Even in a Life Like This (9)
“There’s no way that could be true.”
“Why not?”
“If all of that was just an act… then that would mean……”
Deathbringer was the first to leap into the counterargument at Berserk’s question. He had so much to say that the words themselves seemed to choke him; his sentences kept breaking off and stitching themselves back together.
“Forget everything else—if it was all an act, what the hell would he even gain from it? Is there any scheme bigger than slaying a corrupted dragon, saving an entire region that nearly got wiped out by a demon’s plot, and taking down both the corrupted Biryuho and one of the Great Demons?”
If they had just left it alone, that corrupted dragon would have turned the sea to rot. Everyone living in the area would have died for nothing.
Zakrati was the same. Look the other way and the place would have become an island of demons.
Biryuho, and the Moby Dick that got tangled up while hunting her—same story. Without Nari, neither the corrupted beast nor one of the Great Demons would ever have died. Their survival would have handed the demons far more profit than their corpses ever could. That much was obvious.
And yet Nari had personally cleaned up every single one of those messes. For what?
“Maybe I’m just stupid, but I can’t see a single thing worth sacrificing all of that for.”
The Temple’s trust? If he could have gotten that, would Nari be getting treated like this right now?
The Hero’s trust? Sure, he earned that—but what was he planning to do with it? Betray her later? He already had the power to kill her whenever he wanted.
The people’s trust? With that personality? The man couldn’t buy goodwill with a single kind word if his life depended on it; all he ever bought was hostility. How the hell was someone like that supposed to win the support of the masses?
“And if Nari and Satan really were in cahoots, then what does that make Satan—who just sat there and watched the whole thing? A complete idiot?”
“He doesn’t have to be on Satan’s side. He himself claimed he was a being who didn’t need to take orders from Satan, didn’t he?”
“You’re going to believe a demon’s word?”
“I don’t believe it. But I don’t blindly refuse to believe it either.”
Berserk pushed herself up from the floor and straightened her back with a long stretch. A soft, ragged breath—someone else’s—echoed through the tent.
“You deal in information. You should know this better than anyone. A story made of a hundred lies is far less convincing than one made of ninety-nine truths and a single carefully placed lie.”
“…Are you saying what he said is the truth, then?”
“I’m saying it could be. And if we assume it is true, doesn’t that neatly explain why the Demon Knight’s every action has been working against the demons’ interests?”
Before Deathbringer could even focus on that breathing sound, Berserk’s cool golden eyes swept the room.
“And if it really is true that the Demon Knight lost his memories… how the hell did that happen? A man who couldn’t forget even the moment he lost his family doesn’t just throw his entire past away because of some ordinary accident.”
She truly looked as though she suspected the Demon Knight. Not just anyone—Berserk herself was doubting him.
Caught completely off-guard by distrust from that particular person, Deathbringer felt the air leave his lungs.
“I was really hoping I wouldn’t have to open my mouth…”
Fortunately, a new fighter stepped into the ring in Deathbringer’s place. Long fingers lifted a pair of red-framed glasses, then casually polished them against a coat hem.
“Isn’t this usually the part where you flip the whole thing around and think the opposite?”
“What you want to believe and what you have to believe are two different things, as far as I’m concerned.”
“Fixating only on what you want to believe is dumb, sure. But ignoring every other possibility just because you don’t feel like thinking about them? That might be even dumber.”
Then he tossed the next line out like it was nothing. “The Demon Knight really did lose his memories. And the range of what he lost is pretty damn wide.”
That was the exact confirmation Deathbringer had been desperate to hear.
“You said you weren’t going to talk.”
“The situation changed. Earlier I had zero interest in sticking my nose any deeper into this mess… but now I want to know more. So I have to cooperate with you people, don’t I?”
Deathbringer looked a little lost for words, but Meister didn’t care. He had given up expecting other people to understand him a long time ago.
“And the cause of that amnesia, the way I see it, is the demon.”
He laid out the hypothesis he had pieced together.
Faced with Meister—who somehow knew more than any of them who had traveled with the Demon Knight for so long—someone bit down hard on their lip. Someone else quietly closed their eyes.
What mattered was that their feelings didn’t stop there. Standing before the life of a man who had burned everything for revenge, they felt a misery too deep for words.
“You asked earlier, didn’t you? That even if the demon inside the Demon Knight had different intentions from Satan, that still wasn’t a reason to stop suspecting the Demon Knight himself of being a demon?”
