Chapter 4
I’m translating the chapter into the required HTML format and preserving the system-style presentation where the source uses it. I’m also keeping the terminology and names locked to your glossary so the prose reads consistently across the series.CHAPTER_TITLE: How a Continental Calamity Lives (3)
Raul thrust New Moon Blade at the jet-black tentacle lashing toward him through the thick darkness before dawn.
The Saint's body, which had done little but sleep for sixteen hundred years before waking, always creaked at moments like this in a way that was almost annoyingly inconvenient, but it was no real problem.
Holy Weapon and Holy Armor.
The battle was, for all practical purposes, already over the moment he invoked the two skills the Holy Paladins of Motala relied on from beginning to end.
Shaaak-!
The black tentacle touched Raul's coat and dissolved at once.
"That can't be..."
"A training paladin who hasn't even awakened the golden doctrine?"
"What is that white light...!"
Of course the assassins looked stunned.
It was only natural.
The power of the paladins was limited to simple enhancement and recovery.
But the authority formed from the Saint's source light, the Halo, carried a demonic-purging property on an entirely different plane.
In simple terms, it was like bringing a torch to ice cream.
"Didn't I tell you I'd splatter your spinal fluid?"
The assassins, still not shaken out of their fighting spirit by Raul's easy provocation, kicked off the ground at once.
"Go for the vital points!"
"Ah, abyssal archduke!"
"Die! Scatter your spinal fluid!"
Up, down, left, and right.
Four shadows spread out in an easily readable pattern.
Their movements were so fast and precise that, for a Saint with insufficient stats, they should have been impossible to track with the eye, but the result did not change.
Shaaak!
Shaaak, shaaaak-!
The weapons stained a murky violet crumbled the instant they brushed Raul's coat, and the New Moon Blade in his hand drove straight into the throat of the oncoming assassin.
"First, one."
The assassin with his head cut off turned to ash on the spot.
The others came at him, blades reversed and slashing fast, but those knives also vanished like sand the moment they reached the Saint's neck.
Shak-!
"Two."
The overwhelming slaughter repeated itself.
When the third and fourth assassins turned to dust, a clatter sounded from the hallway outside Raul's room.
"The last one is over there."
Raul moved quickly and followed the presence.
At the edge of his vision, he caught sight of a doll-like figure descending the stairs.
Without hesitation, he hurled the bloodstained New Moon Blade.
Clang!
The attacker going down the stairs seemed to be holding a weapon untouched by miasma, because for the first time he heard the sound of iron striking iron.
But then,
"Ugh, aahhh!"
He lost his balance and tumbled down the stairs.
When Raul approached and roughly tore away the mask, a familiar face was there.
"P-please spare me, Holy Paladin. I-I have committed a sin worthy of death!"
He was the owner of this Dawn Bird Inn.
A man with a warm face who was, by reputation, truly generous and kind.
For a brief moment, Raul thought of the excellent soup he used to make and stopped his hand.
"I-I am sorry. But they threatened to kill my family if I didn't cooperate...! They were people I had never seen before in my life! I swear, it's true! I'm not a demon contract holder!!"
Without anyone even accusing him, the man spat and pleaded his innocence in a frenzy.
For an ordinary apprentice cleric, it would have been a convincing excuse. Raul was different.
"Is that so?"
He grabbed the innkeeper's face with a hand suffused with the light of Holy Armor.
Chiiiiiiik!
At once, the sound was like meat laid onto a hot griddle.
"Aaaahhh!"
He might not have been a demon contract holder, but it was the mark of someone exposed to miasma for too long.
"Y-you damned lowlife piece of shi-"
Howling in madness from the agony, the innkeeper twisted violently, then snatched up the dagger that had fallen at his feet and drove it into Raul's calf.
Thud.
Surprisingly, unlike the blades that had been tempered thoroughly in miasma, the plain dagger with no power, no curse, and nothing at all to recommend it sank easily into Raul's leg.
"Huh?"
For an instant, something seemed to flicker across the innkeeper's face as though he had realized something.
