The Bloodfiend Labyrinth (1)
Raul reached one hand behind his back and spoke to the masked men whose purple eyes were glinting in the dark.
"Is this the Abyss side, or the Archduke side?"
The answer came from somewhere completely unexpected.
Already surrounded and locked in a standoff, the Knight Commander Dmitri had drawn his long sword and shouted at the top of his lungs.
"P-please, enough with the nonsense and help me! Warrior!"
It was a remarkably unknightly display.
Raul let out a short sigh, then looked straight at the man in a mask whose brow seemed to glow in the darkness and said as if spitting the words out, "You going to keep your mouth shut? Fine. Something'll turn up at the top, same as with the Spider, won't it?"
The instant Raul gave a thin smile, the black silhouette before him vanished.
Though by now, it was no longer a speed he couldn't follow with his eyes.
Clang-!
Scarlet sparks flew.
At the same time, more than a dozen assailants launched themselves at him, using that sound as a signal.
Chrrrrrk-!
Every one of them hurled a long chain scythe, each blade blackened from edge to edge.
Raul slipped past the man in front of him by the barest margin, then watched the black scythe curving toward him alone.
"Hm."
The moment he inhaled, the world in his sight slowed.
Inside that razor-thin instant, Raul kindled flame at the tip of his sword.
Throwing off its limits and wrapped in blessing, his blade did more than simply block the incoming scythes; it created a gap to turn the attack back on them.
Clang-clang-clang-clang!
Sparks scattered as the scythes had their trajectories twisted, yet they exuded a violet-black demonic aura and came flying again from empty air.
"Your follow-up is slow."
Raul already had the most effective shield in his hand.
"Hk! Ugh?!"
He seized the head of the man standing in front of him, hoisted him up, and swung him around like a whip.
The scythes buried themselves into that body.
Raul flung him to the ground, then reversed his grip and used his sword to cleanly sever the man's neck and the chain attached to the scythe in a single stroke.
Crash-!
The men who had lost their blades all at once faltered, but one of them still kept his head.
"Deal with the ones on the list first, then pull out. Move!"
The low, fast voice rang out.
At the same time, the masked demon contractors began surging in waves toward Lergal and Dmitri.
However,
"Aila!"
Calling for the Cinder, Raul planted himself between Lergal and the assassins.
Metal, daggers, thrown weapons, and even tendrils shaped from demonic aura all crashed in like waves in the same instant.
Facing all of that chaos head-on, Raul raised his right hand.
"Horus!"
ᚥ ᚨ ᚸ ᚡ ᚯ
His loyal guardian used rune magic before even revealing its form.
Fwoosh! Fwoooooosh-!
Flames with no such thing as casting consumed everything in front of him in an instant.
At the same time, Raul hurled himself into that fire.
When his blade finally fell, it was aimed at the ankle of the man who had given the "orders" a moment earlier.
Clang-!
The assailant blocked the sword as it drove deep toward his lower body.
Raul flicked a glance to the side and saw the members of the Cinder fighting back-to-back with the knight commander.
He lost interest in that and fixed his gaze ahead.
"One last time. Abyss or Archduke?"
"You vile reincarnated saint bastard!"
"Oh, now you recognize me? Guess you had a long-distance call again while I wasn't looking."
"To think you were hiding in a backwater like this. So that’s why the 'Queen' and the 'Serpent' never showed themselves!"
Raul smiled at the assailant as he spat the words out.
"I wasn't exactly hiding, so what's the problem? Why couldn't you find me?"
"You who stand in the way of our poor, pitiable ascension."
"...There you go again. Do you idiots really think you're the pitiful ones? Seriously?"
Raul asked twice, because it was so absurd.
But the man only bared his long fangs and released a bestial cry, "Kyaaaah!"
Raul knocked aside the scythe the man held in both hands with a single stroke, then swept his gaze over the area.
Of course, the rotten stench of the corpses of those who had once been knights still hung here too.
He narrowed his brow.
"If your victim complex gets that bad, it's a disease."
Fwoosh-!
The Sun King's holy sword, wrapped in authority, burst forward in a sudden acceleration and then carved a single, straight horizontal line through the air.
A moment later, what dropped to the floor with a dry thud was the man's head.
Raul looked down at the head and body burning white and narrowed his brow again.
"Disgusting, in the end."
He fixed the demon contractors, now crumbling to dust without a single drop of blood left in them, with a look of pure revulsion.
***
Dmitri, who had survived thanks to Aila's efforts with only a large slash wound across his shoulder, surveyed the area with heavy eyes.
"There were six steadfast knight order members... How could this have happened?"
He began gathering the remains of the knights, whose bodies had been shattered into pieces and scattered across the floor.
It seemed he intended to at least give them proper burial rites with due respect.
