Nothing Has Ended Yet (3)
The snap of the string made the shoulders of the soldiers who had been moving about flinch and shudder in sympathy.
"……."
Cariel changed the string, lips moving in what looked like a murmur to himself.
From the front rank, the knight in black armor—Luke—turned his head, stole a glance at the scene, and addressed the Saintess who had just come up beside him, Alesia.
"That's more than half a day's walk. Are you planning to go on foot?"
"Consider it training. Besides, there are no horses to ride right now, are there?"
"And the wagons are invisible to you, apparently."
"Then the horses would suffer, wouldn't they?"
"…I can't tell whether you're being thoughtful or just pointlessly sentimental."
Luke turned his back again and surveyed the rear.
Including the hands who managed the wagons, the party numbered about twenty. A small village within the territory had sent word asking for help against a monster incursion, and since things happened to be quiet, Luke had personally brought a portion of his garrison troops.
The village did have its own watch brigade, but frankly, while that might be enough to drive off wild beasts, it was hardly suited for dealing with monsters.
Every now and then some absurdly powerful outlier would crawl out of a walled backwater village, but that was an exception among exceptions.
"The good fortune here is that, thanks to that young man, it all ended without a single casualty."
"Excuse me?"
When the Saintess pointed at herself with the question, Luke replied, "…Of course, Lady Alesia was a help as well."
"Being treated like an afterthought stings a little, you know."
"That could never be."
Truth be told, that fortunate lull in duties—if it could be called luck—was, for better or worse, owing to this woman.
In the past, there had been only one Saintess.
The symbol of the Order, the apostle of God—one who carried out His voice and will, quite literally His messenger, and at the same time the child upon whom God Himself gazed with tender affection.
But over this very matter, the Order had once gone through a violent fever, so to speak.
At that time, it was Ermina—later hailed as more than a Saintess, as the Holy Mother—who turned the entire situation on its head: she cast out the Pope who had been colluding with the Demon King of that era, and dismantled the Saintess's singular symbolism so that the faithful could approach holiness in a warmer, more accessible form.
One of her great achievements.
Because of that, the title of Saintess no longer meant one unique individual as it once had.
Even now, the Order recognized six Saintesses.
Alesia ranked fourth among them.
"Do you have any idea how pitiful I look, being dragged around under the pretense of 'supervising' you leeches, thanks to the likes of you?"
"Still, none of this is exactly wrong to call work for the sake of the Order, is it?"
"…Please. You just find me inconvenient."
Alesia tilted her head to one side with a sly look in her eyes.
"Isn't diligence supposed to be a clergyman's virtue?"
"Save that nonsense for the pigs."
She was unyielding on the point.
"When there's actual work to do, you can't slack off even if you want to, right? So you be diligent then. If you have to grind yourself down over every little thing, you won't survive."
"Is that so?"
"What do you mean, is that so~! Look—those teachers of ours who played at being oh-so-devout holy men ended up twisting into perverts and traitors later on, and there's a reason for it, every single one. Isn't it far better to blow up early than to harden into some half-baked stubbornness? An imperfect human trying to perform perfection—that's how every one of them ends up with something wrong in the head. Well? Am I wrong?"
"……."
It was remarkably blunt.
Though it had little to do with hostility or animosity.
"And in that same sense, that boy is also a product of such sacrifice."
Look at his face. Look at his eyes.
"…Can something like that really belong to a child his age?"
On that point at least, Luke agreed down to his bones.
Watching the boy hold the line against those monsters alongside the village watch, his skill had been so uncanny that awe escaped him before he could stop it.
…But apart from that, the boy's whole atmosphere, his very bearing, was far too melancholic.
Moreover, even the gratitude the villagers offered him—every gesture of it—looked like something he had terribly little practice receiving.
Monsters appearing in scattered, unpredictable clusters, a few here, many there.
This was less the aftermath of the current Demon King's invasion than the scar of an invasion far older.
Across the continent, eruptions of ambient mana broke out without warning, and when they accumulated, they burst forth and took shape as monsters. Ordinarily these were surveyed and purged on a regular cycle, but now and then the schedule slipped.
Exactly as it had this time.
Had he not, by sheer fortune, been passing near the village, the villagers would have had no way even to call for help—they would have fled, only to run headlong into Luke and his men coming to their rescue.
Or perhaps, fleeing in another direction, they might have crossed paths with the Saintess instead, and found deliverance of a different kind.
"The way he moves—it isn't a human's."
"Oh?"
The Saintess had arrived too late to witness the fighting herself, but everyone else sang the boy's praises without reserve.
Her healing during the treatment of the wounded had been genuinely breathtaking, granted—but most of those had been the gravely injured from before Luke and Ruell reached the scene.
Thankfully, no one had died.
Which meant, one might say, that heaven itself had been keeping watch. …If not for that, there'd be no explaining how every piece of this calamity fit together so perfectly.
Once the cleanup was finished, the reason the boy traveled with them was simple: their destinations were the same.
