Bluesteel Blasphemer Volume 3

by Ichirou Sakaki

  “Fire?!”

  With a roar, flames spewed from the saint’s waist. The raging inferno illuminated the feet of the Missionary Order’s ultimate weapon, making it look more awful and more terrifying than ever. The steel giant must have had oil inside it, enabling it to shoot fire. It might be able to spew boiling oil as well.

  To get anywhere near any of the statues was clearly fatal, and yet at this rate, they would soon be surrounded on three sides. She presumed the reinforcements would be helping to block their escape.

  “Hrg...!”

  This was not good. They would all be destroyed. The only option now was to try to dodge the statues’ attacks, get behind one of them to the missionaries who were no doubt waiting there, and die fighting. The question was how long her overcoat could withstand the flames.

  “No.” Someone gripped her shoulder. She looked back to find a white-haired man with only one eye shaking his head. He was the one she trusted most. He may have been past his physical prime, but he had the experience and wisdom of a lifetime of battle.

  “You must run,” he said. “You must escape.”

  He didn’t mean along with everyone else. He meant alone. He was telling her to abandon the rest of them.

  “If you think I would ever—”

  She had done a great deal of dirty work. She had learned to take every advantage in battle. But that didn’t mean—

  “No, you must. I will not allow you to perish here, Princess!”

  He was right. Survival was, for her, the highest imperative. Everything she had done, she had done for this. She had not been ashamed even to flee.

  She remembered that day six years before. She had run, abandoning her castle, her country, and her father. And she had kept running, because that was what he had told her to do. But when would she be able to stop? When she was dead? Would she have to throw away all her companions, ignoring the deaths of everyone closest to her, until she was running, surviving, but alone?

  She would sooner—

  “Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh!”

  She sat up with a scream like a wild beast. Then, and only then, did she realize it had all been a dream.

  “Where am I...?”

  She looked around, taking in the strange room. It was small, with only a few furnishings, but it was clean and well cared for.

  Suddenly, she noticed the girl standing by the wall. She looked to be in her early teens, by all appearances a perfectly ordinary village girl. She was seated on the floor, looking surprised. A small wooden bucket was nearby, and water, which had presumably been in the bucket, was on the floor.

  It took the woman a moment to put the pieces together. The girl must have been startled by her scream.

  “And who are you...?”

  She thought perhaps this girl was there to guard her, but she looked so weak, and she carried no weapon. Perhaps she’d simply come to check on the woman.

  “I—I’ll call Lord Yukinari.” She didn’t answer the question, but only scuttled out of the room.

  The woman considered for moment. It didn’t make sense. She must have fainted from exhaustion and blood loss after her battle with the missionary knights. Why had they not tied her up? Why was she not under armed guard? This was an awfully incautious way to treat a complete stranger.

  “And that young man...” The boy who had confronted her at the end, with white hair and red eyes. He’d said he wanted to talk. It seemed, now, that he hadn’t simply been trying to distract her, but had really meant it. She was being treated not as a captive, but as a guest.

  “Yuki... Yukinari. So that’s his name.” She frowned. It sounded very strange to her.

  ●

  “Ex-Excuse me!” The door of the reception room burst open, and Berta came in.

  “Berta? Please remember to knock.” Fiona was talking with Yukinari and the others, a frown on her face.

  “What? Oh, I... I’m sorry. But the woman... She’s awake...”

  “Then I guess we should go say hello.” Yukinari stood with a grin. Fiona sighed, then followed him.

  The rather distraught Berta led them to the room where the woman had been sleeping. In addition to Yukinari and Fiona, Dasa, Ulrike, and Arlen were all there.

  “You didn’t even know to knock?” Arlen was saying with his usual arrogance. “I guess that’s a country girl for you.”

  “S-Sorry...”

  “I wish you wouldn’t talk about us that way,” Fiona grumbled. “It’s not like Berta didn’t know. She was just in a hurry and forgot. And for your information, she and I are practically the same age. The next time you talk like that, you’re gonna get it!”

