While the two of them are talking to the man, a group of knights approached them.
"Take him," the leader commanded as he pointed his index finger to Engelard.
"What's the meaning of this?" Sergey asked as he pulled Engelard to hide on his back.
"We're only following commands, young master. We—"
"Run!" Sergey suddenly shouted as he pushed Engelard away from the knights. He also managed to encase him in a barrier and run for himself.
"Don't look back!," he shouted once more when the abruptness of the order froze Engelard in his position to look back at him. "Run!," he repeated and threw him farther away this time as he stopped on his own tracks to stop the knights.
The shaken lad ran away from the scene with tears flooding down on his entire face. He wanted to look back as he heard the sound of fighting from his back but he couldn't.
He ran without any care in the direction and hid himself in the maze-like alleys of the town. When a knight almost caught him, he jumped into a garbage dump without hesitation and held his breath.
"Damn, find him. The madam will give birth tonight, she needs him to complete the child's birth." Engelard heard from one of the knights that made him crouched more on that position until the sun of the next day started to rise.
With a broken foot, Engelard walked to find a place to hide himself. He used a dirty old cloth he found in the garbage pile to hide himself and tore the hem of his pants to bind his limping foot.
He opened the door of a pub and the merriment of early breakfast of the guest broke off.
"A beggar?"
"Why a beggar at this time of the day?"
"Mistress!," one of the guests called to the pub owner. He whispered something to her and the owner went back to the kitchen only to come out again with a bowl of soup in her hand.
Engelard seemed confused at the events and simply followed the mistress in the corner where she guided him to eat.
Meek and weak, the hungry young master took off the amethyst pin in his coat and gave it secretly to the mistress.
"A room, please... Thank you."
And that's how Engelard ended up hiding in one of that pub's rental rooms. The first minutes inside the enclosed space was full of anxiety and worry about Sergey who chose to face the knights all by himself. Next is self pity to himself who was caught up in a situation he does not clearly understand.
The image of his father being lacerated and his aunt who were drinking his father's blood luxuriously flashes inside his head like a broken record.
"No..."
Engelard denies.
But in the middle of his chaotic memories and emotions, the noise from outside started to get louder and louder.
"Stop...please, stop."
Ah. He suddenly remembered the man begging them last night to save his daughter, he's slashed on the spot by the knight who came after them and his helpless body kissed the ground.
"AAAAAAAAA!" he yelled inside the room but the people seemed to care very little to that sudden raise in voice because they were focused on a more horrifying fact approaching them.
Engelard tried to see what's going on outside and what he saw was a completely macabre scene of people begging the gods to make them live.
A sinister mana is crawling in the ground and anyone it touches falls into the ground. All of the victims are bleeding from all the holes in their body and they are holding their chest as if they can't breathe.
At that moment, he thought of Sergey and his mother.
Engelard hurried his way down to the pub's ground floor but the people in there were already occupied by the events outside, watching it from the window like what he did earlier.
They looked at him with shock and recognized him immediately as the young lord of Erasmus since he had no time to cover his face.
"Where are you going?"
"I... Hah. I-I'm going home."
"No one's opening the door!"
It's the mistress. She stopped Engelard and announced the ban on opening the pub's door.
Muddled in his own thoughts, Engelard staggered on his feet. And stared at the people stopping him to go outside, helplessly.
Then he remembered the window in his room.
He ran, almost stumbling on the stairs back to his room and when the mistress realized what Engelard was thinking to do, she pushed two men beside him to go after him.
"Stop him, He's going to break through the window!"
But they were too late to catch Engelard. He successfully broke the window and jumped from there, breaking his foot once more from the impact of the fall.
"That crazy son of a—"
"Eih...eih. That's enough." The mistress' husband stopped her.