Old Testament: The Belphegor Grimoire (10)
"...How does that kind of power even reach across kilometers? No matter how I turn it over, unlimited Holy Essence Shells are just cheating."
"From where I stand, I find it rather harder to accept the one who fights while regenerating a rotting body through sheer force of will."
A werewolf who would not stop talking even as black blood poured in strings from his maw. Watching him, Han Seoyeon let out a small sigh. The wolf, Hoffman, sat perched atop an enormous skull, as if flaunting the trophy head he had taken for himself.
The giant that had indiscriminately sown decay in every direction proved, in the end, impartial even about his own death. Worn down at last by Hoffman's endless chain of blows and a baptism of Holy Essence Shells, Baalzebul dropped to his knees—and rotted away on the spot, leaving nothing but bone.
"Setting that aside, is it all right that we are not pursuing Beelzebub?"
Having watched it happen, Seoyeon put the question to him. The last thing she had seen through the drone camera was the giant going down, and Beelzebub slipping swiftly off the battlefield.
"No need. Didn't catch the comms?"
"No. I stopped by the evacuation site on the way, and I was in a hurry getting here..."
What came back to her as she said it was a space whose floor was packed solid with patients rotting inward from the tips of their limbs. A temporary ward the members of Triage had thrown together, hauling the wounded in even as they themselves lost arms and legs and vomited their own organs out through their mouths.
By the time Seoyeon arrived, only the clergy were still rushing about, wholly absorbed in treatment. Triage itself had administered the bare minimum of emergency care and been gone for quite some time. She had meant to offer her thanks, so it was a shame—but it did not surprise her.
A group that barged into wars and disasters without anyone's permission or so much as a word of consultation, rescued and treated whoever they came across by any means necessary, and then vanished into thin air. Ruled by conviction, and restoring their own numbers however they pleased no matter how many were killed, they were one of the organizations bound together as the Triple T. Even in the surface world, rumors of the Angels of the Black Armband made the rounds from time to time.
Beings like hobgoblins or kikimora, appearing out of nowhere to help human beings and disappearing just as suddenly—that was what Triage was, and Seoyeon was not the least bit startled to find them already gone. They had surely gone off to throw their lives away in some other place teetering on the brink.
And there Han Seoyeon had performed only the minimum—the revival of damaged souls, and only to the meager extent that she alone could just barely manage—before leaving just as quickly. She had meant to hurry back to the front and lend her support. The last thing she had seen, after all, was one of the four of Beelzebute, the architects of this catastrophe, in flight.
"Beelzebub and Baalzebul are dead."
"That is a relief.... But who, exactly?"
Yet while she had been racing here with all her might, their deaths had already been confirmed over the radio. When Seoyeon asked in puzzlement, Hoffman turned an inscrutable smile up toward the sky.
"Their subordinate demons."
"...I beg your pardon. Would you say that once more?"
"They figured there was no chance of winning left, so they cut off their masters' heads and offered them up."
"..."
The explanation that followed left Han Seoyeon with a similarly complicated expression.
"Well, think about the gap in caliber. Even if you assume it was an ambush, those weren't opponents they could kill. The talk that passed between them was probably something like this: I'll take the responsibility and die, so cut your losses, surrender, and at least keep your lives."
"...Even granting that they are demons, perhaps they possessed a minimum of responsibility. Or of loyalty."
Of course, it was not as if she had come to see them in some new light. Seoyeon was the very person who had nearly lost her head because of that leader. Rather than complain of it, though, Han Seoyeon merely sighed and turned the conversation elsewhere.
"Then all that remains is Bael."
"More or less."
Hoffman grinned, baring his teeth as he answered.
"But I don't think we need to worry much about that, either."
"And why is that?"
"Because the blade meant for him is already close to his throat."
"...?"
For a moment Han Seoyeon's brow furrowed, as if her understanding had failed to keep pace. Hoffman, however, only went on chuckling.
"How do you think we won the intelligence war against a prophet better than we are?"
"Damn it...! Goddamn it..."
