I made my way out of the room where the beast and the lord had been.
The Luxeon Cult had already shown itself, and since I knew that information leading to them lay somewhere in the bedchamber, there was no time to waste.
Since I had no idea what form the clue might take, the only option available to me was to go through everything in the bedroom, one item at a time.
I toppled the bookshelves lining the walls and tore open the walls on all sides.
After examining the walls, I checked the books scattered across the floor one by one.
All around me was silence, and the only thing filling the bedchamber was the moonlight streaming through the window whose curtains I'd thrown open.
The night was still deep.
It was around the time the moon had sunk halfway that I found something worth noting.
'No title.'
I opened the book with a blank cover.
As expected, it was a kind of personal poetry collection the lord had written himself.
If he'd left behind any information related to Luxeon, there would have been no method more discreet or convenient than a handwritten book.
"Refined hobby you've got."
The poems covered a range of subjects, but there was not a whiff of anything about Luxeon; they were all about women or landscapes.
I cross-referenced the contents between the poems, but there didn't seem to be any hidden cipher.
I tossed the book onto the desk.
I was about to pick up another when I had to stop.
"......."
A slip of paper poking out from the last page of the book caught my eye.
After a moment's hesitation, I pulled it free.
It was most likely just another poem, like the rest of the pages, but I had nothing to lose.
The contents of the paper could be summed up in a single line.
A letter inquiring after the well-being of a son who'd gone to the north.
The only thing that stood out was that the handwriting was different from the other poems.
'......Is this a sender's name?'
At the bottom of the paper was a name that appeared to belong to the letter's author.
Findel Morein.
It was the sort of letter any father worried about his son might write, yet no matter how thoroughly I searched the lord's room afterward, I could find nothing more noteworthy.
I read the paper once more, but still nothing unusual stood out.
'A letter hidden among the lord's diary entries.......'
Paradoxically, it was the very lack of anything special that made it strange.
There was no reason for such an unremarkable letter to turn up among the lord's poems.
This one slip of paper felt disconnected, as though it belonged to a different world from the rest of the lord's room.
Somewhere in this letter that seemed to have come from another world entirely, there was a clue.
I could tell by instinct.
The paper seemed to hold something, but the paper alone yielded nothing I could work with.
So what I had to do was simple.
"I'll need to look around more."
Expand the search from the lord's room to the entire estate.
This letter had felt out of place in this room from the start, so perhaps the answer was never meant to be found here at all.
Without hesitation, I headed for the first floor.
The soldiers were nowhere to be seen; perhaps they had fled.
The lord had been dead for quite some time now, and they still hadn't stormed the bedchamber, so I'd already suspected as much.
If they hadn't fled even after seeing the carnage on the first floor, it was one of two things.
Either they were supremely confident in their abilities, or they were insane.
In that sense, the surviving soldiers were all perfectly sane.
I had no reason to chase them down.
Surely at least one person who knew about the letter would still be around.
As it turned out, my reasoning was sound, and I managed to find a soldier who had chosen hiding over fleeing.
Though rather than finding him, I had simply dragged him out of the corner of the storeroom where he'd been curled up.
When I discovered him, he'd been dozing off among the crates.
"Hey."
"GYAH! P-please don't kill me!"
"......I'm not going to kill you."
Whether he was naturally fearless or simply thoughtless, he'd been bold enough to drool in his sleep here while the other soldiers fled.
"I have something to ask you."
The soldier's eyes darted around.
After a brief silence, the fact that he opened his mouth at all suggested he was indeed fearless.
"Wh-what do you want to know?"
"Do you know a man named Findel Morein?"
"......Findel Morein, you say?"
If a slip of paper like that were tucked inside his own poetry book, the lord couldn't have missed it.
The lord had known the letter was there and left it untouched, which meant he'd understood the hidden meaning within it.
I didn't expect the soldier in front of me to know anything about Findel Morein.
Where on earth was I supposed to find information on Findel Morein, and when was I going to decode the clue in the letter?
My head was already starting to ache.
"I know who that is."
"......You do?"
The lead, however, was closer than I'd thought.
"He's this estate's secretary. Hasn't been here long, either."
Findel Morein.
So he'd been one of the estate's staff.
His identity was far simpler than I'd imagined.
"Where is he now?"
"I'm not sure about that...... Oh, the secretary's quarters are on the second floor, next to the library."
"I see. Take me there."
"......Huh?"
"How would I know where the library is?"
I marched the visibly reluctant soldier up to the second floor.
He squeezed his eyes shut at the sight of the first floor, but I was too pressed for time to spare him any consideration.
When we arrived, the secretary's quarters were already empty, without a single sign of anyone.
"He ran."
"W-well, that's......."
The soldier's eyes darted.
The look on his face seemed to say it was my fault that Findel Morein had run.
I watched him for a moment, then let out a small sigh.
"Read this."
I handed him the paper I'd brought from the bedroom.
