Rescue
Jing and Lia's eyes, brimming with suspicion, locked onto me.
"Kwek, if you've stared enough, hold onto this." I lightly tossed the water bottle I'd taken from the priest. Jing gasped in horror and lunged forward. Despite his dazed state, he caught it with practiced ease.
"Kwek, we still need to ask how to use it, so keep a tight grip on it." He stared down at the red liquid sloshing inside the bottle, then looked up at me, his eyes swimming with confusion.
"What on earth are you?"
"Kwek, just a mutant Orc."
"Don't you think you know a bit too much for 'just a mutant Orc'?"
"Kwek, do we really have time for introductions right now? You said you wanted to save that Ratel fellow, but I guess it wasn't that urgent after all." My evasive reply made his brow furrow.
"No, that is far more urgent. But consider yourself warned. Once this is over, you and I are going to have a very long talk." I turned my head, ignoring his warning. He was letting it slide for now given the circumstances, but this was far from over.
However, there was still one person beside us who had absolutely no reason to remain calm.
"Uh... so, is that really the blood of the Imperial Family?" Lia stammered, pointing at the transparent bottle in Jing's hand. Her brain seemed stuck on processing that single piece of information.
"According to that priest... it seems so," Jing replied.
"But why on earth would a priest of the Temple have such a thing? This isn't something a mere human should ever possess." At Lia's question, Jing's face hardened as he rolled the bottle in his hand. He was likely trying to guess the owner of the blood. And his guess would be correct. The blood belonged to none other than Dito.
The experiments Dito conducted using children were not confined to the Capital. To keep the other royals in the dark, he had extended his reach to the temples of several cities near the Capital. The temple in Limis was one of them. And the cowardly priest standing before us was the human who had received his orders.
However, not a single child possessing Manis had ever emerged from Limis. As a result, Dito's blood had remained untouched, safely tucked away in the man's breast pocket without ever being used.
Dito had no interest in this luckless man who had yielded zero results. Busy conducting experiments to his heart's content by rounding up massive numbers of street orphans in the Capital, Dito had neither the need nor the leisure to pay attention to a place like the Limis temple. At least, until now.
In the original novel, Dito loses the Red Book to Ratel, meaning he doesn't know exactly where Ratel heads after fleeing the Capital. The one who flips the board against Ratel is this fragile-looking priest. He is the one who informs Dito of the Holy Relic's existence and how to destroy it. Consequently, in the original story, Ratel is stripped of the Red Book by Dito right here. My decision to target this place first was partly because it was the closest, but also to prevent this man from ever making contact with Dito.
I approached the skinny priest, who still hadn't snapped out of his daze. Staring blankly at the light cast by Lia's small candle, he noticed the heavy shadow looming over him and looked up. Anguish filled his eyes, but he still had a job to do.
"Kwek, what are we supposed to do with that?" The man, who had been slowly backing away from me, glanced at my expression before pointing a trembling finger at the ground. It was the exact spot where the Orc Seed had been birthed.
"He... he said to pour the blood here. And then, to kill the cave. I really don't know anything beyond that," he said, his face contorted in misery.
"Kill the cave?" Lia asked, utterly indifferent to his personal distress. "How do you kill a cave that was never alive to begin with? Is that different from collapsing it?"
"I... I told you I don't know!" Perhaps emboldened because Lia seemed like the easiest target among us, the priest raised his voice in frustration.
"Even if you don't, you have to figure it out. You killed innocent people." Her cold voice shut him up instantly, though.
Lia glared at the man who had slaughtered her villagers based on nothing but flimsy pretexts. Meeting her furious gaze head-on, the thin priest couldn't utter a word and cast his eyes downward. After staring him down with a rigid expression, Lia took a deep breath and stepped back.
"Are you alright?" Jing asked gently. Lia nodded slowly. "For now, saving Ratel comes first." Closing and opening her eyes a few times to regain her composure, Lia spoke again.
"I don't think there's any point in that priest hiding anything else after telling us this much. Which means we have no choice but to do as he says..." Lia looked at Dito's blood in Jing's hand with a frightened expression.
"But I really don't know if it's safe to throw something like that on the ground... Besides, it seems we need someone who can use Manis. Unless a high noble suddenly drops from the sky, that's an impossible condition to meet."
Though he hadn't dropped from the sky, Jing—a high noble who could indeed use Manis—flinched and averted his eyes. At this rate, they'll take all day.
"Kwek, if you're that worried, I'll help. It's not like I'm ever going to meet Sierra in the afterlife anyway." Unable to bear the frustration, I snatched Dito's blood from Jing's hand.
