Children of the Grave
"I'm on my way to kill someone."
Rai's voice was flat, emptied of any feeling at all.
Philia hadn't been hoping for anything romantic, but a murder announcement hadn't been on the list either. Her face went cold and stiff.
The look she gave him was deadly serious, though the strip of jerky clamped between her teeth rather ruined the effect. Rai was about to laugh to himself when she spoke.
"The person you're going to kill… no. Why are you going to kill them? Are they a criminal?"
The mood was far too grave for jokes, yet Rai only shrugged, the picture of shameless nonchalance.
"Nah. Just some mercenary captain. Don't know if he's done anything wrong. He's a mercenary, though, so he's probably got at least one or two things on his ledger."
"Then why are you going to kill him?"
"When the people upstairs say jump, you jump."
"Did Instructor Leila give the order?"
As far as Philia knew, Leila was the only person who seemed to supervise Rai at all.
Rai shook his head.
"She's not even around right now. She's probably too busy pulling together the faction of whoever she serves. And she's too rigid to ask me for a favor, let alone give me orders. She'd have an easier life if she used me for a few personal things now and then."
At his answer, Philia glanced toward the ceiling, then lowered her eyes again.
"I don't know for sure, but it's not her either. That old raccoon has plenty of good tools. He doesn't need to use me."
"…That 'old raccoon'… you don't mean…"
Watching Rai grin and point a finger at the ceiling, Philia frowned.
Both of them were talking about the Emperor of the Empire.
The nickname grated, but Philia knew the two of them had crossed paths countless times on the battlefield. She decided to pretend she hadn't heard it.
There was no record of what the Devil of All Nations had called the Emperor, but the names the Emperor had used for him were documented in exhaustive detail. The witless one. The library. The matchstick. Red-Eyes. The dead man. The list went on and on.
Back then the Emperor had been the enemy, so Rai had probably coined similar nicknames of his own. Old Man Raccoon was likely one of them.
Philia spent a quiet moment considering who stood above him, then lifted her head and met his eyes.
"Is it the Headmistress?"
She had thought of Vice Principal Bright at first, but the image of him chasing Rai around and scolding him made her shake her head at once and name Celenas instead. Leila aside, there weren't many candidates. It was an obvious guess.
When Rai nodded, Philia drew a deep breath.
She had expected it, and still the idea that the renowned Celenas had ordered a killing did not feel real. The memory of that perpetually gentle smile rose in her mind, and Philia's face crumpled.
"She's more frightening than she looks."
"Of course she is. A juicy seat like Headmistress doesn't come free. You have to claw your way past a pack of jackals and shake your ass for the ones who actually hold the power."
The bluntness of it had been about to make her angry. Instead, she found she had nothing to say.
"Why does the Headmistress want the mercenary captain dead?"
"I didn't ask her myself, but… it's just politics. The mercenary company is someone's money pipeline, so she wants it cut."
Raised in a household that lived and breathed politics, Philia wasn't surprised. But the respect she had held for the woman who led Legandia Academy hit the floor.
It was a position that, more than any other, ought to remain neutral for the students' sake. Realizing that even Celenas was just another slave to power, Philia fell silent.
She broke the long quiet by looking at Rai, who was chewing jerky as if none of this concerned him in the slightest.
"Why are you telling me the truth? I could go public with this. I could try to stop you."
"Beats me. I guess it felt like the old days, and I was suffocating. Wanted to dump it on somebody."
He said it as if he were talking about someone else, then gave a short laugh and looked at her with a provocative glint in his eye.
"So? Now that you know, are you going to stop me?"
"…"
Philia couldn't answer. She hesitated, then forced the words out.
"No. Not yet."
"Meaning you might get in my way someday."
"I'd like to decide once I've sorted out how I feel. But if I say that, you'll send me back."
"Nah. Stay. I'm bored. If you want to get in the way, get in the way. If you want to tell someone, go ahead."
Philia had been wearing a bitter smile. At that casual permission she stared at him in surprise, then looked away.
An uncomfortable silence settled over the room again. She said nothing, fidgeting with the jerky in her hand.
"Why'd you come along?"
Rai asked as he tossed a piece of jerky into his mouth. From the way he acted, they might as well have been shooting the breeze in a tavern.
Philia lifted her head and looked at him steadily.
"Because I wanted to know you better."
"Me? The Devil of All Nations? Or the academy instructor?"
"Both."
She had said you instead of Instructor, but Rai didn't notice. He tipped his head back, thought for a moment, then laughed.
"The Rai you see is me. Then and now, nothing's changed except the job and the name. Becoming an instructor didn't give me manners or make me well-behaved, and being a commander didn't make me any colder or any more obsessed with war."
Philia watched him in silence, as if waiting for him to go on.
"Rai, Elliot — they're the same. The Rai you see is Elliot, and he's Rai. And from now until I die, I'm Rai Redford. Take away the name and the occupation, and the academy instructor and the commander who slaughtered the Empire are the same person."
"It wasn't a slaughter. You were rivals. And the Empire won."
"Yes, yes. As you say. I am the loser."
Watching Philia puff up with imperial pride, Rai laughed and shook his head.
"You've got a lot of interest in me, though."
He said it playfully, trying to tease her, but this time she didn't fluster at all. If anything, her calm eyes had grown deeper, holding the smiling man in front of her.
"Yes. I told you I wanted to know more. I'm interested in you."