“The wording’s different, but yeah, that’s the gist.”
Meister’s explanation kept rolling. Berserk gave a short nod of agreement.
“I’ll grant you the first part. The demon inside the Demon Knight… ah, saying the whole thing is annoying, so let’s just call it Wrath. Whether it’s for survival or some other goal, Wrath’s intentions clearly don’t line up with Satan’s.”
That Wrath was not Satan’s loyal subordinate was obvious. Whether it was because of the bet with the Demon Knight or something else entirely, the thing had shown—starting with the fact that it had been brawling with a Great Demon—that it put itself first long before any loyalty to Satan.
“But the Demon Knight and Wrath’s wills don’t line up either. If the two of them had ever truly been of one mind……”
“You want to use ‘he would have killed all of us already’ as your proof? What if there’s another reason?”
“That’s a fair enough possibility, sure.”
Maybe he simply couldn’t draw out his full power yet… or maybe he wasn’t actually that strong to begin with, and only became that powerful under very specific conditions at specific moments…
In that case, the demon could still be pretending to be the Demon Knight just to avoid drawing human hostility. That hypothesis was possible too.
“But even you don’t really think that’s likely.”
Deathbringer’s earlier point—that there was no profit—still held weight, and so did the fact that the whole plan would be far too much of a gamble. Volunteering for your own execution just to avoid being hunted as a demon? That was an insane risk even for a demon, wasn’t it?
“And even if you drag in some other cause, the same problem remains. You still need another chain of circumstances to explain that.”
Fine—say you somehow justify the gamble with some desperate ‘die and live, live and die’ nonsense. Then how do you explain the fact that the demon still couldn’t draw out its full power?
No matter what excuse you dragged in, you still had to face the same core issue: something was stopping the demon from acting like a demon.
“So the Demon Knight really is Wrath’s restraint. That much is certain. Worst-case scenario, he might not even be a pitiful soul caught up by a demon—he could be a perfectly controlled double the demon isn’t even bothering to restrain, just to make the act flawless… but if that were true, Grandfather never would have failed to notice.”
“Are you kidding me? A double?”
“What if your grandfather simply looked the other way?”
Deathbringer was about to explode at the casual suggestion that the Demon Knight was nothing more than a demon’s double when Berserk, still completely calm, shot the question right back. She didn’t seem to care in the slightest that the man standing in front of her was the grandson of the person being misunderstood.
Archmage and Deathbringer, both well acquainted with Meister’s temper, tensed for no good reason.
“If the demon had gone wild, every single person there could have died. Is there no chance he simply let them go knowing the risk?”
“There is.”
To their surprise, Meister agreed without the slightest heat, as if he had already considered the exact same possibility.
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
“…I thought you’d get mad.”
“Why would I get mad over a doubt that anyone would naturally have? Suspecting a suspicious situation is just what a person is supposed to do, isn’t it?”
“W-well… I guess?”
The muscle-headed warrior’s theory—that Grandfather had accepted a necessary evil in order to save everyone—actually fit together neatly and was a perfectly reasonable suspicion.
You could argue against it, sure, but the doubt itself was solid enough that even Meister had to admit it. So of course he understood. Of course he wasn’t angry.
“The reason I can’t stand the Temple’s current attitude is because the way they go about their suspicion, and the so-called evidence they shove forward, is just that mind-numbingly stupid.”
“I see……”
And what about the suspicion the Temple was floating right now? That Grandfather had been a heretic all along and that was why he had set the demon free this time. Did that even make sense? If Cheongsanho had truly been a heretic, this whole mess never would have unfolded the way it did!
In the end, a bunch of thoughtless bastards had simply charged in without thinking and called it suspicion. It would have been weirder if he hadn’t gotten angry.
“Anti-intellectual trials are already horrifying and idiotic enough—how do those Temple bastards not know that and still keep pulling this sh—”
“Enough, enough. I understand where your anger is coming from. So is Berserk’s suspicion correct?”
“Archmage, you already know the answer, don’t you? There’s no way that’s right.”
Meister waved a hand as if he were deeply contemplating why the entire world was full of absolute morons.
“If he let them go in exchange for not killing anyone, then Grandfather would never have protected the Demon Knight afterward.”
“…He’s protecting him?”
“What else do you call that ‘mistaken targeting’ excuse if not protection?”
Cheongsanho could easily have claimed he had been threatened by the Demon Knight and had no choice. Instead of waiting for the sleep magic to wear off so the guards could wake up and report, he could have fired a signal spell the moment the Demon Knight left.
