Chapter 5 – An End to the Death-Struggle

1

Down in the underground waterway, where the spray leapt off the current, two vicious blades and a leather whip of slaughter were trading blows.

“Yow!?”

“Watch yourself. One hit and you’re pretty much dead on the spot!”

“…Says the guy who tanked one and is just standing there like normal!”

Rudolf and I were trading strikes with the Black Serpent by a hair’s breadth, closing on the win one sure move at a time. On the cramped board of the waterway, each of us did what he was there to do and poured everything we had into whittling down the Serpent’s stamina.

Nerves sharpened to a point, constantly under the threat of a savage blow. All that motion had piled fatigue into my legs, and I could feel my first step turning heavy, like someone had poured lead into my boots. The damp waterway air had soaked into my clothes, and with every passing minute it dragged at me like a weight, dulling me further.

“…Haah, haah. Getting about time you tired out too, huh, old man?”

“Bwahah, hah, hah, whew. You’re the one whose panting’s echoing all up and down the waterway!”

“Huh? That’s your imagination. I’m not tired at all…!”

“Tch!”

Even mid-conversation, the Black Serpent’s attacks never stopped. I dodged the tail that came slamming down at the center of the waterway, and the two of us, split apart, re-gripped our weapons hard.

“Ho. Looks like you’ve still got some fight in you!”

“…Mgh. Annoying.”

In contrast to me, wiping the sweat off, Rudolf stood planted like a guardian king, all bold and blustering.

“Right then, plenty more where that came from! Come on, Black Serpent!”

The stamina-monster of a division commander leveled his hulking great sword and bellowed. Moving nonstop the whole time, and slipping every one of the Serpent’s fast, crushing strikes. Not something an ordinary person could manage. Where did the bottomless stamina even well up from? For all that he looked, from any angle, like a pure power type, he closed the gap on the Serpent in quick, nimble bursts, and there was nothing to do but gape at it.

“Huh? He’s got way too much stamina… he’s an old man, he’s supposed to run out of gas…”

“Ha! You say something?”

“Nope, didn’t say a thing.”

Even as we swapped idle chatter, the Black Serpent coiled itself up and shifted into the stance for a strike to finish us. I narrowed my eyes and watched, dead still, for the first twitch of movement. Land the first dodge, and ride the momentum to shave at the Serpent’s tough hide. Same thing we’d been doing over and over up to now.

“Sssshhh!!”

But it was about time to be done with the cautious way of fighting. There was so little roughness creeping into the Black Serpent’s movements that you had to wonder whether the concept of fatigue even existed for it. That terrifying attack speed hadn’t dropped from the very start.

“Here it comes!”

“You bet!”

The Serpent drew back its jaw, swayed its tail, and let out a low growl. The ground-hugging tail, savage as a whip, came around, and I twisted my body to slip it by a hair. Rudolf, meanwhile, took the heavy strike head-on with his sword and forced it back by sheer strength. Both of us planted ourselves and, on the very same beat, drove power down through the soles of our feet.

“Now! Let’s finish this, old man!”

“Aye!”

The ground we kicked off cracked lightly, and all of that force poured into closing on the Black Serpent. The tail Rudolf had knocked away slammed into the waterway wall and buried itself deep, which would put a few seconds’ delay on the tail’s next strike. Only a sliver of grace, but for us, the perfect chance. I traded a glance with Rudolf, leapt off the wall in a dancing bound, and drove my knifepoint at the Black Serpent’s head.

“Shhhyaaah!!”

That’s right. With the tail-strike off the table, the only counter the Serpent had left was a bite from those iron jaws. The huge beast gaped its mouth wide, ferocious fangs on show, and, drawn to it, I charged in head-on.

And then—!

“———!”

“Gyugii!?”

An instant before the killing fangs met my body, I stopped dead. I felt the shockwave off its clamped jaws against my skin and locked my killing intent against the Serpent’s, then pulled my gaze off its eyes at once.

My aim wasn’t the undefended inside of its mouth. I wasn’t about to run a reckless play that gambled on being bitten. To make sure the next move connected, I planted the seed of victory: I cut, with everything I had, straight at the seam of the Serpent’s shut jaw.

“Open sesame!”

What held up the Black Serpent’s monstrous bite were the two thick cheekbones bracing the upper and lower jaw. So smash those to splinters, and one of the Serpent’s fearsome ways of attacking was gone, and—

“Checkmate. You big idiot!”

“Gyagaaah!!”

—the Black Serpent’s greatest weak point would be laid open for good!

In this fight, there was no need for me to be the one who ended it. On the scene of this death-struggle stood a division commander with the dumb strength to cleave a giant monster clean in two. As I peeled away, a single shadow swapped places with me and bore down on the Serpent’s head at furious speed. The burly man who’d been watching, keen-eyed, for the moment to settle it hauled back the vicious blade that pierced all things and flashed his white teeth.

“Well done, you little brat! I’ll treat you to sweets later!”

“Heh. Super don’t want ’em.”

“———!!”

The Serpent turned its eyes overhead, but it was too late to panic now. The moment it made that suicidal lunge and failed to crunch me in that split second, the match was already decided.

As the flow of the wind stalled, a warp opened along a single thread of space. Rudolf moved, and the rustle of his clothes reached the Serpent’s sensitive hearing. And then—

“Oraaaaah!!”

A crowning strike that carried a gale with it, the supreme slash he’d honed on the front line as a division commander of the Imperial army, came bearing down on the Black Serpent’s gaping mouth.

However hard the scales that armored the Black Serpent, take a blow to the weak point with no guard up, and grave injury was certain. Into the Serpent’s lower jaw, hanging slack, his downswung sword crashed with a thunderous roar, and a pure-white shockwave and the Serpent’s fresh blood sprayed out in an oval. The Black Serpent, offering no resistance to the force, dropped its head to the ground and thrashed as if in agony.

“Gyuiiiiiaaah!!”

The ground shattered, and the water running through the channel threw up a spray. At the eardrum-splitting shriek I clapped my hands over my ears without a second thought. His cheek cut open by the flying grit, Rudolf still wouldn’t let go of the sword he’d driven in. I kept my eyes wide through the blast and the dust and saw the thing through to its end, as a great gush of blood dyed the jet-black scales red.

“…Ggh, gashi.”

After stopping completely on the spot, the long beast toppled, all its strength gone. That was the moment a long, grueling fight found its finish.

“…That’s that. Nice work.”

His gallant figure came walking slow through the dust, and I called out to him with an easy, breezy air.

“Not bad for an old man.”

“Hah. Course not. I’m one of the Imperial army’s division commanders, I’ll have you know.”

“Proud as you are, look at your legs. They’re like a newborn fawn’s.”

“Sh-shut it, you!”

Rudolf, having burned through every ounce of strength in his body, wobbled and looked about to keel over on the spot. I shoved a shoulder under him on reflex, and he just barely stayed on his feet.

“…Honestly, if you’re at your limit, you could just say so.”

“Idiot. I’m at the age where a man wants to look good…”

I lent a shoulder to the battered-and-bloody Rudolf and looked out over the wreck of the Black Serpent lying there. A refreshingly quiet air settled in, and the gentle sound of the water running through the channel grazed my ears.

The Black Serpent battle. Settled here. The victory went to the two who’d doggedly searched out the thread of the thing and reached the best answer. The Saint’s assassin, put down. In the dim space of an underground waterway, the curtain had come down on a battle that would be carved into history.

2

The Saint’s slash, mowing through the air, tore a deep gouge out of my belly.

“—Kh!”

“Fufufu!”

That eerie laugh clung to my ears and wouldn’t let go, as if it were proof the Saint was in earnest. A wave of heat, spreading into flame, parted us as though to check the Saint where she’d stepped forward to settle it all at a stroke.

“Al!”

“Haah, haah. Sorry… I got a little rushed.”

Rune-sama laid a hand to my wound and closed it at astonishing speed. The pain of my torn belly vanished, and strength flowed back through my whole body.

“Thank you.”

Back in the fight. Two seconds, no more, in between. Her healing magic boasted a staggering rate of recovery, yet she never let the strain drop from her face for a single instant, nullifying the torrents of magic the Saint flung by throwing up a barrier.

“Ufufu. When it comes to healing speed, you’ve already overtaken me, then.”

“Have I. I didn’t notice, no room to spare on such trifles.”

The two of them glared each other down. They cut flesh and blood from each other and whittled one another down, and the fight dragged on by way of endless recovery. Into a battle with no end in sight, one that could send your mind reeling, all three threw themselves in and kept throwing. At the Saint Reshia, who wouldn’t budge a step from her one spot, I hurled slashes that used the whole terrain of the waterway.

“Haah!!”

Blades crossed, and countless sparks glittered crimson. As if she’d taken the stagnant air itself for an ally, the Saint pivoted on one foot, twisted her hips, and flung me, straining against her, into the wall.

“Gah!?”

Along with the spit that flew from my mouth, a heavy impact and a searing pain ran through my back. Still not enough to reach her, after all. I couldn’t draw in the decisive chance to overwhelm the Saint and drive her into a corner. In my own movements I was doing my utmost, aiming a slash at every gap that could be called a gap, and every last one of them was turned aside. Before I could read the Saint’s pattern of movement, Reshia was already swinging her weapon two, three moves ahead of me.

“About at your limit, are you?”

“…Whew.”

I steadied my ragged breathing, emptied my mind once more, and turned my mind to sorting out the situation. In a fight with the Saint, what was the right way for me to move? The way I’d been going, I’d never reach the ground the Saint stood on. My full strength still fell well short. I needed to grow, one more step, in the middle of this fight.

“Haah!”

“Ufufu!”

The glow of magic chased the Saint in arcs. Rune-sama kept loosing spells to pin down the Saint’s free movement, but even she had a ceiling on her mana. In sheer mana volume, the Saint was almost certainly the greater, and in a battle of attrition the advantage went to the other side.

“Lovely. It’s wonderful. Because it’s a fight with your lives on the line, your radiance only grows the stronger.”

A deadlock this even could tip at any moment. If the Saint shifted up one more gear, even fending off her attacks would turn difficult.

“I’ll break it open.”

“Wait, Al.”

Just as I made to step in, she caught one of my arms and called me back.

“What is it?”

“Honestly, this stalemate isn’t what I want. Keep the fight up like this and I think it only bleeds our stamina away.”

“That’s true enough, but…”

I’d no intention of throwing myself at her blindly, but without clashing, no path forward would open.

“The only way to read the Saint’s movement is to keep pressing her.”

“There’s sense in your thinking, certainly. But turn it around, and the longer it drags on, the more our way of fighting is learned too.”

“That’s…”

Hearing it, I caught myself. That moment I’d landed a slash on the Saint: in her mind, it went deep precisely because I’d moved differently from the pattern I’d shown until then. There’s no countering the unknown. But if it was the kind of blow she’d parry with room to spare once she’d seen it, then the one time I got an attack through her was that one moment, and no more.

“…You’re saying I should make a move beyond her imagining at that instant?”

“And on top of that, if we can’t finish her, in the end it only gets harder for us.”

A self I hadn’t been until now. Easy enough to say out loud, but actually changing how you fight is desperately hard. Seal away the sword-strikes the Saint had parried, and forge new cards I hadn’t yet shown her. …No, that’s not it either.

“Are you finished conferring? Fufu. Then let us begin again, shall we.”

The Saint’s single step, put forward like a war god’s, rang out all around.

“Rune-sama. A card you haven’t shown yet.”

“I have one.”

“Then let’s throw it at the Saint.”

I stepped forward at once.

“Oh my. So in the end it’s the same movement as ever?… A disappointment.”

“Say what you like. You monster!”

I took the Saint’s swung weapon head-on in a lateral sweep, and the shock carried through my jet-black sword and left my fingertips numb.

“Yes, yes, yes! You won’t beat me just by defending!”

I went on holding off the heavy blows from every quarter, above, below, left, right, hard enough to grind my bones. When I was pushed back, I covered it with footwork and held my ground without giving way behind.

“—Kh!”

My grip was reaching its limit. Unable to fully disperse the flow of force, the whole-bodied strikes from that long weapon were draining the feeling from my hands. Not yet. Not yet! Braced to right my staggering body, I fought to plant my feet and read the Saint’s next swing.

“Fufufu.”

A smile like a jeer let a fine delay slip into her strike.

“There!”

I saw it, clear as day. A great swing meant to break me where I’d held to nothing but defense. Of course, taking it straight on was impossible, but in an instant I drove my upper body inside her guard and let go of my sword. I put a full-strength open palm into the Saint’s belly.

“Ugh!!”

A move she couldn’t foresee, keyed as her senses were to a killing blow. A bare-handed strike meant only to stagger her, it worked well enough to lock up the Saint’s movement for a moment. Would she ever have thought I’d catch her with a surprise, me who’d gone on doggedly, honestly trading blows head-on? A fighter of her caliber would’ve kept a sliver of the possibility tucked in a corner of her mind, but with her guard down she couldn’t quite carry it through to a snap response.

“I overtook you, Saint. My read got out ahead of yours.”

“With a cheap trick like this… you think you can beat me.”

“Never thought that.”

“—Kh!?”

I knew it. A light strike, a child’s trick, could do nothing to threaten the Saint. From the very start, I never once meant to see this through by my own hand. I’d cast off the self-satisfied way I used to fight; all to reach the one goal of victory, I’d only scattered the stones I could set on the board.

“…Well done. Al.”

“I’m honored.”

The real card, from the beginning, was her new technique. A rear-support mage, specialized in healing, she’d add a spell attack now and then, but had been doling out magic of a power the Saint had no cause to fear, and in this instant she brought out the spell she’d worked up, shown for the very first time.

“…Kneel. Overload!”

“—Aiih!!”

The ground beneath the Saint glowed a pale blue, and then, rising as if to climb to the heavens, an electric discharge coursed through her whole body. The desperate overload, crackling and sparking, tormented the Saint without mercy. An ordinary person run through with that much current would die on the spot, but surely it wasn’t enough to kill her.

Before the surge of magic ran out, I set my stance to strike again. I snatched my beloved sword up off the ground and circled to the blind spot of the Saint writhing in the current. The gap while the Saint healed her own wounds was the moment my attack would land easiest. Miss it, and there might be no next time. This chance she’d handed me, I wouldn’t waste.

“Hah!!”

I timed it to the point where I’d taken her back and the current wrapping her had thinned to almost nothing, and closed to her waist in one motion. I dropped my sword-tip to a hair off the ground and swept it up all at once. The Saint’s eyes rolled and fixed on me, but there was no time now to defend. The greatest firepower I could give an undefended Saint, her whole body still convulsing.

Settle it here, and—

“…I told you, didn’t I. I cannot be finished until I’ve seen this world’s ending through.”

“—Kh.”

A ghastly air fastened onto my sword. A crushing gravity poured down from above without mercy, moving to kill the sword’s momentum entirely. The chance I’d fought for was being smashed apart; at this rate the sword would lose speed and stop before ever reaching the Saint. Her narrowed eyes seemed to press it on me: however hard you struggle, you have no hope of winning. My whole body ran hot, as if brought to a boil.

No. It couldn’t be. There was no way I’d let things go just as she’d pictured them. To shelve my own helplessness and admit defeat was a disgrace as her personal knight. She’d believed I would strike the Saint down, and dealt her a heavy blow to make it so. Come on, struggle! Struggle, struggle, keep on struggling! Fire-in-a-crisis freak strength, anything, I don’t care. Now! I want the strength to land one hit on the Saint!

“Kgaaaaaaah!!”

I re-gripped the sword hilt in both hands and pushed back against the crushing gravity bearing down from above, pouring in everything I had, hard enough that the veins on the backs of my hands stood out fit to burst.

At a weight I’d never felt before, blood ran from my clenched lips. Even so, the surging waves of feeling set my vitality boiling on reflex.

“—Gah!!”

The sword-tip, which had rocked back and forth again and again, touched the Saint’s skin. Slow but sure, the blade edged upward, and the eyes of the Saint Reshia filled with a dread and dismay greater than any I’d seen.

“Gih!!”

“Ku-hah…!?”

A single slash from the black sword, driven all the way through, carved up to the ceiling of the waterway. The water-spray that danced into the air along the line of the strike glittered pale blue in the reflection off the blade. And the Saint’s body, caught in its path, was run through with a red line, split, quite literally, in two.

“A-aah… aaah, aaaah!!”

“It’s over. Saint Reshia… sleep here.”

That prized regeneration of hers, too, would come to nothing with a wound this deep.

“Such… you mean to tell me this is the end I meet?”

The weapon the Saint had held melted into empty air and vanished, and even the pressure that had radiated off her thinned away. This time it truly was the end.

“…Yes. Truly.”

Her last words, perhaps. The Saint wrung a hoarse voice from trembling lips.

“Truly, a wonderful time, one I could take real delight in.”

Her face, wearing its suffering, changed in a breath. Bleeding from her eyes, she smiled in rapture.

“…Al.”

“Yes.”

I sensed the uncanny air about the Saint and stepped back at once to Rune-sama’s side.

“It isn’t over yet.”

Even taking a wound like that, was the regeneration lodged in the Saint the greater force still? The Saint’s mana, which had scattered, snapped back to what it was in no time, and, giving off a divine light, mended that deep wound. The fight went on without ending. This monster, it seemed, would not go down easily after all.

3

A pain that severed every nerve strung through my body. The first such thing I’d felt in all my life. This, surely, was suffering deeper than death. Even when an ordinary person takes a mortal wound, the flame of life housed in me goes on burning, and in exchange, the deep gash where I’d been cut came with a pain like being set alight.

“…Yes. Truly, a wonderful time, one I could take real delight in.”

To think I’d gain fresh experience in this age, of all things. I’d never imagined it. I’d thought that living long only piled up hollow, wasted hours, and yet perhaps this world was not so worthless after all. The bright red blood running to my fingertips, the sharp pain racing through my whole body: they made me feel, truly, that I was alive in this world.

“Fufufu! My heart pounding like this, it’s all thanks to you two.”

I spoke my thanks and set about healing my own wound. A loneliness came over me at the sensation of the pain gradually withdrawing, and at the same time I held a joy that I could fight again. Over a long span of years I’d sought the Elect across the whole continent, and so, at last, I’d found those able to kill god. These two could grow stronger yet. In fact they’d driven me a single step from death: Aldia Graetz and Valtrune von Felsdorf. Without fail, they could become the heroes who save the world.

The Empire route they weave here in this land, the Valugan Empire. How I longed to see it through to the very end, to the moment they made real the world they wished for. The many parallel worlds that had collapsed, over and over. It was here, I felt, that the chain of tragedy would be rooted out.

“Now. Let us begin afresh.”

Against my brimming eagerness, the two of them, weary faces and all, set their stances with killing intent bared plain.

“…Haah. I do wish she’d give it a rest.”

“This time I finish it.”

A strong heart that wouldn’t break though it heaped failure on failure. Truly, children who can turn a burst of feeling into strength hold infinite promise within them, and those buds I had to make bloom without fail. However rich their talent, god could not yet be brought down by the likes of this. They were, so to speak, still young leaves only just sprouted from the seed into the soil, so I would take it on myself to nurture these two and make of them true heroes.

“Lord Svell… only a little further now. The world will surely be saved by human hands.”

The whisper was so faint that none but I could hear it. No one answered my talking to myself, and it was speech that would, I was sure, reach not even Lord Svell. With no leisure to sink into the emptiness, I drew a deep breath and, as I’d planned all along, shifted into the next phase.

Now then. About time I raised the difficulty a notch, I should think. How many hundred years had it been since I’d put out more than sixty percent of my strength? Against children of man, today was the first time, and my expectations were rising.

“You foolish Elect who defy your fate, show me. Make this Saint bend her knee.”

I loosed that provoking line and let a faint smile rise. And, having said it, that overblown turn of phrase, I felt a touch embarrassed. Foolish Elect, indeed. What mouth did I have to spin words that came straight back on their speaker? The true fool who defies her fate: now which Saint might that be, I wonder?

4

Even I, who couldn’t use magic, caught the sign of the dense mana the Saint had wrapped herself in. At an outward pressure so strong it made even breathing painful, I couldn’t stop the shudder running through me. Perhaps unable to watch me like that, Rune-sama caught my hand at once.

“It’s all right. The two of us are together.”

She herself had to be gripped by fear at the Saint’s aura. A force powerful enough that, ordinarily, a person would faint on the spot; just standing there was creditable enough, and the aura the Saint gave off was a thing beyond the human.

“…She’s grown stronger again.”

“It really does seem she’s been releasing her power by stages. Knowing she was going easy on us the whole time, it stings a little.”

Had she come at us with everything from the start, wiping us out would have been simple work. I couldn’t make out the Saint’s aim, and even this crushing pressure of an overwhelming superior, whether it was so much as her true strength, we had no way to judge. Well, either way, what we had to do didn’t change.

“…Let’s resist. Give up before we’ve begun, and even a wish that could come true is snuffed out.”

Let them sneer at me for a fool. Let it be pointed out that we, in the Saint’s eyes, were nobodies who couldn’t know our place, standing up to a vast evil we had no hope of matching. We didn’t care in the slightest. A losing fight, and we’d hold our conviction and fight it through. Whatever the outcome, I prayed the proof that we’d kept challenging would lay the next stone.

“Haah!!”

This time I ignored the sword-forms entirely. With footwork worked into my own style, I drove a barrage of strikes that used every angle and carved wounds faster than she could regenerate. With her weapon not yet back in hand, the Saint parried my sword bare-handed.

“…Much faster than at the start, aren’t you.”

An astonished look rose on the Saint. Throw ten strikes, and nine would be stopped cold, but one would set a faint cut on her skin. More. Faster still. The Saint was blocking after watching my movement, so there was a slight lag before she reacted. Widen that lag as far as it would go by moving faster, and I could break the Saint’s ironclad defense.

“———!”

“Hah!”

And then, predicting the Saint’s next motion. I pictured, vivid and clear, the future a few seconds out, and linked it, instant by instant, into my strikes. Little by little, the attacks the Saint parried grew fewer. And on top of that—

“—Kh!”

As if to lay a limit on the Saint’s movement, a strong current ran through her whole body. Piling on, the magic bolts loosed from Valtrune burst apart before the barrier the Saint threw up on the spot, but the mere fact of a fierce covering fire doubled the number of things the Saint had to think about. Still in this. I can keep going. I was holding my own even against the strengthened Saint. If I could drive one more heavy blow home like this. Just as the thought formed, the Saint let her smile drop and murmured with a thoughtful face.

“…You’ve a fine eye, but your use of it is still clumsy.”

What is this woman on about.

“Let’s leave it here for today… there’s still time, after all.”

I heard out the string of words she laid out as so much nonsense and sent my blade at the Saint’s throat. But the arm I swung was caught by the Saint, and my upper body’s balance broke with it. The next instant, the Saint’s knee buried itself deep in my solar plexus.

“Goh…!?”

Unable to breathe, my thought stopping cold, I was kicked away just like that and rolled to a stop in front of Rune-sama.

“Al!”

Crouching down in front of me where I lay, she wore a desperate look, working her healing magic to ease the pain.

“…Quite an enjoyable fight, that was.”

“Cough, cough!!”

To me, hacking, and to her, throwing up a barrier and glaring the Saint down, the Saint Reshia came drawing near with a graceful step. Facing a hopeless, cornered crisis, my heartbeat spiking, the Saint tucked away completely the pressure she’d worn until then, and, as if to declare that every battle before had been a farce, she raised both her hands.

“I surrender.”

“—Kh!?”

The unlooked-for words brought a stillness down over the underground waterway.

5

Had I misheard? Just now, hadn’t the Saint said she surrendered? In the dim of my swimming consciousness, the warped scenery around me finally righted itself. The Saint came up before us, where we stood unable to answer for a while, and smiled again.

“A splendid death-struggle. I lost to the two of you and your fight. And so, I surrender.”

“Wh-what are you playing at… cough!”

I tried to glare her down and force out some retort, but the instant I did, my lungs refused the air, and a dry cough came instead.

“Al. Don’t push yourself.”

“But… cough, cough…!”

“You. What exactly are you scheming?”

“Fufufu! Scheming, how unkind. I’m only saying, plainly, that I’ve no will to fight any further.”

“It’s that I can’t believe it!”

“Fufufu! Come now. Then how am I to explain it so you’ll understand?”

The killing intent had vanished from the Saint completely. She carried no overwhelming aura now to plant dread in you; she wore a smile so pure and guileless it lent her all the innocence of her outward age. The death-struggle, ended so suddenly, my head still couldn’t catch up. But undefended as she was now, this was the perfect chance to strike the Saint down.

“…Fufu. Will you kill me?”

I set the edge of my blade flat against the Saint’s throat. There was still no will to resist in her; if anything, she tipped her chin up a touch and pushed her neck out toward it.

“Go ahead. If you want to kill me, kill me.”

“—Kh.”

The point cut the skin of the Saint’s throat, and blood ran down the blade.

“Al. That’s enough.”

“…Yes.”

Keeping her gallant look, she caught my arm to draw the sword off the Saint and lowered the point to the ground.

“There’s no will to fight left in her that I can feel. As she wishes, let’s grant her surrender.”

“Fufu. A wise judgment.”

“Don’t misunderstand. Make one suspicious move, and I’ll take your head that very instant.”

“I won’t. Come, bind me or do as you please.”

The Saint held out her wrists, and Rune-sama passed me a chain of metal.

“It’s a magic tool worked with a mana-seal. Restrain her with that for now.”

“Understood.”

When I wound the chain around the Saint’s wrists, even the faintest sign of mana died out completely. With this, the Saint couldn’t use magic.

“…Fufu. I can’t use magic anymore. Does that set you at ease?”

“Hardly. Even without magic, you can still fight by hand.”

“Then you’re welcome to sever the tendons of my arms and legs.”

“They’d only heal soon enough. No point in it.”

“Fufu. So no matter how it turns out, I’m not to be trusted after all.”

Why, then, did she think her word would be trusted at all? Twice she’d violated the Empire’s territory, and on top of it we’d nearly had our lives taken. There was no chance of easing our guard.

“Al. Let’s link up with Rudolf. If the fight with the Black Serpent’s still going, we’ll lend a hand.”

“Yes.”

I gripped the chain bound to the Saint’s wrists, and we started back the way we’d come. I trod over the great smears of blood left in the waterway and put my foot forward toward the outside light spilling in from the exit.

6

“The Black Serpent got away from us. But hey, we won~.”

The one strolling up from ahead, voice all gone slack and manner bright, with a light spring in his step, was Fadi.

“Don’t go celebrating. Reflect on letting a strong enemy slip away.”

“Ehh… but doesn’t that make you just as guilty, old man?”

“What galls me is that I can’t argue back.”

On the face of Rudolf walking beside him, the weariness of a hard fight showed through.

“It’s fine, Rudolf. Nothing matters more than you being safe. You too, Fadi. I’d no idea you’d come down into the waterway.”

“Cleared out the ones up top, so. Heard big bro and Lady Valtrune were down in the waterway, figured I might be some help.”

It seemed the cult’s lot had been wiped out by the intelligence unit under Fadi’s lead. Originally, after settling things with the Saint in the waterway, we’d meant to deal with the enemy strength left on the surface, but if it was already done, so much the better. One weight off the shoulders.

“The surface is confirmed safe. So you can rest easy.”

“I see. Thank you.”

Scratching his head, bashful at her thanks, Fadi turned his eyes next toward me.

“So there’s something that’s been bugging me this whole time.”

His finger pointed slowly toward the Saint, bound to the chain in my hand.

“…Who’s that lady?”

“—Kh!?”

Rudolf, too, lost his voice and threw his eyes wide open. Rudolf had caught a glimpse of the Saint; Fadi hadn’t. That the two of them, seeing her, would react in opposite ways was only to be expected.

“…She’s the Saint Reshia.”

At my short explanation, Fadi nodded, satisfied, with a smile.

“Ah, got it! So that’s the Saint! Mm-hm. I see, I see!… wait, sorry. Come again?”

“Like I said. She’s the Saint Reshia, who led the soldiers of the Svell Order. The one behind all the trouble, with the Black Serpent and the White Serpent at her command. The most dangerous person we’ve been treating as our number-one threat.”

“…Uh. This lady is… the S-Saint?”

“That’s right.”

“The real one?”

“If she were a fake, I wouldn’t have bound her and dragged her along.”

“Ha, haah…”

The air froze over in a heartbeat, and Fadi went stock-still, as if time itself had stopped for him.

“As introduced, I am the Saint Reshia, the very one you all strove with everything you had to bring down. Fufufu! Your faces change so charmingly. What an amusing companion you have here.”

Without a shred of reserve, Reshia stepped in front of Fadi wearing a brimming smile and introduced herself, though no one had asked her to. Both hands bound in chains, her own mana sealed, and the manner of her, treating such circumstances as beneath the smallest notice. She really ought, I thought, to recognize just once that her own sensibilities were out of true.

“The two of us captured the Saint at the end of the fight.”

When Rune-sama put in the note, Reshia cut into the conversation yet again.

“Just so. At the end of the fight I acknowledged my defeat, and here I am, taken prisoner.”

“…Why does she look so delighted about it.”

Rune-sama pressed a hand to her temple and looked down, at a loss. That easy slackness, from someone we’d been seriously trying to kill only minutes ago, kept knocking us off our footing.

“Lady Valtrune. How on earth did you catch this monster?”

“Caught her, or rather, we were made to catch her; that’s closer to the truth.”

“Meaning?”

“Before the match was decided, she suddenly declared her surrender.”

“Hah?!”

Rudolf’s reaction was the right one. She’d thrown away a fight she could win, and while there was even the option of fleeing, she’d made what had to be the worst decision imaginable: letting the enemy take her. There was no way an ordinary person could grasp the thinking of a Saint who’d do something so wildly off the wall.

“You. Are you right in the head?!”

“I’m in no particular ill health. I’m the very picture of a sound body.”

“It’s that beside-the-point answer that makes you seem anything but sound…”

Looking at the two pale faces, I could tell the four of us, the Saint aside, were of one mind: this woman, before she was a threat to the Empire, was a genuinely dangerous case as a human being.

7

Coming up out of the waterway to the surface, we were met by the subordinates Fadi had brought and the handful of escort soldiers who remained.

“Commander! Nothing gladder than seeing you safe!”

A breath of relief from the surface group. But Rudolf’s face clouded as he looked at them.

“…Say. What happened to the others?”

“…My apologies. Many fell in the fighting when we secured the surface. This is the whole of the escort now, the ones here.”

“Damn it. What a thing…”

When we’d first set out from the Imperial capital, Rudolf’s subordinates had numbered more than fifty; by the time the fighting at Nocto was done, they’d dwindled to a mere four. Rudolf ground his teeth, the bitterness plain on his face, and Fadi gave his shoulder a quiet tap.

“Over half of our people died too. For now, let’s just honor the brave men for how hard they fought and all they gave.”

“…Yeah. I know that much.”

Even knowing in his head that he had to make his peace with it, the sorrow he couldn’t hold down showed of its own accord in the shake of his shoulders.

“…It pains me, but I can’t give them a proper burial just now.”

“Yes. Our duty is to see Lady Valtrune safely delivered to the Roscheld Republic. I understand that if we can’t carry that out, the ones who died won’t rest… ngh, I understand it. I do understand it, but.”

“Rudolf…”

Feelings weren’t so easily sorted out. That was how heavy the losses we’d taken this time weighed on us.

“Everyone’s hard fighting is what brought the trouble to a close. Their deaths weren’t in vain.”

There’d been sacrifice, but that didn’t mean there was nothing to show for it.

“That’s… that’s right, isn’t it. They carried out their duty as escorts to the full, didn’t they.”

“Yes. They drew the cult soldiers’ attention and moved to keep the fight in the waterway from being disturbed, and because of that, Rudolf and Fadi routed the Black Serpent, and Al and I managed to capture the Saint. This is a real victory.”

The Order, having lost its Saint, would suffer a heavy blow to its command and in time fall apart. So she was quietly telling them. There were those whose feelings were saved by those words… but one person wouldn’t allow such comfort, and spat out a cruel truth.

“The Order losing its momentum because it lost me? Fufu. How fine it would be were that so.”

The one who put her mouth in yet again was the Saint Reshia, fallen now to the station of a captive.

“What are you trying to say?”

“Nothing so deep. If there’s one thing worth telling you, it’s this: the cult soldiers who slipped into Nocto this time and I are entirely unconnected.”

“—What are you saying?!”

“What I mean is, I never once thought to lead the Order and occupy Nocto. All I’ve had at my command are the White Serpent and the Black Serpent, granted me by Lord Svell.”

“Then the Order—”

“At the Archbishop’s word, they’ll go on sending people into the Empire again, undeterred.”

The kind of thing you’d wave off as idle talk. And yet, if what she said was true, it lent a consistency to that three-way standoff back on the forest road. The White Serpent having gone only for the assassins who attacked us made sense as well, if the Saint and the Order had moved separately, with no coordination between them. And when I thought back to the ones the Saint had butchered in the waterway, they’d been people connected to the Order. The conclusion I’d drawn from all this, I put to the Saint straight.

“…You’re at odds with the Order.”

“At odds? Fufu. I simply did away with them because they were in my way. From the very beginning, I’m no puppet of the Archbishop.”

“Then you’ve no connection to the Madmiasma either.”

“None. I had no part in manufacturing that poison.”

By her eyes, at least, she wasn’t lying.

“What’s your relationship with the Order as it stands now?”

“Oh my. So you’ve the mind to believe my words after all?”

“Answer the question. What’s between you and the Order?”

I drew my sword from its sheath and laid it along the Saint’s throat. When I glared her down, Reshia let out a deep sigh, looked up at the far blue sky, and began to speak with a look that seemed to long for the past.

“The Svell Order was once a gathering of noble souls who revered Lord Svell. To preach to them the wonder of Lord Svell, to pass on the words granted by my Lord, and to raise their faith into something deeper still: that was the role I bore as Saint. …But over a long span of time, the Order sank into a den crawling with a vulgar mob eaten up by lust for power. The Madmiasma, too, is a thing born of an Archbishop possessed by the fantasy of gaining eternal life. Their high-handed, do-as-they-please ways left even me sick to death of them.”

“…So you wiped out those tied to the Order because you’d given up on the men who run its upper ranks?”

“No. The spread of the Madmiasma was a thing that harmed my interests as well. Setting aside any private feeling toward the Order, I simply judged they had to be exterminated.”

Little by little, I was starting to read the Saint’s thinking. She moved by a philosophy all her own, and thought of the Order as no more than one organization she could use. What the Saint herself wished for, and by what intent she’d moved until now, weren’t clear, but that she stood against the Madmiasma came through well enough from what she’d said.

“Marking the Madmiasma as dangerous is the same for us.”

“Oh-ho. Then this time you ought to thank me.”

At the Saint puffing out her chest, smug-faced, Rune-sama tilted her head.

“Why exactly should we thank you?”

“Fufufu. Inside that waterway, the one who slaughtered the men who’d brought in the Madmiasma was me. I did the work you were meant to do in your stead. Might it not be right to feel a little gratitude for that?”

A thoroughly self-serving way of putting it, but there was something to it. That the Saint had lent a hand in wiping out the dangerous factors swarming the waterway was a fact that wouldn’t be overturned, however much ill feeling we bore her.

“You’re right. I’ll thank you for subjugating the ones who brought in the Madmiasma.”

Seeing her bow her head, the Saint narrowed her eyes, satisfied.

“Even so, that won’t get you released.”

“Yes, yes. I understand. I don’t mean to say anything so shameless.”

Seeking no return for it, the Saint nodded with a composed face. A still air, without a single ripple, made you feel that even being captured was part of her design. That breezy manner never wavered once outside of combat, and she seemed to feel no unease at all over how she’d be dealt with from here.

With the talk with the Saint at a stopping point, Rune-sama looked around at the companions gathered there. Of the four surviving escorts, two had taken injuries of some weight, effectively unfit to fight. And Rudolf, perhaps from the long contest with the Black Serpent, had his usual fire well banked down. Judging it hard to bring them along to the Republic, she spoke with a firm, clear bearing.

“Rudolf. Take your subordinates and escort her to the Imperial capital. Al and I will take Fadi and the rest and cross the sea.”

At the sudden order to turn back, Rudolf was thrown.

“W-wait, please. Are you telling me to take the Saint and head back to the capital?!”

“That’s right. Her mana is sealed by that chain. Whatever resistance she puts up on the road, with you along it should be fine.”

“No. That’s not what I’m getting at…”

Before he could ask why she wouldn’t let him come along to the Republic, Rune-sama shot the Saint a glance and shook her head.

“I know. Your wish to carry out your role as an escort to the very end.”

“Then why…?”

“Because they’re already at their limit.”

Turning toward Rudolf’s worn-out subordinates, she told him plainly, without dressing it up.

“They’ve given more than enough. They fought this far with their lives on the line. We can’t wear them down any further than this.”

“It’s true I can’t push my men. But I still—”

“I’m saying this to you as well.”

With a resolute manner that brooked no argument, she laid a hand to Rudolf’s flank.

“Gh!?”

A dull ache shot through him. Guarding the spot she’d touched, Rudolf backed away with a hard look.

“I knew it. Did you think I hadn’t noticed?”

“This is just a graze… ugh!”

He must have taken the wound sometime during the fight with the Black Serpent. Unable to bear the pain, he twisted his face.

“Wow, looks like it hurts~.”

“Bearing pain is admirable, I’ll grant — but such endurance has a way of coming round to trip one up later, you know.”

“So true. You should just head home the normal way.”

“Fufu. A wounded soldier only drags the rest down — turning back is the wisest course there is, is it not.”

“Well, no help for it this time. You were at it with the Black Serpent a long while, so be glad you got off with just a bad injury… I mean, I don’t have a scratch, myself!”

“These children of mine are excellent, after all. To have fought those two and still be alive is something to be proud of in itself. You’ve done well.”

Fadi and the Saint took turns saying whatever they pleased, no reserve at all. At the perfectly matched double-barreled needling, as though the two were comrades, Rudolf cried out.

“You two! You picking a fight with me?!”

“Yep.”

“Yes, rather.”

Not expecting the merciless snap replies, he hung his head and sank into a crouch on the ground.

“Haah…”

At Rudolf’s beaten-down state, Fadi and Reshia traded a look.

“Ah, now he’s crying.”

“We’ve made him cry, it seems.”

“Think I broke his division-commander pride?”

“Surely not. A fighter of the caliber to call himself a division commander would never sulk over a thing like this.”

“That’s true! Right, no way he’d get down over bowing out partway through one mission!”

“Yes. For anyone who calls himself a division commander, that’d be out of the question.”

When would this conversation, driving the cruel truth home, ever end? Rudolf lifted his face at once and turned his eyes to Rune-sama.

“…I’ll go back quietly.”

The sight of that valiant general, shrunk small, was more than one could bear to watch.

Chapter 4 – The Philnotes Front, the Theresia Front

1

The march toward Philnotes went off without a hitch. No accident of any note along the way, and by the schedule, a few more hours would bring us to Philnotes, where the Kingdom army sat in siege.

“Eerily quiet, isn’t it,” Petra said.

“Yeah. Hard to believe we’re about to trade blows with the Kingdom army out here.”

“The calm before the storm. So this is what they mean.”

The Kingdom army’s eyes were on Philnotes, true, but it would be no surprise for them to have posted troops around the region to watch for the Imperial army’s approach. If anything, not to have a camp laid would be strange. Let word of the invasion spread, and the Empire was certain to move. The Kingdom army was not so foolish as to leave that out of its reckoning.

“We have to allow they’re lying in wait with a trap set,” Petra said.

“Or it’s the swagger of the strong.”

“The Kingdom’s not fool enough to swagger against the Imperial army. Rotten as it is, on this continent it’s the military power second only to the Empire. Their strategy for taking Philnotes is locked down to a point, and they’ll have measures against us laid in for certain.”

“In that case, pushing on carelessly is starting to get dangerous.”

Steano raised a hand overhead and drew the scouts in around him.

“Time we started sweeping the perimeter. Ring the column wide, and the moment you spot anything off, send a smoke round up high overhead.”

“Yes, sir!”

“Ambros, you’re with me.”

“Right. Petra, the two of us are peeling off the column.”

“Mm.”

Steano and Ambros drifted outward from the column, still mounted, and each gave a light wave.

“We’re off, then. Send up a signal if things turn hairy.”

“Mm. You two watch yourselves.”

“Will do. All right, Ambros, move out!”

“Aye!”

Timed to the pair angling away, Ritziareite, at the very front, gathered her dragon-mount riders and began giving orders.

“Begin your aerial sweep. And keep low, please; don’t climb too high, whatever you do.”

