The Plight of a Civil Servant
"Ugh... what in the world is even going on anymore."
The moment Yona disappeared from sight, Ceres scrunched up her face with all her might and heaved a deep sigh.
She looked so miserable, her hand pressed from forehead to chin, that even watching from the side was uncomfortable. Alec cautiously addressed her.
"Um, Lady Regent? Is something the matter?"
"Is something the matter? Oh, something's the matter, all right."
The answer came without a moment's hesitation, and somehow it was thick with emotion. That sheer force of it kept Alec from daring to press her further.
Not that he needed to—Ceres began muttering to herself, though loud enough that Alec and Kayak standing nearby could hardly fail to hear every word.
"A demon bursting out in the middle of a city, I throw the bishop to him just to catch a little break on my own, I head out for Infula and the dead start running amok—and they don't just run amok, oh no, they wipe out an entire village. And not just any village, but Semek, absolutely flattened. That's what's been going on. All of it. Every last bit. Everything!"
Just as Ceres said, Semek lay in ruins.
The buildings still stood more or less intact, but not a soul could be seen anywhere. There was no barking of dogs or mewing of cats that households might have kept, not even the cries of livestock that should have filled the stables—nothing. With only empty buildings left behind, the village was as good as a ghost town.
A village stripped of every last spark of life, leaving nothing but inanimate stone and timber behind.
If that wasn't a ruin, what was?
Ceres swept her gaze around her, eyes brimming with gloom.
Though night had fallen, the full moon hanging high overhead cast down enough light to make the surroundings easy enough to survey.
As she looked over Semek—so hollow that even a trace of habitation was hard to find—Ceres let out a long sigh and spoke.
"And I'm the one who has to write up the report on ALL of this. If this godforsaken Semek were even a little further toward Infula, the Church Territory would be writing it up! But no, it just HAD to sit close to Carpatia Port, so now the job falls to me. Ha, honestly, I'm losing my mind."
So this is the sorrow of a civil servant, Alec thought, and kept his mouth shut.
It was all talk he could never hope to understand anyway, so there was hardly any need to say anything in return.
"Ugh... anyway, we need to catch the thing and put it down. That goddamn bloodsucking bastard..."
As Ceres grumbled and swore under her breath, Kayak—who had been walking along in silence—asked her a question.
"How is it ye be so certain it be a vampire?"
His axe was missing teeth here and there, its chipped edges hewn away and crudely rehoned into a rough, sharp blade.
Caught in the pale yellow moonlight, that jagged edge glinted all the more sharply, its ragged profile flashing with a keener menace than ever.
Kayak had asked Ceres for her reasoning.
As Scarlet of the Crusade Knights had said, the odds that a mad necromancer was behind all this were extremely low; the culprit, she claimed, was either a vampire or a lich.
And yet Ceres spoke so brazenly of a vampire. Kayak supposed she simply couldn't sense any mana traces—but something about it still struck him as slightly off.
"Because I can't sense any mana traces."
The expected answer.
Kayak pondered something for a moment, then questioned her again.
Whatever else might be said, this was a point he had to press before they went any further.
"We've scarce been out searching at all, and we've only just reached the outskirts of the village. Yet already ye sense no mana traces, and from that alone ye conclude it be a vampire's doing? I confess I don't quite follow."
At Kayak's words, Ceres said nothing, lost in thought for a while.
Kayak quietly waited for her reply, and after a moment, Ceres spoke slowly.
"You can tell just by looking. If there were any kind of trace left, do you think that lunatic... no, pardon me—do you think those Crusade Knights would be standing around doing nothing? If there were going to be an uproar, there already would have been. The damned vampire leaves no trace of anything, which is exactly why we're stuck floundering like this. And on top of that, I can't sense a thing—no mana traces, no miasma, nothing at all."
"A vampire that leaves... no trace whatsoever?"
Alec's question was born of genuine ignorance.
From what he'd heard, a vampire was also a high-ranking demon—so shouldn't it leave some trace, miasma or otherwise?
The complete absence of any evidence simply didn't make sense to him.
"Vampires don't use magic. That's why they leave neither miasma nor mana traces."
"They don't use magic?"
"Because they were human to begin with—never a mage, never a demon."
There once was a monarch.
The ruler of a kingdom whose name had already been forgotten even in legend.
That king harbored a fanatical terror of aging and death, and day after day he harried his retainers, demanding they bring him an elixir of immortality.
His kingdom, mighty and vast, bled gold day after day in the grip of the king's pathological fear, buying up every so-called elixir of eternal life the merchants could offer—and with each passing day, the kingdom sank deeper into ruin.
Then one day, a woman came to his kingdom.
When she claimed to have lived a thousand years, the king dismissed her as a lunatic and tried to cast her out.
