Chapter Three: The Second Person

Fiends—

In any city, their ill fame was enough to make crying infants stop in terror.

Corbeck flicked the mechanism beneath his lantern, extinguished its flame, and carefully hid himself within the crevices of a ruined building. Through the gap in front of him, he peered closely at the towering giant that had driven him into a dead end.

—A Frost Giant.

He was not unfamiliar with this type of fiend. Despite bearing the name of frost, it had actually nothing to do with snow or the northern lands; it earned its name solely from the thick, silver-white stratum of keratin covering its body and its towering stature.

In the demonology textbooks compiled by the Order, its threat level was rated as the third tier. Among thousands of fiendish species, it was comfortably in the upper-middle class. Though it was not entirely impossible for a prospective sword-bearer like him—one who had yet to have a stigmata implanted—to slay it, doing so would inevitably require dancing on the edge of life and death. Even if he miraculously succeeded, it was hard to say whether he would forever lose a part of his own body.

Yet fortunately, its head was entirely filled with muscle.

Ugh… this was no joke.

The Frost Giant's disproportionately small head was truly and literally packed with muscle. Even with a shape resembling that of a human, its essence was that of a fundamentally different creature. Its head was less an organ for thinking and more of a "vital point" meant to mislead people—according to experiments revealed by the Technical Department, if the wounds were treated properly, the head was never a necessity for them; losing it merely made them duller than before.

Their true vital point was the heart.

Or so they said, but it was actually difficult to target because a Frost Giant possessed more than one heart.

Generally speaking, there were two; stronger ones had three, and there were even rumors that a certain corpse handled by the Technical Department contained six hearts—incidentally, that corpse came from the spoils of a certain sword-bearer. To a sword-bearer with an implanted stigmata, an enemy of the fiend rank—aside from special kinds whose threat level was placed at the absolute highest tier—actually had little difference between the second and third tiers; they were nothing more than fodder.

After all, a fiend's weaknesses were far too glaring.

Combat had never required mere brute strength alone; it demanded wisdom even more.

Corbeck had always been a man with keen self-awareness. He was crystal clear about his own limits. Fiends of a threat level below the fourth tier were targets he could subjugate independently; the fourth tier required a tremendous amount of effort; as for the third tier like the Frost Giant, without throwing caution to the wind and staking his life on a desperate struggle, he had zero hope of achieving victory.

Therefore, he was waiting.

Waiting for the Frost Giant to leave.

Frost Giants, fiends whose heads were stuffed with muscle, were never clever. Taking the one before him as an example, it only knew how to blindly destroy whatever lay before its eyes, never once pondering where he might be hiding. Although the commotion it caused was massive, the threat it posed to him was zero. Instead, it unexpectedly served as a gathering horn, bringing no harm and only benefits to him—and indeed, to everyone else.

Of course, that assumed some unlucky fool was not actually caught by this creature.

Mm… surely there wouldn't be one, right?

The Frost Giant's burly physique stood out exceptionally well in the darkness. Coupled with its sluggish senses, if one exercised care and caution, the risk of being discovered was practically nonexistent.

If one truly were discovered, it could only be blamed on one's own carelessness. However, he imagined that colleagues who had graduated from the Guidance Academy would not make such a mistake… R-Right?

Corbeck widened his eyes—

There really was someone with a death wish!

Who did he think he was? A formally baptized sword-bearer? Or some genius who had obtained a title before having their stigmata implanted, such as Mia the Wind Whisperer, Norton the Thunder Lord, or Levatine the Oath-Bringer?

Arrogance should have its limits!

For a split second, Corbeck wanted to rush out and tackle this damned idiot to the ground.

Yet impulse was one thing; humans ultimately had to live by reason. Why should he take responsibility for another person's stupidity?

After much deliberation, he hid himself even deeper.

Yet precisely at that very moment, the sound of a heavy object crashing to the ground echoed by his ear. Before he could even edge his body closer to the gap, the death rattle of the Frost Giant nearly pierced his eardrums.

What… had happened?

A look of shock and suspicion surfaced on his face. Corbeck searched through the gap for the footprints of both the Frost Giant and the unfamiliar visitor, and then his gaze froze.

You've got to be kidding me—

His mouth hung open, emitting a silent gasp of amazement.

The Frost Giant, which possessed an overwhelming advantage in a direct confrontation against a squad of ordinary soldiers, had just toppled to the ground like that. A challenger with chestnut-colored tousled hair and azure eyes maintained a posture of kneeling on one knee, propping himself up with a sword in both hands. The greater part of the trial-taker's greatsword was buried deep within the giant's chest, and dark red blood was pooling all over the ground.

It… was dead!?

Judging from that motionless chest cavity, Corbeck struggled to digest and absorb the reality of this fact.

Then, hoisting himself up from the ground amidst piles of rubble and sand, too preoccupied to brush the dust from his clothes, he hurried over in a rush and extended a hand: "Hello, I am Corbeck, from Ramsden."

"Judas."

