THSK Vol. 3 Chapter 2

Chapter 2 – The Saint Reshia and the Battle with the Divine Beasts

1

For one moment I felt something so wrong it put ice down my spine.

Ahead of us the Order’s army was waiting. Our own strength came to about five hundred, a comparatively small body, but with dragon mounts and the ground itself worked into the tactics, a win was still there to be taken. That was what I had been thinking, at any rate.

“Al. Are you all right?”

Princess Valtrune caught the change in my face before anyone else and laid a hand gently against my back.

“I’m all right. There was just something unpleasant in the air.”

“Unpleasant?”

“Yes, it may be that there is an enemy out there more troublesome than we’ve allowed for.”

A battlefield hands you a bad feeling fairly often, and seven or eight times out of ten the trouble turns out to be real and you find yourself standing in it.

“There’s a great deal about the Svell Order nobody knows. Let’s go carefully.”

“Yes.”

Even in my days as a knight of the Kingdom I never had dealings with the Svell Order. The religious body with more believers than any other on the continent, that is the Svell Order, and it keeps a great deal to itself. An organization wrapped up that tightly is very likely to move in ways we haven’t accounted for.

—Knowing the Order is coming at us in concert with the Kingdom’s army doesn’t buy me the right to relax.

We went forward carefully, eyes working over everything around us, and then a shattering roar came up and the ground heaved under us.

“That’s…”

“Magic tools. …The Corps must have set them off in the fighting with the Kingdom’s army. It doesn’t affect anything on our side of the operation, so let’s press on and not mind it.”

Explosive magic tools had been buried all across the Dyrst plain. The moment the Kingdom’s army passed certain points, Petra would give her mages the word to blow them.

“Do you suppose they’ll be all right over there?”

One of the soldiers said it, half to himself. The Corps was locked into a savage fight with the Kingdom’s army, and Princess Valtrune spoke gently, taking care of the uneasiness in them.

“So long as those tools are in the ground, the Kingdom can’t afford a clumsy advance… they aren’t going to lose easily. Isn’t that right?”

“Yes.”

She was right. We had known from the start that the numbers were against us, and the magic tools were the card we had prepared to cover that enormous gap.

That explosion also told me something else: Petra, who gives the word to fire them, was alive. If the tools could be set off, the Corps could stand toe to toe with the Kingdom’s army.

Which left the problem on our side of the map. Being short of strength was every bit as true of us, with the Order in front of us.

“Whatever is happening over there, we have to concentrate on the enemy in front of us. Do not get careless. I am not prepared to lose a single one of you. Tighten up.”

“Y-Yes, sir…!”

A little intimidation, and the soldier’s back jumped and he faced front again in a hurry.

The Corps was fighting an enemy several times its size, and we were about to fight at odds of more than ten to one ourselves, the Order had seven thousand.

And the key to winning this one lay with the intelligence unit.

“Fuu… took your time, didn’t you. The enemy’s practically on top of us.”

The intelligence unit had been gathering what could be gathered on the forward edge of the Dyrst region, and the whole of it answers to Dorothea, whose face never quite lifts and who smokes one cigarette after another. She had a few of her people posted around her, and she was sitting on the trunk of a fallen tree looking straight at us, for all the world as though she had been waiting for us to arrive.

“Well? Is it going smoothly?”

“Neither well nor badly… unfortunately every one of my fighters is out on other business. Running around an enemy camp with nothing but non-combatants is hard labor.”

“Why are your fighters out?”

“Who can say. Fadi mentioned something he absolutely could not get out of. Ask the boy yourself if you want the details.”

Her fighters being out meant Fadi had gone to sweep up the anti-Princess nobles. Dorothea passed straight over the fact that the instruction had been mine, and to move the subject along she pointed at the soldiers we had brought and pulled her brows down.

“So. That’s the whole of your strength, is it?”

“…Yes. Five hundred all told. Twenty of them dragon-mount soldiers.”

“That’s a bold way to divide an army… you do know how many of them there are?”

“I hadn’t expected the Order to raise seven thousand. But we will drive the Order’s soldiers off with these numbers, exactly as originally planned.”

Dorothea had probably assumed we would come with two or three thousand at the least. Unfortunately the Corps had no resources left to put into this.

“The Kingdom’s army is over forty thousand. This was the limit of what could be spared for the Order…”

One of the Corps’ soldiers made the case with his eyes down, and Dorothea drew on her cigarette and looked up at the sky and stopped moving for a while.

“…………Looks like the load on us gets heavier too.”

She didn’t lose an ounce of composure. She tipped her head slightly and gathered in the subordinates who had been lying hidden around her.

“Lady Dorothea.”

“You called for us?”

“Listen and listen properly. Sorry about this, but the plan’s changing. I told you the intelligence unit wouldn’t have to join the fighting. Circumstances have moved. Where there’s an enemy you can take down without carrying much risk, go after them. Understood?”

She rattled it out in a way that made it clear objections weren’t being accepted.

“Which means…”

“Which means we’re short of strength and this is going to be a harder fight than we planned for. You lot can all fight to some degree. You’re drawing good pay for it. Betting your lives once or twice isn’t too much to ask, is it?”

There are a lot of new faces in the intelligence unit. You would expect people to flinch, told out of nowhere that they were about to be in reach of dying.

“Of course! We’ll fight with everything we have!”

“Well, nothing for it but to do it!”

“We were all living hand to mouth, never knowing which day was the last one. Now somebody’s given us a decent life, if we don’t put our backs into it here, when exactly are we going to?”

Most of them come out of the slums. They have lived eventful enough lives that a fair number of them have the nerve for dangerous work.

Dorothea heard their answers and turned back to Princess Valtrune.

“There you are. The intelligence unit’s a hundred. That makes six hundred to fight the Order with.”

“I’m sorry. It’s because we’re short.”

“Don’t let it trouble you. Stand on a battlefield and everybody makes their peace with dying.”

—Making peace with dying, is it.

“Then I will make my peace with keeping as many of these brave people alive as I can.”

“Al…!”

Everyone makes their peace with death on a battlefield. And every one of them wants to come home alive at the same time.

It was Dorothea who reacted to what I had said, and out of all proportion.

“…Hah! That’s a large thing to say. Personal knight.”

She threw the cigarette away and laughed as though she suspected me of something, then walked slowly up in front of me and put a knee to the ground.

It was nothing like her usual way of letting the world slide past her. Crouched there, looking up at me, Dorothea wore the same serious face she had worn on that day in the rain when we fought for our lives.

“That feeling of yours… don’t you forget it before the end.”

“I am Rune-sama’s sword. Guarding what matters to her is part of what I’m for.”

“…Is that so.”

It had started to embarrass me and I covered it with that, and she got smartly to her feet and set off into the depths of the forest where the Order’s army would be.

“We’ll go on ahead. Leave scouting the enemy to us and rest easy.”

Her people went with her, scattering into the forest in an instant and out of sight. She walked a few paces, then turned only her eyes back to me.

“…I’m relying on you. Aldia, the brave personal knight, see that you work hard enough to keep those words from turning out to be a lie.”

She left that behind her and dissolved into the dark of the trees.

Being taken in hand and driven forward like that settled my resolve properly. I closed my fist hard and looked back at the soldiers still waiting behind us. Not one of them had lost his nerve; every face was full of fight.

“Rune-sama. Let’s be certain to win this.”

The succession she has wanted so long lies on the far side of beating the Order’s army.

“Fufu.”

“Yes?”

“I’m sorry. It’s only… it seems to be nothing but this sort of thing with us.”

Princess Valtrune, smiling, rested a hand lightly on my shoulder and laid a body-strengthening spell on me.

“You are the pivot of the line. I believe you’ll protect them all.”

“Leave it to me.”

