26. The One Who's Going To Live Needs To Live.

While Beron was out cold, I got a lot of information out of Valerian, and the core of it was that he’d already risen to a place close to Astraea’s right hand.

I was half in doubt about it.

But my doubts didn’t change a thing. The man with the byname Blue Lion really was Valerian, and by his account he’d cut such a figure on the battlefield that at some point he’d caught her eye.

Right — Beron said this man was the number-two assassination target after the Saintess. There’s no way a figure like that wouldn’t be entered into the historical record.

“When exactly did you possess this body?”

Because nobody could have piled up deeds like those if they’d arrived only a few hours ago, the way I had. He plainly hadn’t crossed over in the same era as me.

“…”

But Valerian wasn’t going to tell me anything more. Then again, he was my rival for the heir’s seat, so what he’d let slip already was something to be grateful for.

“That friend you just knocked out, Brother…”

I could’ve taken his information and clammed up, and nobody would’ve called me on it, but it would’ve left a bad taste in my mouth. So I.

“…That’s how things ended up this way.”

I told him how I’d possessed into the dungeon and met Beron, and then about Beron’s attempt on the Saintess. A kind of fair-play spirit, I suppose.

That should be enough.

Of course, I kept back that Beron had let himself be captured deliberately for the assassination, and that he was no ordinary elf.

When I’d finished, Valerian finally spoke.

“I see.”

Then he turned on his heel to go.

“H-hey, wait a minute!”

I scrambled to grab him. You’re just going to walk off like this?

Cha-clank, cha-clank!

I rattled the steel chains on my hands back and forth. And then.

“Bro… Brother!”

I flashed him a wheedling grin. Surely even the cold-blooded Valerian would cut me loose after that?

“I am not your brother right now.”

The crazy bastard ignored my cry completely and strolled out at his leisure.

“Wait— hey!!”

All I got back was the hollow echo of my own shout.

Huh?

Thud. Thud.

But soon after, I heard someone walking back.

See, I knew it!

Even Valerian must have hesitated to leave me here. There was a reason people said blood was thicker than water.

“Heh heh heh, you little rats gave me the slip earlier, didn’t you?”

And my hopes shattered like a glass cup smashed into a thousand pieces, because the one who’d appeared was the jailer I’d beaten down before.

“Now I’ll teach you a proper lesson.”

And he was seething with fury.

He dug around in his pocket and pulled something out. I naturally braced for torture tools or a whip, but.

“Heh heh heh…”

What he was holding wasn’t what I’d expected. In one hand he had a thin little stick, supple as a switch, and with it an uncapped bottle, a sticky, transparent, slime-like fluid oozing out of it.

“…?”

What was that? Something used for torture?

I sat there blankly, unable to read the situation, while the jailer smacked his lips and spoke.

“The folks upstairs told me not to kill you. But they didn’t say not to touch you.”

His gaze raked up and down my body, and that sticky look came to rest on my waistline.

“I gave you a few smacks earlier, you know. You didn’t even scream — no reaction at all. No fun in beating you.”

The thin stick slid up my thigh, dragging slowly, and goosebumps prickled across my skin.

“So this time, no hitting. Truth is, there’s something I like even better than hitting.”

He dipped his fingers generously into the bottle. If the world had a most-terrifying horror movie, this had to be it.

“It’s something I do now and then for prisoners who give me trouble… They hate it at first, but by the end they love it to death. I’ll get you there too.”

An alarm went off in my head like a screaming siren. The purpose of that fluid, that thin rounded rod, the leering glint in his eye.

…What the actual fuck.

Panic. My brain literally went white.

I could endure fighting demons. I could endure broken bones. But not this. This was a genre change!

Thanks to little-Eve’s helpful commentary, I realized that the jailer was, very seriously, a man who enjoyed sodomy.

I went pale and twisted this way and that, but the steel chains didn’t budge an inch.

“Heh heh, your squirming is adorable.”

If anything, he was loving it, and he inched closer. I was just about to consider biting through my own tongue, killing myself and forfeiting this trial—

“Hmmm… which one shall I dote on first?”

