Full of Anguish (3)
Meister limped along on his bruised and swollen leg, the pain flaring with every step, and thought to himself,
“Those demon bastards really screwed the place over good.”
He’d heard the stories and only half believed them, but seeing it with his own eyes drove the truth home hard. Half the city and the entire stretch of coastline had simply been erased—that was no exaggeration.
“No point even going as far as the Magic Tower.”
Hell, at this rate finding where the Tower used to stand would be a challenge all by itself. There wasn’t a single landmark or building left that could serve as a reference point. Show anyone who didn’t know what had happened just this view and they would never guess a city had once stood here. It looked like nothing more than a rocky desert.
“Guess I can forget about hunting for magic materials…”
Still, he’d come all this way. Going home empty-handed wasn’t an option.
Meister scooped up a pebble rolling in the street and began tossing it into the air and catching it again and again. Tok. His feet came to rest at the edge of a road that simply… stopped.
“Even slicing a cheese wheel with a knife wouldn’t leave a cut this clean.”
He studied the boundary between what remained and what had been sheared away. However the hell it had been done, one thing was certain: a cliff several meters high had been born. The severed face was so glass-smooth there was nothing to grab onto if he wanted to climb down—that was going to be a problem.
“Hmm.”
Jumping was out of the question. The drop was the perfect height for snapping a leg, and his own legs weren’t exactly in mint condition right now. Even if he somehow landed without injury, getting back up would be another nightmare.
So instead of descending, Meister simply squatted at the rim. Tok. The pack on his back tipped and spilled onto the ground.
“Looks like the coastline got gouged a lot deeper. From the shape of things, part of what used to be under the water got blasted away too…”
The distance was considerable, yet the terraced layers were still visible. He filed away the fact that the shore had been carved far deeper and decided it counted as good news.
After all, the last time he remembered the sea wall it had been crawling with mermen—plus that giant turtle that might have been a snake pretending to be a turtle, or whatever the hell the thing was. Now the place was spotless. Chances were excellent the whole lot of them had been swept up and killed.
Even if the mermen (the turtle was confirmed dead by fire, according to the reports, so no need to worry about that one) had flung themselves into the sea to escape the flames, the outcome would be the same. Witnesses said the attack had lasted mere seconds. At least half of them must have died. And if half a swarm was dead, the survivors would be too busy picking up the pieces to think about launching another assault.
Definitely good news.
“They haven’t even tried to land again despite the city looking like this… maybe it wasn’t half—maybe the whole damn pack got wiped.”
Then something glittered near the shore. Too bright, too clustered to be ordinary sunlight on sand.
“What the hell.”
Mermen? He hurriedly pressed the magnifying glass he’d stolen from his grandfather to his eye.
“…Glass?”
Thankfully the sparkle wasn’t merman scales. The true identity was almost as unexpected.
“Is that actually glass?”
He adjusted the lens and stared. No matter how he looked at them, the transparent, glittering shards could only be glass. The voice of a man who knew exactly how hard glass was to produce came out sounding dazed.
“…Unbelievable. Glass got mass-produced overnight.”
They’d said the one who flattened the city had used fire. Must have been one hell of a heat. Meister’s hand rose on its own and scratched the back of his head.
“Would be useful for metal smelting.”
That was the full extent of his wonder. Then he stood.
“Meister-nim! Are you still looking around?”
“No, I’m done.”
He’d seen everything worth seeing. Time to get to work on the real reason he’d come.
“The requisition of the workshop district is almost finished. If there’s anything you need, please take it quickly.”
“Will do.”
Meister was genuinely grateful that the workshop street—including his own shop—had barely escaped the evaporation zone. It wasn’t just a craftsman’s relief. Even thinking of the citizens who’d become refugees, the same conclusion held. A craftsman with tools could make far more, far more efficiently, than one without. In a situation where everything was scarce, that difference would save lives.
Clatter.
