Arcanist In Another World-Chapter 67: Belgrave

“There’s a difference between a Hollow and a Wailborn,” Garran said, one hand dangling from the window, face turned toward the gentle breeze that rustled the leaves of the trees lining the road. “The former lacks Authority and is mostly an empty shell. Just the foul air of the Broken Lands is enough to make a Hollow out of a corpse so long as the heart remains. A Wailborn, though, is different. It’s alive.”

Valens nodded absently at the words, glancing at Selin who sat spellbound by Celme with eyes glinting as she listened to the Berserker’s tales. They were mostly about D-Tier Rifts that housed the creatures of the Broken Lands, which could’ve piqued Valens’s interest had it not been for their recent visit to that particular Cursed Rift.

As expected, coming across a Remnant Terror is not a common experience.

But it seemed even the mention of a few weak creatures had made a story good enough to keep a Nursemaid invested for so long. Valens appreciated the effort, as anything that would keep Selin’s mind away from their sessions helped with the resulting backlash of her memories.

It’s been tough on her. We did what, a dozen sessions in just over a week?

Thankfully, not all of her memories were about that mysterious younger brother who burned their parents. No, they were mostly about the religious nursery she was brought to after her brother went missing. She spent nearly ten years with the nuns and the nursemaids of the church there, a happy little child who got way too excited whenever they gave her sweets, which was contrary to what anyone would expect from the terrible loss of her family.

She buried everything about her brother and her family deep in her mind, and grew to be a reliable young woman recruited by Countess Margaret right after she’d picked her Nursemaid class. The moment she’d heard she would be working for a noble family was the happiest time of her life.

But no matter what I did, I couldn’t pry into the memories about her time in the Countess’s mansion.

“That’s why we use Sacred Artifacts like the Wraithspike in those cases.” Garran opened the palm of his hand and caught a leaf as the carriage lumbered on, turning with an eyebrow arched to Valens. “Hey, are you listening? I’m spilling classified information here. At least act like you’re interested.”

“I am.” Valens came to himself the second he felt the man’s gaze on him. “But you’ve already told me I’ll get a comprehensive course in the capital from a respectable — What was the name? Percival? The intelligence guy you’ve mentioned who works for the Golden Ward.”

“Yeah, but those people only deal with information while we deal with the true dark work.” Garran lifted his chin with the expression of a man who thought paperwork was beneath his skills. “Write the details all you want. Work up a sketch with the lines aligned and perfectly smooth. Paint it for good measure. You know, the shading and all that, but still it wouldn’t reflect the true side of it. Nine Hells, you should know better. You’ve seen it for yourself.”

Valens briefly remembered the moment he decided to place a hand on the Weeping Horror’s sprawling form. He remembered the sticky feeling of it, of the tendrils stretching from all around, of the oily, crooked version of himself reflected upon that giant singular eye, of the dread prickling insidiously through his skin.

Still gives me the chills.

“You’re right,” he admitted.

“Anyway,” Garran went on now that he had Valens’s attention on him. “That’s why there are only two ways to deal with a Wailborn. Either you’d catch it before it’s too late and have it delivered to the hands of an expert Hexmender, or you’d use a Sacred Artifact and a generous amount of flames to be rid of it.”

“Or you can scorch the shadow out of it, then heal the person just right on time,” Captain Edric said from the side. “That works too, eh?”

“I’d rather not try that ever again,” Valens frowned.

“Trouble is,” Garran seemed mildly bothered that the captain had intervened with his speech, but shrugged it off as if he decided it wouldn’t be wise of him to go against him. “While we catch dozens of Wailborns in Belgrave every year, we don’t have enough Hexmenders to go over them one by one.”

“So you kill them?” Valens asked.

“More or less,” Garran nodded as though it was perfectly normal. “Though not before Lenora and her team get their fill.”

“And how many could they save from the dozens you’ve mentioned?”

“I’d say a quarter of them.”

That’s… a lot of people.

“And this is with us tearing through those cults every year,” Garran said. “We had no other choice but to get good at catching those fools in preparation before they attempt something stupid. We’ve even built a whole company for it, have we not, Captain?”

“The company…” Captain Edric didn’t share the obvious pride glinting in Garran’s eyes as he lowered his head. “Sometimes I forget we have that damned thing.”

“What company?” Valens asked. “Don’t tell me the honest, religious men of the mighty Sun’s Church are out to exploit their skills to earn some quick money?”

“It’s honest business, alright,” Garran chuckled. “Pays good, too, I have to admit, if you can find the right customers, but we use it mostly to catch a whiff of little things happening around the city. There’s something refreshing about acting as the detective going about the cases.”

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“You…” Valens’s eyes widened. “You mean you knock on one door to the other while dressed in shining golden plates? Why?”

“You’ll see,” Garran banged a fist on his chest piece and grinned at him. “And we don’t go strolling about the city dressed in plates. We only do that when we’re about to enter a Rift and take a little ride across the countryside. No, we dress like distinguished gentlemen in the capital because discretion is important when you have thousands of people on the other side of the stick.”

Valens pictured for a moment a scene in which Garran and the captain wore silken suits topped with leather vests, with frock coats over them, and a pair of black, shining boots with quality straps. There would be hats, of course, perhaps a big one for Garran, but not too big since even though he liked showing off, he did that only after getting to know someone. The captain… Well, Valens suspected that if there was ever a hat made for a man of his caliber, then it would be a—

I don’t know. I can’t imagine a hat that would fit the captain. I mean, the helmet just works, since it gives him a holy air, but a hat? No. But this guy… Oh, you’d have a pointy one, wouldn’t you? Like that giant nose poking out from your face like a stick.

