WeTried Translations

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◈ Paladin of a Ruined Order

Chapter 99

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Black Cat

Even while walking beside Rombel and Sonia, Elbridge kept glancing back.

Solenion lay steeped in a soft darkness. But there was nothing uncomfortable about the visibility. Even the expressions of people far in the distance came through clearly. Only a dream made that possible.

People swayed clumsily or danced with practiced grace. Some leaned against doorframes and talked instead of dancing, while others slipped quietly into their houses.

Young people meeting for the first time today, and elderly couples who had long forgotten the flutter of nerves, all faced each other the same way.

"Odd."

Sonia answered Elbridge's murmur.

"Well, of course it's odd. How often would you end up inside a strange dream like this?"

"I mean it's odd even measured against a demon's divine power."

"In what way?"

"There are plenty of demons that make people desire each other. The ones that stir up lust are the classic example."

Elbridge thought as he said it. Those lust-stirring demons had probably once been gods symbolizing fertility, abundance, or procreation.

"Wherever demons like that take hold, grotesque scenes play out. Dozens, sometimes hundreds of people tangled together, spilling out their desire until they die. But this is different. This isn't simple lust."

Sonia saw it the same way.

The people weren't looking at each other's bodies. They were looking into each other's eyes. Not carnal desire, but something more essential, a deeper emotional exchange.

Maybe that was why, even though the whole scene had been artificially constructed, it wasn't unpleasant to watch.

Sonia spoke up.

"So why was Marcus the only one who turned into a walking embodiment of desire?"

That part was hard for Elbridge to make sense of too.

"...Maybe his taste was just especially specific."

Sonia gave up trying to understand and shook her head.

"I don't know what those people were feeling... but will it carry over once they wake up?"

"Who knows."

At the very least, Marcus probably would.

But whether the woman dancing with Marcus would feel the same... that, Elbridge couldn't be sure of.

Rombel, who had been listening quietly, spoke up.

"I don't know about the others, but I hope Marcus gets rejected."

"Why?"

"Because that'd be funnier."

A clear enough answer. And one impossible to disagree with.

- ♩♬

No one had decided on a destination, but the three of them naturally drifted toward the music.

The strangest thing about the whole situation was that music.

Hadn't the people, who'd been lounging around a little carelessly, started moving the moment that music began?

Their steps carried them out of the residential district and into an area crowded with temples large and small.

Sonia said, "Elbridge."

"What?"

Sonia hesitated for a moment before asking.

"You. Two hundred years ago, that fairy tale... that was you, wasn't it?"

The question came fragmented, cut off in places, only the bare bones left. But he understood what she wanted to ask.

"Yeah."

"I see..."

Sonia had heard what Elbridge said when he gathered the High Paladins and Archbishops of each church. She had seen them bow their heads before him, and she'd heard the rumors spreading through Solenion.

It wasn't a guess anymore. It was already something closer to certainty. She'd only wanted the surest possible answer.

Rombel, walking ahead, came to a stop. Sonia and Elbridge stopped too.

On the roof of an abandoned temple, smaller even than the shabby ones nearby, sat a small cat.

Nothing particularly large about it. Nothing strange in its shape.

Just a black cat with sleek fur, a cute one at that. The kind you'd see anywhere and walk right past without a second thought.

But Elbridge and the others experienced a strange, focused sensation.

Of everything within sight, everything except the cat felt like mere background. As if the cat alone straddled some other world entirely.

Elbridge felt the wrongness half a beat too late.

'It's a dream.'

In dreams, every sense often narrows onto one particular object. That was exactly what was happening now.

The cat, which had been licking its paw, stood up, stretched its forepaws straight out, and arched its back. Right after, it leapt down from the temple roof.

The direction it jumped was behind the temple, a direction Elbridge and the others couldn't possibly see.

And yet they "saw" the cat leap down, clear as day.

Even the angle from which they watched the cat was wrong. It felt as if they were observing it not from where they stood, but from somewhere up in the empty sky where nothing existed.

Rombel muttered, "I'm already losing my mind."

All of this was only possible because it was a dream.

Some dreams felt as vivid as reality, but the sensations of dream and reality were fundamentally different. Fragmented senses, oddly exaggerated senses, information pouring in that the mind couldn't quite accept.

