Bear School Astartes

"That is the child of Great God Kos, belonging to the oceanic Great God Kos, the nameless orphan left behind."

Simon’s voice was as distant as if he were recounting some ancient tale.

"The god’s corpse drifted with the waves to the beach of the fishing hamlet. The fishermen here worshipped Him, revered Him, and in the end turned themselves into fish-men. Able to coexist with the sea."

"But... that is a divine child! Kos’s orphan, bereft of all protection!"

As the child of an Ancient God, it was only natural that He was born already bearing the rank of a god-child.

Yet because His mother was already dead, Kos’s orphan was left without any guardian.

The Ancient Gods’ hunger for god-children is something mortals can never comprehend.

It may even be that Kos willingly died for the sake of the god-child’s birth.

But at a distance this close to Yan’an, once news that "a god-child has appeared" leaked out...

Half-kneeling on the ground, leaning forward with his arm clasped by Simon’s hand, Lann turned his head to look out of the loft.

Corpses strewn across the ground, houses engulfed in gasoline flames... this is the outcome!

Using the last of his strength to finish recounting his investigation, this lucid Old Hunter also brought his life, within this nightmare, to an end.

As for why the Healing Church would go to such lengths to gather so many Hunters and come here to hunt that Kos Orphan, Simon had not said.

Lann also felt it was not hard to guess.

The god-child’s rank was indisputably lofty, even regarded as on par with an Ancient God.

And once Byron Vis discovered the blood of an Ancient God’s corpse, the sciences, medicine, and arcana of Yan’an erupted into explosive development.

What of a living god-child?

Setting aside, even, the human lust for gain.

Who could say with certainty that this was not part of some other Ancient God’s plan to remove a god-child?

The Ancient Gods all crave god-children, yet none wish for another Ancient God to obtain a god-child.

To sabotage one another, to drag each other down, even to the point of killing a god-child who has already taken flesh and descended—this is easy enough to fathom.

"Then... it all makes sense."

Lann laid down Simon’s now motionless corpse, rose from his half-kneeling posture, and murmured under his breath.

The Old Hunters had said that the mighty Hunters led by Gremman and Ludwig had already "completed the hunt."

This was the Hunters’ nightmare, reflecting the process by which those Hunters committed original sin.

Which meant... the god-child had indeed been killed in this slaughter of the fishing hamlet.

An orphan left by an Ancient God slain—of course that was enough to shape the deepest of nightmares.

"And since the nightmare originates from that murdered orphan, then the most crucial thing within the nightmare is... Sir!"

Mentos swiftly finished sorting through the logic and immediately reported to the main self.

"Mm, indeed." Lann looked at Simon’s corpse and nodded lightly. "The key is that god-child’s body."

The Demon Hunter moved at once, heading toward the place outside the fishing hamlet where Maria had agreed to meet him.

Now, the clues in Lann’s hands and the fruits of Simon’s exploration had already linked into a single line.

The Ashen-Blood disease currently raging in Old Yan’an originated from the fishing hamlet, and appeared to be a kind of oceanic parasitic illness.

The Healing Church’s spies had come to this fishing hamlet; they carried back the source of the Ashen-Blood, and also learned of the Kos Orphan’s existence.

Which of these had been their initial purpose in coming here was now of no importance.

What mattered was that they had begun, in Yan’an, to spread plague in order to study the Ashen-Blood and the knowledge hidden within the disease.

And now they had gathered Hunters to slaughter the entire fishing hamlet, to hunt down the Kos Orphan, all for the sake of the god-child’s knowledge of the Great Ones.

There was no time left!

Both Lann’s instincts and Mentos’s calculations showed this with stark clarity!

The Demon Hunter’s steps, rarely, took on an urgency.

He ran all the way out of the fishing hamlet, and at the place agreed upon with Maria he saw Adeline, peering nervously out from within the carriage, and the white-haired Female Hunter, her Long Blade "Leaf Fall" already stained with blood, standing guard by the carriage door.

It seemed the Old Hunter originally entrusted with watching the carriage and looking after Adeline had already been "dealt with" by her.

"Your face looks worse than mine."

Lann spoke as he walked closer to the Female Hunter, who was leaning with her weapon against the carriage, looking crisp and valiant.

"So it seems you’ve already asked."

Beneath the tricorn hat adorned with swan feathers, Maria’s complexion was indeed ghastly.

And seeing Lann return, Adeline let out a sigh of relief and hurriedly opened the carriage door.

"Maria just now took out a blood vial for me to look at. I said it was very ordinary, but also a perfectly standard blood vial. After that she became like this, and wouldn’t tell me what had happened."

When it comes to blood alone, few in the Healing Church can claim a deeper understanding than the Blood Saintess.

After all, the so-called ’Holy Blood’ of the Healing Church is drawn from the bodies of those who have been trained for that purpose.

"Did I... say something wrong?"

Adeline nervously sought confirmation from Lann.

"No, nothing." Before Lann could answer, Maria, her hat brim pressed low, said coolly, "It’s just... my own problem."

Lann saw Maria’s lips bite under the brim of her hat, but in the end she still said nothing to Adeline, turned, stepped onto the carriage footboard, and entered the compartment.

The mountain roads of Yan’an at night were harder to travel, and all the more deep and grim.

