Filled with Suffering (10) — End of Part 1
Deathbringer crouched numbly inside the tent, arms wrapped around his knees. The Inquisitor still lay before him, showing no sign of waking. He had no idea how long she meant to sleep.
"Please, just wake up soon..."
He knew it was the last thing you said to someone who had suffered as much as the Demon Knight. Even so, Deathbringer could not bring himself to hope she would rise any later.
Right now, the only one who could actually change this situation was the Inquisitor.
"Even the two Great Sages holding them off is reaching its limit..."
The Demon Knight waking had been bad enough. The moment he declared he would accept any conclusion, the clash of opinions had turned savage. And of course the stronger side was the one screaming for execution.
The two Great Sages might be shielding him, but they had failed to produce any proper evidence or justification, which only made it worse. Even the city lord had woken and consented; people were already shifting toward "well, if he's fine with it..."
"Damn it all..."
Did they really believe that if there was no excuse to stop it and the man himself submitted to death, then everything was settled? Was a decision forced in a situation like this even truly his own?
Yes, the Demon Knight was dangerous. But that same dangerous power was the only reason any of them were still alive.
"I'm even starting to hope that damn jinx of a kid succeeds..."
If Meister—whom he had only just met—managed to talk the Demon Knight around, the sense of powerlessness would probably crush him. Even so, he would take it. As long as the Demon Knight did not die like this, as long as he was not forced to face such a wretched end... Deathbringer would gladly be proven worthless in the man's eyes.
He would gladly take it...
Shhhk.
Someone entered. Berserk, carrying the Archmage on her back.
Perhaps because she had been racing around without proper rest for days, the air around her felt unnaturally heavy and still—cool and dense like the hour before dawn.
"You're here... What's wrong with the mage?"
"Found him collapsed from overwork. The healers on duty looked just as exhausted, so I brought him to you."
Deathbringer closed his mouth for a moment. There was nothing left to say.
"Hand him over."
With Berserk's help he laid the Archmage down beside the Inquisitor. The body, light for its size, pressed down on Deathbringer's chest all the harder.
The fur hid it somewhat, but the old mage seemed even thinner than before.
"The turtle?"
"...Sleeping over there."
"Right."
With both the not-small Inquisitor and the Archmage lying side by side, half the tent was already full. Once Deathbringer and Berserk sat down as well, every scrap of free space vanished. Naturally the two of them ended up crouched with their legs crossed and stretched out.
"...What happens to us now?"
"Who knows. The only thing that changes is whether the Demon Knight still exists, I figure."
Who knows. Wasn't that the most important thing of all?
Deathbringer lifted his head at Berserk's words, wondering if she truly had no opinion on the Demon Knight's fate.
"...Warrior. Are you fine with the knight dying?"
The instant he asked, Berserk raised her own head. The gloom in her eyes answered for her.
"I know he is not a man who should die that way."
The quiet sentence summed everything up.
Deathbringer's head dropped again. Misery shredded the heart inside his chest into rags.
"Mm."
Just as he was about to drown in the bleakness, a soft groan overturned the silence. Both of them, who had closed their eyes to chew on the quiet, snapped their heads around.
The Inquisitor instinctively understood the pitch-black world before her. This place was... this place was of the god...
"O God."
She recalled the moment she had received the oracle before her journey as a Hero even began.
It had been the same then. Everything around her black; she could see only herself inside the absolute dark.
And the god... the god had left her nothing but a one-sided command.
"This lowly servant dares to ask."
Back then, had she simply obeyed the words left for her without question?
Because the black and white of what she had been taught were so clear that no question remained, because she believed that teaching was the entire world, because she had been a frog in a well who found obedience more comfortable than doubt and submission easier than distrust—had she never once dared to wonder?
"Why was it me?"
But now was different.
Before the god could speak, she decided she would settle the questions she had carried all this time.
It was the courage of someone who had finally learned that asking was not the same as disrespect, that doubt was not the same as failing to revere, that the world was not simply divided into black and white.
"Why was it him?"
It was the prayer of a mortal who had too many things she wanted to save and had finally realized how pitifully short her strength fell.
"Why Bemyurhen..."
She needed the answer of an all-knowing, all-powerful god now.
Why had someone so lacking been chosen as Hero?
Why did that devoted man have to suffer so?
Why had the people of this city been left to die without the god's care?
Why, why...
"O God, I beg You, grant me an answer..."
[────]
"...?"
[──go─]
In that instant a voice rang through her mind. No—not a voice. Closer to letters seeping in through the ears. Or something more fundamental—
[North── go─]
A spark.
Had it been like this last time as well? The moment she tried to dig up the memory, the Inquisitor saw it: a single light rising in a world that had been nothing but darkness. Perhaps it had fallen. Or been born. Or something long hidden had finally become visible.
Or something that had always been there had at last opened its eyes.
[Go north─.]
Thousands, tens of thousands, or numbers beyond counting of eyes looked down upon her—from above her head, from straight ahead, from her very feet, out of every scrap of darkness.
[There─ seek─ your answer─.]
The world, nature, the unknown—everything humanity must forever revere—was watching her.
[…Take─ the one─ who walks─ that path─.]
The darkness shattered. The world grew bright.
"Hahk!"
