Tell Me (9)
“...I'm heavy.”
“It's fine.”
“I mean that carrying me is too much when we need to get there as soon as possible......”
Even with my protest, Mr. Licha refused to back down. Instead he approached me as I stood half-leaning against the tree and dropped to one knee.
“Wha—?”
In an instant my body was pulled onto his shoulder—he yanked from the far side—and Mr. Licha rose. My body went up like a sack of grain before I could blink.
What had begun as a wary “let’s see how this goes” turned into a flustered “Huh? Huh??”
“...You’re heavier than you look, though.”
What do they call this again? Shoulder carry? Manual transport? Military fireman’s haul?
Anyway, it was definitely not a princess carry. I lay draped sideways across his shoulder, breaking out in a cold sweat. If I so much as squirmed—if I tried thrashing to get down—Mr. Licha’s back would give out, so I didn’t dare flap around.
“You looked skinny.”
That’s only because the clothes are cut to my height and hang loose… In reality this body tops a hundred kilos. Probably.
Unless you’re underweight, height alone puts you at ninety, and I have muscle on top of that.
Anyway, the fact that I’m heavy is true. For someone smaller than me to haul me through the mountains is definitely too much.
“Let’s go.”
Yet Mr. Licha never bent his stubbornness to the end, and I was dragged along like that before I knew it. The fate of a man who couldn’t win with words and was too worried about the other fellow’s spine to put up a real fight.
“Cough.”
“...Hang on a little longer.”
Besides, the hardship was Mr. Licha’s problem; for me this wasn’t all that bad. Heat was already climbing through my body and skull, so walking had not been a great idea to begin with.
“......!”
“I killed it, so don’t worry......”
On top of that, this way it was easier to protect him. I hastily skewered a demon that came barreling out of the trees toward us with a mana spear, then coughed up a little blood.
Just let us reach Munmunt like this. I’ll do exactly what the Archmage once did—claim my insides are shaken from overusing mana, swear I absolutely, absolutely cannot fight, and collapse.
Side effects of magic overuse can’t be healed with Holy Power either—more precisely, pouring Holy Power into already-shaken guts only tangles them worse, they said—so there’s nothing to fear.
I firmly resolved to fake the illness and coughed up a bit more blood.
“...A castle.”
After an hour, or two, or perhaps longer, the castle finally appeared.
“A demon?!”
Naturally the guards on the walls were extremely wary. Passing through a forest crawling with demons just the two of us made that inevitable.
“Pull them up first! Interrogate later!”
The only reason we were still allowed up was that single judgment: better to haul us in and question us than leave us outside the walls to die to demons while they fretted over suspicion.
“Don’t move. Move and you die.”
Of course, being lifted onto the wall didn’t lessen the suspicion aimed at us. Mr. Licha and I stood ringed by spear points and were slowly examined.
“...Before the questions, it seems a Demon Energy antidote is needed.”
“Then... thank you.”
What first drew notice in the process was the black veins crawling across Mr. Licha’s skin. One soldier stepped back, then returned with a small pouch.
“Thank you.”
The pouch was passed on the tip of a spear. No water came with it.
“...Water. Shall I give you some.”
“It’s fine. Taking anything out carelessly here would only raise more suspicion.”
That... made sense. I thought of tightly sealed curse jars and decided to keep quiet. Meanwhile Mr. Licha chewed the medicine raw and swallowed it.
“Priest.”
“...For now, I sense nothing.”
“Hmm. Then are they really scouts? Affiliation?”
Once the bare minimum of measures and confirmation—demon or not—was finished, we answered their questions one by one with our hands raised.
The focus stayed mostly on verifying Mr. Licha’s identity, and since he was originally from here the exchange went smoothly.
With solid identity established, the guards’ hostility eased a fraction.
“Then the young man beside him......”
“Make way a moment.”
Someone shoved the soldiers aside and pushed through. Compared to the common troops his gear looked far finer; he had glossy dark-blue hair.
Looked like someone very high-ranking. My instincts roughly gauged his station.
“...Atya?”
Even that failed the moment the unexpected word slipped out.
“...Looks like I really do resemble your nephew.”
“......”
More than that—what kind of person was Atya that even a man who looked every bit a noble knew him? I wondered while simultaneously clutching my arm. It really hurt. About two-thirds of the pain I’d felt back in the cabin.
No—exactly as bad as that pain.
“Mage?”
“Huu......”
“Mage?”
Mr. Licha, still holding his hands up, urgently grabbed me. I had no idea when my own hands had dropped. Everyone around stared at me in alarm. Even that was soon forgotten.
“It hurts......”
Pain like being pounded from head to toe by a pestle wracked me.
What are you doing.
And a laugh reached my ears. Whose laugh was that?
The seal is shaking, brat.
I forgot to keep strength in my body and toppled sideways. In the tilted world a few crushed voices rang out. “Steady—.” My vision hazed over and Mr. Licha warped.
Or else.
And in one corner of that distorted field of view someone took a step.
Have you finally decided to let me out?
The skull of a mountain goat came into view.
Pitch black rushed in.
“Still no sign of them coming today.”
Looking out at the distant scene, the knight Walter muttered. His field of vision was nothing but the desolate Demon Realm and the packs of skeletons drifting across it.
“Maybe they’re gathering more before they move.”
“I wonder if that’s really it.”
Yet their numbers were too few to lament “this is the end,” and too many to feel “we’re safe.”
Too awkward to strike first, too risky to ignore completely.
“To my eye those things are just a binding meant to keep us from moving rashly.”
How long was this bizarre standoff going to last?
Were those damned demon bastards simply stalling for time? Or were they holding their gathered forces in secret for a sudden raid?