"Huh? Wait!" I heard Lia's panicked voice trying to stop me, but I pretended not to hear. I hurled the bottle straight at the ground.
Clang! Shatter! The crisp sound of glass meeting rock echoed through the cavern. With Jing and Lia rendered utterly speechless by shock, I was able to quietly observe what happened next.
The red liquid splattered across the stone in an irregular pattern, splashed upward from the impact, and then—defying all laws of physics—began to pull itself back together into a single, cohesive mass.
"Is... is the blood of the Imperial Family really that different?" Lia muttered to herself, bewildered by the way it moved like a living organism. No one answered her.
Lia didn't mind the silence. She, too, was too busy watching the gathered red liquid slowly shrink in size. Before long, even the very last drop vanished completely.
It didn't take long to realize what effect Dito's blood had triggered after vanishing without leaving so much as a stain. Just like when the black flesh had been spat out—no, perhaps even more brilliantly—a radiant light erupted from the ground.
Rumble— The ground shook violently as a massive, echoing sound reverberated from below. I was the only one who knew this was the sound of the cave floor splitting open. Which meant the others were not nearly as calm as I was.
"Kyaaaaaah!" Lia's reaction was particularly severe. Unlike Jing, who calmly accepted reality and drew Sierra's Sword, the other two scrambled backward to distance themselves from the rapidly crumbling edges of the floor. Still, Lia was in better shape than the skinny priest. That bastard had fainted before the ground even began to split.
As the blinding light gradually faded, the yawning chasm in the floor came into view. Anything in this world becomes grotesque when there is too much of it. Many people find puppies adorable, but a tight, squirming mass of thousands of puppies in one place would only evoke disgust. How much worse, then, was the sight of black flesh writhing so densely that it completely carpeted the floor? Especially when we already knew those things were Orc Seeds. Thus, I could fully understand both Jing, who stood frozen in place, and Lia, who was screaming loud enough to burst my eardrums.
"Drive the sword into it!" My shout snapped Jing back to his senses. At least, it seemed that way, considering he plunged Sierra's Sword into the black mass without a moment's hesitation. Or perhaps his mind was half-gone, and he had simply acted on autopilot upon hearing the command. Seeing him slowly collapse over the mass of flesh with the sword still embedded, it was clear the act hadn't boded well for him. I decided to believe the former—that it was his own will, not my command, that drove him.
I eased the resulting pang of guilt by pulling him out as he began to sink into the writhing black flesh.
"Jing! Wake up!" Having finally stopped screaming, Lia rushed over to help me, grabbing and pulling at Jing's legs, which were already half-submerged.
Thud. Having finally succeeded in dragging Jing out of the black mass of flesh, we hauled him over to a spot where the ground was still relatively intact.
"Jing, wake up. Jing!" While Lia slapped the unconscious Jing's cheeks, I checked his condition. Even then, Jing hadn't let go of Sierra's Sword. I pried open his tightly clenched fingers and slipped the sword from his grasp. It fell with a dull clatter, looking disappointingly unchanged from before he had struck the black flesh. Swallowing a groan, I strapped the sword to my back. Then, I scooped up both Jing and Lia, who was supporting him. First, we had to get out of this cave.
Just as I took a step toward the exit, a searing heat, like a direct burn, flared up behind my back. Immediately after, a powerful force slammed into my spine, launching me forward in the direction I was heading.
I curled my body inward to shield Jing and Lia as I tumbled forward. But the force that had struck me was far too massive to merely knock an Orc over; my body rolled across the cavern floor several times. This painful, jarring tumble only ended when I slammed hard into the cave wall.
I checked on Jing and Lia. Aside from the fact that Lia, who had been perfectly fine, was now unconscious, nothing seemed to have changed. The problem now was me. Thanks to a floor made entirely of jagged rock without a single blade of grass, my Orc body was aching all over, especially my back. I was nursing a backache that throbbed far worse than any pang of guilt when I heard it.
As I crouched weakly on the ground from the impact, the sound of slow, deliberate footsteps approached. I didn't even need to look to know who it was, but I raised my head anyway. My eyes met a pair of golden irises beneath a mop of black hair. After a brief pause, his gaze drifted down to scan Jing and Lia cradled in my arms.
"Are you going to eat them?"
As if. I couldn't help but scowl at his first words, which practically begged for a curse in response. Looking up at the guy who, despite our long-awaited reunion, was still asking such absurd questions, I forced the words out.
"Yeah, they're my emergency rations. That's why I'm holding them so preciously." With that final bit of sarcasm, I blacked out once more.