Moonflower Scent (2)
The Frost Steel Orcs wore full suits of armor that, even in the sunlight, never lost their own bluish chill.
From head to toe, each one was clad in armor tempered from thick slabs of frost steel.
The moment they appeared, the Fatal Fortress coolly shifted into battle formation.
The Frost Steel Orcs were terrifying monsters, but Fatal had long since become a city that had held them back for more than a hundred years. The tension between the two sides settled over the battlefield in the form of silence.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, the orcs remained exactly where they were for two days, like statues dyeing the horizon blue.
Veteran knights and mercenaries who had only come here to collect a war participation fee were in the same position now.
Day and night, they had to swallow the bitter unease in their mouths and keep their nerves taut without ever letting their guard down. It was a kind of exhaustion that only those who had lived through it could ever understand.
And stress made people irritable.
Especially those who had come here chasing money rather than anything noble.
“Damn it, what the hell are they even doing? We haven’t had a decent meal or a proper night’s sleep for two days!”
By the third day, voices of complaint were beginning to rise all through the outpost.
“Tch. They might as well build an outpost of their own. They said the Fatal siege was going to be a long war, so what the hell are they doing just standing there for two days?”
Most of the curses came from the mercenaries.
But among the mercenaries and adventurers here, there were more who had lived through Fatal’s Winter War than there were who hadn’t.
“Hey. That’s probably their whole point, damn it. They want to get us pissed off. So calm the hell down.”
“Yeah. If we start beating the shit out of each other, that’s exactly what those pigs want.”
With just a few words of reassurance from the older mercenaries, the complaints quickly died down.
Meaning a cheap little trick like psychological pressure didn’t work on a fortress as solid as Fatal.
But to Raul, the orcs’ behavior looked like something entirely different.
It wasn’t some sly tactic meant to wear them down mentally or drain their stamina.
They were simply waiting.
As the mercenaries had said, orcs preparing for a long siege usually built a camp.
The basic tactic of the Frost Steel Orcs was to establish a position, deploy giant trebuchets, and hurl boulders until they found an opening.
It was primitive, yes, but when backed by crude, overwhelming force, it became a fearsome enough threat.
And yet these ones were doing nothing.
Absolutely nothing. Sometimes they even napped under the blue sky until the silent Fatal outpost seemed embarrassed by their stillness.
Maybe that was why.
Rumors had already started spreading through the Fatal outpost that the whole lot of them had gone insane.
Unfortunately, though, that probably wasn’t it.
There was only one reason their behavior didn’t make sense: whether or not they knew about the demon summoning circles.
Over the last two days, Raul had walked the outpost and the surrounding area alone, continuing to investigate and trace their movements.
And in the process, he had uncovered something very important.
The slums to the south and the brothel district to the east.
Raul had found crucial traces in those two places.
Under normal circumstances, neither the slums nor the brothel district would have been this empty, but most of the adventurers and mercenaries in Fatal had come to the city just to collect the war fee.
At this point, the city district of Fatal was little more than a ghost town.
That was probably why they set up those blue scarecrows out front.
Empty streets.
Suspicious figures moving through them.
Raul had followed them and found the demon summoning circles.
Unlike his earlier guess that they would complete the summoning outside the city and then move in, they were wandering in and out of the city’s interior—blatantly suspicious places, no less.
They’d been underestimated badly enough to let that happen...
In this age, in this western land, most people probably wouldn’t be able to look at a demon summoning circle with their own eyes and even recognize what it was.
Still, thanks to that, Raul had already discovered two summoning circles, so there was no need to think too harshly of their carelessness.
Their mistake was Raul’s opportunity too.
An opportunity to ruin years of planning from the very starting point.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
“You’ve been running all over the place these past few days. What exactly are you so busy with?”
Raul, who was getting by on a special meal sent up to the princess, looked up when Celia spoke.
He had come here hoping for at least one warm meal, since the wartime jerky they’d been issued was basically a rock in all but name...
“Nothing much.”
Now he was starting to think it might have been a mistake to come.
Celia’s voice, for some reason, was edged sharp enough to cut.
After finally swallowing the chunk of meat in his mouth, Raul looked up and saw that her eyes were anything but normal.
Her golden eyes were actually shimmering like amber, still actively drawing power.
“Hmm. ‘Nothing much,’ and yet you’ve been to the brothel district and the slums?”
“Celia... you can already see precognition now?”
“If I’m lucky, for about a day or two. More importantly, unless you hurry up and tell me the truth exactly as it is, my hammer won’t stay quiet. What do you think about that, Raul?”
Think? What was there to think about?
Celia, saying that in a voice laced with laughter, had eyes that looked terrifying enough to make him sweat.
She glared at him with the sort of look a wife might use when suspecting an affair, and Raul could almost see the phantom of a massive hammer she wasn’t even holding.