But,
"Too late."
Schlck-!
Raul's sword had already bitten into the back of his neck.
The man had supposedly been the sort of person who never spared donations for the orphanage, a rarity in this city.
He had been kind, well-mannered, with a respectable household and quite a few young men who followed him, so they said.
That was what he had been.
Raul looked down at the body of a human being that refused to turn to ash even after waiting.
He said nothing.
He only thought that this was simply the sort of age it was.
Before sunrise, Raul left.
It had been a city he'd only reached after five days, but there was no helping it.
Unlike in the game version of Exeria, the clergy of this world concealed their identities by default for exactly this reason.
You never knew where, or who, might be a contract holder or a collaborator.
That was the kind of world it was.
Still, he had gained something.
"Salt and pepper aren't cheap."
He rummaged through the inn's kitchen and took a little dried meat and some spices.
A warm, soft bed had been tempting, sure, but to be blunt, compared with the "demon-beast forest" where Raul first awoke in this world, a floor like this was practically a first-class hotel.
This was what it meant to live as a continental calamity.
"Hngh!"
Raul gritted his teeth and pulled the dagger from his calf.
Clink, clink, clink-
He flung the bloodied dagger onto the dirt and hurriedly muttered the prayer the Holy Paladins recited.
At once, the pure white light of the Halo seeped into the wound and healed the slash that had cut deep into the flesh as though nothing had ever happened.
"Haah."
He had spent the entire time leaving the city using divine power to numb the pain, so Raul's head was still spinning.
Even so, he could not stop walking.
It took another half day before he reached the entrance to a dense forest.
Lying beneath a broad band of shade, Raul muttered in a listless voice, "Really..."
This world was such a fucking mess.
But it was too late now to retire like this.
Over the past year, after biting down hard and enduring four whole seasons, the result of all that had finally come into view.
If the earlier quest for Elena's awakening, the "Extra Scenario," had been nothing more than a temporary, one-dimensional random event, this one was built on a completely different scale.
The epic quest granted to the 6-star job, Saint of the Beginning.
It was, quite literally, the quest that would determine the fate of this world, Exeria.
Most of the continent had turned against the Saint, but that also meant there was at least one-tenth of it that would look on the Saint of the Beginning favorably.
And Raul had begun this long journey to find that one-tenth: the elves of the Great Forest in the west, a force that stood in opposition to the three great churches while still matching the direction pointed to by the epic quest.
Since the remaining distance is roughly 230 kilometers...
Along the way, he had wondered more than once whether that holy land called the Church of Beginning might be in elven territory after all.
For an ordinary person, 200 km might not even be something one could call close, not even as a joke. For Raul, it was different.
I've already fought my way through several thousand kilometers while suffering like hell...
235.6 km was practically within arm's reach.
The probable future base of the elves, who might become his first friendly force, overlapped with the place the Saint of the Beginning absolutely had to visit?
No matter how he looked at it, there was no way that was a simple coincidence.
At last, he was really here.
Yes. He had come this far...
Raul kept staring at the quest window in front of him, trying to shake off the muddled thoughts and the endless sense of helplessness.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
Red sparks flew up into the sky.
The blazing campfire was driving the darkness out of the dense forest in a pale ring, and Raul was watching the meat hanging over it.
Once the surface had taken enough heat, the meat gave off a mouthwatering sizzle.
"Hoo. Hoo."
Meat with juices running down it, after so long waiting for it.
Raul brought it to his mouth and worked his jaw with obvious delight.
As expected, salt was the secret ingredient that made magic taste even more magical.
In a world where it was precious, how boring must everyone's life have been?
Raul firmly resolved that someday he would absolutely make ramen, the ultimate soul food of Koreans, and eat it here.
Once his stomach was full, the lethargy that had been clouding his mind and body eased a little.
Right. Even if you roll in a field of filth, being alive still beats the alternative.
Raul nodded to himself alone and reached for another piece of meat over the fire.
That was when he heard it.
Rustle.
From beyond the dark, ragged grass, a small set of footsteps was approaching.
