Chapter 185: Oblivion (10)
TL/ED – Miso
A black line was drawn across the white snow.
The contrasting colors created a stark difference. Balkan’s eyes trembled slightly at the surreal sight that made this enormous mountain feel like nothing more than a single sheet of drawing paper.
Even for a knight, witnessing magic at its peak seemed to stir something within.
“Let’s run.”
“…R-right.”
There was no time for consideration. Even at this very moment, precious time was slipping away.
Even if I ran with everything I had, wouldn’t the situation already be over by the time I arrived… I was pushing my Current Sense out as wide as possible while struggling to run through the snowfield.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
Balkan let out a scoff of disbelief and grabbed me by the scruff of my neck. “Running.”
“Ha, just brace yourself so your neck doesn’t snap.”
Balkan took a short breath- then kicked off the snow.
-BOOM!!
“Oh…”
With every step Balkan took, a small avalanche erupted.
From the outside, it looked like he was running with bombs going off under his feet. As I watched in admiration, he shouted.
“Guide the way! Where to!”
“At this speed, turn right in ten seconds. After that, go straight.”
A knight really was a knight. As I quietly played navigator, the place where Dersia had fallen gradually came within my Current Sense.
Slowly, conviction began to take hold.
The conviction that she had won.
“I don’t think we need to rush so much.”
“What?”
“I’m not entirely sure, but it seems like it’s over.”
“What did you say? Decay’s been taken care of?!”
“That… doesn’t seem to be the case.”
The Burden was still active. My Current Sense hadn’t picked up anything particularly meaningful either.
But even so, there was much that could be inferred.
“If Dersia-nim had lost, we should have been under attack by now.”
“You’re saying we’d be the next targets?”
“More or less. Think about it. Several dozen minutes must have passed while we’ve been moving. That’s more than enough time for any battle to produce a winner and a loser, no matter how drawn out. If Decay had won, he’d be coming to finish off the stragglers, meaning us.”
“And if Dersia won…”
“She’d be waiting for us to arrive.”
“I, I see.”
Balkan nodded as if he understood, but didn’t slow his pace.
“We never know. Keep your sensing ability spread as wide as you can. Report immediately if you pick up anything.”
“Will do.”
Carrying a sliver of hope, I gradually drew closer to where Dersia had fallen.
And the closer I got.
“…?”
That hope slowly twisted into something else.
A sense of wrongness.
“What is it? Did you see something?!”
“…I see ice.”
“Of course there’s ice, isn’t that obvious?”
“This is a different kind of ice.”
“?”
By the time we arrived where Dersia had been, Balkan could see the same thing I had.
Countless ice sculptures. They weren’t shaped in Dersia’s likeness, though.
They were simply ice sculptures in the form of humans, far too many to count. They held the posture of knights wielding swords, but their faces were hollow. Literally just well-carved statues, and nothing more.
I slowly brushed my Current Sense across one of the sculptures and murmured.
“Signs of battle.”
“Decay’s work, I assume.”
“No. Dersia did this.”
A precision bordering on perverse. In that, I could feel Dersia’s hand at work.
There was no doubt that a battle had taken place here.
But-
“This is far too strange.”
This battlefield bore no trace of a victor, nor a loser.
Neither could be seen. If Dersia had won, she should have been sitting among those ice sculptures, happily reading a book without a care in the world. If Decay had won, he would have greeted me with that unsettling smile of his.
No, at the very least, Brimdal should have been here to scratch his head alongside us. That knight would have arrived before us if anything, certainly not after.
Several hours must have passed by the time we made it here.
What remained, aside from these sculptures, was nothing.
“Let’s wait a moment. I’ll sweep the area with my Current Sense…?”
I said that and turned to look at Balkan.
His expression was strange.
“…So that’s how it is.”
“Pardon?”
His face was twisted into a grimace, and he slowly drew his sword.
“Now it all makes sense. It was all a lie.”
“What nonsense are you spouting now?”
