Chapter 64
“Over there! Over there!”
The streets near the slums were caught up in an unseasonable commotion.
More precisely, criminals with guilty consciences were too busy fleeing from the capital guard unit that had appeared for the first time in ages.
But arresting those scum from the underworld was not important to them.
“Damn it, Sir Denzel…!!”
It was because they had heard fighting noises coming from Denzel Rossington's house.
“He has to be safe….”
“He's Sir Denzel! I'm sure he's fine!”
After retiring as commander of the Imperial Knights, the street on the edge of the capital's slums where he had settled was, in fact, the underworld itself.
As soon as he appeared, he personally crushed those who ruled the capital's underworld,
and Denzel even took in children who were not protected by imperial law and taught them swordsmanship himself.
“Old Man Denzel…!”
The officer in charge of security in District 8, where the slums were located, and all the young guards running alongside him were orphans Denzel had taken in.
They had grown up at Rossington Orphanage, which Denzel had built with his own money, and had become such excellent guards.
- Boom! Boom!!!
“That sound…!”
“They must still be fighting!”
For them, hearing the sounds of fighting still going on was a sign of hope.
At least their true father couldn't be dead.
- Crack! Boom─!!
- Splatter!
“Gasp?!”
“Huh, aaaaaaah…!”
As they rushed into the mansion, a corpse came flying through the shattered front door.
Since Denzel was a knight, they assumed he must have used a sword… and for a moment, every one of them thought it was Denzel's corpse.
“Wait!! Everyone, calm down! Unlike Sir Denzel, it has white skin!”
“What?!”
But when the officer in charge approached and checked, the corpse's skin was white, unlike Denzel's dark skin.
Then it had clearly suffered this injury from Denzel's attack, but…
“Can a sword… make a wound like this?”
The wound on the corpse looked exactly like a cylindrical hole punched through it by tremendous force.
They were bewildered because it was an injury that absolutely could not have been made by a sword when—
- KRAAANG!!!
- Boom!!
“Waaah?!”
The mansion's front entrance exploded completely.
The citizens who had come out to watch fled in a panic, but the District 8 security unit simply stared blankly at the scene.
- Splatter!
“Gaaaaaaaaah…!!!”
Bodies lay sprawled across the mansion's courtyard, holes punched through various parts of them.
- Thud, thud, thud.
And through the mansion's ruined entrance… the dark-skinned former commander of the Imperial Knights emerged, brushing off his hands.
“S-Sir Denzel…?”
And behind him, eight cloaked corpses lay sprawled along the mansion's hallway.
“O-oh…!”
“As expected of a Master… taking out professional killers without a sword…!”
Seeing the blood on Denzel's hands, the guards realized that he had annihilated the assassination unit with his bare hands.
“Hmm? Why are you all here… Ah.”
Denzel was relatively unharmed, aside from a few stab wounds here and there.
He set about assessing the situation first.
“You were dispatched after hearing the commotion… Good. Angela was being held hostage. Could you take her to the clinic, just in case?”
“Uh, y-yes. Understood.”
Denzel had risen from orphan to guard, officer, and knight, then reached the rank of Master and risen all the way to commander of the Imperial Knights… He was the ultimate role model for commoners.
“Then, Sir Denzel….”
“If they bypassed the black magic detector at the outer wall entrance, there can only be one route.”
As a veteran investigator with countless experiences in the field, he judged that they had to catch the culprits before they escaped.
“Some vermin from the underworld must have dug another tunnel. I'll deal with it first, so follow at your leisure.”
And Denzel was now a Master-level combatant even without a sword!
How reassuring was that?
With a man like this as their teacher and the Empire's sword, the security unit's pride swelled to the heavens.
“Yes, sir! Salute!”
After receiving their salute, Denzel put his sword back at his waist and turned toward the underworld once more.
“Goddammit, some lunatic went after that bald black guy's house….”
“Hell if I know, fuck. Whoever that crazy bastard is, he must have joined hands with some big shots. The rumor I heard says—”
“There he is, that bald black guy. May I ask you about the rumors??”
“Gaaasp.”
“D-D-D-Denzel, D-D-D-Denzel!”
“Not D-D-Denzel. Denzel Rossington.”
To exterminate the maggots and snakes that had once again set up shop in the underworld.
*
The next day.
“Thank you, Young Master.”
“…….”
Akion was summoned to the capital guard unit.
In this situation, Akion lightly clutched his head.
He had been trying to find every workaround possible to pay less in taxes and such, so he wondered if he had been caught and reported to the Imperial Taxation Bureau.
But….
“Thanks to the clue you gave me, I was able to slaughter those scoundrels even without a sword.”