I would earn what she expected in this fight. The strengthening she had put on me with her own hand felt like another hand at my back.

2

Fighting in forest is skirmishing, always, done on the move.

The lightly equipped and quick-footed take the front, and the soldiers with magic or bows pick the enemy off through the gaps between trunks.

“Enemy in numbers to the front!”

“Beginning the sweep!”

“There’s an Order banner over here as well—!”

“Watch every direction! Push the front line forward from straight ahead, with Al at the center of it!”

The deeper into the forest we went, the more of the Order’s soldiers appeared. We destroyed them before they could call for anyone, and being few in number, we fought inside a fixed radius, covering one another.

“…Tch! Support over here!”

“Give me a moment. Coming!”

The Corps’ soldiers kept their eyes on the enemy arriving from all four sides and went to pull out whoever was being pressed.

“Hah!”

“Gaaaah…!”

Fortunately, most of the Order’s soldiers had far less combat experience than the Kingdom’s, and their equipment was poor, the kind assembled out of whatever came to hand.

“Sorry. That helped.”

“Don’t mention it. Looks worse on the far side next. Let’s get over there.”

“Right!”

—So far nothing has happened that would collapse the formation.

They weren’t coming at us in any well-controlled mass. They came at us as individuals, each one as he noticed us, and taken in that order they could be met without trouble.

“Sir Aldia. The enemy to our front is destroyed. May we go and support the flanks?”

“Yes. Half of you stay here; the rest move out and clear whatever’s left nearby.”

“Sir!”

As they moved off, Princess Valtrune, who had been giving us magical support from behind, came up at my back.

“It’s going well enough so far.”

“It is. Dorothea’s intelligence unit is running riot in their camp, and because of it they can’t commit their full strength against us.”

Right at the forward edge, Dorothea’s people were jumping between trees and drawing the Order’s attention with what amounted to a running ambush. In a skirmishing fight the advantage was ours, and we kept widening the ground we held.

“Guh…”

“Kh—!”

Move fast, put the enemy down, and be somewhere else before reinforcements arrive.

“This side is completely held!”

“The dragon-mount soldiers are sweeping from the air. No sign of the enemy anywhere near us.”

—We can do this.

With the fighting settled for the moment, Princess Valtrune brought the units together.

“Damage report.”

“Several dead and wounded on our side, but nothing that impedes the destruction of the Order’s army. On their side the response has been too slow, and the intelligence unit reports that if we keep the pressure on we should be able to push them back all at once.”

—And no encounter with anyone worth being careful about. Was the bad feeling nothing after all?

Keep on like this and even a small force could chase them off easily.

“Al… what do you think?”

But Princess Valtrune’s face hadn’t eased even now, with everything going our way. She was uncomfortable about how far we had come without meeting any real resistance, and I found myself distrusting the absence of trouble exactly as she did.

“If I were on the Order’s side… I would not give orders that let a small enemy do as it liked. If the other side is skirmishing, you crush it in one motion with the sheer weight of your numbers.”

“I think the same. They must know by now how few we are… so what is this lack of coordination?”

There was every chance they had a trap laid. Just as the Corps was playing the Kingdom’s army with magic tools, we had to allow for the Order scheming to take the whole of us in one net with some device of their own.

“…Excuse me, may I raise something?”

One of the soldiers pointed at the corpse of an Order soldier and spoke with some hesitation.

“What is it?”

“It’s… the Order’s soldiers we’ve been fighting. I can’t shake the feeling they’re ordinary people who have plainly never trained for combat.”

“Ordinary people…”

He was right. Every one of them had gone down far too easily.

“…I did think it was strange in itself that the Order could raise seven thousand at short notice and invade the Empire. Surely they haven’t forced believers onto a battlefield?”

“If they’d been forced, some of them would run. Every one of them came at us bravely.”

Believers with no fighting ability at all, standing in a front line as soldiers? To take part in an invasion of the Empire knowing your life is at risk, there has to be a reason of some weight.

“What was the Order’s stated reason for attacking the Empire in the first place?”

“Retaking the holy land in the Dyrst region… I believe.”

“The holy land. And whereabouts would that be? There’s nothing in Dyrst but the mines where the Divine Demon Orb comes out and a stretch of farmland.”

Their reason for invading was the recovery of the Svell Order’s holy land, but there is no pure and sacred spot anywhere in this region that the Order could be pointing at.

“…The reason for the invasion doesn’t matter in the slightest to the Order.”

A reason cooked up to raise an army: that would be the ‘recovery of the Svell Order’s holy land.’ To a believer offering up deep faith, the Empire would look like a villain squatting unlawfully on holy ground.

“They’ll have called for volunteers among the faithful. The proof of it is that their weapons are all different, nothing standard about any of it.”

Few of them carried a proper sword or shield, and some, apparently, had come swinging farm tools.

“Which means… what we are fighting isn’t soldiers, it’s ordinary townspeople?”

“If the theory is right, yes.”

“That’s…”

There are numerous people in the Corps with a strong sense of justice. Foreign or not, killing civilians was always going to sit badly with some of them.

—So the high spirits have wavered.

It hadn’t gone as far as losing the will to fight, but the momentum they came in with was entirely gone.

“Are we to keep fighting like this…”

“Hey, what are you talking about? They’re invaders threatening our homeland.”

“I know. But killing ordinary people who don’t even know the situation is a bit…”

A small tear becomes a large collapse. That is the way the world is built.

“—Don’t waver. Kill all of them.”

“—!”

Just as the doubt was taking hold, Dorothea appeared from nowhere and shouted it loud enough to shock the life back into them.

“Ordinary people or not, an enemy is an enemy. Waver and you’re the one who gets killed… instead of wasting breath arguing, put the mission first!”

Just what you would expect from a former boss of a shadow organization. She reads a moment on a battlefield very well. If someone had hesitated there, our chance of winning would have thinned without question.

Princess Valtrune called out as the last push.

“Listen, all of you. If we are beaten here, the people those men turn on next may be the people you love, at home in the Empire. Strangers, or the people we are sworn to protect, I don’t think there’s any question which comes first.”

The two of them said their piece, and the doubt went out of the soldiers’ eyes.

“…We continue. All of you, to your positions.”

“Sir!”

—That was close.

If opinion had split there, holding the force together would have become very difficult, and it occurred to me that all of this might have been exactly what the Order was after.

“All units, ready! The enemy is the Svell Order. Kill every one of them on sight and show no mercy! We take no prisoners. For this one span of time, put every merciful thought away!”

The advance resumed on the order.

What came at us were Svell believers who had never been in a fight in their lives, and against soldiers who had come through hard training and set pity aside, they went down one after another with nothing they could do about it.

Some of ours faltered at the blood going up into the air, but they cut down every last one regardless. This could no longer be covered by a word as mild as war.

It was one-sided, and it was butchery.

“Hah!”

“Guh…”

The feel of a blade going through flesh and the bone inside it. People who couldn’t hold their own balance staggered and were flung backward with no effort at all.

“…We go on. I’m going to cut down whoever is behind this.”

With me at the head of it, the soldiers cut their way forward down a road that wasn’t a road. The forest that had been under green was wrapped now in red blood and in heat that bent the air above the fires.

—I’ll bring the hammer down on the coward who used devout believers to do this.

“Advance!”

“Aaaaaaah!”

We kept up the momentum, cutting the enemy down as we went, and came within reach of the throat of their main body.

And then…

“Your Highness! Report from the intelligence unit. Enemy in numbers across the river deep in the forest, over four thousand, with heavily armed cavalry and many people in priest’s robes among them!”

At last the whole shape of the enemy army had come into the light.

“…The Order’s main force.”

“If there are that many at priest rank, then it’s certain. We should go forward watching for concentrated magical fire as well. Shall we raise magic barriers, to be safe?”

