Old Man Impact

In a chapel overlooked by a stained glass window with a saintly image, a controversial discussion was raging.

“Shouldn’t we escape through the passageway?”

“But what are we going to do when we escape? What are we going to do if the monsters find us?”

“Isn’t it dangerous to stay here?”

“Are you saying that Marquis-sama’s soldiers will be defeated!?”

“I never said that!”

“Mother…i’m scared…”

“You can run if you want.”

“Hey, if you open the tunnel, they might break in the other direction.”

“So …, if people run, you close it again.”

“If we do that, we won’t be able to come back when we’re in danger!”

“Then why don’t you just stay here!”

People of rank and honor, fueled by the flames of crisis, spit on each other.

The servants who have taken refuge in the chapel were dismayed to see this, unable to interject.

Inside the castle, protected by solid walls and strong soldiers. A holy place that the undead avoided. And an escape route in case of emergency.

Those who had taken refuge in the castle chapel (with the exception of a few) were anxious, but somewhere in the back of their minds they were optimistic that if they stayed here, they would somehow be saved.

However, the sounds of battle began to come from strangely close by, and the sound of something large collapsing could be heard, and everyone gradually became more and more anxious.

Should they run or not?

No instructions or guidance.

The knights, who had been coming to get holy water from time to time, were no longer seen.

Catherine watched the arguments from a corner of the chapel.

Catherine had an idea that a crisis might be imminent, but she felt like she was no longer herself, and the sense that her life was in danger was distant.

Instead, Catherine was preoccupied with ruminating in her mind about the strange event that had just occurred.

Was it an illusion or something else?

It couldn’t have been.

René had appeared there. And she tried to do something to Catherine.

Was it René’s soul that Catherine saw at that moment? She was surely right. She didn’t understand how it could have happened, but she was sure that it was Rene’s soul.

Catherine held on to the vindictiveness and sadness that no human being could hold on to as if it were her own.

She felt like she was wandering through a nightmare of burning black flames. Her chest rumbled and tightened. Such a thing, such a feeling.

“Yes, I understand, I understand. Then how about this!”

The discussion that seemed to go on forever broke off, and Catherine, who had been wandering through her nightmare as she woke up, became just a little bit more interested in what was happening in front of her.

A middle-aged gentleman was moving, looking as though he was getting impatient.

He looked like a wealthy merchant or a retired knight. He was dressed in his evening gown and had a magnificent head that made one suspect that he was a descendant of a boiled egg.

“Servants, come here.”

He commanded with a great air of authority, and several of the male servants who were taking refuge walked out.

And they soon returned. They brought various jars, bottles, and other items filled with water and began to arrange them on the altar at the front of the chapel, following the instructions of the man with the bald head. He even started bringing out bottles big enough to be dragged.

–Nobody stopped him…? So, is it okay?

She had a pretty good idea what he was doing, but if Catherine’s guess was right, this was a dangerous gamble.

“Um, what are you doing?”

Catherine ventured to ask the man who was giving her instructions.

“Oh? Holy water. I’m making holy water. The water offered at the altar becomes holy water by the blessing of God. If we pour it over them, the undead will fall. With the holy water, we will be somewhat safer when we run away.”

“So much … at once?”

“That’s right. No matter how much there is, it will never be enough. The knights might come back for more holy water.”

The altar was crowded like a general store.

Catherine’s blood ran cold as she realized that the man seemed to be thinking about nothing at all. Catherine, who had been absentmindedly thinking about René, was brought sharply back to reality.

“You mustn’t, sir, you mustn’t!”

“What? Hey, you’re being rude. Who are you, kid?”

“That’s none of your business!”

The man with the boiled egg head suddenly turned red when Catherine stopped him. He looked not only like an egg, but also like an octopus.

“You don’t seem to know how to talk to your elders! It shows where you come from!”

The man said in a yell that sounded like a verbal smackdown.

He shouted so loudly that a small boy who was watching nearby started to cry.

Catherine, however, was surprisingly unfazed. She had been thrown into the middle of a truly horrific battle earlier, and just now she had seen something so horrific that she didn’t want to remember it.

“This is not the time to talk about etiquette!”

“What’s it to you? I see you couldn’t get a proper nanny! Instead, I am here to educate the young for the future of this country…”

The boiled egg man (or octopus man) still tried to say something in a high-handed manner, but his yelling was forcibly interrupted.

The chapel door was kicked open with a loud bang.

The door was not blocked so that the soldiers could easily enter and leave.

