A night when even the stars and moon hung their heads low.
The unlit bedchamber lay buried in thick darkness, as if refusing to welcome the midnight intruder.
Every step I took sent a wet squelch reverberating through the room.
Something was wrong. Even accounting for the fact that this was a lord's bedchamber, it was far too vast.
This space clearly had an abnormally massive structure.
'Simple extravagance? Or.......'
Every hair on my body stood on end.
The only real threat here should have been guards at most.
Perhaps something had moved, perhaps it was instinct, or perhaps it was merely a feeling.
I ducked my head.
———CRUNCH!
At the same instant, something seized my ankle.
Not figuratively.
A massive maw belonging to some beast punched up through the floorboards, clamped around my right leg, and wrenched me downward.
The beast's bite force was beyond anything I could counter.
Before I could even struggle, the beast dragged me below and slammed me into a hard stone floor.
———BOOM!
My heart hammered wildly.
Not because my right leg was being ground between its jaws.
No, I couldn't say it was entirely unrelated.
The problem was the fact that the beast was here at all.
First, I scanned my surroundings as fast as I could.
The floor and walls were made of stone.
The space was quite large, and lanterns mounted here and there pushed the darkness back just barely.
In one corner stood the lord.
The moment suspicion hardened into certainty.
"You'd better answer well."
Plibentorinus II and all the rest of it, none of that mattered anymore.
Something incomparably larger than all of that was staring me in the face.
I had much to ask the lord, and much to hear.
To do that, I'd first need to deal with this beast trying to swallow me whole.
The beast was a lizard the size of a mountain.
Its scales were peculiarly black and jagged, which suggested it was a species very distantly related to dragons.
I stabbed the sword in my hand into its forehead with all my strength.
I'd intended to shatter its skull, but the blade caught fast in its scales and wouldn't budge.
'Troublesome.'
A beast with a hide too tough for a sword to bite into.
Brute force alone, as I'd been relying on, was clearly going to be useless.
"Quite the struggle for someone about to die."
The lord sneered between grimaces as he watched my leg lose its shape.
I said nothing in return.
Instead, I severed the right leg the creature was chewing on from the knee down and, at the same time, drove my left foot into the beast with everything I had.
- SHRAAAK!
The beast slid toward the corner where the lord stood, but it only spared him a brief glance before turning its head back toward me.
I bit down hard on my lip. Blood seeped out and wet my tongue.
Since ancient times, phenomena beyond human comprehension had been called divine miracles.
Each god possessed miracles they could perform, and we had come to call those divine authority.
A beast that would not attack a human. A human who commanded a beast like a limb.
Didn't that bear a harrowing resemblance to a divine authority I knew?
To Eladin's, the Power of Domination she had wielded.
Unless humanity had somehow invented magic to control beasts in the time since, this lord was exercising Eladin's authority right before my eyes.
———BOOM!
The beast lunged the moment I tried to push myself upright.
I barely managed to jerk my head back in time.
Had I not already been low to the ground, I wouldn't have reacted at all.
Movements too fast for the eye to follow, and scales no blade could pierce.
This was no beast that belonged anywhere near the Slonhar March on the western frontier.
Even during the years I'd spent roaming the continent to slaughter the cult, encountering something like this had been exceedingly rare.
I discarded the longsword in my hand and gripped the shaft still lodged in my solar plexus with both hands.
I wrenched it free, held it like a staff, and hauled myself to my feet.
My severed right leg would need time to regenerate.
The moment drool dripped from the beast's snout and its facial muscles twitched.
I leapt diagonally.
Almost simultaneously, a tremendous impact traveled through the shaft.
The spear I'd thrust out, half-thrown, had caught the beast's neck as it lunged into the spot I'd just vacated.
The creature's immense force sent a savage recoil through the weapon.
I absorbed every ounce of that force, then channeled it through my arms and spun.
A rotation riding the recoil.
Landing point: the beast's back.
My body traced a wide arc and settled onto its spine.
I seized the far end of the shaft with my other hand the instant I landed.
Pinning its head with my knee, I hauled the shaft taut against its throat. The beast, airway crushed, thrashed its entire body.
- SHRAAAAAK!
I absorbed every shock with my arms alone, and waited for it to lose consciousness.
How long had it been?
Clinging to the beast's back felt like seconds and hours at once.
What was certain was that the creature had finally blacked out.
The limp beast swayed and collapsed.
———BOOM!
My right leg had finished regenerating at some point.
I hopped off its back and landed lightly on both feet.
"Gave me a fair bit of trouble."
The lord hadn't even thought to run; he stood rooted to the spot, dazed.
Only when our eyes met did he bolt for the door.
I reversed my grip on the shaft and, putting my whole body's strength into it, stamped a heavy step forward.
Then came the throw.
The spear, launched with every fiber of muscle wrung dry, slammed into the iron door with a deafening crash.
———CRASH!
The lord, who had been fumbling with the key in a desperate bid to open the door, collapsed where he stood. Naturally.
"M-my legs......."
The lord stared at me with terror-stricken eyes.
It was the same look I'd received thousands, tens of thousands of times.
"What...... what are you?"
"I'll be the one asking questions."
I retrieved the sword from where it had fallen in the corner and drove it into the ground beside him.