“Yes. Everything past this point is an enemy worth being careful about.”

At Princess Valtrune’s order, our mages threw magic barriers up all around us in a single motion.

—So it’s the decisive fight with the Order at last.

The Empire’s ruin is a fate that gets broken here, in this one battle.

Wishing for a victory for the Provisional Elite Corps that Princess Valtrune leads, every one of us made peace with a fight to the death, and went slowly forward.

3

Only about one in ten of the Svell Order ever reaches the rank of priest, and the magic those people command is close to a royal court mage’s.

We had been walking a while since the report that the enemy’s main body was near, and the attacks by rank-and-file had stopped dead. The quiet did nothing but wind the tension tighter, and what finally broke that unpleasant silence was a report from one of the intelligence unit scouting at the very front.

“Urgent report! At the center of the enemy army… there’s a woman in a nun’s habit!”

“—!”

Whatever else a Svell believer might do, a nun going out to a battlefield is hard to picture. And at the center of the enemy army, of all places.

“Rune-sama, how do you read it?”

“I don’t want to think it, but I don’t see any choice except to assume the worst enemy on the board has arrived.”

“The Saint…”

Every one of us felt it at once, cruelly enough: the one opponent in this fight who most needed watching had come.

“A messenger of God with magic to rival a god’s, granted countless blessings and her own particular arts, if the woman in the habit is genuinely the Saint, then whether we can beat her is, honestly, unknown. What would you have us do?”

I put it to Princess Valtrune. Even if we fought, without an effective answer to the Saint’s magic, being wiped out entirely was on the table. Adding a second source of dread on top of the difference in numbers was nothing but wind in our faces.

“…What do you think? What do you make of the woman?”

“I don’t know. I never met the Saint in my previous life either. But the chill I felt when we entered the forest. That was unmistakably the sense of something enormous arriving. If the Saint is with them, then the bad feeling explains itself.”

If she were merely human, we could have forced our way through and killed her. Even with several priests skilled in magic, close the distance by main strength and they would go down for certain; that had been my reasoning. But with the Saint on the field the arithmetic changed. Back when I was a knight of the Kingdom, before I went backward through time, I heard a few stories about the Saints.

“I’ve heard that a Saint handles arts only she can use, and carries blessings so strong that neither magic nor a physical blow gets through.”

And the actual measure of her fighting strength has never been made public: a sealed box. Misjudge her by a little and you may take a wound you don’t get up from.

“Would a straight fight from the front be reckless?”

“A mage of Rune-sama’s ability wouldn’t lose easily, I think. The others are another matter.”

“Yes… that’s true.”

“By rights I’d want to crush them in one blow, but I think we need to look before we move.”

It may have been faint-hearted, but we could not afford to gamble and take losses for nothing. We were already short of soldiers and standing at the edge where one section breaking takes everyone down with it. We had to move carefully, and she understood that as well as I did, because she agreed.

“Very well. Then we’ll have the intelligence unit test them lightly.”

“And the dragon-mount soldiers out scouting?”

“Pull them back and bring them in to us. I want our main strength gathered.”

“Understood. I’ll have them recalled at once.”

That left the intelligence unit as the only force forward, and its fighting ability was the part I was least easy about. It would put a heavy load on Dorothea, but there was nothing for it except to hope her experience as a boss in the underworld and her feel for the give-and-take of a fight would carry her through.

“…Orders sent. Let’s wait for word.”

The enemy had taken ground on the far side of a hard-running river. It was difficult to imagine them forcing a crossing through that water, and the same held for us: neither side could attack easily, which meant the first move would go a long way toward deciding the rest of it.

“How do you think it will go?”

“If they’re standing on the defensive, I’d rather stretch the deadlock out. If they come at us, I want their formation broken before they finish crossing.”

Our side looked down from slightly above a cliff line, which gave us the better ground, and waiting suited our soldiers better than attacking.

“Either way, all we can do is wait for the intelligence unit.”

A short wait, I thought. Immediately afterward Dorothea appeared in front of us, dragging one leg, covered in wounds.

“…Kh.”

“Dorothea!”

Princess Valtrune reached her first. There was nothing among the injuries that would kill her, at least.

“What in the world happened?”

Dorothea steadied her breathing and began.

“…She saw through all of it. We were concealed perfectly and that woman shot us out of cover exactly. That isn’t normal.”

“‘That woman’…”

“The Saint…”

Another of the particular gifts handed down from her god, then. The concealment Dorothea’s intelligence unit works with is good enough to stand comparison with any nation’s agents. Finding them once they were hidden in a forest was beyond me, certainly.

“It was instant. I was closing without being spotted, and past a certain distance her eyes came straight up and met mine.”

“You mean no disguise of any kind works in front of the Saint?”

“No… some of my people got closer than I did and were never seen. There’s a mechanism behind that unnatural detection of hers somewhere.”

Dorothea said it with certainty, then sighed out what strength she had left and added that she was not, unfortunately, going to be able to go back and check.

“Someone stop Dorothea’s bleeding, quickly.”

“Sorry about that. Not much use to you…”

“Not at all. You went forward first, and because you did the rest of us advanced safely. Leave what comes next to us.”

Princess Valtrune handed the blood-soaked Dorothea over to one of the women among the dragon-mount soldiers.

“Take her to the operations post, please.”

“Yes, ma’am!”

Dorothea’s head hung and she went out with the other wounded agents, carried by the riders. When the departing group was out of sight, Princess Valtrune put a hand to her head and let out a long breath.

“Well… what shall we do from here.”

“It seems there’s no simple way through. What’s here is the whole of our remaining strength.”

So many of the agents had been shot out of the trees by the Saint’s magic before they could even close on the Order, and the intelligence unit at the front had been effectively destroyed.

“Fighting close looks bad. And the range on the magic that woman throws is so far outside normal that trading fire at distance goes badly too.”

—And we still haven’t uncovered the trick behind how well she detects us.

“We’ve lost most of our intelligence unit and we can’t read how the enemy will move.”

The clever choice was to pull back to the operations post and rebuild. But taking that choice meant letting the Order push further in.

“…Rune-sama.”

“Your Highness, your orders.”

“What will you have us do?”

The soldiers were waiting for the next command, and making the decision here would be very hard on Princess Valtrune. Retreat was hell and advance was hell. Only silence went by, and by degrees the unease she was carrying spread out into the soldiers.

“…All of you. Listen to me.”

She thought it through to the end, and when she spoke her face was serious, and her voice was sad.

“From here we go to meet the Order’s army head-on. Many of us will be lost in this fight, and whether we can win it is unknown… even so, will you run the whole of it beside me, to the end?”

Her decision was to go forward into the fight with the Order.

An enemy who had wrecked the intelligence unit in a moment and against whom even Dorothea had been able to do nothing at all. An enemy strong enough that everyone standing here, put together, still looked unequal to her. But this fight would beyond question be the turning point that overturned the Empire’s ruin.

“Rune-sama… I am your personal knight. Whatever you decide, I follow you.”

“Al…”

Running from a power like the Saint’s would be easy. It may even be that running was the correct answer in that place. But what is waiting at the end of running? The grief of failing to remove a threat and losing what matters to you. Or the regret of never having taken the step. Either way, I don’t believe the best future is at the end of it.

“But having come this far, we can only go on. Why are we fighting in the first place? To protect the way we live? For honor? Any of it will serve, you are standing on this field because you judged this country worth fighting to protect. Isn’t that so?”

I asked them the reason they had taken up weapons and decided to stake their lives here, and they answered without needing to think about it.

“…There’s something I want to protect. That’s why I’m fighting here.”

“My wife’s in the imperial capital. My son turns three next month. I’m not letting those people get that far!”

