Shouted Excuses (2)
Flash.
The instant awareness returned, my eyelids snapped open on pure reflex.
Probably because the last frayed scrap of memory was driving a blade straight into Moby Dick’s skull. Before reason even had a chance to clock in, instinct had already taken over the job of scanning the surroundings.
And what that scan turned up was this:
Walls and ceiling of white stone. Blue tapestries hanging at intervals, each worked with distinctive golden embroidery. A soft bed and thick blankets.
Drawing on past adventures for a quick forecast, I put the odds at ninety-nine percent that this was a temple.
I put a little more strength into it and sat up. They’d stripped me down to bandages and a loose shirt so I could rest easy; the fabric fluttered lightly with every movement. Vest and coat sat neatly folded on the side table right beside me.
Hmm. This felt faintly like déjà vu.
Please don’t tell me another two weeks just got deleted.
A little unease stirred, but unfortunately there was no clock or calendar in sight to check the date. My body felt crushing-heavy and my vision was still a touch hazy—overall condition: not great. Considering how quickly ordinary wounds usually closed up on me, it didn’t seem like much time had passed.
Well, Tatara had taught me that if you brush right up against death, two weeks later your body can still feel like lead… but I hadn’t gone that far this time, right?
I’d followed White Wind’s advice, taken only minor scrapes, and carefully avoided any wound that would leave me thrashing on the edge of the afterlife… hadn’t I?
Knock-knock.
A soft rap came at the door—kept deliberately quiet, as if they thought I was still asleep.
“…What.”
Whoa, voice completely shredded.
“…Awake already?”
I dragged the blanket a little higher as the visitor entered—just enough to cover the right arm; covering everything would have looked weird.
“Treatment finished less than an hour ago. Rest more.”
“The Great Demon. What became of it.”
It was the Archmage. Somehow I always seemed to get the after-action report from her—even though I’d been the one doing the fighting—and I listened carefully.
“Dead. You killed it. Don’t you remember?”
I remembered the killing blow… sort of. Whether it had been the final hit or not was fuzzier. Still, apparently I’d done the job.
“For the record, everyone except Berserk collapsed, so we had no choice but to return to the temple. Two of you couldn’t be treated with holy power, which is why I came along as well.”
So everyone but Berserk had blacked out—meaning Inquisitor and Dev had both gone down hard. But why Dev? Had his internal injuries flared up again? And if they had, why couldn’t holy power fix them?
The Great Demon was dead. Shouldn’t that have solved the demon-energy problem inside Dev’s body? Shouldn’t it??
I filed away my worry for Dev and the growing suspicion that Berserk might actually be something beyond human, then calmly sorted the new information. All of it was just the preliminary step before deciding what reaction fit the concept.
“Ah, no need to fret—we only brought three people to carry you and three more as escort. The rest are still there purifying and guarding the Great Demon’s corpse. Berserk stayed behind with them.”
She must have read my silence as concern, because she hurried to add the explanation. Not a bad development. Berserk still watching the body meant they hadn’t managed a shift change yet, which meant not that much time had passed. Factor in “treatment finished an hour ago” and “I had to come because no one else could treat you,” and the elapsed time was probably half a day at most, maybe a full day if I was unlucky. The fact that the Archmage still wore the exact same travel-stained clothes only reinforced the timeline—she’d been too busy healing to change.
“I will confirm it with my own eyes.”
That felt like the right line, didn’t it? Normally I might have just grunted “I see” and moved on, but given who I was dealing with, double-checking once more fitted the concept better. Body still felt like garbage, yet I doubted any extra fighting was about to break out. And if it did, that just meant a new problem had appeared—which, well, wouldn’t be a total loss. Probably.
“Have you gone mad?”
“…?”
“No—poor phrasing. Has your brain still not restarted properly?”
Hey. The corrected version is basically the same thing.
“Do you have any idea what state your body was in earlier—!”
The Archmage started to raise her voice, then lifted a hand and forced herself to calm down.
“Demon Knight. Are you aware that your sealing sphere shattered?”
“…What?”
Huh?
“So you didn’t know. Which means you didn’t deliberately smash it because the power was too much— you simply, instinctively, pulled more mana to heal yourself.”
