The Purification of the Living

Smith, ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠a subject of the Luciarkenel Kingdom and chief of this village, found his thoughts in a tangle.

One of the villagers had come to report that a company of horsemen — clearly outsiders — had spotted them and then ridden off somewhere.

So it's finally come.

He had always known that some foreign army would attack them one day. Today was that day.

He looked up at the sky. Clouds hung so thick that not a single ray of sunlight could break through.

At first we all thought we'd be killed and put to work as zombies or skeletons.

When the Luciarkenel Kingdom fell, many of its people fled to other regions. But in this age, packing up and heading into some remote place where no one knew your name was no small matter. Merchants and others with money could lodge at inns and take their time. Ordinary folk, though, slept rough as a matter of course. Newcomers from other lands became the easiest prey for criminal gangs, targets for every kind of crime. Those already settled treated them as rivals come to steal their livelihoods and drove them out with every petty cruelty they could invent.

Having lived that reality in their own bodies, most of those who stayed behind had decided that rather than give up everything and die slowly under hardship, they would simply die cleanly and be done with it.

Then the vampires who had toppled Luciarkenel — the ones outsiders came to call the Saryeong Kingdom — responded in a way no one expected.

A measured, almost gentle answer, coming from the mouths of undead who were supposed to hate the living and sow only death. Some still refused to trust them and left. Most, however, reasoned that if the undead had wanted them dead it would have been simple enough — and that the very fact they had bothered to persuade them was worth one chance. So they stayed.

After that, the people's lives went on. What changed was that the sky grew dark and sunlight became hard to come by, and that the labor gap left by those who had fled was filled by skeleton workers. With no merchants arriving from outside, barter between villages flourished. Taxes, aside from a mild drawing of blood, were all but nonexistent. Life was not abundant, but neither was it wanting. Bandits and monsters had vanished, so that a torch alone was enough to travel safely from one village to the next.

They aren't the ordinary undead monsters we know. But whether outsiders will listen to a word we say is another matter entirely.

The chief was still turning it over until his head spun when he heard hurried footsteps outside the door.

"Ch-Chief! They're here!"

"Gather everyone. We are unarmed, and we must show them we have no intention of resisting."

At the villager's report he gave the order, determined to make their lack of hostility plain. He himself joined the others heading for the square, and waited for the punitive force to arrive.

Please… let the commander be a reasonable man…

A short while later, a company of cavalry appeared, clad in clean white armor and in magical plate that looked ready to blaze the moment sunlight touched it.

"We are the Purification Knights of the Medelgard Church. Who is responsible for this village?"

"That would be me, Holy Knight."

The chief stepped forward at the Purification Knight commander's call.

"How is it that you survived the wicked undead?"

For a moment he considered lying — claiming they had been enslaved by the undead. But there was no way to get every story straight now, and a lie would be found out soon enough. He chose honesty.

"Well… a few days after the kingdom fell…"

Even the chief did not know why the undead of the Saryeong Kingdom had spared them, so he stressed that point as he laid out everything that had happened.

"Then there are others like you?"

"Yes. The other villages are made up of living people, just as we are."

"And you still don't know why they let you live."

"That's right. Honestly, we'd like to ask them ourselves why they've treated us this way."

A commander from one of the other territorial forces — traveling with them at the Purification Knight commander's persuasion — began running calculations in his head.

If the people are still alive, there's no need to force a mass migration.

The lords had planned to relocate their own subjects onto empty land. Living commoners already in place meant those plans could be scrapped or sharply reduced. Pleased that he would have good news for his liege — and quietly congratulating himself for having come along — he was still thinking when a Purification Knight who had been scouting the area came running back with the face of a man who had just witnessed the world's every sin.

"Commander! You need to see this!"

The chief and the villagers felt a cold premonition that something was going terribly wrong.

The commander followed where his subordinate led. There, inside a storehouse, they found skeleton laborers at work.

"Undead!"

"Unholy abominations!"

The commander and the knights around him drew their swords — yet the skeletons showed none of the hatred the living expected. They simply stared blankly in one direction.

"What are these things?!"