The summons was for a secret expression of gratitude,
and before Akion sat a row of Black Star Cult members whose arms, legs, or parts of their abdomens had been blown away and wrapped tightly in bandages.
“What in the world is this….”
“Thanks to you, Young Master, I finally grasped the secrets of my one-inch punch. To show you….”
To calm Akion down and help him understand, Denzel had brought a log nearly a handspan thick.
He then—
“Hup!”
- Craaack!!!
- Splinter!
right in front of Akion, made a perfectly clean, fist-sized cylindrical hole in the log.
“What do you think? This was the technique that defeated me when I was training as a wandering warrior on the Eastern Continent in my youth. It's been well over twenty years… but thanks to the clue you gave me, I finally understood it completely.”
“…….”
“Force is mass times acceleration… Thanks to that, I realized I had mistakenly thought boxing and swordsmanship were different. Thank you so much!”
Like Bruce Ham from old Hong Kong martial arts movies, perhaps.
Or a nunchaku-wielding character from the fighting-game series in his previous life that had been going downhill, its health bar getting slapped around.
Anyway, it was that whatever principle behind fa jin that also appeared in martial arts novels.
Even though Akion had not said anything in particular about the scientific analysis of it…
“Congratulations.”
“Ha-ha-ha! I figured it out thanks to you, and now you're even congratulating me! I'll boast about this for years to come!”
“I don't think you need to go that far. It's not as if I'm particularly well-versed in martial arts….”
You figured it out on your own from F = ma?
And then that one-inch punch bored a hole through a one-handspan log harder than a human being?
“I've heard a great deal about you, Young Master, but you really are humble.”
“I simply don't want a commotion.”
Akion wanted to tear his hair out and shout, ‘Heavenly Lord, you XXX!’ right then and there,
but if he did, he would end up in a twenty-hour, no-holds-barred debate with the Heavenly Lord.
Akion bottled it all up… and decided to argue about it later.
“Ha-ha-ha! I understand. I'll keep this matter a secret! Ah, Young Master, I ask that you also keep quiet about seeing this trash. The Imperial Security Bureau has classified it.”
“Ngh….”
And so Akion was even made to swear an oath of confidentiality.
As he trudged out of the capital guard unit, Akion continued cursing the Heavenly Lord in his mind.
* * *
Akion thought the commotion was finally dying down.
Just as he was about to look for a place for his laboratory as a professor-in-waiting at the academy,
“A revelation has descended.”
the saintess came to visit.
“A revelation that a crisis will befall Saint Akion's future.”
“Let's start with the fact that the title of the document in your hand is ‘Flashlight Improvements.’”
“Tsk.”
She was using the revelation as a pretext to ask him to improve the flashlight.
It was a temporary office set up exclusively for Akion to keep him stationed at the academy.
There, Akion began looking over the documents the saintess had handed him.
The contents were, in short—
“You want me to improve it to the same version as the Saint's?”
“Yes!”
She wanted him to replace it with exactly the same flashlight as the Saint's.
Akion smiled brightly and handed the documents back,
“No.”
“Why not?!”
and flatly refused.
Why?
“Isn't this just because of your personal greed, Saintess?”
He had already heard through researchers belonging to the Papal See that the saintess made very good use of her flashlight holy sword.
She was already using it well, and it was more than sufficient as it was. Was there any need to customize an even higher-output version for her?
Absolutely not. And the saintess surely knew that as well.
Therefore….
“N-no, it isn't?”
“Do you swear it on the Heavenly Lord?”
“Tsk, actually, it is.”
There was no reason besides the saintess's personal greed.
Only after invoking the Heavenly Lord did the saintess become honest, grumbling as she reclaimed the documents and flashlight.
Akion thought that was the end of the conversation, but—
“Ahem. Shall we move on to the revelation now?”
“Wasn't the revelation just a pretext…?”
“No. A real revelation did descend, you know?”
Saying that the revelation about Akion falling into a crisis was genuine, the saintess straightened her posture again.
“The Heavenly Lord has mentioned that, amid the rough currents of this world, even you, Saint, are not free from danger. Objectively speaking, you possess less physical strength than an ordinary commoner.”
“Ugh.”
The moment the Heavenly Lord called Akion a ‘weakling who couldn't even subdue a commoner,’ he had considered activating the Sign and cursing him out first.
Still, the Heavenly Lord was the Heavenly Lord.
Just as he had read Akion's thoughts about his future and answered them in the previous revelation scroll, the Heavenly Lord must have figured out all sorts of things about Akion's future.
“He did not tell us what kind of crisis it would be… but he said that we, the Heavenly Lord's faithful, must lend our strength to Saint Akion.”
“I am at a loss for words, since the Heavenly Lord and all of you are always watching over me.”
