Does It Have Meaning? (2)
"Enough. Enough with the explanations. I already know how much you like that guy."
"Awww..."
"Who the hell did this kid take after to turn out so ridiculous?"
Rain lashed against my body without pause. The owner of the voice, thoroughly disgusted by Sangun's endless praise of me, ordered him to stop. Beneath those words lay a clear undercurrent of dislike directed squarely at me.
How that dislike landed on me was one thing; the command itself was something I fully agreed with. Sangun's compliments were embarrassing for me as well.
"Aw, why's he gotta be like that?"
"You're not seriously asking because you don't know, are you?"
But who exactly was the owner of that voice? Judging by the way Sangun deferred to him, he couldn't be anyone of low rank...
I tried to gauge the speaker's position from the sense of distance in the voice. He didn't seem far. Even with the darkness acting as a veil, I should have been able to make out at least a faint outline, shouldn't I?
"...Forget it. You're not the only one who thinks well of him."
Yet all my eyes found was Sangun's slick white body. Nothing else. Puzzling.
"It's not like I have no concerns... but we'll set them aside for now."
Ah. Or was this being capable of melting into the empty air the same way Sangun could...?
With that assumption in mind, I turned my attention back to the conversation I had missed.
He would set it aside for now. The decision to tolerate me despite finding me unpleasant turned over twice in my mind. Whatever my feelings on the matter, it wasn't a bad conclusion.
"That's right, that's right. You can really trust the Knight, y'know."
"You wouldn't say that if you knew what he's done."
"Huh?"
"Drop it. We already decided to move past it."
Still, the more I listened, the more it felt like this person already knew me. Not intimately, perhaps, but as if he had been aware of my existence before...
"...Do you know me?"
I exhaled a breath that was both cold and hot, searching my memory. When had I ever crossed paths with someone who spoke like this?
But within the range of anything I could recall, there was nothing. He was a stranger to me. So how did he know me?
...Could he actually have been connected to the real Demon Knight?
"Looks like you don't remember me... Well, I suppose that makes sense. The state I'm in now is a far cry from back then."
I had asked on a faint hope, and the answer that came back inflated that hope a little further. My chest hammered as if I'd stumbled onto unexpected good fortune—not confirmed, but still... No. It was beating slower than usual, a heavy, deliberate thud.
"Oho. You two have met before?"
"Yeah."
"When the heck?"
"Not long ago. A few days back, when you were being a softhearted fool. We crossed paths in that city that was collapsing in real time."
"...Huh?"
But the stage of that story, no matter how I turned it over, could only have been Bemyurhen. My hopes shattered in an instant, leaving nothing but a hollow ache in my gut. The muscles that had been taut with tension went slack and cold.
"Thanks to that guy my other half stopped his evil deeds, and this body that was being used as a puppet was freed... but I never expected him to just snatch the whole thing and run off with it. Ah, right. Perfect timing. Any chance you'd give me my old body back?"
I only remained caught in that emptiness for a moment. His words sparked a new set of questions.
His other half's evil deeds? The liberation of a puppet body? Running off with it?
No—setting all that aside, what exactly was this "old body"...?
I forced my dulled mind to work through what he had said.
Everything I remembered from Bemyurhen boiled down to two events: fighting the lava demon, and waking up to find myself about to be executed. Neither of those had any connection to the picture he was painting... Ah. Wait.
"I don't remember."
"You don't want to give it back?"
I shook the rainwater from my eyelashes and added,
"I mean exactly what I said."
Not that the clarification changed much.
Perhaps I had been playing the unfriendly, curt concept for too long. Even the added words came out as a short answer that forced the listener to dig for deeper meaning.
At this rate, communication was going to be a problem once I got home.
"...Does that have something to do with the core of Demon Energy inside you?"
The silver lining, if there was one, was that the other party was fairly sharp.
Before I could even add the explanation that I hadn't been the one to do it, he understood the intent and returned a matching question. I blinked again, trying to clear the wet lashes.
