"Queen, are you alright?"
"I... let my guard down."
On the banks of the Thames River, Guinevere and her companions had easily hunted down the Octopus Monster, their "surface objective." It was puzzling how this marine creature had managed to survive in freshwater.
After killing it, they deliberately set up a hot pot feast on the spot, hoping the Agents who had been monitoring them from nearby would mistakenly believe they were completely unaware of the observation.
But shortly after they began eating, Guinevere's stomach began acting up, as if her mastery of Jewel Magecraft had also inherited the gemstone mage's fate of suffering critical malfunctions at crucial moments.
Normally, a stomach upset would only mean a few extra trips to the restroom. But here, on a completely exposed riverbank with enemies closing in, it was a dire situation.
"Guinevere..."
"Don't worry about me. I can hold out a little longer. Use this time to..."
Guinevere wasn't the only unlucky one. Soon after her, thirty-one knights, including Lancelot, also began experiencing stomach distress.
A short while later, as they were taking turns addressing their predicament, Morgan's expression suddenly turned strange.
"Guinevere, this is my fault. I inspected the food and declared it non-toxic and safe to eat."
Unfamiliar ingredients naturally required inspection. Given Morgan's mastery of potion-making, Guinevere trusted her assessment implicitly. Yet this trust had backfired, leading to unforeseen complications.
The peculiar nature of the problem, however, paradoxically made the Agents preparing to act hesitate. In an unexpected twist, they began to suspect a trap.
"Queen, they seem to be trying to escape and are arguing," the wind carried back the voice of the Barthomeloi Family Head, who was overseeing the surveillance. He was equally incredulous at Morgan's oversight, even suspecting it was deliberate.
He reminded Guinevere to keep some Octopus Monster samples for further examination.
Hearing this, Guinevere, unwilling to believe Morgan had colluded with the Church, agreed to the Barthomeloi Family Head's request.
Driven by hunger, she abandoned any thoughts of luring the Agents into a trap for a clean sweep.
With a wave of her hand, she ordered her Knight Order to mount their steeds, instructing them to protect Morgan within the charging formation.
As for Lancelot, she had no intention of revealing him until unexpected circumstances arose.
"Knight Order, advance!"
The discomfort in Guinevere's stomach limited her full strength, but the bloody madness within her Mana remained undiminished.
As her Mana and that of her Knight Order overflowed and merged into a unified force, their stomach ailments began to subside.
While forming their battle formation and slowly advancing toward the Agents, Guinevere was most surprised to discover that Lancelot's Mana also contained madness, allowing him to perfectly conceal himself within the Knight Order.
-
"It's a trap after all. Archbishop Canterbury's intelligence was accurate. Camelot City is covered by a wide-ranging detection barrier."
"Then we..."
"Agents will never be chased into fleeing by Heretics! God will protect us! We are not weak!"
To become an Agent, paramount strength was the primary requirement, with faith taking secondary importance. Moreover, the founder of the Burial Agency's prototype that accommodates Agents was a Dead Apostle Ancestor.
Thus, when the captain activated some mechanism and issued a final order, the cloaks covering this group of Agents were ripped away, revealing a mass of inhuman bodies.
Werewolves, Harpies, Ogres...
In this era where the supernatural had yet to fully recede, the Church still had the opportunity to capture and domesticate these heretical beings.
Over a thousand years later, with Heretics nearly extinct, the Church found it increasingly difficult to acquire and domesticate them. Consequently, the Burial Agency, which housed the Agents, became almost entirely composed of humans.
As the price for being domesticated by the Church, these Heretics had no means of retreating on their own.
A wolf's howl, a harpy's shriek, ... accompanied by red light erupting from their collars, the Heretics charged Guinevere and her Knight Order with even greater ferocity.
By now, night was approaching. Ten thousand plumes of cooking smoke were rising over Camelot City, nestled along the lower reaches of the Thames River, and the blood-soaked sea of slaughter had yet to reach their doorsteps.
"Charge! Crush them!"
From a slow march to a brisk pace, then to a full-scale charge once they closed the distance with the Agents.
The battle unfolded with astonishing ease—so effortlessly that not a single member of Guinevere's forces fell. Over a dozen powerful heretical Agents were utterly crushed.
"Were they deliberately sent to die?"
Guinevere's unease grew with each passing moment, the unnerving smoothness of the battle only intensifying her anxiety.
"There's definitely something wrong," Lancelot confirmed. "I just checked—among all the Agents, only one is human, and he bears the Fanatic's Mark. The Holy Church likely never intended for them to return alive."
Having spent over half a year in Gaul, Lancelot knew the Holy Church far better than anyone in Great Britain.
They were fanatics—madmen a hundred times, a thousand times more deranged than the Holy Church Guinevere knew, the one that would one day "reconcile" with the Mages.
Under the guise of hunting heretics, they had nearly eradicated all heretical creatures from the European continent. Now, with true heretics growing scarce and even most Mages reduced to homeless vagrants, they had begun hunting ordinary people born with magic circuits.
Back on the banks of the Thames River, after confirming the annihilation of the heretic Agents and verifying the area was clear of enemies, Guinevere's group dispersed to address personal matters.
The Barthomeloi Family Head, who had remained hidden in the shadows, and Lady Morgan, her heart burdened by unspoken frustrations, went together to examine the remains of the octopus.
The examination revealed that the octopus was harmless, merely an exceptionally powerful Magical Beast. The real problem lay in the previously overlooked river water.
After collecting a large quantity of river water, refining it, and concentrating it to an extreme degree, Morgan finally detected a foreign 'poison' lurking within.
The group's upset stomachs and the octopus's sudden frenzy were likely caused by this toxin.
"Someone poisoned the Thames River?" Guinevere wondered aloud.
Camelot City's water supply relied almost entirely on this river. The river water itself couldn't possibly be toxic. Given the river's immense flow, Guinevere couldn't fathom what kind of 'poison,' in what quantity, could resist such dilution and still cause diarrhea at such a low concentration.
If she hadn't experienced it firsthand, Guinevere would never have believed such a thing possible.
"Guinevere," Morgan said gravely, "we may have to kill a great many people."
On the horizon, the sun, delayed by their investigation, began to sink. In the river, red-eyed nocturnal fish began leaping from the water's surface to hunt.
"Guinevere, this poison is from the blood of a Dead Apostle. It's been diluted to near extinction. For any creature with strong vitality or Mana, it would at most cause diarrhea.
But if a frail ordinary person were to ingest it, and someone were to manipulate it through some means, that person could very likely be transformed into the lowest-ranking Dead Apostle, a Ghoul."
-
Spy-Otherwise known as the Shokushiki.