Chapter 305: Agincourt

Richard returned to the windowless classroom and resumed sorting through his stack of new requisition forms.

Sleep-return, sealing, severance, reforging, along with an assortment of miscellaneous tasks—he needed to process and categorize them all.

Halfway down, he spotted a few items that weren't requisition forms at all, catching his interest.

He pulled the pages out.

They were anomaly investigation reports sent back from the front line.

The top page was labeled "The Retreat from Mons."

Beneath the heading were three different oral accounts describing the exact same event.

A captain had penned the first. The handwriting was neat and meticulous, yet a trace of lingering terror bled through the orderly script.

"St. George returned with the bowmen of Agincourt."

"They stood in a line across the sky and deflected every enemy bullet."

The second was an account dictated by an old veteran.

The handwriting was immaculate, but the words themselves were remarkably crude.

"Angels? Bowmen? It's all bullshit. I didn't see a single one!"

"I was dazed, but I saw some kind of light block the space between us and the Germans. Maybe it's some new weapon Command developed?"

An army chaplain wrote the third.

His tone was profoundly devout, every stroke of the pen carrying an intense conviction.

"This is a miracle. God has not abandoned His children."

"I saw it with my own eyes: the angels leaned down and shielded us."

Richard laid the three reports side by side on his desk.

One event, three completely different accounts.

"Oh? You looking into that Mons business too?"

Someone nearby glanced at the papers and leaned over.

This man was the most senior of the postgraduate students and handled the most difficult sealing blueprints. He rarely spoke to the preparatory students.

"Yeah," Richard replied casually.

"You probably know the higher-ups pulled a team from the major academies recently and sent them to that sector."

The postgraduate tipped his chin toward the three oral accounts.

"Did that incident really cause that much of a stir? Isn't the fighting over?" Richard asked.

"They weren't sent there for this, obviously. Their main job is sealing. Investigating this was just a side task," the postgraduate scoffed.

"A few hundred years back, a much bigger battle was fought at Mons. Far more dead were buried there than this time around."

"That team went to reforge the old seals disrupted by the fighting."

His tone was utterly dismissive.

"The angel business was just a passing inquiry."

"Command's exact words were: 'While you're passing through, look into that thing too.'"

"Did they find anything out?" Richard asked, interested.

"Find out my ass." The postgraduate shoved the reports back into the stack.

"They spent their days patching seals until they were half-dead from exhaustion. Nighttime was their only chance to investigate this."

He let out a yawn, the dark circles beneath his eyes heavier than usual.

"Either way, it has nothing to do with us. As long as we finish compiling the manual, our job is done."

The man returned to his seat, leaving Richard still pondering the matter.

..................

The sealing team in Mons sent a batch of materials back to the Imperial Capital every few days.

They used the academy's dedicated line, stamped with the wax seal of the Department of Internal Affairs.

The vast majority of it consisted of sealing work logs:

Reforging schematics, requisition forms awaiting approval, and structural weakness data gathered from the field piled high in the rear.

The matter of the angels was buried in this mountain of work logs, occupying only a fraction of the pile.

Sophia's letters arrived even more frequently than the field samples.

Before leaving, she had boasted that she would send Mentor a telegram every single day.

She hadn't quite lived up to that claim. Once the actual work started, who had the energy to fire off daily telegrams?

Even so, a letter arrived every three to five days, and she remained as chatty as ever.

"Mentor:

It's much safer here than I imagined. We haven't even run into any proper evil creatures—it's just exhausting beyond belief.

During the day, I follow the team around patching seals. Those old seals were blown to pieces by artillery fire; reforging them is much harder than what they taught us in class.

The senior student leading our group is fierce—even fiercer than Associate Professor Croft.

If I draw a single stroke wrong, he glares at me. He glares so hard my hands shake.

And don't even get me started on the food. The bread is hard enough to crack walnuts. Right now, I keep dreaming about the dining hall's cream stew.

Oh, right. The sample attached to this letter is something I picked up while I was at it.

It's a bullet casing from the ground where the angel manifested. It's completely drenched in ether.

We couldn't collect samples until we finished work at night, and that guy from the School of Theology insisted it was a holy relic and wouldn't let us take much.

I argued with him for ages just to snatch this single casing back.

Mentor, Richard—if you two have time, take a look and see what this thing is.

—Sophia

P.S. I didn't slack off. I didn't miss a single seal."

Isabella let out a visible sigh of relief after reading it.

"Still writing so much nonsense." She set the letter aside.

Richard read through the letter as well. By the time he finished, Isabella had already erected a ward.

"I'm not the only one in the rear who received samples," she said as she set it up.

"Several groups are studying them independently. When the time comes, we'll pool our conclusions."

"Then you're..."

"I just finished reading that stack of front-line reforging schematics. I'm switching to something else to rest my brain."

Isabella rubbed her brow.

"There's no rush with this. Take your time."

She looked at her nephew, a hint of a test in her gaze.

"You try first."

Richard nodded.

He sat at the writing desk and extended his Inspiration.

That layer of still water drifted forward silently, pressing against the specimen container.

At first, the ether on the bullet casing was a chaotic, tangled mess with no discernible pattern.

Richard sank his Inspiration deeper.

Slowly, the chaotic mass separated.

Strand after strand of thought converged from all directions, twisting into a single rope.

"Please... don't let me die."

He shifted to another strand.

"I don't want to die."

Then another.

"Let me make it home alive."

He withdrew his Inspiration from the container.

"From what I read, it was created through 'faith.'"