  “Wha? You insolent— Hiding behind the favor of your ‘erdgod’!”

  “I don’t want to hear it, especially not from you!”

  Dasa was a common sight at Yukinari’s side, as was Ulrike, since she seemed to have taken a shine to Yukinari and was quite interested in the world around her. Only Arlen seemed out of place. Partly he was with them because he had been participating in the discussion when Berta showed up, but Arlen was surely curious about this young woman, as well. He and two of his companions together couldn’t stop her; in fact, she had nearly overwhelmed them, something he might have been less than happy about. Arlen had some martial training, but the woman had clearly held the upper hand.

  Perhaps he hoped to dampen his frustration by seeing her captive. Although that being said, she had simply been given a guest room to sleep in; they hadn’t put her in jail or even bound her with chains.

  She seemed to have just fainted from exhaustion... And I didn’t want to have to commit a bunch of people to keeping an eye on her.

  Yukinari looked at Dasa, to his left, and then at Ulrike, to his right. Both girls gave him quizzical looks.

  “Yuki...?”

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing,” he said with a smile. He could have asked them to wait in the reception room, but he doubted either one would have listened.

  Fiona knocked on the door, which hung open. “You’re awake?”

  The woman sat on the bed, looking slightly distracted. Yukinari, however, felt something was off. She appeared to be only sitting, but a palpable attentiveness wafted from her. As he took a closer look at the woman, Yukinari realized what seemed wrong.

  Her feet...

  Her feet were planted firmly on the floor. But her heels didn’t simply rest on the ground; they actively pressed down. Hence, the woman appeared not to have her full weight on the bed. In other words, she was ready to stand up at any time—ready to leap at an enemy at any moment. She was trying to look unguarded, but if there was an opportunity, she would take it.

  She reminds me of a feral cat, Yukinari thought.

  Just at that moment, Arlen stepped forward. “You should be grateful we spared your worthless life. We didn’t even cut off any limbs—”

  “Oh, you can ignore this moron.”

  “What—?!” Arlen’s face paled at Fiona’s remark.

  Yukinari spared a wry grin for the scene and said, “Don’t worry. We aren’t going to hurt you.”

  The woman said nothing, but narrowed her eyes and glared at Yukinari. She was obviously sizing him up. She knew it was Yukinari’s intervention that had led to her capture. She knew it had something to do with his and Dasa’s weapons, but because she didn’t know what a gun was, she couldn’t possibly imagine the details.

  At length, she looked at Arlen and spat, “He’s a missionary knight, isn’t he?”

  “Hrm? Yes, I am part of the glorious—”

  “Look,” Fiona said, pulling Arlen away by the ear. “Just shut up, okay? The more you talk, the more problems we have.”

  Yukinari glanced in Arlen’s direction as he was dragged away shouting, “Hey, that hurts, stop it!” Then he turned back to the woman and said, “You’re right. He’s a knight of the Missionary Order of the True Church of Harris.” He gave her a pointed look. “So what?”

  “The Church is after me.
If I’ve been captured by friends of the missionaries, then you can hardly expect me to ‘not worry.’”

  “Ahh. This is starting to make sense now.”

  According to Arlen, the woman had attacked him and the others out of the blue the moment she appeared. Now Yukinari understood why. If she was running from the Church, she might have mistaken Arlen and the knights for her pursuers. Yukinari could hardly fail to understand; he knew what it meant to be on the run from the Church of Harris.

  “I don’t have any way of proving it to you right now, but that guy isn’t quite your average missionary knight. I don’t know what the situation is between you and the Church, but if you don’t attack him, he won’t do you any harm. Not on my watch, anyway.”

  “Damn you, Yukinari Amano, how dare you just—”

  “Oh, shut up already!”

  “Ow! Ow! My hair! Let go of my hair!” Fiona had a good, strong grip on Arlen’s golden locks.

