Between Glory and Faith (1)
Forgotten Existence
You have completed the quest.
Distributing rewards.
Demon Spear
A week had passed since I returned from meeting the Goddess of the Black Swamp.
Maybe longer. I was never particularly good at keeping track of the days.
Father Patrick, I was told, had not even stopped by the chapel where Priest Thomas resided. As the escort assigned to the Special Task Force of the Heresy Inquisition — cursed individuals who required a social guarantor — his role had been to lead them. After the first battle against the Undead King's thralls, he fled. He must have slipped straight out of the barony and gone back to the Church.
Clara insisted we file a formal protest. Abandoning the Task Force inquisitors alone would have been one thing, but he had left me behind as well — me, who had agreed to aid the Lumenic Church.
"Sh-shit… Our m-monk, at least~~!! He never ran away~~!!!!"
The thoroughly drunk Baron Manfred agreed. Clara wrote the letter for him, since he could barely hold a pen. It was sent to the Church through Priest Thomas.
I did not speak much with Baroness Manfred. My visit to the Black Swamp was classified in its own right, and I had no desire to torment my mother further over her son's curses. To Clara, I simply said that yes, I had gone to the Black Swamp because of a curse.
The Special Task Force decided to remain at the castle a while longer. They had to wait until the Lumenic Church sent a replacement escort.
Veronica said she could impose no further and offered to stay at Priest Thomas's chapel, but the baron and baroness — parents of a cursed child themselves — did not seem to regard the Task Force as strangers.
For a time, nothing demanded my personal intervention. This was, after all, a rural territory whose usual headaches were little more than bandits. Quiet like this was the natural state of things.
Aside from physical training with Brenden, I shut myself in the library. I spent the hours reading tomes on dark magic and studying the curses bound to me.
"Demon Spear…"
I examined the item I had received as a quest reward. It was called a spear, yet it looked like nothing more than a black dagger — roughly the same size as the silver dagger that served as the catalyst for my Curse of Obsession.
The system had explained its properties once before. The lack of any further description suggested I would have to figure the rest out myself.
"…Young master."
Veronica, captain of the Heresy Inquisition's Special Task Force, came looking for me. She checked that I was wearing the silver ring before she spoke. It had been a long time since I last heard her voice. After the mission ended, she had barely spoken at all. Conversation itself was agony under the Curse of Severance, so she seemed to avoid small talk whenever she could.
"…Could we speak alone for a moment?"
"If you have business with Master. Tell me first."
I had simply meant to stand and change locations, but Dorothy stepped between Veronica and me. The library was never empty — Sophie attended me, and Clara was always there reading fairy tales to Dorothy. Apparently Dorothy had picked up something odd from the stories again.
Dorothy had no silver ring to shield her from the pain of the Curse of Severance. Veronica could only look at me in silence. She could have spoken under her breath without hurting Dorothy, but she must have figured Dorothy would not understand her that way.
"Dorothy… stop picking up weird habits. Stay with Clara."
"Uugh…"
I sent Dorothy back into Clara's arms and led Veronica to my room. Once we were alone, she carefully opened her mouth.
"…I do not intend to file a proper report on the goddess. …I will say she was nothing more than superstition. …I would appreciate your cooperation, young master."
"That would be more convenient for me as well."
If the Lumenic Church — believers in a single god — learned that a goddess could be erased simply by extinguishing faith in her, they would want to intervene in the land of the Black Swamp and make even more of a nuisance of themselves in the Manfred Barony. Following Veronica's lead was in my interest. Still, she was unmistakably a member of the Lumenic Church.
"You don't seem particularly devout."
"…And."
Veronica did not answer my question.
"…Please keep trying to stay alive."
Was she still hung up on the fact that I had shortened my own lifespan transferring a curse? Or had the Goddess of the Black Swamp's words — that I had been fated to take my own life — come back to her? I preferred not to read too much into it.
"Do I worry you that much?"
"…Almost no one shows us this kind of consideration. …Especially among the nobility."
"Well, we're cursed the same way…"
"…This is not the first time we have met a noble in our situation. …They were not so different from any other aristocrat. …I would like people like the Manfred family to live a little longer."
"Is that so."
Veronica seemed embarrassed; she scratched at a faintly flushed cheek with one finger.
"…That is all I wanted to say. …I said it by way of farewell. …Our new escort arrives tomorrow. …Along with payment for your cooperation on the mission, and compensation for the matter of Father Patrick."
"Shall I return this now, then?"
I pointed to the ring on the ring finger of my right hand. Offering a farewell now meant she had nothing left to discuss with me. In that case, she would no longer need the ring either.
"…No. …Consider it a gift."
"Won't ordinary conversation be difficult without it?"
"…From now on, I plan to have Agnes handle that."
That black bear girl. With her temper, I doubted normal conversation would be possible at all. Whatever showed on my face must have given my thoughts away, because Veronica allowed herself a faint smile.
The Manfred family was gathered around a single table for dinner.
"Clara! My daughter! I'm going to miss you! …Hic."
