Regression
Las of Wrath.
She found the bloodbath unfolding right before her eyes utterly delightful.
Two naked knights.
And not just any knights—men who had once called each other friends, now locked in a desperate fight for survival with weapons in hand.
But the way the two men dawdled and hesitated only stoked Las’s wrath.
“If you don’t start fighting properly right now, both of you will die horribly! I’ll castrate you and shove it down your throats until you choke! Skinning you alive sounds good too!”
Tak—.
Las flipped an hourglass that measured roughly five minutes and set it before her.
“Five minutes. Only one of you gets to walk out alive.”
That was the reason she had once been known as the Hourglass Witch during her time in Walpurgis.
She loved placing hourglasses and driving people to the brink with torture and pressure.
“Tristan! You fucking bastard! What the hell is that knife?!”
“Loras! I—I had no choice! It’s your fault for waking up late!”
Loras and Tristan.
Two men who had raced through forests and hills together since childhood now stood facing each other.
Club in hand, Loras felt the world spin as he stared at Tristan’s dagger.
“You son of a bitch, Tristan. Every single time I asked which weapon was better—dagger or club—you always said the club! You fucking bastard!”
“But you always said the dagger was better! And right now I agree with you!”
Flash—.
The blade in Tristan’s grip reflected the torchlight with an eerie gleam.
Whether Tristan held a dagger or not, Loras was still confident he could win.
After all, he had been the foremost knight of the entire Agarpe house.
“Hahah—.”
Yet for some reason Loras kept bursting into laughter he couldn’t control, making it impossible to steady his breathing.
And after snacking on castor seeds these past few days, his stomach churned, dizziness washed over him, and Tristan’s face doubled in a hallucination.
This fucking… it was all a trap. Hyde’s doing, that bastard. He was in cahoots with these witches from the start. Yeah, that explains everything. Even this laughter—is it some kind of curse…?!
Thinking was supposed to be the domain of the theology scholar Selim.
But Loras considered himself every bit as clever.
I just have to survive somehow and rip that bastard Hyde’s mask off. Then the marriage will be null and void, and I can marry Psyche. Marry that bitch Psyche and take the count’s house for myself—
The laughter kept bubbling up.
It was such a pleasant fantasy.
But there was a problem.
Even if I beat Tristan, how do I escape from here? That Las bitch is a real monster. Can I shake her off in this condition?
Right then—
“Loras! Don’t hold it against me!”
Dagger in hand, Tristan charged at Loras with everything he had.
“Tristan, you son of a bitch!”
Loras swung the club with all his strength. A sickening crack rang out as Tristan’s shoulder shattered.
He had aimed for the head, but the trajectory had drifted just slightly.
Still, it should have been a fatal blow.
“Loras!!! Die!!!!”
Yet Tristan, blood rushing to his head, felt no pain at all and drove the dagger straight into Loras’s gut.
“Guaaagh!”
Loras felt as if his belly had been seared with a branding iron.
A mortal wound among mortal wounds.
This fucking… that’s why I always said the dagger was stronger! You piece-of-shit Tristan! When the hell did you start insisting the club was better, you dog-fucking bastard!
Rage made it impossible for Loras to calm down.
Tristan stabbed wildly into Loras’s belly again and again.
Thrust, thrust-thrust—!
“Loras! You have to die so I can live! Please just let me live! I’ve got parents to take care of and a little sister who still isn’t married! You, on the other hand—your whole family’s dead, so you’re an orphan! You orphan bastard! Crippled orphan bastard!! You’ve got nothing left to be responsible for, so just die already!”
“You fucking bastard, is that how you’ve always seen me?! Tristan, I thought of you as a brother! Cough, gaaaagh!”
Twitch—.
In that moment Tristan’s lower half sprang to rigid attention.
Loras stared in pure horror.
“Wh-what the fuck is that?!”
“I loved you even though you’re a crippled orphan bastard, Loras! You son of a bitch! You’re going to live forever inside me!”
