Ch.265Request Log #021 – The Struggle for the Mountain Peak (6)

“Yes, this is Husband. I believe I’ve recovered everything, sir. Since you knew these items had dangerous spells on them, I assume you have an inventory list somewhere.”

I didn’t mention dealing with the thieves. The client’s goal was to recover those jewels before they caused problems, and making sure the warlocks met their appropriate fate was my job.

The old warlock-soldier responded as if he couldn’t rationally comprehend what I was saying. But his answer was affirmative. Though his reason might shake its head in disbelief, his heart seemed to want to believe.

“There’s no way you found everything in half a day… But still, let me see how much you’ve recovered. Even with someone like you, I’m uncomfortable leaving these in a non-specialist’s hands. Can you come now?”

“That won’t be difficult. They’re all contained in a jewelry box, so there’s no danger. I’ll head over right away.”

I only report to clients about their business. The fact that I no longer get angry when facing dwarf warlock-soldiers but still hate magic and warlocks was one of my contradictions.

But I didn’t want to resolve it. It was hatred that persisted even as I swallowed my own past. Magic is forbidden. This is what happens to warlocks. Yes, that’s how it had to be.

After hanging up, I took the jewelry box and headed to the client’s address. While I’d learned the address during surveillance, today we would act like people who trusted each other, and I’d follow the directions on the note.

It wasn’t an ideal place for theft. No house is built with consideration for potential thieves, but the dwarves’ characteristic fortress-like building with thick walls kept thieves out quite effectively.

I was seeing it from the opposite direction compared to last time. Not looking down from the sixth floor of the Heartland Hotel, but standing in front of the house door. I knocked twice. Footsteps approached quickly.

The door opened. I handed the jewelry box to the former dwarf warlock-soldier who looked up at me anxiously. He chuckled at its weight.

“Even now, will you still claim you’re not in league with those thieves? No, no… if you had been working with them, your work wouldn’t have been this crude. Did blood rain down?”

“Even fence dealers don’t value stolen goods more than their lives, sir. When I showed them the magic in the jewels, they all handed them over willingly. Better to bleed from your palm than to die. And this… is a jewel where the spell hasn’t been broken yet.”

I handed him a velvet pouch containing about half a handful of sapphires extracted from necklaces. He kneaded the pouch once and sighed.

“Only the strongest one remains. Come in for now. I’d like to check against the inventory first.”

I entered the house and closed the door. The workshop, converted from what was originally a bathroom space beyond the bedroom, was cramped but had everything necessary.

The former warlock-soldier pulled out a filing cabinet and tossed me a folder. I caught it. It contained information about the jewels. Most were written in English, so reading wasn’t difficult. Most were items from the Great War.

After flipping through the list for a quick review, I compared the jewels he had scattered on the small metal table with those on the list. Since they had been removed from their original jewelry settings, they looked quite different from the photos in the folder, but I could identify most of them by the size and cut of the stones.

The list showed 27 pieces of jewelry and 51 jewels. I had brought thirty-nine jewels. Adding the half-handful of sapphires from the necklace made the count perfect. He sighed again.

“Would it be rude if I said I somewhat understand why the Johnnies were so enthusiastic about the Argonne Invincibles during the Great War?”

He was looking at the Argonne Invincibles, not the Doppel. It was a term I never imagined hearing from dwarves, and one I hardly expected.

Of course, it wasn’t pleasant. Whether Invincible or Doppel, they’re both slurs to us. It’s like asking if we killed people to gain power. But at least this one was a slur filled with goodwill.

“It would be rude if you’re seeing a detective as something other than a detective, sir. I thought we had settled all that talk when I took the job.”

About three seconds of silence passed. When silence falls, time seems to move a bit slower. He took a step back.

“This old man spoke nonsense out of joy. I’ll keep quiet. But I’d like you to watch the process of breaking the spell with me. For some reason… I can’t explain why, but I feel like I should show you.”