But the horses of Cainhurst seemed to feel nothing at all; they simply ran in silence.

Retracing the road back to Yan’an.

But that was only about three quarters of the way along this road.

Inside the carriage, where the silence of Maria and Lann made the air feel heavy, Adeline stared blankly out through the glass window.

Her hesitant, incredulous voice shattered the oppressive stillness.

"What... is that?!"

Just then, the carriage crested another densely vegetated slope, and a moon so enormous it could not be natural hung high in the sky.

The night, which should have been pitch-black, was instead bleeding a red glow up from the horizon, its light reflected in the carriage windows.

Maria and Lann both had their gazes drawn by Adeline’s startled cry.

The Female Hunter stared dumbly toward the distant red light, while the Demon Hunter narrowed his eyes slightly.

The hot air surging upward made Yan’an’s tall, razor-sharp Gothic spires look as if they were submerged in rippling water, swaying and twisting!

That was the direction of Yan’an, and that red glow rising from the line of the earth... was fire!

A sky-devouring blaze!

-----------------

At dusk, as night was nearing, the Yan Nan People were startled to discover that from the grand procession of Hunters that had departed that morning, a single carriage had already returned.

Even after entering the city proper, that carriage showed not the slightest intention of slowing.

These horses were no match for the Blood Nobility steeds of Cainhurst; their mouths were already foaming, and the ragged sounds of their breathing carried the rasp of tortured lungs.

But the Hunter driving the team still showed absolutely no intention of easing the pace.

"Hyah!"

After bursting into the city and onto the smooth cobbled roads, the Hunter sitting on the box actually goaded the horses to even greater speed.

The carriage wheels rolled forward over Yan’an’s stone-brick streets with a grinding thunder.

More than a few unlucky Yan Nan People had to throw themselves forward in a clumsy dive just to barely avoid being run down.

Yet the Yan Nan People voiced little complaint; they only snatched up their belongings in a panic and hurried home. After all, darkness was about to fall.

Only in the gaps between their motions did some spiteful, venomous words still habitually slip from their mouths.

"So many went out, and only this one comes back? Running for their lives, I’d wager!"

"Best if that lot of Old Hunters never return... it’s the retribution for their indulgence in blood, their gluttonous hunting!"

The Yan Nan People themselves knew full well who those bestial patients the Hunters slew had once been.

They had all been locals who were still normal the day before, locals just like them.

So the natives of Yan’an rarely became Hunters, and held no fondness for Hunters at all.

However, these muttered words from street-side commoners, no matter how vicious, how petty, held no weight, no right to be taken seriously.

The carriage tore along Yan’an’s tangled, winding streets, racing straight toward the higher slopes of the mountain where Church Town stood.

Inside the carriage, the oil lamp hanging from the inner wall swayed with the jolting of the vehicle, its flame flickering.

Ludwig was holding a handkerchief, wiping at his cheeks, his eyes so vacant he seemed on the verge of a daze.

And strangely, though his face was already scrubbed utterly clean, he kept wiping it over and over, to the point of seeming almost deranged.

For the man famed for his Swordsmanship, the Church’s First Hunter, the hand that should have been most steady trembled even in this simple act of wiping his face.

Gremman sat opposite him, the brim of his cylindrical top hat pressed very low; his disordered hair did not stir, like an old man pretending to nap with his hat pulled over his face.

Yet whenever the third man in the carriage—a gloomy-looking figure in a Byron Vis Scholar’s robe—drifted into a trance and tried to reach toward the object placed between them...

The barrel of the pistol resting at Gremman’s hand would lift just a fraction, its muzzle vaguely aligning with the scholar’s forehead.

"Easy. Patience, Miklás."

The First Hunter’s aged voice came soft and slow, like the advice of an old friend.

"It isn’t time yet. Not yet."

The shadowy man in scholar’s garb came back to himself, gave a grin that never reached his flesh, and pulled his hand back.

Between the three of them lay a large wrapped bundle.

The waterproof material would not allow a single drop of liquid from within to seep out.

Judging by the outline, it looked vaguely like a cadaverously thin human form curled in on itself.

But comparing it to the proportions of the three people beside it, the height of that shriveled human shape... was utterly unnatural.

Outside the carriage, the Old Hunter on the box snapped the whip again.

The carriage lunged urgently out beyond Yan’an’s city limits, then thundered up the mountain road into Church Town, whose construction had not yet spread very far.

Before the Healing Church Cathedral, the carriage rattled to a halt.

And Lawrence, the archbishop wrapped in his long robe, had long since been waiting at the foot of the Great Cathedral steps.

As soon as the door opened he hurried forward, seized Gremman’s hand as the latter emerged, his tone feverishly anxious.

"Did we succeed?"

Gremman did not answer at once. He only lowered his head and glanced at the place where Lawrence gripped his hand.

The gesture seemed to return a sliver of reason to the archbishop.

He recoiled as if shocked, snatching his hand back into the sleeve of his robe and darting a look to either side.

Only after he had completed this motion did Gremman calmly brush the soot from his singed sleeve and step aside from the doorway.

He let Lawrence see the great sack inside, and let those within the carriage see Lawrence.

"Yes. We succeeded."

Only then did Gremman finally respond.