But the woman proposed a wager to the king.
From that night onward, she would tell him the story of her long life, night after night. And if, after a hundred days had passed, the king still could not believe that she had lived a thousand years, she would gladly die.
The king accepted the wager, and when the hundred days had passed, he had fallen in love with the woman.
And on the final night, the story the woman told the king was this: that no elixir of immortality existed in this world—but that a hidden art which could achieve immortality did.
Following the woman's instructions, the king at once beheaded a thousand of his subjects and gathered their blood.
With that blood, the woman drew an enormous magic circle—and activated it.
His kingdom was home to millions.
The crimson canopy that spread over that kingdom drank down the blood of the people beneath it without mercy.
It drained the life of every living, breathing thing on the land—not just humans—and the canopy that had devoured millions upon millions of lives, far surpassing the first million, transformed the king into something that was human, and yet no longer human at all.
And so his kingdom perished.
A land from which all life had vanished.
In later ages, people came to call that land the Great Desert.
"So in the end, it's human. An abnormally powerful human—a cursed human. It holds tens of millions of lives within it, so it cannot die; far from dying, it cannot even age. A cursed human. That's what we call a vampire. A vampire that could hand out a few thousand false lives to corpses without leaving so much as a smudge of evidence."
"Tens of millions of lives... that's rather horrifying."
Alec shuddered and grimaced.
Classified among the high-ranking demons yet not truly a demon, a being that scatters no miasma and remains within the bounds of humanity—the vampire.
It wasn't so named for drinking blood directly, but because its very origin lay in tens of millions of lives, in that sea of blood.
Whatever the details, it remained a horrifying existence all the same.
*
"Hm?"
Yona, who had been playing clapping games with Rubina, looked up at the person who flung open the carriage door—and flinched, her whole body jerking in surprise.
Scarlet's eyes met hers as well, but the knight promptly pretended not to see, stepped into the carriage, and took a seat.
And of course, it had to be directly across from Yona.
That ramrod-straight posture, that gaze fixed squarely forward.
In other words, a stare aimed straight at Yona.
That stare of Scarlet's was almost unbearable.
"How went the scouting?"
James struck up a friendly conversation with Scarlet.
Truth be told, James hadn't been too pleased with Scarlet either, after how rudely she'd treated Yona.
But they were all in the same boat now, so to speak, and getting along—at least until they reached Infula—couldn't hurt.
"There was no trace of anything, milord. It would seem to be a vampire's doing, but tracking it further from here will be difficult, I fear."
At Scarlet's words, James turned to look at Yona.
Yona met his gaze briefly, then nodded.
Honestly, it was good news as far as they were concerned.
There was no sense in burning time here like this, was there?
Yona had her own errand—a purpose that required her to reach the Wizard Community—and once they arrived at Infula, James would be heading back to his own home anyway.
Misplaced notions of justice and the like meant nothing to them.
They'd ended up moving with the Hero's party by pure happenstance, and it was all for the money.
Saving the world, averting calamity—they couldn't have cared less about any of that.
"Then we return to Infula now?"
"That would be for the best. Several days have passed already, and whatever the culprit may be, tracking it from here will be no easy task. Though after we report to His Holiness, the pursuit will no doubt continue."
Phew.
Yona let out a sigh of relief.
She'd been half afraid the knight would launch into something like, You stand accused of heresy, so I must follow you wherever you go!—thankfully, that wasn't the case.
And right then, the carriage door opened again.
A silver-haired beauty stepped inside, and catching sight of Scarlet already seated there, her eyes went round with surprise.
"Oh, Dame Scarlet was here already?"
"So it happened, milady. We could find no trace of anything, in any case. Are we to wait for the Hero's party alone?"
"Now that you mention it... the Hero and the Saintess haven't returned yet, have they. Perhaps someone should go look for them?"
At that, Yona shot her hand up and rose to her feet.
Rather than sit face-to-face with that walking tin can—Scarlet or whatever her name was—she'd much rather go out and fetch Lud and Vig herself.
"I'll go! So, was there anything outside!?"
"Well, we didn't sense any mana traces or miasma, but still, be careful. You might trip over a rock."
"Th-that's fine, I'll just take this muscle-head with me!"
Yona grabbed Alec's arm and hurried out of the carriage.
Ceres was saying something or other behind her, but not a word of it registered.
"Whew..."
"What? Why me?"
At Alec's curt voice, Yona spun around sharply and glared at him.
"Hey. Were you planning to just send me out there alone?"
Faced with Yona's furious glare, Alec merely grinned back at her.
"As if I would. We're comrades, aren't we? Comrades."
"See? Exactly. Comrades. So you come with me. Right?"
"Kheheheh," Yona cackled, making a strange sound quite unbecoming of her.