The Terror Descends (1)
Early morning. Residents of Graveyard Valley passing near the Graveyard House froze at the unfamiliar clamor. This was a place where even the most ruthless kidnapping gangs made a point of muffling their footsteps. The local ghost stories claimed that the instant any sound resembling construction rang out, a monster would appear and drag the offender away. As a result, the surrounding alleys always lay wrapped in a silence thick as any cemetery. That was why everyone called it the Graveyard House—even though the sign out front boldly declared it a hospital.
In truth, the mere fact that a hospital operated in Graveyard Valley was terrifying enough. The Eleim who lived here, perpetually short on food, carved up the corpses of the fallen and sold the meat on the streets. This was a demonic pit where the daily struggle for survival had become routine. In a place like this, there should have been no room for any peaceful notion such as a free clinic.
At first, everyone had thought exactly that. Yet the hospital had stood on the same spot for decades.
If a grazing beast wanted to survive among wolves, it had only three options: hide well, flee well… or be strong enough to shatter every predator’s jaw. A building, of course, could neither hide nor run. That left only one conclusion.
In that nightmarish hospital—near the Graveyard House rumored to run on money earned by selling gangsters’ organs—a hammer now rang against steel with steady, metallic clangs. The residents whispered in fear. Looked like they’d be hauling away several bodies today.
“His very existence is that of a rebel.”
From the sixth-floor rooftop, Nathan gazed down at the muttering residents and murmured with quiet satisfaction. A general hospital built in the sewers, a sanctuary feared even by thugs. He had stayed at the Graveyard House only a few days, yet he already felt a warm surge of affection, as though he had returned home. It seemed rebels truly did recognize their own.
The true source of the noise was nothing like the wild fantasies of the pointed-eared locals. There was no brawl with gangsters inside. No torture devices being built for the patients. What was happening was far more sinister.
Fortification. The hospital was preparing for war.
“Hey! Where the hell are you going with that pan spring, you crazy bastard? I was saving that for a hinge!”
“I know where I’m going better than you filthy pointy-ears, since I’m a dwarf! With nothing but a hammer and the kitchen hearth, I’ll show you I can forge something truly terrifying!”
“Bullshit. What could you possibly cook up in a kitchen scarier than Ramkaf’s slop?”
When the patients burst into laughter, the dwarf patient—with a pickaxe blade still embedded in the top of his skull—snorted loudly. Then he gathered an armful of spring steel and dashed toward the cafeteria.
Benny stared after him, dazed, as if she had seen a ghost.
“Just now… in my building’s my kitchen… what exactly did he say he was going to do?”
The emergency meeting held last night by the staff and patients had ended in a conclusion Benny never wanted: Let’s turn our beloved sanctuary into a terrifying war machine.
The patients had cheered as though it were a rare festival and thrown themselves into the project. Benny had tried to stop them with her fiercest glare, but it was useless. Life trapped inside the hospital was unbearably boring—more so than any fear or respect for the director.
Especially for the long-term Eleim patients, they craved any distraction. And if that distraction helped ensure their beloved hospital’s survival, they welcomed it even more.
“For free food—!”
“For my free blood-pressure bandages!”
“I refuse to lose my mana transfusion pack dispenser to some nobody!”
“Are you in love with the hospital or with the free stuff, you lunatics? At least clean the first-floor bathroom properly like usual—!”
Benny shouted at the excited patients. She understood. Preparing was the rational choice. But after guarding the Graveyard House “exactly as it was” for fifty years, her affection and pride were not easily suppressed.
Hrozka, busily twisting a hunting knot nearby, looked at her with pitying eyes.
“Want to take it?”
Benny glanced back and forth between Hrozka and the sturdy rope he offered—perfect for hanging something. Kill me first. I can’t bear to see that sight. Those had been her words during yesterday’s meeting. She could not allow the hospital she had built to be turned into some gangster hideout.
She slapped the back of Hrozka’s hand and kicked his shin like lightning. The forest elf cursed the violent culture of the heavenly Eleim as he tumbled forward.
Benny cried out desperately toward the rooftop.
“Damn it, Nathan! Do we really have to go this far?”
A steel helmet poked out from the roof. The armor Nathan wore had originally been part of Benny’s personal collection. To her eyes, it looked like one of her display models had come to life.
“Seeing your face makes me want to stop too. If you tell me to run even now, I will.”
“…Where would I go, leaving my hospital behind!”
Stamping her feet, Benny offered a small compromise.
“You don’t have to tear out all the walls. The building was plenty sturdy when it was first constructed! It can hold out against thugs until Sweetie returns from its walk! It did yesterday! If that pervert shows up again, Sweetie can just swallow him in one bite, right?”
Nathan nodded. That was the sort of thing someone could say if they didn’t know better.
“Benny, remember the Changeling?”
“Changeling? Just sprinkle salt and read a fairy tale. Like you taught me.”
“What about a Wendigo?”
“…I don’t know. Do I need to?”
Nathan’s answer sent a chill down Benny’s spine.
“An abyssal sorcerer is not simply a mage or shaman with a twisted personality. They cook and offer sacrifices to evil gods, gaining power equal to the weight of those offerings. They wield the strength to command ghosts or handle demons.”
The fight against an abyssal sorcerer was not waged in the physical world. If you didn’t understand that, you would lose. Therefore every possible preparation had to be made.
“If the enemy can attach demons to other people’s bodies or transform his own flesh… he is no ordinary abyssal sorcerer. He’ll send every abyssal monster you’ve never heard of—Wendigo, Acheri, Bogeyman, Hydra, and worse. I’ll ask one last time, Benny. Are you truly not going to evacuate?”
“I’m not leaving! This is my building, built with my own money!”
“Then there’s no choice. If you want to protect it, we must prepare.”
