However, when they reached the sanctuary, they were unable to confirm the corpse of the erdgod. It wasn’t there. Anywhere. Not a single part of it.
It wasn’t only the erdgod that was missing; even the bodies of its familiars were nowhere to be found. There were traces of blood here and there, but they were truly no more than traces, and it was impossible to distinguish whether they had come from the erdgod and its familiars or from the many shrine maidens that had been sacrificed here up until now.
“Where is it that you say you felled the erdgod?” Fiona asked.
“Well, it should be just around here,” Yukinari said, pointing to one of the sanctuary’s broken stone pillars.
That’s strange. A body can’t decompose to nothing in just a couple of days. Was it eaten by something? This place is surrounded by forest... I could imagine there being a pack of animals around...
“There’s no body,” Fiona said, frowning.
“No, there isn’t.” He was forced to agree. “Any chance that it could’ve melted and, uh, disappeared?”
He looked to Dasa for help, but she shook her head. It probably meant that she didn’t know. Like him, she knew about as much as was written in a dictionary and nothing beyond that.
Berta offered an explanation in Dasa’s place. Perhaps she thought she might as well, since she had nothing else to do. “I’ve been told that erdgods are creatures that have lived for a very long time and exceeded a certain ‘limit.’”
“Exceeded a limit?” he asked.
“Yes. They’re living creatures that have exceeded their intended lifespans in some way or another and, as a result, gained tremendous power and wisdom surpassing human beings. We call such beings ‘gods,’ or sometimes ‘spirits.’”
However, “spirits” were apparently beings that had begun to discard their physical forms. To Yukinari, it seemed like a stretch to call them “living creatures.”
“Sounds like the Yaoyorozu no Kami.”
“Yaoyo... What’s that?”
“Nothing,” he said, shrugging.
“Because of their power, they reign over humans as higher beings,” Fiona said to him, taking over from Berta. “That includes demigods, erdgods and their familiars, and xenobeasts. Erdgods are what we call the beings that manage to form a spiritual bond with the land and become able to exert influence upon their environment.”
“I’ve pretty much heard about all of that...”
“We—our ancestors—made ‘contracts’ with those erdgods. We’ve maintained those contracts for generations. We’ve relied upon the erdgods for this area’s protection in exchange for regularly offering them shrine maidens. The reason they’re called ‘gods’ is the bizarre way they look.” There was clear bitterness in the tone of Fiona’s voice. She evidently wasn’t a supporter of this sacrificial system.
“...Demigods... erdgods... xenobeasts... spirits...” It was Dasa muttering the words. She was keeping her voice low, so it would only be caught by Yukinari. “...In the Church’s... ideology... they’re just collectively called... ‘demons’...”
“Demons, huh?” Yukinari also kept his voice somewhat subdued in reply. “Doesn’t surprise me that a monotheistic religion would treat them that way.”
“Yukinari.” Fiona looked into his face. “I know you said you didn’t want to, but given that you killed the ‘god’ that we were worshipping, we would like you to take responsibility for the fact that our town is now defenseless.”
“Like I said—”
“So I have a new proposal for you,” Fiona continued, cutting him off. “If you can’t do the same things as an erdgod, then please, at least stay here in this sanctuary.”
“...What?”
Yukinari looked around him. They may have been insisting on using the word “sanctuary” to describe this place, but the truth of the matter was you couldn’t reasonably call it a “sanctuary” anymore. The most you could say was that it “used to be” a sanctuary. The structure here had been hard to call a building even before, but now several of the stone pillars were broken, and the huge slab that they had been supporting was tilting toward the ground. Asking them to live in this place wasn’t much different from telling them to camp out.
“This will also serve to prevent meaningless strife between you and the townspeople.”
“Oh. Right.” Yukinari nodded, a sour taste in his mouth.
The reason the townspeople, who had been giving Berta icy looks, had been condemning her was solely that they had the safety of the town in mind. That attitude hadn’t arisen out of a deeply-rooted reverence toward the erdgod. They didn’t actually care whether Berta became a sacrifice or not; as long as an erdgod or something similar was protecting the town, they would be happy.
As a corollary, if they learned that Yukinari had felled the erdgod, they would no doubt turn on him. In fact, they would probably lump Berta, Dasa, and Yukinari all together as equally responsible and demand they do something about it. And if the three of them refused, who knew what they might do...
“How are we supposed to live here, though?” Yukinari protested. “There’s nothing here.” Indeed, all that stood there now was a number of stone pillars. “It’s a bit much to ask us to sleep out in this windswept place.”
“We can build a hut that will serve the purpose,” Fiona said. “And of course—”
One of the priests interjected. “There is no need for the girl to live here.”
Beside Yukinari, Dasa pointed a finger at herself and tilted her head in confusion.
“Excuse me!” Fiona raised her voice. “I told you to leave that for now and let me persuade him—”
“The girl will live in town,” the priest said, ignoring Fiona. At exactly the same time, several other priests forced themselves between Yukinari and Dasa.
Yukinari reacted fast—then stopped himself. The priests were all reaching inside their robes.