“So I've been told to stay with you, Saint, starting today.”
“I didn't ask you to watch over me quite that closely….”
But using that as a pretext to attach the saintess to Akion?
One of the three great powers of this world's Heavenly Church, the saintess, as his personal bodyguard?!
It was extravagant and glorious, to be sure, but for Akion….
“Not necessary.”
It was more like, “Not particularly?”
Goldie and the tower master were already there. What more combat power could he possibly need?
“Oh my. Saint. This is a notification, not a proposal.”
“Pardon?”
“It has already been unanimously approved by the Papal See's Supreme Council. I hereby inform you that I have been assigned to serve under Saint Akion and protect him from this day forward.”
The problem was that this was a decision already made.
Akion's wishes had been completely ignored.
Akion knew how fanatically the clergy of this world worshiped their real god.
And he had heard they had become even more fanatical after the recent divine punishment experiments… so Akion was not particularly pleased about it.
“Saintess, I—.”
He was about to say something and send her back, but—
- Smack!!
“Ow! Why did you hit me all of a sudden?!”
the saintess suddenly struck him on the head.
With a halo lit above her head.
What pointless, unprovoked violence!
Akion was about to protest, brimming with fury, but—
“Do I look like I'm saying something pointless? You master's-and-doctorate student who died from electrocution.”
“……….”
Akion fell silent at the saintess's bizarre behavior as she recited details of his past life that nobody in this world could possibly know.
Unlike the usual saintess, she had a rosary symbol glowing in her eyes.
Her demeanor was also different from usual… more flippant, yet at the same time, perhaps it would be better described as reverent.
Faced with that distinctive presence, Akion suddenly remembered the last time he had received a revelation.
The modern way of speaking written on that parchment… wasn't it quite similar to what she had just said?
“Heavenly Lord?”
That was why he ventured a guess.
“Yeah. It's me, you customer who keeps dropping bomb after bomb of malicious complaints.”
“Gasp.”
“I even gave you a revelation because I was worried about you, and you ignore it? And now you're trying to reject the pretty saintess I'm sending you?!”
And then he was hit.
The Heavenly Lord had descended through the saintess's body!
It would have been a moment for the clergy to cry out ‘Amen!’ and weep tears of joy if they had witnessed it.
But….
“You're hopeless. Let's give you a beating.”
“What?”
- Smack!
“Ow!”
Having descended only to immediately smack Akion across the back was a little lame, though.
- Smacksmacksmacksmack!!
“Good grief! God's hitting his own believer!”
“You don't believe in me, you heretic!!!”
And so, after the Lord's direct execution of a heretic (not really),
“Ow, my back….”
“Be grateful I didn't bring down divine punishment.”
“How merciful of you. Anyway….”
Akion rubbed his stinging back and began by asking,
“I'm in danger?”
Was the saintess's revelation truly serious enough that the Heavenly Lord had to descend through her and speak to him?
Was it really one hundred percent true that Akion would fall into a huge crisis someday?
The Heavenly Lord nodded.
“Ahem. Yes, it is so. Within the short span of less than six months, you will become embroiled in a major incident.”
“Where?”
“Here.”
“Oh, come on….”
“It is a grave matter, which is why I descended myself.”
One of the basic tropes of a fantasy academy: an invasion of the academy by the forces of evil.
He warned Akion that he would be caught up in it as well.
More than anything, six months from now would be the academy's entrance ceremony and first-semester season.
Did that mean the Black Star Cult or some other villains would invade the academy then?
“Act as you normally do, but always have at least one bodyguard with you. That is all I can tell you. Anything more is impossible.”
“Wait! Is the saintess watching this conversation too?”
“She is asleep in the realm of the unconscious. She will not remember anything we have discussed.”
It was disappointing that he could not learn anything more,
but since the academy was where Akion would be staying from now on… the Heavenly Lord must have been trying to look after him through the revelation as well.
It was enough to make his faith well up on its own, but—
“More importantly… sigh. Akion, do you know how great the cost of this descent is? Despite caring this much about you, you blaspheme every time—”
“But… couldn't you have just contacted me through the Sign and told me?”
As Akion said, wouldn't contacting him through the Sign have been enough?
When Akion raised that question… the Heavenly Lord avoided his gaze and exercised his right to remain silent.
At this point, Akion caught on.
“You actually came down here to hit me, didn't you?”
“…….”
This descent had included an element of revenge!
“I knew it. Good grief, for a god, you're so petty—Ow! Ow!!”
“Do you! Have any idea! How hard developers work?! Do you?!”
Akion added one more point to his ‘I hate the Heavenly Lord’ stack that day.
While vowing to get his revenge someday.