The Feast of Blood (4)
"Lenaaa!!"
Horrified, Kallen bolted toward her, screaming her name.
"Le... Lenaaa...!"
"Hrk... hagh...!"
As he closed in and took in the sight of Lenart, the color drained from his face until it was bone-white.
Dark crimson blood was streaming from her mouth with every ragged, rattling cough.
Her lower half—blown clean away—was nowhere to be found at all.
"Wh-what are you... doing..."
Half-submerged in a pool of her own blood, she gasped for breath and turned her clouding eyes toward Kallen.
"Don't just stand there like an idiot, hrk... run... hurry...!"
"Don't talk! You'll make it worse—!"
"I was... hrk... wrong... you know I was..."
Despite Kallen's desperate protests, Lenart only shook her head, as if she already knew the end had come. Then, with a trembling hand, she reached up and snapped something loose, forcing it into Kallen's palm.
He stared down at it, dazed.
It was the necklace she'd once won from the Supreme Master of the Church of Aten—the symbol of her captaincy of the mercenary corps.
"Take it... it's... yours now... always was..."
"Lena... Lena..."
All Kallen could do was call her name again and again as he cradled her cheek.
Through his palm, the only thing that reached him was a bone-deep chill, like touching a corpse.
"Ah... aagh..."
Tears welled up until they blurred everything before his eyes.
His mind had seized up like a broken machine, refusing to work properly.
He had never imagined—even in his wildest dreams—that he would lose Lenart like this.
"Your wedding... I wanted... to see it... so badly..."
Lenart's voice grew fainter and fainter, each word squeezed out with effort.
Even now, a soft smile lingered at the corners of her mouth as she fixed her hazy gaze on Kallen.
"And you... blubbering... like a baby... some... grown man you are..."
"Lena, no... don't..."
"Remember what I told you... always... be... happy..."
"Lena...?"
Lenart's voice—once so full of life, always ringing out bright and cheerful—could be heard no longer.
No matter how frantically Kallen called for her, only a dreadful, suffocating silence settled over the plaza.
Her head had lolled limply to the side and never moved again.
Those proud orange eyes had lost their light long before.
Her fingers, which he'd been clutching so tightly, slipped slack and lifeless out of his hand like wet sand.
Only then did Kallen's wavering, unfocused gaze fall upon his surroundings.
The floor of the plaza was carpeted with the corpses of his comrades, their upper and lower halves severed apart.
"Ah...?"
A blank moan escaped Kallen's lips.
Ayli, the mischievous vice-captain. Hess, with her endless affection. Rosie, braver than any of them. All of them lay there, without so much as a twitch.
For one moment, Kallen wondered if he was trapped in some horrific nightmare.
The sudden tragedy had arrived before he could even register the pain of it, and in a heartbeat it had swallowed him whole.
His greatest misfortune, right now, was that none of this was a nightmare at all—it was reality, unfolding before his eyes with terrible clarity.
"Kal... Kallen...?"
At the hollow, frantic voice of someone searching for him, Kallen barely managed to claw his mind back from the edge.
"Wh-what... is this..."
Ellie had come to on the ground, muttering to herself as she stared wildly into the empty air around her with a fear unlike anything he'd ever seen in her.
"Lena...? E-everyone...?"
The situation seemed every bit as unreal to her as it did to him.
And seeing her like that only twisted the knife in Kallen's heart.
"Ellie..."
If there was any comfort to be had, it was that he had at least managed to keep her safe.
Just as he moved to go to her, to the newly awakened Ellie—
—a voice like someone dragging claws across his very soul exploded inside his head.
"Ah, what a rare outing this is. It has been ever so long."
Something whose nature he could not identify was stirring within the rift.
Each syllable carried a pressure that seemed to crush his lungs flat, until Kallen could barely draw breath at all.
The rift, which had been on the verge of sealing itself shut, began tearing wider again, as though some invisible hand were prying it apart.
And then, shouldering its way out through the rift, came a monster even more colossal than the one that had made the mountain of corpses.
"So. A lowly worm dares to stand in the presence of this Gamalot."
The horned, deer-skulled creature looked down at Kallen, who had placed himself in its path, and let out a shrill, cackling laugh.
Its jaw—stripped of everything but exposed gum and bone—rattled and clattered obscenely.
