Chapter 96: Thousands of Gargoyles

Lucian could see her clearly now.

Beyond hair that seemed to catch and hold the lantern light on its own, Eleonor’s eyes carried something stranger still, pupils shaped into faint triangular patterns of blue, unlike anything he’d ever seen on another person.

Meeting someone who might become another rival among the Order of Lumielle’s Saintesses was rare enough on its own. Rarer still given where she’d come from.

Relations between the Republic of Rippledale and Bravenheart had never been warm, strained further by the frequent flare-ups along their shared northern border.

A Saintess from a foreign land, operating outside her own country, was an unusual thing in its own right too. The Order of Lumielle belonged to no single nation by its own doctrine, but its leadership understood perfectly well that a foreign Saintess rarely found easy acceptance elsewhere.

By custom, they kept a Saintess within her own homeland’s territory, barring some genuinely unusual circumstance.

Which left Jeanne with an obvious, pressing question. What was Eleonor actually doing here?

If this had been some official visit, she should have arrived under heavy escort, Bravenheart’s own guard alongside soldiers from House Winter, the Pillar family whose territory ran from the northern border all the way down to the capital.

Nothing about the men Jeanne and her unit had just fought carried that kind of identification. And the letter in her hand said plainly that Eleonor was meant to be heading straight for Virelle, a destination sitting nowhere near the stretch of territory they currently occupied.

Jeanne studied Eleonor’s eyes, which had drifted, unmistakably, toward Lucian’s face.

Elder Petrovel seemed to be following the exact same thread of suspicion, weighing Eleonor’s true purpose against the unstable, fraying state of the empire tonight.

His finger rose, pointed directly at her, his expression caught somewhere between disbelief and accusation.

"Did all of you come here in secret to spy on our empire?"

The words cut sharp. The man who’d faced Lucian only minutes earlier spun to face Petrovel at once.

"Watch your tongue, old man. Why would we spy on your empire through something like this? Didn’t you read the letter we handed you? My lady is set to become a Saintess of the Order of Lumielle. What possible use would something this pointless serve us?"

"And yet here you are, standing inside Bravenheart’s own borders instead of Virelle. For all I know, that letter isn’t even yours. We haven’t seen a single soul from the Order of Lumielle traveling with you."

Elder Petrovel wasn’t wrong. Eleonor had arrived without a single paladin, without anyone bearing the Order’s own mark at her side. Even before her status as Saintess was formally confirmed, she should have had an Order escort guiding her all the way to Virelle.

"How dare you suggest we’ve forged this document, old man. Do you have any idea who my lady’s grandfather—"

Before he could finish, Eleonor stepped forward and closed a hand over his shoulder from behind, cutting him off.

"Arnol. Mind your tone, you’re letting this get away from you. This is only a misunderstanding."

Her own voice stayed calm as she turned to address Elder Petrovel and Jeanne directly, laying out the whole account.

They’d been caught off course by the storm, she explained, drifting into Bravenheart territory by nothing more than bad weather and bad luck, with no deeper motive behind it at all.

They’d reached this village, settled in to wait out the storm, and spotted what they’d taken for a band of suspicious strangers moving through the dark, mistaking the Phantom unit’s own scouts for bandits. That misunderstanding alone had been enough to set off the attack against Jeanne and Lucian’s group.

Eleonor admitted openly to having crossed into Bravenheart without permission, and promised she would draft a formal letter of apology to the Emperor himself once this was behind them.

Then something crashed somewhere in the inn’s kitchen, and a door swung open.

An elderly man, somewhere in his sixties, stepped through it, trailed by a handful of younger men dressed like ordinary villagers.

The moment they caught sight of Jeanne and the Phantom soldiers, relief broke across their faces, recognition dawning at the sight of House Sarnel’s own crest.

"Oh, miss, and all of you, House Sarnel, is it? Forgive us, we weren’t exactly prepared to welcome guests properly tonight."

The old man introduced himself as the village chief, and told a story that lined up almost perfectly with Eleonor’s own, that the entire village had taken shelter inside this inn, mistaking the Phantom unit for a band of raiders.

Not long after, more villagers began filing out from a hidden cellar beneath the inn, feeling safe enough now to finally set the misunderstanding straight with House Sarnel.

"You lot nearly gave us all a heart attack," Elder Petrovel said, something close to a scolding in his voice. "Why wait this long to show yourselves? Are our soldiers really that frightening? Even your own livestock had to go into hiding?"

The chief’s easy smile faltered, something in Petrovel’s words catching him off guard.