"Saint Cariel's Feast Day falls right around then, you see. There will be quite a crowd."
The guardian saint of Varonens.
One of the eleven guardian knights of the Berck Empire.
From an age before knighthood had even taken form, when the remnants of the demon folk and the barbarians trampled borders and boundaries alike without a second thought. An Age of Distrust, when loyalty, faith, and even belief in the gods had fallen into the dirt.
In that era, vowing to save a people ravaged by plague, he had abandoned even his own lord to shield the sick and the starving.
The one who faced an army of hundreds of barbarians alone.
And the hero who drove them out even as he died.
He was said to have spoken of himself not as a warrior but as a knight—the very one who preached what he called the Mindset of a Knight.
Three hundred years ago, no less.
A contemporary of Iland, called the Empire's strongest and its first knight.
Saint Cariel—he stood far removed from any notion of "strongest," and yet his compassion for the weak, his devotion and courage in their service, the spirit of sacrifice born of it, became nothing less than the founding ideal of the age of knights.
When the hero Rueld and the Saintess Ermina gave their first child the name Cariel—
Was it not, in the end, because they held that ideal in the highest esteem?
"It's no rare thing for a wanderer to find his own road through the saints and sages of old. We who follow the teachings of Lord Irenis—are we not, in a sense, the same? Because we do not know the way, we follow in His footsteps, and we want to believe we are walking rightly on our own."
"For someone who says that, you sound remarkably like a proper Saintess."
"Watch your irreverent tongue, would you?"
Around the time the two of them had worn out their bickering—
Ting!
The restringing done, Cariel had begun plucking at the lute once more. At times the melody was calm and still; at other times he played something so full of drive and urgency that it set the heart pounding.
"Where did you learn that?"
This time, Alesia had come to stand at Cariel's side. She was mounted, naturally, which meant he had to tilt his eyes downward.
"On my own."
"From gypsies, or some minstrel? You didn't learn it from the demon folk?"
"No, my lady. I've seen them a few times, but I've never spoken with one directly, nor been taught by any."
He'd hardly had the leisure for it, either.
Swallowing the rest, Cariel went on plucking the lute, his gaze distant.
In the Demon King's phrasing: his conscious mind had gone sour, and further combat training would do more harm than good, so it was forbidden. …Thanks to which, these days he plucked the lute even in his dreams.
No wonder his playing kept improving. The Demon King had taken to teaching him guitar alongside it, and since the instrument's structure differed from the lute, it had its own charm.
Especially that mana-guitar of his.
It felt like nothing short of a devil's handiwork.
"By the way, you've never once asked. How heartless of you."
"…Pardon?"
When Cariel looked at her blankly, Alesia smiled sweetly.
"Why I've been following you lot. Aren't you curious?"
"……Am I supposed to be?"
"……."
Way to cut a person off mid-sentence.
This wasn't indifference, but… how to put it.
"Fine then. I'll just talk to myself."
Sulking on principle, Alesia blew a puff of air through her nose.
"You know the ones, don't you? Those who, back when the Demon King invaded, were quick to sever ties with him and cast their lot with humanity."
"…Yes. Broadly speaking."
Cariel shot a glance off into empty air, then returned his eyes to Alesia.
"Many of them carry strange arts and abilities. And among them, there are those who can… glimpse remnants of the past left behind in the land. Ah—putting it that way must be confusing, isn't it? In other words, there are gifted ones who can peer into fragments of memories."
"Is that so?"
"And as you know, the history of the Age of Distrust still holds plenty of murk for us too, doesn't it?"
Which was why—
"It wasn't what the Holy See wanted, but it seems they came to us first, saying they wished to help with it."
"…Why would they?"
So—let me see. The remnants of the demon folk wanted to know the history of the saints of the Irenis Order, and since the details were unknown even to them, they wished to use their own abilities to dig into it. Was that the idea?
"For the Order, it means they can throw fresh momentum into research on the saints, which is a boon. And for them… apparently it helps with their creative work?"
"Their… work?"
Cariel's eyes drifted toward the empty air again.
"After the Great War, everything they did was confined strictly to artistic, technical, and commercial pursuits."
"……."
He had known it—it was something the Academy's lectures had touched on briefly before moving on.
"But you never know, right? That's why I was dispatched—to keep an eye on the whole arrangement."
And of all the places to be posted, it had to be this neck of the woods. What a stroke of misfortune.
Alesia lamented, her face gloomy.
"Still, with the festival coming up, who knows—I might land myself a decent man if I play my cards right."
"……."
"Notice something, will you! I'm talking about you! I even proposed to you earlier! Have you already forgotten?!"
"Pardon? Me? You proposed to… me?"
Wait—that was serious? Not a joke?
At a loss, Cariel could do nothing but lend his ear to her nagging-that-was-not-quite-nagging.
And yet, somehow.
…It didn't feel bad.
So much so that he had to fight, desperately, to keep the corners of his mouth from rising against his will.
He felt, rather annoyingly, quite good.