Pindel Morein (3)

Roughly a fortnight earlier.

The very day Kalen and I reached Oskalt and every last person there was sculpted.

Pormel, which had been waiting outside the city, turned back for Pirberk on the signal I sent.

A week to retrace the road we had come and reach Talios’s city.

About a day for the church to spot Pormel loitering about and realize something was wrong.

And then a bare four days for them to arrive at Oskalt at last.

Drick could be standing in front of me now only because all those spans of time had come together so precisely where they crossed. I had followed the whole of that current through Pormel, and there was nothing left to do but mutter.

“You’re late.”

The monster with its arm cut off writhed in pain. The hideous shriek would long since have torn an ordinary man’s eardrums, but Drick was unruffled.

“Well now, I’d say I came fairly quick.”

The other paladins, who had taken Talios’s holy power into themselves, arrived one after another. They formed up in flawless order, and Drick alone stood quite still among them. Only then did I notice that his armor was subtly different in shape from the rest.

“Some kind of promotion out of turn, all in one leap?”

“Something of the sort. I’m a commander.”

“…An unprecedented parachute appointment, well past anything I’d have guessed.¹”

The paladins went straight into the monster hunt. Moving like the wind, they literally ground the enormous lump of flesh away.

A paladin who has taken holy power can no longer be called human. This was a fight of monster against monster, and the paladins of the Talios church were monsters in the truest sense, living for battle and nothing else.

“Parachute? What’s that?”
“It’s nothing.”

Drick had pinned on the title of a knight order’s commander in under a month. The news was shocking enough that a term out of a past life came out of me before I knew it.

“Seems I had a talent this way that even I never knew about.”
“Isn’t that the sort of thing nobody could be expected to know?”

Now and then there are men like that.

Men who stand above the rest.

Geniuses are born in any world, and in taking in Talios’s holy power Drick was a genius of absorption.

The strength of the paladins butchering the monster was plainly past anything human. But not one of them had taken that enormous arm off in a single stroke, the way Drick had.

“Heard it from the branch head — that my vessel for taking in holy power runs larger than most. The commander of the Second Order sat me down in the commander’s seat the moment my baptism was over and went off to the First.”

“Walter Schneider did?”

“Said that since I had a commander’s worth of force in me, there’d be nothing wrong with it as a matter of form. The funny part is the branch head approved it on the spot. And so, as you see, I’ve had the Second Order dumped on me out of nowhere.”

The Talios church is a strange body.

An enormous religion that follows the order of strength with absolute thoroughness.

Apart from a handful of posts that handle nothing but administration, such as the branch head, the stronger man stands in the higher place. Given strength, a twenty-year-old Walter Schneider could command a knight order, and so could an outsider like Camilla Rosette. That was the Talios church.

“Still, it’s true enough I’ve not been long in the church, so I’m being handed this and that from the commander of the Third Order. By rights that was Walter Schneider’s part as well, but no sooner had he passed the seat over than he crossed to the First. The Second Order’s as good as a holding of the Third by now.”

Before long the monster went down, flinging up a thick cloud of dust. Not five minutes had passed since the paladins entered the fight in earnest.

— THOOM!

Drick and I came out of the ruined building and stepped into the alley. Far off, past the broken gate, the Talios church’s temporary camp came into view. Staying near the wall so the knight order could reach me easily had been the right call.

Drick spoke, his face gone hard.

“Brother. Looks to me like there’s a great deal you’ve got to explain.”

Why Oskalt was in such a state.

What had become of the Pindel Morein I had said I was hunting.

And why Kalen was nowhere to be seen.

I began to broach them, one after another.

There was no hiding Lucseon from Drick any longer. In the end I laid out everything but Eladin and a few other odds and ends, and in the course of it he came to learn the story of how the Lucseon church and I had been tangled together for hundreds of years. It was a long story, and by the time the talk was done the sun was going down.

“…I see. So at Pindel Morein’s hand, the whole city, Kalen with it…”

Drick had nothing to say for a good while.

The church’s temporary camp was a cluster of tents pitched outside the wall, a wartime base used by the whole of the Second and Third Orders, the guard corps excepted. Drick had shown me to a tent that looked to be the officers’ quarters, and we were talking there when someone stepped inside.

“…I trust you have been well.”

“Camilla Rosette. It’s been a while.”

Drick glared at Camilla.

“I believe I said not to come in until I came out.”
“Oho. Putting a bit of steel in your eye now that you’re in front of the apostle, are you?”

“…Mind your words and your conduct. Discipline is absolute. Show proper respect before the apostle. Commander of the Third Order.”

Straining for dignity, Drick never got to finish speaking. Camilla had slipped behind him in an instant and had her forearm around his throat.

“Oh? Then why is it you show no respect to me?”

Drick did not answer. He only threw Camilla down without a word.

“Gakh!”

“Respect, she says. And where does a commander of the Third get off demanding it of a commander of the Second, who stands as high as heaven above her.”

He showed me a victor’s smile. I could not help letting out a hollow laugh.

“Seems the two of you are getting on well.”
“Ngh… Yes. He’s got nothing but brute strength going for him…”

Camilla let out a groan. That lasted only a moment; she was soon up and brushing herself off.