"Th-this… when the able-bodied among the villagers fled…"

The chief explained. Young, strong residents had trusted their youth and their bodies and escaped, leaving the village short of hands and groaning under the work. A vampire of the Saryeong Kingdom had come, seen their hardship, and lent them undead laborers free of charge. At first the villagers had recoiled. Then they discovered that a single skeleton — which neither ate, nor fought, nor slept — could easily handle the work of four men, and convenience won out.

The Purification Knights took a very different view.

"Even submitting to foul undead is already a sin! And you put the dead to work as field hands?! How are you any different from wicked necromancers?!"

"W-wait, my lords, there's been a misunderstanding—"

"Silence!"

"Gah—!"

The commander's blade cut the chief down in a single stroke before he could finish his plea.

"Kill them all! They are thralls of filthy necromancers, and they have committed the Crime of Colluding with Otherworlders!"

"Aaaaaah!"

"Please, spare us!!"

At their commander's order, the Purification Knights began slaughtering every soul in the village.

"W-wait! There's no need to kill them — we could put them to work as laborers—!"

"No! These are foul creatures who fell for the wiles of the undead, and of otherworlders beyond them! If we do not purify them, their filth will spread to other subjects as well!"

The territorial commander, who had been full of plans to put the villagers to work, stared in shock at the sudden massacre.

The commander led his knights from the front as they butchered the villagers.

This is hell…

As the blade took him and he died, the chief felt lament rise before pain at the sight of his people being massacred.

We… we only tried to live…

Men who howled the name of their god were slaughtering them without a shred of guilt, for no reason but that they had accepted the Saryeong Kingdom's help. When the knights gathered the chief and every remaining villager and began a cremation they called "purification," what he felt as the flames took his body was not heat so much as the cold in the Purification Knights' eyes — eyes that looked at them as filthy refuse. Then consciousness left him.

"Purify every colluder with otherworlders in this region! That is the duty of every faithful of the Dawn!"

"…What did you say?"

Sirin, knight of the queen, waiting for the expeditionary force, received news from her scouts that was almost impossible to believe.

The expedition had detached separate units and was massacring and burning the villages along its line of march.

"What in the world are they doing? Are those people not human like the rest of us?"

"What is going on out there?"

The vampires had assumed that, as fellow humans, the invaders would at least stop short of killing the living, and so had made no special preparations. Now came word not of mere plunder, but of entire villages put to the torch. They could not hide their dismay.

"We move."

"My lady?"

"We evacuate the subjects near the line of advance."

"She's right. There's no need for us to go out ourselves—"

The vampires serving as her aides insisted there was no reason for their own forces to stir.

"Whatever the cause, those people are subjects of our kingdom. And I am a knight and a commander sworn to defend that kingdom. I will not stand by and force suffering on them."

"But if we do that, the magic circles will have to be moved as well…"

"I am not saying we march straight into a clash. We establish the circles at a distance of a day or two."

"The formations may not activate properly. Even if they do, they could be unstable — there's no telling what side effects might follow."

"Then we account for that."

With that, Sirin closed her mouth. Through the helm that fully hid her face, the vampires felt the steel in her gaze and understood that her will would not be broken.

"It can't be helped, then."

"Even if something goes wrong, with Lady Sirin's power it shouldn't become a serious problem."

So the undead army chose to leave ground easy to defend, in order to protect the kingdom's people. In her former world she had been the queen's sword and the kingdom's guardian. In this other dimension, among other subjects, she still cast aside her own advantageous position for the sake of those she was sworn to shield.

"Nngh…"

"This is bad. They even killed the children."

Passing near one of the villages along the line of march, Lillian's party came upon the aftermath of a "purification" that had left no one alive — old or young. A groan escaped them.

"There was a pregnant woman…"

"Ulp—! Ugh—!"

At someone's muttered words, Kaisent could no longer hold back the nausea. He bolted for a corner.

"Hrrk! Hrk!"

It was not the first massacre he had seen, and he had witnessed cruelties worse than this. But those had all been the work of things called "monsters" — irrational beings that treated humans as prey. In the natural world that was a kind of food chain, a law of the ecosystem. This slaughter had nothing to do with any such law. It was humans killing humans. That was why the shock hit Kaisent so hard — and harder still because it was pure human malice, undiluted by anything else.