The Inquisitor snapped her eyelids open by pure reflex. The stale, unventilated air flooded her nose and mouth. A faint warmth lingered—kept for the patients, perhaps.
"Lady!"
"You're awake."
The gentle heat sank quietly into her lungs, yet it was not enough to restore her clear mind at once. She drew several more steadying breaths and rolled her eyes.
A lantern hung on one side of the tent lit the faces around her.
Deathbringer and Berserk standing whole, the Archmage sleeping soundly to one side. Just the three of them.
Confirming every face eased a worry she had not even realized she still carried. Once she confirmed the Demon Knight's safety as well, nearly all her anxiety would be gone.
The Inquisitor opened her mouth with a face that had brightened without her noticing.
"All three of you... are alive."
Her voice came out rough and scraped raw.
It felt unpleasantly close to the voice of an old crone. She sat up and laid a hand against her own throat.
"Is your body all right?"
"Not bad, ahem, not bad. A little stiff, but."
Long stillness had left her body somewhat locked, yet a few movements would almost certainly loosen it again; it could not truly be called a problem.
"More importantly, the situation?"
What mattered far more than her own condition was whatever had changed while she slept.
She pressed the two of them for answers, questions tumbling over one another—how she had survived, what had become of the city, where the Demon Knight was now.
The oracle from the dream she set aside for the moment. That could be delivered later without issue.
"Seeing all three of you safe, it seems things aren't entirely—"
"...About that."
Contrary to her expectation, the faces of the two people she had hurried began to harden. Their reaction was nothing like what she had hoped for.
"...Is it that bad?"
"...Depends on how you look at it."
So that was how it was. That kind of situation.
She could not simply sit here steeped in anxiety and ignorance. The Inquisitor straightened her posture and waited for the explanation.
Soon Deathbringer's calm voice filled the tent.
"...So the reinforcements arrived and we managed to catch our breath, is that it?"
"If I had to sum it up."
"Hah."
Astonishingly, the answer he had spent so long gathering was better than she had feared. At the very least they had avoided a future in which every single person was slaughtered, and the threatening demons—Greed and that unknown turtle—had all been eliminated.
Given that the worst case could easily have left everyone dead, this ending was nearly the best possible. It was genuinely good news.
"And yet the one person who contributed the most to saving the city is locked up right now while they debate his execution?"
Everything except the treatment of that single man.
"Guide me."
"...You're going?"
"Of course I'm going. Why wouldn't I?"
She would not deny that the sacrifice of the few for the many was efficient. If one person made everyone else uneasy, then some measure of restraint against that one person could be understandable.
But understanding something and that thing being truly right were separate questions. Did the fact that the present situation was unavoidable somehow grant it justice as well?
"Killing a man on the pretext of mere possibility is no different from saying a healthy adult should be executed because he might become a criminal someday. In other words, it is sophistry. The sophistry of people who simply do not want to get hurt."
By contrast the Demon Knight had already given everything he had to save the city. Even if demon power had been used in the process.
The moment he somehow succeeded in controlling the demon and no one suffered any harm from him, there remained not a single reason he deserved this treatment!
"I have not the slightest intention of listening to that sophistry! Do you understand? I will return the price of his devotion no matter what!"
And so the Inquisitor spoke of the Demon Knight's survival as the most natural thing in the world. It was a truth she never needed to doubt.
"And if he himself wants to die?"
Berserk, who had been silent until then, added a single line.
"Other people's will has clearly influenced the Demon Knight's current treatment a great deal. But even after you strip all those opinions away—do you really think he wants to live?"
"...!"
"What if, regardless of anyone around him, he chooses death himself? What then?"
"Th-that is..."
The warrior, whose atmosphere had shifted so completely from before, rested a hand on her own knee in a listless posture. Her drained face recalled an earlier conversation.
"I told you before. Fate does not wait for you."
The arm she had propped on her raised knee hung as limp as a dead man's.
"...I've said it before as well. I will persuade him. Somehow!"
"Is that so... Still the same choice."
Yet she was not a dead person. The eyes connected to that slack arm narrowed. It was the movement of someone who had watched the world long enough to foresee certain things.
"Do as you like."
Insight alone does not make everyone act. Berserk was no exception.
"Struggling under fate is the right of every human being."
Instead of using her prediction as an excuse to interfere with the Inquisitor, she chose, as always, to simply watch. Her eyelids, rimmed with faded gold, slowly closed.
"...Let's go."
Even so, every one of those gestures felt like an omen of her failure, and the Inquisitor felt an uneasy prickle she could not shake—the particular anxiety that belongs to every living person.
"All right."
But in the few hours she had been unconscious, what could possibly have happened?
Deathbringer would never have been careless with the Demon Knight, and night had simply forced them to return to their quarters for a short while.
Surely nothing could have gone wrong in that short span.
"Ah, before we see the Demon Knight, let's stop by the ward first. Or is the place where he is being held closer?"
"No, the ward is nearer."
"Then the ward first."
The Inquisitor made the decision according to her own common sense. The bells that proved that judgment wrong began to ring less than ten minutes later.
"The knight is gone!!"
Through the pealing of bells from every direction, someone shouted.
"The Demon Knight has disappeared!!"
Berserk had been right.
Fate had not waited for her.
And upon the ruined earth, green shoots began to push through the soil.