The Bloodfiend Labyrinth (2)
Raul shot forward with a blast that sounded like a gun going off, white light wrapping his entire body. The afterimage he left behind was so vivid that a second Raul seemed to hang in the air.
His black blade rippled like a wave, splitting into two, then three traces in the blink of an eye as it carved through every blood fiend in sight.
Clang—!
“Ghk?!”
By the time Dmitry's gaze chased after him, Raul was already locked in a struggle with the blood fiend who had been shouting on its own.
That was what it meant for the two to be on completely different levels.
Only then did Dmitry finally realize, with painful clarity, just what sort of person he had been brazenly picking a fight with.
The back of his neck tingled.
Raul and Aila were so far beyond anything that could be called common sense that even seeing it with his own eyes still didn't feel real.
Just as his mind began to drift under a shock that bordered on awe,
“Captain!”
Clang!
Flames burst before Dmitry's eyes.
When he opened them wide, he saw a jet-black chain sickle slashing down from the ceiling and a crimson dagger deflecting it.
Then the girl holding the dagger glanced over her shoulder and said, “If you don't keep your head on straight, I'll let you die next time.”
“...My apologies.”
Dmitry clenched down hard on what was left of his composure.
With his eyes wide open, he gripped his sword and swept the battlefield with a broader gaze.
At most, three or four travelers were cowering in the corner, trembling on the floor.
The rest of the dozen-odd people there had all bared long fangs.
“So they were hiding out in the back alleys and quietly building their numbers.”
Most of what stood before him were blood fiend slaves—in other words, thralls.
Aila answered him. “That's how these things always work. They spread like a plague, turn more people into carriers, then only show their true colors once they've built up enough strength. If they hit the knight order, that means they've already swallowed up several other places besides this one.”
“...So that's why you were so sure we'd run into them if we just walked into any random place.”
“Exactly.”
“...You know a lot about this.”
“Didn't my old man say so? I'm an expert.”
Dmitry felt a chill run down his spine when he looked at the small girl wearing that eerie smile.
By now he could feel the blood-red killing intent rolling off her as naturally as breath.
“They're coming.”
In that instant, Aila's form vanished.
The next moment, a flesh-rending sound rang out—puh-shuk—followed by blood raining down from above.
When Dmitry looked up, he saw several assassins hanging upside down from the ceiling like bats.
And Aila was moving through the air as if using them as stepping stones, stabbing and kicking off them in turn.
It was a sight that could only leave one speechless.
But soon, Dmitry focused on the front once more.
He had spotted a black shadow hurtling straight toward him.
Clang!
He knocked the chain sickle aside with a precise motion.
But just like before, the ominous demonic energy wrapped around it made the weapon move again.
Dmitry, however, hurled his heavy body forward instead and answered it head-on.
“You think a knight of Zern would fall for the same trick twice?”
Rrrrk—!
Ignoring the chain sickle scraping over his armor, he brought a heavy horizontal slash down on the assassin's neck as the man closed in.
It was a plain attack, but a heavy one.
The assassin's eyes flew wide.
Using the chain in one hand and the other hand as well, he caught the knight's blade and barely managed to twist its path away.
Blood spilled in a stream from the man's hand, which had been split almost in half, and from his torn shoulder.
“Hah!”
Confident of victory, Dmitry tightened both hands around his sword.
He meant to cut the man cleanly in two.
Just then, a fierce red glint flared in the assassin's pupils.
Gulp—!
Then the blood that had been flowing downward surged back upward.
“A thrall using blood sorcery?!”
Startled, Dmitry quickly abandoned his sword and raised both hands to shield his face.
Red streams of blood came rushing at his head.
By then, each drop had already changed into a sharp thorn.
“D-damn it!”
Dmitry stood there in disbelief at the unexpected counterattack, at a loss for what to do—
And then, in that very moment, a streak of scarlet lightning fell from above and buried itself deep in the blood fiend's collarbone.
“Kraaa—”
The instant the fiend tried to scream, a black chain sickle dropped into its mouth and stabbed through.
