32. The Head Of The House

“Enter.”

I pulled in one deep breath and rolled the wheelchair forward into the room. The instant I was fully inside, Leo bowed to the room’s master and drew the door shut behind me.

Creeeak—.

The mood that had been bubbling between Leo and me only seconds earlier, all the laughter and bouncing and teasing, went dead still in a heartbeat. There was no other way it could have gone, not in this room.

The room held not a single flourish of decoration, ordered to a frightening degree. Not so much as a hanging painting or a stray vase. The bareness of the place seemed to declare that no superfluous ornament is permitted to exist here.

Slowly, I pushed the wheelchair deeper inside.

Rattle-rattle-rattle-rattle.

Was the rattle of my wheelchair’s wheels the only sound this room would tolerate? Every turn of them made me feel as if I were committing some grave sin. Only a few steps separated us, and yet closing that distance to reach the master of this room felt impossibly hard.

I arrived in front of him, and there, sparing me not the slightest scrap of attention, sat a middle-aged man reviewing documents. Hair shot through with white and deep-cut wrinkles testified to the weight of the years he had carried. Yet his back stayed ramrod-straight, and even without armor he gave off a domineering presence that loomed like a mountain.

Big.

My eyes snagged on the breadth of his shoulders. Like father, like son; no wonder people said it. Kairon’s frame ran even larger than the hulking Valerian’s.

So this man is the head of House Arne.

Of course he was. He stood among the few greatest swordsmen in the entire Empire.

If I had to hazard a guess, it was probably because he was overwhelmingly stronger than me.

Then it was fine. For now, that was the part that mattered.

The real reason I’d chosen Astraea, the Red Saintess out of all the countless histories on the Trial of Wisdom’s shelf had been to steal the holy magic that could resolve the [Erosion of the Abyss] lodged in my heart.

But in the end, instead of stealing holy magic, I uncovered a shame the house had been hiding all along.

What I’d learned was that the Saintess set down in House Arne’s history had, in truth, been a demon-worshipper. And there was no way the head of the house, Kairon, didn’t already know it.

“What became of Astraea?”

I’d wrangled a passing grade out of Rose by cutting a deal, which meant I didn’t actually know the truth of the real history.

If my hypothesis is right, Astraea and the Blood Lord are still alive.

For someone who had just passed the Trial of Wisdom to be asking the head of the house this kind of question was, on its face, absurd.

“Where did the demon flee to?”

But I had no choice except to ask the man in front of me. Rose, even as she handed over a falsified pass certificate, had clenched her teeth and refused to the very last to tell me the truth of that history.

Even at my blunt questions, Kairon’s hand never paused in turning the pages. His expression was too grave for me to recklessly press for more.

Better a malicious comment than no comment at all. That old line fit the moment, and I felt it keenly, sitting there with no idea what to do.

“It’s been a while.”

His mountain of paperwork finished, Kairon at last lifted his eyes to me.

Tap.

He set the page bearing his final signature down on top of the stack. It should have been the simplest of gestures, the laying down of a single sheet of paper. Yet he didn’t release it until he’d confirmed that all four corners overlapped the documents beneath without a single millimeter of error.

He took up his words again.

“I’m told you passed the Trial of Wisdom… seems that child fell for your wheedling. Then again, knowing the truth of that day mattered more to her than anything else, so it’s no wonder she handed over the pass certificate.”

“…Pardon?”

“You must have discovered the demon the Saintess was forcibly suppressing, and from there the matter escalated into combat.”

It was almost eerie, as though Kairon had slipped into the Trial of Wisdom right alongside me. The words pouring out of his mouth raised the hairs on the back of my neck.

“You did well to survive against that demon.”

“…How did you know?”

The question was out before I could stop it, and in asking it I’d as good as conceded that his guess was right. There was no taking back what I’d already let slip, though, so I gave up on the mental-poker game, owned the defeat, and pushed the conversation forward.

“You’re right. While discovering that the Saintess was a demon-worshipper, I ended up in combat with the demon.”

“With the swordsmanship of that era, you should not have been able to win.”

“…That is correct. He was an opponent I absolutely could not have beaten.”

It was a lie.

I had taken down the Blood Lord. I just chose, deliberately, not to reveal it.

“Where is he?”

I asked after his whereabouts point-blank.

At that, Kairon laced his fingers together, rested his chin on them, and looked at me intently.

“Of whom do you speak?”

“Pardon?”

“You asked me two questions at the start, did you not?”

I cast my mind back to the two questions I had thrown out, and my brow furrowed.

“You’re telling me both the Saintess and the demon are still alive?”

“No one in the house knows the reason the Saintess vanished. Not myself as the current head, not Rose, not even any of the heads who came before. The record itself was erased.”

“Then…”

“By the same token, no one knows where that demon vanished to either — nor who broke the seal and took him away.”

I couldn’t wrap my head around it. Was he really telling me that not a single soul knew the truth of an event written into the house’s official chronicles?

“The demon, maybe — but the Saintess was human. Could she not have simply died of old age?”

“No.”

Kairon denied it flatly, as though he held some piece of evidence that proved their survival beyond all doubt.

“Do your eyes truly see that wench as human?”

I couldn’t find the words to follow that.

The Saintess had had her heart pulped and one arm blown clean off, and still she’d held out against the demon without dying. She had already crossed into a domain beyond the reach of human beings.

“That she vanished does not necessarily mean that she died.”

Kairon rose from his seat and crossed to the window. His gaze reached far, past the boundaries of the Arne domain.

