Every Morning, My Mirror Saves the World - Chapter 9

Chapter 9

“Escape… escape… That damn charlatan Holy Archmage! He called this escaping? This is obviously fleeing for our lives! In this situation, if Lars doesn’t awaken his mage bloodline, we wait around to die, but if he does awaken it, he destroys the world. You bastard, are you trying to force me to kill him before a certain someone snaps and powers up?!”

Ruiyin tore through the only material she had from her transmigration, a certain notebook, and when she found nothing about an Orcs invasion smashing through the prison, she hurled the book aside in a rage.

With Ruiyin on his back, Lars sped through the streets and alleys. More than half of the once-familiar scenery had been reduced to ruins. Wounded people lay among broken walls and rubble, moaning in pain. Lars ran to the square at the center of town, then abruptly stopped.

“What, is the road to the lord’s manor blocked?” Ruiyin poked her head out from behind him. “I remember it should be that way.”

He had no time to answer her. Lars grabbed a passerby rushing past and asked anxiously, “There are so many wounded people and children here. Where are the knights? Where did the castle’s knights go?!”

“Knights? In the war not long ago, the castle’s knight order was almost wiped out. The remaining knights were all gathered around Lord Maxen.” The man swept a mocking glance over Lars’s armor. “Aren’t you on your way there too, Sir Knight?”

“…” Lars looked as if he had been stabbed. He let go, wounded, and the man could not flee fast enough.

Ruiyin jumped down from his back and gave the dazed boy a firm slap on the shoulder. She had already run to the side and was straining to move a stone slab pinning down an injured person. “Don’t just stand there. Come help!”

This area was not the main battlefield where the Orcs had broken through, but there were still plenty of people trapped under collapsed buildings. With no medicine and no food, all they could do was pull the injured out; they had no way to save them. Ruiyin was not very strong, and before long she was panting. She lifted her head and looked at Lars, who was bent over hauling stones with everything he had. The boy’s lips were pressed tight, and two astonishing flames burned in his green eyes.

“Stop wasting time here! Without medicine, they’re all going to die. Is there a church or hospital nearby? We need to find healers!” Ruiyin shouted. Lars seemed to jolt awake. He nodded in a panic. “There is! There is! I’ll go find a priest right now!”

The hand pulling her along had thin calluses at the thumb web and palm from gripping a sword, but now it was slick with cold sweat. Ruiyin looked up at the boy’s slightly pale face. Her sense of duty in seeking a way back home, along with the last scraps of her compassion, made her unable to hold back. “You don’t have to be that disappointed. Maybe you just haven’t run into the knights doing rescue work yet. Like… ah! Look over there. Isn’t that a knight?”

Ruiyin’s and Lars’s eyes lit up at the same time.

Amid the splattering blood of the Orcs, a flash of bright silver shone like a beam splitting the darkness, carving a bloody path of survival through filth and evil. The towering knight in silver armor protected the trembling women and children behind him, his expression solemn as he fought alone against four or five Orcs. This was no easy feat. He was already bloodied in several places, yet he still held on, as if using his very life to maintain the last solid wall in this sinful world.

The above was courtesy of Lars’s imagination.

With stars in his eyes, Lars stared ahead in utter awe at the Silver Knight fiercely cutting down Orcs. “Ah, as expected of a Silver Knight! Even badly wounded himself, he still protects innocent civilians. This is a true knight. This is a subject of Lord Xisaluo!”

As if hearing Lars’s soaring aria, the Silver Knight in the middle of the bloody battle turned toward the sound. His eyes instantly shone with what could only be called desperate hunger.

“Ruiyin! Lars!” Tears burst from the Silver Knight’s eyes. “Are you here to rescue me? Wuu, wuu, wuu, I can’t find the way out of the city! Why are there more and more Orcs?!”

As he sobbed with a trembling mouth, the young man yanked hard at his own armor. “You… let go of me already! It’s because you’ve been clinging to me that I couldn’t run away. I didn’t get lost! It’s all because you wouldn’t let me leave! If you’re a man, pick up a sword and go fight bravely by yourself!”