Even now, Elbridge and the others stood there dazed, experiencing the black cat's movements in flashes. Without seeing or hearing it directly, they vaguely knew where the cat was heading.

Stranger still, they couldn't feel the wrongness of these impossible sensations right away. The wrongness always arrived at least a step late. And even that delayed wrongness never came through clearly. If their focus slipped even slightly, they felt like they'd forget this was even a dream at all. The way an ordinary, non-lucid dream usually worked.

"Let's follow it."

That cat had never done anything strange before.

But without any logic, without any cause and effect they could point to, Elbridge and the others knew that the black cat was the one behind all of this.

The moment they took a few steps forward, the space around them changed.

Elbridge, every sense on edge, hesitated, and Sonia spoke.

"Don't think it's strange. In dreams, the process of moving from one place to another often just gets skipped. The moment you decide you need to go somewhere, you arrive there like it's the most natural thing in the world. That's how dreams work, isn't it?"

"...Sonia. You're adjusting to this weirdly fast."

"Mages train using dreams a lot. You use dreams to adapt to all kinds of laws you've never encountered before, to worlds that are both familiar and unfamiliar at once. Nothing builds flexibility of thought and sense better than a dream."

Rombel muttered something meaningful under his breath.

"Dreams, and unfamiliar worlds, huh. Feels like something's about to come back to me..."

Of course, Elbridge and Sonia let that comment go in one ear and out the other.

Elbridge ran forward a couple of steps. A new space unfolded all at once. Before they knew it, the three of them were standing on the roof of a temple they'd never climbed.

The cat, which should have been right there, had already moved far off, only its swaying tail visible.

"...How are we supposed to just accept this calmly?"

"What choice do you have? We have to catch that cat inside a dream. Just run wherever!"

"Wherever?"

"Doesn't matter. Run while thinking you're chasing the cat!"

...That sounds like a con.

Elbridge thought so, but he ran anyway, following what Sonia said.

The space kept flipping around them. Without realizing it, they leapt off a high wall, landed softly, and found themselves running down a main road. The cat still showed only a blurred hint of its back at the edge of their vision.

"There!"

Stepping into a temple, the inside of a blacksmith's forge appeared out of nowhere. Turning around to leave the forge, the interior of a temple appeared instead.

The path they'd just walked spread out before them again, and the memory of having walked a path they'd never actually walked settled into their minds regardless. Time leapt forward in the blink of an eye, then quietly reversed and slipped back into the past.

The world, time itself, shifted and jumbled however it pleased. Only a dream made that possible.

They ran without knowing which direction they were even going. And yet the distance between them and the cat kept slowly closing.

Now Elbridge fully understood what Sonia had meant. Inside a dream, all that mattered was believing you were chasing the cat. Space, direction, none of it mattered.

"Be trapped!"

Sonia shouted and swung her staff, and the ground and walls around the cat rose up in the shape of two hands, closing around it. But the cat leapt free without any warning, without any visible process, and escaped the hands entirely.

If this had happened when the dream first started, maybe. But by now Elbridge had more or less adjusted to how this dream world worked.

Before he knew it, he was standing right beside the cat. Without stopping to question anything, Elbridge reached out toward it. But the cat kicked off thin air with practiced ease and slipped past his hand.

The cat seemed to mock him.

- Meow.

But Rombel was still in the fight.

"Just die already!"

Just like he'd done back in Dickens Viscounty not long ago, Rombel used centrifugal force to hurl his massive axe.

The axe spun horizontally through the air, flying straight at the cat.

'Doesn't he plan on catching it alive?'

But that worry turned out to be needless. The black cat leapt lightly and landed atop the spinning axe as it whirled through the air, riding it,

- Meeeeeow-

and vanished into the night sky, spinning along with the axe.

A sight that could never exist in reality, possible only in a dream. All three of them fell silent.

"...How are we supposed to catch that?"

Then the black cat, which had vanished into the night sky, quietly reappeared beside Rombel.

The black cat nudged the massive axe back toward Rombel with a white paw and said,

- Not bad for a first try. Make sure you catch me tomorrow.

