The Second Storm (3)
CLANG! KA-ANG!
Sharp ringing of steel erupted from every direction.
Sshk — CRUNCH!
Sparks flew, blood sprayed, and horrible sounds of tearing flesh filled the air.
Golden holy power settled over the square like a thick, suffocating swamp, pressing down on every throat it could reach.
It was carnage. The plaza before the Holy See — peaceful for so long, crowded and bustling these past three weeks — had become a highway through hell itself.
Blood ran across the flagstones, while screams and battle cries echoed off the sky. Violence and slaughter met the eye wherever one looked, as though this were the bleeding heart of some desperate battlefield.
And in the middle of it all, Thena Delight, Vice-Commander of the 1st Holy Knight Order, stared at the massacre unfolding before her, her face frozen in shock.
"P-please, spare me! Please, spare me!"
"Don't let them escape! If they resist, you may cut them down!"
The 2nd Holy Knight Order — once hailed as the most sacred shield of the Church — was swinging its swords at the very civilians it was meant to protect.
It was a scene far too familiar.
It was, exactly and precisely, what they themselves looked like.
Those were the same eyes they had worn on battlefields of their own, frenzied and raving in religious madness.
"...Why do they call us the heretics?"
She forced the words out at last.
"Why do they treat us as enemies — us, who have spent our entire lives fighting for the Church with our very souls?"
But there was no conviction in her voice. Only questions, filling her up and spilling over.
Then it happened.
"Vice-Commander! Look out!"
A desperate shout from somewhere behind her.
A blade shrieked through the air, hurtling straight for her throat from just beside her.
Instinct honed across countless battlefields wrenched her right arm upward against her will —
KA-BOOM!
Armor wrapped in holy power and her sword collided with a thunderous roar.
Thena cried out at the sword's owner, her face aghast.
"Commander Kubian! What in the world is the meaning of this!?"
The most sacred shield of the Church — and the wise leader of that shield, its Commander, Kubian, was bearing down on her with all his strength, growling.
"Silence, heretic! Do not dare speak my name with that mouth!"
"We are... ugh — we are not heretics! How can you do this to your own brothers and sis—"
"You failed even to protect the Saintess, and now you dare question His Holiness's will! How are men like you anything but heretics?!"
If the 1st Order was the sword that cut down the Church's enemies, then the 2nd Order was the shield that placed protection and rescue above all else. And yet here they were, swinging their blades with such fervor — against brothers and sisters who had bled beside them on a hundred battlefields.
The man's eyes blazed with open hostility. He had already cut down four holy knights and was marking his next prey.
Realizing that no words could reach him, Thena shoved him back with the last of her strength and scrambled away.
"1st Holy Knight Order! Rally to me!"
At her cry, the surviving knights gathered to her one by one, their voices ragged with panic.
"What do we do!? We're being attacked from every side! Give us your orders!"
"Where is the Commander!?"
"He hasn't returned yet!"
"Damn it...!"
This was the worst of it.
Mohaim, their single greatest fighting force, had entered the Holy See without even a weapon — and there was no way whatsoever to go rescue him. They lacked even the strength to shield the pilgrims, who were mere civilians.
"Give us your orders! Are we to retreat!?"
"If we do, the Commander's in danger!"
But pushing into the Holy See in this state was, quite literally, suicide.
Her mind raced at a fever pitch.
Commander...!
Just as Thena stood paralyzed between impossible choices —
KA-BOOM!
Without warning, the gates of the Holy See burst open, and one of the Papal Guard, caked head to toe in holy power, came tumbling across the ground.
Through the rising cloud of dust, a man staggered to his feet and revealed himself.
He was walking with nothing in his hand but a single broken dagger — and at the sight of him, Thena cried out in relief.
"Commander! Commander Mohaim!"
"Hahh... hahh... Vice-Commander. You're... still alive."
"Thank goodness. Thank goodness, you're safe—!"
But she could not finish the sentence.
Something was wrong with him — a wrongness beyond describing.
The more Mohaim straightened himself, the more the dust cloud settled, the more clearly that wrongness swelled.
Her gaze fell to his left arm.
Where the thick, scar-crisscrossed arm had once been, there was nothing at all.
Only a sleeve knotted off below the elbow, and blood dripping, drip by drip, to the stones.
"...!!! Commander!!"
The Vice-Commander's scream cracked with horror.
"Someone, fetch a priest! The Commander is gravely wounded—"
Then she remembered — they had all been condemned as heretics.
"There! Mohaim is over there! Don't let him slip away! His Holiness has commanded he be taken alive!"
Dozens more soldiers poured out behind the shout. And on one of their blades, along with freshly severed flesh, blood still glistened.
Papal Guards, in armor etched with words of blessing, bearing relics at their hips.
Thena's teeth ground together.
