66. A Beaming School Trip
66. A Beaming School Trip
"Whoa, whoa—dropping your guard? That arm's gonna break."
"Aagh!"
"Ehehe. Listen to me. If you'd just dropped your guard and passed out clean, we'd both be happy, yeah? Right?"
"S...save me!"
"The way you talk, anyone'd think I'm a murderer. Let's just do this nice and smooth—pass out already, come on."
The moment I appeared, the cultists fell into collective chaos.
They stared at me as if to say, “What the hell are you doing here?” So I kicked one cultist hard and launched into battle.
As soon as I showed up, the Archbishop, who'd been looking smug just moments before, instantly turned pale and started calculating his escape route.
But as if his feet were frozen to the spot by sheer terror, he couldn't lift them from that place.
"You damn bitch...!!"
"What're you on about, you cult freak. I'm a man."
If he’d mistaken me for a woman, he must’ve been high out of his mind.
Ignoring the crossbow bolts in my back and the cultists trying to stop me, I barreled through them like an American football player and took the Archbishop down in a touchdown.
The Archbishop, pinned under me, tried to attack right away, but as if his mana had run bone-dry, all he could do was flail helplessly.
"Aaaagh!!! You trashy bitch!!! You damn fox-faced whore!!! I'll curse you!!!"
"Not bitch—bastard! And I've got wolf features, not fox!"
Seemed like he'd fried his brain on drugs, no question.
That was exactly why drugs were terrifying.
Sensing his end, the Archbishop stopped thrashing and murmured with his eyes closed as if resigned.
"Our god shall—"
Crunch.
I snapped his neck just like that.
From long experience, I'd learned that the most dangerous moment was when a cultist's lips uttered the word "god."
Fortunately, maybe because I'd dealt with him before he could finish, nothing happened.
An anticlimactic end for an Archbishop, but the easier the better.
I tossed what had been the Archbishop aside and began thinning out the remaining cultists one by one. Then the door to the room where Pia had been opened, and she joined the fight.
"Hey! Hi! Where's Zeke?"
"Why are you here, Allen?"
"That's for later. No chatting during cleanup!"
"Ah, fine. Zeke, please."
At her command, Zeke revealed himself again and joined the combat—
Crash!
But his battered joints couldn’t support his massive body, and he collapsed on the spot.
"..."
Even the cultists, apparently dumbfounded, stared at the fallen Zeke, frozen in place.
"Man, what am I supposed to do with this mood?"
Only my voice echoed low through the corridor.
*
After that, the battle was completely one-sided.
With the Archbishop dead by Allen's hand and the fanatic army reduced to a disorderly rabble, cleaning them up was no task at all.
"Oh. My. Gosh. The arrows are so scary~"
"Pia. Drop the coy act. I came here after hearing everything from Leon."
"..."
There were slight delays here and there from Pia playing innocent, but in any case, the scene was wrapped up.
Only after the battle had concluded and things had been somewhat tidied up could Pia ask Allen what she'd been curious about all along.
"How did you..."
"How did I find it? I put it into GPS... No, you wouldn’t know what that is. I just teleported here."
"That's not what I was asking."
"Alright, alright. I'll tell you, so put away those threads."
Only after the menacing crimson threads vanished did Allen perch himself on a suitable crate and begin explaining the situation.
"You know I was ordered to turn the train into a tourist attraction, right?"
"Yes, I know."
"On my way back after finishing that report, Leon suddenly started looking for me."
===========
Leon had come looking for Allen right after Pia's signal suddenly vanished from the waters off Duke Karamzin's territory.
Originally, the plan should have ended with her cleaning up the rebels, and then the knights Leon had prepared escorting her back.
But when Pia's signal abruptly disappeared and a report came in that her location was being detected beyond the border, the first thought that came to Leon's mind was to find Allen.
After Leon gave him the shortest possible explanation, Allen scratched his head and answered.
"So, to sum it up: everything Pia’s done until now was part of a five-year master plan; she’s the Empire’s tactical weapon, a Duke; and I, not knowing any of that, went around poking my nose everywhere and threw the whole plan off course. Right?"
"You believe all that?"
"Five years?"
A five-year master plan was entirely plausible to Allen, who’d planned operations on similar scales in his previous life.
"And the reason you're suddenly telling me all this is because things went massively off the rails?"
Nod.
"And the knights move too slowly to get there?"
Nod.
"And since it's beyond the border, sending Calamity Duke would be a declaration of war?"
Nod nod.
"So right now, the most convenient asset you can deploy is me?"
Nod nod nod.
"Go-o-od damn it."
"I'm sorry."
"No need to be sorry. I messed up the board too, so I've got my share of responsibility. But before I head out, let's get one thing crystal clear."
"Name it."
"Don't call me for the next few months. I can barely remember the last time I got to film movies in peace, goddammit. I'm starting to lose track of whether I'm a Hero or a soldier, man."
At Allen's words, a question mark floated up over Leon's head.
Wasn't that event from just a day ago a film shoot?
In the first place, wasn't a Hero a soldier?
There was no shortage of things to pick apart, but this was Allen he was dealing with.
Trying to persuade him with logic was a fool's errand.
