Chapter 224 |
The atmosphere in Lobrus was bleak. The whole country probably felt like it was walking on thin ice.
The bloodstorm that Varmil had ordered and Zerof had steered, the Great Purge, was still very much in progress.
Military generals who had barked commands just yesterday, capable engineers, scholars, ordinary farmers and students going about their daily lives, all of them found themselves branded reactionaries without even realizing it, dragged off to labor reeducation camps to dig tunnels.
The man leading that absurd purge was Zerof.
The same man who had tripped while walking and gone sprawling onto the rail tracks.
"......"
Zerof, who had gone down hard, rose quietly and turned to look at me. Or seemed to. I hadn't seen it. I'd been turned away, pretending to admire the sky.
"......Sir Knight."
Zerof called out to me.
Only then did I turn back and give him a smile.
"My apologies. The view is quite lovely. The moon is bright tonight."
"......I heard the moon is the symbol of Ebenholtz."
"That's right. On a full moon like tonight, one's gaze simply gets pulled to it."
Zerof tried to hide the blood on his lip and yanked the train door open.
"Sir Knight. Watch this."
He aimed the muzzle at the temple of a dragged-out prisoner.
Bang!
He pulled the trigger without hesitation.
"Next!"
Zerof shouted that, and I leaned in and whispered something small to his adjutants.
Bang!
The gunshot echoed. The adjutants' shoulders flinched with it.
"Committee Member Zerof will probably ask you as well, whether you 'saw it.'"
Whether they'd seen him trip on the tracks.
Zerof was a man riddled with inferiority. He wasn't the type to let someone who'd witnessed his smallest, pettiest shame live.
"So when he asks, tell him you saw it. Tell him that the sight of him striking down traitors to his people was very......"
Bang!
The pistol kept firing, keeping pace with each prisoner dragged out.
"Elegant."
Bang!
"And if he asks exactly what it looked like."
Bang!
"Tell him the whole sequence leading up to the shot looked like a single stroke of ballet."
Zerof was a ballet enthusiast. Somewhere in my memory sat a line from a biography I'd read once.
[ Zerof. He was a man with no formal learning. Three years of schooling was all he ever had, and to his dying day he misspelled words on official documents...... Ballet was the one art in which he never felt inferior. The body onstage cites no foreign phrases. It appends no footnotes. It is simply beautiful, or not...... ]
Excerpted from "The Monster's Other Face," an account describing the Lobrus Great Purge.
Bang!
The prisoner's head burst open.
"If you answer him that way, he'll let it go."
I patted the adjutants' shoulders lightly.
They weren't Izenheim, so they deserved at least this much mercy.
Bang!
Seriously, how many people is this bastard going to kill.
Bang!
No wonder they call him the Blood Goblin.
Bang!
"Hff......"
Only after emptying the magazine did his rage seem to settle.
"Kuh!"
Zerof exhaled hard and lowered the pistol. His blood-splattered brow twitched with elation and madness.
This man wasn't right in the head either.
"How was it?"
At the insane question, I clapped my hands as if genuinely impressed.
"It seems you've truly steeled your resolve and your will."
Zerof was a man with an expiration date on his life anyway.
A hunting dog raised by its master's hand might convince itself it will live forever, basking in that master's favor, but once the hunt ends, it's the first thing boiled for stew.
"Hah. Yes. I've thought long and hard about what you told me that day, Sir Knight. I too intend to bring my own kind of change and revolution......"
Zerof dragged his words out, but I let it pass through one ear and out the other.
"Ah, right. That imperial terrorist you mentioned before, 'Nigelsmann.'"
This time it was news actually worth hearing.
"He's on the train too."
Zerof's eyes crinkled with a smile as he gestured toward the train.
* * *
Clatter. Clatter.
The military train, loaded full of prisoners, sped down the rail line toward the imperial center.
Clatter. Clatter.
I sat in one of the train cars, facing a single person.
"Let's start with a meal."
Nigelsmann. The man who had planted a bomb at Imperial Guard headquarters six years ago and killed a brigadier general.
He gave no answer to my words.
"Not hungry?"
Between us sat a table. Steak, salad, a proper meal.
"......Did you know it would come to this, when you fled?"
His face already bore the marks of countless tortures. Dried out, gaunt, he said nothing.
Thud.
My heart pounded, heavy.
Thud.
This thing was Izenheim.
"Well......"
Watching him not even reach for a fork, I opened my mouth.
【You really didn't think it would come to this, did you?】
Not the imperial tongue, not Lobrus. A language of an entirely different origin.
His mouth moved and sound came out, but the moment those words left, the wavelength was too strange to belong to any human language.
"......!"
Nigelsmann's dead-fish eyes tore wide open. A reaction unmistakably different from before.
"I know what you want."
Staring deep into his pupils, I continued in that language from another world.
【The end of the world.】
Thud.
The virus stirred violently. It shook my ribs.