"...Yes."
"Then I won't be getting my power back."
"...You had your power taken?"
"From my perspective it's roughly the same. If you want to say the victor simply claimed his rightful spoils, I don't have much of an argument."
More than that, who was this person really? From the story alone, it sounded as if something—his body or his power—had been stolen at the moment a demon was controlling my flesh in my place...
Was the reason I couldn't see him because his body had been taken? But could someone survive after losing their body? Or, since he said "old body," did that mean he had a new one?
And before any of that—how strong must he have been if a demon went out of its way to steal his power? How had someone with that kind of strength never been witnessed?
Where had the demon stashed what it stole?
"If I can't get it back, so be it."
The questions only piled higher the more I heard, tangling my thoughts. A sentence carrying a faint sigh and resignation slid into my ears next. Through the distorted roar of the rain, the words spread thickly; I had to turn them over three times before they sank in.
"...You give up easily."
"Obsessing over what's already lost only makes you look pathetic. And it wasn't as if the process of losing it was free of my own fault."
Surprisingly, he seemed to feel little regret over not recovering his power. Unexpected. Given how unpleasant he found me, I had assumed this would sour his mood as well.
"If you've got nothing more to say, let's go."
"Aww. You two done talkin'?"
"Yeah. Why, you still got something left?"
"Oh, I got a few things I wanna say, sure."
Of course, the fact that he hadn't tried to pin responsibility on me simply because we shared the same flesh was something to be grateful for. If he had pushed that kind of unreasonable demand, I would have been in real trouble.
"Like why the Knight's here, where he's headed, why he's wanderin' around leavin' all his companions behind... stuff like that."
"You've got plenty of questions, huh. Do what you want. It's not like I can go alone anyway."
"Heheh."
Anyway—did that mean this being no longer had any business with me? I still had plenty I wanted to ask him.
I almost reached out to stop him from withdrawing from the conversation, then thought better of it, conscious of Sangun's presence, and took a step back.
Sangun probably wouldn't try to cave my skull in just because I acted a little strange... but you never knew. I didn't need to roleplay as tightly as I did with the Hero's party, but keeping at least the minimum of the concept was safer.
"Well then, Knight—why're you here...?"
Honestly, it was like a scarlet letter all its own. Because of the concept, everything I wanted to do got blocked, and even the simple roads had to be taken the long way around...
"Knight?"
Huh? Right. Sangun had been talking.
I reflected that I had gotten too lost in my own thoughts—strange; I hadn't been that deeply absorbed—and shifted my focus. The white snake I looked at with stiff eyes had outlines that seemed a little blurred.
"I'm listening."
"Ah, right. Yes. So why'd you come here? Me, I'm headin' back to the Great Forest, but ain't you supposed to be goin' north?"
At least I could still hear the voice. After replaying the mashed sounds a few times, I finally grasped the full sentence.
"That is..."
But what was I supposed to say to that? Sangun didn't know my concept in fine detail, but he at least roughly understood I was a maniac obsessed with hunting demons.
Just bury the fact that I had fled Bemyurhen? When someone who knew about the Bemyurhen incident was right here beside me?
"That is..."
...Still, hedging completely would be better. If I said goodbye right after, even if he sensed something off, he wouldn't be able to press me on it.
"That is...?"
So.
"..."
I worked my throat, which for some reason had gone dry even in the rain. No sound came out. In that brief moment my vision blurred further until I could see two Sanguns.
"...Knight?"
...Wait. Seeing an object—well, not an object, but a target—split into two wasn't normal, was it?
"Huh?"
Beyond Sangun dividing into two, the world itself tilted. I wondered why it was spinning. The world wasn't supposed to spin. What the hell? Why was the world... ah.
Was the problem me?
"Oh nooo! The Knight's dyin'!!"
I closed my eyelids on Sangun's booming voice.
I had thought the tinnitus was unusually bad today, but that hadn't been the real issue.
That was the last thought I had.
"W-what do we do?!"