In quiet like this, most soldiers let their guard slip and grew careless. Not her. She was, after all, the supreme commander who had led the Empire’s special vanguard corps. Ritziareite left no opening, no room for complacency. She set out what needed doing to her subordinates in clean order and kept choosing the best action. The enemy might still be far off, but it was precisely because she read danger so keenly that Rune-sama placed such deep trust in her. That much I could feel.

“Petra. Have the mages ready for combat. We’ll reach Laivan Ravine before long.”

“Understood.”

A push into a danger zone; the tension ran through all of us. The great shadows of dragon-mounts wheeling overhead cut across the sunlight now and then. Keeping half an eye on them, I turned to look back at the mages ranked behind me.

“You lot. Move out, as planned.”

“Roger!”

The mages scattered to the four quarters. Better to take the risk of being picked off piecemeal than to be wiped out in a single blow, and with so few guards on the mages, dispersing them was worth doing. I held the center of the column, and the mages spread out just within my line of sight.

“Entering Laivan Ravine in ten seconds! All hands, watch your surroundings.”

The moment Ritziareite spoke, the sound of running water began to reach us from somewhere ahead. Cool air, the twitter of small birds; I let it fill my ears and swept the whole forward arc with my eyes alone. Nothing wrong. Only the pleasant, easy sounds of the wild.

“…No sign of the enemy.”

One of the scouts came in toward the column’s center to relay word.

“No enemy in sight here either.”

“Same.”

“Widening the search.”

We’d been in Laivan Ravine a while now, and still no report of finding the Kingdom army. It had the feel of a force pouring everything into the assault on Philnotes. Rather than split their strength to watch the surroundings, they’d clamped down hard on a narrow zone. If so, a surprise strike to break their formation would be difficult, but by the same token, a mage’s area fire would land square in the middle of them.

“General Ritziareite. Let’s keep the sweep up as before and pick up the pace. In all likelihood the enemy hasn’t deployed in Laivan Ravine.”

“I’d been weighing that same chance. Yes… we’ll judge an ambush unlikely and make straight for Philnotes by the shortest road! All units, ford the river! Hold your alert but clear the ravine fast!”

No detour around the water, even; only the shortest line straight to Philnotes. It looked as though we’d cut nearly half an hour off our estimated arrival.

2

“Al. The situation on the Philnotes front, how do you read it?”

Valtrune’s party, three hours before the breach into Nocto. Aldia and Valtrune were just then talking over Ritziareite, who had gone ahead to the Philnotes front. I let a short beat fall before I answered her.

“Read how?”

“I thought I’d hear your analysis of the enemy’s strength.”

“My analysis…”

“You served in the Kingdom army once. From where you sit, I want to know how much force the Kingdom’s put into this Philnotes push.”

The Kingdom army’s strength, then. At this point in the war, the early strength still stood whole and intact. Set against Ritziareite and the Imperial force gone to relieve Philnotes, the threat the Kingdom posed came out like this.

“…Well. It depends on how it’s fought, but if the two armies met head-on, I’d say the odds sit with the Empire.”

“Oh? What makes you say so?”

She leaned forward, drinking it in. I kept my voice level on purpose.

“Simple enough. The number of heavy hitters the Kingdom can field on a single battlefield is limited.”

“Heavy hitters?”

“Put plainly, the Kingdom army’s top-ranked fighters: the Kingdom’s Ten Elites. I mean how many of them they’ll commit to taking Philnotes.”

The Kingdom’s Ten Elites: the name for the ten strongest in the Kingdom army, just as it sounds. Each of them held power enough to turn a battle around alone, but never in a hundred years would all ten march on Philnotes at once. Before open war with the Empire, they’d hold their greatest strength in reserve and play it as a trump card when it counted.

“Taking Philnotes means a great deal to the Kingdom, but it isn’t a thing they absolutely have to bring off.”

“You’re saying the Kingdom can overwhelm the Empire even without seizing Philnotes?”

“They have a lot of close friends among the nations. Same as it ever was. They call on states all across the continent and beat the Empire down all together. Even the foremost military power on the continent bleeds out by inches in a war on many fronts.”

Against the brute force of nations by the dozen, even the Empire and its overwhelming strength would give way. So the reason the Kingdom was throwing itself at Philnotes wasn’t to gain ground in the war with the Empire; first and foremost, it was to pull the Empire’s gaze.

“While they kick up a fuss at Philnotes, they set an invasion of the Empire with the neighboring states. That’s the play, I’d guess. Three of the Ten Elites at most. No more than that will show their faces.”

If it was only three or so of the Ten Elites, the Imperial force now bound for Philnotes could put them down without trouble.

But she knit her brow and let out a low sound.

“Is that truly so? The three strongest in the whole Kingdom are coming to Philnotes. I’m very much afraid for them.”

Her worry was fair enough, and yet I held a conviction that our side wouldn’t lose on strength.

“Rune-sama. Set your mind at ease. Our army is full of people who are the equal of any of the Ten.”

“You mean Ritziareite?”

“No. Set General Ritziareite aside, and we still have force enough to overwhelm the current Ten. The friends I believe in.”

“They surpass the Ten Elites?”

“Yes. Beyond any doubt.”

Three of my friends had gone to Philnotes. Steano, Petra, Ambros. Of them, Petra and Ambros were the genuine article: heavy hitters who, in the middle years of the war, had once cut their way into the upper ranks of the Kingdom’s Ten Elites.

The era when the Kingdom army stood at its strongest was around the war’s middle years. That Petra and Ambros, who’d held Ten Elite rank in that era, were fighting on our side meant a mere three of the current Ten could be turned back and sent home.

“Petra and Ambros. Those two have it in them to kill an equal number of the current Ten, or better. And Steano’s good enough to give one of the Ten a real fight. They’re all first-rate.”

On top of that we had Ritziareite, one of the Empire’s finest dragon-mount riders, and the excellent soldiers she’d raised herself. Which was why the factors that spelled defeat came out vanishingly thin.

“Of course, this is all my own read, so how it actually goes we won’t know till we try.”

“…If you’ll say it that plainly, Al, then it must be all right.”

“I’m praying it is.”

The comrades who had died, once. They were never weak. Give them ground to fight on and a stage where they could spend their full strength, and they didn’t go down easily. It was because I placed a trust in them that held even across a distance that I could pour everything I had into my own part.

3

The sight of the enemy blocking the road set my heart dancing. Ah, at last it can begin.

The Theresia front. The bridge at the near edge of the Darius domain. This was where the battle of old grudges would raise its curtain for Epika von Darius.

“…Haah. How long I have waited for this.”

I let slip a sigh of pure feeling and fixed my eyes on the small fry before me. Amateurs risen up from farmhands, and a mob of brigands cast off from the old Imperial army. Just the thing for a warm-up before the main event.

“Halt! Beyond this point is the Darius domain! No entry without leave!”

I gave a wry little smile at the one soldier dutifully thrusting his stop order at me, then looked down at them from the saddle with a cold eye.

“Cornelia.”

“Yes, Lady Epika.”

Only her name, and she understood. She raised one hand to the height of her face and swept it sharply down.

“Wh—! All units, take cover!!”

The next instant, the bridge was bathed in raging fire by a hail of magic bolts. The stonework melted in patches to sludge under the heat, and several men, roasted where they stood, pitched off the bridge below.

“Ahahahaha! Truly, what fools! …As if we’d hear out a stop order. We came to kill, and we came prepared to the last detail. What we’re about to do is a killing in dead earnest. If you haven’t the stomach for it, clear the road this instant — or die quietly.”

On those words of resolve I wove up a single spell and flung it at the knot of men frozen at the bridge’s end. Faces filled with terror and despair, the enemy soldiers returned to ash and dust without so much as a word.

This place, set as the frontline of the Darius domain, saw everyone within wiped out in under ten minutes. No prisoners. Survivors put to the sword, no questions asked. That this was war, I carved into the watching enemy spies as a cruel truth for them to behold.

“…Father. I’ll be coming to kill you right away. Just like the subjects you left behind at this outpost.”

Gazing at the wreck of the burned-out forward post, I hooked the toe of my boot under the head of a corpse rolling at my feet and kicked it up. Turning from the roar and the black smoke, I set my aim on the next target.

“Come. Let’s crush the enemy positions one by one. There’s no need for talk. Kill every last one.”

I had no scruple to be swayed by a plea for life. This was enemy ground now, ground ruled by traitors.

“…What a frightful woman.”

“Unless I go this far, the enemy won’t lose the will to fight.”

“And for that, you’d do anything, however cruel.”

“Yes. That is what war is.”

Cornelia said no more than that. She shut her eyes and turned from me, as if to spare herself the pitiful dead; as if her heart pained her, her lashes wavered for a single instant.

4

“It seems one of the outposts has been taken.”

The spy’s report told him of the enemy force closing in. Count Darius, who had entertained the easy notion that a siege would buy a day or two, saw the scheme crumble away; his face went crimson, his shoulders shook, and he brought his fist down on the table.

“That ungrateful child, getting in my way!!”

“Now, now. Let us settle ourselves a moment, Count Darius.”

I laid a light hand on the Count’s shoulder, speaking to gentle him down.

“Mm. Forgive me. I lost my composure somewhat.”

“Not at all. I understand your feelings very well indeed.”

The enemy’s supreme commander was Epika von Darius: the Count’s own daughter, and once my equal, standing shoulder to shoulder as a division commander of the Imperial army. Her way of war was a foul thing. She’d bludgeon with raw magic, and at times, to break the foe’s spirit, she’d string up a killing so brutal it stood as a warning to all. The way that first outpost fell belonged to the latter sort.

“In all likelihood she’s wrecking the outposts so lavishly to make us lose heart.”

“Is that it. Looks to me like nothing so much as showing off her power…”

No. If all she wanted was to flaunt that power and feed a hunger for praise, she’d never fixate on smashing the little posts set out at the very front. Knowing her nature, she’d want this land flattened by the shortest road and go straight for the throat of Count Darius, the lord of the region.

“…She has some reason she can’t meet us head-on.”

“What do you mean?”

“It may be she hasn’t the strength assembled for a straight confrontation with us.”

Epika was the sort who wanted, above all, to dodge troublesome work. As far as I could reason it, she was a cunning creature who’d steer a fight to its close by whatever means cost her least. That such a woman was taking the long way around, felling the outposts one after another in order, meant there was a reason she had no choice. Given force enough, she’d choose to press forward and ignore the fire crossing at her from every side; she of all people would understand that as the efficient course. That she wasn’t doing it was proof she carried some anxiety about the force she led.

“Count Darius. I’d advise taking one careful measure of the enemy’s true numbers.”

Epika. As two who once stood as division commanders of the Imperial army, let us have it out to the full.

5

I inked another X onto the map in my hand. Crushing the enemy outposts as we swept along, this made the sixth today.

“…A miss here too.”

“So it appears.”

If I could, I’d kill my father at once and push on past the Darius domain. I hated this homeland of mine with all my heart.

“Do we burn this one as well?”

“Yes. Thoroughly, till not a speck of dust is left.”

We took the trouble to wipe out the enemy fort, then set it alight. All six forts we’d crushed had been given the same treatment. Soon enough the enemy would start reading my movements and stir themselves to act.

“Cornelia. On to the next.”

The same work. The same battle. The same merciless deeds, over and over.

On horseback, as I rode out in front, Cornelia could bear it no longer and called to me.

“Lady Epika. What is the intent behind this?”

“What is it, all of a sudden?”

I asked it back, playing dumb. I’d sensed the whole of what Cornelia wanted to say, wanted to ask.

“Is there any meaning to this destruction?”

Her blue hair swayed; her face was a blank, mechanical thing, and yet a faint irritation seemed threaded through it.

“There is meaning. It’s needed to break the enemy’s heart.”

“And so you kill even the innocent, every one of them?”

“…Yes. That’s right.”

The unarmed among them and all the rest, every soul at the outpost, I had taken. It was necessary; there was no other road. Without this, my strategy would never come alive.

Still, it caught me off guard. At the outset of this campaign she’d worn a cool detachment, as though she had no intention of offering me a single opinion, but as the days wore on, the plated mask she’d fitted over herself flaked away piece by piece.

“You approved of it too, didn’t you. You thought it convenient, my going on a rampage.”

The corner of Cornelia’s mouth twisted, just barely.

“The next fort I’ll smash to pulp the same as ever. Kill them all!”

“—!”

Before I knew it, Cornelia had struck me across the cheek with the full of her strength.

“That stings… What’s gotten into you?”

My cheek burned red, a needle-sharp pain throbbing through it at even intervals. …I’d known it would come to this. Since taking her on I’d looked into what Cornelia was made of any number of times. A girl of shallow feeling who served a master no one could name. A cold ruthlessness, no hesitation at all in killing an enemy. Her magic outstripped an ordinary mage’s, but she’d likely never climb to my level; she’d already met the ceiling of her growth.

Digging all this up, at the last, I’d found one thing in Cornelia’s temper that gave me pause: a strong recoil from doing harm to anything that wasn’t a mark meant for killing. In this case, an affection taking root in her for the unarmed, the noncombatants.

“…Is your heart aching? This is war.”

“War it may be, but killing your own nation’s guiltless people is hardly a way to be praised, I’d think.”

“As a human being, the basest of acts, true enough. A deed against morality, I don’t doubt.”

“Then—”

“But I won’t change it. This is how I fight.”

I would not bend my way of war into the shape Cornelia wanted. To dream that I’d revise my thinking out of care for a subordinate was nothing but a child’s indulgence on her part.

“Ah, yes. There was something I’d meant to tell you, while the chance was here.”

Where we were bound was a gray killing ground, the death-cries never off the air. A place to hone every nerve and spend your whole self on staying alive. She was a subordinate my work could not do without. Precisely because of that, I spat a hard word of warning at her.

“Cornelia. Throw needless mercy away on the battlefield. Otherwise it’s you who dies. Understand?”

On a battlefield, high and low counted for nothing. Anyone at all killed, equally; anyone at all died, equally. The role might shift the odds of dying or the number of fights, but it changed nothing in the fact that we did our work with our lives put up as collateral.

“Cornelia.”

“…Yes.”

“If you want to spare the innocent their sacrifice, the only way is to crush the root that set this fight going. Once that’s done, the pointless killing ends of its own accord.”

“So that is why you were doing those things, Lady Epika…”

“Yes. It gladdens me you caught on.”

The meaning of killing so cruelly, again and again. It was not to hand the enemy despair and press them toward surrender. Nor was it aimed at grinding down morale to weaken them.

“…This too, all of it, is to bring things to a swift close.”

Far off across the plain, a level line of dust was rising. At that arrogant advance, with no thought even of masking its coming, I couldn’t help a laugh breaking out of me. Not the small armed bands I’d been felling. The genuine main army, led by Count Darius himself. Just the way I’d drawn it up.

“Finally, out they come.”

“So all of this was bait, to draw them out.”

“Yes. Win here, and there’ll be no more need to kill the people who live on this land. To save the many, the hard bargain was worth it.”

A host that dwarfed our suppression corps came on with a roar. To put fire back into the men it cowed, I drew a deep breath.

“All of you, look! There is our quarry: Count Darius and his hangers-on. You see? Take the commander’s head. Do that, and the victory is ours. Well, now? A very simple business, isn’t it?”

There was no need to make it complicated. How many each of us had to fell, whether to annihilate the enemy, none of that mattered. One man. Shatter Count Darius, the core of that army, and it was finished.

“Neatly lured out. A great help to me.”

At my father’s side was the man who’d once been commander of the Dragon Mount Division. He would read my thinking halfway, guess at our shortage of strength, and slide into the notion of crushing us under a great host. A simple man, easy to set dancing. Give him some show that hinted at our intent, and he’d leap to his own conclusions and move just as I wished. Nothing about him had changed since the old days. It was because he ran his outdated reads of people without a breath of doubt that things came to this. I had changed. I was no longer the weakling I’d been.

“…Cornelia. Have them ready. We begin the Great Purge.”

Before the closing host, I set them to laying out the magic that would trample it under. A faint smile on my lips, I fixed on my own blood, small as a bean yet plainly in view.

“Father. Welcome to the hell I’ve made ready for you.”

“All units, volley fire!!”

At the signal, a rain of fire bolts came down on the enemy. Did they scorn us for so few? Truly, how green. A mage force is not a thing to be judged by numbers. What you look at first is the total volume of magic brought to bear.

I stained the whole sky red, watching the streaming downpour of magic as I drew my own power to a point at my fingertips. The little flash bolt I sent up to set the mood burst overhead and glittered.

“Come. Ready the next. Until the mana runs dry… let us give them the finest hospitality.”

The one-sided slaughter had only just raised its curtain.

6

In a heartbeat, the view walled itself off behind a cliff of flame. The heat rolled in to scorch bare skin, and every man there threw up his arms to cover his face.

“—This, is—”

“E-enemy attack!!”

The front rank was swallowed whole in the vortex of fire; the men around them writhed in a bedlam of screaming. What in the world was that magic. Were mages such fearsome things. In one instant close to a tenth of the infantry was shaved away. There’d been no chance to stand on a field like this in a long while, and magic this violent coming down on us was beyond anything I’d braced for. This was bad.

My pulse hammered. Quickest of all to grasp how dangerous the enemy was, the former Dragon Mount Division commander roared the order.

“All units, fall back! Harden the defense at the stone fortress to the rear, and the moment we’ve regrouped, we meet them and drive them off!”

Gawein’s voice carried across the whole army, and the soldiers began, as one, to withdraw.

“Count Darius. Let us fall back as well.”

“A-ah.”

Urged by my vassal, I turned my back, but before I did, I seared into my eyes the figure of the enemy standing far to the rear.

Epika.

The daughter who had now become an outside threat to my very life. How many years had it been since I’d last set eyes on her face? I couldn’t call it to mind; I had lived taking no interest in Epika at all. That she’d become such an overwhelming presence as commander of the Imperial Mage Division, it had never once crossed my thoughts. The girl I remembered was young and feeble, a child who could do nothing. Nowhere now could I find a trace of that shadow.

“Gyaaaaah!!”

“H-hot… it’s hot…”

“Somebody, help me!!”

The ranks had long since come apart, the soldiers scattering every which way in flight. I’d checked my advantage in numbers and judged the fight an easy win from there. And now I was made to see how wrong that had been. Had I sent men to look closely into the matter of that magic, I’d never have offered battle out on an open plain like this. The quickening bombardment tore hollow after hollow into the field.

“…Damn it.”

Humiliation at having my numbers overturned, and despair. The only choice left me was to hunker inside the outpost at the end of the retreat and ride out that disaster of a magic storm.

7

When the furious barrage was spent and the smoke rising off the ground thinned away, only the wreckage of the enemy’s men remained.

The host that had spread wide to hem us in had vanished without a trace, and I found myself a touch impressed they hadn’t swelled their losses with some reckless charge.

“It seems they’ve pulled back.”

Cornelia covered her mouth with her hem against the smoke drifting our way on the wind and turned her eyes to the view ahead.

“No matter. We simply give chase.”

“Could they be feigning a rout and lying in wait…”

“No. If they’d meant from the start to draw us in, they’d never have come on so boldly with a host that size.”

They’d misjudged our strength and were rewriting their plan on the fly. Most likely they’d fled into some nearby outpost, thinking to meet us there.

Press forward, corner them, and pound the army holed up in whatever post they’d run to with magic. To the fools who’d assumed a stout stronghold couldn’t be cracked so easily, I would carve the true meaning of magic into their bones. However thick a wall was built, its endurance against shock had a limit.

“…Oh?”

The sky went suddenly dark; I looked up to find black clouds massing. A drop of water struck my brow, and, cooling the air all around, a real rain began to fall on the scorched fields.

“It’s come on to rain.”

“So it has.”

Thunder rolled, and lightning drove down into the burnt ground and shook the earth. The foul weather cut our sight, but I paid it no mind and swung my baton on.

“Well then, shall we march? The keep can’t be far now.”

Under the storm that wrapped the Darius domain, countless hooves came ringing down. The enemy no doubt thought themselves hidden in the roughly dug dry moats, but to us, who ran our sweep by lobbing magic into any spot that looked wrong, the textbook tactics they wrung out of their shallow cleverness were transparent, a wasted motion.

“Stop them!”

“Charge!!”

Here and there I glimpsed the soldiers set out as throwaway pawns. To the rabble rushing us so rashly with sword and spear, I gave the order to fire without mercy.

“Shoot them dead.”

“Gah—!”

“Ugh…”

A dull crump blew the men and the very ground they stood on into the air. Each time the enemy showed himself, he was blasted to pieces by the magic flaring in the sky. Across the pitch-black, cloud-choked heavens, five or six spells hung loosed at any moment, and every time one struck, a great pillar of fire went up.

“…Kill confirmed.”

“Finished here as well.”

“We keep advancing.”

I nodded at the cool reports and gave the order to press on once more.

“…Nothing but the same one-note ambush. How dull.”

The road we’d come down held nothing but scorched earth. Trees charred black as coal. The green turf that had covered the ground, all of it stained black too. Hard as the rain came down, the scattered points of fire never fully went out, and they went on lighting the darkened land.

A one-sided trampling by magic. The enemy had nothing left that could stand as a threat enough to halt our march.

“…Rather like a villain, aren’t I.”

“From where they stand, you’re the very picture of one, without a doubt.”

Conjuring magic, breaking the land. A punitive corps against a rebel force honed for savage slaughter, its members our own countrymen. Truly, I was the right one to lead it. A single hard-hearted girl and the withered slaves of vested interest, all destroyed together. The pus that had festered through the Empire, wiped clean here and now, and those who could suit themselves to the change of the age left to carry the next one.

“It’s a changing of the generations. What’s grown old wants returning to the soil, all of it, just the once.”

“Your lines and your face both, the very image of the villain in a story.”

“Oh? You think so? How glad that makes me. In fact, I’m terribly fond of a good villain, you know.”

“You are warped in any number of ways…”

Letting her rebuke wash past me, I drank in the thick reek of burning that clung about my nose.

“The villain of a story usually holds to some conviction of his own. Isn’t that splendid? However much the crowd shuns him, hates him, right up to the moment he falls at the end he clings to the life he chose to believe in. A life not jerked about by the opinions of those around him… that’s how I’d like to live, myself.”

Each time the scent stung my nose, the sense of it sank in: a battlefield staked with lives. I’d entered the army rather than live out a life as a daughter of House Darius. With magic so far past everyone else’s that it painted over the handicap of being a woman, I’d wrested the seat of Imperial Mage Division commander from the man who was my superior at the time. Force of arms: that was the proof that Epika von Darius existed.

Those who took against me tried to bring me low more times than I could count. That I held on to a division commander’s seat in the Empire all the same was because I never spared the effort of clearing away my outside enemies. To guard myself from assassins, I sharpened my magic. So as not to be caught in a scheme, I learned cunning. Because I refused to fall, I taught myself the arts of getting on in the world. And meaning one day to sweep out the trash I so despised, I worked, steady and patient, to widen my sway inside the Imperial army.

How many years had I waited for this hour? There were surely paths on which the chance to sweep the vermin away never came round at all. Had a new Emperor been crowned who muddied the internal struggle for the sake of the looming war with the Kingdom, my wish might have run out my whole life unmet.

“Let them think me a wicked woman; I don’t care. Hated by whoever likes, it’s nothing to me.”

I had no wish to live a dull life, falling in with those around me and never able to spend my whole strength on what I wanted.

“Mark it well, Cornelia. The only one who can make you happy is yourself. Happiness handed to you by another is a counterfeit, gotten by settling for less.”

“Is that meant as a barb at me?”

“No. Merely a lesson from experience.”

I’d no mind to jeer at Cornelia for moving under someone else’s hand. If she’d chosen that, then it too was one shape happiness could take. I’d only told her that if she was simply drifting along on inertia, she’d do well to think again.

“We’ll be at the enemy’s post before long. The men are thickening up.”

The shockwaves the magic threw off shook me to the bone. The count of spell-bolts dancing across the sky climbed higher, the blasts booming out on every side.

“Commander! The enemy are so many our magic can’t keep pace!”

“We slow our advance. Keep them from closing, and the enemy has no answer to magic. Pick off the nearest ones, sure and steady.”

“Yes, ma’am!”

A formation that could throw magic to all four quarters. A stance of solid rock. About now the enemy, too, would begin to grasp that fighting a losing defense only sped their ruin.

“…Will they play it, I wonder. Their trump card.”

The chill wind streaming my hair out behind me, I called up in my mind the scene of a reckoning with an old colleague.

8

—

A sight cruel enough to steal the breath. The red of raging fire. The black of scorched earth blanketed with the dead. The downpour-soaked land had been made over into hell itself by the reapers closing the distance on horseback.

“Count Darius. The enemy still advance. It’s only a matter of time before they reach us.”

Shown the whole course of the explosions and ruin breaking out everywhere, I understood by instinct that this stone fortress, too, would not last long. However thick the wall, it could never hold against the numberless magic they threw, against hundreds, thousands of shocks. Let the faintest crack run through it and it was over: the defenses would fail, and the bared interior would be swept with a merciless downpour of death.

“…You. We can send no more men to the front line! Do something, drive them back!!”

“Every card we could play, we’ve played. There’s nothing left but to meet them here and—”

“Damn it. Epika, you—! You mean to kill me, your own father!?”

Count Darius, driven to fury, was clearly aware, too, that death had come crawling near; a cold sweat ran down his brow, and he couldn’t keep still.

“This is as far as it goes, then.”

The edge in numbers had long since been turned on its head. The mages Epika commanded were slaughter-engines built above all to break an enemy line, called the spearhead of attack in the Imperial army. A threat the equal of, or greater than, the dragon-mount riders who ruled the sky; a foe you were meant to plan carefully against. That I’d forgotten a thing so plain, perhaps it made me unworthy of ever having been the Dragon Mount Division’s commander.

The rule of thumb against mages is the close-range ambush. What matters is denying them the time and the safe range to work their spells up. Knowing the enemy’s skill was high, I’d shied from the clash and put distance between us instead. That, I was now made to learn, had been the worst folly of all.

At this rate, Epika would kill every soldier we had.

“Count Darius.”

“What is it?”

“Let me be the one to go after Epika. If we can’t cut her down, we’re finished.”

The loss of the enemy’s supreme commander: that was the victory condition both armies shared. To overturn a fight where we’d been forced onto the back foot, there was nothing else.

“…Can you do it?”

“I can’t say. But I’m the only one who can stand against her.”

The dragon-mount was the single greatest asset we held. Its match against a mage was poor, but the only counter I could put up was a dragon-mount rider. As the rain sharpened and cold air moved through, I gathered up the riders still inside the stone fortress. One attack, and only one. A double-edged plan honed against Epika alone, mounted in the full knowledge it might mean our end.

“We will bring those creatures down, and we will guard Count Darius.”

“Yes, sir!”

I watched the men ahead of us burned by magic in the thick of their confusion, and drew a great breath. My heart was pounding loud enough to ring in my skull.

9

The sky had filled with dragon-mounts taking wing. Their dark hides, blending into the black clouds, did their part in stealing them from sight.

“Dragon-mounts. So the enemy’s been driven to the wall as well.”

We’d scattered green troops with little battle experience, but dragon-mount riders were not so easily brought down. Those had to be the picked men among all my father’s forces. Their ranks were cleanly dressed, and at their head rode a man I knew.

“That man.”

“The former Dragon Mount Division commander.”

“Yes. When Lady Valtrune reorganized the Imperial army, he was struck from the commander’s seat, and rather than stay, he left the army and threw in with my father…”

To that man, commander of the Imperial army division had been a post to cling to. For one who longed to climb back to his former glory, toppling Duke Felsdorf’s faction and the new Emperor Valtrune must have looked the most profitable course.

“A division commander’s salary was a fine sum, and the gifts from the nobles were sweet besides. I turned all of it down, but knowing that man, I imagine he had himself quite a good time of it.”

The very incarnation of greed, drowned in privilege. As a dragon-mount rider he’d been superb, but somewhere along the way he’d grown fat and idle on the commander’s seat, and fallen.

“He was a division commander once, but he looks quite at his ease,” Cornelia murmured, following the dragon-mounts wheeling overhead with her eyes.

“Not at his ease, exactly. Only that he doesn’t mean to lose.”

The dragon-mount riders slipped the mages’ sharp, arcing volleys with no trouble at all and dropped as one into a diving posture.

“Here they come.”

“Volley, at once—”

“No need for that! Evasive action, now!”

The countless black dots writhing above plunged, hidden in the black clouds. The dragon-mounts’ cruel talons carved apart several mages who’d let their watch on the sky grow thin, in the space of a breath.

“Gyah!!”

“Gbo…”

A mage’s weakness is her frailty in a close fight. Wheeling on high where magic couldn’t reach, the riders read the openings while spells were still being built and came down all at once, whittling us away a little at a time.

“Shall we pull back and reset?”

“No. Keep advancing.”

“But while we’re taken up with the ambush, the infantry are closing from the front as well.”

The situation, where we’d held an absolute edge and could pour magic down one-sidedly, had turned on its head. The dragon-mount riders and their maddening movements had our mages well and truly at their mercy. We’d shaved the enemy’s numbers by no small margin, and yet in sheer count we were still the fewer.

Let this pesky ambush drag on, and it was plain to see: sooner or later the enemy’s great counterstroke would land and deal us a heavy blow.

…And yet to draw the army back here and dress the formation was out of the question. Give them the wasted grace, and the enemy, ahead of us in numbers, would recover and simply grind us down by force.

“The dragon-mounts I’ll handle. Set the rest of the mages on bringing down that keep ahead of us.”

“Understood.”

A nuisance, but there was no avoiding it now. I’d meant to stay out of the fighting as much as I could, but with the enemy come in earnest to smash us, this was no time to sit on my hands.

“…What a troublesome man, truly. To make himself my enemy and trouble my hands into the bargain, I wish he wouldn’t.”

10

It was twelve years ago now that I was taken on as a mage of the Imperial army. Fifteen at the time, I’d pushed past my father’s objections and passed the Imperial army’s entrance trials, and so joined the ranks of soldiers at last.

“You there. Your name?”

“Oh, yes! Epika von Darius.”

“…Ah. The young lady of House Darius, is it. Well. Pleased to have you.”

“Yes! I’ll be in your care!”

That I’d made it into the army in proper form was a joy above anything. I’d loved handling magic from the start, and I dreamed of making a name across the Empire as a great mage.

…But once it got out that I was the daughter of House Darius, no one would see me as a soldier in my own right. The Darius girl had joined the army on a whim. She’d never last the training; she’d quit soon enough. A little noble lady shoved in through her parents’ connections.

“Hey, that girl over there.”

“Ah. Count Darius’s daughter, isn’t she. Well, keeping up with the training this far is admirable, I’ll grant, but isn’t it about time the whining started?”

“Right? No way she lasts in the Imperial army.”

“Just so. The dropout rate in the first year’s four in ten. Brutal enough as it is; no way a noble’s little miss holds up.”

“Inside the year she’ll cook up some excuse, a marriage of state or whatever, and bawl her way out.”

Sneering looks turned my way, half-laughing. No high-noble’s daughter had ever walked a soldier’s path before, and the few who enlisted almost all quit before the year was out. With no strength in my arms and reflexes that weren’t much to speak of, the daily training was hard enough that clinging on was the most I could manage; back at the dormitory I was wracked again and again by fever, jolting awake in the night to vomit, over and over.

“Training’s done for the day. Clean up and dismiss to quarters. That’s all!”

Training over, I’d collapse and fight to catch my breath, and the other soldiers, looking down at me, would give a careless little wave.

“Lady Epika. Good work today, hm?”

“Get plenty of rest tonight. That was a bit hard on a young lady like you, I’m sure.”

“Now, don’t overdo it and make yourself ill. The Count might worry, after all. Hahaha!”

“Oi, don’t laugh at her. It’s cruel… pfft.”

A sad, chest-tightening feeling would rise in me, but I kept it off my face, put on a look of composure, and returned their greetings.

“…Yes. Good work today.”

The contempt dressed up as words of care wounded my heart time and again. Why should I be looked down on and made a fool of for nothing but being a noble’s daughter. When the seniors had gone past me, half-smiling, I bowed my head, and once they were out of sight I stamped hard on the ground and ground my teeth.

“So annoying. What is their problem…!”

The contempt made my blood boil, and so did my own uselessness, unable to give any of it back. This wasn’t the life I’d wanted, days spent cramped in a misery like this. What I’d wanted was to be marked as a mage in my own right, to reach a place where no one gave a thought to my ties to House Darius.

To break free of the curse that was House Darius, and to be seen for myself.

But in the end, wherever I went, I couldn’t change. So long as I couldn’t undo the fact of being House Darius’s daughter, the label pinned to me would never peel away.

I can never become anyone at all.

“Oi. You there.”

“…”

“Hey. You listening? You, the mage.”

Face twisted with the bitterness, right in the thick of my temper, a hand came down on my shoulder. I turned, and there stood a burly man of the Cavalry Division, a greatsword shouldered on his back.

“…What do you want with me?”

I’d been half a year in the ranks, and the man before me was a stranger I’d never so much as crossed paths with. When I glared at him, wary, he threw his mouth wide in surprise.

“Eh, wai— are you… are you crying!?”

“I’m not… crying, or… anything…”

“No, come on—”

“Don’t look at me…!”

The worst meeting there could be, at the worst possible moment.

That was my first contact with the man who would later become the Imperial army’s Cavalry Division commander: Rudolf von Argus.

“Rudolf, boy. Just when I think you’ve up and vanished, here you are dawdling… hm?”

At the same moment, I met for the first time the man who would go on to become commander of the Dragon Mount Division.

“You’d be of the Mage Division, then?”

“Hic… Epika von Darius.”

“Hoh. Darius, is it.”

A stoutish man in his late thirties, holding an officer’s rank in the Dragon Mount Division: Gawein Rasse. Green as I was, both as a soldier and as a mage, I could never in my wildest dreams have imagined that, a dozen years and more on, I’d be locked in a fight to the death with this man.

“I am Gawein Rasse, of the Dragon Mount Division. We may find ourselves working joint assignments together, so do get to know me.”

Gawein, hearing my house name, made nothing much of it; he put out his hand as naturally as breathing. Even I, so full of suspicion, could tell: he had no interest in a name, only in trading a greeting with a fellow soldier of the Imperial army.

“Hey now, Gawein. I called out to her first, you know?”

“You were only frightening her. One must treat a lady more gently than that.”

“I didn’t say anything weird!”

“That’s for the one on the receiving end to decide.”

“Argh, what a pain you are!!”

The pair of them squabbling looked, for all the world, like brothers a good few years apart, an oddly warming sight.

“Pfft.”

At the smile that slipped out of me despite myself, Rudolf reacted with wild overkill.

“Ah, you laughed just now, didn’t you!?”

“I did not.”

“Liar! You absolutely laughed! …I’m Rudolf. You’re this year’s intake too, right? New recruits together, so let’s get along from here on. Eh?”

“…Well. I suppose that’s fine.”

No malice in it. Only pure, plain goodwill. It felt as though I’d met, for the first time, someone I could call a comrade.

Looking back now, it was surely nothing more than Rudolf happening past a girl standing alone, throwing out a word on a whim. But if not for that meeting, I think I’d have stayed with no anchor for my heart, and somewhere along the way broken and left the army.

So I am grateful to the two of them. Thank you, for hauling me up out of the pit in those young days.

And so, under that clouded sky, the resolve set hard and firm.

“…Gawein. Let’s end all of it here.”

11

A shaft of golden light broke the black clouds and struck the ground, and in the same instant a keen slashing wave of magic pierced the dragon-mount riders flanking me. From the trueness of the aim and the strength of the backwash that grazed my skin, the one who’d loosed it rose at once to my mind.

“Epika!”

Supreme commander of the enemy army she might be, yet there she was on the very front line, loosing magic, shooting down the gliding riders one after another. Her accuracy was beyond any other mage’s by an order, and, forgetting I stood on a killing field, I caught the corners of my mouth pulling up.

“Ha, how splendid!”

A bout with her, after all this time. When was the last we’d truly gone at each other in earnest? Some years now. The very day, I think, that Epika and Rudolf were made division commanders. We were raw, green commanders still, back then. And her skill now, how far had it come? I leveled the beloved spear of ten years straight ahead and shouted till my throat tore.

“Haaaaah!!”

The long spear, driven down from the dragon-mount’s back, split the air as it went and drew toward the hollow of Epika’s throat. Her lips went on moving; she made not the slightest move to dodge.

“…A poor end, this. Epika. You disappoint me.”

I’d let myself hope a little, at how startlingly the power of her magic had grown, but in the end she’d never conquered the mage’s weakness, the frailty at close quarters, and the letdown sank through me.

“Farewell, then.”

The point would carve clean through Epika’s throat. It should have.

“—What!?”

The feel of the spear driving home was gone; the tip met something hardened past all moving and stopped dead. Through the shock that ran up my arms, I felt it: a strike thrown with everything I had, turned aside.

A dull ring of metal, and inside my skull a single thought spun: impossible.

What is this, a sword?

A mage fights by wielding magic, a made thing with no body to it. As a rule she carries nothing on her to guard against an incoming blade. And yet the straight sword hanging in the air to shield her throat was, past all doubt, a piece of defense moved by her own magic.

“…It’s been a while. Gawein.”

“Epika, you… since when do you swing a sword about!?”

Our two gazes fixed and held. In this one moment, at least, we were not enemies, but two old friends who had spent long years of soldiering side by side, looking each at the other.

“That you’d raise your banner against the imperial house, how unexpected of… fufufu. No. You always were that sort, weren’t you.”

“My apologies. I too have a reason I can’t step back. I cannot give up the commander’s seat.”

That post had been my own place of honor for years on end. To become the Dragon Mount Division’s commander I’d served out year upon year of grinding apprenticeship, and only then laid hands on it: my reason for being. To let it go on the whim of a new Emperor was not a thing I could ever bring myself to accept.

“Is a commander’s chair so very fine a thing, I wonder.”

“That place is mine. I hand it to no one.”

“Possessed by your own attachments. What a foolish thing.”

There was no turning back now. Cut her down here, and bring the hammer down on the sitting Emperor. The Valtrune government would not be let stand long. I would set Duke Felsdorf’s heir on the throne as the next Emperor without delay, and climb once more to the head of the Imperial army.

“I’m sorry, but I can let no one past here, and it seems I’ll be cutting you down where you stand.”

“Yes. I rather thought that was your intent.”

I drew the spear back once and broke the deadlock. The sword Epika worked by magic wouldn’t budge a hair’s breadth in any direction, as steady as if the very space around it had been pinned in place. One-handed, I hauled on the dragon-mount’s reins and pulled off at an angle, gaining a little distance.

“It’s a rare thing, a bout after so long. Since we’re at it, shall we make it an aerial fight, with the weapon you favor, Gawein?”

The soles of Epika’s feet left the ground. As they did, three straight swords gathered and circled her body, moving in strange, shifting arcs as though life had been breathed into them.

“Meant as provocation, is it. Fighting in the sky is a dragon-mount rider’s own trade. Do you truly think you can win?”

“You’d fret over me? A needless kindness.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Fufu… because, you see, whatever the ground we fought on, you could never beat me, Gawein. As the one who’ll take the victory, I only thought to do you the courtesy of letting you fall, gracelessly and with a light heart, in the place you’re strongest.”

She’d learned to say some high and haughty things. Not a shred remained of the girl who’d flinched at everything and everyone.

“You had a touch more charm about you in the old days.”

“Charm, was it… don’t you mean the timid, clumsy little thing I was?”

An overbearing, arrogant bearing. Not one shade of inferiority lived in her now. Parted clean from her past, Epika von Darius today was a figure that stood as a symbol, a mage running at the Empire’s very front. She was dazzling to look on, so much so that, as I was now, even meeting her eyes felt like a pain to bear.

“Well then, shall we have you die? Are your affairs in order for the road to the netherworld?”

To ward off the three swords she worked, I looped the dragon-mount’s reins around my leg and took the spear firm again in both hands.

12

A duel between the commanders of two armies.

An air of strange, taut menace hung over the field, and as if to shatter it, a swarm of black shapes came screaming down and cut across the moment of decision.

“Lord Gawein!!”

“Leave this to us!”

“Diiie!!”

They passed clean by Gawein where he leveled his spear and drove straight at me. The men on their many dragon-mounts, fearing not even death, made a truly fine and gallant show of it, throwing themselves in to shield their commander.

“How moving. And yet…”

But subordinates were a thing I had as well. Sensing the massed dragon-mounts, the mages drew together around me and began working up the magic that beckoned death.

“Keep away from Lady Epika!”

“Burst.”

“All units, open fire.”

The mages moved to shoot the swift riders coldly from the air. At the firing order, given in a cool and limpid voice, hellfire swallowed the great dragon-mounts one after another.

A slaughter so lopsided it was no contest at all. This was the wall, sheer and unscalable, that stood between the Imperial army as it now was and a mob of amateurs risen from broken soldiery.

“…Haah.”