At the sight of that, Aila frowned, while the youngest knight, Lergal, stared blankly for a moment before abruptly bolting outside the building with a gagging sound.
Raul, who had been silently watching that horrific scene, suddenly noticed something strange.
"Dmitri, wait."
When Raul called him by name, the knight commander paused briefly, then turned to look at him.
His expression was, naturally, terrible.
"...Why? As commander, I have a duty to see these men put to rest properly until the end of--"
"I'm not telling you to stop the funeral preparations. Look closely. Doesn't something seem off?"
"What is... hm?"
Fortunately, Dmitri was a sharp-eyed knight.
Raul walked over with steady steps and stopped in front of a round table that had been split cleanly in half.
"Blood."
He swept his gaze over the surrounding area with that point as the center.
At first glance, blood seemed to have been sprayed everywhere in a bloody mess, but the stains were thin, and far too widespread.
"There's too little blood. Not enough for six people. And yet the bloodstains are scattered all over the place. It's like--"
As Raul's eyes followed a thick trail of blood, he found a shattered upper body lying beneath a streak that stretched off to the right.
Beside it, spilled organs were strewn messily across the floor.
"It's not that blood gushed from the wounds. It looks more like someone controlled the blood and used it to attack them."
Only then did Dmitri, whose trembling mouth had been following Raul's gaze, speak.
"Controlled the blood... don't tell me, a bloodfiend?!"
Raul nodded.
"What's more, every one of the assailants here had long fangs. You know what that means, right?"
"Thralls, then. In other words, those assassins we faced a moment ago were nothing more than foot soldiers for the one who brought down the knights..."
At Dmitri's words, Raul nodded.
He had also come to understand it.
The bastard from earlier. Something about him had felt far too low-grade to be an Exceed executive.
He had only been a mid-level manager who received and shared information.
The real culprit, the one who had torn six knights apart and killed them here, was someone else entirely.
Having properly grasped the situation, Dmitri clenched his fists, trembling, and said, "I'll inform the Labyrinth Administration Bureau and the guilds in charge of each branch at once. That filthy bloodfiend... I swear I'll avenge the knight order!"
He was just about to stride off with heavy, clanging steps.
But from behind him, the Cinder spoke in a calm voice.
"That wouldn't be a good choice."
"...What did you say?"
"I know those kinds of habits well. If you alert the city to a bloodfiend's presence, the bloodfiend will vanish without looking back. This is a labyrinth city, after all."
"If the guild and Asmos guards search together, then even that labyrinth could be--"
"How many labyrinths are there around Asmos, and how deep do they go? Do you honestly think that makes sense? What is it, is the knight of Therion not all that impressive after all?"
Crack-!
Perhaps because, on the surface, she looked no different from a dazed little girl, Dmitri glared at her with bloodshot eyes and shouted, "What the hell gives you the right to keep running your mouth like that? Are you some great holy warrior like Lord Raul over there?!"
"No, I'm not."
"Then shut your trap and do what you're told, girl!"
In that moment, Raul and Aila vanished at the same time.
Tap.
The place they reappeared was right in front of Dmitri.
Raul was gripping the hand that had tried to stab out Aila's dagger as it moved for his eyes.
"Wha--?!"
The knight's eyes flew wide.
At that moment, Aila, her dagger held fast, shot Raul a sidelong look and said, "Old man, let go of me, will you? I need to kill this bastard. He crossed the line just now. This bastard."
"Hold on a little longer. To be fair, he's the one at fault, but he didn't know who you were. He just lost all the comrades he'd lived his entire life with. He wasn't in his right mind."
"Who... I am?"
Only then did Dmitri look back and forth between Raul and Aila with fear rising in his eyes.
Aila flashed him a nasty smile.
"Curious? You'd have to die if you knew. Lucky you. Ask me now. Go on, bark it out through that filthy mouth of yours. You idiot."
Raul let out a sigh as he looked at Dmitri's trembling eyes, shaken as if an earthquake were running through them.
"...Do you get it now, Dmitri? Just because you're from a noble house and you're the commander of a knight order doesn't mean you can go around barking at people whenever you feel like it. You only have one life, you know."
Gulp.
The knight commander swallowed dryly.
At that moment, the door opened again.
"I'm sorry. I showed you an unseemly side of me... But what exactly are you doing?"
When Lergal's puzzled gaze landed on them, Aila spat to the side and put her dagger away.
"...Haa."
Dmitri, still unable to calm down, let out a breath as if the air had been driven from his lungs.
Raul looked at Lergal, who seemed like the only one he could still talk to, and said, "It seems that besides the demon contractors who appeared here, there's a true culprit somewhere else."
"R-really?"
"Yes. So from here on out, we were just about to track them down. The four of us."
"Of course. We have to track them... Huh? The four of us?"