“There were rumors once that on the Northern Continent there was a race that did not die even with a sword through the heart. Lately, similar ominous rumors have been drifting up from the borderlands of the Empire as well.”

My head went blank. The truth I had witnessed inside the Trial of Wisdom was clicking into place against the rumors of the real world.

Arne soldiers had been injected with the Blood Lord’s blood and made conditionally immortal. At every banquet they’d tipped red wine down their throats, certain it was the Saintess’s Miracle. It had been no blessing at all. It had been a curse, and it turned them into monsters.

“They are very much alive. Somewhere in this world.”

Which meant that cursed bloodline was still pulsing somewhere, even now, one hundred and fifty years later.

Kairon turned again and looked down at me.

“I will ask you.”

His voice dropped low.

“When you realized that the glory of the house — what the people called the Saintess’s Miracle — was the result of suckling on the pus of a demon… what did you feel?”

“…What I felt?”

“Did you despise the inhumane treatment of prisoners? Or did you loathe the way your ancestors, knowing full well that in standing against the Empire they were drifting further and further from the realm of humanity, turned their faces from that truth?”

To speak honestly, lofty feelings like despise or loathe hadn’t come to me. It had been nothing grander, nothing smaller, than the smell of blood is disgusting.

If anything, I’d run a scenario through my head. What if losing to the Empire had meant every grown man slaughtered and every woman dragged off to a life of misery as a slave, that ending waiting at the end of the road? What if defeat had meant a hell worse than death itself?

Then I, too, would have followed the Saintess’s choice.

Unethical, sure. But I couldn’t deny that, as a way to overturn a hopeless tide of battle, it was the most certain card on the table.

But that’s only the case if we assume the Empire was unfathomably cruel in temperament.

In reality, the Empire wasn’t all that cruel. To lords who surrendered it extended mercy, and even left those lords’ domains intact.

What would I have done, if it had been me?

Either way, selling my soul to a demon was a card I’d only play with an end far worse than death waiting for me.

So I answered honestly.

“I couldn’t understand it.”

“Why?”

“If I had been the one in that position, I would have chosen surrender.”

I looked Kairon straight in the eye as I said it.

“Rather than cling to a hopeless fight and give up our humanity, isn’t it better to bend the knee and plan for the days to come? Astraea’s choice wasn’t protecting the house — it was greed that drove the house to the edge of the cliff.”

The history I knew, along with everything I’d learned inside the game, said that the Empire of that era extended mercy to lords who surrendered. If anything, the fact that House Arne wasn’t annihilated despite resisting to the bitter end and reaching for a demon’s power was closer to a miracle.

“That we — those who were left after the Saintess vanished, and absorbed by the Empire — are still alive at all is, purely, a mercy the Empire chose to extend. Through that war, they had figured out early on that Arne soldiers weren’t ordinary humans.”

An enemy who doesn’t die when you put a sword through his heart. Speaking from experience, fighting a thing like that is no pleasant feeling. More than fear, what it stirs up is disgust and rage.

“That a house that borrowed the power of a demon survived was solely because the Empire permitted it. Astraea didn’t protect the house. She was just steeping herself in the demon’s power.”

Even at my biting critique, Kairon’s expression didn’t shift. He neither affirmed nor denied any of it, only listened in silence.

After a beat, he opened his mouth, his tone heavy.

“You’re coolheaded.”

He left it at the short remark and shifted the topic.

“But do not deceive yourself into thinking you survived.”

His gaze swept over my whole body, as though seeing clean through every trace of combat it still carried.

“That demon you faced was nothing more than a hatchling that had just woken — that is the only reason you were able to keep your life and flee.”

Kairon still believed I’d fled from the Blood Lord. I shut the mouth that had been about to argue back and turned his words over in my head.

He’s not entirely wrong.

Let me lay it out coolly. The Blood Lord had only just finished his awakening. He was a demon who manipulated blood, which meant the more of it ran on the battlefield and the longer the war stretched, the more his strength swelled, exponentially. Layer onto that the war-torn era of the Empire locked in flesh-and-blood combat. If he’d been freed and feasting on blood for even a few days, then for all that I had his patterns memorized, I couldn’t have guaranteed a clear as smooth as this one.

I was lucky, no question.

That victory had only been possible because I’d struck his weakest point at his weakest moment, with surgical precision.

“I will bear that in mind.”

Arrogance was always the thing to guard against. Accidents happen the instant you let your focus slip.

But, that said —

Not for one second did I think I’d have lost to him, even at his prime. Use the terrain. Throw Beron out as bait. Detonate the Saintess’s corpse, if it came to that. Whatever tools were on the table, I’d have found a way to lop his head off.

“That you came back alive from that demon at all is, in itself, a thing of considerable worth.”

Reading my silence as humility, Kairon offered a low word of comfort.

So he knows how to comfort someone, after all.

I’d pegged him as a strictly cold-blooded head of the house, but it turned out he was, surprisingly enough, capable of softening toward a person. Some of the tension drained out of me, and I slipped a bit of mischief into my next thrust.

“By the way, head of the house. If what you say is true, isn’t this trial defective?”

“Defective?”

“If no one knows the truth about Astraea’s whereabouts, then The Red Saintess, Astraea ought to be excluded from the Trial of Wisdom, shouldn’t it?”

My point was perfectly valid. The whole purpose of the trial was to bring back the truth, and yet even the house that was supposed to grade it didn’t know that truth.

Come to think of it, this is the same as handing a student an exam sheet with no answer key.

In this day and age, you’d get sued for that!