🔊 TTS Settings
Chapter 28
Rita did not say to Gid that it was impossible. Somehow, it felt like if it were him, it might actually be possible.
She thought for a moment, then spoke honestly.
“No. I just want it to end with us no longer obeying the Command’s orders.”
“Don’t you want revenge?”
She clenched her fist tightly. A hoarse voice slipped out, but her answer itself was calm.
“I do want it. But… fighting the war against the beasts alone is already overwhelming. If we do that, it’ll just lead to pointless bloodshed. If we fight the Command, the Final Defense Line might be breached. And then even more people will die.”
“Then what do you hope will happen going forward?”
“I want this war to end. And I want all of us to survive and live peacefully in a world without beasts.”
“I see.”
“This doesn’t mean I forgive the Command for what they did. And I’m not saying we should just leave those bastards alone. It’s just that…”
“I get what you mean. It’s a matter of priorities, right?”
“Yeah. Once the war against the beasts is over… a new world will come. A world that doesn’t need the Final Defense Line or the Command.”
Gid reached out to her. His scar-roughened hand brushed against her cheek, and he smiled faintly.
“Alright. If that’s your dream, then let that be my dream too.”
“Was your original dream different?”
“A little. But it doesn’t matter.”
Rita asked him what his original dream had been, but instead of answering, Gid posed a new question.
“Rita, do you think there’s a way to end this war? Even though it’s a war that’s continued since long before we were born?”
“Wouldn’t you know better than I do? We’ve been exploring the ruins nonstop and drawing that map, haven’t we? That’s why we’ve been so meticulous about measuring magical contamination.”
Looking up at Gid, she added,
“You’re trying to find the direction in which the magical contamination spreads, right? You think that if we trace that flow back upstream, there might be something there that caused the Beast War—something like the point of origin of the contamination.”
“…You really are amazing, Rita.”
“I’ve just known you for a long time.”
She gave a short laugh, then asked him in return,
“Gid, do you think we can find a way to end this war?”
Gid smiled faintly. Rita knew that he was thinking the same thing she was.
“Let’s find it and announce the end of the war—true to the name Beacon.”
The winter of her nineteenth year. The day cold snow quietly blanketed the gravestones. The day countless futile deaths were overlaid in pure white.
Together with him, she set a new goal.
The surviving comrades listened to their story and their future objective, and agreed.
After that, Beacon no longer accepted new recruits. With only six members, they accomplished everything.
However—just once—
There was an exception to their rule of not taking in new recruits.
“I’m a weapon, so you can just take me out and use me when you need to, right?”
“My performance is good. If you take me out, I’ll fight really well.”
It was Ollie who discovered the boy.
Ollie Pascal, an outstanding mage sent to carry out a commission from the ‘City’s’ upper echelons, found Luca Pascal among their collection.
The boy lived trapped inside a large glass case. A beautiful exhibit and a living weapon. He wasn’t even aware that he had gone half-mad.
“Gloves? They put them on me because I bit all my nails off and it looked ugly. They tell me not to bite them, but I can’t help it.”
“The scar on my forehead—I keep smashing my head against the wall… It’s embarrassing, but I do it without even realizing.”
“Mage sir, could you talk with me just a little more? It’s been so long since I talked like this, it’s fun…”
Ollie made a deal with the upper echelons and bought the boy—glass case and all. It was a half-forced transaction.
“Damn it. After seeing the kid’s mind that fucked up, I couldn’t just leave him there.”
Any friction with the upper echelons that arose in the process was handled by Gid and Is, while Sera took charge of rehabilitating the boy after taking him out of the case. Rita and Ethan then retrained him.
That was how Luca Pascal became Beacon’s seventh member.
At age twenty—
They completed an independent autonomous squad.
After defeating a named beast called the Commander, which roamed with countless subordinate beasts, Gid earned the nickname “Emperor.” That battle made their skills famous, and Rita and the other squad members gained nicknames of their own.