Truly, until they came at us there was no way to know the answer.
“...Frustrating.”
“Agreed.”
Of course, if you folded in the intelligence coming from other cities, the answer was probably the former.
Even for demons, that kind of maneuver wasn’t easy. Across the entire eastern front neither humans nor demons had the surplus troops for an all-out charge. Centuries of deadlock proved it.
If either side ever found itself with forces to spare, they would long ago have annihilated the other.
So the pressure they were applying now was ultimately temporary—something possible only because they had suddenly abandoned the southern front and wheeled their troops north one step faster.
It would unravel the moment the human southern armies reached the east.
“Is what they’re really after truly one spot on the eastern front?”
“...What do you mean?”
“I’ve been thinking it feels odd. If they truly meant to hit one place in the east, rather than pressing the whole line and raising everyone’s guard, it would have been far more effective to gather in secret and smash a single city all at once...... Yet they seem to be announcing, ‘We’re going to attack the east, we’re going to attack here, so focus your attention here.’ Don’t they?”
“Hmm......”
Walter had no trouble drawing up tactics for a single battle, but grand strategy that spanned multiple regions was not his gift.
So he turned his sluggish brain for a moment, trying to follow his friend’s meaning.
“When you put it that way it does sound plausible... not entirely strange.”
“You think so too?”
“But after investing this much force on the eastern front, where else would they be aiming?”
“Well... that’s the problem.”
The southern front, thinned out by the reinforcements sent east?
Yet why had the southern front always been held so loosely? Because of that damned desert. A desert where both humans and demons could starve to death for lack of food—that was the greatest barrier to any advance.
“Mmm... maybe they sent the skeletons there? Skeletons can function without eating, can’t they?”
“I’ve thought of that too... but I doubt it. Skeletons still need corpses to be made. To pin us down and still hit the southern front in force they’d need a massive supply of bodies... is that realistic?”
“True......”
“Besides, unlike our side which can be crossed in a day, the southern desert is vast beyond reason... they’d be lucky just to reach the walls.”
And while skeletons need no food, they are demons that must constantly draw Demon Energy from their surroundings to keep moving.
In the heart of the Maryeok where Demon Energy boils thick, fine—but in a desert where the energy grows thinner the farther you go, they would collapse halfway rather than make the crossing.
So not skeletons either.
“Then the north...? No, impossible. That place is the one that will never be breached. The west as well... mountains as harsh as any desert stand in the way. And the Great Temple is there on top of it.”
Yet his friend’s words actually eased Walter’s doubts. There simply was no convenient target anywhere—that was the practical reality.
“In my view... they’re just aiming for the east after all.”
“So it is.”
“And... who knows? Maybe they meant to come for us, but that black thing that appeared the first day stopped them.”
So Walter grinned, deliberately changing the subject.
Something that had dyed the horizon black in an instant. What flashed through his mind was the scene from a few weeks earlier.
“What if that thing turns on us?”
“Ha, if it were going to attack it would have done so already. Besides, what enemy uses that kind of power on its own side instead of the foe? The priests said it wasn’t even a sacrificial rite.”
Of course, even if it wasn’t a sacrifice, it had still been something made of Demon Energy. Every priest who witnessed the sight had shuddered, so that much was certain.
“Whether internal strife broke out or not I don’t know... but I think it was a stroke of luck for us.”
In the end it had done the city no harm. On the contrary it had thinned out their enemies a little. Wasn’t that enough?
“Our junior Guderian coming home only strengthens that opinion.”
The day the horizon had gone black—more precisely, the night after—there had been the remains of a Dullahan laid neatly before the gates.
It was also the body of Guderian, the knight who had died twelve years ago, once the heir of a famous knight house of this very city.
“A trap?”
“Hardly. Every priest rushed out to purify it, and no attack came while they recovered it.”
Who had placed it before the castle no one knew. They had left it under cover of night, so there was not a single witness.
Yet the body of the knight no one had been able to kill and reclaim had returned at just that moment—was that truly coincidence? Right after that pitch-black thing had dyed the desert and slaughtered demons?
“...I don’t like thinking a demon showed that kind of kindness.”
“I’m with you there.”
...It could not have been a demon that returned him. It must not have been.
They had no wish to accept the return of the man they had killed as some gesture of goodwill. The blood and flesh piled between them ran too deep for one show of mercy to wash away.
“But the world has its share of luck without reason, doesn’t it?”
Therefore it was simply luck.
“Or maybe it was drawn by my kindness—hahaha!”
As a certain wheat-haired youth had once told him, the kindness he had shown the knight candidates had returned instead to his junior.
“Kindness, my foot......”
“Come now, the young man who stayed at my house for a while said it with complete sincerity.”
“That young man needs his eyes checked.”
“What nonsense. He was a friend who wore glasses and saw the world clearly.”
“Then he must have taken them off.”
Walter smacked the back of his teasing friend’s head. “Ow! You madman, hitting the helmet—!” He instantly regretted it as well.
“Ah, my mistake. I should have told you that luck would come looking for you too—”
“Revenge, you bastard!”
Regret that arrived a beat too late met the friend’s palm across his own back.
“All knights assemble!!”
“Hm?”
And then news arrived that made them forget everything.
“Support request from Munmunt! A Great Demon has appeared!”
News that erased both the prayers aimed at someone and the possibilities someone else had been tentatively discussing.
“...So what they were after was Munmunt.”
And that news was not delivered to Manahfelt alone.
“Fortunately it hasn’t been long since we turned south. If we head north from now we may still make it in time.”
The Inquisitor stroked the bridge of the nose of the horse the Demon Knight had once ridden and let out a breath.
“...We go at full speed.”
The wheel of coincidence and fate began to turn.