Gun of Ashes

The Weapon Master and the Black Angel slowly sank below the deck, dragged back by the lift into the hidden maintenance bay; the crew bustled about, while Lorenzo and Bola, the two combat personnel, instead found themselves idle.

The Morning Glow Advance was sailing away from the storm, and the storm was also receding from the ship; its trajectory had finally shifted, like a hunter on the sea, turning off in another direction to search for prey.

The pirates were swept along with it, together with shattered wreckage slowly drifting forward, or else sinking to the bottom of the sea.

The rain was gradually easing, thinning into a fine drizzle; countless delicate strands of rain fell softly, and it soothed everyone’s taut nerves to some extent.

”In the end, does God really exist or not?”

Lorenzo stood in the shadow of the structure, keeping out of the rain.

”What made you think of that?”

Bola sat down, leaning against the wall. He gulped air in great mouthfuls, greedily flooding his lungs with the fresh, icy cold, using it to quell that awful nausea.

Notar and Blue Jade had begun their work; the remaining matters no longer needed Lorenzo and Bola’s concern. The two of them only had to rest properly.

”I just ran into a pirate. The other pirates were scared witless, waiting quietly for death; only he was shouting something about Odin, and came at me swinging a hand axe.”

Zeus’s furious face flickered before his eyes, but what truly fixed him in Lorenzo’s memory was not the roaring wrath, but that final expression of despair. Death was clearly something so worthy of fear, yet when he realized he could not die by his own hand, a crushing despair seeped out from Zeus, so heavy that even death itself seemed, by comparison, like immense mercy to him.

”A heroic death—that sounds pretty stupid.”

Bola sighed. He found it hard to understand the Vikings’ way of thinking—no, to be precise, hard to understand their mythic faith.

Everyone feared the reckoning after death, yet only they yearned for death’s arrival, as if it would herald some kind of greatness.

”Indeed. But it’s precisely that sort of stupidity that kept him from shrinking back before despair...” Lorenzo seemed conflicted. ”I keep wondering, is ignorant faith right or wrong? It constrains our thinking, yet to some extent it really does hold us up.”

”Sounds complicated already. Things like that should be left to Scholars, not to us.”

Bola had no wish to discuss such profound matters. His mind was a mush; he just wanted to rest properly.

”What are you planning to do later?” Bola asked.

”Draw up a plan. We’ll have to stay at Ice Bay for a while; there are too many parts that need repairs. What about you?” Lorenzo looked at the chaos on the deck and frowned.

”I... I want to go back and get some sleep.”

Bola was utterly exhausted.

For him this truly was a dreadful beginning: first the nightmare, then this encounter battle. His head was splitting; all he wanted was a good sleep, to escape every trouble.

”I’m starting to hate the sea. The hull keeps swaying, you can’t even sleep in peace.”

”At least you don’t get seasick. When Heracles was with me, he nearly puked his stomach out on the ship.”

”That does sound pretty miserable.”

The two chatted in fits and starts, and in the end it dwindled into silence.

”Aren’t you going to make your plan?” Bola said.

”No rush. You don’t see scenery like this often; I want to look a bit longer.”

Lorenzo tilted his head back. The Morning Glow Advance had just crossed the boundary between gray and white, slipping free from the shroud of the storm.

”You just don’t want to see her, do you?”

Bola saw straight through Lorenzo’s lie. After knowing him this long, he’d more or less learned to read some of Lorenzo’s behavior.

”Something like that. I just told her this was an ordinary operation—that we’d finish handling trade with the Viking nations, then Selyu would return with the cargo ships, and we’d continue forward.”

Lorenzo glanced at the still-smoldering sea and said helplessly,

”But then we got blocked by these pirates out of nowhere, and the Armor of Original Sin was even deployed. There’s no way I can fool her now.”

”You don’t want to tell her about this?” Bola asked.

”What good would it do to tell her? It’d only add to her worries.” Lorenzo said.

”It does look like she really likes you.”

”Liking a Demon Hunter? That’s hardly a wise choice.” He shook his head. ”For all we know, we might die at the World’s End on this very voyage. And even if we don’t die there, we’ll die some other day on some battlefield.”

”Bola, you know this as well as I do: how many people in the Purification Mechanism get to live peacefully to retirement?”

”So that’s the reason?” Bola asked.

”What else? The world is about to be plunged into a brutal war. Even I, for all my carelessness, can’t possibly be untouched by that.” Lorenzo sighed. ”In a situation like this, what do you expect me to say to her? It feels like anything I say would be pure nonsense.”

”For all my sorry state, I do understand a few things. If there’s something you can’t accomplish, then don’t promise it. That feeling of expectation can crush a person. I’ve lived it—and you could even say I’m still living under others’ expectations now.”

The fall of the old Order, the last wishes of Lorenzo de’ Medici—too many tangled matters to count, and Lorenzo’s own life was a tangled mess along with them.

”But all of this does have a solution,” Bola was not quite so pessimistic.

”Wipe out all the Demons? I know. Isn’t that what we’re working toward already?”

At the mention of eradicating Demons, Lorenzo perked up, a cruel smile touching his face.

”Looks like both the Demon Hunting Order and the Nation-Builders have realized this. Some secrets are best known only to a few. If too many people know, yet are powerless to change anything, it just makes the world worse.”

”Like the Silencers and the Fences,” Bola replied.

”Right, something like that. Seen this way, we are indeed on the right path, drawing ever closer to the Truth.”

All the clues corresponded to each other, all calling out the same name.

”Seeing that Viking, I was reminded of my days in the Evangelical Church.” A look of gloom crossed Lorenzo’s face.

”I remembered my God, the God I once had.”

”Things from the Gospel?”

Bola asked. He was not a Believer, but he still had some understanding of such things.

Before Ingwig’s rise, it was the Evangelical Church that ruled the western world. On nearly every stretch of land they had their Believers, Ingwig included—but fortunately, Ingwig had not been too deeply subjugated by faith, and in the end it broke free.

”Yeah. ’Demons are spawned from God’s shadow’... I once thought that was just the Cardinals’ ravings. They couldn’t explain these things, so they wrapped them in the shell of faith.”

His gaze drifted north.

”But now, it might actually be true.”

Lorenzo sorted through his thoughts. After so much he had gone through, his understanding of the world had been overturned again and again.

”Because of Meme Contamination, those Saints who grasped the knowledge couldn’t pass it down intact; they could only distort its original meaning with Theology, so that under no contamination—or only slight contamination—we might still gain some understanding of the darkness of this world.”

”Maybe... If you took these words back to Florence, they might even shake the Evangelical Church’s rule,” Bola drawled. ”All mysteries are but the unknowns we’ve yet to learn. Every step reason takes forward, ignorance retreats a step.”

Lorenzo nodded in affirmation of Bola’s words.

”Once I might have been exhilarated by such conjectures, but now they seem commonplace. Everything is connected—Demons and Demon Hunters, Nation-Builders and the World’s End. An invisible net has ensnared each and every one of us.

Now we are sailing toward the source of it all, the end of the world.”

Lorenzo’s tone shifted. He looked down at Bola and said,

”There’s actually another reason I’m saying all this.”

”What is it?”

”If our conjecture is correct, we might see It at the World’s End.”

”Who is It?”

”The source of everything—our God.”