“I’ll go ask...”
Kai got up and looked for Basco, one of the top-ranking soldiers. He spotted Basco discussing something with Setta over in the corner of the training ground, so he walked over. Having to deal with little tasks like this was a responsibility that came with being a squad leader.
In a serious bout, it turned out that Kai’s rapid growth had made him powerful enough to smash Manso’s weapon apart, and Manso had actually looked relieved to give up his position as squad leader. Deep down, Manso was probably glad to be free from all the little responsibilities that came with leading a squad.
Kai, on the other hand, was now one of the ten highest ranked soldiers and often had to spend his time on small tasks.
Being in a position of responsibility also meant that he found himself on night watch more often while there were guests in the village, leaving him with fewer opportunities to visit the valley.
In most years, an inspector’s party would leave after about a week.
Kai concentrated on the tasks at hand, feeling sure that this year would be no different.
**
“I see no sign of those ghastly baboons today.”
Truthseeker Nada had climbed to the top of a high rock in the forest, where he could see his surroundings clearly.
Olha had waited on the ground, but it wasn’t long before the truthseeker climbed back down. Nada spread out the map of the region, which was an item passed down through many generations of House Moloch, and pointed to various parts of the map while describing things he’d seen and making notes.
“I see some rather large inconsistencies from what’s drawn here.”
“This map was drawn by one of my ancestors, almost 100 years ago. The forests have been spreading ever since.”
The population of the borderlands had been dropping with each passing year, reducing the demand for wood and giving the forests a chance to expand. Places where the trees were once thinned out before they could grow tall were now left untouched because of the demi-human threat. Once the trees were allowed to mature, it was no easy task to cut them back.
“Can all members of Maas use the art of a hundred eyes with such skill?”
“I have sharpened my arts as part of my daily training. Those with particularly good eyes were deliberately chosen to be dispatched as truthseekers. This is a necessity, otherwise we might overlook subtle signs.”
“And in our bout earlier?”
“The art of Raksha-ryu staff fighting was developed to give traveling priests a means to defend themselves. The art allows us to sense and then deflect an arrow in flight. For that purpose, we learn to use the eye, and then the same principles are easily transferable to other techniques.”
“It’s most impressive. Perhaps you could teach me...”
“Do you mean to tell me you wish to join the priesthood, Lord Olha?” Nada asked, still smiling.
Olha turned to look at him and realized that the priest wasn’t smiling with his eyes.
“I see you are wondering why you must join the priesthood.”
“...”
“These are secret arts not taught to outsiders. Even members of the royal family must join the priesthood for a time before they can learn our arts. They do so merely for the sake of appearances, but still, the monastery demands it.”
“I see...”
Olha asked no further questions.
Once someone gained a land god as their guardian, they couldn’t be away from that god’s land for long periods of time. This was the cost of receiving a land god’s blessings, often known as the curse of the land.
It was standard practice to join the priesthood and enter the monastery while not carrying a guardian. This was one reason that priests would go to great pains to gain power without a guardian.
Even for those with the same level of sigil, the cost they paid for it was different. A guardian bearer was bound to the land, meanwhile those who gained their power from the blessings of godstones alone would go through great hardships to gain power, but wouldn’t be tied down by strange fixations, and kept their freedom to travel from one area to another.
“Perhaps there’s a monastery nearby where I could...”
“I’m afraid there are none.” Nada breathed a deep sigh and then corrected himself. “More precisely, there are none that I see.”
Even with the secret art of a hundred eyes, he couldn’t easily see beneath the ground or into the depths of bodies of water. As useful as the technique appeared, it was not all-powerful.
“There were four baboons exterminated yesterday by my count. How many would you say you kill per year?”
“I would estimate around one hundred.”
To kill so many macaques had cost Lag fifty of their soldiers, and they’d also lost a few dozen women and children. It was only because they had aid from neighboring villages that they’d kept their losses so low. But the number of casualties was still significantly higher than the number of births, and there was less activity in the village with each passing year.
Nada pointed to the northeast and calmly said, “I’ve seen a large dwelling of the baboons in this direction.”
Olha looked into those still, silent eyes, and a shiver ran down his spine.
“There are many of them. This group looks to have several times the population of your village. I cannot say whether there were always so many, or if they all came to gather from other places.”
“That can’t be!”
“I have seen it for myself. There is no mistake.”
A large macaque dwelling. Those were the words that Olha had least expected to hear.
“I suspect it’s only a matter of time before they invade in great numbers,” the truthseeker said softly.
25
“Welcome home, My God.”
The night had already grown late when Kai arrived in the valley.
Aruwe appeared to have been sleeping inside the cabin, but the soft sound of Kai’s footsteps was enough to wake her up, and she greeted him happily. She then tried to throw herself down on the ground before Kai, but he grabbed a hold of her and forced her to stop.
