The Thirst of Paradise (2)
Eldrix Sererial’s eyes went round for an instant.
Then, once again, that gentle, affable smile settled over his face.
He studied Raul with a calm, steady gaze.
Amid the weight of the silence and the razor-edge tension, it was Eldrix Sererial who spoke first.
“Now that I’ve heard that, I find myself curious instead. How did you know?”
“Know what?”
“The deal with the Cinder is top secret. Only people we can trust are allowed to know. There was no way word should have leaked out.”
There was no anger in his eyes at the possibility of betrayal, nor confusion at some inexplicable phenomenon.
Only pure curiosity.
Raul probed him lightly. “I heard it.”
“You heard it? Hah, impossible. I’m the one holding the reins on the people who know that information. Even the Cinder bastards were only supposed to learn their target on the day the operation was carried out. In other words, there was no way you could have ‘heard’ that Sererial would strike Sererial.”
Something cold moved through Raul at the certainty in his voice.
Holding the reins could only mean one thing: he was silencing those involved through coercion, like a curse or sorcery.
As Eldrix kept staring at him, the smile on his face gradually faded.
“But a lunatic who calls himself a saint somehow knew the details of the plan.”
The expression that settled over him was blank.
In a face that had grown so cold it seemed to carry its own chill, the Sererial elder said, “I’ll ask again. How did you know?”
“I’ll tell you if you answer my question first.”
At Raul’s composed tone, a crack appeared in Eldrix Sererial’s doll-like face.
He frowned very slowly, then smoothed the expression away all at once and opened his mouth.
“Do you know anything about elven history?”
“No. None of you ever talk.”
“Hah. Fair enough.”
The corners of his mouth lifted as if into a smile.
But nothing beyond the mouth was smiling.
It was the textbook shape of a false grin.
“We were hunters. For a span of time you humans couldn’t even begin to measure, not even with the ‘two thousand years’ you like to cite when speaking of Exeria’s history.”
“So?”
“Don’t you see? To elves, hunting is instinct. We shot down anything that moved. We were the rulers of the continent, and we took the flesh and blood of what we hunted. But this ‘world’ has been castrating our instincts.”
It was not persuasive, but it was understandable.
Raul himself had spent only eight days roaming this World of the Divine Tree, and he had already witnessed so much dissipation, so much laziness, and such vile arrogance.
The elf before him, Eldrix Sererial, was simply someone who had come to despise the state of his own people.
“...So?”
When Raul narrowed his brow and pressed him, the cold blankness on Eldrix’s face suddenly twisted into a smile so grotesque it looked as if it might split his ears open.
He was laughing.
With a grin born of a madness entirely different from anything he had shown until now, Eldrix said, “I will connect Exeria and the World of the Divine Tree. I’m going to drive my kin onto a battlefield soaked in blood and awaken the true hunting instinct that’s been etched into the blood of these rotten, decayed fools!”
At last, his words touched Raul’s future sight.
So it really had been him.
The idiot who would provide the trigger for the World Tree to fall into the hands of demons.
Eldrix had become a raving lunatic with bloodshot eyes and an elaborate speech to match, but Raul’s reply was only a cold sneer.
“You’re trapped in a delusion that isn’t even funny.”
“...What? A delusion?”
At Raul’s mockery, the smile that had flickered with madness froze like stone.
“You plan to kill your own family and use them as kindling for a war. If that isn’t insanity, then what is?”
Raul had already stopped thinking he would get anything more useful out of him, and he narrowed his eyes to slits.
He already had the picture.
The reason this man had brought a human force like the Cinder into elven society was fear.
The World of the Divine Tree was no longer safe.
At any moment, Exeria’s assassins, monsters, might cross into this world.
Pouring oil on that fear would be the voice of Eldrix’s own revenge and grief over the slaughter of his household.
He had intended to stage the whole thing himself, shed tears of blood, and declare:
- We must fight. If only to honor my family’s dead.
That spark would have set the whole society ablaze.
Elves were more emotional than they looked, and they cared for their kin with a near-fanatical fervor.
Their anger would bridge the broken dimension, and then the World Tree would fall into the demons’ hands.
That was what the World Tree had shown him in the future.
Having grasped every detail of the incident, Raul looked at Eldrix’s warped face and spat the words out.