Thwump—!
The red-haired girl let her hair sway as she landed without a sound on the ground, starkly contrasting with the gruesome, heavy tearing noise that had come before.
Aila had finished off the blood fiend before them.
At the same time, rattle-rattle-rattle.
The three assassins who had been hanging upside down from the ceiling came crashing down to the floor as well.
Dmitry stared at the utterly bewildering scene with a blank expression.
“This, this isn't the time for that. We need to help—!”
He came back to his senses at last and shouted as he regripped his sword, but Aila, watching him with leisurely eyes, asked, “Help who?”
“Who? Obviously Sir Raul, who charged alone into the middle of their formation—”
But when Dmitry looked ahead, he gasped and his mouth fell open, leaving him unable to lower the sword he'd just raised.
There, in a pile now more than twice the number he'd seen before—over twenty blood fiends—lay nothing but cold corpses.
The holy warrior standing atop that small mound had exterminated an enemy force more than twenty times Dmitry's own and six times Aila's, yet his breathing still hadn't even gone ragged.
“Is everyone all right?”
At that electrifying sight, Dmitry heard himself blurt out a single word before he knew it.
“M-Motala...”
The middle-aged knight, who had all his life followed only the strength of his own hard body and the mercy of the gracious noble who had taken him in and knighted him—Zern—...
At that moment, he had no choice but to become a devout believer of Motala.
“So what exactly is this so-called Blood Lord?”
Raul asked the bald man lying spread-eagled before him.
He was the tavern owner who had vanished after leaving one final warning for Aila.
The uproar inside the tavern had died down, and Lergal had caught the man as he calmly returned while calling the blood fiends back. He had been brought here by force.
“I-I am just a common civilian. I don't know a thing—aaaghhh!”
At Raul's glance, Aila drove a dagger into the man's ankle and twisted it.
The man shook all over from the impossible pain, but he couldn't even get back up.
That was the result of a highly skilled assassin from the Embers personally severing the tendons that connected his limbs.
“I really don't! I really don't know anything, I swear!”
The man screamed his innocence, his eyes bulging with bloodshot veins.
But Raul only narrowed his brow.
“Hmm. Are you sure about that?”
He laid a palm against the man's forehead and focused the brilliant holy light of his Halo.
Hissss—
“Aaaagh! Aaaaghhh!”
At once, the sound of flesh burning filled the room.
He wasn't a demon contract holder, and there was no demonic energy inside his body. Yet he was reacting to holiness with this much violence.
There was only one way that could happen.
“Your resistance to the sacred isn't something you built up over a year or two, is it, accomplice?”
Only after Raul used the word accomplice did the man's face stiffen.
“You know what happens to anyone who lies before Motala's scales, don't you?”
“P-please, spare me! I'll tell you everything I know, I swear. Please, just don't kill me!”
Watching him, Aila licked her lips with an oddly delighted expression.
“Tsk. Hold out a little longer. The fun hasn't even started yet.”
That chilling remark only made the man's face go even paler.
Looking down at him, Raul said flatly, “I'll decide whether you live or die after I hear what you have to say.”
But what followed was rather shocking.
After listening to the man's story in silence for a while, Raul asked with a rather unreadable expression, “So that Blood Lord guy is your acquaintance?”
“...To be exact, he was the leader of a five-man adventuring party that discovered Kurjen's Labyrinth and personally organized the first expedition. The gold-plate adventurer, Zanzas.”
The gold-plate adventurer, Zanzas.
Raul had heard enough about him over the past few months while traveling through the western region to know he was a name of some renown.
Frowning, Raul asked, “An adventurer who was said to have died in a labyrinth came back to life? And not just that—he became a high-ranking blood fiend capable of making thralls?”
“I-I know it sounds impossible, but... t-the reality is exactly that. Zanzas asked to be given a place to hide and food. And in just a few days...”
“He subdued the thugs and the assassins of this entire back alley—nine-tenths of them, and turned them into his thralls?”