Well, if it were normal nonsense, I might have entertained it. But with that shaggy look of his, suddenly delivering lines like some tragic heroine, I couldn’t muster a single kind word.
But Balkan didn’t believe me and continued to approach, slowly.
With killing intent flooding his eyes.
“What I’m saying is that you and Decay were in this together.”
“…I’ll hear you out, at least.”
“I hate to admit it, but- Dersia, that woman, is not someone who would lose to any Fallen. Not to Decay, and not even to their leader.”
Balkan’s assessment of Dersia was surprisingly level-headed.,
“If what you said is true, then Dersia faced Decay alone, one on one.”
“That’s right.”
“And yet, looking at the result, she lost handily.”
“How do you arrive at that conclusion?”
When I frowned and asked, Balkan produced a red stone as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
“Because I planted a tracking device on that woman.”
“?”
“The quality of a Guardian Knight is the ability to catch spies sneaking in. To catch those who hide, you must know how to hide yourself. My swordsmanship and footwork are built entirely on extreme concealment.”
Balkan gave the stone a light shake. Even as I watched with my own eyes, the hand holding the stone seemed to vanish.
“If someone allowed me that close, then even a wizard who has lit nine stars wouldn’t notice a single thread stuck to their collar. With this, I planted tracking devices on Dersia, Brimdal, and even you.”
I hastily swept my Current Sense over my own body.
And sure enough, I found an impossibly thin thread, thinner than a chick’s down, stuck to my back, and pulled it off.
Balkan watched and nodded, inwardly impressed.
“As expected, a surprise would never work on you. To think your ability is that precise.”
“No, why would you do something like this?”
“It should be obvious. Because I don’t trust you.”
Balkan glared at me with ice-cold eyes. Before I knew it, he was close enough to reach with an outstretched hand.
“Trust a Fallen? Ha! Don’t make me laugh. On top of that, you once joined the Crimson Circle… do you have any idea how ridiculous that sounded to me?”
“My identity is vouched for by Her Highness the Princess. And my infiltration of the Crimson Circle was exactly that, a mission, nothing more.”
“I don’t trust that Princess either.”
“…”
Balkan, bristling with intensity, murmured with complete sincerity.
“His Majesty the Emperor suddenly grew frail. And then, out of nowhere, he handed all power over to the Princess. No matter how qualified the successor, the Imperial Household has its unspoken rules. In a thousand years of our illustrious history, nothing like this has ever happened.”
“Are you denying even Her Highness’s competence?”
“She is far too competent… competent enough to conspire with the Crimson Circle and ally with the Fallen to orchestrate this whole crisis.”
“…Delusions that severe are a disease.”
“Do you know what’s been whispered across the empire since the Crimson Circle started running rampant? That the current Princess should be crowned Empress, even though His Majesty still lies bedridden. And that talk circulates openly. All because our great Princess has been repelling every crisis that threatens to tear the empire apart with absolute perfection. Anyone watching would think she could see the future.”
He had, remarkably, arrived at the truth. Though it sounded like he meant it as a joke.
“The elf no longer exists on this mountain. My tracking device has gone dead. That means she’s dead.”
“…”
Of course, I met his gaze squarely without believing a single word.
“How could Dersia have lost to Decay? And if your Current Sense is really that precise, then why did you split us into three groups? As if giving Decay the chance to pick us off one by one.”
“Upper Tier members can’t be perfectly detected even by my Current Sense. That’s why I chose the most probable locations.”
“You had your excuse ready, I see. It was you who fed all of Dersia’s weaknesses to Decay, wasn’t it? If this is connected to Her Highness the Princess…”
Balkan drew his sword, making a terrifying declaration.
“Then I must march forward in the spirit of loyalty to the nation.”
At this rate, if he went back like this, there was a one hundred percent chance he’d start an actual rebellion.
Should I fight him? No, I didn’t even have time to waste on this.
Furrowing my brow and clenching my fist, I tried one last, desperate appeal.