“Know your place, elf. If you want to kill yourself, do it alone. Don’t drag innocent people into it.”
But Eldrix only kept that stone-still face even after Raul’s rebuke.
After a while, he spoke.
“...So you’re claiming that our elves will be defeated by Exeria’s insignificant little vermin?”
His tone was almost fascinated, like that of a scholar who had stumbled on a phenomenon he could not comprehend.
Raul answered by drawing the dagger from his waist.
“I’m not claiming anything. That’s how the future actually is.”
“The future actually is...? Do you mean to say that? The greatest miracle of divine beings. You can use future sight? A mere priestling like yourself?”
Eldrix did not seem to be ignorant of holiness itself. He looked Raul up and down with the air of someone rendering a verdict.
Raul laid a sheen of light over the dagger and answered in a dry voice.
“Not me.”
“...What?”
“The one who showed me the future wasn’t me.”
“What in the world are you even trying to say...? You saw the future, but it wasn’t your doing?”
Ha.
Clearly not believing a shred of what Raul had said, Eldrix’s mouth curved again, and that same mad smile returned.
Then his smile abruptly stiffened.
“No way...”
Eldrix frowned as if he had just realized something.
Slowly, his gaze shifted, and what he looked toward was the presence of the World Tree visible beyond the immense window in the lord’s room.
When his face came back to Raul, for the first time there was a heavy layer of bewilderment on it.
“You heard Mother’s voice? That voice no one has heard for the last several decades? You? A mere human?!”
“I told you. I’m not just a human.”
Eldrix stared with wide eyes, frozen in place.
In a tone that sounded close to disbelief, he let out a short laugh.
“...Saint.”
Ha.
Before that word could even fade from his mouth, Eldrix’s hand moved.
Fwoosh! Whiish-!
He carved something into the air with the spark gathered at his fingertips, the sound of slicing wind following the motion.
“Taru Vetter Arda Mun.”
It was rune script.
The four characters engraved in the air flew at once and seeped into the walls of the lord’s room.
In that instant, Raul identified the ancient spell Eldrix had invoked.
“Soundproofing, dustproofing, locking, separation.”
In a single breath, the room became a space cut off from the outside.
The man who heard Raul’s mutter raised the corners of his mouth.
“To recognize ancient magic too? I never imagined you really were a saint!”
“I told you. I’m the real thing.”
“But, saint, you’ve made a grave mistake. If you saw through my scheme, you should have killed me without a word!”
“...I didn’t think that was necessary.”
“Do you despise me that much?”
“No, it’s not that.”
Fwoom-!
The light gathered on the dagger rippled like a wave.
Raul faced Eldrix directly, his eyes turned pure white under the illumination.
He said, calmly, “I wanted to see what was behind you.”
But the result was clear: there was no sign that Eldrix had been brainwashed by demons or bound by a contract.
He was clean.
He had truly intended to butcher his own family and shatter this elven world with nothing but pure madness.
“So, your conclusion?”
“A madman beyond imagination.”
“...As expected of a saint. I can’t exactly deny that.”
“You think so?”
“I do.”
Raul and Eldrix fell silent at the same time.
Only silence remained there, like a frozen wasteland of white.
There was no signal of any kind.
And yet, holiness and green light burst forth in the same instant.
“Lahat Herda!”
The rune script etched into the air by Eldrix’s fingertips instantly transformed into a roaring blaze.
At the same moment, Raul’s sword, springing like a loaded coil, aimed for the man’s throat as he sat in arrogant repose.
“Too late!”
Neither Raul’s lightning-fast leap nor his momentum could outrun the speed of rune magic, which knew no such thing as casting time.
“Burn to death, saint!”
And yet, for some reason, Raul did not slow down even with a fireball right in front of him.
Instead, he kicked off the floor again and hurled himself straight toward it, a reckless maneuver that defied common sense.
The moment a smile of certainty appeared on Eldrix’s lips,
“Al Lar Girdo!”
Raul thrust out the artifact on his wrist with a shout.
Crack-!
A rift split the air.
The distortion of space centered on Raul swallowed the fireball whole.
At the same time, a second distortion field rose in Eldrix’s line of sight.
Raul stretched his arm into the gap opened by the fireball bursting out of the distortion, and drove in a sword strengthened by Holy Weapon.
