Departure
When Celine let go of the man she had been holding, the golden holy power that had been circling around him slowly faded away.
His complexion had clearly improved from what it had been before Celine treated him.
He was still pale, but at least he no longer looked as if he might collapse and breathe his last at any moment.
“I’ve done everything I can. But….”
“You’re about to say that a complete cure is impossible, aren’t you?”
“...I’m sorry. It’s only because I’m lacking….”
“That’s not true at all. My body was already dying, and thanks to you, Sister, it has been granted a little reprieve. How could I possibly blame you? So please, I beg you, don’t say such things.”
The man knew the reaper’s scythe was hanging over his own neck.
Even so, he regarded his death with the composure of someone who had long since accepted it.
“Ever since I resolved to challenge the Ascension Ritual, I was prepared for this kind of ending.”
Celine, hearing an unfamiliar term, asked again in confusion.
“The Ascension Ritual?”
“It’s a rite that forcibly takes in Magi to raise one’s rank.”
“Could it be that you are one of my people… ah, I suppose ‘demon’ is the word you prefer. Are you perhaps a demon?”
“Do I look like one?”
“No, not particularly.”
After I explained it to Celine, the man glanced at me with a suspicious look.
Of course he would stare at me like that. I knew a rite that only demons were supposed to know about.
I wouldn’t have known either if Edel hadn’t told me.
“As the lady said, the Ascension Ritual is a rite that accepts Magi and raises the rank of both soul and body.”
“Mm-hmm.”
Lady, huh.
Not exactly my favorite way to be addressed, but compared with things like little miss or girl, it wasn’t bad at all.
While I nodded in satisfaction, Celine wore a puzzled expression.
“You mean you raise your rank by accepting Magi?”
“That’s correct.”
“This may be rude of me to say, but that sounds like an extremely dangerous ritual.”
“Haha. Rude? Not at all. It truly is dangerous, so you’ve seen it exactly right.”
“Forcing in more Magi than the body can safely hold is dangerous by definition.”
Even pure mana would be dangerous if you stuffed too much of it into yourself, and Magi was worse. How dangerous could it possibly be?
If you put it simply, it was like cramming more and more food into a stomach already full to bursting.
And not even fresh food, either—spoiled food, whose ingredients and age you didn’t even know.
Whether the overfilled stomach went bang! and killed you on the spot, or whether you died slowly from food poisoning and the like, the result was still death.
And the man in front of me was the latter.
Well… poison could become medicine if used properly, and maybe, if he was lucky, he would survive and grow stronger for it.
But what were the odds of that?
“How many people have succeeded so far?”
“...Only the former chief and the current chief. Two in total.”
“Only two….”
In answer to Celine’s question about how many had attempted it, the man replied at last.
“Before I answer that, I should probably tell you this first. You came all this way under Atisha’s guidance, so I assume you already know what our duty is.”
“To purify polluted mana, isn’t it?”
“Ah, so you do know. Then I can keep my explanation brief.”
The mission given by Lady Edel, the vanished power, the Magi that had begun to overflow.
It was all information I already knew, so I let most of it wash over me without paying much attention.
“…So, we didn’t stop the children when they said they would migrate to another continent. Their mission is important, but the lives of our children are just as important.”
Even so, there were a few interesting things in his story.
Younger demons, relatively speaking, had less of a sense of duty. Because of that, they tended to prioritize their lives first.
It could have sounded a little like an old man preaching, but perhaps because there was no sense of blame in his tone, it didn’t come across that way.
I thought of the demon village on the Ardeena Continent.
Their faces, where even their smiles carried a trace of darkness.
They had left their homeland to survive, yet still suffered under the guilt of having abandoned their duty.
“Those who remain either still have the strength to endure, or, if they can no longer endure at all, have resolved to die here and be buried with the land.”
“What exactly is so important about that damn duty, anyway?”
“Haha….”
The man brushed off my muttering, which was almost a complaint, with a laugh.
“In any case, after enduring and enduring until they can no longer endure, there are three choices left. First, leave for the Ardeena Continent with the children. Second, die where they stand. Third….”
“The Ascension Ritual.”
I wasn’t so clueless that I couldn’t follow the setup after all that.
“If you raise your rank through the Ascension Ritual, you can remain in Laxia, which is good. And even if you fail and die, you were already prepared to be buried here, so it doesn’t matter, right?”
“...Are you truly not a demon?”
“Why don’t you check for yourself?”
I casually pushed back the hair covering my head, and the man shook his own head.
“I wasn’t seriously doubting you. I only said that because you were correct down to the last detail.”
“I’ve already read the answer sheet.”
“The answer sheet…? Ah, but there is one thing you have misunderstood. Not just me, but those who challenge the Ascension Ritual do not think failure doesn’t matter.”
“Of course not. Naturally, they’d want to succeed.”
“No. That isn’t what I meant….”
“Ah.”
Celine, who had stepped in as if she understood, retreated awkwardly.
“Even if we fail, my death will still be of use to Laxia and to the clan. So we accept it willingly.”
“It’s useful even if you fail?”
“Haha, I suppose that much wasn’t known to you. I’m pleased to realize there’s still something I can teach you.”