Gawein’s men, blasted apart, turning to ash, mixing into the air and gone, swallowed in a killing so instant not even a scream escaped.

“…!”

As though to work the stiffness out of his cheek, as though to hide the breath caught in his chest, Gawein held his shaking, misshapen scowl.

“…How dare you.”

“How dare I?”

“How dare you kill my men!!”

Even that fury felt thin to me. Hunting about for a reason to fight, he’d made the deaths of his subordinates the charge that set his own feelings alight, a spur to lash himself on. He was deceiving his own heart to wish away his fear, and it struck me as very like him.

And at the same time it made me feel, again, that the man he was now was unfit to be a division commander of the Imperial army.

“To let feeling carry you off is second-rate at best, in one who leads.”

That scene, his subordinates dying a pointless death. By rights, he should never have let it disturb him. The terror of trusted comrades dying in an instant, and, a beat behind, the sorrow and the rage that welled up after — none of it should show on his face. At the very least, a superior who still had many other subordinates ought to move with a thought for those who remained.

“Epikaaaaah!!”

A heart in disarray, waves running high across it. Feeling, once shaken loose, was a breeding ground for the ragged breath and the loss of edge in the spear’s line, for everything that dulled ability.

Move by feeling, and the quality of your fighting comes out uneven.

Move by feeling, and you misjudge.

Move by feeling, and you lose to your own wants.

“…Haah.”

Never be swept away by feeling.

And it was you who taught me that. It was, wasn’t it.

Epika. You needn’t mind what people say around you. What matters is what you yourself should do. How you wish to be, in the days to come. Keep your eyes on the goal alone and let the rest of the noise wash past. What’s asked of a commander is to go on choosing, cool and hard, the best action toward the end you’re after.

Gawein. Is this your best action now, I wonder.

My dream? Let me see. My dream is to become commander of the Dragon Mount Division and stand as a cornerstone of the Empire’s guard, protecting His Majesty the Emperor, Her Highness the Princess, and the people.

You who set yourself against the imperial house, you who trade killing blows with me now: is this the life you wanted, the one you dreamed of laying hold of?

Epika, Rudolf. Power, left too long in one place, is bound to rot. So it has to be cycled through, at regular turns. Truth be told, the current Dragon Mount Division commander is a wretched man with no thought for his subordinates. So I’ll set the Dragon Mount Division to rights. You two, aim for the top, in the Cavalry Division and the Mage Division. The three of us at the head of our own divisions of the Imperial army. Do that, and the Imperial army is sure to come back to life. Let’s build one together: an Imperial army that keeps a creed truly minded for the good of the nation!

The high aims you raised in those days, mere prattle? All of it a lie? …No, surely not. That was your true heart beyond any doubt, wasn’t it?

“Haaah!!”

The vicious spear knocked the three swords I worked aside and drove for the center of my chest, but a barrier of magic stopped it dead.

“Kh…”

From the anguish written on Gawein’s face, a faint feeling seemed to linger yet: feeling against killing a junior he’d known so long.

“Grown blunt with the spear, have you?”

“Is that how it looks to you.”

“Yes. Very much so.”

“Tch!”

The Gawein of old would have had force enough to run my magic barrier through. He was a man of far more combat experience than I, one who knew inside out how a mage is killed. Only, his knowledge had stopped, caught fast in the past, and he could wring out no scheme to bring down the me who had grown. He took a fresh grip on the heavy spear. A storm of wild slashes, gusts battering out — but on the thick barrier of magic ringed close around me, not a single scratch.

“Sad to say, this is the gap in our strength, Gawein.”

“No. Not yet!!”

Gawein swept aside the sword I’d sent thrusting at his back and went for a forced breakthrough, a rough gambit riding the dragon-mount’s charging weight. The body-blow warped the shape of the barrier greatly, but it only bounced, faintly, and no crack was born.

A barrier of magic is desperately weak to the thrust that lands its shock on a single point, but against a broad-contact strike, it spreads the force out, and breaking it is no easy thing. What he ought to do here was drive the spear stubbornly, honestly, into one point over and over, but robbed of his composure, even that was likely beyond his reach now.

“Damn, damn, damn it all!!”

“Gawein…”

“Haga—!!”

“It pains me, killing you. Truly it does.”

With the ironclad guard of the barrier and the three swords I could move one-sidedly from a place of safety, I went on cutting into Gawein’s body without mercy or pause. The rough, grating sound of blades opening the flesh rang out without end, and, taking cut after cut, he ground his teeth against the pain.

“Ggh, gugaaah!!”

He forgot even the blood he coughed up, working his dragon-mount in a frenzy, throwing himself recklessly at me; the sight of him was pitiful, a wrung-out rag of a man.

That he still would not stop his hand was because he’d fixed on the single point of taking back the commander’s seat, whipping a screaming body onward to reach the end he was after.

“…Where did you leave the cool head and the hard heart to see the goal through?”

“—”

“The true cause of your growing weak is that you mistook your goal and walked the wrong way.”

“Be quiet. What could you possibly know of me—”

“Who can say. Only, at the least, the you of old never fought like this, lost to himself. He faced himself squarely and searched out the thread of victory.”

“—!!”

Rebuked, Gawein, for all the great flow of blood down his whole body, poured his soul into a single spear-thrust. He made a shield of the dragon-mount’s bulk to lock down the swords I moved and threw himself in, believing his own spearwork would strip my barrier away.

But the passion buried under his fierceness did not arrive at any sweet victory.

“Wh-why…!?”

A crack ran through the barrier the spearpoint had met.

He had, indeed, brought down a strike with force enough to break through my barrier. To pierce that ironclad guard and lay a wave of killing intent on me was a feat that could have been done by no one but him; of that I’ll speak plainly.

…But the victory beyond it, I would not let him grasp.

What Gawein saw, in the instant he broke the wall and reached for the decision, was the cold, heatless brilliance of magic, chilling to the marrow.

“—”

The whole of the surroundings folded into that light, and Gawein himself, who to the last would not own his defeat, let slip a sigh of wonder before the netherworld’s door drawn up close in front of him.

“…Ah. I see.”

I watched his figure swallowed in the source of light and rewritten pure white, and whispered, low.

“Goodbye—Gawein.”

13

“Hey, you hear? Come the month after next, they’re swapping out every division commander in the Imperial army.”

On the Imperial army’s training ground, the fierce heat unbroken, Rudolf, trading heavy training-sword blows with me, said it as though he’d only just remembered. As he and I moved about, breath ragged in the white heat of the drills, Epika, cooling herself in the shade under the eaves, sipped elegantly at cold water and picked at her nails, looking bored.

“…Haah, you’re slow with the news. Everyone’s known that half a year now. And besides, I’ve already had word off the record: a recommendation for next Mage Division commander.”

“What, a recommendation!?”

“What are you so shocked about. It’s under two months till the new commanders are announced. A total swap of the division heads means a large-scale shake-up across the whole Imperial army. Rebuilding the personnel structure takes time, so it’s no wonder they’ve settled some of the people for the posts already. The next commander in most every branch is more or less decided by now, I’d think. Whether your Cavalry Division’s the same, I couldn’t tell you…”

I gave Rudolf, standing stock-still and blank, a light rap on the head with my spearpoint.

“Ow!”

“Rudolf. Focus on the training.”

I meant the flat, even reproach to tighten the wholly slackened mood, but he pressed his case with an unconvinced face.

“No, no, Gawein! You hear a bombshell like that and you expect a man to keep his head in the drills? There’s no way, I tell you!”

“…Well. There’s something in what you say, I suppose.”

The gist of what Epika had said rang true enough, but even so, her being all but promised the next Mage Division commander’s seat was a thing to be astonished at.

“…It’s only that in the Imperial army, where merit rules, my ability got its due. Nothing worth making a fuss over.”

She declared it in an offhand tone, but she was still nineteen. To take a recommendation for next division commander in under four years in the army was the exception among exceptions.

“That’s not so, Epika. The recommendation is a result you fought for and won. You ought to hold your head high and be proud. Truly, congratulations.”

“…Thank you very much. Gawein.”

At those blunt words of thanks, given with a touch of bashfulness, a smile slipped out of me despite myself. When we’d first met she’d struck me as a girl who couldn’t hold on to any faith in herself, and in a scant few years she’d made a startling, headlong growth.

She’d chased the ideal way for a mage to fight in single combat and gone on training harder than anyone. If that effort had been repaid, it was a thing to be glad of past all measure.

And there was this, besides.

“For what it’s worth, I too have been sounded out about becoming the next Dragon Mount Division commander.”

“Hwah!?”

To me, Gawein Rasse, word had come of a push for next division commander as well.

“At this rate, Epika and I will be shouldering the Imperial army’s banner as its new commanders.”

“Is that so. Congratulations.”

“Thank you. Becoming a commander was a dream of mine for years. I’m glad it came true without trouble.”

While I and Epika shared in the joy of an honored promotion, there stood one man, thunderstruck, who let the sword in his hand drop to the ground.

“Wh-why just the two of you!?”

Rudolf von Argus. A superbly gifted man in his own right, and yet word of next division commander seemed not to have reached him. As if to rub salt in the wound, Epika curled her lips into a wicked, bewitching sneer.

“Well, you’re a fool, so there’s no help for it.”

“Guh—!”

“And besides, the Cavalry Division’s the branch with the most muscle-headed crack soldiers of the lot, isn’t it. The competition’s fierce, and you thought you’d be picked for commander? Awfully full of yourself.”

“Gah—!”

“And to begin with, you’re hopeless at selling yourself to the people around you. No one can trust the Imperial army’s core to a man who can’t get on in the world.”

“Hbo—!!”

Clutching his chest, Rudolf pitched face-down onto the floor. No good; his spirit was on death’s door entirely. I checked the state of him, lying there gone pale, and signaled to Epika that he was past recovery, and she let out a sigh of exasperation.

“…Well, I suppose I could put in a word for you, from a candidate for next commander, that is.”

“Is that true!?”

“T-too close… you’re a nuisance, back off already.”

“You’ll recommend me!?”

“I said I could put in a quiet word. I never once said I would—”

“Thank you, Epika!!”

“He only hears what suits him…”

Fending off Rudolf with the sole of her foot as he crowded in, she threw me a look brimming with distress, begging rescue. The force in that gaze of hers was so strong that I couldn’t help hauling Rudolf back by the collar to still the runaway.

“Now, calm yourself. You’re troubling Epika. …Let me see, very well, I’ll put in a word above for you as well.”

“Gawein…”

“If Epika and I both recommend you, then even if it can’t be this year, the chance is bound to come round. The three of us becoming commanders together needn’t stay a fairy tale.”

The three of us to lead the Imperial army. Sweeping away the old ways, all of them, to meet the dawn of a new age.

“Let the three of us take the commanders’ seats together. What do you say? Shall we swear it, here and now?”

“Yeah! Of course I’ll swear it! Come on, Epika, get over here!”

“…Yes, yes. There’s no need to rush me, I’m coming.”

The three of us, Epika, Rudolf, and I, laid our hands one atop another.

In all my long years as an Imperial soldier, the oath the three of us swore that day was the greatest treasure I owned. A day I was never, ever meant to forget.

Ah, why did I turn away from facing the two of them?

As I watched Epika’s magic blaze dazzling before me, memories from long ago flooded my mind like a lantern spinning its images round.

“Ah, I see… Epika. You’ve grown this strong. I never noticed at all.”

The three of us took the commanders’ seats, and for a while after, things went well. But over trifling misunderstandings, and the faction struggles that quietly swelled in the army, the three of us, no, the two of them and I, drifted apart by degrees.

Only now did I feel the regret welling up from the pit of me like water without end.

Had I sat down with Epika and Rudolf and talked it out, honest and open, about the Imperial army’s road ahead, would this future, where we cut each other down, never have come?

Had I not forgotten the oath of that day, had I not struck a secret pact with Duke Felsdorf for the sole sake of clinging to the commander’s seat, might I still be a proper Dragon Mount Division commander of the Imperial army, offering my loyalty to the imperial house even now?

“…Far too late to notice.”

Too late for anything, then.

Whatever I thought now, it was all what-might-have-been. There was no overturning a past overflowing with mistakes. Drowned in privilege, I’d cast out, without exception, every one I found in my way. I’d meant to renew the body of the organization, to win back a proud Imperial army that fought for the people and the nation, and somewhere along the road I’d taken up a share in the very rot that fouled the army.

Was I not, in this, the very image of a clown?

The creed I should have carried through, gone. The pride of a commander, gone. The trust of dear comrades, gone as well.

There was nothing left in my hands worth guarding.

What in the world had I even wanted to do?

“—”

The heat began to sear my skin, and the shape of my body slipped away by degrees. Pain and agony gnawed through the whole of me. There was fear, true, at death drawn near. And yet, more than that, my heart was wrapped, strangely, in stillness.

“…Goodbye, then.”

I turned my eyes straight toward Epika.

Knowing her, I’d thought she’d be watching my death through cold and level eyes, but to my surprise, those deep violet eyes were trembling in tiny quivers.

“——”

I was glad.

That I was, to her still, someone whose death would bring grief: knowing only that was enough.

Let the three of us take the commanders’ seats together.

The words of that day rose clear in my mind.

Every last wish I’d wanted never came true. But the oath of that day was, beyond doubt, kept.

And my comrade in arms, Epika, whispered the words of a parting offering and raised the output of her magic.

“Goodbye—Gawein.”

Thank you. I’m glad it was you who brought my life to its close.

The end of it may be a wretched thing past all speaking, but as his body turned to ash and dust, Gawein Rasse met a quiet, peaceful last.

14

The foul reek of scorched flesh clung all about my face and would not leave.

The enemy general, Gawein Rasse, had burned away in the heat of magic without a trace and vanished.

The dark rain-sky cleared to a clean blue, and, as if in mockery, a dazzling sun poured down to light the ground.

“…Haah.”

With that, the enemy had lost Gawein Rasse, the mainstay of their attack. Robbed of the one who’d held them together, the enemy’s dragon-mount riders wheeled the sky in disarray.

“Now! All units, shoot down every last one in the sky!”

At the command, magic without number loosed and brought the dragon-mounts down one after another; the black specks that had covered the sky thinned by degrees, and at last were gone.

“Lady Epika.”

“Yes. …All units, resume the advance!”

Hearing the voice I’d forced up out of myself, the mages, mounted, pressed on toward the post where Count Darius had holed up.

With that, the outcome was as good as settled.

Cornelia, hurrying to my side, let out a breath of relief.

“…This is the end of it, then.”

“…So it is.”

Unlike Cornelia, whose cheeks eased at the fight’s winding down, I was seized by a loss like a hole punched clean through my heart.

The leftover heat in my palm called his face back to me. In the end, right to the very last, I’d been made to dance to his tune. A dreadful man, taking up lodging in a corner of my heart even after he’d died. …I could do without it, truly.

“Before I stood against him, I felt nothing, and thought I could kill him…”

“Lady Epika?”

Stirring my heart to disorder as a parting gift, Gawein Rasse had gone.

I gripped the hair at the back of my head hard and dropped my eyes to the pitch-black ash blanketing the ground.

“Haah… feeling. What a wretchedly troublesome thing it is.”

In the moment I settled it, I could not, after all, play the heartless, cold-blooded officer through to the end.

To me he’d been the teacher who gave me the spark to change how I lived, and an old comrade in arms besides. Even after our roads forked, the fondness I bore him had gone on living, quietly. I should never have looked at his face.

Grinding the ash spread across the ground under my heel, I walked on as I was.

Kill an old comrade in arms, and next kill the father whose blood I shared… hm?

“…How strange. Killing that old wretch stirs nothing in me at all.”

Blood ties held no meaning. My own heart seemed to prove it out.

“Lady Epika. Target confirmed by sight.”

“Open fire the moment we’re in range. There’s no need to answer any call for surrender… kill them all.”

“Yes, ma’am!!”

The stout fortress had come into view ahead. To the foolish father, deluded that it was a safe haven, I would drum in the merciless thing that is reality.

I raised a hand overhead and slowly swung it down. The final full assault by magic began, signaled by the walls blowing apart.

15

Only a few seconds until the thick stone wall was made over into a mountain of rubble.

Gawein Rasse and his picked dragon-mount riders, not returning.

The mage host, closing to the very foot of the fortress.

…The worst of futures waiting beyond this came to mind with no effort at all.

“I won’t have it. I won’t have it! Not here, not I—!”

Shaking my head, tearing my eyes from the countless soldiers dead and gone, I broke into a run for the depths of the post, as if fleeing the roar of the blasts. At my back, red pillars of fire and no end of black smoke climbing to the heavens. The provisions laid in for a siege lay scattered underfoot, charred wreckage, and the soldiers who’d lived scrambled about the interior in a panic, unmanned by the endless volleys of magic.

“Count Darius. Word from a dragon-mount rider come back. General Gawein Rasse’s unit, that went to the front, is annihilated. Lord Gawein too, they say, has fallen in battle to the enemy general, Epika.”

“Damn it… so it’s as I feared.”

The moment I’d let the enemy’s advance through, I’d held no hope, but hearing the death confirmed in fact, the will to fight drained out of me all at once. With the strength that remained, slipping through that rain of magic to strike back was a hard thing.

Surrender, then.

Just as that humiliating last resort crossed my mind, another rueful word came flying from one of the soldiers.

“Count Darius. A little while ago, several men bolted the post, meaning to turn coat to the enemy.”

“…I see.”

That men would flee the post to save their skins and beg for their lives was a thing I’d foreseen. No surprise in it. But the next words twisted my face despite myself.

“…Only, their pleading found no ear with the enemy. Every last one of them was butchered.”

“—”

“The enemy won’t take our surrender. They mean, it appears, to keep up the attack, thorough and unbroken, until we’re wiped out entire.”

“…That little girl—! She truly means to kill me!”

No different from what she’d done at the other posts, the rain of attacks would not stop until every one of us here had perished. The defenses of the post were as good as gone now, and the soldiers, despairing at the gap in strength, would bolt and beg for their lives. And those who’d lost the will to fight, she’d shoot down with magic, no questions asked.

A deed you could fairly call the work of a devil.

“…Command the soldiers. Not a single step out of the post.”

I gave the messenger the word to pass along, but the man’s response came oddly halting.

“Count Darius. But holed up in this post, we’ll only be killed one-sidedly by magic in the end.”

“The enemy won’t allow surrender, will they. Go out, and it’s a dog’s death.”

“Stay in, and it’s still annihilation, as things stand.”

I know that much without being told. The moment we joined with Duke Felsdorf, who set himself against the imperial house and made a show of fighting to the last, we became, in the eyes of the present Empire, a nuisance to be cleared away. Violent outlaws. The enemy had no reason on earth to grant such men the right to live.

“…Damn it. To lose out to a mere handful of that number…”

The edge in soldiers had been ours for certain. Had we shaped the encircling line with more care and fought not head-on but by a way that surely dragged the enemy low, we’d never have fallen into a corner like this.

“…One more order. Gather the soldiers we’ve left at the depths of the post, at once.”

“That is—”

“Quickly! From here we enter our final battle. As one body we sweep away Epika’s faction. Understand it, and hurry the preparations!”

A siege, that kind of resistance, held no meaning now. The stone wall that had seemed so solid lay broken, its inside laid bare, and a post with zero defensive worth left was worth nothing to hold. Once they’d shaved our strength down hard with magic, the enemy would step into the post. Knowing that girl, she’d come to take my head with her own hand, no doubt of it.

“…Forgetting the debt of being raised, after all I did.”

Spit out what whining and grudges I might, the grating roar of the blasts would not fall still.

Trembling before the sign of death drawing near, I had nothing for it but to walk the one road left me, even if the end of that road ran on into the pit’s own bottom.

16

“Gugh!!”

I ran an enemy through with a sword in the space of a breath, as he sprang at me in ambush.

They’d massed the men at one point, meaning to catch us in a surprise strike once we’d stepped into the post, but through a careful sweep by magic, his scheme had been laid bare to us, plain as day.

With overwhelming magic I swept away the soldiers around the Count. To cut down Count Darius, left standing utterly alone, was easier than twisting a baby’s arm.

“It’s been a while. Father.”

“Epika. You… you little—!”

I ran my father through the heart, put on a smile brimming over, and bowed my head, deep and low. A reunion to move a family to tears… a touch too rank with blood, perhaps, for that.

I drew the pasted-on smile back in and looked the man bleeding so wretchedly before me over, head to foot, in order. Though I stood watching his clothes soak through with blood and his color turn pale and bloodless, no feeling of any particular kind welled up in me.

At the father coughing thick, clotted blood back up his throat, spitting a red froth from his lips, I let an insolent smile rise.

“Set your mind at ease. The name of Darius will go on a while yet.”

“Gogh… ugh…”

“I’ll take up the name of Count Darius as head of the house. Though of course I’ll dispose of every last relative who had a hand in your scheming. Still, the historied House Darius lives on. That must be your heart’s own wish too, Father, no?”

“Gah… ugbo!”

“Ahaha. I can’t make out a word you’re saying.”

Count Darius opened his mouth to raise some voice of curse and spite, but no sound would come; he only groaned, foul and low. He hadn’t the strength left in him even to speak.

This man, my true father. Enough to turn the stomach, and it left me at a loss.

“Well then, shall we bring it to a close.”

“Gobo—!!”

I swept the sword lodged in his chest sidelong and cut his upper body clean in two.

My own true father, Count Darius, breathed his last.

The enemy within the post, wiped out. With the lord of the region dead, the Darius domain would slip from the hands of the resistance and be set under the imperial house’s rule.

The outcome was settled.

That so much blood had run within the Darius domain would be graven into the nation’s chronicle as cruel history, no doubt.

“Lady Epika. No survivors among the enemy. Subjugation complete.”

Cornelia gave the word in a cold voice, a mountain of corpses at her back.

“It ended awfully easily. No showy resistance to speak of.”

“This is no more than the opening of a civil war.”

“So it is. Until we cut down the ringleader who set the civil war going, there’s no peace to hope for.”

The interior of the post, riddled with holes, was all rubble and dead men. It was past all believing that this had been a stout fortress.

I called up a small ball of fire in my palm and set the heaped bodies of the enemy soldiers alight.

I watched the sparks scatter and snap for a few seconds, then turned my back on the ruined enemy post.

“How kind of you, to lay them to rest. Some small feeling for your father too, then, is it.”

“I didn’t burn the bodies to mourn them. Left as they are, the heaps of flesh would raise a stink and a fuss, which is a bother; I only burned them for that.”

“Then you’ve no feeling for your father at all.”

“Who can say… only, at the least, I felt no prick of regret at killing off that old bag of bones.”

The feeling of a heart squeezed hard enough to crush: that had come, if anywhere, only when I burned Gawein to nothing.

A tie of blood is nothing so precious. That, I think, was a fight that proved it out, true and clear.

What matters is who you spent your days with, and how. The death of someone who was good to you gouges the heart and wounds it, unconditioned, however you school yourself not to mind. All the more when it was your own hand that did it.

“In war you can’t choose the ones you kill. And if you fought weighing each of them by like and dislike, the heart would never hold.”

I spoke as if to teach Cornelia, but all of it was a spell cast on myself.

I’d show no mercy so mild as sparing someone for being an old acquaintance. The enemy, you cut down. Whoever it is, the answer must not change. Let me start choosing which lives to keep and which to throw by my own feeling, and I’m no different from the corrupt nobles clinging to their privileges. Set private sentiment aside and carry out the work you’re given. From this moment on, at the least, I swore I’d hold not a shred of feeling for an enemy.

Watching the black rainclouds gathered overhead, Cornelia let out a breath with a lonely look.

“Where you’re bound, Lady Epika, looks to be a solitary world.”

“Let me teach you something good. Solitude isn’t a bitter, sorrowful thing. Jerked about by no one else’s doings, able to live for your own sake alone: in a way, it’s the happiest state there is.”

“…Somehow that sounds like the line of a person poor at getting on with others.”

As dusk drew near and the light bled from all around, the mage corps, bound for the toppling of Duke Felsdorf, rode on and on toward what lay ahead, swaying in the saddle.

Across the boundless plain a single long column crawled, holding to a march so quiet you’d never feel the ghastly aftermath of war in it at all.

Chapter 3 – Rematch of the Strongest and the Most Feared

1

Kingdom Calendar Year 1241, October.

To the Philnotes front went the main force under Ritziareite. To the Theresia front went the rebel-suppression corps under Epika. The strength left in the Imperial capital came to roughly two-tenths of the whole, and of that, what Emperor Valtrune would take with her to the Republic was a bare escort of fewer than fifty.

“Rudolf. For a while yet, starting today, I’m counting on you as captain of the escort.”

“If it costs me this life, I will guard your person, Lady Valtrune.”

“Fufu. Thank you. But there’s no need to steel yourself so. The road shouldn’t be all that dangerous.”

Her purpose in going to the Republic this time was to conclude a peace between the two nations. There was no great battle looming ahead.

“I have a dependable personal knight to guard me at every moment, so unless something happens, you’re free to take it easy.”

At her words, the tension in Rudolf’s face eased a little.

“Your consideration humbles me.”

He never once let his formal speech slip, but the weight of the most vital of duties, guarding the person of the Emperor, must have felt stifling to him.

“Rune-sama is right. Lord Rudolf, let’s go without stiffening our shoulders too much.”

“Ah. Strange as it is, hearing you say so puts me at ease. After all, you’re the man who overpowered Epika. Nothing could be more reassuring than having you along.”

Where his manner toward Rune-sama had been all deference, he clapped my shoulder lightly with an easy, familiar hand.

“That’s my line as well. I was looking forward to working alongside a division commander the Imperial army takes such pride in.”

“Heh. You do say the nicest things!”

To Rudolf, doling out his casual pats of the shoulder at every turn, I made no particular comment and turned my back.

“I have separate preparations to see to, so if you’ll excuse me.”

“Sure! Let’s meet again when it’s time to set out!”

I bowed to that hearty smile, which looked to have no front or back to it, and then leaned in to whisper to Her Majesty.

“Rune-sama. I’ll go and call in Fadi and the others, the ones to shadow us in secret.”

“Yes. See to it as arranged.”

“Yes.”

A few words to align our intentions, and I slipped away from the guards of her person.

Rudolf and the Imperial soldiers who guarded the Emperor, Rudolf above all, I did count as allies, properly. It was only that I felt them not quite worth my whole trust. If a spy had mixed in among them, plotting her assassination, I alone could not handle it.

When I came to the far side of a castle wall, out of sight of where Rudolf and the rest were gathered, presences appeared one after another, as if to say they’d been waiting. Among them a red-haired youth of outsized presence turned his eyes to me, polishing his prized short knife with a practiced hand.

“About time to set out?”

“Yeah. Just as Rune-sama ordered, I want you to tail us without a soul catching on.”

“Aye aye, leave it to me, big bro.”

The intelligence corps under Fadi. They were our side, people I could spare all needless wariness with. Dorothea was out, having taken deep wounds in the recent fight in the Dyrst region, but even so the corps was full of the elite she and Fadi had drilled hard.

“If you spot anyone suspicious, report it as it comes. I mean to handle it on our end as far as I can, but it’d help to have you positioned to step into a fight at any moment, just in case.”

“Got it! Ah, and one thing. If there’s a guy we can plainly call an enemy, is it fine for us to deal with him on our own?”

“The fine judgment I leave to you and yours. Above all, make it absolute that Rune-sama isn’t put in danger.”

“Okay. I’ll play it nice and clever so I don’t get in your way, big bro.”

The road to the Republic was, next to the Philnotes and Theresia fronts, overwhelmingly less dangerous, safe. Only, the sort who schemed the Emperor’s downfall lay hidden in every place, at home and abroad. As the personal knight who guarded her closest of all, I wanted to tend even to the finest risks with care.

“Fadi. Of the strength I can move right now, you and yours are the only ones I can believe in without condition.”

“Ehh~ you do say the nicest things! Now I’m raring to go!”

“Keep it up, then. We’ll discuss again later whether you board the ship to the Republic with us.”

“And if we don’t board, we double back to the Theresia region and back up General Epika, was it? Question mark.”

“Yeah.”

The fight in the Theresia region was by no means one we could afford to lose either. Fadi’s people were an excellent intelligence corps and, at the same time, a company of skilled hands who could be counted on for no end of work on the battlefield too. What strength I could spare, I wanted sent to the front as far as possible.

Ideally, the road would pass without incident and we’d reach the harbor city of Nocto, where the ship bound for the Roscheld Republic lay moored. Once aboard, we need only keep our minds on safety inside the ship until we reached the Republic. Threats one couldn’t foresee lurked in other nations too, I supposed, but being on Republic soil would be far safer than being inside an Empire so thick with political enemies.

“If anything’s going to happen, it’d be inside the harbor city of Nocto, or on the road while we’re exposed.”

“Just so. Nocto especially has countless harbors, so assassins from other nations slip in among the crowds easily.”

Nocto was a city with fine infrastructure for trade and exchange with other nations. It was also one of the routes by which the Order’s and the Kingdom’s people entered the Empire. On top of that, a maze-like network of underground waterways, flushing domestic wastewater straight out to sea, ran beneath the whole of the town. Dim and vast, sewers that ordinary folk rarely set foot in were the perfect place for rats to prowl.

“Al! Time to move out soon!”

“You’re being called, big bro.”

“Ah… I know.”

There were far too many places in Nocto that needed watching. For me, holding the defense close by Her Majesty, there’d be no means to confirm the safety of Nocto’s vast sewers. Which was exactly why I’d brought the help.

“Fadi. There may be filthy rats lurking in Nocto.”

“Filthy rats… ah, that’s what you mean.”

Fadi read the turn of my words at once and cast his eyes down with a grave face. The Order, the Kingdom, assassins of other hostile nobles.

“Smoke them out and they’d come swarming, sure enough. All kinds of rats, at that.”

“Before we reach Nocto, I want you to put a few on scouting the area around it. If there’s nothing, then that’s fine…”

“I’ll set them to send word the moment anything’s hiding. Because if it’s not rats but snakes that turn up, now that’d be real trouble.”

“Snakes…”

An unpleasant memory flickered across my mind. The Saint, and the giant Black Serpent and White Serpent. If a threat like that were lurking close at hand, then we’d be in no position to be conducting peace talks in the Republic at all.

I braced for the worst, parted from Fadi, and made my way back to her.

2

Deceiving the Order’s eyes under the pretext of convalescence, I had set foot on Imperial soil once again.

Before the Kingdom struck at Philnotes, I made my way there, and from Philnotes boarded a cargo ship bound for the Empire and slipped inside its borders. I cast off my Saint’s raiment and disguised myself as a traveler in a plain hemp robe. All of it to fulfill a reunion with the Elect, with them. All of it to save the world.

“Not here.”

The harbor city of Nocto. I’d been certain the Elect, that they, would be here, but had I guessed wrong? And yet near the port, guards were making rounds, far too heavy a watch to keep stationed there in ordinary times. Plainly this was no ordinary moment.

“Nothing for it. I’ll wait a little, and… hm?”

As I walked to put distance between myself and the guards, a suspicious shadow slipped into the corner of my eye. And then I even caught sight of shady men making their way toward the sewers.

“This looks to be turning tiresome.”

The men who vanished toward the sewers wore the same shabby traveler’s guise as I did. Ordinarily there’d be no need to mark them, but by chance I had seen it. That in their hands they gripped a small vial of Madmiasma.

“…That looks likely to spoil the touching reunion between me and the Elect.”

My intuition was reacting hard. That those people ought to be cleared away at once. From their build and bearing alone I couldn’t make out who they were, but Madmiasma being brought in meant the Order was most likely tangled up in it too.

“A bother, but no help for it… Shall I sweep them clean before I meet the Elect again?”

Either way, this breed of vermin was, to me, a thing that got in the way. I hadn’t meant to root them out entirely, but to weaken them until the organization’s strength was gone. Sooner or later, a confrontation with those bewitched by Madmiasma would have to be had.

“Well, a reunion with the Elect will nine times in ten become a battle, so I might as well think of this as a warm-up.”

Talking myself round with some such excuse, I moved to deal with the bother. …Oh? Since when had I begun to act in so human a way?

A heartless creation of god. I ought only to move to fulfill my meaning as a Saint, and yet, here I was, finding joy in a reunion with the Elect, and, conversely, chafing at those who’d get in the way of it. Was this not, for all the world, a person with feelings, exactly?

“…Fuu. What am I thinking, I wonder.”

I shook my head and denied the conceited turn of my own thoughts. All of it for Lord Svell. What I did was by Lord Svell’s will. That I wished to kill god, to kill the Lord Svell swallowed by miasma, was all one and the same with the wish of the chief deity.

The meaning of casting away my heart, of forgetting the feelings that mattered. It was because I myself had wished to carry out my duty, undisturbed by feeling. Once more I drove a wedge into what I, as the Saint, ought to do.

“…Glad that I might fulfill my purpose? Impossible. I’m meant to have cast my heart away.”

Feeling something within me shift, little by little, I chased after the men who carried the Madmiasma, as though to shake off the vexing thought.

3

“Then let us set out for the harbor city of Nocto.”

When the driver of the carriage that bore Emperor Valtrune and me cracked his whip, the carriage began to move slowly. The forty-odd cavalry arrayed around it started forward all at once, matching the carriage’s pace.

“So we’re off at last.”

Her profile as she watched the scenery through the window looked a touch uneasy.

“Something on your mind?”

“I worry about the ones who went to the Philnotes and Theresia fronts. That’s all it is.”

“And any unease about going to the Republic?”

“Not much of that. If anything, I’m looking forward to seeing Raquel. …Is she keeping well, I wonder.”

“I’m sure Lady Raquel is looking forward to your visit too, Rune-sama.”

“I hope so.”

It seemed she felt no unease about the talks with the Republic. Her first diplomacy as Emperor. It wouldn’t be strange to be a little nervous, but the joy of reuniting with an old friend outweighed any worry over the diplomacy. Ordinarily she was a woman strung taut as Emperor at every hour. Harder days than this surely lay ahead of her. So I hoped this diplomacy with the Republic would prove a meaningful thing for her.

“Before we board the ship for the Republic, I expect we’ll spend one day in Nocto.”

“For the guards who’d traveled by horse, a sea voyage straight afterward would be a hard thing to bear.”

“Yes. After discussing it with Lord Rudolf, it’s a stay to account for the fatigue of long travel.”

Consideration for her condition went without saying, but the escort’s condition, too, had to be kept above a certain level. It was to forestall the case where, at the crucial moment, fatigue or ill health left them unable to fight.

Through the window, the countless cavalry. For now they had room to spare in body and spirit, and one could see riders near one another chatting and laughing, but the more time passed, the more surely even these hardy men would wear down.

“If we could take it as given nothing would happen, there’d be no problem pushing them and setting out at once.”

“It’d be a trouble to have them break down aboard ship, too.”

I wanted them to fill their role as her guard in full. Nodding back at Rune-sama’s words of concern, I watched Rudolf outside, hoisting his sword high to the sky in high spirits.

“…He, at least, looks to need no rest.”

“He does seem to have inexhaustible stamina.”

A division commander of the Imperial army, no less. He even had the leisure to swing his sword about for no reason, and the soldiers around him kept a slight, wary distance from him.

“Is he always like that?”

“Watching him enjoy himself puts the heart back in you, doesn’t it?”

“Well… somehow it feels like you’d have to add Steano and Ambros together and not divide by two to get it.”

A bold, boisterous temperament. And on top of it, a hard-charging vanguard type in a fight. The very picture of the kind who racks up battle after battle in raw physical combat.

“In a close-quarters trial of strength, I don’t think he’d let anyone come after him.”

“I know it well. I killed him in the previous timeline.”

In the previous timeline, I’d taken his life on the battlefield. Rudolf, who had mowed down so many soldiers, gave the Kingdom no small trouble. There was little of the feint-laced movement that reads an opponent’s tricks, but his charging force and the weight of a single blow were such that if you couldn’t parry them cleanly, your limbs would break with ease.

“Did you fight him one on one?”

“No. Their side was Epika and him, the two of them. It wasn’t just me on ours, mind.”

Epika and Rudolf. To take on these two great pillars of the Imperial army, the Kingdom’s side had needed to gather men who could fight them accordingly. In the earliest stage of the war, that the Imperial army won victories across the map and expanded its territory owed itself, wholly, to the two of them fighting hard. The sudden swelling of held territory made it impossible to keep supply lines maintained, and that told, and the momentum gradually waned, but the sense that these were people who could not be left alone held firm and unbroken inside the Kingdom too.

“The battle specialists called the Kingdom’s Ten Elites… three of them, plus me, four all told, went at it, and somehow we brought the two down.”

It was a fierce fight. Three of the ten renowned across the Kingdom for their skill had been thrown into it, no less. In the war between Kingdom and Empire, how fiercely Rudolf and Epika had raged, that alone conveyed it well enough.

To add to it, of the three of the Ten who went to fight the two, two died in the midst of it, and the third gave out just after the fight ended. So I did not doubt Rudolf’s strength in the slightest.

“As a guard he’d look, if anything, like excess strength.”

“The feeling being it’s a waste to use an Imperial army division commander to watch over one person?”

“Most people, I think, would say he ought to be sent to the Theresia region or the Philnotes front, put to reinforcing a main line.”

“That’s so. I thought to do that at first, too. But more than I’d reckoned at the start, suspicious movements have grown thick around me.”

But that was only the general view. In a present where domestic affairs were so tense, keeping a firm defensive strength beside the Emperor was by no means wrong. Because those who found her existence a hindrance, who wished her gone, were beyond counting. Having set her hand to political reform and brought a cleansing action to the Empire’s stagnant, rotten state apparatus, she was, to those who’d enjoyed the old vested interests, nothing but a thorn in their side. Once they’d marked her as a being who might threaten the unshakable positions they’d built, they’d want her dragged down from the Emperor’s seat by any means at all.

“To have your life hunted from within rather than by an outside enemy is trouble of the worst kind…”

“I’ve accepted this too, as the fate of having become Emperor. And if anything happens, you’ll protect me, won’t you. So the worry isn’t so very great.”

She spun the trust-filled words out naturally and laid a hand on my head.

“You’re my personal knight, and my pride.”

Held by the beautiful blue eyes peering into mine, all I could do was keep silently watching her smile.

4

The road passed with no accident of being set upon by anything, and we drew steadily nearer the harbor city of Nocto. Just sitting in the carriage, holding the same posture without cease, was harder than you’d expect. She stretched a little too, and kept casting her eyes over the scenery outside.

“Shall we take a short rest soon?”

“Yes. I’d like to breathe the outside air once.”

“Then I’ll give the signal to stop.”

I put my face out the window and waved lightly to Rudolf, who was riding abreast a little behind the carriage. Noticing my signal at once, he bellowed, ‘Halt the march!’

“Ow…”

“What’s the matter, Al?”

“Nothing. I didn’t think he’d give the order to halt the unit in a shout, so I flinched and knocked my head.”

I’d assumed he controlled the whole body’s movements with some easy-to-read hand gesture or the like. Made to hear a sudden, unexpected shout, I’d gone and struck my head on the upper window frame.

“Is the spot you hit all right?”

“Yes. I’m fine.”

I set a hand to the dully aching back of my head and slowly drew it in from the window.

“Do you need healing magic?”

“No, that’s quite all right. Or rather, absolutely please don’t.”

For the Emperor to work healing magic herself on a personal knight who’d hurt himself, startled by Rudolf’s volume, was a thing that could not be right even for appearances’ sake. Or rather, it was just far too embarrassing. To trouble her hand over something so trivial, as her personal knight, was a thing I could not permit though heaven and earth turned over.

“Are you truly sure? You needn’t hold back.”

“No, it isn’t holding back, it’s a matter of a personal knight’s sense of order.”

“Is it? Well, if you’re all right, then that’s fine.”

Not a shred of dignity to it. Perhaps I’d gone soft in the peace, too much at ease. If it stayed this quiet all the way to Nocto, we’d arrive an hour ahead of schedule.

“Rune-sama, I’ll step away a moment.”

“Yes.”

I got out of the carriage, and when I traded a glance with her she caught my meaning and headed toward Rudolf and the others.

“Thank you for your work this far. Your fine, orderly ranks let me feel safe the whole road.”

“I am honored by your praise.”

“I’m counting on you as far as Nocto, just so.”

“Yes!”

Rudolf and the escort, addressed with words of thanks by the Emperor herself, reacted with tremendous delight.

“Oh. Getting all happy at being praised by Lady Valtrune.”

Fadi poked his face out from behind me, laid a hand on my shoulder, and watched Rune-sama and Rudolf and the rest with an interested eye.

“Naturally. There’s no one alive who’d be handed words by her and not be glad.”

“Boss… take it that far and there’s nothing for it but to call you a blind believer.”

“I don’t mind. I’m a blind believer because I like it.”