Even as he gasped for breath, the curses spilled out of their own accord. A human mouth, a frog's gullet, a cat's muzzle—each of them cursed the situation without ceasing. And the very man who had made it, too.
"James...!"
The lunatic who had summoned Behemoth into that narrow space without a shred of hesitation. Muttering the name, Bael ground his teeth. In that moment there had not even been room to deny reality, to insist that nothing of the sort had been in the prophecy. He read the future at speed and flung his body toward wherever the odds of survival were even slightly higher. A lord, and still he crawled along the ground in disgrace.
Humiliation sent the blood surging to the crown of his head. Or perhaps his brain was still rattling from an impact he had not been able to fully dampen, even then. But the result itself was a good one. Bael had survived an attack from which there should have been no way out, and gotten clear of it.
His body was a wreck, true... but it was far better than being crushed to death where he stood. Trembling from head to toe with rage, Bael staggered on across the wilderness of hell. This was a withdrawal for the sake of rising again later. True to his epithet, the demon of wisdom, practical gain stood well ahead of insult and shame.
And then, far off, he saw a demon standing. It was looking at Bael—no, more than that. It was walking straight toward him. Wariness spiked for an instant, but he recognized who it was soon enough. A woman with a sly look on her face... Nisroc.
Relief, that she was no demon of Belial's camp. And once the tension eased even a little, what came rushing in to fill that space was a ferocious anger.
"You damned wretch! How dare you desert the field on your own, without so much as an order from me—"
But the roar never reached its end. The middle head, the human-shaped one that had been shouting, was cut away and went tumbling across the ground.
"What...?"
Only then did Bael look at what Nisroc held. In her hand was a greatsword the size of a person.
Shhk. It swung again, and this time sheared off every one of Bael's many legs. The mass of flesh, its pillars gone, hit the ground with a wet slap.
Even then, Bael's mind turned quickly. One thing, at least, was certain—Nisroc was his enemy now. The problem was what followed. Since when? The thoughts unfolding at such speed arrived at a possibility.
"You... don't tell me—!"
The frog's eyes fixed on Nisroc. Shock blew the pupils wide. That, too, did not last. The frog's head was severed from the body and sent flying, and what had been eyes became nothing but mindless lenses of crystal.
In the matter of foresight, he had been far ahead. And yet, how had his opponent been able to smash Bael's schemes one after another? Had it been a matter of simply crushing him head-on with force, he might have accepted it... but this was not that sort of problem.
...What if information had been leaking.
What if a spy had existed.
The one head that remained, the cat's, looked upon Nisroc.
"So you were the spy. Nisroc."
She had approached so suspiciously that it had never occurred to him she might actually be a spy. There would have been far more plausible ways to get close. Had he instead been run through at precisely that opening? Bael let out a lament.
"Ah. I see. It really was that Pope. The name of the Blue Knight was no empty title."
If he had lost a contest of wits, there was nothing to be done. That, too, was the essence of the monster called Bael. Amid a feeling in which resignation and acceptance were mingled, Bael slowly closed his eyes.
He had known the Pope to be an excellent strategist. Back in the days when the four of them had wandered the world together and been called the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, he had been given the name of the Blue Knight.
The owner of a refinery capable of shaking the world. The Vampire Slayer, who crushed every dictate of reason as if it were nothing. The Apostle, who toyed with matter at will. To have been called the knight of Death even set apart from the likes of them—he could hardly have been called an ordinary human.
Bael closed his eyes, and before long the sword-stroke fell. Three heads, rolling. The corpse of a great demon, gone cold in an instant.
Slowly lowering the greatsword, Nisroc quietly looked down at the sight. And, slowly, she opened her mouth.
"...A spy? No. What on earth is this man even talking about?"
She had seen what she came to the war to confirm, and had only meant to cut her losses quickly and take the supreme commander's head along as proof. In the end, even at the moment she surrendered to the Church, she still had not understood the context of any of it.
"Oh, jackpot."
The wasteland where Bael's corpse lay sprawled. On a low hill overlooking it, a woman stood.
Someone else does the work you were supposed to do.
Belphegor was simply happy.