Since it was something I wanted to see anyway, I nodded. If the reporter were following me now, I would have told her to grab her camera immediately. He raised a ritual dagger with his right hand.

I suppressed the feeling of my fingers twitching involuntarily. He rolled up his scarred left forearm and, instead of cutting himself, ran the flat side of the dagger along his arm.

Even without the scent of ozone, a bluish-white light flickered from his scars. The patterns once engraved there glowed and then faded.

He spoke just like Professor Albert. Comparing the two, with apologies to Professor Albert, somehow he sounded that way now.

“The gods always make rules. We call them laws. Wotan has his rules too. The rule that only warriors who die in battle can be reborn as his warriors. This spell imitates that power, but it bypasses that rule. When the spell touches someone, it turns them into a monster. What we’re about to do is erase that loophole.”

Magic was crude. It was the inevitable result of humans trying to imitate the perfect rights of gods, each possessing their own form of perfection, albeit to varying degrees.

That’s why magic had numerous safeguards built in. Offering sacrifices was part of those safeguards. They lowered the concept to the level of transactions that humans could understand, trying somehow to produce consistent results.

For connection rituals, time was the safeguard. The saying that it takes half a day with a chicken or a week with a lamb was essentially a safeguard. We seemed to have broken that safeguard.

He tried to gather all the light remaining in his body into his scar-covered left hand while casting the spell. The scars were diverse, from engraved spell patterns to simple marks from blood sacrifices.

Those wounds glowed with Wotan’s blue-green light. The traces of magic, or rather the traces of using a god’s power, began to surge raw without the spell’s safeguards. His thick, strong dwarf arm trembled like an aspen.

He too seemed to have difficulty maintaining his composure, shuddering. His head would suddenly jerk up, or he would make animal-like growling sounds… behaving as if in a hallucinatory state.

But he didn’t forget his purpose. He extended his hand, irregularly pulsing with blue-green light, toward the sapphires placed on the metal table. While the Hexenbane inscribed with the God-President’s words could cut through magic as if it were nothing, borrowing the weaker and more capricious power of a god required this much effort.

He began muttering in a mix of German and English. He seemed to be trying to speak English, but his native language burst out spasmodically. It was understandable enough.

“If we, if we really were stabbed in the back, if a knife had been thrust into our backs while fighting, that alone would have opened the gates of Valhalla… We are still standing on our two feet, Wotan… Either we weren’t stabbed, or we didn’t fight like warriors. That must be it… So, help me erase one unwarriorlike method.”

His voice was filled with regret. But he didn’t seem certain whether he could truly regret it. We were terribly alike. All the Great War left behind were people who were carbon copies of each other.

With the feeling of witnessing a poet’s success again, I watched his trembling arm grasp the jewels in one hand. I watched him try to counter the spell in the jewels with what magical power remained in him.

Though there was still no scent of ozone, wind began to leak from his hand holding the jewels. A gale strong enough to make hair flutter erupted and began to swirl.

He still seemed to be trying to contain the spell in his hand and wash it away, but the fierce wind was strong enough to tear through the dwarf’s thick skin and cause wounds.

Seeing the cuts on his hand bleeding, he scattered the jewels he had been holding onto the metal table.

But the reaction was sluggish. Originally, these jewels contained spells strong enough to create bone-deep monsters with just a drop or two of blood, but even soaked with his blood, they only made the droplets twitch bizarrely.

The curse wasn’t completely purified. At best, it was half done. But his idea of trying to purify the spell with the power of the same god had worked halfway. For a result from so few attempts, it was impressive.

However, those who were doing well always tended to worry. As he wrapped bandages around his wounded hand, he sighed deeply.

“I don’t know why. It’s like washing away dirt with water, or scraping away soot by burning it again… but this is the first time I’ve weakened it this much.”

“Are you going to act like that to someone seeing magic weakening for the first time? If it were me, I’d invest just based on seeing this. And the reason is simple, isn’t it? Even that cleansing is imperfect because it’s still a human borrowing a god’s power. Isn’t that right?”