They most likely had blades hidden in there. If he made any wrong moves, they would kill Dasa. That was what they were saying.
Both Yukinari and Dasa were armed with guns, but it would be far faster for a priest to pull a blade and slash or stab them at short range. And worst of all, Dasa’s Red Chili was in her case. She couldn’t immediately pull it out and fire.
Dasa had been within arm’s reach, and because of that, Yukinari had let his guard down.
“Yuki—” Dasa’s expression had stiffened a little. She no doubt understood the situation. Berta also looked flustered; her eyes were flicking back and forth between Yukinari and Fiona. It looked as though she hadn’t been told about this.
“There’s no need to worry,” a priest said, his expression also somewhat strained. Maybe he was feeling the tension as well. “We will ensure that her basic needs are met.”
“By throwing her in a place like the orphanage Berta grew up in?”
“Pardon?” the priest replied, as if he couldn’t see anything wrong with that.
“Yukinari, I—” Fiona said, panicked.
“I know.” Yukinari nodded back at her.
Judging by what she had said to the priest just now, this “hostage” business had probably been discussed beforehand, and Fiona had rejected it. She might have said that she would persuade Yukinari and told them not to get involved, but the priests had ignored her order as deputy mayor. They must have thought it unlikely that a young woman like her would be capable of persuading him.
Yukinari breathed a long sigh. “Goddammit.”
He could imagine that Dasa might be put up as a possible sacrifice to prepare for the eventuality of him dying in a fight against the demigods and xenobeasts. From the perspective of the people living here, that would be the most rational approach, and one that would receive no complaints from anyone except those involved.
“Look,” Yukinari said, scratching the back of his head. “I’m willing to admit it may have been a bad move for me to kill the erdgod before I knew how things worked around here. Okay, it was a bad move.�
��
“Yuki—” Dasa tried to say something, but Yukinari saw the priests grip her shoulders tightly as if telling her to shut up.
“But people, how about you look a bit more at the ‘here and now’?”
“The here and now?” The priests sounded suspicious. Fiona, meanwhile, had her eyes opened slightly wider than normal, as though Yukinari had seen right through her. There must have been something in his words that had resonated strongly with her.
Yukinari had discovered, or rather confirmed, a number of things while walking through town.
The level of this world’s culture and civilization, when compared with Yukinari’s “previous world,” seemed at first glance like the Middle Ages: it was dominated by a terribly superstitious way of thinking, and in the noble name of preserving tradition, no one even considered improving their quality of life or reforming the system. It should be said that the people of this town were not simply lazy, of course; they just had too much else to deal with to think about such luxuries.
In actual fact, however, the technology and facilities to make a number of industrial products did exist in this world, and their benefits extended to this town as well, even if only in a limited capacity. This world didn’t quite measure up to the ‘present’ of his previous one, but it was at least possible to consider it ‘modern,’ somewhere around the level of the eighteenth or nineteenth century. Of course, not everything had developed here the same way as in Yukinari’s “previous world,” but he thought that the people of this town should at least be able to find other ways to improve their standards of living instead of remaining stuck in the past.
“I understand that leaving everything to the erdgods or whatever is easier,” Yukinari said, fixing his gaze on the priests. “You don’t need to think about anything that way. But this can’t go on for—”
His words were interrupted by a short, terrified shriek.
Everyone spun toward the source of the noise.
It had come from one of the priests, who had been a short distance away from the rest, investigating the state of the “sanctuary.”
He was—
Fiona and Berta’s screams stuck in their throats.
The priest was in the grip of a doomful beast of gigantic proportions. The priest’s head was split open, and the beast was guzzling the gray matter of his brain.
It unfurled a long tongue from its fang-filled mouth and inserted it into the priest’s skull. There came a series of disgusting slurps, each of which caused the priest’s body to convulse and his eyes to roll back into his head, so only the whites could be seen.
“...Xenobeast...!” Dasa said quietly. And she was right. This was what Fiona had called a xenobeast—an animal that had discarded its animality.
●
Fiona felt all the hairs on her body stand on end.
She knew of xenobeasts and demigods, but this was the first time she had been face-to-face with one. These monsters had very rarely dared to come close before, because the town had been protected by the erdgod—it was the erdgod’s territory. Even those monsters who had come here hoping that they could usurp the erdgod were usually killed by it well before any human laid eyes on them. But this—
“No... No, it’s too...”
This was completely different from looking at a picture or hearing a description. Just by being there, this monster filled everything around it with despair. She could tell at a glance: there was no way a person could fight this thing and win. It was covered in thick bristles, each of its four limbs was larger around than a human’s torso, and a huge number of horns—or perhaps fins—were growing up the length of its back all the way to its head. A human being wouldn’t even survive a collision with it. Their whole body would be immediately smashed and torn apart, their last breath forcibly expelled.
The fingers on its two forearms were long like a human’s, and they seemed capable of complex movements. In fact, even now the monster had those “hands” in a tight grip around the priest it had recently caught.
“...Xenobeast...!”