He got an equally disgusted look from Mas, which further proved his assumptions. For all he knew, Mas liked to be the thorn stabbed at whatever that was good, and a thorn he would remain until the day he died.

Or a stick. It’d hardly make a difference.

Then, almost instinctively, Valens looked at Celme and pictured her in a fashionable dress. That image shattered before he could even begin to draw a part of it in his mind.

A Berserker and a group of Templars. It feels like I’m going to a giant party where people carved out of their everyday chaos try to act as a normal, functioning society while there’s a world of twisted monsters breathing just outside.

But he did see a flash of that normal in Brackley with the Miners and the Priests, a quite gentle-looking Innkeeper and a helplessly hateable company agent whose name was something something Richards.

People seek normal when the situation is anything but. So then, it seems only inevitable that they would establish their own normal in their own ways. What will it be like, I wonder.

Good thing he wouldn’t be left alone with his own musings for long, as they were about to arrive at this so-called trade center of Haven’s Reach, the giant capital of the Melton Kingdom, the famous Belgrave.

…..

There were no walls. That was the first thing Valens noticed when the carriage creaked a loud way across the path, into a side road with rows of horse-drawn carriages lined after one another. There were no walls around the capital or any sort of protection to be used against...

A horde of Hollows? A group of Shriekers? An army of Skeletons? A Necromancer who has a bone to pick with his kind? A giant eye monster out for some fresh air?

Those were all things to be protected from, to Valens’s thinking, if he’d been of the folk who lived in Belgrave. But as they creaked further into the city, the lack of protection only got worse, and buildings rose from around them without a regard for which shadows might be out on this particular morning to take a chance at the pitiful humans.

I’m not sure if even the shadows could see through this fog, though.

A heavy carpet of darkish fog welcomed them inside the city. It either patted itself off the shoulders of the fast-walking men who seemed to be in haste to reach their destinations, got sucked in and coughed out by a number of older men, or, as most people did, was regarded as an element of everyday life and ignored as the public went about with their ways.

Belgrave reeked a similar stench to that of the Brackley mines, which prompted the assumption in Valens’s mind that this could result from manastones being burnt as fuel in this city. And indeed, the paved road of the carriages was lined with pole lights that sucked in the mana of the stones to supply the public with their modest and painfully insufficient lights.

With the fog being this thick, I daresay no one can blame those poor poles.

Valens was almost pained to see they used bricks and wood here for the buildings, which further added to the heavy atmosphere of the city and made it a whole lot more dreary than it had every right to be. Even he, as a stranger who was visiting the capital for the first time, knew from the captain that it always rained in Melton, and to him, that should’ve been a sign for the Magi responsible for the construction, or at least the paintwork.

Wait a second. They have Miners here who do the mining work. Then, by logic, they should have what, Builders, for the construction work? Workmen? Laborers?

Given the right construction plan, an Earth Magi could finish a three-story building in about two weeks. An Arch Earth Magus could do that job in half the time, with half the effort, though those were rare and almost always at work doing a complex bridge design or a towering building whose floors numbered in the high tens.

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I can’t even imagine how many people and how many days it would take for manual labor to complete a single building.

Granted, the mastermind behind the System, who Valens suspected was the First of the Magi equivalent of this world, wouldn’t be cruel enough to deprive those people of the skills that would lessen the burden of such an undertaking.

But how can you learn how to build a whole city? As in, what sort of skill would you get that would help with the work? Something like Heavy Lifting? Or, I don’t know, Sleek Scaffolding?

“See that?” Garran pointed a finger out the window toward a fancy-looking tower that jutted out from between the regular, three- or four-story brick buildings around it. “That’s the Tower of Resni of the Mage Guild. You should pay a visit when we’re done with the Bishop.”

“If we can be done with the Bishop, you’re saying,” Valens said, glancing at Mas, who sat grumbling all alone to the side. “I seem to remember we have yet to deal with certain complications.”

“Don’t worry,” Captain Edric said. “We’ll get a few Wailborn for you to display your abilities and the support of a certain woman whose name is enough to shake the bishop in that fancy cassock of his.”

“I don’t mind taking the day off,” Garran said sourly as if he’d chewed on a nasty slab of meat and was now suffering from the taste of it. “Blessed Father knows I hate that woman with passion.”

“Everybody does,” the captain said. “But respect has little to do with hatred. You respect her because of all the Hexmenders we got, she’s the only one with a fair chance of passing her Third Trial. That has never happened before.”

“Never?” Valens asked.

“Never,” the captain nodded gravely. “We have enough bodies in the Cathedral of those who tried before and failed.”

“Wait,” Valens scowled. “Why would you keep the bodies if they have failed to pass their Third Trials and died? You could’ve at least buried them in a good cemetery.”

“It’s because of the Sacred Artifacts—“

“That’s enough,” the captain fixed Garran with a stare, then turned and peered off out into the brick monotony of Belgrave. “You’ll eventually learn. There’s no need to rush.”

No need to rush.

Valens took the message and leaned into the seat. He’d learned by now that while Captain Edric had an easygoing side about him, he also had one that was more controlled than most, and when that side spoke, it was best to listen.

I wonder which side I will get to see before the bishop.

He shook his head. While he appreciated the gesture of the Templars inviting him to become a part-time member of their group and even got surprised when he learned that the captain felt so strongly about the possibility of his skills becoming a valuable asset to the Church, his true purpose hadn’t changed.

He wasn’t interested in serving a religion that literally called itself the Order of the Sun. No, he came here for his trial and to see what the Melton Kingdom had to offer.

………