He made a puzzled expression for a moment as if this was something he hadn’t considered, then nodded a few times. Each nod became more vigorous.

“In the end, erasing magic with magic… Was the answer that simple? I thought I was borrowing the complete power of a god to wash away the imperfect remnants of magic, but then… then that explains it!”

In this respect, my thorough hatred for the God-President seemed to have helped. People like us who try to be devout only end up like the Rat-Catcher. We end up dividing things into clean and dirty.

Devotion made one believe in perfection. In the world, only the God-President was complete, yet even he suffered from a lack of imperfection. The crudely borrowed power of gods was even worse.

The power he borrowed wasn’t completely pure either. The former warlock-soldier’s face showed a glimmer of hope after finding a clean answer.

Unfortunately, what I gained wasn’t as much as what he gained. It was almost nothing.

All I learned was the principle of how Hexenbane cuts through magic. Just a reminder that the poet’s death had meaning—that magic could be washed away with the power of the same god. Another day of repetition.

I pushed the boulder with all my might. It reached the mountaintop. I watched it roll down helplessly from the peak. I should have felt empty, but I didn’t. At least I was walking in place vigorously.

What I gained was a little reassurance, a little sense of stability. That’s probably all. The fact that I wasn’t the only one struggling because of magic seemed somewhat comforting.

When I killed the dwarves who were spreading monsters in New York to find their comrades, I only admitted at the time of killing Sol Invictus that I had completely destroyed a sandcastle with my own hands. And only now had I gathered the sand again.

Perhaps this time I could build something more solid. Maybe I could pave a way out of magic. Maybe I could seriously consider the reporter’s words.

It didn’t matter. It was already far too late to beg the God-President for absolution, but still too early to give up. In the end, there was still just one thing to do. Just repeating the act of living one more day.

I tried to dissuade the reporter once, but she decided what to say. I didn’t save her. She poured out her true feelings while drunk, but it was I who decided to love this repetition. She didn’t save me. The only lives we could salvage were our own. There were no exceptions.

While I was lost in these thoughts, the dwarf was also immersed in his own reflections. We came to our senses at almost the same time. He extended his hand first.

For reasons I couldn’t explain, I shook it. Somehow it felt like the right thing to do. It felt like an act that could only be shared by people who had witnessed this coincidental yet inevitable moment together.

He offered me his ritual dagger and the fee. It was $20 for exactly one day’s employment at $100. I counted the number of bullets I’d fired today to calculate the additional fee he owed. He willingly paid the full amount. He was someone who understood very well what it meant to pay a detective.

That’s why I chuckled a bit. It was a fitting response for the two of us who felt uncomfortable yet deeply connected just by looking at each other.

“I’ve been smashing up pawnshops all day, and now I’m getting paid in goods like I’m at one.”

“So you can make idle jokes too, Argonnie? But seeing how much you know, you people also…”

I clicked my tongue twice. I briefly thought about smoothing things over again, but… it seemed like there was nothing I couldn’t say during our half-day friendship. We knew who we were.

“We’re the only monsters smart enough to know we’re monsters. So naturally we try to find a way out of that terrible state. That’s all there is to it.”

We both tried not to look at each other with expressions of pity. We knew that much. It was strange to share a feeling usually reserved for comrades with a third party, especially a dwarf warlock-soldier.

But he was older. When he tried to be a bit meddlesome, I rebuffed him. A line is a line. I felt to the bone every day that there were things others couldn’t do for you.

“Even so, if there’s anything I can help with…”

“Unless we’ve worked together on something like this, we don’t have much reason to trust a dwarf warlock-soldier. And besides, this is magic cast in another god’s name. As someone said, each god’s rules are different, so no matter how much progress you make, unless you serve the God-President, you can’t help us. It doesn’t matter, so don’t worry about it.”

My immediate refusal without a moment’s hesitation wouldn’t appear rude to him. This was just a half-day friendship. It would take longer than half a day to evaporate, though.