The blade slotted precisely into a crack in the stone, trembling faintly.
Eladin's authority, which commanded beasts, and the lord now before my eyes.
Anyone who claimed there was a connection between the two would be talking such nonsense that I'd want to beat him senseless, yet that very nonsense was unfolding right before my eyes.
There was so much to ask that writing it all down would take more than a single page.
"Have you ever heard the name Eladin?"
"Eladin? I d-don't know it."
Whether the answer was true or not was beside the point.
If the lord was tied to the Luxeon Cult, opening his mouth at all would be impossible.
I pressed on.
"Then what about Luxeon?"
"......."
The lord's face turned a ghastly blue, and he couldn't utter a word.
'Bullseye.'
It was now certain that the Luxeon Cult still existed in this world.
It had not been in vain.
My long, long years of wandering, and I, who had lived for this moment alone, had not been wrong.
'......Eladin.'
It was as though she were whispering to me.
I clenched my teeth hard.
This was only the beginning.
"......So the poison activates when they try to divulge information about the cult. A century has passed, and they still haven't changed."
I pulled the sword embedded beside him free.
"Then let's do this instead."
And I drove the blade through the hand he'd braced against the floor.
"AAAAAAAARGH!"
"Every minute, I'll cut one of your finger joints. One segment at a time. Fourteen joints per hand, and both of yours are intact, so twenty-eight in all. Twenty-eight minutes should give you plenty of time to think."
It was precisely seven minutes later.
The lord, eyes glazed, drooling, opened his mouth.
"A-a long time ago...... people who introduced themselves as the Luxeon Cult came to me."
The lord immediately began convulsing in agony.
Below his neck, his veins had swollen black.
A curse wrought of divine power.
Just as gods each possessed unique authorities, divine power came in different colors.
If there had been a priest capable of wielding another god's divine power, they could have neutralized Luxeon's divine power tormenting the lord, but unfortunately, that did not apply to me.
"Answer my questions with nods and shakes only. Their curse only reacts to your voice."
The lord managed a labored nod.
"Was the beast brought to you by them?"
Seventy years, and the Luxeon Cult had appeared before me once more.
The card they'd played was Eladin's authority.
I had no idea how they were wielding the divine authority of a god long dead, but one thing was certain.
They had crossed a line that should never have been crossed.
'How far do you intend to defile Eladin?'
I bit down so hard that a tooth cracked.
The lord, reading my expression, nodded.
"To borrow an authority, you'd need divine power, and you wouldn't have used divine power yourself. Are you carrying a vessel imbued with divine power?"
The lord nodded again.
I searched his body.
I rifled through his pockets and pulled off his shirt.
At that moment, I couldn't help but grimace.
"......."
It was a small pendant.
A glass vial with no markings or decoration, but it contained something.
It was blood.
How could I ever forget?
Though time had erased countless memories, this sensation I knew with skin-crawling precision.
What I felt from that blood was Eladin's divine power.
Not Luxeon's, but Eladin's divine power, of all things.
"......These sons of bitches."
It felt as though they'd deliberately set out to mock me.
Divine power was like a fingerprint.
Unless Eladin had somehow come back to life, her divine power should not exist in this world.
"Do you know where they are now?"
The lord shook his head.
To track them, I'd need information first.
The identities of their members, or failing that, at least the place they were last seen.
'......Wait.'
Something important was nagging at me.
The lord had said they'd approached him first.
If the lord had run into them while walking the streets of Brüs, someone among the townsfolk would surely have witnessed it.
But they would never tolerate that kind of exposure.
Which meant they had come to the lord in secret and held a proper meeting.
"Saying you don't know where they are is a lie."
Whether they'd politely knocked on his door or infiltrated the estate, the lord almost certainly had some means of contacting them.
The lord visibly stiffened at my words.
"......Tell me who the contact is that can reach the Luxeon Cult. Do that, and I'll overlook the lie."
In a world like this, a means of contact ultimately came down to a person.
Someone who was part of the Luxeon Cult yet publicly visible enough for the lord of Brüs to reach at any time.
That person was the key that connected to the Luxeon Cult.
"I-if I say anything about them, w-won't the curse spread?"
"If you'd already lied, you should have been prepared for that much."
The lord protested with his eyes.
If he directly named the person, there was a high probability he would die.
The lord knew that, too.
But unless someone was a truly extraordinary breed of stubborn, there was no mouth I couldn't open.
The lord had a surprisingly strong will, but not strong enough to endure my torture.
It wasn't until both his hands and feet had been cut off that he finally spoke, with eyes that had given up everything.
"S-search my chambers."
He seemed to have racked his brain in his own way, choosing to drop a hint rather than speak the name outright.
Of course, the Luxeon Cult was not the kind of organization where such shallow tricks would go unpunished.
"GRRRAAAAAARGH!"
The moment he gave up information that could identify the insider, Luxeon's divine power began consuming the lord's body.
The poison spread through him entirely, and every vein, swollen to bursting, ruptured.
Their silencing curse was cruel and savage enough to unsettle even me.
Leaving behind the lord's gruesome remains, I straightened my knees.
A thread that could lead me to the Luxeon Cult.
It was close enough to reach out and touch.