Chapter 4 – The Young Elite Who Turn Back a Great Host

1

The battlefield I had been given was nothing but one punishing moment after another.

Immediately after the fighting opened, too many Kingdom soldiers overwhelmed us; our men panicked, began fighting as individuals, and went down with no coordination between them at all. I felt the danger of things not going as planned, but the battle had already begun, and there was no meaning left in lamenting anything now.

“…General Ritziareite. The front line is all but destroyed… please, give the order to commit every unit we are holding back.”

The dragon-mount soldiers who had been concentrating on reconnaissance above couldn’t bear to watch what was happening below and had moved into combat as well. Even when it meant a dive that amounted to throwing a life away, they kept scattering their lives one after another.

“Even if we commit everything, in this state it is plain that we would simply lose soldiers for nothing.”

“But then the men at the front, who are barely holding the Kingdom’s army, will be sacrificed.”

“That is…”

—What is the right answer here?

Lady Valtrune was away on another task. Full authority over the Provisional Elite Corps rested with me.

“Where is Petra?”

“The front is so badly tangled we cannot even distinguish which are ours and which are theirs…”

What held the key to victory today was setting off the magic tools. A great quantity of explosive tools had been laid across the Dyrst region, and the only person who could give the order to fire them was, at present, Petra alone.

—I should have placed her further back.

Had I known the enemy’s assault would be this fierce, I would have built a formation with more thought for defense. My appetite for cutting even a little into their numbers had got the better of me, and I had put irreplaceable mages relatively far forward.

“General Ritziareite. Your next order…”

“…………”

The enemy had already broken the Corps’ line. If our soldiers kept dying and we lost the ability to obstruct the Kingdom’s advance, this whole area would pass into the Kingdom’s hands at a stroke.

“Is there nothing for it but to go to the front myself?”

Time was passing, moment by moment. Without a decision, all that would grow was the number of dead.

“…Continue to hold!”

“H-hold, ma’am?!”

“Yes. Hold.”

The conclusion I reached after agonizing over it was that we wouldn’t yet intervene in the fighting. The situation was certainly severe, but if I moved now, the entire plan to take the Kingdom’s army in one net might be reduced to cinders.

“But General Ritziareite, the front line cannot last!”

“I understand perfectly well how narrow this is… but.”

Calming down and thinking it through, I decided I must not cut off the possibility that Petra was alive. The Corps still holds the seed of a reversal. We were being pushed back along the whole line, yes, but if all of this was part of the plan she built, then it would be wrong of me to interfere with it clumsily.

Draw the enemy in, and blow them apart in one motion with the tools. If Petra gives the word and the tools destroy that great host, there is a chance of winning.

—I am betting on you, Petra.

“To all soldiers. We will not commit our remaining strength. We continue to hold the second and third defense lines. We intervene at the front only after the great detonation. Tell the dragon-mount soldiers as well to refrain from engaging as far as they possibly can!”

“Ma’am!”

This has to be right. And if this judgment proves wrong, then I will take the whole of the responsibility and step down from command of the Provisional Elite Corps.

“I believe in all of you.”

2

At the rear position of the Provisional Elite Corps’ first defense line, Dyrst region.

The first defense line is the one that meets the Kingdom’s army head-on, ahead of everyone else, and the person given command of this place was none other than me, Petra Farban.

Obstruct the enemy’s advance, and use the detonation of the magic tools to do a fast-moving enemy damage of half-destruction or worse. That is one of the duties laid on me.

The brown dust filling the whole of my view had covered the Dyrst plain, and it was impossible to tell even where, or in what numbers, the enemy soldiers were massed. The one thing that could be said with certainty was that their strength overwhelmingly exceeded ours. The instant that advancing host appeared, I understood that sealing its momentum off completely wasn’t possible.

“Come on, Petra. There’s no beating that many… the Kingdom’s army is way too big.”

“Don’t complain.”

“B-but, y’know…”

Steano scratched his head with a weak expression and stared out at the front. What he was looking at was one of our units being trampled by the Kingdom’s host with nothing much in the way of resistance, and the color went out of his face at once; anybody could see how shaken he was.

“Whoa… they got flattened in a second there.”

“So it seems.”

“‘So it seems’… at this rate they’ll come at this position too.”

He walked round and round the same patch of ground, unable to settle. What was there to panic about? Everyone had known from the start that the Kingdom’s numbers were overwhelmingly greater than ours and that stopping their advance in a straight fight would be difficult.

What we had to think about was one thing only: how many Kingdom soldiers we could blow away when the tools went off.

“Skittering around in front of me is getting on my nerves! Settle down a little!”

“Yeah, but, look…”

“You don’t have to be that frightened. We’ve got the magic tools. Blow the Kingdom’s main force away at a decent moment and the shape of this turns over easily.”

“Even so, when exactly are we turning it over? Looks to me like they just break through.”

Steano pointed out the way the line was crumbling piece by piece across the field. It was an ugly sight, no question. However hard we dug in to stop the Kingdom’s advance, we couldn’t beat the sheer weight of numbers, and unit after unit was being crushed.

At this rate the Kingdom’s army would stay spread over a wide area, and it was easy to see the Corps simply losing on numbers.

“…We haven’t drawn them in far enough to use the tools yet. We need a few more of them inside the blast area.”

If they kept being defeated in detail, holding the line would become impossible, and eventually the formation would collapse all at once. To rebuild the front I had to buy time, however little.

“Steano. Signal the dragon-mount soldiers to make an air attack… let them do as they like much longer and even sweeping them with the tools gets difficult.”

“‘Kay. I use the smoke tool, right?”

“Yes. The red smoke. Don’t get it wrong.”

Having sent Steano off, I gathered the mages nearby.

“Everyone here.”

Every one of them wore an anxious face.

“Petra-san, what do we do?”

“I think this is a bit beyond us.”

“Are we going to be killed like this?”

Why were they all so faint-hearted? However bad the position we had been put in, we had one shot at turning it over completely. I put in a cough, then let my eyes go over all of them.

“All of you, calm down. Nothing has decided that we lose yet.”

I tried encouragement and it didn’t seem to take. With that scene spread out in front of them, words alone were evidently not going to lift anyone.

—Then for now I will simply overlook their nerves.

“You there.”

“Er, yes?”

“You’ll take over from me and give the order for the tools to fire!”

“What—?!”

I went on before the bewildered mage could recover.

“I am going to the front line and crushing every enemy soldier who still has any push left in him. I don’t expect to have time to be giving orders about the tools, so I’m entrusting that to you.”

“Wait, are you serious?!”

“I am. There’s nothing strange about it. I’ve simply judged it to be the best thing to do.”

Standing at the very front as a mage and putting down oncoming soldiers reliably, in the right order, isn’t an easy thing. Most of the mages in the Corps are young, and only know how to operate with front-line soldiers guaranteeing their safety.

—But I can manage risk accurately on a dangerous field with a lot of enemies on it. At the academy I went through combat for mages under realistic conditions again and again. I can get the most out of everything I learned.

“Anyone can give the order to detonate. If you don’t like carrying the responsibility alone, talk to everybody here and set the tools off at an appropriate moment.”

“Please wait. Then, Petra-san, are you really…”

“Obviously. I’m going to fight mixed in with the soldiers at the front.”

At that, every one of the mages made the same complicated face, as though they wanted me not to go.

“You can’t. It’s far too dangerous…”

“If you die, Petra-san, the first defense line really is finished.”

“Please reconsider!”

Voices going up on all sides to keep me from the front, and my mind didn’t change.

“Sorry, but whatever anybody says, I’m going.”

The order to detonate doesn’t have to come from me. Every mage has been shown how the tools are fired, and the reason I was given the role in the first place is that I was credited with putting down numerous enemy soldiers in the earlier fighting in Marquis Rigel’s territory. If what is being valued is my quality as a soldier rather than as a commander, then it is absolutely better for me to be at the front, fighting.

“I really am better suited to fighting actively than sitting still back here…”

“B-but going alone is too reckless…”

Reckless, perhaps that is fair. A mage’s role is mainly to support the front-line soldiers from behind, not to go out and stand in the line of fire on purpose.

Even so, I had no intention of bending.

“…Frankly, the chance of the Corps beating the Kingdom’s army in the current position is quite low. Sweeping them with the tools means nothing unless we can lure enough of them into the area where the tools are laid.”

As things stood, the Kingdom was fighting us while still holding a great deal of surplus strength at the back. If possible I wanted every one of those reserves committed forward too, and all of it blown away at once.

“That front line can’t hold much longer… which is exactly why I’m going to scatter their soldiers with magic and put pressure on them. To make them believe that if they don’t commit everything here, they’ll be pushed back.”

If the enemy took our bait and threw in their whole strength, we could be certain of blowing away the great mass of them with the tools, and the probability of a win would rise sharply.

“I’ve never once intended to lose. But I’d still be happier with better odds.”

Hearing that, Steano said ‘Fair enough’ and started walking toward the front himself.

“…Wait. Don’t tell me you’re coming too?”

“You don’t need ‘don’t tell me,’ you can tell. How many years d’you think we’ve known each other?”

“What are you posing for? We’ve known each other about six years, since the academy.”

He talks like a partner of several decades, when not remotely enough time has passed for us to communicate by exchanging a look. He scratched his head and pushed his lips out anyway.

“Six years is plenty long for us.”

“…Is it.”

I made a deliberately blank, joking face, and he said ‘Hey’ and gave me a light dig back. I had meant to tease him, and Steano didn’t let the serious look go; he showed me a strained sort of smile instead.

“…Let me fight with you. I’m not completely useless, y’know?”

“I’ve never once thought of you as useless.”

“Huh?! But you’re always telling me I’m an idiot!”

“Obviously that’s banter. It’s also true.”

“That’s not backing me up, though. Petra-saaan?”

What a stupid face.

I have had many chances to treat Steano coldly, and I take them because I trust him. Otherwise I wouldn’t have stayed involved with the same person this long.

He was standing there with his eyes wide, still looking at me, so I gave his shin a light kick and jerked a finger to say get moving.

“Stop standing about. You’re coming, aren’t you?”

“R-right!”

I started walking and he caught up at a trot almost at once.

“Wait, Petra-san?!”

“I’m going to the front with Steano. Firing the tools is all yours.”

I didn’t look back once. I handed full authority over the tools to the mages behind me with my eyes fixed straight ahead at the field.

As an officer leading a large number of soldiers, this behavior is probably a disqualifying one. But if it wins, I don’t care what it is. Mud on my record is worth nothing to me. The only thing that matters is whether the process I chose leads to the best result.

“That all right? Looked like that lot were relying on you.”

“Don’t worry, those children will manage… besides, a girl like me standing at the back with her arms folded playing commander doesn’t suit anyone, does it?”

Those mages are older than I am to begin with, and have been soldiers longer. Being worked by someone younger who has only just left the academy must have grated on them considerably.

“They’ll find it easier moving freely.”

“Hey. That’s what’s called abandoning your post.”

“It is not. I handed the important work over properly.”

“You dumped it on him… well, no use saying anything now.”

Steano shrugged like a man giving up and moved, without making anything of it, in front of me. He drew his sword and put his eyes to work on our surroundings, and the way he did it was a proper knight’s.

“You. Make sure you protect me.”

“Right. As my Lady Petra commands.”

“…Also, pay back the money you borrowed from me.”

“You’re bringing that up now…”

Steano dropped his shoulders in the most obvious way possible. What was he genuinely depressed about? Of course it was a joke. If he’s going to claim we’ve known each other a long time, he could read what I actually mean.

He is slow, so I resigned myself to saying the thing directly.

“What I mean is.”

“Hm?”

“Don’t you dare die without my permission. Both of us are coming back alive.”

I finished and looked for his reaction, and he had that stupid face on again and had gone red.

“…No, hang on. Sudden affection, I’m confused?”

“Excuse me?”

“Wait, is that reaction, are you actually angry about the money?! Your voice has gone frightening.”

Oh, honestly, this idiot. Read the room a little and end the conversation with a quiet ‘yes.’ The fact that he says one thing too many is proof this man understands nothing about how a woman feels.

“…Haah. Of course it doesn’t get through to this idiot.”

“Wh, why are you angry? I’ll apologize for the money, all right…”

“Stop dragging that out. Be quiet and watch our surroundings.”

“Ugh, this is unreasonable…”

What is unreasonable about it?

All I wanted to say was that I trust Steano as a comrade who matters to me. And the first thing out of his mouth is ‘sudden affection, I’m confused’?

When, exactly, was I being affectionate? However you look at it, that was encouragement and nothing else. If words like that count as affection, then I am an indiscriminate, people-pleasing idiot of a woman who is affectionate with everyone.

No. Absolutely not.

I trust him, and Steano is still a stupid man. That is my position.

“…Haah. My opinion of Steano has hit the floor with that. I might start collecting on that debt tomorrow.”

“Wha—?! P-please, anything but that…”

“Oh, is that right. You’re panicking rather. Hmm.”

“Lady Petra… no, Your Excellency. I will stake everything I have on protecting you, so please, some mercy in your handling of this!”

“Hmm, only protecting me. What to do. To forgive an insensitive man like this, I’d need some considerable deeds of arms out of him…”

“Yes! I swear to protect Your Excellency absolutely and to kill a hundred of them, or a thousand!”

I tormented a thoroughly frightened, thoroughly fawning Steano for a good while, and then let my irritation end there, and gave him an outrageous order in its place.

“…Well, for now: keep me alive and kill an unlimited number of the enemy. Whether there are mitigating circumstances depends on how hard you work. Understood?”

“Yes! I’ll do my absolute best!”

“Good. Then we charge into that mess at once!”

I gave the order to charge to a Steano who was working himself up for no reason.

“Wait, we’re going there? Seriously…?”

He seemed to be coming out of his trance somewhat, and that wasn’t my problem. When I saw his pace drop, I broke into a run.

“Stop being frightened at everything. We charge together, nicely!”

“Ehh… incidentally, what’s the plan?”

“Obviously… no guard, full attack!”

“That’s not a plan anymore, that’s just brainless!”

Having declared it at the top of my voice, I went into a field stinking of blood with countless enemy soldiers closing on it.

“Hey, Petra, you’re a mage, you’re too far forward!”

“Be quiet. Hurry up or I’ll kill your share of them too!”

This is a field where lives are on the line, the place nearest the next world, where one mistaken judgment kills you easily. By rights it ought to be somewhere you fear the enemy in front of you, and instead I couldn’t keep my excitement down at fighting at the very front.

I could make a life out of standing on a battlefield and earning brilliant deeds of arms. Fighting spirit hot enough to throw the fear of death back had settled into me.

“I’ll give them a big one to get us started!”

I put everything I had into a working and threw it at the center of the enemy army. The frail magic they threw back in resistance was swallowed whole, and the great fireball burned a large number of Kingdom soldiers to nothing.

“Damn you—!”

A Kingdom soldier came at me with his sword at once, and I looked away with a cool face.

“Not happening!”

“Gah!”

Because the guarding of my immediate surroundings has been entrusted to a man I trust. Steano cut down the soldiers reaching us one after another, moving fast and wasting nothing.

Steano got permanently unremarkable marks in his academic work, but where the sword is concerned I recognize him as the best I know after Aldia. He may not be the strongest, but he is genuinely skilled, and a man like that doesn’t get the order of his targets wrong.

“Heh. How’s that, Petra? Not bad swordwork, eh?”

“It’ll do. A bare pass, I’d say.”

“That’s harsh marking…”

Of course it is. I know Steano very well. Praise him carelessly and he floats off on his own and makes strange mistakes. Here the correct move is to keep a level face, even if it is a lie, and hold to a moderate compliment.

“Right. Next!”

“Yeah. I’ll work for full marks.”

The road the mage Petra walks is the road of still winning. I believe in myself, use magic, and sweep away every enemy in the range I can see.

“Regret ever standing in front of me! And then open me a road!”

The great fire I sent out dyed the field red, and flames burning as though mad writhed high toward the sky. The Kingdom soldiers’ armor began to melt in the heat, and the ground I had walked became a mountain of the dead, black ash and heat drifting over it, making a road.

‘Too many of the enemy?’

‘No chance of winning?’

‘They’ll simply break through?’

‘You don’t want to die for nothing?’

‘You don’t see the point of fighting at a disadvantage?’

Truly idiotic.

Facts that plain are worth nothing to me. Whenever it is and whatever the situation, I hate losing. I go at a contest with everything I have, and however unlovely it gets, I do my utmost to the very end to take the win.

“Steano. Left is yours.”

“Got it. Right’s yours.”

There is someone here chasing victory alongside me. He wants to win as badly as I do, and he follows me down a road of carnage with a fair bit of cheek about it.

—Which is why, however hard it gets, I don’t give up on winning.

“Hah!”

“Hyah!”

Steano and I stood back to back, eyeing the many enemies around us. In this place the only ally either of us could rely on was the other. And even so, neither of us despaired.

“Tch. Cut them and cut them and there’s no end to it.”

“That’s fine. However many come, if we keep killing until the last one is down, it’s our win.”

To become a first-rate soldier who survives a battlefield, you need the greed to chase victory and a very bad habit of not giving up. Victory doesn’t come to people who decide immediately that a thing is impossible.

Whatever the result turns out to be, I will fight to the end. That is the conviction I hold as a mage, and the reason I decided to live here.

3

Red smoke spread out across the sky.

We riders had been watching the enemy advance from far above, and after a round of eye contact we began to descend slowly.

“Right, that’s the attack signal!”

“Time to flatten some soldiers!”

“Okaaay. Let’s do this!”

We had been holding station directly over the Dyrst first defense line for tens of minutes, so the riders were straining at it now that the moment had come.

“Everyone, settle down a bit~ though I do know how you feel.”

The signal to attack had gone up and I was as pleased about it as any of them. Honestly, just watching from above while the ground took a beating had been unbearable.

“All riders, prepare for the strike!”

The riders moved over the enemy soldiers’ heads and began circling, hunting hard for somewhere worth hitting.

—Hmm. Best target’s probably over there, where the mages look thin. The soldiers on the ground are keeping them busy, so they won’t have attention to spare for the sky.

“Right. We go in a bit behind the line where the two armies are meeting!”

“Understood!”

“Yes, ma’am!”

The riders spread out from one another and watched for the moment to dive.

Not yet… not yet… right, now!

“Down!”

I said it short and went into the dive first, and the rest of them came down after me one after another. Not one enemy soldier had his eyes up. Well, even if they’d noticed, they probably wouldn’t have made it in time.

“All right, here we go, Pochi!”

We landed on top of the Kingdom soldiers without shedding any speed at all. Armor breaking, something crushing, iron shrieking against iron in a way that hurt the ears, all that noise went out across the entire field in an instant.

“A-air attack!”

“The riders have come down! Shoot them!”

I put more into an enemy line that was already confused by the sudden attack.

“We’re sweeping the lot of them!”

I pulled the reins and Pochi swung that long tail and rolled the Kingdom soldiers over, then crushed them flat under his bulk before they could get up.

“Right, next!”

Pochi gave a roar and bit into the soldiers in front of us this time.

“Kh, let go, agh! My arm! My arrrm!”

What he’d bitten was a Kingdom soldier’s arm. Pochi tore it away, worked his throat, and swallowed it whole. I did think it was rather sad for a man to have his arm taken off, but I put the pity down and shot him through the crown of the head with my short bow.

Looking around, the dragons that had come down out of the sky were biting Kingdom soldiers to death one after another. The ground units had been struggling against the Kingdom’s numbers, but our disruption had worked nicely, and where we riders had landed the flow had gone completely to the Corps.

“Hey, don’t run!”

“Come baaack!”

Riders with too much blood in them, chasing Kingdom soldiers who’d lost the will to fight and were running everywhere, on and on. Aggressive pursuit the moment the position turned over, a model example of the unit I command.

“Hmm. That’s awful.”

“No, before you call it awful, could you stop them? At that rate they’ll chase to the end of the earth and be off the battlefield entirely.”

At some point one of the riders had drawn level with me and was watching the same thing: our own people pursuing running Kingdom soldiers without a shred of mercy.

“Ehh~ well, enthusiasm’s a good thing, isn’t it?”

“It’s because the captain talks like that that people say our unit is full of free spirits…”

“Free spirits! That’s true enough!”

“I wasn’t complimenting you, you know!”

The most sensible person in the unit I command let out an enormous sigh and headed off toward the riders chasing the enemy about, looking thoroughly put upon.

“Right, you two! Stop wasting time and fight where you were told to!”

“Ehh.”

“Just a bit longer~”

“I’m not hearing excuses! Get back to your posts, now!”

The scolding was pitched slightly out of tune with the tension of an actual battlefield, and I turned my face away in spite of myself.

—She’s like a dragon-rider version of Petra-chan. Best not to cross her.

“S-so. Perhaps I’ll go and fight somewhere else.”

“Ah, Captain! Hold on a sec…”

“I’ll leave the fighting round here to you~”

Close. That was absolutely the air of an imminent lecture. Better to get well away before anybody says anything about a captain’s self-awareness.

Pochi caught what I wanted at once and leapt up hard into the air.

“Right, we’re running from the scary junior, Pochi. Solo charge over where the enemy look thickest!”

Pochi gave a small growl and beat his wings hard to take us where I’d pointed.

—Oh. Hold on, isn’t that…

What came into view ahead of me were two very familiar figures.

“Heeeey, Petra-chaaan! Steanooo~”

Delighted, I went to join in with the two of them.

4

“Heeeey, Petra-chaaan! Steanooo~”

A cheerful voice from behind and above, and my attention went to it in spite of me, because on a field this grim I hadn’t allowed for an entrance that stupid.

“Hey, Petra. An idiot has arrived.”

“Steano. Ignore it. Concentrate on what’s in front of you… that’s nothing but noise now.”

“Right, got it.”

I ignored the airhead of a rider closing from behind and chose to keep burning Kingdom soldiers down in front of me. There was no reason whatsoever to turn round and go ‘Oh, it’s Mia~ over here, over here~’ like two friends on a day off.

On a dangerous field a moment’s lapse costs a life. Without hesitating I kept burning enemy soldiers to death with fierce-flame workings.

…Besides which, I am not that cheerful a person.

“Yaaay. Petra-cha, gbbogh?!”

Except that the problem child of a rider was evidently not going to grant me the option of ignoring her.

An enormous dragon mount came in without shedding any speed at all, straight into the Kingdom soldier I was about to put a working into, and carried on, taking the soldiers behind him with it, sending men flying one after another. The noise of it was loud enough to draw the attention of the Kingdom’s army and the Corps alike.

“Wh-why is a dragon…”

“Nobody attacks like that…”

“I-is that thing all right…”

“Looks dead to me. Wait, it’s alive?”

Faced with a charge that reckless, everyone standing on that field was thoroughly bewildered.

“Q-quiet! All of you can go flying!”

—And Mia, for her part, seemed to dislike having her fighting picked at, because she set the dragon rampaging in an utterly indiscriminate way.

Nobody could stop a dragon rolling about in every direction at once. Against that unpredictable outrage, Steano and I could only watch with blank faces as the rampaging dragon kept downing enemies.

“…She’s probably stupider than me.”

“Stupid and reckless with her life… it’s a wonder she’s alive at all.”

Even with quality equipment on the dragon, a charge that violent could injure it badly. An ordinary person would fight rather more carefully. And yet…

“Good, that’s it, Pochi! I knew you’d do it!”

Muscle-headed tactics, made up as she went. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for the dragon called Pochi, steered by a woman who doesn’t think.

“…That’s a lecture when we get back. It’s an important dragon, she can move it more gently.”

“Her instincts for a fight are good, though… she’s just alarming.”

As it turned out, Mia’s intervention broke well and we destroyed a Kingdom unit outright. But a reckless charge with a high probability of killing herself isn’t something I can forgive.

5

“Ow?!”

“You, we’re on a battlefield, have some sense of tension. Do you understand that that incomprehensible charge was dangerous?!”

“Ugh… we won, so you don’t have to be that angry.”

“Winning and losing has nothing to do with it! The problem is that you made that pointless charge! Do you understand how many people are inconvenienced if you die?!”

Mia, being scolded by Petra right in front of me. Not one person on our side stepped up to defend her.

“Waaah. S-Steanooo~”

She turned a pathetic, help-me face on me, but I couldn’t endorse that violent way of fighting either. And besides…

“Steano? If you say one unnecessary word, you know what happens.”

“Eep…”

I am currently a debtor who has borrowed money from Petra, and I can’t take any action that goes against her. Sorry, Mia. Stand there quietly and be told off.

I held a beautiful, rigid posture and took my eyes off her.

“Yep. This one is entirely Mia’s fault!”

“Ahh?! Steano, you cold-hearted—!”

An enormously overblown reaction, like a comrade sold out. No, that was pretty hard to defend, that was.

Petra likes a fight as much as Mia does, but she can tell the difference between what you may and may not do, so nobody can flatly condemn how she acts. Mia moves on whatever the moment feels like, which is how she ends up taking a long lecture for misconduct.

“You’re the captain of the rider unit, aren’t you? Do you think a captain charging an enemy army without thinking is going to be excused?”

“Ugh… then I’m a captain, so don’t be so angry with me!”

“I am the battalion commander of this defense line. Of course I’m angry!”

…Fair point.

“Waaaaah! Being that angry with me is too cruel!”

“Oh, honestly, there’s no need to cry… I’ll come with you afterward when you apologize to the people you inconvenienced.”

“Uu. Petra-chan… I love you.”

Snuffling tears and worse on the back of a dragon, Mia had precisely zero dignity as a captain.

—Also, why is this idiot a captain when I’m not? I feel the unfairness of the world.

“There. Finished crying?”

“Mhm… oh, thanks for the handkerchief.”

…Mother and daughter, are they.

The scene in front of me was so out of place I could have forgotten I was standing on a battlefield. Petra brushed the dust off Mia’s clothes, handed her a handkerchief, and stroked her head to settle her.

“Haah… you’re not hurt?”

“Nope. I’m fine.”

“Then that’s enough. Pull yourself together, we’re going to support somewhere else.”

“Yep!”

Having cried her way out of it and worked out that no more scolding was coming, Mia went back to her usual bright smile.

—Has this one actually reflected on anything?

I was aiming a suspicious look at her when…

“Nyeh~”

—Mia pulled down the skin under her right eye with a finger and stuck her tongue out at me.

—Ah. This idiot woman. I am absolutely not letting that go.

She may bob her head at Petra, but there is no color of remorse in her anywhere.

“Petra! This idiot hasn’t reflected at all. She just stuck her tongue out at me!”

“I-I did not! I felt Petra-chan’s deep love in worrying about me and I reflected intensely!”

She fired back the instant I informed on her.

“Hah! Would someone who’d reflected intensely provoke me like that? You liar.”

“Waaah, Petra-chan! Steano’s trying to pin a crime on me that I didn’t commit. That’s awful, isn’t it? The one you should really be scolding is him!”

“Hey, Petra. Don’t be fooled by this act. Three seconds from now she’ll do exactly the same thing!”

“I will not!”

“You absolutely will!”

“No. I absolutely will not!”

“No. Your ‘absolutely will not’ can’t be trusted!”

“You stubborn… you perpetual failing-grade alien!”

“Shut up! You were about the same as me!”

While the fruitless argument went on, Petra, head down, began to shake at the shoulders.

“Petra-chaaan. Scold this idiot Steano, won’t you?”

Mia hadn’t noticed that obvious fawning was, with Petra in this state, exactly the wrong move.

I understood at once that something about Petra had changed, and shut my mouth so as not to say anything unnecessary. And thanks to Mia’s blithe attitude, my choosing silence lost all its meaning.

“…You two?”

“Eep…?!”

“Fweh…”

A low voice with a chill at the bottom of it. Petra’s tone shifting brought beads of sweat out on Mia’s forehead.

“No fighting. Yes?”

A manufactured smile with a shadow on it. On what ought to have been a field full of noise, the cold coming off Petra brought a silence down as though time had stopped for a moment.

Neither Mia nor I had any option except to nod immediately.

“We’re sorry. We’ll get along. We won’t fight anymore.”

“Is that so? I’m glad. And if what you just said was a lie… mm?”

“We swear it isn’t a lie!”

Not a word of protest from either of us. Mia and I looked at Petra’s about-to-snap smile and put our foreheads to the ground at the same moment.

In conclusion: when Petra genuinely loses her temper there are two patterns, the shouting one and the quietly-pressing one. Personally, this one frightens me several grades more than a shouting Petra.

6

Beginning with the lecture to Mia and ending with settling a fruitless argument between Mia and Steano, we could finally concentrate on the fighting.

“You two are going to fight at the very front, of course?”

“Yes! As my Lady Petra commands!”

The pair of idiots went off amicably at the head of the ground units.

The Kingdom’s army had withdrawn from where we had just been fighting, which let the Corps take possession of a wide area, and we were now heading somewhere new where the enemy soldiers were thick.

“…Enemy in numbers! Our people are surrounded!”

“Understood! You two are up. Scatter that rabble!”

“Yes! We’ll kill them in an instant for Lady Petra!”

The two of them kept up the grandiose speech, answered in perfect unison, and ran for the enemy ahead of everyone else. I drew a light breath and pointed at their backs.

“Everyone else, follow those two. Begin the attack!”

“Ma’am!”

Mia with her short bow and her enormous dragon mount, and Steano with his gift for the sword. Those two are forever squabbling noisily, but where fighting is concerned I trust them a great deal. Honestly, neither is suited to standing above anyone and giving orders, but as soldiers fighting at the front they have a potential that shines far past any ordinary soldier.

“Hold them for me…”

“Leave it!”

“Yeees!”

Watching the two of them meet the enemy and fight hard, I set about preparing a working at once.

There was no need for something large and showy that tears a formation apart. We had force enough to push the enemy in front of us back. What I ought to use was…

“…Barriers on my own people. Nothing else.”

If I let a wide-area attack go in this situation, the worst case is a disaster that catches my own people. Back on the field earlier, before Mia arrived, the only ally near me was Steano, so I could throw magic without reservation. Now the circumstances had changed, and there was no reason for me to be firing whatever I liked. This wasn’t a moment for exercising personal power however I pleased.

“Change how you fight to suit the situation. People who can’t become first-rate mages are the ones who misjudge at the decisive moment. …Hah!”

I am a first-rate mage. I find the optimal answer and draw victory in.

I laid barriers on the soldiers fighting ahead of me and then sent my eyes around us.

“Hyaah!”

“Sei!”

Mia and Steano were attacking the enemy in front of them with real aggression, which had put the enemy’s opening tempo a beat behind. The other soldiers holding both flanks to protect them thrust out swords and spears to keep the enemy from closing, and kept them checked well.

Everyone was working together and fighting from an ironclad formation. What I could see was a board on which the Kingdom’s army was struggling to attack and their advance had gone sticky.

The enemy would be impatient, thinking about how to solve the two greatest threats in this place, Mia and Steano, and wanting to put pressure on them. All I had to do was kill any move against those two before it happened.

“That’s where you are, then!”

“—?!”

A little behind where the Kingdom’s army and the Corps were engaged, I could see several mages hidden in the shadow of a long row of Kingdom soldiers, quietly taking aim at the pair of them.

I put a working in immediately, and the mages gave it up and raised a barrier to protect the soldiers.

“Damn her…”

“Change of plan. We kill that woman first.”

“There’s one of her. All of us together and she’s finished!”

Having obstructed their move, I had turned the enemy mages’ target from Mia and Steano onto myself.

The enemy mages began building their workings, the pressure of it coming off them in waves, and I moved into a counterattacking stance at once.

“Hmph! Very good. A crowd of nobodies can’t beat me however many of you there are. Let me teach you what a difference in ability looks like!”

—Advantage or not, this is a fight the Corps can’t step down from.

If we could push the Kingdom’s army back here as well, the enemy would certainly become impatient. And then the Kingdom would try to commit an even larger host and crush a Corps that was defending the whole enormous Dyrst region with a handful of people.

—If we can get the enemy to stand on our ground, victory comes a great deal closer.

“Listen! This is where we prove ourselves! If you don’t want to lose disgracefully, hold this place as though your lives depend on it!”

Immediately after I shouted that encouragement at my people, innumerable bolts giving off a pale light like the first of the dawn were loosed across the whole of my view. Every one of them came straight at me.

Even if I threw up layer after layer of barrier around myself with everything I had, right now, whether I could cancel every bolt wasn’t certain. On the feel of it, at about seventy percent I should expect to take at least one hit.

“If one lands badly I might die… but!”

I drew a deep breath in order to sweep every bolt aside. At this stage it isn’t a question of whether I can. There is only doing it.

“For me, thirty percent is no different from a hundred!”

I am not a woman to be caught by worthless probability.

I released every barrier I had given my people and raised a solid one around myself. The bolts struck it and burst, one after another.

“Please… hold.”

A sound like breaking glass every second, and the explosions and the waves of heat getting steadily closer. A countdown toward dying, ticking nearer.

—How many barriers do I have left, and how many bolts do they have left?

A test of endurance with a life on it, and where it ended…

“…Ah.”

—tipped, as it happened, toward the invaders.

7

I felt heat appalling enough to burn a face.

The last barrier shattered into powder and the fragments came down over the whole of me, and then melted away into nothing.

“…Kh!”

Covering my head with both arms, I made my peace with dying.

—I did everything I could do. If that isn’t enough, I’ve no regrets.

Blown away by the impact of the bolts, badly wounded, out of the fight. That was what I expected. Except…

“Heavy unit, cover our people, quickly!”

“Ma’am!”

A woman’s voice from behind me.

“Petra! Hnn!”

The light of the bolts that had been lighting my face was cut off, immediately after that voice, by some large obstruction. A dull shock traveled through the air, the feel of bolts being turned away.

There was no pain in my body. I simply hadn’t caught up with the situation.

“Wh… at…?”

I brushed the dust rising off the ground aside with a hand and slowly opened my eyes. Standing there covering me was a single soldier in enormous armor, with a great shield up.

“You, surely not…”

“Are you all right, Petra?”

I heard that gravelly voice and my eyes went wide.

“Ambros?!”

Hard armor, unnecessarily broad across. A great shield thick enough and tall enough that you would wonder whether he had brought an iron door from somewhere. And that huge frame, with a core in it like a fortress.

“Yeah! I’m glad I made it in time!”

There was no mistaking him. This dependable, giant of a man was Ambros.

“Next! Dragon-mount units, help break their front open!”

“General Ritziareite, the heavy unit…”

“Follow the riders and advance! The rest, work on protecting the mages!”

And the owner of the first voice I had heard was General Ritziareite, who leads the Provisional Elite Corps.

“Reinforcements…”

The pain I had been carrying in my stomach eased all at once. With them arriving, I understood that holding this area was no longer in doubt.

“Petra. I’m glad you’re unhurt.”

“I’m sorry. I went to the front on my own authority.”

“Not at all. Thanks to you the front has recovered. The plan won’t collapse now.”

Ritziareite, astride a dragon mount, put down a Kingdom soldier bearing down on her with a beautiful piece of spearwork. Our soldiers, who had been fighting one engagement after another, visibly relaxed at her arrival.

“I’m going to support Mia and the others. This area will be all right, won’t it?”

“Yes. Leave it to us!”

Words with trust in them. To answer what she expected of me, I fixed my eyes on the enemy from behind Ambros.

“What is that… he took bolts and he’s still standing?”

“And he took all of that on himself, how hard is that shield?!”

“D-don’t flinch! Keep firing until he stops breathing!”

The enemy mages threw magic at us again, and Ambros’s ironclad guard wouldn’t let a bolt through.

“Gh… Petra, the counterattack’s yours.”

Enduring the bolts on that great shield and his own body, Ambros turned his eyes toward me.

“…Yes. Leave it to me.”

There was no need to say much. If Ambros holds in front, I need spend no attention on defense and can think about one thing only: sweeping the enemy mages away.

“This will take a little time.”

“That’s fine. Take as long as you like.”

“Thank you. The wall is yours.”

I put the possibility of Ambros being broken through out of my mind and began building a high-power working carefully. Destroy the enemy mages and the rain of bolts concentrating on him stops dead.

So many of our people had come to help us. In a safe place with nothing interfering, I put everything into the construction.

“…Right, I can fire whenever!”

Ambros nodded when I said it.

“Good, any time you like!”

“Yes. And this is our great reversal! Drop dead!”

From behind Ambros I released all the magic I had stored at once, and it pulled in even the enemy’s puny little bolts as it went.

“…She built a working on that scale in that little time?”

“Impossible! We can’t stop it!”

“All units, withdraw—!”

Kingdom soldiers running in every direction, and of course there was no getting clear. A great many people were pulled into my working, and where the Kingdom’s army had been became scorched ground burned entirely black.

“Right, their formation’s well and truly broken!”

“Now! Flatten them with everything!”

Mia and Steano pressed and scattered the enemy soldiers who were left. The difference in numbers had turned over, and the few surviving Kingdom soldiers at the back began to fall away in scattered groups.

“Hey! Get back here!”

“Hey, idiot, idiot, idiot! That’s too far out even for a rider. Come baaack!”

Watching Mia and Steano become entirely certain of victory and let their guard drop, I put a hand to my chest and let out a long breath.

That was close. Without the reinforcements, being wiped out entirely was a real possibility.

Then I looked up at Ambros and put out a fist.

“We won because you people came. Thank you.”

“Mm! I’m glad I was of use!”

Ambros and I knocked our fists lightly together.

We had helped our own people, who were being pushed back, and succeeded in turning the battle over. If Ritziareite and Ambros hadn’t appeared to rescue us, the side that lost might well have been ours.

“Right. Shall we go and hunt the stragglers?”

“No, we’re not. Holding this place is plenty of work done. Wait quietly for General Ritziareite’s orders.”

“Mm… is that so. Then that’s fine!”