“I want to make a proper soldier of myself and keep this country at peace!”

“I want to make life easier for my mother and father… I want to pay them back.”

“Joining the Corps put some room in my life. I want to fight beside everyone here until the very last!”

The reasons differed, but every one of them had a clear purpose in the fight.

“Then the answer is simple. Brave heroes, who took up arms to defend your country, now is the time to strike the invaders down!”

I still had not found the way to beat the Saint. There was nothing for it but to go at her anyway.

“Your Highness… let’s go forward! We have to win!”

“The others from my year are out there staking their lives against the Kingdom’s army. If we’re the only ones who run, I’ll be too ashamed to look any of them in the face. I’m fighting!”

“We knew they’d outnumber us from the start. Now there’s a Saint on top of it, that’s all! That’s not a reason to run anywhere!”

“I’m not thinking about losing. We are absolutely going to win!”

“Well, pulling out here wouldn’t make me much of a man. Cut the lot of them down and let’s get home!”

They had settled it in themselves.

“So… you’re ready to stand against a Saint.”

Resolve on its own is not enough, of course.

“Your Highness, the Saint’s magic is extremely strong, but that doesn’t mean there’s no answer to it. We mages can raise a high-density magic barrier. Unlike an ordinary one it’s difficult to hold for long, but it should last until we make contact with the Order’s forward units.”

“I see. And after that it becomes a matter of bodies.”

“Once we’re close, she can’t fire magic carelessly for fear of hitting her own people…”

“Understood. Raise the barrier just before the Saint’s magic reaches us.”

The mages began building the barrier together. Princess Valtrune took the head of the army and gave the order.

“We open our fate with our own hands. Win this fight, without fail. Now, forward!”

At her word the army began to move again, toward a decisive battle with the Svell Order’s army under its Saint, and a full and open confrontation.

4

—They have finally moved.

The heroes that a mischievous fate has been toying with had committed their whole strength in our direction. I spoke to the priest standing at my side with his hands clasped behind his back.

“The Imperial army is moving. Prepare for battle.”

“I will give the order at once.”

He left to share the information with each of the commanders, and I sat where I was and looked steadily out in front of me.

“I can smell it. That thick scent of miasma the Chosen carry…”

I brushed the foulness drifting around me lightly aside with one hand and let a small piece of magic go, a single blow at the Imperial army coming toward us so unguardedly, meant as a warning.

The blue lightning threw sparks and ran dead straight through the trees toward the front of the enemy army.

“—Missed? No. That isn’t it.”

Far off in the forest, white smoke went up with a great crack of thunder. That shot had certainly landed. But the Imperial army coming on did not appear to have been damaged.

—My magic, turned aside by a magic barrier raised by ordinary people?

“Priest. A moment.”

He had finished passing on the orders and was coming back, and at my call he tilted his head, puzzled.

“You look a little pale… is something wrong?”

He had not noticed. Somewhere among that small handful of soldiers coming toward us, a monster was hiding who could stand against me.

“Be on your guard. This enemy is formidable.”

“Whatever are you saying? They are far fewer than we are, and the enemy scouts who came before were all cut down by you, Lady Reshia.”

“Those were merely visible… this enemy will not be so easy. Be careless and you will die quickly.”

“What—!”

I turned away from the priest’s graceless, dumbfounded face and let out a long breath.

—Yes. I can see the flow of magic.

I saw it a moment ago, and I can see it now. Something carrying enormous magic is coming toward us, and the volume of it is climbing steadily, enough that one day it might rise past mine.

“That one is also a Chosen. But I get very little scent of miasma from it… why should that be?”

A Chosen steeped in strong miasma, and a Chosen who is not. Both draw their vast power from a strong feeling held in the heart.

“The one wrapped in miasma is very strong. Strength for fighting, perhaps? And the one holding abundant magic is barely touched by miasma at all, and yet draws out this much power… what is the difference?”

The Chosen I had prepared for was the former sort, a person taking a strong feeling they had conceived and swelling it explosively by borrowing the miasma’s power. The nature of the latter’s power is beyond my understanding.

I turned it over, built theory on theory, and cut away the possibilities that led nowhere. What remained, after everything had been pared down, was a single hypothesis.

“…Because the feelings the two of them hold are different in kind?”

I had arrived at a hypothesis close to the truth. But a hypothesis is only ever a hypothesis; to know the answer, I would have to see it with my own eyes.

“Priest. I am going to the front.”

I rose and called the Black Serpent up out of the ground, and the priest became flustered.

“Why? Lady Reshia, even without you at the front, that handful cannot possibly finish us.”

“Is that truly so?”

Immediately afterward a piece of an Order soldier, blown back from the front line, passed by the side of the priest’s face. It struck a tree with a dull sound and dropped to the ground, and the priest froze in shock.

“With that in front of you, can you still tell me there is no need for me to stand at the front?”

—Their thinking really is soft.

Gathering enough heads does not win anything. Bundle the weak together in front of the strong and it is a wall made of straw: it comes apart with no trouble at all.

“I shall say it once more. I am going to the front. You have no objection?”

“…Y-Yes, my lady!”

He seemed to have grasped how little his army could be relied on, because he hurriedly summoned the White Serpent I had given into his keeping. Apparently the priest was coming to the front as well.

“Oh? You are coming too?”

“Of course. I could hardly leave the work to you alone, Lady Reshia.”

—What a convenient thing to say.

The truth is that he fears my losing, the Order’s spirit collapsing with it, and the front line going to pieces. The moment I am gone as the Order’s center of gravity, the Order shatters as an organization.

“…Fufu. What very easy people to read.”

The words came out under my breath, too faint for the priest walking beside me to catch.

They pen the Saint in and use her, and through her the Order means to lay hands on the power of that thing. But it is hard to imagine, as things stand, that the plan proceeds without difficulty.

What sort of end shallow people come to after this is no concern of mine, though I confess I am, just slightly, looking forward to it.

5

The magic barrier our mages had thrown up with everything they had between them turned aside one carefully aimed strike after another, all of it coming from impossibly far away. Layering a barrier that many times over means it can’t be spread wide, but fortunately the magic only ever came at the center of our advancing column.

“Another one, incoming!”

At the shout, the mages pushed more power into the barrier.

“Kh!”

“That one was heavy again…”

“Hold it if it kills you!”

What came at us varied constantly: high-output lightning built for speed; enormous fireballs that scattered sparks across a wide area; ice lances, fragile, but throwing appalling cold off every shard when they broke; wind rounds heavy enough to push trees over; and the pillars of pure white light that the clergy are fond of.

“…Hah. We managed it.”

Powerful, varied magic, and every piece of it eating reliably into our mages’ reserves. The Saint kept firing without a shred of mercy.

“So the Saint can use any magic there is…”

“Never mind the raw power, what’s frightening is that all of it comes out at the same strength.”

A mage is supposed to have things she is good at and things she isn’t. That theory appeared not to apply to the Saint, who could throw every kind of attack without any of it suffering. Combined with a supply of magic that never seemed to run down, the threat she posed stood comparison with a whole army.

I caught how worn our mages were getting and looked to Princess Valtrune.

“Rune-sama. The mages are being drained badly.”

“I know. But I can’t let them rest partway. The Saint’s magic doesn’t stop, and we make contact with the Order’s forward units very soon.”

By the time we collided with the Order’s soldiers, the mages would almost certainly have spent nearly everything they had, which meant the whole thing rested on how far the soldiers holding the front could drive the enemy back.

“The brush is about to end.”

We could hear the river running, and through the gaps in the trees came innumerable great banners stamped with the Order’s symbol. Clear the undergrowth and we would be facing the enemy army across the water.

—The Saint’s bombardment has eased off, too. Time to attack.

My eyes met Princess Valtrune’s; she had judged the same moment.

