“Not here…”
The Marquis’s castle, which had been destroyed to the utmost, looked like a giant dragon’s wreckage when the battle was over. Broken down to the level of a ruin, the castle looked like a bare skeleton.
The castle walls were crumbling, and the ground had been gouged out. What appeared to be the remains of livestock sheds swept away by the water were washed ashore near the walls.
In the muddy ground, which was recognizable as the remains of the giant’s rampage, however, Ghislain’s huge body did not exist.
Only a few dumpling-shaped white lumps of flesh remained, covered in blood, shouldering the damage.
“I wonder if he turned into a human and hid somewhere. It’s not fair, once I’m undead, I can’t return to my human body.”
“Irrecuperable.”
“Yes, just a piece of meat lying around.”
He didn’t mean to hide in a piece of meat, did he?
Incidentally, the pieces of meat were to be collected after the killing, just in case. There was no telling if there would be another chance to fight a similar holy beast, so it should be sent to the analysis team (which at the moment had only one person on staff).
“Alastair, were there any signs of escape outside?”
“I have checked with the captains of the units surrounding the castle, and they have not reported seeing anyone resembling such a person. It would be difficult to tell if he was using magic or magic items to hide himself.”
“…I’ll have the Bloodsuckers look for footprints. Ghislain disappeared right after he crushed my body, right?”
“Yes.”
Although it would be possible to hide the holy energy and the huge body by transforming into a person, it was not easy to remove the footprints.
Fortunately, the area was muddy, so there might have been some traces left behind.
The Bloodsuckers, led by René, headed toward the wall that had been crushed by Ghislain’s fist.
They were careful not to cover any traces with their own footprints, and they kept their eyes open like saucers to check the area.
The undead had a knack for simple tasks and human wave tactics.
“If Ghislain were just a normal holy beast, I could have used my “Emotional Detection” power to find him. But that’s just not the case.”
“Let’s search for it with all the forces deployed in the city.”
“Please do so. And please continue with the extermination of the holy beasts.”
Stopping the call mark, René sighed.
At first, René had come to eliminate Ghislain as a political enemy. But now Ghislain had apparently lost his mind. She had no idea that he would eat Marquis Edfeldt, another target of René’s. Who would do this to Ghislain?
She knew who had made Ghislain this way. It was that old woman Morgana, who had the will of the Great God in her. For some reason, she was captured by Noacurio’s army and sent to Wesala to be deported back to the home country.
She was the maker of holy beasts, she herself reflected the Great God in her heart, and she could probably engrave the holy stigma on others.
But why she did this … or let it happen remained to be seen.
What was certain was that unlike the other holy beasts, Ghislain was working by implementing a degraded copy of God’s thought process. If that was the case, he needed to be slaughtered at all costs.
–…I can’t stop thinking about it. I have to look for Ghislain, too.
René also began to look around, searching for signs around her.
*
The sounds of battle reaching the chapel had ceased at some point.
The passage was a narrow one. It could only be entered if those in front advanced. Those who remained in the chapel, still unable to escape, listened intently in stifling silence. They were preparing for what might or might not happen next.
Then something happened, some footsteps were heard walking through the muddy ground, and a few figures appeared in front of the large hole where the door to the outside had been.
Silver knight’s armor stained with mud. They came rolling in with wobbly steps, perhaps injured or fatigued.
They were identifiable by the emblem on their chests.
“Oh, young lady!”
“Everyone!”
Catherine advanced and greeted them.
They were the knights of Oswald’s army.
The knights kneeled in front of Catherine like they were going to collapse.
“I see that you are all safe.”
“Hah, yes…, but, hah…, Earl-sama…!”
The knight’s words trailed off as though stuck in his throat, and Catherine’s face paled quickly.
“Father…? What happened to Father!? What happened to you!? What happened to my brothers!? What happened to my sister!?”
The knight finally squeezed the words out as Catherine gripped his armored shoulder and shook him stiffly.
“Hadley-sama, Steve-sama, and Priscilla-sama fought bravely and were killed by … the ‘Rose Princess of Hellrage’.”
“No way…”
Catherine clenched her hands together at her chest as if praying. Her gaze wandered around as if searching for something.
Was it admirable that she hasn’t collapsed? Or was it that she still hadn’t fully accepted what had happened?
Catherine sent her family into a desperate battle and lost them all at once. One could only imagine how shocked she must have been.
But the words of the knights that followed were even more shocking.