She probably didn't mean it as a man and a woman, but hearing Philia deliver a line that embarrassing with a perfectly straight face shut Rai's mouth.
"What was it like, being the Devil of All Nations? I mean… I only know you from the Empire's books. Your childhood, the war, the political infighting with the central nobility — you've lived through things most people never experience even once, and you've done it over and over. You defeated Swift Retana in the Kuchenlan Kingdom. You brought down the Great Tree of the Abyss in Belucasico."
She knew more than he'd expected. Rai scratched his cheek, looking faintly embarrassed.
"If you hadn't been the Empire's enemy — and I know this is blasphemy coming from me — if the winner and the loser had been reversed, the things you've accomplished would fill a hero's legend. I want to hear your story. From your own mouth."
Rai met Philia's unwavering gaze, held it for a moment, then looked away. He seemed to need time to think. His eyes dropped to the tips of his feet, propped on the bed, but they looked as if they were staring somewhere far off.
Then he snorted a laugh, his face sliding back into that mischievous look, and rolled onto his side to face her.
"You lie down too."
"I'm not planning to sleep yet."
"Kids always say that. This is a goodnight bedtime story. Grandpa's going to read you a fairy tale, so it's time for night-night."
Even at the joke, Philia only tilted her head, looking as if she didn't understand.
"Your parents never read you fairy tales before bed when you were little?"
"No. Never."
"Different culture, maybe? No, that can't be it. It's the same all over the continent. Any ordinary family would do that."
Philia swallowed the words We weren't an ordinary family, recalled something she'd heard from friends her own age as a child, and lay down facing him.
She pulled the thin blanket up to her shoulders, propped her head on her arm, and met the eyes of the man watching her.
"What's this? You said you'd never done it, but look at you. Your eyes are full of anticipation."
"It's a story I've wanted to hear."
Philia answered calmly, shifting her head until she found a comfortable position.
"Uh… before I start, there's something you need to know first."
"I've done quite a bit of research. I think I know most of it."
"No. You won't know this. Even in the Empire, barely anyone does — that old raccoon, Edelian, a handful of others. In the kingdom, it was just the royal family and a few of my adjutants."
At the mention of how few people knew, Philia's eyes lit up. She waited for what came next.
"Have you ever heard of the Knowledge of the Grave?"
"…No. This is the first time."
She thought for a moment, then shook her head.
"The Knowledge of the Grave started as a spell a necromancer created a very long time ago, trying to live forever."
He began from the distant past, as if telling an old story. Philia couldn't see what it had to do with his own history, but she listened quietly.
It was a past so distant it had to be counted in millennia. A necromancer, lamenting the finite span of a human life, set out to research immortality. Liches already existed, but he dismissed them as rotting corpses wedged in the doorway of death, and after years of work he conceived the idea of storing his own memories in another person's body.
The condemnable notion of injecting his memories into someone else and swapping bodies ended in failure. Because it was an act that forcibly violated another's freedom, the churches and other mages alike condemned his research. And the research itself produced no good results. The necromancer remained alive, and another person who had inherited the necromancer's memories was simply born. Someone carrying his memories would exist — but he himself would still have to die.
Before he could even despair, he was hunted down and killed, and the research was abandoned. Later, the Keilen Kingdom discovered the work everyone thought had vanished, and together with the Blue Dragon Crier they created the project called the Knowledge of the Grave.
"A dragon was involved?"
"Yeah. Crier originally contracted with Vilgort, the founding king. But that contract ended with Vilgort. It didn't pass down to his bloodline."
The last time a dragon had shown itself was four hundred years ago. They were treated as legend now, but founding stories were usually thick with legends of that kind, so Philia let it pass without much thought.
"Crier didn't want the nation Vilgort built to vanish. So he started the Knowledge of the Grave research of his own accord."
"What is the Knowledge of the Grave, exactly?"
A gleam of killing intent lit Rai's eyes as he said it. Philia shut her mouth and watched his face. Those excited red eyes burned for a moment, then subsided, and he went on with a peaceful expression once more.
The Knowledge of the Grave. It was the name of a project that used the necromancer's magic to create people who would protect the kingdom. As the word create rather than train implied, it meant forcibly injecting one person's accumulated experience and knowledge into another, and passing that inheritance down without end.
It was limited to ten people per generation. When every member of that generation died, it moved on to the next. The ten who belonged to a generation were designated by the king who held the Control Seal.
"…"
Philia understood, then, why the Keilen Kingdom had produced so many figures who deserved to be called heroes. Whenever the kingdom was in danger, a commander of unmatched brilliance had appeared and saved it.
It was too much to dismiss as coincidence. Sitting in the very center of the continent — a prize anyone might have taken — it had lasted nearly a thousand years. Sharing borders with most of the nations around it, it could have grown rich on transit tariffs alone, and yet it had been a small country, and no one would have called it well-governed.
And still, through all those long thousand years, outstanding commanders had always existed, and they had driven back every enemy that threatened the kingdom. There was a reason for the pride in the name Unconquerable Keilen. Until the Empire took it, the capital had never once fallen. Whenever they seemed about to be driven onto the back foot, a brilliant commander would appear and solve everything.
"Then…"
Looking at the Devil of All Nations — the strongest and greatest of all Keilen's commanders — Philia let the rest of the sentence die.
It was a staggering thing to hear. Rai only smiled.