“Rune-sama.”

“Yes. All units, charge!”

At the order the soldiers behind the barrier broke into a full run, and I took the head of them and led.

“Enemy sighted!”

“Intercept!”

The moment we left the brush the Order caught on, and arrows and magic came down like a cloudburst.

“Gaah!”

“Gyaah—!”

Many of ours went down under the successive waves. The attacks were fiercer than we had allowed for.

“Don’t flinch! Keep going!”

Retreat had stopped being available to us some time ago. Annihilation or victory: with those two extremes in front of us, we bet on the thread of hope and stepped into ground built for dying.

“If we lose them, we have no way to win! Begin covering fire!”

Support from behind thinned the attacks a little, and the men at the head of the charge finally reached the near bank, where the soldiers put themselves behind the boulders lying along the water and into what few dips the ground offered, and waited for the next order.

“Sir Aldia. Their attack isn’t slackening at all. What are we to…”

In front of us was a river running hard. To get across it we needed their attention pulled further off us than it was, and the people behind us throwing magic and arrows had lost a great many of their number trading fire with the Order. Many of the forward units, too, had died getting us as far as this bank. Going on would take more sacrifice, and there was nothing left to offer.

If there was anything at all… yes. There was.

“Holding here won’t last long… I’ll go forward at the head and draw their attention.”

“You’ll what—?! Please wait. Even you, Sir Aldia, if that many of them concentrate on one target, you will not come through it!”

“I’m aware of that… but there’s no other way.”

“I cannot believe Her Highness would permit that choice. Please reconsider.”

—True enough. Rune-sama would stop me.

She is kind, and it may be that even with every option gone and the Order winning, she wouldn’t pick up a victory at the cost of my life. But that won’t do. I can’t accept leaving a single cloud on the future she walks into.

“…If nothing about this changes, I go out of here first.”

You can’t wait behind a rock forever. To keep the soldiers from dying for nothing, we needed one large move to turn a losing position over. I put a hand to my chest and settled the urgency down.

—One moment is all I need. Give me one opening and I can be out in front of them.

I was still failing to find a way through when a hard wind moved across my skin, and far above us something large crossed the sun and painted the ground black. A dragon mount hung there at height, both jet-black wings spread wide, growling. And there were two figures astride it: one the rider working the reins, and the other…

“…Well. I never really got my moment, did I. Seems a waste to just withdraw, don’t you think?”

—That voice. It couldn’t be.

Speaking as though there were nothing in the world more natural than her being there, with a fearless grin on her, was Dorothea, who had taken a serious wound and was supposed to have left the field.

“The river’s in your way and you can’t advance. There are too many of them and one volley turns you into a honeycomb… hah! That’s my cue, surely!”

She was bandaged everywhere on her and couldn’t possibly be in any condition for this. What on earth was she planning?

A dragon mount circling overhead and Dorothea making enormous pronouncements from its back: the enemy’s attention went up all at once.

“Shoot that dragon down!”

Magic and arrows went for the dragon carrying her at once, and every bit of it was completely powerless against her barrier.

“Fufu. You expect to put a hole in me with idiot attacks of that quality? Hah! It’s the height of comedy!”

—She sounds exactly like a villain.

But Dorothea turning up was a very welcome miscalculation. From the look of her, most of the wounds hadn’t closed and fighting might be beyond her, but that expression, entirely at her ease, was the face she wears when she is about to do something.

“All units, prepare to advance. Dorothea looks likely to break this open for us.”

They nodded at the order and got themselves into a posture to move at once, and while everyone watched to see what she would do, she lifted her hand high into the sky and shouted.

“Listen closely, fools of the Order! My name is Dorothea, the finest hand with magic in the Empire. Fufu, you did a fine job humiliating me earlier… you can regret making me taste that in the next world!”

A cloudless sky was covered by degrees in thick rain cloud, and the cloud dropped its altitude sharply and poured down over the center of the Order’s army.

“The cloud—!”

“I can’t see anything!”

It was deeper than fog, and it stayed where it was put. Then, as though setting the last piece, Dorothea gave an instruction to the woman riding with her.

“Right, girl. Ram that rabble of fools down there!”

The order was sudden and outrageous, and naturally her face went to astonishment.

“Wh-what?! Are you talking to me?!”

“Who else is there? Come along, it’s to open a road for the ground units. Get your nerve up!”

“B-but one dragon on its own will just get shot down!”

“What nonsense are you… is that full plate we strapped to your dragon decorative? Nobody said sit on the ground and stay there. Drop, trample them, climb, trample them again. Disorder their formation a little and that’s quite enough!”

She delivered it as though it weren’t remotely difficult, but keeping a dragon mount moving up and down like that would take no small skill from whoever was flying it. Entirely unbothered by any of that, she kept pointing at the ground and pressing.

“Off you go, off you go! You’ll be fine!”

“Uuu…”

—I was starting to feel rather sorry for the girl.

That miserable, half-crying voice. And I understood it perfectly; what she had been handed amounted to half a suicide run. But if Dorothea’s plan worked, we could drive straight through a disordered enemy line.

—Any other day I would be shouting at her to stop. Today the situation is what it is. I’m sorry. Go in hard.

“Right, we’re going!”

“Eek, understood! Don’t blame me for whatever happens!”

At Dorothea’s word the dragon began a vertical dive, and under all that cloud the Order wouldn’t even know a dragon was coming down out of the sky.

“…All units. The instant that dragon reaches the ground, we cross the river in one push. Do not take your eyes off it!”

“Sir!”

The timing of the charge had been placed in the hands of one dragon and one rider. We weren’t finished. Our counterattack started here.

6

The dragon made its dive with its life on the line, and success or failure, it would be the thing that got our ground units moving.

“Gyoaaaaah—?! Nghh!”

It came down like a single thrown spear, not shedding any speed at all.

“Sir Aldia… is that going to be all right?”

“However it ends, what we do doesn’t change… though I do feel a little sorry for her.”

“…There’s nothing to be done, I suppose.”

“No. Nothing to be done.”

At worst, Dorothea was riding with her and would manage something. She is a very fine mage, and even on a dragon dropping at that speed she showed no sign of hurry. On the contrary…

“Hah! That’s an aggressive way to fall!”

“Th-that’s just the brakes not working!”

Unlike the rider, who was on the edge of tears, Dorothea was holding her stomach and laughing with real enjoyment. The woman has an outrageous amount of nerve.

“Al! Hold the advance a moment!”

Princess Valtrune drew power for a long time and released a large working. It ran out along the ground and closed the river over: clear blue water turned to hard white ice, and the water that had divided the two armies vanished in a moment.

“That way you don’t lose any speed.”

“Thank you, Rune-sama.”

The enemy still had their sight taken from them by deep, heavy cloud. And into that came the outrageous business of a dragon falling out of the sky.

“Gaaah—!”

“E-enemy attack!”

“Damn it, everything’s white, I can’t see!”

The dragon’s landing was loud enough to carry through the whole forest, and with it came a high shearing sound like scrap iron being crushed flat.

“Hah! Beautiful press!”

“Y-you’re enjoying this because it isn’t you!”

Dorothea was trampling and scattering the enemy and laughing while she did it, and behind her voice came the rider’s slightly frayed, hoarse shouting.

I listened to the enemy’s screaming for a while, then swung my hand forward and stepped out onto the ice.

“Right. Charge!”

“Aaaaaah!”

Dorothea and that girl had made this opening for us at the risk of their lives, and it wasn’t going to be wasted. We went forward steadily, watching our footing on the slick ice, and once we were inside the space the white cloud covered, the Order’s soldiers came into view in complete disarray.

“Hah!”

There were none of ours in front of me. I swung the sword all the way through and felt it bite more than once.

“Guh!”

