Chapter 178

Translator: Willia

The innocent laughter of children seemed to carry God's love within it. More than flowers, it belonged with the sunlight of a spring day. Their bright peals of laughter were a delight to hear as well.

Five or six children between seven and ten years old were running around near the village. At that age, it was about time for them to start helping the adults with their work, but perhaps this was still a season when there was not much work to be done.

In a field full of flowers, the children reveled in spring, simply running about in delight without playing any particular game.

Some carried sticks in their hands, while another flapped both arms about as though pretending to be a bird.

But whenever children played together, there was always one who kept apart from the rest. It was not that the child was being excluded. The child simply did not seem very interested in playing with a group.

One child, dressed in clothes little better than rags, had been squatting there scratching at the ground with a short twig. Then, all of a sudden, the child stood and headed toward the ditch beside the village. The child was barefoot.

A sparse line of broad, flat stepping-stones crossed the ditch, and the child hopped from one to the next.

On the other side of the ditch was a forest called ‘Weissfeld’. The village had taken its name from the forest and was likewise called Weissfeld.

Strictly speaking, Weissfeld was the hunting ground of a certain Count, but forests were difficult places to draw clear boundaries around in the first place. So the villagers would often go into the woods to gather various things they needed for daily life.

The child entered the forest, stepping beneath cool shadows that seemed to harbor secrets.

At last, a smile spread across the child's previously bored face. Perhaps it was simply the child's natural disposition, but playing quietly alone seemed preferable to making a noisy commotion with a crowd.

The child walked along a familiar path, heading toward a favorite spot in the forest.

Along the way, the child picked up pinecones here and there. Holding up the hem of the ragged clothes to make an improvised basket, the child gathered quite a lot of them. They were meant for the birds.

After walking for quite some time, the child finally reached that favorite place. Deep in the forest was a small spring.

Birds came there to drink or bathe, and the child liked scattering food for them before moving far away to watch.

But upon reaching the beloved spot, the child suddenly froze and let all the gathered pinecones spill across the ground.

Apparently not even noticing the pinecones scattering, the child stared blankly at something ahead.

That something was a corpse lying on the ground.

In the silence, the only sound was the gentle trickle of water dripping into the spring. The water had turned half red from the blood spilled by the corpse.

Given enough time, it would clear again, but not yet. And that also meant the person had not been dead for very long.

Then came a rapid thud-thud-thud. It sounded terribly urgent, like someone running. The child's head snapped instinctively toward the sound.

A pitch-black shadow suddenly fell over the child, as though some enormous beast were pouncing. The child squeezed both eyes shut. At once, the sound of wind rushed past those ears.

Whoosh!

Splash!

Nothing had happened to the child. Even the child found that strange. Something huge had definitely seemed about to pounce, yet no matter how long the child waited, nothing happened.

Then a gentle hand softly settled atop the child's head, prompting those eyes to open naturally and look upward.

It was a beautiful blond man. His eyes were the color of pinecones, and droplets of blood were spattered across his fair skin.

The man looked down at the child and gave a faint smile. It was the sort of smile that seemed touched by God's love, even on the face of a grown man.

“Go play somewhere else.”

After saying that to a child he had never seen before, Ricardt raised his sword once more and headed deeper into the forest. Not a single drop of blood stained its chilling blade.

When the child turned around, there was now a headless corpse with its neck plunged into the spring. By the time the child looked back again, Ricardt had vanished like a ghost.

As Ricardt moved through the forest, corpses lay scattered here and there in all manner of positions, each bearing a different cause of death.

Some were slumped against trees, some had their chests laid open, and some had no heads.

The farther he went, the louder the sounds of fighting became. There were metallic clangs and dull thuds, with the occasional scream mixed in.

From those sounds, Ricardt could accurately picture both the direction of the fighting and the rough situation unfolding there. He did not do so consciously. Complex pieces of information simply assembled themselves naturally inside his mind.

Sight, hearing, smell, and every other faint sensation that reached him went to no waste. He read each one precisely for what it was. From among that mass of complex and varied information, Ricardt pinpointed Roy's exact location.

He put strength into his legs and vanished with a sudden burst, the movement almost beastlike.

Dodging the trees as he reached the spot, he found Roy wrenching an axe out of the back of someone lying facedown with a crunch. The ribs across the man's back had been completely shattered, and even the lung beneath them had been torn open.

“King.”

Roy turned toward Ricardt as he spoke.

Despite his young age, Roy's combat ability had already reached an impressive level, but he was still too inexperienced to completely rein in the excitement of battle. His pupils were dilated, and he was panting heavily.

“I took care of the one who ran the farthest. Looks like we're about finished now. Let's go.”

“Yes.”

“He's not dead yet. Finish him properly.”

“Ah, yes.”

With his lung grievously damaged and his ribs broken, the enemy was already as good as dead, but he had not quite died yet. Harsh, hissing breaths still escaped him.

Roy swung his axe as though splitting firewood and cleaved through the back of the man's skull. The enemy's body jerked once like a fish.

Roy pulled his axe free again, then gave it a few rough wipes on the dead man's clothes.

Ricardt took Roy with him and headed toward the center of the fighting. After walking for a short while, they soon reached the place, a broad clearing containing several cabins.

This was something like a staging area for the One-Eye Clan. They had several places like this, and this was one of the ones that had just been smashed apart.

Household goods lay carelessly strewn outside throughout the camp. Things had been broken and shattered everywhere, and savage sword marks scored the place here and there.

Those now in control of the place were Ice and Bori of the Council of Six, members of the Viola Clan, and several outstanding students and disciples dispatched from Beringen Academy and the Miquella Sword Monastery.

There seemed to be around twenty of them in total. By contrast, roughly fifty corpses were sprawled haphazardly all over the area.