For a man who had just weathered that many bolts, Ambros’s face was bright and showed no fatigue at all.

8

With the Corps having driven the Kingdom’s army back at two separate points, the Kingdom’s army was visibly confused. Their skirmishing units milled about as though they couldn’t work out where to go and help, and pulled back toward the main body one after another.

Having grasped that an offensive designed to enclose the whole Dyrst region was no longer working, the Kingdom’s army was expected to try to break through at a single point with everything they had.

Preparing for a single-point offensive on the largest scale yet, Ritziareite gathered everyone present into one place.

“Petra, we worked hard and killed absolutely loads of them!”

“Yes, yes, me too! That wipes out my earlier disgrace, doesn’t it!”

With the Kingdom’s army driven back repeatedly, our spirits were climbing steadily. Mia and Steano had their arms round each other’s shoulders in high excitement.

“You both did well. Good.”

“Got it!”

“Yaay! Petra-chan praised me!”

Praised honestly, the two of them went up another notch.

“General Ritziareite, thank you truly for coming to help us.”

“Not at all. I am the one who should be grateful. You changed the shape of the battle. I was alarmed when we lost contact with you, but you rampaged so spectacularly that I could work out where you were.”

Ritziareite, who had been at the operations post, had come to the front as well. Everything from here would be a total engagement.

“We have come this far with our entire strength. There are no further reinforcements to be had… Petra, you understand what that means, don’t you?”

“Yes. That we fight the final battle for the Dyrst region as we stand.”

“Exactly. The tools go off where we are standing right now. We pull the front back once, and when the enemy army comes to this place again, we detonate all of it at once. That is our only path to a win.”

We had driven the Kingdom’s army back with our trump card still in hand. If they intended to destroy us, they had no option but to come with their whole army.

“Even in small numbers we are fighting the Kingdom’s army perfectly well. Let us draw them in as we are and take the whole of them in one net!”

“Yes!”

After this the Kingdom’s army had two options: continue the offensive, or pull out entirely because of the severe damage they had taken.

If they gave up on taking the Dyrst region, so much the better. We could build our strength for the next invasion and wouldn’t have shown our card.

But what had to be thought about was the case where the Kingdom pressed on. The Corps had soldiers spread over a wide area, and the numbers in each place were thin enough that the concentration of enemy strength anywhere would break us easily.

“General Ritziareite. I think we should gather the first defense line’s people together for now.”

“Petra. I was thinking exactly the same. If the Kingdom aims at a single point, we do not have the mass to hold it.”

A plan to detonate tools laid in the ground means nothing unless the enemy can be held in place; the momentum of their advance has to be killed. Throw their whole strength and ours together, and slow the movement of the battlefield down.

That is the best move available to us.

“Mia. You are captain of the rider unit, are you not?”

“Th-that’s right, but…”

“…Then why are you here alone on one dragon?”

“Um… ah. I-I just got separated. Please don’t worry about it!”

An unsightly excuse. She will have handed the unit off to somebody without permission and slipped away because she wanted to move freely.

Ritziareite seemed to be taking Mia’s excuse at about half value and answered ‘Is that so’ with no interest whatsoever.

“Which means, then, that your dragon-mount unit is still somewhere out there. Is that correct?”

“Er… hmm. Probably?”

“Then I am sorry, but call them back here quickly. Dragon mounts are a valuable asset. The more of them we can scrape together, the better our chances.”

At Ritziareite’s instruction, Mia sent her dragon into the air at once.

“I’ll hurry and gather them~”

“I’m counting on you.”

Mia left the site at a truly impressive speed.

“Hey, Petra.”

“Hm?”

“She absolutely ran because she didn’t want it getting out that she slipped away on her own, didn’t she.”

“There’s nothing else it could be. Well, never mind. General Ritziareite doesn’t seem bothered either.”

There should not be time to be scolding Mia now, and the proof of it was that she was still giving her other subordinates detailed instructions.

“What do we do?”

Steano, who had come with me, would be moving with me to the end.

“Nothing changes. Keep guarding me.”

“Yeah.”

Ritziareite finished giving orders and the soldiers who had gathered moved off to their tasks. Seeing that the people around us had thinned, she walked slowly over toward me.

“Petra. I would like to leave you in combat at the front, going forward.”

“…Truly?”

It was hard to believe I had heard it correctly. By rights my role was to command from the rear and read the state of the whole first defense line. Which I had, admittedly, handed to a subordinate myself.

“Is that all right?”

“Yes. I entrusted you with full authority over the timing of the tools because I judged your ability to command and organize to be high, but that evidently was not satisfying enough for you.”

“That’s…”

Her face wasn’t the face of a woman reproaching me. If anything, she put a hand gently on my shoulder and smiled warmly.

“The very front needs a mage with your power. Will you go?”

Eyes with expectation in them.

There is no word I would rather hear. Having my skill as a mage counted on is what pleases me most; when somebody says your power is needed, it feels as though my worth has been made plain.

“How is it… you may refuse if you dislike the idea.”

Ritziareite drew her brows together slightly at my not answering, and I said ‘No,’ left a beat, and nodded hard.

“Of course. Allow me to go!”

“Good, that helps. If you hold the soldiers at the front together, the plan should certainly work.”

“Yes. Leave it to me.”

Ritziareite signaled the dragon-mount soldiers she had brought, mounted, and left.

“I will pass you information from the air as it comes. Those of you remaining here, fall back for now.”

The many dragons in the air climbed steadily higher so as not to be attacked, and flew off toward where the Kingdom’s main force was.

“Steano, we’re going back!”

“Yep. Understood.”

“Ambros, you’re free at the moment?”

“Mm, right!”

“Then come with me.”

I took Steano and Ambros and several hundred soldiers and pulled the line back.

It wouldn’t be long before the Kingdom’s army moved. All that was left was to wait for the riders’ reports and meet the enemy in perfect condition.

9

Petra’s safety was confirmed, and the Kingdom’s advance had settled for the moment. From here we entered the final stage, the one that rested on the magic tools.

“General Ritziareite. The enemy army shows little sign of moving… but they are changing formation. They may be preparing something.”

“Keep watching. Once the new formation is complete, they may begin.”

Astride a dragon mount, I searched out what the Kingdom’s army meant to do.

For the present they were collecting the soldiers who had withdrawn from the front and reorganizing. Ranks of soldiers plainly more numerous than the Corps.

And at the center of them was Euris Leto Reshfeld, second prince of the Reshfeld Kingdom.

“…That is the Second Prince.”

We had climbed high enough not to be noticed, so people showed no larger than beans, but one figure’s coloring was clearly different from the soldiers in iron around him.

The other riders had evidently picked him out too, because they all arrived at the same view: that is the Second Prince.

“That selfish Second Prince, is it… so he invaded on a whim?”

“Hardly. Starting a war is not something even a prince can do easily.”

“True. It would take considerable circumstances to move the Kingdom’s army.”

The other riders exchanged opinions among themselves. Nowhere in my view was there another person dressed showily besides Prince Euris.

—Then I think we can take it as settled that Prince Euris is directing this battle.

“You. Fall back for now and report the situation. I believe they will move shortly.”

“Understood.”

If Prince Euris is in command, he won’t be producing complicated schemes one after another. He will have come at this believing that weight of numbers wins it.

—If they had a fine strategist I couldn’t rule out our trap being seen through, but from what I can see there is no one Prince Euris speaks with more than a commander must.

I had thought to stay a little longer and observe, but I judged the likelihood of any unusual tactic to be as close to zero as makes no difference, and told the riders around me:

“…I predict they will simply push with the difference in numbers. Leave a few to watch and let us return to the first defense line. If we can hold their leading units in place, we can manage.”

I moved the reins and turned the dragon toward the sky we had come through.

—Now. It seems the full confrontation is about to begin.

10

“Your Highness! Imperial resistance is fierce and we judge a breakthrough by a small force to be difficult. We request reinforcement!”

“What did you say—?!”

The soldier who came with the report was covered in wounds from head to foot. I had been watching from a distance, and small force or not, our numbers were overwhelmingly the greater.

“What are you doing? You cannot even scatter an enemy that small?”

“B-but, Your Highness… the enemy has numerous capable mages and dragon riders, and we, having only ground forces, are in a position where we cannot press the attack home.”

Mages and dragon riders, is it.

It is true that the Kingdom’s army I command is short of mages. For this invasion I couldn’t obtain the full cooperation of the royal court mages; they came out with some worthless line about not setting foot in another nation’s territory without my father’s order, and I gave up on persuading them.

—Damn it. Are ground forces alone useless no matter how many bodies I gather?

“And we have no dragon mounts either. …Damn it, this is infuriating.”

The irritation wouldn’t settle. But one of my people spoke up.

“However, Your Highness. They may have a quantity of dragon mounts and mages, but in the end they are a small body of a few thousand at most. We have taken heavy damage, and we still hold more than thirty thousand. If we mount an offensive with the entire army, we should be able to destroy them without difficulty.”

“I see… yes, quite so!”

At the start I didn’t know the enemy’s numbers, so I moved about ten thousand and had them probe. Now that the other side is known to be a few thousand at most, going to crush them with everything is one option.

I called a commander over at once.

“You.”

“How may I serve, Your Highness?”

“From now we begin the reduction of the Imperial army with the entire army.”

“…I beg your pardon?”

“Did you not hear me?! The entire army. We put down those irritating soldiers in one motion, with the entire army! I will not entertain objections! Give the order at once!”

“Y-yes, Your Highness…!”

Honestly, slow-witted people are exactly the problem. With this many soldiers there is no possibility of our losing, dragons and mages are beside the point. Battles are decided by numbers. However strong the soldiers on the other side may be, faced with soldiers filling every direction, they can’t possibly survive.

“For Reshia’s sake, I will take this Dyrst region…!”

I will win this battle without fail and, exactly as she wishes, present this land to the Svell Order. If it is for her, there is nothing I can’t do, and that is the first reason I have for exercising the power I hold as the Second Prince.

11

The time was two in the afternoon, four hours since the Kingdom’s invasion began. The Kingdom’s army, driven back once, resumed its advance and began to move slowly, and exactly as we had planned, they appeared to intend to overwhelm us with the difference in numbers.

“They’ve come. We obstruct the enemy’s advance. All units, begin moving!”

The Kingdom’s army moved its entire strength, swinging round from the left, and the whole of the force we had massed at the front began moving left in answer.

“I do hope this ends here…”

The tools’ detonation area covers the whole of the Dyrst region, so a Kingdom army trying to come round from the left can be handled as well. The question is how much damage the detonation does to the enemy.

The power of a single tool has already been tested: a fine piece of work that destroys everything within a radius of several meters. No matter how hard the armor, it can’t withstand one.

If it goes as it did in rehearsal, it should succeed. It will be all right.

“Hold them. Draw as many of the enemy as possible into the detonation area and strike all at once. Fuu.”

I said the same thing over and over under my breath, with a deep breath in between.

“…And if it fails, we are destroyed.”

It is an operation with a great deal of risk in it, and the strain on me was greater than anything I have experienced. But nothing is achieved by being afraid here, so I tapped my cheeks twice and roused myself.

“Right!”

There are many companions around me. We have trained hard, and though the time has been short, bonds have genuinely formed. Becoming a general of the Provisional Elite Corps became the meaning of my life and the strength I fight with.

The Empire I love, and the place I share with the companions who matter to me, can’t be lost here.

With an appalling number of enemy soldiers in front of me, I raised my spear and declared:

“All of you are my pride. Let us fight it through to the very end.”

“Yes!”

I am about to order a head-on collision with the Kingdom’s great host knowing that a great many of my companions will be lost. There is no guarantee that a single one of us survives.

Even so, we will keep advancing over the bodies of our own.

As proud soldiers of the Provisional Elite Corps, obeying the command of Princess Valtrune, to strike down these evil invaders…

12

“All units, charge!”

The order came down from Ritziareite, and the total engagement with the Kingdom’s army finally opened.

The cavalry at the head thrust their spears forward and collided with the enemy’s cavalry, and horse against horse, riders on both sides went down onto the ground as though crushed.

“Magic units, ready! Fire!”

Then, with Petra’s shout, innumerable bolts colored the sky. They drew a clean arc and came down into the center of the Kingdom’s army, and with a great roar red fire spread out across where they landed.

“Forward!”

“Let’s go!”

Our numbers were plainly insufficient, but we had a special asset with the potential to break an enemy formation in an instant: dragon mounts. Their entry into a fight is enough to make up a hopeless difference in strength.

The Corps set its aim on the enemy ahead without hesitating and pushed forward, ducking the storm of bolts and arrows crossing overhead and cutting down the soldiers who reached us.

“Petra. There are too many people, I can’t move!”

“You can’t fall back either!”

“I know that.”

With enemy and ally alike packed too tightly, our movements were badly restricted, and along the line where the two armies met, bodies were piling up.

“H-hey… we’re being shoved hard from behind.”

While I was complaining, Petra, pressed up against me in the same crush, got a sudden look on her face.

“No, this is fine.”

“What?”

“It’s going to plan, is what I mean. The front being jammed and movement stopping is not a bad thing. The worst case would be our own people moving to run from the front they’re supposed to hold.”

Hearing that, I dropped into a crouch at once.

“I see. So we’ve stopped the enemy army moving, exactly as intended.”

“Yes. All that’s left is blowing them away with the tools!”

“Well, if that’s the case, we hold here even if it kills us!”

By digging in so as not to be pushed by the enemy’s momentum, we made the enemy send people forward and forward again to try to get their line moving. Blow them up once they had packed themselves in, and all that would be left was cleaning up the remnants.

“…Kh.”

“Endure it with everything!”

The front began to be pushed back by degrees, and we put our bodies together and dug in desperately to keep from moving off the ground where we stood.

“Now. Use the tools!”

Ritziareite’s order came down, and the mages standing by to fire them set off every tool at once.

And then the tools under the earth threw off a light bright enough to hurt through the gaps in the soil.

“Wh-what is that—?!”

“Hey. Wait… this is—!”

Some among the enemy mages seemed to grasp what was coming, and there was no possibility of the Kingdom’s army leaving that ground.

Immediately afterward, earth leapt into the air across a wide area, and so many Kingdom soldiers went up with it, the end of soldiers packed too tightly together being to get blown apart by magic tools. The ground shook hard and I nearly went over backward.

“Careful, you.”

“S-sorry…”

Even in shaking that made standing difficult, Petra put a hand on my back at the moment I began to go and set me slowly upright with an entirely untroubled face.

“How are you still standing in that?”

“Strong core.”

“Didn’t know that about you…”

Surprised by unexpected new information, I turned my eyes back to the blast.

What had appeared there was a crater deep enough and broad enough that a lake with a radius of several hundred meters might form in it, which told you everything about the tools’ power.

“…You have to be joking.”

Black smoke rose out of the bottom of a crater with real depth to it, and the Kingdom soldiers who had been in the air came down one after another, and what spread out was a scene full of appalling corpses.

“Now! Press the attack!”

The great bulk of the Kingdom’s army had been caught in the detonation and destroyed. What remained on their side was the thin skim of the best of them who had been at the very front contending with the Corps, and the limited units at the very rear who had been lucky enough not to step inside the blast area.

“That settles it.”

Petra said it with a cool face and threw magic after the fleeing Kingdom soldiers like a pursuit.

Watching Kingdom soldiers writhe in pain, I moved out in front of her.

“You’re merciless.”

“Mercy isn’t required. It’s a field where you live or die.”

“Well… yeah, fair enough!”

And I brought my sword down on a Kingdom soldier lying nearby who could no longer move.

“You’re no different from me.”

“…No. I suppose not.”

It hardly needs saying that the Corps had taken the advantage in this fight. What was left was disposing of the remnants, and there were plenty of soldiers going after them; Petra and I looked to be finished for the day.

13

Red light wrapped the whole of my vision, and a roar loud enough to burst an eardrum came with the blast and brought despair down on me.

“Gaaaaah…!”

“It’s hot… it’s so hot…”

The only screaming came from the men just in front of me. The Kingdom soldiers standing at the center of it burst apart with the detonation without making any sound at all.

“That… can’t be… my army…”

“Your Highness, it’s dangerous. Please fall back!”

The remains of Kingdom soldiers came flying toward me, thrown out by the blast, and thanks to the barrier I had ordered raised I took no injury.

But that one detonation had cost me more than seven-tenths of my soldiers.

“…What… am I supposed to do…”

“Your Highness. We must withdraw now! Our chain of command is in pieces, we have no coordination at all!”

“No… then Reshia’s wish can’t be granted.”

My head went white, and I began walking slowly toward the enormous circular crater the explosion had opened. I looked down into it, and Kingdom bodies lay strewn across the bottom in appalling numbers. Some still had the shape of people; a great many could only be taken for red, ruined lumps of meat.

“…I can’t win this. Can I.”

The soldiers left on the far side of the crater were being cut down by the Imperial army one after another, and sooner or later they would come across this crater and turn their blades on us.

“Your Highness! It’s dangerous there. Come, this way… gah!”

One of the generals pulled at my hand to run with me, and abruptly threw up blood and went down. Looking properly, there was an arrow through his forehead.

“…It’s finished. All of it, ruined.”

There was nobody left around me. I had been abandoned entirely, and the sound of horsemen was closing from both sides.

I made every preparation in order to grant Reshia’s wish, and am I going to die in a place like this?

“We’ve found the Second Prince!”

“No Kingdom soldiers nearby. Taking his head!”

What was coming was not my own soldiers. The killing intent winding around me got thicker and thicker, until my breathing came apart and I could not properly draw air.

—So I die here.

For the first time in my life I understood that I was about to die.

I had entirely underestimated a battlefield. I had thought of nothing but that a difference in numbers would carry it through. Every one of my calculations was soft. What I needed was to see through the enemy’s scheme and give orders that answered it flexibly.

A battlefield I walked onto knowing nothing… what I was capable of doing there amounted to nothing at all.

“I’m sorry… Reshia…”

I called up the face of the woman I love, sat down where I was, and closed my eyes.

14

“Now, we destroy the last of them!”

The tools’ detonation had turned the position over. The Kingdom’s great host, more than forty thousand at the start, had been caught in the blast and was now a few thousand at most, roughly equal to our own numbers, or slightly fewer.

Naturally we pursued.

Once we had scattered every enemy we had been contending with, I pointed at the far side of the crater.

“The commander leading the Kingdom’s army is almost certainly Euris Leto Reshfeld, second prince of the Reshfeld Kingdom! Strike him down the moment you find him!”

The Corps’ soldiers went round the great circular depression on both sides and shifted to hunting the Kingdom remnants left on the opposite bank.

—And with that it is over, I think.

The time had been short, and the fatigue had piled up until I could have believed I had been fighting for months. It was less that my body was heavy than that there had been far too much to think about.

“Haah… I would like to pray that fighting this hard does not continue.”

Having delivered my own verdict on a decisive battle that had proved a far harder fight than expected, I mounted a dragon and flew out over the crater.

The tools’ power was immense; it had neutralized tens of thousands of enemy soldiers in an instant. Without the groundwork of that detonation, I believe the side that lost would have been the Corps. It was, beyond any question, a victory of planning.

“We’ve found Prince Euris!”

What I could see from the dragon was Prince Euris, abandoned even by his own soldiers, sitting alone on the ground. He plainly had no will to fight left; it looked like a situation in which nothing remained but to wait for his head to be taken.

“It really did end in a moment.”

One of the Corps’ soldiers began walking toward him. He would finish it, and this battle would be over. That was what I thought as I turned the dragon and took my eyes off Prince Euris.

Then a fine, rapid shaking, quite unlike the tools’ detonation, opened cracks in the ground.

“What—!”

I turned back at the sound of a soldier’s short, strangled cry.

“…What is that?!”

There, having broken up through the ground, was the head of an enormous serpent. And looking properly, it had swallowed Prince Euris, and only him, whole.

“Everyone, get clear of that place!”

I gave the order in the panic of something entirely unforeseen, but the black serpent showed no sign of hostility toward us; it kept Prince Euris in its mouth, went back down into the earth, and disappeared.

What had just happened?

That an enormous serpent like that was moving beneath the Dyrst region was something I had not known.

“Watch your surroundings! You need not pursue the Kingdom’s army. Concentrate above all on securing your own safety!”

Being able to fly on a dragon, I could feel safe enough; the soldiers standing on the ground where the black serpent had appeared began checking under their feet constantly.

“…This will have to be reported to Lady Valtrune.”

Our victory over the Kingdom’s army had lasted a very short while, and now a suspicion had surfaced that a dangerous monster was lurking in the Dyrst region.

I would be told later that the enormous black serpent was a Divine Beast the Saint had brought with her, but that was a matter for after everything had ended.

15

I was breathing, barely, inside a warm darkness.

I had seen the Imperial soldiers close on me and raise a sword to kill me. But the moment of my death did not arrive. A hair before the edge cut my neck in two, something came out from under my feet and shut me inside an unfamiliar dark space.

After that I understood nothing. No sound reached me from outside; my clothes were fouled by a slightly rank, viscous liquid, and all I could do was breathe in and out inside a swaying dark.

What in the world was happening? Where was this? Was I even still alive?

I stayed where I was, entirely unable to grasp the situation, and then the swaying stopped and a thin light came into the darkness from outside.

“…Where is this?”

I came out through the opening, and it was not imperial territory; it was the top of a hill thick with grass and trees, with the whole of Philnotes laid out below.

“Lord Euris. Are you unharmed?”

“—! That voice, Reshia?”

“Yes, Lord Euris. I am Reshia.”

Soft air and a voice with no thorn anywhere in it. I turned, and there stood Reshia with an enormous black serpent at her side.

“…And the black serpent?”

“This child is a Divine Beast granted to me by the Lord God Svell. It will never do you any harm, so please be at ease.”

“A Divine Beast… then at that moment—!”

So that was it. What broke up through the ground and shut me into that darkness was this black serpent. I had not seen it properly in the instant it happened, but I remembered something faintly like black scales catching the outside light and glittering.

“Do you mean you sent this creature to the battlefield to save me?”

I asked, and she nodded several small times.

“Yes. I was worried about you, Lord Euris. I told this child that if anything happened, it was to take you and flee the field.”

“I see. So that is why I am alive…”

The person who had kept alive a man whose death was all but settled was Reshia, and nobody else.

“Lord Euris, I, I’m sorry!”

She suddenly dropped her head and began apologizing.

“I never… at the start I never thought you might die…”

The Kingdom’s great defeat in the Dyrst region. She appeared to feel responsible for it. But every fault in this defeat is mine.

“No… none of it is your fault, Reshia. The whole cause is that I was not equal to it.”

She saved my life and now tried to take the blame for the loss as well.

What was it that I wanted to do? I wanted to see her happy. That was supposed to be all of it.

…And look at the result. I could not take the Dyrst region she wanted, and I have put a great weight of worry on her.

“I am pathetic.”

I had never experienced failure before. My conscience hurt for the first time. The single thing that registered was the weight of my own body, gone as heavy as lead.

Nothing remained in my hands. What I gained in this battle was soldiers lost for nothing and a bitter memory of failure burned into the back of my mind.

16

Having finished with the Saint and gone to support the Provisional Elite Corps, I doubted my own eyes.

“…Is all of it over?”

Across the plain of the Dyrst region there were no armies still fighting. No noise of magic being traded, no cavalry or dragon-mount soldiers moving about the field with any energy.

For a moment I wondered whether the Corps had been destroyed, and then saw a Corps soldier walking directly in front of me and understood there was no possibility of that.

“What’s happened here?”

“There’s no sign of the Kingdom’s army… wait, look at that!”

The rider I was sharing with raised his voice in surprise, and where his eyes went there was a great black depression that had no business being there. Heavy black smoke came up out of the bottom of it, with fires in places.

“That’s where the magic tools were laid! Hasn’t the ground caved in badly?”

I narrowed my eyes, and in the hollow that must have been the blast center numerous charred bodies were lying. Riders were circling around the edge of it. There was nobody in sight wearing anything like Kingdom armor.

“Don’t tell me they actually did it?!”

“The Kingdom’s army is gone, so that’s exactly what it means!”

The riders broke into grins at once and raised their weapons to the sky as though celebrating.

A complete victory, then. It did not feel real to me.

The Kingdom’s great host had evaporated entirely and the Provisional Elite Corps held the victory. I had of course done everything I could to make a win possible, but that they would drive the Kingdom’s army all the way to destruction…

“Sir Aldia. We did it! It’s our victory.”

“Yes. So it is…”

The Corps had fought it through admirably without any need for me to arrive.

In the end my part in the day appears to have ended where I left the White Serpent near death. Overturning that overwhelming difference in numbers and taking the victory, the Corps had made me recognize again that it is, in name and in fact, the strongest army there is.

Corps soldiers were dotted around the edge of the crater.

—Petra, Steano, Ambros.

The three of them had their faces turned toward one another, talking happily, sharing it.

Ritziareite, still on a dragon and still giving orders with a serious face, looked as though something in her expression had eased a little.

“…It’s over, then.”

I said it looking at a field that had drawn to its close from a distance, and the rider nodded at once and held the dragon hovering where it was.

“Looks like there’s no part for us. Shall we head back?”

“Then take me to Rune-sama. I want to tell her the Corps beat the Kingdom’s army.”

“Understood!”

How would Princess Valtrune react to good news like that? Delighted, without minding who saw, or would she tell us to tighten up further for the full war with the Kingdom that waits ahead?

Either way what I have to do does not change: obey the orders Princess Valtrune gives, and carry out a personal knight’s duty to make what she wants happen, sparing nothing when the moment calls for it.

17

What the Order’s army had been aiming at was never made clear. The meaning of the words the Saint left, and why the Order fixed so hard on getting hold of the Divine Demon Orbs, produced no satisfactory explanation however far we looked.

“Your Highness. There are no Order soldiers anywhere nearby. I think we may take it that they have withdrawn completely.”

Every trace of the enemy had gone, and we had recovered nearly all of the Order’s dead and the belongings they left. In the forest the White Serpent had wrecked, only the painful scars of the fighting remained.

I nodded at once and started walking toward the Dyrst plain.

“I see. Then let us go and support the Provisional Elite Corps as well. Things may be difficult over there.”

“Ma’am.”

The soldier walked at my side, watching our surroundings constantly.

I was anxious about how the Corps was faring, and my pace grew faster than usual without my deciding it. We came out of the thick trees and went along the long game trail that leads to the plain.

“Rune-sama.”

“Yes?”

My name, called suddenly from above. I looked up, and Aldia, who was supposed to have gone to the plain on a dragon, had come back with every one of the riders he had taken with him.

“Al. Weren’t you going to relieve the Corps?”

“Yes. I have a report on that…”

“Don’t tell me… you aren’t about to say they were destroyed.”

I put a hand over my mouth and murmured it to myself. If I was going to hear the worst possible news, I would have to return to the imperial capital immediately and request that the Imperial army be deployed.

“…Tell me what happened.”

I braced myself and asked him. He opened his mouth with the same serious face he always wears, not a fraction different.

“In fact, when we reached the Corps… in the Dyrst region…”

“…………”

“There was no Kingdom army there.”

“…What do you mean?”

No Kingdom army. Which meant…

“A complete victory for the Provisional Elite Corps. The enemy stepped into the area where the magic tools were laid, and it appears many of them were blown apart with the detonation.”

When he had finished the last of it, the tension went out of his cheeks and he smiled a little.

“Rune-sama. We have held this land!”

Why is it, I wonder. It still did not feel real.

The Dyrst region, once taken by the Kingdom. That invasion was the first spark of the great war that eventually pulled in the whole world and drove the Empire to ruin. The Kingdom and the Order holding Dyrst. The Empire sending soldiers again and again to take its own land back. The fighting grew steadily fiercer and spread beyond the Dyrst region to the neutral city of Philnotes, to Reshfeld Kingdom territory, and eventually as far as the Roscheld Republic, until it had become a world war.

I can picture scorching fire thrown into an imperial capital covered in darkness, standing up high like a pillar.

At the very least, by turning a past defeat into a victory at today’s fork in the road, that tragedy will not now repeat by the same route. There will be no more battles that produce casualties beyond any need, and everything after this is a different thing from the old war, it will be a war against a Kingdom-and-Order alliance, without other nations intervening.

“…I see. So I have overturned one piece of fate.”

My chest went hot, and I was so full of it that I could not tell what expression I was wearing.

The dragon came down to the ground and Aldia hurried over to me.

“Rune-sama.”

When he reached me, the other soldiers drifted away of their own accord, and it became a space with only the two of us in it. In the forest nothing could be heard but birdsong and the sound of grass and flowers moving in the wind.

“Al.”

Looking at him kneeling in front of me with his eyes closed, I remembered the strongest enemy I ever had, the one who stood in my way as a knight of the Kingdom. The man who was once the Empire’s greatest threat had become the personal knight I can place more trust in than anyone.

I owe him more than I can ever repay.

“…I’m glad you’re on my side.”

“That is my line, Rune-sama. Being able to serve you makes me happy.”

We will paint over a hateful past and build a new history. And as we take the first step into it, we will have to meet a threat at its maddest, one I never even registered in the past.

“Al… about the Saint. I don’t think any of the advantage our memories give us works on her. She is the thing to be most wary of from here.”

“I understand. That woman is dangerous in particular… and what she said. The matter of the Progenitor God Svell, whom the Order worships, wanting our lives, I think we had better look further into that as well.”

We have made an enemy of a Saint loved by a god, and even the progenitor god Svell, who is said to have made this world, finds our desperate efforts to survive tiresome.

For now there is no trace of a god having interfered. Perhaps because we were following the same history as before the regression.

…But that is no longer true. The Empire weathering the Kingdom’s invasion has put a distortion into history. Of course we intend to keep fighting a fate of ruin, and to keep working against the flow of the world as a god ordained it.

“Al. I will not bend until the last moment of my life. Even if a god becomes my enemy.”

“Understood. I intend to serve you until the last moment of mine as well.”

I have no sense that anything from here will go as we want. I could feel a violent history we know nothing about beginning to run.

And even if there is such a thing as fate, and even if it is something our strength can never change, I am certain I will not give up. Exactly as I did when I chose the road that walks alongside Aldia, I decide my own future.

18

“Damn it! The invasion of the Dyrst region has failed? Do not talk rubbish at me!”

With a force in his voice unfitting for a man of the cloth, the old man in front of me swept the documents and writing tools off the desk and onto the floor with everything he had.

A slightly fat old man somewhere past sixty, bringing a fist down on the desk over and over. The upper half of his face was red enough to burst a vessel, and his long white beard shook with his fury.

“Reshia. I told you, did I not, to take control of the Dyrst region and secure the orb workings without fail. That place is the holy land of the Svell Order. We have the duty and the right to hold it!”

The Archbishop of the Svell Order bore down on me, his footsteps loud.

“And yet, why? Beaten by an Imperial army of all things, and creeping back alone!”

—Haah. This is exactly why old men who have outstayed their usefulness are so tiresome.

I wanted to spit poison inwardly, but I am the pure and blameless Saint Reshia, and I show my true nature only to people where showing it cannot possibly disadvantage me.

I made my face conspicuously frightened and bowed deeply to the Archbishop.

“I, I am so sorry! …The Empire’s soldiers were far too strong, and even with the Divine Beasts we could not stand against them…”

“Tch. Useless creature!”

Spraying spittle in the most unpleasant way, the Archbishop threw himself down grandly onto a sofa in dreadful taste.

“Listen. That place will be taken. It will. This time it seems our luck was poor and that brainless Second Prince Euris botched the command of the army, so the plan stalled, but I have not given up!”

“…But, Your Grace. Every one of the priests you sent with me was killed. My healing was not in time, and not one of them came back alive.”

“Hmph. Getting my own aides killed for nothing… a useless Saint.”

Grumbling all the while, the Archbishop toyed with that pure white beard and growled, and then produced an order.

“…Yes. You cannot fight, and you cannot properly command an army, but you do at least have charm. Use that charm of yours and go and seduce the First Prince this time!”

He had begun saying outrageous things again.

The reason I came to make contact with Prince Euris in the first place was also an order from the Archbishop. As the Second Prince, his was a relatively easy character to bring round; the First Prince has a far more troublesome one. I am hardly better myself, but the First Prince is said to be wicked in a way that comes along once in a generation, and I would rather avoid involvement with people who look difficult to manipulate.

“Y-Your Grace… that is simply impossible now!”

“Be quiet! Hold your tongue and do as I tell you! You were the one who said you wished to be of use to me, which is why I hand down orders at all. Do not get above yourself merely because you are a Saint!”

“…Yes. Understood.”

“Hmph. So long as you understand. And take the greatest care never to act against my orders.”

“I shall keep it in m, haah.”

The Archbishop left the room before I could finish. Did nobody ever teach him that one hears a person out to the end?

With him gone, I let out a deep sigh.

“…So the target really is the Divine Demon Orb. One of the materials required to develop Madmiasma.”

I looked over the paper on ‘Madmiasma’ I had stolen from a drawer in the Archbishop’s desk.

A dangerous drug producing drastic change in the human body. In its user, marked loss of reason is observed in exchange for enhancement of the body and of magic.

“That is what it says on the surface, but…”

There is no possibility of that Archbishop fixating on developing a drug whose effect goes no further than that. There is no question that the Divine Demon Orb is, alongside miasma, an important material in producing Madmiasma. The question is the detail of what it does.

Miasma is a poison itself: it grants overwhelming power and takes in exchange the reason a person needs to be a person. Be charmed by the power, be swallowed by the miasma, and you never return to being a proper human being. You are reduced to a pitiable monster with no heart left.

“The Archbishop must know how dangerous miasma is… so why did he put a hand to developing something like Madmiasma?”

The symptoms of a person exposed to miasma and a person who has taken Madmiasma are identical. If they produce the same effect, there has to be a reason to shun the one and want the other.

I turned over several of the things the Archbishop is likely to think, and arrived at one conclusion.

“…Forever, I suppose.”

A person eaten by miasma loses their heart and becomes a monster nobody can control. And besides having no reason, and besides the enhancement of body and magic, such people have one other characteristic: the aging of the body slows dramatically.

They are not immortal, but absent some serious cause they do not die for a very long time. The body scarcely weakens at all, and the parts of it the miasma has taken harden past anything you would call living, so the risk of injury falls too.

Though eventually the whole body mutates and can no longer hold the shape of a person.

The Archbishop is surely developing ‘Madmiasma’ in order to get the particular effects miasma has on a person without trouble, while cutting away the side effects he does not want.

…And in that case, was the Divine Demon Orb adopted as the material that suppresses those side effects?

“There was a tradition, I believe, that the Divine Demon Orb has the power to hold a heart in place… and he believed superstition like that?”

If this hypothesis is right, the Archbishop is a very great fool. His intention is transparent, to secure the heart he would otherwise lose and obtain a body that lives forever, and by my reckoning the day his ideal comes true will never arrive.

Miasma is a substance that should not exist in this world at all, and mere human beings cannot possibly handle it. Its influence is bad enough to distort the very order of things; it was a thing that troubled even Lord Svell. So a merely pretty stone has no power whatsoever to neutralize the poison of miasma.

What the Archbishop is attempting is wrong, and it is dangerous enough to spread the miasma contamination, which has so far been confirmed only in places, across the entire world.

“Forever is not a thing anyone should want.”

A life with no end to it is crueler than anything. Living creatures try to live each day with everything they have precisely because there is an end. To escape death and keep living forever is an act that steps outside the order of the world.

“…So the Archbishop is, after all, someone I shall have to dispose of with my own hands.”

I remembered what I swore to Lord Svell: that anything distorting history is to be removed.

Miasma is a thing that should be erased from this world completely, and if he intends to misuse it, then the Archbishop too becomes one of the people I must dispose of.

The Saint Reshia keeps faithfully to the oath she exchanged with her god. I always intended to use the Svell Order and discard it immediately, but if the Archbishop’s scheme runs against Lord Svell’s will, I cannot let it pass.

“For now I shall have to move without making the Archbishop suspicious.”

First, seduce the First Prince. I have no appetite for it, but I should carry it out at least for appearances.

I went off toward the room where the priests are, to arrange with the church staff for a carriage to the royal castle.

Chapter 3 – The Operation to Annihilate the Opposition

1

War had broken out without warning in the northeast of the Dyrst region, and while the main body of the Provisional Elite Corps threw itself bravely at the Kingdom’s army in a hell of killing and being killed, something else was about to happen out in a small town where the anti-Princess nobles gathered.

“It’s so hooot! Somebody, water~”

I was wiping the sweat off and demanding a drink from one of my people when an enormous sigh came out behind me.

“Haah. The operation starts any minute and there isn’t a shred of tension in you.”

Linos, second son of the Gerreschiff ducal house, was waiting in the undergrowth in a Kingdom army uniform with a cloth pulled up over his mouth. He normally dresses like the flashy noble he is, so watching him lie low and breathe quietly was a fairly surreal sight. I, by contrast, was relaxing openly on a bench in the square.

“What’s the harm? Anyway, why don’t you come out of there instead of hiding? We’ve still got five minutes.”

“Five minutes, which is exactly why you should be changing. Now.”

“Ehhh.”

“Not ‘ehhh.’ Honestly, why does not one of your people ever pull you up… is there nobody here but fools?”

What a foul mouth on a noble’s son. If he weren’t in the Provisional Elite Corps I might have killed him half for the fun of it. But boss has impressed on me that I’m to keep things friendly with him.

I did as Linos and his endless nagging told me and put the Kingdom uniform on somewhere out of sight.

—Hmm. Now it’s even hotter.

“Somebody~ cold water~”

“Here you are.”

“Yep. Thanks~♪”

I drained the cold water out of the flask.

“This creature…”

“Regular hydration is basic conduct in the Provisional Elite Corps, is there a problem?”