“Kh…”

Feeling the weight of it, I carried the swing through, took a great deal of blood across me, and went on forward. They still hadn’t noticed we had crossed the river, or rather…

“Damn it, what is happening?!”

“That’s a dragon calling… above us. Watch above!”

They were still being run ragged by one dragon. Thanks to it their mages and archers weren’t functioning, and closing was easy.

—After this it’s simply a matter of killing all of them.

“Hah! Well done, girl. That’s about enough. We’re clearing out!”

“I-I’m going without being told!”

Having confirmed we had made contact with the enemy army, Dorothea broke off from the center of the Order’s force entirely, and threw one parting shot back as she went.

“…Brave comrades. That’s one favor owed. I’ll expect good liquor, or one of those expensive Republic cigars.”

Having said something that shameless, she swept off to the rear.

“Steady. Put down what’s in front of you. They’ve lost their coordination. One at a time, and be certain of each!”

The enemy had no fixed target to attack and no idea where to throw anything, and a lot of them were simply standing where they were. We, by contrast, held our positions strictly enough that we could see one another even inside the deep cloud, and destroyed them without ever hitting our own.

“Magic ready… fire!”

From behind us Princess Valtrune was putting volleys into the Order’s army. Soldiers cut into ranks that were bursting apart, and we pushed the line up and broke the enemy piece by piece. As though being outnumbered meant nothing at all, our soldiers ran riot inside their formation with hardly any losses of our own, one-sided, and pitiless.

“I’m going ahead. Bring the line up slowly.”

Alone, I went deeper and deeper into the Order’s formation, swinging without discrimination. Their psychology gave me the gap I needed, none of them dared risk hitting their own, so I slid into the middle of them and hunted the ones around me down.

“Guh…”

“Hgk!”

Red blood ran down from the blade and pooled at the hilt. With bodies lying around my feet and the enemy nearby cleared, I looked for the next group and ran.

“Hah…!”

I kept running and took heads in passing. There was no time to spend on rank-and-file. There was one target: the Saint’s neck. Bring the Saint down and the Order would collapse on its own.

“—!”

I cut through soldier after soldier and searched everywhere I could. Not one of our own was anywhere near me. Everywhere I looked there were enemy soldiers, enemy soldiers, enemy soldiers, and no Saint anywhere.

“Deeper in, then… damn it.”

Their army was too thick. Cut, kick away, beat down, trample, kill another frightened soldier. I kept killing my way through the shouting with one black sword.

“Where are you?!”

The urgency was building. How many of ours were left by now? How far had the enemy been reduced? Under all that cloud, with visibility gone, none of it could be known.

“…Fufu. In such a hurry. Whatever is the matter?”

“—!”

A woman’s voice, reaching me from every direction at once, echoing. Fear came down on me like a blade set against my throat.

“Who’s there?!”

At the question the owner of the voice laughed as though thoroughly entertained.

“…Are you the foolish Chosen who defies fate, I wonder. Fufu, if so, then nothing could make me happier. I have wanted to meet you. Foolish hero of the Empire.”

The voice whispered at my ear, playing with me. I brought the sword around to cut whoever it belonged to, and there was no one there. It was like a phantom slipping through white haze, but the sense of enormous power very close by was far too thick to be an illusion.

“Yes, I understand. Waiting for ruin with nothing to do is unbearable. …Give a person the chance and every one of them wishes to begin again and clings to a thread of hope.”

The voice came from behind me next and I spun, and all that was left there were fine gold particles, glittering.

“Fufu. Like a stray cat with its fur up.”

“…Who are you?”

In a pure white space, only a voice knew where I was. There were no enemy soldiers within reach and no killing intent anywhere.

“…Are you the Saint?”

“…What do you think?”

My answer was already decided. I brushed the white cloud lightly away from me and closed my eyes; sight was no use here. I put everything into the enormous presence pressing against my skin.

“Whether you are the Saint or not makes no difference to me.”

Whoever the voice belonged to, if it stood in Princess Valtrune’s way it was simply an enemy to be removed. I gave her the hostility plainly, and she dropped the pitch of her voice as though laughing at me.

“Ah, how lovely… then show me. Show me the ridiculous sight of you struggling against a fate you cannot possibly overcome. The pitiful end of a man frightened of dying.”

Something slid across the ground, and I heard trees being crushed flat. Something enormous was coming. Before I could work out what, the voice let out a delighted breath.

“If you can defeat this child… then I shall show you my proper form as well. I wish you a good fight.”

I opened my eyes, and two great gold-glittering eyes were looking down into mine.

“—What is that.”

A white monster, blending into a white world. My hand tightened on the sword without being told to. The one thing I could say about the unidentifiable thing in front of me was that it wasn’t something you could file under the heading of ‘person.’

7

The battlefield lay under an enormous white cloud, and from where we stood giving support at the rear, nothing of it could be seen. The magic Dorothea had used to open the charge had taken away the enemy’s chance to attack and, at the same time, made any careless advance impossible for those of us behind.

“…Your Highness. Are we not going to fire a volley?”

“No. We don’t know how far forward our own front units have got. If we put a heavy strike into our own people by mistake, our defeat becomes a certainty.”

—Even so, with no support going in at all, the soldiers held here amount to idle troops. Is there really no way to get them supporting the front?

“Fuu… what’s the long face for?”

“Dorothea…”

Covered in wounds and still smoking with perfect elegance, she was looking steadily out at the field ahead of her with a clear, unbothered expression.

“What are you agonizing over?”

“That cloud. I was wondering whether it can be cleared.”

“That cloud is the opening I made for you to charge through. And now you want it gone?”

“We can’t see what’s happening inside it either.”

“Oh, is that all… go in normally, then. The way I did.”

I assume she meant that reckless, headlong suicide run of hers. She folded her arms across her chest as though inviting me to follow her example.

“Are you afraid of losing?”

“Of course I am…”

“Ha ha ha! I see. Of course.”

She laughed loudly, and then her voice went serious.

“…Your Highness. Let me ask you one thing. Inside that white swirl right now, what do you think the state of the battle is?”

—The state of the battle? I can’t possibly answer that when I can’t see anything.

“…I don’t know.”

“Oh? Is that truly so?”

“What are you trying to say?”

I could not follow what she wanted me to understand, and when I asked again she tapped the ash off the end of her cigarette with a finger and blew smoke out with a very pleased look on her face.

“…In those conditions, I do not believe the soldiers of the Provisional Elite Corps are on the losing side of anything. I go further: I think they are flattening the Order’s soldiers one-sidedly, on an overwhelming difference in ability. …Now. Does Her Highness understand why I think so?”

No answer came to me at once. But I could not believe Dorothea would speak with that much certainty about our advantage without grounds for it; she is a person who understands very well what makes a fight favorable or unfavorable. I thought about what she had said, and thought again, and then I saw it.

The Corps’ strengths. An organization only just founded. A structure built on ability rather than the supremacy of noble birth. Operational planning that takes a wide range of situations into account.

“Because everything the Corps has built up, all that combat training, comes into its own here?”

“…Correct. Just what one expects of Her Highness.”

Dorothea clapped her palms together and gave me her praise.

“Exactly so. They have been trained to fight in unusual conditions. Live training inside fog thick enough to take your sight. Marching under load over appalling ground. How to keep struggling when part of a limb is gone… that sort of thing.”

She was right. In this short span, every day, they had endured training as agonizing as hell, so that they might surpass the Imperial army. If that experience was worth anything, then inside that deep cloud the army accustomed to fighting was not the Order’s; it was ours.

“…May I believe that?”

“Fufu. A foolish question… this is a thing Her Highness began. What else would you do but believe in it?”

