Every Morning, My Mirror Saves the World - Chapter 24

Chapter 24

As they passed through the enormous archway, Ruiyin looked up. Baroque reliefs wound along the top of the black structure, and in the center of the arch was the face of a female Dark Elf. Her eyes were tightly shut. Under the slanted morning light, half of that exquisite face was bright and half was shadowed, and for one fleeting instant it seemed to come alive, eerily captivating.

“Who is that?” Ruiyin asked.

The Black Knight was deftly tracing a magic circle on the wall. Without looking back, he answered, “The first priestess of the Dark Elves, Tio. Legend says she possessed the ability to communicate with the God of Darkness. But please rest assured. I killed her two hundred years ago. Other than you, I will answer no one’s summons.”

A low, heavy rumble sounded. Under the effect of the magic circle, the scenery inside the arch began to spin and twist. A moment later, all color fixed into shades of gray and black. A broad staircase winding downward appeared before the four of them. The Black Knight took a step back, bent halfway at the waist, and lightly extended his right hand forward in invitation.

Lars immediately rushed one step ahead and placed his right hand steadily into that waiting palm, while shooting Galahad, whose face had gone painfully stiff, a look that told him to hurry up and latch onto the Black Knight’s other hand. Lars held his head high, trying very hard to minimize the height difference, rolled his eyes upward in a look of disdain, and replied with great composure, “Then let us be off.”

A chicken in his left hand, a duck in his right, both of them six feet tall; the three of them looked exactly like a trio of total idiots heading home for the holidays.

“…So this so-called temple is your temple?” Ruiyin, practically radiating exasperation, walked around the three males and stepped onto the dark staircase ahead. “No wonder you’re so familiar with this place. But how did Vigia get here?”

“It used to be,” the Black Knight said. He swiftly shook off the two fools dragging down the group’s average intelligence and silently followed behind Ruiyin. “I am familiar with this place not because I have been here before, but because the magic of the Dark Race is largely similar. As for how that dragon came here, it is because its seal is here.”

“Seal?” Galahad could not help blurting out. “Wait! Wasn’t the God of Darkness’s seal inside Seres’s relic, that mirror?”

The Black Knight strode forward as if he had heard nothing.

Lars’s face darkened. “Even if Vigia is a dragon, it shouldn’t be able to enter and leave the territory of the Dark Elves so easily. If you’re so certain it’s here, are you deliberately leading us into a trap, or… was Vigia brought here by you from the very beginning?”

The Black Knight continued following behind Ruiyin as if he had seen and heard nothing, gently brushing a bit of dust from her shoulder as he walked.

Ruiyin stopped in her tracks. She turned around and frowned. “Explain.”

“Yes, my liege.” The Black Knight immediately dropped to one knee. He lowered his head, his voice deep and mellow as he spoke. “That dragon was sealed in an underground cavern by dark magic. But the seal itself was not located there. The one who sealed it back then should have been a powerful dark mage. He scattered the dragon’s seal across several corners of the continent. When the dragon draws near those seals, it can use them to gradually recover its strength. The territory of the Dark Race rejects any creature that possesses power, but this dragon is as harmless as a human infant, which is why it was able to arrive here without difficulty. Therefore, my liege, you need not doubt your own strength in the slightest.”

Lars and Galahad: “…”

To hell with this blatant favoritism! How did that woman get the whole cause and effect plus a friendly comfort package with just two words? Why?!

“Good.” Ruiyin nodded in satisfaction. After thinking for a moment, she added, “But from now on, you must answer other people’s questions too, not just mine.”

“…Yes, my liege.” His voice instantly dropped an octave, and it was packed with reluctance and twisted resentment.

And so Ruiyin, believing she had perfectly (?) reconciled the conflict among her teammates, turned around in satisfaction and continued down the stairs, not noticing the two people behind her silently turning to ash…

“I hate him,” Galahad muttered under his breath, clenching his fists and grinding his teeth. “He is the first… second person in the world who has ever dared humiliate me like this. I am going to kill him. What do you say, Lars? Want to help?”
“No.”