I’d spent several days preparing this operation with Linos and we still didn’t fit together.

—When this job’s over I’m going to formally register my refusal to work with him.

“Hey. It’s time. Stop dawdling and move!”

“Yeees.”

“Don’t stretch out your answers!”

Nobles and I just aren’t compatible. That was my feeling on the matter that day.

2

The anti-Princess nobles were meeting in a mountain lodge deep in the hills, well away from the center of town. Normally there’d be nobody around, but with the central figures of a whole faction assembling, guards in full steel were making rounds everywhere.

“One, two… no, hang on, isn’t that about sixty?”

“Counting them is pointless. We finish them off in order, starting from the ones at the edge.”

Kingdom uniforms or not, there were few enough of us that moving unseen was the basis of the whole thing.

“I do wonder whether a young gentleman of the nobility can keep quiet…”

“Are you mocking me? At the very least I don’t make noise the way you do.”

Wearing a face that was doing its best to look cool, he gave his orders to the men he’d brought from the ducal house.

“You will take the area around the lodge’s rear entrance. We will handle the front.”

“Sir.”

I watched him give orders self-importantly out of the corner of my eye and turned to my own people.

“When the signal goes up in town, we start~ Oh! And you know what happens if you botch it, right?”

“Yes!”

My lot scattered too. Putting down the guards near the front entrance was me, Linos and a handful of others.

“Right then. Let’s get the job done quick.”

“Hmph. Don’t slow me down.”

“That’s my line, that is.”

To make the people inside the lodge believe the Kingdom’s advance had turned their way, Epika, division commander of the Imperial army’s mages, was to set off explosions and small fires in several places at once in town. Until then we kept our heads down. Except…

“…Nothing yet.”

“Silence.”

The time came and went and no signal.

—I can’t imagine that woman getting a time wrong, so is something actually wrong?

Uneasy about it, I waited a bit longer just in case.

—Yep. There it is.

About five minutes. Down in the lower town where the shopping streets run, big cracks of explosion and black smoke going up in several places. With that very showy signal we all moved at once.

“Front, here we go!”

“Don’t get out too far and die.”

“Hmhm! My risk management is perfect, thank you. I did a lot of looking during all that waiting, you know.”

Sight-Share doesn’t only project your own view to somebody else; you can also look through somebody else’s. There’s no restriction on the target as long as it’s alive, which includes the insects and small animals in the area. I’d checked the enemy’s positions from every angle there was, so my picture of where everyone stood was perfect, and I’d worked out the ideal order to drop them in.

“Ff!”

“—!”

You put a guard down before he can make a sound. To be safe I clamped a hand hard over each mouth and cut off even the small noises that leaked out.

“Right, next.”

One at a time, the guards around the lodge went down without fail. Even I thought I was working neatly.

And Linos, for his part, moved with enough dexterity that you’d wonder whether he’d been an assassin, putting his own down quietly.

“Huh. You’re not bad at all.”

“This much is a matter of course.”

The manner was as irritating as ever, but the ability was actually behind it, so it grated less than it had at the start. Apparently he isn’t a young gentleman who is all mouth.

“Now. We’ve cleared everyone here, do we go in next?”

Blood well up, Linos had a short blade ready and was looking at me as though he’d go this second. I put a hand on his shoulder and wagged a finger side to side.

“Heheh. We’re not doing anything that tiresome. Look, my people have brought the secret weapon.”

“Secret weapon…?”

“Yep. The lucky item that catches every single person shut inside a room!”

I told them to bring the thing over, and they moved quickly and came back with four palm-sized censers.

“What are these?”

“Hehe~ sorry to spoil the mystery, but don’t sniff it. You’ll drop dead instantly.”

I threatened him half in jest, and Linos and his men covered their noses and mouths and took two or three steps back.

“Ahaha! You’re way too scared~ the instant death was a lie. It just numbs your arms and legs a bit so you can’t move.”

“…If you were bringing poison, you tell us beforehand. Using it by accident would have been a catastrophe.”

“Sorry, sorry. I honestly just forgot.”

Laughing it off didn’t soften his glare. He doesn’t have to lose his temper like that. It’s not as though anyone got hurt.

These are ‘Acid Censers,’ one of the self-defense items that circulate in the slums where we lived. They’re extremely dangerous goods kept under a serious lock, and breathe in what’s inside and a person loses consciousness in a moment; keep breathing it and it can kill.

“So today we use these to finish off everyone inside the lodge.”

“Fadi. All the vents in the rooms are blocked. We’ve fixed the windows so they won’t open either. We’re set.”

“Ooh, that was fast!”

Once the enemy outside was cleared, the operation was complete as soon as the poison from these censers went into the lodge. No unnecessary risk taken, and every obstruction dead.

“Aah. Easy job~♪”

“Let your guard down and you’ll be knocked off your feet.”

“I’m not letting my guard down. Now, I’m opening the censers. Anyone who doesn’t know how to handle them, get well back.”

I unlocked a censer and threw it inside the lodge, and my people did the same, feeding the rest in at various points around the building.

“Right then. From here we just wait.”

I sat down in front of the lodge, and Linos looked at me and shrugged and let out a long breath.

“So I wasn’t especially necessary to this operation.”

He sounded, if anything, a little dissatisfied about it. And it’s true that all he’d personally done was remove a few guards on the outside of the lodge. For what was supposed to be a large-scale purge, this job hadn’t needed many hands.

But there was a second layer to it: bringing Linos in from the planning stage was boss’s doing, and boss had a reason of his own.

“Nah. Mister Linos was necessary to this operation.”

“I have done nothing in particular.”

“Not directly, no… but now the second son of the Gerreschiff ducal house is an accomplice in the killing of the anti-Princess nobles.”

Linos went quiet, wearing the face of a man asking why any of that needed saying.

“…And? That was obvious from the outset, surely.”

“Nope. Boss is a careful man. If this operation had leaked to the enemy and gone wrong, the first people he’d suspect would be the outside collaborators.”

In a sense the whole thing doubled as a test of whether Linos and Epika were worth having as collaborators. That’s why both had a few watchers attached, keeping an eye on how they behaved during the operation. Removing the anti-Princess nobles was a genuine objective, but what boss actually wanted was to smoke out any traitor among our own.

And this time we found there wasn’t one.

“I see… and what became of your assessment of me?”

“Taking the serious effort today into account, we’d like to continue the working relationship going forward. That’s our conclusion, I’d say.”

Linos had put real work into this, and so had General Epika. As collaborators laying the foundation of a new Empire, we may well be working together again.

“So, formally: looking forward to it, Mister Linos.”

“…………”

I put out a hand as a token of goodwill. Linos seemed rather unhappy about having been tested, but…

“Hmph. This is for the sake of the objective. I have no intention of being chummy with you, but I will swear to lend a hand in future.”

—I got a verbal commitment to keep the alliance going. From here on there’d be no need to keep watchers on him either, which was a weight off.

He wouldn’t shake my hand, but somehow I got the feeling he wasn’t going to betray us at the end of it all, and it became a lot easier to be flippant at him.

“Right! Now that we’ve deepened our bond, let’s finish the job! The people inside the lodge should all be unconscious!”

“Hey. Our bond has most certainly not been deepened! Don’t work yourself up on your own!”

“Come on, come on, don’t get so prickly. I’ll leave you behind~”

And besides the foul mouth, he does honestly do as he’s told. As a work partner I’d rate him fairly highly, is where I’ve got to lately.

3

A cramped space full of poison. I opened the lodge door slowly, and a quiet corridor ran away into the back of the building.

“Hey. It’s definitely safe to go in now?”

“The poison only works for a few minutes and we’ve aired it out, so I think we’re fine… probably.”

“Hey…”

I don’t actually know the details. Because I’ve never used one of these.

When I killed a lot of people, I never used to bother concealing who I was. Even if the crime came out and pursuers came for my life, I was confident I could kill them right back.

…But the situation’s changed, and I belong to a military organization directly under Princess Valtrune. I can’t do crime openly the way I used to.

“It’s hard work keeping the trail off you. There’s a lot to think about, and some of it I haven’t got a handle on.”

“Learn the parts that concern people’s lives, idiot.”

“Well, you see, my subordinates are excellent…”

I looked to my people for rescue.

“The censers’ effect will have run out by now. There’s no need to worry.”

“See! It’s fine!”

I pointed at Linos smugly, riding on that, and he brushed my hand lightly aside.

“You knew nothing at all. Don’t act important…”

Feeling Linos’s opinion of me drop a notch or two, I went on into the lodge without saying much.

“…Right. Everyone’s properly down.”

The guards inside had foamed at the mouth and passed out, and the anti-Princess nobles who’d been holding their private meeting in a good-sized conference room were slumped over the table, not moving.

“Finish them and we go home.”

I took the short blade out of my coat and put the edge into an unconscious noble’s neck. They can’t scream and they die easily, so it’s a happier end than dying in pain or in terror.

“…Fadi. Everyone over here is stabbed.”

“Right. Good work… check them off the list and record who we killed.”

We’d disposed of a great many anti-Princess nobles in a matter of minutes, which was a very good result, all told.

—Except it couldn’t quite be called perfect.

“…Duke Felsdorf sent a proxy and isn’t here, then.”

The single most important target, the head of the anti-Princess nobles, we hadn’t been able to kill.

“The man is cautious. He rarely comes to this sort of private meeting in person.”

“Hmm… well. Nothing for it, I suppose.”

Going by the list, we’d disposed of more or less every high noble besides Duke Felsdorf.

Even so, holding a private meeting when the Kingdom’s army might be bearing down on them? What were this lot thinking?

There was a bundle of documents on the table in front of each seat, and I picked one of them up.

“Bribery… collusion with the Kingdom… a joint venture with the church… huh. They were up to a lot of things.”

I read further, and the reason began to surface: they had been treating the invasion by the Kingdom and the Order as no threat at all, and meeting here with only minimal precautions. They had been told in advance about the attack on the Dyrst region by the Kingdom’s army and the Order. Today, the day the Princess was supposed to be occupied dealing with an attack on imperial soil, must have looked like exactly the right day to meet.

That there was someone among the anti-Princess nobles in contact with the Kingdom and the Order was easy enough to see through.

I read on.

“Divine Demon Orb… miasma… eternal life… development of Madmiasma… failed test-subject cases…”

The further I read, the more it felt like putting one foot into the dark of the world. Even working with the White Smoke Lizards I never saw a recipe for a drug as ugly as this.

“What the hell is this… actually, hold on. This test subject, I’ve seen him somewhere…”

A sketch of a large, heavily muscled man. Skin decently tanned and dark, not a single hair on his head.

“This one. He’s the man who went on the rampage in Marquis Rigel’s territory—!”

What was written in the record was extraordinary, and set out completely in the open.

‘Madmiasma test subject number twenty-eight, Nort Ledisipalt.

‘A serious criminal, imprisoned for crimes committed within Marquis Rigel’s territory.

‘Administration of Madmiasma produced severe violent agitation and loss of self.

‘Deployed experimentally as a strategic weapon in the fighting against the Provisional Elite Corps under the Princess.

‘Killed by the personal knight Aldia and the former Imperial army soldier Ritziareite, but confirmed to have massacred large numbers of enemy soldiers.

‘Madmiasma judged effective for physical enhancement.

‘A business partnership with the Kingdom is planned with a view to bringing Madmiasma into practical use, and new test subjects are to be secured…’

Oh dear. Is this for real?

“Hey. How long do you intend to stay in here? We’re leaving.”

“…Have a look at this a moment.”

“Hm?”

I handed Linos the bundle of documents from the meeting room. He took it looking mildly put out, and as he read further into it, those bored eyes turned serious.

“…This isn’t a fabrication, is it.”

He finished reading and gripped the papers hard enough to crease them, and asked me whether the contents were true.

“Who knows. But would they gather this many senior anti-Princess nobles together to share fake information?”

“They would not… these pieces of filth. Have they forgotten even the pride of an imperial noble?”

Contempt came off every edge of the words. Colluding with the Kingdom behind the Emperor’s back and pushing forward suspicious military experiments, that is evidence of treason nothing can overturn.

“If we denounce them, we can be rid of this lot easily without dirtying our own hands…”

“I would like to tell His Majesty this very moment… but.”

Linos put a hand over his face and let out a long breath.

“This is information obtained after removing the opposition. If we take it to His Majesty, our own covert activity may be pursued as well.”

“That could make trouble for Lady Valtrune.”

“Yes. Fortunately we now know their scheme down to the details. If it can be settled internally, so much the better.”

—I came for an assassination job on some nobles and I’ve ended up learning about something far worse.

This isn’t a factional problem. It’s the kind of thing that can shake the Empire at its foundations.

“We’re taking every document here back with us. Sweep up everything on the table.”

“Fadi. I will prevail on my elder brother and put the prestige of the Gerreschiff ducal house behind an investigation into Madmiasma. Anything I learn, I will share at once.”

“Thanks. Then we’ll go through everyone with a connection to the Kingdom. I’ll report to boss too, we’ll have to be thorough about removing the informants.”

Linos and I set our people to work and gathered up, one after another, everything in the lodge that looked connected to the anti-Princess nobles’ scheme. The more we looked, the more black evidence turned up.

—This is gonna get busy. To break their scheme open we’d have to be a great deal more active than we had been.

“Fadi. Collection’s done.”

“Right. Then we get out of here fast. Tell the ones outside to get ready to set the fire.”

I watched my man trot out of the room, then followed him out of the lodge myself.

Once everybody was confirmed outside, we set fire to the lodge so no evidence of the attack would be left. It caught quickly and eventually took the whole building.

The original plan had the mission complete the moment we killed the central figures of the enemy faction in one stroke.

A burning lodge and jet-black smoke. The wooden frame came down with a great collapsing sound and threw ash into the air.

“…And I thought this was where it ended.”

I said it watching the lodge burn and rot away. A blaze that ought to have been a fitting end had turned into no more than the start of a new job.

“What a lot of bother.”

“There’s nothing to be done. Given what we now know, it can’t be overlooked.”

Linos, standing beside me before I’d noticed him arrive, folded his arms and put the documents away inside his coat.

“We have one more pretext for destroying them. That is all it is.”

“I suppose so…”

Not just a completion report, then, but a whole separate piece of work on top of it. A bit of a nuisance, although I’d had time on my hands for the last two weeks or so, and it was about right for getting a body moving that had gone soft.

—Right then. Time to show what I can actually do, for once in a while.

With the burning lodge at our backs, we left.

As leader of the Provisional Elite Corps’ intelligence unit, I’d keep supporting Lady Valtrune and boss from here. And for now, get the results we’d just picked up safely home, and build my strength back up before the next job.

Interlude 2 – A Choice as the Third Camp

Having fled the fight with the Chosen in a hurry, I called the White Serpent up out of the ground somewhere a long way from the site.

“Haa… that was close.”

A Divine Beast draws the eye. Let a body more than ten meters long travel above ground and it would be spotted from the air almost at once, so I put the White Serpent back under the soil and moved myself to safe ground by a transfer working. It deceives any pursuit and spares me taking risks I need not take. A perfect plan for a withdrawal, if I say so myself.

“…The Kingdom’s army was beginning to come apart as well, and they were supposed to be putting on such a show. The only thing troubling me is whether the Black Serpent managed to recover Prince Euris.”

I stroked the White Serpent, which had put only its head up out of the earth, and quietly let my chest settle. It must have felt the killing intent from above as well; by the time I gave the order to run it was thoroughly frightened.

“Fufufu. Well, when you feel killing intent on that scale, running is all one can do, isn’t it?”

Honestly, had I stayed and fought, I would not have lost. Princess Valtrune’s magic was entirely spent, and the black knight boy had had his ability blown apart completely and was worn down to the point of not being able to move.

—So in truth I would have liked to observe a little longer. What those two truly have is nothing like what they showed me. A little more pressure and I could have drawn out the next stage of their real strength.

But that was refused me by the appalling killing intent that came drifting down from above. Had I ignored it and stayed absorbed in the two of them, the White Serpent, badly wounded and behind me, would have been killed without any difficulty. That would be very inconvenient for me.

“I wonder what that one was. It looked as though it were riding a dragon mount, and it moved like something thoroughly used to fighting.”

What poured water on an enjoyable fight was a Chosen other than Princess Valtrune and the black knight. Fierce killing intent directed at me and at nothing else. One of the people who had come to help those two, surely.

The last Chosen was outside my calculations, and an unexpected harvest as well.

“Unlike the incomplete pair, the last one had command of its power… perhaps its memories came back a long time ago. I shall have to identify who it is quickly.”

When I felt the killing intent and turned my eyes upward, the shape I glimpsed for an instant was wrapped in black miasma, and I could not so much as see it.

“Fufu. Was that concealment done knowingly, I wonder… how very interesting.”

It was carried out by someone who understands my particular nature very well. I can see the flow of miasma and of magic, and a place where thick pooled magic or miasma drifts is precisely the place I cannot make out what is in it. I may know that something is there without ever grasping accurately what it is.

Someone knew that weakness of mine, and wore thick miasma to conceal what they were.

…Still, I did get one hint about the Chosen.

“Hiding your identity with miasma would mean not having much magic… or perhaps a child who cannot use magic at all. Although if the miasma was worn precisely so that I would read it that way, then whoever did it is cleverer than anything I can hope to see through.”

—Three of the Chosen, gathered in the Empire. My interest is thoroughly awake now.

How far they will grow, and whether they can, in the end, break the hopelessly cruel fate that waits for them.

“I look forward to the day we meet again… ah.”

While I was standing beside the White Serpent thinking about the Chosen, I saw Order soldiers who had run from the battle in the distance. They had numbers and very little experience of fighting, so their formation had collapsed and they were scattering away at a jog.

“…I had forgotten. So they weren’t all destroyed.”

I looked hard at the ones running toward me. Their coordination was entirely gone, and mixed in among them were several of the priests who had been commanding the Order’s army.

“How convenient. All that fighting must have made you very hungry.”

I spoke to it gently, and the White Serpent opened its mouth wide and showed its fangs.

“Fufufu. Yes, of course… then let us fill you up as much as you like.”

The Order’s soldiers must have caught sight of me and the White Serpent, because they came running with relief on their faces.

Ah, you poor things, with no idea at all what is about to become of you.

“Now. Eat your fill of them.”

The White Serpent went back under the ground and crawled toward the soldiers, then split the earth open and came up from beneath to swallow them whole, one after another, without mercy. With each soldier it took down, its wounds closed a little further.

“Wh-why is the White Serpent attacking u—!”

“H-help me!”

Relief was painted over with terror, and men frightened of being eaten alive were eaten without resisting.

—What was left at the end was one priest, an arm torn off him, broken all over.

“Lady Reshia… why…”

He walked toward me on unsteady feet with his eyes asking for help, and I turned my face away from him. Behind him the White Serpent was closing, drooling. When the enormous shadow fell over him he wept and stretched a hand out toward me.

“P-please, help me…”

—Ah, this really is a masterpiece.

I put a hand at my mouth and smiled at the voice asking to be saved.

“Priest. Thank you for everything up to now. Goodbye.”

“—Hgk?!”

Immediately after that short scream the White Serpent bit him at the head, and no end of blood ran out onto the ground, and he stopped moving. What remained was meat cut cruelly into pieces.

“That’s the end of it…”

On a road running toward Kingdom territory, nowhere near any battlefield, many bodies had been produced. Some with parts missing, some with faces damaged badly enough to make identification difficult. I put my hands together as though offering a prayer over corpses with no determinable cause of death.

“…I never intended to send any of you back alive. I am sorry.”

Only the White Serpent and I were left there. Apart from me the Order’s army was entirely destroyed, and a great many of the priests, who are the Order’s executive officers, had lost their lives in this fight. For the Order this defeat will be a considerable blow.

“Fufufu. You did well… now go and sleep a while somewhere quiet.”

I saw the White Serpent dig its way down into the earth, and started for home. I wiped the blood that had spattered onto my cheek away with my hand, and returned to the church as the single survivor.

My purpose in the Dyrst region was accomplished: to find the Chosen and measure their strength, and to remove every one of the priests who were in my way.

—The Archbishop will be furious about the failure of this invasion, no doubt. But it will never occur to him that I killed the last of the Order’s soldiers myself. Today was a perfect opportunity to bring every one of the Archbishop’s people to their deaths without anything seeming out of place.

“…To imagine you could use me to satisfy your own appetites. Your thinking is far too soft, Archbishop.”

The recovery of the Svell Order’s holy land in the Dyrst region. That is the reason on the surface, and the Archbishop’s aim lies elsewhere: he sent so many priests to Dyrst in order to lay hands on the ‘Divine Demon Orb’ sleeping in that ground.

Before I went backward through time I thought no further than that the Archbishop was scheming a shallow invasion for money. Now I already know that he means to misuse the Divine Demon Orb and bring about a catastrophe severe enough to collapse the order of the world.

“I have nothing to do but accomplish my own purpose… and the tiresome little villains obstructing my plan will have to make an early exit.”

Before ever facing the Chosen who keep defying fate in the Empire, I have an enemy that must be removed.

—The rotten upper leadership of the Svell Order.

The Archbishop misuses Lord Svell’s name, and being of the privileged class, waves his authority about without limit. The greedy priests who attach themselves behind him and gorge on the benefits are equally guilty. I will never leave ugly monsters wearing the shape of people at liberty.

One day I will accomplish the mission I received from Lord Svell, and to do it I remove the obstacles one at a time, and thoroughly.

“…Now then.”

First, let us inform the Archbishop of the Order’s defeat. He will be irritated at the failure, and he will heap abuse on me, but for my part, simply being permitted to observe him losing his composure will be a sufficient result.

The road home was a solitary walk. The quiet all around was hard to reconcile with having just come from a battlefield that stank of blood.

Now. What excuse shall I make when I arrive? I thought hard about how to deceive the Archbishop, and then it came to me.

—Ah. What about a script along these lines.

‘The frail Saint, sole survivor of the Dyrst invasion, lived through a hellish battlefield of blood and screaming by a miracle. She fled back to the church with her life and no more, and, having lost so many companions, is sunk in grief. The burden on her heart has left her unable to perform a Saint’s duties, and she will be away from the church for some time, recuperating.’

That way I slip out from under the church’s watch and move about freely. And if the Archbishop judges me to be of no further use, he will cut me loose easily enough.

“…Which means I shall have to act the part of a woman who is unwell.”

There is a great deal of time before I reach the church, and I must use it to get ready to play the tragic Saint.

“Ah, that only I should survive, how could such a thing be… no, that is a little theatrical.”

“I can’t bear it. I don’t want to watch anyone be hurt… no. There’s no feeling in that.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. …Ah, with that one, might they read a mind that has broken into it even if my face stays quite blank?”

I kept trying and discarding, and searching for the very best performance of a woman coming apart.

Chapter 2 – The Saint Reshia and the Battle with the Divine Beasts

1

For one moment I felt something so wrong it put ice down my spine.

Ahead of us the Order’s army was waiting. Our own strength came to about five hundred, a comparatively small body, but with dragon mounts and the ground itself worked into the tactics, a win was still there to be taken. That was what I had been thinking, at any rate.

“Al. Are you all right?”

Princess Valtrune caught the change in my face before anyone else and laid a hand gently against my back.

“I’m all right. There was just something unpleasant in the air.”

“Unpleasant?”

“Yes, it may be that there is an enemy out there more troublesome than we’ve allowed for.”

A battlefield hands you a bad feeling fairly often, and seven or eight times out of ten the trouble turns out to be real and you find yourself standing in it.

“There’s a great deal about the Svell Order nobody knows. Let’s go carefully.”

“Yes.”

Even in my days as a knight of the Kingdom I never had dealings with the Svell Order. The religious body with more believers than any other on the continent, that is the Svell Order, and it keeps a great deal to itself. An organization wrapped up that tightly is very likely to move in ways we haven’t accounted for.

—Knowing the Order is coming at us in concert with the Kingdom’s army doesn’t buy me the right to relax.

We went forward carefully, eyes working over everything around us, and then a shattering roar came up and the ground heaved under us.

“That’s…”

“Magic tools. …The Corps must have set them off in the fighting with the Kingdom’s army. It doesn’t affect anything on our side of the operation, so let’s press on and not mind it.”

Explosive magic tools had been buried all across the Dyrst plain. The moment the Kingdom’s army passed certain points, Petra would give her mages the word to blow them.

“Do you suppose they’ll be all right over there?”

One of the soldiers said it, half to himself. The Corps was locked into a savage fight with the Kingdom’s army, and Princess Valtrune spoke gently, taking care of the uneasiness in them.

“So long as those tools are in the ground, the Kingdom can’t afford a clumsy advance… they aren’t going to lose easily. Isn’t that right?”

“Yes.”

She was right. We had known from the start that the numbers were against us, and the magic tools were the card we had prepared to cover that enormous gap.

That explosion also told me something else: Petra, who gives the word to fire them, was alive. If the tools could be set off, the Corps could stand toe to toe with the Kingdom’s army.

Which left the problem on our side of the map. Being short of strength was every bit as true of us, with the Order in front of us.

“Whatever is happening over there, we have to concentrate on the enemy in front of us. Do not get careless. I am not prepared to lose a single one of you. Tighten up.”

“Y-Yes, sir…!”

A little intimidation, and the soldier’s back jumped and he faced front again in a hurry.

The Corps was fighting an enemy several times its size, and we were about to fight at odds of more than ten to one ourselves, the Order had seven thousand.

And the key to winning this one lay with the intelligence unit.

“Fuu… took your time, didn’t you. The enemy’s practically on top of us.”

The intelligence unit had been gathering what could be gathered on the forward edge of the Dyrst region, and the whole of it answers to Dorothea, whose face never quite lifts and who smokes one cigarette after another. She had a few of her people posted around her, and she was sitting on the trunk of a fallen tree looking straight at us, for all the world as though she had been waiting for us to arrive.

“Well? Is it going smoothly?”

“Neither well nor badly… unfortunately every one of my fighters is out on other business. Running around an enemy camp with nothing but non-combatants is hard labor.”

“Why are your fighters out?”

“Who can say. Fadi mentioned something he absolutely could not get out of. Ask the boy yourself if you want the details.”

Her fighters being out meant Fadi had gone to sweep up the anti-Princess nobles. Dorothea passed straight over the fact that the instruction had been mine, and to move the subject along she pointed at the soldiers we had brought and pulled her brows down.

“So. That’s the whole of your strength, is it?”

“…Yes. Five hundred all told. Twenty of them dragon-mount soldiers.”

“That’s a bold way to divide an army… you do know how many of them there are?”

“I hadn’t expected the Order to raise seven thousand. But we will drive the Order’s soldiers off with these numbers, exactly as originally planned.”

Dorothea had probably assumed we would come with two or three thousand at the least. Unfortunately the Corps had no resources left to put into this.

“The Kingdom’s army is over forty thousand. This was the limit of what could be spared for the Order…”

One of the Corps’ soldiers made the case with his eyes down, and Dorothea drew on her cigarette and looked up at the sky and stopped moving for a while.

“…………Looks like the load on us gets heavier too.”

She didn’t lose an ounce of composure. She tipped her head slightly and gathered in the subordinates who had been lying hidden around her.

“Lady Dorothea.”

“You called for us?”

“Listen and listen properly. Sorry about this, but the plan’s changing. I told you the intelligence unit wouldn’t have to join the fighting. Circumstances have moved. Where there’s an enemy you can take down without carrying much risk, go after them. Understood?”

She rattled it out in a way that made it clear objections weren’t being accepted.

“Which means…”

“Which means we’re short of strength and this is going to be a harder fight than we planned for. You lot can all fight to some degree. You’re drawing good pay for it. Betting your lives once or twice isn’t too much to ask, is it?”

There are a lot of new faces in the intelligence unit. You would expect people to flinch, told out of nowhere that they were about to be in reach of dying.

“Of course! We’ll fight with everything we have!”

“Well, nothing for it but to do it!”

“We were all living hand to mouth, never knowing which day was the last one. Now somebody’s given us a decent life, if we don’t put our backs into it here, when exactly are we going to?”

Most of them come out of the slums. They have lived eventful enough lives that a fair number of them have the nerve for dangerous work.

Dorothea heard their answers and turned back to Princess Valtrune.

“There you are. The intelligence unit’s a hundred. That makes six hundred to fight the Order with.”

“I’m sorry. It’s because we’re short.”

“Don’t let it trouble you. Stand on a battlefield and everybody makes their peace with dying.”

—Making peace with dying, is it.

“Then I will make my peace with keeping as many of these brave people alive as I can.”

“Al…!”

Everyone makes their peace with death on a battlefield. And every one of them wants to come home alive at the same time.

It was Dorothea who reacted to what I had said, and out of all proportion.

“…Hah! That’s a large thing to say. Personal knight.”

She threw the cigarette away and laughed as though she suspected me of something, then walked slowly up in front of me and put a knee to the ground.

It was nothing like her usual way of letting the world slide past her. Crouched there, looking up at me, Dorothea wore the same serious face she had worn on that day in the rain when we fought for our lives.

“That feeling of yours… don’t you forget it before the end.”

“I am Rune-sama’s sword. Guarding what matters to her is part of what I’m for.”

“…Is that so.”

It had started to embarrass me and I covered it with that, and she got smartly to her feet and set off into the depths of the forest where the Order’s army would be.

“We’ll go on ahead. Leave scouting the enemy to us and rest easy.”

Her people went with her, scattering into the forest in an instant and out of sight. She walked a few paces, then turned only her eyes back to me.

“…I’m relying on you. Aldia, the brave personal knight, see that you work hard enough to keep those words from turning out to be a lie.”

She left that behind her and dissolved into the dark of the trees.

Being taken in hand and driven forward like that settled my resolve properly. I closed my fist hard and looked back at the soldiers still waiting behind us. Not one of them had lost his nerve; every face was full of fight.

“Rune-sama. Let’s be certain to win this.”

The succession she has wanted so long lies on the far side of beating the Order’s army.

“Fufu.”

“Yes?”

“I’m sorry. It’s only… it seems to be nothing but this sort of thing with us.”

Princess Valtrune, smiling, rested a hand lightly on my shoulder and laid a body-strengthening spell on me.

“You are the pivot of the line. I believe you’ll protect them all.”

“Leave it to me.”

I would earn what she expected in this fight. The strengthening she had put on me with her own hand felt like another hand at my back.

2

Fighting in forest is skirmishing, always, done on the move.

The lightly equipped and quick-footed take the front, and the soldiers with magic or bows pick the enemy off through the gaps between trunks.

“Enemy in numbers to the front!”

“Beginning the sweep!”

“There’s an Order banner over here as well—!”

“Watch every direction! Push the front line forward from straight ahead, with Al at the center of it!”

The deeper into the forest we went, the more of the Order’s soldiers appeared. We destroyed them before they could call for anyone, and being few in number, we fought inside a fixed radius, covering one another.

“…Tch! Support over here!”

“Give me a moment. Coming!”

The Corps’ soldiers kept their eyes on the enemy arriving from all four sides and went to pull out whoever was being pressed.

“Hah!”

“Gaaaah…!”

Fortunately, most of the Order’s soldiers had far less combat experience than the Kingdom’s, and their equipment was poor, the kind assembled out of whatever came to hand.

“Sorry. That helped.”

“Don’t mention it. Looks worse on the far side next. Let’s get over there.”

“Right!”

—So far nothing has happened that would collapse the formation.

They weren’t coming at us in any well-controlled mass. They came at us as individuals, each one as he noticed us, and taken in that order they could be met without trouble.

“Sir Aldia. The enemy to our front is destroyed. May we go and support the flanks?”

“Yes. Half of you stay here; the rest move out and clear whatever’s left nearby.”

“Sir!”

As they moved off, Princess Valtrune, who had been giving us magical support from behind, came up at my back.

“It’s going well enough so far.”

“It is. Dorothea’s intelligence unit is running riot in their camp, and because of it they can’t commit their full strength against us.”

Right at the forward edge, Dorothea’s people were jumping between trees and drawing the Order’s attention with what amounted to a running ambush. In a skirmishing fight the advantage was ours, and we kept widening the ground we held.

“Guh…”

“Kh—!”

Move fast, put the enemy down, and be somewhere else before reinforcements arrive.

“This side is completely held!”

“The dragon-mount soldiers are sweeping from the air. No sign of the enemy anywhere near us.”

—We can do this.

With the fighting settled for the moment, Princess Valtrune brought the units together.

“Damage report.”

“Several dead and wounded on our side, but nothing that impedes the destruction of the Order’s army. On their side the response has been too slow, and the intelligence unit reports that if we keep the pressure on we should be able to push them back all at once.”

—And no encounter with anyone worth being careful about. Was the bad feeling nothing after all?

Keep on like this and even a small force could chase them off easily.

“Al… what do you think?”

But Princess Valtrune’s face hadn’t eased even now, with everything going our way. She was uncomfortable about how far we had come without meeting any real resistance, and I found myself distrusting the absence of trouble exactly as she did.

“If I were on the Order’s side… I would not give orders that let a small enemy do as it liked. If the other side is skirmishing, you crush it in one motion with the sheer weight of your numbers.”

“I think the same. They must know by now how few we are… so what is this lack of coordination?”

There was every chance they had a trap laid. Just as the Corps was playing the Kingdom’s army with magic tools, we had to allow for the Order scheming to take the whole of us in one net with some device of their own.

“…Excuse me, may I raise something?”

One of the soldiers pointed at the corpse of an Order soldier and spoke with some hesitation.

“What is it?”

“It’s… the Order’s soldiers we’ve been fighting. I can’t shake the feeling they’re ordinary people who have plainly never trained for combat.”

“Ordinary people…”

He was right. Every one of them had gone down far too easily.

“…I did think it was strange in itself that the Order could raise seven thousand at short notice and invade the Empire. Surely they haven’t forced believers onto a battlefield?”

“If they’d been forced, some of them would run. Every one of them came at us bravely.”

Believers with no fighting ability at all, standing in a front line as soldiers? To take part in an invasion of the Empire knowing your life is at risk, there has to be a reason of some weight.

“What was the Order’s stated reason for attacking the Empire in the first place?”

“Retaking the holy land in the Dyrst region… I believe.”

“The holy land. And whereabouts would that be? There’s nothing in Dyrst but the mines where the Divine Demon Orb comes out and a stretch of farmland.”

Their reason for invading was the recovery of the Svell Order’s holy land, but there is no pure and sacred spot anywhere in this region that the Order could be pointing at.

“…The reason for the invasion doesn’t matter in the slightest to the Order.”

A reason cooked up to raise an army: that would be the ‘recovery of the Svell Order’s holy land.’ To a believer offering up deep faith, the Empire would look like a villain squatting unlawfully on holy ground.

“They’ll have called for volunteers among the faithful. The proof of it is that their weapons are all different, nothing standard about any of it.”

Few of them carried a proper sword or shield, and some, apparently, had come swinging farm tools.

“Which means… what we are fighting isn’t soldiers, it’s ordinary townspeople?”

“If the theory is right, yes.”

“That’s…”

There are numerous people in the Corps with a strong sense of justice. Foreign or not, killing civilians was always going to sit badly with some of them.

—So the high spirits have wavered.

It hadn’t gone as far as losing the will to fight, but the momentum they came in with was entirely gone.

“Are we to keep fighting like this…”

“Hey, what are you talking about? They’re invaders threatening our homeland.”

“I know. But killing ordinary people who don’t even know the situation is a bit…”

A small tear becomes a large collapse. That is the way the world is built.

“—Don’t waver. Kill all of them.”

“—!”

Just as the doubt was taking hold, Dorothea appeared from nowhere and shouted it loud enough to shock the life back into them.

“Ordinary people or not, an enemy is an enemy. Waver and you’re the one who gets killed… instead of wasting breath arguing, put the mission first!”

Just what you would expect from a former boss of a shadow organization. She reads a moment on a battlefield very well. If someone had hesitated there, our chance of winning would have thinned without question.

Princess Valtrune called out as the last push.

“Listen, all of you. If we are beaten here, the people those men turn on next may be the people you love, at home in the Empire. Strangers, or the people we are sworn to protect, I don’t think there’s any question which comes first.”

The two of them said their piece, and the doubt went out of the soldiers’ eyes.

“…We continue. All of you, to your positions.”

“Sir!”

—That was close.

If opinion had split there, holding the force together would have become very difficult, and it occurred to me that all of this might have been exactly what the Order was after.

“All units, ready! The enemy is the Svell Order. Kill every one of them on sight and show no mercy! We take no prisoners. For this one span of time, put every merciful thought away!”

The advance resumed on the order.

What came at us were Svell believers who had never been in a fight in their lives, and against soldiers who had come through hard training and set pity aside, they went down one after another with nothing they could do about it.

Some of ours faltered at the blood going up into the air, but they cut down every last one regardless. This could no longer be covered by a word as mild as war.

It was one-sided, and it was butchery.

“Hah!”

“Guh…”

The feel of a blade going through flesh and the bone inside it. People who couldn’t hold their own balance staggered and were flung backward with no effort at all.

“…We go on. I’m going to cut down whoever is behind this.”

With me at the head of it, the soldiers cut their way forward down a road that wasn’t a road. The forest that had been under green was wrapped now in red blood and in heat that bent the air above the fires.

—I’ll bring the hammer down on the coward who used devout believers to do this.

“Advance!”

“Aaaaaaah!”

We kept up the momentum, cutting the enemy down as we went, and came within reach of the throat of their main body.

And then…

“Your Highness! Report from the intelligence unit. Enemy in numbers across the river deep in the forest, over four thousand, with heavily armed cavalry and many people in priest’s robes among them!”

At last the whole shape of the enemy army had come into the light.

“…The Order’s main force.”

“If there are that many at priest rank, then it’s certain. We should go forward watching for concentrated magical fire as well. Shall we raise magic barriers, to be safe?”

