One Moon, One Month (2)
Word that the Hero and the Saintess party had returned to the little port city of Poret and were now headed straight for Evian reached the city faster than they did.
There were rumors that Viscount Cartein had gone out to greet them in person, and that Bishop Pobi had tagged along, but the truly shocking news was something else entirely.
"Honestly, even the Heavenly God has terrible taste sometimes."
"You madman, don't just say whatever comes out of that hole in your face."
"It's the truth, isn't it? That tiny little shrimp being the Saintess — something about it is off, you have to admit."
"Oh, come on…"
The priestess Vigrind — famous, though in a rather different way than Yona — had officially received ordination as the Saintess. She really was the Saintess. That news spread through Evian like wildfire, shaking the city to its foundations.
Ludwig's astonishing display of prowess had left a deep impression on the adventurers and knights who had gathered to witness it, but that much was no surprise — he had claimed to be the Hero from the very start.
Vigrind, however, had supposedly been appointed by the direct descent of the Heavenly God herself, and such a thing was so wildly implausible that amid murmurs of is it real, could it be true?, a quiet controversy was beginning to smolder: why her, of all people?
"Please don't say such strange things."
Amid the droning back-and-forth of the conversation, Mary set down two mugs of beer. The foam clung precariously to the rims, one breath away from spilling over, and her expression was utterly indifferent.
"Keep that up and the bells will ring for you. The Cathedral Knights are already prowling around with their eyes bulging out over the Hero and the Saintess's arrival."
"Hey, Mary. Honestly, even by your eyes, they don't suit each other — that much is true, right?"
At that, Mary fell silent.
Frankly, the image of a Saintess was one that the First Saintess, Sonia, had all but single-handedly created. An overwhelming bust, so vast it radiated generosity and benevolence at a glance — that chest had come to be regarded, tacitly, as the very symbol of the Saintess herself.
And so it was only natural that the news of Vigrind's appointment would leave everyone with doubts. A Saintess appearing after hundreds of years — and one who looked nothing, nothing, like the image everyone held. Nobody said it aloud, but everyone thought it.
"Still, don't go saying that so carelessly. I'm telling you, they'll ring the bells."
"Aigoo, fine, fine. So is the Catacomb reopening now or what?"
"How should I know? That's for the Hero to decide once he arrives."
Mary shook her head listlessly and turned back toward the reception desk. Wasn't it four adventurers who died last time? If the search parties hadn't brought back their guild plaques, they would have been filed not as casualties but as missing persons.
The news left Mary's head in a tangle.
A long while had passed since the headless knight demon in the Catacombs had been exterminated. On the day the so-called Hero — a Gold-rank spear-carrier — slew it, and the Heavenly God descended in person to appoint a Saintess, the Catacombs had been reopened, designated as a so-called dungeon where adventurers could hunt down the remaining monsters and haul off the spoils.
Then, just recently, the Catacombs had turned on its heel once more.
Not only within its depths — a gray mist had begun to seep outward from the Catacomb entrance into the surrounding land, and that mist kept spreading, wider and wider. So thick was it that anyone who stepped inside couldn't tell up from down, left from right. And those who entered the fog never came out again, vanishing into it for good.
This new calamity was beyond anything Evian could handle. Priests had come out at Viscount Cartein's request to perform consecrations, but the relief lasted only moments before the fog swallowed the ground again. They even attempted to encircle the fogged zone entirely and bless it from every side, but there simply weren't enough priests to ring a territory that vast — and that was no solution either. The adventurers who had swaggered about declaring since when did I ever hoard my life while making money? were dying off one by one.
In the end, the Guild strengthened its watch on the fog zone and even began running search parties on a regular rotation — and still, there was no shortage of fools who defiantly charged in and never came back.
"So what the hell are we supposed to do about this, Mary?"
"I wish I knew… Mr. Emerson, don't you dare think about going in there."
Mary shot a sidelong glance at the archer leaning against the reception desk and answered in a sulky voice. Evian was a place where the joke went around that the city might actually run out of adventurers someday — but that joke might soon become the truth.
"Aigoo… I won't, I won't. If Kayak were still around, who knows. Anybody with the guts and the skill to punch through that fog is lying flat in the ground already."
Emerson answered while picking at his ear with his pinky. At the word lying flat, Mary wondered what on earth he meant and stared at him blankly — whereupon Emerson blew the pea-sized lump of earwax off his finger and replied without a care.
