61. The Arena (5)

Out of nowhere, I thought of Kairon, the head of the house.

Kairon made regular rounds to clean out the Abyss. They called him one of the finest swordsmen in the Empire, and he came and went from this musty pit as if it were his own front yard, but there was no grand will to safeguard the peace behind it, or anything of the sort.

1. He takes charge of the Abyss, the Empire’s perennial headache.

2. A cleared Abyss comes back once a month, so he cleans it out on schedule, right on time.

3. And on top of that, he does other lackey work for the Empire that I don’t even know about.

So this is how a house that lost to the Empire survives.

What can you do? If you want to survive, you grovel and crawl.

“…Krrrrr.”
“Anyway, you’ve sure got some stamina.”

Two of Cerberus’s heads were gone and blood was spilling from the cut ends, yet he was still growling. Killing him in this state would be no trouble at all now. But what would be the point of ending him right now?

Either way, a month from now he’ll just respawn here good as new.

And once he had, Kairon would come around again and lop his head clean off. That was his fate, to have his neck sawed through once a month, forever. To him, the Abyss was a slaughterhouse without end, a wheel of hell that never stopped turning.

What if I took this mutt outside?

Curiosity took hold of me. Would the one that revived a month from now really be the same being as the fellow in front of me? The ordinary monsters scattered across the field have a fresh individual generated the instant they die, but whatever else you might say about Cerberus, he does bear the title of ‘mid-boss.’ And bosses have heavy backsides. They’re born and revived in fixed locations.

If you approach it in game-system terms, wouldn’t bosses be assigned a unique code?

That would make the Cerberus guarding this Abyss’s second gate the one and only individual of its kind in this world. If my hypothesis was right, there might be another Cerberus in a different Abyss, but the sentinel of this place was this fellow and no other.

And in truth, whether he was here or not wouldn’t change the difficulty of the subjugation much for Kairon, who’d already been doing this for decades.

“Woof, woof!”

All that aside, I’d taken a strange liking to him. He’d lost two heads, he had no hope left, and he was still trying to sink his teeth into his enemy to the very end. That survival instinct was just like watching myself, possessed into Arden’s wreck of a body.

A petty curiosity played its part too, because in thousands of hours of play, I’d never once tamed a monster.

“Hey.”

I looked straight into the eyes of Cerberus, who was baring his teeth and bristling on guard, and spoke.

“Stay here and you’ll end up dead. A human way more merciless and way stronger than me is going to come for you once a month. You’ve been through it already, so you know that, right?”

At my words, his growling eased, ever so faintly.

“Promise not to hurt people and to do as I say, and I’ll help you get out of here. Stay, and all you’ve got coming is the pain of getting killed once a month, over and over. You know that better than anyone, don’t you?”

Maybe he was chewing that over. His eyes swung left and right, and before long he drew his teeth back in.

“Good boy.”

Then he slowly lowered his stance, padded up to my feet, and sank down as if in surrender. I took it to mean the mutt was offering complete obedience, but…

“You’re going to take quite a bit of training, huh.”

His head was bowed, yet the eyes he turned up at me held a wildness that said he’d sink his teeth into the back of my neck the moment he got the chance. A dog that has bitten a person once doesn’t turn gentle so easily, sure enough.

Doesn’t matter.

If anything, this half-obedience pleased me all the more. It wasn’t as if I’d wanted some endlessly docile puppy.

“Hey, shrink yourself down a bit. How are you supposed to go anywhere with us in that body?”

At my command his eyes rolled, and jet-black smoke rose from his body.

— Tssss—!

Like a doll with the air let out of it, the monster’s body began to shrink grotesquely. The once-enormous muscles compressed into sleek curves, and the torn cut ends of the left and right necks melted into the smoke and vanished without a trace. When the smoke finally cleared, a creature of a familiar size stood at my feet.

“…Oh.”

The gasp slipped out on its own.

The hideous three-headed monster was nowhere to be seen. In its place, looking up at me, was a finely built Doberman with sleek ebony fur and a taut, muscular frame. His ears stood up in points and his eyes were sharp, the very picture of a thoroughbred hunting hound. All that set him apart from an ordinary dog was the red glint that flashed in his eyes now and again, and the stare that still looked ready to devour me.

“All right, much better.”

Satisfied, I gave his head a light tap and turned toward the red barrier, and he reluctantly peeled his feet off the ground and fell in behind me.

When I came back into view past the red barrier, Elli came running.

“Young Master!”

Her steps stopped at my feet, and her gaze sank lower and lower until it fixed on the dog pressed tight against my calf. Elli had watched my fight with Cerberus. However far he’d shrunk, however much he looked like an ordinary Doberman, she knew this was the monster that had been spewing three kinds of breath just moments ago. So she gripped her shield tight, kept her guard up against him, and asked.

“Is it really all right?”

Her voice trembled thinly.

“Ah, this guy?”

I rubbed the head of Cerberus, who was growling and glaring at Elli. His fur felt rough and coarse against my fingertips.

“He promised to listen to me. Didn’t you?”

Cerberus bared his teeth and snapped at the hand rubbing him, but I dodged and seized him by the scruff of the neck.

“As you can see, it’ll take some time to train him, though.”

Elli looked back and forth between me and Cerberus, uneasy, and I answered that worry with a laugh.

“Got a little breathing room, I take it? Worrying about me and all.”

I’d won too, after Seraphina. But by the rules of the arena, every challenger had to win for us to move on to the next chapter, which meant our success rested in Elli’s hands. She knew it, and she looked at me with an expression caught between crying and laughing.