“He up and admitted to being a blind believer…”

I was aware I believed in her blindly. Or rather, from Linos, whose face I met so often now in daily business, I was constantly told, ‘You’re infatuated with her.’ But I didn’t think that a bad thing.

“People believe what they want to believe.”

“What’s that. Sounds like a line you’d find written in the scriptures of the Svell faith.”

“Religion, gods, a lord, parents, a lover… what people believe in differs from one to the next, and its depth differs by the person too.”

For me, the thing I could believe in without condition happened to be her, that was all. Had I never met her, there’d have been a world-line where I put my faith in something else, I supposed.

“Just as you trust Dorothea, Fadi, I believe the things Rune-sama does are right.”

“I see. So it’s the same as Dorothea plotting a riot inside the hospital because she couldn’t smoke for a few days.”

“Well, close to that… also, the riot business, in detail later.”

“Yeah. I’d been meaning to talk to you about it at some point too, big bro.”

I’d meant to be talking about the things one believes in, but with Fadi’s confession my attention had been carried off completely. What trivial reason was that woman about to run riot over… When we got back from the Republic visit, it seemed I’d have to hold a hearing.

“So, Fadi. About Nocto.”

The matter of Dorothea starting a riot at the hospital waiting ahead I’d deal with later; what mattered was how things stood with the peace and order of the harbor city of Nocto. When I asked, he threw out his chest as if he’d been waiting and cleared his throat.

“The ones I sent ahead seem to be watching the town, but there’s no suspicious movement so far. Peace itself, they say.”

“Is that so. Keep at it.”

For the moment, no danger factor had been confirmed in Nocto, which left me feeling a delicate mix, relieved and uneasy both.

“Huh. Not too happy about it?”

“No, it isn’t that… I was thinking that if we knew there was a danger, we could lay countermeasures for it.”

“True, having no information at all makes you more uneasy, if anything.”

“It isn’t that I doubt your people’s ability, Fadi. It’s only that at every moment I turn over every possibility and brace for the worst.”

That the unease never ran dry was because, over Rune-sama’s safety, I myself had become extremely anxiety-ridden. However much I prepared, somewhere in my heart I could not wipe the worry clean. Perhaps because I’d witnessed her death once, the same scene as that time flashed back on me at odd moments.

If you lose her again, you’re finished. There was a self within me that spoke it to me like an admonition. Become a personal knight, improve my sword-arm however far, and only this weak heart I could not change. It was the weakness at my very foundation.

“Boss. You’re scared, aren’t you.”

“Yeah.”

“Not of a fight, is it… you always fight like your own life doesn’t matter. Actually there are times you look downright thrilled by a nasty fight.”

Fadi had grasped, too, that my weak point was her. When the thing one believes in is lost, what does a person feel? The answer was simple. Cling forever to what’s lost, and in time be ruined.

I fell silent and swallowed my voice in the back of my throat. As I felt the warmth of my whole body drop clear to my fingertips, Fadi, his red hair swaying, turned a sharp, cutting gaze toward where Nocto lay.

“…Listen. It’s not my place, a brat like me saying it, but sink in too deep and you might get badly burned.”

In that instant, a gust of wind struck the spot. Dead leaves fallen to the ground scattered up and vanished into the far sky, as if laughing at me.

“I’m glad you’re worried about me.”

Along with my thanks to him, my answer to the excess of concern was already decided.

“But I don’t intend to lose Rune-sama.”

“Even if you don’t intend it, a time to lose her might come. And when it does… what then?”

If I failed to protect her through and lost her life. In that case, then surely, I would—

“…Throw everything away, I suppose.”

“That’s—”

The unease on Fadi’s face deepened. There was no way I’d think about what came after losing her. Rather, there was no need to. Because in a world without her, I’d surely have found no value in myself.

“…Don’t tell me you’d die?”

“…There’ll be no losing her. If it came to losing her—”

I’d die in her place. That was the duty of a blind believer.

5

Thirty minutes before Valtrune’s party reached Nocto.

The ones dashing frantically along the forest road were Fadi’s subordinates. Rolling on the ground behind those who fled were the corpses of the comrades who had, until moments ago, moved with them.

“Scatter and run!”

“Guh…”

“One more of us is down… gyaah!”

Against the fleeing figures, a merciless rain of arrows poured down. Not pinpoint, but the sharp downpour reaped the runners’ lives without fail.

“Damn. Where the hell did they crawl out from?!”

“How should I know. But before I knew it there were Order soldiers all over the town… gah!!”

“H-hey!”

A spray of bright-red droplets danced into the air. A shot from behind. The pointed arrow ran clean through the right shoulder of the woman fleeing with the man and drove deep into the trunk of a tree ahead.

“I-it hurts it hurts hurts hurts hurts!!”

“Don’t thrash. I’ll stop the bleeding now—”

“Hot, hurts, itches… I can’t, breathe…!”

Holding down the thrashing woman, the man pressed cloth to the wound, but the red seeping through it gradually consumed the whole of the cloth.

“Hang on. If we just stop the blood you can still run!”

The man called to her desperately, but she was already in no state to lend an ear to a voice. Foam at her mouth, the whites of her eyes rolling up, the woman wrung out her last strength to shape one thing.

“…Ahh… it hurts, so much.”

It spoke of a pain great enough to draw tears. Writhing and convulsing in agony, the woman lost at last even the will to thrash, and her thin breath in time gave out completely.

“Damn it. Poison, was it…”

The shoulder wound was not, by itself, a fatal one. But smeared into the arrowhead, apart from blood, was some black liquid thing. Staunching the bleeding meant nothing. A deadly poison that, at the barest graze of flesh, coursed through the whole body.

The man laid the dead woman’s head on his knee, looked up at the sky, and let out a sigh as if giving up.

“…So this is where we die.”

A voice heavy with the resentment one feels at an unreasonable death. The moment he’d finished his lament, arrows just like the ones that had killed the woman sprouted at scores of points across his body, and in an instant his breath, too, gave out.

The forest road lost its screams and the footfalls parting the grass alike, and silence took their place. The scouting party, wiped out. The suspicious band stirring in Nocto, the city Aldia and the others were bound for, cut people down without hesitation, and in numbers. It was cold-bloodedness itself.

6

The instant we set foot on that ground, a strange air drifted even into the carriage.

“Stop!”

At Her Majesty’s single word the carriage jolted to a halt, and Rudolf and the others began to sharpen their watch on the surroundings. The single road leading to Nocto. We’d come to where, once through the forest track, the port could be seen at a glance, but plainly there was something off about the state of things around us.

“…Al. We’re getting out.”

“Yes.”

When we stepped down from the carriage, Rudolf came over at once and, brow furrowed, let out a long breath.

“Lady Valtrune. Seems we’ve come to Nocto at one hell of a time.”

“So it seems.”

The source of the strangeness was found soon enough.

“Commander! There’s a foul smell from the grass over there!”

“Don’t go near it carelessly! I’ll check.”

A foul smell, one of the soldiers called it, but plainly it was the reek of blood. Rune-sama and I traded a look and nodded.

“…This is likely.”

“Yes. Someone’s dead.”

It wouldn’t be a passerby who’d chanced to collapse and die. Because plainly, without an external cause, without being killed, a thing wouldn’t bleed like this.

“…Ugh. This is grim.”

Rudolf parted the grass, stepped into the thicket, covered his mouth with a hand, and went pale in the face. The source of the reek of blood. It was a well-built man whose arm had, savagely, been bitten clean off.

“Who is it?”

“Beats me. Only thing that’s sure is he’s not from around here.”

Rudolf turned over the badly damaged corpse.

“…Be nice if he had something to show who he was.”

“It won’t be so convenient, I expect.”

For all the search of the body from corner to corner, there was no telling what sort of man the corpse had been. The one thing made clear was that something dangerous was happening in Nocto. The soldiers turned drawn faces toward the forest road.

“…We’re going, then? On?”

“Feels awfully dangerous to me.”

Many of them shrank back. As most wished for a return, Rudolf alone drew a breath, then slapped both cheeks hard and raised a rousing shout.

“All right! We push on ahead!”

“C-Commander?!”

“Oi oi. Why so shocked? We’re the Emperor’s guard. If we are, then we’ve a duty to see her safely to the destination. Well, if the Emperor herself wishes to withdraw, then of course I mean to follow that command…”

Rudolf let the words trail and moved his eyes to her. Don’t go saying something feeble like withdraw, now. To that gaze, laden with such an intent, she couldn’t help letting a laugh spill.

“That’s right. We won’t withdraw. As planned, we advance toward the port of Nocto!”

“There it is.”

The soldiers were quaking with dread, but Rudolf loosed a hearty laugh like a man who’d shaken something off and swung himself onto his horse. Once he’d decided to go, the soldiers, reluctantly, turned their eyes too to the forest road.

“That’s the way of it. Everyone, form up. From here on, the first to lose his nerve and leave the ranks might be the first to die.”

“——?!”

His one line worked well on the soldiers, it seemed. So as not to scatter, they passed glances to those before, behind, and to either side.

“Al. I’ll go by horse, not the carriage.”

The forest road was somewhat mired, a bad path where the carriage looked likely to bog down at once. I left the carriage too and walked behind her.

“I’ll attend you.”

A forest road that gave off an eerie stillness and a fathomless dread. Following Rudolf, who led the breath-holding soldiers, we too, swayed on horseback, made our attempt at the intrusion into dangerous ground.

7

That a great, hulking shadow was crawling and writhing along the forest road, I noticed at just about the midpoint of the track leading to Nocto.

“Gyah…?!”

One of the galloping cavalry vanished, abruptly, with a short cry, and that was the signal for the fight.

“All hands, on your guard… one man’s down.”

At Rudolf’s thick voice, we formed a small cluster back to back. The rustle of grass and brush being parted. One, two, three. Straining the ears, there were footsteps closing from every side.

“Commander… w-we’re surrounded.”

“So it seems. But haste is forbidden. We draw them in, nice and slow.”

Rudolf clapped the shoulder of a soldier whose voice was shaking, as if to rally him, then killed his own footsteps and crouched into the cover of the grass. The footsteps clothed in the scent of death drew near us a while, then, of a sudden, snuffed out.

“…………?”

“…Nothing… you hear anything?”

The soldiers too traded whispers and watched the surroundings. A forest road wrapped in stillness. The eerie footsteps, gone. A few minutes of nothing passed, and it was just as one soldier, out of patience, raised his face a little from the grass’s cover.

“——nng?!”

There was no death-cry; with a muffled sound the soldier, rigid and upright, toppled straight backward.

“…An arrow?”

Into the crown of his head, a single arrow had driven.

“All hands, advance toward Nocto!!”

“““—Ha!”””

The order came down the instant after. The escort broke into a run all at once. Keeping my watch on the space around Rune-sama, I urged her to follow after them.

“We go too.”

“Yes.”

At the soldiers sprinting the forest road, countless arrows began to fly from every direction.

“Gah!”

“Ugh…!”

“Kh… Commander! A fierce volley!”

“All hands, evade!”

Rudolf called out desperately, but to keep dodging a rain of arrows with no telling where they flew from was a fearful task. Somehow I wanted to get through the forest road and reach Nocto, but breaking through while weathering this onslaught seemed, plainly put, an outrageous thing.

One, then another, the soldiers running beside us dropped away.

“Rune-sama.”

“I’m fine. More to the point, there are no guards left around us.”

“——?!”

Taken up with the attacks from every side, I’d failed to keep a count of the escort’s number. The strength had scattered before I knew it, and around her and me only some ten guards remained. On top of it, there was no sign of Rudolf, the forerunner who’d slipped through this concentrated fire.

Push on like this, and it was only a matter of being picked off one by one until we were wiped out.

“Rune-sama. Here, above all, we should give ourselves to enduring, and to rejoining Lord Rudolf.”

“That’s so. All of you still living, follow us! We run for that hollow over there like our lives depend on it!”

“““Ha!”””

We gathered the escort, halted our advance a while, and changed direction, charging headlong for a hollow that could cut off the threat of the arrows. Sliding in, the arrows didn’t reach inside the hollow and passed over our heads instead.

“For the moment we’re safe.”

“But close the distance and they’ll shoot us from above and it’ll be over after all.”

“Let’s meet them. A hollow angled as steep as this, they’d have to close a fair distance before they could strike us.”

She’d judged, I supposed, that fighting at a range we could see was better than being struck one-sidedly from a distance we couldn’t. Our guards, myself among them, carried little in the way of ranged weapons; they were all specialists of the sword and spear, of close combat.

If we were to make a chance of winning, there was nothing for it but to hunt them down all at once on the counter.

“When we break out, I’ll go first.”

“Too much caution is a danger in itself.”

“Of course.”

Even with her magic supporting the attack, the moment I put my face out of the hollow, a split-second’s delay in setting off could well mean death. If I meant to go forward, I’d need to move fast enough to give them no opening.

“…Your Majesty. Will we get out of here?”

“It’s all right. Act calmly and a way through will surely open.”

She heartened a young soldier who looked about to be crushed by unease.

Spirits low. The arrows crossing mercilessly overhead sounded their whistle of split air and fed the soldiers’ dread.

“…Are we. All going to die here.”

“Don’t say ill-omened things.”

“But we ought to steel ourselves that it might come to that.”

“…This is no joke.”

The fear of not knowing when an arrow might run you through, and the impatience of passing time. In this present, taking on constant, enormous stress, endurance wouldn’t hold for long. Unless I played a hand that could show them a hope, they’d all simply be cut down, worn to nothing. Tracing the movement of the arrows overhead with my eyes, I readied to leap from the hollow.

“…Rune-sama. Soon now.”

“Take care.”

Relying on the faint sound of feet pressing the grass, I slowly raised myself to a crouch. Confirming that the number of arrows passing overhead had thinned and that the footsteps had closed to about twenty meters ahead, I drew one last great breath.

“Haah… I’m going!”

I showed myself out of the hollow all at once, and, sword at the ready, sprinted at full tilt. Passing my eyes lightly over the whole, grasping the rough positions of the enemy, I made a sharp change of direction.

“Now. The counterattack begins.”

8

A breath before the flash of the blade, the head of a black-clad attacker flew off.

“—Gsh?!”

“Don’t take it hard. We’re desperate too.”

I felt some slight guilt at the soundless scream, but didn’t slow my speed. As if to whip the fresh blood clinging to the swung-through blade away, a pair of arms still holding a drawn bow spun into the air. Feeling the sure response of a cut, I looked to see how he’d take it.

“…………?”

I turned my gaze and felt something off at once. Wait. Both arms cut away, and this thin a reaction, why?

If both arms were cut, then even short of instant death, one ought to crouch and writhe in a bleeding fit and a pain near enough to drive you mad. And yet the man before me—

“…Fuu. Fuu. A, ah.”

A tongue that wouldn’t turn. A dullness of response in the hollow eyes as though he felt no pain. It looked less like a man enduring pain than one whose mind had gone wrong by some other cause. Swaying his upper body unevenly, the man walked slowly toward me with eyes that held no will. As if wholly ruled by the will to kill his opponent, he showed no sign of even staunching the wound.

This feeling, I’d seen it somewhere—

“—?!”

While I turned over what the wrongness was, a killing intent that raised gooseflesh across my whole body touched me. The crust of the earth trembled, and sand and mud at my feet leapt faintly. A scent of death crawling soundlessly up from behind. When I pulled clear of the spot at once, the upper half of the man whose arms I’d just cut vanished in a single instant.

“…What?!”

A gale slapped hard at my skin, and white lightning tore across before my eyes. No. That was no lightning. Covered in pure-white scales, a giant predator that devoured human flesh.

“The White. Serpent?!”

“Shiiiiiii!!”

The calamity called a Divine Beast, the one the Saint had at her command, its eyes shining gold, ground the attacker down bone and all and swallowed him.

“So it came to this after all.”

“Shaaaa…”

The worst I’d braced for stood there in the flesh, showing its being as one part of the scene before me. That this great beast was here meant, one and the same, that the monster paired with it, the Saint Reshia, lay hidden in Nocto.

“Everywhere I turn, nothing but obstacles.”

Ah. Truly an eyesore. Blocking both ears against the shriek ringing in them, I leapt toward the outside enemy I ought to strike down, but—

“Kishaaa!!”

“This thing. Where’s it headed?!”

The White Serpent, not sparing me so much as a glance, drove on into the thicket where a deeper darkness spread.

“Al!”

“Rune-sama…”

“What in the world—. What happened?”

She, leading the escort, took in the carnage spread across the spot and caught her breath. The corpse of a man mangled head to foot. And trees on trees twisted and torn as though something huge had forced its way through. A fresh-made game trail where the bloodstains ran on.

“Wh-what is this…”

“Same way of dying as the corpse at the mouth of the forest road…”

The soldiers who ran up wore the color of terror at so wretched a manner of killing.

“Rune-sama. Just now, the White Serpent dealt the finishing blow to this man.”

“Who is he?”

“…One of the band that shot at us to pick us off, I think.”

“I see. So while Al was fighting him, the White Serpent stepped in and took the man’s life.”

“Yes.”

A man belonging to a power hostile to us had been attacked by the White Serpent and killed. And the White Serpent took no interest in me, the one closest to the man, and vanished into the depths of the forest, clad in an overflowing killing intent. There was no hostility toward us; it was purely an act of choosing whom to attack. Which meant that these men who’d loosed arrows at us were beings hostile to the Saint and the White Serpent as well.

“I haven’t made out this one’s identity, but it looks as though the White Serpent and the Saint are going around killing his comrades.”

“Strange. Was there any power besides the Empire that stood against the Svell Order?”

“That side too, it seems, we’ll need to look into closely.”

Something was happening in Nocto, our destination. At the least, two or more powers besides us of the Imperial army were, beneath the surface, waging a blood-for-blood slaughter, that much was certain.

“The White Serpent’s gone on ahead?”

I nodded to her, pointing at the unnaturally opened game trail.

“Yes. What lies ahead may be more of a hell than this place.”

No screams came at all, but from the ground a fine, ceaseless tremor carried up. Follow the White Serpent, and the Saint’s whereabouts might come clear. But at the same time, that carried too great a risk.

“What will you do?”

“We can’t leave the White Serpent’s threat untended. But for now, let’s make cutting through the forest road, riding this confusion, the highest priority.”

“Understood.”

To fight the Saint we were, as things stood, short of strength. At the least I wanted to try to rejoin Rudolf and secure some measure of numbers.

“Then I’ll lead. Luckily, thanks to that White Serpent tearing up the place, the rain of arrows seems to have let up, so getting through the forest road has become much less of a task.”

“I’ll keep a magic barrier up at all times. Alone I can’t spread it very wide, but enough to enclose the ones here I can hold better than an hour.”

Even if we took a surprise blow, her magic barrier could shut out the damage to some degree. If there was one thing to be wary of, it was whether the White Serpent’s aim would turn our way, but that too, for the time being, I thought wouldn’t come.

“Sir Aldia, we’ll run at the head with you.”

“If it comes to it, use us as a wall of flesh.”

The soldiers’ hearts, too, seemed to have set completely. Three of them ran point with me, and the rest formed up to lock down all four sides of Emperor Valtrune.

“Let’s go.”

At her word, every face tightened all the more. As if bound to one fate, in movements without a thread out of place, the company began to act toward the breakout of the forest road.

9

“Where did you come fr… gah!”

“Intruder! Answer him at once!”

“Damn. How many of us are left…”

“H-hey, somebody, say something!”

Once I’d entered the sewers, it was a run of slaughter without break. Set a single footstep down and, from the shadows, out swarmed the Madmiasma-holders. For all the world a horde of gutter rats. Vermin one exterminates before they can breed. My coming to Nocto had been chance, but perhaps I’d been lucky, in that I’d been given the chance to pare down a power in my way all at once.

“…The surface, those children will tidy up, so I’ve only to strike the main keep.”

I’d loosed the White Serpent and the Black Serpent up above and set them to kill their way clean through the Madmiasma folk in hiding. With their outsized hearing and sense of smell, they’d exterminate every last one without a slip. Provided no threat surpassing those children appears, that is. Either way, my own part was limited to the great cleaning of the sewers.

“Hii! D-don’t come!”

“Fufu. Your luck ran out the moment I came to Nocto.”

“That voice, don’t tell me, the Saint Reshia?! You’re supposed to be convalescing off in some backwater…”

“Fufufu! To take a lie like that at face value, the Order’s information network is quite the sieve.”

“—This woman!”

The kind-hearted Saint who’d believed the Order’s designs without a doubt. That she would bare her fangs and come to thwart their plans, they’d surely never foreseen it. A pity. I am an independent Saint. I do not let myself be taken into the core of that great evil the Order.

“I hope your next life is one where you don’t set your hand to wickedness.”

“Drop deeeead!!”

To the man who stood to face me, I sent a small flame.

“Guh… agh…”

The man suffered, a hand rising to his throat. A pitiful sight. From the moment my magic touches him, an ordinary person can do nothing but die. His whole body ignited, and when I’d seen out his end, charred pure black, I felt at once the presence of several more behind me.

“Guaaaaaah!”

“Oh, my.”

Swollen muscle and an explosive burst of speed. Had I moved a fraction of a second slower, the swung-through blade might have cut this body. Might have.

“Kufuu… I, I’ll kill you… so that we, may claim, our eternity!”

“It seems some self is still left in you. Did you gulp it down in a panic when I appeared, I wonder.”

“Uraaaah!!”

“Fu.”

Dodging the man’s blows, loosed one after another as he stooped forward, I looked down from above into eyes dyed with madness. An incomplete, hideous form. Take Madmiasma into you and it’s over; you’ll never get a proper self back. The end of a person.

“Gufu! Hagu! Gah!”

Monotone attacks, brute force with no intellect felt in them. Against a guard you’d find anywhere they’d overwhelm, but against me such poor movement won’t work.

“Sleep well.”

“Buba… ?!”

One sweep. Yes, one sweep is enough. Move the forefinger of my right hand outward and the man’s body is cut clean in two at the trunk. This is the gulf in strength between a person and a not-person like me. However explosive the mutation Madmiasma wrought on the flesh, it’s a sham monkey-show in the end. It could never match a true strong one.

“A… aah…”

“Madmiasma is nothing but a harmful poison. It’s no dream-drug that grants eternal life. …Ah, I’d forgotten. Words no longer reach you, did they.”

Even this bit of irony wouldn’t reach the man’s ears. Groaning an unsightly groan, working the upper half left to him desperately to kill me, he dragged his ruined lower half and came on.

For all the world a thing living and dead at once. Madmiasma holds no power to grant eternal time. All of it is illusion.

“…Every one without human feeling must be put to sleep here.”

Humans steeped in greed choose the road to ruin, seeking the wellspring of power. To grant such pitiful ones the mercy-stroke, too, was my duty, was it not. How many lives had I taken to this day. I believe this is the right thing, and yet at times I nearly lose sight of the way I ought to go.

“A, ah… I beg, you. Kill, me.”

“…That wish, I’ll grant.”

Hearing the plea of one who’d fought the loss of his reason, I put strength into my fingertips. With a hiss of cloven air, I struck off all their heads in a single blow each. Death was the work of an instant. They were pitiable ones, caught by the Madmiasma’s effect. To the many corpses lined up at my back I closed my eyes and offered a prayer.

Would that, in their next lives, their lives be no longer thrown out of true by gods and miasma and Saints and such alien beings.

“…I can no longer stop. Not until my duty is done.”

10

Out of the long forest road and up to a place where the streets of Nocto could be seen at a glance, we arrived.

“Rudolf!”

“You’re safe, Lady Valtrune!”

Rudolf, waiting ahead with only two subordinates left to him, stood gazing hard at the Nocto spread out below.

“For a commander to leave Rune-sama and get through the forest road ahead of her is, I’d say, out of the question.”

“Th-that’s… my apologies.”

Even granting he’d had to break through that place at a desperate run, that Rudolf had gone on ahead alone made me feel his sense as a guard was thin.

“Al. Don’t blame him too much. In that moment every one of us was walking the line of death, without question. He was straining to fill his role to the fullest.”

“If you say so, Rune-sama, then I’ll say no more.”

“Thank you.”

As a result, she’d come through that carnage without a single wound. That owed itself, too, to Rudolf and the veteran soldiers taking the arrow-fire onto themselves. The life-staking breakthrough had been achieved at the cost of many lives.

“Rudolf. I wasn’t quite calm myself. Let me apologize for my discourtesy.”

When I made to bow my head, he set a hand on my shoulder and shook his head with an apologetic face.

“No. What you said is right. Before I’m a division commander, I was charged with duty as the Emperor’s guard. That it was a blunder is a plain fact.”

“Then let’s call this matter water under the bridge for both of us, and be done.”

“That all right by you?”

“Since Rune-sama has already said it’s fine, there’s no need to keep at it. And it’s a fact too that Lord Rudolf pressing ahead saved us.”

There were things to be done before holding a session of self-reproach. That I meant to end this contest of apologies got through to him, and answering ‘Understood,’ short, he returned his face to its usual valiant cast.

“…Rudolf. The assassins on the forest road pulled back from their sweep of us when a third power turned up. On the way, besides the ones loosing arrows, did you see anyone else?”

“No. I was running for my life with my eyes only ahead, so I saw nothing of the sort.”

“I see.”

Whether the Saint had been there when Rudolf came out of the forest road was unknown. But however desperately he’d fled, there was no way Rudolf wouldn’t feel the Saint’s dense presence of a strong one.

“The Saint is likely acting separately.”

“And if she’s moving elsewhere…”

“The sewers, I’d suspect.”

The vast waterways laid through the ground of Nocto were a place ideal for concealment. If the Saint were in hiding, it’d be in the thickets sprouting along the forest road we’d just passed, or there, and nowhere else.

“And the head of this third power is that Saint of yours.”

“Yes. It was the White Serpent she keeps that attacked the ones hunting us.”

“…For Lady Valtrune to make such a difficult face, she’s quite the danger factor.”

“Honestly, a level of danger the earlier attackers don’t come near.”

Unlike an organization that draws its power from swarming in numbers, plainly, as a single Reshia the Saint, she was a strong one who could wipe out an army entire. Add that she commanded two great beasts of tough flesh, the Black Serpent and the White Serpent, and that a plan against them, too, had to be laid, which was the troublesome part.

“So unless we can find where this Saint is and deal with her, we can’t so much as set sail.”

“Just so. If the Saint has slipped into the Empire, it’s a problem we can’t overlook.”

She looked out over the streets of Nocto, and then gave her command at once.

“Let’s go down into the sewers and investigate.”

“I think that’s the best course too.”

We could not leave Nocto with the Saint’s threat left untended.

“Lady Valtrune, I’ve no objection to investigating the sewers, but haven’t we too few people left to search the whole of Nocto’s underground?”

Rudolf offered the counsel, but she answered, ‘No problem there,’ with room to spare. To make it plain for Rudolf and the others, she beckoned easily to the rear and called out the trump card she’d readied for this inspection.

“You called?”

“—?!”

The one she’d called out was a member of the intelligence corps Fadi led. I’d assumed Fadi himself would appear here, but this time a woman of the corps knelt before her in his stead.

“What’s become of him?”

When she asked after Fadi’s whereabouts, the woman spoke evenly.

“At present he’s moving to annihilate the hostile force on the forest road. He’s keeping track of the White Serpent’s location too, so should there be a problem, we’ve readied things so word flies to us at once.”

“Understood. Now, to the point: I’d like the strength you can move at present turned to investigating the sewers.”

“Rest easy. The people we can spare are already advancing the search of the sewers and of the town of Nocto. The instant we spot a suspicious figure, a report should go up at once.”

Though we’d spoken of it beforehand, there seemed to be no slips, and I was reassured. Rudolf, who’d been listening to the deft intelligence corps, had frozen with eyes and mouth open in a blank stare.

“Lady Valtrune. Ah, who is she?”

“I’m late in the introduction. She’s of the Provisional Elite Corps’ intelligence unit. Apart from you guards, I had her attend us in secret.”

“Was that so… I didn’t notice at all.”

The intelligence corps, skilled at stealth, could deceive even Rudolf’s senses. In any case, we’d secured strength enough to fill the guards’ losses. From here on it would be a life-staking fight with no reinforcement at all.

“…The moment those gone to the sewers send word, let’s have ourselves ready to move in too.”

Emperor Valtrune, who would not affirm the collapse of the Empire’s order. Steeling her resolve, she wished for the rematch with the Saint. Learning from the effective defeat in the Dyrst region, this time, with her own hands, she was set on protecting the Empire.

11

The trampling spectacle called up on the forest road was nearing the moment of its end.

“Gwah!”

The White Serpent killed the black-clad men without mercy. In the eyes of the predator reaping its prey there was not a flicker of fear. Against the fury swung from that huge body, dealing with it was out of the question, and even flight scarcely possible.

Watching the ghastly scene from a distance, I’d been feeling there was no opening for us to step in.

“…Waah. So totally one-sided. So that’s the White Serpent big bro and the others were talking about…”

As I looked on, impressed by the display of overwhelming combat, a figure shaking beside me turned a gaze packed with tremendous resentment my way.

“Um, Fadi, sir? Why have I been dragged into such a dangerous zone too? Actually, when exactly did I become a member of the intelligence corps?!”

The dragon-mount pilot riding along with me kept her eyes going, quaking, over the one-sided hunt playing out below.

“What can you do. Dorothea took a liking to you.”

“That’s the older lady who suddenly clambered onto my dragon back in the Dyrst region, isn’t it?! Was she someone that important?!”

“You didn’t know?”

“If I’d known I wouldn’t be this confused!”

She could throw her voice out surprisingly loud. Transferred into the intelligence corps as of yesterday and dragged onto a mission today, out of nowhere, and yet she’d adapted so well you’d never guess it. Her manner was usually all lack of confidence, but her handling of the dragon was steady, and for all her complaints she showed not the least sign of running away. She seemed to carry a fair bit of nerve, too.

“I see. No wonder Dorothea took to you.”

“Yes? I don’t understand at all!”

It was a cry truly heartfelt in its distress. But she’d taken to our lot right away, and Dorothea forcing her transfer from the dragon-mount units might, unexpectedly, have been no bad thing.

“Uu… I wasn’t in any position to be holding a front line like this… I only volunteered as a rear-support dragon-mount soldier…”

…Well, from her own point of view she seemed to feel she’d been sent into hell.

“Come now, calm down. While you’re on the dragon the enemy’s attacks won’t land, so it’s safe.”

“…Did you know? Dragons are hopelessly weak to attacks from bows and magic.”

“Ha. As if there’d be anyone who’d fire that kind of attack at us in a situation like—”

Just as I began to say it, at a range close enough to graze my cheek, an arrow passed by with a sharp whistle.

“…‘As if,’ is what I meant to say. But an attack came flying! A stray shot, maybe?”

“See?! I knew we were being targeted! We were being targeted for sure just now! …If this one gets hurt and we go down, the two of us are done for, you know?!”

“No need to be so dramatic. Oh, want some water?”

“Why are you fishing out a canteen so calmly?! Are you a psychopath?!”

A sharp, cutting retort glinting inside a timid voice. This one was that sort. Dorothea had likely thought to keep her near as a mascot easy to tease. A toy that squeaks when you hit it. Even I found it fairly funny, watching her flail and fret and cry out.

Only, it really was getting dangerous now.

“Heh. You really are cut out for the intelligence corps.”

“This is no time for joking, um, wait, hey!”

“Wait here. I’m gonna, pop off a sec.”

Fun as it was to keep teasing her, seeing a second and third arrow come flying, I couldn’t keep chatting at my leisure. Cutting aside with my knife only the arrows on a course to strike the dragon, I leapt straight down off it.

I never turn down a fight someone picks with me.

“Whaa?!”

“Jumping down from that height…!”

I landed just ahead of the men loosing the arrows and let a grin spill.

“Then I’ll take you on, just as you wished.”

“Ki!”

“This brat!”

There was a risk of the White Serpent coming my way, but sparks that fall on you have to be brushed off fast, or you take a bad burn. Casting aside my bow, I parried the blows they threw bare-handed with my gauntlets and split the vessels running in a throat with the point of my knife.

“Gabo… ?!”

The instant I’d decided the match, the scene around me seemed to slow. My honed senses caught the tremor of the ground and a white shadow crawling up with a roar.

Ah. Bad. It’s already come this far over.

A vast, gaping maw, out to swallow me whole along with earth and grass, was closing to within a few meters.

“Heh. This time I might really die…”

If I hadn’t jumped off the dragon. If I’d gone on parrying the loosed arrows from the dragon’s back. If I’d taken the choice to leave this place at all. Of the countless threads of possibility, had I not chosen to jump down and fight, I might have been spared the fate of settling into the White Serpent’s belly.

A roar to split the ears and beast-fangs counted down my end moment by moment. Bracing against the White Serpent’s earth-shaking rush, a force that rang through to the marrow, I gritted my teeth.

In that instant, outside my awareness, an unnatural flow of wind was born overhead.

“Honestly! Why is it always things like this!”

“—Huh?”

A future where I passed into the White Serpent’s mouth. As if to smash it, a jet-black shadow came down before me. The great beating wings spread as though to curtain off the White Serpent’s approach and, throwing up dust, covered me over.

“Grab him!”

“Grrl!”

“Whoa?!”

My body floated softly into the air. The sharp claws digging a little into both my shoulders, the dull ache of it, gave me the real sense of being alive.

“Wh, why?”

“No time to argue, we run now! I am done, done, with dangerous places like this!!”

The one who’d been all fear from first to last, pleading that she wanted to run away, had saved me.

Ha… I could read the White Serpent’s charge, but the one thing I couldn’t read was you diving in headlong.

“…Thanks. You saved me.”

“Truly. If I hadn’t come to the rescue you’d really have been eaten. You need to think a little before you move, or you’ll die on the spot, really.”

For the one who’d saved me even at the risk of being devoured herself the moment the White Serpent closed in, it was hardly a line I’d expect. This girl, after all. She’s got guts to spare. She might not know it herself, but by stepping without hesitation in front of the White Serpent at that pinch, I was sure of it. This one has the makings, true and genuine, of a vanguard fighter.

12

The results of the sewer search came back in a mere few minutes.

“They confirmed a woman who looks to be the Saint in the sewers, it seems.”

“I see. Then let’s go down into the sewers ourselves at once.”

“One more thing. They also confirmed, at the same time, a power in combat with that woman. Please bear in mind, above all, that the enemy is not only the Saint and the White and Black Serpents.”

“Understood.”

The entrances to the sewers, everywhere in Nocto. Without hesitation, she settled on the intrusion from the widest passage, at Nocto’s center.

“Shall we go.”

“Yes.”

“Understood!”

The infiltration party was Rune-sama, Rudolf, me, and two attendant soldiers. The rest of the strength we left waiting at the entrance, held in reserve as a support unit for the withdrawal.

Dim and poor of sight, the sewer’s flowing filth-water gave off a reek foul enough to warp the nose.

“…Ugh.”

“A powerful stench.”

Covering their mouths with their hands, the attendant soldiers wrung out pained voices. At their feet, blackly gleaming bugs of fair size and rats crawled and swarmed. A vile environment. The sort who’d think to enter here would be a suspicious figure minding others’ eyes. Failing that, none but a real oddball.

“Rune-sama. Is your stomach not troubled?”

“I’m fine. But exposed to this fierce reek for long, I don’t think my focus for keeping watch on the surroundings would hold.”

“I share the feeling.”

The stench that seemed to rock the brain was near enough to a fresh form of mental attack. If I could help it, I’d never want to walk a place like this again.

“…Ugh.”

Pressing deeper in, the strength of the reek grew. To the smell we’d felt so far, like filth left to ferment in water, was added a faintly blood-reeking thing, a sourness like meat gone to rot. It differed plainly from waste flushed away. A death-stench one seldom smelled in daily life. The company caught the strangeness at once and stopped.

“…The smell of blood.”

“This is more than one or two people dead.”

Rudolf drew his sword and sprang forward as if to shield Rune-sama and me behind him. With Rudolf, the attendant soldiers too readied their swords and swept their eyes warily around.

They advanced slowly on, and then—

“Bloodstains.”

A vivid, blood-drenched carnage came into view.

“Rudolf, be on guard. These bloodstains are still fresh.”

The bright red with no trace of drying ran along the ground and flowed into the waterway. The further we pressed, the wider the range of blood splashed at our feet. On top of it, from the sluggish flow of the channel came drifting an unidentified lump of flesh.

“…Al.”

“Yes.”

At her word, I hooked the lump of flesh flowing in the channel on my sword’s tip and scooped it up.

“Can you tell where the person’s from?”

Limbs savagely torn away, the flank too gouged as though run through by something, a corpse in pieces. Bloody all over, its sex and age were beyond telling. But in the clothing the corpse wore, I found a small vial I knew and an iron cross.

This vial… it looked just like the container of Madmiasma from the material Fadi and the others brought back from the Dyrst region. And this cross, wasn’t it the very cross the Order hands out to believers of the Svell faith.

“…At a guess, this is a person of the Svell Order. And this vial. It’s like the containers for the Madmiasma the anti-Princess nobles were secretly advancing the development of.”

“…From the moment I saw the White Serpent, I’d thought the Order was surely hiding in this place, but I never thought they were tangled up in the Madmiasma too.”

“If there were those among the anti-Princess nobles in league with the Order, it explains our being attacked at Nocto too.”

“Yes. So the ambush on the forest road was all of it arranged.”

“In that case, the theory that the hostile power besides the Order is assassins the anti-Princess nobles sent looks the strong one.”

Those who’d have the Emperor dead, joining hands across the borders of nations. That the enemy had lain in wait so conveniently at the point of ambush made sense too. If there was one question left, it was—

“…But it’s strange. The White Serpent we met on the forest road struck only at the attackers. This looks like nothing so much as infighting.”

That in that attack a fight had broken out between the White Serpent and the assailants. Say the Order turned traitor and shot the assassins in the back, and that’s the end of it, but in a situation where interests aligned and a common enemy stood before them, would they crush one another? That one point, however many times I turned it over, I couldn’t draw a reason from.

“The reason the attackers were killing one another. That too, press on ahead and you’ll understand.”

The sewer went on yet deeper. The corpses of Order people. Cruel traces smearing blood across the whole face of the passage. The answer to all of it lay ahead down this road.

“What in the world is happening up ahead, I wonder.”

She took my hand and told me.

“Be easy. I’ll always be at your side.”

“Yes.”

From the far end of the passage drifted the presence of a strong one. To lay bare its true form, we took another step forward.

13

“A, ah…”

“Comm, ander… Your Majesty, run… hivh!”

The soldiers advancing at the head with Rudolf, in less than a second, were wounded head to foot and, vomiting great quantities of blood, collapsed on the spot.

“Oh dear… I was seeing to some pest control and stumbled onto unexpected visitors.”

An encounter with a troublesome foe in a sewer with nowhere to flee. I’d half known it, but faced with it in fact, the shudder still wouldn’t stop. Mingled into the sewer’s stagnant air, on the old walls around us lay many bloodstains and lumps of flesh maimed past recognition of their form.

“Get back. This is no one to make light of.”

“I know, Rudolf.”

Rudolf ground his teeth without meaning to and, without a word from us, set his stance for battle, and Rune-sama and I too narrowed our eyes and glared ahead.

“——?!”

The instant hair mixed white and black slid into the edge of my sight, we grasped that we’d made the reunion we feared most. The approach of the footsteps I’d no wish to hear sent my heartbeat racing hard.

“It’s been a while. Your Majesty the Emperor, and Sir Personal Knight.”

“The Saint!”

The Saint appeared from the depths of the dark, an eerie smile on her face. Casting off the pressure loosed at us with no cause given, she stepped one pace forward.

“If I could, I’d never have wished to meet you again.”

“Rune-sama.”

“I know. Let’s take her on, the two of us.”

There was no need to sense danger. The plain threat, Reshia the Saint, watched me and her, standing side by side, with an interested eye. That was a devil playing at a Saint brimming with mercy and love. Her true nature was a heartless woman who thought nothing of a person’s death.

“A wondrous reunion. I’m truly glad!”

“…Is that so. It seems you hold thoughts we can’t come to terms with.”

“Fufu. Is that truly so, I wonder. When there might yet be a road where we join hands.”

She spread her arms wide as if to welcome us. But no wish rose in me to leap into that bosom. In her hands, spattered red with the blood of those she’d cut down, was gripped a torn scrap of Order-soldier flesh. At the soft smile and the madness askew from it, I couldn’t help stepping back a pace.

This woman. What she’s thinking, I can’t read in the slightest.

“Why attack the Order? Don’t tell me you had a falling-out.”

“Fufufu. Since when did you labor under the delusion that I was the Order’s puppet?”

“—What is that supposed to—!”

“I always move as the divine will bids me. The Order, the Kingdom, they are no more than convenient things, made to dance on the palm of my hand.”

To kill, so easily, people of the very organization she’d belonged to. A monster who was a Saint in name only. Truly loathsome… and yet, feeling that even as I did, I laid myself and her over one another.