Before things could get any more troublesome, Raul held out his hand and called his guardian.
“I’ll explain everything, so calm down. Horus.”
He had planned to ask her for help anyway, if only because she was the one person he could trust with it.
“Meow—”
The pure white kitten that sprang from Raul’s right hand cast an appropriate rune into the air without needing a single word of explanation.
The rune then flew to the wall of the guest suite and sank into it.
“It’s a soundproofing spell.”
“Rune magic...? No, wait. Isn’t that a Stigma?”
“...A Stigma?”
A spark of surprise lit Celia’s eyes.
As a holy warrior, she had recognized the Stigma at a glance.
Princess Elenoa, startled in turn, widened her eyes.
“Hah.”
He hadn’t wanted to drag Elenoa into this, but things had become slightly tangled.
Rubbing his forehead, Raul proceeded to tell the princess—who had been swept up in all this anyway—about the demon summoning circles.
“...A summoning circle for summoning an advanced demon?”
This time even Celia’s brows twitched in disbelief.
But Raul had only told the truth as it was, so he nodded without hesitation.
The target was the Flame Devil Armor.
Its classification was a full ninth rank, which even the clergy of Motala treated as a high-risk entity.
Once he added the details about the three summoning circles and the suspicious figures moving through Fatal’s empty streets, the suspicion in her eyes vanished completely.
Raul let out a quiet breath of relief, then voiced the thing he had already planned to say to her.
“But there’s one problem.”
“A problem?”
“I think the only way to destroy these demon summoning circles is to strike all three places at once.”
“Summoning...? You mean because of the catalyst and the sacrifice required for the ritual?”
As expected of Celia. She understood immediately.
“Exactly. A summoning needs a ‘catalyst’ to designate the target and a ‘sacrifice’ worthy of that target’s rank. Even if we catch and beat the hell out of all of them, if even one of them escapes with the catalyst or the sacrifice, it fails.”
“Then they’ll just draw another demon summoning circle somewhere else before long.”
Raul nodded.
“That’s why now, while they’re careless, is our chance.”
Without giving them time to run, without giving them time to smuggle out the catalyst and sacrifice, they would have to suppress all three sites in a single day and at the same time.
That was the only way to fully crush this divided summoning-circle operation—and at the same time, the reason it was such a problem.
“But the only people who could dive into enemy territory alone and still be trusted without question are me and you, Celia.”
“Ah.”
At that, Celia made a small, dazed sound and turned her head away in one swift motion.
He could see the corners of her mouth, hidden behind her hand, twitching bit by bit.
He’d said it without much thought, but she seemed to like Raul’s answer quite a lot.
“Your Highness.”
Just then, Princess Elenoa, who had been listening quietly the whole time, raised her hand carefully.
“After considering what Your Highness has said, it seems the important question is not ability, but whether the person in question can be trusted. Is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“Then why am I not included among those you can trust, despite having nearly been killed in front of your own eyes more than once?”
The princess opened her brown eyes wide and looked straight into Raul’s obsidian gaze.
Raul had initially considered her outside the scope of this mission, so he hesitated for a moment, thinking of how to answer.
But the princess spoke first.
“I know. I’m not as strong as you or Lady Celia. Keeping the last bloodline of the royal family away from danger is only common sense.”
“If you know that...”
“I know it, and that’s why I’m saying it.”
With a soft rustle, Princess Elenoa casually took off the outer garment covering her upper body, her expression unchanged.
What came into view before the curves of her chest was a huge burn scar that ran from her waist all the way across her back.
“It’s a scar from Walter’s flames. Even though I knew he had no choice, he apologized to me through tears until late at night.”
For someone talking about an injury inflicted by a vassal, the princess wore a faint smile.
“But I liked this scar instead. It has already been more than a year since I fled the palace. This was the only proof of the road I’d traveled, carved into this ridiculous body of mine.”
Then she turned her bright eyes back to Raul and asked,
“And so, until today, I have lived for 425 days as the last bloodline of the royal family, not as Elenoa. I have lived as duty and authority, not as a person. So tell me—do I truly look alive to you now?”
Facing the expressionless Elenoa, whose only movement was the slight curl of her dry lips, Raul held his tongue for a moment.
He couldn’t possibly answer that question with a yes, either.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
A princess who wanted to throw herself into the battlefield...
For sure, Elenoa was nothing like any princess Raul had known until now.
Had her meeting with the demon contractor Grandel the other day stirred something in her?
The princess now seemed very determined to fill the last opening in Raul’s plan with herself.
Her request was not at all desperate, and her dead eyes and hollow tone clearly claimed indifference.
And yet, there was a strange force to her words that made it impossible to simply refuse them out of hand.
So she really is royal.
Ha.
Raul let the corner of his mouth curl at the thought, then rested his arm on the terrace railing in front of him and propped his chin on his hand.
