Old Testament: The Beelzebute Grimoire (7)
The demon Halphas. Thirty-eighth of the Lemegeton. A demon of ruin and death, a bird of calamity clothed in the authority of war—a master of fortification, and one who had cut down countless humans with the blade he loved.
And now—
"Hold the line! What the hell are you doing, you idiots!"
He sprayed spit as he screamed for the fortress to be held, not even knowing that command had already abandoned him. Or perhaps he did know. Knew that he had been written off as beyond saving, and that this fortress might no longer have any hope left in it. He was a demon of war, and of course he possessed the insight to read a whole battlefield; it was because that gift had been recognized that he had been set to defend a strongpoint like this. Even so, he knew his own life was not a thing to spend cheaply, and so he clung, perhaps, even to a fight that could not be won.
"Damn it! Are you deaf?! I said hold them! They've already gone around five times...!"
"W-we're holding with everything we have...! But...!"
"Gwahahahahaha!"
Of course, if desperation alone could accomplish anything, no one would ever make a contract with a demon. Contrary to Halphas's hopes, the enemy was drawing the noose tighter around his neck. Their number was exactly two. But both were Apostles—which was to say, walking calamities that outclassed even Halphas.
"Hahaha! What's this?! The great raven general, and this is all he amounts to?!"
A werewolf, enormous upward and outward alike. His clothes were stretched so tight they looked ready to split at any moment, and yet they held their shape, so they were plainly no ordinary cloth. Stakes loosed by magic came shrieking for him, but the beast—Jude Thaddaeus—stopped them merely by lifting an arm. Through the burst fragments of the stakes, the chain wound about his forearm showed itself.
That chain rang as it shot back along the path the stakes had flown, striking like a water snake in a current. Its tip punched clean through the skull of the demon that had attacked. The Chains of St. Jude Thaddaeus. The sacred relic snuffed a nameless demon out in a single instant.
The werewolf ran on in great strides, and the corpse still linked to him was dragged along as a matter of course and tumbled down beneath the wall. Arrows poured after him like rain, but he swung the chain, demon and all, like a meteor hammer and scattered every one of them. An endless charge across the field, like a wild horse that would not break. For that, he was the Pioneer. For that, he was Horseshoe—Moritz Hoffmann Christophoro.
"Kh—?!"
But even he could not outrun a thunderbolt. Lightning fell out of the sky and roasted the Apostle's body. Acrid smoke leaked from the wolf's muzzle. They did not miss the instant he faltered. Arrows, stakes, every kind of attack crashed down on him, and spells of flame and frost came hard behind.
At last the wolf's footsteps, which had seemed as though they might go on forever, stopped together with his heart—
—and a great shield slammed into the scorched, burnt-reeking werewolf from behind. The impact sent the body of Jude Thaddaeus, of Hoffmann, hurtling forward, as if to push a man already halted even a few steps farther. The distance gained that way did not even reach ten meters. A margin of error, at best.
"Good! That makes six laps... Thanks, miss!"
It would have stayed a margin of error, had his stilled heart not begun to beat again, and the wolf not surged on ahead once more.
"Chariot, dead ahead!"
"I've got eyes, miss!"
The woman who had rammed Hoffmann with her shield confirmed that he was alive again, then immediately closed in and tucked herself behind his back. The body that had been torn to pieces was already restored by the werewolf's regeneration. At Han Seoyeon's shout, Moritz broke into wild laughter and leapt with all his strength, trampling the headless horse in his path until it shattered.
In raw breakthrough and raw defense, Jude Thaddaeus stood first even among the Apostles, and attending him was Han Seoyeon, a resurrection engine that was, for every practical purpose, without limit. Together they made a runaway train that ordinary means could never stop—violence given flesh, enough on its own to bring down a fortress of no small size.
And yet, possessed of all that destructive power, they did nothing but circle the fortress, around and around. It was for the fighting still to come. It was to spend as little as they could. Even they could not help burning time and stamina in a siege against a fortress of Hell.
And so.
"Seventh lap, nearly complete! Eighty meters out...!"
They had decided to make of it not a siege, but a circuit. Moritz Hoffmann's voice, booming through the verse, drew out long and wolfish into a howl, and the ground shook.
"Aaaagh...!"
Not even a few seconds later, the rampart beside them came down in a roar. The bird-shaped demon who had been commanding from its height plunged headlong to the ground as well.
"...All units, charge!"
From here, the stage belonged to Margarita alone. At her cry, the holy knights waiting in the rear began their charge as one. Elites picked even from among holy knights—and among them, well over a dozen who bore the name of Gravekeeper. In perfect order they leapt into the fallen rubble, swinging sword and spear and bludgeon, lavishing their specialties upon the demons without restraint.
Of course, some lost their lives in the doing.
They did. It meant nothing.
The instant breath ceased, breath returned. The wound that had brought a man to death had already been mended by a fellow holy knight. Raised again, he swung his sword, and a demon's head dropped to the ground. A moment later his own neck snapped and he died once more, and once more he was given life and carried out, with his own hands, revenge for himself. It was a sight sufficient to make even the demons facing them reach, without thinking, for the words an army of demons. As if to declare that this, and nothing else, was what a Papal Special Measure of Bowl-class had always been meant to be, the Armata Strigoi went on with the slaughter.
It did not take long before every demon that had held the fortress was "exorcised."
"......"
On a hill strewn at random with the wreck of the fortress and the remains of demons, Han Seoyeon let out a light breath. Once her breathing was steady, she took up the radio at her waist.
"This is Margarita. Fortress destruction complete. Requesting the next order."
