The One Who Deserves Special Affection
Arthur staggered backward a few steps before collapsing to the ground.
Blake remained frozen in place, exactly in the posture Arthur had caught him in. His screaming mouth looked ready to burst out a shriek at any moment, yet not a single stirring could be felt from him anymore.
He was completely dead.
“Is he alive?”
Arendt, wiping his mouth with a smooth swipe, cast a glance at Arthur. Looking at each other like that, neither of them could manage even a laugh.
“That's my line, you little punk. I nearly died of shock thinking you'd kicked the bucket. What the hell happened?”
“I nearly did kick the bucket. I only survived thanks to Count Stadler.”
Arendt rolled up his sleeve and showed it to Arthur. There was the bracelet he had once used to subdue Warren. In that split second, he had activated it, partially neutralizing Blake's self-destruct attack.
“What about you, Senior? You've got a hole in you.”
“I'm fine. It didn't go in that deep.”
The way he waved his hand frantically made it obvious to anyone that he was anything but fine. The wound in his side, stabbed at the very end, showed no sign of the bleeding letting up.
Perhaps even Arendt realized how unconvincing he sounded, because Arthur clicked his tongue, pulled out the tourniquet he always carried, and cinched the wound tight.
Watching this, Arendt finally snorted, turned away, and limped off, his destination the passage Blake had been guarding all this time.
He hadn't gone far before Arthur, having hauled himself up, followed after him.
“What is it? Why are you following me?”
“To clean up the corpse of the guy who's half-dead.”
There wasn't much time to waste bickering.
They had to move quickly, before every one of those things finished activating. Beyond the stairs, in the darkness, he could feel the telltale signs of ghouls waking one by one.
Adding more enemies here would be a problem.
Not just for himself and Arthur—Laios and Richt, up above dealing with a dragon, wouldn't have the capacity to handle more of them either.
In the end, Arendt gave up on shaking Arthur off and pressed forward as fast as his limping legs would allow.
After a long descent down the stairs, the rotting stench—fairly familiar by now—stung his nose. An ominous mana unlike anything he'd felt so far also hung thick in the air.
Between the stench and the mana, he could barely catch his breath.
At the bottom of the stairs, a thick door greeted the two of them. Instead of flinging it open right away, they both stopped dead in their tracks.
He could instinctively feel that the source of the mana lay just beyond it.
Seeing Arthur silently draw his sword, Arendt stepped forward.
Creeeak.
With an eerie sound, the heavy door slid aside without the slightest resistance—and the moment they laid eyes on the interior, both men felt their faces harden.
In a space pooling with pitch-black darkness, countless figures turned their heads toward them. Dozens of pairs of unfocused, milky-white eyes stared blankly at the knights. There seemed to be even more of them than the ones they'd fought outside the temple.
The magic crystal pillar glowed with a sickening light at the far end of the room.
In a word, it meant they would have to cut through every last one of those things to destroy it.
“Grrk.”
The creatures, having found their prey, began to slink forward. Baring their teeth as they slowly closed in, they looked ready to pounce at any second.
Arendt and Arthur assumed combat stances at the same time.
But the very next moment, the back of his neck prickled.
“Duck!”
He dropped his head low, and a sword packed with tremendous force swept just over it.
Thud—crash!
The blade sank precisely into the center of the magic crystal. The crystal lost its light, and the mana drifting like fog around it vanished in an instant.
The ghouls, which had been brimming with menacing energy, froze mid-motion—then, one by one, began collapsing where they stood.
Barely managing to turn his stiff neck to look behind him, Arendt met the eyes of Laios, still holding the follow-through of his thrown sword.
“You all right?”
“Well……”
Frankly, he was rattled.
More rattled than when they'd discovered the new horde of ghouls.
Arthur seemed to feel the same, standing there with his mouth hanging open, making only strangled, garbled sounds.
When neither of them answered right away, Laios hurriedly raced down the stairs.
“What's wrong? Did something happen?”
“……”
“……”
It had been nothing but problems from start to finish, but facing Laios's face practically dripping with worry, Arendt couldn't quite bring himself to say it.
Only Richt, following behind, quietly averted his gaze and coughed shortly.
* * *
Once they made it outside and took stock of each other, they looked even more battered than expected. In particular, Laios and Richt, seeing Arendt without a single unscathed spot on him, couldn't hold back their exclamations.
“You were walking around like that?”
“What's wrong with how I look? As long as I'm handsome, that's all that matters.”
He couldn't even stand upright properly and had to stay seated, yet the guy's mouth never stopped. Arthur, glaring at the back of the punk's head with a fist slowly clenching, soon let the tension drain from his hand.
If he hit him even once right now, the kid really might die.
“……For now, further activity seems impossible. Fortunately, there's a settlement nearby, so I'll search for somewhere we can stay and get treated.”
“No, I'll go. You rest.”
Holding back Richt, who had been about to set off, Laios started running toward the city visible in the distance before he'd even heard the answer.
Richt stared blankly at the commander's receding back, then lowered his gaze to examine the two juniors. Perhaps it was the release of tension, but both of them were sprawled out, unable to move a muscle.
“Hey. You alive?”
“……Don't talk to me. Even breathing is a chore.”
Having somehow dragged himself over to lean against a tree stump, Arendt closed his eyes right then and there.
Watching him, Richt could only let out a short sigh.
“Rest. I'll keep watch.”
“You're just as much of a wreck as I am, Senior. What's with the act?”
“He's right.”
Arthur piled on to Arendt's grumbling.
This time, Richt's fist clenched briefly before relaxing again.