"Lying flat. In that grave of ours."
"…Ugh, you're genuinely disgusting."
Emerson snickered at Mary's grimace. The more she despised it, the more he wanted to do it — but push too far and he might get thrown out, so he held himself back.
"By the way, whatever happened with that goblin mage? Why not at least try what she suggested?"
"You mean Freaky?"
"Yeah, Freaky."
Mary pondered Emerson's words for a moment, then shook her head. Freaky, Alevian's apprentice, was a reasonably capable mage. The only mage who could rival her had been Viola, and Viola had been dragged out of the fog as a corpse just days ago — which effectively made Freaky the most experienced mage left in Evian.
And her proposed solution had been none other than arson. Fog and flame were naturalborn enemies, so why not simply set the entire fog zone ablaze?
It was a tempting proposal — a genuinely plausible one, in fact — and the Guild had gone back and forth on trying it, when out of nowhere the Cathedral shouted its absolute opposition. The Catacombs had always been a relic of the Church, and its contents were all things bound up in the history of the Heavenly God Religion; setting fire to them was simply unthinkable. That logic, infuriatingly, was ironclad — undeniable, unassailable common sense — and so the idea of burning it all down was snuffed out on the spot.
"…Once the Hero and the Saintess arrive, it'll be resolved. Yes. It will be resolved. Let's just wait a little longer."
Mary smacked her lips. For all the adventurers dying off, plenty of new ones were flowing in — but the newcomers were almost all Bronze rank at best. At this rate, the numbers would never balance.
I wonder when Yona unnie and Alec will come back.
They'll come back.
Mary thought this as she sorted through the paperwork. Judging by how long they'd been gone, probably — though in truth she didn't even let herself think they would return. But still.
It was one of those afternoons when she missed Alec and Yona more than usual.
The sky was brilliantly clear — which made the back alleys of Evian, so utterly unlike that weather, seem all the darker.
Crammed tight with houses too rotten and crumbling to deserve even the name of shanties, this back quarter was the slum. People who had lost an arm or a leg somewhere in their adventuring days and could no longer earn their bread. People who had sold their bodies in the brothels and now simply waited out the days until venereal disease killed them. People whose businesses had collapsed utterly and who scraped by, one day to the next, on nothing at all.
In this slum, where the defeated and the swept-away of the world had gathered to live out their days, there was nonetheless something that could charitably be called a meeting hall. It was nothing more than a two-story building with a floor that seemed merely spacious, but it was the kind of place where people gathered whenever charitable work brought visitors into the slum.
Now every window of that meeting hall had been boarded over with thick planks. It proclaimed, outright and without shame, that something suspicious was going on inside — but the people of Evian's sunlit front streets didn't spare a single glance for the doings of this filthy back quarter.
"They say the Hero and the Saintess are coming."
"Mm."
A man with a deep brown hood pulled low spoke, prostrate on the floor. He lay bowed over a round carpet — a ragged thing riddled with cigarette burns, its pile worn threadbare, wretched to look at. And where the man pressed his head, there sat a small, low desk, barely tall enough to sit behind.
"Is that so."
At the man's words, the figure seated at the low desk nodded with a faint murmur. Like the man, this one wore a deep brown hood pulled low, and the voice was so thoroughly androgynous that even its sex was impossible to divine.
The figure raised an arm. From between the folds of an ample robe, an arm as gaunt as dead wood shot out, and slender, twiglike fingers spread open — then traced a star in the empty air.
Not lines of violet, but lines of a deep, blackish red drew a star along the path of those fingers. The star took shape, began to rotate, and from between its turning points a branch stretched out, long and slow.
Clutching that branch — withered and skeletal, as straight and barren as if it had never once tasted water in the depths of a dry winter — the figure slowly rose from its seat.
"This is only the beginning. Only now does it begin."
The branch sank soundlessly into the floor. Frail-looking, the kind of thing that would snap with a crack at the mere touch — yet unlike anything its appearance promised, it bored straight through the building's floor, plunged into the exposed earth below, and burrowed onward without pause.
- Ssskrrrrrk…
Roots spread out from the branch, tunneling through the ground like veins. As though drinking up the moisture and every last nutrient the soil contained, the branch soon began to flush a ruddy, blood-warm color.
"It begins. It begins now."
Like a broken clock, the figure laughed — a sobbing, hitching laugh — from beneath the hood.