Loras’s mind reeled.
So Tristan was a damned homosexual all along.
The great Loras’s life ends at the hands of this pathetic queer? This empty? No. If I can just survive this—
Loras summoned superhuman strength.
Survival instinct.
And pure wrath at the situation flooded every corner of his mind.
“You fucking homo bastard!”
Loras seized Tristan’s skull in both hands.
He jammed his thumbs into the man’s eyes and squeezed with crushing force.
“Lo-Loras, let go! We’re friends! You dog-fucking—aaaaagh! We’re friends!”
“Die! You homo bastard!”
Crunch, grind, splaaat—.
Tristan’s head burst in Loras’s grip and he died on the spot.
The heretics erupted in cheers.
“We have a winner!”
“He’s hotter than I expected. Wouldn’t it be a waste to castrate him?”
“Idiot, don’t you know the best part is hearing a hot guy scream while he’s being castrated?”
“Haa… haa…”
Clutching the dagger-ripped belly, Loras forced himself upright with that same superhuman strength.
His eyes still burned with fighting spirit. Las of Wrath watched with keen interest.
“Flame dwells in your eyes. Not on the level of this great Las, of course, but I can feel fierce wrath. You were worthy of receiving the Seal of Wrath after all.”
“Seal of Wrath? What the hell are you talking about. Haa, hahah—. Hahaha. I won. Haha.”
“Swear loyalty to me. Kneel and submit to the witches’ council. Do that and I’ll heal your wounds and put you to good use.”
Las of Wrath.
At her words, Loras’s mind held only one thought: survive no matter what.
Whether his strength failed or he chose it himself, he dropped to his knees.
Thud—.
“The Knight of the Smile isn’t much after all.”
“In the face of a Great Sin Seat’s overwhelming power, everything becomes useless.”
“At this rate the Crescent Moon Sisterhood will take all of Durgien!”
The cultist sisters cackled madly.
Loras’s consciousness was fading.
Las licked her lips as she looked at him—then sensed something strange.
Aaaaaaaagh━━───!!!
It was someone’s scream.
It sounded almost like a beast’s roar, yet also like a mournful lament.
Killing intent.
If murderous aura could be given a voice, it would sound exactly like this.
Shff—.
Las rose, log club in hand.
“Seems we have another intruder. Everyone, battle ready!”
At her command the cultist sisters looked at one another.
They moved in perfect unison for a moment—then something appeared before them.
Something bizarre.
It was a woman roughly five feet tall.
She wore a brown robe, yet the graceful lines of her body made her sex unmistakable.
A mask painted with a swirling pattern covered her face.
“Who are you? Are you one of the Sisterhood as well? What’s with that mask?”
Las demanded.
The swirl-masked woman gave no answer. She simply approached Las and reached for both of her hands.
Crrrack—.
“Hoh, you’ve got quite the grip. But flexing strength in front of the great Las?! Don’t you know my grip can crumple a knight’s full plate armor?!”
Las and the swirl-masked woman locked hands and poured power into the contest.
Crunch, crrrrack—.
The sound of bones shattering began to ring out, and Las of Wrath realized something was terribly wrong.
“W-wait—spare m—”
Rippp—. Splaash—!
Las’s towering frame—over seven feet in every direction—was torn cleanly in two. Blood erupted from the sundered body like a fountain, filling the air with a crimson mist.
Could a human body really tear apart like soft cheese?
Every sister present froze for a heartbeat—
Slither—.
When the masked woman, her robe now soaked scarlet by the fountain of blood, turned toward the crowd—
“R-run!”
“Kyaaaaah!”
The women fled in utter panic.
Hell.
The faithful tend to picture that dreadful place in their minds at least once.
In my case, I contemplated its image every single day for various reasons.
As a vow never to end up there—something like that.
And yet.
The hell I had always imagined was unfolding right here.
Women fleeing in every direction.
Pandemonium.