“But then a strange …, no, a horrifying … thing happened. A mysterious holy beast suddenly appeared and … ah!”
“Earl-sama! It took the Earl-sama from his head!”
“Eh…?”
Catherine’s face was not one of surprise or not astonishment, but of not knowing what they were talking about.
A holy beast had eaten Oswald, they said.
Bertil, who was listening nearby, was of course surprised, sympathetic, and regretful that such a precious person had been lost. At the same time, he was calmly thinking about what this situation meant.
–The Holy Beast that suddenly appeared and tried to eat us. The holy beast that attacked and devoured the survivors in the city center. And… Maybe it wasn’t trying to kill us, maybe it wasn’t. Either way, it’s pretty messed up.
At first, Bertil thought that the Holy Beast had gone mad or out of control and rampaged.
However, it seemed more correct to think that they were all moving simultaneously for some other purpose.
They did not know what the purpose was yet, but it was something more important to the holy beasts than the lives of the citizens.
“The sounds of fighting have suddenly stopped, what is going on out there?”
The knight managed to answer Bertil’s question in a trembling voice.
They, too, have lost their Lord before their eyes. They were filled with a sense of weariness that they had somehow managed to escape from a hopeless battle, and the term “crawling” would have been more appropriate.
“… A mysterious holy beast was fighting with “Rose Princess of Hellrage”. It was a battle that I couldn’t understand what was happening even though I was watching it from the sidelines…, but when the holy beast crushed the “Rose Princess of Hellrage”, shortly afterwards the holy beast disappeared as well…”
“Both disappeared? Huh… Disappeared, but how?”
“I don’t know… We were also fighting desperately against the army of undead that was trying to invade. Suddenly, the undead stopped attacking, and we barely had time to retreat.”
The knight spoke slowly as he looked at the floor.
Bertil guessed that René was probably not defeated.
It was a natural assumption since he already knew that she had the power to change bodies.
Holy beasts were sensitive to evil spirits.
If René had obtained a body somewhere in the city, it was possible that he would have gone after it.
It was possible, but he was not sure why it hid its appearance.
Did it hide itself by magic, or was it hiding in human form?
Was he trying to catch her by surprise? If René had the power of “Emotional Detection”, he didn’t think a surprise attack would work, and the holy beasts seemed to have the tendency to fight head-on…
“The walls are no longer of any use. If the battle had continued a little longer, we would have all been killed.”
“Therefore,… We have returned to protect you, my lady, in shame that we could not fulfill our duty and protect my Lord, the Earl.”
The knights, shedding tears of disappointment, strained their voices.
–I don’t think we can afford to be probing the holy beasts’ movements.
For some reason the battle has lulled, but Bertil’s perception was that things were not getting any better. It was still dangerous to stay here.
In other words, there were more survivors, but what needed to be done remained the same. All they had to do was run away.
If he wished, he would have grasped what the holy beasts were up to, but he probably didn’t have the luxury of doing so. What was more important for Bertil was to analyze what had happened in this chapel.
Bertil had planted a “Wedge of Isolation” in this chapel as well, on René’s orders. In other words, René intended to use this chapel as a nursery to increase the number of Bloodsuckers.
However, for some reason, that did not happen. What was the cause, or did René simply change her mind? If there was a key to countering René, he had to find it.
To do so, they needed to gather and piece together the testimonies of survivors. The more survivors, the better.
–Then we just have to … hope nothing happens until after the evacuation, huh…
But. On the battlefield, prayers were often betrayed in the worst possible way.
Bertil suddenly felt air rush over his body.
The chapel, which was supposed to be filled with a pure holy energy, was now filled with an ominous atmosphere.
The holy air, which had been diluted by the making of holy water, was drowned out by competition from the evil energy.
The mere presence alone was enough to make Bertil, a knight of many battles, shudder.
He had a memory of this feeling.
Bertil had met her on the day the capital fell.
――Oi oi……Please stop. I don’t want to die yet, do I?
A silver moon, fallen to the ground, stood at the entrance of the chapel.
Long, beautiful silver hair and dull silver eyes with a hard, noble shine.
Her face was pretty and innocent, but bloodless, and the slit in her slender neck and the blood that flowed from it indicated that she was not an ordinary being.
In her hand was a sword that looked as if it had been carved out of a crimson gem.
She wore a common one-piece dress of a whitish-brown color. On the skirt of the dress was a bright red, fresh-blooded rose.
René “Rosey” Ruvia Ciel-Terra.
… “Rose Princess of Hellrage”.
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