“I get it already, so hurry up and tell me.”
“Those who fail the Ascension Ritual either burst apart and die on the spot, or, if they don’t burst apart, their bodies are ruined and they die before long. However, when death comes, the large amount of Magi we have been carrying also disappears.”
“What? There’s no way….”
“No. It’s possible. Our bodies are polluted with Magi.”
The man lifted a hand.
Then he brought that pale hand to his own chest.
“But our souls are not.”
In the final instant before death.
The exact moment the soul leaves the body, the soul and Magi are mixed together to dilute the pollution.
Even if it wasn’t purification but only dilution, and even if it wasn’t a fundamental solution, it still bought them time.
That was what the man said.
“Because there’s a risk the Magi might go berserk, the Ascension Ritual is performed somewhere uninhabited. Those who fail also go to a quiet place and meet their death alone.”
At his words, a scene rose in my mind.
Corpses strewn along the beach, and other bodies along the roadside, as if they had been heading somewhere and died before they could arrive.
Celine must have pictured the same thing I did, because she was covering her mouth with one hand in visible horror.
“...That’s insane.”
Leaving aside how they even managed to burn their souls, if they did it so casually, wasn’t it fair to call them insane?
As I mulled over the man’s words, I let out a snort of laughter.
“Well. I’m not really in a position to talk.”
“Pardon? What did you say?”
“No, nothing. More importantly, are all the living people gathered in the center?”
“Yes. Those who lived on the outskirts have almost all left for the Ardeena Continent, and the rest live clustered together in the center. Otherwise, the village simply wouldn’t survive.”
“Right. Makes sense.”
With the population shrinking, there was no way the village could function normally. If they wanted to survive, sticking together was the only option.
What had started as a fairly long explanation from the man came to an end with something so shocking that I needed a moment to digest it.
I already knew about the Ascension Ritual from Edel.
But knowing that it existed and knowing that the people involved thought about it this way were two very different things, so I ended up falling quiet just like Celine.
I knew demons valued duty more than any other race, but I hadn’t realized it was to this extent.
“I think I’ve about finished my story, so if it isn’t too rude, may I ask you one thing as well?”
“...What is it?”
“Why are you all heading toward the center?”
“That was awfully quick.”
“Haha….”
Well, there really hadn’t been any room to speak.
“That Ascension Ritual you mentioned.”
In the meantime, the campfire was beginning to die.
I gathered up the remaining firewood and tossed it in, and the flames swelled to a size they hadn’t yet reached once before.
“I’m going to try it too.”
Of course, I didn’t think failure was fine the way you do.
Sacrificing my soul just to do a good deed for someone else? There was no way I’d ever do some selfless nonsense like that.
I was going to succeed.
And then succeed….
As I poked at the kindling with a stick, I suddenly realized the surrounding area had gone silent and looked up.
The man and Celine were staring at me with identical expressions, like a pair of mirrored images.
In other words, they were looking at me as if to ask whether I’d lost my mind.
“...Why?”
Surely Celine at least would understand, wouldn’t she?
“Didn’t Edel tell you?”
Celine silently nodded.
“Yes….”
“Ah. That explains it.”
Right, if she hadn’t even known about the Ascension Ritual, there was no way she’d know what our objective was.
It would be blatantly strange if people working together didn’t even know the purpose of their collaboration.
What on earth had Edel been doing if she hadn’t even told them that much?
Honestly, this is exactly why having a proper superior matters.
In that sense, I thought I’d been a pretty decent superior myself.
At least, no trouble like this had ever happened.
No matter what the people under me said behind my back, I was the one who made the final decisions for the knights, and whenever I sensed even a hint of disagreement, I’d clamp down on it right away.
It was usually the noble-born ones who gave me trouble, but even the rebels full of complaints would eventually understand my intentions if I kept trying to talk to them patiently.
For some reason, every time that happened, the number of patients in the infirmary went up, but what of it? A knight getting injured from hard training wasn’t anything remarkable.
Bang!
“That’s not the important part…!”
“Good grief.”
All of a sudden, Celine pushed herself to her feet.
Unusually for her, she raised her voice, and I frowned at the sharpness of it.
“You’ll wake them up. Speak quietly.”
“...You’re still planning to do it after hearing that failure means your soul disappears?”
“We use that method to dilute the Magi. It doesn’t mean the soul disappears just because you fail—”
Glare.
The man, who had been continuing his explanation, fell silent under Celine’s sharp look.
Judging by the way he had called Atisha a child, he must have lived several times longer than Celine, but he was still completely cowed by her presence.
“There’s a misunderstanding here, but this method was first suggested by Edel.”
“...By Lady Edel?”
“Yes.”
To begin with, I hadn’t known about it either until Edel told me—how could I have possibly come up with a method like that on my own?
“Then why in the world….”
“Why else? I already told you.”
The purpose of the Ascension Ritual that the man had described.
I needed a higher rank than I had now, and if the ritual succeeded—
“It’s so I can raise my rank.”
I’d end up with a rank far above my current one.
Ah, I’d phrased that badly.
Not if it succeeds.
When it succeeds.
As I said, I had no intention whatsoever of failing.