Goblin Slayer, Vol. 8

by Kumo Kagyu

  It was impossible to see the expression hidden behind the visor, but…

  “The nation will not act in this matter, nor will the army.”

  “…Right.”

  Goblin Slayer sought his footing, his attention never lapsing. He checked the width of the dungeon entrance, sank into a deep stance, and readied his weapon.

  He had found a place where the goblins would be unable to use their numbers to their advantage.

  He intended to meet them head on.

  He had not given up.

  “Presumably, they don’t even wish to be informed that a family member was kidnapped by goblins,” he said, and his helmet moved ever so slightly. His gaze turned toward the princess.

  Right. Priestess gave another small nod.

  There was a clicking sound. It came from her sounding staff: her hands were trembling. She gripped it tighter, but the sound didn’t go away. Her teeth were chattering, too.

  “Goblin Slayer…sir…!”

  As foolish as it seemed, she felt she had to do it.

  She reached out her small hand toward his rough, gloved one, almost as if clinging to him.

  He didn’t push her hand away.

  Instead, still looking at the goblins, he said, “This is goblin slaying.”

  The goblins were coming.

  High Elf Archer readied the very last of her arrows.

  The goblins were coming.

  Dwarf Shaman gently set the princess down and drew his ax.

  The goblins were coming.

  Lizard Priest spread wide his hands and tail, striking an imposing stance.

  The goblins were coming.

  Priestess bit her lip and stood fast, her sounding staff held in one shaking hand.

  The goblins were coming.

  The adventurer—the one in the cheap-looking metal helmet and grimy leather armor, with a round shield strapped to his arm and a sword of a strange length at his hip—said, “But if not…”

  The goblins were—

  §

  “Lord of judgment, Sword-prince, Scale-bearer, show here your power!”

  §

  —the goblins were blown every which way.

  “GOOROGB?!”

  “GBB?! OROG?!”

  A purple flash of electricity.

  The air boiled as the blade of judgment swept down from above upon the goblins, sweeping them away. The sky, which had been enveloped in dark clouds, suddenly shone like midday, a Thunder Drake growling overhead. It was almost no sound, just enough to make their ears tingle—true divine majesty.

  “Wha…?”

  “Well, now…”

  High Elf Archer could only gawk, while Dwarf Shaman gave a bit of an exasperated sigh.

  “I see—the hammer and the anvil,” Lizard Priest said with a shake of his head. “So this is what you meant.”

  “GOOROGB?!”

  “GBBOOG?!”

  The goblins, struggling to flee, were struck one after the next by lightning bolts that fell like rain.

  In the midst of it all, Priestess was looking directly at her.

  “Everyone, the goblins are not our enemy.”

  Her, standing atop the walls of the city, silhouetted against the pale blue of the dawn sky.

  “Not they, but the foul fellowship, the Non-Prayers who seek to usher the Demons of Chaos into this realm.”

  A beautiful woman, accompanied by a white alligator, a holy beast.

  The flesh of her voluptuous body was only just covered by her thin white garments. Her golden hair gleamed in the sun. The staff of the sword and scales, which she now held in reverse with the blade facing upward, was the sign of righteousness and the justice of law.

  If one were to picture the Supreme God as a female deity, she might well look like this.

  The only possible blemish was the dark sash wrapped around her eyes. And yet, it did nothing to mar her beauty. In fact, perhaps the sash only accentuated how stunning she was.

  “A certain adventurer told me thus.” To her bounteous chest she clutched a piece of paper bearing an unsightly scrawl as if it were holy writ. “Judge each and every one of them while they yet lived.”

  A great answering cry came from the city gates. Then the warrior priests came on like a tempest, literally trampling the goblins underfoot. The sword and scales moaned, and the monsters were induced to repent—when their skulls were smashed in.

  “O goddess of battle! Grant us victory!”

  “O Earth Mother, abounding in mercy, by the power of the land grant safety to we who are weak!”