With that in mind he packed saws, hammers, carving knives, and rulers first. Given the circumstances, woodworking would see far more use than smelting.
“Meister-nim, may we take metal scraps and kindling as well?”
“Show me first.”
He didn’t mind them taking things, but some metals exploded on contact with water, so a quick inspection was mandatory. Meister glanced over the crates the soldiers dragged up. Sure enough, a few dangerous materials had slipped in.
“What about the books?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
Nothing burned better than paper. Books were expensive, true… but you could always buy more books. You couldn’t buy more lives. He set aside only the irreplaceable volumes and waved the rest through.
Flutter. An unfamiliar cover caught his eye as the second crate was being carried off. He picked up the book titled Broken Horn and flipped through it. Memory returned late.
“So this was still around.”
A few years back, a daydreamer he sometimes ran into at the tavern—rich enough to live like a wastrel—had given it to him, claiming it was based on a recent experience. The only people who read books were nobles and mages, and since the man had no connections among mages, he’d asked Meister to help spread the word. Something like that.
Wonder if that idiot survived. Meister tossed the book onto the kindling pile.
“This one too?”
“Yeah.”
Yet as he did, something rough scraped along the edges of his heart. No real reason. Just a flash of ash-gray hair. A single word that had skimmed past in the text had reminded him of someone.
“A demon… huh.”
He chewed over everything that had supposedly happened after he blacked out—everything Grandfather had told him. Adding the ending of the novel he’d just recalled only made the taste fouler.
“Tch.”
Broken Horn was, in short, a story about kindness that goes unrewarded. The protagonist, who hides a curse because he longs for human warmth, finally abandons the effort to conceal it in order to save others… only to be driven out by the very people who mistake him for a demon.
“Spoils the mood for a smoke.”
And the situation now didn’t look all that different. Even knowing there was an unbridgeable wall between the controllable Broken Horn and that one who seemed completely beyond control, the parallel still stank.
Honestly, it left a bad taste.
“Ah. No fire anyway.”
He really wanted a cigarette.
“Ughk.”
“Gasp—Great Sage!”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. Mind your own business.”
Surging Cheongsanho coughed up a fist-sized amount of blood. It happened the moment he returned to his place after granting the lord’s request—to keep an eye on the adventurer’s movements.
“Looks like the internal injuries have flared up again.”
With one hand he waved off the mages rushing toward him; with the other he wiped his mouth on his sleeve. Thankfully the robe carried an automatic cleaning enchantment. The blood soaking the fabric gradually vanished.
“Please don’t move any more.”
“That was the plan.”
Right after the healer’s absolute bed-rest order, he had neatly folded up any thought of running around fixing things himself. Today’s outing had been unavoidable only because the lord insisted on the Great Sage’s personal guarantee.
“Suspicious lot, every one of them…”
If they truly shared his vision, none of this would have been necessary. Cheongsanho clicked his tongue, recalling the moment the demon had exited with that sly mockery.
“If only the Great Sage would clearly explain why he can relax, neither the temple side nor the mages would stay so uneasy…”
“You think I keep quiet because I enjoy it? If you were in my shoes you’d do the same.”
“That’s exactly the problem. Only Cheongsanho-nim can see the essence.”
Cheongsanho himself was certain. Leave things as they were and there would be nothing to worry about. The trouble was that this kind of intuition sat a long way from the logic and reason mages preferred.
He could produce a solid argument if pressed… but that direction held a slight… complication. A rather serious headache he couldn’t casually speak of on his own judgment alone.
“I’ve served you long enough to know you don’t talk nonsense, but the temple priests aren’t the same. When I checked earlier they were already wondering whether that bet was some kind of contract.”
“…Is that so.”
“The mages are similar. I overheard them saying that if the Great Sage is this tight-lipped it must really be a contract.”
“How bad?”
“Mm… not yet at the point of hard confrontation. But their patience is clearly running out. Enough that we should at least give them one reason to keep waiting, even if we can’t fully persuade them.”