“Even His Majesty would prefer an ungrateful daughter ruling the empire over a loyal subject seizing it.”
“How dare a wretch like you presume to judge His Majesty’s will? I, a Guardian Knight, am the sole hope he chose.”
“You speak as if you’ve received orders directly.”
“I have. Not that someone like you could understand.”
“?”
He had received orders from the Emperor, a man who had been bedridden and hadn’t risen for years.
Something about that sentence triggered a feeling of déjà vu, so I asked the man who was about to take my head at any moment.
“Did the Emperor, supposedly bedridden, happen to suddenly appear before you, say a bunch of things, and then vanish just as suddenly as he appeared?”
“…….What?”
“He, well, he left me some kind of book.”
“……….”
Balkan froze mid-swing, sword still raised above his head-
His jaw dropped open as he asked again.
“W-wait. What did you say? You too… you also had an audience? With His Majesty’s spirit?”
“It wasn’t a spirit. He’s still alive.”
“He, he was in an astral state. He came to me in that form and asked me to make a decisive stand for the empire…”
That was something only a person completely ignorant of magic would say.
I explained things to Balkan, step by step.
“First of all, whatever that was, it does seem to be connected to His Majesty. Because he was carrying an item that could only have come from the Emperor’s personal chambers. But it clearly wasn’t normal, was it? Did you seriously believe it without question?”
“…There’s no way I would. What did His Majesty say to you?”
It seemed Balkan had been fully convinced that the Emperor’s ghost was genuinely the Emperor himself, and that was what had fueled his hostility toward the Princess.
What a mess. What on earth was that thing? I tilted my head for a moment, then realized I could use this to my advantage and continued smoothly.
“Hmm, he told me to aid the empire’s savior. I took that to mean the Princess, so I stood by her side, even if I had my doubts.”
“I-is that really true?”
“Yes. Why would I lie?”
Balkan, having already sheathed his sword at some point, began slowly nodding as if it all clicked into place.
“Is that so… I see. His Majesty pointed you out as the one to assist me…”
He was a remarkably easy man to handle.
Making a complete mockery of the fact that he’d been trying to kill me just moments ago, he broke into a broad smile and extended his hand.
“I apologize. It seems there was a bit of a misunderstanding between us.”
“It’s fine. Misunderstandings happen. Just a small one, right?”
“Gahaha, exactly! Now then, the elf’s signal is actually being picked up from a different location, not here.”
“What?”
“I hid that fact in case you were concealing something. It seems the battlefield has shifted. If we don’t hurry, we’ll be too late.”
“No way…”
What an absolute lunatic.
But it’s hard to pick a fight with someone grinning ear to ear. Getting angry at that beaming grin would only make me look like the fool, so I let out a sigh and started moving.
Then I stopped, just for a moment.
“Hmm.”
“What are you looking at?”
My gaze had lingered on one of the ice sculptures. Balkan, looking puzzled, came over and examined the sculpture alongside me.
“Is there some secret hidden in it?”
“No. I was just wondering why she didn’t give them faces.”
“…Save that question for when you see her.”
He frowned in exasperation, then bent down.
“I’ll carry you on my back this time. Hop on.”
Quite the change in treatment.
I let out a dry laugh, but instead of climbing onto his back, I turned once more to study the ice sculpture.
A faceless ice sculpture.
A faceless knight.
A thought landed somewhere in my mind, and I grimaced deeply.
“Ah. Son of a…”
“What now? We’re in a hurry, so get on already.”
“Even in a situation like this, she has to make things difficult. What a temper.”
When I snapped, Balkan flinched and turned around.
“? Was that directed at me?”
“No. At my master.”
“Your master?”
“Yes. It’s nothing important. She just hid her hint in the most obnoxious way possible.”
I lightly called up Water Pressure.
“…Hm?”
-Crack!
Along with Balkan’s questioning hum.
A red flower bloomed across the snow.
*****
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