The cat wagged its tail lightly and disappeared.

"..."

Elbridge woke up a little past noon.

He sat blankly on the edge of the bed for a while, and once he pulled on his shirt, the Goddess of the Rusted Shield delivered an oracle.

- Elbridge. Seeing you unable to wake up early in the morning like this... your goddess feels strangely uneasy about it.

"Same here, Goddess."

It hadn't been long since Elbridge had prayed to the Goddess of the Rusted Shield to please sleep early and wake early, and now their positions had reversed. Not that this was Elbridge's fault, of course.

Sonia appeared as well, looking a little disheveled.

Despite being a nonbeliever, Sonia was still staying at the temple of the Order of the Rusted Shield.

With no money and no one she knew, she had no option to move out on her own.

Sonia said to Elbridge, "You had the dream too, didn't you?"

Elbridge nodded.

As expected, last night's dream hadn't been an ordinary dream.

A little later, Rombel showed up.

"Sonia, Elbridge. Got any good ideas?"

"Not really."

Just as Elbridge was about to shake his head the same as Sonia, a thought suddenly occurred to him.

Wouldn't something be possible if the Goddess of the Rusted Shield lent her help?

Elbridge immediately clasped his hands together and prayed to the Goddess of the Rusted Shield.

"Goddess. Can you see my dreams, by any chance?"

The oracle came at once.

- A dream is nothing but imagination happening inside the mind, not reality itself, so even a god cannot intervene in one. Did you have some strange dream last night?

The Goddess of the Rusted Shield seemed to know nothing at all about last night's dream. Elbridge nodded.

"Yes. Something strange happened... but explaining it now would take a while."

Rombel poked Elbridge in the side.

"Elbridge. What did the goddess say?"

"She says she can't help with anything that happens in a dream."

"So, same as always..."

The moment those words left his mouth, a bolt of lightning struck the ground in front of the temple. Crack!

A situation where getting struck by lightning right after stepping out of the temple wouldn't have been surprising at all.

Rombel immediately dropped to the ground and prayed.

"Goddess. This dwarf here has wasted three hundred years of his life eating nothing but nonsense, so his mind gets a little foggy now and then and careless words slip out. Please, forgive me just this once!"

- Tell him I will forgive him only this once. Elbridge.

"The goddess says she'll forgive you only this once. Leave a donation before you go."

"Oh, thank you so much."

Rombel got up, rummaged through his coin pouch, pulled out a couple of silver coins, and dropped them into the donation box.

Something yellowish had briefly flashed inside that coin pouch, but neither Elbridge nor the Goddess of the Rusted Shield were petty enough to demand gold coins instead of silver.

Rombel sat down across from Elbridge with the proud expression of a man who'd just paid off every debt he owed.

"Say anything. Whatever comes to mind."

Elbridge and Sonia took turns pouring out their thoughts.

"At most, we probably have about five days left. After that, there's no guarantee we'll be able to wake up."

"There's no normal way to catch that cat. Mages spend a lot of time in a semi-awakened state while training their magic, so I'm fairly used to dreams myself, but that cat operates on a completely different level than I do."

"Would catching the cat even solve everything? This could be a plan to waste our time by making us focus on the wrong thing entirely. And it felt a little too out of place to be a demon, honestly."

"Out of place, huh..."

That cat had clearly been something out of place. It bent the dream world however it pleased and dragged every situation along however it wanted. Behavior you'd expect from a demon.

But that cat had none of the grotesque appearance typical of demons, none of the unsettling feeling either.

"No matter how I think about it, that cat doesn't seem like its true form."

Rombel agreed with Elbridge's remark.

"I think so too."

"And here's the strange part. That cat wasn't particularly hostile toward us. If anything, it felt almost friendly. Is that thing even a demon?"

Demons were hostile to humans.

No, it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say they were hostile to every living thing on the surface of the world. There were relatively gentle exceptions, like Starwave... but even then, it was only a matter of degree.

"If something causing a phenomenon like that isn't a demon, then what is it?"

"I don't know. But there's no need to rush. We've still got five days to spare. And there are plenty of people who could help us."

Rombel got up from his seat.

"See you tonight."

Rombel left the temple, looking a little tense.

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