The small koror girl’s body was very light. Kai’s method of forcing her to stop was to grab the back of her clothing and lift her into the air with a small amount of strength.
“A quick bow will do.”
“But...”
“Otherwise it’s annoying.”
He put Aruwe down and for a moment she was unsure what to do, but then she breathed a deep breath and said, “If that’s your request, My God,” before bowing her head politely.
Kai also wanted to tell her to stop calling him God, but he wasn’t ready to tell her his real name. He had no choice but to accept it until he was ready to open his heart to her.
The starry sky was reduced to a circle by the edges of the valley around him, but some of the light found its way down to light the area around them. Something much more interesting then grabbed Kai’s attention.
“T-The cabin...”
Aruwe smiled triumphantly when she heard the surprise in Kai’s voice.
“I wanted to surprise My God. Straightened it up as best I could.”
It had been several days since Kai’s last visit to the valley. Less than half a month since he’d taken in Aruwe, she was already more or less fluent in the human tongue, suggesting that Porek had been giving her lessons.
Kai’s eyes lit up as he examined his transformed cabin. It’d been a makeshift thing that he felt wasn’t quite worthy of being called a building, and he’d preferred to think of it as a child’s secret base. But now it had been reborn as an impressive cabin.
Kai saw the proud look on Aruwe’s face and soon became suspicious about the whole thing.
“Did some of the other koror come down into the valley?”
The color drained from Aruwe’s face when she noticed the change in Kai’s attitude, but she adamantly denied it while holding up her hands for Kai to see.
“They only lowered down tools. My people build their village at top of the cliff. They give me materials, but no one enters.”
Kai could see that there were several pieces of wood in the corner of the cabin that were still being worked on, and there were various tools left lying here and there. Kai knew that the koror were good with their hands, and now he realized that Aruwe was no exception.
“That’s all right then. You’re amazing, Aruwe.”
“T-Thank you!”
“How’d you get rid of all the gaps between the planks?”
“My people call it collard. They use it in the same way. It forms at the bottom of a pot when boiling down leaves. It’s waterproof, so we use it as coating for unglazed pots.”
“The entrance has steps now.”
“They took me half a day to make.”
When he entered the cabin, he was surprised to find that the floor had been adjusted to make it perfectly level. Aruwe had used what she called levers to lift up one side, and then she’d placed pebbles underneath to adjust the incline of the surface. The planks that Kai had cut were unusually thick, so they didn’t warp in the center.
Around the edges of the floor, gaps at the ends of planks had been filled in with black collard, just like on the walls.
He looked at the ceiling and saw that it still looked the same.
“Using land god’s gravesite to support roof is disrespectful.”
“...”
“The walls made by My God are strong enough to support the roof. I can’t do it myself. I hoped My God would help.”
That kind of small modification was something Kai could easily handle by himself. Following Aruwe’s instructions, he cut the roofing planks to the right length and placed them down so that they sloped down toward the cabin’s edges. The upper edges of the wall planks that the roof rested on were cut and made even by Aruwe, so they matched the incline correctly.
Then Kai dug up some exposed rocks from near the waterside and broke them apart to form weight stones, which he placed on the top of the planks. The roof needed to have gaps for ventilation, so those were left as they were.
This is amazing!
He never thought he’d see the day when he had a dwelling that was all his own.
Inside the cabin, a bed had been prepared by putting cloth over a pile of straw against the back wall. His plans for the night were decided right then.
“My God, if you wish... I-I am inexperienced... but!”
“...?”
For some reason Aruwe had thrown herself down on the ground again despite having just been told to stop, but Kai didn’t stop her this time because he was too busy finding out how comfortable the bed was.
When he jumped onto the bed, he could smell the scent of straw that had been dried just right.
The bed was perfect.
“I-I’m inexperienced, but...”
“...”
Although Kai had no great need for sleep, the day had left him mentally tired and he was a prisoner to the comfortable bed. Before he could put up a fight, he was already asleep.
Aruwe unleashed a flurry of hits against his back as he slept, but Kai’s toughened body was immune to that kind of attack.
Kai probably hadn’t slept for very long.
He got up, feeling some sort of presence. His drowsiness was gone in an instant.
Kai could hear Aruwe’s breathing as she slept soundly, almost buried in the straw by his side.
She showed no signs of waking up, and Kai guessed that she must have been trying hard to match her daily rhythm to his night-time visits to the valley.
Something... doesn’t feel right.
Kai left the cabin.
For some reason the soft sounds of insects that he could usually hear had fallen silent. For now, he didn’t know what to make of it, so he simply washed his face in the water of the lake and then began cleaning the gravesite as he always did during his visits to the valley. But then the cry of a bird in the distance caught his attention.