No, wait, why? I hadn’t been hurt that badly.
“…Did you only pay attention to external wounds?”
…Was I supposed to have been watching the inside as well?
I’d been mildly worried about altitude sickness, but had that actually progressed into cerebral edema or pulmonary edema and left me dangling by a thread?
“…Demon Knight. A person does not die only when stabbed or when bones break. Bleeding in the brain can kill you. The heart can simply stop for any number of reasons.”
I understood.
“For injuries like that, holy power is virtually the only answer. A few mages have begun collaborating with physicians to push the frontiers of surgery, but if no specialist in the field is present, surgery remains pure fantasy.”
So much for “I carefully followed White Wind’s advice.” This entire raid had been me cheerfully ignoring that advice after pretending to listen.
“I myself possess none of that knowledge. We got lucky and healing magic worked this time, but anything more severe would have been beyond me.”
And on top of that… “never say never” really can kill a man. From now on I had to watch for internal damage too!
“Fortunately you do not yet suffer from any such condition… but this time it was close. So for the next two days, do not even think of leaving the temple. Rest. Please. I beg you.”
But come on, the difficulty is ridiculous!
You forcibly haul someone thousands of meters into the sky and then dump realistic medical conditions on them—what exactly am I supposed to do? If that’s the plan, just make me an unbreakable monster like Berserk!
“We will handle the Great Demon’s remains ourselves.”
Balance team, show yourselves!!!
“Achoo!”
Berserk turned her head at the sound while standing night watch.
The priest who’d drawn the toughest middle shift purely for being the youngest stood with his ears stiffly pricked.
“Caught a cold?”
“N-no, it’s nothing of the sort.”
Apparently embarrassed by the sneeze, the priest covered cheeks that were invisible under fur anyway. The round ears still flapped openly.
“Berserk is a little cold.”
“Ah! Th-then I’ll stoke the fire higher!”
At her single remark the priest shook off the shame and hurriedly fed the fire more wood. The flames that had swallowed the fuel grew a bit larger, and the heat spread farther—as expected.
“Th-then a blanket as well…?”
“Annoying. Don’t want it.”
She hadn’t actually been cold in the first place.
Her homeland was a place where exhaled breath took solid form and runny noses froze solid in an instant—how could this be cold by comparison?
“…Want to climb the Eternal Peaks again.”
“Pardon?”
“Nothing.”
She’d never expected to feel homesick for that detestable place. Maybe home simply was home. Or maybe the air she’d breathed while climbing after the whale had been close enough to her birthplace that nostalgia had struck.
With those thoughts she fixed her gaze on the thing that had been half-blocking her view. The enormous merman corpse still looked exactly the same more than half a day later.
She wasn’t talking about rigor mortis or anything technical. It simply… didn’t feel dead. It didn’t feel alive either, though.
“Hm.”
She had already checked the body every time it bothered her, yet she decided to look once more.
Berserk gripped the halberd she had planted in the ground and stood again.
“Wh-where are you going?”
“Confirming.”
She stepped lightly up onto the corpse. The demon’s body, faintly luminous under the moonlight, glowed as though dusted with silver powder.
Considering its bodily fluids were a lightless black, the contrast between outside and inside was severe.
“Mmm.”
Pretty. And at the same time, revolting.
It had nothing to do with the fact that it was a demon. Demons were simply things one was obligated to exterminate, and occasionally entertaining prey; she had never sorted them into likes or dislikes.
No—it was simply that this one looked too much like a thick blanket of fallen snow. The white hair, the silver irises ringed in black—same problem.
Berserk hated snow. More precisely, she hated the memories it dragged up, and everything those memories had stolen.
Everything that would remain forever frozen beneath the snow.
Grind.
“…?”
She had been staring down at that massive head for quite a while when she felt a presence.
Grrrind.
Not imagination. Berserk’s hand tightened on the halberd; every sense locked onto the surroundings. Something was approaching.
Not from above, not from the sides, not from behind or in front.
“Rise—!!!”
From directly beneath the thing she was standing on.
“Get clear of this spot at once!”
She hurled the halberd away. KRA-KOOM! The earth shook with her shout, and the sleepers snapped awake.
“Ugh?”