A rotten night wind blew in.

Many, many red lights floated side by side in the darkness.

“Holy water is made by gathering holy energy,… so if you make too much at once, it weakens the holy energy around,… Onee-sama told me… “

The pale, dried-up bodies, the glowing red, vacant eyes.

There was a crowd there, obviously undead.

The altar was the focal point of this chapel.

It was the place where the flow of the holy energy inside the chapel was connected, and even if you just put water there, it would absorb the holy energy and become holy water.

However, this meant that the holy energy inside the chapel would diminish as much as the holy energy melted into the water.

If the undead were to appear here, the repellent effect of the holy energy would not work as it should, and the continuous damage from the environment would be severely weakened.

The attack came at the worst possible time.

A slight fading of the holy energy would not be a problem in normal times, and it would not be an issue, but to let it fade here and now was tantamount to throwing away one’s shield and taking off one’s armor.

Unlike the temple in the city where many priests and people gathered to pray, this was a chapel for the lord of the castle. The amount of holy energy gathered was even less.

“No, no, nooooooo!!”

“Why are there monsters here!?”

Screams went up, and the area was in an uproar like a bee hive being poked.

The undead streamed in at a furious pace, jumping on those closest to them in order and assembling them on the floor.

“Gyahhhh!”

Several undead jumped on the fallen, devouring their entire bodies, and set their fangs everywhere.

The victims, who died screaming in horror, … eventually staggered to their feet. Like the other undead, their eyes glowed red and their faces were pale and dried out.

“Vampires …!”

A blood-sucking, abominable, dark fiend who multiplied his friends by sucking blood. A very famous undead monster.

A noblewoman who witnessed the bloodsucking swooned in shock like she was anemic, and then fell prey to a pack of vampires.

As the number of victims continued to increase, everyone rushed toward the altar to get as far away from the entrance of the chapel as possible.

In inverse proportion to the frenzy, Catherine felt her mind becoming as still and calm as the surface of a frozen lake.

“Escape route! We’ve got to run for the escape route!”

The people gathered around the altar, and with great vigor, they put their hands on the innermost statue of God.

There was a secret passageway behind the statue.

Although they were mainly women, children, and the elderly, all of whom were not strong enough to do the work, the strong male servants did all the heavy lifting.

However, the movement of the god statue was heavy.

“Hurry, open the way!”

“It… doesn’t move! It must be rusty!”

It appeared to be equipped with a slit and wheels to move it, but both the slit and wheels were rusted. It seemed that even though there was a tunnel, it had never been used properly, and maintenance had been neglected.

Even if a way out had been discovered, it would not have been easy to break in, but if they were to use it themselves, it would have been hopeless.

The undead were slowly closing in on them faster than the statue of the God could move.

“They are coming, they are coming!”

“If we can get rid of them with this holy water…”

“Impossible, there’s too many of them!”

“Eh, damn it!”

The man with the boiled egg head jumped out from among the crowd pushing and shoving around the statue of God.

He knelt down in front of the altar and put his hand on a large vial of water.

He then tilted it toward him.

The water poured down his bald head, soaking his evening gown and spreading over the floor.

“This is fine!”

He declared with a look of accomplishment on his face, and for a moment, everyone in the room was taken aback.

“Hey, what did you do!! You threw away precious holy water!”

An old man with a bent back raised his cane and attacked.

“This won’t save everyone anyway! Only those who should be saved should be saved! In any case, I made this…”

The man was a wet rat who arrogantly said, but…

Catherine saw. An object was swung down toward the wet and shiny boiled egg head.

“Gee!?”

The man with the boiled egg head was hit on the head, and he staggered and fell down.

He somehow managed to get up, but bright red blood was pouring out of his head.

The vampires, with their arms outstretched and their fangs bared, ‘were ready to embrace and kiss’, but they would never be able to attach themselves to a human covered in holy water.

But then, they had the intelligence to use their tools.

Among the group of vampires, there were only a few individuals with weapons of convenience, such as a poker and a long, thin horn. They stepped forward and began to perform on the man drenched in holy water.

“Stop, wait! Using weapons is against the law! Aghhhh!!”

The intermittent sounds of the man’s demise as he was being beaten to death echoed, and even when it eventually quieted down, the undead continued to beat him.

It appeared that they were determined to finish him off reliably.

They did not seem to want to go near the man soaked in holy water, though, and their stoicism was such that they would stretch out their arms and strike their prey with the tip of their sticks.

“You b**tards!”

