Chapter 275: To the North (3)

The ground heaved and kept heaving, not only the topsoil but the deep layers beneath, all the packed sediments of ages rolling forward at once. It rose like a brown tide and poured across the field.

A wave of earth swallowed the pack of monsters. Howls cut off mid-breath, and claws vanished. Heavy bodies thrashed and then did not. The stronger monsters held out for a heartbeat or two, then the pressure closed and soil filled mouths and lungs. They would not be seen on the surface again. They would die where they lay, and in time their flesh would rot and turn slick as oil in the dark.

Hundreds of monsters went under the earth.

“W-wait—”

“What are you?”

The two demons who had mocked the soldiers’ last stand felt their jest die in their throats. They took to the air in the same motion. One caught a clear look at the man at the wave’s crest and forgot how to laugh.

"Wait, you are—”

Ketal did not wait for the rest of the sentence. He put his foot down and crossed the space as if it were a small room. His fist closed, and Myst ran to it like iron filings to a lodestone. He struck once.

Bone shattered with a sound like a tree trunk splitting in winter. A hole the size of a shield opened in the demon’s chest.

“

Argh!

” The demon coughed blood and staggered, lifting an arm that no longer felt like his own.

Ketal caught the wrist, torqued the joint, and broke it clean. He drove the demon backward with three short blows, each set on a different target, and watched the body lose its shape.

The demon did not regenerate. He had been banished back to Hell. Ketal gave a nod, as if to say he now understood how to fully banish demons.

“So this tier needs a little beating to finish the job,” Ketal said, nodding to himself. “Noted.”

“You,” the second demon said, trying to stand firm and failing to keep his weight from shifting back. “You are that barbarian!”

“Now, it's your turn to shine,” Ketal said.

"As you like," the Holy Sword chimed.

Ketal drew the broken blade. The demon tried to step away and then decided he would never be quick enough. Ketal closed, shifted his grip, and brought the hilt down like a hammer. Again, the demon could not regenerate and was banished to Hell.

“One strike for this level,” Ketal said, satisfied. “Good.”

For nameless demons and the small fish with names, the broken Holy Sword was the cleaner tool. He filed the lesson away.

“Oh, oh, I can feel it,” the Holy Sword said, almost shivering in Ketal's hand. “The bite through filthy demon flesh, the clean answer of duty done. This is delightful!”

“You talk too much," Ketal said, though his mouth twitched.

Loud or not, the Holy Sword was a very useful tool. He moved, and everything in his reach broke. The monsters felt the truth of it as a ripple traveling through the crowd. They were creatures of appetite more than thought, yet even appetite recognized extinction when it wore a human face and walked toward them. The pack faltered, and the falter became panic. The monsters ran.

On the wall, men who had braced themselves to die stood there with their mouths open. They had steeled themselves for a clean end and had sworn to disappear with their kingdom. Now, a single man was taking the battlefield apart as if dismantling a poorly built stage set. The captain of the knights glanced at his prince.

“Your Highness,” he said, “do you know the man?”

He had seen Ketal speak to Pasika before the charge. Pasika blinked out of his daze, read the moment the way a prince should, and raised his voice.

“That is the Champion!” he shouted.

“S-sir?”

“The warrior whose name is sung across the continent,” Pasika cried. “He has slain countless demons and shattered every hand that reached for the Mortal Realm. He has come to help us!”

The knights and soldiers cheered on.

“Forward!” Pasika roared. “Follow the Champion!”

The remnants of the monsters swept aside by Ketal fell swiftly to the hands of his allies. In an instant, the tide of battle turned. Bones cracked and shattered. Pressing through the crashing waves of monsters, Ketal advanced, and at the end of his path, he came upon a vast, gaping hole.

“What is this?” he wondered.

A black, gelatinous opening lay in the ground, pulsing as if it breathed. He touched it with a fingertip and felt it spring back with an elastic recoil.

“It is a passage," the Holy Sword said. "A throat from Hell to here.”

Ketal’s eyes lit. “Then I can go through.”

A path to the demons’ world would have been convenient. The sword spoiled the idea at once.

