69. Salesman

Since ancient times, they say, the beauty trap was aimed less at seducing some low-ranking grunt than at the boss who gave that grunt his orders. It was the more efficient way to bring a situation to heel, after all. And yet the beauty trap was no master key that turned every lock. The men who had weathered every kind of storm, who lived with their lives forever in someone’s crosshairs, were the first to grow wary of hidden blades, of poison, of women. But that was their world, and theirs alone. None of it applied to the people who lived in the arena, the place that sat nearest of all to death.

Once I was certain Sylvia was the one leading the mage group, I drew her aside, just her, to a quiet corner.

“Mind if I call you Sylvia?”
“…Yes. Go ahead.”
“You seem to be the one playing leader for that lot. Am I right?”

Sylvia gave a shy little nod. Keeping my eyes on her the whole time, I went on.

“As you know, the man who gave you all your orders — I’m the one who killed him. If you shared any kind of bond with him, I’d apologize, but…”

“I bear no resentment. He was nothing more than a loudspeaker passing along the master’s words. There’s no personal feeling tangled up in it.”

I let relief show on my face. After a beat, I reached out, careful, toward the deep chestnut of Sylvia’s hair. She flinched at the motion, just a little, though she didn’t quite pull away. Her soft hair slipped smoothly through my fingers.

“That’s a relief. The last thing I’d want is for you to hate me, Sylvia.”

I toyed with her hair a moment longer, then let my hand fall slowly away. As my touch left her, something almost like regret flickered across Sylvia’s face, there and gone before she composed herself.

“And what is it you want, calling me aside like this?”

“I wanted to talk about what’s to become of all of you. How you’ll be treated.”

In an instant, the light in Sylvia’s eyes went cold and hard.

“For now, we’ll do as you say, Lord Arden. But if we can’t reach a proper agreement on how we’re treated…”

I reached to touch Sylvia’s hair again, but this time she turned her head away and refused my hand.

“…then we’ll rise in revolt, even at the cost of our lives.”

Knife-sharp, her bearing kept public duty and private feeling cleanly apart.

So that’s probably why she ended up the leader.

I wanted capable people. Given the choice, I’d take a fierce blade over a tame, easy-to-handle one, because a blade meant for killing needs an edge that doesn’t dull.

“Steeling yourselves for death isn’t exactly hard for you and yours, is it?”

I drew back my hand, with nowhere left for it to go, and spoke evenly.

“You live with death always on your mind. Killing and dying at the arena master’s command, this whole time.”

“…”

“Not that I mean I’ll treat you carelessly because of it. I just want to point out that ‘we’re ready to die’ isn’t much of a threat.”

“…What are you trying to say?”

Sylvia looked lost, so I spelled it out.

“Before I decide how you’ll be treated, I want to hear, in detail, what kind of life you’ve been living here.”

Sylvia mulled it over a moment, then answered in a flat, dry voice.

“There’s hardly anything you could call a life. Once a month, when the arena opens, the overseer comes and orders one of us out to fight. And then, for that one person, the rest of us pray together.”

“Pray? To whom? Is there some god you all believe in?”

At my question, Sylvia gave a bitter smile.

“Not one of the people dragged into this place believes in any god. We simply pray, all of us, that the comrade going out to fight today comes back alive.”

I could tell the prayer had been Sylvia’s own idea. Before the mood could sink any darker, I moved on to my next question.

“So what do your meals here usually look like?”

“Meals? If you can call a hunk of barley bread gone so hard you can barely chew it a meal, then that’s what we eat. All the master gives us is the bare minimum — just enough to scrape through a month without dying.”

A deep resignation ran through Sylvia’s words.

“From the master’s standpoint, there’d be no reason to invest anything more in us. We’re nothing but expendables — starve to death and we revive, die on a blade and we open our eyes again all the same.”

Her gaze drifted up across the empty vault of the arena ceiling.

“Ah — there are times we get a special meal, once in a great while. When someone comes back victorious from a duel. Though that, too, was a very long time ago.”

From the way she talked, I could tell Sylvia had been in this place a very long time. I found myself curious about her exact age, but I didn’t bother to ask.

“…Victory has become a rare thing by now, as well. Ever since that lion of a man you mentioned, Lord Arden, came to this place, everyone gave up even on surviving and simply resigned themselves.”

She was right. Ever since Kairon Arne became head of the house, the Abyss could only have been, to its minions, less a dueling ground than a slaughterhouse run on a schedule. What was left was the same grisly dismemberment month after month, and the hard, cold scraps of bread they choked down just to keep their stomachs from caving in.

I didn’t dig into their misery any further.

“Now then, here’s my offer on how you’ll be treated.”
“Go on, then.”
“When I return to my house, I want every one of you to come with me.”
“…What?”
“In place of hard bread, you’ll have steaming meat and warm soup ready for you every day. And if you grow sick of those, you’re free to ask for whatever meals you like.”

To a dumbfounded Sylvia, I went on.

“And a soft bed instead of a hard floor. One each, of course.”

This offer wasn’t only for Sylvia’s group. I’d told Lillian to win over everyone else outside on the very same terms.

Whatever they lack, I can train up.

Put bluntly, most of the arena’s minions were nothing close to first-rate soldiers. Shield-bearers who’d written off the enemy in front of them as weaklings, flung their shields aside, charged in, and been wiped out. Spearmen whose veterans had lost every scrap of will to fight under loss piled on loss, their defeats papered over by the swagger of the younger ranks. Cavalry that came up just slightly short. Even the archers and the mages, who’d at least had the sense to argue against ambushing me, were no less weak for it in the end.

“You and yours will be folded into my knight order. There’ll be training, yes — but I won’t hold you to any strict discipline. What I mean is, you’ll live just like any ordinary knight order you’d find anywhere.”