Arendt, cracking one eye to shoot Richt a sideways glance, shifted his gaze to the sky. Stars were studded thickly across the night sky where the sun had sunk away.
The fatigue came flooding in, late as ever, like water.
Blake is dead.
He'd probably be squaring off with Vincent in the afterlife by now.
The ghoul lairs that had appeared in The Blue Knight of the Sacred Sword had all been wiped out too.
The most troublesome dragon ghoul had been dealt with, and Diana and Kendrick, dispatched to their separate fronts, would each have taken down their own monster or two as well.
There shouldn't be any further problems related to this…… probably.
Then what are those things?
Ghouls with intelligence, not controlled by magic crystals.
Clearly, the ghouls that had appeared this time were far weaker than their depictions in the novel, never having passed through Vincent's and Count Stadler's hands.
In that case, it was reasonable to assume that ghoul development had been halted.
I'll have to dig into that.
Come to think of it, maybe that was the very reason the existing ghouls had been set loose all at once.
They were already failed products—so they'd simply been consumed en masse. And from now on, the focus would shift to developing new ones.
It's a shame about the dragon corpse, though.
He'd never dreamed Laios would just go and slice the thing apart.
“Hah……”
His brain refused to turn anymore.
Arendt simply slumped deeper against the trunk and closed his eyes again.
Count Stadler would launch his investigation before long, and everything the knights needed to know would come pouring out of his mouth on its own.
There was nothing he himself needed to do right now.
“……”
When Arendt went quiet, Richt and Arthur, who had been keeping silent, exchanged looks across the air.
“He's not dead, is he?”
“He's asleep. Leave him be.”
Richt waved his uninjured hand at Arthur, whose speech habits had, at some point, become thoroughly contaminated by Arendt's.
Arthur, apparently unable to keep sitting up either, flopped flat onto the bare ground and let out a groan.
“What in the world is this mess…… Every single time trouble breaks out, it's a catastrophe. The ghouls alone were unbelievable, but I never even imagined I'd see a dragon with my own eyes.”
“More of this is going to happen.”
No one had said it out loud yet, but he was certain of it now.
“So we'd better be ready.”
The malice those creatures harbored was aimed at every living being under the protection of Luce, the God of Light. Not just the imperial family—the citizens dwelling under the Empire's protection were all targets.
Everything that had happened so far would surely have caused countless civilian casualties if it had simply been allowed to pass.
Looking back, the fact that barely any victims had emerged was nothing short of miraculous.
Not that we didn't work ourselves half to death for it.
And all of that credit belonged to that insolent apprentice knight.
The enemy had certainly been an enemy, but by this point, the greatest enigma of all was Arendt.
What exactly is that guy?
Richt couldn't shake the conviction that the sudden imperial order had been influenced by that guy's whispers.
But he shook his head and cast the thought aside.
If His Highness the Crown Prince believed him, then that's that.
There must have been good reason enough. And if the Crown Prince himself had agreed to keep silent, then it wasn't a matter for knights to pry into.
By the time he'd thought that far, his heart felt considerably lighter.
Richt had no way of knowing that the Crown Prince he served was a far more hopeless human being than anyone could imagine—and that he had fallen completely into Arendt's scheme.
* * *
The dragon remains, appearing out of nowhere, threw the already uproarious Imperial Palace into yet another frenzy.
Count Stadler, who had returned to the palace after receiving word, flew into a rage, screaming that he had to depart for the site immediately, and Cantares cheerfully granted his wish.
What's more, the Crown Prince himself finished his preparations in record time and rushed to the dragon's appearance site, with Zereon in tow.
Count Stadler's eyes sparkled like a man possessed at the sight of the massive dragon's remains…… and the people from the nearby city swarmed in to gawk at the dragon bones, nearly turning the site into complete chaos.
That was the news Cantares had delivered personally.
Arendt shot the Crown Prince, who stood there recounting all of this to him, a pointedly pitying look.
“Do you have that much free time? Coming all the way out here?”
“I'm busy enough to die thanks to a certain someone, but still, I figured I ought to come see for myself.”
Dragon bones were harder to lay eyes on than a living dragon, after all.
With the commander, the seniors, Count Stadler and his assistant—even the Crown Prince—running around in a frenzy, Arendt had been half-forcibly confined to his lodgings.
Even Arthur, who had been resting alongside him, had gone off to work two days ago, so his restlessness was only natural.
And that was exactly when Cantares had barged in and started rattling on like this.
“We've decided to transport the remains to the Imperial Palace for now. How they'll be used is a matter to be decided later.”
“Sell them off or do whatever you like with them. Just make sure to kick a generous cut back to me if there's profit in it.”
“Just how far has your greed for money grown?”
Cantares replied as if utterly exasperated.
“You have to earn while the earning's good, Your Highness.”
“True enough, I suppose.”
In any case, thanks to the Crown Prince himself gracing them with his presence, things were proceeding smoothly.
“But that's not what's important.”
Cantares changed the subject.
Arendt, noticing that the look in the Crown Prince's eyes had abruptly shifted, frowned slightly.
“What is it?”
“Just personal curiosity.”
Cantares's eyes narrowed, a shadow falling over them. Making no effort to hide his curiosity and suspicion, he spat it out flatly.
“You. Did you know there was a dragon ghoul here?”
“……Haah.”
Come to think of it, this man wasn't the type to let things slide easily, either.
Reminding himself of that fact all over again, Arendt pressed a hand to his forehead and let out a short sigh.
“My, my. Sighing in the presence of the Crown Prince? How irreverent.”
“……”