The sun was sinking beyond the cold western mountains, swallowed whole by indigo.
On the third night, too, a blizzard blew in as always, and dusk fell with a razor’s edge.
Darkness creeping over a veil of white.
Raul found himself thinking that the warped landscape looked a little like Princess Elenoa.
A princess who harbored a twisted hope suited to this age of ruin.
It was a ridiculous thought, and yet Raul’s mouth still twisted faintly in the end.
There was nothing strange about it.
This was simply the kind of era it was.
“What are you doing?”
Then the inner door of the guest suite burst open, and Celia peeked her head out, her hair shining pure white.
A faint trace of an elegant, warm smile touched her face.
“Where’s the princess?”
“She just fell asleep. She didn’t show it very well, but she seemed to have a lot on her mind even while she was with me.”
“So this whole thing finally came out all at once because of what happened here?”
“Probably. But Raul. You’re awfully comfortable talking about another woman while I’m standing right here.”
“...What are you talking about now?”
“The princess has a great body and a pretty face, doesn’t she? You think so too, right?”
When he looked back at her, her dark eyes were shining like those of a beast beneath the night shadow.
Thwack.
Raul immediately flicked her on the forehead.
“Ow.”
“That’s enough out of you. I’ve never looked at Princess Elenoa that way once in my life.”
“Good enough for me.”
Rubbing her forehead over and over, Celia seemed quite pleased with his answer. She let out a soft smile and walked over to his side.
Her head naturally tilted against Raul’s shoulder.
The two of them spoke without even looking at each other.
“What happened to the Stigma?”
“I found a holy site.”
“Which church?”
“Not a church. I found a saint’s holy site hidden in elven territory.”
“Then...”
“That’s right. The saint your order of trackers had been hunting was me. Now that I’ve even gained the Stigma, the three great churches, except for yours, will probably try to kill me with everything they have.”
“...So it really was true.”
Without once looking at Raul, Celia suddenly went still, even holding her breath as she said nothing.
Her gaze seemed to be fixed on something very far away.
What, exactly, was she thinking so intently about?
Just as Raul was about to wonder about something he would never put into words, she finally spoke.
“I genuinely want to help Elenoa now, Raul.”
“The princess?”
“Yes. You felt it too, didn’t you? That she’s never been some blind royal puppet.”
“No, she hasn’t.”
“At first, I was planning to get kidnapped by you again, like back in the Shinryong Kingdom.”
The Shinryong Kingdom was the country where she and Raul had first met.
She lifted her head from Raul’s shoulder and looked directly into his eyes.
“I wanted to travel the continent with you again and shoulder together that burden weighing on your shoulders.”
There were faint tears gathered in her large, round eyes.
“But I’m sorry. I don’t think I can let you kidnap me so obediently this time. I’ve really come to want to see the Therion Kingdom Elenoa is going to build.”
What colored her gaze as she met his was nothing but clean, unmistakable remorse.
Raul scrunched the bridge of his nose and said in a teasing tone,
“Hey, Your Highness? Shouldn’t you ask the kidnapper whether he even wants to kidnap you before deciding whether you’re getting kidnapped?”
That drew a short, breathy laugh from Celia, and a deep smile blossomed on her lips.
Then she said,
“Still, Raul, don’t forget. Before I’m a holy warrior, I’m still the carefree adventurer SilverBullet who used to dream impossible dreams.”
Raul already knew how she felt about him.
And she probably understood his feelings better than anyone else too.
Even so, Raul could not bring himself to hold her back.
Gifted talent and overwhelming brilliance.
In Exeria, being born with great blessings was not, in truth, a good thing at all.
Exeria’s credo was equality.
To be given talent was no different from being made to shoulder a risk of equal size.
And that rule did not apply only to players.
Raul had already known it for a long time.
Celia’s extraordinary brilliance was surely granted because she was meant to bear an extraordinary burden.
She would undoubtedly be able to complete that burden.
And once every duty was done and she was finally free, she would travel this world again as an adventurer.
She was someone who truly loved adventure.
But the future she would share with Raul would not be like that.
The burden Raul had to face was the trial of the Halo bearer.
Traveling with him would almost certainly cost her her life.
Whether Raul intended it or not, that ice-cold reality would not change.
So when he looked at Celia, her eyes silently begging him to hold on to her, Raul could not force a single word past his lips.
They remained silent for a long time, until the tears gathered at the corners of her eyes finally began to spill down her pale cheeks.
She gave a small, awkward laugh and said, “Ah...”
Watching that face, where tears and a smile existed side by side in open contradiction, Raul thought:
Maybe the greatest distortion this collapsing world had ever burdened him with was this relationship between her and him.
Without a word, Raul lifted a hand and wiped away the tears running down her cheek.
Then, almost as if drawn in by her, he pressed his lips to hers without resistance.
Her lips tasted of something bitter and yet deep, like moonflower scent.