“…Why?”

Sylvia’s question was thick with suspicion and confusion.

“Why offer us terms so far beyond what we deserve? We’re nothing but losers who couldn’t beat even one of you.”

“It’s simple.”

I drew the sword at my waist. Sylvia’s staff jerked up on instinct, but my blade had already stopped a hair short of the white of her throat.

“I don’t want you throwing your lives away for nothing any longer.”

The endless life they’d been granted reached only this far, only as far as the arena master’s power held. Somewhere in the cycle of death that grew out of it, these people had gone numb.

“I want you and yours to live giving it everything you have.”

Drawing my sword slowly back, I went on.

“From here on, I’ll be stepping onto battlefields where I have to fight with my life on the line, and often. And you’ll be at my side, under the banner of my knight order. The training isn’t mandatory, mind you. If you don’t feel like it, you can slack off, or take a nap out in the sun — I won’t mind.”

“…”

“You can write off all your deaths until now as things that couldn’t be helped. But your final death has to belong to me, without fail. That’s my condition.”

I slid my sword back into place at my waist and held out my hand.

“That’s the condition for taking you in.”

“We’ve decided to enter Lord Arden’s service.”

The announcement Sylvia flung at the mage unit the instant she rejoined them landed like a bombshell. The mages gaped, mouths falling open, and fired questions back at her.

“What? Lady Sylvia, what do you mean, all of a sudden—!”
“Why? You got a problem with it?”

At Sylvia’s sharp bark, the mages who’d been buzzing only a moment before clamped their mouths shut at once. Ears faintly red at the tips, she avoided their eyes and coughed once, dryly. Not one of them looked willing to talk back to her.

With Sylvia handling the mages so neatly, it was time to check on Lillian’s side. I turned my gaze to the ranks of spearmen and cavalry that Big Sis Lillian had taken in hand.

“Lady Lillian is our sun!”
“We’ll follow you all our lives, Lady Lillian!”

The grim mood of moments ago had vanished without a trace, and cheers worthy of a fanatic cult filled the arena to the brim. Faced with this unexpected fervor, Big Sis Lillian had gone red in the face and was utterly beside herself.

“I told you, that’s enough!”

I couldn’t even begin to guess what on earth Lillian had said to them. The best I could figure was that her one-of-a-kind warmth had struck a clean shot straight through the hearts of those despair-sunk spearmen.

Just then, one of the archers, risen back from his corpse and stuck to the wall in a zombie state, lurched toward me with a grotesque groan and started mumbling something.

“Nngh… uhhh…”

As I frowned, unable to make out a word he was trying to say, an intricate violet magic circle bloomed into being near the archer’s throat.

“From the very start, we had no intention of turning against you, Lord Arden. Even if you don’t get us out of this place, we won’t fight you. So please — please don’t torture us.”

“Don’t worry. If you join my knight order, there’ll be no such mistreatment.”
“We’ll join. Please, please let us join.”
“Even if you didn’t want to, you’d have to. My knight order can’t do without archers.”

The zombie archers looked at one another, then let out sighs of relief.

I could feel Eve glaring at me, but I turned my eyes away.

“Is there anything you’d want, by any chance, as far as treatment goes?”

At my question, they looked at each other, then spoke.

“We want to be free of these bodies. For now, that alone would be enough to satisfy us.”
“I’ll try putting in a word about that with your current master.”
“Thank you.”

And with that, the archers were won over as well.

I turned to Sylvia, the one who’d cast the magic circle. She gave her staff a light wave and, catching my eye, smiled shyly.

Now only one thing remained. Seraphina had vanished upstairs for her private audience with the master; all that was left was for her to come back down with the arena master’s head in hand.

About time this got wrapped up.

I was looking up at the sky above the arena when it happened.

— KWAAANG—!

The light of the massive chandelier that spanned the sky twisted to the color of blood, and then, with a flash that tore at the eyes, something came plummeting toward the ground.

— KUUNG!

The impact set the entire arena floor shuddering. The figure that emerged through the thick haze of dust was, of all people, Seraphina.

“Sister!”
“Sis!”

She couldn’t answer the cries from Lillian and me. Her snow-white hair was matted red, clotted thick with congealed blood, and the clothes covering her whole body hung in shreds, as if someone had slashed them to ribbons. She spat a gob of bloody spittle roughly onto the floor, then braced herself on her sword with a trembling hand, barely keeping her upper body upright.

An instant later, a jet-black beam came lancing down from the sky toward the dead center of the arena.

— Pajijik, pajik!

As the ugly noise of searing air died away and the black smoke cleared, a knight appeared, astride a black horse far larger than any ordinary steed. The same black haze that had swallowed Valerian earlier rose off the pitch-black plate armor encasing him, and a red glow of eyes spilled from the slit of his helm. Even mounted, his frame was vast enough to loom over us where we stood on the ground.

— KUUNG!

He drove the enormous black spear in his hand down into the sandy floor. At the blow, the sand carpeting the ground surged outward in every direction in one great wave.

The Demon Who Leads Legions — Eligos.

He stood fifteenth in rank among the seventy-two demons. This was the final boss of the Abyss, the one who had bound its minions, Sylvia among them, into their hellish cycle.

The moment Eligos appeared, he leveled the point of his spear at the battered, broken Seraphina and bellowed.

“Woo-hyo-hyo-hyo! To think I get to ravage a beauty like this to my heart’s content, with my own two hands! Kyahahaha!”

Mad laughter burst out of him and shook the entire arena.

At that revolting sound, words spilled out of me too, before I could stop them.

“…This guy’s a complete psycho bastard, isn’t he?”