To ask His Holiness which way the deathless army should march next.
"Thank you. The next order."
"......Has something gone wrong?"
The air of the voice coming through the radio was what drew the question from her. Had he meant only to order another fortress broken by the Armata Strigoi, as he had until now, there would have been no reason at all to speak that way.
"...I will move at once."
The moment she grasped it, Han Seoyeon answered. She had no other choice.
"But there is no choice in which we do not go."
He was silent a moment at her words, but the Pope's answer came back quickly. If Han Seoyeon did not go to them now, far too many would meet an eternal death. Trap or not, she could not choose to stay away. She was, at the least, a person who acted in that way. It was why she had been able to become an Apostle.
Han Seoyeon let out a short sigh and looked over the holy knights under her command.
"We will move as quickly as possible. Anyone who falls behind will be left as they are. Be advised."
"I cannot, even as empty flattery, call that a good choice."
Legs upon legs, like a spider's. Set above them, a deformed trunk and the heads of three beasts. The great demon Bael—one of the divided bodies of Beelzebute, and supreme commander of the war to put down Bartholomew. Three pairs of eyes looked down.
A woman lay face-down there, wrecked past the point of ruin, her limbs torn away. The uniform of the United States Navy was soaked through with blood, and the ribbons and the colonel's insignia had been ripped off and scattered across the floor.
"Killing a single person does not require even several. Therefore all of you will concentrate on one thing alone: opening a path, and delivering you, Rachel Evans, to this place without fail."
Golden hair, likewise smeared with blood and fallen into a tangle. The woman—Colonel Rachel Evans—barely lifted her heavy head and met Bael's eyes.
"That, in itself, is not bad. It is not a bad conception."
Her sight was dim. Her waist was half severed, and the bleeding from that side was severe. No—worse than that. By the feel of it, a good deal of her innards had spilled out as well.
"Kh...!"
"This, of course, assumes that I was unaware of your raid."
She reached her left hand—the only limb still left to her—toward the pistol on the floor, and that forearm was crushed underfoot.
"I knew all of it. That the Azure Knight Pope was planning a decapitation. That the one charged with it was Leviathan. That the one who would carry it out was you, Rachel Evans. This is what it means to face precognition. Do you understand?"
He murmured it in a voice like frost, and tore away even the last of her, the left arm that remained.
"Nisroc. Do you happen to have any interest in this one's meat as well? If so, I will have it given to you."
"Huh. Not interested in that one."
"Then that will do."
"You sure look after your people's welfare in the strangest places, boss..."
"Be quiet."
With that he picked up Colonel Evans's limbs, confirmed Nisroc's lukewarm answer, and threw them down again.
"So, to state only the conclusion: it was meaningless. Had the whole of you charged in while your momentum still held, the chance would have been the slightest degree higher. Even that, of course, still converges on zero."
Bael added the last of it and let out a sigh.
"...So you're not gonna kill me, huh, three-headed old man?"
"I am equally well aware that you have set in your body a curse which takes death as its trigger."
"......Figures. First time I've met a prophet this goddamn accurate."
"At any rate, that is why I will not let you die. Put away any thought of killing yourself."
So saying, Bael's gaze moved to the other subordinates who had been watching.
"Carry word to Beelzebub. He is to break into the northern front together with Baalzebul."
The head of Beelzebute is four: Bael, Beelzebub, Baal-zephon, and Baalzebul. Yet until now only the first three had ever sat in council. Baalzebul had not shown his face at a single gathering of Beelzebute. The reason was simple. He was too savage and too dangerous to be brought into a council chamber at all.
In the course of resurrection, the great Fly King, Beelzebute, had his very attributes split into four. Bael, as king of Hell, took his royal authority, his wisdom, and the insight that reads what is to come. Beelzebub, as the emblem of gluttony and rapacity, took his hideousness and his revulsion, corruption, and a nest of vermin. Baal-zephon, as a Mesopotamian god of abundance, took divinity and harvest and the authority to command the workings of heaven. And Baalzebul took pure force, which asked for no epithet at all, and death itself.
The trump card they had kept sealed tight, for the sake of even a sliver of a chance at killing an Apostle beyond every standard—Han Seoyeon Margarita.
"Will that be all right? We still have to keep Belial in check..."
"By the time matters have come this far, Belial is unlikely to be on the field. They are surely not lying in a sickbed, whatever they themselves claim. ...And so, this time, we gamble on that."
But now the hour had come to bring it out. Bael turned his head slowly and looked toward that distant front, where two calamities of Beelzebute would soon arrive.
What would unfold there was a slaughter on a terrible scale, wrought by Baalzebul. Corpses made in such numbers would be stripped to white bone in an instant by Beelzebub's flies and reborn as his minions. Then even Han Seoyeon would be unable to raise them. They would meet a death that did not end. And the woman, as Bael had taken her measure, was not a human being who could stand and watch a thing like that.
Even if, by some means, she tore her feelings free, the conclusion would not greatly change. Belial's numberless host, and the great mass of holy knights the Church had fielded, would pass beyond merely dying all at once. That very quantity would turn, intact, and become the enemy. Set the emotional factor aside, and the rational factor alone made it a thing that absolutely had to be stopped. Knowing the field would be a bad one for her, knowing it was a trap, Han Seoyeon would still have no choice but to come.
"And a decapitation strike is not a privilege that belongs to you lot alone."
The confusion that would then break over command. Bartholomew Margarita, cut off—in the flesh, and in her communications alike.
"Now then. Shall we watch, and see whether she can unravel even this thread?"
All three of Bael's heads drew the corners of their mouths high and shaped a sinister smile.