“I’m really going to give it my best, as far as I can go.”

She gripped her shield again and steeled her resolve.

I laid my hand over the back of hers, clenched white with the force in it, and gently pressed the high-raised shield down toward the ground.

“Listen carefully. Giving it your best means nothing.”
“…Sorry?”
“If you get even the slightest gut feeling mid-fight that you’re going to lose, shout that you forfeit, right then. You losing your life here means nothing to me. Zero value. Understand?”

I understood the pressure weighing on her shoulders, but I hoped it wouldn’t end up shackling her.

“We’ve got no use for any ‘good game’ nonsense.”
“‘Good… game’?”
“It means ‘I lost, but I fought well.’ Give that to the dogs. Like I told you, in this arena, if you lose, you die. So if you can’t win, don’t lose either. Forfeiting here isn’t really losing. You’re just pulling back for now. You can come back and challenge again in a month.”

I spun the talk out on purpose, cold and long-winded, because more than anything, even if it killed me, I wanted to avoid any situation where Elli got reckless and threw her life away.

Maybe she read what I really meant. She closed her eyes for a moment, opened them, and nodded with a clear smile.

“Yes, I’ll do exactly as you say, Young Master. If I can’t win, then I won’t lose, either.”

That was enough.

Elli stepped over the red barrier. I watched her back vanish into the battlefield and bit down on my lip.

Just then, Seraphina, standing beside me, spoke in a low voice.

“It will be better than you fear.”

That I hadn’t expected. To think Seraphina would offer me words of comfort. I turned my head and gave her a puzzled look.

“Are you comforting me right now?”

She didn’t answer. She kept her gaze fixed ahead and went on.

“When you train knight-candidates in the Empire, how many do you suppose give up and walk out of their own accord?”
“Well. With your training, Sister, I’d imagine quite a few run off partway through.”
“No. Not one quits of his own free will. The honor of being an Imperial knight is not a chance that comes so easily. They cling to that chance even as they cough up blood.”
“So you’re saying every last trainee makes it to the end of your regimen?”
“Hardly.”

Seraphina shook her head firmly.

“The will not to give up is a separate talent from skill with the sword. Regrettably, if a candidate lacks even one of those two talents, I simply cut them myself.”

Her cool gaze turned toward the far side of the red barrier, where Elli had vanished.

“By that measure, that child is all right.”

Wasn’t that the highest praise an Imperial Knight Commander could give? This woman must have cut thousands of knight-candidates, and the simple fact that Elli had registered as a passing mark in her eyes was enough to settle my anxious heart a little.

But understanding it with my head was one thing, and the trembling in my chest was another. I stared hard at Elli’s back as she headed for the center of the battlefield. Was this what a guardian felt, watching over a small child set down at the water’s edge? All I could do now was watch and pray she made it through safely.

Sweat beaded clammy on the palm wrapped around the shield grip.

With every step, the sand seeping into my shoes grated oddly loud. The warmth the Young Master had pressed into the back of my hand a moment ago still seemed to linger, yet my heart was pounding wildly all on its own.

I can do it. I can do it, Elli.

I repeated the Young Master’s words over and over inside my mouth.

When you face a mage, close the distance no matter what. Driving in without giving them even a sliver of room to chant — that’s the only path a shield-soldier has to survive.

The strategy was simple. Force the fight into close range. Don’t miss the instant the battle begins. Bore in. And never, ever give your opponent the time to complete a spell.

I’d already replayed the fight Lady Seraphina had shown me in my head several hundred times over, and then some.

This shield I learned under Lord Valerian, scraping past death again and again, isn’t simply a tool for blocking.

This shield was the only weapon I had, and I reminded myself of that ceaselessly. Defending alone can’t win you anything. The Young Master had explained that to me again and again.

Just get close. If I can land one solid, telling blow…

Keeping my eyes fixed on the upper rim of the shield, I stared hard at the red barrier shimmering on the far side.

— Tssss—.

At last the fog thinned and the barrier lifted. I poured all my strength into my knees, ready to kick off the ground and spring forward at once, because just as the Young Master had taught me, I had to close the distance before the mage began to chant.

But.

“…Huh?”

The instant I saw the figure walking out of the fog, my body, about to lunge, froze solid, like a lie. The fingers gripping the shield trembled faintly. It wasn’t an old wizard with a staff, or some grotesque demon-shaped thing. The one who came cutting through the dark was a man shouldering a massive greatsword, his eyes blazing with a fierce blue light.

“…Lord Valerian?”

Gladness and confusion tangled together in my heart. The memories of those months of training, when he’d driven me relentlessly and tempered me, came flooding back, fresh and vivid. And at the sight of his face, looking perfectly fine, the strings of my tension snapped before I even knew it. I lowered the shield I’d been holding bunched up to my shoulder and, as if entranced, waved to him.

“Lord Valerian! You made it through safe…”

That was when it happened.

Beyond the barrier, I could see Arden — the Young Master — shouting something. Maybe it was the eerie air of the arena, but his voice came muffled, buzzing and blurred.

“…I can’t hear you very well!”

I stepped a few paces closer to make out his cry, and only then did the outline of his voice, refracted and barred by the wall, stab sharply into my ears.

“It’s not the real one!”
“What do you mean by that…?”
“Look behind you!”

At that scream-laced warning, I whipped my head around on instinct.

Right behind me.

From the empty air on the far side, where Lord Valerian had been standing only moments ago, a livid half-moon crescent of sword-energy was bearing down.

“Elli!!”