“Dardado!”
But the rune script carved into the air changed form once again.
This time it became an immense ice wall, thick enough to surge from the floor to the ceiling.
Crash-roar!
Shhhhh!
Fire and ice collided head-on with a grotesque screech.
The next instant, Raul smashed through the half-melted wall of ice and came charging onward.
There was no slowing that advance, and before long he was facing Eldrix, who had drawn a sword of his own.
Clang-! Chaejaeng, chaejjaeng!
Knife and sword crossed in a burst of sparks.
At the same time, mana began gathering between the bookshelves arranged like a ring around the lord’s room.
The moment Raul sensed something was wrong, Eldrix’s mouth curled with a thin, unpleasant smile.
“You think you can beat me in my own space?”
Shak-!
It was an arrow.
Three from the left, three from the right. Six serpentine traps with no room left to evade.
Instinctively, Raul forced divinity to maximum output and wrapped himself in it.
His reflexes and senses sharpened to their limit.
Raul perfectly measured the order and distance of the arrows flying in from every direction, and in his mind he formed a movement almost acrobatic in nature.
Chaejaejaejaejaejaeng-!
His whole body danced along the exact trajectory of the simulation deep in his mind.
He deflected every arrow, and in the next instant he even caught the diagonal thrust flying in from behind.
Tup!
Raul’s hand, protected by thick light, had already clamped onto the blade of Eldrix Sererial’s sword as it appeared behind him.
Their gazes collided fiercely.
The first to move was Eldrix’s mouth.
“...You really are a monster.”
“I’m not even that strong in Exeria.”
“And you’re saying monsters like you are all over the place?”
“You seeing things a little clearer now?”
“No. The opposite.”
Grin.
Even while driven onto the defensive, Eldrix widened his smile.
“My heart is racing!”
“You crazy bastard.”
Raul frowned and forced a massive amount of sacred light directly into the sword he had seized.
Crack.
In an instant, unable to withstand the excessive output, the blade turned white, then exploded with a deafening roar.
Kwaaang-!
Shattered fragments of the sword burst outward like flashes of white lightning.
Raul took them head-on with the Holy Armor wrapped around his body and lunged forward, then drove a sword blade washed pure white toward Eldrix, who was still putting on a show of blocking the shards with nothing but his hilt.
Ruuuuumble!
Only belatedly did thunder follow in the wake of the high-pressure light.
Khuk-!
And then it was Eldrix, heart pierced and chest peppered with fragments, who coughed up dark red blood in thick spurts.
Unlike the boldness of his tone, he collapsed forward with surprising emptiness.
The pool of blood, the cooling temperature of the corpse.
All of it seemed to declare that the matter was over.
And yet Raul continued to listen to the warning in his instincts.
It isn’t over yet?
Questioning the strange sensation, he sharpened his senses even further.
The thin, ragged breaths leaking from Eldrix’s lungs.
The lord’s room, half destroyed by the backlash of power and magic.
And the wave pattern touching his skin, peculiar to spirits.
Spirit...?
There were no spirits anywhere here. So why was he sensing a spirit’s wave pattern?
Raul frowned.
His head was already starting to swim from the backlash of drawing so much divinity at once, but the sensation that something was wrong still kept every muscle in his body taut.
How much time passed that way?
Suddenly, warmth flared over the back of Raul’s hand.
Hm?
He looked down in confusion and saw the power he had newly acquired, the Stigma, blazing with light.
Then the message appeared.
“A Stigma-Logos has had its performance greatly enhanced under the influence of Halo!”
“The Stigma has destroyed the evil god’s authority, Veiled Malice!”
“The evil god’s authority?”
Raul’s eyes widened.
As far as he knew, the lowest tier of beings capable of properly wielding a power called the authority of an evil god was an upper demon.
No way. Is there one here? Right now?
He narrowed his brow and held his breath.
For several seconds, he made himself ready to spring out like a loaded coil at any moment.
Shhhhhhh-!
The light spilling from the Stigma suddenly traced a broad curve and poured down onto Eldrix’s corpse, which lay before Raul.
What was this?
As Raul blinked at the unfamiliar sight, he saw Eldrix’s body lose all shape and begin to collapse, as though metal were melting in a furnace.
What emerged then was absolutely not an elf.