The three-year-old boy behind the Silver Knight: “…”

The once-impassioned Lars silently turned to ash where he stood. “But… but… isn’t he a Silver Knight? How could he…”
Lars thought about it for a long time. In the end, unable to find any adjective at all, he gave up on language.

“That is perfectly normal,” said Ruiyin, who had remained calm from start to finish. “He is a Silver Knight. But do not forget, he is also Galahad.”

“What do we do? Should I go help him?”

“No need.” Ruiyin made the decision. “That is a Silver Knight defending the old, the weak, women, and children. If you join his battle, he will not be happy about it. Go find your lord.”

Lars did not hesitate. “Mm!”

In those beautiful Japanese dramas where a boy and girl run hand in hand toward the sunset, wasn’t there always, somewhere behind them, a figure running with tears of heartbreak streaming down his face? He would shout, “You bastards, are you just leaving me here?” He would cry in sorrow, “You’re a man, stop holding my hand, don’t you feel ashamed?” And yet the only shot left for him was the lingering echo of his wails behind the male and female leads…

Hello, Galahad. Goodbye forever, Galahad.

Ruiyin honestly suspected these invading Orcs had been sent by some anti-corruption task force. They had passed through towns, shops, churches, and plazas, and had even dragged a priest along to revisit all the aforementioned places, yet the number of Orcs they encountered could still be counted on one hand. (Galahad, surrounded by one hand’s worth of enemies: …)

So when they arrived at the estate of Lars’s lord, Ruiyin and her little companion were both stunned.

This… wasn’t this an infinite monster spawn point?!

An army of Orcs surged in from every direction like a tide. They scaled walls, leapt through windows, tore down doors, dug tunnels, and charged into the building by every possible and impossible method, no matter how sturdy and crumbling the defensive wall formed by the knights and mages in front of them was. While Ruiyin was still dazed, Lars yanked her aside. One of the Orcs had already thundered right over the footprints where she had just been standing, without even glancing at either of them.

…So that first Orc who had made such a flashy entrance earlier had actually been a staff member specifically sent to the prison to destroy the wall for plot purposes?

“Lord Maxen!” Lars shouted. Before Ruiyin could stop him, the boy had already drawn his sword without the slightest hesitation and charged into the army of Orcs. It was as if he had completely forgotten his earlier injuries, suspicion, frustration, and anger. He had even forgotten that he was only a lowly Apprentice Knight. One man, one sword. Fearlessly, he charged in.

“Wait! Lars, you idiot!” Ruiyin shouted in sheer fury. But the boy had completely forgotten her existence, so she had no choice but to force her way through the monsters around her with her own body. Fortunately, those things did not care that someone from the Allied Forces was charging in alongside them. It was as if something with a deadly magic deep inside the castle was calling to them. They stepped over the corpses of their companions and desperately threw themselves against the already exhausted ring of resistance.

“Mark, Covoni, Marpas… damn Orcs! Where is my lord?” Lars cut his way in as he advanced. He saw companions gravely wounded and dying. He saw the corpses of familiar faces. In the end, the hand of a warrior who could have faced certain death with proud resolve began to tremble faintly.

Lars came to an abrupt halt. Filled with terror, he stared at the door in front of him. From the crack beneath it, glaringly red blood was gurgling out.

“What are you doing here?” Ruiyin caught up from behind, panting, and grabbed his arm. “Did you come all this way just to stand around in a daze?”

“This… this is Lord Maxen’s room, but…”

Ruiyin also saw the blood flowing out from underneath. She took Lars’s hand and aimed Lars’s sword at the door.

“Open it,” she said. “Hurry. Standing here in a daze will not solve anything. Even if there is some private torture chamber fun going on inside, you still have to open the door before you can save anyone!”

Yet the boy remained frozen, giving no response at all. Ruiyin raised an eyebrow, stepped back a few paces, and without hesitation kicked open the door, which had not been tightly locked in the first place.

It was a scene that would leave Ruiyin and Lars with psychological scars for a very long time afterward.