  “Lord of judgment, Scale-sovereign, Sword-prince, let there be light…!”

  “My god the roaming wind, let all on our road be good fortune!”

  “Watchman of the Candle, shine a humble flame into the shadows of our ignorance! May darkness never fall!”

  The onrushing figures, calling upon the names of their sundry gods, were certainly neither the army, nor adventurers.

  They were simply the fighting strength of the temple, who jumped to obey at a single word from a single great cleric.

  The outcome of this battle was no longer in doubt. One of the heroes who had fought the Demon Lord was present now. The deepest and most awful dungeon in all the world could hold no fear. A handful of goblins, so much the less so. There was no way the adventurers could lose.

  The goblins, who had thought they’d had their foes surrounded and now found themselves enveloped, began to shout and run. Perhaps they had it in mind to flee into the dungeon. But he met them with weapon in hand, as ever.

  “Yes, I told her,” Goblin Slayer said. He sounded somehow as if he were looking at something very bright. “But the rest was up to her.”

  Oh…

  Priestess blinked.

  She was sure, now, that she could see it. She shouldn’t have been able to see it, yet there was.

  The sword and scales held up by Sword Maiden were trembling.

  Her lips were moving ever so slightly, her teeth striking against one another time and again.

  The reason she was leaning on that alligator was because she didn’t have the strength to hold herself up.

  But…

  But there she was.

  With the morning sun at her back, its color mingling with the gold of her hair, she truly looked like a goddess. Weak with fear, hardly able to stand, terror tinging her expression—and yet, she confronted the goblins.

  Priestess realized that Sword Maiden’s unseeing eyes were focused directly on him.

  That was the answer; that was the reason.

  Priestess noticed that her hand was still clinging to his and blushed. She made to disentangle her fingers—hesitated—brushed his hand softly and, finally, pulled hers away.

  She was humiliated, pathetic, pitiful…and yet.

  I want to be…

  …a source of strength to him.

  That day, she stored up the smallest of prayers in her heart.

  One day, she swore, she would be.

  “Well now, that is quite the plan!”

  “Oh, you’re too kind.”

  They were at the house of a noble, which stood beside the river that flowed through the capital. It was so late at night that even the moons had hidden their faces.

  Two men sat drinking at a table in a parlor whose luxury befitted a high official.

  One of the men wore clothes cut to accommodate his portly frame; he was part of the nobility of this nation.

  Across from him sat a man bearing a strange holy mark in the shape of a single forbidding eye; he was one of those who followed an evil cult.

  In short, this was one of those events that had been held time and again since the very founding of the world, a banquet between companions in evil.

  “Controlling the goblins using the fiery stone from heaven, causing them to kidnap the princess and sacrifice her to resurrect the greater demon…”

  “If we could crossbreed the greater demon with the thing from beyond the
stars, we could create a true horror,” the cultist concurred.

  “It could impersonate the princess, but it would be under our control, so we could manage the king somehow.” The nobleman gave a belly-shaking laugh. He didn’t seem to have any doubts about his ability to control an unknown entity from another realm. “If even one of those plots succeeds, well and good. But even if they all fail, if we spread a rumor that the princess was violated…”

  Then no one would want to marry her. The power of the bloodline would wane, the king’s royal glory would be overshadowed, and the scales of the Court would tilt dramatically.

  “Why should that whelp of an adventurer run the government just because he’s got a few drops of royal blood in him?” the nobleman said, shaking his head in intense displeasure. It was a gesture overflowing with pity for the world, with righteous indignation, completely characteristic of the great many high-class people in town. It said more about who he thought was fit to control the government than a thousand speeches ever could.

  “…As for myself, I’m perfectly content to let His Majesty sit on the throne, so long as my faith continues to spread,” the noble follower of the God of Wisdom said pleasantly. “The knowledge of him is good for my profits, after all.”