Sangun barely managed to catch the collapsing figure, then cried out in utter panic.
The coils he had wrapped protectively around the other transmitted a body heat that was both cold and burning hot. It was nothing like the temperature of the humans he knew.
"H-he's gonna die like this!"
If he had feet, he would have been stamping them into the earth and laying the ground to waste by now. But Sangun had no feet, and the tail he did have was already being used to cradle the other. For that reason alone, he succeeded in leaving the surroundings perfectly intact.
"Dead?"
"Ancestor!!"
"Nope."
Unlike the frantic Sangun, Yukgui only clicked his tongue. Wouldn't the world have been better off if the man had simply died? The cold calculation came as a free bonus.
"Why are you making such a fuss? It's just one human collapsing—and one that houses a demon, at that."
But was that thought truly nothing but cold?
Yukgui crawled laboriously along Sangun's body until he reached a vantage where he could look down at the fallen human. The first thing he saw was a face so pale it had gone bluish.
"Huh? A demon?"
"So you really didn't know."
Yet what rose first was not pity but fear. It couldn't be helped. On the surface it looked like little more than a vessel carrying a bit of Demon Energy; in truth it was a vessel that held a Great Demon.
"What's inside him is a Great Demon."
"Whaaaat?!"
How a Great Demon had come to parasitize a human body, Yukgui did not know. Why the human was still in control instead of being completely pushed out, he also did not know.
"...How about we kill him now?"
"A-Ancestor?"
What he did know was only one thing: the power that Great Demon would display when it woke.
"An already strong demon swallowed my other half and my body as well. It monopolized the full power that Heugsa and I once held."
...For now, he knew that thanks to this one's intervention, the corrupted Heugsa had died before he could cause greater havoc. And if not for this one's fire, the body that had become a nest for demons and been defiled would have gone on inflicting every possible nuisance on the surroundings.
So, in that sense, one could say he owed this being a small debt.
"Can you even imagine it? How strong a Great Demon that has completely swallowed the power of an Ancient Beast will become?"
But did that mean he truly needed to feel gratitude toward it?
If he had not clung desperately to a human body, he himself might have burned away along with his own shell by now. And even if Heugsa's betrayal had already stripped him of everything, the power that had originally been his had still been torn away completely.
It was like this: a man permanently crippled when an accident broke his legs, yet because of that he was never dragged off to war. Should that man be grateful to the accident that broke his legs, or not?
"I understand that the western dragon and you both think well of this human. But that's one thing, and this is another."
The answer would be "no."
"Besides, that human... he probably ran all the way here because he didn't want to die..."
"What? He ran 'cause he didn't want to die?"
"While we were in that tent, I heard the humans talking about executing him. And then that human vanished without a word in the middle of the night. So of course he ran because he didn't want to die, right?"
"Well, usually that's how it goes..."
And so Yukgui urged Sangun. The urging was never based on personal grudge—that this one had nearly driven him to death, or that it had killed his other half even if that half had been corrupted. It was based on the conviction that this would be better for the world.
"...Do we really have to?"
But after hearing everything, Sangun only fidgeted and quietly offered his own opinion.
"...Is it too much of my own greed?"
If he had shouted a flat refusal, that would have been one thing. Watching the chatterbox suddenly deflate and mumble so timidly left Yukgui speechless.
"Greed... well, yes..."
"Figures... but I don't wanna do that..."
"..."
Honestly, this one never read the room on ordinary days—why only at times like this...!
Yukgui was thoroughly exasperated, yet in the end he did not press the matter. He might have wanted the human dead, but the one who would actually have to do it—and the one who would have to look after Yukgui's life afterward—was Sangun.
"I don't care. Do as you like."
Well. If the human lived, the ones who would suffer for it were the other humans, not them, so looking the other way was fine. After that shrewd calculation, Yukgui finally gave permission.
Sangun's drooping face brightened in an instant.
"Then let's hurry home! There's a typhoon comin', and we gotta treat the Knight right away!"
It was time to take to the road again.