Chapter 157

Translator: Willia

The drizzling rain seemed not so much to fall as to settle down ever so softly. On people's heads, on their shoulders, and on the blades of swords.

On that overcast day, with the sun hidden behind clouds, a blade beaded with tiny droplets looked as though it had undergone a ritual cleansing. All so that it might split flesh and bone and, in the end, drench itself in blood.

But this particular sword would have no such occasion. Holy Sword, or Demon Sword. Whatever one called it, the moment a quiet golden flame ran along the blade, the droplets evaporated.

The bandits came pushing forward, holding shields nearly as tall as themselves, shoulder to shoulder with their comrades, and they saw it clearly. The flame, that is. To their eyes it looked like magic.

And that magic-like flame flashed before their eyes for an instant, like a bolt of lightning.

Thwip!

It hardly made a loud sound at all. Even with a shield being sliced through and a head separating from its body.

Snake-Eye Ashtad, standing behind several layers of his men, couldn't see it well. So when his men crumpled limply to the ground, he thought they were suddenly horsing around.

But that's strange, isn't it? Goofing off, in a situation like this. Only belatedly did Ashtad notice that their heads were gone, that blood was spreading across the ground. Huh?

Both sides of the narrow path were steep slopes. One side rose uphill; the other dropped away.

By the time Ashtad realized his man's head was gone, Ricardt had already darted around the slope, kicked off the ground, and was once more on his way down.

He'd moved so fast that his hood had slipped off, baring his hair and his face. Seeing how young the swordsman was, far younger than he'd expected, Ashtad felt that something was off.

Gripping the burning sword in both hands and hoisting it high overhead, Ricardt came down into the very middle of his enemies. The bandits were packed in so thick that he couldn't land on the ground, and he simply tangled in among them.

To anyone watching it looked like suicide. He seemed about to be buried under the enemy, trampled or seized, but the reversal came at once.

The burning sword punched out through somebody's torso and then traced one great circle.

Shhhhhhrrk!

It was a ring of blood. Along that ring of blood, everything was severed. And those whose bodies came apart died without ever knowing why.

Bodies that were no longer living things but slabs of meat tumbled down all at once. What technique was there in this? It was murder, plain and simple.

Between the corpses underfoot and all the blood, in no time there was nowhere left to set a foot.

In the middle of it Ricardt stood alone. Everything else was drowned in black blood, but only the burning sword and his two gleaming eyes stood out sharp and clear.

Those who'd been outside the radius lived, and it was pure luck. Inside it, you died; outside it, you lived. That was all there was to it.

At first the survivors didn't know what had happened. And even seeing it with their own eyes, they couldn't believe it.

Soon their pupils dilated and the hair on their heads stood on end, yet not even a scream would come. Because the breath they'd sucked in all at once wouldn't release properly, as if the muscles of their lungs had locked up.

Whether by misfortune or good fortune, Ashtad too barely survived. He gawked at the sight of Ricardt scampering up the slope again with quick, light footfalls and then dropping back down.

Watching this, Ashtad made his decision. Sure enough, perhaps because he had the makings of a man fit to head a band, unlike his men who just stood there dazed, he flung himself down the downslope at the side of the path.

Because the trees grew thick, he managed, with no small effort, to grab at this and that and keep himself alive. But it was extremely dangerous, for below flowed the valley water, its current fierce. One wrong step and he'd be swept off by the rapids and killed.

Grabbing tree after tree, he worked his way along the steep slope. The rain had left the trees wet and slick, so he had to strain with everything he had.

And all the while, from above, corpses, or else severed heads and limbs and the like, came tumbling down.

As far as Ricardt was concerned, Snake-Eye Ashtad had never even been on his radar to begin with. As if to say: you think the Knight Order would waste a thought on the likes of you?

Once Ricardt had cut the enemy down a couple of times, clean and satisfying, the panicked enemy began shoving one another and bolting every which way. Most of them didn't even know why they were running; their own side was pushing, so they just ran.