"Christopher. Stop crying. You're being ridiculous."
Baron Manfred's eyes were red and swollen. Clara was returning to the Academy tomorrow. She had meant to leave much earlier, but she had grown so attached to Dorothy that she stayed on a little longer. The Special Task Force's new escort was also due tomorrow — the schedules had simply overlapped by chance.
"Clara! Study hard! …Uugh."
"I'll be back in a few months, Father."
"And absolutely no boyfriends—!"
"Oh, for heaven's sake. Ridiculous."
Baroness Manfred stuffed a sausage into the baron's mouth. He kept mumbling unintelligibly around the mouthful, bits of sausage and tears flying in every direction. It did not take long before the baroness's hand found the back of his head.
"To think our little brother would come home like this, and we'd all sit at the same table again."
Cain rested a heavy hand on my shoulder. It stung. Before, the difference in strength would have driven me straight into the tabletop. The physical training with Brenden seemed to be paying off.
"That's right! Thanks to our youngest, your old man's life has gotten a lot easier lately! If some ghost showed up, I'd have no idea what to do!"
The baron beamed at me.
"It's nothing, Father. I only stepped in for the occasional odd incident. The bandits still running wild are for you and Brother to—"
"And you caught a dark mage and a werewolf, too! Back in the old days, who knows how many men we would have lost!"
Cain cut me off. He was clearly praising me, yet it felt as though he were deliberately ignoring what I had said.
"I wasn't the one who caught them. That was Father and Brother—"
"You must have studied a great deal about sorcery at the sanitarium. Enough that the heresy inquisitors themselves came asking for help."
"It's truly reassuring, Brother. I can leave for the Academy with peace of mind."
Baroness Manfred and Clara piled on. Everyone was elevating me, yet something about their smiling faces felt off — as if they were holding back words they wanted to say.
"Ahem. Which brings me to the point, my son."
The baron cleared his throat with a suddenly solemn expression. Even in the original Karl's memories from before I possessed this body, I had never seen the baron set a mood like this.
"Ahem, ahem. You… how would you feel about becoming the second Baron Manfred?"
"—Khk."
I nearly choked on my food. In novels and comics, the scene where someone spits out their drink at a sudden absurd statement had always struck me as wildly unrealistic. Now that it was happening to me, I may not have made quite that much of a spectacle — but no other reaction was possible.
"What… are you talking about, Father? I was in recovery until recently. How could I possibly become the baron?"
If there had been no other healthy children, perhaps. But there was Cain, the eldest son, who resembled the baron so closely he could fill his father's shoes better than anyone. And there was Clara, the only person in this rural territory receiving the latest education the Laviart Empire had to offer. Unless both of them had refused the succession outright, offering the title to the frail second son right in front of them seemed like a sure way to bruise some pride. If I, who had spent my life shut in a sickroom, tried to snatch the barony just because I had solved a few dark magic problems—
"Brother and Clara are both—"
But Cain's expression was perfectly calm, and though Clara's face was a little dark, she was smiling. Neither of them seemed offended.
"Did you really not know? I've always said I have no intention of becoming baron. With this thick skull of mine, how am I supposed to run a barony? I'm better suited to charging out front and sweeping up bandits."
This battle maniac had lost his mind. He was refusing a title he could have taken for free? Baron Manfred himself ran the territory without major disaster on a head not much sharper than Cain's — with plenty of help from others, granted, but still.
"I'd rather marry into a good family. I want to get out of this manure-smelling countryside as soon as I can."
"What? You clearly said—"
"I said no boyfriends!"
The baron flared up so violently that Clara could not finish. While he was being subdued by the baroness's hand, I shot Clara a look full of questions. She had clearly said she would become baron herself, to build a land where Karl would never have to be alone. In answer, she simply pressed a finger to her lips.
"Anyway! My eldest son doesn't want it! My daughter doesn't want it! So what am I supposed to do?! Hand the title over to some stranger who doesn't even share our blood?! Do you know how hard I worked to get us this far?!"
He was not even drunk, yet the baron began to rant pitifully. By the end he looked ready to throw himself at my feet.
"Karl! Please become my heir! Protect the history of House Manfred! You can do it!"
"Honestly, even if he hasn't studied as much as Clara, of the three of us our little brother seems like the smartest one."
"Brother Cain, that stings a little… but I won't deny it."
How was I supposed to govern a territory and lead its people? All I knew was a bit about dark magic — and even that was skewed toward death magic; I was hardly exceptional with shadow magic.
In countless stories, I had never understood the noble children who lacked even the ability to compete for succession, yet still lived steeped in bitterness. They had not been cast into the streets. They would never starve. They even had a private villa to themselves. What was there to complain about?
I had expected to live that kind of life myself — the peaceful existence of a noble child with no standing to enter the succession struggle in the first place. Solving the occasional dark magic problem to earn my keep.
"Give me time to think…"
In the end, I could not bring myself to ignore the baron's desperate eyes. I could not refuse him outright.