  The woman watched them for a moment, then let out a small breath. The tension throughout her body relaxed a little. Perhaps she didn’t fully trust them, but maybe this meant she was ready to talk.

  “You said you were being chased,” Yukinari said. “Why?”

  “I’m a mercenary,” she said. “I’ll do just about anything, and I’m not picky about my employers. Even if one were, say, a merchant conducting unlicensed trade.”

  “I see.”

  So this woman had been a bodyguard for someone who was conducting trade without the capital’s authorization—meaning they weren’t paying taxes.

  In general, a tax was demanded to use the main roads. An additional levy might be imposed depending on the goods being transported. The administrators of each region might want payment as well. The result was that legally traded goods might be sold at many times their original price.

  There was another organization that wanted “taxes,” too: the Harris Church. The church had no legal power to tax anyone, so the money merchants paid it was considered a voluntary donation—but it was not, in reality, voluntary at all.

  As a result of all this, some merchants began engaging in covert trade, without the knowledge of the capital. Of course, this meant leaving the comparatively safe main roads in favor of mountain passes, and that meant the possibility of attacks by xenobeasts or demigods. Bandits weren’t unheard of, either. To protect against such threats and to keep their goods safe, these illicit merchants hired mercenaries.

  “The job was to see some cargo to Aldreil, but...”

  “Someone from the Harris Church found you?”

  “Sort of. I didn’t know, and neither did my employer,” the woman spat.

  “Didn’t know what?”

  “That a unit of missionaries was garrisoned in Aldreil.”

  Yukinari glanced over his shoulder at Fiona and Arlen.

  “Aldreil is closer to the capital than Friedland, near a fork in the road,” Fiona said.

  “We came through there on our way here,” Arlen said, his hair still in Fiona’s grip.

  “So it’s sort of a staging ground for missionary units heading to the frontier?” Yukinari asked.

  “It’s a pretty big city,” Fiona said. “So officially or not, it’s always been a place where a lot of trade with the remote regions gets done. That’s probably why the Church wanted it as a base for the Civilizing Expedition.”

  Yukinari silently added the town to his mental map of the area. He remembered a large town where he and Dasa had stocked up on supplies while fleeing the capital, back before they had come to Friedland. The main street had run straight through the center of town, and he remembered it being full of carts and wagons big and small. That must have been Aldreil.

  “The Missionary Order is an organization charged with bringing the light of truth to you ignorant savages on the frontier. The Civilizing Expedition is regularly dispatched to help spread the word.” Arlen sounded oddly pleased with himself.

  “Thanks, Arlen,” Fiona said. “Everyone knows that already.”

  “Just listen to me! You impossibly impatient person!” Arlen shouted down Fiona’s interruption. “Now, where was I? Oh, yes. The Civilizing Expedition. Sending individual divisions directly from the capital to remote towns and villages involves a huge waste of men and resources.”

  “I guess that makes sense.” Yukinari nodded. Even having enough food for a single unit would be a considerable amount of cargo. Add to that all the necessities of daily life. It wouldn’t be very efficient to carry all that all the way to the frontier. Procuring it on location would be a much better solution.

  In Yukinari’s previous world, which had seen “civilizing expeditions” of its own in the Middle Ages, it had been typical to obtain resources at the destination. That was how things were back before telecommunications, or even the idea of logistics as such, had been much developed.

  “So,” Yukinari said. “Instead you send several units together and set up a base that can supply food and resources.”

  From that perspective, a booming trade town made sense. A wide variety of goods would pass through it, and all the travelers meant facilities that could accommodate large numbers of horses and men would already be available. In other words, the garrison there wasn’t simply converting the people. It was anchoring the Civilizing Expedition for the entire frontier.

  “Yuki...” Dasa said with the faintest frown.