“No. Only beings steeped in demonic energy can cross, such as demons and their beasts.”

“Ah,” Ketal said.

“You look disappointed. I must be misreading you,” the sword replied.

“What is the proper way to deal with it?” Ketal asked the sword.

“Think of it as a monster in the shape of a tunnel. It is sturdy, and it can bear a great deal of weight, yet what it can bear is not infinite.”

“I see.”

He set his foot and pushed down. The crack snaked away in silence, then spread like a net. It ran the whole length of the passage, reached the living core at the far end, and delivered the message. The passage burst like an overfilled bladder.

Everything halfway through became nothing at all. The rest tumbled and tore with the collapse. The field fell quiet in a way that had nothing to do with peace.

“That will do,” Ketal said. “Simpler than I feared.”

“It should not be that simple,” the sword muttered.

The passage was what bound Hell to the mortal world, and its importance made it immensely resilient. Even a carpet bombardment of spells would not be enough to break it.

“Ke—Ketal,” Pasika called, picking his way toward him through the bodies. Ketal glanced over.

“Can you handle the rest? Ketal asked Pasika.

“We can,” Pasika said.

The demons were gone. Most of the monsters were dead. The passage had been torn out like a bad tooth. The scraps that remained would not trouble the kingdom’s remaining soldiers.

“Then I leave it to you,” Ketal said. “I have far to go.”

“Wait.” Pasika stared at him, wrestling with a question that would not give him a clear shape. “Who are you?”

Pasika had guessed and postured for the sake of hearts, but he did not truly know. He had seen the Guildmaster bow and the Saintess of the Sun God incline her head and the Tower Master’s only disciple speak with respect. He had fled Elia’s holy land because he had felt small standing beside Ketal.

He had shouted that Ketal was the new Champion who came here to save them, but it was purely to rally his men whose knees had begun to wobble, not because he had believed it.

“When we first met, you asked me about a rumor,” Ketal said with a smile.

“I did.”

“You said there was someone who should already be called a Champion, someone who drove back demons and saved holy ground and stood with the elves.”

“Yes.”

“Who do you think that is?”

Pasika made a sound and swallowed it. He nodded once.

“You,” he said. “You are the one in the stories.”

Ketal’s smile warmed. “Then we will meet again, I hope. Friend.”

He kicked off the ground and went up like an arrow.

Pasika watched him go and laughed under his breath. “It was an honor to have fought alongside you, Ketal.”

By the time he turned, the battlefield had grown quiet. The captain came to his side and spoke softly.

“Who was that, Your Highness?”

“His name is Ketal,” Pasika said. He was still looking at the sky. “He is the new Champion of this continent.”

A murmur swelled behind them.

“Ketal,” a soldier shouted.

“Ketal! Thank you.”

“Thank you for saving us.”

The cry leaped the broken ground and went back through the gate, picked up by voices inside the city and carried street to street. For a long time, Peridoan’s capital shouted a single name.

***

“That was not what I expected,” the Holy Sword said later.

“What do you mean?” Ketal asked it.

“You are more willing to protect the Mortal Realm than I had imagined.”

Ketal had not only saved one city, but he had run north and found trouble leaning into the road again and again. He had seen a village pinned under a band of demons who wanted easy meat; he had found a caravan ripped open and spilling lives; he had come across border forts thin as reeds in a flood. In every case, he had moved first and asked questions after.

People cheered him and reached for his hands. They called him the savior of the Mortal Realm. The sword had not expected that rhythm. It had expected him to measure the situation and act based on his plan.

Ketal was an Anomaly. He did not belong to the Mortal Realm, but was a being from the Demon Realm. For that reason, the Holy Sword assumed he stood neutral between the Mortal Realm and Hell. Even if he showed goodwill toward mortals, no one believed he would take their side. Yet his actions made it plain: Ketal stood firmly with the world of men.

“I am not a villain,” Ketal said quietly.

He knew he was twisted. He had never pretended otherwise. That twist did not mean he had abandoned being human. He had left the White Snowfield as a person. Some could say he was broken, yet anchored to a set of truths. He believed he could keep the core of that self.

