Chapter 56

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

A huge burst of flame raged overhead. Or was it a flash of light?

As if divine punishment had been unleashed, I scrambled up to get Nero, but the quake threw me off my feet and I fell again.

“Who is interfering with my execution of this body?!” someone shouted.

“You seem not to know whose land this is,” another voice answered.

“Some backwater village in the north…!”

I covered my face as dirt poured down and forced my eyes open.

Everything moved too fast to take in properly, but I could see three figures colliding with savage force.

White and black light poured out from them, each radiating tremendous power.

‘This is like what I saw before.’

The strange power the duke used on the training ground.

I had no idea what was happening. I had a hunch one of them was the duke, but I couldn’t even guess who the other two were.

Either way, I decided the priority was Nero, so I grabbed him and ran.

“Come here, Nero! Good boy, okay?”

“Kyah!”

A flash revealed Nero hidden in the shadows. He looked as shocked by the sudden disaster as I was.

His fur stood on end and he glared at the sky where explosions were booming.

“You must be scared. It’s okay. Come here, I’ll hold you.”

“Kyaaaao!”

“Mommy, okay? Don’t struggle… ugh!”

Nero clawed the back of my hand as he thrashed.

His frantic movements stopped as if someone flipped a switch.

‘The color of his eyes…’

Was I imagining it? Maybe the flash in the sky had warped my vision.

Nero glanced between my face and the deep, bloody scratch on my hand, then froze.

Like a person, with eyes that seemed to say it was a mistake, he looked on the edge of crying.

I forced myself to pick up the rigid little thing and hold him tight.

I could feel his muscles clenched stiff with tension.

“What now,” I muttered.

By some mercy of the gods I had managed to find runaway Nero.

But right in front of me the world was a mountain of hell.

Luckily the cause seemed to be human, not natural, but as the owner of something small and precious to me, it was devastation either way.

I couldn’t even stand properly and wondered whether we could escape when a voice cut through the chaos.

“Bow, Elicia!”

“…!”

It was the duke’s voice.

I hunched reflexively around Nero.

The figure I thought was the duke drew a formidable force. As if the sun itself were falling to the earth, a choking pressure crushed our chests.

Kwahng!

An ear-splitting roar shook the ground, and then came a suffocating silence.

After a long while, when even my sense of time began to fade, a heavy warmth settled on my shoulders.

“Why are you in a place like this?”

“…Your Excellency,” I answered.

The duke took off his cloak and wrapped it over me, fastening it tight against the cold gusts.

I hadn’t noticed at first because I was stunned by the scene I had never seen before, but snow had begun to fall.

I was about to ask what had happened when the duke pushed himself up and stepped in front of me.

Someone was walking out from under the collapsed cliff, boots crunching through the rubble.

“Oh my, it’s a mess.”

“…”

“Even if they were priests dispatched by the holy city, to leave them like rags…”

“Then they shouldn’t have caused trouble in my territory.”

It seemed there was a third intruder besides the two who’d been fighting the duke.

I couldn’t make sense of it, but the grand duke who controlled dark qi like a natural disaster was on my side for now, so I wasn’t too worried.

I held Nero tighter as he writhed and peeked from behind the duke.

‘Is that the leader of the intruders?’

On the opposite mountain path stood a tall, imposing figure with a commanding presence.

I narrowed my eyes to get a better look.

And then—

“Well, who do we have here? Long time no see, Elicia.”

Unbelievable.

This was beyond anything reasonable.

How could this happen?

“This isn’t the reunion I hoped for, but whatever. Let’s greet each other again.”

The man grinned and waved a sickle through the air.

A dazzling light flashed and the weapon vanished without a trace.

“My name is Brother Vincent, prefect of the Inquisition Bureau of the Holy Office, dispatched from the holy city Argenbach. But as always, feel free to call me whatever you’re used to.”

The face revealed by the flash was the one I knew, a priest so timid he was almost painfully shy, but devout and human.

* * *

Edwin felt as if he had been dreaming the whole time.

Sitting side by side in the same carriage, when she casually tossed off a few words about business he answered her with the same easy air.

It was like a day far in the past, dim and fading from memory, yet the desperate way he clung to it made him hold on like he might lose it.

But the warm air didn’t last long.

‘So he’s going to cross the mountain after all.’

He must have known whose territory Lombard was. The way the inquisitors flaunted their holy power yanked him back into the present.

It reminded him of original sin.

You don’t deserve to sit beside her and smile, it said. Someone like you couldn’t possibly be allowed.

“I have to get off here. I just remembered I left something at the camp.”

“Eh? Could you send a servant for that?”

“It’s important, so I can’t leave it to someone else.”

He ordered the escort following the carriage to show the duchess’s wrist to the physician once they reached the castle, and then climbed up onto the horse.

All over Lombard there are hidden paths that don’t appear on maps.

Even if one route was blocked by an avalanche, there were many ways to reach the place where the unwelcome guests were deliberately making a fuss.

The fastest route was to pass through the western village of Caldrick and climb up the mountain range.

“Your Excellency, are you sure you want to go alone?”

“You being here will just get in the way.”

Edwin rested for a moment at the Caldrick gate and caught his breath.

The holy power the inquisitors were ostentatiously unleashing was agitating the monsters beyond the northern wall.

The air shimmered unstable like gunpowder that would explode from the smallest spark.

“Place elite knights at the northern wall just in case.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And if the fighting intensifies and the village gets harmed, lock down the roads. Under no circumstances allow civilians to pass.”

Edwin knew well the temperament of the inquisitors from Argenbach.

Some recruits who crossed their path passed through untouched, others got entangled.

But there had never been a pleasant outcome when they clashed.

“Lord!”

At that moment a rider guarding the western gate tower galloped up.

A messenger hawk circled overhead.

“A dispatch from the castle. The duchess has suddenly disappeared!”

“…What?”

“It seems the duchess left through a servants’ back door to look for a runaway cat. But even after searching the entire inner wall they haven’t found the lady.”

Edwin snatched the small scroll his subordinate handed him.

Written in Berthold’s hand, short though it was, its conclusion was clear.

‘Elicia is in danger.’

Nero often went in and out of the castle.

Although he was a cat in body, two souls shared that body, so when the monster Morcathus seized control, Nero’s body would be used.

Its destination was the Caldrick mountains, the very place she and Nero had grown up.

Someone who knew this land better than anyone—

“Master, are you leaving already?!”

“This should be enough.”

The horse that had been grazing lifted its head.

It looked annoyed that it hadn’t rested properly, but it straightened up at its master’s command and readied to run.

It was one of the finest warhorses in northern Lombard.

Edwin mounted quickly and tucked his waist into the saddle.

‘I hope it’s not too late.’

A thick vein bulged on the back of the hand gripping the reins.

Losing his right arm had been part of the original life he was born into, yet Edwin still heard the hollow whisper of empty sleeve flapping in his ears.