Chapter 11
What Happened in Tilong (3)
“Damn it!”
The moment the gunshot rang out, Lashin rolled across the floor.
“Mister!”
At the same time, Julien’s shout pierced my ears.
I turned my head toward him. The smoke that had filled the lobby after the gunshot slowly began to clear, revealing the people who had come to help me. But what I saw was completely different from what I had expected.
“Why are you holding the gun?”
I thought Orléans would be the one with the gun, but somehow Julien was holding it instead.
“Because both of them said they weren’t confident. I’m good at shooting.”
Julien proudly answered with a bright smile.
Meanwhile, Orléans and Marco, standing on either side of him, avoided my gaze.
Another useless adult added to the list.
No, seriously—what kind of brain structure does a grown man have to hand a gun over to a kid just because he says he’s good with it?
Once we survive today, I’m going to work them until they cough up blood.
“Sword!”
I ran toward Orléans while shouting for my weapon.
“H-here!”
Thankfully, Orléans had brought my sword.
“Your surprise attack wasn’t bad. I’ll give it seven points.”
Lashin had already gotten back on his feet and looked between Julien and me as he spoke.
“I definitely aimed for your chest. How did I miss?”
Julien stared at the blood flowing down Lashin’s arm.
Lashin must have noticed the sword flashing and twisted his body half a beat early. Judging from the movements he’d shown so far, that level of reflexes was entirely possible for him.
Still, Julien surprised me even more than Lashin did.
To hit exactly where he wanted with a gun he didn’t even know how to sight properly—that wasn’t normal talent.
“Kid! I’ll deal with you later, so stay out of this. I’m only warning you once. If you meddle in adults’ business, you’ll really die.”
Apparently even Lashin recognized Julien as a threat.
“Hmph! Don’t wanna. I’ll do whatever I want.”
Julien responded exactly like a child his age would.
If he started throwing in insults about someone’s parents, he’d basically be the perfect image of a Korean middle schooler.
“I’m not going easy on you because you’re a kid!”
“Bleeeh, not going easy on meee.”
“You little brat!”
Lashin tightened his grip on his sword and waited for the right moment to attack.
Even with his emotions boiling, he kept a cool head.
If not, he would’ve already charged recklessly at Julien.
In that case, I just needed to keep Lashin occupied long enough for Julien to fire another shot.
Clang!
I drew my sword and launched the first attack exactly as I had learned at the dojo.
A proper sword really was different. Even after colliding with Lashin’s blade, it neither cracked nor bent.
Good.
At this rate, I could actually fight him for a while.
“So you can use a sword?”
After exchanging five or six blows and locking blades against each other, Lashin sounded genuinely surprised.
“What? How many points would you give me?”
“You think I can score you after a few swings?”
He grabbed the blade with his hand and shoved forward hard, throwing me backward.
“Boss!”
“Mister!”
“Liar!”
One of those words definitely sounded out of place, but at least they were all worried about me falling on my ass.
Lashin immediately followed up with another attack.
As expected, he was a professional.
He didn’t hesitate or hold back. He clearly intended to finish me off while I was defenseless.
Bang!
Julien fired a second shot.
But this time he missed.
“You tiny little bastard!”
Unable to contain his rage, Lashin shifted his target from me to Julien.
He launched himself toward the boy even faster than before.
This was bad.
Because of the smoke from the gunshot, Julien couldn’t see Lashin charging at him.
“Don’t reload—run!”
I shouted while chasing after Lashin.
“Knew you’d do that.”
Lashin suddenly spun around and flashed me a vicious grin.
I’d been too hasty.
All I could think about was saving Julien, so I failed to notice Lashin’s trap.
“I should give my brilliant brain ten points.”
A pain I never wanted to feel again exploded through my lower abdomen.
Lashin looked at me with a cruel smile, clearly satisfied.
I wanted to smash his face in with my fist, but if I moved now, it felt like my insides would spill apart.
Damn it.
Even cold steel touching your skin felt awful enough—but having a sharpened blade buried inside your body made nausea rise in my throat.
Blood—obviously mine—dripped from Lashin’s sword onto the floor.
But there was no way I’d go down like this.
“Do you really think you deserve ten points?”
“A dying bastard sure talks a lot.”
“I’m not dead yet.”
Gathering every bit of strength I had left, I clamped down hard on the hand gripping the sword.
If he yanked the blade around or ripped it out violently, things would get much worse.
“Struggling? That’s pretty pathetic.”
Lashin snorted in disbelief.
“Living is pathetic in the first place.”
“Not for me.”
“You sure about that? Julien! Don’t miss this time!”
The moment Lashin heard my shout, his expression stiffened.
He’d gotten so absorbed in killing me that he completely forgot about Julien.
“Let go!”
Lashin shook violently, trying to free his hand from my grip.
But maybe because I’d gone through something similar not long ago, I refused to let go so easily this time.
Julien finished reloading and aimed the gun at Lashin.
“You fucking bastard!”
Lashin struggled even harder.
Julien hesitated.
Probably because Lashin was too close to me.
“Don’t hesitate—shoot! I won’t die!”
I shouted with all the strength I could muster.
He needed to fire quickly.
My blood ran down the sword and soaked the hand gripping Lashin. Between the blood making my hand slippery and his violent struggling, losing hold of him was only a matter of time.
“Let go!”
“Trust me and shoot!”
As our shouts crossed—
Boom!
The roar of exploding gunpowder filled the lobby, followed by a thick cloud of white smoke.
At the same time, Lashin’s hand slipped free from mine.
“Aaagh!”
Then came Lashin’s scream.
The smoke was too dense to see him, but judging by the sound alone, Julien had definitely hit him.
I groped around the floor and grabbed the sword I’d dropped.
My stomach had been stabbed, but fortunately the wound missed anything vital.
