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

While Beron lay there out cold, I pried a good deal of information out of Valerian. The heart of it was that he’d already climbed to a position close to Astraea’s right hand.

I was half in doubt about it.

Doubt it as I might, the man who went by the byname Blue Lion really was Valerian. By his own 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 into this body?”

But these were achievements no one could have racked up by possessing only a few hours ago, the way I had. Clearly, he hadn’t crossed over in the same era as me.

“…”

And yet Valerian seemed to have no intention of giving up anything more. Then again, he was my rival for the heir’s seat. The fact that he’d let slip as much as he had was something to be grateful for in itself.

“That friend you just knocked out, Brother…”

I knew that if I just pocketed his intel and clammed up myself, no one would call me on it, but it would leave a bad taste in my mouth. So I talked.

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

After I’d been possessed into the dungeon and run into Beron, I told Valerian everything about Beron’s attempt to assassinate the Saintess. A kind of fair-play spirit, I suppose.

That should be enough.

Of course, I didn’t disclose that Beron had let himself be captured deliberately in order to kill the Saintess, or that he was no ordinary elf. When my explanation wound down, Valerian spoke.

“I see.”

And then he turned on his heel and made to leave.

“H-hey, wait a minute!”

I scrambled to grab at Valerian. You’re seriously just going to walk off like this?

Cha-clank, cha-clank!

I rattled the steel chains binding my wrists back and forth.

And then.

“Bro… Brother!”

I flashed him my most wheedling grin. Surely even cold-blooded Valerian would cut me loose if I laid it on this thick?

“I am not your brother right now.”

The crazy bastard ignored my cry completely and strolled out of the place without a care in the world.

“Wait— hey!!”

My shout came back to me as nothing but a hollow echo.

Huh?

Thud. Thud.

But then, a moment later, I heard footsteps coming back.

See, I knew it!

Even Valerian must have felt a twinge about leaving me here. There was a reason people said blood was thicker than water.

“Heh heh heh, you little rats slipped away nicely earlier, didn’t you?”

But my expectations shattered like a glass cup smashed into a thousand pieces, because the figure standing there was the jailer I’d beaten down before.

“I’ll show you a proper lesson now.”

On top of that, he’d come back seething with rage. He dug around in his pocket and pulled something out.

Naturally I braced myself, expecting some torture implement or a whip to appear.

“Heh heh heh…”

But what he held in his hand was the last thing I’d expected. A thin little rod, supple as a switch. And, oozing from an uncapped bottle, a sticky, clear, slime-like fluid.

“…?”

What was that? Some kind of torture tool?

While I sat there blank, unable to read the situation, 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. That sticky stare 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 rod slid up my thigh, dragging slowly higher. Goosebumps prickled across my skin.

“So this time I won’t be hitting you. Truth is, there’s something I enjoy even more than hitting.”

He dipped his fingers generously into the bottle of sticky fluid. If there was a single most terrifying horror movie in all the world, this was surely it.

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

An alarm blared in my head like a screaming siren. The purpose of that fluid, that rounded little rod, the leer glinting in his eye.

…What the actual fuck.

Panic. My brain, quite literally, went white.

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

Listening to little Eve’s helpful commentary, I realized the jailer was, in dead earnest, a man who enjoyed sodomy.

I went pale and thrashed my body this way and that. But the steel chains didn’t give so much as an inch.

“Heh heh, your squirming is adorable.”

If anything, it only delighted the jailer, and he inched closer.

Right at the instant I started seriously weighing whether to bite through my own tongue, kill myself, and forfeit the trial…

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

The jailer paused, his face settling into a pondering look. He glanced back and forth between me and Beron, slumped limp at my side.

I didn’t let the brief opening slip past.

“Surely you should 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 and said:

“That guy’s the one who knocked you out and pitched an escape to me!”

At my words, the jailer’s eyes flashed.

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

Loyalty? Brotherhood? When my own ass is about to get drilled through, what good is any of that? You’ve got to live first and worry about the rest later.

“Yes, that’s the one!”

The jailer swallowed my words whole and switched his target. He shook out the hand smeared with sticky fluid, stepped over to Beron, and seized a rough fistful of the elf’s limp, defenseless hair.

“An elf, huh… Looks fastidious — there’ll be a real thrill to conquering this one. Actually, this is even better.”

And just as he lifted Beron’s face with one hand and reached for his waistband with the other…

Flash.

Beron, who I’d been sure was unconscious, opened his eyes and said:

“Crazy fucker.”

— THWACK!

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

“Khuhuherrrgggh…!”

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

Crash!

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

Beron bent at the waist and lowered his face toward the unconscious jailer’s rear.

Jangle.

