The Church Covert Unit ②
"Tch... If you'd just stayed asleep, we could've sent you off in peace."
"Did the ambush get made...?"
The men muttered as they drew their weapons. I forced myself to stay calm and reached for the sword I'd left beside the bed, but my heart was slamming against my ribs.
Shit! That scared the living hell out of me!
I mean, who in their right mind expects to take a blade to the face in their sleep? If Princess Aine hadn't dragged me up a snowy mountain for survival training when I was around ten — if I hadn't already been ambushed by monsters back then — I really might have died just now.
I calmly switched on the room's lights. As the space brightened, the situation inside came into view. Two men standing. One unconscious.
...And two more outside the door, by the feel of it.
Figures in black who might as well have had assassin written across their chests. Black outfits, black hoods, and necklaces hanging at their throats. A look I knew all too well.
"Did the World Tree Church send you?"
"...!!"
Oh-ho. That got a reaction. So I was right.
"What business does the World Tree Church's Covert Unit have with me?"
"You little...!"
And now they were getting angry. Yeah, that confirmed it.
This was the Church Covert Unit from the original novel. In the original, the Church had featured prominently as Alan's ally, and the Covert Unit had been a fairly useful supporting player — the kind that regularly moved in the shadows on his behalf. Their hallmarks were the black cloth wrapped around their faces and the black clothing covering them from head to toe, offset by the necklaces they all wore, each one bearing the emblem that marked them as faithful of the World Tree Church.
Well... any believer could buy one of those necklaces and wear it. But men in black masks and black clothes, walking around with Church necklaces on top of all that, matched the original novel's description of the Covert Unit to the letter.
"A mere student, acting so insolent...!"
"Don't rush in!!"
One of them lunged in a fit of temper; the other tried to hold him back. He ignored the warning and charged straight at me anyway.
As I said, they had shown up often in the original. The descriptions had been quite detailed, so I had a decent grasp of how strong they actually were. The unit took in those whose combat skills had stagnated and trained them as a special force to operate in the shadows. Coldly put, it was a dumping ground for washouts.
⟨ Wind Cutter ⟩
"GAAAAH!!"
The man screamed and staggered backward, clutching the stump where his sword arm had been.
"You idiot! You should have read the briefing! He's from the northern House of Count Ventus!"
"Ghhhkk...!"
The one who seemed to be their leader barked the rebuke at the man writhing around his severed arm, then raised his voice.
"Eta! Omega!"
At the leader's call, the two who had been waiting outside the door burst in. The leader's hand slipped into his coat.
What's he trying to—
"We're withdrawing! Dispose of Zeta!"
"What?"
They'd been an inch from a fight, and now they were retreating? I hesitated for a beat, still trying to catch up — and in that opening, the leader hurled whatever he'd pulled from his coat. I'd been watching his hands, so I slashed the thrown object out of the air, but—
BANG!!
"Wha—"
A plume of white smoke erupted through the room. I kept my nerves wound tight, half-expecting an attack to come screaming out of the cloud, but nothing came. The smoke thinned by degrees, and when it finally cleared, all that remained was a wrecked room, the hand my Wind Cutter had taken off, and the man who'd been sent flying by my magic at the start and knocked unconscious.
I couldn't begin to guess why the Church Covert Unit would come after me. Hoping I might get something out of the unconscious man, I started toward him — and found only a corpse with its throat cut open.
The next day, the academy was in an uproar. And of course it was — overnight, intruders had broken into the academy dormitories, and not just any dormitories: both buildings of Aurum Hall, where the high-ranking nobles resided.
No one had been hurt, and the intruders had been driven off, which was a mercy. If there had been even a single victim, the incident would have been enough to turn the royal capital on its head. A student from the women's dormitory who had witnessed the attack filed a report, the royal capital's military police deployed at once, and an investigation began immediately.
Riel, Phyllis, and I were summoned as key witnesses.
"Do you have any idea as to their identities?"
"No. They were people I'd never seen before."
I didn't tell them what I knew. The fact that they were the World Tree Church's Covert Unit was original-novel knowledge and nothing more; I had not a scrap of evidence that would actually prove who they were. If I went around insisting they were Church operatives, the Church would simply play dumb, and I'd be the only one who looked like a fool.
"They did... mutter something strange, though. Something like, 'for the Church'..."
Well. I did plant a little false testimony that would point suspicion their way. I'd nearly been murdered in my sleep and I couldn't even name the actual culprits, so a fib like this was the least I could do. Yeah.
