Nothing Is Over Yet (2)
"Come on, move it, everyone! We need to be back before sundown! Or what, should we just starve and set out anyway?"
It was early morning, the sun barely risen. With the dawn mist blurring everything around him, a man in gleaming black full plate brushed back his deep-blue cropped hair and stamped his iron boots into the rotten earth like he was driving a seal into wax.
Bustling all about the small camp, he met each soldier's eyes one by one, trading greetings as he took the morning count. Every time he came near, the soldiers groaned and moaned like men at death's door, but the man just chuckled and swept their theatrics away.
"There you are, Lady Alesia. What on earth are you doing right now?"
"What? Why?"
A few dozen paces off from the camp. The man abruptly addressed the figure sitting propped against one of the trees, holding someone in her arms.
The burly woman merely jerked her chin at him, glaring with red eyes as if to say, mind your own business. Her long red hair swayed like a mane with the motion.
The man asked again.
"Why are you hugging that poor boy? Don't tell me… you couldn't hold out any longer?"
"Luke? Are you still half asleep? What nonsense. Our Ruel seemed to be having a nightmare, so as his big sister I was calming him down. Can't you see I'm performing a priestess's most fundamental duty?"
"Fulfilling your own appetites, you mean. Why not just be honest about it? And you call yourself a Saintess?"
"Oh, yes, I became a Saintess out of burning personal desire. Everyone around me lost their minds screaming for me to do it, so I had no choice but to be pushed into it. And whose fault is it that your eyes see impurity in this? With that rich imagination of yours, maybe you're the one who's cursed."
"Ha… when you put it that way, I have a mouth and nothing worth saying with it. Would you care to share even half of that shamelessness with me?"
Then the man turned his question to the boy squirming in her embrace.
"Ruel. How was it? Sleep well last night?"
"…Yes. Thanks to your consideration."
The black-haired boy, having barely wriggled free of the woman's arms, replied calmly as he caught his breath. Watching him, still looking half-asleep, the black-eyed man flashed a wry little smile at the amber eyes that happened to meet his own.
"That irreverent Saintess of ours didn't do anything suspicious to you, did she? Running her hands all over you, groping here and there? Or perhaps…"
"Suspicious?! You irreverent, absolutely shameless wretch!"
"Nobody asked for your opinion, so let's keep it down, shall we?"
For all their constant bickering, there wasn't the slightest hint of genuine hostility between the two. To put an honest name to it, it felt like watching a friendship of ten years' standing.
Before long, the man departed with a warning that wasn't quite a warning, and she too rose to her feet with a brisk hop.
"If it gets hard, tell your big sister. I'll hold you any time."
"Th-that's… very kind of you."
"It's not just talk, I mean it — stop doing that. You've tasted these happiness pouches and still you keep giving me lip?"
"I'm sorry… your what pouches?"
When the boy — Cariel — blinked and questioned it, she crossed her arms beneath her chest, and the heavy swell of her bust formed an unmistakable mound against the fabric.
"These. These right here. They bring happiness to men, so they're happiness pouches. Seeing them, touching them. As long as you can forgive my shoulders for suffering a little, everyone ends up happy. See? Can't argue with that logic, right?"
"……"
How am I supposed to respond to that?
For Cariel, this was a category of human interaction he had simply never encountered, and he was utterly at a loss.
For that matter — a person, a woman no less, who approached him this openly, this warmly, without a single condition attached?
"But if you're a Saintess, shouldn't you not behave so… freely like that?"
"Who says?"
"Um…"
"If I were doing wrong, Heaven would punish me, no? And yet nothing falls from the sky. You know why that is?"
"I… couldn't say?"
When Cariel answered grudgingly, she broke into a bright smile.
"Because I've piled up far more good deeds than sins, that's why."
"……"
"Otherwise I'd have been struck by lightning in my sleep by now, wouldn't I? And since I never have been, that means I'm doing just fine. See? No counterargument, is there? That's reality. If it weren't, do you think I'd be crazy enough to do this job? Honestly, I'm about ready to throw the whole Saintess business overboard and go find myself a husband. At my age, kids with four or five children of their own are everywhere! What am I even doing with my life?!"
"……"
"Which brings me to — how about living with me? Your face is just! Exactly my type, that's all."
"Ha… haha."
"I'm being serious, why are you taking it as a joke? Is it the atmosphere? Hmm?!"
…Is it teasing, or blatant flirting? Cariel was a little bewildered.
And yet, before the sheer momentum of her goodwill and her overwhelming power of positivity, his own gloom melted away into something almost embarrassingly trivial.
"Anyway, we ought to eat before we set out, no? Come on."
Following behind her as she led the way, they arrived at the camp, which was just being packed up. The water had been hauled in a large pot, and whatever odds and ends had been thrown into the stew, it did its job of filling stomachs and warming them from within well enough.