“Yes. Everything past this point is an enemy worth being careful about.”

At Princess Valtrune’s order, our mages threw magic barriers up all around us in a single motion.

—So it’s the decisive fight with the Order at last.

The Empire’s ruin is a fate that gets broken here, in this one battle.

Wishing for a victory for the Provisional Elite Corps that Princess Valtrune leads, every one of us made peace with a fight to the death, and went slowly forward.

3

Only about one in ten of the Svell Order ever reaches the rank of priest, and the magic those people command is close to a royal court mage’s.

We had been walking a while since the report that the enemy’s main body was near, and the attacks by rank-and-file had stopped dead. The quiet did nothing but wind the tension tighter, and what finally broke that unpleasant silence was a report from one of the intelligence unit scouting at the very front.

“Urgent report! At the center of the enemy army… there’s a woman in a nun’s habit!”

“—!”

Whatever else a Svell believer might do, a nun going out to a battlefield is hard to picture. And at the center of the enemy army, of all places.

“Rune-sama, how do you read it?”

“I don’t want to think it, but I don’t see any choice except to assume the worst enemy on the board has arrived.”

“The Saint…”

Every one of us felt it at once, cruelly enough: the one opponent in this fight who most needed watching had come.

“A messenger of God with magic to rival a god’s, granted countless blessings and her own particular arts, if the woman in the habit is genuinely the Saint, then whether we can beat her is, honestly, unknown. What would you have us do?”

I put it to Princess Valtrune. Even if we fought, without an effective answer to the Saint’s magic, being wiped out entirely was on the table. Adding a second source of dread on top of the difference in numbers was nothing but wind in our faces.

“…What do you think? What do you make of the woman?”

“I don’t know. I never met the Saint in my previous life either. But the chill I felt when we entered the forest. That was unmistakably the sense of something enormous arriving. If the Saint is with them, then the bad feeling explains itself.”

If she were merely human, we could have forced our way through and killed her. Even with several priests skilled in magic, close the distance by main strength and they would go down for certain; that had been my reasoning. But with the Saint on the field the arithmetic changed. Back when I was a knight of the Kingdom, before I went backward through time, I heard a few stories about the Saints.

“I’ve heard that a Saint handles arts only she can use, and carries blessings so strong that neither magic nor a physical blow gets through.”

And the actual measure of her fighting strength has never been made public: a sealed box. Misjudge her by a little and you may take a wound you don’t get up from.

“Would a straight fight from the front be reckless?”

“A mage of Rune-sama’s ability wouldn’t lose easily, I think. The others are another matter.”

“Yes… that’s true.”

“By rights I’d want to crush them in one blow, but I think we need to look before we move.”

It may have been faint-hearted, but we could not afford to gamble and take losses for nothing. We were already short of soldiers and standing at the edge where one section breaking takes everyone down with it. We had to move carefully, and she understood that as well as I did, because she agreed.

“Very well. Then we’ll have the intelligence unit test them lightly.”

“And the dragon-mount soldiers out scouting?”

“Pull them back and bring them in to us. I want our main strength gathered.”

“Understood. I’ll have them recalled at once.”

That left the intelligence unit as the only force forward, and its fighting ability was the part I was least easy about. It would put a heavy load on Dorothea, but there was nothing for it except to hope her experience as a boss in the underworld and her feel for the give-and-take of a fight would carry her through.

“…Orders sent. Let’s wait for word.”

The enemy had taken ground on the far side of a hard-running river. It was difficult to imagine them forcing a crossing through that water, and the same held for us: neither side could attack easily, which meant the first move would go a long way toward deciding the rest of it.

“How do you think it will go?”

“If they’re standing on the defensive, I’d rather stretch the deadlock out. If they come at us, I want their formation broken before they finish crossing.”

Our side looked down from slightly above a cliff line, which gave us the better ground, and waiting suited our soldiers better than attacking.

“Either way, all we can do is wait for the intelligence unit.”

A short wait, I thought. Immediately afterward Dorothea appeared in front of us, dragging one leg, covered in wounds.

“…Kh.”

“Dorothea!”

Princess Valtrune reached her first. There was nothing among the injuries that would kill her, at least.

“What in the world happened?”

Dorothea steadied her breathing and began.

“…She saw through all of it. We were concealed perfectly and that woman shot us out of cover exactly. That isn’t normal.”

“‘That woman’…”

“The Saint…”

Another of the particular gifts handed down from her god, then. The concealment Dorothea’s intelligence unit works with is good enough to stand comparison with any nation’s agents. Finding them once they were hidden in a forest was beyond me, certainly.

“It was instant. I was closing without being spotted, and past a certain distance her eyes came straight up and met mine.”

“You mean no disguise of any kind works in front of the Saint?”

“No… some of my people got closer than I did and were never seen. There’s a mechanism behind that unnatural detection of hers somewhere.”

Dorothea said it with certainty, then sighed out what strength she had left and added that she was not, unfortunately, going to be able to go back and check.

“Someone stop Dorothea’s bleeding, quickly.”

“Sorry about that. Not much use to you…”

“Not at all. You went forward first, and because you did the rest of us advanced safely. Leave what comes next to us.”

Princess Valtrune handed the blood-soaked Dorothea over to one of the women among the dragon-mount soldiers.

“Take her to the operations post, please.”

“Yes, ma’am!”

Dorothea’s head hung and she went out with the other wounded agents, carried by the riders. When the departing group was out of sight, Princess Valtrune put a hand to her head and let out a long breath.

“Well… what shall we do from here.”

“It seems there’s no simple way through. What’s here is the whole of our remaining strength.”

So many of the agents had been shot out of the trees by the Saint’s magic before they could even close on the Order, and the intelligence unit at the front had been effectively destroyed.

“Fighting close looks bad. And the range on the magic that woman throws is so far outside normal that trading fire at distance goes badly too.”

—And we still haven’t uncovered the trick behind how well she detects us.

“We’ve lost most of our intelligence unit and we can’t read how the enemy will move.”

The clever choice was to pull back to the operations post and rebuild. But taking that choice meant letting the Order push further in.

“…Rune-sama.”

“Your Highness, your orders.”

“What will you have us do?”

The soldiers were waiting for the next command, and making the decision here would be very hard on Princess Valtrune. Retreat was hell and advance was hell. Only silence went by, and by degrees the unease she was carrying spread out into the soldiers.

“…All of you. Listen to me.”

She thought it through to the end, and when she spoke her face was serious, and her voice was sad.

“From here we go to meet the Order’s army head-on. Many of us will be lost in this fight, and whether we can win it is unknown… even so, will you run the whole of it beside me, to the end?”

Her decision was to go forward into the fight with the Order.

An enemy who had wrecked the intelligence unit in a moment and against whom even Dorothea had been able to do nothing at all. An enemy strong enough that everyone standing here, put together, still looked unequal to her. But this fight would beyond question be the turning point that overturned the Empire’s ruin.

“Rune-sama… I am your personal knight. Whatever you decide, I follow you.”

“Al…”

Running from a power like the Saint’s would be easy. It may even be that running was the correct answer in that place. But what is waiting at the end of running? The grief of failing to remove a threat and losing what matters to you. Or the regret of never having taken the step. Either way, I don’t believe the best future is at the end of it.

“But having come this far, we can only go on. Why are we fighting in the first place? To protect the way we live? For honor? Any of it will serve, you are standing on this field because you judged this country worth fighting to protect. Isn’t that so?”

I asked them the reason they had taken up weapons and decided to stake their lives here, and they answered without needing to think about it.

“…There’s something I want to protect. That’s why I’m fighting here.”

“My wife’s in the imperial capital. My son turns three next month. I’m not letting those people get that far!”

“I want to make a proper soldier of myself and keep this country at peace!”

“I want to make life easier for my mother and father… I want to pay them back.”

“Joining the Corps put some room in my life. I want to fight beside everyone here until the very last!”

The reasons differed, but every one of them had a clear purpose in the fight.

“Then the answer is simple. Brave heroes, who took up arms to defend your country, now is the time to strike the invaders down!”

I still had not found the way to beat the Saint. There was nothing for it but to go at her anyway.

“Your Highness… let’s go forward! We have to win!”

“The others from my year are out there staking their lives against the Kingdom’s army. If we’re the only ones who run, I’ll be too ashamed to look any of them in the face. I’m fighting!”

“We knew they’d outnumber us from the start. Now there’s a Saint on top of it, that’s all! That’s not a reason to run anywhere!”

“I’m not thinking about losing. We are absolutely going to win!”

“Well, pulling out here wouldn’t make me much of a man. Cut the lot of them down and let’s get home!”

They had settled it in themselves.

“So… you’re ready to stand against a Saint.”

Resolve on its own is not enough, of course.

“Your Highness, the Saint’s magic is extremely strong, but that doesn’t mean there’s no answer to it. We mages can raise a high-density magic barrier. Unlike an ordinary one it’s difficult to hold for long, but it should last until we make contact with the Order’s forward units.”

“I see. And after that it becomes a matter of bodies.”

“Once we’re close, she can’t fire magic carelessly for fear of hitting her own people…”

“Understood. Raise the barrier just before the Saint’s magic reaches us.”

The mages began building the barrier together. Princess Valtrune took the head of the army and gave the order.

“We open our fate with our own hands. Win this fight, without fail. Now, forward!”

At her word the army began to move again, toward a decisive battle with the Svell Order’s army under its Saint, and a full and open confrontation.

4

—They have finally moved.

The heroes that a mischievous fate has been toying with had committed their whole strength in our direction. I spoke to the priest standing at my side with his hands clasped behind his back.

“The Imperial army is moving. Prepare for battle.”

“I will give the order at once.”

He left to share the information with each of the commanders, and I sat where I was and looked steadily out in front of me.

“I can smell it. That thick scent of miasma the Chosen carry…”

I brushed the foulness drifting around me lightly aside with one hand and let a small piece of magic go, a single blow at the Imperial army coming toward us so unguardedly, meant as a warning.

The blue lightning threw sparks and ran dead straight through the trees toward the front of the enemy army.

“—Missed? No. That isn’t it.”

Far off in the forest, white smoke went up with a great crack of thunder. That shot had certainly landed. But the Imperial army coming on did not appear to have been damaged.

—My magic, turned aside by a magic barrier raised by ordinary people?

“Priest. A moment.”

He had finished passing on the orders and was coming back, and at my call he tilted his head, puzzled.

“You look a little pale… is something wrong?”

He had not noticed. Somewhere among that small handful of soldiers coming toward us, a monster was hiding who could stand against me.

“Be on your guard. This enemy is formidable.”

“Whatever are you saying? They are far fewer than we are, and the enemy scouts who came before were all cut down by you, Lady Reshia.”

“Those were merely visible… this enemy will not be so easy. Be careless and you will die quickly.”

“What—!”

I turned away from the priest’s graceless, dumbfounded face and let out a long breath.

—Yes. I can see the flow of magic.

I saw it a moment ago, and I can see it now. Something carrying enormous magic is coming toward us, and the volume of it is climbing steadily, enough that one day it might rise past mine.

“That one is also a Chosen. But I get very little scent of miasma from it… why should that be?”

A Chosen steeped in strong miasma, and a Chosen who is not. Both draw their vast power from a strong feeling held in the heart.

“The one wrapped in miasma is very strong. Strength for fighting, perhaps? And the one holding abundant magic is barely touched by miasma at all, and yet draws out this much power… what is the difference?”

The Chosen I had prepared for was the former sort, a person taking a strong feeling they had conceived and swelling it explosively by borrowing the miasma’s power. The nature of the latter’s power is beyond my understanding.

I turned it over, built theory on theory, and cut away the possibilities that led nowhere. What remained, after everything had been pared down, was a single hypothesis.

“…Because the feelings the two of them hold are different in kind?”

I had arrived at a hypothesis close to the truth. But a hypothesis is only ever a hypothesis; to know the answer, I would have to see it with my own eyes.

“Priest. I am going to the front.”

I rose and called the Black Serpent up out of the ground, and the priest became flustered.

“Why? Lady Reshia, even without you at the front, that handful cannot possibly finish us.”

“Is that truly so?”

Immediately afterward a piece of an Order soldier, blown back from the front line, passed by the side of the priest’s face. It struck a tree with a dull sound and dropped to the ground, and the priest froze in shock.

“With that in front of you, can you still tell me there is no need for me to stand at the front?”

—Their thinking really is soft.

Gathering enough heads does not win anything. Bundle the weak together in front of the strong and it is a wall made of straw: it comes apart with no trouble at all.

“I shall say it once more. I am going to the front. You have no objection?”

“…Y-Yes, my lady!”

He seemed to have grasped how little his army could be relied on, because he hurriedly summoned the White Serpent I had given into his keeping. Apparently the priest was coming to the front as well.

“Oh? You are coming too?”

“Of course. I could hardly leave the work to you alone, Lady Reshia.”

—What a convenient thing to say.

The truth is that he fears my losing, the Order’s spirit collapsing with it, and the front line going to pieces. The moment I am gone as the Order’s center of gravity, the Order shatters as an organization.

“…Fufu. What very easy people to read.”

The words came out under my breath, too faint for the priest walking beside me to catch.

They pen the Saint in and use her, and through her the Order means to lay hands on the power of that thing. But it is hard to imagine, as things stand, that the plan proceeds without difficulty.

What sort of end shallow people come to after this is no concern of mine, though I confess I am, just slightly, looking forward to it.

5

The magic barrier our mages had thrown up with everything they had between them turned aside one carefully aimed strike after another, all of it coming from impossibly far away. Layering a barrier that many times over means it can’t be spread wide, but fortunately the magic only ever came at the center of our advancing column.

“Another one, incoming!”

At the shout, the mages pushed more power into the barrier.

“Kh!”

“That one was heavy again…”

“Hold it if it kills you!”

What came at us varied constantly: high-output lightning built for speed; enormous fireballs that scattered sparks across a wide area; ice lances, fragile, but throwing appalling cold off every shard when they broke; wind rounds heavy enough to push trees over; and the pillars of pure white light that the clergy are fond of.

“…Hah. We managed it.”

Powerful, varied magic, and every piece of it eating reliably into our mages’ reserves. The Saint kept firing without a shred of mercy.

“So the Saint can use any magic there is…”

“Never mind the raw power, what’s frightening is that all of it comes out at the same strength.”

A mage is supposed to have things she is good at and things she isn’t. That theory appeared not to apply to the Saint, who could throw every kind of attack without any of it suffering. Combined with a supply of magic that never seemed to run down, the threat she posed stood comparison with a whole army.

I caught how worn our mages were getting and looked to Princess Valtrune.

“Rune-sama. The mages are being drained badly.”

“I know. But I can’t let them rest partway. The Saint’s magic doesn’t stop, and we make contact with the Order’s forward units very soon.”

By the time we collided with the Order’s soldiers, the mages would almost certainly have spent nearly everything they had, which meant the whole thing rested on how far the soldiers holding the front could drive the enemy back.

“The brush is about to end.”

We could hear the river running, and through the gaps in the trees came innumerable great banners stamped with the Order’s symbol. Clear the undergrowth and we would be facing the enemy army across the water.

—The Saint’s bombardment has eased off, too. Time to attack.

My eyes met Princess Valtrune’s; she had judged the same moment.

“Rune-sama.”

“Yes. All units, charge!”

At the order the soldiers behind the barrier broke into a full run, and I took the head of them and led.

“Enemy sighted!”

“Intercept!”

The moment we left the brush the Order caught on, and arrows and magic came down like a cloudburst.

“Gaah!”

“Gyaah—!”

Many of ours went down under the successive waves. The attacks were fiercer than we had allowed for.

“Don’t flinch! Keep going!”

Retreat had stopped being available to us some time ago. Annihilation or victory: with those two extremes in front of us, we bet on the thread of hope and stepped into ground built for dying.

“If we lose them, we have no way to win! Begin covering fire!”

Support from behind thinned the attacks a little, and the men at the head of the charge finally reached the near bank, where the soldiers put themselves behind the boulders lying along the water and into what few dips the ground offered, and waited for the next order.

“Sir Aldia. Their attack isn’t slackening at all. What are we to…”

In front of us was a river running hard. To get across it we needed their attention pulled further off us than it was, and the people behind us throwing magic and arrows had lost a great many of their number trading fire with the Order. Many of the forward units, too, had died getting us as far as this bank. Going on would take more sacrifice, and there was nothing left to offer.

If there was anything at all… yes. There was.

“Holding here won’t last long… I’ll go forward at the head and draw their attention.”

“You’ll what—?! Please wait. Even you, Sir Aldia, if that many of them concentrate on one target, you will not come through it!”

“I’m aware of that… but there’s no other way.”

“I cannot believe Her Highness would permit that choice. Please reconsider.”

—True enough. Rune-sama would stop me.

She is kind, and it may be that even with every option gone and the Order winning, she wouldn’t pick up a victory at the cost of my life. But that won’t do. I can’t accept leaving a single cloud on the future she walks into.

“…If nothing about this changes, I go out of here first.”

You can’t wait behind a rock forever. To keep the soldiers from dying for nothing, we needed one large move to turn a losing position over. I put a hand to my chest and settled the urgency down.

—One moment is all I need. Give me one opening and I can be out in front of them.

I was still failing to find a way through when a hard wind moved across my skin, and far above us something large crossed the sun and painted the ground black. A dragon mount hung there at height, both jet-black wings spread wide, growling. And there were two figures astride it: one the rider working the reins, and the other…

“…Well. I never really got my moment, did I. Seems a waste to just withdraw, don’t you think?”

—That voice. It couldn’t be.

Speaking as though there were nothing in the world more natural than her being there, with a fearless grin on her, was Dorothea, who had taken a serious wound and was supposed to have left the field.

“The river’s in your way and you can’t advance. There are too many of them and one volley turns you into a honeycomb… hah! That’s my cue, surely!”

She was bandaged everywhere on her and couldn’t possibly be in any condition for this. What on earth was she planning?

A dragon mount circling overhead and Dorothea making enormous pronouncements from its back: the enemy’s attention went up all at once.

“Shoot that dragon down!”

Magic and arrows went for the dragon carrying her at once, and every bit of it was completely powerless against her barrier.

“Fufu. You expect to put a hole in me with idiot attacks of that quality? Hah! It’s the height of comedy!”

—She sounds exactly like a villain.

But Dorothea turning up was a very welcome miscalculation. From the look of her, most of the wounds hadn’t closed and fighting might be beyond her, but that expression, entirely at her ease, was the face she wears when she is about to do something.

“All units, prepare to advance. Dorothea looks likely to break this open for us.”

They nodded at the order and got themselves into a posture to move at once, and while everyone watched to see what she would do, she lifted her hand high into the sky and shouted.

“Listen closely, fools of the Order! My name is Dorothea, the finest hand with magic in the Empire. Fufu, you did a fine job humiliating me earlier… you can regret making me taste that in the next world!”

A cloudless sky was covered by degrees in thick rain cloud, and the cloud dropped its altitude sharply and poured down over the center of the Order’s army.

“The cloud—!”

“I can’t see anything!”

It was deeper than fog, and it stayed where it was put. Then, as though setting the last piece, Dorothea gave an instruction to the woman riding with her.

“Right, girl. Ram that rabble of fools down there!”

The order was sudden and outrageous, and naturally her face went to astonishment.

“Wh-what?! Are you talking to me?!”

“Who else is there? Come along, it’s to open a road for the ground units. Get your nerve up!”

“B-but one dragon on its own will just get shot down!”

“What nonsense are you… is that full plate we strapped to your dragon decorative? Nobody said sit on the ground and stay there. Drop, trample them, climb, trample them again. Disorder their formation a little and that’s quite enough!”

She delivered it as though it weren’t remotely difficult, but keeping a dragon mount moving up and down like that would take no small skill from whoever was flying it. Entirely unbothered by any of that, she kept pointing at the ground and pressing.

“Off you go, off you go! You’ll be fine!”

“Uuu…”

—I was starting to feel rather sorry for the girl.

That miserable, half-crying voice. And I understood it perfectly; what she had been handed amounted to half a suicide run. But if Dorothea’s plan worked, we could drive straight through a disordered enemy line.

—Any other day I would be shouting at her to stop. Today the situation is what it is. I’m sorry. Go in hard.

“Right, we’re going!”

“Eek, understood! Don’t blame me for whatever happens!”

At Dorothea’s word the dragon began a vertical dive, and under all that cloud the Order wouldn’t even know a dragon was coming down out of the sky.

“…All units. The instant that dragon reaches the ground, we cross the river in one push. Do not take your eyes off it!”

“Sir!”

The timing of the charge had been placed in the hands of one dragon and one rider. We weren’t finished. Our counterattack started here.

6

The dragon made its dive with its life on the line, and success or failure, it would be the thing that got our ground units moving.

“Gyoaaaaah—?! Nghh!”

It came down like a single thrown spear, not shedding any speed at all.

“Sir Aldia… is that going to be all right?”

“However it ends, what we do doesn’t change… though I do feel a little sorry for her.”

“…There’s nothing to be done, I suppose.”

“No. Nothing to be done.”

At worst, Dorothea was riding with her and would manage something. She is a very fine mage, and even on a dragon dropping at that speed she showed no sign of hurry. On the contrary…

“Hah! That’s an aggressive way to fall!”

“Th-that’s just the brakes not working!”

Unlike the rider, who was on the edge of tears, Dorothea was holding her stomach and laughing with real enjoyment. The woman has an outrageous amount of nerve.

“Al! Hold the advance a moment!”

Princess Valtrune drew power for a long time and released a large working. It ran out along the ground and closed the river over: clear blue water turned to hard white ice, and the water that had divided the two armies vanished in a moment.

“That way you don’t lose any speed.”

“Thank you, Rune-sama.”

The enemy still had their sight taken from them by deep, heavy cloud. And into that came the outrageous business of a dragon falling out of the sky.

“Gaaah—!”

“E-enemy attack!”

“Damn it, everything’s white, I can’t see!”

The dragon’s landing was loud enough to carry through the whole forest, and with it came a high shearing sound like scrap iron being crushed flat.

“Hah! Beautiful press!”

“Y-you’re enjoying this because it isn’t you!”

Dorothea was trampling and scattering the enemy and laughing while she did it, and behind her voice came the rider’s slightly frayed, hoarse shouting.

I listened to the enemy’s screaming for a while, then swung my hand forward and stepped out onto the ice.

“Right. Charge!”

“Aaaaaah!”

Dorothea and that girl had made this opening for us at the risk of their lives, and it wasn’t going to be wasted. We went forward steadily, watching our footing on the slick ice, and once we were inside the space the white cloud covered, the Order’s soldiers came into view in complete disarray.

“Hah!”

There were none of ours in front of me. I swung the sword all the way through and felt it bite more than once.

“Guh!”

“Kh…”

Feeling the weight of it, I carried the swing through, took a great deal of blood across me, and went on forward. They still hadn’t noticed we had crossed the river, or rather…

“Damn it, what is happening?!”

“That’s a dragon calling… above us. Watch above!”

They were still being run ragged by one dragon. Thanks to it their mages and archers weren’t functioning, and closing was easy.

—After this it’s simply a matter of killing all of them.

“Hah! Well done, girl. That’s about enough. We’re clearing out!”

“I-I’m going without being told!”

Having confirmed we had made contact with the enemy army, Dorothea broke off from the center of the Order’s force entirely, and threw one parting shot back as she went.

“…Brave comrades. That’s one favor owed. I’ll expect good liquor, or one of those expensive Republic cigars.”

Having said something that shameless, she swept off to the rear.

“Steady. Put down what’s in front of you. They’ve lost their coordination. One at a time, and be certain of each!”

The enemy had no fixed target to attack and no idea where to throw anything, and a lot of them were simply standing where they were. We, by contrast, held our positions strictly enough that we could see one another even inside the deep cloud, and destroyed them without ever hitting our own.

“Magic ready… fire!”

From behind us Princess Valtrune was putting volleys into the Order’s army. Soldiers cut into ranks that were bursting apart, and we pushed the line up and broke the enemy piece by piece. As though being outnumbered meant nothing at all, our soldiers ran riot inside their formation with hardly any losses of our own, one-sided, and pitiless.

“I’m going ahead. Bring the line up slowly.”

Alone, I went deeper and deeper into the Order’s formation, swinging without discrimination. Their psychology gave me the gap I needed, none of them dared risk hitting their own, so I slid into the middle of them and hunted the ones around me down.

“Guh…”

“Hgk!”

Red blood ran down from the blade and pooled at the hilt. With bodies lying around my feet and the enemy nearby cleared, I looked for the next group and ran.

“Hah…!”

I kept running and took heads in passing. There was no time to spend on rank-and-file. There was one target: the Saint’s neck. Bring the Saint down and the Order would collapse on its own.

“—!”

I cut through soldier after soldier and searched everywhere I could. Not one of our own was anywhere near me. Everywhere I looked there were enemy soldiers, enemy soldiers, enemy soldiers, and no Saint anywhere.

“Deeper in, then… damn it.”

Their army was too thick. Cut, kick away, beat down, trample, kill another frightened soldier. I kept killing my way through the shouting with one black sword.

“Where are you?!”

The urgency was building. How many of ours were left by now? How far had the enemy been reduced? Under all that cloud, with visibility gone, none of it could be known.

“…Fufu. In such a hurry. Whatever is the matter?”

“—!”

A woman’s voice, reaching me from every direction at once, echoing. Fear came down on me like a blade set against my throat.

“Who’s there?!”

At the question the owner of the voice laughed as though thoroughly entertained.

“…Are you the foolish Chosen who defies fate, I wonder. Fufu, if so, then nothing could make me happier. I have wanted to meet you. Foolish hero of the Empire.”

The voice whispered at my ear, playing with me. I brought the sword around to cut whoever it belonged to, and there was no one there. It was like a phantom slipping through white haze, but the sense of enormous power very close by was far too thick to be an illusion.

“Yes, I understand. Waiting for ruin with nothing to do is unbearable. …Give a person the chance and every one of them wishes to begin again and clings to a thread of hope.”

The voice came from behind me next and I spun, and all that was left there were fine gold particles, glittering.

“Fufu. Like a stray cat with its fur up.”

“…Who are you?”

In a pure white space, only a voice knew where I was. There were no enemy soldiers within reach and no killing intent anywhere.

“…Are you the Saint?”

“…What do you think?”

My answer was already decided. I brushed the white cloud lightly away from me and closed my eyes; sight was no use here. I put everything into the enormous presence pressing against my skin.

“Whether you are the Saint or not makes no difference to me.”

Whoever the voice belonged to, if it stood in Princess Valtrune’s way it was simply an enemy to be removed. I gave her the hostility plainly, and she dropped the pitch of her voice as though laughing at me.

“Ah, how lovely… then show me. Show me the ridiculous sight of you struggling against a fate you cannot possibly overcome. The pitiful end of a man frightened of dying.”

Something slid across the ground, and I heard trees being crushed flat. Something enormous was coming. Before I could work out what, the voice let out a delighted breath.

“If you can defeat this child… then I shall show you my proper form as well. I wish you a good fight.”

I opened my eyes, and two great gold-glittering eyes were looking down into mine.

“—What is that.”

A white monster, blending into a white world. My hand tightened on the sword without being told to. The one thing I could say about the unidentifiable thing in front of me was that it wasn’t something you could file under the heading of ‘person.’

7

The battlefield lay under an enormous white cloud, and from where we stood giving support at the rear, nothing of it could be seen. The magic Dorothea had used to open the charge had taken away the enemy’s chance to attack and, at the same time, made any careless advance impossible for those of us behind.

“…Your Highness. Are we not going to fire a volley?”

“No. We don’t know how far forward our own front units have got. If we put a heavy strike into our own people by mistake, our defeat becomes a certainty.”

—Even so, with no support going in at all, the soldiers held here amount to idle troops. Is there really no way to get them supporting the front?

“Fuu… what’s the long face for?”

“Dorothea…”

Covered in wounds and still smoking with perfect elegance, she was looking steadily out at the field ahead of her with a clear, unbothered expression.

“What are you agonizing over?”

“That cloud. I was wondering whether it can be cleared.”

“That cloud is the opening I made for you to charge through. And now you want it gone?”

“We can’t see what’s happening inside it either.”

“Oh, is that all… go in normally, then. The way I did.”

I assume she meant that reckless, headlong suicide run of hers. She folded her arms across her chest as though inviting me to follow her example.

“Are you afraid of losing?”

“Of course I am…”

“Ha ha ha! I see. Of course.”

She laughed loudly, and then her voice went serious.

“…Your Highness. Let me ask you one thing. Inside that white swirl right now, what do you think the state of the battle is?”

—The state of the battle? I can’t possibly answer that when I can’t see anything.

“…I don’t know.”

“Oh? Is that truly so?”

“What are you trying to say?”

I could not follow what she wanted me to understand, and when I asked again she tapped the ash off the end of her cigarette with a finger and blew smoke out with a very pleased look on her face.

“…In those conditions, I do not believe the soldiers of the Provisional Elite Corps are on the losing side of anything. I go further: I think they are flattening the Order’s soldiers one-sidedly, on an overwhelming difference in ability. …Now. Does Her Highness understand why I think so?”

No answer came to me at once. But I could not believe Dorothea would speak with that much certainty about our advantage without grounds for it; she is a person who understands very well what makes a fight favorable or unfavorable. I thought about what she had said, and thought again, and then I saw it.

The Corps’ strengths. An organization only just founded. A structure built on ability rather than the supremacy of noble birth. Operational planning that takes a wide range of situations into account.

“Because everything the Corps has built up, all that combat training, comes into its own here?”

“…Correct. Just what one expects of Her Highness.”

Dorothea clapped her palms together and gave me her praise.

“Exactly so. They have been trained to fight in unusual conditions. Live training inside fog thick enough to take your sight. Marching under load over appalling ground. How to keep struggling when part of a limb is gone… that sort of thing.”

She was right. In this short span, every day, they had endured training as agonizing as hell, so that they might surpass the Imperial army. If that experience was worth anything, then inside that deep cloud the army accustomed to fighting was not the Order’s; it was ours.

“…May I believe that?”

“Fufu. A foolish question… this is a thing Her Highness began. What else would you do but believe in it?”

I founded the Provisional Elite Corps, gathered its people, and built its record. I am the one who drew them into it and stirred them up. Being anxious is natural enough. But believing in the Corps before anyone else, giving up the timid footwork and moving boldly, may be exactly what is required of me as a princess.

“…Thank you, Dorothea. I’m all right now.”

“Glad to hear it. So… have you decided what happens from here?”

“Yes. Even with no sight of it, everything we built is still in my head. We are going to believe the front units are breaking the enemy’s formation apart, and we are going into that cloud!”

That, surely, is the answer a princess is meant to arrive at.

Dorothea lifted one corner of her mouth and turned her back with an unhurried step.

“If you got that far, you have no more use for me. My wounds hurt. I’ll go on ahead and start arranging the celebration.”

Broken as she was, she had come back to the field and used a working large enough to overturn a losing position. For all the bravery she carried it with, her body must have been in a bad way.

“…Leave the rest of it to me. Rest properly.”

“You needn’t tell me twice.”

Dorothea walked slowly off, and when I had seen her go, we of the rear units made our own attempt to get inside the deep cloud.

8

It was a shadow of quite unreasonable size, and the weight of the pressure coming off it felt as though it would swallow me the moment I let my eyes slide. The long body was coiled over and over on itself and the thin tongue kept going in and out. The thing was, exactly and entirely, a serpent.

“Well? Isn’t she lovely? This child is the Divine Beast, the White Serpent. A precious child of mine, granted by Lord Svell.”

The owner of the voice let it go soft and rapt, the way you speak about something you dote on. The White Serpent standing in my way was the most difficult opponent I had yet stood in front of.

“This will be my first time hunting a monster.”

“Fufufu! A monster, you say… this child is still very much on the adorable side of things, you know.”

The White Serpent gave a high, unpleasant cry that put ice down my back and whipped its tail at me.

“—Kh!”

The thick white tail gouged the ground open, and the force of it carried into the air around us; the shock came off it and prickled against my skin.

“Oh, my, my! That was meant to catch you off guard and you avoided it cleanly! Just what one expects of a Chosen. Lovely. How lovely.”

A voice entirely at its ease. There was no time to attend to its owner, because the White Serpent swung that long tail again and again, smashing ground and trees to pieces. For its size it moved very fast, and simply staying out of the way took everything I had, and there was not even room to turn and get a swing in.

“Ahaha! I wonder how long you can keep running?”

Being driven like that with nothing coming back built the irritation in me.

“Tch!”

I used the narrow gap before the tail arrived to close the distance in an instant, and put everything I had into the grip of the sword to land one heavy blow on the coiled monster.

—But it did not go the way I wanted it to.

“Kh—?!”

—What is this? The edge isn’t going through!

The White Serpent’s scales, pure white with a faint iridescence over them, were harder than any armor I had ever cut. The force pushing back came straight up the blade as though the point would shatter.

“Kh!”

I was thrown off the hard scales and rocked backward. The hand holding the sword had gone numb, and the shock of the strike rang through every bone in my body.

“It must be very hard indeed to wound that child. She is a special Divine Beast, after all, created by Lord Svell and sent to me.”

Standing in front of the White Serpent, one thought kept coming: how much easier this would have been if the enemy were only the Saint. You can accumulate endless experience fighting people. Chances to accumulate experience hunting monsters do not come along. I could not read its weak points or find any regularity in how it moved.

“…This is troublesome. Extremely so.”

“Fufu. The enjoyable part is still ahead of us.”

Immediately after the Saint’s loaded little remark, a great deal of magic came at me from the front, and I threw my weight right and left on instinct alone and kept from taking a direct hit.

“Damn it, I was sure that one would land!”

“A cunning little man.”

“Calm down. His limit will come eventually. Until it does, keep attacking and be patient.”

Through the cloud I could make out, faintly, several Svell soldiers and a priest.

“One after another…”

There was no time to deal with a monster I could not handle before the Order’s rank-and-file began closing in as well. The ring around me tightened by degrees, and the White Serpent came nearer with it.

“Chosen who defies fate. This is a fight with your life on it, now, show me more of you struggling and suffering with everything you have!”

The voice delivered it as though this were an entertainment. Watching from somewhere I could not see, up above it all. The woman has an unpleasant hobby.

“…Hah.”

But there was no choice available to me. Exactly as the voice said, all I could do was keep killing with everything I had.

—Our soldiers still haven’t got this far. I’ll have to manage on my own.

There was no telling how long it would take for relief to arrive, and until it did I had to keep enduring, whatever that took.

9

—What was that shaking?

We had been inside the cloud for some time when the sound of something striking the earth came ringing from far ahead of us.

“Your Highness. Please stay back.”

“Everyone hurry and prepare to release…”

Having joined up with the front units, we of the rear tightened our guard toward the sound. But there was no enemy attack, and by now no sign of an enemy at all.

“…Your Highness. There’s no sign of the enemy. This area appears to have been cleared already.”

One of the soldiers who had been swinging a sword at the front made his report, and he was right: the whole area was strewn with the bodies of Order soldiers, and there was not a living presence anywhere in it.

“No fierce resistance at all. That’s odd…”

“Do you suppose they’ve withdrawn?”

“No. With that much of an advantage in numbers I can’t believe the Order would pull back… and where is Al? We have to warn him too, in case this is an ambush.”

“Sir Aldia? Well, um…”

Before the soldier could answer, another great shudder and a rolling of the ground came through.

“—!”

The earth shook hard enough that staying upright took work, and every one of us understood that this was not an ordinary thing.

“Your Highness. Something is happening deeper in.”

“I can tell that much from the shaking.”

Ominous tremors and a low rolling in the ground. And then something occurred to me.

—He isn’t here.

“Somebody. Does anyone know where Al is?!”

“We lost sight of him on the way here…”

“Sir Aldia was at the head of the advance, surely.”

“Now that you mention it, he doesn’t seem to be nearby. He may still be fighting…”

—I have a bad feeling.

That he is nowhere in sight. That there is no sense of an enemy anywhere. And on top of both, that unnatural rolling of the ground, over and over, from ahead of us. It occurred to me that he might be taking on the Order’s soldiers all by himself.

“There are no enemies left in this area, correct?”

“Yes. If the Order has strength remaining, it will be further along from here.”

As a personal knight, the man Aldia Graetz has a strength that lets nothing near him. But even he is not immortal. Surround him on four sides and force him into a chain of fights with no end to it, and the limit arrives eventually.

“All units. Advance, quickly! Al may still be out there fighting alone!”

—I half knew this would happen.

He will try to save someone even at the cost of himself. For a victory, he will stake his own life without hesitating. That is the kind of person he is.

—I knew it already.

What choice he makes when the situation goes to its limit. I stood on the other side of the field as his enemy and watched him do it many times: broken all over and still going forward while his life lasted, thorough enough to want every enemy destroyed. Winning or losing, moving with the same unchanging strength to take the initiative of the battlefield.

“…He’s gone to cut down the Saint. I’m certain of it.”

The most efficient way to break the Order is the removal of its absolute leader, the Saint. He understands that, so he tried to bring this disaster to an end by the shortest road available, accepting the risk in front of him and throwing himself into the most dangerous ground there is.

“If we don’t hurry, we may not be in time…!”

No matter how many enemies surround him, however thoroughly his way is blocked, he cuts all of it down with one sword. How badly he is hurt in the course of that, how much it costs him. It aches just to imagine.

“Your Highness?!”

“Follow me! The enemy is still ahead!”

I ran flat out toward the noise. The white cloud covered everything and I could see nothing, but I could faintly hear the sound of his sword moving, alive, in the middle of a savage fight.

—Close. He’s fighting just there.

I could hear the screaming of men whose flesh was being opened. No end of magic was being thrown and bursting in countless places.

“That’s enough of—!”