“Demons are my enemies,” he went on. “I have tested that assumption enough times. I have no reason to watch them soil the world I walk.”

“Good,” the sword said sunnily. “I would have it no other way. I am still a holy blade, and watching evil go by without lifting a finger would chafe. I chose the right owner.”

Ketal snorted and picked up his pace.

“By the way, the situation is ugly,” he said, changing the topic.

In a handful of days, he had watched nine or ten separate assaults. He had already reached towns where the help would have mattered yesterday and not today. Some could not be saved at all. The world was in danger, and there was no point denying it. Therefore, he pressed harder.

The land blurred. Wind combed his hair and tore his breath away. His steps struck like drums and left shallow craters in the hardpan. When trouble showed in the road, he dealt with it, and when there was nothing to strike, he ran.

People learned his name. They passed it along with the facts of what he had done, and the story picked up speed. By the time the air grew thin and the taste of cold began to make itself known, he heard it ahead of him as often as he heard it behind.

“Snow,” he said at last.

White had collected in the hollows and along the north faces of stones. The light had turned thin and clear, and a dry chill gathered along the skin.

He had reached the North.

***

This was the North, the land of the barbarians.

Ketal stood at the edge of a drift and did not move for a long breath. He had worked to bury a set of memories, and they woke, one after another, like people in a house where someone had thrown the shutters open.

“Why have we stopped?” the sword asked Ketal.

𝒻𝑟𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝑛𝘰𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝘤𝘰𝘮

“It is nothing,” he replied.

He shook his head and stepped forward. His foot went down and left a neat oval in the powder. The first village waited in a shallow basin. Smoke rose from a pair of chimneys and blew flat in the wind. He walked in through an open gap where a gate might have been in a different mind.

“This is the place,” he said.

This was where the missionary from Elia’s Church had been assigned.

There were no guards. No one watched the road. The houses had been built one at a time and laid where a hand fell, not where a plan put them. The streets were rutted so deeply that a freeze would turn them into traps. The air smelled wrong in a place this cold, too many animals with too little water to wash the proof away.

Barbarians moved through it all, big-shouldered and blunt-faced, wrapped in layers of fur that had not seen a proper brush in weeks.

Ketal had always looked out of place in cities. He carried the wrong height and the wrong breadth; his face did not fit the geometry of a cathedral, and his eyes set children on edge. It was like seeing a piece from another game set shoved into a puzzle that should not accept it.

However, in here, he blended with the crowd. He was a head taller than most and broader across the chest, and no one looked twice. He fit the palette and the proportions. It felt like stepping into a room where the chairs had been set for a party he had not wanted to attend.

The feeling disgusted him. He was not a barbarian. He had been born in the White Snowfield and had climbed out of it with bleeding hands. That did not make this his home.

“Let us find him,” he said.

“Yes,” the sword said, very politely.

It sensed his mood and chose to be quiet. Ketal walked the lanes and read faces and the lines of traffic. Before long, he came to a building that looked as if it had picked a fight with a giant and lost.

The walls were peppered with holes. A plank clung to the frame by a single bent nail and sawed back and forth when the wind changed direction. The emblem of the God of the Sword hung at a tilt above the door and groaned whenever the sign chain shifted. Without that emblem, Ketal would have mistaken it for an abandoned shed.

Somewhere in there, the missionary lived.

The Saint had called him gentle. He had said that others had clung to him and wept when he left the holy land for his work. Ketal wondered what kind of patience a man needed to keep that tone in a village like this.

He climbed the step and knocked. Inside, something crashed. The door flew inward and bounced against the wall. A man in a threadbare cleric’s robe stood there, beard ragged, eyes bloodshot to the edges. Swearing rolled to the door like a loose barrel.

“You flea-bitten, dog-blooded barbarians,” a voice bellowed. “How many times do I have to say it? Do not come during sleeping hours! Learn to listen for once in your lives! Please!”

“That seems like a misunderstanding,” Ketal said.

“Shut up and die!” the man shouted and swung his sword.

The blade flashed toward Ketal’s throat, a clean cut delivered by hands that had spent years learning to swing something heavier than a sermon. Ketal sighed, reached up, and caught the steel in his palm.