“T-those events were already two months ago.”
At Raul's words, the man gave a quiet nod.
“So where is the important one now?”
There was no doubt that the one who had butchered the six knights of the Zern Knight Order was the Blood Lord himself.
If it hadn't been him, six knights wouldn't have been slaughtered so one-sidedly.
That meant the man had still been right here in this tavern until this morning.
Unfortunately, the answer the man gave was not the one Raul wanted.
“I-I don't know. Zanzas left the shop at dawn today with a large group of those stinking blood zombies. T-that's all I know. That's the truth!”
“Is that so?”
“Yes! So now I can fin—”
Slash—!
Raul swung the Sun King's Sword without hesitation and took the man's head off.
There wasn't a trace of doubt or mercy in the blade.
Whoosh—
At that cold display, Aila let out a low whistle.
“You really don't have any softness in you, do you, old man.”
“Sending him off without pain is the last mercy I can give.”
“Well, that's not exactly wrong.”
Perhaps because Raul's attitude had been a little unexpected, Knight Lergal's eyes went wide.
Raul gave a quiet warning to the knight, who still seemed trapped in his ideals.
“Lergal. Remember this. Once you've gotten even a little tangled up with demons, there is no such thing as the possibility of reform.”
“...I will take that to heart.”
With that gloomy reply, the tavern fell briefly into silence.
The place that had only moments ago been thick with enough drunken stench to make a nose bend out of shape was now filled only with the sour smell of ash and the metallic reek of blood.
At the center of it all stood the young knight, his expression still deeply conflicted.
Dmitry approached Raul, ruffling Lergal's hair as he came.
“At any rate, things have come back to square one. We'll have to start over and figure out how a gold-plate adventurer turned into a high-ranking blood fiend, and where the bastard who attacked the Zern Knights with a host of thralls disappeared to. We'll begin the investigation again.”
Raul, however, shook his head at Dmitry's words.
“No. No further investigation is necessary.”
“What? But—”
“Think about it, Dmitry. Where did Zanzas vanish from before he returned as a blood fiend?”
“That would be Kurjen's Labyrinth.”
“And who had the authority to organize the Sixth Expedition Team for Kurjen's Labyrinth?”
“Well, the Zern Knight Order—”
Raul watched Dmitry trail off, then gave a small nod and said, “They attacked the Zern Knights because they intended to ruin the Sixth Expedition Team's entry into the labyrinth itself. So where would the place they were trying to protect be?”
“...Kurjen's Labyrinth.”
Raul regarded the knight captain, whose reasoning was poor but whose comprehension was not, and added, “The identity of the S-rank labyrinth that has swallowed five expedition teams so far was a blood fiend nest.”
Lergal and Dmitry went rigid as stone.
Meanwhile, Aila had already gone trotting over to the bar table by herself.
Someone must have poured it at some point, because a glass there was already filled with the right mix of ice and liquor.
She picked it up and downed it in one gulp.
Well, her stomach really did have a strange constitution... Raul snorted at that absurd sight.
As dusk settled, the outer walls of the labyrinth city turned a deep vermilion.
Beneath that orange glow stood the group, hiding themselves in thick shadows.
Raul looked at the two knights beneath their deeply lowered hoods and said, “Let's split the party in two here.”
Lergal immediately went wide-eyed.
“W-wait! Sir Raul?”
“I've thought it over, and this is the most efficient option. Aila and I will head for Kurjen's Labyrinth first. We'll stop their scheme before it gets any further.”
“You're planning to enter an S-rank labyrinth with only two people? That's too dangerous! J-just as we discussed beforehand, we should inform the Labyrinth Administration Bureau and—”
Raul grabbed Lergal's shoulders before the young knight could go any further and start rambling with a face gone even paler than before.
Lergal flinched hard.
“Lergal.”
“Yes, Sir Raul...”
“I know you're upset because you've lost comrades you've long fought beside. But the more serious the situation, the calmer you have to be.”
“Calm...”