“Whuh.”
“What—!”
No discipline whatsoever!
Berserk leapt down from the corpse, then seized the napes of the still-dazed people and flung them.
Sudden violence produced a chorus of screams, but the effect was excellent. Even if they hadn’t fully grasped the situation, the act itself made them recognize danger, and they began scrambling backward.
And the moment they finally reached the safe ground she had indicated—
KRAAAAAASH!
“—!!”
Massive tree roots erupted from the earth and began to swallow the Great Demon’s dead body whole.
The Archmage had locked me in the temple, yet before dawn she herself had blithely left under the pretext of examining the Great Demon.
Of course I couldn’t complain. She was the only mage available, and there were investigations only a mage could perform in this world.
Clink-crash.
Still, after she left, the soup bowl that arrived with breakfast shattering seemed like it might be a problem.
Bowl-breaking has long been a classic cliché for every kind of ominous sign and the universal foreshadowing of “plot incoming—open your mouth.”
“Huk! Are you unhurt, sir?!”
More importantly, why did the thing break in the first place? Did they pour hot soup straight into a cold bowl? Or did the natural frequency of the table somehow perfectly match the external vibration when they set it down?
“I-I’ll bring a new one at once!”
Well, it had already happened.
I watched the priest hurriedly gather the broken bowl and spilled food, then set down the spoon I had just lifted.
Once the priest scurried out of the dining hall, I was the only one left at the table.
Unwanted solitude after so long felt faintly awkward. And a little boring.
“….”
But the moment I attributed that boredom to the people who were still unconscious, my mood turned serious again.
Sure, Archmage and Berserk had gone out to investigate the Great Demon, but the empty seats of the two dumplings had nothing to do with that.
One had collapsed from overusing her power; the other had blacked out when his internal injuries flared. And the latter still couldn’t receive proper treatment because of the demon energy.
This was not a situation where I could just go “Sweet, free win” and move on.
“…Haa.”
Inquisitor was sturdy enough that I was confident she’d wake soon. Dev, though… I had no idea about Dev.
I was certain he wasn’t a traitor—his attitude had been too awkward for betrayal, and he’d been coughing up mystery blood at regular intervals—but that didn’t mean I could completely relax.
Take right now, for example.
We’d slain the Great Demon that was supposed to be the cause, yet the kid was still carrying demon energy around inside him.
Regardless of Dev’s true feelings, the possibility that something was being forced on him couldn’t be ignored. And if that something ever activated, I had no idea whether I’d be able to keep the concept intact the way I had so far.
I was also worried about how Dev himself must be feeling.
The cause had been eliminated and still nothing was fixed. Even the Sea Dragon’s orb I’d secretly slipped him had done nothing. This was starting to look like something he might have to carry for the rest of his life.
In that case, how hard would it be for Meat Dumpling?
He didn’t seem to burn with the kind of extreme hatred my concept demanded, so maybe he’d be fine… and then my insides twisted again.
He already had low self-esteem thanks to his origins and all that. This incident would only make it worse, never better.
Thud.
In the end I rested my forehead against my hand, propping my arm on the table. My head hurt.
“Damn it.”
Head aching, yet the thoughts refused to stop.
If I’d known it would come to this, I should have been more suspicious the first time I found Dev on that rooftop. Can Dev keep traveling with us? Can we actually solve the problem that’s grown on him? And if we can’t, then what? Questions kept chaining one after another until they filled my skull.
And at the end of that chain there was always the image of Deathbringer thrusting a sword at me.
I brushed the now-smooth, unscarred cheek.
Does Dev even want to stay with us… with me?
Yeah. Head still hurt.
Tap-tap-tap.
Why, after killing one of the seven Great Demons, do I have to suffer like this?
Tap-tap-tap-tap.
If the first button is sewn on this crooked, when am I supposed to take down the remaining six—wait, five?—and how the hell do we deal with Satan?
Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap.
Shit. Instead of a victory-party atmosphere we just keep getting crises. Is this even allowed…
Bang!
“Ah, Lord Demon Knight!”
I leisurely lifted my forehead from my hand and looked at the person who had just burst in.
“A messenger from the group watching the Great Demon!”
The broken-bowl cliché had finally done its job.