“I’m the same breed in the end, is that it.”

Having betrayed the Kingdom and turned to the Empire, I myself might be a fox from the same den as the Saint. Well, since I hadn’t a shred of patriotism for my homeland, I didn’t regret it by so much as a hair.

“How about it? We might, perhaps, get along well?”

They were words thin to the last degree, poor in any ring of truth. The false, lie-scented smile, the red eyes hiding cruelty within, all of it I found not to my liking. The polar opposite of the woman who’d held out a hand with kindness that asked nothing back. Which meant the day I opened my heart to the Saint would surely never come.

“Sorry, but I’ve not the slightest mind to grow cozy.”

“Is that so… a pity!”

Against the word of disappointment, she kept lifting the corners of her mouth in evident delight and tossed the scrap of flesh in her hand down at our feet. Each time the flesh rolled along the ground, a bright-red trail was traced behind it.

“Loath as I am to part with the moment… shall we begin soon?”

“By all means.”

She was the fiercest opponent I’d faced from before my regression to now. A fight with slim odds of winning was a thing I was never good at. And on top of that, hard as she alone would be, in the depths of the narrow sewer were a pair of huge eyes fixing their unblinking stare on us.

“Al. It’s in the back.”

“I’m aware.”

From its keeping its shape hidden in the dark, it’d be not the White Serpent but the Black Serpent. To have a monster come along in the set, too, my bad luck ran deep indeed.

“Rudolf. I want to leave that great serpent to you. Can you manage?”

“Heh. That it’s no easy opponent is sure enough. But it beats fighting that eerie little miss over there by a mile. That big one, I’ll take on.”

“I’m counting on you.”

Rudolf drew his sword, let out a long breath, then set his blade at once. A martial air drifted around, and at his feet a faint ripple spread across the water’s flow.

Rudolf was a strong one fit to serve as a division commander in the Imperial army. Even were he to end up fighting the Saint, he’d put up a good fight. But she was a hard opponent to take on at first sight.

“Say, Aldia.”

“What is it?”

“Can you go toe to toe with that Saint as an equal?”

Likely I couldn’t. Ranged combat by magic and physical close combat. Reshia held top-tier aptitude for both, a finished two-sword fighter. Add that she was thought to hold no end of cards yet concealed. She was no opponent of balanced strength to be won against on momentum or luck, like the countless rabble I’d buried until now.

“With no plan I’d surely lose.”

“Ho. From the way you put it, it sounds like you’ve got some plan in mind.”

At Rudolf’s words I gave a small nod.

“Whether it works, I can’t say.”

Lay countermeasures in fine detail, find the way to crack her, manage an approach without a hair’s error, and only then does the thread of a road to victory come faintly into view. Reshia the Saint was a genuine mighty one you couldn’t beat without going that far.

“Lord Rudolf. The front line will be held by you and me, the two of us, I think. The serpent I leave to you completely.”

“Ah. Come to think, this is our first time fighting side by side. I’m counting on you!”

“I’ll give it everything to meet your expectations.”

Rudolf and I knocked our fists lightly together, then each charged at the threat before us.

“Fufufu. That desperate face. I’m smitten!”

The Saint swung her hand down, and the Black Serpent, springing from behind her, bore down with jaws gaping wide to swallow us both.

“That move’s within reckoning. Haah!”

“—?! Gyagagaaaah!!”

What was sucked into the Black Serpent’s great maw was neither me nor Rudolf, but a pale-blue fireball worked up by the magic Rune-sama loosed. From the Black Serpent’s mouth and nostrils leaked pitch-black smoke, and from its bloodshot eyes great tears spilled and fell.

“Hard scale may guard the outside, but the inside of the mouth, no?”

We’d already learned it in the Dyrst region: the scales that armored the great serpents were exceedingly tough, and slash and magic alike scarcely told as damage. The most efficient way to break through the Black Serpent coiling before us. It was to dodge the hard, unpierceable scales and deal damage directly to the flesh.

“…Barely any time has passed since then, and to hit on the notion of loosing magic straight into the body. Well thought.”

“Every hard problem has an answer. I’ve only solved, one by one and doggedly, the problems set before me!”

“It seems I too am in no place to be showing my leisure.”

The Black Serpent thrashing in agony. Threading the gap of it, I sprang out at once in front of the Saint.

“Just so. If you can keep your leisure, then try. This time I’ll cut you for certain!”

Just as Rune-sama had pried open a breach against the serpent, it wasn’t as if I’d laid no plan against the Saint.

“Shall we do it?”

“I’ll do it!”

When I brought the black blade down, the Saint, answering, worked magic up at her fingertips in an instant and loosed it my way. Red sparks scattered, and amid the blast and the scent of scorching iron, we went on holding each other’s eyes.

“I endured it, see?”

“Oh. Splendid.”

“I won’t lose again. I’ll beat you, and protect through the future Rune-sama wished for!”

I was not the powerless me of that day I’d tasted bitter dregs. The weak Aldia Graetz who’d witnessed her execution and, able to do nothing, shed tears, I’d cast off in the past. Cut the hard foe at the risk of my life. No drawn match was needed. What I wanted was only the victory that carries the future forward.

“…Ah, I feel it. The wave of the thought you offer up to her. That, precisely, is the wellspring of the power you gained. The same as mine, no. A crystal of possibility that could reach far higher than mine!”

The meaning of the Saint’s words I couldn’t grasp from one to ten. Or rather, there was likely no need to. Whether I’m this or that, whether others are, in such things I hold no interest. I’d decided to live for the sake of one person alone, Valtrune von Felsdorf. For her I could do anything. When I fought with her at my back, against any enemy at all, I stopped feeling I could lose.

“Al. Here, let’s settle it with the Saint!”

“I won’t let it drag on. I’ll finish this by the hour we set sail!”

Bring down the impregnable stronghold that was the Saint. The troublesome Black Serpent writhing about, luckily, I was in a spot where I need not be its opponent.

“Uraaah!”

“—Shaaaa!”

“Tch! Not just big, my sword won’t even go through… like Lady Valtrune, do I just cut it up from the inside the moment it opens its mouth?”

With Rudolf added as an offensive piece, the situation differed from the time in the Dyrst region. To move about in the narrow sewer carried heavy limits, but that held for the other side as well. For a monster of a needlessly huge frame like the Black Serpent, in particular, the choices of action narrowed to a set. And, if I could ask for it, in the fight with the Saint I wanted the extra noise cleared away.

“Rudolf. I’d like you to draw the Black Serpent off and away! Have it rage close by and an uncertain element mixes into the fight with the Saint.”

I wanted the Black Serpent and the Saint cut fully apart, to put everything into cracking the Saint. Handed the impossible demand, Rudolf furrowed his brow.

“Th-that’s a tall—! Order!”

He dodged a blow of the Black Serpent’s tail, then leapt back to put distance from it. Seizing the opening, the Black Serpent flicked a stone lying in the sewer with its tail. Countless pebbles were dealt to Rudolf, but he calmly guarded his vital points with his sword and slipped through the spot with the least of wounds.

“Fuu… you’re telling me to lead this thing off and fight it lonesome?”

Walking slowly from the far side of the sand-cloud, Rudolf griped, a greatsword slung on his shoulder.

“Oh. Can a man who’s a division commander no less not manage it?”

“Put it that way and I can’t very well say I can’t…”

“Then please. Trusting to your strength as a division commander, I’d have you carry out the felling of the Black Serpent.”

At the provoking request Rudolf nodded.

“If it’s a request from none other than the Emperor, I can’t refuse.”

“A fine answer. That settled, the operation begins!”

She sent a magic-wrought blast booming to drive the Black Serpent off. The unsteady sewer shook hard, and from the ceiling fine chips of stone and dust rained down in a patter.

“H-hey, are you sane, doing this in a space this cramped?!”

As if to avoid being buried in rubble, the Black Serpent began a furious charge toward Rudolf.

“So, is the Emperor a bit of a devil, unexpectedly?!”

“Gyagaaaah!!”

“No time even to gripe, huh… fine by me!”

Against the Black Serpent that had begun to move toward Rudolf, he himself, to lure the great beast’s pursuit, held off his evasion to the last possible instant. Meeting even the ground-crawling sweep of the tail with cool nerve, Rudolf and the Black Serpent gradually shifted the ground of the fight away from where we stood.

“It was forceful, but I’m glad it worked.”

Once the two had cleared the spot entirely, Rune-sama turned to face the Saint and set her stance for battle. With this, unless Rudolf went down, the Black Serpent’s interference was gone. We could fight with our focus on the Saint alone.

“Splitting the Black Serpent off from me is a very good call, I’ll grant, but—”

“—Ha!”

“Your eyes wander too much.”

The Saint, of a sudden, loosed magic at her. I’d let my guard down. Taken up with the Black Serpent, I’d let my eyes leave the Saint’s small movements. I started to move the instant after the Saint loosed her magic, but by a slim margin I wouldn’t make it in to shield her.

“Rune-sama!”

There was nothing I could do but cry her name. My outstretched hand didn’t reach, and mercilessly the Saint’s magic bore in to just before her.

“Al. I—”

She made no move to dodge the Saint’s magic and stood there, a gallant look on her face. Her gaze was pouring toward me. Giving no time even to spin out the rest of the words she’d begun, the dazzling glare of the magic the Saint loosed hid her figure from sight.

The Saint smiled fearlessly and closed her eyes as if certain of victory.

“——?!”

In that instant, the magic burst, and crimson flame and pitch-black sand-smoke filled the surroundings.

At the scent of scorching flesh drifting to my nose, the worst scenario ran through my mind.

“…No.”

A slight lapse breaks everything. When I ought to rush to her side at once, my feet couldn’t step forward, not wanting to see the reality within the black smoke. The knight who ought to protect her could do nothing but watch the danger bearing on his lord. Together with the hellfire searing onto my corneas, the Saint’s sigh, edged with disappointment, carved the two letters of despair into me.

“She had room enough to dodge, and yet to let magic of this degree land direct is a great disappointment.”

At the Saint’s courteously insolent words, my guts boiled over. A way of speaking as if to indict Rune-sama as an incompetent short on strength. Not knowing with what thoughts she’d taken the Emperor’s seat, brandishing her own power, disappointed on her own account. That settles it, this woman above all I absolutely kill. I’ll take her to hell even if it means running her through and taking the wound myself.

“Haah… you, I finish for certain.”

“Fufufu. I feel your anger… yes. That was what I wanted to see!”

The inside of the Saint’s head was surely awash in some lively rapture. A fiend who rubs a person’s feelings the wrong way, forces out by main strength the thing she wants drawn out, and steeps herself in a sense of superiority. This monster with not a fragment of a human heart, I should have finished off at a far earlier stage.

That, precisely, before I made the reunion with her, I should have stopped the Saint’s breath by assassination or whatever else. It was all my negligence. A bud of possible threat ought to have been reaped before it ripened. The result of neglecting it was the result of magic landing on her.

“…Fuu.”

I set wrinkles into the bridge of my nose, faced straight at the Saint, and took the stance for a single strike. A long-winded feint was no longer needed. What I, who’d failed to protect the person I held most precious in this world, ought to do was close on the Saint. This alone I would carry out at the risk of my life.

“Now. Any time is fine! Dance with me, wildly and merrily to the last!”

“Rune-sama… I failed to protect you again, didn’t I.”

I murmured the words of a confession, glared hard at the Saint, and leapt forward in a low crouch.

The distance to the Saint closed with ease. Though the hole opened in my heart wouldn’t fill, my mind was cool as if doused with cold water, and I’d come to think of one point alone, running my sword through the Saint’s heart.

“…The wave of your anger has stilled?”

Now was no time to give myself to passion, to throw a tantrum. With a fight of brute force and no theory like that, the Saint couldn’t be beaten. Her death couldn’t be avenged. The grief and rage of failing to protect her went on welling darkly in the depths of my heart, but that feeling I kept from showing on the surface and pressed down within myself.

“…Fuu.”

The Saint’s unpleasant laugh, of course, and from the sound of the sewer water flowing around to the distant clash of Rudolf and the Black Serpent, every environmental sound was shut out. A world of endless silence. And the sight beyond my opened eyes was clearer than any I’d ever seen.

“Fu!”

The single stroke at the Saint, as if to cleave space itself, passed smoothly clean through her belly.

“Gobo… ?!”

Seeing before my eyes the Saint spun round, bleeding a fearsome quantity from her stomach, I thought. Well now. It’s cutting through fine and ordinary.

There was no overwhelming gulf of strength there, and no fear of the Saint. The me who’d shrunk before the strong one that was the Saint and fought with rough, wild swings was gone.

“Wh… y… gh!”

“Who knows. It’s the first I’ve felt my sword-line so keen too.”

With a heart clear as a still mirror, all needless strength left my whole body, and now I had the confidence to lose to no opponent at all. Even the Saint’s guard that had seemed a wall of iron was no exception.

…Had I been able, I’d have wanted to reach this ground before I lost her.

“This time we finish it. Reshia the Saint, sleep in this cold sewer.”

“…Ufufu. It won’t end. Not I!”

The Saint called up something like a pitch-black vortex and thrust her right hand into it. In the right hand she drew out was gripped a weapon shaped like a spear with a bright-red haft. Where it differed from a spear was that the blade’s tip was formed somewhat like a curved knife.

Fitting a possession of the Saint’s, it differed from any existing weapon. Something like an ominous black cloud drifted, clinging to the weapon.

On top of it, its material was beyond all guessing. The grip was of a smooth stuff, at a glance like wood with a mind to lightness, but the sound when she swung it was a low one carrying a slight weight. The blade too bore a seven-colored sheen I’d never seen.

It seemed I might close for a struggle at short range without minding it, but—

“Ha?!”

The instant I stepped in, an image of my limbs cleanly blown off flooded into my head.

Was the sight that just rose in my head the outcome of my charging on into the Saint like this?

If what had just come was no grandiose delusion but something like future-sight, then in the present, beating the Saint in close combat had become all but impossible.

“I am Reshia the Saint. Until I’ve guided this world in the right direction, I am not permitted to die!”

This was the first moment the Saint had taken up a weapon. In her bright-red eyes was gone the color of leisure of a moment ago, and her deft handling of the arm was of one who’d reached, wholly, the domain of a master.

The Saint too was in earnest at last, it seemed. Each time the chill loosed from her feet carried across like a wave, an alarm rang in my head enough to make the body refuse to go forward.

“Ah… how many hundreds of years since I was driven this far, I wonder.”

The wound opened in the Saint’s belly had already closed, with no sign of gasping in pain.

“A monster…”

Whether an effective blow could even be landed on the Saint with a weapon in hand was unknown, but the greatest problem was how much damage it would take to bring the Saint to her knees.

“Now! Let’s start over from the top!”

That the healing of wounds by the Saint’s power was not infinite either, I wanted to believe. Were the Saint an undying being, then the very thought of killing her fell apart. Would I end up laying my death out unsightly in a fight with no meaning in taking it on… or would I catch the thread of a way through and pay her back one blow.

Sorting the surroundings, myself included, from a remove, however far I increased and tested our choices of action, there was no decisive strike. The Saint in earnest snuffed out with ease even the light of victory I’d found.

“This is a bad matchup.”

I gave half a step back, but flee here and the very meaning of going down into the sewer would come to nothing. Rudolf even now went on with his exchange against the Black Serpent, and she, to the last, watched over me as if worrying for my safety. Those blue eyes were certain I would win.

If I didn’t answer the hope, the whole of the road I’d walked as a personal knight beside her would be denied, it seemed to me.

“Can’t retreat. Nothing for it but to push!”

There was no road but forward. Even were it a fight with slim odds of winning. The her I’m infatuated with would surely, without flinching, step in and take on the threat. If I’m her believer, I ought to move as she’d move!

“This is right, isn’t it.”

When, questioning the lord I’d failed to shield, I turned the blade’s tip upward.

“Yes. That’s right. If it’s you… no. If it’s you and me, we won’t lose even to the Saint!”

The voice I’d most wanted to hear reached my ears.

“—Rune, sama!”

Sweeping aside the dust, showing herself out of the black smoke, was Rune-sama, magic already built and at the very stage of firing at the Saint.

“Al. Thanks to you, I worked up the magic without the Saint sensing it!”

“…You’re joking. There was a response. My magic should have struck direct… and yet how are you standing?”

The one most bewildered was not I but Reshia the Saint. Certain her magic had landed, treating her existence as dead and giving herself to the direct duel with me, the Saint had grown lax in reading the sign of magic.

“I did take it direct… it hurt very much.”

“Then why?”

She touched the countless burn-marks in her soot-covered dress and declared.

“…Reshia. Taking your magic, I was burned head to foot. Had I not healed the wounds of my whole body at once with healing magic, my life would have been gone by now.”

“Impossible. Healing magic is no such all-purpose thing… no, if you were one of the Elect, it’s possible?!”

The result of overtrusting her own power. The Saint had struck her revival from her thoughts. Gripping the readied weapon hard again, the Saint clenched her teeth and took a posture as if to receive a blow.

“So here’s your return!”

The highly worked magic loosed at a speed no less than the Saint’s own.

“Ngh—!”

The magic flew as if sucked into the Saint and told well enough to leave her breathless. Along with the burst of flame, the martial air enclosing the Saint peeled off just a little.

“Haah, haah… I see. You too were one of the Elect, of equal rank to him.”

“I’m not as strong as Al. But I’m not weak enough to lose to you, either!”

The situation ringing us round was rebuilt all at once. As the Saint flinched from the magic, I drove in again.

“Right here!”

“A pity. Still too soft!”

The Saint hauled up the weapon she’d lowered to the ground and met my sword-blow dead on. Even shaken, the finishing strike she blocks pinpoint. In a brute clash of blades the Saint gave not a single step. She had the raw strength for it, and in a plain trial of power I still couldn’t match her. But now I wasn’t fighting alone.

“Haah!!”

Magic’s rolling blows struck the Saint without mercy. Each single strike she loosed gave the Saint no time to think.

“Hmm. So… the pair of you are growing faster than I’d reckoned. Marvelous.”

“What’s, that about?”

“It means a most welcome thing.”

“Well, thanks, for that!”

Parrying at each other’s blade-tip, the Saint and I once more opened a set distance. Now that I knew she was safe, there was no need to keep on attacking in reckless abandon. If anything, working in concert would drive the Saint harder.

“Rune-sama. I’ll buy the time to work up magic. The finishing blow I leave to you.”

“Yes. Let’s win, the two of us. In this fight, for the first time, we’re gaining the upper hand on the Saint!”

The Saint’s threat had grown greater than in the Dyrst region. But we too had planted our feet at the brink to stand against the Saint in earnest and were drawing out more power than ever before.

When you stand against an absolute strong one, people take one another’s hands and wring out their wits to make a match of it. Now, at last, we would become the matched pair to strike down the unmatched, and carve open our fate.

Here was the great crux of it.

14

Dodging the bite of the tough jaws to right and to left, I watched for the opening to land a blow.

The iron-wall Black Serpent, whole body clad in hardened scale. The way to break through, Her Majesty had shown me by driving magic into the mouth, marking that spot the weak point, but when it came to aiming for the scale-less mouth or the eyes, it was a hard thing indeed.

“Haah, haah… keep the hardness to the hide, would you.”

The long tail wouldn’t grant me an approach, and yet let my mind fix on the tail and, of a sudden, the sharp fangs closed to just before me. With head and tail moving independently, misjudge the range and you take the hit for certain.

A tail-strike ends in being blown off and slammed into a wall, but bitten, and from where the fangs sank in you’d be chewed through, bone and all, in one go.

“I can’t take a hit, and I’ve got to land plenty on the other one… haha! Fighting on a crap set of terms like this might be a first in my whole life!”

At a time like this Epika would line up a few worthless sophistries and quibbles, and yet at the end drive her magic precisely into the enemy’s vitals and close the fight up clean.

“Tch. What are you shrinking for! Don’t run. Face it and fight, properly!”

To be running from this threat as a division commander wouldn’t do for my honor. Nothing but the offensive.

Trying to break straight through on momentum, the Black Serpent’s tail, coiled in fold on fold, stretched across the sewer walls in every direction and came at me. Not the front alone. Reflecting off the wall, a death-blow reached from behind too for a vital point.

“Guah!!”

Close one… take that just now and a bone or two would surely have gone. Sliding the sword at my back and swinging it up, parrying the attack from behind, I switched my mind to the defense ahead.

Slip into its bosom and I’d thought I could seal the unreasonable whipping, but the momentum only mounted. There’s a limit to handling this string of blows with a single greatsword. Gradually my range of action was hemmed in, and then—

“Gishaaaaa!!”

“—gogah!!”

The one blow I failed to parry bit into my belly, and I was blown clear to a wall several meters back.

“Gah!!”

I crashed into the wall and dropped straight to the ground.

“Held out better than I’d… gobo… kha?!”

That it wasn’t instant death, I’d learned in my own flesh. The problem was that the power of the one blow was, sure enough, insanely high. The fierce pain running across my back stole my breath. My body refused to draw in air, and my breath tore like a man in the grip of a seizure.

“…I’ve, got to, stand.”

I set a hand to my knee to rise, but against my will, as though a current ran through my whole body, no intent could enter a single motion.

The Black Serpent crawling slowly on.

Do I die here?

Pain, fear, despair, fury, impatience. The various feelings whirling in my head sped up before the Black Serpent’s approach.

The Black Serpent’s frame was ten and more times my own, its range of attack wide, and each blow strong to boot. A monster of this kind was never meant to be taken on by one man.

If only there’d been even one, one comrade with me.

The precious subordinates I’d brought to Nocto had, all across the board, been done in. So this longing held no meaning. Nor could I hope for rescue from Her Majesty and the personal knight Aldia. Downing the Black Serpent single-handed was the part given me.

“…Haah.”

“…Shii.”

This monster too seemed to be learning how to fight, and, so as not to let me slip into its bosom, was checking me with a swaying tail. It understood that a single blow to the inside of its mouth could tie straight to its own death. It meant to kill me for certain, without an easy approach.

Glaring at the Black Serpent, feeling the crisis of my life right there, in the midst of it—

“Ooh. Looks like a real desperate spot, huh.”

“—?!”

The shadow that closed at my back with no footstep, no presence, murmured in a bright, unhurried voice.

Even in the dim sewer, a striking red head of hair. The glint of a flashing knife-blade passed by the side of my face and drove straight through the Black Serpent’s eye.

“Gyaaaah!!”

A child working countless knives with nimble movement.

“Shall I lend you a hand? Old man.”

He stood there wearing a smug look as if to say be at ease, but I cocked my head and asked.

“You there… who are you?”

“Eh?!”

In that instant, the time flowing between the two of us stopped completely. The Black Serpent writhing and raging clear outside our minds, we held each other’s eyes and froze for several seconds.

“I-I’m Fadi! One of the Provisional Elite Corps’ elite!”

“…I remember now. The intelligence brat, was it.”

“Who’re you calling a brat!”

The way he stamped his feet as if throwing a tantrum was a child himself, to the life. I watched the sullen-cheeked Fadi with a fond eye, but when the tail struck the sewer wall and the surroundings shook hard, my mind was dragged back to the Black Serpent’s presence.

“Pleasant chat’s on hold a minute.”

Fadi’s arrival was beyond my reckoning, but the Black Serpent, wary, had stopped its approach. My own breathing-trouble from the pain gradually eased, and my hands and feet came back to a state I could move.

“Now. For now let’s join our strength, the two of us, and bring down the enemy in front of us!”

With this, the odds of winning had climbed at a stroke.

“Right. I’m counting on your cover, brat!”

“Heh. What’re you on about. The one giving cover is you, old man!”

Fadi, who bewilders with quick, fine movement and looses relentless flurries of overwhelming numbers of strikes without mercy. And Rudolf, a warrior specialized in a sure kill with a single powerful blow, no shame to the name of Imperial army division commander. The two, holding contrasting styles of battle, began their life-staking charge to bring down the great beast that was the Black Serpent.

Interlude – The Crumbling Order of the Republic

1

An ugly political feud escalates into civil war. Never had I imagined that, before we could be scorched by the fires the Kingdom and the Empire were stirring up across the continent, flames would come blazing up right under our own feet. The order of the Roscheld Republic, at the very time the conflict between Kingdom and Empire sharpened, began to crumble away at its fragile foundations.

Mid-September, Kingdom Calendar Year 1241.

That day I was in my own councilor’s office, hard at work preparing the materials for the debate at the council. The item on the agenda: ‘On the conclusion of an alliance with the Empire.’

The Empire’s new Emperor, Valtrune von Felsdorf. She, my dear friend from our days at the Philnotes officers’ academy, wished for the Empire and the Republic to make peace and lend each other aid amid the continent’s mounting strain. But I wanted to go one step further: specifically, that when the Kingdom and the Empire began war in earnest, the Republic would enter the fight on the Empire’s side. In other words, I was thinking of concluding a formal alliance with the Empire.

“…There, that’ll do.”

The materials to submit to the assembly finished, I stretched and let my weight fall back against the chair. That was the day’s work done; all that remained was to wait for the council three days off. I sat there, at ease, turning over such thoughts.

—That the Republic’s council had already ceased to mean anything at all, I never dreamed.

“…I-it’s terrible, Lady Raquel!”

The one who flung the door open in an obvious panic was the boy who served as my secretary.

“What is it, in such a state?”

“There’s no ‘what is it’ about it! Lady Raquel, please evacuate this place at once. Pursuers are closing in!”

—Pursuers? After me? It took me a moment to grasp what my secretary meant. I had no memory of ever having done anything to be pursued for, to begin with. Simply going about the daily duties a councilor ought to see to. Could that make a person hunted? Questions like these ran through my mind, but from the way my secretary was panicking, it was plain this was an emergency.

“All right. I’ll leave the office right away…”

“Please wait. To be safe, let’s go out through the hidden passage at the back. The entrance is very likely being watched.”

“Being watched…? Listen, I’ve been wanting to ask this whole time, who in the world are my pursuers sent by… eek!”

Whose doing was it. Before I could finish asking my secretary, the office shook hard. A sideways lurch, as though it were not an earthquake but something striking the outer wall. The unexpected shock put my hand to the floor.

“This is bad… they’re already, this far.”

“Hold on, what was that just now?!”

“The talk comes later! Right now, getting away safely comes first, above all! Lady Raquel, this way.”

Led by the hand toward the hidden passage.

“Wait. What about the other children who were in the office?”

“They’ve armed themselves to buy Lady Raquel the time to escape, and they’re facing down the enemy at the entrance.”

“…What are you… I don’t understand what you’re saying! Some of them only came on as part-time help!”

“They are people who, at the contract stage, agreed that in an emergency Lady Raquel takes the highest priority. This is, for them, a duty that goes without saying.”

“…No.”

It was true, such wording had been set down at the time of employment. That we would ever actually meet with an emergency I had never once dreamed. My secretary closed the hidden passage’s door behind us and fixed it fast with magic so it could never be opened again. From beyond that single door came the roar of magic flying back and forth and the violent clash of metal.

“Let’s go. We mustn’t let their sacrifice be for nothing.”

“…Why…”

Carrying a pain sharp as a nail dragged across my chest, I turned my back on the hidden door and half-ran down the path that led outside. The people who had worked alongside me at the office were precious to me. I had treated them like family. The shame of having used them as decoys and fled. The bitterness of being able to do nothing for them. Tears spilled over of their own accord.

“…Gaen. Explain it all to me properly, later.”

“Yes. Once we’ve escaped somewhere safe, I’ll tell you in detail. …What is happening now, and the report that will grieve you, Lady Raquel, as well.”

“——!”

My secretary’s face had gone pale, and he looked worn out to the depths of his spirit. Surely he too was in dreadful pain at having lost the colleagues he’d worked beside in the office. I reflected, deeply, on how my head had been full of nothing but myself.

2

The hidden passage led out into a nearby forest.

The forest, wrapped in stillness, ran with a cold air, and with sunset drawing near besides, the surroundings were dim and eerie.

“Lady Raquel, let’s hurry. If we press on ahead, it’ll be harder for the pursuers to find you.”

Gaen, my secretary, urged me on, keeping a wary eye on the direction the passage had come from. As he’d said, I pressed deeper into the forest.

After an hour or so of walking, we came out into a slightly open space.

“Raquel! So you escaped safely too.”

“Thank goodness. If Raquel’s safe, then there’s still hope.”

Called by name in voices I knew well, I was just a little relieved. Before me were the council members who had shown themselves in favor of building an alliance with the Empire, and the guards arrayed as if to watch the surroundings.

“Did all of you get away too, then?”

The council members gathered there numbered some thirty-odd. Even counting the guards and other associates, the number fell short of a hundred. At my question each of them nodded, then traded glances and wore bitter expressions.

“Yes. This is everyone, most likely?”

“The other councilors were cut down across the board.”

“Cut down, by whom…”

When I asked, Gaen, who’d caught up from behind, spoke up.

“By the radical faction of the council, the ones who opposed an alliance with the Empire.”

“That can’t be… you mean part of the council, who swore to bear the governance of the state through dialogue, resorted to force of arms?”

“That’s right. In fact, any number of the pro-alliance councilors were killed, and the councilors who protested their tyranny were murdered out of hand as well. …Lady Raquel, please hear this calmly. The truth is that your own father, the Council Chairman, Lord Lairott Nova, was slain by their hands as well.”

“…What.”

At his words my thoughts dulled for an instant. What… my father, dead?

“The Chairman sought dialogue to his very last moment, but they gave him no room to negotiate. They ran the Chairman through with a sword.”

“You’re lying… there’s no way my father is dead. Only yesterday he was so full of life—”

“Lady Raquel!”

“——!”

“…Please accept the reality of it. Your father, Lairott Nova, was killed. And now, the only one who can pull this Republic out of chaos is you, his daughter.”

“Even told such a thing, so suddenly…”

Gaen was surely telling me to take up my father’s role as Council Chairman in his stead. But of course I was in no way ready for this. To study the Republic’s governance while my father held the chairmanship, and only ten, twenty years on to at last aim for the Council Chairman’s seat. The design I’d drawn for my future had been built on the premise that my father still lived.

“…Save the Republic, you say. What would you have me do?”

“The surviving councilors here and their associates are people who support your accession as Council Chairman. Lead the people, carry the Republic’s future forward. Lady Raquel, we would have you become our leader, as Lord Lairott’s successor.”

I would govern this Republic with no order left in it? …No. Impossible. Absolutely beyond me.

“I couldn’t possibly do such a thing…”

I voiced the weak protest, but not one of the councilors around me looked at me as some green, half-formed member.

“Lady Raquel. The only one who can lead the council after Lord Lairott is you. We know it is a cruel thing to ask, but please.”

“There’s no one else with the power to draw people together the way you have. You’re the only one we can entrust Lairott’s place to. That’s what every one of us here believes.”

“…Whatever the case, to set the Republic back on its feet, we must raise up a symbol of its recovery. And that ought to be, not old codgers like us, but a young leader who will walk the Republic’s future.”

Every gaze fell on me at once. There was no way I could fill my father’s place. Everyone here had to understand that much. And still they told me to shoulder the title, because I was not merely a councilor but the daughter of Lairott Nova, that great Council Chairman.

“…I…”

To take on so heavy a charge was, after all, frightening. A single misjudgment on my part could cost many lives. From the moment I nodded here and answered their hopes, I would be, not a mere councilor, but the one responsible, carrying the fates of everyone gathered here.

As my heartbeat quickened all the more, there rose behind my eyelids the figure of a woman my own age who yet shouldered the greatest power on the continent: the female Emperor.

—Rune-chan, I’m sure, would set about leading them without a moment’s hesitation.

A space wrapped in unease. In a Republic broken by base violence, even hoping for a tomorrow was a doubtful thing. And amid it, each and every one gathered here was enduring the fear of being hunted themselves, and trying to entrust so much to me.

“…I cannot become someone as dependable as my father. To set the Republic right again quickly will be difficult, too.”

However much hope they pinned on me, the fact that I was a green girl did not change.

“I may err in an important decision.”

Even in a situation my father would have surmounted with ease, I might trip in unsightly fashion and come away covered in wounds.

“But I wish, with all my strength, for the Republic’s prosperity and peace. Just like my father, and like all of you here, I want, with no word of a lie, to protect the lives of the people who live in this Republic!”

The Roscheld Republic was a nation that prized peace, one that had waged no war for over a hundred years. Its very method of governance, ever since its founding, had been carried out by representatives the people chose, through debate piled upon debate. The road our forebears walked must not be made light of. That the history of the Republic built up until now had been trampled by an appeal to violence was something I could never forgive.

“If there are those who mean to use force of arms to rob us of the chance for open debate, then, as people of the Republic, we ought to stand against them with an unflinching resolve.”

My whole body trembled. A moment ago I’d been all but crushed by unease, and now an entirely different feeling had budded in me. A quiet indignation lit a flame in my heart. For me, this moment was surely the time to step forward.

“…I humbly accept your proposal. As my father’s stand-in, I will take responsibility, rebuild the council, and win back the peace of the Republic!”

Ah, I’ve said something grandiose, I thought. But before any regret over the words could come, I saw the relief-filled faces of my countrymen, and felt that making so bold a decision had been the right choice.

“…It’s settled, then. We’re counting on you, Chairman Raquel.”

“Lady Raquel, we will support you with all our strength.”

“I’ve little life left ahead of me, but I’ll stake the whole of my remaining days on you, Lady Raquel. Protect the Republic, I beg you.”

“Yes. I’ll give the best that’s in me.”

And so a new Council Chairman was born to the Republic.

3

—Five days after Raquel Nova’s accession as Council Chairman.

The Roscheld Republic sent a single written petition to the Valugan Empire. Its contents demanded the early conclusion of an alliance between Republic and Empire, and, on top of that, support in strength to put down the coup that had risen in the Republic.

In one corner of an encampment where countless tents had been pitched, I was in conference with Gaen, my secretary.

“Lady Raquel. The envoy bearing the letter to the Empire has departed the port safely. If the ship makes good progress along its route, it should reach the Empire in five days at the earliest.”

“Then, until we can receive the Empire’s support, we need to somehow endure and hold on. Gaen, how do the enemy’s forces stand?”

“At present, coups are breaking out in several cities of the Republic at once, but the local self-governments of each region are somehow resisting their armed control. However, the northern sixty percent of the Republic’s land has, it seems, fallen into enemy hands.”

Six-tenths of the Republic seized, and the remaining four under fierce attack. If the Republic were taken by the radicals like this, then rebuilding the council would be the least of it: even the rights of the people who lived in this nation might be trampled underfoot. Should the radicals gain command of the whole of the Republic, they might well side with the Kingdom and go so far as to conscript ordinary citizens by force. That worst case, at least, we had to prevent.

“…For now, there’s nothing for it but to work with the surviving self-governments and resist the radicals.”

“At worst, so long as we can hold the military port that lets us call in reinforcements from the Empire, retaking the cities that have fallen to the enemy remains possible.”

At Gaen’s proposal I shook my head.

“That would make the military cost of retaking each city far too heavy. The Empire is already bracing for war with the Kingdom as it is, and if we make a demand that places too great a burden on the Empire’s side, there’s every chance our aid will be refused.”

Rune-chan, the Empire’s present Emperor, may have been my dear friend in our student days, but in matters of diplomacy, if she judged as Emperor that a thing didn’t serve her own nation’s interest, she wouldn’t hesitate to cut it loose.

“Besides, the Republic is our nation. To rely on the Empire’s military might to weather the crisis is, I believe, a poor way of thinking in itself.”

To lean wholly on the Empire would rob my taking up the Council Chairman’s seat of its meaning. What we could manage, we ought to settle with our own people alone.

“And to begin with, there’s no guarantee at all that the Empire will lend a hand simply because we’ve handed over a petition.”

“…If the Empire’s help can’t be had, we’ll be forced into a considerably harsh fight. The whole of the Republic may be reduced to scorched earth.”

“Whatever the future holds, all we can do is give the best that’s in us. We’ll need to think, now, about what happens if we can’t borrow the Empire’s help, too.”

The position we stood in was a fragile one indeed. We were barely holding together a foundation built as if of straw, to be blown away at a breath. And so, for now, there was no road but to keep resisting the radicals while we prayed.

“It may be a rather dreamy sort of strategy, unusual for me. To move on the premise of borrowing the Empire’s strength.”

“That’s how far we’ve been driven.”

“Tell me, Gaen. Do you truly think the Empire will lend us a hand?”

Honestly, from the Empire’s side there was little advantage in lending us its strength. The council that had held the Republic together, the core of its central government, had collapsed, and the running of the state had ceased to function properly. However much the present council laid out a national course for the Empire, there was no guarantee anywhere that it would be realized.

I knew it was a sweet, naive hope. And yet, even so, that I clung to a single thread of hope in the Empire’s aid was because I wanted to believe my dear friend would reach out a saving hand.

“I believe. That the Empire, that Rune-chan, will come to save me.”

What Gaen thought, hearing those words, I couldn’t say. But he spoke then not in the taut, cold voice of before, but his face a little eased.

“You’re rather like a princess awaiting her prince on a white horse.”

“If I’m a princess, then to the prince I’m a truly wretched short straw to draw.”

As we talked so, the sun sank and the surroundings folded into darkness. Lights began to kindle here and there across the encampment.

—Our dawn lies far, far ahead.

Chapter 2 – The Valtrune Administration and the Three-Front Operation

1

Kingdom Calendar Year 1241, October.

Roughly a month on from Valtrune’s accession to the throne, in the hour the morning star rose, it was decided: the operation we’d been readying step by step under the new administration would be put into motion.

The Three-Front Operation: troops deployed on three fronts at once, against the Kingdom, the Republic, and the Empire’s northeast.

To the Kingdom side and the northeast, where fighting was all but certain, we’d send the main strength of the Imperial army and the Provisional Elite Corps both; to the Republic, Valtrune would go with the barest escort to hold talks with Raquel.

“…Word is the ship’s ready at the harbor city of Nocto.”

“Then the moment we’ve finished the final check on the Three-Front Operation, we set out.”

“Yes.”

Gathered in the room, besides Rune-sama and me, were the senior commanders of the units bound for Philnotes.

“Then let us begin the council. The Philnotes front first.”

Of the three fronts, the one with the greatest urgency was the deployment to the Kingdom side. This time, holding Philnotes, encircled by the Kingdom’s army, out of the Kingdom’s hands was the single most important item in her mind.

“Ritziareite. A week ago a request for relief came to the Empire from Philnotes. How stand the Provisional Elite Corps and the Imperial army since then?”

“Yes. Preparations for the march on Philnotes are already under way across every unit. Within six hours, the whole force earmarked for the Kingdom front can be made to leave the Imperial capital.”

“Good… The Kingdom’s army is said to have arrayed itself in an unbroken ring around Philnotes. Your task is to drive the Kingdom’s forces encircling Philnotes into retreat. Bear in mind: I am by no means telling you to annihilate them.”

“Understood.”

She laid a hand softly on Ritziareite’s shoulder as she nodded gravely.

“If Philnotes falls, it becomes a bridgehead for the Kingdom’s army to invade the Empire. That, above all, we must prevent.”

“Ha! I’ll hold Philnotes without fail, if it costs me this life.”

The Empire had already declared war on the Kingdom. And now, for the Kingdom’s army to set its sights on Philnotes, which had, if only tacitly, bound itself in cooperation with the Empire, was the natural flow of things. Philnotes was the heart of the continent, its borders meeting all three great powers: Kingdom, Empire, and Republic. Whether we surrendered it to the Kingdom or held it would tip the whole course of the war to come.

“Forgive me. I keep handing you the heaviest of loads, every time.”

“Not at all. I take it as proof of how far you trust me, Lady Valtrune, and I only wish to answer that faith. Whatever the order, if it is your word, I will give everything to see it done!”

Ritziareite declared it, her voice ringing.

“It’s a genuine comfort to have you. Until I return from the Republic, I leave the Empire’s defense and the support of our allies in your hands.”

“Leave it to me.”

Ritziareite, who had held overall command of the Provisional Elite Corps, now stood over the greater part of the Imperial army as well. Keeping to the distribution of troops to each region that Linos, as Military Lord, had drawn up, she was making the fullest possible use of the numbers given her to carry out the most vital of tasks.

She turned her eye, too, to Petra, standing at Ritziareite’s side.

“Petra. You support her as well.”

“Yes. Take care on the road, Your Majesty.”

Petra didn’t spin the words out long; she answered with a flat, even expression. She, too, was the linchpin of the offensive when the mage units moved. To establish the upper hand in this Three-Front Operation’s all-out clash with the Kingdom’s army, her maneuvering would bear directly on the result. A rolling wave-attack from the overwhelming firepower of the dragon-mount units and the mage units together. Set the Empire’s two greatest strengths working in balance, and it would be possible to overpower the Kingdom outright, to leave it helpless.