Some, like Ashtad, threw themselves down the slope, but quite a few failed to get a proper hold on the trees and tumbled wildly down to be swept away by the valley water.

The path was narrow and jammed solid front and back, so they shoved one another and fell and it was sheer chaos. Every kind of curse blanketed the area around the Bandit Stronghold. Hey, you asshole, quit pushing, you know, things like that.

With corpses and people constantly falling from above, Ashtad felt like he was experiencing hell. A hell where corpses rained down, that is. And below was a watery hell.

Whether his men lived or died, however the situation was unfolding, he didn't care to know any of it; he moved his trembling arms and legs and headed for the Bandit Stronghold. His startled heart slammed and pounded as if it would burst out through his chest.

Then at some point the corpses and people stopped falling from above; it seemed the demon that had risen up out of hell hadn't reached this far.

So, gripping the trees, he hauled himself laboriously back up the slope. One of his men up above looked blankly down at him, his own boss. He, too, wore a thoroughly shocked expression.

"Boss? What are you doing here?"

"Don't just stand there like a fool, grab me!"

"What happened up at the front?"

"Ah, fuck it!"

For no good reason he grabbed the man and dragged him down as he climbed back up onto the path. The henchman nearly went over the edge and only kept from falling because the others around him grabbed hold.

Once he was up on the path, the Bandit Stronghold stood not far off. He hurried up to it and shouted.

"Hey! Open the gate!"

But no answer came from the Bandit Stronghold. A deeply ominous silence held for a moment.

Just then, from far behind him, screams reached his ears. Each time a scream came, Ashtad flinched and whipped around to look back.

"Hey! I said open the gate! Who's on duty?! You want to die?! Which bastard is it?!"

He was frantic, dying of urgency, and still there was no answer, no sign of the gate opening. So his anger shot all the way to the top of his head. Veins popped up on his forehead one after another, and the whites of his eyes went bloodshot.

Then, all at once, he grasped the wrongness of it, and his heart lurched and sank.

"It's betrayal. Hort, that bastard, betrayed me."

Hort was his second-in-command. A comrade and a subordinate who'd been with him ever since they deserted the mercenary company, and lately even Ashtad had been sensing an uneasy mood about him.

That was why he'd brought all his men out, more than the job required. He'd meant to pull the thing off in grand, conspicuous style and assert his authority once again, but...

Just then, something heavy dropped from atop the palisade. The ground was so muddy that it couldn't even roll; it merely landed with a wet splat.

Wondering what it was, he looked, and it was none other than Hort's severed head. Ashtad stared at it blankly, then lifted his face, still blank, to look up. Atop the palisade, some unfamiliar men were gazing quietly down at him.

From this point on, Ashtad simply could not make sense of the situation itself. What the hell is this......?

"Wh-who are you?"

he asked, but there was no answer; the men standing atop the palisade only looked down at him, stone-faced.

Just then the screams of his men came from behind, closer now.

"Aaagh!"

"Don't push! I said don't push!"

"What's going on up front?!"

"Boss! Boss!"

Whether or not he heard them desperately calling for him, Ashtad just ran, blindly.

Only one thought ruled his mind: you have to survive while you still can. He was in no state of mind to weigh things like rallying his men and counterattacking.

And once a person got into a state like this, he became awfully simple. Because all there was to it was running blindly along whatever way out lay in front of him. But, sad to say, this happened to be a mountain, and there weren't all that many paths.

And on the few narrow mountain trails there were, the Monastery disciples Ricardt had stationed in advance stood blocking the way, solid and immovable.

Some bandits must have already fled ahead of them, because several corpses were piled at the disciples' feet. Like a rampart that had heaped itself up of its own accord, the bodies made it no easy thing to clamber over and escape.

Ashtad had completely lost his mind and shoved the men around him every which way. And his men had lost their minds just the same, so they couldn't even tell whether someone was their boss or not, and just shoved one another wildly.

Running like that without a thought in their heads, at some point, with people shoving from front and back, those caught in the middle were nearly crushed to death.