"I... I was fast asleep, so I don't really..."
"I shall provide the testimony in her place."
Riel was white as a sheet and shaking so hard her voice wouldn't hold, so Phyllis took over the account of what had happened in the women's dormitory. And of course she did. After waking in the middle of last night's chaos, Riel had heard the whole story from Phyllis — that an intruder had come into her room while she slept. Anyone would be terrified.
She looked so pitiful, trembling like that, that I took her hand and held it tight. She looked up at me.
"Hehe... thanks."
A little color returned to that bloodless face as she smiled, and I smiled back.
"Of all the things to happen on the morning of the festival's final day..."
In the royal palace of Gransen, King Galarus let out a long, heavy sigh as he received the report of the night's events. According to that report, the intruders who had broken into the academy dormitories had been after Riel Ignis and Kyou Ventus — the very names that had come out of Archbishop Marconi's mouth only yesterday.
The culprit was so obvious it was almost insulting. The king summoned Archbishop Marconi at once and pressed him. The archbishop, however, played the innocent and denied everything.
"It would appear the Priestess is not being adequately protected. Would it not be better for our Church to take her into our care?"
He even turned the blame around, suggesting the kingdom had failed to protect her properly. There was every reason to suspect him, and not a shred of proof.
They had at least recovered the intruders' corpses, and had hoped to identify them through magic — but even that had failed.
"Their brains had completely melted."
To identify the dead by magic, one read fragmentary memories from the corpse. That method, however, required the brain to be intact. Every last body had a brain that had dissolved from the inside. According to the forensic examiner, a poison designed to melt the organs upon death had been planted in their heads. It was enough to make one's skin crawl.
Beyond that, the only evidence was the World Tree Church necklaces they had all been wearing — and those, too, were something any believer of the Church could obtain. There was also the testimony from those involved, claiming the intruders had said something about "for the Church"...
"It would seem they were faithful devotees of our Church... Though they committed a crime, I should like to pray for the repose of their souls."
He denied it all with pious noises like that. Then there was the artifact recovered from one of the corpses. An investigation had confirmed it was a magical implement once held by the Church, and the king had pressed him on that as well.
"That is an item that was stolen from our Church long ago. How fortunate that it has been recovered."
He was already requesting its return. They did not, of course, hand it over — it was a critical piece of evidence — but that was little comfort.
"You sly old raccoon..."
King Galarus swallowed the stream of curses he desperately wanted to unleash. As ever, it seemed the Church was never going to be a friend.
At the same hour, Alan Ludwig was shut up alone in his dormitory room.
A humiliating defeat in the semifinals of the Martial God Festival. He had even made a spectacle of himself as he went down. And that had not been the end of it. Some of the students had begun raising questions about the victories that had carried him as far as the semifinals, and rumors started circulating that Alan had cheated. In less than a day, the story had spread everywhere. There was no evidence whatsoever — but information about the actual skill of those Alan had beaten spread alongside it, and the rumor was taken as credible. Overnight, he was being treated as a coward and a cheat.
"......"
He had heard the rumor yesterday evening, and in the end he hadn't been able to face it. He had locked himself in his room. Early that morning, girls he was close with had come all the way to the dormitory, but Alan refused to see them, and they had no choice but to leave.
He had been briefly shaken when he heard that an intruder had broken into the dormitories and that Riel had been the target. But in the end, Alan couldn't bring himself to move.
It's not like it matters... Riel already hates me.
Right before he had lost consciousness in defeat, he thought he had seen her face in the stands — looking down at him with a cold, indifferent expression. She had been sitting in the distant VIP seats, far away, and still he could not forget those icy eyes.
I want to quit... quit everything. Wouldn't it be better to just go home?
Wanting only to give it all up, Alan sat in silence inside his room. That was when a knock sounded at his door.
"Alan Ludwig, are you in?"
"......"
"Pardon the intrusion."
He thought he heard something like the chime of a bell — and then the door he had locked burst open. Startled despite himself that a bolted door had simply opened, Alan looked toward it. A middle-aged man in priest's vestments stood there.
"A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Alan Ludwig. My name is Marconi... I serve as Archbishop of the World Tree Church."
Alan only stared at him. Archbishop Marconi smiled, gentle as anything.
Today is Christmas! Have a wonderful Christmas!
[This illustration is unrelated to the novel's content.]