"Eat up! You're still growing, aren't you? Eat that little and the girls won't give you a second look, you know? Plenty of food brings plenty of luck and plenty of strength. There was a prince of some kingdom or other who ate so poorly they nearly stripped him from the line of succession — the firstborn son, mind you — on grounds he lacked the making of a king. You've never heard that story?"
"……"
He'd heard almost the same words in the Imperial Capital, hurled as mockery. Yet hearing them from her, his chest instead grew warm.
Goodwill and malice. That single difference was all it took for the very same words to become, on one side, a sneering jeer — and on the other, consideration born of genuine care.
By the time the meal was finished, the camp had been struck completely.
One of the soldiers had taken it upon himself to see to the horse's feed.
"What a sweet creature. So affectionate, too."
"Is it?"
The boy soldier spoke as though he'd had no small experience with horses.
"Honestly, it seems better suited to being a riding horse than a warhorse. Patient, and it listens well to people — it must have had proper training. Its coat's well cared for, too."
You're a noble, aren't you?
"……"
Cariel only nodded silently.
"Still, it'll need time to adjust to pulling a carriage or a wagon. Carrying one person and some luggage is fine, but… unfamiliar work wears on a horse too, after all."
"Most people wouldn't think that far, would they?"
"People who don't care don't. If they think of a horse as a tool — a wagon or a cart on four legs."
"……"
He couldn't say why, but it was a remark that set his thoughts churning.
"Alright, we move! Don't even think about getting home after sundown! Let's arrive before it falls!"
"Easy does it, young master!"
"The night scenery is quite lovely, you know?"
"And if we fold in the night patrol while we're at it, what could be better?"
"Cut the nonsense, all of you! Move out!"
When Luke mounted his horse and lowered his helm over his head, there was no mistaking him for anything but a knight in full. Perhaps because the horse itself was a black-coated one, the pair suited each other remarkably well.
As the cargo wagon rolled out after them, the Saintess — for her part — layered chainmail over her clothes, and over that a fresh white garment bearing a golden cross. Add the steel plate guarding her limbs, and she was armed from head to toe, every inch of her. A mace and shield slung across her back, and at her waist a one-handed arming sword to match. Aside from her unexpectedly fine features and her enormously swollen chest, she was a warrior through and through.
"……"
Hoping to put the travel time to somewhat meaningful use, Cariel took up his lute.
Beyond practicing, the idea was to lend a little diversion to the people on the move. And besides that…
"Did you see my dream?"
— What dream?
Cariel asked about the dream he'd had just before waking.
— Ah, that pale thing staring at me was you? It was getting on my nerves, so I tossed a word its way.
"…Then what was that thing fighting alongside you?"
— Something that had latched onto you.
"…I'm sorry?"
— It started acting up in earnest the moment you left the Imperial Capital. I was planning to tell you soon enough anyway.
"…Explain. In detail. Please."
— Should I, though? Should I really?
The golden girl giggled. Seen like this, she was nothing but a mischievous young girl — and yet…
— Think back, one by one, to everything that's gone wrong since the moment you left the Capital.
"……"
Cariel plucked at the lute's strings atop his swaying horse and sank into thought.
First…
The seizures — pains that mimicked them.
Unknown things kept rising to the surface of his mind.
'I heard voices, too.'
And beyond that…
"You said before that something had latched onto me?"
— That's right, that's right.
"…Then is this something of a different kind from a curse?"
He'd learned at the Academy that curses, too, came in many varieties — that they ranged evenly across methods: those cast upon and applied to a single target, and those that spread from one victim outward, contagion-style.
— If that's the case, then here's the question: why was nothing wrong while you were still inside the Capital? Why did it only reach this state once you left?
"…I suppose so, yes."
These days, it was costing him his sleep.
His escape had eased his mind considerably, but every time he drifted off came dreams of Rueld seizing hold of him, or of Patina, Elhermina, Seras, and the others chasing him down —
And when he'd once dreamed of Eras already lying in wait everywhere he turned, the fever that had raged through him had been something else entirely.
Worse still, when he'd dreamed of that wretch Alesius leading an army to hunt him down and kill him…
No — that one, he'd almost welcomed.
It was, in a sense, the man voluntarily providing him grounds for a perfectly legitimate revenge, and Cariel had been genuinely glad.
Until the very end, just as he was driving his sword into Alesius's heart.
In that instant, a doubt had struck him — is this right?
And then he'd woken.
Two emotions had seized him at that moment.
One was a deep frustration at having failed to finish what he'd started.
…And the other was the revulsion he felt toward himself — at how easily he could have butchered Alesius and everyone around him without a shred of guilt or sin, laughing merrily as he reveled in it.