“Hah!”

“Gaugh…”

—Found him!

“Al!”

I could see Aldia’s back, surrounded by a crowd of enemy soldiers and still putting them down one at a time, without fail. He reacted to my voice and turned only his eyes toward me.

“Rune-sama, why are you—?”

His attention went entirely to me, and in that moment a small opening appeared.

“Look out!”

A mass of magic bolts closing on him from behind. But he had heard me shout, and the instant he saw them he avoided every one with movements that wasted nothing.

“Damn it!”

“They’ve been reinforced. Re-form!”

Corps soldiers came up behind me one after another, and the Order’s soldiers who had been converging on Aldia broke their ring and began slowly to pull back.

“Your Highness, you ran off so suddenly, we didn’t know what had happened…”

The soldier was worried about me. And so many of them walked forward to put themselves in front of Aldia.

“There are so many of them…”

“No matter how many there are, we’ve only to put them down!”

“Sir Aldia. Forgive us for arriving late! Everyone, charge!”

He dropped the point of his sword toward the ground, looking rather dumbfounded.

“…I didn’t expect relief this soon.”

The face he had been wearing a moment ago belonged to a demon; now he looked considerably eased.

“Al. From here I’m fighting alongside you!”

“…Rune-sama has been fighting alongside me the whole time, surely.”

“Fufu. So I have.”

I laughed, and he gave me a gentle smile back and then set his sword at once.

“The Saint should be near here. I want to find her and bring her down…”

“Gaaah…!”

While he was explaining, two or three Corps soldiers were flung backward. Watching how little progress the others were making, it seemed there was a rather troublesome enemy to be dealt with before we could reach any Saint.

“…We can’t get to the Saint without killing that enormous White Serpent.”

A huge White Serpent, red-eyed, covered all over in pure white scales. Aldia ordered the other soldiers back and went forward alone.

“I’ll take the White Serpent. Rune-sama, please put down the enemies around us with the others, and the priest throwing the magic first of all.”

“Understood.”

When he had finished, the soldiers and I set our aim on the Order’s people standing to either side of the White Serpent.

“Now, forward!”

Everyone broke into a run at once, and with Aldia at the head of it avoiding the White Serpent’s headbutt and forcing a scale off those hard plates with his sword, the fighting between the two armies began.

10

The White Serpent moved in ways more troublesome than any hardened soldier I had ever fought, and nothing about them could be read by a man whose experience was all against people.

“…Hah… hah…”

The blows that came off that long tail were far too heavy; try to take one on the sword and I would be thrown bodily through the air, which left avoidance as the only option. But the strikes came one after another and never lost any of their force, and the only thing being worn away was my stamina.

“Hah!”

And when I did try to cut it down, those unyielding scales kept the serpent’s body safe. The risk was high, the return low, and the odds were against me. Even so, as things stood I was the only one who could hold this thing. Princess Valtrune excels at magic, but she isn’t built for close work, and there was, unfortunately, nobody else here who could stand against the White Serpent on even terms.

“Push in, all at once!”

Sending instructions in every direction, Princess Valtrune burned groups of the enemy down with fire, dulled their movement with ice, and built situations in which the soldiers at the front could fight with the advantage.

—If the rest of the enemy soldiers can be dealt with, this serpent gets easier.

“Kh!”

The tail came down and broke the ground open again, and even when I moved to avoid it the White Serpent came in to bite me anyway.

“Al!”

Its fangs had closed to the front of my face when Princess Valtrune’s magic struck the serpent’s head and burst. The head was scorched in red fire, and the white scales discolored slightly toward black.

“That helped. Thank you.”

“Never mind that. Is the thing still alive?”

“It is… and it still looks in good health.”

The serpent had taken everything she had in that working and merely flinched, and it resumed its attacks on me as though nothing had happened at all.

“Al. The enemy soldiers around us are nearly cleared. I’ll come and sup…”

“Your Highness, evade!”

“—!”

She bent her body back and a sharply angled piece of magic went past by the narrowest of margins, and the priest who had thrown it opened his eyes wide, startled by how supple she was and how well she moved.

“Oh dear. I was sure that one had landed…”

—A priest. And one who carries himself as though he has fought rather more than the others.

For a moment I had hoped for her support; with that priest there, she wouldn’t be able to give me any.

“Get in my way and I’ll show you no mercy.”

“That is precisely my line.”

She and the priest locked eyes, and she released everything she had. He threw his own at the same moment, and the two workings collided and blew a wide gust out across the ground.

“…Kh!”

“Cancelled out. I see.”

The Saint wasn’t the only capable one; this priest could handle magic of a power that gave nothing away to Princess Valtrune, and he was reasonably quick on his feet with it.

“Ha ha ha! I never imagined Her Highness the Princess would come and face me herself!”

“Be quiet. You die here, by my hand.”

“I wonder about that. We have the Saint’s White Serpent. It is your side that has no chance of winning!”

“—!”

The priest fired a mass of bolts at her. She stopped every one of them with a barrier, let out a long breath, and put a single answering shot into him.

“Returned!”

“An attack of that quality, hmph!”

He threw his own working to cancel it as before, but hers carried more force, and his shattered into pieces with a pale flare. The hand he had extended toward her was burned raw by the heat of it, and the pain pulled a short scream out of him.

“Gugh—?!”

—That side is settled.

He had fought well enough, but he was no match for magic as accomplished as hers. He landed on his back and struggled desperately to get up, and she sent soldiers over at once.

“…It’s finished. Give it up!”

“You… little girl.”

With a great many blades leveled at him, the priest drew his brows together in frustration.

“If you resist any further I’ll have no choice but to finish it… what will you do?”

“—The others. Where are…”

“I’m sorry to say there’s no one left but you.”

Snapped spears and swords stood up out of the ground everywhere, and the bodies of Order soldiers and other priests lay scattered across it among the reddened banners of the Order. Looking at that, the priest had no will to resist left in him.

“That can’t be… so many soldiers, in a moment like that.”

No matter how many times he blinked, the appalling view didn’t change.

“Take him away.”

“Sir!”

Everything but the White Serpent had been put down. And the serpent I was working on had begun to bleed in places, the hard scales pierced at last, perhaps because I had simply kept cutting at it and refused to stop.

“Al. Are you all right?”

“A little more and I can finish it!”

Its movements had begun to slow and the edge had gone off its attacks. Keep this up and eventually it would stop moving. I was building that hopeful little forecast and getting ready to press when…

“…Oh dear, you poor thing. That must have hurt terribly.”

“—?!”

The cloud that had covered everything began to thin, and the view cleared so beautifully that I could see the trees standing along the distant mountains. And at the same moment I felt magic more intense than anything I had ever felt in my life.

I still couldn’t see her, and my legs wouldn’t stop shaking. It was plain, straightforward fear.

Her footsteps snapped small fallen branches and pressed down dead leaves, and came steadily nearer.

“The priests were beaten by the Chosen, I see. And after I went to the trouble of lending them the White Serpent. What a very disappointing result.”

She said it as though heartbroken, and there wasn’t the slightest sadness anywhere in the voice. If anything she came toward us with a demure, unhurried step, like a woman who had been waiting for this.

—So she finally shows herself.

The White Serpent, covered in wounds, dragged itself weakly backward and buried its face somewhere around the midsection of the Saint’s black habit, and she stroked its enormous head with a gentle hand.

“That hurt, didn’t it… but it’s all right now. I am here to hold my hand out to you. There’s nothing to be frightened of.”

The Saint stood in an atmosphere that felt like something out of a scripture. I suppose that by rights one is meant to look at her and find her divine and beautiful and offer up worship. My first impression of her was of something unplaceable and deeply unpleasant. She appeared to be wearing a soft smile, and the backs of her eyes weren’t smiling at all, and the rise and fall of her voice sat slightly wrong against the way ordinary people speak.

“…Ah. They’ve all died, haven’t they. Not one soldier or believer left breathing. …And the priest is taken. You poor things, but it’s quite all right. Lord Svell will take vengeance for you, I think. Our Lord will not permit a foreign body that changes history… fufu. That means you.”

Without so much as guarding herself against me, she put her hands together for the dead of the Order, and then slowly raised her eyes to mine. I put the edge of my sword toward her.

“…And that’s the end of the entertainment. I did enjoy it very much.”

“Every one of your people is dead and you can still talk like that. Their dying means nothing to you, does it?”

The Saint looked steadily into me with eyes that seemed to be missing a soul.

“Death is salvation. The only way a person is released from the suffering of this world.”

There was a particular wrongness in that flat, unmodulated voice.

“I don’t understand how you feel about anything.”

“No, you wouldn’t… you were never able to escape the suffering of living. Tell me, how is the second life? Is it enjoyable? Or is defying fate painful work?”

“—!”

I didn’t answer. I drove the sword at her throat.

“Fufufu! Silence is your answer, then.”

“Be quiet…!”

The blade stopped short of her. However much force I put behind it, the invisible wall between us wouldn’t be pierced.

“You—!”

“Uhufu! That look, with the killing all through it. It makes me shiver!”

The Saint’s expression went to a mad kind of rapture, and she laid her index finger against her lips and whispered.

“…Bye-bye.”

“—Kh!”

The instant I heard it I felt my life in danger. I pulled my eyes off her clinging gaze, dragged the sword back out of its useless thrust, and threw myself backward as hard as I could, and felt the faintest blast against the soles of my feet.

What came into my vision as I retreated was numerous bursts of gold light. The explosion tore the space itself open without any mercy in it, reduced everything nearby to nothing, and left only black ash behind. If I had stayed standing in front of her, my body would have been scattered in pieces.

“This woman…”

“Oh my. What good instincts for danger you have. Congratulations on surviving!”

There was a cruelty hidden in that innocent laugh that had nothing to do with any saint.

“Sir Aldia!”

“We’re joining in!”

As I fell back, Corps soldiers moved up to take my place against her. And from that one instant I had already understood that they had no chance.

“W-wait, all of you—!”

“Haaaaah!”

“Seyaaa—!”

My voice didn’t reach them, and they went straight at her, soldiers with swords and spears charging one after another for her neck.

“I’m sorry. I have no interest in you… goodbye.”

Before any of them could bring a weapon down, blue fire ignited on the inside of their armor.

“Gyaaaah!”

“It’s hot…”

There is no preparing for an attack like that. All I could do was watch soldiers burn in blue fire and writhe.

“The Saint uses a special power! Stop these reckless charges!”

Princess Valtrune raised the warning after seeing how easily they had been killed. Even the others seemed to grasp how far the difference in strength ran, and they slowly backed away and put distance between themselves and the Saint.

“Al. It looks as though nobody but the two of us can fight her.”

“Rune-sama, please fall back as well. That woman is dangerous.”

“No. I’m probably the only one who can meet a Saint’s magic on level terms… she may well be an opponent you can’t beat by yourself, don’t you think?”

She was right. My sword had ended without reaching her, and if anything could stand against the Saint’s magic, it was Princess Valtrune and her command of high-order workings.

“You truly mean to fight?”

She nodded and threw up layer upon layer of barrier, a defensive posture. From the strain in her face I could read the thought behind it: whatever else happened, she must not take one of the Saint’s heavier blows.

“The Saint uses magic with power well past what a person should have. This may amount to no more than comfort, but I think it will let us weather some of it.”

Her will was firm. I gave up on persuading her and swore instead to bring the Saint down together with her.

“Every technique I have is turned aside. How do we kill her?”

“The Saint is presumably using a defensive working of the same family as a barrier… to strip magic away you either keep hitting it until it breaks by force, or you interfere with the art constructing it and erase it. There’s no third method.”

Both of them looked difficult to realize. But if hammering away at it could break the enemy’s working, that was worth a wager.

“…Then I’ll keep putting the sword into her and break the barrier down.”

“And I’ll wear it away with magic wherever I can!”

Facing us, the Saint stood there with a composed expression, waiting patiently for our discussion to finish.

“She looks entirely at her ease.”

Carrying herself in a way designed to make you feel she couldn’t possibly lose. The composure of the genuinely strong, I suppose.

“I will strip that barrier off her!”

I started walking toward a Saint who had still not lost any of her calm.

“…Oh, is the council of war over? Then do struggle for me, with your life on it.”

She sent the White Serpent back behind her and walked toward me completely unguarded.

“Hah!”

“Fufufu!”

The strike was turned aside, of course. Each step the Saint took forward pushed me a step back.

—She’s strong in a contest of pure force, too.

I had assumed the problem was simply that attacks wouldn’t land. In fact there was an unmeasurable weight behind every step she took. The ground dented deeply under her, and the shock traveled up through my feet into my body. Enormous strength, entirely at odds with how frail she looked, and far heavier than anything the White Serpent had put on me.

“Oh my. Is that really the best you have?”

“Who can say…!”

Pushed back the whole way, I kept swinging desperately. Her barrier didn’t so much as twitch; it was like working against a great steel shield. The sword threw sparks and was knocked away, and as my balance tipped backward, Princess Valtrune shouted.

“Al, get your head down!”

“Hmm.”

The bolt she had packed with every scrap of magic she had was turned aside with a single sideways sweep of the Saint’s hand and burst harmlessly off its new course.

Honestly, the Saint is of a different order. If everything I had fought until now was a person, she could only be described as an omniscient, omnipotent monster wearing the shape of a small woman.

“…A fine working. But it still isn’t enough.”

“What strength…”

She was a genuine final enemy. She yawned, rubbed one eye, and smiled.

“You are trying to change fate, and you cannot even beat someone like me… in that case, striking Lord Svell down and throwing a stone into the history of ruin is quite impossible for you.”

As though laughing at me, she floated an enormous volume of magic into the air and swung her arm down toward us.

“I wonder whether you can block this, as you are now?”

It was plainly not a thing that could be blocked, a mass of energy that would kill on contact, or melt part of a body away in an instant. It was far too late to move to avoid it, so I decided the sword would have to serve, planted my feet, and dropped my hips.

“I won’t allow it!”

Princess Valtrune spread a great barrier around me, an instant before that mass of magic swallowed me.

“Oh my… your timing really is always very good.”

Her barriers are extremely solid. But cracks began to run through the one in front of me, and then, with a shock loud enough to split the ear, it came apart into small hard fragments.

“No!”

“Kh…!”

Her barrier hadn’t been enough. The mass of magic came to the front of me and swallowed my whole body.

—It burns!

A sharp pain, as though every part of me were being held in a fire. And then my sight went black.

“Al!”

I could hear Princess Valtrune’s grieving cry. And from the other side, the delighted voice of the Saint, smiling like something base.

“Ahahahaha! I told you, it isn’t enough to defy fate!”

“You couldn’t protect what you wanted to protect, you couldn’t accomplish what you set out to do, and now you lose all of it… and your princess will be killed by me too, because you died pointlessly and did nothing. Ah, the poor thing. It’s all because you were weak, you see?”

The Saint raised her voice a little, as though scolding me for it. I couldn’t answer any of it, and I let gravity have me and closed my eyes.

—You have to be joking. Do I end here?

I fought fate and took hold of a place at Princess Valtrune’s side. From here she is supposed to come through the succession and become the hope that leads the Empire. And am I going to die before I see any of it?

“…No. No, I’m not.”

“…Hm?”

There is no possibility of my ending here. I want to overturn that worst of all futures and hand her quiet days she can live through, laughing. To do that, I still have enemies of hers to kill.

I can’t go out with things left undone. The moment I thought it, the agony running through my body vanished cleanly, and in its place something black boiled up from the floor of me.

—This is hatred. Hostility. Killing intent. Fury.

Everything negative I had toward that woman doing exactly as she pleased came up at once and out.

“…I’ll kill you. You above all. I will kill you!”

I swept the mass of magic around me away with my bare hands. My eyes had one thing in them: the Saint, still laughing at me as I writhed.

“Oh my… fufu. At last. Your true ability, I think.”

“…I’ll kill you, I won’t forgive you, I’ll break every part of you!”

I had no interest left in listening to a word she said. My sight was dyed red, and it focused on one place only, the front of her chest, where the heart is.

“I’ll dig that filthy little life out of you!”

“Ahahaha! Yes. Wonderful!”

The Saint’s face went rapt and the words came out of her fast.

“Yes. Yes! The heart is the source of power… the stronger the feeling, the more the power grows, without limit. You’ve finally learned how to handle it!”

—Nothing the Saint said was even reaching my ears.

In fact I could hear nothing at all. There was only the ugly desire to break the enemy in front of me into a wet ruin.

11

Burned by the Saint’s magic, Aldia went down in agony. I had tried to stop it with a barrier of my own, and the Saint had simply been a step above me.

If this went on he was going to die, and everything inside my head went white.

“…A… l.”

I put a hand to my mouth and found I couldn’t move from where I stood. The strength went entirely out of my knees and I folded down onto the ground where I was.

I was terrified of the moment when I would no longer be able to hear Aldia’s heart beating. A hollow, opened-out feeling, like a hole punched through the middle of me, the appalling thing you taste when you are losing what matters most.

“No. No… nooooo!”

The tears wouldn’t stop coming. My sight blurred, and I couldn’t properly look at him lying completely still. Faced with a reality I wanted to turn away from, I covered my ears.

“I can’t bear this…”

When did I become such a weak person? I have lost people I was close to before and never once come apart like this. I am imperial blood, with politics wound through everything, and one or two of the people who serve nearby have always simply disappeared.

And yet here I was. Why does it hurt this much?

“…Don’t leave me behind. You promised, didn’t you… that you would stay beside me to the end.”

—I refuse to accept an ending like this!

I am not living this life over in order to repeat a tragedy. I am holding on to what I want to protect with everything I have and fighting fate so that all of it survives into a new future.

“…Al isn’t going to die. He’s my personal knight.”

I hadn’t given up. There had to be something I could do; healing magic would surely get him back on his feet.

I was about to work a healing on him when the fingers of his fallen hand moved, very slightly. His breathing, which had stopped, came back, and he slowly stood up.

—Thank goodness. He’s alive!

I was so glad I got to my feet to run to him. But the man swaying on his feet with a sword in his hand, facing the Saint, had something entirely unlike him about him.

“…What? Al?”

“I’ll kill you. You above all. I will kill you!”

“—!”

The instant he forced those words out, something like a black haze began to rise from around his feet.

This wasn’t an ordinary thing. A moment ago he had been looking after me, meeting my eyes. Now he didn’t glance in my direction at all; instead he began walking slowly toward the Saint.

“Oh my… fufu. At last. Your true ability, I think.”

—How can she be so unconcerned?!

Nothing about Aldia’s strange condition made the Saint flinch. If anything, the magic circulating through her seemed to have become more active for it.

“…I’ll kill you, I won’t forgive you, I’ll break every part of you! I’ll dig that filthy little life out of you!”

“Ahahaha! Yes. Wonderful!”

Aldia kept advancing on her wrapped in that black, malevolent aura.

“Yes. Yes! The heart is the source of power… the stronger the feeling, the more the power grows, without limit. You’ve finally learned how to handle it!”

The Saint threw a great deal of magic at him almost the way one offers a greeting.

“…That much doesn’t work on me anymore.”

He didn’t avoid any of it. He took every piece of it on his body and his walking pace never dropped, and the Saint put both hands to her cheeks and smiled with her whole face.

“Fufu, how lovely. It’s as though I can feel what you feel… anger, grief, hatred… negative feeling strong enough and thick enough to freeze a spine. More. It still isn’t enough… like that you’ll never reach Lord Svell, you know?”

I don’t know why. But I had the sense that if I let him go on like this, something would happen that couldn’t be undone.

It was true that as he was now, he might be able to bring the Saint down. It looked as though he had laid hands on some strange, enormous power I had never seen, and he was taking magic he had been struggling merely to avoid a moment ago full on the body, without hesitating, and still walking.

By rights the priority was to leave it to him and let him kill her. But the anxiety crawling around at the bottom of me wouldn’t run out, and it dulled my will.

“Al… wait.”

So I called his name, without meaning to, and tried to stop him walking. Because on any other day he would have turned at once and listened to me with that beautiful posture of his.

But…

“You are Rune-sama’s enemy… I am not letting you go home alive!”

My voice didn’t reach the man he was now.

“Ahaha! You’re very nearly a lunatic… you’re drowning in the power, you know?”

“Be quiet!”

Aldia swung at the Saint with a speed the eye couldn’t follow. She moved to turn it aside with a barrier as though that were simply what happened, and in under a second the barrier she had raised shattered into powder.

“It’s over—!”

He said it with the certainty of a man who had won, and the Saint still lifted a corner of her mouth, unshaken.

“…You’ve shown me something good. But it’s incomplete.”

“—What?!”

She laid an index finger against the point of his sword, and the black aura wrapped around him scattered and disappeared.

“…Why…”

“Why, is it… because that power is a counterfeit.”

The Saint said it in a cold voice and raised a hard wind that drove Aldia back.

“…The feelings that grow a great power are always unstable. That is why they are so easily swallowed by miasma. Want power to excess and it will destroy you eventually.”

She set something on her palm, a jewel of some kind that threw off a holy light.

“People are terribly foolish. They will break their own hearts to get power… and are swallowed down into the pit without ever noticing the mistake.”

She rose slowly into the air, and gathered a great deal of magic again.

“That negative feeling you hold… is it truly the strongest thing in you?”

“What are you trying to say?”

“The feeling you took hold of was incomplete… frail, and temporary. Do you really believe a borrowed thing like that will make you strongest?”

It wasn’t a question that wanted an answer. She probably had a definite one of her own.

“Your power is certainly strong… strong enough to strike back at me once. But the power is incomplete. It is wrong. What you should truly want is a quite different feeling. As you are, you will not be able to defy fate.”

She raised her arm and murmured, sounding sad about it.

“I had such very great expectations of you… how disappointing.”

A pillar of light large enough to blow the ground apart all around us. Burned by that, he wouldn’t survive it a second time.

“…I won’t allow it. I have my own stubbornness about protecting the person who matters to me!”

I concentrated every scrap of magic in my body. I didn’t care if I lost consciousness; if I could cancel the working that would hurt him, I would pay any price at all.

“Fuu… haa…”

A barrier gets shattered. So what else is there? Put something into it with more force than the Saint’s own and set it off early. That is all.

“Now. It’s over.”

“You are the one who is finished!”

For an instant the world was covered in blinding light. My ears rang so hard that no sound reached them at all. The ground came apart underneath and my consciousness thinned.

—I gave it everything, to the end. What happens now happens.

I had spent all of it, and I fell onto my back.

“Foolish Chosen who defy fate. Let us meet again before very long.”

The last thing I heard from the Saint sounded like a pure promise of another meeting, with not even any irony in it.

I had no answer to give her. Only… whether I had managed to protect Aldia.

That was the one thing on my mind.

12

My body was heavy, and the strength felt as though it had been taken out of it. I sensed death coming while I was unable to move at all, and what threw that danger back was Princess Valtrune’s magic.

“Now. It’s over.”

“You are the one who is finished!”

The Saint’s working and Princess Valtrune’s collided and threw sparks in every direction. The Saint’s was visibly the larger of the two, but Princess Valtrune’s went in sharp and drove straight through it.

“…Fufu. Not bad at all.”

Her magic kept going, flying straight at the Saint. The Saint showed no intention of giving ground; she simply raised a palm toward it, and when she closed her hand as though crushing something, Princess Valtrune’s working gave off a pale light and ceased to exist.

—Damn it. I still can’t move.

Not one finger of the hand holding my sword would answer me. The Saint looked down at me for a while and then turned on her heel.

“Foolish Chosen who defy fate. Let us meet again before very long.”

“…Wait!”

She sent the White Serpent down into the ground, and was herself wrapped in gold particles and gone in an instant.

“Damn it, where did she—?!”

That the Saint had vanished by magic was certain. I looked around in case she had hidden herself somewhere nearby, and there was no figure anywhere, not even that overwhelming presence of hers. In every direction all I could see was forest wrecked by the White Serpent, and Princess Valtrune lying unconscious on the ground.

“…So I let her get away. No.”

I steadied my breathing and put the sword back in its sheath. This wasn’t a case of the Saint escaping me. The accurate way to describe it is that my opponent withdrew, miraculously, because if she had kept fighting, I had no chance of winning at all.

“…I couldn’t do anything.”

The moment the danger left, I felt anger at my own uselessness. In that fight I hadn’t put so much as a scratch on the Saint; I had only had my life protected by Princess Valtrune. I had gone at it with everything I had in me, and the result was a complete defeat.

“Rune-sama… I’m sorry.”

I put Princess Valtrune, still with her eyes closed, on my back and left the place.

With the Saint’s withdrawal, the Order’s army had pulled out of the Dyrst region entirely. The forest was quiet. Our own soldiers had fallen back beyond the reach of the Saint’s attacks, so I made for where they were.

“…Al?”

As I walked slowly back the way we had come, she regained consciousness almost at once.

“I’m glad you’re awake. The Saint left, thanks to you. There’s no threat here now.”

“The Saint left… I see. So we couldn’t kill her.”

“I’m sorry. My strength wasn’t sufficient.”

“None of that is your fault. Nobody could have predicted the Saint would be that strong.”

She pressed her face into my back.

“…You being alive is enough for me. That on its own is enough.”

I couldn’t answer that. She wanted the threat of the Saint removed more than anyone, and she told me that my being alive was all she needed.

Fighting to protect Princess Valtrune is the only thing I can do. Which makes being completely outmatched by a Saint feel that much more shameful.

“…Next time I will bring her down. Without fail.”

I said it quietly, and she answered ‘Yes’ in a gentle voice.

“But for now we’ve driven the Order’s army off. That result is enough.”

“Yes. Which leaves the Kingdom’s army…”

We had forced the Order’s advance into a retreat, but the Kingdom’s army was still sitting in the Dyrst region, and as long as we could hear the roar of magic colliding, the fighting wasn’t over.

“Rune-sama. May I go and support them, late as it is?”

Even handling the magic tools well, the Corps was overwhelmingly outnumbered and would be having a hard time of it.

“Of course. Ritziareite will be glad of you.”

She took my meaning and agreed immediately.

“And what will you do, Rune-sama?”

“Well. In truth I would like to return to the operations post myself…”

“You’ll secure the area.”

“Yes. There’s no presence here now, but that isn’t the same as this whole area being safe.”

She got down off my back and stood beside me.

“I’ll take the soldiers we have left and survey the area, to find out what the Order was actually after. Don’t worry about it, go and support the Corps.”

Then she gave a light wave to the soldiers coming toward us at a run. Men who hadn’t given a step to a host with all the numbers on its side. Yes, I could leave her with them.

“…Understood. Then I’ll go.”

“I’ll send a few of the dragon-mount soldiers with you. Take care, and come back.”

With Princess Valtrune seeing me off, I took three riders and headed for the plain where the fighting was. I swore quietly, in the bottom of myself, that I would make up here what I had failed to contribute against the Saint.

13

Since going back through time, I have come through one desperate situation after another. After founding the Provisional Elite Corps, large battles came at a headlong rush.

The old me believed that the period after graduating the academy would be a quiet one. Then I began acting in earnest to fight fate, and ran into power struggles among the nobility, a civil conflict, and feuds in an underworld I had known nothing about, and was shown to a painful degree how unstable my own position was.

“…………”

—And now another one. The truth about the Order’s invasion, which I never knew, has come to light.

“Your Highness! We inspected the possessions of the dead priests and found these!”

What the soldier held were Divine Demon Orbs, presumably stolen from the workings. And not one of them, either; several of the people who looked like priests had been carrying them.

“Would this be the Order’s reason for attacking the Dyrst region?”

“You mean they sent an army on this scale to get their hands on the ‘Divine Demon Orb,’ the rare gem that can only be taken in this part of the Empire?”

“I don’t know their real intent, but I think that line is the strong one.”

In the end there was no deep meaning behind the Svell Order’s reason for invading in this fight. They simply wanted to keep the Divine Demon Orbs of this land for themselves.

—But is that truly all of it?

The Order committed the Saint Reshia herself. They must have wanted to win this battle by any means. And yet the Saint abandoned the Order’s soldiers and withdrew as casually as that.

At the last moment, the person controlling that battlefield was without question the Saint Reshia. Aldia’s sword didn’t reach her, all of my magic was cancelled, and both of the Divine Beasts on the Order’s side were unharmed.

“…Why?”

She had the option of pressing until she had destroyed us completely. Instead of withdrawing, she could have broken all of it with a Saint’s power. And she did not.

‘Foolish Chosen who defy fate. Let us meet again before very long.’

Words promising another meeting. And for one instant I saw the woman who is supposed to be our enemy smiling, and enjoying herself.

—The Saint doesn’t consider this battle a defeat. Did she accomplish what she came for?

I can’t understand the real intent of a Saint who withdrew in good spirits.

“I don’t understand it…”

“Sorry?”

“…Talking to myself. Never mind.”

The mystery only deepens. She knew the world in which we were destroyed. She held the same memories. If that is so, has she also died once and come back here? Was she moving to remove us, the Chosen, for throwing history out of true?

…No. If that were it, withdrawing from a position that favorable makes no sense.

‘The heart is the source of power… the stronger the feeling, the more the power grows, without limit.’

Does the Saint know something detailed about the particular power Aldia has?

‘…The feelings that grow a great power are always unstable. That is why they are so easily swallowed by miasma. Want power to excess and it will destroy you eventually.’

In the middle of the fight, the Saint stopped Aldia’s raised sword with one hand, and in that same moment the black aura clinging around him cleared entirely. She dispersed the special power he was trying to use, by some method of her own.

In that moment… honestly, I was relieved. I had been afraid he was about to be swallowed by that black aura.

‘Your power is certainly strong… strong enough to strike back at me once. But the power is incomplete. It is wrong. What you should truly want is a quite different feeling. As you are, you will not be able to defy fate.’

—Why did the Saint say a thing like that?

Rather than genuinely trying to kill Aldia, she spent a great deal of that fight talking to him. She seemed to be adjusting her own strength to sit near our limit and fighting us as a test. There was even a margin in her, enough to admonish him while he was running out of control and instruct him in the handling of his power.

“Why did the Saint leave us alone and go? She could have continued the invasion of the Dyrst region single-handed. Her pulling out makes no sense.”

The Order’s objective wasn’t achieved, and she showed no particular sign of being troubled by that.

There were a number of contradictions in the Saint’s behavior. She fixed on Aldia’s power and on mine, and treated the invasion of Dyrst and the destruction of the Provisional Elite Corps as secondary.

However long I turn it over, I can’t read what she intends.

The mystery has only grown deeper.

Interlude 1 – The Saint’s Destiny

—I have still not forgotten that day.

The order Lord Svell gave me. ‘Please ■■■■■, won’t you.’

‘Lord Svell! Please, reconsider… I cannot do such a thing!’

Until that day I had listened for Lord Svell’s voice and been faithful to every word of it, as a Saint should be. That day was the first time I ever argued back.

‘There is no one but you, the Saint, of whom this can be asked. You are to ■■■■■ the Chosen, and ■■■■■ what the miasma has defiled.’

What Lord Svell commanded me to do that day ran against every conviction I had built up in myself.

But Lord Svell told me this would be the last thing she would ever leave me.

‘Reshia. I am about to ■■■■■, and ■■■■■ this distorted history. The price is that I shall not come through it whole.’

‘—!’

‘You are to ■■■■■, remove the Chosen, ■■■■■, and when the moment opens, strike down ■■■■■. Do that, and the history that went wrong can be set right.’

I could hardly bring myself to nod.

‘Reshia…’

‘You are telling me to ■■■■■?’

‘I am. If you do not ■■■■■, there will never again be ■■■■■.’

I agonized over it. Whether to accept what Lord Svell said, or to search out some other road and put a different proposal to her. But no plan that would let me ■■■■■ came to me.

‘Must I truly… must I truly ■■■■■?’

‘It is the one way the distorted history can be returned to what it was. With ■■■■■ swallowed by the miasma still in this world, history will go on down the wrong road.’

‘…I understand. Everything as Lord Svell’s heart wills it.’

‘Thank you, Reshia. Be sure to ■■■■■, won’t you.’

I wanted to be rid of ■■■■■. Otherwise I would certainly lose sight of myself.

I am the Saint, who offers absolute faith to the Lord God.

Even so, my resistance to obeying Lord Svell’s command to ■■■■■ stayed exactly as strong as it had been.

—And so, in place of simply obeying, I put forward one request of my own.

‘…Lord Svell, please ■■■■■. If you will, then I am certain I can bring your dearest wish to pass.’

‘…Very well. I shall grant your request.’

For an instant Lord Svell’s face looked as though it wavered, but she accepted my request and ■■■■■ for me. So that I would waver no further. So that I would ■■■■■.

‘Now. It is nearly time. I shall ■■■■■ in order to ■■■■■. The fate of the world I have entrusted to you.’

At the hour of the ending, those were the words Lord Svell left me.

‘Please leave it to me.’

Having ■■■■■, I was able to take Lord Svell’s words simply as they were given.

I will not stop again. What remains is the covert work of one devout Saint, faithful to the command of her Lord God.

I swore upon this body that I would carry out my mission and prevent the altering of history, my own precious mission, which will remain in no one’s memory and no one’s record.

‘…Now, then. Shall we begin? Setting the world to rights.’

I went back through time, and set about removing the threat that would lead the world to ruin.

Along with that great mission, Lord Svell entrusted me with the power of the mighty Divine Beasts.

‘With this power, surely, ’

A history of war without end.

Just as Lord Svell wished it, I will strike down ■■■■■ and take back the history that is true.

“Lady Reshia. The Kingdom’s army has engaged the Imperial army. It appears they have begun the taking of the Dyrst region in earnest.”

One of the Order’s soldiers made his report on the Kingdom’s movements. I had been steeped in the memory of the past; I raised my face and turned my mind at once to the present.

“I see… then it is all as planned. When the two armies have crushed one another and worn themselves down, shall we begin our own invasion.”

“Yes, ma’am!”

“Fufu. Just how much the Empire’s Chosen can manage… I shall do them the favor of watching personally.”

If they imagine that holding the memories of the past means everything will go as they please, then I shall have to do them the kindness of correcting that misunderstanding. They must be taught the cruelty of a history that repeats, and the recklessness of trying to overturn what is fated.

“Priest.”

“Yes. What is it, my lady?”

“I am entrusting one of the Divine Beasts to you. Should you meet the enemy suddenly and find the situation beyond your own strength, only then, use this child to remove whoever stands in your way.”

I sent the White Serpent over to the priest standing beside me.

“I-Is that truly permitted?”

“It is. Take the greatest care not to let it come to harm, won’t you.”

“Understood.”

The priest stood there delighted with a Divine Beast at his side, and I glanced at him sidelong and let out a deep breath.

—With that, the preparations are perfectly in order.

“…We advance by degrees. Begin the march into the deep forest near the Dyrst border.”

The Order’s army formed up in clean, unbroken ranks and began to move without a sound.

“Lady Reshia, let us be certain to take back our holy land.”

The recovery of the holy land… ah, yes. This was a recovery of the holy land, wasn’t it.

“Yes. So it is.”

I put on a smile for him, mounted the Black Serpent’s back, and went forward.

—Now. Let me teach them personally what one of the Chosen is truly capable of.

This battle is my mission itself, the one Lord Svell laid upon me.

Chapter 1 – The Signal Fire of War

1

Late August, Kingdom Calendar Year 1241.

The glare had turned merciless and the heat owned everything under it. On that midsummer day the Dyrst region opened its great inspection: military exercises by the Provisional Elite Corps, and a viewing of the workings where the Divine Demon Orb is mined.

The lodging quarter in Dyrst was overflowing with dignitaries who had come in from abroad to see it.

“So the inspection’s finally here.”

“And a full program today, by the look of it!”

“The workings where the orbs come out in quantity, and the exercises of the Corps Her Highness has just founded, both in a single day. Ah, I can hardly stand the waiting!”

“It’s certain to be a worthwhile visit!”

“Ha ha ha ha!”

The visitors from other nations laughed and talked over breakfast at their inns, thoroughly enjoying themselves.

Their laughter carried out into the street, where Flegel was waiting with his fingers pressed to his temple.

“Not a care between them…”

“They don’t know anything. You can hardly blame them.”

“No. I suppose not.”

He was looking away toward the northeast of the Dyrst region, the stretch that runs nearest the border between Kingdom and Empire.

“A pleasant day out turns into a scene from hell in the space of a minute. When that happens, I wonder how that lot in there will take it.”

They would be walking the Dyrst countryside on their tour, and the Kingdom’s army would come down on the site without warning. The Provisional Elite Corps, conveniently in the middle of exercises, would meet them. And after that, two armies in each other’s teeth and no mercy anywhere in it.

“It’ll knock the wind out of them.”

“That it will.”

Flegel closed his hand around the hilt of the sword at his hip. The hand was shaking, very slightly.

“…I’m not good at fighting.”

“You mean the escort detail for the delegations.”

“Yes. If it comes to trading blows with the Kingdom’s soldiers, I don’t see myself winning.”

Fifty or so of the Corps, Flegel among them, were assigned to guard the delegations, and the route had been planned to keep the visitors well clear of anything that might turn into a war.

I put a hand against his back and pitched my voice a little brighter.

“Set your mind at rest. There’s exactly one condition under which the delegations come under attack, and that’s the Provisional Elite Corps being wiped out.”

“…Hah. Where in that am I supposed to find rest?”

“It means the Corps isn’t going to lose.”

“—!”

What he was afraid of was not going to happen. The Empire I knew had lost to the Kingdom’s army. But what would meet them this time was the Provisional Elite Corps, built up from nothing by Princess Valtrune, a fighting force that had not existed in the Empire up to now. She had drilled and expanded it for months against exactly this day, and I had no intention whatsoever of losing.

“There are many people in the Corps worth relying on. Trust them, and guard the delegations. That’s enough, isn’t it?”

