Old Testament: The Beelzebute Grimoire (5)
"Well, now. What a spectacle."
The stone tower looked easily dozens of meters tall. The man standing at its summit was the one who had spoken.
Baal-zephon. Charged with the divinity of Beelzebute — that power split four ways — he looked down on what lay below with an unhurried gaze.
So this was the sort of thing the old Chinese chronicles meant, when they wrote of great hosts hundreds of thousands strong. At the very least, he had never seen a host of the living gathered in such numbers.
Then again, they were demons. Whether "the living" was even the right name for them was anyone's guess.
"Oh?"
A crow came down onto Baal-zephon's shoulder. It was a bird whose heart no longer beat, its body left with the quilted stitch-seams of a doll. The familiar he had sent out to scout, as it happened.
A moment later he looked past the horizon. Lava ran like a river through Hell's wilderness, and a dark crimson fog packed the air; something small could be seen writhing as it pushed through that fog. Small only because of the distance, of course.
If the intelligence gathered beforehand held, a host even larger than the demons now massed beneath this tower — beneath Baal-zephon's own feet — was closing in. A vast army that sent a crawling chill through him merely to behold. Whether that shiver was rapture or terror, even he could not say for certain.
Then Baal-zephon snatched the crow off his shoulder and gripped it hard, as if he meant to squeeze until it burst. The pressure made its eyes bulge, and still the bird did not cry out once. He brought its head to his lips and spoke.
"There. The enemy has been sighted. Advance."
A siege was one thing. A pitched battle on open ground was another, and there was no need to sit still and fight at whatever hour the enemy preferred. If his side simply held where it was, the other side would keep its distance and drag the hours out. They were in a position where merely holding the line and running down the clock would do.
Meteors, that repulsive spider had said.
The situation was little different from meteors pouring out of the sky like rain. This was a fight over whether everything could be ended before those meteors scorched the field to ash — or could not. And so his side had two ways to win. Succeed in taking the next Bartholomew, Han Seoyeon Margarita, and do it quickly; or else smash the enemy's anvil, catch the momentum, and drive straight through them.
Weigh the circumstances, and the first was the more realistic. A modest chance of success, though, was no reason to throw Plan B away entirely. Hence the pitched battle.
"The finer orders I will leave to the commanders of each unit."
To keep the front from locking into a stalemate, he would throw everything in a single blow. The risk of failure hardly entered into it. If this dragged on, it was his side that would be the one destroyed.
"...I find I have a separate matter to attend to."
At last Baal-zephon raised his head. The enemy host was drawing nearer, and his gaze shifted to the steel birds beginning to show above it, roaring as they shook heaven and earth.
Military strategy, if he was honest, was not something he understood. He did possess at least the shallow knowledge that air superiority mattered in a modern war, and so he lifted his arm. A moment later the skin began to melt slowly from the tips of his fingers, and soon muscle showed, and then bone of pure white.
The sky started to stain itself black. The dark crimson fog that had filled the ground surged higher still and began to form an enormous cloud.
Beelzebute had many names, and many aspects. What Baal-zephon, split off from that whole, symbolized was divinity and fertility. He was the very being who meant Baal himself — the Mesopotamian god of plenty from whom the Lord of the Flies had taken his origin.
Out of the storm clouds packing the sky, a rumble began to roll. A god of fertility is a god of the heavens, a god of rain and of cloud, and further still a god of lightning and of storm. Each time another length of Baal-zephon's forearm melted away, the cloud swelled larger, until at last it took the shape of a colossal wolf and opened its maw.
Set against that maw, with light leaking from inside it, the gray flying machines racing in over the wilderness seemed no more than contemptible flies.
The wind began to blow so hard that an uncanny sound rang from every direction.
...And then the noise cut out.
The shriek of a gale that could have snapped any tree clean in two, and the bellow of thunder that had seemed ready at any instant to tear its leash and charge — both of them fell silent. Even the clouds filling the sky lost their shape in a flash and began to split away to left and right. What showed through a moment later was blue sky, a rare sight in Hell even on an ordinary day, and a rainbow stretching on past the horizon.
"......"
Baal-zephon's gaze drifted back down from above, as if gravity itself were drawing it along.
Follow that gaze, and a low hill came into view far off, and upon it a red shadow kneeling on one knee.
Among the clergy of the Church, those permitted to wear red belonged — save for a single exception — to one rank alone. Cardinals. And if the intelligence was not wrong, only one cardinal had entered Hell as of this moment.
"...Adam Greenie."
The man said to be the leading candidate for the Vatican's next Director of Intelligence. He was one of the figures she had watched with a private interest, and so he had remained in her memory. Not that anyone had expected to meet him in battle here. Baal-zephon grinned, all teeth, and looked up at the sky.