"Tens of thousands of people praying at once."

Richard stared at the container.

"Praying 'we will be saved.'"

"This collective will itself... condensed into something capable of stopping bullets?"

His aunt set down her teacup.

"On the other side of the veil, thought carries weight. You should know this."

"When tens of thousands of people simultaneously believe the same thing, it becomes real."

"The conclusion sent back by the School of Theology is roughly the same as what you just read."

She added one more thing.

"Except the flavor they read from it was different."

"Different how?"

Isabella's tone betrayed neither praise nor mockery.

"They read 'the Lord's mercy.'"

Richard suddenly remembered something.

He pulled out the folded slip of paper from deep inside his notebook.

"I've read this before."

"What?" His aunt looked up.

"Madam Marie had me act as an automatic scribe once."

Richard pointed at the paper.

"That night, my hand wrote this on its own."

"I didn't know what it was at the time."

He slid the paper toward his aunt.

"Thinking back, what I fished out that night was this Mons entity's echo in the Spirit Realm."

"Tens of thousands of strands of 'don't let me die,' twisted into one."

His aunt picked up the paper and studied it for a long time.

"For an automatic scribe to dredge this up... it means it has already formed into a cohesive mass in the Spirit Realm."

She folded the paper and handed it back to Richard.

"Make a copy of this sheet for me."

Richard tucked the paper away.

He could feel his [Speculation] take another step forward as he dissected this thing.

Yet just as he unraveled this layer, the next question surfaced.

"Aunt."

"Hm?"

"The thoughts of tens of thousands of people are scattered," Richard said, staring at the paper.

"They won't converge in one place and form a 'shape' on their own."

"There has to be an initial seed."

"A place for those scattered thoughts to latch onto."

His finger fell to the bottom of the page.

Beneath that sea of "don't let me die" sat a single, isolated line.

"The archers are right above you."

Richard stared at the line for a long moment.

"Why archers, of all things?"

..................

Richard wasn't the only one asking that question.

Several groups of scholars in the rear had pooled the oral reports from Mons, arranged them chronologically, and hit the exact same bottleneck.

The later reports grew increasingly chaotic in their claims: angels, St. George, light, miracles—everything imaginable.

Yet the earliest reports were highly consistent in their phrasing.

Almost all of them used the exact same term: the archers of Agincourt.

Agincourt was a major battle of the Hundred Years' War where the weak triumphed over the strong.

A few thousand longbowmen used the terrain to defeat an enemy several times their number.

It was one of the most famous battles in the Empire's history.

Shakespeare depicted it in detail in Henry V, and the Empire's new battleship bore its name.

"The archers are right above you."

The Department of Internal Affairs traced the origin of that sentence backward.

What they eventually uncovered was a short story printed in a newspaper.

"The Bowmen."

His aunt placed the retrieved newspaper clipping on the writing desk.

It was an old newspaper from over two weeks ago, turned to the literary supplement.

The short story wasn't long, and the author's column bore the name Arthur Machen.

Richard's eyes fell on the name.

"You know him?"

Isabella's expression grew complicated.

"I do."

She picked up the clipping and tapped the author's name.

"I have two of his books on my shelf."

"The Great God Pan, and a short story collection."

"He writes well."

"Very few people can capture that damp, eerie flavor."

Richard was surprised. He assumed his aunt only read ancient texts and inscriptions; he hadn't expected her to read leisure fiction in private.

"I even met him in person at a literary salon a few years ago," Isabella continued.

"What kind of person was he?"

Isabella thought for a moment.

"Just a very ordinary middle-aged man."

"He wore a threadbare coat, drank a little too much wine, and started rambling."

"He talked about the 'ancient things' he'd seen in the countryside in his youth—Celtic grails, vanished ancient pathways, things like that."

She set the clipping back on the desk.

"Everyone in the room just thought he was a drunk with too much imagination."

Richard caught her meaning.

"You're saying he isn't a Practitioner?"

"He hasn't even touched the fringes of it," Isabella shook her head. "He's completely clean—not a single ether circuit in his body."

"He's just an ordinary man. A novelist who uses the mystic side as literary material."

Isabella lifted her grapefruit tea and took a sip.

"And that is precisely what's wrong here."

Richard understood why she looked like that.

"A short story written by an ordinary person," Richard said slowly.

"How could that possibly erect something on the other side of the veil capable of stopping bullets?"

"Exactly." Isabella nodded.

"No matter how widely a short story spreads, at best it becomes idle gossip."

"It can move people, it can scare people, it can make them repeat a few lines in their heads."

"But it has no 'root.'"

She pushed the clipping closer to Richard.

"Tens of thousands of people read it and believed it—the scattered thoughts were there. But for scattered thoughts to twist into something capable of stopping bullets, tens of thousands of mouths aren't enough."

"Someone on the other side of the veil had to build the 'bridge' first, guiding and packing those tens of thousands of scattered thoughts into one place."

Richard's mind raced.

"Machen planted the word 'archers.'"

"But the one who 'nourished' that name into a thing was someone else entirely."

"Yes," Isabella's voice sank low. "The one behind this just needed a shell."

"What is that person after?" Richard asked.

"We actually found a few clues regarding Machen himself."

Isabella pulled another page from the stack.

"After The Bowmen was published, the Church invited him to give lectures, and newspapers contracted him to write columns. Even the military knocked on his door, asking him to keep writing to boost troop morale."

"In just two weeks, he went from a washed-up writer nobody remembered to 'the man who prophesied a miracle.'"