A smile spread across my lips.
"But I swear on my soul. I will absolutely, your kind that seeks to destroy us......"
【Annihilate you.】
One of Nigelsmann's eyes twisted grotesquely. His retina filled with a blackness like the void of space for a moment, then settled back into an ordinary pupil.
"......"
Was it rage? Or just some reaction from his weakened body?
They imitate everything about humans. Which means, inevitably, they also carry the negative parts within them.
That "negative part," in my thinking, was emotion.
That gave me my Seventh Hypothesis.
7. They possess genuine emotion, and they are sometimes vulnerable to pain.
"......We are not guilty of anything."
"Oh. Is that so."
"We are not guilty of anything."
We are not guilty of anything. We are not guilty of anything. We are not guilty of anything.
I watched him, indifferent, as he repeated those words again and again, as though he'd already given up on his own life, and then,
Bang!
I drew my pistol and shot him dead.
"......"
The corpse with its ruptured head collapsed under the table. Red blood soaked into the carpet, but I picked up my fork and knife without a word.
Slice.
I cut into the steak and put it in my mouth. The texture and flavor of the meat were quite good.
Screech!
Maybe it was the gunshot. Soldiers rushed in and threw the door open.
"Ah......!"
A corpse with a hole through its head, and the interior soaked in blood. Their eyes filled with shock.
I only went on slowly chewing and swallowing the steak in my mouth.
Wiping my lips with a napkin, I gave the order.
"Clean this up."
* * *
After Maximilian left first, it was time for the Eastern Alliance soldiers to board the train and return to Lobrus.
"Wait a moment."
Zerof wiped his bloodied hands and walked off somewhere for a moment. He approached the group of Adversaries guarding him from a distance.
"By the time we arrive... the engineers......"
Zerof's instructions slipped, very quietly, into the ears of his adjutants.
Engineers.
A code word the Committee Member liked to use.
The adjutants exchanged glances.
"Let's go."
Zerof, having returned, boarded the train first, and the adjutants followed after him.
"Move out."
The train rattled into motion. A thick stench of blood and heavy silence settled over the interior.
Zerof gazed out the window, then suddenly turned to look at his adjutants.
"......Today."
At the blood-flecked voice, their shoulders tensed involuntarily.
"Did you see it?"
At those words, Maximilian flashed unbidden through their minds. The advice the Empire's knight had left them.
One of the adjutants swallowed hard.
"Yes. We saw it."
Exactly the line Maximilian had taught them,..."The sight of you striking down traitors to your people was...... truly, very elegant."
"......"
Zerof's eyes narrowed. He stared intently into the adjutant's eyes and asked again.
"......What exactly did it look like?"
The adjutant steadied his trembling breath. Showing nothing on his face, he answered with nothing but admiration in his voice.
"The entire sequence from drawing the gun to firing it...... looked like a single stroke of ballet."
Ballet. The moment he heard that word, Zerof's face twitched. A hollow, faint laugh soon spread across it.
"Hmm, yes. Ballet. So you two have an eye for it as well."
Unable to hold back his laughter any longer, he laughed aloud and leaned back against the seat.
"......Ballet. I suppose. Of course it would look that way. Ha ha ha."
Zerof gazed comfortably out the window until the train arrived.
Screech!
Dawn was breaking somewhere along the way.
The train reached the platform. Zerof and his adjutants got off together.
"Committee Member."
A man already in plain clothes, the so-called "engineer," was waiting there.
Zerof glanced back and forth between him and his two adjutants.
"Ah, never mind. It was nothing important. You can head back."
"......"
The engineer left the platform without a word.
"Well then, let's be going too."
"......Yes."
The adjutants followed Zerof with a strange dizziness churning inside them.
......Probably.
They had kept their lives today, thanks to that knight of the Empire.
* * *
On some nameless mountain in the imperial center, I stood alone atop its silent summit.
"Recognize it."
Freya's quiet voice drifted to my ears on the mountain wind.
"You now place your heart out into the world."
Place my heart outside myself.
At first it sounded like some unanswerable riddle.
But this was exactly why Freya had emphasized meditation so much.
To settle and empty the mind, to bring the stillness within into perfect alignment with the world outside.
Just as the mana of northern "Finnomia" carried the bitter cold within it, this was training meant to let me dwell within my own mana.
"No two Ebenholtz swords are alike. Just as no two people are alike."
Freya continued, hands clasped behind her back, circling me.
"How does Sebastian use his mana? Even if he's called the completion of Ebenholtz, the house's secret art isn't some single uniform thing."
Whoosh......
A strong mountain wind swept across my cheek.
"Will you wield mana as sharp moonlight?"
Sebastian's longsword shattered like light itself. His mana bloomed into countless flashes, cutting down every enemy on the ground without exception.
"Or will you wield it as the night sky, embracing all things?"
At Freya's question, I found myself lifting my head to look up at the distant sky.