But.
Setting everything else aside, the most serious thing was, as ever, that.
…His mother.
Whenever she appeared in his dreams, the world before his eyes would blanch pure white — then turn pitch black.
It was simply despair itself.
Every time he woke from it, he found himself drenched to the bone in sweat.
And the one who had seized him first, and most often, in his dreams —
Had been his mother, naturally.
— You think someone cast you out?
"…That's one theory. But I don't think that's it."
— Then?
"What if they're not driving me away — what if they're calling me?"
— On what grounds?
"…Vaguely. But I hear it."
A voice, begging to be saved.
— So what's your conclusion?
"…I don't have one yet."
— Don't tell me you've dreamed up some absurd notion — that this curse or whatever it is was made to make the world hate you, something like that?
"…Is that even possible?"
— Nothing's impossible. But it'd be an outrageous waste of resources.
In other words — if it were someone with reason to do such a thing, perhaps it could be managed.
— How many curses do you imagine could work a miracle like that?
"You don't know either?"
— I do, actually.
"……"
— But it doesn't matter.
So — turn the idea on its head.
— Giving a child with reason to be hated yet another reason to be hated? That's far more plausible than anything you just guessed at, wouldn't you say?
"…That's a difficult thing to hear."
— Why? You want to believe that some lovely little curse is the reason you were hated — that it's the reason you were treated the way you've been treated? That even the darkness in your heart, the gloom, is just a byproduct of that kind of hypnosis, that brainwashing? Is that what you want to believe?
"……"
— Self-deception only stretches so far.
The Demon King snorted in exasperation.
— Still squirming, searching for a reason to forgive them. You curse them with everything you have, and yet somewhere in you, you pity them. Is that it?
"……"
Even while he himself was breaking apart, crumbling to pieces.
What kind of mind reaches for empathy with others first?
Given even a little breathing room, and he starts defending other people in the most absurd ways imaginable. When it came to self-justification, to excusing himself, the wretch was shamefully destitute — so why was he this soft where others were concerned?
'Not that he's simply naive.'
It had happened only yesterday.
This was the boy who had carved through monsters without a flicker of hesitation and taken their heads.
And yet he feared blades — feared the edge of a sword.
Rather, toward the things everyone else took for granted they should fear, he was oddly composed.
You could blame the brutal training, but his adaptation had been faster than anyone expected.
Dreams, however vivid, however close to reality they felt — in the end, a dream is a dream.
The balance, the harmony between his consciousness and his body in the real world was a shambles as it was. And yet somehow, impossibly, the boy managed it.
— Let me settle it for you, plainly. The kind of curse you're hoping for wasn't common even in antiquity — and if someone wielded it today, it wouldn't be a curse at all. It would be divine punishment.
"Divine punishment?"
— Frankly, it would be more convincing to say some god simply bore malice toward you, wished for your misery, and twisted your karma into knots.
So.
— Wake up. The trigger, the cause of it all, may well have been influenced by the lingering will lodged inside you. But that is not the fundamental reason they treated you the way they did.
In other words, the point was this:
— You were simply struck down because it was a situation in which you could be struck down. Without the lingering will's influence, it likely wouldn't have gone as far as it did. But it wouldn't have been a great deal better, either. That's my conclusion.
Suddenly —
Twang!
The lute string he'd been plucking snapped.
"…I see."
— Homesick already? I told you to wake up. Where's that resolve from the other day? Maybe you're still too young — so rich in feeling. I'm jealous, so jealous! If I could have yearned for something too, how delightful that would have been.
"……"
In the end.
The malice they had shown him was not the work of some transcendent will, nor the magical product of anyone's hatred.
It was simply their own honest…
No. Wait.
"…You're not lying to me, are you?"
— Shall we put it in the contract? And what would you give me in return?
"……"
Cariel began replacing the broken string.
Of course.
It was true the Demon King had blended some falsehood into the truth.
But that didn't mean everything he'd said was wrong.
— As I said before, I perceive this world through only the tiniest sliver of your sight and hearing. So most of what I can know is guesswork. Errors could abound, any number of them.
Coat the ground with hedges beforehand, and what is there to hold against you?
After all, her greatest weapon had always been who knows?
"Haah…"
— Forget the pointless thoughts. Focus on one thing.
Secure Grandeus's legacy, Elbart — then, after that, optimize his consciousness and his body.
— If you're thinking of turning back within a hundred days, the time is desperately tight.
"…Or maybe I'll just dawdle another year or so."
When he'd written that letter, he hadn't felt as he did now.
But.
Elhermina had reminded him.
I have no confidence in facing them again — not truly.
And so. When the time comes to face them properly.
One way or another — whether it was his father, or his mother —
He would have to settle it.