“Yes. Think about it calmly. How could those bastards, who had been doing nothing but hiding their faces, suddenly attack the knight order in broad daylight?”
“Th-that...”
Lergal shut his mouth, his face clouding with confusion.
It wasn't that he didn't know the answer to Raul's question. He simply looked too tangled up to think of anything at all.
So Raul explained.
“The blood fiend race has already prepared something they don't care if Asmos learns about their true identity.”
Dmitry, who had been standing silently at Raul's side, picked up the thought.
“So they've already prepared a trump card powerful enough that they wouldn't mind making the whole of Asmos their enemy?”
Raul looked that way and went on.
“They probably haven't finished preparing it yet. If they had, they wouldn't have attacked the knights and vanished. They would've started a full-scale invasion already.”
“Then that means...”
“What they want is time. A day or two to prepare that so-called trump card you just mentioned.”
A shadow fell over Dmitry's face.
“If the Labyrinth Administration Bureau and the guilds are to move properly, it'll take at least three days... So that's why you want to go to the labyrinth first.”
Raul gave a light nod at that.
“That's right, Dmitry. That doesn't mean your role and Lergal's aren't important. The two of you need to take responsibility for gathering everyone in this city who can still fight.”
When Raul looked him straight in the eye and said that, Dmitry suddenly reddened around the eyes and replied, “So you're really going to head for the most dangerous place yourselves.”
What was with that overly emotional reaction...?
Raul found himself at a loss looking at Dmitry's moved expression, but since there was no harm in letting the man feel inspired, he gave a fitting answer.
“It was simply the most efficient choice.”
Then Dmitry drew his sword and answered with a knight's salute.
“I will follow the will of the Great Hammer.”
Seriously, why was he acting like a fanatic of Motala?
A stiff smile tugged at Raul's mouth.
After that, Raul gathered up several magical tools that had originally been prepared for the Sixth Expedition Team, along with a map of the labyrinth he had purchased from a surviving mage.
But just before the party split up, Raul suddenly spoke with a strange expression.
“Oh, and by the way. Dmitry. Did you hear?”
“...Yes?”
“They say Kurjen's Labyrinth is surrounded by ancient magic.”
“That is correct, yes.”
“I happened to hear some interesting news recently at the Labyrinth Administration Bureau. Have you ever heard of rune magic?”
A bizarre, almost vicious smile crept onto Raul's lips.
The entrance to the S-rank labyrinth lay quite a distance from Asmos.
Under an old ruin that had already been “fully excavated” decades ago, the entrance to the recently discovered underground labyrinth stood upright.
Its unreal scale, along with the abruptly cut-off green moss around it, made it clear that this entrance had not emerged naturally, but had suddenly appeared one day by twisting space itself.
That was how the labyrinths of Exeria usually came into being.
Raul finished one last inspection of the magical tools he'd taken from the two knights and of his own original weapons, then prepared to enter the labyrinth at once.
Just then, a small hand seized the sleeve of his robe.
“Huh?”
When Raul turned around, Aila was standing there, having stopped him with a curious look on her face.
“You know, old man. I've been thinking about it, and I still don't get it, so I'm asking. You know.”
“What about?”
“That rune mage you suddenly told that knight to go find at the end... you weren't talking about yourself, were you?”
Raul gave a faint laugh at Aila's wildly delayed realization.
“Yeah.”
“What? It was? No, but you're right here. So why did you suddenly tell them to look for you in the city? Old man... Don't tell me you were even trying to screw over that knight while all this was going on? Seriously?”
“No, nothing like that.”
Raul realized that even the Embers assassin hadn't noticed what he had really meant, and a thin smile touched his lips once more.
Then Aila, unable to stand it any longer, asked again, “Then what was it? Why did you send that knight, who wanted to gather reinforcements, running in circles?”
Raul's mouth curved into a dark smile that carved a deep hollow into his cheek.
“Why else? So I can take the thing hidden in this labyrinth, of course.”
“...A thing?”
“Yeah. You heard it too, didn't you? That there's a holy relic at the very end of this labyrinth.”