“Huh? You actually don’t hate him?” Galahad whipped around in shock when he failed to get the answer he expected, only to nearly wet himself the instant he saw the person beside him.

In the darkness, the Little Knight’s beautiful emerald-green eyes shone with startling brightness, yet they seemed veiled in a hazy red glow, wide and bloodshot with fury. And yet he was smiling. One hand slowly, unconsciously rubbed along the edge of his sword as he lifted his head and stared at the Black Knight’s back with that eerie gaze.

“I’ll kill him with my own hands. Piece by piece, inch by inch… Mm, what do you think about feeding his corpse to magical beasts? Or maybe, like those Dark Elves, I could cut off his head and hang it upside down from a tree~”

…He actually put a little flourish at the end of that sentence. Help.

Galahad was almost scared senseless by the clearly broken boy. One hand braced against the wall, he barely managed to keep his legs under him and tried to go downstairs to find the only normal person here, Ruiyin, for help. Just then, the Black Knight, who had been silent up ahead the entire time, turned around. His helmet showed no face at all, yet Galahad distinctly sensed the contemptuous smile behind the mask.

“Oh? You want to kill me? If you have the ability, I would be very pleased.”

Galahad’s knees gave out, and he went tumbling down the stairs with a series of clattering thuds.

At the bottom of the staircase, what appeared before them was a vast hall. The vaulted ceiling rose more than twenty meters high, making it impossible to feel as if they were underground. Every pillar was decorated with magic crystals that gave off a faint glow. Elves were a race that naturally worshiped beauty. This should have been the heart of the temple. Two rows of warrior statues of the Dark Elves stood on either side like guards, and at the end of the path they flanked stood the seated statue of the god they worshiped.

In a temple of the Dark Elves, the one enshrined would naturally be the God of Darkness. But occasionally, there were exceptions.

“Hey, Mordova,” Ruiyin said solemnly to the person behind her. “Your face… looks like it shattered.”

A cold wind blew appropriately across the stone fragments scattered all over the floor, along with the Black Knight’s utterly unmoving dignity…

“No. It is not that the statue was destroyed. It is that they no longer have the right to continue worshiping the God of Darkness,” the Black Knight said.

“Oh, I think I remember now.” Galahad struck his fist against his palm in sudden realization. “Lars said that after the war, the Dark Elves lost their god’s favor, and that’s why they were forced to move into the underground world. So you really are that petty. You’d rather smash your own face than let them off unpunished.”

As he spoke, he shot the Black Knight a sidelong look that clearly said, Come on, buddy, with a heart that small, are you even a man?

“That was already a mercy to them,” the Black Knight said coldly. “For insects who wished to defect to the light, allowing them to linger on underground at all… I am truly astonished by the executioner’s kindness at the time.”

“Defect to the light?” Ruiyin asked, confused.

“It happened during the last war. Nearly every race across the four continents was dragged into it. At a critical moment in the war, the Dark Elves, who had suffered devastating casualties, chose to temporarily retreat. That became one of the reasons the God of Darkness was defeated. As a result, after the war, they also lost their god’s favor.”

The sudden voice startled all of them. Ruiyin spun around and saw Lars walking out of the shadows behind them.

“Huh, Lars, where did you go just now?” Ruiyin asked curiously. “And… what happened to your face?”

Lars kept his face taut. “Nothing.”

Ruiyin stared at him. His dark circles made him look like a panda, while his cheek looked like a half-ripe tomato with the skin scraped off. The guy was practically a failed plant-animal hybrid come to life. He held a sword in one hand, his expression still a little gloomy. When he noticed Ruiyin’s gaze, he unnaturally edged farther back into the shadows.

Galahad drifted over at just the right time and explained in a faint, ghostly voice, “Obviously, he got beaten up…”

“I did not!” the Little Knight shouted furiously, clenching his fists as he jumped up. “I hit him too!”

The Black Knight turned his head over with perfect composure. His back was straight, his build tall and imposing. He raised one hand and lightly brushed away a speck of dust that did not exist from his armor.