Fiona couldn’t tell who had said that word, but they weren’t mistaken. This was not a demigod. It was a monster that had both failed to become a demigod and deviated violently from what had once made it an animal.
One of the elements that made the demigods demigods was their clearly higher intelligence when compared to animals, most obviously their ability to speak human language (albeit poorly). However, this monster lacked that. It had yet to utter a single human word, and, most tellingly of all, its face was that of a beast or animal, never showing any human expression.
“R-Run...” one of the priests said from the ground. His legs must have been too weak from fear to follow his own advice. “Th-They’ll eat your... your...”
The xenobeast was eating its victim’s brain. Its long tongue lapped insistently at the contents of the priest’s head, cracked open like a walnut, as it sucked and gorged on everything inside. If it had simply been hungry, there would have been plenty of other parts of the man it could have eaten, but this monster was first and foremost sticking to the brain—the fount of intelligence.
It was... trying to ascend. From a beast... to a god.
Some animals acquired intelligence naturally by living for a very long time. Some among the xenobeasts, however, were more eager. They sought out the places where intelligence dwelled—human brains, or the brains of other demigods—and fed on them in an attempt to push their intelligence over the threshold. This thing must have been one of those “strong-willed” creatures.
Fiona stood aghast, unable to tear her eyes from it.
The priest was no longer even twitching. The xenobeast must have finished consuming his brain. It tossed the body away, then cast its mindless, animal eyes around. Fiona couldn’t tell what its criteria were, but when she realized that the focus of its gaze had met with hers, she inhaled sharply.
Its eyes were saying clearly that it was going to eat her next.
And barely a moment later—its already huge body rapidly grew large in her vision. She knew it was rushing straight toward her, but she couldn’t move from where she was standing. It had struck terror in her, and she was completely in its grip.
She had to run.
She knew it, but her body wouldn’t move.
She was going to be killed. No, devoured. Fiona pictured her own grisly end and grunted in revulsion.
The xenobeast barreled toward her, closer, closer, and then—
A short shout and a black blade penetrated that nightmare together.
Confusion reigned. The xenobeast staggered. And with unstoppable forward momentum, it lurched wildly to one side, passed her, and slammed hard into one of the sanctuary’s remaining stone pillars.
It stooped down there for a while as the pillar crumbled.
“Wake up,” someone said as they grabbed her by the arm and pulled.
She snapped to her senses and looked up to see that Yukinari was suddenly standing right beside her, holding that weapon of his—“Durandall,” she thought it was called—in his right hand.
She noticed something strange lying on the ground. A lump of meat shaped like a human palm, but obviously several times larger. It was the end of one of the xenobeast’s forearms.
“He... cut—?” she said distractedly.
The bristly body of a xenobeast was said to be difficult even to slice into. A normal blade would slide across the surface or clash uselessly against it. But this man had cut off one of its legs.
Granted, he had probably used the momentum of its own charge against it. But doing that would mean his hands taking the full weight and impact of that tackle. It would be like swinging an iron bar at a huge boulder rolling down at you. Normally the weapon would just be smashed out of your grip.
“Hey.” Yukinari was calling out to her. “Is that thing what you’ve been calling a xenobeast?”
She looked up at his profile, half in a daze. “Ah... Yes.” She nodded.
/> “Let me make sure I’ve got this. It’s not the same thing as a demigod. ‘Beast’? It’s not a god at all, then?”
“Ah...” Still shaken and struggling to keep up, she tried her hardest to answer his question. “Demigods have powers just like erdgods except... they don’t have a territory... They have the same kind of intelligence, too, human intelligence... But xenobeasts...”
Yukinari frowned as he listened. “So we’re not gonna be talking things out with it.”
“Right...!”
It was possible that if they allowed it to eat a few more human brains or waited a few decades, this xenobeast might succeed in becoming a demigod. However, neither she nor the priests could afford to wait for it.
“Get back.” Yukinari stepped forward, putting himself between her and the beast. Then, he held that sword she’d heard so much about in a peculiar stance, resting it on the wrist of his raised left arm, and said, “I’m killing it. That okay?”
She noticed he’d thought to check with her. He must have learned from what happened the last time he killed a creature without thinking too deeply about it.
As she looked at his face from the side, she couldn’t see any trace of fear or hesitation, even with this monster in front of him. He genuinely thought that he could defeat it. That he could kill it. As for her—
“Y-Yes...!”
She could do nothing but nod.
●
There was more than one of them.
Only one had charged in at first, but many followed its lead. Monsters—xenobeasts—of all shapes and sizes came out from between the trees. Every one of them had a sinister feel about it that was clearly nothing like that of an ordinary wild animal. Almost every living thing possesses an innate “functional beauty,” but in these creatures it was nowhere to be found. And yet—
This might be how humans look to animals, Yukinari thought.
The default for wild animals is to walk on four legs, not two. From their perspective, human beings, who have a body shape optimized for bipedal movement, must look like the strangest things they’ve ever seen.
Bluesteel Blasphemer Volume 1 Page 9