A young man with his right arm missing at the elbow ran up to the altar and kicked as hard as he could.

The altar was overturned, along with everything on top of it. With a noisy clang, the remaining container of holy water was splashed down.

Inevitably, it fell on the man covered in blood in front of the altar and the armed undead surrounding and beating him.

“Ah… Ah…”

“Aaaaaaaa……”

The undead fell down while making a sound like the creaking of a tangle.

The part that was splashed with holy water crumbled and the individual that took the direct hit turned into a pile of completely wet white ashes.

The surrounding vampires backed away.

“I beat it, but … the holy water …”

The one-armed man breathed out a bitter sound through clenched teeth.

The spraying of the holy water caused the vampires to retreat, but it was unlikely that they would stay this way forever.

In fact, the retreating vampires had regrouped and were beginning to gather by the wall, seemingly to bypass the holy water that had been sprinkled in the center.

“Hurry up and get out of here!”

“It’s heavy!”

“Put more effort into it!”

The people moving the god statue (probably all accusing each other of sloppy management of the exit) slide it along at a speed that would be a good match for slugs.

There would be no telling if they would make it in time.

“Hey, can someone fight!”

The one-armed man selected a piece of wood, as long as possible among the weapons dropped by the undead, and rolled it over the holy water spilled on the floor. It looked bad, but now he had a holy weapon.

He held the long stick with one left hand, seemingly uncomfortable to hold.

But no one answered his call.

The women didn’t think they were being addressed in the first place. Fighting was a man’s job. The servants were all trembling in a lump in the back corner of the chapel.

Even the children were frightened, and by all appearances they were younger than Catherine. It was doubtful what they could do.

“I don’t know how to fight monsters!”

“Besides, you can’t open this passageway without us!”

The male servants, who were now staring at the statue of God like it was the enemy of their parents, adamantly refused to fight.

They were not warriors and had no experience fighting monsters. They could at least wield weapons, but it was doubtful that their courage would catch up with them.

Still, they were the best force on the ground, but they were surely in need of workers to open the passageway.

“I can’t do it anymore!”

“Ah, if only I were ten, no, twenty years younger!”

The old retired men, who would have once wielded swords as knights, shook their heads.

The knight alone, who has lost his dominant arm, was facing the approaching vampires.

Numerous glowing red eyes were staring back.

There was no way they could hold on, though they had no idea how many more minutes and seconds they would need before they could open the passageway.

At any rate, there was no weapon here that could keep the fangs away from him while he fought.

If there had been even a spear, the situation might have been different, but a knife for self-defense or a poker dropped by a vampire would have been too risky. A stick-like piece of wood was the best they could come up with, and the only other thing they could do was to throw things at random.

　No.

Catherine jumped out like she had been thrown.

At the feet of the man holding the holy horn, she grabbed the corpse’s jacket as it lay there.

“What…”

Catherine snatched the jacket from the man like she was skinning him. It was covered with a lot of blood, but it was soaked with holy water that it looked like it could be squeezed out.

She took a small, light metal cauldron that was lying nearby and wrapped it in the jacket.

Then she undid the belt she had been wearing over her clothes to secure the charm, tightened it, and tied the jacket up like a purse. The belt she had borrowed from her brother was so long that it wrapped around Katherine’s waist more than twice, but now the length was important.

“One of the stories I read in a book I borrowed from Onii-sama …there was one…”

The vampires were at the forefront of the battle, and several vampires rushed toward Catherine, who was working on the front line.

The actual vampires attacked Catherine with their fangs, even though their bodies were scorched by the holy energy rising from the holy water that was sprinkled around.

They decided that something was wrong and came after Catherine, even willing to step into the holy energy themselves and fall down.

Catherine.　

Holding one end of the belt around her hand, she swung the jacket, which was wrapped around a drawstring.

The cauldron inside was light but shaped for a blow, and the soggy, wet clothes exerted considerable centrifugal force. Catherine was almost pulled away, but held on with her feet.

A cleaving blow like a Morning Star slammed into the vampire’s eyes.

The oncoming vampires were blown off their upper bodies as white ash, almost like they had been a mass of ashes from the start.

The power of the weapon that the child, Catherine, could wield with her strength was negligible. But the holy energy of the holy water that soaked the jacket alone was lethal to the vampires that were closing in.

“An adventurer who was caught up in a brothel and needed to get out of it … He stuffed stones into his sock and used it as a weapon…!”

Just the thought of herself standing in the black flames gave Catherine the courage to fight.