The youth before him looked to be only seventeen or eighteen years old, seemingly even younger than himself. His appearance was slightly above average, barely earning him the praise of a handsome strapping lad, but that was all—what was truly impressive was his cold, stern countenance that possessed a maturity beyond his years. At a glance, he was obviously not the type of person who was easy to deal with.

Confirming his first impression, the youth who called himself Judas did not shake his hand, merely offering a cold response.

"Judas…" Corbeck did not mind the other's discourtesy; his style of handling matters was naturally quite slick, and the youth before him had already proven his own strength through that recent battle. Furthermore, the strong possessed corresponding privileges everywhere: "Are you Judas of the City of Hermetica?"

"Mm." There was no denial.

"No wonder…"

That tragic war of Hermetica had been spread throughout the entire floating fleet within a mere dozen days by the mouths of those who returned. A battle for the ages whose mere aftershocks had destroyed an ancient city was fraught with mythological romanticism no matter how one thought about it. To be able to survive to the very end there as a mere mortal, if the fellow before him could become the sole survivor of the entire Guidance Academy, then he naturally had his own unique strengths.

"Any intelligence?"

The stern-faced youth from the City of Hermetica swept a glance at him, speaking in a low yet powerful voice.

"None." Of course Corbeck knew what the other wanted to ask. Thrust into an inexplicable crisis, anyone would want to figure out the cause. "The only thing that can be confirmed is… we have all lost a portion of our memories."

"Lost… memories?"

Gently chewing on those words, the youth before him seemed to have thought of something as he raised an eyebrow.

"Any clues?" came the natural follow-up question.

"Memories have indeed been tampered with," Judas—let's call him that for now—said with a tone of certainty. "I have memories concerning the mortal world of Canaan, but they are extremely fragmented and entirely unsystematic."

"In other words, the floating ship didn't crash?" The simplest, most obvious, and most direct guess was denied. A look of astonishment surfaced on the face of Corbeck, who fancied himself a clever person. "But since the floating fleet has already arrived in Canaan, why did we appear here?"

"Who knows." An equivocal reply. The voice of the youth from Hermetica was quite calm, as if he were not in a perilous, dead city, but rather in his own backyard. "What I can confirm is that there is a problem with our memories; what I cannot be certain of is how they were rewritten."

He paused. "On the other hand, I want to know how you can be sure that we have all lost a portion of our memories."

"It's very simple. Although a clock with twelve graduations can only record one day of time, and most of us don't carry long-term timers, besides timers, there are plenty of things capable of recording the passage of time." Corbeck entered a password to open his suitcase, and from within, he pulled out a potted miniature landscape. "Moonlight grass, which grows in the Adelaide woodlands—ah, forgot, you're from Hermetica."

Feeling somewhat awkward, he tapped his forehead before offering an explanation: "Moonlight grass can be considered a specialty of our Ramsden. Its characteristic is that it emits a faint fluorescence in the dark, and roughly every three days, it undergoes a seeding process, sprouting many moonlight grass seedlings nearby."

"And so?" The youth from Hermetica had already vaguely guessed the answer.

"Because it's a potted plant, the nutrients in the soil can only sustain a single stalk of moonlight grass, so I have always paid close attention to dividing and isolating the seedlings. Yet where my memory was cut off, I distinctly remember pruning it on that very day, and now… look—"

He handed the moonlight grass, which was emitting a faint luminescence in the dark, right in front of Judas.

Judas—well, let's call him Judas, or rather, the person playing the role of Judas—carefully scrutinized this strange plant from another region. It was truly miraculous; it really did cast an unusual glimmer in the dark, its tiny grassy body seeming to become a pathway conducting light. It was completely bright white and looked quite beautiful, but what truly moved him was not this beauty, but the dozen or so tender new grass shoots that had sprouted nearby at the same time.

"At least three days," Corbeck said. "Judging by the current growth rate, it should be five."

Five days of time…

The youth from Hermetica could not help falling silent. Far too many things could happen in the span of five days—so many that he did not possess even the slightest clue.

After a protracted silence, having racked his brains to no avail, he tossed the problem back: "Corbeck, what do you think?"

Almost the moment the words fell, he realized he had not yet made the question clear, so he provided a further explanation: "These five days… what are your thoughts?"

"Me?" Corbeck pointed at himself with a finger. "I don't have any particularly special thoughts, except that… the Order should be aware that we have ended up drifting here."

"Reason." A concise and pithy question.

"Value." Corbeck paused slightly here. "Every single prospective sword-bearer is an elite cultivated at great expense by their respective orders. One or two, or even ten or twenty, could still be afforded as losses, but there are probably one or two thousand people across the entire floating fleet. If they were to be wiped out due to some inexplicable reason, even the entire headquarters wouldn't find a few people capable of shouldering that responsibility."

"But there are only two of us right now."

"Then what makes you think that only the two of us became stragglers?" Corbeck's voice turned uncharacteristically firm. "You should know the size of a city; even if a thousand people entered together, they wouldn't make a ripple. Why on earth would you think we could encounter one another so easily here?"

—Because the number deployed was large enough.

The youth from Hermetica read between the lines of his subtext.