“…It’s only because his armor is too hard that you can’t tell! I hit him too, and I hit him really, really hard!” Lars puffed out his cheeks, gritting his teeth indignantly while trying to rub away the bruises on his own face with the back of his hand. In that instant, Ruiyin felt as if she had seen a wolf cub trying to challenge the dignity of the wolf king, only to get beaten up and then howl at the moon all alone afterward. From beginning to end, the entire scene was filled with the tragedy of overestimating oneself and trying to force growth before its time.
“…Enough. Right now, all I want to know is where the road ahead is. Vigia came all the way here for a reason, and I doubt it was to pay respects to a shattered statue of the Dark God.” Ruiyin rubbed her temples.

Of course, the god Vigia believed in was not going to suddenly switch to the penniless Dark God. According to the Black Knight, there was a vast space of unknown purpose beneath this temple, but it could only be opened at noon, when sunlight fell upon the divine throne. When the four of them had first entered, it had still been early morning. In this era without mahjong for entertainment, all they could do was sit around in utter boredom and wait.

“I still want to know what you meant just now by the Dark Elves ‘turning to the Light,'” Ruiyin asked softly. “By then, hadn’t they already suffered terrible losses? A temporary retreat was the right strategy, wasn’t it? So why is that guy… so hurt by it?”

She tactfully pointed at the Black Knight, who had not joined their little three-person conversation circle. Ever since earlier, he had been half-kneeling beside the shattered divine throne. His once-imposing figure had shrunk into a small, pitiful lump, his fingers forlornly fiddling with bits of broken stone on the ground, wearing the tragic expression of someone who had grown too tired to love anymore.

Ever since the blow he’d taken earlier, Lars had looked somewhat dispirited. He glanced disdainfully at the Black Knight’s back. “Because that is the nature of the Dark Race. They are selfish, cold, skilled at deception, and quick to repay the smallest slight. Their so-called loyalty is more fragile than morning mist. Once their interests vanish, even comrades who once trusted each other with their lives will turn on one another without the slightest hesitation.”

And at the end, he did not forget to lodge a righteous little accusation.

The Black Knight, who had stayed out of the topic until now, suddenly moved. He turned back, his voice ice-cold. “For the Dark Race, deception and war are in our nature. Avoiding conflict is the sort of shameful behavior only those White Elves would choose. Yet they actually betrayed the very nature of our race. That is an absolutely unforgivable act.”

“Betrayal is the thing I despise most, the thing I can least forgive.” He raised his head and looked into Ruiyin’s eyes, solemnly repeating the words as if swearing an oath.

Such overwhelming, unbearably dramatic middle-schooler energy…

“…Looks like the sun’s come out.” Ruiyin dodged the topic by lifting her head. She stood and walked stiffly, same hand and same foot, over to the divine throne where the sunlight was falling, then bent to examine the broken statue. “How do we open this place?”

No one had time to answer her. The instant her hand touched the divine throne, the entire hall suddenly began to tremble. Ruiyin lost her balance and fell hard onto the pile of rubble. Then the pedestal supporting the divine statue suddenly rotated with her on it. Immediately after, the wall facing Ruiyin slowly opened.

What appeared before her was a dim room. As the wall opened, a strange, fishy odor mixed with the smell of blood rushed out at her. Directly opposite her was a rather odd-looking cross-shaped iron frame. And right now, someone was fixed to that frame.

It was an almost completely naked man. His deep honey-colored skin, pointed ears, and long mithril-colored hair identified him as one of the Dark Elves. His arms were spread and bound to the frame with chains. His bare, leanly muscled upper body was covered in bloody whip marks, while the place between his legs was concealed by a torn scrap of cloth, blood slowly seeping through it in patches. He was awake. That exquisitely beautiful face was flushed an unnatural red, and now he was narrowing his eyes, his crystalline blood-red gaze misted with moisture as he looked at Ruiyin with a dangerous, seductive allure.

“…”

Damn it, what was with this sudden scene that felt like someone had kicked open the door to a whole new world?!

Author’s Note: And so I let out another lunatic… Ahaha, the door to a whole! New! World! has been opened!