He caught the key ring hanging from the jailer’s back pocket with his mouth. Then he plucked a single key from the ring with his teeth, snapped his head back, and started jamming it into the keyhole of the lock on his own wrist. The flexibility and jaw control were jaw-dropping.

I watched the circus act unfolding beside me, utterly speechless.

Clack.

A second later, the cuffs came loose. Free now, Beron rolled his wrists, rose to his feet, and turned to look at me slowly, a murderous glint in his eye.

“What was it you said just now?”

I sheepishly avoided Beron’s burning gaze.

Sorry, man. But if our positions were reversed, you’d have done the exact same thing. …Or maybe not. Whatever.

Clack.

The heavy steel chains dropped to the floor.

I rubbed my numb wrists and looked up at Beron. I’d been bracing for him either to leave me here or to plant a fist in my face as payback for selling him out earlier.

“Surprising. I thought you were going to kill me.”
“As far as my feelings go, I’d love to.”

Beron rifled through the jailer sprawled on the floor, checking for anything useful. I’d noticed it before, but he looked thoroughly practiced at picking pockets.

Once he’d searched the jailer over thoroughly, Beron made an unexpected declaration.

“I’m coming with you.”
“With me? Why?”
“Just because. Your identity has become a personal point of curiosity for me.”

Beron pointed at the torn jailer’s uniform I had on.

“You claim to be an ordinary soldier, yet you impersonate a jailer, don’t bat an eye at torture, and even have 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 strolled right into the Saintess’s chambers without breaking a sweat. The guard around her had to be several times tighter now; approaching her, let alone assassinating 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 real question was whether bringing Beron along actually came out as a net gain for me. I’d originally planned to work solo, or at most with just Eve along for the ride.

He must have read the hesitation off me, because Beron launched into his pitch.

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

And 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.”

Beron’s expression turned serious.

“The wind tells me things. Where this dungeon’s drainage pipes empty out, where the carts loaded with the wounded stop every night, even the route they’ve been dragging the prisoners along this whole time.”

I nodded, no complaints. A solid pitch.

I did have Eve, but real-time tracking was beyond her. A scent hound, or rather a scent elf, would make the clear go a whole lot smoother.

“You’re hired.”

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

As we moved, I lobbed Beron a question to help sort things out in my own head.

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

Beron thought back for a moment, then answered.

“Roughly a year ago. He showed up like a comet and turned the whole battlefield upside down.”

I paused. It had been only a few hours since I’d dropped into this book, and yet Valerian had already been active for a year? This was flat-out cheating.

Oblivious to what was running through my head, Beron carried on with his explanation.

“Before he showed up, things were even. To be precise, we lost on the battlefields where the Saintess was, and won on the ones where she wasn’t.”
“With the Empire’s numbers so much larger, you should’ve been able to grind them down in a war of attrition and take the win.”

At my words, Beron stopped walking and turned to look at me.

“Be straight with me. Are you a spy from some other 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.

At that, Beron’s face went hollow, and he said:

“The Arne army doesn’t die unless you take their heads off. Stab a man clean through the heart and somehow he’s 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, when you came down to it, a world built on top of a game I used to play: Demonic Frontier. I’d had my own newbie days too, and over the course of playing I’d died thousands of times. The player, meaning me, was fine, thanks to ‘auto-revive.’ But the NPCs who followed me around, the ones with decent stats or first-rate skills, had died plenty of times along the way. I’d done everything I could to bring them back, but nowhere was there a method for fully resurrecting the dead.

And 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 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 might. For the Imperial army, it must have been nothing short of a catastrophe.

“In truth, the Empire was on the verge of giving up on subjugating Arne and pulling out entirely just a few months ago. The losses had been too steep.”

The Empire was in the final stages of its wars of conquest now. Arne territory aside, every nation around it had already bent the knee. But if the subjugation of Arne dragged on and kept bleeding the Empire’s military strength, a rebellion could rise up in the gap at any moment. So I could see why the Empire had been on the brink of cutting its losses and walking away.

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

At my question, 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 Valerian-and-Saintess combination?

“Only a few months ago. The hero who blocked the haughty Blue Lion’s blade made his appearance.”
“Valeri— I mean, someone blocked the Blue Lion?”

Valerian was, beyond dispute, in the top-strength tier of this world’s setting. For anyone to go toe-to-toe with him meant 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.

A name I’d never heard before. And to think a martial talent capable of standing on equal footing with Valerian existed on the Imperial side, of all places.

A variable.

I had no idea who he was, but the corners of my mouth were already creeping upward. A piece of history I didn’t know surfacing was always a welcome thing. That was exactly when clearing the game got fun.

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

And in the matchup between bear and tiger, it was the bear that came out on top.¹