The jailer paused with a deliberating look on his face, glancing back and forth between me and Beron, who was slumped limp beside me. I didn’t let that brief opening slip past.

“Shouldn’t you start with the one who clubbed you over the back of the head, Officer?!”
“What?”

Beron, sorry about this.

But the one who’s going to live needs to live.

I jerked my chin toward Beron.

“That guy knocked you out and suggested we escape!”

The jailer’s eyes flashed.

“It was this bastard? The one who whacked me on the back of the head earlier?!”

Loyalty? Brotherhood? What good is any of that when my own ass is about to be drilled through? You live first and worry about it later.

“Yes, that’s the one!”

The jailer swallowed it whole and changed targets. He shook out the hand smeared with fluid, stepped over to Beron, and roughly seized a fistful of hair while Beron hung there limp and defenseless.

“An elf, huh… Looks prim and fussy — conquering this one’s going to be a real thrill. Actually, this is even better.”

And just as he was lifting Beron’s face with one hand and reaching for his waistband with the other—

Flash.

Beron, whom I’d thought was unconscious, opened his eyes.

“Crazy fucker.”

— THWACK!

A blunt, heavy crack rang through the cell. Beron’s knee had driven up, clean and powerful, into the jailer’s testicles.

“Khuhuherrrgggh…!”

A wheezing, wind-knocked-out scream burst from the jailer’s lips. His eyes rolled back and, unable to bear the pain, he pitched forward onto his face.

Crash!

He lay collapsed at Beron’s feet, foaming at the mouth, out cold. He probably wouldn’t be much of a man again in this life.

Beron bent his upper body and brought his face down toward the unconscious jailer’s rear.

Jangle.

He’d caught the key ring hanging from the jailer’s back pocket with his mouth. Then he picked out a single key with his teeth, snapped his head back, and started jamming it at the keyhole of the lock on his own wrist.

The flexibility and jaw-joint control were jaw-dropping. I watched the circus act going on next to me, completely speechless.

Clack.

Right after that, the cuffs came loose. Now free, Beron rotated his wrists, rose to his feet, and slowly turned to me with a murderous glint in his eye.

“What’d you say just now?”

I sheepishly avoided his burning gaze.

Sorry, man. But if our positions were reversed, you’d have done the same.

…Or not, whatever.

Clack.

The heavy steel chains dropped to the floor. I rubbed my numb wrists and looked up at Beron, because I’d expected him either to leave me here or to land a fist on me as payback for selling him out earlier.

“That’s a surprise. I figured you’d kill me.”
“I’d love to, believe me.”

Beron was rifling through the jailer sprawled on the floor, checking for anything useful. I’d noticed before that he looked very practiced at picking pockets.

Once he’d searched the man thoroughly, he made an unexpected declaration.

“I’m coming with you.”
“With me? Why?”
“Just because. Personally, I’ve gotten curious about who you really are.”

He pointed at the torn jailer’s uniform I was wearing.

“You claim to be an ordinary soldier, but you pose as a jailer, don’t bat an eye at torture, and you’ve even got the gall to sell out your own ally. Quite a combination.”
“Thanks for the compliments.”
“Besides, the Saintess assassination is a lost cause now, so I’ve got nothing better to do.”

Failure or not, we had walked right into the Saintess’s chambers without breaking a sweat. So the guard around her was no doubt several times stronger now, and forget assassination, even getting near her would be impossible.

“Don’t suppose you’re thinking of going back to the Empire.”

Beron nodded. Then again, an assassin who’d failed his mission had no home to return to.

The question was whether bringing him along was actually a net positive for me, because I’d originally planned to act solo, or at most with just Eve. He must have read that hesitation off me, because he launched into his pitch.

“You said something at the start, didn’t you? That you wanted to find out where the missing prisoners were taken. In that case, you’ll need me.”
“Why’s that?”
“I know the way.”
“After what I’ve seen of you so far? That’s a little hard to believe.”

It was a fair point. He’d swaggered in talking about assassinating the Saintess, and what did he have to show for it? Memories of getting knocked out and beaten down.

