Rumel van Holne
Rumel van Holne
She rested her chin on her knees and began to speak. The voice that emerged was damp and soaked with anxiety, yet it flowed without stumbling, as if she had been desperate to tell someone.
Though it wavered and trembled, the words did not stop. Aslan started to pull his hand from her shoulder to listen, but when Rumel turned her wet eyes toward him, he placed it back.
The story she laid out was not a long one.
After parting ways with Aslan, Rumel had set out to clarify the target of her vengeance. Revenge without direction was nothing but a burden on everyone else, so she intended to aim her spearpoint carefully.
And upon reflection, the list turned out to be short.
House Aira.
When it came to who bore the heaviest responsibility and was within immediate reach, the answer was House Aira.
So Rumel drifted through the cities, tracking Baron Aira's whereabouts.
In the process, she crossed the Ashuld Barony—now practically absorbed into the Imperial Demesne—and passed through the Eternal Desert, the Desert Magic Tower, Glanusta, and cities like them.
She eventually learned that House Aira was not in Gerne but in Asan, and she turned her steps there at once.
The journey itself was simple. She paid for supplies in a few villages along the way and kept walking.
The trouble began after she reached Asan.
Rumel van Holne. She was a Master of the Spear and an exceptionally skilled mercenary.
For a mercenary of her caliber, finding a nobleman traveling with a handful of bodyguards was no great challenge, and she soon secured a private audience with Baron Aira, just as she had hoped.
At first, she intended to question him. To demand answers.
Why had he burned Gerne? Why had he slaughtered her entire family?
She had not come to kill.
Aslan could not understand it, but Rumel explained that witnessing his composure had made her renounce murder.
Whatever the reason, Aslan already knew that Baron Aira was dead. Which meant something must have happened to warrant his death.
He assumed the baron must have provoked her, but contrary to his expectations, the calamity seemed to have overtaken her even sooner.
Before Rumel, already sickened by a begging Baron Aira, could pass judgment on his crimes, Tormule appeared.
Tormule drove his spear through Baron Aira, then methodically impaled every member of the household who had witnessed it.
Amid the burst-open chests, the shattered heads, and the spray of bone and viscera, Rumel was a moment too late.
Her spear flashed and met Tormule's. Though he had become a Warrior Monk and his strength had drastically increased, Tormule's only true asset was the Spiral Spear. Against Rumel, who had absorbed the Spiral Spear and every other spear art, he had no chance.
She killed him with an unadorned thrust that tore out his throat and then burst his head.
That was not the problem.
Aslan's expression hardened, and Rumel, seeing it, nodded faintly as if she understood exactly what he was thinking.
"He came back... didn't he?"
"Yes. More precisely... it seemed as if he was resurrected in the body of a Warrior Monk who took up his spear."
A specific image forced its way into Aslan's mind: a Warrior Monk inheriting Tormule's spear and wielding the Spiral Spear.
When the War God bestowed a technique, that technique was erased from the War God's own memory. Aslan recognized it immediately as a clear anomaly.
The original Tormule, who had received the Spiral Spear, was dead—and yet another Warrior Monk had inherited it.
It could not even be dismissed as a form of magic. The War God's nature was to absorb even the Masters of Magic; there was no possibility it had learned such a spell.
What, then, was the truth? Aslan tilted his head, unable to grasp it, and pressed on.
"So... did you flee?"
She shook her head firmly.
"No. I stood and fought."
"If you fought..."
"I killed Tormule. Again and again. But he kept coming back. It took me about twenty kills before I realized something was wrong."
Wrong?
Aslan looked at her as if wondering what could possibly be stranger than what he had already heard, but Rumel seemed caught up in her own account and continued without pause.
"There were too many Warrior Monks."
His eyes widened. Rumel looked at him as if to ask whether he understood now.
"Every one of the more than twenty Tormuls I killed was a Warrior Monk. Warrior Monks who had no weapon of their own, or had grabbed whatever was lying around."
Aslan could not help but feel the wrongness of it now.
Warrior Monks were relatively numerous among the priests, but not so numerous as this.
Even if that could somehow be explained, another question remained.
How had that many Warrior Monks infiltrated this city?
Seeing that Aslan had followed her reasoning, Rumel swallowed and went on.
"So I began killing the Warrior Monks supporting Tormule and pushed forward in the direction they were coming from. Do you know what I found?"
"...What did you find?"
"Civilians. Transforming into Warrior Monks and becoming Tormule's vessels, right there on the spot."
Aslan's face turned rigid, and Rumel's was just as stiff as she fell silent. In the stillness that followed, his thoughts expanded.
The troubled look she had worn earlier. The guardedness. The way she had attacked him even after seeing him from behind.
He finally understood the reason for all of it.
She had been wary because anyone could be the enemy.
The weight of that possibility had clouded her judgment.
Rumel seemed to have reached the same conclusion. She buried her face against her knees in despondency, and Aslan, understanding it too well, could offer no comfort.
The quiet was laced with the faint sound of waves. Rumel spoke again, her voice subdued.
"I don't know how to win."
"...Did you try destroying his weapon? The spear?"
"Yes. But even when I broke it, it became whole again as soon as another Tormule picked it up."
Aslan let out a low hum.
Either it was a weapon that treated destruction as "temporary damage" rather than true annihilation, or it was enchanted with a form of magic that triggered immediate repair.
If it was the latter, something came to mind.
Like the ruin built by Fearless Bolen, it could be done if a soul itself was bound into the spear.
The weapon would restore itself along the grain of the soul. In that case, there was no need to question what soul would be sealed inside.
The real issue was not the possibility.
It was a particular magic—Bolen's unique necromancy, which bound souls to objects and drew power from the netherworld.
Who possessed that magic now?