Drawing on his experience in the knight order, Nathan stated only the unvarnished truth. The reason everyone except the hospital director had voted to remodel the building was simple.
“An abyssal sorcerer who fails to achieve his goal will definitely return.”
To collect the sacrifices he had already marked. Or to eliminate anyone who had seen his face.
It was wiser to leave unfamiliar fields to experts. Benny understood that well—she was an expert in many fields herself. As both hospital director and engineer Eleim, she offered no further objections.
Instead she watched the patients. They pretended not to have heard a thing, even though Nathan had spoken loudly enough for them to hear. While the mobile patients welded iron desks into barricades, the bedridden ones shouted mockery and unasked-for advice. Even as they coughed in the construction dust, they kept laughing.
As if they truly hadn’t heard anything at all.
Only then did Benny understand their hearts. All of it was an attempt to forget yesterday’s terror—and the possibility that the same terror might return. Sometimes, to keep your own feet from running away, you had to pretend not to know.
“If I spread this, will demons really be unable to climb up?”
“Good morning, Nathan.”
Nathan, who had been reciting a passage from the human scriptures while brushing salt water across the roof, set his brush down and turned. Climbing the rooftop ladder with considerable effort was the massive Tuzetey. Clinging to his back was Nilly. The sight reminded him of a crocodile bird riding an alligator.
“Good morning, Tuzetey. It’s not perfect, but any demon that steps on it should at least suffer burns. Though… what exactly are you wearing?”
Tuzetey had covered his enormous frame in what looked like pitch-black leather. Goggles even sat on his forehead. As a surface-dweller, Nathan could not guess their purpose.
“This? A diving suit.”
“…A diving suit? You have scales—do you really need one?”
“I was patrolling the perimeter through the water pipes. That meant diving into the sewer water, which is honestly disgusting. It stings on contact too. Whew. I don’t know how I ever lived in that filth.”
Like Nathan, Tuzetey had been kidnapped to the heavens. He had once lived like a beast in the sewers of Graveyard Valley, hunting and devouring anything that moved—while quietly waiting for the day he would be hunted in turn. That was how it had been until Benny rescued him. Only inside the hospital had Tuzetey been able to return to his true self as a healer. A civilized being rather than a monster.
“I see. It really is hard to imagine.”
Looking at the respectable medical professional Tuzetey had become, it was difficult to picture such a past. The corners of the lizardman’s eyes curved with quiet pleasure.
“So, how is the work progressing?”
“Nowhere near enough.”
Nathan let out a long sigh.
“Honestly, I feel like burning the whole hospital down. I’ve tried scaring them into fleeing, but no one listens.”
They truly refused to listen—neither Benny nor the patients who still lingered. If that was their decision, Nathan would do everything in his power to help them. Yet he remained uncertain. Could these hasty preparations truly stop an abyssal sorcerer?
Judging by the enemy’s behavior, the man seemed determined to obtain both Hrozka and Nathan.
He swore he would offer us. To the god he serves.
If he broke that oath, the evil god might claim his soul. Would someone like that come unprepared this time?
Nilly clumsily slid down from Tuzetey’s back and pointed below the railing.
“If you’re worried about the patients, you can stop. Every one of them claims they lived pretty rough lives on the surface. Just like you and Arqueba.”
Humans, dwarves, lizardians, centaurs with the bodies of horses. Even a few orcs who had never sworn themselves to the abyss. Kidnapped arena slaves who had escaped or been abandoned. Innocent surface folk—or their descendants. The latter were far more common.
So it was hard to believe all their heroic tales. Nathan’s worry only deepened.
“What about the Eleim? I doubt any of them are familiar with fighting the abyss.”
“If they’ve settled down here, their situations are all roughly the same. Where else would they go?”
Nilly shrugged and took a long pull from the pack in her hands. The transfusion pack supposedly contained pure magical energy. With every sip, color returned to her face.
“It’s supposed to be injected, but drinking it like this makes me feel like a vampire. It’s kind of fun.”
While gulping the liquid, Nilly idly clenched and opened her left hand. Shards of ice formed instantly between her fingers and fell one after another.
“Ugh, now I understand why mana addicts exist. My head’s spinning and power is practically bursting out of me.”
“I prescribed that to let your overworked mana core rest, Princess, not to play with. Limit it to tomorrow. Patients whose bodies cannot generate mana on their own will struggle the moment those packs run out.”
Nilly quickly shoved her left hand into her pocket.
“Eek. Yes.”
To the Eleim, mana was not a tool but life itself. Young Baeleim could survive without it, but afterward a fixed quantity of mana had to flow through their blood or they would die. Still, three or four such congenital patients were born out of every hundred—like fish that could not breathe on land, or bodies unable to produce their own blood.
Outside Graveyard Valley, in the sunlit districts, transfusion packs for such patients were plentiful, as were wealthy buyers. But in this sewer, most could not afford the cost.
The more one learned, the farther reality drifted from the beautiful illusions the word “elf” usually evoked.
A world where even tomorrow had to be purchased with money.
“It really is strange,” Nilly sighed. “Those capable of wielding magic are rare, yet mana they cannot even expend is strangling their lifelines.”
She gave Nathan a sidelong glance, mischief sparkling in her eyes despite the heavy subject.
“In your eyes it must look pathetic. You probably think that since we have infinite lifespans, we ought to have accumulated just as much. But it isn’t that easy. Just look at this hospital. If not for Benny, every patient here would have died long ago….”
Her tone turned playful. “Actually, the same goes for you and me. So tell me—how are things going?”
Nathan frowned. “You mean the preparations against the abyssal sorcerer? I already said they’re insufficient.”
“Not that. I mean with Benny. You’re not about to say she’s insufficient, are you?”