Hell, with a mind like Cheongsanho’s, he wouldn’t even have needed sleep magic. He could have pretended to block the escape while actually letting him go, ending the whole thing as a silent understanding between the two of them that never cast suspicion on anyone.
And yet Cheongsanho had still helped the Demon Knight while fully prepared to look suspicious. To Meister, that was evidence in itself—the evidence of a man so pure that his grandfather was willing to accept personal harm just to protect him.
“In the end, you’re staking everything on someone else’s judgment.”
“That’s offensive. Calling the act of consulting someone who can see the true essence of things ‘handing over your judgment’? Isn’t that one hell of an overreach? If that’s the standard, every appraiser on the continent should just pack up and quit.”
Berserk’s quiet counter was crushed under a single cutting line from Meister. Her eyes narrowed.
“That’s enough.”
“…?”
“Enough?”
“I’ll ask the rest myself.”
“Wait—Warrior!”
Then, for just a moment—someone rose behind Berserk. Deathbringer, who had trusted Berserk completely and therefore hadn’t been watching the other side carefully, shot to his feet as a matter of course.
“You said you’d watch whether he woke up or not!”
“I said I’d watch. I never said I’d tell you.”
Deathbringer’s trust had been thoroughly betrayed.
With a soft rustle, Daniel pushed aside the white cloth that had been resting over his face and sat up. Right after he woke, Berserk had pressed a hand over his mouth for a while so he wouldn’t cry out; a faint palm print still lingered near his lips.
He didn’t mind. Because she had kept him still, he had been able to listen to the entire conversation without anyone noticing.
And because he had heard that conversation…
“Do you know the extent of the memories the Demon Knight has lost?”
He…
“Are you asking me?”
“Yes.”
“And why exactly do I have to answer that?”
“You will answer.”
“A threat?”
“Who knows.”
Daniel pressed down hard on the heat gathering at the corners of his eyes.
All the thoughts that had drifted through his mind during the forced silence prodded at him one after another. Most of them were things he desperately did not want to admit.
“I lost my parents to a demon that wielded black flames, and through this incident I learned that the Demon Knight carries a demon of black flame.”
And yet there were also things he wanted to admit.
“Please tell me. I believe I have the right to know.”
Things like the desire to believe in the person his little cousin Schutz believed in.
“Did he kill my parents and then play dumb with me?”
Or the desire to hear that he hadn’t been deceived after all.
“Or did he truly not know, and that’s why he said he didn’t?”
Even knowing that the answer would bring him no real comfort.
“…I don’t know that. It’s not like I sat him down and got every last detail of his life story.”
“……”
“But… I do think there’s a good chance he doesn’t know.”
Even so…
“I see.”
Even so, that single scrap of possibility was enough to let him endure.
That was all he needed.
“So that was it.”
Daniel murmured the words emptily. The orphaned resentment inside him settled into a thick, heavy hollowness that pressed down on his shoulders. He wanted to cry. Or scream. Or… or…
“In the end, only he knows the truth.”
“Well… yeah.”
One thing, however, was certain: Daniel now had a reason to meet that man.
“I will keep my mouth shut.”
“…?”
“You don’t want me reporting this to the Order, do you? That’s what I’m offering.”
“…We’d be grateful if you did, but may I ask why?”
“The reason…”
Daniel considered what would happen if he reported this conversation.
Two Great Sages, one Grandmaster Craftsman, and two people without special titles who were still companions of the Proxy—none of them ordinary. Execution might not follow, but serious trouble certainly would. Even the Proxy himself, who hadn’t taken part in this talk, would get dragged into some of the mess. After all, every person he had been traveling with would suddenly look like demon collaborators.
“I don’t want to believe that trusting someone is a mistake.”
But were these people truly in league with a demon? Cheongsanho the Great Sage might be another matter, but the rest of them were simply trying to understand why that man had run away.
Daniel replayed their conversation in his mind. They simply wanted to believe—just as he himself still wanted to place one last hope in that man.
“So… no matter what the Demon Knight’s true nature turns out to be, I will not report this matter.”
Of course, he still had to set a condition. Daniel wrung the last drops of moisture from his dry throat.
“In return, let me come with you. I have to see with my own eyes what becomes of this faith of mine.”
And on a stretch of land where a great serpent crawled in silence—
…Hold on.
Why is that here?
Huh…?
Someone walking alone through the rain lifted their head.