The strength was more than adequate. If there was one point to worry over—

“The choke point in the Philnotes relief would be the area around Laivan Ravine, I take it?”

“It would. If the Kingdom’s army has read our movements and stationed troops, that’s the only place they’d do it.”

Past the Empire’s Dyrst region, over Laivan Ravine set along the Imperial border, lay our objective: Philnotes. There were detours, true, but if the Kingdom’s army had seized every road in the vicinity, the danger of them was little different from driving straight through Laivan Ravine.

“Just before we push into Laivan Ravine, we’ll set aside time to sweep for the enemy. We mean to move with all caution, so as not to be taken by a one-sided ambush.”

“If the mages are cut down, the Empire’s only effective blow against the Kingdom becomes the dragon-mount soldiers. Keep that in your head as you march.”

“Understood.”

The points of concern reconciled, Ritziareite, surely brimming with confidence, laid a hand to her chest and bowed her head to Emperor Valtrune.

“This time we were given ample time to gather and train our troops. That is all thanks to you, Lady Valtrune. Our thanks. The present Military Lord reckoned that in the fight at Philnotes our strength stands even with the Kingdom’s army, or the Empire a shade ahead. There will be no oversights.”

When she passed on the substance of her talk with Linos, a faint tinge of relief settled into Rune-sama’s expression.

“I’m glad the troops are in perfect order. And it makes me happy to see Linos giving his all as Military Lord.”

The final say on the Imperial army, Valtrune had entrusted wholly to Linos. It wasn’t that she stayed clear of military matters altogether and left them untended. Short a span as it was, she’d watched the workings of Linos, the man she’d set in the Military Lord’s seat down to the fine detail, satisfied herself, and judged him a man she could hand the Imperial army to in full. That was what her trust rested on.

“Al. Linos is exceedingly capable, but he’s not long in the Military Lord’s post. So if ever you think he needs a hand, tell me at once.”

“Of course.”

That she meant to see Linos supported by way of me was, in its own way, her particular thoughtfulness. Linos was a man hard on others and harder still on himself. His pride as a first-rate Imperial noble ran high too, and having been named Military Lord on the strength of his ability, he’d find it difficult to breathe a word of complaint to the Emperor.

His appointment had come of dismissing Duke Felsdorf, long seated in the Military Lord’s chair, in the grandest terms. Linos bore the weight of succeeding an old hand who’d wielded tremendous sway within the Empire. Given his own temperament, and under the Valtrune administration besides, he could not afford to have the impression take hold that ‘the present Military Lord is short on experience, not to be relied on.’ I fixed it in my mind to give him every support I could.

And the talk shifted to the matter of the civil war.

“Next is the confrontation with Duke Felsdorf in the Theresia region. Al. Could you explain how the deployment of troops to the Theresia region stands?”

“Yes. As to the Theresia region, General Epika set out for the Theresia front before dawn today, at the head of the strength required.”

“Wasn’t the departure set for tomorrow?”

“It seems that information leaked to the outside, so to catch the enemy off guard she moved the departure up by a day.”

“Information leaked… I see. If that’s how it is, then her changing the departure time makes sense.”

The battlefield that mattered was not Philnotes alone. The northwest of the Valugan Empire. The Theresia region, home to Duke Felsdorf’s domain and to many of the nobles of his faction. By the revolt of the Duke Felsdorf who’d been stripped of the Military Lord’s post, the great majority of the domains in the Theresia region had, in effect, slipped entirely out from under the Empire’s rule. Leave the powers who defied Rune-sama’s will to run loose like this, and before long the running of the state itself would suffer. Nothing so showy as Philnotes, but in the Empire’s northwest too, between the Duke Felsdorf who sought to reclaim the Military Lord’s post and us who sought to unify the Empire’s will, the signal fire of war was quietly beginning to rise.

“Lady Valtrune. May I speak?”

“Of course. Say anything.”

“Then, presuming to… this becomes my own subjective opinion, but hearing the distribution of forces from the Military Lord, the impression I got was that the strength sent to the Theresia region is a touch too thin. Duke Felsdorf, I hear, has all but the whole of the Theresia region in hand and has readied numbers to rival the Imperial army. Are we truly all right?”

At Ritziareite’s counsel, she nodded too.

“It’s true, there’s no denying the strength we spared for the Theresia region is very small. It will surely be a hard fight. But as things stand, forced to split our strength across so many fronts, we simply come up short somewhere no matter what.”

I could understand Ritziareite’s worry, but it was also a fact that we couldn’t throw further troops onto the Theresia front. That the weight of force leaned toward the Philnotes front, where we absolutely had to win through, was only natural; crushing the rebel powers of the Theresia front ranked below the defense of Philnotes in priority. Winning both fights was the best outcome, but the order of priority must not be mistaken.

“Rotten as he may be, Duke Felsdorf is a man who served long years as Military Lord. He won’t be handled by any simple means, I think.”

“Yes. That’s precisely why I set Epika, who ran one division of the Imperial army under him, as supreme commander of the Theresia campaign. She, of anyone, has a high chance of reading the old Military Lord’s thinking through to the end and steering the fight to our advantage.”

“And if Duke Felsdorf proves the better…?”

“Then that will be that. As I am now, I can only believe Epika will seize the victory. The same as I believe you’ll bring back good news from the fight at Philnotes without fail.”

There wasn’t the faintest waver in her eyes. That the old Military Lord, Duke Felsdorf, was a cunning man was a thing one heard often. If anyone could go toe to toe with him as an equal, it would be someone of the same strategist’s cast, one who understood the reality of it deeply and wouldn’t be swallowed by the schemes he laid. The choice for supreme commander came down to two: Rudolf or Epika, the division commanders versed in the Imperial army’s inner workings. Of the two, Epika, the strategist, was judged the fittest, and chosen.

“…Duke Felsdorf, who held broad knowledge as Military Lord, and General Epika, who has fought through any number of fierce battles at the practical level. Since their roles in a fight are of different kinds, which of them stands the higher in the Theresia region can’t be judged in full as things are.”

“Just as Al says. We decided we could stake it on Epika.”

“The threat is great, but it’s by no means a bad wager.”

The Emperor, the present Military Lord Linos, and I had arrived at this together. On top of which, it wasn’t even certain that Duke Felsdorf himself would come out as the enemy commander facing Epika. As a placement of personnel, we’d drawn out the best we could conceive. In the result from here on, there was nothing to do but believe in the ones we’d chosen.

2

While the discussion of the Three-Front Operation went on at its height, Fadi, now serving as the head of the intelligence corps, had, in a gap in his work, made his way to the Central Hospital in the Imperial capital.

The Empire’s largest medical facility. His aim, of course, was to look in on Dorothea, the older-sister figure to him. Struck by the Saint’s magic in the Dyrst region and gravely wounded, she’d been diagnosed as needing a full month to heal and had had convalescence at the Central Hospital forced upon her.

‘A scratch like this is totally fine. I’m going home to sleep.’

…So Dorothea had balked at being admitted from first to last, but after persuasion from those who looked up to her, me chief among them, and a pain fierce enough to disrupt even the business of daily life, she’d chosen, grudgingly, to be admitted.

Stepping into the building, I asked the woman at reception in an easy, friendly manner.

“Excuse me. I’m here to visit my boss, the one who got hurt. Which room’s Dorothea in?”

“Certainly. Forgive me, but might I have your name?”

“Fadi.”

“Master Fadi. Understood. I’ll go confirm whether she can receive visitors, so please wait a moment in one of the seats there.”

“Sure thing~.”

The receptionist whispered to another attendant, who whisked off at a quick step into the depths of the ward. Perched on a chair near reception, I was a little surprised. I’d assumed I’d just be shown straight to the room, but today was the first I’d learned there were several steps to go through.

“…Huh. Nothing like the private clinics in the slums.”

In the private clinics, where you were never stopped at a desk to begin with, anyone could walk into any room they liked. Put that way, the Central Hospital lived up to its name: the security felt strict.

“Master Fadi, permission for the visit is granted. I’ll show you to the room.”

“Comiiing.”

Led by the attendant, I was shown to Dorothea’s room. Up the stairs, the room at the far end of the ward. That was hers, it seemed, and on the wall by the door a nameplate reading ‘Dorothea’ had been fixed.

“Then I’ll take my leave here. If anything comes up, don’t hesitate to call.”

“Got it. Thank you!”

I gave the attendant a nod and set my hand to the door handle. To loosen the nerves of seeing Dorothea for the first time in a while, I took a breath, then put my weight into the hand on the handle.

“Dorothea~, I came to see you~.”

I opened the door and stepped in to find Dorothea up on a pure-white bed, staring bored out the window. That striking long silver hair swayed in a light breeze blowing in from outside.

“Fadi, what happened to your work?”

“Mm. Skipped it, obviously.”

“Figures. Today of all days you’d be busy…”

She met me, come all this way to visit, with a flat, offhand manner. She could’ve looked a little happier about it, I thought, but for Dorothea, who loved her freedom above all, hospital life was apparently torment itself. She kept her expression fixed in the very picture of composure, but from the edges of every small gesture an irritation she couldn’t quite hold down came seeping out.

“Fadi. Listen. Today’s day five of quitting smoking… ahh, the itch won’t stop. I feel like tearing something apart.”

Seemed she’d built up a fair store of stress from hospital living. How many years had it been since a forced smile scared me this much?

“Day five off cigarettes, huh… but wait, when I came the other time, weren’t you all smug about it, going ‘I snuck off to the roof for the sweetest smoke of my life’?”

“Those medical people here… ‘bad for your health,’ they said, and took my cigarettes off me. That I, who ruled the underworld as boss of ‘The White Smoke Lizards,’ should suffer a humiliation like this. I never once imagined it…!”

Dorothea spoke in earnest tones, but—

“Ah, sorry. The Dorothea in front of me right now is not cool in the slightest…”

—to me, honestly, I couldn’t find it in myself to care in the least.

“I mean, come on. Getting this worked up just because you can’t smoke seems way over the top…”

“Over the top? Fadi, you’re still a child, so maybe you don’t get it, but to a smoker, a day without a cigarette is about as agonizing as three days with no food or water.”

“W-wow.”

For all the fervor, the scale of the thing was awfully small. Where had the old dignity gone? The pathetic sight of a former boss in despair as though the world had ended, all for having her cigarettes taken away… honestly, I’d rather not have seen it.

“Fadi. There are times when a person has to protect the thing that matters to them. If there is anything you will never yield, then you must never bow to it.”

“Yep. You’re putting on this whole wise-saying air, but that’s just about cigarettes, right? You thinking of switching careers to, like, a traveling minstrel?”

“…Haah. Youth is nice, being so unencumbered. A life bound to something is nothing but suffering, after all.”

“…That’s not deep or anything, that story.”

“Haah. So this is youth.”

She wasn’t listening to a word of what I pointed out. With the far-off eyes of someone who’d transcended it all, she gazed up at the ceiling of the room. Anything she didn’t want to hear she shut out completely, like an invincible person you can’t reason with.

“Dorothea, you’re still in your twenties, y’know. Drop the enlightened-sage thing. And you’ve circled right back to cigarettes again. Aren’t you a bit too dependent?”

“Cigarettes are my life. If I’m to live unable to smoke, then I’ll die.”

“…Ahh, is that so.”

No good. This heavy smoker’s dignity had shattered to bits because whatever the cigarettes topped up in her had run dry. The Dorothea sitting on the hospital bed wasn’t the boss of the shadow organization I knew. Every time that lovely silver hair swayed, that sorrow-touched face looked like nothing but an addict driven frantic by not being able to smoke.

—Like this, she’s just a selfish patient.

“Tch. If only I hadn’t gotten hurt, I wouldn’t be locked up in a place like this.”

“It’s an honorable wound, so it’s a normal thing to be proud of.”

“Hmph. I’ve no use for honor. What the me of now wants is a cigarette that hits just right.”

Once you got this far, you couldn’t tell anymore whether it was devotion or sheer greed.

“A hospital’s a stifling, unpleasant place through and through…”

So Dorothea grumbled, but to me there was no place so blessed with comforts.

“…Personally, I think a hospital’s a surprisingly comfortable spot. Long as you’re here you get out of working, no strings; being with the Provisional Elite Corps means the bills cost nothing; three proper meals laid out for you; and you can lie in bed all day… compared to the poverty we knew back when, that’s ridiculously well-off, if you ask me.”

“…Hmph. I know that much without being told. This place is peace itself. No pointless conflict, devoted support from the staff all day long. For a lazybones it’d be a heaven of a place.”

“Then what’s your complaint?”

“Haah. That’d be not being allowed to smoke, obviously! Don’t mess with me!”

“It’s cigarettes after all! I never should’ve asked something so stupid.”

I’d been half sure I’d get a somewhat deeper talk, but from start to finish all I got was a long lament over her lost cigarettes. As I turned an exasperated eye on her, Dorothea heaved a great sigh and opened her mouth.

“Well, enough joking. This place really is stifling to me. I’d sooner be on a savage battlefield or in the filthy slums… stick me somewhere with no tension to it at all and I feel like I’ll die of boredom.”

The slums she’d lived in all this while had been a life pressed up against the danger of death. The losers who’d fled to that dumping ground grew desperate over nothing but scraping through to tomorrow. Food and money fought over; pointless brawling an everyday affair. Threats and extortion carried out openly in the streets, and, at the far end of it, armed shadow organizations waging turf wars night after night; order collapsed to that degree. In those days a moment you could sleep easy was as good as nonexistent.

“Me, I hated the old days, the hard-to-live-through ones, always on edge.”

“…Well. That suits you fine.”

She spoke as if to say she herself was different. Dorothea turned her eyes back to the window.

“Grown-ups feel easier, sometimes, when they’ve talked themselves into shouldering some responsibility and are pushing hard at it.”

“What’s that mean?”

“…Nothing but self-satisfaction. Spend your hours doing nothing and the unease comes at you instead. You get caught up in that answerless question: what is my worth as a person.”

It was a fairly knotty thing to say. An answerless question, huh. A fool like me had never once thought about such a thing, but maybe people who lived turning their minds over all manner of things day by day thought too deeply about how they lived.

“Dorothea too?”

“Who knows, hm?”

“?”

“…Well. Being the only one left out of the loop at such a crucial time does chafe at me somewhat.”

Dorothea answered quietly and gave a bored yawn. For the Emperor, now that she’d taken the throne, it was a bitterly hard time. The Kingdom, the Order, Duke Felsdorf and the rest: hostile powers thick on every side, a beset-on-all-fronts situation. Dorothea, too, was perhaps galled at having to sit quiet and useless while it went on.

“It’s fine, Dorothea. Lady Valtrune’s got no shortage of allies now. Plenty of enemies too, maybe, but she’s not going down that easy.”

“…I hope you’re right.”

“You’re worried?”

“I threw away my rank as boss of a shadow organization to join the Provisional Elite Corps on that girl’s word. If she’s brought down and loses her power as Emperor, we’ll be left out in the cold.”

“Then shall we make a run for it?”

“Hah, don’t be absurd. I bet everything on her having the makings of a ruler, so I’m resigned to going down with her if it comes to it.”

For all she said it so flatly, the shadow of unease she carried wasn’t wiped clean away.

3

The deployment to the Theresia region was, to me, one great turning point. A fight that meant a break with the past.

From the moment I was granted the name Epika von Darius, this family name had clung to me and never let go, like a curse. The gazes of expectation turned on me as a daughter of the nobility. Nowhere in that ideal image was there so much as a fragment of me as a soldier.

“Lady Epika. It’s nearly time.”

“The hour to set out… all present, ready?”

“““Ha!”””

“…Very good. Then the march begins.”

Just before daybreak, the sky dyed a blue-violet. From half past four in the early morning, with the daytime-bustling Imperial capital fully asleep, our rebel-suppression force began its march toward the Theresia region.

The numbers themselves fell far short of the great host assembled from Duke Felsdorf’s underlings, but the ones I’d called up were the many mages I’d raised with my own hands and the fine troops the present Military Lord had culled with care. The enemy facing us, by contrast, was a rabble mustered for sheer headcount, amateurs with no combat experience mixed in among them. So long as I kept wielding the right command, there would be no defeat in the fight for the Theresia region.

“Duke Felsdorf means to send his close retainers Count Darius, Viscount Elisenne, and Baron Teje against us as his vanguard. How shall we proceed?”

“Let whichever house sends troops send them. All we do is crush them one by one, in order.”

I’d no intention whatsoever of honestly taking on all three nobles at once. I’d scatter, plainly, the bait each of them would bite at, and sink them into the abyss in turn. Besides, a rebel force without Duke Felsdorf himself at its command was nothing to fear. There was no need to over-guard and blunt the speed of our march.

“We make no change to our route. As planned, we drive straight for the kill zone they’ve made.”

“That would put us in a head-on collision with the enemy… don’t tell me you mean to break their spirit outright, in a fair, open fight?”

“I won’t make an honest, blockheaded charge. But I’ll deliberately give battle on ground the enemy favors, and there, with an overwhelming gap in strength, break their will to fight.”

A person whose spirit is broken can be buried with ease. There’s no exception to it. However mighty a warrior, destroy the part at their core and they become at once no different from the rank rabble. This rests on my own hard-won rule. It was by this method that I’d buried so many until now. The more brittle an organization’s foundations, the easier it collapses, and the smoother the cleanup after. For those of us short on strength to keep winning efficiently, there’s nothing for it but to snare the enemy in stratagem. This time no different. Not cowed by the enemy, a bold posture, and I crush both heart and body. That’s the conclusion for the fight to come.

“You’re merciless as ever, Lady Epika.”

“Well, yes. This isn’t some fair, upright civil war to me. It’s nothing but a purge to sweep the trash away.”

Peering into my violet eyes, Cornelia murmured.

“You mean to lay hands on your own father as well?”

“Naturally. He’s the enemy.”

“Is that because that’s what the mission is?”

“No. It’s a reckoning of my own.”

This was a fight to prove that I was Epika von Darius and no one else. In this great work of sweeping away those, my father among them, who looked ill on the Emperor Valtrune’s administration, if I could leave a solid record of achievement, then I’d shake off the curse of Darius in name and in fact, and be able to walk my own life in the truest sense.

Kill my father and take the headship of House Darius for myself. Blood ties mean nothing to me. Even should my kin beg for mercy, I’d bring my hand down without any. —To crush an absolute evil, I’ve the resolve to become a necessary one.

The one to smash every useless old commandment and set a new age moving would be neither the new Emperor Valtrune von Felsdorf nor the new Military Lord Linos von Gerreschiff. I would be the revolutionary who worked the dramatic turn in the tide.

“Cornelia. We liberate the Theresia region ourselves, and ourselves alone. Before any reinforcements can arrive, we crush the enemy swiftly, at maximum efficiency.”

“Do as you please, Lady Epika. That suits me well enough too.”

Riding along at my side, rocking with her horse’s gait, Cornelia only nodded, her answer flat and mechanical, her blue hair stirring. Not a scrap of her private feeling entered into it. Cornelia was a subordinate obedient to me… so she played it to the outside world, but her true master lay elsewhere. Just as I put her to use on the battlefield as an excellent mage, she too wished for me to wage a fierce fight against Duke Felsdorf and the rest in the Theresia region. Whom Cornelia served I hadn’t determined, but so long as she wouldn’t get in my way in this fight, at least, I’d nothing to say to her.

“…I’ll have you work to the fullest.”

“By all means, put me to good use. It would trouble me to see you lose here, Lady Epika.”

Quite the boast to throw down. It would trouble her to see me lose… would it, now? I’ve been made light of. I’ll have you know, I’m the excellent mage who became the youngest woman ever to hold the post of Imperial army Mage Division commander. No small-fry to fall behind some run-of-the-mill nobody.

“There’s no chance I lose. Rather than be beaten partway down a road like this, I’d sooner die clean.”

If I can’t seize the future with my own hands, then I was only ever a person of that much. Even should I meet a wretched end, I’ll burn the flame of my life so fiercely it carves itself into someone’s memory. I will never, ever bend the way I live. How I live and how I die, both, I decide for myself, properly. Or I could never live a life I found any peace with.

4

Nine hours after the departure of the Theresia-region force under Epika, the main body of the Imperial army bound next for the Philnotes front had entirely finished its preparations to march. Departure came when Ritziareite gave the word. For now, there was a slim stretch of leisure allotted us.

“Mia’s off, apparently. Sheesh, taking leave at a time like this, same as ever.”

“Mia’s been a free spirit since way back. That’s just how she is.”

“Ambros. You’re way too soft on that idiot. You could stand to learn a little from Petra and give her a lecture or two.”

The march in formation was beginning. There was still distance to our objective, Philnotes, and we still had room enough in our hearts to trade idle chatter.

“You two. Thinking about Mia’s fine, but don’t go forgetting we’re headed to a battlefield after this.”

When I warned Steano and Ambros, whose minds were off wandering somewhere far away, the two nodded at once.

“That much I’ve got, obviously!”

“Yes. The resolve is already made.”

“Hmm. If you say so.”

Their answers were passable enough, but honestly I was uneasy whether they truly understood. The Kingdom’s army encircling Philnotes was exceptional among the exceptional. The Kingdom was throwing itself frantic at taking the fortress city of Philnotes, which had declared its neutrality, into its grasp. The measure of the effort was, without question, different from the recent fight in the Dyrst region. Most likely they’d hold nothing back, throwing in the elite of the royal court mages and the cream of the Kingdom’s army, in securing a bridgehead for the invasion of the Empire. And if anyone stood in the way to prevent it, the Kingdom’s army would surely put up a fierce resistance with every ounce of its strength.

“Get yourselves genuinely braced. …One misstep, and not a single one of us may come back alive.”

It came out sounding like a threat, but it wasn’t overstated. The next battle, for us, was the one where death would come closest.

“You two.”

“Hm?”

“What is it?”

“This time too, we win without losing a single one.”

After the usual bracing rally, I told them, this time in a low voice.

“…And put your own lives first. If it gets dangerous, don’t rule out breaking off and running.”

Even I felt I’d said something pathetic, but that was how carefully this fight ought to be handled.

“Uncharacteristically faint-hearted. Not like you.”

“Oh? Don’t go filing it under something as simple as ‘faint-hearted.’ I learned something recently. To snatch the win at the very end, a strategic retreat is sometimes necessary too!”

So I explained, but Steano’s and Ambros’s reactions weren’t encouraging.

“That was definitely Miss Epika who taught you that. I can picture the whole scene, her rattling off trivia at top speed…”

“Mm. Cunning maneuvering doesn’t suit Petra, I think.”

“Right, right. She’s bound to slip up somewhere. Petra’s way of fighting, up to now, has been all straight-ahead, honest tactics.”

“You two…”

Just as I was about to fire back at the pair saying whatever they pleased—

“All present, form up. We leave the Imperial capital in two minutes!”

—the order came down from a Ritziareite whose voice was pitched a notch lower than usual. The tension that ran through the ground took less than a second to spread to everyone, and I drew a deep breath too.

“Time to move out.”

“Seems so.”

“…Let’s go.”

The idle chatter ended here. From now on, it was time for serious work.

“Petra. I leave command of the mages to you. Take the utmost care not to scatter in trying to encircle the Kingdom’s army and end up encircled yourselves.”

“Yes. Understood.”

Having given me my orders, Ritziareite’s gaze left me and flowed on in turn to the others.

“I’m counting on the hard fight of each and every one of you bound for Philnotes. Let’s all live to carry good news back to the Imperial capital.”

At the powerful rally, everyone nodded and raised a battle cry. Amid the clash of armor ringing metal on metal all around, Ritziareite turned a quiet gaze on the troops.

The place of battle was the outer ring of the fortress city of Philnotes, where the Kingdom’s soldiers swarmed. For a surprise strike on a Kingdom army absorbed in the siege of Philnotes, it was the ideal situation.

“We encircle the enemy from the outer ring, and when the Kingdom’s army turns its will to fight outward, if there’s an action from the Philnotes side, we crush them between inside and out and press the life from them…”

What mattered was completing the encirclement of the Kingdom’s army without their catching on. Honestly, covert action wasn’t my strong suit, but there wasn’t much time to shelve what I was good and bad at and think it over at length.

“Steano. I leave scouting the surroundings to you. Report the Kingdom army’s movements moment by moment, the same way you did on Marquis Rigel’s lands. Don’t let the enemy catch on.”

“I’m not a handyman, y’know… but, well, understood. I’ll survey the enemy’s state good and careful from a safe distance.”

“Ambros, take the heavily armored troops and swing around to guard Steano. In the worst case, if the scouting party’s presence comes to light, I want you to buy them time to get away.”

“Understood. Only, if heavy-armored guards go with the scouting party, the defensive line protecting the mages goes thin.”

“That side of the problem I’ll handle on our end.”

“If you say so, Petra, then I’ll move with Steano as told.”

“Yes. Above all, take every last care that no blow lands on the scouting party.”

By the book, protecting the mages, hopelessly weak to a close-range strike, should have been the guard unit’s single most important task. But for this fight, it had been given out ahead of time that a top-class scouting party, the likes of Fadi and Dorothea, couldn’t come to the Philnotes side. Our information-gathering was shaky enough as it was, and if the scouting party we’d assembled took a heavy blow, the Empire’s side would tip all at once into a losing position. However dire a corner we were driven into, a loss in this one fight could not be allowed. The Philnotes force held the greatest strength the Empire could currently move. Leave no result here and breed heavy casualties, and it would be a mortal wound to the Empire.

“…You all right?”

“Yes. Just a lot to think about, and my head started aching a little.”

“If I’ll do, I’m here for whatever you need: advice, anything.”

“Then lend me a bit of your wits. Let me hear your honest opinion, from your angle.”

Thanks to Steano’s consideration, the load on my shoulders felt just a shade lighter. Rather than brooding alone, sharing a problem with someone makes the thread of a solution easier to find.

—There’s plenty I want to talk through, but there’s ample time before we reach Philnotes. First, calmly, let me put the thoughts inside me in order.

Win this one fight for certain, and carry it into the next. The task laid on us was not to fail. It was an utterly simple thing, and an exceedingly difficult one.

5

War, to me, is nothing but one of the trivial little events in a life.

Gnawing at a strip of dried meat, I dropped a cold gaze on the fortress city of Philnotes, still showing not the slightest sign of opening its gates.

“…Haah~. Just staring each other down forever is so boring~!”

A deadlocked front. Waiting out an enemy who’d shut himself in with no sign of coming forth. A hollow, wasted stretch of time, enough to draw a yawn and a sigh out of me at once.

What I want is a tense, prickling kill-or-be-killed where life and death get mixed together. To beat a merciless, starving beast down from above with overwhelming force. And then, after savoring the crying, despair-blurred face like I’m licking it clean, to kill it the most painful way there is. That is the finest entertainment I could ask for.

“Hey, hey! It’s gone all tedious. Mind if I just go kill every last one of them myself?”

I asked the burly, shaven-headed man standing beside me, but he didn’t so much as twitch, eyes shut.

—Here I am, begging so sweet and cute, and he ignores me. Seriously gross.

“…Haah. You really are a boring man. Want me to lop that pointlessly thick head of yours off?”

“Lily. The suppression of Philnotes is the lords’ doing. It is a wholly different thing from a make-believe game you may move about on your private whim.”

“You’re slow to open your mouth, dumbass. Don’t go irritating me too much, yeah?”

“We are pieces on the battlefield. We move as we are told from above. No exceptions are permitted.”

“Yes, yes. As my nation’s little puppet commands.”

Stubborn types you can’t reason with. I seriously hate them. Worthless, aren’t they, the play-the-good-student sort who can’t move without an order from above, standing around waiting to be told.

—Kingdom this, Empire that. I’ve no interest in such trifles. I only want to live doing the things I want to do. And what I want to do right now is butcher someone as gruesomely as instinct moves me to. Not that it’ll be allowed, most likely…

Complaints I had beyond counting, gripes I could air without end, but say what I might, the stubborn man before me would never take it in. He’d only line up his pieties about discipline and the lords’ commands and go on sitting enthroned here until the moment the order came down. My chest went tight. It was uncomfortable to the bone. I’d sooner spend a day in a cesspit rank enough to warp your nose. That’s how little I wanted to breathe the same air in the same space as this man.

I made my sweet, wheedling voice again and put on a display of full-frontal adorableness.

“Hey, heyy? Then, say. Staring each other down in a place like this forever, my legs are going to rot, so… mind if I go make a patrol around the encampment, hm?”

“Do as you like. Only, if you go out on some offensive of your own accord, I’ll have no choice but to put you before a court-martial. Bear it in mind.”

“Ye~s. I’ll take you up on it and go on my little patrol! Bye-bye, then. Mister trash-heap dead-weight stubborn baldy♪ …Don’t you ever talk down to me again. Next time I’ll kill you, got it?”

“Off you go, quickly.”

I spat on the ground, and the bald man didn’t move so much as an eyebrow. If anything, he waved a hand as if to shoo me away.

—Haaah. If this dour, spiteful stubborn man weren’t a person of note, one of the Kingdom’s Ten Elites the same as me, I’d have killed him without a second’s hesitation.

“…Someday, for sure. I’ll chew through that stupid neck of yours.”

I muttered my spiteful little grudge under my breath and left the spot.

One of the Kingdom’s Ten Elites: ‘the Hedonist, Lily.’ I was fond of the moniker they’d pinned on me. Because it fit me perfectly. To chase after pleasure without end and live life to the hilt. This, precisely, is my way of living. Anyone who denies this creed of mine and gets in its way, whoever they are, I slaughter, every one.

And the one I want to kill most right now isn’t the cowards holed up in sturdy Philnotes, nor the small-fry of the Imperial army. It’s that stubborn son of a bitch nearest at hand, who thinks he’s put a collar on me. For now I’d play meek and follow orders, but let the chance come and I’d make him, quite literally, a bloodless doll that couldn’t run its mouth.

Without so much as sending a glance after my departing back, he simply faced Philnotes in an eerie stillness. This man never spoke plainly; always he only mumbled his monologues under his breath. A gloomy, hateful sort, enough to turn your stomach.

“…Honestly. Do something unnecessary and it becomes my task to dispose of you. A slip of a girl who only barely scraped into the Ten. I do wish she’d hold her arrogance to some limit.”

The schemes of each and every party swirled in every place, poison upon poison mixing to breed chaos. How it would all work upon the war, surely not even a god could foresee.

Chapter 1 – The Last Vacation Among Classmates

1

The last time all six of us had come down into the streets together with the sun still high had been back in our days at the Philnotes officers’ academy. With the change of emperor barely behind it, the Empire’s military and its civil administration had both gone briefly unsteady, and for weeks now the work had been heavier even than in our first days here. Paperwork piled higher on the office desk night after night, and Rune-sama, plainly worn thin, faced the business of state day in and day out.

Flegel, who shared the burden of assisting her with me, was losing the color in his face by the day, and, judging on her own that at this rate our efficiency would only keep sliding, she abruptly handed the two of us a day off.

A rest at last, a rest wrung out of days spent working from dawn to dusk. And that precious, hard-won holiday—

“Wait, you and Flegel are off tomorrow too, Al? Turns out so am I! Come on, the three of us should go somewhere for once!”

“Oh my. What a coincidence, all three of you. Mia and I are off tomorrow as well.”

“Heyyy, Petra-chan! Bro-suke’s off tomorrow! Isn’t that great? That’s our load-bearing pack mule secured for tomorrow’s shopping!”

“…Don’t tell me. Everyone’s off tomorrow, all six of us?”

By pure chance, it had landed on the same day as the whole rest of the old classmate crowd.

“Aldia, Steano! Get a move on, both of you! We’ll be late for our reservation at the play!”

Petra had gone on ahead at a half-run, fretting over the time at every step, threading through the crowded peddlers’ quarter of the Imperial capital. The road was one long clamor, so packed with people you couldn’t see the cobblestones underfoot. Watching those streets brim with life, you could almost forget the Empire’s administration was in the middle of upheaval.

“Lot of people.”

“Well, it’s the Empire’s capital.”

“No kidding. And the peddlers’ quarter especially draws a crowd, I might just get sick from all the bodies and throw up…”

“Don’t be dramatic. More to the point, is it fine, Petra charging on ahead by herself like that?”

I pointed out Petra, silk-fine gold hair swinging as she pressed boldly into the throng, and Steano shook his head as if to reset himself, then said in a voice pitched slightly too high.

“Crap! We’d better hurry too!”

“Right.”

Steano broke into a light jog after Petra.

“You sure you’re all right?”

“…Nah, I’m about ready to keel over from malnutrition. Skipped breakfast to make room for stall food. I’ve been looking forward to today that much.”

A hand pressed to his stomach, Steano was breaking into a cold sweat, his breathing gone somewhat ragged. An empty gut in a crowd this thick would take it out of anyone. For all his good mood, his color was rather poor. Still, hearing the cause was nothing worse than hunger, I was relieved.

“But man, today’s gonna be great!”

If he could keep grinning through the ache of an empty stomach, part of it was surely the air of the streets, so like our student days come again. So many people, each of them happy just wandering from stall to stall. The merchants cried their wares as if in competition; the passersby answered by stopping to weigh up the goods lined out in rows. It was the daily life of a lively citizenry, peace itself made into a picture. Something nostalgic rose off it, and the memories of Philnotes came back vivid.

“Still, all six of us together, now that’s a rare thing.”

Steano toyed idly at his own brown hair, a rapt little smile on his face, drunk on the bustle around him.

“Most we ever managed was three or four with the same day off. Someone’s on the roster just about every day.”

“Yeah, and most of the time it’s you and Flegel, buried in civil-side work.”

“Sorry about that. I’ll try to work more days off in from now on.”

…Try being the operative word; whether I’d actually manage to rest was another matter entirely. Steano had it right, though. Between us, Flegel and I seemed to get dragged out somewhere in or beyond the castle every single day. As Her Majesty’s personal knight I might be trailing her through the streets to see how the common quarters fared, or shut in with Linos arguing reform after reform of the military. Even back at the barracks with the day’s work done, my head ran at full tilt on tomorrow’s.

Turn my mind to the last little while, and though I crossed paths with the Philnotes classmates often enough on the job, the days when all six of us were free at once could be counted on one hand since we’d come to the Empire.

“One way or another, our days off never did line up.”

“Right?! That’s exactly why I thought it was such a great idea when Mia said she wanted all six of us to go look around the peddlers’ quarter together!”

‘We’re all off for once, so let’s get everybody together and do something!’

It was that one word from Mia that had us meeting up in the peddlers’ quarter of Aldan. What had started as a plan for Petra and Mia to take in a play hugely popular in the capital had become an outing for all six.

We shouldered our way through, slipping along the edge of the main avenue. Slight as she was, Petra threaded neatly between one body and the next, but there wasn’t a gap wide enough for a pack of grown men like us to move through without knocking into anyone. Little by little, the distance to that bobbing gold head opened up.

“Hey, Al.”

“I know. Keep on like this and we lose Petra.”

Worst case, I figured, we’d regroup at the theater. But Steano drew a breath as if bracing himself, then forced his way against the current of the crowd, stepping hard toward where Petra was.

The closer we came to the theater, the denser the crowd grew. Just as I was about to lose sight of Petra up ahead—

“Petra, quick, stop!”

“Huh? Wh-what, all of a sudden?!”

“…It’s just, we’ll be in trouble if we get split up. Al’s way back there too.”

“Th-that’s… true. Sorry.”

Steano caught Petra’s hand as she forged on ahead, and by the barest margin we avoided losing her.

“Hey. Steano, aren’t you gripping too hard?”

“Sorry. But there’s a ton of people, so bear with it.”

Hands joined, the two walked on, and I followed a pace or so behind, parting the waves of people as I went. Normally Petra would be pouring some acid remark over Steano, but just then she let herself be led along quietly by the hand. Eyes lowered a fraction, she murmured under her breath.

“…Honestly.”

Whether it was the crush of the crowd wearing her down or the muggy heat that came with all those bodies, I couldn’t say, but Petra’s face looked to have gone quite red.

2

“Heyyy, over here, you three, over here~!”

Out of the crush and up to the theater, we found Mia, Ambros, and Flegel near the entrance. Perhaps because they’d traded their usual dress for plain clothes, all three had a loose, easy air about them.

“Sorry, sorry. Been waiting long?”

“Hmm. About five minutes, I’d say!”

“Y’know, I read in a book that the polite thing is to say you just got here.”

“What a stupid book. Anyway, never mind. Leave the tiresome-clinging-Steano routine for later…”

“Hey, now.”

Ignoring Steano as he skittered about at her heels, Mia held out the theater tickets she must have bought in advance.

“Al-chi. Here, your ticket for the play.”

“Thanks.”

Once I’d taken it, she walked over to stand in front of Petra.

“Here’s yours too, Petra-chan… huh, what’s wrong? You look kind of down.”

“I-it’s nothing! Thanks for buying the ticket for me!”

Petra all but snatched the ticket, then fidgeted, winding a strand of her prized gold hair around a fingertip, and looked down. Mia’s face took on a shade of suspicion at the meekness of it, and she came over to me and whispered in my ear.

“…Hey, Al-chi. Did something happen to Petra-chan on the way here?”

“No, nothing I can think of.”

I told her as much under my breath. She looked unconvinced, but shook it off at once, seized the meek Petra’s hand, and marched brightly into the theater with her.

“Ahh, Petra-chan! The play, I can’t wait!”

“…Right. I’m looking forward to it.”

“I mean, going out to have fun all together like this, it’s the first time since we were students, huh!”

“Now that you mention it, it is. We’ve been busy in our own ways since coming to the Empire…”

“All right! Today I’m playing until I can’t move a muscle!”

“W-wait, Mia?! There’s no need to rush, the show doesn’t start for a while yet!”

Mia hauled Petra bodily along, bounding and skipping ahead in great surges of energy.

“Huh. Shouldn’t we go help her?”

“Leave it. We don’t want the fire spreading.”

Petra stretched a hand back toward us, mutely begging release from high-strung Mia’s grip, and every one of us shook our heads and saw her off.

“Come on…”

She said it in a scraped-thin voice, throwing a look our way as if in protest, but in the end she was held fast in the crook of Mia’s arm, unable to resist, dragged along by that unruly bounce and led to the theater doors.

Steano watched it with an exasperated eye and let a wry laugh slip.

“Honestly, she never does shut up.”

“She looks like she’s having fun. Where’s the harm?”

Steano, who called Mia a scatterbrain, and Ambros, soothing him, followed the two toward the entrance. That left Flegel and me.

“Rowdy as ever.”

“Nine-tenths of the noise is Mia, though. And most of the other tenth’s Steano.”

For all the grumble in it, Flegel’s own face was calm.

“Aldia. Let’s go in too.”

“Yeah.”

I nodded, and we made for the theater doors together. Near where we’d all met, the crowd had swelled steadily as the start drew near. Once we’d finished at reception and gone through into the theater itself, a wide space opened before us, faintly dark under only the barest of lights.

3

The play behind us, we spilled back out into the streets of the peddlers’ quarter.

“That play was incredible!”

“You could feel exactly what the characters were feeling, in the acting.”

“Right? I couldn’t stop getting swept up in it!”

While the women were busy talking up the play—

“Hey, doesn’t that look good?”

“Let’s go buy some!”

“…Oi, how much are you two planning to buy?”

—Steano and Ambros had their eyes shining at the stall food. Their hands were already full of a mountain of food and drink, and still they were scanning the surroundings. Dodging the waves of people with unlikely skill, Steano bore straight for a stall he’d set his sights on.

“Flegel, we’re gonna go grab from that place over there!”

“Sorry. Go on ahead without us!”

“Ah, wander off on your own and you’ll get lo— …hah. Not listening.”

Before Flegel could get a word out, the two had joined the long line at the stall. He stood there dumbstruck for a moment, then cut his eyes away from them.

“So much for the finer things in life…”

“Steano skipped breakfast for today, apparently.”

“Even so, he’s got no restraint at all. How many stalls is that now…”

“…I can’t argue with that.”

Flegel and I left the two to their line and walked on behind Mia and Petra, who were still deep in the play, talking as we went. A lively scene, and time spent with close friends. Cut it wherever you liked, it was all noise and no rest, and yet every moment of it left me feeling about as happy as it was possible to feel.

“Good that everyone’s having fun.”

“You having fun too, Aldia?”

“Yeah. Just walking around like this is enough.”

An ordinary scene from an ordinary day off. And to me, that was more precious than anything. How many more times, from here on, would all of us gather and laugh together like today? The thought that it might be the last only made me want to hold this time close and savor it.

“I’d like all six of us to meet up again.”

“Anyone gives a shout, we’ll all be together in no time.”

“…Yeah.”

I only hoped a time I could believe that of would go on and on.

“Huh? Where are Steano and Bro-suke?”

“Held up. The stalls got them.”

“Ehh, again? Those two bottomless pits, honestly.”