A swirl-masked woman plucking human heads from their necks like turnips from a field.
“Las—”
I spoke the name aloud and felt the world spin.
The one tearing women apart with her bare hands was the true Las of Wrath.
Great Sin Seat Las.
The monster known as the Nightmare of Durgien, who had crushed countless knights like aluminum cans.
“Why is she here?”
She had appeared out of nowhere, but one thing was certain: Las’s wrath had reached the stage of Extreme Rage.
According to my personal theory, Las’s wrath progressed through four stages, and depending on the stage she could go completely insane.
Extreme Rage was the highest of those four.
At this point, there was only one possible way to stop her.
From now on she would continue endless slaughter and destruction.
“Could this be the escape opportunity Oscar mentioned?”
It was far too neatly arranged to be coincidence. I considered the connection between Archibold and Las, then chose flight for the moment.
Stay here and I would be swept up in Las’s wrath and die for certain.
That was an unchangeable truth even for me.
A Great Sin Seat was best regarded as a natural disaster—a typhoon or an earthquake. At least this particular typhoon would wipe out the Crescent Moon Sisterhood for us, which was convenient.
“Galatea! We have to run!”
“Auuu—”
I dragged Galatea—whose intelligence seemed to have regressed to that of an infant—and fled. Getting out of this place as fast as possible was critical.
I hadn’t witnessed Loras’s death with my own eyes, but every other objective had been achieved, so there was nothing left to hesitate over.
Loras would never survive a rampaging Las either.
“Ah… child—”
Then Galatea seized my hand and pulled me somewhere.
What did “ah… child” mean?
The problem was that even with her mind reduced to an infant’s, her strength remained formidable.
I was dragged helplessly along—and a strange scene appeared before me.
“Sir Loras! Run! I’ll save you!”
A child.
A boy who did not belong in this vision of hell was tugging desperately at Loras’s arm.
Paulo, the apprentice gardener of House Agarpe.
Even with her mind shattered, Galatea had reacted to the child’s voice.
“That little shit… didn’t he leave with the soldiers? Loras, that bastard’s still alive too. What a stubbornly long life.”
“Child… must save…”
Galatea reached toward Paulo.
The worst part was that Las—her brown robe now completely dyed red from slaughtering people—was coming this way.
A hair-trigger situation.
This moment.
Right now—
—what the hell was I supposed to do?
If Las kept coming, Loras would die.
“Sir Loras! Hurry and run! Hurry!”
And Paulo would die too, of course.
“Child… must save the child…”
Galatea seemed unwilling to leave the boy behind.
The Knight of Divine Punishment, Galatea, had apparently been a truly righteous knight of a type I had never seen before.
At last she dashed to Paulo and took the child’s hand.
“…Run. Run… child.”
“Y-you! I don’t know who you are, but please help Sir Loras!”
At this rate Galatea would die to Las as well.
In that case I could simply run away alone from this corner where I was hiding.
If I ran alone, every problem would be solved.
Was there ever a simpler answer?
Truth was originally something so simple even a child could understand it.
Yet if I fled here, I felt as though everything would end on one side of the scale.
How could I call myself a true man of faith if I ran from injustice?
The boy Paulo and Galatea were innocent.
That fact drove me mad.
I felt as if my brain were splitting and my soul were tearing apart.
There was only one way to stop Las when she was this far gone with rage.
And I was the only person present who knew that method.
“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa━─!!!!”
Why did the person who had to do that insane thing have to be me?
It was so unfair and infuriating that I truly could not endure it.
My guts felt twisted; my brain boiled until molten blood seemed ready to burst from my eyes.
But there really was no other way.
Shff—.
I pulled the iron mask from the bag I had brought.
I had forged this mask the way Goujian once chewed bile to steel his resolve—so that I would never again stray down the wrong path.
A symbol of my sin and humiliation that I had made to steel my heart every single day.
—My own little hell.
“Ah, whatever! I’ll just say a big repentance prayer before bed!”
I put it on.