With three Sword Masters among them, Ricardt included, defeating these people had never been a problem. Exterminating every last one without allowing a single person to escape, however, was a considerably more difficult task.

They had only just finished that difficult work, and five or six people had been captured alive. All of them were kneeling with their hands and feet bound.

When Ricardt appeared, everyone looked his way. The inexperienced academy students and Ice's disciples who had accompanied him had disheveled hair and faces still flushed with the excitement of battle.

Ricardt sheathed his sword and approached the prisoners, at which point Bori spoke with an indifferent expression.

“He won't talk.”

Ice was wiping the blood from his hands while his disciples attended to him from the side.

From what Ricardt could tell, Ice had stepped in and performed some basic torture, but the prisoner apparently had not opened his mouth. Ice had come from the Order of Judgment, so he was quite adept at torture.

A monk who tortured people. Was that really acceptable? Ricardt decided to let it pass. Instead, he looked down at the prisoner Ice had been torturing.

Unable even to collapse, the man remained kneeling as his entire body trembled. One eye was swollen nearly shut, his lip was split, and several teeth were missing.

Yet what the tortured man said was surprisingly defiant.

“Fuu......cking bastards......”

“Oh.”

Perhaps impressed by that unexpected display of spirit, Bori let out a quiet sound of admiration.

Ricardt looked down at the man for a moment before speaking.

“Anything else to say?”

Amazingly, the man's battered face twisted as he chuckled.

“You know who's backing us? You'll all be dead soon too. I'll go on ahead and wait for you. Fucking bastards.”

“Who's backing you? The Second Prince, isn't it?”

“?”

“You think we did this without knowing?”

“......What are you talking about? Don't tell me, the Fifth Prince?”

“No. It's not as though the Fifth Prince can't do what the Second Prince is doing, but if both of them started this sort of thing, wouldn't the fight get even uglier? More importantly, the reason you're dying right now is purely because you went after the Viola Clan and harmed people who had nothing to do with any of this. Don't go looking elsewhere for a reason.”

“Th-the Viola Clan?”

The prisoner looked as though the very idea defied common sense. The reason was simple. The Viola Clan he knew did not possess anything close to this level of fighting strength.

“Enough. Your clan master is ‘Iron Arm’ Randell, right? The man who used to be one of the Empire's Nine Swords. Where is he now?”

From information he had uncovered not long ago, Ricardt knew that the master of the One-Eye Clan was Randell the Iron Arm.

The most important information right now was Iron Arm Randell's location.

“......W-who the hell are you people? Who's backing you? The Philosopher King of Adeloron?”

From the prisoner's perspective, the only person who came to mind as powerful enough to oppose the princes currently fighting the imperial succession war was someone of that stature.

Yet it had never once crossed his mind that the man standing before him was Ricardt, the King of Adeloron himself.

Rumors would spread with time, but for now, the formation of the Master Alliance and the existence of the Council of Six were not yet widely known.

Ricardt was deliberately taking advantage of that. He intended to strike hard and fast, dealing the enemy a devastating blow before they could learn who they were dealing with.

When the prisoner failed to recognize the man standing right in front of him, even the perpetually cold-faced Ice seemed to find it amusing and gave a faint smile. Bori and Roy snickered as well.

The other students and disciples could not bring themselves to laugh. With fifty corpses sprawled around them, they simply could not understand how those three could laugh in a situation like this.

Ricardt himself did not find it particularly funny either. He merely raised an eyebrow and spoke.

“Unfortunately, I'm not the sort of person who throws his weight around because he's got someone powerful backing him.”

“Then who the hell are you?”

“Ricky.”

As he answered, Ricardt drove his foot hard into the prisoner's head. The kick came with such tremendous speed that it could barely be seen. The man's skull shattered at the same instant his neck snapped completely, killing him on the spot.

Crack!

The prisoner who had shown some spirit toppled sideways and lay dead.

“Eek!”

The other prisoners waiting beside him for their turn to be tortured recoiled in horror. Some of them pissed themselves.

Ricardt looked at the prisoners and spoke.

“We're all former adventurers here, so we know how this goes, don't we? There's a procedure to these things. If you know where Randell is, just tell me. If you don't know, there'll be torture, and you'll die in pain. Because we have no way of knowing whether you're hiding something or lying.”

Unable to endure the fear any longer, one man hurriedly shouted.

“Caldebern! He's at Caldebern Castle! I heard he's staying there as a Dependent Scholar! I don't know if he's still there now, but that's what I heard! It's true! It's true! Believe me!”

At last, one of the prisoners succumbed to terror and gave up the most important piece of information.

The house of Count Caldebern was the main house of the Caldebern Family's Stormhertz line. Ricardt had only seen the Count a few times in his life, but because it was the main family, he could not help finding the place somewhat uncomfortable and intimidating. Doctor Reno was also there as both a Dependent Scholar and a member of the advisory council.

In an instant, however, the atmosphere that had seemed somewhat lighthearted until then turned cold. At the word Caldebern, Bori and Ice instinctively turned toward Ricardt.

From the outside, his expression had not changed at all. But his luminous hazel eyes were different from usual. Was it concern or worry? Unease? Or anger? It was difficult to put into words.

One thing was certain. It was not a face touched by God's love. For a moment, it was as though God had closed His eyes.

Ricardt spoke to Bori.

“Bori, I need you to make a trip to Adelun. You know Ray, right? Raimund. The Royal Standard-Bearer.”

“I do.”

“Ask him to send me a few knights.”

“Where?”

“To Caldebern Castle.”

Bori nodded. Then Ricardt killed all the remaining prisoners without torturing them. There was no chance the request the king had just made would leak out.

****

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