Kallen knew at once what the creature was—the thing that had annihilated his comrades with a single strike.
An apex predator that roamed freely between the Illusion Realm and the Material Realm. The most favored servant of the three Demon Gods. A wicked herald whose every waking thought was devoted to sowing misfortune and sorrow across the world.
"A High Demon..."
That was the name of the existence the witches had truly given their lives to summon.
Every High Demon Kallen had ever heard of was an incarnation of living mana that neither the finest knight nor the most brilliant mage could hope to withstand.
Witnessing the descent of a wicked existence he'd only ever heard of in stories, Kallen clenched his teeth until they ached.
"Ghhk...!"
A High Demon of Pestilence was a living calamity in its own right. With every breath the thing exhaled, poisonous miasma spread in all directions, until blood was streaming freely from Kallen's eyes and ears.
Before that presence, all he could manage was to force his breathing steady and fight down the vertigo of raw, primal fear.
The demon's slitted red eyes rolled across its surroundings—and then, without warning, its mouth split open in a grin that stretched all the way to its skull's base.
In the next instant, it swung its bare, skeletal arm in a savage arc.
"Oh no—!"
The shockwave that had slaughtered the mercenary corps was aimed precisely at Ellie.
She stood frozen where she was, trembling violently, too terrified even to think of running.
Kallen threw himself in front of her, sword bared.
A vicious shockwave of condensed, monstrous mana crashed down over him like it meant to devour him whole.
"Ellie! Ngh—ugh...!"
Crushing pressure bore down from every side, heavy enough to flatten his body into pulp at any moment.
Even beneath that crushing weight, Kallen desperately gathered his sword aura and diverted the shockwave away.
"Hah... hahh...!"
Having endured the attack, he staggered on buckling knees and barely steadied himself against his sword.
Only when she saw the blood pouring from his mouth did Ellie snap back to her senses and scream.
"Kallen! Your mouth—it's bleeding!"
"I'm fine. I'm fine..."
Soothing the sobbing girl as best he could, Kallen fixed his glare on the front once more.
The mountain-sized demon was grinning down at them as though it had discovered a pair of insects delightful to play with.
The rift, which had been shrinking, now blazed wide open behind the creature, swollen larger than ever by its arrival.
If the rift closed, the demon would naturally be pulled back to the Illusion Realm—but the problem, regrettably, was that there was far too much time left to wait for that.
Even in this hopeless situation, Kallen drew long, deliberate breaths, fighting desperately to recover his composure.
He had already lost far too much. He could not—would not—lose Ellie too, the last one he had left.
With no avenue of escape, there was only one way to protect her now.
To accept death, land a fatal blow on the demon by any means necessary, and force it back into the Illusion Realm.
...
Given the gulf between them, it was all but impossible—a goal beyond any realistic hope.
And yet Kallen made his decision without a moment's hesitation.
Resolve was never even required.
He had sworn long ago to give his life for Ellie.
Even a situation this desperate could not change that vow. Not now, not ever.
Kallen met Ellie's frightened, trembling eyes.
Then he forced an easy smile and spoke.
"Ellie. You trust me, right?"
"Kallen..."
"It's fine. It'll be over soon. So... just wait for me a little while longer, okay?"
"Kallen—no... don't...!"
With those brief parting words, he pried her desperately clinging fingers from his hand and stepped forward.
"A fool of a knight who cannot tell courage from recklessness! How laughable! Utterly laughable!"
Watching Kallen steel himself for battle, the demon burst into a great mocking roar, as though it could no longer contain itself.
"The price of your arrogance shall be paid in death!"
With another earth-shaking roar, the creature's elongated arm swung down and crashed toward him.
Kallen angled his blade horizontally and caught the blow.
"Ghk—!"
A grinding, jarring shock rippled down through his entire body, wrenching a groan from between clenched teeth.
Every single strike from the High Demon was a disaster in itself. Up close, those two long arms hammered down without mercy; at a distance, a barrage of every manner of magic rained from the sky.
And all the while he had to shield the dazed, frozen Ellie as well—the burden on Kallen was beyond measure.
Barely moments into the fight, he had already been dragged to the brink of death more times than he could count.
Even as he endured one punishing exchange after another, he strained desperately to read the flow of the battle.
And somewhere in the chaos of blindly swinging his sword, Kallen slowly came to realize something—he was keeping up. Following the movements of the creature that had seemed so utterly overwhelming.