"Oh, well, all the villagers managed to fit in here, sir, but there wasn’t room left for the animals. We just left them tied in their pens as usual. No reason they wouldn’t still be there, haha."

He’d clearly misunderstood what Petrovel was actually asking. Petrovel repeated himself more plainly this time, telling him flatly that not one single animal remained in any pen across the entire village.

A middle-aged villager stepped forward, pressing a hand to his own head, shock and confusion plain on his face at the news. He remembered tying his own cow in place himself, not long before they’d all gone into hiding.

"There isn’t a single head of livestock left anywhere in this village. Go check for yourselves if you don’t believe us."

Every villager who owned animals looked just as baffled, each one insisting the same thing, that none of them had hidden their own stock away.

But an elite soldier of House Sarnel had no reason to lie about something like this either.

Whatever had happened to those animals, it sat strangely with everyone present, Lucian included, a question with no easy answer.

Then his gaze drifted, almost by accident, toward one of the second-floor windows, and he caught sight of a woman descending with a small child in her arms, making her way down to join the rest of the gathered villagers.

"That—"

"Hey. Give me your spear."

Lucian didn’t wait for permission. He pulled the weapon straight out of the hands of one of the Rippledale soldiers standing nearby and hurled it, without a word of explanation, directly at the woman and her child.

Both Eleonor and Jeanne’s eyes went wide with horror, the spear’s path looking, for one gut-wrenching second, like it was flying straight at an innocent mother and her small son.

Every hand in the room shot out to stop it. None of them came close in time.

CRRRAAAACKKK.

It wasn’t the sound of breaking glass.

And it wasn’t the sound of a body taking a spear through flesh and bone either. The horrible, splitting shriek that followed came from something monstrous, crouched in the dark just behind the window, inches from where the mother and her boy had been standing only seconds before.

The spear caught one of its wings, tearing through it, and that alone was enough to save them both, the mother and child shoved clear just in time, screaming now in raw, open terror at the creature revealed in the broken window frame.

"That’s a Gargoyle! Petrovel, sound the bell, now!"

Jeanne understood, in that same instant, exactly why Lucian had thrown the spear at all.

He wasn’t finished.

He knew the creature wasn’t down yet, and he launched himself upward, clearing the distance to the second floor in a single bound, shouting for the mother and child to fall back and find real cover.

The Gargoyle, wounded wing and all, lunged at him anyway, Lucian planting himself squarely between it and the people still cowering behind him.

"Agh, damn it, there’s no room to move up here."

Between holding off the creature’s considerable strength and keeping himself positioned so the still-prone mother wasn’t caught in the crossfire, he had almost nothing left to work with.

"VOLTA FALCON"

Jeanne’s voice rang out below him, mana pouring from her outstretched hand and shaping itself into a falcon wreathed entirely in crackling lightning, driving hard into the Gargoyle’s flank.

The strike shoved the creature, which had nearly forced its way fully inside, back out through the shattered window.

Lucian saw his opening and took it without hesitation, driving his blade forward in one clean, decisive thrust, straight through the glowing core buried at the center of the Gargoyle’s chest.

It dropped from the second floor in a dead fall, landing right where a line of Phantom soldiers already stood waiting below.

Jeanne climbed up after him at once, checking him over. He looked thoroughly spent, and more than a little unsettled by his own reflexes, this being the first time in his life he’d ever brought down a Gargoyle.

She filed away her own curiosity for later, how exactly he’d known the attack was coming before any of them had, because the situation in front of them mattered more right now.

She ordered the rest of the Phantom unit to sweep the village thoroughly, checking for any other Gargoyles that might still be hiding among the buildings.

Elder Petrovel took the order and headed straight for the rooftops, searching for any further trace of the creatures.

Eleonor and her two guards made their way up to the second floor shortly after, unnoticed until they offered help of their own, a potion held out toward Lucian.

"I’m sorry, I haven’t learned any proper healing techniques yet. This is all we have. But it should restore your stamina and your mana almost instantly. It’s a good one, I promise."

Jeanne took the bottle from her and examined it, catching the name pressed clearly into the glass.

Barbosa.

"Is this girl from that renowned Alchemist family out of Rippledale?"

She murmured the thought to herself while helping Lucian drink it down, still visibly shaken by what he’d just done, his first Gargoyle kill in his entire life settling over him slowly.

A few moments later, Elder Petrovel came rushing back, urgency written across every line of his face.

"Lady Jeanne. This is bad."

Jeanne and Lucian both turned toward him at once.

"We’ve spotted thousands of Gargoyles, flying straight toward Korven."