"Please, don't push!"

"I said don't push!"

"Hey, you assholes! I'm Snake-Eye Ashtad! Move it!"

There was no telling at all how the situation was unfolding. For those on the receiving end, anyway. For the side carrying out a proper tactic, a proper plan, it was simple enough.

In the end the crowd surged hard toward the side with the least pressure. Ashtad suddenly came to his senses. Not far off ran the fierce valley water, and his own men were tumbling into it one after another.

Ah, so that was why they kept pushing from this side, he realized only now, but it was already too late. Because the other side kept pushing this way.

There was nowhere left to go. Nowhere but down into the valley water. So, whether he'd gone mad or whether it was simply a last desperate thrashing, he drew a dagger and stabbed the man who kept pushing him.

"I told you not to push!"

Did he have to cling to life even like this? There was no telling.

But the tragic part was that even going this far did little good. Because no matter how many of the men shoving at him he stabbed, the pushing force didn't let up.

What's more, with everything packed tight on all sides, even moving his arm to stab was, in truth, difficult.

So he went on stabbing the men shoving him to the very end, stabbing the same man he'd already stabbed over and over again, and then fell straight into the valley water.

At that moment, surprisingly, he wasn't all that afraid. Because he'd watched death drawing nearer and nearer with his own eyes, and in his own way he'd had time to ready himself for it.

More than the sensation of falling into the water, the sensation of being swept away reached him first. In an instant water rushed into his lungs through his nose and mouth, and at once he lost all sense of direction, front and back, side to side, up and down, and so he let go of consciousness and drowned, just like that.

The men who'd gone before him, the men who followed after. The bandits of the Bandit Stronghold died, for the most part, just like that.

The number Ricardt had killed by his own hand came to fewer than one might think. Some twenty? Thirty? Most had died shoving among themselves. And no small number had fallen and been trampled to death.

And so the mountain trail was blanketed all over with the corpses of the trampled. The sight was so grotesque that everyone but Ricardt, who had devised the plan, was too stunned to shut their mouths.

Ice, and the Monastery disciples too, were utterly dumbfounded as to what on earth had happened. They'd done nothing but carry out the order to hold the chokepoints, and yet the result was this.

It was a truly ingenious method. When it came to killing people, that is.

"Let's get the soldiers to clear away the corpses sprawled across the path."

Ricardt said to the knights as he looked around the inside of the Bandit Stronghold.

The Bandit Stronghold was empty. Apart from a few women and small children who'd done the menial chores, there was no one there at all.

Had a battle been fought there, it would have been a shambles, but it was clean.

The valley water with its rough current, as if feigning innocence about what it had done, simply rushed on with a churning gush-gush-gush, as though nothing at all had happened.

With this, they'd secured a place to wait out the rainy season, and they'd also tied up the bandit subjugation the Miquella Sword Monastery had set out to carry out.

A search of the Bandit Stronghold turned up an enormous fortune that the man called Snake-Eye had piled up over the years. He could have just bought food with money like this; what kind of greed drove him to hoard it all for himself was impossible to understand.

Ricardt handed out rewards to the ten knights, and since Ice and the Monastery disciples had worked hard too, he distributed a certain portion to them as a donation.

And the rest he decided to put entirely toward war funds. He kept not a single thing for himself.

It took exactly one day for the Knight Order's troops to strike their camp, climb up to the Bandit Stronghold, clear away the corpses, and set up camp anew.

And, wouldn't you know it, the day after, the rain thickened again.

Luck is what you make of it, or so they say. No matter how hard the rain came down, they could savor their ease, listening to it drum against a sturdy roof and watching it run off the ends of the eaves.

Now, rather than suffering on account of the rainy season, it felt like a kind of rest. With a good friend nearby and the hushed murmur of rain for company, for the moment there was nothing more to wish for.

For the people who had lived here before all this, of course, it was a tragedy. But the valley water flowing beside the Bandit Stronghold swallowed that tragedy whole, leaving no trace.

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