The Second Order of Holy Knights
“You can’t dodge those arrows. You can’t block them, either.”
The only real counter was to intercept them from range.
In other words—
“Commander. Your Highness Amelia.”
—the two whose specialty was close combat were useless here.
It might have sounded excessively cold, but that was simply the reality.
“Commander, I need you to be the bait.”
“…….”
Blash looked startled by the words. The others were no less shocked. They had expected the Knight Commander to be their strongest asset. To hear that his role would amount to nothing more than bait was something none of them could quite believe.
“And once I am the bait,” Blash asked, “what then?”
The man himself, at least, seemed to be facing the truth with cold clarity.
“Are we meant to look for a chance to close in?”
Charging Ballad head-on was out of the question. Pouring out those snake-headed arrows was his specialty, but at his core he was a medusa. Meet his eyes and you turned to stone. Unless you were a Sword Saint who could swing a blade with both eyes shut, approaching him meant certain death.
A Sword Saint. The Iron Spirit. Those had been the only weapons that could even hope to face Ballad.
Right now they had neither.
“No. You’ll simply be the bait. They’ll recognize the Commander at once.”
“So the only weapon I can bring to this place is the title of Knight Commander itself.”
“Yes.”
Daywin cut off any argument with flat certainty.
“That is all.”
“…….”
“And Your Highness has nothing she can do here either.”
“I can still help.”
“Yes. Please do. But not here.”
Earlier, Chronos had said there were statues where Laward had been sent. Given how quickly Laward had returned, he clearly had not finished them all. And if it was Ballad, he would relish that situation—just as he had once fanned the flames between two nations until the corpses piled high. Being surrounded from both sides was the scenario Ballad loved most.
“Those things you saw beyond the coffin earlier—keep them from crossing over to this side. Lord Kairon, I’m counting on you as well.”
The moment the words left him, Kairon nodded and led Amelia away.
“W-wait! Hasgard! Are you truly certain about this?!”
“Whether it turns out all right depends on Your Highness. Please. Both of you.”
Amelia looked as though she had a great deal more she wanted to say, but there was no time. Kairon seemed to understand; he took hold of her and vanished through the coffin in a rush.
“Laward—you wouldn’t have known, but this plan is only possible because of you. That bastard is already mortally wounded from the discharge magic you hit him with.”
“What? When did I ever…?”
“Lady Kaine. Here, your magic matters more than anything else. I’m counting on you.”
After that he explained the one task only Kaine could perform. She looked startled, but once Blash gave a nod she signaled her understanding as well.
“And finally, Chris.”
“Y-yes…!”
Daywin gave the younger man’s shoulder a light clap. Chris had been standing rigid the entire time without uttering a single word.
“Don’t freeze up.”
You’ve got a talent for staying alive, after all. The two of us made it to the end with our lives still attached, didn’t we?
He had said everything that needed saying.
Even after the preparations were finished, he did not run a simulation. He deliberately refused to check the probabilities. Everything he had seen before—he decided to forget it all.
Since when had that stubborn, thick-headed Holy Knight Order ever fought battles of probability?
Kill, or be killed.
One or the other.
That was how they had always fought.
Daywin took the lead beside Blash.
Blash. Kaine. Chris. And Laward.
He hadn’t aimed for it, but this was the lineup that had come together.
Five Holy Knights in all.
His second Order of Holy Knights.
“Ha.”
Chronos laughed as though heaving a sigh.
“Of course you would not stay away….”
At some point the board had changed. Amelia and Kairon—the very targets of the Death God Cult—were gone, and one more figure had been added instead.
He had expected it the moment Amelia appeared, and sure enough the man had shown himself.
Daywin.
Daywin Hasgard again.
This cursed entanglement simply would not end.
“In fact, I am almost grateful you came…!”
Chronos forced himself upright, desperately holding closed the gaping hole in his abdomen.
“This one has prepared the coffins you will enter.”
He leaned on a black coffin, rising with a ragged breath.
“The funerals shall be conducted with the utmost care.”
The instant the words left him, Daywin and Blash split apart and charged from both sides.
Boom—!
A pillar of light descended from the black sky and struck Daywin; pure white armor unfolded around his body.
“Sir Ballad—that is the Knight Commander.”
Chronos, who had somehow already appeared atop the cliff, whispered to Ballad.
“…….”
Seated on a throne of stone, Ballad merely shot him a look of pure annoyance.
“The Knight Commander is a dangerous man. We ought to take him first.”