An instant later, innumerable shadows filled the heavens. Unlike the steel wings of the fighters flying in toward them, colossal creatures rose beating wings of membrane and feather — those who venerated the ancient serpent and the morning star.
Having read a future in which the enemy would commit an air force, there was no chance they had failed to prepare for a battle in the sky. Had they been an organization that hopelessly stupid, Beelzebute and all the rest of it would have been dropped ages ago in favor of somewhere else. Then again, from a certain point of view, a little stupidity did make them easier to use...
In any case, so long as a contest for the air could be made to exist on this side as well, taking one blow from the cardinal a moment ago was no great matter. They had merely returned to a battlefield that was fair to both. Baal-zephon smiled again. The battle had only just begun — a battle in which, whoever won, countless lives would gutter out and turn to corpses.
There are several expressions translated as "holy knight," and Paladin is one of them. What sets the term apart from the other holy knights is its origin among the knights of the palace, and the meaning it carries of being the regular army of Vatican City.
Of course, in the twenty-first century, the Vatican maintains no army. From the Middle Ages onward the Paladins had already been little more than a ceremonial reserve, a body one could only just barely claim "existed" as an army, and even that had vanished over the course of the world wars. At present, then, the defense of the Vatican fell to Swiss mercenaries, and from a slightly wider view the Italian forces surrounding the Vatican shared the duty as well.
...Such was the account current in the surface world.
A little thought made the truth obvious. Considering the role the Vatican occupied in the hidden world, the nonsense that it had no army would never even come up. Vatican City possessed a cheat-tier force of arms in its holy knights, and among them were, of course, troops charged with defending the Vatican homeland itself. Those who bore that duty were more than fit to be called the Vatican's army. And yet, ironically, the very ones who more than anyone else fulfilled the old role of the Paladins were not called Paladins. More precisely, they could not be.
The reason was simple. Those generally known as Holy Knights were clergy of the Armed Exorcism order, authorized to carry out special solemn exorcism — the armed suppression people pictured whenever they thought of "exorcism" — and monks belonging to a knightly monastic order. A Paladin, by tradition, meant a lay knight who had received no holy orders and belonged to no monastic house. A holy knight, being a formally ordained monk-priest, therefore could not become a Paladin.
Did the office of Paladin, then, stand vacant in the twenty-first century? The answer was no.
The post had been revived by the development of modern firearms. Equipment of the sort an army used was, without question, useful to special solemn exorcism. Even so, the holy knights favored cold weapons, and at the outside they did not range past pistols and rifles. It was not that they were stubborn, or behind the times. It was solely in observance of the Secrecy Protocol.
That concealment did include the problem of gunshots and blasts being far too loud. A somewhat different reason, however, weighed more heavily: once equipment reached military grade, it was simply not easy to procure and manage in bulk without leaving traces in the surface world. Getting hold of a production line and quietly securing the goods might, somehow or other, be managed. What snagged them immediately afterward was training.
Infantry arms could be set aside. Training to operate large equipment — fighter jets, warships, and the like — without the surface world ever noticing demanded a truly unreasonable quantity of money and effort. But then, human beings are creatures who always find an answer, are they not? In the end the Holy See found one for this problem as well.
What came of it was the Paladin system, restored to life in the modern age. Put more bluntly, it was a cover identity. They were soldiers assigned to specific units of various nations, stationed in those countries and drawing on those national militaries' supply lines. The cost of the materiel they received was, for some reason, paid not from the home country's defense budget but with Vatican funds, and their training somehow differed considerably from that of other units — but they were, at any rate, that country's armed forces.
...They were sent all over the world at the Vatican's request, and a fair number of the soldiers were said to wield holy power. Vatican City, at any rate, did not possess an army. The Holy See had merely conferred upon them the title of Paladin.
"We've come charging all the way into Hell on the Pope's orders, but—anyway! They're U.S. military, same as us. Those men, I'll have you know, are nothing more than a slightly special unit that has absolutely nothing to do with the Vatican."
"Um, Colonel Evans, sir? But we aren't even Paladins like that. Why are we the ones fighting a war in Hell?"
"I don't believe I follow what the lieutenant is saying. We are members of U.S. Naval Forces Japan. We were faithfully conducting a joint U.S.–Japan exercise when we got a little lost in the Pacific. Wouldn't you agree, Lieutenant?"
"...Is the hidden world's whole system maybe just incredibly full of holes?"
"Now you've finally become a proper citizen of the hidden world! Congratulations, Lieutenant. Drinks are on me when we get back. —All right, then, advance! Follow the vehicles that went ahead and ram straight into them!"