The Young Old Man
"Ughh... Henry..."
"My lady?! What on earth are you doing here—!"
Kang!
Henry wasted no time, shearing through the bars with a blade wreathed in sword aura. The person he gathered into his arms was a girl of slight build—barely taller than Lena, so she couldn't have been much older than her.
He'd called her "my lady," so nobility, then?
"Henry? It's you, isn't it, Henry? My knight..."
"Yes, my lady. It is I. Please, rest assured..."
The two clung to each other, conjuring a moment of tender reunion so theatrical that even the anxious whispers of the hostages and their sour, unwashed stench seemed powerless to intrude on it.
He's putting on a melodrama. Are the two of them lovers? No, hold on—that girl looks underage no matter how I look at her.
I flinched at this startling hidden side of Henry, who always presented himself as so upright. Though... then again, people in this era typically married before coming of age, so perhaps it wasn't all that strange.
We ignored the pair still glued together and busied ourselves freeing the remaining hostages, sawing through bars while repeatedly urging everyone to stay quiet. By the time every captive was out, their number had reached thirty.
That didn't add up.
"The request listed ten missing persons in total. Where the rest came from is beyond me."
From the scraps of their stories, it sounded like the people had been abducted from all sorts of different villages. The cult's kidnappings, it seemed, had been far more widespread than we'd assumed. And since we'd received no other requests, the other villages clearly hadn't yet realized that monsters weren't to blame.
We were in the middle of taking down the hostages' details when Henry and his lady finally came to their senses.
"Ahem! What an unseemly sight you've all witnessed. Senior, this is the youngest daughter of Count Risacher, the rightful ruler of Bolston."
"I am called Catherine de la Bornee."
The girl—Catherine, apparently—gathered the torn skirts of her dress in both hands and offered a light curtsy. Her appearance was filthy, but a grace no commoner could have possessed, the bearing of someone raised a lifetime amid etiquette, marked her unmistakably as noble blood.
Setting aside the question of why the daughter of a high noble was in a place like this, I hastily dredged up a crash course in courtly manners from a corner of my brain.
"It is an honor to meet the cherished daughter of House Bornee."
I dropped to one knee and feigned a kiss upon the back of her hand—the trick being that my lips must never actually touch it. When I performed the gesture lightly and withdrew, Catherine looked thoroughly satisfied.
"How well-mannered. They always say adventurers have nothing but muscle and no courtesy whatsoever..."
"He's truly remarkable, my lady. He has already reached the Expert Realm—a master far beyond a humble specimen such as myself."
"Oh my. A man of both letters and arms. And your name would be...?"
Catherine's interest was piqued at Henry's words, and we exchanged introductions in full. It was an absurd little comedy for a filthy, pitch-black tent, but I couldn't pass up the chance to build a connection with a noble who seemed determined never to leave Bolston's central district. All the more so when that noble was the child of the very lord who ruled the city.
"...So that's what happened. Thank you, truly. But how are we to get out of here...? These cultists are truly dreadful people. Without so much as a blink, they'll turn a living human being into a mummy."
Once she'd heard the details of the rescue operation, Catherine shuddered, her face dark. Escaping this place was the obvious course, but hearing that cultists still roamed outside seemed to send fresh waves of anxiety washing over her. I could hardly blame her—the other hostages were in much the same state. A kind of learned helplessness, you might call it.
Dispelling that was Henry's job. Hearing him speak, dressed as he was in the classic image of a knight, one couldn't help but feel an inexplicable urge to trust him.
"Do not worry, everyone. The escape route is already prepared—in a place even the cultists know nothing of."
"That's my knight! I never doubted you."
"Haha... though it isn't my doing, I confess..."
To be precise, it was the escape route belonging to the men in the tent we'd ambushed at the start. They belonged to an organization clearly distinct from the cultists, and had built a secret passage in case of emergencies. Now it was our turn to make good use of it.
It seemed we'd dawdled long enough, so I urged the people onward.
"Ahem... we've wasted quite a lot of time already. Let's move quickly."
"Oh! I'm so sorry. I've been the one holding us up, haven't I..."
"It's quite all right, my lady. Sneaking this many people out undetected was never going to work anyway. We'll draw their eyes outside, so you need only stay under Henry's and Lena's protection."
"This little one...?"
"She's even smaller than m—mmph!"
I barely managed to smother Lena before she could blow up at the word "small"—it was her ultimate complex. Was there no artifact that could mute her mouth remotely? Honestly, this was getting tiresome.
But Catherine seemed to have already guessed what Lena was about to say, and sent her an awkward smile. "Come to think of it, I am the smaller one, aren't I? I'm sorry, Miss Lena."
Nod.
Still muzzled, Lena gave a small dip of her head. As a warning, I pressed a finger lightly against the crown of her skull. It was only luck that this young lady had a good temper.
Sensing the conversation was winding down, Henry gathered Catherine and the other hostages together and gave them a brief briefing.
"Everyone, follow me. When I tell you to get down, you get down—no questions. When I tell you to run, you run."
"The secret passage isn't far from here. At full sprint, it's only ten minutes away. Even crawling, we can make it within the hour, so stay calm and keep moving."
"It's quite cold outside, so tear strips from the tents and wrap your feet. You there! Once you're done, help the person beside you."
"Keep my knight's words close to your hearts, everyone."
"Yes, my lady."
Perhaps because Henry and Catherine gave them focal points to rally around, the hostages showed not the slightest inclination to act up, following instructions without complaint. The very air of willing obedience to anyone of high noble birth.
Even though I'd apparently adapted well to this world, seeing it always left me with a faint sense of wrongness. Was Lena the only one contrarian enough to talk back to nobility?