"You blind sons of bitches!!! Everything we've sacrificed for your sake — we lived our whole lives as your swords, and how dare you do this to us!!!"
At last, the fury she had swallowed and swallowed again came boiling over.
"HRAAAAAGH!"
One knight — no, one zealot — swept his sword down at her head, carried along by the frenzy of the cry.
KA-GA-GA-GAK!
She caught his holy power-laced strike with a savage parry and answered with a counterattack that held not a whisper of hesitation.
Sshk!
A single stroke, severing his arm below the elbow — exactly as they had done to her Commander.
"GUAAAAAAAGH!!!"
Blood geysered up with his scream and spattered across Thena's cheek.
The fever of war began to flow into her with the blood itself.
"You dared to touch the Commander — you dared, you dared...!"
Gasping, eyes flashing, Thena raised her sword high to the sky.
"P-please... spare me...!"
"SILENCE!!!"
And at the very instant she swung with everything she had to take the knight's head —
THUD!
"Stand down, Thena."
Mohaim, utterly spent, blocked her arm with his right hand.
"But Commander — your arm!"
"It doesn't matter. We must not hand them the justification of calling us true heretics."
As he spoke, Mohaim turned his gaze toward the entrance of the Holy See.
Thena followed his eyes — and hatred began to frost over her own.
Because there, advancing alongside the Papal Guard, came the greatest man of the Holy Church, the one who stood closest to God Himself.
Step. Step.
An old man wrapped in every relic the Church possessed.
Escabor emerged without a single wound upon him.
"Commander Kubian. It seems the suppression is not yet complete."
"Your Holiness!"
The 2nd Order's Commander hurriedly lowered his sword and dropped to one knee.
"Forgive me, Your Holiness. Their resistance was... considerable. But soon I shall sweep every last one of those heretics away!"
"It's quite all right, quite all right."
Escabor waved his hand gently, the way one might comfort a son.
"And even heretics, I suppose, must be granted one last chance to repent."
He bestowed a kindly smile upon the condemned.
"I will give you a choice, Mohaim."
The Pope approached slowly, the Guard at his heels.
"Atone."
"..."
"Order the 1st Knight Order to lay down its arms. Do so, and I will retract the heresy judgment against you and every knight of the 1st Order."
"...You are asking us to surrender."
"Look around you, man. You and your men have suffered enough. And even if you resist here, you will only be branded enemies of the Church all the more thoroughly."
At his words, Mohaim wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand and surveyed the square.
The 2nd Holy Knight Order. The Papal Guard. And behind them, the reinforcements of the Inquisition.
No matter how valiantly his men fought, the enemy numbers swelling into the square were greater by multiples.
Worse still, nearly half the civilians had already been wounded, killed, or bound and dragged away.
There was no path to victory. Mohaim bowed his head.
And in the red blood spreading across the plaza floor, he saw his own face reflected.
"...Then what becomes of the pilgrims?"
The question came out low and quiet.
"What do you intend to do with those civilians?"
"..."
The Pope held his silence for a moment, then answered with terrible brevity.
"I shall honor their noble sacrifice, without fail."
A purge. The word was monstrous in its coldness — and he spoke it as if reciting a pleasant announcement. Mohaim let out a long, shuddering breath.
"So this is the man I served as God's own代理— as the proxy of God Himself."
What manner of creature sacrifices his own people to cling to power? And not some worldly king, but a man who claimed to carry out the will of the divine?
Mohaim made up his mind.
Picking up a fallen sword from the ground, he drew in a great, deep breath.
"Knights of the 1st Holy Knight Order!"
His voice boomed out, piercing the holy power that hung thick over the battlefield.
"Hear me, the unyielding blades of the Church!"
In an instant, silence swallowed the entire plaza, and every soul stopped moving.
"Just give the order, Commander."
Thena gritted her teeth and tightened her grip on her longsword. The holy power bleeding into the bloodstains around her was beautiful in a way that made her sick.
"We'll slaughter every one of those heretics. Only give the order."
"..."
"Even if we die here... we'll drag as many of those bastards down with us as we can."
Hatred boiled in her eyes and vibrated in her voice. The other holy knights, too, raised their swords — grieving for fallen comrades, hungry for vengeance against those they had once trusted.
Then Mohaim's gaze caught on the banner beneath their feet.
Blood-soaked, embroidered with a cross and a rose.
He turned his eyes back to his men.
Every one of them had been raised for a single purpose and nothing more.
Faith. And slaughter.
War machines that had gone out into the world only to learn the swing of a sword, whose only lessons had been screams and battle cries.
Even having seen through the lies and glimpsed the truth, they had not changed the way they answered it. Each side still calling the other heretic.
Is this really how we have always spoken to the world?
If they had questioned their wars even once — only once — might they not have had the chance to set things right a little sooner?