  “But what’s to be done about the hero?”

  “Easy enough. She’s a sweet little girl whom we can wrap around our little finger with a bit of fawning: O Platinum!, we’ll say. O great hero!”

  The first nobleman allowed the cultist to pour him more wine. He wiped away a few red droplets with his sleeve.

  “If she plays along with us after that, then fine,” the cultist continued. “If not, we find some convenient excuse to send her on a suicide mission.”

  “I can’t see myself getting along very well with her type.”

  “Nor she with you, I suspect. How I would like to see her and her friends begging pitifully for their lives.”

  The nobleman smirked at the nasty image in his mind. The cultist, picking up on his amusement, chuckled and sipped his own drink. It made scant difference to him what happened to some so-called hero, or sage, or sword saint, women all.

  But if his spawn were to gain their powers, what a thing that would be. Yes, that was all he cared about.

  Knowledge was power, and power ruled the world. Few could truly understand what a sweet and beautiful thing that was.

  That thought might have prompted, in some sense, a small factoid that flashed through the cultist’s mind and then disappeared.

  “…I was thinking, it’s been some time since I heard any rumors of that interloper.”

  “Heh-heh—what, do you believe what people say? Don’t make me laugh. That’s just the idle fancies of peasants.”

  That was when it happened.

  The quake, the wind, the thunder.

  For a moment, they thought perhaps it was the sound of the river grown especially violent, but then came the roar.

  It was, quite literally, the sound of a battering ram at the castle gates, the prow of a ship striking a wall.

  Bursting through the wall of the parlor came, indeed, the prow of a ferryboat.

  “Wh-what is the meaning of this?!” the nobleman and the cultist shouted.

  An answer came, likewise, from the ferryboat: “It’s been a long time, you scum.”

  The sculler existed more as a small, dim silhouette than anything—judging by the lines in the figure’s black clothing, might it be a young woman?—but this spy was not the source of the words.

  Instead, the speaker was a man, standing beside the sculler with a dignity that seemed out of place. He looked down at the astonished villains and growled derisively, “It’s been a long time, you scum. Have you missed me?”

  Look—yes, look—at his glittering accoutrements. Shining brightly even there in the dark were his armor, his shield, his helmet, and his gloves, as well as the sword that hung at his hip. He carried enough magical items to astound any onlooker: a blessing of Healing, an Evil-Banishing Light, an Anti-Freezing charm, a Primal Flame, and a Whirling Wind. And his name was…

  “The Knight of Diamonds…!”

  He was supposed to be nothing more than a myth, a fairy tale passed around among the common people. A phantom about whom whispers had spread in the city these past few years. A man who hid his face and punished evil by darkness, a true knight of the streets.

  But he couldn’t be real; there was no one that crazy.

  For starters, slaughtering crooked merchants and nobles and cultists of one’s own accord—didn’t that make him a simple murderer? How could that boy playing at being king, with all his talk of righteousness, allow such acts to go unchecked?

  Yet, there he was, right in front of them. But who exactly was he? Or what?

  He must be a simple deviant.

  Thus the nobleman seemed to think. He had either remembered his own station and honor or had concluded that his visitor was a simple ne’er-do-well. Feeling he had a better grasp now on his own position, he said forcefully, “Impudent fool! Whose residence do you think you’re in? Remove your helmet, at once!”

  “Oh-ho. So you want to see my face, eh?” The Knight of Diamonds sounded almost amused; he laughed with a sound like a lion bearing its fangs. “I’m happy to oblige—but I don’t think you’re going to like it.”

  With that, those glittering gauntlets reached up to his visor, lifting it without a sound.

  Then his face stood revealed. The nobleman and the cultist alike felt their eyes go wide.

  “Wha…?!”

  “It—it can’t be…!”

  That was all they could say.

  They were witnessing something that could not be. Something unbelievable, something that shouldn’t exist—but the knight’s was a face they knew all too well.