Raul glanced between Lergal, who had gone wide-eyed, and Dmitri, who still looked half-dead, then said, "If you're not confident, you don't have to come with us."
That was not a thing a knight could simply brush off.
Of course, both knights declared they would join, but Lergal, who still couldn't shake his unease, added one more thing.
"Do you have a method?"
Raul gave a small smile and suddenly looked toward the back.
The target of that gaze was Aila.
"In situations like this, you call in an expert."
***
At the northernmost edge of Therion, the labyrinth city of Asmos had its own underground power structure, just like the slave market in Valentia.
Of course, no one was bringing slaves all the way out here to sell them.
Because there were so many labyrinths here, and so many adventurers who vanished inside them, a sizable back-alley market had naturally grown up around the disposal of the dead's belongings.
It was late evening there too, and a chill wind was driving in a snowstorm through the back alleys.
As the temperature steadily dropped, one by one people headed into nearby taverns and inns, while a small girl with her hood pulled low walked calmly down the gloomy street.
"Hey, kid. You've got the wrong place."
"Are you a girl, or some short little brat? Want some leftover milk? Huh?"
"I don't know what you picked up in the labyrinth, but come over here. I'll pay good money for it."
The residents of the back alley threw out one taunt after another, each laced with a kind of mock friendliness.
But the girl kept walking as if she hadn't heard a thing and went into a tavern.
Creaaak.
As soon as she entered the sparsely populated tavern, she sat down on the first chair she saw.
"Dispose."
She took a single cigarette from her waist, brought it to the candlelight on the table, and lit it.
"Hoo."
After exhaling a long stream of pale gray smoke, she faced the owner, who had stopped wiping a plate and come over to her.
"The goods."
The girl took a dagger, a broken scythe, and a few chain links from her robe and laid them out.
"These."
But the owner's expression turned peculiar.
"A chain scythe..."
He frowned at the unusual weapon, then asked again, "Where'd you get this?"
The girl met his gaze for a moment with her red-glinting eyes, then exhaled another haze of smoke and answered, "I came to a place where they don't ask that sort of thing."
"I don't care about the rest, but not the black chain scythe."
"Why? Do the bastards who use black chain scythes have some special standing even in this back alley?"
With half-lidded eyes, the girl spoke in a mocking tone, and the owner began glaring at her.
Yet the girl, Aila, merely let a sneer curl at her lips, as if even that look amused her.
"You'll answer properly from here on out."
"Sure. Go ahead, then."
"The owners of these things?"
"I killed them all."
"Why? Did they try to do something to you?"
"No? They just got in the way, so I killed them all."
"...Can you take responsibility for that?"
"Responsibility, my ass. I just need money."
Aila and the owner exchanged razor-sharp looks.
The first to raise the white flag was, naturally, the owner.
He gave a small "Understood," then swept the weapons in front of him into a large sack.
With a hard stare, he warned, "I can tell you're not ordinary either... But you'll definitely regret what you just said."
"Just give me the money. And bring me one of those too."
What Aila pointed at was, as expected, Beast Blood.
The owner shoved over a glass with ice and the bottle from the shelf, then added in a low voice, "May fortune be with you."
"You're making me tear up with concern."
By the time he had carried the bundle off and vanished into the dark shadow beyond the alley,
Chrrrrrk!
From behind Aila, from four directions at once, came chain scythes flying in.
Blackened blades that showed their true worth in the pitch-dark were poised to turn into invisible death and tear the red-haired woman to shreds.
At that moment,
Bang-!
A black-haired man literally smashed through the tavern door and burst inside.
"Bingo."
Raul swept his white-dyed pupils quickly across the tavern, then tightened his grip on the sword in his hand.
A moment later, a burst of white light left a deep trail in the blink of an eye, severing the necks of the two men who had already been standing side by side.
Aila dodged the incoming chain scythes with an acrobatic twist, and the two knights who had already infiltrated here threw off their robes.
"From this moment on, this place is under the control of the Knights of Zern! Any bystanders unrelated to this matter, please crouch in the corner and do not move."
The two knights sealed off the routes to the front and back entrances.
Watching those ruthlessly calculated movements, the pale-skinned man spoke in disbelief.
"What a bunch of insane bastards."
Showing long fangs, the man bared the veins at his temple and shouted, "Do you idiots know that our back is covered by the Blood Lord, and still come barging in like this? What the hell are you? What kind of bastards are you, that you dare stand against us on this land?!"
To that, Raul answered.
He flicked the sword in his hand, scattering the dark red bloodstains that had clung to it in a fan shape.
"The kind of bastard the 'Blood Lord' you're relying on is afraid of."
His eyes were dry as dust, and savage too.
"That's me."
The bloodfiend, meeting that beast-like stare, flinched.