“If I may come to the point, I came because there is something I must report to you regarding the state of the fighting.”

This was not yet the time for catching up. My talk with Drick was drawing to its close as well, so I gave her a nod.

“The confirmed number of the enemy is somewhere near eight hundred beasts of unknown kind, and somewhere near four hundred undead.”
“And ours?”
“The whole detachment has come, save the First Order and the guard corps. Ninety-six paladins, two hundred and forty-three knights in training, three hundred and seventeen common soldiers.”
“That will do. Pull the common soldiers back first. They would only be lives thrown away.”
“Yes, understood. How will you dispose the force?”
“This is a war of annihilation. Every last one of them has to be wiped out.”

To leave no seed behind.

That is the utmost respect that can be shown to those who were, if only for a time, human.

“The common soldiers turn their backs to the wall. Cut off any further undead coming in. Then make teams of two paladins and three knights in training. Commit twelve teams to each of the four points of the compass. The ninety-nine knights in training left over will watch for undead alongside the common soldiers for now.”
“Understood. When will you set the time to move in?”
“Tomorrow morning.”

The advantage in numbers lay with the monsters. But every last one of Talios’s paladins was a specialist in battle, and in a tangled street fight, sending in teams built out of paladins would be more efficient than one paladin leading a mass of common soldiers.

Drick and Camilla went out, and before long I was the only one left in the tent. The sky had gone dark already, and the one light inside was a small lamp. I watched it sway for a while.

Now and then the soldiers’ voices carried in from outside. They would stop up the wall through this evening, and from tomorrow they would begin the annihilation operation in full.

‘A sense of loss isn’t what you feel when something disappears. It’s what you feel when the thing that’s gone finally becomes real to you.’

Kalen’s voice circled at my ear, as though he were whispering from right beside me.

A fortnight had passed since he died. Watching that precarious lamp, ready to go out at any moment, I was feeling a sense of loss that had come out of nowhere.

“…”

A faint wind came in through a gap in the tent, and the lamp that had been swaying soon lost its light.

The room was no longer bright.

The next day.

A sweeping mop-up operation began against the sculpted humans and the undead. Drick and I set out from the outpost early in the morning along with the paladins.

“Moving in! Go!”
“Three undead ahead!”
“Fourth operational zone secured!”

The teams made of knights in training and paladins mashed the undead and the monsters like baked potatoes. The creatures seemed to have no habit of moving about in packs of tens either, so against paladins who had long since become old hands at clearing out beasts they stood no chance. In no time at all they had pushed as far as the city’s center.

“If this really is the whole of it, it’ll finish easier than I thought.”
“There won’t be anything more out of the ordinary than this.”

Pindel Morein’s plan had been effective. Had the Talios church not cut in at exactly the right moment, it would in fact have been quite dangerous.

Even so, the cause of his failure was simple. When he laid the plan, he failed to take into account the link between the Talios church and me. He had left the day I arrived in Pirberk, so there would have been no way for him to know. Pirberk’s order of paladins was a wild card decisive enough to overturn the trap at Oskalt. The Lucseon church had never foreseen that I could call them out. The result was that it found itself driven back under attack by the knight order instead.

Lucseon had not reckoned on Talios.

And so, once an enemy it had never reckoned on entered the board, the plan was bound to collapse, and it was likewise only natural that I should be standing before the cathedral at the head of this force.

“How far has the operation got?”
“Pushed as far as the third zone, they tell me.”

The city’s center was the first operational zone. In practice the annihilation operation only truly began once that first zone had been taken ahead of everything else. The zones spread outward and widened as they went, so that clearing the first completely meant advancing to the second, and then the third. The last of them, the fourth zone, was the outer defensive belt running up against the wall.

By now it was late afternoon. Before anyone quite noticed, the Oskalt cleansing operation had only its final stage left.

“Good. Are you ready?”
“All in perfect readiness.”

This was not the cleansing operation.

As the cleansing operation drew near its end there was room to draw some of the committed paladins back out, and I had laid a plan to storm the cathedral at once.

A second operation running alongside the cleansing work.

The search for Pindel Morein.

Of course, there would have been no harm in waiting until the fourth zone too had been wiped clean before entering the cathedral. There was no denying this second operation came early.

But.

“Time we went in.”
“Stand back.”

Beyond that door is Pindel Morein.

The man who killed Kalen and stood him up in front of me, who made sport of his death.

The Lucseon church, which murdered Eladin and means to wield her power.

Beyond that door, they are waiting for me.

How could I not hurry?

Drick put the twenty paladins and me behind him and stepped out in front of the cathedral. His sword slid free of the scabbard as though brushing over silk, and then it swung at a speed the eye could hardly catch.

— SHUNK!

A single shriek of split air.

And yet the cathedral’s front doors came down, sliced into nine pieces. Past the wreckage, the inside was no different from when I had seen it last.

A gloomy, dark chapel.

“Let’s go in.”

On an impulse I turned and swept my eyes across the open ground in front of the cathedral. I thought I had seen the hem of the robe Kalen had been wearing. But the ground was empty, with nothing on it at all.

Just a trick of the eye, then?

“Yes.”

I turned my head away again.