The War God had absorbed Masters of Magic, but it could not have absorbed Bolen. Bolen had burned entirely, soul and all, in the Twilight Flock's grip.
'Could it be the Flock?'
But why?
Aslan could guess at no reason.
'Is this aimed at me? Do they know I'm gathering Masters? If so...'
He was in the middle of trying to piece together the first thread of a motive when the door at the end of the prison corridor suddenly burst open.
Through it stepped a guard, and behind him, a familiar face.
"You've arrived. I knew you would come."
A woman with long red hair and eyes swirling with green-tinged mana.
Outwardly, she appeared to be in her late twenties or early thirties: the Archmage Anna Heleminus.
Aslan smiled faintly, as if he had been expecting her. Rumel, watching his reaction from the corner of her eye, stiffened.
Anna sighed at the pair's responses and approached.
"I was about to turn back. Lucky I didn't have to. I'll get you out now."
She nodded toward the guard, who looked at Aslan with an unsettled expression before opening the cell door.
The metal screeched as it swung open. Aslan rose to step out.
Before he could, Rumel grabbed his arm and held it against her.
The solid pressure against his arm made him flinch. He turned. Their eyes met, and Rumel gazed steadily into his as she asked,
"...Sir Aslan, who is this woman?"
Her voice was saturated with wariness. She glanced sidelong at Anna, fixing her with a sharp stare.
Anna showed little reaction, as though the mistrust puzzled her. Rumel simply regarded the Archmage through narrowed eyes.
What flickered in that gaze was caution and a sense of crisis. Aslan misinterpreted both.
'Ah. She doesn't know when this person might turn into Tormule.'
It was the wrong answer. The explanation that followed was never going to improve the situation.
"An ally. A mage who has agreed to support me, and the mayor of the City of Mages."
Even with that small smile, Rumel did not relax her guard.
If anything, it deepened. The sense of crisis intensified so much that she refused to let go of his arm.
As Aslan and Anna stood without understanding, a narrative was assembling itself in Rumel's mind.
As it always did, the story diverged significantly from reality.
*
The city of Asan, nestled against the sea, was known for its developed sewer system.
Monsters and criminals were discovered in those sewers with some frequency, but the sewers' existence kept the city relatively more sanitary than others.
Relatively, of course. Compared to Velus, a city built in the days of the Ancient Empire, the shortcomings were many.
A portion of those shortcomings was present here.
Wastewater split apart with a wet slap. Something pushed through the floating filth as it walked.
Its entire body was covered in so much blood and so many scars that its skin seemed uniquely textured. The areas not encased in chitin were especially bad, swollen as if about to burst.
Blood dripped into the foul water. Though contamination gnawed at its wounds, the creature made no effort to brush off the filth clinging to its flesh.
"Ah-ah-ah-ah."
A voice that had rusted through. It was too grating to be called human. The creature's name was Tormule.
Or rather, whatever remained of Tormule's consciousness.
He trudged through the sewer and dropped to his knees. Kneeling in the filth, he groped at his own head as if wailing.
The scalp was already a mess of scars, marked by the repeated digging of his fingers.
Tormule drove his fingers into those marks again.
Chitin-sheathed digits peeled back skin and stirred through cracked skull. Blood and cerebral fluid pooled and dripped onto the floor.
"Hrrk, hrrk..."
A pack of Warrior Monks trailed behind him. Walking without weapons, expressionless, they watched Tormule and mimicked the sounds he made.
The sudden chorus of groans filled the sewer. A rat that had been lapping up the dripping fluid bolted. At the scurry of its retreat, Tormule barely clawed his way back to awareness.
He was Tormule.
Master of the Spear, commander of a mercenary band, a man who was supposed to become a Warrior Monk someday.
Or had he already become one?
In his fragmented memory, he rolled his eyes back and forward again and wiped the oozing pus with the back of his hand.
Everything had washed out into a blur.
His memories and emotions had been reduced to a handful.
His own existence had grown so faint that he clung to what little trace remained.
"Ru-mel..."
That trace was Rumel van Holne.
The woman who had stolen everything from him.
He fixated on her and hated her in equal measure. The incompatible emotions curdled together under an unstable mind.
He truly believed it. Rumel had taken his existence from him. If he killed her, he could return to what he had been.
Inside that blind conviction, Tormule's thoughts blurred again, and he looked at his own hand to confirm that he still existed.
Blackened crystal—or something resembling twisted bone—sat where his fingers should have been.
He did not know why, but looking at those fingers, he understood that his time was running very short.
It could not be helped. He knew there were no other choices.
A man who had been beheaded, clumsily priestified, unable to live or die, cast aside even by the War God—if he wanted to survive, all he could do was make a deal.
Shivering under the feeling that he was crumbling away, Tormule sank his nails into his scalp once more.
Scraping at his brain, he wailed mournfully.
"Re-member... re-mem-ber..."
I am Tormule. I am Tormule. The repeated words echoed sorrowfully, but there was no one to comfort him.
But one thing, at least, remained bright and sharp in the recesses of his mind.
A being. And the deal he had struck with that being.
A barefoot woman, immaculate and unsullied even as she walked the earth, crowned with four horns.
Red eyes and white hair—very long hair that she wore wrapped around her neck.
Tormule remembered what she had said, and tears streaked down his face.
'I'll give you one more chance. I do need to raise the difficulty, after all... As it stands, it's not especially realistic, is it?'
A bright, ringing voice. A dense, cruel smile that bloomed across her face in utter contrast to her offhand tone.
Tormule recalled it, and his tears stopped.
The fingers that had been gouging through his head no longer resembled anything human.
Skin, muscle, and bone had fused into blackened digits. With those skeletal fingers, Tormule gripped his spear.