Chronos whispered again, but Ballad simply stretched out a hand and parted the rain of arrows to either side.
Blash peeling away in the opposite direction from the Holy Knights following Daywin. Both flanks could be covered at once—what was the problem? Ballad redirected the arrows with casual ease, as if to say exactly that.
Yet even that much was enough.
Simply by dividing their course, the storm of arrows racing toward Daywin was already cut in half.
Then—
Rumble—!
A blue flash dropped from the sky and burned the arrows away. The shafts that had nearly reached Daywin and Blash vanished without a trace.
Chronos narrowed his eyes, focusing—and there was the Holy Knight already preparing the next flash of light. Chris, blue halo blazing, blade drawn.
“A boy I have never seen before….”
Saturation magic.
That was the reason Chris would one day become a cornerstone of the Holy Knights. With wide-area strikes he could intercept arrows from range. He might have been mediocre in single combat, but against Ballad he was effective. His weakness was any place with a roof—yet Ballad’s arrows suffered the same handicap in such terrain.
Chris remained alone at the rearmost line, pouring out magic without pause.
“…….”
Ballad’s expression still did not change. He simply propped his chin on one hand. Then he set the petrified prisoners into motion.
Rumble…
At Ballad’s command the prisoners charged the Holy Knights.
“I’ll be back.”
Chris first—then it was Kaine’s turn.
Kaine had been following Daywin; she stopped dead in her tracks.
Clank!
With a metallic shriek, pillar-like modules rose from both shoulders of her armor. Square housings opened one after another; four launch ports each snapped outward.
Thud-thud-thud!
From the shoulder ports, silver shaped into bullets streaked toward the statues and the flocks of arrows.
Silver rounds.
The metal that had been used against demons since ancient times.
And—
BOOM-BOOM-BOOM!
—silver’s transformative property was explosion.
She struck the ground and the air at once, where the arrows were already pouring in.
Hissss—
Heat bled from the shoulder ports as Kaine raised her right arm and took aim at the remaining arrows.
Clack!
The gauntlet split in four directions; more launch ports erupted from her arm as well.
Thud-thud-BOOM!
Silver rounds pulverized the statues and opened a path for Daywin.
Kaine’s armor kept transforming without end. Shoulders, both arms, abdomen, legs—armor plates separated and recombined, revealing port after port.
Thud-thud-thud-thud!
Under the combined fire of Chris and Kaine, a straight corridor became visible.
At this rate, I might actually reach him.
The moment Daywin thought it, his spirits clung to his armor and drove him forward with fresh thrust.
But then—
Shaaak—
The remaining arrows hissed like snakes and wheeled about. Like a school of tropical fish turning as one body, every single head swung toward him.
All of them.
Toward Daywin.
Ballad had grasped that the first three Holy Knights were only clearing a path; he herded every last arrow to keep Daywin from closing the distance.
“Kh…!”
From the rear Chris hurriedly closed the gap and loosed a blade of light, but Ballad had already read even that pattern. He split and scattered the arrows so the sword aura slipped harmlessly past.
“That hell-spawned bastard… just sitting there, weaving left and right…!”
When his attacks failed to land, Chris grew impatient and edged closer still.
Shaaak!
A single snake-arrow that had been lying in wait streaked for Chris’s ankle.
“Oh, for—!”
An instant before the arrow could sink its fangs into flesh—
CRASH!
Blash, who had somehow already returned, smashed the shaft with his fist. The blow crumpled both the arrow and the ground beneath it at once.
Yet the moment his fist touched the arrow, the petrification began.
Crrrkkkk—
Blash’s arm turned ashen gray.
Clank!
With a snarl of pure irritation he ripped the gauntlet free, barely stopping the stone from eating into his skin—but his face twisted in pain. Without the gauntlet his arm would already have been ruined.
“That I… of all people… to something like this….”
He clenched his teeth until they ground, swallowing the hate.
“All a Knight Commander can do is….”
Bait.
Even that had failed halfway through, and now he would have to fight ready to sacrifice limbs.
The medusa had rendered Blash helpless. If Chris grew stronger specifically against Ballad, Blash was the opposite.
The moment Blash glared up at the cliff where Ballad sat—
Shaaaaak—
Countless arrows swallowed Daywin whole. A tidal wave of shafts finally engulfed him. When the black arrows closed around him so tightly that he vanished from sight—
“Do not stop!”
BOOM!