His body, once leaden under the crushing mana pouring from the rift, had finally finished adapting.
He himself was wearing down, yes—but the wounds he carved into the demon's flesh were accumulating faster and faster.
And when he peeled back just one layer of that insurmountable despair, a small, fragile sprout of hope had already begun to push through.
Kallen regripped his sword with his bloodied, ruined hand and stoked his fighting spirit higher still.
If it's like this... I might really be able to do it...!
Waiting for an opening, he kicked off the ground and leapt.
He caught the demon from behind and swarmed up its massive back as nimble as a squirrel.
Then he began swinging his aura-laden blade without restraint, slashing through the demon's muscles wherever they lay.
"GRAAAH!! You wretch!"
The demon thrashed its body violently, as if trying to shake off a maddening itch.
Each time, Kallen drove his sword backward into its flesh and hung on for dear life—then sprang up again to repeat it all once more.
"Hah... hahh..."
He didn't know how much time had passed.
Kallen stood propped up on his sword alone, chest heaving with ragged breaths.
Drenched in the demon's poisonous miasma and festering plague, he was already little more than a walking corpse.
Blood-tears streamed down his face, dyeing his entire world a vivid, searing red.
His once-flawless skin—skin Ellie had always envied—had long since been ruined by erupting rashes and weeping blisters. Beneath the rotting, sloughing flesh of his right arm, the white glint of bone showed through at the joints.
Even so, Kallen kept his eyes fixed on nothing but the enemy before him.
By now, the demon's body had been reduced to a pathetic, ragged wreck.
Its once-long arms hung limp and twisted, unmoving.
This time, the light of victory was truly within reach.
Convinced at last of his triumph, Kallen dredged up the very last of his strength and tightened his grip on the hilt, exhausted though every fiber of him was.
He aimed for the demon's undefended, exposed throat—and the instant he hurled himself at it—
"Puhuhu."
"Gghk...!!"
A low, sinister chuckle sounded in his ears, and Kallen was wracked by a groan of pure agony.
"How pitiable. Truly, how pitiable—the tricks of a pitiful little beast!"
The demon's limp, dangling hand—when had it recovered?—had hardened once more, clamped around him as if to crush the life from his throat.
Steam rose from the fissured hide across its body, and in the blink of an eye, every wound was sealing itself shut.
"I saw it! I saw that filth called hope, gathering in those murky little eyes of yours! You fool, drunk on the sweetness of victory, forgetting the terror that gnaws at your very skin!"
Laughter dripping with contempt, the demon mocked him without end.
"This body was granted its very name by the Lord of Pestilence himself. Did you truly believe a mere scrap of steel could harm it?"
Even that fleeting hope he'd allowed himself had been nothing but an ingredient for the demon's amusement. Kallen had been dancing in the creature's palm from the very beginning.
Crack!
"Gahk—!"
"Kallen!"
The monstrous grip crushed down around his whole body, and his broken ribs drove backward into his lungs.
Seeing Kallen held fast in the demon's fist, vomiting blood, Ellie went white as death and screamed.
"Kallen, no—!"
There was nothing she could do but sob and stamp her feet in helpless anguish.
Then the demon swung its arm in a brutal arc and hurled Kallen away like a tossed stone.
BOOM!
The impact sent a column of dust soaring high into the sky.
Kallen's body tore through wall after wall before it finally, mercifully, came to a stop.
Spread broken and ruined across the ground, he coughed up a weak, rattling breath.
"Hrk..."
"Kallen! Get up, Kallen...!"
Warm tears splashed down onto his face, one after another.
His body had passed its limit long, long ago.
His arms and legs had gone as rigid as stone, refusing to move. Even Ellie's face, inches from his own, had blurred beyond recognition.
Kallen forced his mouth open and faltered through her name, his voice breaking.
"El... lie..."
"Get up! Get up, please...!"
In the distance, the demon's thundering footsteps were drawing steadily closer—but Ellie heard none of it, shaking him with all her might.
"You said you'd protect me...! Please, please..."
At the very, very end, what surfaced in Kallen's mind was an old, worn-out regret.
If only.
If only what had been in his hand just now had not been a mere sword—but Prominence.
"Ellie... run..."
And with those final, gasped words, Kallen's vision drifted at last into a distant, fading haze.