Maybe not normal, but I could probably still swing a sword and—
Nope.
Apparently fighting like a madman after being stabbed only worked in movies and dramas.
“Mister!”
“Boss!”
“Beggar… mister!”
Julien and the other two rushed over to me.
“We need to find him and finish this.”
Watching the smoke clear, I handed my sword to Orléans.
He nodded and ran toward where Lashin had fallen.
But there was nothing there.
“I think he escaped.”
Orléans followed the trail of blood all the way outside the building, but couldn’t find him.
If his injuries had been minor, he would’ve endured the pain and attacked me again somehow. The fact that he fled immediately meant the wound must have been serious.
“Mister, are you okay? What do we do? You’re bleeding too much!”
“A hospital… there isn’t really a hospital here…”
The White siblings looked completely panicked at my condition.
“This is a hotel. There should be emergency medicine somewhere. Find me bandages and whatever medical supplies they have.”
After asking them, I leaned against the wall and pressed hard against the bleeding wound.
It didn’t feel like my organs were damaged, but if this kept up, I might meet the Grim Reaper from blood loss alone.
“Boss, no matter how important this is, it’s not more important than your life. Let’s go back to Rudis right now. No—let’s find a large hospital on the way.”
Orléans knelt beside me, speaking desperately.
If we returned to the capital, Rudis, finding a proper hospital would be easy.
But it was too far away.
“No. Looking for a hospital on the road is more dangerous. Do you even know where one is?”
“That’s not the point! Boss, you’ll really die like this. If that’s what worries you, then let’s hurry back to Rudis.”
“There’s no need.”
“There is! You really need to go back.”
“I said there’s no need. This is Tilong. Wounds like this are treated well at the cathedral. Don’t you get it?”
At my words, Orléans stared blankly like he’d just been smacked in the back of the head.
I couldn’t guarantee it one hundred percent, but there was a very high chance that Tilong Cathedral also functioned as a hospital.
The medical supplies I saw there before, and the room marked with a red cross, weren’t there for nothing.
And since this place had once stood at the center of religious wars, they likely possessed considerable surgical knowledge too.
“Mister! Here!”
Julien came running back carrying bandages and some unidentified ointment.
As I took off my shirt, I looked toward Orléans.
He accepted the bandages and tightly wrapped them around the wound.
“Marco, the Tilong Cathedral treats injured people, right?”
After the bandaging was done, I stood up with Orléans supporting me and asked the question I already knew the answer to.
“Ah! Yeah. I don’t know about small illnesses, but people hurt like you always went to Tilong Cathedral.”
Just as I expected.
“But mister, you said you can’t go there. That’s why you were asking about some secret hole earlier.”
Marco’s expression darkened immediately after briefly brightening.
He was right.
In my current state, I really couldn’t return to Tilong Cathedral normally.
I’d been caught red-handed in the underground chapel by the bishop himself.
I thought he’d let it slide if I apologized appropriately, but the clergy here had personalities far rougher than expected.
The bishop of Tilong Cathedral had shouted:
“Get out at once! Someone like you has no right to be our brother!”
Then he called people over and had me forcibly thrown out, yelling:
“Drive out that suspicious man immediately!”
Honestly, I still questioned whether he was really a bishop.
Judging by the black priest robe and purple sash, he definitely was one—but the way he talked was more like a gang boss.
That was why I planned to solve the key-finding mission by sneaking into the underground chapel without the cathedral noticing.
“They wouldn’t throw out someone who’s dying, would they?”
No matter how eccentric the bishop was, surely he wouldn’t reject someone with injuries this severe.
Ironically, this unintended injury had solved one of my biggest problems.
“You still shouldn’t be moving.”
Orléans tried to stop me as I got up.
“I need to move if I want treatment. Stop arguing and do as I say.”
I told the White siblings to search the hotel for something resembling a holy grail.
Then I ordered Orléans to fetch the oldest bottle of wine from the underground cellar.
“Wine? No, you absolutely shouldn’t drink alcohol in your condition.”
“I’m not drinking it. I need it for something. Seriously, little brother, we don’t have time. If you don’t want to watch me die, hurry up and get it.”
Maybe because my stomach hurt so badly, I snapped at him.
Still, seeing him move immediately after being yelled at made me think I might need to keep doing it in the future.
“There should be something like a chapel around here.”
Since this hotel catered to pilgrims, there was probably a small prayer room for guests to use before sleeping.
Using my sword as a cane, I staggered down the hallway.
A line from some old gangster movie came to mind:
“When there’s a hole in your gut, even breathing hurts.”
“Lashin, you bastard. Did you really have to go this far?”
As I searched the hotel corridors for the chapel, I spotted an open room.
Inside was a man dead from a stab wound.
So that was the source of the faint smell of blood coming from Lashin earlier.
Comparing the corpse to the portrait hanging in the lobby, the dead man was probably the hotel owner.
“Boss! Here’s the wine— huh?! What happened here?!”
Orléans saw the body too and asked in shock.
“I think that bastard did this.”
I took the wine bottle from him while answering.
The bottle was covered in dust, evidence of long aging.
“Just like you said, it was stored separately in the back of the cellar. But it looks like someone already drank from it.”
As Orléans said, the bottle was only half full.
Didn’t matter.
“Mister, we found it!”
Julien ran over holding a golden goblet in both hands.
“Just like you said, there was a separate place for it. It was sitting on top of this thing with steps.”
Marco, breathing heavily, explained where they’d found the grail.
He was apparently trying to describe an altar.
I looked at the ancient golden cup Julien handed me.
Anyone would recognize it as something resembling a holy grail.
“Now we have everything.”
The holy grail and the sacred blood that would fill it were ready.
Now all that remained was to go to the chapel and obtain the key.
Before I died.