The Silver Knight’s silver rounds punched through the rain of arrows and detonated at the center. The shafts that had been a heartbeat from Daywin scattered once more.
“I will keep covering you!”
Daywin had no time even to nod; he simply ran.
For the first time, Ballad—who until now had propped his chin with bored indifference—changed expression. He scowled as though the whole affair were an annoyance.
From the beginning, the Silver Knight had been in the way.
The arrows that had been chasing Daywin wheeled again and poured toward the Silver Knight instead.
As if she had expected exactly that, the Silver Knight soared upward with her silver armor and streaked at full speed to Daywin’s side. In the process she even dragged every arrow near Daywin along with her into the air.
Even so, she could not evade thousands upon tens of thousands of arrows forever.
Snap—
The moment she missed even one, a snake head clamped onto the foot of her armor. Once balance was lost, the rest was instantaneous. The instant her speed dropped, the swarm of arrows plastered themselves across her entire body.
The silver armor began to turn to stone.
As they had confirmed in the sewers before, once it became stone the Spirit of Abundance would not help. It was the reverse of alchemy. An unequal exchange. Armor whose value had been erased could no longer move.
The Silver Knight’s power of flight vanished; she plummeted straight down.
“Vice-Commander… the Vice-Commander is…!”
Chris watched the scene with a face drained by shock. The Silver Knight, arrows bristling from every surface as the petrification advanced, fell headfirst.
Then—
Clank!
The breastplate and abdominal sections of the silver armor split open to either side, and a woman of compact build leapt free.
About the same height as Lucia. Black hair cut straight and neat, just long enough to brush her shoulders, fluttered loose.
Thud—
Kaine hit the ground in a roll, then sprinted at full power toward Chris and Blash. As the abandoned armor neared the earth she spun, pointed a finger at it, and—while even a scrap of silver still remained—
“Bang!”
—detonated the three-meter suit of armor in a single blast, taking every arrow clustered upon it with it.
Kaine had lost her armor, but she had bought them time.
“I’m here.”
Fwoooosh—!
Driven by the spirits’ thrust, Daywin vaulted the cliff in a single bound and stood before Ballad and Chronos.
“Daywin… in the end…!”
Chronos ground his teeth and pointed at him.
“But the moment you came this far….”
He glanced back and forth between Ballad and Daywin, swallowing his rage.
“It is finished.”
Ballad’s blue eyes tracked Daywin’s every movement. Vertical pupils split those blue irises—snake eyes that looked ready to devour him.
Petrification magic.
Look into a medusa’s eyes and—
“You can wait.”
Ballad had been waiting for their gazes to lock, but Daywin simply brushed past him. As if he had never cared from the start, he ignored Ballad completely and charged straight on.
“What…? The target is Sir Ballad….”
“It was you from the beginning, Chronos.”
Humm—
A blade forged of light carved through Chronos.
Slash!
“Damn it—again?”
There was no sensation of cutting. Chronos swapped places in an instant and reappeared at Daywin’s side.
“My apologies for that.”
The same terrifying magic they had seen in the south.
“You could not catch this one last time, and it seems you still cannot. You spent three Holy Knights just to get this far, yet that appears to have been insufficient.”
“Four Holy Knights, actually.”
The moment Daywin spoke, Chronos’s eyes flew wide.
Come to think of it—there had been five from the start.
Daywin standing before him.
The Knight Commander who had been nothing but a diversion.
The boy pouring out crossfire from far away.
The Silver Knight who had shed her armor and revealed her true form.
Which meant the last one—
“Laward! Left side!”
The instant Daywin shouted, Chronos felt a chill as though blood were rushing backward through his veins.
When had he lost track of him?
When had they been hiding him?
Clack—
Below the cliff, Laward thrust his arm through the transparent wall that had been screening him.
Light-Eating Stone.
While Daywin had been swallowed by arrows, he had taken the Light-Eating Stone from his subspace pouch and built a wall—so that Laward, sheltering behind it, could take the sniper’s shot.
Laward’s fingers, waiting for the signal, shifted a fraction to the left.
Even now Chronos was invisible to his eyes.
“You said next time,” he murmured,
trusting only the words of his teacher,
“I’d aim properly.”
Fwoooooosh—!
A crimson beam of light punched straight through Chronos’s chest.
Struck a second time by Laward, the light vanished from Chronos’s eyes. As he lost his balance and began to fall—
Slice—!
This time Daywin severed his neck cleanly.
[Undertaker]
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