I swear!”

Raul was attacked by the ringleader, who still had not lost the ability to speak human language. Daggers flew at him with the explosive force of a grotesquely distorted muscle’s swing, but in truth they were little more than wild, useless flails with no real accuracy at all.

So he still can’t fully control the human body.

Raul calmly spun the halberd wide, knocking aside the blades entering its effective range as he muttered, “So you left the ego intact and manipulated emotions indirectly through hormones. That’s how you’re controlling them?”

“Wh-what the hell are you talking abouuut?!”

The ringleader shook all over like a man electrocuted under Raul’s question, but Raul’s eyes were as still as a quiet lake. They were looking straight through the body and into the thing inside it, into its true essence.

“You hide behind a human skin to avoid divinity. Is the goal concealment? Or are you trying to hide your very existence? Answer me, demon. If you’ve got a mouth that can scream, then you can speak.”

“Enough nonsense—j-just spare meeee—!”

“Shut up, shell-man.”

Without even looking back, Raul used the halberd to suppress another merchant rushing up behind him. At the same time, he thrust his free arm forward and seized the ringleader by the throat.

A sheet of white light burst from Raul’s body like a shock wave. His eyes, and the palm tightening around the demon’s throat, began to blaze with a radiance like a searing sun. All that remained of the ringleader’s final, thinning scream was a dry rasp.

“Sp-spa—”

With that final word, the stubbornly writhing demon died completely.

Thud.

When Raul let go, the ringleader’s body—its skin scorched raw all over—collapsed to the ground like a trash bag, pitiful and empty. Raul looked down at it without the slightest change in expression and muttered softly, “So you still hadn’t learned how to speak yet.”

Already, in his head, a new strategy guide for a form of Desecration Bug he had never encountered before was beginning to take shape.

“S-Sir Holy Warrior! We need help here too!”

Then a voice called out to him from a distance. The knight, Lergal, was locked in a duel with a Desecration Bug that was whipping its parasite-like flesh around like a lash, its blade meeting his sword in a shower of sparks.

The demon’s flesh, split by torn joints and slashed wounds, oozed and twitched in strands like frayed thread.

“P-please, save usss!”

What was most horrifying was that even in that state, the humans who had once been its hosts were still alive. Their minds remained intact while their arms and legs bent backward, while blades cut and ground against their flesh, and they endured the pain in full, conscious clarity.

They had not known. Not knowing, they had swallowed the so-called miracle tonic of the liars. And they had probably been pleased by it too. After all, magi granted the human body a superior kind of distortion. That was why they had grown arrogant, and why arrogance had curdled into cruelty toward others.

But demons were like that. The dignity of the host? Its suffering? They did not care. The end of fools who thought they could use demons and magi was always the same, no matter the age.

Raul gripped the heavy halberd again.

“Noble one!”

“Thank you! Thank you so much for helping us!”

“He’s a cleric! R-really, ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠he’s a crusader of Motala!”

“We’re alive. We’re really alive!”

Once the battle was over, the villagers who had taken shelter inside the buildings flooded out like a rising tide. Raul had already seen at a glance that not a single one of them had a scratch on them, and that was entirely the knight Lergal’s doing.

Unlike Raul, who had leapt straight into the middle of enemy territory from the start, Lergal had put the villagers’ safety above everything else. Action before words. Raul decided that the knight before him was not bad at all.

A little late, perhaps, but Raul approached the village chief, who had faced the corrupted ones head-on even with his frail, aged body. Coincidentally, he looked exactly as he had in the game Raul knew—thirty years earlier.

“Are you hurt?”

At Raul’s question, tears welled in the village chief’s eyes.

“Hurt? How could I be? When a great warrior of Motala has set foot on this land, how could anything be wrong?”

Raul’s chest ached, because he knew the old man’s stubborn devotion to his village and the ferocious tenacity behind that worn face. So, speaking on behalf of the golden liars who were always late and always trying to remain nothing more than bystanders, he said, “Sorry I’m late.” He took the chief’s thin, skeletal hand in both of his, as though in prayer.

At that, tears that had gathered at the corners of the chief’s eyes finally spilled down his cheeks. Even so, the old man only smiled and said, “You’re not late at all. You’re standing right in front of me now, aren’t you?”

Raul knew that beside this chief—stubborn, rough in his manners, always spewing the sort of cutting remarks no one wanted to hear—there should have been someone else.

In fact, she had been an NPC even more famous than the old man in front of him. Of course he knew her: the granddaughter who became involved with Kyle, the character you played after raising a Demon Hunter. How could anyone not know that?

But the village chief’s sweet, lovely granddaughter no longer existed anywhere in this village. Thirty years had passed in the setting, so the girl must have become a woman by now. She might even have started a family, perhaps become someone’s mother. The chief might have had a grandson-in-law by now, and the granddaughter might have had children of her own. Were they happy? Raul thought they probably had not been miserable. This was that kind of place.

But none of them were here.

Had they gone to another village? No. The girl who had once been a granddaughter, a child, and then a woman had been the next village chief of Mountain Village. She should have been here. Her family should have been here too.

But now they were gone.

...

Looking at the village as it was now, Raul could easily infer what had happened here. He narrowed his brow just a little.

And yet—

“I know well that those who are noble have greater duties to bear.”