"You don't need to say that. Once this matter is settled, the Empire will be at peace not just for months but for years, so don't worry."
"Make sure you keep that promise."
With those words, Allen placed himself in the teleportation circle.
By the time he'd shaken off the teleport sickness and surveyed his surroundings, he was above the cultists' underground lair.
===========
"...So that's how it went. As soon as I got here, I sensed your signal below and the cultists' presence right under it, so I punched through the ceiling and came down."
"But this is about 10 meters underground."
"Ta-da~"
When Allen cheerfully produced a bundle of dynamite, Pia immediately understood.
Allen tossed the bundle of dynamite into a corner and sent her up through the exit (the hole in the ceiling).
By the time the two reached the surface, dawn had already broken outside.
"Let's wait here. No point wandering around some weird place and missing the knights."
Bringing knights across the border would take time, but it was better than wandering around and having things get tangled up one more time.
As Allen sat beside her counting stars in the sky, her head came to rest against his shoulder.
"Tired?"
"Yes... a little."
"...Want a lap pillow?"
"Huh?"
"I used to give you one all the time back then. What’s the big deal now?"
"No, I mean..."
He ignored her words and placed her head on his thigh.
Ignoring her unspoken question of "Isn't it usually the other way around?", he drifted alone into reminiscence.
"Come to think of it, we had a moment like this before, didn't we."
"It was at my tenth birthday party."
"Was it a young lord or a young lady I planted in the garden back then?"
"One young lord and one young lady."
The moment Allen spotted the noble children who’d been ignoring Pia because she was an illegitimate daughter, he planted them in the garden. It was a memory worth remembering.
'Maybe it started from then.'
Pia had that thought for a moment, but shook her head.
No one said the oil poured onto a wildfire was the wildfire itself.
Even before her heart spread into a raging inferno after that party, Allen had already set a fire in her chest.
- Pia! Leon says he's busy today! Let's play house with me!
He'd barged into the room in the detached palace where she'd lived in seclusion and introduced her to the hobby of puppet theater,
- Allen. You might not understand this yet, but a concubine's child—
- Hey, do you know how it feels not to be able to call your bro a bro? Getting all stingy over granting one measly "big brother" title. So petty.
And making Leon, whom she couldn't even have spoken to originally, into her big brother,
- Aren’t you part of the First Prince’s faction? Then why are you protecting her?
- Does a man need a reason to become a knight who protects a princess?
He’d also volunteered to act as her escort when high society ignored her as an illegitimate daughter without succession rights, calling it his romantic ideal.
Once the fire was already burning, it would be absurd to blame the oil poured onto it for starting the blaze.
As she was examining the flame rising within her heart, a question from Allen pulled her out of her reverie.
"Just in case—were you the Puppet Duchess back then too?"
"...I gained the title relatively recently."
"Since when?"
The answer "Since around the time you became John" rose to the tip of her tongue, but she buried it deep in her heart.
The title of Duke was one she was proud of, but it was a title she didn't want to reveal to the man before her.
Because a title that handled people, manipulated them, and even controlled oneself was not exactly something to boast about.
Rather, from Allen's perspective, it was the sort of title he'd have every right to find disquieting.
Watching her mumble and hesitate, Allen pinched her earlobe.
"Eek!"
"If you don't want to say it, let it be. I was just curious."
As Allen tidied her matted hair, the cozy sensation made her eyelids start drooping heavily.
Then, remembering the conversation they'd been having just before, she came back to her senses.
"Allen, don't you find me... disquieting?"
"Disquieting? What about?"
"My abilities, or my... history, I suppose..."
"Nah. There's nothing to find disquieting."
"But you said you dislike most archmages because they are mentally unstable..."
Pia had at least the self-awareness that she wasn't entirely right in the head either.
And Allen disliked archmages who weren't right in the head, like Duke Karamzin.
Therefore, he would dislike her.
Under that logic, she quietly glanced at Allen for his reaction.
But Allen was completely unperturbed.
He was even playing with her, fiddling with that very archmage's hair and earlobes.
"I know you're not like that."
"?"
"The Pia I've seen up till now is a gentle, adorable girl. If it were an archmage I'd never met, I'd be afraid, but I'm not so full of prejudice that I'd deny what I've seen. Ah, though Calamity Duke still scares me."
Ignoring the last remark, she placed a hand over her fiercely pounding heart.
Gentle and adorable.
With just those words, the anxiety she'd been carrying melted away like snow.
"Um... could you say that again...?"
"That you're gentle and adorable?"
"Heuheuheu..."
They remained like that, with her head in his lap, until the knights arrived.
.
.
.
"Hey, but aren't you stronger than me?"
"..."
"But the way you moved in the fight earlier didn't look like it. Did you get hurt somewhere?"
"...I sprained my wrist right after the teleport."
"Well, can't be helped then."
As if to hide her expression from the readily accepting Allen, she buried her face in his thigh.
The fact that she went around with Zeke, and that her movements had been sluggish after Allen arrived—
The Puppet Duchess couldn’t admit, even under torture, that she’d kept Zeke with her and moved sluggishly after Allen arrived because she liked feeling protected.
The mastermind behind all this commotion, the Empire's last weapon,
was a girl in the bloom of her twenties.