“…You’re right, Aldia. Thank you.”

Perhaps that lifted the weight off him a little. I left him there with the sound of his forced steadiness at my back.

“…Listen to me. ‘The Corps isn’t going to lose.’”

Repeating my own line back to myself pulled a thin, self-mocking smile out of me. The man who had said something so lofty was carrying his own considerable dread into this fight.

I understood every move the enemy would make. Or I should. And still the hard knocking under my ribs would not let up.

2

“Thank you all most sincerely for traveling so far to join us. We have prepared with the hope that today proves genuinely worth your while. I look forward to your company.”

Princess Valtrune bowed deeply to the assembled delegations, her clear white hair swaying with it.

The Dyrst region. The inspection had begun.

“I’d like to start with the industry this land is built on. This way, please.”

An imperial princess personally guiding foreign guests through her own territory was a first, for the Empire and for every nation attending. On top of which, a lot of what she meant to show them had never been opened to outsiders before, and expectations for the day were running very high.

“And next, over here.”

The delegations followed her up the mountain road, talking cheerfully as they went. I kept to the rear of the party and carried myself as one more member of the security detail.

While the visitors were busy with Dyrst, a man in black came close and spoke against my ear. I went straight to Princess Valtrune, and when the delegations had drifted far enough off, I told her.

“Rune-sama. Word from intelligence, the Kingdom’s army is closing on the border.”

“I see. Thank you. How long until they meet the Corps?”

“They should come into view on the plain within two hours.”

She dropped her eyes at that and thought.

“…At the pace we’re walking, the exercises will be…”

“About an hour from now.”

“Then I think we’ll go just a touch more slowly.”

She gave me a charming little wink, then hurried over to the knot of visitors and folded herself into the conversation.

—I see.

Small talk, evidently, to burn a little time. Timing adjusted without anything looking adjusted. To reach the thing she was actually here for, she made herself more talkative than usual.

3

The inspection of the Dyrst region was an inspection in name only. The real purpose was to put the moment of the Kingdom’s unprovoked invasion in front of the eyes of the entire continent. That was why Princess Valtrune had the timing of the clash between the Kingdom’s army and the Corps worked out in fine detail, and the tour’s route paced against it.

As for the day’s centerpiece, the visit to the workings that yield the Divine Demon Orb, it was scheduled for after the military exercises, at the very end of the day. And once the Kingdom attacked, the inspection would be suspended. So in practice she had no intention of showing anyone from another country where the orbs come out of the ground; she had baited the hook with a genuine state secret and landed delegations from all over the world with it.

“Ha ha ha! The Corps and the workings both. I am truly looking forward to it!”

“Yes. I do hope you enjoy it all the way to the end.”

She matched the cheerful man’s laugh with a demure one of her own, a hand raised to hide her mouth.

—She really is a superb schemer.

Look at that clean, open smile and you would never once suspect that you were being used, and used beautifully.

“Now, then. The finish.”

The inspection was coming up on its midpoint, and the Provisional Elite Corps’ military exercises, or rather, the opening of the war with the Kingdom, were very nearly on top of us.

4

“General Ritziareite. Our agents report the Kingdom’s army has crossed the border into imperial territory. Their vanguard should appear on the plain shortly.”

—So it has begun.

As general of the Provisional Elite Corps, I was about to fight a foreign army for the first time. And if I am honest, I have very little experience as a person who leads an army. Whatever skill I may have as an individual fighter, whether I can hold a body of soldiers together is another question entirely.

“Fuu… So it’s finally here.”

The tension on the ground was thick, and I think mine had transmitted itself to the soldiers, because their movements had gone stiff.

—This won’t do. If I let myself look uncertain, I set my subordinates no example at all.

“All units. To your positions, at speed! Dragon-mount units, get above the field and bring back everything you can see. Ground units, take ground from which the plain can be struck all at once.”

At my order, the Provisional Elite Corps began to move.

Yes. Lady Valtrune had entrusted this army’s fortunes to me, and there was no time to spare for being frightened. The dependable ones would go forward to the line, and I would stand behind them as commander and hold the whole of it up.

“General Ritziareite! This is where we prove what the Corps is, ma’am!”

“Yes. It is.”

“We’re not about to lose to the Kingdom’s lot!”

“Right! Let’s take a real victory here and push the Corps’ name up where it belongs!”

The soldiers’ spirits were high, and they were right. Endure the Kingdom’s assault here, hold imperial ground, and the Corps’ future would be secure.

We began as a small army Lady Valtrune had founded. We had no record and nobody knew what we could do, but after taking the victory in the civil conflict, the results have not stopped coming.

It will be all right. With these people, however overwhelming the enemy in front of us, we will find our way to a win. And if the plan meshes as it should, even our small numbers leave us a real chance.

A plan to annihilate an enemy army with magic tools deployed in quantity. I command the army as a whole, but the position that matters most in this plan belongs to…

“Are you nervous?”

“…I’m all right. I’ll see it through!”

—Petra, who moves the mages across the whole of the Dyrst region and gives the word for each tool to fire.

“I have every expectation of you. You’ll do it well.”

Since the Corps was founded she has been a head above the rest as a mage. Watch how she handles her subordinates, how she reads the give-and-take of a fight, and you would never believe she left the military academy less than a year ago.

“General Ritziareite. Thank you.”

There was a steadiness in those confident eyes well beyond her years.

And besides that…

“Yeeeowch! Mia, you—! Train your dragon mount, would you?! It got my whole wrist!”

“Hmhm. I’m doing it on purpose, to put a bit of fire under a slacking Steano~ Go on, Pochi. Bite him, bite him♪”

“Ow ow ow ow! It’s g-going to leave teeth marks!”

“Steano! Mia! We’re about to fight a battle that matters and you two are clowning! If you botch anything because of this I’ll blast you both with magic!”

—the bearing of a commander who can pull a slack atmosphere tight again.

“Petra-senpai~ I’ve lost the map with the magic tool placements on it…”

“I have a spare, so there’s no need to look like that. Be more careful from now on, all right?”

“Ugh… thank you so much…!”

“It’s hardly worth crying over. Here. Handkerchief.”

—the kind of care that covers a subordinate’s blunder and then tends to the feelings underneath it as well.

“Petra-san. Our strength doesn’t come close to the Kingdom’s army. Can we really win…?”

“What are you being so faint-hearted about? Fewer of us, less experience, none of it matters. Set your mind at ease. Let them come in their thousands, their tens of thousands; I’ll blow every one of them off the field with my magic. So all of you just do the best you’re each capable of and there’ll be no problem.”

—and a soldier’s readiness to run at a battlefield, better than anyone’s.

Every quality that makes a commander of people is strong in her, and she can be relied on to stay cool and do the right thing in any situation the day produces.

“You are thoroughly dependable, you know.”

“…Sorry?”

“Fufu. I said I’m glad you joined the Provisional Elite Corps.”

At the compliment she flushed red and turned her face away.

“Oh? Is Petra-chan embarrassed?”

“Q-quiet, you! Anyone with a dragon mount, get into the sky this instant!”

“Yeees. Steano, I’m handing the job of teasing Petra-chan to you while I’m gone!”

“On it! Leave it with me!”

“I’ll remember this, both of you…!”

“Uh-oh. She’s going to shoot me dead with magic. Run awaaay♪”

“Hey, that’s not fair, Mia! I’m the only one down here to take the hit!”

“Heh. Not my prob-lem.”

—Haah. They kept it up right to the end, of course.

If I could only get the two problem children fully under control, I would have nothing left to complain about.

“I’m sorry about our pair of idiots…”

“No. There’s nothing for it but to give the whole army a firm lesson in discipline afterward…”

A second problem had surfaced early, but there was nothing to be done now except concentrate on the Kingdom’s army. I gathered myself and turned my eyes toward the plain, and the great host coming across it.

5

My name is Raquel Nova.

I am a council member of the Roscheld Republic, sent to the Empire to represent my country as part of this inspection.

I came with the council’s purpose in mind, to see the Empire’s military and technical strength with my own eyes, but since the event was hosted by Princess Valtrune, my friend from our academy days, I had privately been looking forward to seeing her again.

‘Raquel. Thank you for coming today.’

‘Not at all. I’m the one who’s glad, it’s been so long, Rune-chan.’

Facing her as one nation’s representative to another was new, and it did make me a little nervous, but she was exactly as she had been at the academy, chatting to me easily along the road.

—I’m so glad I came today after all.

The tour went smoothly and I walked imperial ground in excellent spirits. Today, I thought, will be a memory I keep my whole life.

That comfortable thought lasted exactly as long as it took for something to break it.

“Wh-what is that?!”

It came without any warning at all.

One of the visitors noticed a dust cloud bearing down from far off and pointed out across the Dyrst plain. The ground shook underfoot like a warning of some approaching calamity, and then the source of that unpleasant feeling revealed itself.

“Th-the Kingdom’s army!”

“What?!”

“The Kingdom’s army, here?!”

“You mean the Kingdom is invading the Empire?!”

“That can’t… it can’t be…”

The Kingdom’s host. Even counting only what the eye could pick out, it was comfortably over ten thousand.

The genial mood of the morning was gone in an instant, and every person in the delegations felt fear.

“Al! Explain the situation!”

The visitors were in confusion at the Kingdom’s arrival. Princess Valtrune alone was calm, calling to her subordinate.

“…It appears the Kingdom’s army has invaded. Forty thousand at the very least.”

“Has the Corps been informed?”

“Word has already been passed.”

The guards moved quickly, carrying out their roles without a flicker.

“Everyone! This is a sudden attack by the Kingdom’s army. It is dangerous here, so please evacuate at once. Flegel, take the delegations and their escort to the temporary fortress!”

“Understood. This way, everyone!”

—It was so flawless that I half believed she had foreseen the whole of it.

“Rune-sama. The Corps was mid-exercise and is already at readiness. General Ritziareite has her formation set to close around the Kingdom’s army.”

“Good. Then we ride for the line ourselves, quickly!”

“R-Rune-sama?! You mustn’t. The line is far too dangerous!”

We had drawn a little way off from the tour site when I overheard something I could not let past.

—The Princess herself, going to the front?

I was not the only one who had heard it.

“Her Highness intends to fight?!”

“Why would she go to such lengths, and such danger…”

“Surely this is what soldiers are for?”

Astonishment, and with it a note of doubt about how a princess ought to behave. But the moment they saw the clear set of Princess Valtrune’s face and heard what she truly felt, the noise died in their throats.

“Be quiet. If I, the imperial princess, do not stand at the front, then who is to answer a threat against this country? This is the Empire I love, my homeland is in danger of invasion, and I will not do it the discourtesy of running. And this inspection is mine. I invited you here, and the one who invites has a duty to protect her guests.”

“But, Your Highness…”

“I will not have the delegations put at any further risk. You understand me, surely.”

“That is… yes. Very well.”

A fierce love of her homeland, and a deep consideration for those of us who had come as her guests.

None of us could keep seeing Princess Valtrune as merely one nation’s princess. She was like some divine savior, her crimson garments streaming.

“We’re going, Al. The Kingdom’s army has had its own way long enough.”

“Ma’am!”

There was so much mercy and so much courage in the sight of her going that anyone might have lost their heart to it.

“Her Highness…”

“She means to fight, for the likes of us?”

“What courage.”

The older men among us must be easily moved, and one or two of them actually wept.

That my own eyes prickled a little is a secret.

It was brought home to me that this was a fine ruler who thought harder about her country’s future than anyone, and that only a few months ago she had been a student walking the academy halls.

“I can’t afford to stand still either…!”

At the academy I had thought we stood in the same place, and I had been quite wrong. She is far ahead of me.

Watching Princess Valtrune, so utterly changed from her student days and understanding the duties of a nation’s princess better than anyone, I wanted to become a person who could shield my own country from a great threat.

6

“…And how was my performance?”

“Flawless. Just as one expects of Rune-sama.”

Princess Valtrune and I were riding hard to link up with the Provisional Elite Corps, and as we took the horses down a forest track we talked over the little piece of theater she had just performed.

“I would be glad if it thinned out the countries that drift to the Kingdom’s side, even a little…”

“A great many of them were moved by the sight of you, Rune-sama.”

“I hope so.”

The delegations had watched her speak with respect in their eyes. A nation’s princess, disregarding her own safety, going out to meet an invader herself. Once the fighting with the Kingdom was over and they carried that impression home, there would certainly be countries looking to draw closer to the Empire than they had been.

“As far as the inspection goes, everything that needed doing is done. Next is the battle with the Kingdom’s army, no. What we two are facing is…”

“The Order.”

The Kingdom’s army was the Corps’ to take. What Princess Valtrune and I had to do was throw back the Order’s army, moving in the Kingdom’s shadow, that had made its way into Dyrst.

“We’ll collect the soldiers waiting at the operations post and, ah!”

“Rune-sama!”

A large black shape came down out of the sky beside her horse. It threw up a wall of dust, convulsed once, and stopped moving.

“This is…”

“A dragon mount…”

What had come down out of the sky was a dragon mount with both wings burned through and nothing about it left unbroken. The soldier who had been riding it had been shot through his whole body with arrows and was already dead, which told me plainly enough how hard the fighting on the field had become.

“Rune-sama, your hand.”

“Yes.”

The impact of the fall had injured her horse, but she herself was not hurt anywhere, and I pulled her up onto mine.

“It seems this area is dangerous too.”

The closer we came to a field with two armies tangled in it, the worse the danger got. Even riders in the air stood to be brought down by magic or by arrows, and there was no part of the Dyrst region that had not become hostile ground.

“Dragon-mount soldiers should be scouting the enemy formation from high above. If one has been shot down, then…”

“They dropped their altitude and tried to force a kill on the Kingdom’s army.”

“It may be that our ground units are in a bad way.”

“Al. The shortest route to the operations post, please.”

“Yes!”

The Provisional Elite Corps numbered five thousand, every unit counted.

Against them, an overwhelming host of more than forty thousand.

It was perfectly plain that holding back the invasion would be hard.

“Without the magic tools, we have no way to win.”

“There must be a commander giving the mages the word to fire… I wonder whether that person has been taken.”

“If so, this is as bad as it gets… we should move with a withdrawal in mind as well.”

Defeat was already gathering over the day as we reached the operations post, where so many wounded were being carried in, nothing about it suggested an army with the advantage. And in front of the largest tent stood Ritziareite and her staff officers, brows drawn down hard.

“Ritziareite!”

“Lady Valtrune! I’ve been waiting for you.”

“How does the battle stand?”

Ritziareite set both hands on the wide table outside the tent, and there was a trace of strain in her face.

“As things stand, the Provisional Elite Corps is not holding the Kingdom’s advance.”

“The difference in strength is too great.”

“Yes. And our dragon-mount soldiers are pressing them from above, but they don’t flinch, they simply keep coming, and because of that the encirclement is collapsing as well.”

So the Kingdom had abandoned any care for the sky and set itself to destroying what was in front of it.

“Riders who lost patience have gone into dives to attack, and they’ve been shot down one after another. Our strength in the air is badly thinned.”

The map of the Dyrst region spread across the table was marked over with crosses, and the scale of the losses could be taken in at a glance.

“And the magic tools?”

“Firing the tools is entirely in Petra’s hands. But… we’ve been unable to reach her since the fighting started.”

“…I see.”

With that one sentence from Ritziareite, the worst case began to take on weight.

“…Petra.”

I did not want to believe the worst. Not Petra. She could not possibly go down so easily.

“Rune-sama. May I go forward to search for Petra?”

I put it to her, and Princess Valtrune shook her head, her face severe.

“No.”

“Why…”

“You are to prepare, with me, for the fight against the Order’s army. I will not have the operation ruined for a private feeling.”

“—!”

Everything she said was correct. I had let a private feeling carry me, and I had been on the point of abandoning my own part.

“Al. I know how you feel. It hurts to know it. But this is what war is.”

That sentence was the whole truth of the place we were standing in.

War takes the people who matter, and takes them lightly. No matter how close you were to someone, however fine they were, dying happens in a moment.

“My apologies… I’m all right now.”

The pain of losing people is a thing I have felt to exhaustion, and starting a life over from the beginning has evidently not shaken it loose.

—Petra. I’m sorry.

Ritziareite’s account, and a field out there like the inside of hell: the chances that Petra was already dead were very high. But I could not be a man who stopped walking at that.

“Ritziareite. If this holds, the Kingdom’s army may push as far as the imperial capital. Pull it back together somehow, and hold until the Imperial army’s relief arrives!”

“Yes. I will carry out the task if it costs me my life.”

“Al, we’re…”

“Yes. Let’s go!”

I answered her strongly.

The soldiers of the Provisional Elite Corps were still out there on the line, still fighting the Kingdom’s great host. If I abandoned my own part here, I would be trampling on the effort of every one of them.

“Your Highness… we’re ready here.”

“Good. Then we leave at once.”

The reserve came to a little over five hundred, the last strength Ritziareite had been able to keep at the post while fighting the Kingdom’s army.

“Ritziareite. The Kingdom’s army… I’m counting on you.”

“Yes. Please take care as well, Lady Valtrune.”

Princess Valtrune went ahead into the forest with the soldiers. I moved to follow, and a hand closed hard around mine from behind.

“Sir Aldia.”

“…Is something the matter?”

“No. I only wondered whether you were all right…”

“I’m sorry to have worried you.”

I made my case for being fine, and her grip only tightened.

“We’ll look for Petra from our side as well.”

“Thank you…”

Ritziareite is good at reading the smallest shifts in how someone feels. Even now she was worrying about a man working hard to keep his own feelings crushed down.

“Please come back safely. There are still a great many things I want to talk to you about, Sir Aldia.”

“Yes. If we win this fight, we’ll talk until we’ve had our fill of it.”

“…That’s a promise.”

Her hand let go. With her eyes on my back I broke into a run toward the forest where Princess Valtrune was waiting.

Thanks to her, I had my head fully turned around. From here I would concentrate on one thing only, annihilating what stood in front of me.

Whatever meaning I have as a personal knight comes down to this: guarding Princess Valtrune with this sword.

There is no end to it if I let myself fear losing companions in a fight.

“…I can’t stay half-finished like this.”

Looking down is for after everything has been lost. For now it’s enough to do the best I can so that what remains to me isn’t broken. That’s all.

Prologue

“Hey, you hear?”

“About the Kingdom marching on us? Sure.”

“That’s the one. Think there’s anything in it?”

“Search me. If it’s true, though, we’re not talking about a border scuffle. We’re talking about a war.”

“Grim thing to be saying out loud…”

The rumor had worked its way through every quarter of the imperial capital, and nobody could say where it had started. The Kingdom’s army was coming over the border.

Hardly anyone waved it off as idle talk, either. Relations between the two nations had been souring for a while now, ever since the Kingdom’s prince broke off his engagement to the Empire’s princess without warning. From a rift that public, war was no great leap.

So rumor or not, the Empire had to make ready. Sooner or later the Kingdom would strike a spark, and it wouldn’t be a small one.

“The invasion is supposed to come about a week from now. There’s every chance it falls on the same day the foreign delegations arrive.”

Princess Valtrune was working through the security arrangements in the Provisional Elite Corps’ council room. Her officers stood around the relief map of the Dyrst region with Ritziareite at their head, listening and nodding, the room wound tight.

“So our task is to throw them back, and quickly, the moment an incursion is confirmed anywhere in Dyrst.”

“Yes. It may be nothing more than a rumor going around the streets, but it isn’t one we can afford to ignore. I want a security posture without gaps, whatever else happens, no harm is to come to the delegations.”

The mood had been heavy ever since the invitations went out to the neighboring nations. For Princess Valtrune, this was one undertaking that couldn’t be allowed to fail.

What she had arranged amounted to a debut. The Provisional Elite Corps presented to the world; a tour of the workings that yield the ‘Divine Demon Orb,’ a rare gem that comes out of the ground nowhere else on earth but the Empire’s Dyrst region. There wasn’t an item on the itinerary a foreign power wouldn’t want a look at.

“Securing that much ground will be difficult with the numbers we have, Your Highness…”

“I’ve had several of the roads along the border closed. Short of a long detour, the only approach left to them is open plain, no cover of any kind.”

“Understood. Then I’ll weight our deployment toward the high ground around it.”

“…Any other questions? No? Good, this all looks sound. Ritziareite, take the plan to the rest of the Corps.”

Princess Valtrune looked across the table and fixed her eyes on Ritziareite.

“Ma’am!”

Ritziareite snapped to attention and returned a flawless salute, her answer ringing.

“I’m counting on you.”

“Leave it to me. I will not let an inspection tour Lady Valtrune is hosting fail!”

She had kept growing since command of the Corps landed on her. She handled the army more smoothly than the Ritziareite of the previous timeline ever had, and she had turned into a commander you could lean on.

The Corps’ council went forward with the two of them at its center, Princess Valtrune and Ritziareite.

And two shadows had been watching that council through the gap in the door.

“…Hm. She’s turned into a general people can actually lean on, hasn’t she. And so young, still.”

“You sound like somebody’s mother, General Epika.”

“Quiet, you. Or rather, how much longer do you intend to keep eavesdropping? My time isn’t free either.”

Arms folded outside the council-room door, Epika grumbled and dug an elbow into my side.

I took my hand off the door and drew back from the room.

“…Shall we, then.”

“You needn’t tell me twice.”

She started walking, falling in behind me.

“You’re the Princess’s personal knight. Don’t tell me you called me all the way out here just to make me listen at a door.”

“Of course not. My business has nothing to do with the Provisional Elite Corps. I asked for you, General Epika, because there is something else I wanted to discuss.”

“Oh. Good.”

Everything done out in the open belongs to Princess Valtrune, and to Ritziareite, who leads the Corps; dealing with the awkward things behind it is what a princess’s personal knight is for.

“The short version, since we’re walking. On the day of Rune-sama’s inspection tour, at the same hour as the Kingdom’s invasion, I intend to sweep away the anti-Princess nobles.”

“—! I see. So that’s your game.”

“The ones at the front of the stage can stay at the front of the stage.”

“And black-hearted creatures like us go first into the dirty work.”

“An unkind way to put it. But you’re not wrong.”

Clearing the anti-Princess nobles out of the way wasn’t optional, not if Princess Valtrune was to reach the throne. And I had already called together the people most likely to help me do it.

“Everyone but yourself, General Epika, is already gathered at the place we’re meeting in secret.”

“My. So I’m not the only one.”

“If we’re going to clear out a hostile faction, it’s only sensible to bring as much strength to bear as we can.”

“True enough.”

Since coming to the Empire I had done nothing but move, and all of it toward putting Princess Valtrune on the imperial throne. I had gone over every hostile faction corner by corner, and scraped together force enough to answer them.

“In here.”

Epika followed me to a detached manor deep in the grounds, in a corner where almost nobody came and went. At the very back of it was a wide room, and when I opened the door the rest of them were already assembled.

“Ah! You’re late, boss~!”

“Don’t make a racket over every little thing, Fadi. You’ll give me a headache.”

“Haah. About time.”

Epika took in the faces and drew her brows together.

“…I see. So this is the caliber of person you’ve gathered to wipe out the anti-Princess nobles.”

“Not to your satisfaction?”

“On the contrary. As a fighting force, wouldn’t you call it sufficient?”

Her gaze went straight down the line of them.

Fadi, a first-class assassin whose guilelessness sat over a streak of pure cold.

Dorothea, former boss of a shadow organization, gifted with magic besides, and a woman of considerable force.

Linos von Gerreschiff, second son of the Gerreschiff ducal house, a proud high noble who did everything from swordsmanship to dragon mounts competently and none of it badly.

And last, Epika von Darius, the finest mage in the Imperial army, and the daughter of House Darius.

Those four were the collaborators I had gathered to destroy the anti-Princess nobles.

“Well then. That’s everyone.”

“…So it seems. Nothing here but people with black hearts.”

Linos never troubled to soften anything, and he gave the assembled company his honest impression of it.

He was right, too. Every last person in that room had something of their own tucked away behind the ribs.

Linos wanted honor that belonged to no one else, Epika a noble’s position that nothing could shake, and we who served Princess Valtrune were here to remove, quickly, whatever threatened her claim to the throne. It was an alliance built on interests that happened to line up, and nothing more than that.

“Heh. Because you can’t get through this world without a black heart, right!”

“…Fuu. Well. It’s a world that rewards playing dirty.”

Fadi settled deep into a chair, perfectly at ease. Dorothea leaned against the wall and lit a cigarette.

“What steady nerves they have.”

“Wouldn’t you rather have people who can hold themselves that loosely?”

“You’re not far enough wrong for me to argue.”

Epika delivered her verdict on the two from the underworld, unbothered as both of them were, then nodded, one corner of her mouth lifting.

“…No, it’s fine. To get out in front of a nuisance like the anti-Princess nobles, I think you need exactly this sort of crooked article.”

You couldn’t hand this operation to anyone too straight. It takes people the world has already been unfair to, people who assume there’s a second meaning, to stay level with an enemy this troublesome.

“…Well? Let’s have the outline.”

“…Fuu. Impatient men don’t get far with women.”

“Hmph. It has never once occurred to me to be liked. I came here to see my own convictions through. Skip the preamble.”

Something in his resolve must have carried, because Dorothea let it lie there, and his eyes came back to me.

“The men at the center of the anti-Princess faction are troublesome, and they work in the dark. They won’t go down at the first pull.”

“I understand that. It’s precisely why we move on the day the Kingdom’s army invades Dyrst.”

“The Kingdom’s invasion. Believing a rumor like that…”

“Rumor? Nah, that one’s real.”

“…What?”

Fadi cut across Linos’s little sneer and said it as though it were the most ordinary thing in the world.

Which, for him, it was. That rumor had gone out into the streets on Princess Valtrune’s own instruction.

The people who put it there were the Corps’ intelligence arm, which meant Fadi and Dorothea had run it themselves, and they had taken their time working it through the Empire until it soaked in. Of course they knew it wasn’t a rumor.

“You can’t mean… you seeded it?”

“Yep, that’s the one. And this came to us from a contact inside the Kingdom, so it’s solid.”

“W-Wait. Then the Kingdom’s army…”

“Mm. Should be coming over the border one week from today, near enough to the hour.”

Dorothea put out her cigarette and came over to me.

“…That’s right, isn’t it.”

“Yeah. Rune-sama knows all of it.”

“—!”

We had let the invasion be whispered about so that it would reach the ears of the anti-Princess nobles as well, all of it on Princess Valtrune’s authority.

“You put the invasion out as a rumor because you didn’t want the information confirmed.”

“Exactly so.”

“But why? There’s nothing to be gained by having it out in public.”

Epika tilted her head, and Dorothea answered in the tone of someone bringing another person round to a point.

“…The more names on the list of possible attackers, the better it suits us.”

“—You can’t be serious. You mean to hang this on the Kingdom’s army? The whole thing?”

“Hang it on them, no. If they choose to draw the wrong conclusion, that’s their business.”

Dorothea’s smile turned wolfish, and I laid the clothing I’d prepared out on the long table in the middle of the room.

“This is…”

“Uniforms. What the Kingdom’s soldiers wear. Rank and file was as far as I could get…”

Put on what was on that table and you would pass for a Kingdom soldier from your scalp to your boots. The specially cut coats their officers wore had been beyond me, but as a disguise for a common Kingdom infantryman it was flawless.

“Hmph. You intend to lie about it thoroughly, then.”

“Look, look, we’ve got proper swords over here too~”

Fadi ignored the complaint and came in with an armload of Kingdom-issue longswords.

“…How did you come by this much of it? It’s not the sort of thing that falls into your lap.”

Epika looked over the disguises and turned the question on me.

Kingdom army uniforms don’t circulate on the open market. And I was on the Empire’s side of the border now. Getting hold of Kingdom-issue equipment ought to have been impossible.

…But there was one place I could ask.

“A friend of mine is the daughter of a great trading house. I asked her, and she diverted a set of the same items her people were producing on commission for the Kingdom’s army.”

“…Ah. The Crimea Company girl.”

“Yes. She’s working hard for us as a dragon-mount soldier.”

Epika seemed to accept it; she had placed Mia at once. Her usual slapdash way of carrying herself makes it hard to picture, but Mia is the only daughter of the head of the Crimea Trading Company, a great house’s daughter, properly speaking.

With her help, most things find their way to my hand. I can ask it of her, of course, only because I built the trust first.

“So you use your friends too, if they’re useful.”

“I explained the situation and secured her agreement. There were no orders given.”

“Hmph. If you say so.”

I let the poison in the remark go past me and drew a breath.

“The Kingdom marching into imperial territory is not something we can allow to stand. Simply weathering the outrage would leave us badly out of pocket.”

Take the blow and give nothing back. There was no sense in it. And if the Kingdom’s army hadn’t been coming across our border in the first place, this deception would never have needed to exist; I was not about to be lectured for borrowing the name of men who were on their way to do us harm.

“If the Kingdom’s army attacks imperial soil, we will go under their name, and the killing of the anti-Princess nobles will be laid at their door. Surely you agree, Lord Linos, that the Kingdom’s army has no call on our mercy?”

“…It isn’t that. I dislike winning by underhanded means.”

“The anti-Princess nobles work underhandedly, by your own account. If we don’t stoop as well, we won’t get past them. And if it becomes known that the attackers were the Princess’s own people, the wind against us blows very much harder.”

“There’s no guarantee you won’t be found out.”

“No. And no guarantee we will be.”

Epika put in a word, closing off Linos’s objection, and turned a hard look on him for going on with it. She had evidently decided in favor of my plan.

“An ambush by deceit. That is not how an imperial noble conducts himself.”

“I’m sure I wouldn’t know. What I’m certain of is that the argument will make no impression whatsoever on the anti-Princess nobles.”

“You would have me sink to their level.”

“The honest approach is not always the best one. Learn to change your footing to suit the ground, all the more so if you intend to keep living in noble society.”

Every objection Linos raised, Epika snuffed out.

“…Well, some things you just have to swallow, right.”

“We’ve had our hands filthy for years, so we’re used to it. A young gentleman of the nobility is another matter. Bound to stick in the throat a bit.”

Epika, Fadi and Dorothea were all in favor of putting on the Kingdom’s colors and cutting down the anti-Princess nobles. Linos alone was against it.

“Linos von Gerreschiff. If this much makes you hesitate, my advice is that you withdraw here and now. The rest of us made our peace with it long ago.”

“…”

He heard her out and shut his mouth.

If an attack on a rival faction came to light, it would cost us room to move for a long time afterward. When we cut down Marquis Rigel there had been a clear reason behind it, an order from Emperor Grode himself; this time there was no such banner to march under. We wouldn’t be using Princess Valtrune’s backing either. This time we acted on our own authority.

“From here on, I expect scheme to run into scheme again and again. I’d like to honor your wish to beat an enemy fairly and in the open, Lord Linos… but on this occasion I must ask you to follow our lead.”

“…Understood.”

“Thank you.”

Linos holds his pride as an imperial noble higher than anyone, and I don’t think that’s a fault in itself. But when it starts to dull a decision, that kind of pride is in the way.

“…There was a time when I believed the same. That if you could win head-on, you had no need of dirty methods.”

“—”

“Then I learned that there are things you cannot protect that way. To protect something, sometimes you have to bend what you believe.”

No matter how good you are with a sword, the people who matter to you still die on you, and more than once. A man has his limits, and without trying and failing and trying again, you don’t come through the hard places.

“This operation bears directly on Rune-sama’s succession. Failure isn’t permitted.”

The Kingdom’s invasion, one week out, and the killing of the anti-Princess nobles at the same hour, would put her claim beyond argument. Raise her name higher still, weaken the factions opposing her, and it wouldn’t be long before she held the whole Empire as the next Emperor.

“The force we commit to the killings will be small and it will be good. Mostly the Corps’ intelligence branch. Lord Linos, I’d ask for several capable men from the ducal house. General Epika, I want you creating a disturbance to pull attention away.”

“So we’re the ones with blood on our hands. Got it!”

“On the day, I’m assigned to scouting for the battle with the Kingdom, so field command of the killings goes to Fadi…”

“I’ll pick out a few who can command and some serious fighters. It won’t fail.”

“Heh. That’s a relief, then.”

“You two are awful!”

In practice it would be Fadi and Linos who moved against the anti-Princess nobles. How well the two of them would suit each other was anyone’s guess, but as a fighting pair there was nothing to complain about.

“…And I’m the diversion.”

“Yes. When those two begin, something loud in the vicinity would help us a great deal. With your magic, General Epika, I imagine you could arrange almost anything.”

“Fufu. I imagine I could. Though using a division commander of the Imperial army as a decoy, that’s an idea only you or His Majesty would have.”

“Not enough for you?”

“Not at all. There’s something to be said for playing the supporting part now and then.”

Epika’s magic is too strong; it draws the eye whether she wants it or not. If she was to stay unconnected to us in public, the careful thing was to keep her on the diversion.

“That’s the disposition. Any other questions?”

At that, Epika’s hand was the first to go up.

“…I understand where the rest of us stand. …So what, exactly, will you be doing?”

“I take it ‘preparing for the battle with the Kingdom’ won’t satisfy you.”

“It will not. Fighting the Kingdom is the Corps’ work. There’s no part in it for Lady Valtrune’s personal knight. So by rights, the man who proposed all this should be choosing to fight the anti-Princess nobles. And yet.”

“I’ve heard nothing to suggest you’ll be anywhere near it.”

“Exactly. You’re still keeping something from us.”

It wasn’t only Epika. Linos’s eyes had sharpened on me too.

No lifeline came from Fadi or Dorothea. A heavy silence simply settled over the room and stayed.

“Is it a question you can’t answer?”

“No.”

“Then let’s hear it. What you’ll be doing while the rest of us take out the trash.”

Standing against the anti-Princess nobles carried real risk, and they had offered to help knowing it. They had their own reasons, certainly, but even setting those aside, keeping secrets I didn’t need to keep was a good way to put cracks in a working trust.

“—While the Corps faces the Kingdom’s army, and while all of you are engaged with the anti-Princess nobles, I intend to strike a different enemy.”

“A different enemy?”

“…The Svell Order.”

“—!”

Dorothea said it before I could, and Epika and Linos were both caught without words at the arrival of a force neither had counted on.

“As she says. What I’ll be dealing with is the Svell Order, who will use the Kingdom’s army as a decoy and come into imperial territory behind it.”

“Religious types. In some ways worse to have against you than a whole country. Not that there’s anything to do about an enemy except break them…”

Fadi and Dorothea already knew, so neither of them moved; they only sighed as though something tiresome had come up, and let their faces go slack with it.

“…The anti-Princess nobles aren’t enough for you, nor the Kingdom, and now you’ll take on the Svell Order as well?”

“That’s the intention.”

“Three troublesome organizations at once. That isn’t sanity. I had you for a man who could weigh a risk against a return. Was I mistaken?”

It’s true that the more enemies you have, the less you can spend on any one of them. Run short of strength and your odds go with it; I could follow the logic well enough.

But it is also true that I have no leisure to knock enemies down one at a time.

Winning the factional war inside the Empire isn’t negotiable. It’s the ground everything else stands on.

The Kingdom and the Order, though, won’t move at our convenience. They are scheming to come over the border this minute.

“The Kingdom’s army and the Order will attack in one week, both of them. Facing them together isn’t a choice we get to make.”

“Then the anti-Princess nobles can wait for another occasion. Move in a hurry and you’ll have more on your hands than you can…”

“There’s no time to be leisurely about it!”

“—!”

“Boss. Easy.”

I came back to myself as fast as I did only because Fadi settled me.

“My apologies. I lost my composure.”

“…That kind of hurry. There’s something behind it, isn’t there.”

She misses very little. …But this wasn’t something I could say.

The Kingdom and the Empire go to war. The Empire falls. Every brave officer and soldier who fights on the Empire’s side dies.

—There was no telling them that.

“…Haah. I won’t ask further.”

I had expected Epika to dig. Instead she withdrew, and easily.

“You’re certain?”

“Curious, of course. But I’m hardly in a position to demand a person lay everything bare.”

“I am.”

“You, yes. Other people are different.”

She soothed Linos, who had no patience with secrets, and set her hand on my shoulder.

“You’re rattled far more often than I’d have guessed. That was quite entertaining to watch.”

She said it low, in that velvet voice, then smiled to herself, satisfied, and put a hand to the door.

“I’ll take my leave here. Those of us on the attack can meet again another day.”

She was gone before I could call after her.

A while later, Linos made for the door as well.

“…I’ll do my part. Your promise to put me in as the Imperial army’s Military Lord. Don’t forget it.”

Which left me in the room with Fadi and Dorothea.

“There they go.”

“No harm in it. Each of them will do what they said they’d do.”

Fadi was turning the Kingdom equipment over in his hands, and Dorothea lit a second cigarette without a care in the world. I was the only one backed against anything; the two of them had reserves of ease I couldn’t account for.

“…I don’t know what it is you’re afraid of, but strung this tight is poison to a body. A man who stands at the top ought to let the air out of himself now and then.”

“Ghk—?!”

Fadi had got hold of one of the Kingdom swords and was swinging it about. Trailing white smoke, Dorothea took him by the scruff of the neck and hauled him out with her.

Left alone in the quiet, I closed my eyes and let my head go down.

—Strung too tight, is it.

I turned Dorothea’s words over. The more I think about the future waiting up ahead, the less any hour of rest looks possible, and breathing out will have to wait until the whole tangle is dealt with.

For now there’s nothing to do but go headlong down the road I believe is the best one. That’s the only loyalty to Princess Valtrune I have to give.

Side Story – The Secret History of Philnotes Military Academy

1

“Please, Al! Will you join the Siege Battle with me!?”

“…Huh?”

It all started with Steano’s desperate, formal bow on the ground. He had just flunked his final exams.