The Command had no choice but to tolerate Beacon’s existence—a small group producing overwhelming results. Even when they no longer followed the Command’s orders, there was nothing that could be done.
From the standpoint of the Final Defense Line Command, there was no way to rein in Beacon—a unit that piled mountains of beast corpses, did not rely on supplied rations, was self-sufficient, and faithfully fulfilled its duty of defending the line.
Two years passed.
With only seven members, Beacon wrote legends by defeating named beasts such as the Red Queen, Malefic, Crawler, and Doppelganger.
And finally, they headed beyond the Final Defense Line, into depths humanity had yet to reach.
A land swarming with horrific named beasts that no one had ever gone to—and that did not even have a name.
At that point, for the first time since their training, they were contacted by the Archmage Pascal.
The archmage they met after ten years asked them, his appearance unchanged from the days he trained them,
“Do you know where you are heading?”
“To the point of origin of the magical contamination. The source that produces the beasts.”
Gid answered immediately, then asked in return,
“Do you know what’s there?”
The archmage fell silent for a moment, then replied briefly,
“I do.”
Then he turned his head and fixed his gaze on Rita.
“So it’s you.”
It was a statement without context. Before she could frown and ask what he meant, Gid stepped forward and stood protectively in front of her.
Pascal showed no particular reaction to the gesture. He merely took out a bundle of papers from his robes and handed it to them.
“These are what’s there.”
“You’re right. That place is the starting point of this calamity.”
“I wish you success.”
After that, the archmage vanished as if he had never been there. The bundle of papers he left behind contained drawings of scenery depicting what looked like ruins, and a roughly sketched map of those ruins.
Ruins of a fallen castle.
The Beacon squad fought desperate battles against nameless named beasts, broke through dense contamination, and finally arrived there.
Strangely enough, there were no beasts inside the ruins. The beasts wandered around outside but did not step even a single foot inside.
Thanks to that, they were able to rest—but the outlook was far from positive.
They were in tatters after the brutal fighting it had taken to break through to this point, and they were completely trapped inside ruins surrounded by beasts. Support was out of the question.
While the squad members rested, Is Pascal conducted a meticulous reconnaissance of the inside and outside of the ruins using his summons.
After hearing the results first, Gid called Rita aside and held up three fingers of his right hand.
“Three pieces of bad news? Damn it. What is it?”
Inside one of the relatively intact spires, he told her what Is had found.
First: They had searched the entire interior of the ruins but found nothing particularly special.
They did find scenery that matched the drawings Pascal had given them, but that was all. There was astonishingly nothing inside. There were no supplies such as food or water, so there was no way to hold out here for long.
Second: The number of beasts outside had increased far beyond before.
From the moment they entered the ruins, all nearby beasts had begun converging. With Beacon’s current strength, there was no way to break through them.
Third: The level of magical contamination inside the ruins was continuously rising.
Right now it was merely uncomfortable, but if it continued at this rate, even they—oath-bound as they were—would be unable to endure it within forty-eight hours. Depending on the amount of od within their bodies, they might last a little longer than forty-eight hours, but the outcome would be the same.
Every point indicated their isolation and annihilation.
After a moment of silence, Rita held out her hand to Gid.
“Give me all the drawings Pascal gave us.”
She set upright a fallen marble table and spread the map on top of it. Then she placed the drawings of the ruins’ scenery at the positions where Is had found those scenes.
The drawings were arranged at regular intervals. Gid realized it immediately.
“A hexagon.”
“Or a hexagram. Either way.”
Using the six drawings as points, Rita indicated the center where the connecting lines intersected.
“Let’s check here.”
It was a small garden in a corner of the fortress. All the flowers and trees had withered away, leaving only traces, and the statues that once decorated the garden were damaged and toppled here and there.
“Wait—that pattern on that statue… I saw it earlier!”
Rita found the same pattern on one of the statues as the one depicted on the scenery drawing. She set that statue facing the direction shown in the picture.
When they positioned the remaining six statues correctly in the same manner, a faint light poured out from them, revealing a magic circle. Then a door leading underground opened.