Directly across from the door was a narrow, tall Gothic window. And now two people were sitting by that window, blocking out half the sun. They were holding hands, shoulder to shoulder, and even had their heads resting on each other’s shoulders. From behind, they looked exactly like a pair of intimate lovers leaning against each other as they watched the sunset. It should have been a beautiful image, as long as… as long as those two figures from behind had not looked so very much like a certain lord and a certain Undead mage wrinkled into a ball of tofu skin…
Ruiyin covered her own eyes with one hand, and with an utterly blank expression, used the other to cover the eyes of the boy who had long since frozen like a statue.

“Say, why didn’t you warn me that your Lord Maxen had some hardcore kink for hooking up with bizarre-looking freaks?”

“I… he…” Lars was rigid from head to toe, his expression scrambled. He pried Ruiyin’s hand away, took a few steps forward, and only then realized something was wrong. He reached out and gave the two people leaning together a light push. That picturesque pose was instantly ruined. The two of them fell backward, revealing two hideous, terrifying faces.

Before he even had time to react, a hand shot out and grabbed his pants. Lars looked down on instinct, and could not help feeling that Ruiyin’s descriptions of “Dwarves,” “Dwarves-Orcs hybrid,” “a pile of bison-dung wrinkles,” and so on had been painfully accurate…

“I succeeded…” The pseudo-humanoid thing, collapsed in a limp heap, made a rasping, hissing sound from its throat, barely intelligible as words. “A thousand souls as sacrifice… Seres’s relic… I succeeded…”

Lars took a step back. Ruiyin had already rushed up in one stride. First she kicked that pile of tofu-skin wrinkles aside, then checked Maxen, who was similarly sprawled on the floor beside him, and spread her hands. “No saving him.”

When she did not get the reaction she expected, Ruiyin looked up in confusion and saw Lars staring wide-eyed at the thing clutched in the corpse’s hand: an ancient sheet of parchment. The corpse’s grip hid most of it, but rows upon rows of names could still be vaguely made out. The final name in the final row was, unmistakably, “Maxen Flinholrak.”

“This is… every member of the knights’ order.” Lars’s lips were trembling. “Why… why is everyone here? Even my lord…”

Before he could finish, the parchment held in the cold corpse’s hand began turning into black powder from one corner, scattering slowly downward. The Undead mage lying collapsed on the floor waved the thing in his hand and panted in excitement. “It worked… it worked! Great Dark God Seres, please hear the prayer of your servant. Through slaughter, blood, and souls offered in sacrifice, descend once more into the mortal realm…”

Ruiyin focused and only then realized that the thing in his hand was none other than the mirror that had been swiped from her. Only now, the mirror’s surface had turned pure black, and wisps of black mist, as thick as if they had congealed into a solid, were drifting out through the glass.

“Get down!” she shouted, shoving Lars hard. The knight’s body moved faster than his mind, dropping flat at once, while one hand still did not forget to hook around Ruiyin’s neck and pull her into the safe position behind him.

Dense black fog surged out and filled the entire room. It had no smell, yet Ruiyin felt as if she were suffocating. After who knew how long, the black fog gradually dispersed. She rubbed her eyes and lifted her head. In the center of the room, Maxen’s body had completely vanished. In its place stood a man over two meters tall. No, a person of indeterminate gender…

Their entire body was covered in pitch-black armor, with a helmet of the same material on their head. The Black Knight, who seemed to be giving off black vapor from head to toe, held a greatsword and stood before Ruiyin and Lars.

The Black Knight took a step forward. The head encased in the helmet slowly swept around the room, then they walked at a measured pace to Ruiyin.

Lars tensed, sword in hand as he stepped forward. “Stop! If you want to hurt her, you’ll have to step over my dead bo–”

The knight waved a hand and sent the boy flying before he could even finish speaking.

“…” Ruiyin went stiff all over and, by reflex, tightened her grip on her only weapon: a certain dagger she had just picked up from the floor. Even though, in front of a knight over two meters tall, the thing did not even qualify as a toothpick.

The other party slowly came to stand in front of her. Just when she could not move a muscle, their body suddenly lowered, and they dropped to one knee before her.

“Are you the one who summoned my lord?”

…This was exactly why, no matter who they were, Ruiyin hated people who refused to follow the script of A Certain Boy’s Perverted Notebook!!!

Author’s Note: This Black Knight is absolutely not a male supporting character who likes the heroine! Although he is indeed a character… I really like the Black Knight!