Philnotes Military Academy, located in the neutral city of Philnotes, is a first-rate military academy where the elite from many nations gather.

Students who will one day be responsible for their nations’ development flock here—royalty, imperial heirs, nobles, knights and soldiers who protect their nations, and even the successors to great merchant families. They are all gathered from surrounding countries, regardless of status or standing.

It’s been a year and a half since I started attending this academy. I was now a second-year in the academy’s middle school division.

“Please! I’m begging you, this is the one request of my life!”

The man staying behind in the classroom after school, continuing to beg in that pathetic voice, was Steano, one of my few friends. He’s an extremely talented knight, but while his practical skills are excellent, his academics are atrocious.

“…Hah. You failed again? Just go to the supplementary lessons​.”

“Sorry, sorry, sorry! But I just can’t stand being crammed into the supplementary lessons​ classroom to study anymore! That’s why I want you to join the Siege Battle with me! It’ll boost my overall exam score! I know I can get a good grade in a practical exam. Come on, please?”

And so, just like that, he was begging me to join this practical exam, the ‘Siege Battle,’ which served as a last-ditch rescue measure.

—Seriously, he’s too desperate. How much does he hate studying?

“Steano… we’re second-years now. If your grades stay like this, you’ll just fail again next term. Don’t you think you should try studying more seriously?”

“Guh, I… I have no comeback for that…”

“Besides, if it’s the Siege Battle, just asking me isn’t enough people. You won’t even qualify to participate. How many people do you need to gather?”

Steano counted on his fingers, his face turning pale as he let out a pained breath.

“A… a minimum… of eight.”

“Eight, huh. I’m fine with joining, but… how are you going to get the other six?”

Unfortunately, I don’t really have any close friends besides Steano.

If we’re recruiting, we should probably rely on his wider social network.

“Have you asked anyone else?”

“I was going to, but everyone who passed the finals gets to start summer vacation a little early… they’ve all gone back to their home countries or territories. There’s no one left…”

“That’s a checkmate, then… Just go to the supplementary lessons​.”

“I absolutely refuse! I can only see a future where I fall asleep during the supplementary​ lectures, fail the re-test, and then get stuck in an endless loop of retakes for all of summer vacation!”

—Stop talking as if you’ve already decided not to take the lecture seriously.

But I’ve known him for a year and a half. I know full well how disastrous his academic performance is. I could somewhat understand why he’d want to use the Siege Battle as an escape route. And besides, it would leave a bad taste in my mouth to just ignore a friend in need.

“…Alright, fine. Let’s see if we can somehow scrape together six more people.”

“Al… you really are a good guy!”

He looked overwhelmed with emotion, his eyes a little watery, and he clasped his hands together like he was praying in a chapel. Now is not the time for that.

“Okay, so no close friends are left on campus… That means we’ll just have to find random people who wouldn’t mind joining a Siege Battle.”

This is already the summer vacation period. For students, vacation is a time of supreme happiness. The number of people willing to give up that precious time for what is essentially just an extension of class is limited.

“Our best bet is other supplementary​ students…”

“Meaning?”

“We recruit other idiots like Steano.”

“That’s so harsh! Ever heard of sugar-coating?! Isn’t it awful to call your own friend an idiot!?”

“Steano, be quiet for a second. I’m thinking.”

“‘Shut up, idiot,’ is that it? I’m glad you’re helping, but you’re really brutal, you know that…?”

I ignored Steano pouting and put a hand to my chin, thinking.

Not that many students failed this final exam. The students here are all talented people who carry the future of their countries. The ones who fail are almost always the same people every time.

“In our class, you’re the only habitual failure, Steano. We’ll have to check other classes.”

“That one stings, too, in a subtle way…”

Steano clutched his chest and stumbled, his legs trembling like a newborn fawn.

I felt slightly bad, but he was my only lead, so I asked him.

“Steano, do you know anyone else from your supplementary​ classes?”

“…Yeah. In the next class over, there should be a problem child who fails every test and a gigantic guy.”

He squeezed out the words in a listless voice.

A problem child and a giant.

My first impression from that description was pretty bad, but if this was to help Steano dodge supplementary lessons​, I wasn’t in a position to complain.

“Alright. Let’s try inviting those two first. If they’re in the supplementary​ group, they should be in the supplementary​ room or their classroom.”

And so, “Operation Save Steano from Supplementary Lessons​” began.

Can we really find six other people besides me and Steano? Honestly, I was filled with dread.

2

It didn’t take long to find the ‘problem child’ and the ‘giant’ Steano mentioned.

“Are those them?”

“Yeah, that’s them. Their names are… Mia and Ambros.”

Where I looked, I saw a male and female student sitting at their desks, deep in conversation. The blue-haired girl must be Mia… the ‘problem child.’ The sturdy-looking guy must be Ambros… just as advertised, he’s a giant.

“So, what’s the plan?”

Steano whispered, cupping his hand next to my ear.

“What do you mean ‘what’s the plan’? We just go talk to them.”

“Wh… You don’t know? Those two are the really bad ones, even for the supplementary group!”

“No, I’ve never had to take supplementary lessons​, so I’m not up on the internal gossip.”

“Ugh…”

He’s making a big theatrical show of being hurt, but it’s just the truth.

“So, what’s so ‘bad’ about them?”

I asked in a flat voice. He got a serious look on his face.

“…Those two are the elite of the elite supplementary​ students. They’re the ‘Top of the Idiots’!”

“You’re one to talk.”

…I was the idiot for asking.

“I already figured they were idiots from the fact they’re in supplementary lessons​. So… why are you so hesitant to talk to them?”

“Well…”

If it was just about their poor grades, it’s strange that Steano would be this reluctant. He’s got decent communication skills and a much wider circle of friends than I do.

“…Did something happen between you and them?”

“—!”

I heard him grit his teeth.

“…You won’t laugh if I tell you?”

“Depends on what it is.”

“Then I’m not telling.”

“…Look, if you don’t tell me, we can’t move forward.”

—This is getting annoying. Maybe I should just go home.

It was obvious from his tense expression that there was some serious history there. But if he didn’t tell me why, I was stuck. Even if he couldn’t stand them, they were still valuable potential recruits.

I just kept staring at him silently. He finally sighed, looking uncomfortable.

“…Fine. I’ll tell you.”

He raised his hands in surrender and looked away.

“Mia and Ambros. Those two… they got insane scores on the practical exams. I saw a glimpse of what they can do, and… I lost all my confidence.”

“…So you’re jealous of their strength.”

“Aargh, yes, fine! I was frustrated that I hadn’t been able to beat them in a single practical exam since we enrolled! Is that so wrong!?”

“No, anyone would feel frustrated after tasting defeat. I get it.”

So basically, he had an inferiority complex toward two people who were better than him. Asking rivals who you’re competing with for help… yeah, that’s probably a high psychological hurdle.

“Steano. Just wondering, what are their practical scores actually like?”

He grimaced, but his tone turned serious.

“First, Ambros. The guy just has absurd power. In any strength-related category, he’s not just the top of the second-year middle schoolers, he’s always at the top of the entire middle and high school divisions combined! —But he’s an idiot, so his overall grades aren’t in the top tier.”

“…I see.”

“Next, Mia. Her agility and reflexes are off the charts. Her combat instincts are sharp, too. It’s like she has a natural-born talent for fighting. —But she’s also an idiot. She seems to be decent at arithmetic, but everything else is a total disaster. A complete disaster!”

He said that last part with a lot of passion.

“…I should probably point out that you’re not one to talk.”

“I know that! It’s just sour grapes!”

Steano let out a frustrated sigh. From his expression, he really didn’t want to do this. But in contrast to him, I was suddenly motivated.

“…If we’re going to do a Siege Battle, we need skilled teammates.”

“—! R-right! So we should probably invite some other, more normal-“

“Those two sound like they’ll be excellent assets.”

“Huh!?”

—I had some expectations, but they sound even better than I thought.

“H-hey, Al… It doesn’t have to be those two, you know…”

“No. We’re definitely inviting them. If we don’t win this Siege Battle, you’re guaranteed a spot in supplementary lessons​, right? That’s all the more reason to rely on them.”

Mia and Ambros. The ‘supplementary lessons​ exemption’ reward should be just as appealing to them. Getting them to cooperate should be easy. And most importantly, the fact that they’ve been able to cover their catastrophic academic holes with practical exam scores is a very good sign.

Philnotes Military Academy gathers elites from all over the world. It’s hard to get in, but it’s even harder to graduate. This is especially true if you’re not a noble who gets special treatment.

Of the new students who enter normally, 40% drop out within the first year. Less than 30% of the total starting class makes it from middle school to high school and eventually graduates. This place is a thorough meritocracy. If the school doesn’t recognize your aptitude, they’ll snatch away your right to graduate. This isn’t just a military academy in name; it’s a genuine world-class educational institution.

In a place like this, students who have been promoted almost entirely on their practical exam scores… that means their combat abilities are far superior to the average student.

“Steano.”

“…Hah, fine. I get it.”

We headed toward Mia and Ambros.

“Excuse me, you two. Do you have a minute? We have something important to discuss…”

We asked them to join the Siege Battle.

3

“Yeah, okay!”

“Mhm. We’ll join.”

We secured their participation in the Siege Battle with no trouble at all.

“…Are you… really sure?”

Mia gave the dumbfounded Steano a light nudge.

“Aww, what’s this? Did you think we’d say no? Too bad! We hate supplementary lessons​, too! If it’s to get out of them, we’ll give this Siege Battle everything we’ve got! So, looking forward to working with you!”

“Uh, right…”

She was very casual and friendly with me and Steano, and then she crumpled up what was probably her supplementary lessons​ homework and threw it full-force into the trash can.

—Whoa, even if we join the Siege Battle, we still have to win to get out of supplementary lessons​. To throw away her homework without hesitation… she’s way too decisive.

“Come on, Bro-suke, you throw yours out, too. We’re gonna get out of supplementary lessons​ anyway.”

“Nn. Okay.”

Urged on by Mia, Ambros also shoved his stack of papers into the trash.

“…Uwah. They really threw it out. And it doesn’t even look like they answered the first question.”

Steano stared at the casually discarded homework with a strained look. The tragic wad of paper was crumpled, and of course, every answer blank was empty.

“Hehe! I don’t wanna study! We’re just gonna polish our fighting skills! All right, let’s totally win this!”

“Mhm! If you need a meat shield, leave it to me.”

“Yeah! The walking deserted island!”

“That cheer is so roundabout it’s insulting… hey, don’t you stick your chest out proudly, either!”

The three of them seemed to have decent chemistry.

As I watched them trade jokes, I thought about how to get the rest of the members.

“…Well, that’s four of us for now.”

“Which means four more… at this rate, if we just keep recruiting other supplementary students, we’ll have a team in no time!”

Steano’s mouth relaxed. He was completely in ‘easy mode.’

But gathering members was just to meet the requirements to join. The real goal was to win.

I had no problem bringing Mia and Ambros on board, but from here on out, we had to think about team balance. Which means Steano’s idea of only recruiting supplementary​ students was a bad move.

“…No, we’re not inviting any more supplementary​ students.”

“Huh? But…”

“Yes. Because they’re bad at academics, it’s a given that their practical skills are high. The more we add, the better our chances in the Siege Battle should be.”

“Then-!”

“…or so it’s easy to assume.”

“””—!”””

Yes. We can’t forget.

Even if supplementary lessons​ students are good at practical skills, they are the absolute bottom of the barrel academically.

“Listen. It doesn’t matter how many strong people you gather, that doesn’t guarantee a win. In a group battle, organization is the most important thing. You have frontline soldiers and a tactician in the rear… an organization only starts to function when both sides mesh.”

I looked at the three of them, one by one.

“From the right, we have: muscle-head, muscle-head, muscle-head, and muscle-head… In other words, we have no one who can use their brain.”

I stated the most brutal fact in the room.

“Th-that’s right… We’re a pack of idiots.”

“Kuh… I can’t deny it! We are idiots…!”

“G-guooooooh!”

The three of them turned pale and hung their heads.

“What we need now is a strategist. Someone smart who can plan for the Siege Battle.”

“So… now we have to find someone who’s good at studying?”

“Simply put, yes.”

—And if I can add another condition, I’d prefer a magic-track student, not a knight-track.

This team has another flaw besides academics: everyone is a frontline fighter. For a Siege Battle, we’ll need good rear support, too.

“Do you two know anyone smart?”

I asked Mia and Ambros. They looked at each other and nodded.

“I do!”

“I do!”

They spoke at the same time, pumping their fists.

“He’s a noble, but he’s a really good guy!”

“Yeah. I’m sure he’ll help us.”

The ‘noble’ part is a bit of a red flag, but if they trust him, I’ll keep my mouth shut.

“Okay, you two go explain the situation to him and ask for his help. Steano and I will look for someone else.”

They exchanged glances and immediately ducked out of the classroom.

“Alright, let’s get moving! Let’s go, Bro-suke!”

“…Then let us begin negotiations with him.”

“Ahaha! We don’t need to negotiate. Let’s just gag him, tie him up, and bring him here! ♪”

“I see! So sometimes, such forceful tactics are acceptable!”

“Yup yup. He’s probably in that mansion anyway, so when he comes out, we just… grab him! Oh, I’ll get the supplies, so you be the one to grab him, Bro-suke!”

“Acknowledged!”

They were discussing something awfully dangerous in cheerful voices.

Is it really okay to leave it to those two?

I hope they don’t do something stupid to a noble and get sued… But despite my worries, they disappeared. I should probably start thinking of a contingency plan for when they get into trouble.

“Al. Let’s go find our new teammate.”

“Yeah.”

Steano grabbed my arm, but he sighed, his brow furrowed.

“…But I can’t think of anyone who would help us.”

“Really? I’ve got someone in mind.”

“Huh? Who!?”

“You’ve met her before, Steano. She’s in the magic track, a top honors student. On top of that, her combat skills are a cut above everyone else’s in this school. A real prodigy.”

A female student we’d helped before when she was cornered by a group of noble girls.

Her name is—

“Petra Farben, a second-year in the middle school magic division.”

A commoner girl with exceptional magic skills. And a kid with more pride than anyone, a typical lone-wolf type who doesn’t do ‘friendly.’

Steano must have remembered her, because he shook his head with a dubious look.

“No, no. Impossible. We’ll never convince Petra!”

“Why do you think that?”

“The day we say ‘Please help us, we don’t want to go to supplementary lessons​,’ she’ll just laugh in our faces and tell us to get lost! More importantly, I’m scared I’ll say the wrong thing and she’ll blast me with magic!”

—Did she give him some kind of deep-seated trauma?

His words felt all too real. But we don’t have time.

“Steano. Do you know what the deadline is to apply for the Siege Battle?”

“…Uh, by closing time tomorrow.”

“Right… We don’t have time. So shouldn’t we at least ask her instead of complaining? This doesn’t affect me, but for you supplementary​ guys, this is your only way out.”

“Y-you’re right… Okay. I won’t complain anymore. Let’s go find Petra.”

I get why Steano is worried.

At first glance, Petra seems to treat everyone with a harsh attitude.

She constantly gets top grades and is relentless in her self-improvement. It’s no exaggeration to call her a candidate for the strongest, most flawless mage of her generation.

But she’s still human.

Once, Steano and I helped her when she was facing off against the noble girls from the magic track and was struggling against their numbers. It sounds bad to say ‘return the favor,’ but if she sees that as a debt she owes, there’s a good chance we can get her to join.

“I want to find her right away, but I have no idea where she’d be.”

“If she’s a magic student and not a noble, she’s probably in the student dorms or somewhere on campus. Or… maybe she’s already left Philnotes for the break.”

Let’s ignore the possibility that she’s not here.

“Assuming she’s on campus…”

“The dining hall?”

Idiot. The dining hall is closed for summer vacation. And I can’t even picture Petra eating and laughing with friends in the dining hall anyway.

“I’d think Petra would be somewhere quiet.”

“Quiet… Oh! Like the girls’ bathroom in the annex!”

“Why can you only think of the most random, irrelevant places… Normally, you’d think of the library or the chapel.”

“Oh, right. Al, you’re a genius!”

“No, I’m just using common sense.”

Steano’s off-the-wall thinking never ceases to amaze me.

His first association for ‘quiet place’ is the bathroom in the annex. That’s just unbelievable. Maybe the root cause of all his failing grades is this bizarre, out-of-left-field thinking he sometimes displays.

“…Hah. Okay, so library and chapel. Which one first?”

“Hmm… Why don’t you check the library, Al, and I’ll check the chapel? That’d be more efficient.”

“…Good idea.”

—He really can be quick-witted.

It was a moment where I realized just how extreme the swings in Steano’s thought process were.

4

The way she tucked her hair behind her ear, her face lit by the light from the window, was very striking.

She silently scanned the pages of a thick history book, then let out a heavy sigh.

“…Do you need something?”

She closed her book and turned her spring-green eyes toward me. It was Petra, studying hard in a corner of the library.

The same unsociable attitude as always.

There were a few other people scattered around the library, but not a single person was sitting near her.

“…Sorry, were you studying?”

“I was. But it’s fine. I just reached a good stopping point.”

She said, pulling out the chair next to her.

“…You can sit, at least.”

“Ah. Thanks.”

It had been a while since I’d seen Petra, but she was surprisingly willing to talk.

“So? You were looking for me. What’s it about?”

“It’s a long story if I get into the details…”

“Be brief.”

She tapped her pen on the desk, resting her chin on her hand and pouting slightly.

“…Actually, there’s something I need your help with, Petra.”

When I said that, her eyes shot open in surprise.

“You… need my help? A guy like you?”

“Yeah. Did I say something weird?”

“N-no! So, what do you need me to do?”

She flinched and turned her face away.

Did I say something to offend her?

Trying not to upset her, I spoke again, consciously softening my voice.

“Petra, are you at all interested in the Siege Battle?”

“The Siege Battle?… Ah. You mean the mock battle held at the mansion on the mountain behind the annex.”

“That’s the one.”

“Hmm. Well. I’m interested, but it’s impossible to get the numbers, so I’ve never once thought about joining.”

“…If we could get the numbers, would you want to join?”

“Huh? Well, yeah… getting a rare chance for practical experience is nice, so I’d probably want to. Wait, don’t tell me…!”

It seemed Petra had figured out what I was getting at.

“Petra. Will you join the Siege Battle with me?”

No need to beat around the bush. If she has even the slightest desire to join, I just need to ask her directly.

“How many people have you gathered?”

“Including me, four so far.”

“Four? …Hah…”

That wasn’t a good reaction.

She put her head in her hands, then pointed a finger at me.

“Listen. Do you even understand the participation numbers for the Siege Battle?”

“Of course. You need a minimum of eight, right?”

“Yes. But in the last ten-plus years, there hasn’t been a single case of a team with only eight members winning. Do you understand what that means?”

The maximum number of participants is twenty.

Obviously, if an eight-person team fights a twenty-person team, they’ll be at a disadvantage.

“You were probably thinking ‘Oh, as long as we get eight people, we qualify’… but unless you have the maximum number of people, just winning is next to impossible, even if you can participate.”

Petra finished her long explanation, put a hand on her chest, and caught her breath.

“…Sorry, but I’m not free enough to join a losing battle. Find someone else.”

Her eyes, now devoid of interest, clearly spelled out “No.”

But I couldn’t back down here.

“…Hey, Petra. Aren’t those noble girls still giving you trouble?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“If we win the Siege Battle, they’ll be afraid of your strength, and I guarantee that annoying harassment will stop. This proposal has benefits for you, too.”

“—!”

If Petra doesn’t join, winning will be difficult.

Conversely, even with only eight people, if she acts as our commander, our chances of finding a path to victory increase dramatically.

“…Please, Petra. We need your strength.”

“Th-that’s just flattery…”

“I don’t know any student who can use magic better than you. Please, I’m begging you!”

I bowed my head deeply. She placed a hand on my shoulder. And she spoke, as if admonishing me.

“…The Siege Battle is open to all grades and divisions. That means high school students, who have studied here for years longer than us, will be participating.”

“I know.”

“We’ve only been at this school for a year and a half. No matter how talented you are, you can’t easily overturn a gap of years. …Even after hearing that, can you still say I’m the best mage here?”

We’re still just second-years in middle school.

Like she said, in this academy, we’re still just beginners.

The high school students are bigger, and their combat experience is higher. Trying to fight them knowing that… maybe it is reckless.

—But.

“Even so, I still think you’re the best. If you help us, I promise we will win this Siege Battle! You’ll make your name as the strongest mage in this school, in both name and reality!”

Of all the mages I’ve seen, Petra being the best is an undeniable fact for me. I’d much rather bet on her strength than on some upperclassman I don’t even know.

I had no choice but to bow my head.

It’s a little weird to be this desperate just to save a friend from supplementary lessons​, but now that I’ve taken on the request, I want to see it through.

“…You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“I am.”

I looked Petra straight in the eye. She smiled, as if in resignation.

“Aargh! Fine. You’ve got a deal!”

“So…”

“It means we’re going to win this Siege Battle. And I won’t forgive you if you put a stain on my record!”

“—Yeah! We’ll definitely win. With you on our side, I don’t see how we can lose!”

The handshake we shared was firm, and it became a major catalyst for our friendship for the rest of our time at the academy.

5

The day after Steano asked for my help.

Having successfully convinced Petra, I brought her to the meeting spot we’d agreed on.

Steano, Mia, and Ambros were already there.

“H-hey! Untie me, dammit!”

“Ahaha!”

…And so was a pathetic, handsome, blond-haired guy, whose hands and feet were tied with a rope.

The muscular Ambros was firmly holding down the young man struggling on the floor, while Mia watched and roared with laughter.

—Did they really just kidnap him?

“…What is that. I’m seriously creeped out. That’s terrifying.”

“It seems those two… forcefully… brought their friend.”

Mia and Ambros didn’t look guilty at all, and beamed at our arrival.

Faced with their psychotic behavior, Petra’s face twisted in genuine disgust as she pressed her temples.

“Wait, wait… these are our teammates? I’m already getting a very bad feeling about this.”

“Don’t worry. I feel the same way.”

“How is that reassuring? That just makes me more anxious.”

The antics of these two, who seemed to be missing more than just a few screws, made even my mind go blank.

—Did I make a mistake teaming up with them?

The look of pure despair on the blond man’s face was strong enough to make me think that.

“Aah! C’mon, Al-chi, you’re late!”

“M-Mia… who is that?”

“Hm? Oh, right! This is Flegel! He’s a noble from the Margenoire viscount house. He can use magic and a sword. And he’s super smart, too!”

“I see. Thanks for the explanation.”

—Although, what I really wanted to know was why he’s tied up.

Mia finished her intro and looked down at Flegel.

“Flegel. You can’t run away anymore, ‘kay?”

She said the exact line a kidnapper would use.

“Don’t mess with me! What’s the big idea, shoving a burlap sack over my head!?”

“Ehh? But, you know…?”

“It was the result of prioritizing efficiency.”

“WHAAAAAT!? Don’t screw with me, you idiots!”

“Bro-suke. Flegel seems angry.”

“Mhm. He is angry!”

“Aaaaaaaargh! Is it impossible to talk to idiots!?”

In contrast to the yelling Flegel, Mia and Ambros started explaining as if it couldn’t be helped.

These two are scary. Their values are completely warped.

I felt bad for him, so I put my hand on Ambros’s shoulder.

“Ambros. Let him go.”

Flegel was finally untied and his freedom of movement restored.

“Hey, Mia! Ambros! What do you mean ‘friends’!? I’m not some tool you can just use whenever you want!”

Once freed, Flegel didn’t try to run. He just confronted them.

“Well, it’s your fault for never coming out of your mansion!”

“We were in a hurry, so it was a necessary measure.”

“Your ethics are post-apocalyptic… At least ask me like a friend. This is going to give me trust issues…”

Surprisingly, he didn’t complain any more than that.

He was tied up and forcibly dragged to the school, but he was being remarkably tolerant.

“So, what’s the reason you kidnapped me and brought me here?”

—They didn’t even tell him the most important part?

“Actually… we need you to join the Siege Battle. Please. Save us.”

The one who bowed his head to Flegel with a grave look was none other than Steano.

“Save you…?”

“This is very sudden. I don’t understand. Why are you all so desperate?”

Following Flegel, Petra, who also didn’t know the full story, stepped forward with her arms crossed.

“Aldia. You’re hiding something from me, aren’t you?”

Apparently, her intuition is terrifyingly sharp.

“I wouldn’t say hiding…”

“Just ‘didn’t mention it’?”

“Well…”

—If I had said, “I want you to lend me your strength so my friend can use the extra credit from winning the Siege Battle to get out of supplementary lessons​,” she definitely would have said no.

Oh well. I’m busted now.

After that, Steano explained the real reason we were joining the Siege Battle.

The two prodigies who had been dragged into this listened to the ridiculous reason with cold expressions.

“Hah… To think I’d get roped into helping a supplementary​ student’s selfish request. This is exhausting.”

“Knowing Mia and Ambros, I figured it was something like this…”

Petra and Flegel aimed looks of exasperation at the three supplementary​ students.

“”Hah…””

And let out a magnificent, synchronized sigh.

6

The Siege Battle team members were decided.

Me, Steano, Petra, Mia, Ambros, and Flegel.

I thought we were still two people short, but that was sorted out.

“I’ll bring two of my underclassmen for the last two spots. They’re probably free anyway…”

With that one line from Petra, we had our minimum of eight people.

Steano wrote down all eight names on the application form and managed to submit it to the staff room before the deadline.

Now, all we had to do was wait for the real thing.

“…Hey, Al. Can we really win this?”

Steano asked nervously as he walked beside me on the way home at dusk. It was probably because our opponent was decided at the same time we applied.

“Why are you getting scared now? Don’t worry. If we don’t win, the supplementary group just has to study.”

“So cruel! You’re acting like this has nothing to do with you!”

“Because it doesn’t.”

“Can’t even argue with that…”

His footsteps seemed heavy.

“Aargh, you’re so spineless! We already decided to join, so stand up straight!”

The one whacking him in the back with a school bag was Petra, who for some reason was walking home with us.

“B-but…”

“We knew from the start our opponent would be stronger. At least, I did.”

Petra had been reluctant at first, but now she seemed to have resolved herself. Her expression was much more positive than Steano’s. She looked over the list of opponents.

“Our opponent is the Republic Team, led by Raquel Nova. The leader, Raquel Nova, is only a second-year middle schooler, but she’s called the next genius chairman of the Roscheld Republic’s council. Most of her team members are high-achieving second and third-year high school students, and they’ve filled the roster with the maximum of twenty people. They’re not an opponent to be taken lightly.”

“The more I hear, the worse our chances sound…”

“Yep. We’re just an eight-person team of first and second-year middle schoolers. No one thinks we can win this.”

She added, “…except us,” and stared at me.

“…You do have a plan to win, don’t you?”

Her gaze was filled with expectation.

I’m not so clueless as to shake my head here.

“Yeah. I’ve got the rules down. If we make full use of the battlefield and our team’s strengths, a win is theoretically possible.”

“Whew. Reassuring.”

“Well. If we lose, I’ll just give you all trauma that’ll last a lifetime.”

“You really are scary… Hey, Al. We’ve got an extremist on our team. Is that gonna be okay?”

“It’s not a problem if we win.”

“The ends justify the means, huh… Seriously, I’m counting on you.”

We’ve come this far. Losing isn’t an option. Our experience and knowledge are shallow, but our individual skills are high. No matter how strong the opponent, we can create a path to victory with the right strategy.

“If Petra, the magic genius, and the practical-skill powerhouses from the knight track can all use their full strength, we can win this easily, even at a numerical disadvantage.”

“I’m itching for a fight.”

“Alright! I don’t wanna do supplementary lessons​! We’re absolutely gonna win!”

“Your motivation is impure, but you’ve got guts, I’ll give you that.”

“Yeah! My motivation is second to none!”

“Steano, I don’t think that was a compliment.”

“Wha!? No way!”

“Yes, yes. You idiots should go study strategy for the battle. You’re the ones who’ll be in the most trouble if you screw up.”

“Wait, she really was insulting me!? Al! She’s being way harsher on me!”

“Haha…”

Petra’s verbal assault was relentless, but the atmosphere was somehow lighthearted. I could feel their motivation.

Mia and Ambros should be fine. The only remaining concerns are Flegel, who was forced to join… and Petra’s two first-year underclassmen.

Flegel was friends with Mia and Ambros and seemed to be a commander-type who could handle both magic and swords.

But I had zero information on Petra’s underclassmen, other than their names.

“Hey, Petra.”

“Hm?”

“I didn’t ask before, but about those two underclassmen joining us…”

“You mean Addy and Tredia?”

“Yeah. Why did you decide to have them join?”

‘Defeat’ isn’t in her dictionary.

She’s the type to do everything she can to win. There must be a good reason she put two brand-new first-years on the team.

“The reason? That’s simple.”

She tossed her glossy, translucent blond hair and smirked.

“Because if they’re my underclassmen, I can make them do whatever I want!”

“”…Huh?””

My and Steano’s dumbfounded voices were in perfect harmony.

I thought there’d be a deep reason, but what came out of her mouth was completely self-serving.

“Th-that’s the real reason you added them to the team?”

“That’s right. If an upperclassman joined, they’d definitely try to take charge. I hate being ordered around or nagged. But underclassmen… I can work them like cart horses. It’s very convenient.”

Steano stared at her, deadpan.

“…I think I’m starting to understand why so many people see you as an enemy.”

He stated the brutally rude, but accurate, truth.

7

“I’m Addy, first-year, middle school magic division.”

“L-likewise… Tredia, first-year, middle school magic division.”

We held a meeting for all the Siege Battle participants.

Addy and Tredia, whom I was meeting for the first time, stood next to Petra and bowed deeply.

Unlike Petra, they both seemed rather quiet.

“Addy is smart, and his magic skills are pretty good. Tredia has deep knowledge of magic tools. What do you think, Aldia? Think they’ll be useful?”

She talked about them as if they were her personal belongings. But if she was proud enough to introduce them like that, they were exactly the specs we desperately needed.

“Yeah. They’re exactly the kind of people we needed.”

Addy and Tredia could fill the rear-guard roles our team was missing. And if Tredia knows a lot about magic tools, our strategic options just expanded dramatically.

“Alright! So this is it! The eight of us are taking on the Siege Battle!”

“I’m starting to get pumped!”

“Mhm!”

The supplementary​ group—Steano, Mia, and Ambros—were all smiles. In contrast, the one with the darkest expression was Flegel, who looked deep in thought.

“…Hah.”

“Hey, what’s wrong, Flegel? You’re not looking so hot.”

“On the contrary, how can you be so excited? Our opponent is Raquel Nova’s hand-picked elite. They’re a team of Siege Battle veterans. A thrown-together team like ours doesn’t stand a chance.”

“Whaaat? Are you scared?”

“Yeah. All I can see is a future where we lose miserably.”

Flegel’s expression remained dark, unfazed by Mia’s bright tone. He stared at the opponent roster and the mansion blueprints, putting a hand to his forehead.

“…A 15-minute time limit is a tricky, too.”

He kept muttering to himself, lost in thought.

Of the eight of us, Flegel knew the most about the Siege Battle’s rules. And he, after looking at all the factors, had determined this would be an extremely tough fight.

“…Is it looking that bad?”

When I asked, Flegel nodded slightly.

“Yeah. I don’t see many paths to victory. Our only saving grace is that the win condition isn’t total annihilation, it’s ‘officer elimination.’ It gives us a chance for an all-or-nothing gamble, so our odds aren’t zero.”

Looking at the blueprints, I could see it was a spacious, three-story Western-style mansion.

“…And if we’re going to win, we should be on defense, not offense.”

“But there are a ton of rooms, right?”

“It’s impossible to defend the whole mansion with our numbers. But if we can just lock down the key choke points, we can run out the clock and win on defense. Attacking is hard, even with superior numbers.”

I processed Flegel’s thoughts and looked around at the team.

Frontline is me, Steano, Mia, and Ambros.

The ‘officer’ we have to protect should be one of the other four. Someone who’s good at rear support, but can also fight stubbornly if the enemy breaks through.

In that case…

“…Petra is the best fit for the leader role.”

She’s the only one who can give precise orders, has a stronger sense of responsibility than anyone, and has combat aptitude beyond just her magic.

“Petra. I want to ask you to be our leader for this Siege Battle.”

“Oh? You do get it. Choosing me as leader… you’ve got a good eye.”

She stuck out her flat chest, her eyes wide with a smug look.

Watching her, Mia and Steano looked at each other.

“Hey, Steano.”

“Hm?”

“Don’t you think Petra-chan is, like, super overconfident?”

“I totally get it! That seems to be her one and only flaw.”

They were whispering back and forth.

No, your voices are way too loud. Petra can hear every word.

“You two… It seems you don’t value your lives. I’m the leader, you know?”

“”Ugeh!?””

“Say one more insolent thing, and I’ll freeze those empty heads of yours with magic.”

“”S-sorry!””

…If you’re just going to apologize, maybe don’t say unnecessary things in the first place.

8

After that, we held a detailed strategy meeting for the Siege Battle.

A formation centered on Mia for counter-attacks. To make up for our numbers, Tredia would prepare a large number of trap-style magic tools, and the magic students would command the mansion’s defense.

The knight-track students all have exceptional physical abilities, so in contrast to the magic students defending a tight area, we decided on a deployment that would let them move freely throughout the mansion.

“Okay, so to sum it up: Al-chi is on the third floor, watching for intruders from the roof and listening for advances from the lower floors to alert everyone. Everyone but me and Bro-suke will be on the second floor, protecting Petra-chan and thinning out the enemy. Then, me and Bro-suke, the last ones, will trick the enemy who are watching the upper floors, launch a surprise attack from the basement, and take out their leader… That’s about right?”

—

TL Note: Mia is referring to Ambros as ‘Bro-suke’.

—

“Yeah. We’ll confirm the finer movements and practice our coordination later.”

“Okey-doke!”

It’s obvious we can’t win in a fair fight. This plan hinges on the efforts of Mia and Ambros, hiding in the basement for a surprise attack.

“Bro-suke, did you understand all that?”

“…Yeah! So we just have to beat the enemy!”

“In a nutshell, yup! ♪”

…Hearing Ambros’s over-simplified answer, I’m starting to get a little worried.

This is a battle we could easily lose with a single mistake.

“Hah. I’ll handle Mia’s and Ambros’s training somehow. You two, come here.”

“Ah!”

“Okay!”

Flegel pushed them both forward, looking annoyed, and went to confirm their movements.

After seeing them off, I exchanged a look with Petra.

“Well, I’m going to go lecture my two underclassmen on how mages fight. It’ll be hard to drill perfect movements into them, but it’s better than nothing.”

“Got it. In that case, I’ll teach Steano some of the defensive procedures.”

To prepare for the real thing, Petra and I also split off, taking the people we needed to train.

9

“Hey, Al.”

“Hm?”

“Thanks.”

Steano said with deep emotion as we were heading to the library to grab some textbooks.

“What’s this all of a sudden?”

“Well. I was just thinking, if you hadn’t been here, I probably wouldn’t have even been able to gather the team.”

“Probably. If you had recruited, it would’ve just been a chaotic mob of supplementary students.”

“You say that so casually… but you’re not wrong.”

This whole Siege Battle thing started as a way to help Steano get out of supplementary lessons​. Looking back now, I never dreamed it would become such a huge ordeal.

“Gathering the team was important, but it’s all meaningless if we don’t win.”

“Totally! Making the exemption conditional on winning… this school is too harsh on its lost little lambs.”

“…If that ‘lost little lamb’ had just decided to study seriously, we wouldn’t have had to go through all this trouble.”

“…Let’s just pretend you didn’t say that.”

Steano put his hands together and closed one eye.

“Hah. From now on, just study so you don’t need supplementary lessons​.”

“I will consider it, and after consideration, I will positively consider it.”

“…That’s what people say when they’re not going to do it.”

—I probably shouldn’t spoil him just because he’s my friend.

I’m seriously worried if Steano will actually be able to graduate.

Worrying about my friend’s future, I borrowed the necessary textbooks from the library and headed to an empty classroom. And then…

“Alright, Steano—it’s time to study.”

I announced the start of a special lecture on the one thing he hated most.

“Huh? Why? I decided to join the Siege Battle so I wouldn’t have to study…”

“A Siege Battle isn’t a one-on-one duel. It’s a large-scale battle. You have to learn how to fight accordingly, right?”

I held the textbooks and advanced on him, step by step. His face went pale and he collapsed onto the floor, holding his hands out as if begging for his life.

“St-stop… Come on, Al? We’re friends, right?”

“Yeah. You’re my important friend.”

“Th-then maybe just a little less studying…”

He’s so stubborn. He’s the one who invited me to the Siege Battle in the first place. I’m not letting him get away with it now.

“Steano, don’t hold this against me. This is all a result of respecting your desire to win the Siege Battle. Now, let’s begin.”

“Gya…”

“Gya?”

“Gyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah—!!”

During the quiet summer vacation, a scream loud enough to be heard in the nearby city streets echoed through the academy.

“Ah, hey, don’t run away!”

“Aargh! This completely defeats the purpose of getting out of supplementary lessons​!”

“It can’t be helped! You can’t fight properly with zero knowledge!”

“Even so, this amount of material is no joke! I really don’t want to do thiiiiis!!”

—After this, Steano was forced to write in his notebook until the sun went down.

Steano, after having all sorts of tactical knowledge crammed into his head, had a vacant look in his eyes, but we all agreed to overlook it as a necessary sacrifice for the Siege Battle.

It was just a trivial incident at the academy. But joining that Siege Battle is what brought our group together.

In the process of all eight of us banding together for the main event, many friendships were built.

Meeting them was a precious thing that colored my school life.