He couldn’t ignore those words either. From where he sat, proof-loving mages would never hold out forever without evidence, and temple clergy would never endure to the end without a proper excuse. After all, logic was a mage’s first priority; hatred of demons was a temple’s.
“I know.”
So in the end all he could do was pray. Pray that their patience lasted long enough for him to prove the innocence of that radiant soul.
“More importantly—what’s my next job?”
Separately, the hard moving-around work was finished. He leaned back against a folding chair and looked for something he could do without standing.
“I don’t think the healer’s ‘don’t move’ meant ‘as long as your backside stays glued to the seat’…”
His escort-slash-general-dogsbody muttered the sour remark. Tough enough to have survived the chaos and reunited with him, this one.
“Who doesn’t know that? The situation’s a mess, so we put up with it.”
“The healer would grab the back of his neck if he saw this. He squeezed out time he didn’t have just to diagnose you.”
“If he doesn’t like it he can split himself in two. If I had anyone to dump the work on I’d have done it ages ago and rested.”
“Well… true.”
Despite the escort’s fretting, Cheongsanho pushed on with the work. The man understood the crisis well enough that he kept any further grumbling to himself.
“Speaking of which—got any stimulant?”
In the first place, Cheongsanho wasn’t the only mage working through internal injuries. If even the ordinary mages were pushing, how could the leader take a break? They had been protected as top priority all last night precisely so they could be used heavily at moments like this. Knowing that, he couldn’t allow himself to slack off.
“Shall I give you one?”
“Please.”
In the same spirit he accepted the stimulant and popped it into his mouth. Made from a small black berry and the extract of a red-and-white husk, it left a sweetly bitter aftertaste lingering on the tongue.
“How many left?”
“We handed a few out to the soldiers earlier… about fifty lumps?”
“Everyone brought stimulants instead of catalysts, I see.”
“That’s not fair. You know everyone carries stimulants as standard.”
True enough. Research often produced moments when you urgently needed one, and buying them every time was a nuisance. On top of that, the mage who sold them kept irregular hours and held a monopoly on the recipe, so there was nowhere else to get them.
Thus the mages of Bemyurhen usually kept three or four stimulants on their person; the worst of them carried dozens. The latter group, frankly, seemed to treat them more like snacks than actual stimulants…
Anyway, right now having plenty of stimulants was nothing but good. Ordinary people might not understand, but high-value personnel—mages, knights, soldiers—couldn’t even spare the time to sleep in the present crisis.
“Communication ready?”
“The magic circle is prepared, but we’re short on catalysts. Trying it like this has a high chance of failure.”
“Tch.”
Cheongsanho clicked his tongue at the report. Sending even the communication specialists to the infirmary just because they could use healing magic had been a bad call after all. The infirmary situation needed to be only moderately bad.
“How’s the wall construction going?”
“We’ve mostly blocked the windward side for now.”
“Good. Switch the plan to raising pillars at intervals among the people. Don’t forget to leave spacing so we can put up tents.”
“Understood.”
Ideally he wanted earthen walls on all four sides to protect everyone… but the clouds overhead looked ominous. Rain might be coming.
“At least wait until the tents are up, will you?”
If the rain held off until people had shelter, they could collect the water for drinking. If it came earlier, the body count would probably climb.
“Hmm. That reminds me—we still have to deal with the people who evacuated west…”
Because mages were the most useful personnel for rescue, the lord had even sent a messenger asking him to decide who to dispatch. So that side needed people assigned as soon as possible. Problem was, there was almost no one left to spare.
“One mountain after another.”
They were already rotating for mana recovery and working everyone to the bone, yet manpower was still desperately short. Who exactly was he supposed to peel off now?
He rapidly calculated while running through the list of available names.
“Ah, they’re back!”
The party he’d sent to scrounge catalysts returned around then.
“You’re late.”
“Old man, you don’t see the mountain of stuff on my back?”
“Hmm.”