  Their knees went weak, and they gasped for breath, forgetting themselves as they babbled, “Come! Come forth!”

  The shouting brought armed men of the noble’s personal guard running. The cultist, meanwhile, warped space as he summoned fiends and ghouls from another realm. The fact that the guards didn’t flinch at this was proof enough that they were coconspirators of the men.

  Gods. The Knight of Diamonds groaned.

  Yes, one had to be broad-minded enough to accept all kinds of people, but that was no reason to turn a blind eye to evil. And there was no arguing with men like this; they would simply try to twist everything to their benefit. On top of that, considering how personal the stakes were in this instance, everything seemed tailor-made to put the knight in a bad mood.

  The young woman in the shadows, seeming to sense the knight’s thoughts, let out a breath of simultaneous exasperation and resignation. The Knight of Diamonds ignored her completely, laughing out loud.

  “It looks like you’re far beyond talk. Your fate is sealed.”

  Still looking at the pitiful noble in front of him, the knight lowered his visor once more and drew his sword.

  The blade was all blinding flash, the stroke so violent and so precise that even the wind from the passing sword could have beheaded a man.

  As if to emphasize to the men that they couldn’t flee from before his blade, the Knight of Diamonds declared, “On behalf of heaven, I claim your lives!!”

  Here, now, there was no place for mercy anymore.

  “So after all that, he didn’t accept a reward?”

  “No!” High Elf Archer pounded the table, making the dishes jump. “Can you believe it?!” She had been grievously wounded not long before, but after a few days’ rest, she was already back on her feet. That was an elf for you.

  Guild Girl glanced, a little discomfited, at the others at the table but, nonetheless, still smiled. Witch enjoyed a sip of her wine with an innocent expression, and as for Priestess, she looked much the same.

  For those gathered around the table, each with their own thoughts, High Elf Archer’s fit of temper was nothing new.

  Everything had been more or less as normal in the frontier
town while Goblin Slayer and his party were away. Adventurers drank, laughed, went on adventures, fought, and came home—or, occasionally, didn’t.

  It was just daily life, Priestess thought, that they had come back to.

  “I have to point out,” Guild Girl said, “he did take a reward.”

  “Yeah—for goblin slaying!” High Elf Archer’s ears bounded up and down in absolute frustration. She looked thoroughly drunk—except that the stuff in her cup was grape juice. Evidently, she was in an exceptionally bad mood today.

  “Well, that’s just who he is,” Guild Girl said quietly. She leaned on the table with a what can you do. “Even if the person he rescues is a young noblewoman…he simply sees goblin slaying as goblin slaying.”

  And for him, maybe it is.

  “Maybe,” Priestess concurred.

  She said nothing else, partly because there was nothing in the statement to disagree with, partly because it was true, and partly because she felt the same way.

  “I heard there was a real ruckus in the capital, too,” Guild Girl went on. “Another of the evil cultists’ bases was destroyed or something. But I wonder who this Knight of Diamonds you hear about sometimes really is.” Guild Girl cocked her head.

  Priestess didn’t know the answer. It was true: for the person she was thinking of, goblin slaying was just what he always did.

  But…

  But even so, she could tell that maybe there were more worldly ways to go about it.

  He had saved a daughter of the royal household, even if it was “just” from goblins. He might not have been able to demand anything he wished, but surely, he would have been permitted a significant request.

  Like in a fairy tale, he could have married the princess and lived happily ever… Heh! Well, maybe not.

  But he might well have asked the king to take sterner measures against goblins, or requested a promotion to Gold rank, or asked for some discreet royal support, or…

  Maybe he should be dreaming a little bigger…or not.

  It was a flippant thought. Yes, Priestess saw that.

  But he simply said, “This is goblin slaying.”

  No more and no less, and that was enough.

  Goblin Slayer…

  That was what he wanted, and that was what he kept doing.