After sweeping the area with his intangible, scentless divine power, Raul quickly identified the intruder.
"Are you just going to pass by, or are you going to show yourself? Either way is fine. Let's get on with it."
Rustle!?
Startled by the sudden voice, there was a flinch, and then silence.
With no choice, Raul gripped the New Moon Blade and stood, and the person pushing through the brush raised both hands at once.
"S-sorry. I wasn't trying to threaten you..."
A shabby-looking man.
He had the hollow eyes of someone who had gone through every kind of hardship imaginable.
His face was ashen, and the dark circles under his eyes hung all the way to his jaw, making him look like a corpse fresh from the grave.
"A zombie?"
"Hey! I'm a person. A person! That's a bit much, asking whether a living man is a corpse, don't you think?"
"I'm joking."
"Ah. R-right. Well. This is a little shameless of me, but could I, ah, could I have some of that?"
The middle-aged man scratched the side of his head awkwardly and pointed at the meat Raul was grilling.
By the look of him, he had probably been starving for several days at least.
Raul thought he might as well give it to him, but he still followed the rules of this world.
"Got money?"
"At the village."
"Which village?"
"The village you'd reach after walking through this forest for about a day."
"Affiliation and name."
"Hey! I'm Sam, a watchman from Latina Village. I've been living off knife work for ten years, and in my younger days I was an adventurer for twenty. If you go to the adventurers' guild in the city over there, Zern, my identity can be confirmed. I'll give you more than enough in return. So? What do you say?"
The direction Sam pointed was the same direction as the city Raul had fled from at dawn.
So the city's name was Zern.
Raul nodded at the new information, but he was annoyed all over again that he had left the city without getting a map.
Having a map would make it easier to identify the "map" that was his quest reward, after all.
"Doesn't seem like you're lying."
"Well, of course not. Because I'm not lying. Make up your mind already. The meat's going to burn."
"Fine. Sit down."
Once Raul gave permission, Sam carefully came closer without kicking up any dust and picked up the oily, dripping meat.
"Whoa!?"
The instant he took a huge bite, Sam let out something like a scream.
"I didn't poison it."
"What? You didn't burn it? No, wait, not poison, the taste! You didn't mean to tell me, mister, that you salted this, did you!?"
"There's pepper too."
"Wow! This is the first time in my life I've eaten something this good off the dirt!"
"It must be the market's seasoning."
"No, I mean it! This meat is way better than my wife's cooking!"
Listening to him, the man had a rather amusing side.
Raul faintly smiled and ended up exchanging banter with Sam, who would not stop eating and talking.
"Burp. I'm really grateful. I honestly thought I was going to starve to death like this."
Only after he had fully filled his stomach did Raul, seeing that Sam had finally gone quiet, ask to clear up a question that had come to him late.
"But if you can get through the forest to the village in a day, why were you starving out here?"
No matter how he looked at it, the man's appearance wasn't that of someone who had been wandering hungry for just a day or two.
By common sense, it made no sense.
"Simple enough. I got trapped in this forest."
"Trapped?"
It was a pretty thick forest at a glance, but not nearly large enough to trap a local watchman familiar with the terrain.
"No need to find it strange. Not long ago, I was chasing bandits who had tried to raid the village, and one of them splashed his blood all over me. Then, for some reason, maybe I was cursed or something, I couldn't get out of the forest."
"A curse..."
Once he heard that, the hollow look in Sam's eyes, which had been bothering Raul all along, suddenly seemed especially strange.
So Raul sharpened his gaze and fed in divine power. Then he saw the oily blackness coating Sam's eyeballs.
"It really is."
"Huh? Mister. You can see curses?"
Sam's eyes went round as lanterns, and he stared in shock, muttering to himself, no way, no way.
But Raul could not afford to make the same mistake twice, so he moved first.
"If you're hoping I'll be some secluded pilgrim, you're out of luck."
Rattle-
What he took from inside his robe was a strange bundle of wooden scraps and bone ornaments that defied easy description.