I founded the Provisional Elite Corps, gathered its people, and built its record. I am the one who drew them into it and stirred them up. Being anxious is natural enough. But believing in the Corps before anyone else, giving up the timid footwork and moving boldly, may be exactly what is required of me as a princess.

“…Thank you, Dorothea. I’m all right now.”

“Glad to hear it. So… have you decided what happens from here?”

“Yes. Even with no sight of it, everything we built is still in my head. We are going to believe the front units are breaking the enemy’s formation apart, and we are going into that cloud!”

That, surely, is the answer a princess is meant to arrive at.

Dorothea lifted one corner of her mouth and turned her back with an unhurried step.

“If you got that far, you have no more use for me. My wounds hurt. I’ll go on ahead and start arranging the celebration.”

Broken as she was, she had come back to the field and used a working large enough to overturn a losing position. For all the bravery she carried it with, her body must have been in a bad way.

“…Leave the rest of it to me. Rest properly.”

“You needn’t tell me twice.”

Dorothea walked slowly off, and when I had seen her go, we of the rear units made our own attempt to get inside the deep cloud.

8

It was a shadow of quite unreasonable size, and the weight of the pressure coming off it felt as though it would swallow me the moment I let my eyes slide. The long body was coiled over and over on itself and the thin tongue kept going in and out. The thing was, exactly and entirely, a serpent.

“Well? Isn’t she lovely? This child is the Divine Beast, the White Serpent. A precious child of mine, granted by Lord Svell.”

The owner of the voice let it go soft and rapt, the way you speak about something you dote on. The White Serpent standing in my way was the most difficult opponent I had yet stood in front of.

“This will be my first time hunting a monster.”

“Fufufu! A monster, you say… this child is still very much on the adorable side of things, you know.”

The White Serpent gave a high, unpleasant cry that put ice down my back and whipped its tail at me.

“—Kh!”

The thick white tail gouged the ground open, and the force of it carried into the air around us; the shock came off it and prickled against my skin.

“Oh, my, my! That was meant to catch you off guard and you avoided it cleanly! Just what one expects of a Chosen. Lovely. How lovely.”

A voice entirely at its ease. There was no time to attend to its owner, because the White Serpent swung that long tail again and again, smashing ground and trees to pieces. For its size it moved very fast, and simply staying out of the way took everything I had, and there was not even room to turn and get a swing in.

“Ahaha! I wonder how long you can keep running?”

Being driven like that with nothing coming back built the irritation in me.

“Tch!”

I used the narrow gap before the tail arrived to close the distance in an instant, and put everything I had into the grip of the sword to land one heavy blow on the coiled monster.

—But it did not go the way I wanted it to.

“Kh—?!”

—What is this? The edge isn’t going through!

The White Serpent’s scales, pure white with a faint iridescence over them, were harder than any armor I had ever cut. The force pushing back came straight up the blade as though the point would shatter.

“Kh!”

I was thrown off the hard scales and rocked backward. The hand holding the sword had gone numb, and the shock of the strike rang through every bone in my body.

“It must be very hard indeed to wound that child. She is a special Divine Beast, after all, created by Lord Svell and sent to me.”

Standing in front of the White Serpent, one thought kept coming: how much easier this would have been if the enemy were only the Saint. You can accumulate endless experience fighting people. Chances to accumulate experience hunting monsters do not come along. I could not read its weak points or find any regularity in how it moved.

“…This is troublesome. Extremely so.”

“Fufu. The enjoyable part is still ahead of us.”

Immediately after the Saint’s loaded little remark, a great deal of magic came at me from the front, and I threw my weight right and left on instinct alone and kept from taking a direct hit.

“Damn it, I was sure that one would land!”

“A cunning little man.”

“Calm down. His limit will come eventually. Until it does, keep attacking and be patient.”

Through the cloud I could make out, faintly, several Svell soldiers and a priest.

“One after another…”

There was no time to deal with a monster I could not handle before the Order’s rank-and-file began closing in as well. The ring around me tightened by degrees, and the White Serpent came nearer with it.

“Chosen who defies fate. This is a fight with your life on it, now, show me more of you struggling and suffering with everything you have!”

The voice delivered it as though this were an entertainment. Watching from somewhere I could not see, up above it all. The woman has an unpleasant hobby.

“…Hah.”

But there was no choice available to me. Exactly as the voice said, all I could do was keep killing with everything I had.

—Our soldiers still haven’t got this far. I’ll have to manage on my own.

There was no telling how long it would take for relief to arrive, and until it did I had to keep enduring, whatever that took.

9

—What was that shaking?

We had been inside the cloud for some time when the sound of something striking the earth came ringing from far ahead of us.

“Your Highness. Please stay back.”

“Everyone hurry and prepare to release…”

Having joined up with the front units, we of the rear tightened our guard toward the sound. But there was no enemy attack, and by now no sign of an enemy at all.

“…Your Highness. There’s no sign of the enemy. This area appears to have been cleared already.”

One of the soldiers who had been swinging a sword at the front made his report, and he was right: the whole area was strewn with the bodies of Order soldiers, and there was not a living presence anywhere in it.

“No fierce resistance at all. That’s odd…”

“Do you suppose they’ve withdrawn?”

“No. With that much of an advantage in numbers I can’t believe the Order would pull back… and where is Al? We have to warn him too, in case this is an ambush.”

“Sir Aldia? Well, um…”

Before the soldier could answer, another great shudder and a rolling of the ground came through.

“—!”

The earth shook hard enough that staying upright took work, and every one of us understood that this was not an ordinary thing.

“Your Highness. Something is happening deeper in.”

“I can tell that much from the shaking.”

Ominous tremors and a low rolling in the ground. And then something occurred to me.

—He isn’t here.

“Somebody. Does anyone know where Al is?!”

“We lost sight of him on the way here…”

“Sir Aldia was at the head of the advance, surely.”

“Now that you mention it, he doesn’t seem to be nearby. He may still be fighting…”

—I have a bad feeling.

That he is nowhere in sight. That there is no sense of an enemy anywhere. And on top of both, that unnatural rolling of the ground, over and over, from ahead of us. It occurred to me that he might be taking on the Order’s soldiers all by himself.

“There are no enemies left in this area, correct?”

“Yes. If the Order has strength remaining, it will be further along from here.”

As a personal knight, the man Aldia Graetz has a strength that lets nothing near him. But even he is not immortal. Surround him on four sides and force him into a chain of fights with no end to it, and the limit arrives eventually.

“All units. Advance, quickly! Al may still be out there fighting alone!”

—I half knew this would happen.

He will try to save someone even at the cost of himself. For a victory, he will stake his own life without hesitating. That is the kind of person he is.

—I knew it already.

What choice he makes when the situation goes to its limit. I stood on the other side of the field as his enemy and watched him do it many times: broken all over and still going forward while his life lasted, thorough enough to want every enemy destroyed. Winning or losing, moving with the same unchanging strength to take the initiative of the battlefield.

“…He’s gone to cut down the Saint. I’m certain of it.”

The most efficient way to break the Order is the removal of its absolute leader, the Saint. He understands that, so he tried to bring this disaster to an end by the shortest road available, accepting the risk in front of him and throwing himself into the most dangerous ground there is.

“If we don’t hurry, we may not be in time…!”

No matter how many enemies surround him, however thoroughly his way is blocked, he cuts all of it down with one sword. How badly he is hurt in the course of that, how much it costs him. It aches just to imagine.

“Your Highness?!”

“Follow me! The enemy is still ahead!”

I ran flat out toward the noise. The white cloud covered everything and I could see nothing, but I could faintly hear the sound of his sword moving, alive, in the middle of a savage fight.

—Close. He’s fighting just there.

I could hear the screaming of men whose flesh was being opened. No end of magic was being thrown and bursting in countless places.

“That’s enough of—!”

“Hah!”

“Gaugh…”

—Found him!

