She Entered Alone
Odelli seemed wholly untouched by the miasma.
In the instant everyone held their breath before the unbelievable sight, a faint light spread from her fingertips.
A purifying energy that canceled the miasma. In House Cardel, the energy at its source was called purification power.
Purification was of a different nature from mere healing or blessing. It was not a power borrowed from a god, like divine power, nor a power forcibly drawn out of nature, like mana.
Purification power was a force that restored the world, the way nature itself cleanses. As polluted water flows on and on until at last it runs clear, it was a power that set a defiled world back in its rightful place.
When that power spread from Odelli's body, the thick miasma heaving in a milky haze was driven back little by little in the opposite direction. Her ability was quiet, and overwhelming. Scale by scale the miasma peeled away, then evaporated into the empty air and vanished without a trace. It had been purified.
The air cleared. The oppressive weight that had lain heavy over them faded slowly, like fog. The ends of Odelli's silver hair lifted lightly. She drew a quiet breath with her eyes closed, and the last lingering trace of miasma unraveled from her fingertips and scattered.
Only then did the soldiers, who had been staring as if their souls had left them, begin to come back to themselves one by one.
"Wh-what in the world was that? What did you just do?"
"She only raised her hand, and the miasma withdrew..."
"No—from the very start, it seemed like the miasma was avoiding the young lady."
"So it really is House Cardel. Descendants of the dragon..."
They stirred at her mysterious power, spilling words in which awe, suspicion, and admiration were all tangled together.
Odelli gave no answer. Slowly she closed her trembling fingers into a fist and, quietly, so that no one would see, hid the hand behind her back. Something threatened to surge up inside her, but this much she could bear. She forced it down, swallowed it, and lifted her head again with a calm face, as if nothing had happened.
In the meantime a sense of crisis was slowly spreading through the soldiers.
"That miasma didn't feel like something that had merely leaked out by chance."
"You're right. It wasn't on that level—it had spread. As if something inside had run wild..."
One by one, their expressions hardened.
"If the young lady hadn't suppressed it, this entire force would have been consumed by the miasma."
"I've never seen anything like this. If it's this bad out here, how bad must it be inside..."
"We have to check, right now!"
When the soldiers made to charge into the forest without a plan, Odelli quietly raised a hand and stopped them.
"Stop. Go into the forest and you'll be exposed to the miasma again."
Her voice was firm, and calm.
"I'll go in alone."
"What kind of nonsense is that?"
"I'm not affected by miasma. You saw it plainly enough."
"That may be, but... no. Even so, you can't! There are monsters in the forest!"
"No."
Odelli shook her head.
When the soldiers recoiled and tried to talk her down, she took one more step forward and focused on the presence of the forest. It was uncannily quiet. There was none of the eerie crying peculiar to monsters, nor the heavy, clattering tread of their steps. It was as if no life existed there at all.
"It seems His Highness has already slain every monster in the forest."
When she went on, perfectly calm, the soldiers' faces shifted at last into belated surprise.
"Now that you mention it... we really can't hear the monsters anymore."
"Then where did that miasma from earlier spread from?"
"From the monsters' corpses?"
"But then it shouldn't have pushed all the way outside the forest... Still, if the corpses are piled up like a mountain, I suppose it could."
Listening to them, Odelli narrowed her eyes. A chill ran down her spine. Something was wrong. More precisely, someone was going wrong.
This isn't miasma coming off a dead corpse.
It was still being born, even now. In real time.
Ah. Don't tell me...
She tore quickly through what she remembered of Ludville, and understood a moment too late.
Was his body unable to endure being exposed to miasma that strong in so short a time? There would have been miasma accumulated before this, too. He may have crossed his limit.
Monster blood, monster breath—miasma was mixed into everything that made up a monster. For that reason, it was common sense to leave a proper interval between one subjugation and the next. Lately, though, Ludville had been sweeping through monsters with no interval at all, and doing it alone, drenched in the blood of what must have been hundreds of them.
Ludville couldn't possibly not know that.
Why had he done such a thing? Keep absorbing miasma, and a person was all too likely to lose their humanity by degrees as monsterification advanced. There was no way he didn't know, so why...
...No. Wait.
All at once she recalled the most basic nature of miasma. It was a force that gnawed at human life and, the deeper the addiction, distorted the senses. There was a through-line there with the norvaline cigarettes Ludville smoked as if by habit.
This man... don't tell me.
Had he grown addicted to miasma and come here on purpose to drench himself in monster blood?
Was that why he said that grotesque thing about having to stain his hands with blood at regular intervals?
She ought to have realized it the moment she heard those words!
"...Madman."
Her head went light. Rage surged all the way to the crown of it.
"Pardon?"
Elderick, catching the mutter, briefly looked as though he doubted his own ears. But Odelli was already seized by a blazing fury, blind to everything around her. She mounted her horse and rode into the forest without hesitation. There was no time for anyone to stop her. Before the soldiers could even shout in alarm, she had already vanished into the dark.
A beat late, Elderick swung up onto his horse and tried to follow straight in after her.
But—
Hiiing—!
Terrified, the horse flung its head back, reared onto its hind legs, and scrambled backward. Then it blew a harsh snort, as if swearing it would never set foot inside that forest. When the animal behaved so unlike itself, Elderick tried the whip and tried soothing it, but neither did any good. Even when he seized the reins and twisted in the saddle, the horse stayed planted where it was, like a root.
"...Damn it."
Elderick clenched his teeth and let go of the reins. He leapt down and set a hand to the sword at his hip.
"Dismount! We go in on foot!"
His shout carried through the fierce blizzard. The knights heard him and hesitated for a moment—but only for a moment. Then they checked their weapons in unison.
No one knew exactly what was happening in the forest. The horse's reaction alone was enough to tell them something was badly wrong. Even so, they had to go in. Their lord was in there.
Elderick took the lead, and the soldiers followed.
The forest was silent.
Monster corpses lay strewn across the crushed earth. Their blood was still warm, pooled thick, seeping down between the tree roots.
At the center of it all stood Ludville, miasma pouring from his entire body.
The presence of him as he steadied his breath was clearly human, and yet the energy leaking from that body was no longer wholly a person's. And little by little, it was eating into his very nature.