In a situation where no one would have found it strange for him to be screaming for blood and revenge, the village chief was instead smiling as he said, “Thank you for caring about even a backwater place like this. Thank you for worrying about the well-being of an old, unpleasant bastard like me. All we want is to offer our thanks. And thanks again.”

Raul saw ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠the old man’s smiling face and overlaid it with the image of him crying. The wrinkles pulled deep at the corners of his eyes, the sorrow trembling endlessly at the edges of his mouth. Everything was so painfully clear.

“May Motala receive eternal glory.”

The old man’s praise poured from his weathered mouth, and Raul could say nothing as he watched that bitter endurance.

“May Motala receive eternal glory!”

““May Motala receive eternal glory!!!””

Before long, the village women took up the old man’s praise and carried it forward. They all cried out the name of God in unison, lauding the crusader as well. There was hope in their eyes, and courage in the arms they stretched upward toward the sky.

But to Raul, they looked no different from the chief. Everyone was lying.

They were crying.

Their mouths, forced into smiling lines, trembled violently. Without even time to wipe away the moisture gathering at their eyes, they were crying like that.

Raul was not a crusader of Motala. But today, just for today, he thought he wouldn’t mind becoming a liar too.

Swallowing the bitterness rising to his throat, he said, “Motala has not abandoned you.”

He was a very good liar.

“I’ll be going to the sanctuary.”

At Raul’s words, the knight and the adventurers opened their eyes wide.

“The sanctuary... you mean?”

“There’s a place like that in Tetra Mountain?”

“Yes.”

When Raul nodded, Lergal and the adventurers looked at one another’s faces. Since he was already playing the role of a liar, Raul let the nonsense pour out of his mouth as smoothly as if he’d buttered it first.

“It’s only natural that you wouldn’t know. Most of Motala’s sanctuaries in this western mountain range have either been destroyed or hidden so thoroughly no one can find them.”

The reaction was a simple, silent ah. Of course. If something like that still existed, would the demon contractors have left it alone? And besides, the knight and the adventurers in front of him looked, to put it kindly, no better than street vagrants. It wasn’t that Raul was trying to mock their appearance; it was just that they all looked yellow with fatigue accumulated from long slavery and whatever curse they had been carrying.

For them, it was rest before battle. For Raul, preparation for battle. The knight’s party and Raul reached that conclusion together.

Raul left Mountain Village less than an hour after the knight’s party had fallen asleep.

He could do that because he possessed the power of Prayer of Recovery.

He walked without pause. Night turned to day, and the ocher road became a jade forest, only for that forest to turn once more into a white wasteland of snow and ice. As he climbed the mountain, he reviewed what had happened earlier.

Demons’ eggs and parasitism. Taken at face value, there was nothing especially unusual about that, even in Exeria. There was, however, one peculiar point. In the old form of parasitism, the demon merely devoured the host’s flesh as part of its own growth. But the current parasitism focused on strengthening the host’s body itself and then controlling that body according to the demon’s intent.

That naturally raised the question: Why? Why would they go through such a troublesome process just to obtain a human body in its entirety? The answer to that question was the very heart of their purpose.

The demons manifested in this world already possessed power superior to humanity in every conceivable way. And yet they still wanted humans—wanted those uniquely human traits demons could not possess?

As he quickened his steps, Raul kept accelerating his thoughts. Thirty years of time gap, the geography of the western region, the laws of this kingdom, the lay of the land, the relations with the neighboring races. They flashed through his mind one after another, and soon enough the conclusion came into focus from not very far away at all.

To obtain flesh strong enough to resist divinity head-on. And to seize this western kingdom without having to wage war.

The people selling that so-called miracle tonic through a merchant-and-bandit alliance were, unsurprisingly, nobles.

The current king was incompetent, and the nobles’ power only grew day by day. If the nobles were brought under control, that would be no different from toppling the state itself.

Hah.

Still, Raul had the knowledge to understand the problem and provide the answer at the same time. In the end, the answer did not change.

Standing in the very center of the snowy mountain, he looked out over Tetra Lake, a lake that never froze no matter the season.

Haaah.

The breath he exhaled touched the clouds draped over the mountaintop and scattered into a pale mist. After one steady breath, Raul threw himself into the vast lake.

The water was brutally cold, and deep—so deep that looking down only showed black shadows rippling like a bottomless swamp. But there was nothing to fear. All of this was just a decoy, a false front erected to conceal its true form.

The biting waves of the freezing water seemed determined to lock every bone joint in place. The darkness of the lake’s depths stirred an urge to abandon the search and swim upward, then upward again, until he gave in. But Raul, feeling every last ounce of that fear in his skin and still refusing to stop descending, finally reached the bottom.

Splaaash!

Burrowing through the lakebed, Raul rolled smoothly into a landing. Astonishingly, there was empty space beneath the lake. Looking up, he could see the lake bottom above him, still roiling from the ripples he had made.

This was one of the hidden secret spaces scattered throughout Exeria—using the game’s vocabulary, a place called a hidden event field.

Raul waited quietly, and soon the hidden field flashed blue, altering its shape on its own. Then it rose from the ground.

A gigantic stone statue, each of its six arms holding a different weapon, resembling an asura from Hindu mythology.

The Ancient One.

That was the word for Raul himself, the frozen human who had awakened after sleeping for 1,600 years.

Oh?

A synergy effect between an Ancient One and ancient technology?

Raul’s eyes widened at the completely new piece of knowledge he had never known until now.