“Well, we can let it slide just for today. Better they’re enjoying themselves.”

Flegel’s words were the very thing all four of us there held in common.

“True. It’d be graceless to scold anyone today of all days.”

“Flegel and Petra-chan, you’re both too soft.”

Mia called the generous pair ‘soft,’ but she herself seemed to have no real intention of coming down hard on Steano and Ambros for going their own way, and a moment later an innocent smile spilled over her face. For all our griping, we recognized one another for what we were; not one thing about how we’d been at the academy had really changed, most likely.

“Then let’s go on to a really special shop without those two!”

Setting the pace, Mia sprang two, three steps out front, turned back to us, and walked backward.

“Come on, come on, this way, you three! Hurry, or the popular stuff’ll sell out!”

To Mia, leading us along in high spirits, I offered one remark.

“…That’s not going to turn out to be a Crimea Company shop, is it?”

“Gh-glk… n-no way. Al-chi, you say the funniest things.”

“…So I’m right on the money.”

“I-it’s not as if I get a ten-percent cut of the sales as a margin for bringing everyone to the shops, not at all, absolutely not!”

“So there’s a margin too… you’re so rattled you’re leaking the extra details.”

“N-no, I’m not rattled in the slightest. Not one bit, okay?! Oh, say, the moon’s lovely today, isn’t it~.”

“It’s the middle of the day.”

“Ughh, it’s no good. I’m hopeless at keeping secrets…”

Her eyes darted every which way, and in the end she was reduced to confessing she couldn’t lie. A thoroughly honest reaction, that was Mia.

4

The moment we stepped into the district where the Crimea Company’s shops stood in ranks, Mia’s spirits hit their peak. It was the continent’s largest trading house, and it showed: everything set out in the storefronts was of fine quality.

“Well? Well? Pretty great, right!”

Wrapped in all that clamor, even Mia’s voice got drowned out. Catching only the faint gist of her delighted words, Petra nodded, stopped before a stall, and turned her gaze to the accessories. Necklaces and rings, done up in pretty ornament like jewelry made for women, lined the front of the shop.

“This is cute.”

“Yeah. It does look like the sort of thing you’d like, Petra.”

She liked cute things more than you’d expect, and I watched her fondly enough that she puffed out her cheeks and pressed a light fist to my shoulder.

“You’re thinking it wouldn’t suit me, aren’t you. I know that much without being told.”

“…No, it’d suit you. You’re plenty pretty, Petra.”

“—?! I— r-right. Thanks.”

Every reaction out of Petra today was strangely free of thorns. I turned the question over, wondering why that might be—

“…So Petra really can’t take a compliment, huh.”

“You… that’s one word too many. Honestly, go die!”

“Gh…?!”

The moment I put the conclusion I’d reached into words, a merciless blow gouged into my gut.

“Hold on… I didn’t say anything… wrong, I’m pretty sure…”

“You did. You said something rude! I’m not the least bit easily won over, thanks!”

Never in my wildest dreams had I imagined I’d be the one to take the hazing Steano usually got. …Also, I had absolutely never called Petra easily won over. Having dealt out her unreasonable violence, she spun on her heel and walked on ahead alone.

“Aldia. That one’s on you.”

“Al-chi really doesn’t get how a girl’s heart works, huh. Well, don’t sweat it! That obliviousness of yours probably isn’t getting fixed anytime soon, but!”

Their words, half meant as comfort, barely reached me; until the sting of that blow subsided I couldn’t move a muscle.

5

As I was making my way around the Crimea Company’s shops, a hand tapped me on the shoulder from behind. Wondering who it was, I turned to find Ritziareite, standing there in something a little more casual than usual.

“Sir Aldia. Fancy meeting you in a place like this.”

“General Ritziareite. Good to see you. Are you off today?”

“No. I’m here to talk terms with the Crimea Company over military supplies. I had a little time before the meeting, so I thought I’d look around the shops nearby, and there you were, quite by chance.”

It seemed she was hard at her duties again today. She oversaw everything from the command of troops to the procurement of matériel; there was nothing to say but that it was impressive.

“See anything that caught your eye?”

“Let me think… I’m a little embarrassed to admit it, but the bracelet at that shop was very finely worked, very lovely.”

The shop Ritziareite pointed to was the accessory shop Petra had taken to earlier. This place really was popular with women, then. Passersby often stopped in front of it too. The finely made ornaments were rich with a sense of quality and refinement, and yet they didn’t seem to be aimed only at the upper class; the prices were within a commoner’s reach. Quality and cheapness both, and thanks to that the foot traffic held up; the shop was doing brisk business.

“And which one has your eye, General Ritziareite?”

“Which one…”

At my question she thought it over as if torn, then pointed to a white, C-shaped bangle.

“That one, I suppose, if I had to choose. The shape’s simple, and if you mind the sizing it would fit snugly to the arm, so I don’t think it would get in the way of everyday movement, either.”

At an opinion that put practicality first, I found myself nodding along. But having said it, she slowly lowered the finger she’d pointed with and wore a self-deprecating little smile.

“Though I can’t imagine something like that would suit me. Odd, isn’t it, a general of the army wearing a pretty bracelet like that.”

…Ah. Why is it that women in the military always lace their words about themselves with denial? I, for one, would never think it strange for Petra or Ritziareite to dress themselves up. Fretting so keenly over one’s position and how others judge it can’t be a good thing.

“Wait here a moment, would you.”

Leaving Ritziareite where she stood, I headed for the shop in front of us.

“Excuse me. Could I have this?”

What I bought was the bangle Ritziareite had said caught her eye.

“Here.”

When I tried to hand her the bangle in its small wrapping, she shook her head, looking apologetic.

“I couldn’t. I’ve done nothing to earn it.”

“This bracelet’s too small for my arm, and you’ve helped me any number of times, General Ritziareite. Consider it thanks for all of it.”

“Helped you… if anything, it’s I who’ve been saved, over and over.”

Modest as ever, she stubbornly refused to take it.

“There’s no need to run yourself down. I said it before, didn’t I? Rune-sama and I need your strength, and that’s why we named you the general we’d entrust the Provisional Elite Corps to.”

“…Yes.”

“That’s on account of your skill as a dragon-mount soldier, of course, but more than that, we asked you because you’re someone we can trust. I’d never make the fool’s play of drawing an untrustworthy person in as an ally. It was precisely because you’re warm-hearted and never once let your earnestness toward the work slip that I could hand you a role that important. As a colleague, I respect you. It was because you led the Provisional Elite Corps and fought with everything you had that we won against Marquis Rigel, and that we could hold the Empire against the Kingdom and the Order’s threat in the Dyrst region. This is a small token of thanks from a man who’s leaned on you all this time.”

When I threw the honest truth of it at her without a word of falsehood, Ritziareite laughed, looking abashed.

“Put that way, Sir Aldia, refusing would be the ruder thing to do, wouldn’t it.”

She came slowly up to me and touched the bangle in its wrapping.

“Thank you. I’ll treasure this all my life!”

She cradled the bangle to her chest as if it were precious, and smiled.

6

Lately Mia and I had been going out together more and more.

If our days off happened to fall together we’d usually spend them in each other’s company, and a few times a week without fail we’d head into town after work to eat. Back when we lived in Philnotes, Mia and I rarely moved as a pair. It was only after coming to the Empire that I started spending so much of my time with her. Ending up in a land where I had no roots or ties, and her being the only other girl I could talk to easily; that was surely the biggest part of it.

We’d wander the stalls together, the small talk blooming between us. Today too we’d pass the day off as we always did, and end it with a chorus of ‘what a good day,’ the mood high. …That was how it was supposed to go.

“Hey, Petra-chan.”

“What?”

“…Bluntly, though. You’re in love with Al-chi, aren’t you? In the romantic sense.”

“Wh-what—?!”

The heart of a thing always gets struck out of nowhere. In the middle of savoring a girls-only shopping trip, apart from Aldia and the others, Mia had lobbed an outrageous question at me with all the offhand air of idle gossip. Seeing how it had rattled me, she gave an ‘ahaha’ of a laugh and said, deadpan:

“Heheh. I see, I see, so it’s true~.”

“I-I didn’t confirm anything! Don’t be ridiculous—”

“Nope, nope, one look at that reaction and it’s case closed. Nothing gets past the great-trading-house prodigy Mia! I can read Petra-chan down to the very last corner! Sparkle!”

“Aren’t you embarrassed, saying that about yourself?”

“Honestly, super embarrassed! Everyone’s staring at me and it stings like anything.”

The passersby were indeed turning curious eyes on the posing Mia. That loud declaration of her own embarrassment let me claw back a little composure, and once I’d fully reset with a clearing of my throat, I set my mind to picking apart her mistaken theory.

“Mia. For the record, it’s all a misunderstanding.”

“Ehh. What’s the misunderstanding, exactly~?”

“Wipe that lewd look off your face. I will simply kick your shin.”

To Mia, wearing a slack, silly grin, my words surely weren’t getting through. The teasing, mocking manner and the look of someone who understood me only made it more infuriating. Sidling along to press right up against me, she kept prompting in my ear, ‘And? And?’ as though we were sharing some secret.

“Nngh… listen. First of all, I do not think of Aldia as a man.”

“Ah, mm. Already doubtful.”

“Huh? Doubtful how?!”

“I mean, the feelings you’ve got toward Al-chi, Petra-chan, they’re plainly different from what you’ve got toward me or anyone else in the army.”

She said it, but I had no memory of any such thing.

“I’m equally hard on everyone, thank you.”

“Yeah, no, that I get completely. Same drill-sergeant brain you’ve had since Philnotes.”

“That sounds rather like an insult, but fine, let it stand for now. And? If you admit I treat everyone the same, then why is it, Mia, that you think I hold some special feeling for Aldia?”

I drove at the contradiction folded into her words and felt rather triumphant, but Mia told me without her expression shifting so much as a hair.

“It’s like, Petra-chan, only with Al-chi, this sense that you’ve placed your absolute trust in him seeps out of your ordinary conversation. Especially right before a big fight.”

“And how does that connect to romantic feelings?”

“It happens all the time, doesn’t it. Respect turning into love. In other words, that’s exactly it! Trembling before my brilliant deduction yet?”

“The grounds for that conclusion are awfully thin… I’m not trembling in the least.”

No good. Pathetic of me to have been thrown off by intuition dressed up as reasoning like that. I pulled my gaze from the blue-haired airhead throwing out her chest so proudly and looked up at the clear, open sky.

Well, true enough. As Mia said, I did place great trust in Aldia. As a friend of long acquaintance, and as a goal to be overcome, someone stronger than myself. But there wasn’t a scrap of anything so impure as romance in it. What I felt toward him was no infatuation. It was the affection you turn on a one-and-only friend and the pure admiration you hold for someone unassailably strong. Nothing more, nothing less.

“Mia. Like I said, it’s all your misunderstanding.”

“…Hmm. Is it, really?”

“…It is.”

A silence fell between us. The foolery of a moment ago broke off in an instant, and just for a breath, truly only a breath, a conflicted look crossed Mia’s face, as if she pitied me.

“Come on, Petra-chan~, lying about your own feelings only hurts, you know!”

“I always put my own feelings first.”

Yes. I was lying about nothing.

“You’d do better to be honest, let your feelings out where they show~. Because if a time comes when you want to say it and can’t, then knowing your personality, Petra-chan, you’ll regret it enough to die!”

“Hmph. You talk as if you’d been to the future and seen it.”

The instant those words left my mouth, the loose air of before shifted, all at once, into something heavy and hard to breathe.

“Ah, mm. …Then, say. What if I told you I really had seen a sad ending? What would you do?”

“What… what are you suddenly say—?!”

I felt the air freeze against my skin. I might have said something that touched a nerve of Mia’s. The girl before me still wore a smiling face, yet with a thorniness so unlike her usual self that I found myself cowed despite it all. A cold sweat traced down my cheek. It might well have been the first time, even now, that I’d felt so clear and definite a feeling coming off Mia. Usually she was all vague, unhurried surfaces, her thoughts often impossible to read, but just this once I understood plainly. This feeling was grief and pain, wrung to their essence and mixed together into one.

“…You.”

The words to follow wouldn’t come out right. Unlike the way I dealt with her as a friend, this time I too was choosing my words with care. It felt as if a single wrong choice would put something beyond any hope of recovery. As I watched Mia’s face for a sign, she looked at me, brows drawing together, and opened her mouth as if startled, as though she were bewildered at having created a situation she’d never meant to make.

“Ah. S-sorry, Petra-chan! I made it all weird, huh. Ahaha… I don’t usually say stuff like this. Guess I’m a little off my game in various ways today. Ahh, we’ve been on the move nonstop, maybe I’m just tired!”

A forced, papering-over smile. As if driven by some compulsion to keep talking no matter what, she reeled off a slightly too-fast string of empty words. It was the bad habit Mia showed whenever she was trying to hide something inconvenient.

“…Ahh, hey, come to think of it, aren’t you hungry? While we’re here, let’s go get something tasty over that way!”

“…Right. All right.”

“Great! Then, off we go~!”

There were mountains of things I wanted to ask her, but the courage to press any deeper simply wouldn’t come.

7

Dusk came before we knew it. Against a sky dyed a vivid vermilion, jet-black crows wheeled and danced overhead, and the flood of people that had filled the peddlers’ quarter gradually thinned.

“Urp… flat-out ate too much. Even walking home is rough.”

“C-can’t… move…!”

Steano and Ambros, who’d been eating their way through the stalls ever since we split off, sat slumped in evident misery on a bench in the shade of a tree. When I came near, they noticed me and waved, looking pleased.

“You two. About time to head home.”

“Al. Where’d the other three go?”

“Flegel went on ahead, said he had to prep for tomorrow’s work. Petra and Mia are probably still in the district with the Crimea Company shops. Doesn’t look like we’ll regroup; more like everyone just heads home from where they are.”

I sat down beside the two, too full to move, and stretched my own legs out, if more modestly.

“Haah… back to work again tomorrow, huh.”

“But we got to enjoy today to the full!”

“Well. All we did the back half was eat and drink on repeat.”

“True! But I got to eat so many unusual dishes you’d never come across in ordinary life. It was a blast!”

“Ambros. Next time let’s do the rounds, just the two of us!”

“Mm, a fine plan! We two shall conquer every eatery in this peddlers’ quarter!”

Steano and Ambros launched happily into shop talk about food. It was good that a shared love of eating had deepened the bond between them. What sentence Petra would hand down later on the pair for going their own way to the very end, I couldn’t say.

“How was today for you, Al?”

Steano, in a lull in his talk with Ambros, turned to me next.

“I had fun, of course. Left to myself I’d never have come to a place like this. Everything felt fresh.”

“Yeah? Then I’m relieved you actually got to enjoy it. Lately you’ve looked stretched pretty thin.”

“…You’re right. There wasn’t any slack to spare.”

Day after day, I’d kept my nerves honed to an edge. As personal knight to Her Imperial Majesty Valtrune, I’d grudged even the hours of sleep in guarding her person. Not a single day since coming to the Empire had I slept easy. Back when she was still a Princess, political rivals and outside enemies alike had swarmed thick around her, and I’d worn myself frantic beating aside every last spark before it could reach her. To have something precious harmed, or lost, I never wanted that experience again. It was a fear that gnawed at me, day in and day out.

“Knew it. You can tell, huh.”

“Course I can. I’m your best friend.”

“I know.”

No one knew it better than I did. There’d never be a better male friend than him, not in all the years ahead. We’d fought side by side, and his end, his life scattering before my eyes, was carved into my memory deep as a curse, deep enough that I dreamed of it still, now and again.

“Anyway, that’s the thing. Don’t go carrying it all alone too much. I’m not some upstanding guy who could be a personal knight to Her Majesty like you, and I don’t know the first thing about political tangles. But I can hear you gripe anytime. If there’s stuff you need to get off your chest, I’m always here to talk it out. That goes for you too, Ambros!”

Steano threw an arm around both Ambros and me and laughed in a ridiculously loud voice. This man was as good and open-hearted as ever, I thought. It was because Steano was who he was that, after regressing, he was the very first person I could ask to come with me to the Empire. Without even noticing it, I’d had this man save my heart any number of times, I was sure.

“Glad you’re my best friend, Steano.”

“And I think you’re the best friend a guy could have, Al!”

To keep this bond from breaking, I’d go on agonizing over things after this too, most likely. And yet, if I could smash through the high walls thrown up in my path and solve every last one of the piled-up problems, then surely even the bitter, painful things I’d tasted until now could be raised into fond old tales to look back on.

“Someday, for sure… I’ll tell you all of it.”

Impossible right now, but to Steano and the rest of the irreplaceable friends who’d believed in me and come all the way to the Empire, I’d tell everything I’d been through. The joys. The good times. The hard things. The griefs. All the many things I’d felt in one lifetime that had already ended once would sound, to them, as wild as some invented adventure. Even if I told them I was moving back through time, reliving history, they might not believe me. And that was fine. What mattered most was that, at the end, a situation remained in which I could tell them what had happened to me, hidden nothing, even if only as some tall tale.

8

Once we’d taken a good long rest for our stomachs, the surroundings had gone fully dark.

“See you, Steano. Back at the Imperial Castle.”

“I’ll scout out the eateries around here before our next food crawl. Later!”

“Yeah. See you, both of you!”

Parting from Aldia and Ambros, I walked the night road alone. From the noisy space of three men a moment ago to this: apart from the faint clamor drifting in from around me, there wasn’t a single voice nearby. It was a way home with hardly anyone on it, but oddly enough I made out a figure coming toward me from up ahead.

—Not that it crossed my mind for a second that it might be someone I knew.

“Surprise. Didn’t figure on finding you out here alone, Petra.”

“…That’s my line. Steano.”

A sky full of stars, and half past nine, a chill night wind blowing. We’d all broken up wherever we stood, but by some twist of fate I’d run into Petra on the way home.

“You didn’t head back with Mia?”

“No. There was… a bit of that.”

Petra fumbled the words with something held back in them, and looked away.

“…Huh. Not that I get it. Girls have their stuff too, I guess.”

I didn’t dig. She didn’t have the air of someone who’d talk even if I got curious and pressed, and I had no wish to sour her mood over nothing.

“You… you’re better at reading a room than I’d have thought.”

“…Well. Even a guy like me’s been knocked around by the real world a bit lately.”

“Pff. What’s that supposed to be!”

It was half a snort of derision, but I was glad to see even a little of a cheerful smile come back to Petra. She and I fell naturally into step, walking the quiet night road.

“Honestly. Getting split off because you couldn’t rein in your appetite, what were the two of you even doing?”

“My bad. First time downtown in ages, we got a little carried away.”

“I’m sure. I knew you would.”

“Figured. Thought you’d have the whole thing pegged.”

Gold threads swaying with a lustrous sheen, Petra clasped her hands behind her back and looked up at the stars. Somehow, time spent alone with her felt nostalgic.

“Y’know. Just the two of us like this, Petra. Takes me back to Philnotes.”

“Just the two of us…? Ah. When I taught you your lessons.”

“Ngh. Some nasty trauma just came surging back…”

I’d never forget it. That hellish one-on-one study camp with Petra. It was what came of me, a fixture in remedial classes, clinging to her in tears to help me cram for the test of a course I absolutely could not fail. A brutal week began, one where I wasn’t allowed to leave the study desk day or night. Al and the others, worried, brought snacks by from time to time, but at bottom it was nothing but torment: solving practice problem sets over the test range on my own, under Petra’s watch the whole while.

“That was the worst.”

“Oh? But weren’t you overjoyed at scoring your first perfect hundred in that course?”

“I got shut up a whole week under those extreme conditions. Of course I was thrilled to death when it actually got results!”

“Then it was worth it, wasn’t it. One course cleverer.”

“And in exchange I got saddled with a trauma I’ll carry to the grave!”

Petra wore a smile now, the shadow of unease she’d carried before wiped clean away. One way and another, I’d spent all day steeped in memories of our student days.

“Plenty happened, but the days up to now really have been full ones.”

At that, Petra tucked her hair behind an ear and nodded.

“They have. Nothing but things worth remembering.”

A day spent walking the peddlers’ quarter with all six of us, and I’d grown certain of something. However many years passed from here, this group of six would surely stay a bunch who could share the same fun we did as students.

“Today, too. Six of us out to play, getting worked up over stupid stuff same as the old days, seeing the same sights, larking about the same way we used to… everything I’m worried about, everything I hate, I forgot all of it and just, purely, got to enjoy that time.”

“…Even if today’s already over now.”

“Yeah, well. But come tomorrow, we’ll still be friends, no different.”

A day like today would never come again, but the years could pass and our friendship wouldn’t waver. Even when all six of us had become doddering old men and women, I figured, we’d deal with one another no differently. And even if this bond someday faded, we’d never forget it; it would be carved somewhere in our hearts as a precious memory and stay there until we died.

“I want to come again.”

“Yeah.”

“…Next time too, I hope we can get all six together.”

To the offhand line I let fall, Petra spoke a cruel one.

“If everyone’s still alive, that is.”

“—!”

—That was right. It wasn’t as if we could go on laughing together, all six of us, forever. There was war with the Kingdom ahead of us, and we’d go to the battlefield as soldiers and fight with our lives on the line. It wasn’t that I’d forgotten. I’d only been pretending not to notice.

“Today might be the last time all six of us can gather.”

“…Yeah.”

“And there you and Ambros go, running off wherever your cravings take you.”

“…Sorry.”

The usual perfunctory apology wouldn’t come. Because I’d been made to realize that today’s gathering might be, for us, the last memory we’d ever make.

“I mean it, I’m sorry. After you and the others put so much thought into it.”

“Haah. What are you apologizing so sheepishly for. It’s ridiculous.”

“Ridic— ridiculous? I’m being serious here—”

“You don’t need to worry about that. You had fun today, didn’t you. We all met up for the first time in ages and did exactly what we wanted to the hilt. That’s enough, isn’t it.”

As I moved to argue back, Petra pressed a forefinger to my lips and smiled.

“If today became a fun memory for you, then that alone is more than enough… I’m glad.”

“——!”

She usually talks with a much cooler face, so the way she smiled at me plain and unguarded at a moment like this really was, I thought, unfair of her.

“Seriously… I can’t win against you.”

Petra was supposed to be the same age as me, and yet there was a composure to her that made me half feel I was the younger one. It was always her doing the leading, where I was concerned. Today too she’d taken care over my low mood and, with a warmth she almost never showed, leaned close and stayed near so that I wouldn’t take things to heart.

“Petra.”

“Hm?”

“You were looking out for me, weren’t you. Thanks.”

Where Petra was concerned, I could never hold my head up. It was because she existed that, at Philnotes and in the Empire both, I’d come to feel it mattered to put in the work. To set a goal and truly want to climb past it: that genuine drive I’d never even have held without her.

“Not really. As if I’d be looking out for the likes of you, now of all times.”

“Ha ha… is that so.”

That one was an easy lie to spot. She’s surprisingly guileless, so it shows on her face. Ever since I’d thanked her, the corners of her mouth had been twitching happily. Pretending to comb her hair to desperately hide the grin, that too. So very easy to read. She was the same as me: the type who tries to keep something hidden and has it surface on her face right away, seen through by the other person at once.

“You know, the two of us, we might be more alike than you’d think.”

The thought slipped out of my mouth. Petra’s eyes flew wide at the words—

“Huh? No, sorry. I don’t get what you mean at all?”

“…Ehh?”

—and, wearing a dubious look, she cut my words down on the spot without mercy. No, that was the part where you say ‘maybe you’re right,’ and we get that mutual-understanding thing going. Why do you shoot it down instantly right there? But no matter how hard I appealed with my eyes, not one bit of what I felt reached her.

“Uh, what? What’s wrong?”

Petra, apparently, didn’t think for a moment that she was anything like me.

“We’re not alike?”

“Are you and I alike? Hmm. Maybe we’re al— no, we’re not. Not, not, not. Absolutely not. I’m not that much of an idiot, and I take a much wider view of what’s around me. Completely different.”

That the way she denied it was far too rude to me is another matter entirely. Had all her earlier consideration flown off somewhere? She said whatever she liked without a shred of reserve.

“…Hey. You could stand to look out for me a little more, you know.”

“No. Too much bother.”

“Ah, there it is… so that earlier one, you meant that straight too.”

“Earlier one? What are you talking about.”

One thing had become clear. The kindness Petra showed now and then was, to the woman herself, something she wasn’t aware of. And nothing’s crueler than kindness a person doesn’t know they’re giving. Because you get the feeling, all on your own, that you understand each other, and go and pin all sorts of hopes on it.

“Hold on. What have you been trying to say all this while? I don’t follow at all.”

Genuinely unable to grasp what I meant, she pressed in on me, looking uneasy. Well, all right. Passing the time riding along at her pace like this wasn’t half bad, unexpectedly.

“Nah. It’s nothing.”

I took Petra’s hand just like that.

“Wh—!”

“It’s cold, let’s hurry home. We’ve both got an early start tomorrow.”

The hand I’d joined with mine was faintly cold, from being out in the wind, maybe.

“Don’t just grab it out of nowhere. Same as this morning… you scared me!”

“Sorry, sorry. You just looked cold, so I sort of… and my hand was freezing too.”

“…Don’t warm yourself up with my hand!”

The sharp glare she turned on me, business as usual. It had become the same old familiar pattern, but it was far and away better than the conversation going stiff and awkward over some touchy subject.

“…Hey. I’m getting hungry.”

“You’ve been eating your way through the stalls this whole time since we split off, haven’t you? What are you, a starving brat?”

“There’s a good place up ahead. Mind if we stop in a bit?”

“I don’t mind. Just don’t overdo it.”

“I know!”

No good comes of thinking about what’s ahead; it only stokes the worry. For now, if I could just go on enjoying this time, that alone was more than enough.

Prologue

1

The new Emperor of the Valugan Empire: Valtrune von Felsdorf. It took no time at all for the name to ring out across the whole continent.

The moment she took the throne from her predecessor, the Kingdom dropped the mild diplomatic face it had worn until then; its envoys turned openly high-handed, sharpening the friction between the two nations at every turn. Once the Kingdom hardened toward the Empire, the neighboring states in its orbit seized the chance to follow suit, declaring their own hostility one after another.

None of it differed in the slightest from the previous timeline. All well within what I had expected. Plenty of nations had always resented how much of the continent lay under the Empire’s shadow, and, given a clear banner to rally behind — one Kingdom willing to stand against the Empire — every small state that had never dared rise against that power alone would find its voice at last.

In the old timeline or in this one, the Empire never wanted for enemies. And above all, the Valtrune administration was still newborn. With its internal politics yet unsteady, the rest of the world had the opening it had been waiting for.

“As many enemies as ever, I see.”

“I knew all of it going in. I chose to become Emperor regardless — because I resolved to see this Empire protected, whatever it takes.”

Not a flicker of doubt in those blue eyes, now that she wore the crown. She had known full well it would shake the Empire, and done it anyway: swept out the old consuls and appointed new ones chosen by the will of the people. The Imperial army she had dissolved outright, combed through for the men grown fat on privilege, and rebuilt from the foundation up, with officers who actually meant to defend the Empire set at its head. A scalpel taken to a stagnant realm, to forge something stronger than it had ever been. Crown or no crown, what she wanted had never once changed, and it was that — the will to give everything to this Empire’s keeping — that made her Emperor at all.

“I won’t let the tragedy repeat. Never again.”

“Yes.”

Every time that pure-white hair, the mark of the imperial line, stirred in the air, the old battlefield rose in my mind. Split nails, fingertips raw and weeping; she had taken that ruined hand of mine, blood and grime mingled across the palm, and folded it gently into her own. The mercy of someone who would reach for a dying man and refuse to let him go. On a battlefield where everyone else lost whatever room their heart had left, she alone could still spare a thought for another person on sheer reflex, and that, I was certain, was the only reason we had come as far as we had.

“So many people understand your ideal now, Rune-sama, and stand ready to lend their strength. It’s nothing like those days, when we were powerless and the things that mattered kept being torn out of our hands.”

“…You’re right. This time, I chose the throne. Which means history has already bent away from its old course, hasn’t it.”

Philnotes had been scorched to bare earth as the very heart of the war; the Roscheld Republic had trampled Imperial soil shoulder to shoulder with the Kingdom. And yet both of them, the neutral city and the Republic alike, now welcomed the new Emperor’s rise and showed themselves willing to meet her halfway. Her unswerving sincerity had reached them, and that had made all the difference. It was something the Empire of the previous timeline, left to fight utterly alone, had never once known. She had moved history itself, and set a new age turning.

That the future could be changed at all, she had proven by taking the crown with her own hands. From here on, however thick the wall thrown across our road, we would drive straight through it. The world revolved around her now, and it would be us who built this age and blew a hole clean through the worst of what history had been.

“Al. It’s nearly time for the war council.”

She rose, and seen from behind she stood straighter and prouder than anyone alive; before I knew it, something close to reverence had settled over me.

“Come, then. Let’s go.”

“Yes.”

I took the hand she held out. Her skin was pale, near translucent, and where it met mine it carried a gentle warmth.

“The problems are stacked to the ceiling. Whatever am I to do with them all?”

She said it as though genuinely at a loss, leaning her shoulder lightly into me, a small rueful smile at her lips. And to that question there had only ever been one answer, as far as I was concerned.

“Do as you please, Rune-sama. I’ll wring out every scrap of wit I have to make the Empire you’ve envisioned real, and when it comes to it, I’ll cut the road open by force.”

Honor her will, and hold her up until the day I died — nothing in the world ranked above that. Some universal standard of right meant nothing to me. My one and only sovereign was Valtrune von Felsdorf; I would grind her enemies to dust, every last one, and prove to the whole world that she was the measure of what was right. That was how I meant to live: as her personal knight.

“Then perhaps I’ll just leave today’s council in your hands, hm?”

“If that’s your wish, I’ll take every last piece of the busywork off your shoulders, all but the final call.”

“Fufu. I’m only teasing. But when I lean on you, I’ll lean with everything I have… I’m not carrying this throne alone. It’s because you walk beside me that I’ve been able to go forward with my head high, before now and from here on too.”

The one personal knight who held an Emperor up: that was what I was, and today, as ever, I walked at her side.

“Al. You, at least — stay with me to the very end, won’t you.”

“From the day I inherited my memories, I settled it: I would spend the whole of my life holding you up, Rune-sama. Until I have seen with my own eyes the view at the end of the conqueror’s road you walk, I will remain your knight.”

“Yes.” The vow only settled the deeper in me as I said it aloud. “I am Rune-sama’s personal knight, after all.”

I would go on being her knight — of that I had no doubt — wishing all the while that as many of the futures she longed for as possible would come true, right up until the day that conqueror’s road reached its end. That, and nothing else, was the whole meaning of my having been flung back into this age. Or so I believed: that this, and only this, was the reason I had returned at all.

2

“Military Lord Gerreschiff.”

I’d pitched it across the castle archive to a silver-haired man I knew well enough, and without turning to look he answered in that nonchalant drawl of his, knowing perfectly well who stood at his back, an armful of books still clutched to his chest.

“…Hearing that stiff little title out of your mouth, of all people, turns my stomach. Just call me like a normal person.”

“Then I’ll take you at your word… Lord Linos. Have you managed to get a read on what Duke Felsdorf has been up to?”

The Military Lord’s seat, vacated when Duke Felsdorf was stripped of it, had been filled anew under the Valtrune administration by this man. Linos von Gerreschiff, second son of the Gerreschiff ducal house. His overweening pride and his gutter mouth were the flaws in the stone, but he threw himself at the work with a plain, unbending honesty and a real gift for military administration, and it showed: he had done a great deal to expand the reorganized Imperial army and build up its strength.

He slid the books back onto the shelf one at a time, then turned, unhurried, to face me.

“Your pack of nosy spies finally got hold of his tail. Word is he’s raising a resistance army against the Valtrune administration, mustering it around the Felsdorf domain out in the Theresia region, in the Empire’s northeast. Though if you want my honest opinion, ‘resistance army’ is too kind. They’re a filthy little huddle of traitors to the realm, nothing more.”

His briefing done without a hitch, he folded his arms and fixed his stare on me.

“Knowing you, you’ve no intention of letting them run loose. Am I wrong?”

“You’re not. From next week I’ll be sending troops out to press the resistance army into standing down.”

“…And the real version?”

“They were never going to listen to a word we say, so I’d like you to take the reins, Lord Linos, crush the resistance army, and get the northeast freed up fast. Any abscess that stands in Rune-sama’s way is best cut out early.”

Linos snorted, and at once a clean, satisfied look crossed his face.

“Hah. Just confirms it. You really are a zealot for Lady Valtrune.”

“Aren’t we both, though?”

“…Much as it galls me to admit it. Yeah.”

Two men who served a lord they each held in the highest regard, and who would never once be at ease with one another. That was the measure of the distance between Linos and me.

“That’s the whole of my report. I’m off to the council now to nail down the plan for freeing Theresia. Later.”

The necessary words said, Linos turned on his heel, threw out that curt goodbye, and started off.

“I’m counting on you.”

I sent the words after his retreating back, pressing the point home, and for a heartbeat he stopped and muttered, cool as ever.

“Hmph. You didn’t have to ask. Though if I were you, I’d be saving that worry for my own neck.”

“Your concern is appreciated.”

His real meaning I caught in an instant: the Saint, the one no one could locate. A threat so far beyond us that even every champion the Empire could scrape together might not be enough to meet her. At his words I turned my mind once more to every contingency that could go wrong, and steeled myself.

“…Anyway. Don’t lose sleep over Theresia. The army’s troop dispositions, the infighting inside the ranks — I’ll see all of it squared away.”

The reply was gruff as ever, but there was no mistaking it for anything other than encouragement, his own brand of it.

“Thank you.”

I dipped my head, and he pulled his eyes from me and walked out of the archive without another word.

Left alone, I stood there in the enveloping silence, unable to move for a long moment.

Epilogue

1

Princess Valtrune had come through the accident at the inspection safely, and that the Provisional Elite Corps she founded had stopped the Kingdom’s invasion was announced across the whole Empire.

‘Make the inspection a success and the succession goes ahead.’

Unfortunately, that promise she had exchanged with Emperor Grode was never fulfilled. But having achieved something nobody had predicted, throwing back an invader, voices went up among the people that Princess Valtrune was fit to be the next Emperor. With support from the Empire’s citizens running high, it was formally announced that the succession would take place shortly.

“Rune-sama.”

“Yes. I’ll check it later.”

The coronation was ahead of her, and today, the day before it, she was still working steadily through her official duties. The Corps’ people were in high spirits about holding an eve-of-succession celebration; the woman herself showed no sign of being carried away by any of it.

“…Fuu.”

She stopped the pen she had been moving and straightened her back, and I held out a cup of tea.

“You’ve worked hard.”

“Yes. A little more and the policy proposals for after my accession will be finished.”

She took the tea in a settled voice and put a finger on the paper where the policies were written.

“Establishing a support system for people in hardship, and a tax reduction?”

“Yes. Winning people’s trust comes first. Relief measures for those in hardship are something I always meant to do once I inherited, and lowering the tax rate can be done without trouble if I cut the wasted money flowing to the Imperial army and the nobles. That should leave the new government I lead secure in its support, don’t you think?”

She had already begun moving with an eye on what came next. A festive mood has its place, but seeing her exactly as she always is put me at ease.

“You truly are a splendid person, Rune-sama, thinking of the people.”

“Am I? I don’t think so.”

She rose from the chair and turned her eyes to the view of the imperial capital through the window. The magnificent streets under the sun were full of people going about, thoroughly busy, and she let out a breath of admiration at a scene that peaceful.

“I only want to make this Empire a country anyone would find easy to live in. So the policies I’m thinking about are no more than my ideals written down.”

If that is her ideal, I do not consider it selfishness. Governing for the sake of somebody is, I think, exactly what suits a ruler.

“If you become Emperor, Rune-sama, so many people will be glad.”

Having read through the policies she had set out, I took my own seat. There was still a mountain of work, and I resumed mine a little ahead of her.

“…But I have a great many enemies as well.”

She took up her pen too, and let out a deep sigh. It is true there is much to be uneasy about, and there should be far more that she achieves. I shook my head at the weak note in a voice on the edge of being crushed by worry.

“You have numerous allies, Rune-sama. There is nothing to fear.”

“But… it’s certainly going to get harder from here, isn’t it?”

“So much the better. If there is anything I can do, I will do anything at all for you.”

“I think I’ll have to rely on you far more than I do now. Is that all right?”

“It’s fine. If something troubles you, come to me before anyone.”

“I may end up doing something that disappoints you.”

“Be at ease. A moment when I am disappointed in you will not arrive.”

No matter how far this goes, I am her personal knight. Whatever she does, I keep affirming it, and I search for how to move so that what she wants comes true. A moment of my being disappointed in her will never come, not ever.

“Fufu. You really are blind where I’m concerned.”

“Did you not know? I’m devoted to you, Rune-sama… to the point of holding that your choices are absolutely more correct than some god’s.”

I decided to follow her for the rest of my life. That oath has not changed, and it will not waver from here either.

She heard me out, held her stomach and laughed hard, and when she had finished laughing she quietly put out a slender fist.

“I’m not letting go of you. I’m counting on you from here too, my personal knight.”

“Yes. I’ll accompany you to the bottom of hell.”

I knocked my fist against her small one.

After that we worked in silence right up to the last minute before the eve celebration began. While the paperwork went on we exchanged nothing but businesslike words, and that in itself let me feel her trust and put myself further into the work.

I may still be far from the personal knight she deserves, but one day I mean to become a knight who can stand beside a Princess Valtrune that clever and that full of mercy without shame.

I glanced across at her profile and stopped my pen. The outside light coming through the window had changed color and had begun to turn the whole room red.

“…Rune-sama. It’s nearly time for the eve celebration.”

“Yes. Then let’s finish here for today. The rest tomorrow, no. Tomorrow is the coronation, isn’t it!”

Coloring at having genuinely got it wrong, Princess Valtrune put her work down. I gathered up the mountain of paper she had left in both arms.

“I’ll take the rest home. It’s a quantity that will be done shortly anyway.”

“Liar… hand over half of it and be quiet about it. I’ll take mine home too.”

“But you have an early start tomorrow, Rune-sama…”

“So do you.”

Ready to leave, she took half the stack out of my arms and opened the office door quietly.

“We can’t be late to the eve celebration. Let’s go.”

She turned at the door, the hem of her dress swinging.

“Yeah. Let’s.”

I followed her out of the office.

The twenty-seventh of August, Kingdom Calendar Year 1241. With the Provisional Elite Corps and the others close to Princess Valtrune at the center of it, a grand eve celebration was held in the largest dance hall in the imperial capital, taken over for the night.

“Your Highness! Congratulations on the succession!”

People using tube-shaped magic tools that went off with a loud noise and blew out glittering ribbon offered her their congratulations. Princess Valtrune looked startled at what sounded like a dry explosion, then grasped the situation at once and raised her glass with a smile to everyone in the hall.

“Thank you truly for holding this celebration for me tonight. Today will surely be a day I never forget. To the Empire’s future prosperity, your health!”

“Your health!”

Nobles and citizens attended the lively hall without regard for rank. Watching Princess Valtrune wrapped in a beautiful dress, I quietly enjoyed a wine over at the edge of the room.

A woman came walking toward me out of the busy center of it.

“General Ritziareite…”

“Good evening. Lady Valtrune looks very beautiful.”

“She does.”

Ritziareite came and put her back against the wall beside me.

“You’re always on the outside at events like this.”

Seeing that mischievous smile of hers, I turned my face away.

“I’m not good at fitting into a lively room.”

“Fufu. Nor am I.”

Many people surrounded Princess Valtrune. She must be happy at being celebrated, because she was smiling more brightly and more often than usual.

“You don’t want to join in?”

Asked out of nowhere, I shook my head.

“I want Rune-sama to enjoy this eve more than anybody. And there are countless people who want to speak with her. At a celebration like this I’d rather watch quietly from the outside.”

“I see. Is that so…”

Ritziareite drained the drink in her glass in one go.

“You’re weak with alcohol, surely. Are you all right?”

“No need to worry. This isn’t alcohol!”

She said that much and set off at a trot toward Princess Valtrune. The pitch of her voice was plainly odd and her face had gone somewhat red, but pointing that out would have been graceless.

I took my eyes off her and looked around elsewhere.

“Honestly, how hungry were the three of you…”

“Urp. Look, knowing food this good was going to be laid out, there’s no way I wasn’t going to arrive starving!”

“Right! Ah, Bro-suke, could you pass that meat dish over?”

“Mm?! Ah, sorry. I’ve eaten everything on this plate.”

“Hey~ what are you doing~!”

At the standing buffet the usual crowd was gathered, eating happily.

“Haaah… these idiots are hopeless. Flegel, are you eating anything?”

“Let me think. I was going to have some of that salad.”