"The moon...... is in the sky, after all."
"Good. Then what's your identity?"
My identity.
As the knight Maximilian, or as a human being.
I......
"Wind."
When I'm in the sky. When I let my body ride the wind.
That's when I'm freest.
"Then do that. You can."
I closed my eyes. Silver mana rose from beneath my feet like a heat shimmer.
The heart within flowed outward, and the mana condensed into a soft current of air.
The slope I stood on wasn't steep. Not steep enough to leap from. Nowhere near enough terrain to serve as a runway for flight.
But it didn't matter.
I only had to make the path I would walk, the wind I would ride, out of mana.
"Go."
At Freya's signal,
Whoosh!
I stepped off into empty air on a mana-made wind.
My body lifted, weightless, as if I'd shed gravity entirely, riding the grain of the mountain wind up into the sky.
I never crashed to the ground. I never tumbled.
Whoosh!
In that moment, becoming one with the wind I had raised, cutting through open air.
At the edge of my vision, another shadow appeared, drawing near in a trail of silver.
"......"
Leo. Clad in armor, flying alongside me, my shepherd.
"......Look at him, so cute."
I smiled, and Leo maintained his flight with solemn dignity.
We soared through the night sky together.
......
[ Maximilian: Look at him, so cute ]
Filty worked on her manuscript at home, absorbed in it. Her house sat in the best residential complex in the underground city. Her manager Yam had wanted her to move to the wealthy district in the imperial center outright, but Filty had flatly refused and stayed here instead.
It was the city where she'd once lived alongside her Outcast companions.
[ Maximilian: The moon...... is in the sky, after all. ]
She gazed quietly down at the stack of manuscript pages scattered across her desk.
Maximilian's oddly human side, loving a dog. An ambition that resembled wind.
Page by page, she rewound through the fragmented facts she had drawn purely from her All-Seeing Eye, facts with no place in her own memory, in reverse order.
[ Maximilian: Clean this up ]
Maximilian, cutting into steak in a room soaked with blood, a corpse with a caved-in head lying right in front of him.
An image too monstrous even just to look at, drawn on paper.
"Ugh."
Filty quickly flipped back to the previous page.
[ Prisoner: ......We, our people, are not guilty of anything. We, our people, are not guilty of anything. We, our people, are not guilty of anything. ]
A prisoner muttering like someone out of their mind that they weren't guilty, and Maximilian glaring coldly down at him.
Rustle.
She turned the page back further, to before Maximilian shot the prisoner dead.
"......"
Her hand froze for a moment. Her eyes wavered.
[ Maximilian: ...... ]
Maximilian had opened his mouth, saying something to the prisoner.
Clearly a scene of conversation. But the speech bubble was completely empty.
Her All-Seeing Eye hadn't picked up whatever Maximilian was uttering, not visually, not audibly, not at all.
And right after that, the prisoner's reaction was stranger still.
[ Prisoner: ......! ]
The prisoner's eyes went wide, as if he had somehow understood whatever "it" was that Maximilian had said to him.
[ Maximilian: I know what you want. ]
[ Maximilian: ...... ]
"What in the world is he......"
Saying.
Filty's brow furrowed deeply.
[ Maximilian: I swear on my soul. I will absolutely, your kind that seeks to destroy us...... ]
The panel that followed.
[ Prisoner: ...... ]
The prisoner's face filled an entire page.
"......"
She lost her words for a moment.
If anything, her focus only sharpened.
She found herself leaning in over the drawing.
[ Prisoner: ...... ]
A huge close-up eye. Inside that pitch-black pupil, an unknowable abyss unfolded, stabbing at her optic nerve like a physical thing.
Goosebumps rose all over Filty's body.
"......That's not a mana effect."
Filty usually relied on a fairly consistent set of effects and patterns when depicting the flow or collision of mana.
But this jet-black mass she'd drawn wasn't shaped like mana at all, and it was nothing like the bloodlust or presence a human being gave off either.
"......"
Without her even realizing it, some grotesque development had unspooled at the tip of her pen, on its own.
Filty was frightened by these situations she couldn't make any sense of, but......
Suddenly, she remembered the conviction Maximilian had once shown her.
"I want you to keep watching me."
She thought about that race Maximilian so despised, Izenheim.
Slowly she lifted her head and looked at the books lining one side of her study.
Hundreds of thick volumes she'd had her manager Yam scour the continent to gather.
Documents and research materials describing Izenheim's origins, their culture and religion, the "gap" that set them apart from every other race on the continent, one that never blended with anyone.
"Ugh......"
Filty shook her head, trying to brush the thought away, but one vague fact still lingered.
Just as certain imperial scholars claimed, Izenheim was a race with no history, one whose "origin could not be clearly traced."
"......"
Filty sat still, only her eyes moving.
[ Prisoner: ...... ]
She stared for a long while at the prisoner's face rendered on the page, at the nameless dread that seeped out of the drawing......
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