One of them—his grandson—snapped with a word he hadn’t used in ages. The boy couldn’t use magic without tools, so sending him outside wasn’t a waste of a mage; he could still identify catalysts, and his stamina was solid (leg injury aside—as long as he could walk it was fine, and the healer had said it was just bruising). Perfect for city search duty… yet the assignment seemed to have annoyed him.
For a moment an old memory surfaced. He was just as rude the first time we met. Even if it was a slightly odd recollection.
“What’s got you so irritated?”
“…Just… everything’s a mess.”
“That broken up about the equipment you collected disappearing?”
“……? What are you talking about. We used it to stay alive—why would that be a waste?”
“Then what?”
He shook off the fondness and accepted it. Of course the kid wouldn’t mourn something like that. No one knew better that as long as you were alive you could always get another chance, no matter what you sacrificed.
“Then why the foul mood?”
“…Because some bastard who saved the city is about to die himself, and it’s bugging me?”
“What the—pff—hah, cough—”
The completely unexpected answer made Surging Cheongsanho choke on his own breath. The surrounding mages fared no better; they startled and dropped things or made other blunders.
“…You? Worrying about someone else?”
“Want your nose broken? What’s there to ask again about?”
“Look at your own personality and you’ll know why the question exists.”
“You’re really pissing me off.”
The grandson’s face became that of a man who was genuinely furious. Cheongsanho decided to stop there. Fighting his grandson always ended with him losing—in every sense of the word.
“Fine, fine. But you know it can’t be helped.”
“I know. That’s why I’m not doing anything about it.”
While they spoke the boy set down the bags and loads he’d been carrying. Catalysts scraped together from the workshops peeked out between the packs, along with tools like saws and carving knives.
“Ohhh, catalysts!”
“They’re all low-grade… is this everything?”
“No idea. But this is all that was left in the workshop buildings.”
“And the Magic Tower…?”
Someone chose that moment to ask about the Tower—a mage who had been holding the southern gate and had blacked out before seeing it vanish.
“There wasn’t even a trace that a building ever stood there. Why ask when you already know?”
“…What?”
The grandson hadn’t known. Even if he had, he probably wouldn’t have cared.
The merciless words left several mages with their mouths hanging open; then they simply sank to their knees. Every one of them had been in the final stretch of research—results only a little more effort away.
“…Not even a scrap?”
“Not even a scrap.”
With the laboratories and every record of the research process gone, could they ever finish those projects? Cheongsanho judged the answer was almost certainly no.
Thud.
People began clutching the backs of their necks and collapsing. Fatigue the stimulants hadn’t fully covered combined with the sudden mental shock and simply snapped their consciousness.
“Available manpower just dropped further.”
Their emotional devastation was none of his concern. Cheongsanho coolly expressed regret only at the reduction in usable hands.
Regret over the lost Tower? That existed too. Adding up every material and piece of equipment stored inside would have produced an astronomical sum, and all of it had simply evaporated. But mourning what was already gone wouldn’t bring it back. He decided he would be grateful the Tower had vanished only after the Demon Energy purification formula was complete.
“More importantly—what are you going to do now?”
“Make water filters, of course.”
Refugees needed countless things, but clean water sat near the top of the list. Cheongsanho accepted the pointed remark without argument.
“Why?”
“A request for rescue personnel came from the western gate and we don’t have anyone to send.”
“Me going wouldn’t help much. I’ll stay.”
“Do that.”
Then who do I send? Cheongsanho’s face creased even deeper.
“Great Sage! We’ve established contact with Kirchenrun!”
“What did they say?”
“They’re sending reinforcements, and they’ll also pass word to Deorfumain, Dubanchih, Shubruken, and Belgart!”
The news of support arriving in the middle of all this improved his mood a fraction. Reinforcements would take about a week to arrive, but that was infinitely better than nothing.
“Seems the gods haven’t completely abandoned Bemyurhen after all.”
Sunlight broke through the clouds and spilled warm and bright over the people below.