As if urged on by his intuition, Kai quickly clambered up the roots of the great tree and looked in the direction of the bird call. He concentrated on what he saw and trusted in his visual ability as a guardian bearer to allow him to see clearly through the darkness.
He could feel a battle going on in the area where the koror had been building their temporary settlement. And although he couldn’t hear them clearly, the air carried the sound of distant screams.
Then several lights appeared.
At first, he thought that the koror must have lit their torches, but the light of the fire revealed a huge figure several times larger than a koror. The figure was an org swinging an axe, as if trying to cut back the grass, while its great, wrinkled snout twitched.
Then he heard a voice many times louder.
“God of the Valley!”
Kai heard it clearly. It was a clear voice speaking the human tongue.
The koror were the victims of an org night raid.
The cry must have caused Aruwe to wake up. She came leaping out of the cabin and stared, wide-eyed in shock at her people’s settlement. Then she turned to look at Kai. Aruwe said nothing.
Kai had only ever given the koror permission to live by the edge of the valley. He had never said anything about giving them his protection.
But there was something in her eyes that ate away at him.
The whole time, they could still hear cries of “God of the Valley!” coming from the other side of the valley.
“The orgs come to steal the guardian.”
Aruwe’s words made the whole situation clear to Kai.
The orgs who’d stolen the land and gravesite from the koror wanted to kill Porek so that he’d lose the blessings of his god, and then the orgs could take it for themselves.
The orgs suddenly reminded Kai of the macaques that were always attacking Lag’s land.
Now I get why the macaques never give up on attacking our village.
Their intention wasn’t to take away their land. Stealing a gravesite had no meaning if it was missing its original power to provide blessings. The goal of the macaques was to cause the divine spirit of the land gods to return to their gravesites so that members of their own could claim them as guardians.
Since Kai’s birth, they had taken two villages from them, one of which was Eda. But House Moloch had snatched away the blessings of the land gods. The reason that the macaques were so fixated on the village of Lag should have been obvious.
Kai had only realized it now after having visited other lands.
“They really piss me off.”
“My God...?”
“They think they can come into my valley whenever they like?”
Kai began to run.
26
Kai scaled the cliffs of the valley like an upward rush of wind.
When he reached the scene, he found the koror were being maimed and killed around him. Right in front of him was an org about to bring its axe down on a koror woman who was begging for her life.
It wasn’t a warrior-class org; it looked more like their equivalent of a foot soldier.
“God of the Valley...”
The koror woman’s voice was filled with joy when she saw Kai had put himself between her and the axe.
The org looked surprised to see Kai suddenly appear and get in the way, but then it realized that Kai was unarmed and it howled with laughter.
It swung the axe once more, this time aimed at Kai himself.
Too slow...
Kai had learned to follow the quick movements of Moloch Vezin, the warrior known as the Iron Taurus. Avoiding an attack from this org was mere child’s play in comparison.
He followed the path of the weapon until the last possible moment and then deflected it with the smallest possible movement. When the axe struck the ground, Kai stomped on it, forcing it deeper into the dirt.
Now that he had a moment to spare, his hand went to his waist and found the knife.
The org felt Kai’s gaze move across its body and realized that he was looking for a vulnerable spot. It gave up on the axe and tried to back away.
But there was no escape.
Kai watched as the org soldier turned around to run and then he aimed his knife at the spot where the back of the neck met the head. He mercilessly drove the knife deep into the creature’s brainstem.
The org’s body shuddered for just a moment, and then its huge mass stood up bolt straight. As Kai withdrew his knife, the org’s body fell forward, no longer obscuring his view of the assault. His eyes searched, hoping to find the next target as quickly as possible.
Cutting through the tough hide of the countless orgs with his short knife was going to be hard work.
Let’s use this instead.
He reached for the axe that the org had left embedded in the ground and jerked it free. It wasn’t the first time he’d held an org’s axe, so it didn’t feel too unnatural in his hand.
The axe he’d recovered from the body of the org in the valley had been taken away from him and carried back to the village as one of the spoils of the battle. The iron weapons that orgs often carried were of reasonable quality, so they made fairly valuable prizes here in the borderlands. The fact that orgs could give iron weapons to every foot soldier suggested that metalwork was prevalent in the orgish country.
“The god of the valley has come to us!”
“****, ****, **!”
The koror were speaking in a mixture of their own language and the human tongue.
Kai guessed from the atmosphere that they were throwing defiant taunts at the orgs. Faced with such a dire situation, the koror needed to maintain their morale somehow, so their reaction to Kai’s appearance was understandable.
Several koror corpses were already scattered on the ground. The orgs had clearly intended to wipe out every last one. And then Kai realized why.
They wanted to end the bloodline that might try to cling on to the land god.
Teogonia: Volume 1 (Premium) Page 16