I had no other bright ideas at the moment, so I pressed the note into his hands on the off chance it might yield something.
After quickly scanning the letter, the soldier asked me:
"Um, what should I do with it?"
"Anything. Just tell me whatever comes to mind when you look at it."
It was something I'd stared at for ages without gleaning a single thing.
I didn't expect a common soldier to find anything either, but I waited in silence for him to speak.
"......Well. The paper is high-quality material, and it looks like it was written by a scribe......."
"Wait, wait. What did you just say?"
"Y-yes?"
Findel Morein was the secretary.
And obviously, a scribe was a different position from a secretary.
"You're saying the person who wrote this isn't Findel Morein?"
"Well, the scribe was my childhood friend. Latio Beltran...... I remember his handwriting clear as day. It's identical to this."
It felt like a blow to the head.
To think the person who'd actually written the letter was not the secretary but the scribe.
A scribe's job was to put the lord's words to paper, wasn't it?
"Are you certain? That this letter wasn't written by Findel Morein?"
"Yes. To begin with, as far as I know, the secretary doesn't have a son."
It was implausible that a secretary who could write for himself would have a scribe ghostwrite a letter, so in the end, the one behind this note was the lord.
'Then the lord was impersonating someone named Findel Morein? Using a method as transparently false as sending a letter to a nonexistent son?'
There was woefully insufficient justification for the lord to do something like that.
I needed to approach this from a different angle.
Perhaps what mattered wasn't the content of the letter, but the very fact that the lord had left it behind.
What did the lord gain by leaving this?
He could make the name Findel Morein known, not to the secretary, but to his own son.
"Among the lord's children, is there one who might have been meant to receive this letter?"
"Uh...... I did hear that the lord's second son went up north."
That settled it.
The lord had been trying to convey the name Findel Morein to his child in the north through this letter.
The reason wasn't hard to guess.
'He must have been the channel the Luxeon bastards used to contact the lord.'
Findel Morein.
He was the key to this entire affair.
Having reasoned that far, I tore the paper to shreds.
'I have to find him.'
Finding the vanished Findel Morein was the key to reaching the resurgent Luxeon Cult.
But how?
In this case, fortunately, the answer was clear.
I turned to the bewildered soldier.
"Do you remember what Findel Morein looks like?"
"Huh? Oh, yes. I do."
"Follow me."
I strode out of the secretary's quarters.
The soldier hurried after me and said:
"Uh, where are we going?"
"To Findel Morein."
"As if you know where he is......."
Without answering, I pointed at him.
The soldier went pale.
"Don't tell me...... you mean for me to come along......."
"That's exactly what I mean. Without you, I have no way of knowing who Findel Morein is."
The soldier wore the expression of a man who'd just heard the unthinkable.
Apparently having already forgotten the corpses we'd passed on the first floor moments ago, he protested:
"Why should I have to go looking for Findel Morein? I'm sure you're busy, sir knight, and I understand there's some kind of story behind all this, but...... if I travel with you, I think I'd be too scared to sleep properly."
For someone claiming to be afraid of me, his tone was remarkably calm.
Incredulous, I added:
"If you want to run, you're free to go."
"Really?"
"Yes. Just remember one thing."
If he found me frightening, he was welcome to flee at any time.
I had no intention of taking away his freedom to run.
"Pray that I don't catch up."
But chasing him was equally my freedom, was it not?
No being alive has more time than an immortal.
Since becoming Undying, time had never once failed to be on my side, and that hadn't changed.
It was the cult being hunted that should be anxious, not me, the hunter.
Even if it took decades or centuries, it wouldn't matter.
In the end, the victor would be me, with time as my ally.
The only real concern at the moment was that Findel Morein might meet an untimely death before I found him.
"N-no, never mind."
Perhaps my sincerity had reached him, for the soldier gave up and began packing his things to follow me.
He wouldn't want to spend the rest of his life being hunted by me, after all.
Before long, the moon had fully set, and a dim glow began to tinge the horizon.
The soldier had packed what he needed, and we were just about to leave the estate.
———CRASH!
The wall connecting the staircase to the second floor exploded outward with a thunderous roar.
The soldier collapsed where he stood. I simply stood still.
- SHRAAAAAK!
What burst through the wall was the beast from before.
I'd thought I'd knocked it out cold. Had it already come to?
"Get back."
A pressure that raised every hair on my body washed over me.
Unfortunately, I'd left the spear shaft back where the lord was.
Whether the same trick would even work a second time was doubtful regardless.
"HIIIIIIIK!"
I confirmed the soldier was crawling away to safety, then reluctantly drew my sword.
I preferred to avoid fighting beasts like this whenever possible.
No matter how fast I regenerated, having my entire lower half ripped off was never a pleasant experience.
But right now, even at the cost of blood, I had to put this thing down for good.
"Never lets me leave quietly."
In the end, this was a hunt.
No matter how many times it tore off my legs or crushed my skull.
A hunt in which the one who would die last was already decided.