“Ugh.”
A goat’s head, rotten beyond belief and reeking with a nauseating stench. A lion’s torso and eagle wings grafted onto that head.
It was a chimera.
And from the sensation Raul could feel, it was not merely an animal, but the result of some vile process that had forcibly overlaid flesh onto what had originally been a spirit, then killed and fused it into one.
He had no idea why something like this was here, but Raul could understand one thing beyond all doubt.
“Damn it.”
That was not Eldrix.
Something that had probably been imitating Eldrix.
Or perhaps,
a backup plan he’d prepared in case something went wrong...
Once the authority of an evil god had entered the picture, it was certain that he was at least tied to demons or the demonic.
Ignoring the ache creeping up the back of his neck, Raul hurriedly wrapped his fist in a gauntlet-shaped layer of divinity.
Bang!
The rune magic the false Eldrix had left in place was solid, but it could not endure the impact of divinity compressed to brute force.
Kwaang!
With a second punch twisting through his waist, the door to the lord’s room was blown away with the whole frame and sent tumbling down the corridor.
Once outside, he could feel a brand rushing toward him at tremendous speed.
It was unmistakably the same brand Raul had once left directly on the woman of the Cinder.
“Phew.”
As Raul slowly steadied his breathing, the sound of someone’s confident footsteps reached him, and four shadows emerged at the far end of the dim corridor.
“Somehow I figured we’d be seeing each other again, old judge...”
The first to appear in the moonlight spilling through the window was the red-haired woman of the Cinder.
But Raul kept his guard up not on her easy smile, but on the three shadows behind her.
How long had it been?
Step, step.
The one who had not bothered to hide his footsteps finally stepped into the moonlight.
It was Eldrix.
That is, if you ignored the scar that hadn’t been there before and the shabby state of his appearance.
Eldrix spoke with an expressionless face.
“Even if it’s a dummy... you broke through my rune magic faster than I expected.”
“And you? Don’t you think it would be awkward if the elves in this mansion saw you hanging around with the Cinder?”
“I’m afraid that’s a trivial concern compared to the importance of taking the real saint’s head.”
“So that’s why you all came clustered together like that. You meant to jump me the moment I came out?”
When Raul frowned and said it, the real Eldrix answered in a calmer tone than the fake one ever had.
“The duke wants your spinal fluid.”
“Hah. So there’s the real nature of it.”
Unlike the fake one, who had concealed his demonic energy with the authority of an evil god, the real Eldrix was already exuding a massive amount of it from the moment he appeared.
“At any rate, once things turned out this way, I had intended to kill you and carry out tonight’s operation as well...”
Eldrix glanced around.
He would surely have noticed by now, no matter how focused he had been on Raul.
He asked, “Why is my mansion so empty?”
Only then did Raul smile faintly.
“I’m not a moron who’d lie in bed for more than a week.”
Six days after meeting the Cinder woman, Raul had mobilized everyone he knew among the elves, including Edwin, and asked them to evacuate the mansion’s residents on the day Raul was to face Eldrix.
The excuse was that he had found traces of demons in the mansion.
There was nothing more absolute than the word demons spoken from the mouth of a saint.
“So it seems you did something after all?”
“Shut up and come at me.”
Ha.
Eldrix drew a crescent smile at Raul’s brazen attitude.
“So you’ve finally gone mad. You struggled that badly against my dummy, and now you think you can face the real me and these three?”
Except for the red-haired woman, the other Cinder members wore nearly the same expression as Eldrix.
Faces that could not even imagine their own defeat.
But Raul, in reverse, let out the faintest smile toward them.
“Have any of you ever seen a real miracle?”
Eldrix’s mouth curled again in a thin sneer.
“How pitiful. The legendary saint who appeared after centuries turns out to be a madman who can’t even grasp his own limits.”
Mockery tangled with mockery in the air.
The first to move was Eldrix’s mouth.
“Before the spark even has time to rise, I’ll crush you. Saint.”
“Yeah. If you haven’t seen one, then I’ll have to show you.”
Swish--
In that instant, with a faint sound, daggers flew through the darkness of the mansion.
It was a Cinder ambush so fast and vicious that Raul could not track it with his eyes.
And yet Raul only muttered, very softly, “Halo, open.”
In the blink of an eye, light flooded everything.