  She had probably made the connection, too. This meant that there was a major base with several units of missionaries in a town not far from Friedland, and their number was likely to increase. Yukinari had been able to defeat Arlen and the other knights and even destroy their ultimate weapon, the statue of the guardian saint. But what if two or even three times as many soldiers appeared? There was no guarantee he would win. The opponents wouldn’t simply be two or three times stronger. Their numbers would increase, meaning they would have more strategies open to them in battle. That would make them four times, or even nine times, more dangerous.

  After a moment Yukinari asked, “Do you know the size of the garrison? How many units they have there?”

  “Three separate regiments,” the mercenary replied.

  “That’s the same as when we came through,” Arlen said, crossing his arms and nodding. “Given the size of the town, they probably can’t add any more.”

  The more people there were at the location, naturally, the more resources would be required. Because the knights of the Missionary Order would hardly have dreamed of doing farm work or raising livestock, that meant their numbers would be limited by the ability of the immediate area to produce food. For that matter, if they dominated the town so completely that trade could no longer continue, the commerce that had made Aldreil prosperous in the first place might not be able to go on. Three regiments was probably the most the place could support.

  But for Yukinari and his companions, three regiments was more than threatening enough.

  “I don’t mind saying,” Arlen added with a snort. “That by the time I got there, all the demigods and xenobeasts in the area had already been destroyed.”

  Maybe he meant that as a brag, but for Yukinari it was disturbing information. Any missionary unit would naturally fell the erdgod of the place they had been assigned, but if those in Aldreil had eliminated even the demigods and xenobeasts, that meant the knights there didn’t have to commit much manpower to keeping the town safe. They could travel at their leisure.

  All this meant that Aldreil was fully established as a base. If those knights learned what was going on in Friedland...

  “This could be bad news,” Yukinari muttered dispiritedly.

  Arlen’s unit had reported to the Church’s central authority that they had defeated Friedland’s erdgod, established a garrison there, and were now engaged in converting the populace. It was a lie, of course. But missionaries and erdgods didn’t normally get along, so when the Church received this report, they assumed it was true. If they learned otherwise...

  “Ulrike
.”

  “Yes?” she replied, looking pleased to be part of the conversation.

  “If the Harris Church finds out what’s going on in Friedland, Rostruch is going to be next in line. And probably vice versa. The missionaries in Aldreil will have to be looking for a new target soon, and it might be your town. Could you let your people know to watch out?”

  “So I shall.” Ulrike nodded with an innocent smile on her face, leaving it unclear whether she really understood what he meant.

  They wanted to avoid doing anything that might bring the missionaries down on their heads, but they did need to be ready—be prepared.

  Suddenly Berta spoke up, hesitation in her voice. “Um, Lord Yukinari... Maybe for today we should... I mean, our visitor is probably still weak... We shouldn’t keep her for too long.”

  “Yeah, you’re right.”

  They could just keep an eye on the mercenary for a while. For the time being, he didn’t detect anything suspicious in her story. And although she was conscious now, her pallor was still poor and she clearly wasn’t fully recovered. If Yukinari wanted a longer chat with her, it would be best to do it after she had rested and after they had gained her trust a bit more.

  “I know you have nothing to go on except my word,” Yukinari said, looking once more at the mercenary. “But again, we aren’t going to hurt you. Circumstances have led us to coexist with the missionaries, but I’m no friend of the Harris Church, myself.”

  “Is that so?” the mercenary asked after a moment, squinting at him. “Yukinari—that’s your name, isn’t it? Just who or what are you?”

  “I’m the erdgod around here,” Yukinari said with a shrug.

  “A god? But—”

  “We can talk details once you’re feeling a little better. It takes a while to tell the story. Anyway, what’s your name? I’d hate to just have to call you ‘you’ forever. And you already know my name.”

  For a long moment, the woman looked at the ground, furrowing her brow in silent thought. She seemed to decide that there would be no disadvantage in telling them her name at this point, because she nodded and looked back up at Yukinari.