He regretted it.
But it is not too late.
It was time to change. Mohaim could not be the only one to open his eyes.
All of us must change.
And so Mohaim shouted the opposite of every command he had issued in his entire life.
"Protect the pilgrims!"
An order they had never once received. Everyone turned to stare at him — even Thena, who had served at his side longer and closer than anyone.
"...Commander?"
"Form a defensive square and withdraw with the pilgrims! The wounded get priority protection!"
We are butchers.
We leave no one behind us. We protect no one. We simply swing our swords forward, and swing them again. We are the most unyielding blades of the Church. We have cut down countless unbelievers and heretics, and upon their corpses we built our churches.
And we called that faith.
All those years of burying guilt and atrocity alike inside the will of God. But no more. Never again.
"We will not let them silence us! Save as many as you can — every single soul!"
The man who had always stood at the very front of every battlefield, bellowing only for the charge, was now screaming until his throat tore.
"Remember your oath! You swore to become swords that protect — for His will, not the Church's!"
To protect.
The unyielding blades of the Church would no longer remain blades of vengeance.
"So you have chosen to defy us after all."
Commander Kubian clicked his tongue and readjusted his grip on his sword. Then he sprang forward like lightning, blade arcing down at the exhausted Mohaim's head.
But —
KA-ANG!
Thena's sword barely caught the tremendous blow.
"You're still...!"
"Get... OUT!!"
She shoved with all her strength, and the 2nd Order's Commander skidded backward.
"Not once have you ever given us such an order."
She gasped for breath, then said quietly,
"...We are swords. Are you telling a sword that knows only how to kill the Church's enemies to become a shield?"
"It is a duty we should have carried from the very beginning, Thena. We are only remembering it."
"It would be faster to kill every one of them and run. Our way, as we've always done."
"No. From now on, that will not be our way. We cannot go on living as tools."
Mohaim shook his head, firm and unshaking.
"We start over. Not down the road of vengeance and slaughter — but down the road of becoming true kights... of becoming true knights."
There were no holy knights left in this place. Not one of them still had the right to bear that name.
How could men who broke their oaths and swung their swords call themselves holy? If so, then they too were no longer bearers of sacred duty.
"Cast off the name of holy knight, Thena. All of us must shed it."
Before they became monsters crushed under a hollow sense of duty.
Before they sought forgiveness for the massacres they had committed with closed eyes and stopped ears.
And so that they might become knights who truly followed the divine.
"As the Saintess cast herself aside, so must we abandon ourselves."
Each of them had to lay themselves down first.
Thena was silent for a long while. Then she asked, her voice uncertain:
"...Then for whom? What are we meant to serve now?"
The same question Mohaim had once asked — and here, at last, the answer was settled.
"For the Lord God."
On this, at least, nothing could change.
But Mohaim added one thing more.
"And... for ourselves."
He remembered the countless evils they had committed in God's name. He had seen where it led — throwing one's body again and again 'for the Lord God.'
I will not walk that road.
They had to live as human beings, and bear everything as human beings. The Lord God cherished such souls, did He not?
Had that not been true of Nathan Kell, the Central Officer?
"Seek the will of God in yourselves now, not in the Church. Look inward, and do good."
He had to stand. His eyes had to be the kind that never turned away.
Even if it stung cold and ached, their swords would see everything directly, and judge for themselves.
"So now you would deny even the doctrines themselves, Mohaim...!"
The contemptuous voice of a comrade of many long wars.
"I pray that one day, you too will come to understand, Kubian."
Mohaim said it bitterly, and bent to lift a shield lying on the ground.
Srrring!
At the sight, the 2nd Order leveled their blades and fell into combat stance.
Clack!
At the same moment, the knights of the 1st Order turned their swords vertical, one after another, settling into defensive formation.
The swords had become shields, and the shield had become the sword.
And in that strange, bitter irony, Mohaim gave the cry.
"1st Holy Knight Order — split into five companies and shield the civilians! Then we break out of this accursed place!"
"Where do we go, Commander? Or should I say — Sir Mohaim, of the road ahead."
Ahead. Where.
No one would tell them where they must go anymore. No one would carry their guilt and their sins on their behalf anymore.
And so, for the first time, Mohaim chose their destination with his own will.
"The Crossline Kingdom."
To where Erzena Selaphe stood.
To where Nathan Kell, the Central Officer, stood.
"You want us to go back to the place that turned us away?"
"I do. Without lies this time — as true pilgrims."
At those words, Thena allowed herself a small smile and murmured,
"It will be the roughest road of trials we have ever walked."
The Commander did not deny it.
"It's a burden we must bear. Will you carry it with me?"
"As I always have — together."
And sword met sword, ringing out against each other.
With the second storm, the second pilgrimage had begun.