“I see. I was going to have some as well, so I’ll fetch yours while I’m there.”

“No, I’ll come with you. You want to pick your own things, don’t you, Petra?”

Unlike usual, everyone had changed into tuxedos and dance dresses, and it felt fresh, like a ball.

—Shall I go over? No, this is fine a while longer.

The eve has only just started; let me watch a warm, peaceful scene a little longer. There is no guarantee I will get time this settled again.

2

The Order, having failed at the invasion of the Dyrst region, had fixed on its next target for occupation. That place was inside imperial territory again: the port town of Nocto in the Tielens region, in the southeast of the Valugan Empire, where overseas trade is brisk. Here was the source of the miasma that forms the main component of the Madmiasma the Order wants.

The Archbishop is not a man to be discouraged by one failure or two where his ambition is concerned. Patient is not quite the word; tenacious is more accurate. Undeterred by the defeat in Dyrst, he was pushing preparations for seizing the next destination.

“Our next objective is the occupation of Nocto. Security in the Dyrst region has thickened since that affair and it has become difficult for us to reach. But they still do not treat the defense of Nocto as important. Secure that place and it will be a great first step toward expanding the Order’s power!”

“Yes!”

The foolish believers swallowed the Archbishop’s words whole and began planning their infiltration of the Nocto they had been given as a target. I listened to the worthless discussion in the church with cold eyes.

And then the Archbishop’s gaze came suddenly to me.

“Reshia. You will of course accompany us for the taking of Nocto. We cannot receive the Kingdom’s army’s help this time. The Svell Order needs firm unity!”

He appeared to be planning to appoint me commander again as though it went without saying, and his thinking is soft. I shook my head and denied him.

“I am sorry, Your Grace, but I cannot obey that order.”

“…What?”

The Archbishop’s expression clouded. He must not have been able to believe I would not nod.

I have always listened obediently to the Archbishop’s orders. I was told it was for the Svell Order’s sake, and I believed it without doubting.

—But that was me before I held the memories of a previous life.

“Reshia. Do you mean to defy my orders?”

His roar carried through the whole church. The believers went quiet, frightened by the Archbishop’s rage, and he bore down on me.

“I shall say it again. Our next objective is the port town of Nocto in the Empire’s southeast.”

“…Your Grace, as I said, I cannot go.”

“Why! If you refuse, give me a reason I can accept!”

Mistaking it, perhaps, for simple selfishness on my part, the Archbishop carried himself as though he held the advantageous position, the vulgar face of a man who intends, when I fail to produce a reason, to send me to Nocto as the one in charge.

But I was able to refuse his order. Before he could produce his next words, I showed him a certain medical certificate I had prepared.

“…What is this?”

“The result of an examination by a doctor. In fact, during the recent invasion of the Dyrst region, I developed a fear of blood. The moment I see anything at all gruesome I have difficulty breathing, and so the doctor has told me that commanding at the front would be impossible for me.”

“What of it! You need only stay quietly at the rear!”

“But when I spoke to Prince Euris about it… he recommended convalescence somewhere quiet, and has already made the arrangements.”

“What did you, no, refuse it at once!”

“Your Grace. We cannot treat the kindness of the Reshfeld Kingdom’s second prince as nothing. If I were to refuse, it might touch on the Order’s credibility.”

Even the Archbishop who governs the Svell Order cannot come at royalty very strongly. The Kingdom is the largest supporter funding the Order, and he will not want to take actions that worsen the relationship.

When I explained that refusing was not open to me, the Archbishop drew his face together and went silent.

—Fufu. What an unsightly face. He seems to have been counting on my drawing power to gather volunteer soldiers; unfortunately I shall not be lending a hand to this plan.

“So that is how it stands. I am very sorry, but I cannot take part in the taking of Nocto…”

“Convalescence, you mean you are leaving here?”

“Yes. I intend to go to the quiet countryside.”

“…Kh. I see.”

The Archbishop looked as though he had something to say and gave up on pressing further. He must have judged that nothing he said would matter, and in fact, however much he begged for the operation, my not taking part would not be overturned.

“Then, as I have a discussion with Prince Euris about the convalescence shortly, I shall take my leave.”

“W-wait, Reshia! The matter of bringing the First Prince round…”

“I regret to say the First Prince is unusually cautious and would not open his heart to me.”

“…That cannot be.”

“So, Your Grace. If you wish the First Prince brought round, there is nothing for it but for you to negotiate personally. I am truly sorry to be of so little use.”

Having explained briefly that I had failed to bring the First Prince round, I turned my back on the Archbishop and the believers gathered about him and went out of the church.

The Archbishop called Prince Euris an easily handled, stupid prince, but he carries the title of Second Prince. As someone to use, there could hardly be better material. The First Prince, by contrast, has a cunning mind and may be more capable than Prince Euris, but as a person to move about freely he is extremely difficult to handle.

“Bad luck, Archbishop… Prince Euris is mine now.”

The Order will now have to work hard at building a relationship with a First Prince who is difficult to bring round. Whether it has a prince behind it makes an enormous difference to the range of the Order’s activity, and since Prince Euris is devoted to me, once I leave the Order he will stop cooperating with it too.

“Now. While we are here, let me use him thoroughly.”

Being used by me is Prince Euris’s wish as well.

I cut my connection with the Order and go to a quiet place where nobody watches. Not, of course, that I intend to overlook the Chosen or the Order’s movements.

“…Nocto, then. It is quite far from where I am to convalesce, but there is nothing for it.”

I understood the shape of the Order’s plans from what the Archbishop was saying. If the Order’s army invades imperial land again, the Empire’s response will be stricter than anything so far.

The fighting intensifies. History distorts and moves further from the shape it ought to have.

—While the proper history is being painted over, what I should do now is erase completely the source of the miasma the Archbishop is moving the whole Order to reach. Purify the contaminated land and take back the right way of this world. That is a thing only I can do.

“…And going to the Empire lets me check on the Chosen at the same time. Two birds.”

I remember when I encountered them. A week has already gone by, and even so the scene comes up as vividly as if it had happened a moment ago. The courage of heroes carrying a great power beyond human understanding and still defying fate is burned into the back of my mind and will not leave.

“…If it is them, then perhaps…”

I turned my eyes to the blue sky and put up a hand against the glare.

“They might grant Lord Svell’s wish…”

Nobody was there; it was talking to myself and nothing else. These words will never reach the person they are meant for.

“Lord Svell… in Nocto, I will meet them again.”

The feeling I put into the words is everything I lost, compressed.

“If the Order were gone, would you smile at me again?”

No matter how long I wait there is no answer, and I dropped my eyes to the ground. Knowing I would not get the answer I wanted, I could not keep from asking.

The meaning of my being alive here is to obey Lord Svell’s words and act faithfully on her orders.

—I decided to carry out Lord Svell’s command even at the cost of throwing away a feeling that mattered.

“I still believe the choice I made that day was the right one.”

I do not want to think that losing a part of my heart was wasted. Even if something important to being a person has gone missing, I wanted to grant Lord Svell’s wish. I obeyed her order even at the cost of lying to my own heart. I was going to believe in Lord Svell without doubting, that was decided.

And then I watched them, shaking with feeling, fighting desperately against a fate laid down for them, and I stopped understanding myself a little.

—What did I actually want?

With that important feeling gone, it is a thing I have no way of confirming. And I cannot keep from thinking about it.

“…I am glad the curiosity is still there.”

Had I lost every feeling, I would have become a thing that carried out what it was told without ever questioning an order, exactly like a genuine doll.

I still want to be a person. I want to be recognized as one. Even now, with more power than I need as a Saint, I have not entirely lost sight of the girl I was when I had none.

“…When all of it is finished, I am certain I will wish to take my heart back.”

Even riddled with faults, I do not want to lose the meaning of living. What the love I lost actually is, the heart that goes looking for that is the only thing driving me forward.

“Lord Svell, can you hear me? I will obey the order I received from you, and I will kill you, without fail. I will lead the Chosen, who have built strength to defy fate, and in time I will stir up those who stand against a god.”

‘Must I truly… must I truly kill Lord Svell?’

‘It is the one way the distorted history can be returned to what it was. With me, swallowed by the miasma, still in this world, history will go on down the wrong road.’

That important promise, once. A parting from Lord Svell that feels like the distant past. Words cannot be exchanged now.

—The Lord Svell of this world has already been swallowed by miasma and can no longer make the right judgments a god should. Lord Svell understood that, which is why she ordered me to kill her.

“The Lord Svell of now will surely come to remove me. And the person I used to be would have died quietly for Lord Svell’s sake.”

If any affection had remained in Lord Svell, I would have chosen death without resisting, because there would have been no meaning in resisting.

But now it is different. This is the mission I received from her, the reason I threw away my heart, went backward through time, and act to stop the world being wrapped in miasma and collapsing.

“…Fufu. Even as an enemy, I look forward to the day we meet again.”

I looked up at the sky and pictured a Lord God who could not possibly speak back to me.

Out of the Order’s hands, I can finally begin moving freely toward carrying out my mission. Obstruct an Order that means to bring Nocto down, and prevent miasma from spreading through the world, so that the same history as the previous life does not repeat, so that the great war that pulls in the world and should never have happened is not brought about.

Moving as a third force, I stand between an Order that pushes history toward evil and the Chosen who do not want ruin, and in all things I guide every one of them toward realizing what I want.

It is a thing only I can do, having heard Lord Svell’s wish.

So until I have seen the end this world arrives at, I am not permitted to die.

Chapter 6 – Toward the Signing of an Accord

1

The savage fighting with the Kingdom’s army and the Order’s ended, the inspection was called off partway through, and we were dismissed where we stood.

“Raquel!”

I turned at my name, and there was Princess Valtrune, looking rather tired.

“Rune-chan. Were you all right?”

“Yes. I’m sorry. You came all this way and it ended like this…”

She bowed deeply, sounding genuinely apologetic.

The inspection was called off because the Kingdom’s army attacked. None of it is her fault, if anything she stood at the very front so that no harm would reach the delegations, and protected us desperately. She has my gratitude and nothing resembling criticism.

“Lift your head, Rune-chan.”

“…Raquel.”

“You’re the hero who protected us. That many soldiers came to invade and you didn’t run a step; you went to meet them bravely. I’m certain that isn’t only my feeling, every person in the delegations felt it.”

It is a shame the inspection ended half-finished because of an interference nobody expected. But Princess Valtrune, imperial blood and all, standing in the line of fire and contributing to driving the Kingdom’s army off, has improved every nation’s impression of the Empire. Her efforts were not wasted.

“Have confidence. You’re a wonderful princess, Rune-chan… I shall have to learn from you.”

We never got to the orb workings, but how excellent the Provisional Elite Corps she founded is came through even to those of us watching the field from a distance. Few in number and elite, they did not yield to numbers and defended the Dyrst region admirably. That alone is a large harvest to carry home as the result of an inspection.

At the same time, no end of distrust has been born toward the Reshfeld Kingdom for so selfish an invasion. The Roscheld Republic borders the Kingdom and has built a relatively friendly relationship with it, but I think this affair is a blunder on the Kingdom’s part that could cost it credibility worldwide.

“…I intend to raise the Kingdom’s invasion of the Empire at the council at a later sitting. The Empire isn’t going to forgive it unconditionally either, is it?”

“No. I’ll report this to my father and we intend to send a letter of protest to the Kingdom.”

“Which means… there’s a possibility of full war between the Kingdom and the Empire.”

“I would rather not think about it, but you’re right, Raquel. To protect the Empire’s pride I’m sure we will never simply swallow it.”

If the Kingdom and the Empire go to war, the Republic’s position is deeply involved. If we were asked to take a side, the decision would be one with our nation’s survival on it.

“Raquel, if the Kingdom and the Empire do end up at war, what will the Republic do?”

The question went to the heart of it and I caught on my words.

Had the two countries come into conflict without the Dyrst affair, the Republic would certainly have gone with the Kingdom. But once the fact spreads that the Kingdom invaded the Empire without any declaration, I think even the council will split in two between a Kingdom faction and an Empire faction.

“Honestly, I don’t know yet. I’m one member of the council. I don’t have the power to decide the country’s direction on my own.”

Having said that, I looked steadily into her eyes.

“But personally, I want to side with the Empire.”

“…Raquel. Just hearing you say that makes me happy.”

“Well, I’d rather not think about killing you, Rune-chan.”

I put it half as a joke, though in truth conflict with the Empire would be no good thing for the Republic either.

“Yes. I don’t want to think of you as an enemy either.”

There was a wry smile on Princess Valtrune’s face, and even so there was so little hesitation in her eyes that it made me think she would cut me down if we ever were opposed.

Being tossed about by the state of the world is the lot of those who stand at the top. With dark cloud gathering over the relationship between the two countries, there must be a great deal troubling her, and she does not let any of it show, and puts the emotional care of the delegations first.

“Well then, Raquel. I’ll go and finish greeting everyone else.”

“Mhm. Of course.”

I waved discreetly and watched her grown-up back as she went.

I admire the strength of her will as a princess. When I think about my country’s future there are days I can’t sleep for worry, and I think that shows more sharply the heavier the responsibility pressing on you.

“…I see. She’s already gone somewhere I can’t catch up to.”

In our academy days, we were friends who talked about both of us becoming fine leaders. Back then she and I were still children, and I imagined we would take our time growing into leaders who guide a country.

Instead, graduation was the moment she became a princess dependable enough to lead so many people. While I am still a half-formed council member, she has endured every kind of pressure as the Empire’s only princess, and become an adult.

They say environment changes a person. I think that is no more than one trigger. That she became a splendid princess full of courage is the fruit of the effort she has been stacking up all this time.

“I can’t afford to lose.”

Touched by how well she carried herself, something hot settled in me too. As a council member of the Republic, I want to keep proposing right policies with the people in mind, no matter how rough the politics gets.

This inspection has been a turning point for me. I am finished making excuses about being a half-formed new member. I occupy one of the seats that decide the Republic’s policy, so like every other member I should hold my own opinion and make the choices that put the people first.

Having spent a violent day in the Dyrst region, I hope for a day when I can stand level with her. I put my student memories away at the bottom of my chest and chase after her as she walks into the future, parting from an immature version of myself, to make real the thing she and I swore to each other back then, that we would both become splendid leaders.

2

The inspection was cancelled, whether it would be held again was undecided, and the delegations were to return to their own countries.

The fighting in the Dyrst region, small accidents aside, went broadly to plan, and for my part I obtained a satisfying result.

“I am truly sorry that it turned out this way…”

“Please lift your head, Lady Valtrune… we watched your courage from a distance. The whole of the delegation has been wanting to express its gratitude for Your Highness’s deep consideration.”

“Thank you.”

I was making my rounds among the delegations when a hand touched my shoulder.

“Rune-sama. I am sorry to interrupt when you are busy. There is something I need to confirm urgently.”

It was Aldia, my personal knight, appearing with that thoroughly serious face. The moment I saw the unfamiliar sheaf of paper in his hand, I understood that a matter needing to be solved had arrived.

I excused myself to the delegate I had been about to speak with and left.

“I truly am sorry to intrude.”

“It’s fine. It’s an important matter, isn’t it?”

“Yes. In fact, Fadi reports that today, at the same hour as the invasion, a gathering of anti-Princess nobles somewhere in the Dyrst region was attacked by Kingdom soldiers. Every Kingdom soldier remaining at the site has been destroyed, so there is no danger inside imperial territory. But he apparently found a document at the meeting place that concerns him, and gave me this to have you look at it, Rune-sama.”

I tilted my head at the report.

“A document that concerns him? You mean something the anti-Princess nobles at the private meeting left behind?”

“Yes. It appears to concern the production of a drug…”

Speaking carefully around it, he put the recovered sheaf on a temporary table nearby. The pages were held together with an iron clip, and apart from a slightly torn corner it was in clean condition.

“So this is the document.”

“Please look.”

The title was ‘Concerning Madmiasma.’ A name of a drug I had never heard.

“Is this something that’s been going around the Empire recently?”

“No. I asked Fadi and he says he doesn’t know it.”

“Which may mean it’s only just begun to circulate.”

Talking as I went, I turned a page. On several sheets were a recipe for producing ‘Madmiasma’ and case notes on the symptoms that occurred in the drug’s users.

Madmiasma’s effect: an explosive strengthening of the body and a dramatic increase in the magic held inside it. The side effect, as written, is loss of reason.

—Loss of reason? It doesn’t say it’s temporary. How long, specifically, does a person lose their reason for?

“Al. What do you make of this loss of reason?”

“…I’m not certain either, but presumably something like being unable to judge normally once the drug is taken.”

“…Yes. Perhaps.”

I read on. As far as I could see, besides the imperial nobles counted as anti-Princess, even the names of neutral nobles I would never have expected appeared in the column of people cooperating with the development.

Through repeated human experiments, Madmiasma had been improved by degrees. In the course of it numerous people had died, and the surviving subjects had had their selves destroyed.

“I see. So they were experimenting in Marquis Rigel’s territory too. It says here it was even deployed in a real battle, what on earth is this…”

“Presumably it refers to the large man who ran wild during the Corps’ first engagement. General Ritziareite and I only put him down together, and he had strength nothing like a human being’s. On top of that his eyes never quite focused, and as I remember it, communicating with him by speech was difficult.”

“So this Madmiasma isn’t like the illegal drugs criminal organizations put on the street, giving pleasure and dependency. It’s for producing powerful combatants.”

“Inferring from the context, yes.”

—No wonder Fadi, out of the underworld, doesn’t know it.

An illegal drug it may be, but it is not the sort there is demand for on the street. Given there is nothing written about dependency, it does not look like a drug taken repeatedly.

The distribution route for this drug probably does not exist yet. It will be a dangerous new drug the people at that meeting are developing in secret.

Madmiasma certainly has the advantage of building military strength, but with a side effect that costs so much reason that speech becomes impossible, practical use would be extremely difficult.

And developing military pharmaceuticals of this kind is not permitted without the imperial family’s approval to begin with. It is plainly illegal manufacture.

When I had read the whole of it, I put a hand to my forehead.

“…It seems I shall have to crush the opposing faction in earnest after all.”

Anti-Princess nobles quietly pushing forward the development of a suspicious drug behind everyone’s backs. I had considered giving them a little more line so long as it did not damage the country, but I had reached my limit.

“Al… I am going to ask His Majesty for a swift succession. And then a declaration of war on the Kingdom, along with identifying and sweeping out the hostile forces spreading inside the country.”

“Yes.”

“The anti-Princess nobles’ gathering was attacked by the Kingdom’s army, wasn’t it. I want to know the damage.”

“According to Fadi’s report, the people forming the core of the anti-Princess nobles are dead almost to a man. Duke Felsdorf, the head of the faction, appears not to have attended and so escaped the attack.”

“I see… so they collapsed on their own without my needing to lift a hand.”

With the principal nobles of his faction fallen, Duke Felsdorf will not be able to come at me strongly either. In practical terms, the two groups hostile to me, the Kingdom’s army and the anti-Princess nobles, have conveniently destroyed each other.

“That is the whole of the report. Shall I take charge of the document?”

“Yes. Please.”

“Understood. I’ll have further investigation requested on it. I will report to you, Rune-sama, as soon as anything is known.”

He gathered up the sheaf on Madmiasma and left, and after I had watched him go, I began walking slowly back toward where the delegations were gathered.

“…So there is no time to rest.”

I had never intended to rest to begin with, but faced with a mountain of tasks stacking one on another, I did want to look away from it.

For now let me finish the rounds of greetings and hold the discussion about what happens next.

This much to do, and I am not even Emperor yet. Once I inherit the throne, exactly how busy will the days waiting for me be?

With my thinking taken over by sorting tasks, I put on my outward smile and resumed the greetings.

3

Many Corps soldiers lined up to see off the delegations who had come for the inspection.

Having watched the Corps at work, the delegates waved broadly and praised how bravely they had fought as they left the Empire by carriage and by ship.

“Thank you for protecting us!”

“Having all of you there was a great comfort!”

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

The inspection had been cancelled partway, and they set off for their homelands looking satisfied.

The delegations went off in order, and the last remaining was the woman from the Roscheld Republic’s council, who was still talking with Princess Valtrune.

“Rune-chan. Thank you for seeing me off as well.”

“Not at all. It’s you and me.”

“True. Write to me again once things settle. I’ll come and see you when I can.”

“Yes. I’ll write… well, then.”

“Mhm. Until next time…”

The two embraced, and the councilwoman got into her carriage and left. Princess Valtrune kept waving until the carriage was out of sight.

“…A friend of yours?”

I asked once the carriage had gone entirely, and she nodded and clasped her hands behind her back with a fond look.

“Yes. Her name is Raquel Nova. We were in the same year at the academy. She is a council member of the Roscheld Republic now.”

“Raquel Nova…”

The name was familiar. That she had been in Princess Valtrune’s year at the academy would not by itself have kept a name in my memory, and I was digging desperately through people I had encountered in the past when a startled ‘Ah!’ went up right behind me.

It was Petra.

“Hey, what is it all of a sudden?”

Steano, standing beside her, shook her shoulder, and she began talking in some excitement.

“Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten! Raquel Nova was the girl leading the opposing team the first time we ever fought a siege exercise!”

“A siege exercise?”

“Haah, you really have forgotten? The one you and Mia and Ambros took part in because you got failing marks and didn’t want to sit the remedial class.”

I remembered.

Raquel Nova was an opponent from a siege exercise, the one who led the students from the Republic. She was a middle-school student at the time, as I recall, and even so she stood against our team as the exercise’s commanding mind, over the high-school students.

“Ah, that time…”

Listening to Petra and Steano, I remembered her. We had been short of numbers on top of everything, and the other side was thoroughly practiced at siege work; I remember it being a hard fight. Petra used every kind of trick to keep the enemy off balance and we scraped a win, but Raquel’s quality as somebody who stands above others was very high.

“You cannot possibly have forgotten a fight that close.”

Petra asked again, as though confirming it, and Steano did not appear to follow at all.

“Er, hmm… was there someone like that?”

Which naturally exasperated her.

“I really should have forced you into that remedial class after all… ah, well. I worked so hard for nothing, nothing at all.”

“Wait, no! I remember doing the siege exercise! It wasn’t for nothing!”

Petra refused to meet the eyes of a desperately excusing Steano, teasing him.

“Ahaha! You made Petra-chan angry!”

“Shut up, idiot Mia. You didn’t remember either!”

“I did remember. Right, Bro-suke!”

“Mm!”

Ambros seemed to be nodding along without following any of it, at a Mia who looked as though she was inventing whatever came out of her mouth. Beside them, Flegel, who had entirely stopped listening, gave an enormous yawn.

“…Your friends are all very close, aren’t they.”

“…They are. We were together constantly at the academy.”

Looking back at old memories, I watched my friends messing about. Princess Valtrune’s eyes on them were full of admiration.

“Raquel and I were friends like that too. It wouldn’t be an overstatement to call her my closest friend at the academy.”

“…And now you both carry countries on your backs.”

“Yes. I wanted to treat her the way I used to, and it did feel as though something had changed, just a little.”

Had it? From where I stood I could not see any moment where discord had come between her and Raquel.

“Did you fall out?”

“No. It isn’t that… only that it felt as though a small distance had opened.”

Distance opening is unavoidable. Once you meet as the representatives of nations, you cannot carelessly lay out what you think.

Princess Valtrune carried it well, saying it might only be her imagination, but there was something in her eyes that felt, very slightly, like loneliness.

4

Two days had passed since the invasion of the Dyrst region by the Kingdom’s army and the Order’s.

The Empire protested fiercely to the Kingdom on the grounds of the many casualties and the violation of its rights, and nations across the world joined in condemning the Kingdom’s selfishness. That the invasion began while a delegation was visiting is surely the largest reason the Kingdom drew such criticism.

Having made its opposition to the Kingdom unmistakable, the Empire began moving to build friendly relations with neighboring nations. In the space of a single day, the Kingdom’s position in the world had become an isolated one.

And Princess Valtrune’s position changed as well.

“…Valtrune. You defended this country from the Kingdom’s invasion. It was truly splendid.”

“Thank you, Father.”

Princess Valtrune was highly praised for driving off a Kingdom army of many soldiers with a small force, and an imperial decree came down from Emperor Grode.

“Valtrune. I have resolved to pass my throne to you… you will surely be able to lead the Empire as a fine Emperor.”

“Father, that is…”

“I mean to step back from active rule… I entrust the Empire’s future to you.”

“—!”

It was the moment the Emperor approved the succession.

“Your Majesty! Please reconsider!”

“No. This decision will not be overturned.”

“Her Highness is still young and inexperienced. It is far too early for a succession…”

“Mm. Do you say my daughter is unformed and unfit to be Emperor?”

“N-no, I never intended anything of the kind… I merely felt it premature.”

“…In any case, the throne passes to Valtrune. Say no more about it.”

“Y-yes… my apologies.”

Grode’s will was firm. He rejected the anti-Princess nobles’ objections to her accession outright, and made known throughout the Empire that the coronation would be held on the twenty-eighth of August, Kingdom Calendar Year 1241.

Once the information was public, the anti-Princess nobles could no longer interfere.

One of her long-held wishes, the succession, had come true.

“Rune-sama. Congratulations.”

“Yes. Thank you… and you said you had something to tell me.”

“I wanted to offer my congratulations, and to give you this.”

Princess Valtrune was taking over the affairs of state ahead of the coronation, and I had her spare me a little time, partly to celebrate the succession being settled, and partly because there was something I badly wanted to give her.

I handed her the important document I had ready.

“This is… a letter from Raquel?”

A plain but beautiful envelope, addressed in the name ‘Raquel Nova.’ She opened it carefully and read the letter inside.

‘Your Highness Princess Valtrune.

‘Thank you most sincerely for inviting me to the inspection the other day. It was a great honor to see the Provisional Elite Corps’ excellence for myself. If the chance comes, I should like to see the courage of those who face an enemy so resolutely once again.

‘And that is enough stiff formality.

‘Rune-chan. Congratulations on the succession being decided.

‘When I heard the Valugan Empire’s next Emperor was going to be you, I couldn’t sit still, so I decided to write. So little time has passed since the Kingdom’s army came into imperial territory, and when I heard about the succession I was truly astonished.

‘But the strong, kind Rune-chan I know will surely make a splendid leader who guides the Empire somewhere better. It will be all right, I’m certain.

‘I am working at my own duties every day as a council member so as not to fall behind you. I’ll become a fine member who puts the people first the way you do, so please cheer me on!

‘On the day of the coronation I will certainly come and see you on your great day.

‘Not, of course, as a representative of the Roscheld Republic’s council, but as Rune-chan’s closest friend. There was still so much I didn’t get to say at the inspection, so this time let’s take our time and talk about everything that has happened.

‘I look forward to the day of the coronation. Until then, Rune-chan.

‘From Raquel Nova.’

Having read it through, Princess Valtrune turned eyes toward me that had gone slightly wet.

“How did you come to have this?”

“Lady Raquel entrusted it to me and insisted I put it in your hands. I’m glad I could.”

She put the letter back in the envelope and held it to her chest as though it mattered.

“Raquel… no distance opened at all. Nothing has changed from those days.”

Position changes people. Even so, it is not as though everything is lost and begins again from nothing. The relationships you have built up carry on the same way they did in the past. Change depends on the people themselves, wish to change and you change; wish to keep something and you can go on with the same relationship you had before.

Princess Valtrune and Raquel are both working hard in different countries, and that the two of them are friends is a fact that will never change.

“I’m glad. She thinks of you as a close friend too, Rune-sama.”

“Yes… she does. And I feel the same about Raquel, and I have no intention of changing how I behave toward her once I’m Emperor.”

Her face cleared as though a haze had lifted from it, and her worry about how to go on with Raquel appeared to be gone.

I was glad the trouble had left her; now I could raise the real matter without concern.

“Rune-sama.”

“Hm?”

“In fact there is more to the letter.”

“More? …Ah, so there is.”

A second sheet, headed as a postscript. On it was important information Raquel had set down not as a friend but as a representative of the Republic.

‘Postscript.

‘When I reported to the council that the Kingdom’s army invaded the Empire while I was attending the inspection, opinions were raised that the Republic should reconsider how it deals with the Kingdom. At the same time, countless opinions were raised that the Republic should conclude a treaty of friendship with the Empire. If you are willing, Rune-chan, I would be glad to discuss the signing of such an accord between the Empire and the Republic.’

Friendly relations with the Republic. For the Empire there could hardly be better news.

In the world before the regression, the Republic sided with the Kingdom and became a nation opposed to the Empire; in the war between Kingdom and Empire it supplied the Kingdom with war materials and was never a country the Empire would sign an accord with.

“You’ve done it, Rune-sama. This should put the wind at the Empire’s back.”

“Yes… but why? For the Republic to weigh a relationship with the Empire above one with the Kingdom…”

“That is a question for Lady Raquel, surely.”

It is only conjecture, but I believe this topic came up because Raquel worked for it, that being close to Princess Valtrune, she argued the Kingdom’s invasion was unjust and persuaded the council desperately.

The bond Princess Valtrune built with her in their academy days had shown its real worth here.

“Either way, the accord will need a lot of discussion.”

Her face turned serious at once, and she put Raquel’s letter carefully inside her coat. Standing there entirely composed, she looked steadily into my eyes.

“Al. I’ll write to Raquel. To set the schedule for talks about the accord.”

“Understood!”

“The date to be after the coronation. I want the content of the accord worked out before then.”

Until the coronation comes, she will be as busy as she always is.

With the succession in front of her, Princess Valtrune’s face was full of confidence and more attractive than anyone’s. As she is now, she will become a splendid leader loved by her people even as Emperor.

I found myself hoping I could give every kind of help I have, so that one day she will be spoken of as the finest Emperor there has ever been.

Chapter 5 – A Broken Pride and the Anguish of a Girl Without a Heart

1

It was two days after the day the Kingdom’s army, and the Order’s, took their great defeat in the Dyrst region.

The traffic through the town had thinned right out, and I was thinking it was about time to lock the church’s outer door when Prince Euris appeared at the church in the middle of the night.

“…Lord Euris?”

“…………”

I caught for a moment at the arrival of someone so unexpected, then lifted my voice a tone and dealt with it.

He did not answer when I said his name. If anything he stayed with his head down, unsteady on his feet as though the life had gone out of him.

“Whatever brings you here so late?”

I spoke again and still he answered nothing. He only walked slowly up the aisle of the night church, coming closer.

With just a few candles lit, the inside of the church was almost entirely dark except for the altar at the far end, and I tilted my head at Prince Euris coming toward me one step at a time. Eventually the candlelight reached his face and I began to see it.

“…?”

The skin around his eyes was red and badly swollen, and there was a little blood at his lips, from biting them hard.

“Lord Euris? There’s blood at your mouth. Are you all…”

“…Ah.”

I was about to ask whether the split lip hurt when Prince Euris put his knees to the floor as though the strength had left him. He was entirely vacant; he did not even blink. Tears running down his cheeks soaked into the carpet, and I touched one of those cheeks gently.

“Why are you crying?”

“…I’m sorry, Reshia. I couldn’t… I couldn’t grant your wish.”

The first thing out of his mouth was a confession made to me.

No. This is beyond my understanding. Why should he apologize to me so hard?

I had thought the Dyrst invasion carried a real possibility of defeat from the moment there were Chosen on the other side with memories of a previous life. And for myself, whether the Kingdom’s army beat the Imperial army or lost to it was a matter of complete indifference; I only wanted it to work as cover for the plan I am advancing.

I did not know what words to give a man weeping on the floor in front of me.

“I couldn’t grant your wish, and it galls me… I’m sorry…”

—At a time like this, what is the correct way to respond?

“…………”

“Hgk…”

I could say nothing at all to a sobbing Prince Euris, because I do not know what shocked him badly enough to break him down like this.

“I’m sorry. I truly am… I’m a useless man. I can’t grant even one wish for the person I love.”

“Prince Euris.”

I tried a response along the lines of being deeply moved. As a way of comforting him, that would surely be the right answer.

I crouched slowly and stroked Prince Euris’s back.

“It’s all right. You have done nothing wrong, Lord Euris. So please stop crying.”

“You’ll still be kind to me… even now?”

“Of course. I care for you more than anyone.”

—A pure lie.

“So please don’t take this failure so heavily. You listened to an unreasonable request of mine, and that alone was quite enough to make me happy.”

“…Reshia.”

Ah. So I have laid down another coat of lies.

With a perfect manufactured smile, I play an innocent Saint. How long will I keep doing this?

I used him, the Second Prince, and erased entirely the Archbishop’s distrust of me. The plan is going well. He has been of use to me. There is no further need to be involved with him.

And yet…

“Reshia! Reshia…!”

—I could not reject him.

He is a man I have used to the end. It should be natural enough to think that I ought simply to cut him loose, so why do I not do it?

I thought about it while looking down at the back of Prince Euris’s head as he wept against my thigh. What, exactly, is the correct thing for me to do?

I lost the thing that mattered most to me in order to grant Lord Svell’s wish, which is why I cannot work out the reason he is crying.

“It’s all right. I will be here always.”

The sweet words. The soft expression. The gentle hands.

Every part of me is nothing but a hollow thing packed hard with pretense. All of it is imitation built out of knowledge picked up somewhere, and there is no warmth anywhere in it.

“I care for you, Lord Euris. You know that?”

—Words with nothing inside them.

When I put that feeling down in the previous timeline by my own choice.

‘…Lord Svell, please take a part of my heart from me. If you will, then I am certain I can bring your dearest wish to pass.’

The heart I forgot, it was love.

The heart that dotes on somebody and holds them precious. I threw away that one most important feeling, because it was necessary to carry out the mission Lord Svell laid on me.

“Lord Euris… I…”

In a voice faint enough to be erased under his weeping, I began to ask, and the words that would have followed can never be let outside.

‘Am I still able to be a person?’

I who called the Archbishop a monster over and over. And in spite of that, I had stopped understanding my own self.

With the person I am supposed to love grieving in front of me, there is no pain where my chest ought to hurt, and I recognize that I feel nothing whatever about him. That makes it emptier still, and now and then I nearly forget the meaning of being alive.

“…When the mission is done, I…”

—What becomes of me?

A foolish girl who threw away the love a Saint must have and was reduced to a puppet obeying the Lord God’s orders. That is what I am now.

Reshia, the Saint with a piece of her heart missing. Hollow inside, and incomplete.

2

For me as I am now, the thing to be put before everything else was Reshia.

I fell in love for the first time in my life. Born the second prince of the Reshfeld Kingdom, the only person I have ever wanted to devote myself to is Reshia. She is special to me.

No matter how useless a man I am, she is kind and she always affirms me, and that felt so good that my heart was taken all the further.

“Reshia. Since I lost that battle I haven’t been able to have any confidence in myself…”

“No confidence, you say… you are a splendid person, Lord Euris. Anyone fails once. Please don’t be downcast.”

—There. Reshia never denies me.

The generosity to accept even the pathetic parts of me. It is because she is like this that I came to want so strongly to devote myself to her.

“Reshia. I want to do something for you. Is there anything you want?”

There are people who point at my back and say I believe too blindly in the Saint, and I find I don’t mind. What I feel for her is real, and I want her to understand how strong the feeling is.

“There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you.”

She has the cleanest and kindest heart of anyone. Whatever happens, what I feel toward her does not change.

“Anything… you say?”

“Yes! Next time I will make myself useful to you, without fail!”

Reshia made a small gesture of thinking it over, then put her hands together and said:

“So long as you live a long and healthy life, Lord Euris, that is quite enough for me.”

“…What? That’s all? Surely there’s something more, something you want, something you’d like to do.”

“It is enough. You listened once to an unreasonable request of mine, and that on its own made me happy.”

She asked nothing of me. If anything she turned her eyes away as though sorry and laughed at herself a little.

“…I’m sorry. Lord Euris, the invasion of the Dyrst region, that was something the Archbishop ordered. So it was not what I truly wanted.”

The words hit hard. Why say such a thing now? It felt as though the meaning of what I had done was being taken away, and I did not want to hear what came after it.

“…The Archbishop meant to have me use you, Prince Euris, and provoke a war between the Kingdom and the Empire. I am truly sorry.”

Everything I had built was coming down.

…Then the kindness Reshia turned on me, was every part of it an act?

I had thought that if it was Reshia, I did not mind being used. That so long as I could sit inside her kindness I needed nothing else at all.

“Lord Euris, I believe the Archbishop will try to use you again. But I don’t want you hurt. Because I truly do care for you, I feel it all the more.”

Large tears came down Reshia’s face, and in that instant I pulled her to me.

“I’m sorry. I’ve made you suffer all this time.”

“No. I am the one who is sorry, for behaving as though I were deceiving you…”

That the Archbishop had been using me was of no consequence at all. That Reshia had thought of me and told me the truth was what made me glad, and at the same time it made me hate the Archbishop, who had used his own selfishness to torment a woman whose heart is that clear.

My anger at the Archbishop went past my bitterness at losing to the Imperial army.

“Reshia. If there is some reason you cannot go against the Archbishop’s orders, tell me. I swear I will protect you with everything I have!”

“You mustn’t… for someone like me, for you to set yourself against the Archbishop…”

“I don’t care about that. So long as you are happy, that is enough for me.”

Opposing the Svell Order is not what the Reshfeld Kingdom would want. But my holding hostility toward the Order is a personal matter and permitted as such.

As one man who cares for Reshia, I asked her again.

“Reshia. You want to get away from the Archbishop, don’t you? If that’s so, let me help you do it.”

“—! Lord Euris.”

Reshia dropped her head and closed her eyes for a while. She must be struggling with not wanting to drag me into it. But I want her to take the step and lean on me.

“Reshia. There is nothing I would not do for you. I swear it on my life!”

“…Truly? You won’t regret it?”

“I won’t! Take my hand, Reshia!”

I wrapped both my hands around the hand Reshia held out hesitantly.

I will protect her from the Archbishop’s reach.

“Can you not leave the church?”

“At least, I am not permitted to slip away on my own… if you truly mean to take me out of here, then order me sent to some quiet place on the grounds of convalescence, on a formal document.”

“Understood! That is your wish, Reshia?”

“It is.”

Good. She told me what she honestly felt, plainly.

I will use my position as Second Prince to the utmost and make her happy without fail. I will not bow to the Svell Order. I will keep working from here so that Reshia can take hold of a happy future.

3

Having seen a thoroughly cheerful Prince Euris off, I closed the church door and looked up at the dim ceiling.

Painted on that pointlessly high ceiling is a picture modeled on Lord Svell, and in it there is also a Saint devotedly supporting her god. A great many people are enraptured by the holiness of it. I have always thought I dislike this painting.

“…It’s far away.”

No matter how far I stretch, however far I put out a hand, I cannot so much as touch that painted Saint. It gives me the unpleasant feeling of being pointed at from behind, of being told that I will never be the ideal Saint people worship.

“And I meant to cut him loose.”

I am unfit to be a Saint. And in spite of that, Prince Euris has feelings for me.

I remember the expectation in his eyes.

Let us stop being involved. One sentence and it would have been finished.

I used his position as Second Prince and took part in the Dyrst invasion as the Order’s commander, and as a result I obtained the Archbishop’s trust. From here I ought to move to carry out my mission alone.

That was what I had been thinking, and I used him again.

If the Second Prince and the Archbishop come into conflict, I can move freely without drawing attention. Go somewhere the Order’s people cannot see, under the name of convalescence, and set up a new base of operations where nobody watches. Then I can concentrate on carrying out Lord Svell’s orders and nothing else, rather than on being the Svell Order’s Saint.

“To obtain a place to settle where nothing interferes… that is an attractive thing. Just this once, there was nothing else for it.”

Prince Euris believes in me blindly. If I asked it of him, I am sure he would not balk at killing his own relatives.

Unless I say it, he will not leave. I never wanted anybody to stay close to me. That is how it should be, and yet I could not push him away.

“I wanted to let you go… to have fallen in love with someone like me. Poor Lord Euris.”

He does not know that I have no love in me. He is deceived by the surface kindness I perform, and he will keep being used from here.

A life spent doing as somebody else says. He is the same as hollow me, living not for himself but for somebody else.

But thinking about it is a waste.

“Ff…”

I let out a breath and put out the candles. It is late. Let me put off thinking about what comes next; continuing a debate that reaches no conclusion only tires a person.

It may look like an empty way to live to me, and to him it may be a way of living that means something. People think differently, so I can neither affirm nor deny it.

There is nothing I can do for him. I will use him exactly as much as he can be used, and wear a man who asks nothing in return thoroughly down.

“…So at the very least, let me play his ideal version of me all the way to the end.”

What I can do, having nothing to give, to keep his life from collapsing, is to keep performing the innocent, love-filled ‘Saint Reshia’ he holds as his ideal.

Let him at least be shown a sweet dream to the end.

Because I believe that is what he wishes for.