"Ahh, so you're a shaman. That explains why you were alone in the forest."
Shamans, as a 2-star job, were not especially well treated despite their excellent abilities.
On this continent, Exeria, the three great churches held such influence that most people, whether they liked it or not, followed a religion and believed in a god.
Shamans, by contrast, always worshipped not gods but their ancestors, and the gap that created was the problem.
"Well, for me, this was still a stroke of heavenly luck. I ought to pray to the benevolent Earth Mother. If you hadn't shown up, I'd have starved to death for sure."
In fact, even as Sam said that, he sat down with a little distance between them and Raul.
That was the attitude he took toward someone he was grateful to. That alone said enough about how they were normally treated.
Still, the shaman's abilities were undeniably exceptional.
Exactly the sort of thing Raul could use while hiding his identity and exerting his power.
"Come here a moment. That curse is almost dried out after all this time."
"Come here? You're not planning to gouge my eyes out as payment, are you?"
"I'll just stick a charm on you for a moment and pull it off. What would I do with an old man's eyeballs anyway?"
"W-well, if there's somewhere to use them?"
"Cut the nonsense and come sit down. Before I really do gouge them out."
Sam looked genuinely uncertain about whether this was all right.
Feeling impatient, Raul said, "The curse is dried out enough that it's easy to dispel. If you keep being difficult, I'll just move on."
"Dispel it? R-really!? Oh, mister! You should've said that first! Damn it, now I feel bad. I'll have to apologize to the Earth Mother."
It was me helping you from the start, and me who ought to be apologizing? You're the one praying to some random god like a fool.
Raul barely swallowed the blasphemous words rising to the tip of his tongue and pulled a thick piece of paper from his chest.
In this age, it was a kind of charm made by soaking it in precious red dye and scrawling brush-written characters over the top.
Though, of course, in reality it was just colored paper with no holiness and no mystic force whatsoever.
Raul placed the charm over Sam's eye and quietly gathered divine power.
"Breathe easy. Anyone watching would think I'm the one hurting you."
"If you're really going to erase the curse, I-I'll take responsibility and let you stay at my house. Really. I'll even make sure you eat your fill of good food in our village."
Shamans had such wildly different personalities that people usually did not let them enter the village.
For Sam to offer this much hospitality was, by any standard, an unusually generous gesture.
"Thanks, then."
Raul gave a faint smile at Sam, who was trying hard to look calm, and focused on the sensation in his fingertips.
In truth, the curse was not drying up at all.
Rather, judging by that dense color and sticky texture, the Curse of Misstep was eating into Sam's life.
If he had been two days later, Sam would have lost his sight.
Sha-!
For an instant, a pure white light flashed.
"Done."
Raul lifted the thick paper away from Sam's face.
"Good heavens! Earth Mother Christ! Has the world always been this bright? I kept wondering why morning wasn't coming, but it was my eyes going blind!"
"It's the middle of the night."
"Still bright. Wow, it's really bright. I guess my condition was more serious than I thought. Thank you, shaman. Really, thank you."
"I'll be taking enough compensation, so don't worry about it."
"Hey now! Don't spoil the moment. All right. If you don't touch me or my family, I'll come up with something, anything."
With his travel expenses already running low, that worked out well enough.
Raul still preferred being mistaken for this sort of profession, something he could speak to plainly, rather than being taken for a Holy Paladin.
"Now that I can see, I know the way. Come on, shaman. I'll show you the shortcut to the village in half a day."
"Fine."
With a guide at his side, the forest that had felt so bleak turned into something like a well-maintained road.
Now that his sight was back, Sam chatted even more noisily than before, but he had the occasional joke that made Raul snort, so it wasn't bad.
After another half day of travel, the sky that had been hidden beneath the dense canopy suddenly opened wide.
"We're here."
At Sam's words, Raul raised his head and looked ahead, where a small village could be seen below a low hill.
"That's Latina Village."
It seemed the chance to sleep in a soft bed had come back much sooner than expected.
Raul lifted the corners of his mouth in satisfaction.
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