Whether or not she knew I was thinking this, Lena sauntered over with an utterly shameless expression.
"Mister, look after Unni for me. A party falling apart on our very first request would be just awful."
"Don't worry about us—worry about yourself. You've still got what I gave you earlier, right?"
"Yes."
"If those bastards try anything weird, don't even think about blocking with your shield. Without fail—"
"—I throw the stiletto. Got it."
After leaving my parting instructions with Lena, Noah and I said our last goodbyes to Catherine. The hostages sent us looks blending pity and gratitude, we who would stay behind to buy them time by fighting the dreaded cultists. Noah had healed them all, and everyone looked mobile enough, so the escape should go without a hitch.
Flutter—
Leaving the rest to Henry and Lena, we stepped out of the tent. The mood of the encampment seemed calmer than before, and through pure instinct I knew at once: the cultists' service had ended.
Our little trick wouldn't fool them a second time.
While I took a moment to check my gear, Noah spoke up.
"Catherine... she is a fine young lady. Rather well suited to Henry, I would say."
"Hm? Why's that?"
"If she slipped away alone, she could almost certainly escape without being caught—yet she remains composed. A girl her age would ordinarily be wailing and fussing, demanding to be sent out first."
"Now that you mention it... well, that's a good thing. Pull this request off cleanly and there'll be extra income in it for us."
Just as Noah said, Catherine had shown remarkable composure after that first moment. Which was to say, she didn't look like the type to breezily forget our help. And with a credible witness like Henry vouching for us, getting our deeds officially recognized should be that much easier.
"For the operation to succeed, we'll need to draw attention as spectacularly as possible. Where shall we strike first?"
"The place I was eyeing earlier."
"Ah... the tent that was conspicuously more elaborate than the rest."
"There'll be someone senior in there—something like a Priest. We hit there first."
The tent holding the hostages had been near the heart of the base. As always, the quarters of the higher-ups sat closest to the center.
"This is the place."
The base was slowly stirring back to life, resuming its normal routine. We narrowly slipped past a patrol and reached our target tent. Unlike the others, it was embroidered with golden thread in an intricate yet strangely dignified pattern, and from within came the sound of a single person at ease.
The owner of the tent, no doubt.
"I'll go in first."
"Don't bother with words. Just wreck him."
"Naturally."
Shff!
I simply cut the tent's door clean off. The thick monster hide sagged and fell away, and through the gap I glimpsed an old man wearing a bewildered expression. He'd apparently been about to fall asleep, a thin inner garment draped over him.
He'd seen us. Well, too bad for him.
"Hup!"
FWOOOOM!
Noah, primed and waiting, swept into the tent in a single motion, hammer swinging. The Glacier Bracelet's power was already unleashed to its utmost limit, letting her throw around monstrous strength without a thought for her own body.
"Domain of Pai—"
Crunch!
The old man chanted his incantation at respectable speed, but Noah's hammer was far faster. The violet barrier still forming in midair shattered against her in an instant, and the hammer came down squarely on the old man's skull.
The remains of a human body burst outward in every direction, like a ripe tomato crushed underfoot. Sneak attacks really are the ultimate truth of combat.
"Simple enough."
"Would this man be the leader?"
We took a brief moment to survey the tent's interior. Despite being a portable structure, the furnishings visible within were all of antique, refined design. Pieces that would take considerable manpower just to transport—which meant the tent's owner had unquestionably been a cultist of high rank. His exact position, though, I couldn't say.
"He was definitely somebody important, though. Probably more than just a Priest—"
Feewww... BOOM!
"!"
The sudden crack of fireworks split my sentence in two. The sound had come from the sky directly above us. I had no idea what it meant, but given the circumstances, one thing was certain: we'd been spotted.
We had to get out, now—
Whirr!
Just as we tried to pull away, the interior of the tent flared red, and the fabric and hide within began moving as though alive, sealing off our escape route completely. The ornate pattern we'd admired from outside was now glowing, visible from within.
So that pattern hadn't been mere decoration?
Noah and I struggled against the tent's coils, but it seemed to have been designed with exactly this contingency in mind—the compressed, bunched-up fabric was desperately hard and dense.
It was a trap.
"...The blood must have been the trigger, I believe. It appears to operate automatically."
"Clever little setup. Doesn't matter—we were planning on being noticed anyway."
I drew my sword and raised the Sawtooth Sword Aura.
GGGGRRAAANG!
Astonishingly, the transformed tent held up against even the sawtooth aura to a degree. But it couldn't endure forever—hammering the same spot over and over, it finally began to show a crack. Noah roughly forced the gap open with raw strength, and we barely squeezed free of the tent.
...Only to find ourselves face-to-face with a sea of cultists, already waiting. Roughly two hundred of what looked like Acolytes, twenty Chimeras, and a total of five Cult Knights. And last of all—an old man radiating an even heavier pressure than the Priest we'd seen before.
'Hmm...'
I swept my gaze across the enemy line, taking quick stock. As long as I could dull their senses, the knights didn't frighten me much, and the Chimeras weren't particularly strong either. But that old man... what on earth was he?
His facial wrinkles made him unmistakably elderly, yet between the jet-black hair without a single strand of gray and his skin's bizarre, vivid vitality, a strange impression surfaced: a young old man.
"Bold of you."
The old man, draped in a robe etched with intricate patterns, looked us up and down before speaking in a low murmur. Contrary to the rasping voice I'd expected, it was astonishingly clear and pure—a voice that, in any other circumstance, I could have listened to for hours. But my Beast's Senses were screaming a warning so cold it chilled me to the marrow, driving me into a state of extreme tension.
'This one is dangerous...'