—And this Siege Battle of ours would later be passed down through the school’s history as ‘The Greatest Underdog Victory in Philnotes Military Academy History.’ But that is another story.

Epilogue

Everything is proceeding according to plan.

To liberate the souls of the pitiful Chosen who struggle against fate, I was finishing my preparations to march on the Empire’s battlefield.

[The Heretic God’s Sanctuary, the Dyrst Region]

This is a defiled land, saturated with a miasma that neutralizes the power of our Lord God, Svell.

Lord Svell told me that the Chosen, selected by the Heretic God, are drawn here as if by instinct, gathering in this very place.

“…It makes my skin crawl.”

Taking advantage of the fact that Lord Svell’s hand cannot reach them, these wicked beings selfishly try to alter history.

It is precisely because they possess memories of the past that the Heretic God’s Chosen try to defy the fate that awaits them. But that, too, ends today.

“I will eliminate every last one of you shortly… fufu.”

After I gain complete control of the Dyrst region and purify all the miasma festering there with my power as a Saint, I can use this land as a foothold for the Empire’s destruction.

“And for that to happen, I’ll need you two to work hard for me.”

Flanking me, the two Divine Beasts granted by Lord Svell showed their readiness for battle, tearing at the ground.

“Ohoho. You two are just… dying to fight, aren’t you?”

“—!”

The Divine Beasts shrieked, their cries at a frequency no human ear could detect.

One, a giant serpent covered in pure white scales, coiled itself again and again, crushing a human believer to death.

The other, a giant serpent covered in jet-black scales, flicked its tongue rapidly as it devoured a soldier from our order who was standing nearby.

“L-Lady Reshia—!”

“Don’t be so alarmed. They have become noble sacrifices.”

“Sacrifices…”

“But of course. Is that not a wonderful thing?”

To be able to offer one’s own flesh and blood to the Divine Beasts who serve our Lord God.

For a worshiper of the Svell faith, there is no greater bliss.

Listening to the satisfying, crisp sound of bones breaking, I found myself in a state of rapture.

—Ah, how truly fortunate they are.

“To be able to reach Lord Svell’s side before anyone else… I’m truly envious.”

“…Yes, of course.”

I smiled at the pale-faced soldier as I gazed out at the military preparations for our advance on the Empire.

“Fufu. So, are the preparations for the offensive complete?”

“Yes. As soon as the Kingdom’s army begins its march, we will also begin our advance into the Valugan Empire.”

“I see. Then there are no changes to the plan. Continue your preparations so we can depart at any time.”

“Yes, ma’am!”

The soldier gave a sharp salute and fled the scene as if escaping.

“The enemy should be thoroughly exhausted from their battle with the Kingdom’s army… I must thank Lord Euris.”

I pictured his face—the blond-haired, prideful man who is, for me, the easiest to manipulate. He is among that group that will soon be clashing with the Imperial army, that Prince Euris. Of course, if he fights the mighty Imperial army, there’s no guarantee he’ll survive.

“…If you die, you have my condolences. But you truly are a convenient and beloved pawn, Lord Euris. To set such a wonderful stage for me.”

As I clasped my hands and closed my eyes, the serpents drew closer, as if to protect me.

I offered a prayer of thanks to Prince Euris—or perhaps, a moment of silence for his future self—and slowly opened my eyes.

“Lord Svell—I will fulfill your dearest wish. I vow to you that I will eliminate every last time-bending Chosen, prevent the alteration of history, and then seize this land where the Heretic God is enshrined.”

“Lady Reshia. It appears the Kingdom’s army is about to leave the royal capital.”

“Understood.”

I finished my oath and addressed the entire army, which now stood ready to march.

“—Then we, too, shall begin our advance on the Empire.”

I swung my hand down. The soldiers set off, their armor clattering as they marched forward as one.

An army of seven thousand troops from our order. A great host, destined to crush the Imperial army after it has been worn down by its fight with the Kingdom.

History is something that must be repeated. A new wind is not needed here. Everything must be as our Lord God wills it. This world must be crafted exactly as the [Progenitor God Svell] desires.

—And I, the Saint Reshia, will personally erase every anomaly from this world.

“Now, let us begin. May history arrive at its one, true destination.”

The Empire is on the road to ruin. No matter how many times they repeat, no matter how many times they try again, changing the ending is an act that defies God’s will.

To change the future… such a thing is wrong. That is why I will deliver their final judgment in God’s stead.

To the fools who defy their fate… they will now learn just how meaningless their meager resistance truly is.

4

The place they took me was swarming with more than twenty people—the sons of the anti-Princess nobles and their personal guards.

Every one of them had a sword at their hip and a vile smile on their face, making it painfully obvious they were eager to beat me to a pulp.

“We’re here, Sir Knight. This is your graveyard.”

“Thanks for coming along so quietly. Haha!”

“Alright. Let’s get this over with before someone sees. Hey! Is the lookout posted properly?”

The one who seemed to be the leader called out towards the path leading to the inner courtyard, but there was no reply.

“Hey! What’s wrong?”

“…I’m the one who’d like to ask what’s wrong. You scum!”

“—!”

Holding the lookout by the head with a viselike grip, veins bulging on his forehead, was the man who gave me trouble when I tried to cross into the Empire on the dragon.

“L-Linos…! Why are you here?!”

Linos von Gerreschiff. The second son of the leading pro-Princess noble house, and a man who was the very picture of an Imperial noble who loathed commoners.

“Hmph. I heard the cries of beasts who have forgotten their pride as nobles. I came to look, and it’s just as I thought. You… How dare you do something that stains the very history of the Empire.”

“Shut up, you! This has nothing to do with you!”

“Nothing to do with me? Don’t be absurd. I’m saying your behavior degrades the dignity of the entire Imperial nobility. Ganging up on a commoner to bully him? …Shame on you, you cowards.”

The argument was clearly going in Linos’s favor.

Still, it was surprising to see him acting like he was protecting me.

He hates commoners. That was my first impression of him… but maybe his elitism wasn’t as strong as I thought.

“Hey… commoner.”

“—Yes?”

“You’re just as bad. I don’t know if you’re getting cocky from being made a personal knight, but don’t just follow along without any caution. This is exactly why I hate commoners…”

Just as I was about to change my opinion of Linos, that last statement brought me right back. Nope, he definitely hates commoners.

As I processed that, a question popped into my head.

—Why did Linos show up here?

It’s far too convenient to be a coincidence.

“In any case, I cannot overlook the foolish act you are about to commit against this commoner. Be gone, quickly.”

“—! Just because you’re from a ducal house…”

“That’s right. I am the second son of the Gerreschiff ducal house. I hold a high position in this Empire. And at the same time, I am proud to be an Imperial noble. Unlike you cowards.”

Linos’s behavior was the same as I’d seen before. That overconfident expression, as if he believes without a doubt that he is more virtuous than anyone. If there’s anything out of place…

“…Magic?”

It’s just that I can feel the faint presence of magic surrounding Linos.

The others probably haven’t noticed. But I can.

This magic is the same type as the ‘Sight-Share’ magic Fadi used.

—I see. So that’s what this is.

I perfectly understood why Linos was here and why I was the only one who could sense the magic. This situation was created by Princess Valtrune. Which means she must have witnessed the anti-Princess nobles cornering me.

—What she wants isn’t a peaceful resolution.

“She wants me to cut loose… is that it?”

I whispered so quietly no one could hear, and my hand touched the hilt of my sword.

If I’m to follow her wishes, I need to beat these anti-Princess nobles senseless in front of Linos. But if I make the first move, it’ll look bad for me.

To make sure they are the ones who struck first…

“Lord Linos. You don’t need to worry.”

Right now, the most important thing is to act like a clueless, incapable commoner.

“What? What are you…”

“I wish to have a dialogue with them. Therefore…”

“Are you an idiot!? Don’t you realize you’ve been trapped?”

I met Linos’s shouts with a cold stare.

Of course I know what he’s saying, but if I acknowledge it, things won’t proceed smoothly.

—Don’t get in my way, you well-meaning aristocrat.

“—!”

Linos seemed to notice my intimidating gaze. He broke out in a cold sweat, his mouth twisting. I feel bad for brushing off his kindness, but I need him to let it go, just for now.

“…Lord Linos. I’ll be fine.”

“…Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

He crossed his arms and leaned against a nearby tree.

“Hey, Linos. Does this mean you’re not getting involved?”

“The commoner himself refused my help. I’m not lifting a finger.”

“Heh. That works for us… Just stand there and shut up.”

Without any attempt to hide it, the leader drew his sword.

“…What do you think you’re doing?”

“You still don’t get it? Hah. What a slow personal knight. Listen up. You’re about to beg us for mercy. You’re going to grovel on the ground pathetically.”

The men around him also drew their swords one by one.

Mixed in with the anti-Princess nobles were several skilled fighters.

“Go on, draw your sword! We’re all going to enjoy watching you lose miserably!”

They urged me to draw, but I just smiled, my sword still in its scabbard.

“Hey, what’s your problem!”

“No problem. I just decided I don’t even need to draw my sword.”

“—! Don’t you mock us, you…!”

The blade that swung at me grazed my cheek. A thin line of red blood trickled quietly from the small cut.

“Ha. Does it hurt?”

I ignored his mocking tone and let out a deep breath.

—Alright. The stage is set.

“You made the first move. In that case, I won’t hold back.”

“Huh? What are you saying… Gofh!”

My sword was still in its sheath, but I swung it in a sharp arc. It connected with the man’s jaw with a dull, heavy thud. It’s not lethal, but it’s more than powerful enough to teach a fool a lesson.

I can’t exactly go around killing nobles, but this much should be forgivable. Above all, I’m the victim here. I was cut with a sword. No one can blame me for fighting back.

“Ugh… Gah!”

He clutched his head, blood streaming from his nose. A truly pathetic sight. But this only served to agitate the others.

“You bastard…”

“Don’t get full of yourself.”

“We’ll tear you to pieces!”

Hostile gazes focused on me from all sides.

“You guys. ‘Take good care’ of this personal knight for me.”

As soon as one of the anti-Princess nobles said that, they all drew their swords and rushed me at once.

“Hah!”

“Sei-yah!”

Their sword strokes are so laughably easy to read. It reminds me of my time on the battlefield, reeking of death. This situation is so lukewarm it’s almost funny.

I deflect their blades with minimal movement, countering the instant an opening appears.

“…How boring.”

“—!”

I twist my body, mixing in hand-to-hand combat to systematically deal with them one by one.

There’s not a single shred of excitement. My body just moves on its own, neutralizing these pitiful opponents. This is just work. They’re fragile insects I can crush without even thinking. In fact, it takes more concentration to not kill them than it does to beat them.

“Hiii! I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”

Just a few minutes. That’s all it took to put them in their place. They must not even have the energy to curse me anymore; they’ve all collapsed, trembling.

They lost their will to fight awfully quick, considering they’re the ones who started this.

—I just brushed off a spark that landed on me. Nothing more.

I picked up a sword that had fallen at my feet and tossed it toward one of the men, who was shaking and teary-eyed. The man’s eyes shot open at the metallic clatter.

“Pick it up. We’re not done.”

“P-pick it up…?”

“That’s right. You all started this little party. It’s only right that you take responsibility and see this through to the end, don’t you think?”

A flicker of genuine irritation wells up inside me.

“You all ganged up on me, Rune-sama’s personal knight. I won’t be satisfied until you’ve paid for that. Now, pick up the sword.”

They pointed their swords at me with the intent to hurt me. So, they can’t complain if I, in turn, instill the greatest possible fear into their hearts.

I’ll make it so they can never again even think of acting against Princess Valtrune or me.

“Come on, pick it up.”

“I can’t… I can’t!”

“If you won’t pick it up, then fine. I’ll take your life as compensation right here. It might be dishonorable for a noble to die without leaving any last words, but don’t hold it against me.”

“—Hic! I’ll pick it up! Please forgive me!”

Damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t. A defeated man on his knees has no choices. The others gathered around started to back away, terrified.

—But I have no intention of letting them off this easy.

“If you won’t come to me, shall I come to you?”

I send a sharp glare, and the air crackles. The stench of fear starts to rise, but I ignore it and raise my sheathed sword to the heavens.

That gesture sealed their fate.

“””W-We’re terribly sorry! Please forgive us!”””

They all drop to the ground, prostrating themselves. The fight has completely left them.

—Hah. Is this all they are?

The Empire’s soldiers. Its knights. Its nobles. Is this pathetic rabble all they amount to? They wouldn’t even last a second against the Provisional Elite Corps.

Ritziareite and the others in the Provisional Elite Corps are still inexperienced, and many of them are young. But almost none of them would surrender so quickly in the face of a strong opponent. They would, without a doubt, choose to fight to the death.

The Imperial army, led by elitist anti-Princess nobles. How many of them actually have any real skill?

Seeing this pathetic display, I find it impossible to believe they have the strength to take on the Kingdom’s army.

“Hmph… how pathetic.”

The man, his face twisted in humiliation, glares at me.

“I won’t forgive you. I’ll make you pay for this…!”

The loser’s empty words aren’t worth listening to.

This whole scene is being watched by someone through the ‘Sight-Share’ magic cast on Linos. Their aggression will be made public by Princess Valtrune.

“…Don’t think this is over.”

I turned my back to leave, but I felt an intense killing intent from behind me. It vanished just as quickly.

“Hey. What did you coat that sword with?”

The sword belonging to the man who was glaring at me with such hatred was now at my feet, kicked there by Linos. A strange, acrid smell wafted up from it.

“…Poison. You’re truly despicable.”

Did he think he could attack me from behind with a poisoned blade and land even a scratch? Ridiculous. An incompetent noble who can’t even hide his killing intent or master basic sword skills has no chance of killing me.

The man turned his sharp gaze on Linos and yelled.

“—! Linos, you bastard!”

“Silence.”

“Guh…!”

But Linos’s gaze was even colder, radiating a pressure that crushed the man as he stepped on his head.

“You truly are a fool. Not content with causing this commotion, you even resort to using poison to try and kill a personal knight…”

“Y-you said it too! You said you couldn’t stand that personal knight!”

“I did. But I can’t stand you despicable cowards even more. Don’t worry. You’re all finished, one way or another.”

“Huh?… What do you mean?”

A moment after Linos’s sneer, the sound of countless heavy footsteps echoed through the courtyard.

“Restrain these miscreants who dared to assault Lord Aldia!”

A flood of soldiers from the Provisional Elite Corps poured into the inner courtyard.

“Wh-What’s going on!?”

“I was ordered by Her Highness the Princess to watch and ensure this personal knight didn’t get into any trouble.”

“What!?”

Linos ignored the shocked man, his cold expression unchanging as he let out a sigh.

“…But there was no way Her Highness, in her wisdom, would entrust this task to me alone. The moment you harmed that man, your fate was sealed. You can await your punishment while regretting incurring Her Highness’s wrath.”

“—!”

The soldiers from the Provisional Elite Corps began restraining the anti-Princess nobles’ men with practiced, efficient movements.

“Hey, Al. You okay?”

“Steano… why are you here?”

Steano and Ambros were among those who had come to my aid.

“We were given orders from Lady Valtrune to rescue you.”

“Yup. That’s why we’re here.”

Steano said this, then looked at my cheek with a worried expression. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and pressed it to the cut.

“You’re injured, aren’t you? Are you really okay?”

“Yeah. It’s just a scratch. Nothing to worry about.”

“Don’t overdo it. A lot of people would be sad if you got hurt.”

I nodded at Steano’s words and looked around.

The restrained men were being led away one by one.

“Aldia. In any case, I’m glad you’re safe.”

“Yeah. Thanks for coming to help.”

Ambros gave me a small smile before turning to help restrain the remaining anti-Princess nobles.

“…Did Rune-sama plan this whole thing?”

“Huh? Weren’t you in on it with her, Al?”

“No. I didn’t know anything.”

—I had acted on a guess as to what she wanted, but this wasn’t a pre-planned event. There was no guarantee the anti-Princess nobles would even contact me in the first place.

Linos, still standing there with his arms crossed, also didn’t seem to know the full extent of Princess Valtrune’s plan.

“…Those guys won’t be causing any trouble for a while.”

“No, they won’t. I imagine they will receive a severe punishment, one that ensures they never approach Al again.”

“Rune-sama, and…”

Following Steano and Ambros, my beautiful white-haired liege appeared with the dignified Emperor in tow behind her.

“Your Majesty!”

The current Emperor, Grode von Felsdorf. His sharp, polished gaze was fixed straight on me.

“…Aldia Graetz, I presume.”

Hearing his deep, resonant voice, I immediately dropped to one knee.

“Yes. I am Aldia Graetz, Your Majesty.”

“I see. I witnessed the preceding conflict clearly. Your conduct as a personal knight was truly splendid.”

“You are too kind, Your Majesty.”

His gaze was still sharp, but at least he didn’t seem to have a bad impression of me.

“Valtrune. You have taken on a fine personal knight.”

“Yes, Father.”

Princess Valtrune also gave a graceful curtsy, and I could feel the space completely fall under Emperor Grode’s control.

He stroked his beard with his fingers, the corners of his mouth turning up slightly.

“Furthermore, the ‘Sight-Share’ magic used by your other man is also wonderful. To be able to see a distant scene so clearly… it is truly a unique magic.”

“Flegel, like Al, is also from the Kingdom. I recognized that the magic he wields is special. I did not want to let such talent go to waste, so I invited him to the Empire.”

“I see… which means your request to establish the Provisional Elite Corps was also…”

“—Yes. On the surface, I stated I wanted a loyal and powerful private force for my personal protection. But my true aim was to create an organization where talented individuals could shine. A place where those who deserve the spotlight can be active on the main stage—I wish to make the Empire a country full of such hope. I founded the Provisional Elite Corps with the belief that it could be the vanguard for that change.”

Princess Valtrune rattled off praises for the Provisional Elite Corps and for us without a hint of hesitation.

Grode nodded, looking pleased, and Princess Valtrune’s cheeks flushed slightly.

I understood her intent completely. This situation was created under the false pretext of exposing the anti-Princess nobles’ aggression to the Emperor. Her real goal was to demonstrate the value of the Provisional Elite Corps, and my value as her personal knight, to the Emperor.

“Father. What do you think of my loyal retainers?”

She had used the anti-Princess nobles’ predictable harassment of me to appeal to the Emperor that she was worthy of being his successor. And there was no way the wise Emperor didn’t understand her scheme.

Which means…

“Ah. Wonderful—I am now certain, Valtrune, that there is no one but you to succeed me.”

It means the Emperor himself wants Princess Valtrune to inherit the throne.

She didn’t prevent this problem to deny the anti-Princess nobles an opening; she intentionally orchestrated it.

—She used me as the perfect bait to lure out the rebellious faction and expose their own incompetence.

“Thank you for your gracious words.”

“There is no need for modesty. I am simply overjoyed to see my beloved daughter has grown so splendidly.”

This father and daughter are planning to systematically crush the faction opposing Princess Valtrune’s succession. The two royals create a harmonious, almost warm, atmosphere. Listening to their conversation with deathly pale faces are the anti-Princess nobles being led away.

—They probably never imagined that harassing a personal knight, just to mess with him, would lead to such a disaster.

“By the way, Father. That matter we discussed earlier…”

“Ah. The inspection in the Dyrst region, with the guests from other nations. I remember.”

“That’s good. And about the matter of succession…”

“I was hesitant when you first consulted me, but after seeing this, I see no reason to hesitate.”

“Then…”

“—Valtrune. Upon the successful conclusion of your inspection in the Dyrst region, I shall bequeath my throne to you! It is a great responsibility, but I am sure you can achieve it.”

As if they had planned it all along, the conversation flows inexorably in Princess Valtrune’s favor.

With Princess Valtrune, who knows the future years in advance, making a serious move to claim the throne, her opponents won’t be able to stop her easily.

“Thank you, Father. I will do everything in my power to ensure it is a meaningful inspection.”

After saying those words, Princess Valtrune took my hand.

“My personal knight appears to be injured, so if you will excuse us.”

“Ah… The next time we meet, it may be when you inherit the throne.”

“I pray for that as well.”

She gave a signal to the Provisional Elite Corps soldiers with her eyes.

They immediately fell into formation, flanking her on both sides without a single flaw.

“Then, good day.”

With an elegant bow, Princess Valtrune linked her arm with mine, and we left the inner courtyard.

The sound of armor clanking echoed through the castle. Walking with an entourage of countless soldiers, Princess Valtrune had clearly climbed another step on the stairs to the throne, and her figure now carried an air of authority that strongly resembled the current Emperor.

5

“Hey! Why did you let yourself get hurt on purpose?”

Princess Valtrune pouted, her fingers gently touching my cheek as she stared at me.

“My apologies. I thought that was the most efficient way.”

If I, her personal knight, had struck first, it would have reflected badly on her. Besides, we were being watched.

Normally, I wouldn’t show mercy to an opponent, but starting a bloodbath with the Emperor watching was out of the question.

“I apologize. I overstepped.”

“Don’t apologize. It was my fault, too, for not explaining. I just… I believed you would understand my intentions… Still, I never thought you’d take a blow like that instead of dodging it.”

She looked down sadly, but I believe my decision to take the first cut was the right one for that situation.

The fact that her personal knight was injured. That’s what gave her the upper hand in the negotiations for the throne.

Even if that weren’t the case, by making sure I only counter-attacked, I figured I wouldn’t be blamed for drawing my sword.

“Thanks to you, we were able to secure the promise of succession. But… I don’t want to see you get hurt.”

A warm, white light enveloped the cut, closing it. It was her healing magic.

“It was a shallow cut this time, so it’s fine, but… please stop sacrificing yourself like that, okay?”

“—Yes.”

It’s unheard of for a princess to personally heal her knight’s wounds.

She had dismissed all the Provisional Elite Corps soldiers, so it was just the two of us… or not. Which is why the jealous stares I was getting were so intense.

“Lady Valtrune. If you would be so kind?”

Linos’s soft voice spoke up as he placed a hand on my shoulder.

“Oh. You have something to talk to Al about, don’t you?”

“Yes. Alone, if possible.”

Beneath his calm tone, I could feel a cold, detached emotion directed squarely at me.

Princess Valtrune didn’t seem to notice. As soon as she finished healing me, she stood up.

“Thank you for earlier, Linos. Thanks to you watching, things didn’t get out of hand.”

“No. I didn’t do anything.”

Then he added under his breath, “Truly nothing…” in a frustrated-sounding voice.

His downcast silver eyes were wavering endlessly.

“Lady Valtrune. Your time…”

“Ah! You’re right. I have to go show my face to the Provisional Elite Corps. Well then, Al, I’ll see you later.”

At the reminder, she brushed her hair back, looking slightly flustered, and turned away from us.

I watched her wave cutely until she was gone, then brought my consciousness back to the awkward, prickly silence with Linos. The air turned sharp and uncomfortable.

“…We’re going for a walk, commoner.”

Linos spat the words out and started walking in the opposite direction from where Princess Valtrune had run off.

6

At first, I couldn’t stand his existence.

It was nauseating enough that a commoner was on such familiar terms with Princess Valtrune, but why, of all people, was that man chosen as her personal knight?

It took me a long time to understand.

—Aldia Graetz.

A commoner from the Reshfeld Kingdom.

Apparently, he met Princess Valtrune at the military academy she attended, but his grades were unremarkable. There wasn’t a single story about him excelling in any particular way.

“…Hah.”

‘A man of his caliber has no business being a personal knight.’

The moment that changed my mind came suddenly.

It was when I witnessed him… him… cutting down the men from the anti-Princess faction one after another.

The flying sparks and those glistening, blood-red eyes. I can’t forget them.

Aldia Graetz usually had a quiet, stiff impression.

But his demeanor in combat was so fierce and ruthless, it was as if a different personality was hiding inside him.

That sword style was, without a doubt, specialized for killing. It wasn’t for protecting someone; it was a dreadful, horrific technique for destroying any obstacle in his path.

If his sword hadn’t been sheathed, every single one of those anti-Princess nobles would be dead.

He’s on a completely different level from your average knight. He was, in all respects, a monster thirsting for blood.

That’s why there are things I still don’t understand.

Is it possible for a mere student who attended a military academy to have such battle-honed sword skills? Normally, it would be absolutely impossible.

His movements were designed to minimize damage and sustain a long fight. He seemed to perceive every enemy within a certain range, positioning himself as if he predicted all their movements. He responded fluidly and appropriately even to attacks from behind. It was a flawless, gapless performance.

On top of that, those ruthless eyes. He wouldn’t hesitate to kill, which makes him even more dangerous.

Inexperienced soldiers and knights almost always show a slight hesitation when cutting someone, but he had none of that.

“…Were you really just a student until a few months ago?”

I asked the black-haired man following closely behind me. He met my gaze with an unsettling look, as if he could see right through me, and nodded silently.

“…I see. You’re quite a man, then.”

That wasn’t sarcasm. It was the highest praise I could offer.

“…I’m her personal knight.”

He replied to my words with a perfectly calm expression, his voice utterly cold.

Is this how much his attitude changes when Princess Valtrune isn’t around?

I also change my demeanor depending on the person, but this man is far more blatant.

“You’ve sworn loyalty to Lady Valtrune, correct?”

“Yes. I believe my loyalty to her is deeper than anyone’s.”

“Is that… so.”

There was no falsehood in that statement.

Those eyes were real. If Princess Valtrune told him to die, he would instantly cut off his own head. That’s how devoted, how captivated by her, his eyes were.

Hah. It’s almost funny. If he’s just a typical new graduate, then the Philnotes Military Academy must be a monster-manufacturing plant.

And those resolute eyes, sharp as a seasoned warrior’s.

—This man is, without a doubt, an anomaly.

He’s not someone you can categorize as ‘commoner’ or ‘noble.’ He’s an unknowable monster, hiding in plain sight.

Aldia Graetz—this man has the eyes of someone who has killed many.

How did she tame this monster? And how did she see through him to know of his unparalleled strength? The questions just keep piling up.

“May I ask you a question as well?”

Aldia Graetz spoke abruptly, stopping and letting out a sigh.

I’m the second son of the Gerreschiff ducal house, and he’s treating me with such disrespect. But, paradoxically, I find his lack of commoner-like weakness refreshing.

“If you have a question, ask whatever you want.”

“Then I’ll take you up on that… Lord Linos. Are you Rune-sama’s ally, or her enemy?”

I don’t find the question strange. This man is simply asking a question he genuinely has.

“Which do you think I am?”

“…Who knows. I’m asking because I can’t tell.”

“What if I were her enemy?”

“If you were her enemy, Lord Linos… I would probably dispose of you at an early stage.”

“Hmph. You’re not even trying to hide it.”

“No. Because… you’ve already sensed it, haven’t you? That I’m that kind of person.”

His red-black pupils were ruthless. He was like a demon who had wandered in from another world.

The air grew suffocatingly thick.

“I am…”

“You are… what?”

“—”

My throat seized, and the next word wouldn’t come out.

I’ve never experienced this before. I was being swallowed by an intense killing intent that seemed to envelop the entire castle, and I felt so sick I thought I might vomit.

—I might be killed by this man, right here and now.

The pressure Aldia Graetz released was so intense, so far beyond imagination, that the thought was unavoidable.

7

A suffocating silence.

It was broken by Aldia Graetz, who wore a hollow, empty smile.

“…My apologies. You’re not an enemy, are you, Lord Linos?”

The crushing, suffocating atmosphere vanished in an instant. He walked past me, who had frozen in place.

“I’m sorry for testing you like that. But this, too, is for Rune-sama’s sake. Please, as two people who have sworn loyalty to her, I hope you can overlook it.”

“Ah… Ah, yes. Let’s do that.”

I wiped away the cold sweat that was streaming down my face like a waterfall and followed the personal knight’s black-haired back.

His stride was slow, matching my own. I no longer had the composure to show any hostility toward him.

“Lord Linos. You are of the Gerreschiff ducal house, the head of the pro-Princess faction, correct?”

“Yes. My older brother is the head of the house.”

“I see. So your loyalty to Rune-sama is among the highest of the Imperial nobility?”

“Of course! The Gerreschiff house has served the Imperial family for generations. We are proud Imperial nobles. We would never become fools who harm the royal family, not even if it costs us our lives!”

As I declared this, a bold, challenging smile played on his lips.

“…Absolute loyalty. I see.”

“—!”

A shiver ran down my spine, but I feigned calmness, determined not to let him see my agitation. I couldn’t read his expression, but I could feel his intention to use me leaking from his every gesture.

“Lord Linos. I have a proposal for you.”

This was clearly going to be a shady offer. But this man’s loyalty to Princess Valtrune is real.

That’s why…

“…I’m listening.”

…I sensed that whatever he had to say, it was worth considering.

“It’s not such a difficult proposal. Please, don’t be so guarded.”

“Hmph. I’ve been cautious since the day I was born.”

The Imperial nobility is famous for its elitism. The Gerreschiff house was no exception.

My late parents valued the ducal house’s status above all else and, like typical Imperial nobles, held the stance that it was perfectly fine to oppress commoners.

Acting arrogant was a noble’s privilege. That was the ‘truth’ they tried to instill in both me and my brother.

—But I grew up to be the kind of person who questioned everything, even the words of my own parents.

“I’m surprised. I thought you were the type of man who would dismiss my words as not worth hearing.”

“I hate commoners. But… I do respect you. At the very least, you’ve reached a passing grade as a personal knight.”

“That’s high praise.”

I don’t hate commoners because of the Imperial nobles’ typical elitism. I hate them because they’re weak, liable to be blown away by a single gust of wind.

In that respect, the man in front of me has a will of iron. He would keep walking as long as Princess Valtrune wished it, even if he were cut by swords or burned by fire.

—I don’t dislike people who possess something strong and unshakeable.

“Go on. Tell me what you’re plotting.”

“It’s not so grand as a plot. I just came to the simple realization that the anti-Princess nobles are a truly unnecessary existence. We need to be looking outside our borders. But instead, we’re sparking conflicts within our own country. Don’t you find that utterly foolish?”

“…Continue.”

“Frankly, they’re in the way. Rune-sama is worthy of being the next Emperor. No one else can lead the Empire’s future. And yet, the fools who oppose her succession do nothing but think of ways to trip her up. Don’t you agree that such an existence should be… eliminated?”

I agreed with his opinion.

Princess Valtrune is the Emperor’s only daughter. When it comes to the line of succession, there is no one above her.

“The anti-Princess nobles are in the way… so what do you want from me?”

His sharp, red eyes glinted, unsettling and brilliant.

“…Lord Linos. I want you to take control of the entire Imperial military.”

“—! Are you sane?”

“Yes. I am perfectly sane.”

It’s true that the main obstacle to Princess Valtrune’s succession is the interference of the anti-Princess nobles. And at the very top of that faction is the Duke of Felsdorf, the Military Lord who controls the Imperial army.

To take control of the entire Imperial military… that means defeating the Military Lord and rebuilding the army into a new organization. But that’s a massive, almost impossible, undertaking.

“Hmph. Are you telling me to confront the Felsdorf ducal house? If so, you’re asking the wrong person. I’m the second son of the Gerreschiff house. The power of the house belongs to my brother…”

“Ah. Please don’t misunderstand. I am asking you, Lord Linos, as an individual. I’m not after the power of your ducal house.”

—Don’t ask the impossible.

A man who hasn’t even inherited his family’s title, who isn’t even the heir, has no power to control an army. But, as if he’d anticipated even that, he gave a devilish smile.

“Rest assured. The Imperial army’s Mage Division and Cavalry Division are already on our side. Of the remaining divisions, the most troublesome one is…”

“…The Dragon Mount Division.”

“Yes. I want you, Lord Linos, to hijack the Dragon Mount Division.”

The commander of the Dragon Mount Division is a leading anti-Princess noble and a loyal vassal of Duke Felsdorf.

If we can strip him of his post as commander, Duke Felsdorf’s influence as Military Lord will be greatly diminished.

“I understand your request… So, what is my compensation for taking control of the Dragon Mount Division?”

This is a negotiation. He wouldn’t make such a request without offering something in return.

“What can you offer me?”

“…I’ve already told you the compensation.”

“What?”

Ignoring my confusion, he whispered in my ear.

“Control of the entire Imperial military. When you’ve secured the Dragon Mount Division, Lord Linos, I will petition Rune-sama to recommend you as the next Military Lord.”

For me, who had failed to inherit the family title, that was the greatest possible reward.

So, his initial words weren’t just empty talk.

It’s true… hijacking a single division is something I could do. And the reward for that would be the entire Imperial military…

—Haha.

“That’s absurd. The other division commanders would never stay silent if I were to become Military Lord.”

I said it mockingly, but Aldia Graetz’s expression didn’t change as he stared at me with those red eyes.

“I’m serious. If you become the Military Lord, Lord Linos, Rune-sama’s reign will be stabilized immediately. Besides, this is a huge chance for you. Am I wrong?”

“A chance…?”

“Your brother will inherit the family title, and you will be stuck in the position of ‘second son of the Gerreschiff ducal house.’ You’ll only have a borrowed title. …But you, with your immense pride as an Imperial noble, can’t be satisfied with that, can you?”

“…That… is…”

“Don’t you want it? A title that is yours, and yours alone. If you become the Military Lord, you will be Rune-sama’s most trusted confidant. That should be far more valuable than inheriting the ducal title.”

The devil’s whisper. This commoner, whom I despised, was striking at my weakest point with perfect, unerring accuracy.

‘He’s just stringing you along with sweet words.’

How I wish I could have just dismissed it like that. But I was captivated by his sweet proposal, and I fell silent.

He clapped me on the shoulder as I stood there, unable to think.

“I look forward to a favorable reply.”

And with that, the monster of unknown origin left as coolly as he had arrived.

“…Me, as Military Lord. No, that’s ridiculous.”

Just two days later.

At that moment, I never imagined I would so easily accept Aldia Graetz’s proposal.

I had always thought of myself as a more thoughtful and cautious person, but perhaps that was just my own misconception.

—I had just agreed to help a true monster, one that was eating away at the Empire from the shadows.

8

Linos stood frozen, his expression utterly dumbfounded.

Watching him, I was certain.

“…Negotiations successful.”

I muttered in a raspy voice. The moment Linos was out of sight, I snapped my fingers.

“Fadi.”

I called the name of the young man who was both the leader of the ‘White Smoke Lizards’ and the head of the Provisional Elite Corps’ intelligence division. He slithered down from the air, landing lightly before turning his innocent-looking eyes on me.

“What is it, boss?”

“Put a tail on Linos. It looks like he’s going to be a valuable asset.”

“Oh, I get it. Roger that. I’ll put a few people from the ‘White Smoke Lizards’ on him~”

“Good. Thanks.”

I gave a brief nod. When I looked back at Fadi, he was holding out a blood-stained knife, as if showing off.

“Oh, right! Just as you ordered, I slaughtered all the anti-Princess nobles’ spies in the area. There were about twenty of ’em, I think. It was pretty easy!”

Behind his innocent smile, a cruel and terrifying darkness swirled. But that wasn’t true only for him.

“Just what I’d expect. By the way, what about the report to Rune-sama?”

“Of course I haven’t reported it. You told me to keep my mouth shut.”

“Good.”

“…But are you sure this is okay? Doing all this behind Lady Valtrune’s back.”

“I just don’t want Rune-sama to worry.”

“Hmm. I see… Okay! In that case, I’ll keep my mouth shut about it forever!”

Princess Valtrune has no idea that I’m using force to cull the power of the anti-Princess faction.

She is aiming for the throne by proving her own worth, but that path alone isn’t a guarantee. That’s why I decided to forge a separate path.

“Rune-sama is worthy of being Emperor; that is a given. She is more merciful, virtuous, and noble than anyone. —Therefore, any obstacles…”

“You want them erased before they even enter Lady Valtrune’s field of vision… right?”

“Yes. It’s our job to take on everything—from having to look at these unpleasant people to staining our hands with their filthy blood.”

I want Princess Valtrune to walk as clean a path as possible.

A perfect Empress—the strongest in history to lead the Empire, adored by all her people, merciful, yet never lacking in rigor.

She must never be tarnished by a reputation for being ‘inhumane’ or ‘cruel.’

For her sake, I will gladly continue to handle all the dirty work.

“Rune-sama’s presence has been growing. Everyone is captivated by her.”

“And hidden by her brilliant light, we just quietly carry out our own mission, don’t we?”

—Yes. Everything…

“Is for Rune-sama.”

“For Lady Valtrune.”

From the day I swore absolute loyalty to her, I have resolved to eliminate every disaster that befalls her. This isn’t an oath I took as her personal knight; it’s a penance for my past failure to stop her death.

“…Thanks to Rune-sama’s introduction, Flegel has been recognized by the Emperor. The ‘Sight-Share’ magic will now become known throughout the Empire as his unique ability.”

‘Sight-Share’ was actually taught to Flegel by Fadi. We judged its strategic value was too high to keep secret, so we decided to pass it off as Flegel’s innate magic.

The roles are already being cast: those who will shine on the public stage, and those who will move in the shadows.

“Fadi. Rune-sama has forbidden me from acting independently. That’s why I’m counting on you, who has the freedom to move, to continue acting as my hands and feet.”

“Uh-huh. You can count on me… boss.”

Fadi put an index finger to his lips and vanished, his form dissolving into the scenery.

The ‘White Smoke Lizards,’ led by Fadi, capable of moving as both assassins and spies. And Linos, the second son of the Gerreschiff ducal house, who now holds the potential to control the Imperial army.

We’ve already gathered more than enough strength, but I still feel a lingering unease.

“Rune-sama… I swear, I will lead you to a happy future.”

I will fill in the gaps and make every move necessary to ensure her plan proceeds without a hitch.

Everything is for Princess Valtrune.

As long as I have breath in my body, I will use any means necessary to achieve that goal.