"……"

Yet the one more shaken than Kaisent was Lillian herself. Once, perhaps, it would have been different. Now that she had resolved to rebuild the kingdom, the sight of her people massacred like this set her hands and feet trembling.

From what she had heard, the Purification Knights had slaughtered them for accepting the rule of the Saryeong Kingdom — for being traitors to humanity who had committed the Crime of Colluding with Otherworlders. It was only a few hundred now. If the war ended in the expedition's victory, this massacre would spread across the entire kingdom.

"Lillian…"

"……"

Priscilla ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠did not know how to respond. She could only speak Lillian's name; she had no comfort to offer. She herself was still reeling from the shock.

"What a nuisance."

"It truly has become a nuisance."

Lilith and Arty spoke up, almost grumbling, at the sight of the three of them so stricken. If the ones who had carried out the massacre had been the enemy, they could have burned with rage and fought. The tragedy was that it had been done by their own side — and by the Purification Knights, who wielded enormous influence within the Medelgard Church. Lillian, a junior commander with barely two hundred troops under her, could not even open her mouth in protest.

A woman set on rebuilding a kingdom was about to be crushed by an impossible dilemma. Victory in the war was the only way to secure the territory that would serve as a foundation for that rebuilding. But victory would mean massacres like this one sweeping the whole kingdom.

What… am I supposed to do…

In truth, Lillian's will to lead her subordinates well and earn distinction had already gone out completely. She was not alone. Priscilla and Kaisent had lost their fighting spirit as well.

Meanwhile, Akina had summoned the Purification Knight commander responsible for the slaughter of the surrounding villages.

"Give me one reason I should ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠not put you to the question."

"I do not understand why Lady Akina reacts this way. They were criminals who committed the Crime of Colluding with Otherworlders."

"Judging that is not your place. It is ours."

"The Church also holds authority in such matters."

"And who do you imagine granted that authority?"

She wanted nothing more than to punish the Purification Knights — for breaking formation at will, for staging a massacre — under charges of insubordination and whatever else she could hang on them.

"Then may we simply return as we are? I expect His Majesty King Halot will find our reasons for withdrawing most interesting."

But the king had paid a "donation" to bring them in. Punish them over something like this, send them home, and every consequence of the backlash would fall on Akina's head.

"Now that we have confirmed people are living in these lands, His Majesty — who planned this expedition — will decide their disposition. Or do you believe the decisions of your Medelgard Church stand above His Majesty's judgment?"

Akina might look like a simple, straightforward knight, but she was a full-fledged lord with hard political experience behind her. She pressed the point that the people were the king's "property," and that their fate therefore belonged to the man who would rule these lands.

The commander, who had been leaning on the king's name to apply pressure, found his mouth shut when Akina leaned on that same name and struck back.

She's more politically adept than her reputation suggests. I had best watch my tongue.

However much the king had all but invited them in, that did not place them above the king. If word spread that they had acted in disregard of royal authority — that the Medelgard Church had slighted the king — the Church itself would suffer for it.

"You are to play the most critical role in the war against the Saryeong Kingdom. Until then, I forbid any further impulsive actions of this kind. If you have objections to my strategy, speak them now."

"…Understood. Until that time, the Purification Knights will conserve their strength."

When she followed with a justification, as supreme commander, that the king himself would endorse, the Purification Knight commander had no choice but to fall silent. From the king's point of view, if a core force hired at enormous expense ran wild and then failed to fight properly when it mattered, it would be enough to make him clutch the back of his neck.

It is a pity we could not purify more of them — but it does not matter. Once it becomes known that these people accepted the Saryeong Kingdom's rule and, without leave, took up otherworlder arts, the result will be the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠same.

Democracy made it hard to adopt otherworlder techniques freely, yet not every technique they possessed was dangerous. Many of the weapons of war themselves were the fruit of otherworlder craft. The Saryeong Kingdom, however, was known as a nation of evil. Once it came out that its subjects had worked undead laborers under that rule, purifying this tainted land would follow as a matter of course.

"Haaah."

Having dismissed the knight commander, Akina started to order someone summoned — then decided, if only to work off a little of the frustration while she moved, to go and find them herself.