32. The Head Of The House

“Enter.”

I took one deep breath and rolled the wheelchair into the room. As soon as I was fully inside, Leo bowed his head to the room’s master and shut the door behind me.

Creeeak—.

Only seconds ago Leo and I had been laughing and bouncing and teasing each other, and all of it went still in an instant. It couldn’t have gone any other way, not in this room.

There wasn’t a flourish of decoration anywhere in it, and it was ordered to a frightening degree. Not so much as a hanging painting or a stray vase. The bareness itself seemed to be saying no superfluous ornament is permitted to exist here.

Slowly, I pushed the wheelchair deeper inside.

Rattle-rattle-rattle-rattle.

Was the noise of my wheels the only sound this room would tolerate? The rattling made me feel as if I were committing some grave sin. It was a distance of only a few steps, and yet reaching the master of this room was this hard.

When I arrived in front of him, he paid me not the slightest attention. He was a middle-aged man, and he sat there reviewing documents. The white shot through his hair and the deep-cut wrinkles testified to the weight of the years he’d borne, but his back was ramrod-straight, and even without armor his domineering presence loomed like a mountain.

Big.

My gaze fixed on the breadth of his shoulders. No wonder they say like father, like son. Valerian was hulking, and Kairon’s frame was larger still.

So this man is the head of House Arne.

Of course he was. He was one of 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 that was fine. For now, that was the part that mattered.

Out of all the countless histories in the Trial of Wisdom, I’d chosen to enter Astraea, the Red Saintess for one real reason: 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.

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

“What became of Astraea?”

First of all, I’d only wrangled a passing grade out of Rose by making 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 ask 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, because Rose, even as she handed over a falsified pass certificate, had clenched her teeth and refused to the very end to tell me the truth of the history.

Forward as my questions were, Kairon’s hand went on turning documents without a pause, and his expression was too grave for me to recklessly push for more. “Better a cruel comment than no comment at all,” the saying goes, and I sympathized as I sat there wondering what to do.

“It’s been a while.”

Only when his mountain of paperwork was finished did Kairon at last turn his eyes to me.

Tap.

He set the document with his final signature down on top of the stack. It should have been a simple gesture, just placing a single sheet of paper, but he didn’t let go until he’d confirmed that its four corners overlapped the documents beneath without a single millimeter of error.

Then he picked up his words again.

“I’m told you passed the Trial of Wisdom… so that child fell for your wheedling, it seems. 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 if Kairon had snuck along with me into the Trial of Wisdom, and 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?”

It was out before I could stop myself, and by asking I’d conceded that his guess was correct. But there was no taking it back, so I gave up on the mental-poker game, admitted defeat, and pushed the conversation forward.

“You’re right. I found out the Saintess was a demon-worshipper, and I ended up fighting the demon.”
“With the swordsmanship of that era, you should not have been able to win.”
“…That is correct. There was no way I could have beaten him.”

This was a lie. I had taken down the Blood Lord, but I deliberately kept that fact to myself.

“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 called back to mind the two questions I’d 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 why the Saintess vanished. Not I, its current head, not Rose, not 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 telling me that not a single soul knew the truth of an event committed to the house’s official chronicles?

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

“No.” Kairon denied it flatly, as if he held some piece of evidence that proved their survival beyond 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 off, and still she’d resisted the demon without dying. She had already reached a domain that transcended human beings.

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

Kairon rose from his seat and walked to the window, and his gaze stretched far, beyond the boundaries of the Arne domain.

“There were rumors once of a race on the Northern Continent 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 with the rumors of reality.

The Arne soldiers, injected with the Blood Lord’s blood and made conditionally immortal. The red wine they’d tipped down their throats at every banquet, believing it was the Saintess’s Miracle. It hadn’t been a blessing. It had been a curse, and it had 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 be honest, nothing as lofty as despise or loathe had come to me. It had been no more and no less than the smell of blood is disgusting.

If anything, I’d run through a scenario in my head. What if defeat against the Empire would have meant every adult man slaughtered and every woman dragged off to live in misery as a slave, with that ending waiting at the end of the line? What if losing would have meant a hell worse than death itself?

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

It was unethical, yes, but I couldn’t deny that as a means of overturning a hopeless tide of battle, it was the surest card on the table.

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

The reality is, the Empire wasn’t all that cruel. It extended mercy to lords who surrendered, and it even preserved their domains.

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

Whatever the case, selling my soul to a demon was something I’d only choose when an end worse than death, by a wide margin, was waiting for me.

So I answered honestly.

“I couldn’t understand it.”
“Why?”

“If I had been in that position, I would have chosen to 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 didn’t protect the house — it was greed, and it drove the house to the edge of a cliff.”

The history I knew and the information from inside the game both said that the Empire of that era extended mercy to lords who surrendered. If anything, it was closer to a miracle that House Arne hadn’t been annihilated, after resisting to the bitter end and laying its hands on the power of a demon.

“The Saintess vanished, the Empire absorbed those of us who were left, and we’re still alive at all purely because it chose to show us mercy. They’d figured out early in that war that Arne soldiers weren’t ordinary humans.”

An enemy who doesn’t die when you stab him in the heart. Speaking from experience, fighting a creature like that isn’t a pleasant feeling. More than fear, what it provokes is disgust and rage.

“A house that borrowed the power of a demon survived only 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 change. He neither affirmed nor denied it, just listened in silence, and after a beat he opened his mouth, his tone heavy.

“You’re coolheaded.”

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

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

His gaze swept over my whole body, as if he were 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.”

So Kairon still thought I had fled from the Blood Lord. I closed the mouth that had been about to argue back and turned his words over in my head.

He’s not entirely wrong.

Let’s lay it out coolly. The Blood Lord had only just finished his awakening. He was a demon who manipulated blood, so the more blood ran on the battlefield and the longer the war stretched, the more exponentially he grew in strength. Add to that a war-torn era when the Empire was locked in flesh-and-blood combat, and if he’d been freed to feast 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.

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

“I will bear that in mind.”

Falling into arrogance was always something to be on guard against, because accidents happen the moment you let your focus slip.

But, that said —

Even at his prime, I hadn’t the slightest thought that I would have lost. 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 figured out how to lop off his head.

“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 this low word of comfort.

So he knows how to comfort someone, after all.

I’d taken him for a strictly cold-blooded head of the house, but surprisingly enough, he was capable of mollifying a person. Some of the tension drained out of me, so 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 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!