Beron let out a wounded-sounding sigh, then tapped a finger against his pointed ear.

“All this time, I’ve been listening to the sound of the wind.”

His expression turned serious.

“The wind tells me things. Where the drainage pipes of this dungeon connect to, where the carts loaded with the wounded stop every night, even the route the prisoners have been dragged off along this whole time.”

I nodded without complaint. It was a solid pitch. I did have Eve, but real-time tracking wasn’t something she could do, and a scent hound — no, a scent elf — would make the clear go a lot smoother.

“You’re hired.”

So I stepped back out into the dark corridor with the interviewee who’d successfully sold himself. This time the target wasn’t the Saintess but the place the prisoners had been dragged off to.

While we moved, I tossed Beron a question to help straighten things out in my head.

“That Blue Lion guy from earlier. When did he start showing up on the battlefield?”

Beron thought back for a moment, then answered.

“A year ago or so. He showed up like a comet and turned the battlefield upside down.”

I paused. It had been only a few hours since I’d entered this book, and Valerian had already been active for a year?

This was cheating.

Unaware of what was going on in my head, Beron kept explaining.

“Before he showed up, things were even. To be precise, we lost on the battlefields where the Saintess was, and we won on the battlefields where she wasn’t.”
“The Empire’s got way more troops. You should’ve been able to grind them down in a war of attrition and take the win.”

Beron stopped walking and turned to look at me.

“Be straight with me. Are you a spy from another country entirely?”
“Cut the crap. I’m asking why that strategy didn’t work.”
“Have you never once set foot on a real battlefield in your life?”

I nodded, and Beron’s expression went hollow.

“The Arne army doesn’t die unless you take their heads off. Stab a man through the heart and somehow he’ll be back among the living. The Empire has more troops, you say? That’s the funniest thing I’ve heard in my entire life.”

This world was, in the end, built on top of the game I used to play, Demonic Frontier.

I’d had my own newbie days, and I’d died thousands of times playing it. I, the player, was fine, because there was ‘auto-revive.’ But the NPCs with decent stats or excellent skills who followed me around had died many times along the way, and though I’d done my best to bring them back, nowhere had there been a method for fully resurrecting the dead.

Yet the rank-and-file Arne grunt-NPCs were on infinite revives?

“The Arne army calls it the ‘Saintess’s Miracle.’ At any rate, with a deathless army like that — and a blade who’s worth a hundred, no, a thousand men on his own — the Imperial army has no way to hold out.”

The Saintess’s eerie zombie-magic and Valerian’s overwhelming martial force. For the Imperial army, it must have been nothing short of a disaster.

“Truth is, only a few months ago the Empire was on the verge of giving up on subjugating Arne and pulling out. The losses were too great.”

The Empire was in the final stages of its wars of conquest right now. Arne aside, every nation around it had already bent the knee. But if the subjugation dragged on and kept bleeding its military strength, a rebellion could rise in the gap at any moment. So I could see why the Empire had been about to pull its leg out.

“But the Imperial army didn’t give up, did they?”

Beron smiled faintly.

“No. Because the Empire got a hero of its own.”
“A hero?”

My brow furrowed before I could stop it. There was a way to counter the combination of Valerian and the Saintess?

“It was only a few months ago that a hero turned up and blocked the haughty Blue Lion’s blade.”
“Valeri— I mean, someone blocked the Blue Lion?”

Valerian was, undisputed, in the strongman tier of this world’s setting, so anyone who could go toe-to-toe with him had to be a named-tier hero.

“That’s right. A massive man, with a shield like a mountain to match his frame. We call him the Black Bear.”

Black Bear.

I’d never heard that name before. And a martial talent equal to Valerian existed on the Imperial side, no less.

A variable.

I had no idea who he was, but the corners of my mouth were slowly turning up. A piece of history I didn’t know turning up was always welcome, because that was when clearing the game got fun.

“A fight between a bear and a lion, then.”

In the fight between bear and tiger, the bear won, you know.¹