“Al!”

I could see Aldia’s back, surrounded by a crowd of enemy soldiers and still putting them down one at a time, without fail. He reacted to my voice and turned only his eyes toward me.

“Rune-sama, why are you—?”

His attention went entirely to me, and in that moment a small opening appeared.

“Look out!”

A mass of magic bolts closing on him from behind. But he had heard me shout, and the instant he saw them he avoided every one with movements that wasted nothing.

“Damn it!”

“They’ve been reinforced. Re-form!”

Corps soldiers came up behind me one after another, and the Order’s soldiers who had been converging on Aldia broke their ring and began slowly to pull back.

“Your Highness, you ran off so suddenly, we didn’t know what had happened…”

The soldier was worried about me. And so many of them walked forward to put themselves in front of Aldia.

“There are so many of them…”

“No matter how many there are, we’ve only to put them down!”

“Sir Aldia. Forgive us for arriving late! Everyone, charge!”

He dropped the point of his sword toward the ground, looking rather dumbfounded.

“…I didn’t expect relief this soon.”

The face he had been wearing a moment ago belonged to a demon; now he looked considerably eased.

“Al. From here I’m fighting alongside you!”

“…Rune-sama has been fighting alongside me the whole time, surely.”

“Fufu. So I have.”

I laughed, and he gave me a gentle smile back and then set his sword at once.

“The Saint should be near here. I want to find her and bring her down…”

“Gaaah…!”

While he was explaining, two or three Corps soldiers were flung backward. Watching how little progress the others were making, it seemed there was a rather troublesome enemy to be dealt with before we could reach any Saint.

“…We can’t get to the Saint without killing that enormous White Serpent.”

A huge White Serpent, red-eyed, covered all over in pure white scales. Aldia ordered the other soldiers back and went forward alone.

“I’ll take the White Serpent. Rune-sama, please put down the enemies around us with the others, and the priest throwing the magic first of all.”

“Understood.”

When he had finished, the soldiers and I set our aim on the Order’s people standing to either side of the White Serpent.

“Now, forward!”

Everyone broke into a run at once, and with Aldia at the head of it avoiding the White Serpent’s headbutt and forcing a scale off those hard plates with his sword, the fighting between the two armies began.

10

The White Serpent moved in ways more troublesome than any hardened soldier I had ever fought, and nothing about them could be read by a man whose experience was all against people.

“…Hah… hah…”

The blows that came off that long tail were far too heavy; try to take one on the sword and I would be thrown bodily through the air, which left avoidance as the only option. But the strikes came one after another and never lost any of their force, and the only thing being worn away was my stamina.

“Hah!”

And when I did try to cut it down, those unyielding scales kept the serpent’s body safe. The risk was high, the return low, and the odds were against me. Even so, as things stood I was the only one who could hold this thing. Princess Valtrune excels at magic, but she isn’t built for close work, and there was, unfortunately, nobody else here who could stand against the White Serpent on even terms.

“Push in, all at once!”

Sending instructions in every direction, Princess Valtrune burned groups of the enemy down with fire, dulled their movement with ice, and built situations in which the soldiers at the front could fight with the advantage.

—If the rest of the enemy soldiers can be dealt with, this serpent gets easier.

“Kh!”

The tail came down and broke the ground open again, and even when I moved to avoid it the White Serpent came in to bite me anyway.

“Al!”

Its fangs had closed to the front of my face when Princess Valtrune’s magic struck the serpent’s head and burst. The head was scorched in red fire, and the white scales discolored slightly toward black.

“That helped. Thank you.”

“Never mind that. Is the thing still alive?”

“It is… and it still looks in good health.”

The serpent had taken everything she had in that working and merely flinched, and it resumed its attacks on me as though nothing had happened at all.

“Al. The enemy soldiers around us are nearly cleared. I’ll come and sup…”

“Your Highness, evade!”

“—!”

She bent her body back and a sharply angled piece of magic went past by the narrowest of margins, and the priest who had thrown it opened his eyes wide, startled by how supple she was and how well she moved.

“Oh dear. I was sure that one had landed…”

—A priest. And one who carries himself as though he has fought rather more than the others.

For a moment I had hoped for her support; with that priest there, she wouldn’t be able to give me any.

“Get in my way and I’ll show you no mercy.”

“That is precisely my line.”

She and the priest locked eyes, and she released everything she had. He threw his own at the same moment, and the two workings collided and blew a wide gust out across the ground.

“…Kh!”

“Cancelled out. I see.”

The Saint wasn’t the only capable one; this priest could handle magic of a power that gave nothing away to Princess Valtrune, and he was reasonably quick on his feet with it.

“Ha ha ha! I never imagined Her Highness the Princess would come and face me herself!”

“Be quiet. You die here, by my hand.”

“I wonder about that. We have the Saint’s White Serpent. It is your side that has no chance of winning!”

“—!”

The priest fired a mass of bolts at her. She stopped every one of them with a barrier, let out a long breath, and put a single answering shot into him.

“Returned!”

“An attack of that quality, hmph!”

He threw his own working to cancel it as before, but hers carried more force, and his shattered into pieces with a pale flare. The hand he had extended toward her was burned raw by the heat of it, and the pain pulled a short scream out of him.

“Gugh—?!”

—That side is settled.

He had fought well enough, but he was no match for magic as accomplished as hers. He landed on his back and struggled desperately to get up, and she sent soldiers over at once.

“…It’s finished. Give it up!”

“You… little girl.”

With a great many blades leveled at him, the priest drew his brows together in frustration.

“If you resist any further I’ll have no choice but to finish it… what will you do?”

“—The others. Where are…”

“I’m sorry to say there’s no one left but you.”

Snapped spears and swords stood up out of the ground everywhere, and the bodies of Order soldiers and other priests lay scattered across it among the reddened banners of the Order. Looking at that, the priest had no will to resist left in him.

“That can’t be… so many soldiers, in a moment like that.”

No matter how many times he blinked, the appalling view didn’t change.

“Take him away.”

“Sir!”

Everything but the White Serpent had been put down. And the serpent I was working on had begun to bleed in places, the hard scales pierced at last, perhaps because I had simply kept cutting at it and refused to stop.

“Al. Are you all right?”

“A little more and I can finish it!”

Its movements had begun to slow and the edge had gone off its attacks. Keep this up and eventually it would stop moving. I was building that hopeful little forecast and getting ready to press when…

“…Oh dear, you poor thing. That must have hurt terribly.”

“—?!”

The cloud that had covered everything began to thin, and the view cleared so beautifully that I could see the trees standing along the distant mountains. And at the same moment I felt magic more intense than anything I had ever felt in my life.

I still couldn’t see her, and my legs wouldn’t stop shaking. It was plain, straightforward fear.

Her footsteps snapped small fallen branches and pressed down dead leaves, and came steadily nearer.

“The priests were beaten by the Chosen, I see. And after I went to the trouble of lending them the White Serpent. What a very disappointing result.”

She said it as though heartbroken, and there wasn’t the slightest sadness anywhere in the voice. If anything she came toward us with a demure, unhurried step, like a woman who had been waiting for this.

—So she finally shows herself.

The White Serpent, covered in wounds, dragged itself weakly backward and buried its face somewhere around the midsection of the Saint’s black habit, and she stroked its enormous head with a gentle hand.

“That hurt, didn’t it… but it’s all right now. I am here to hold my hand out to you. There’s nothing to be frightened of.”

The Saint stood in an atmosphere that felt like something out of a scripture. I suppose that by rights one is meant to look at her and find her divine and beautiful and offer up worship. My first impression of her was of something unplaceable and deeply unpleasant. She appeared to be wearing a soft smile, and the backs of her eyes weren’t smiling at all, and the rise and fall of her voice sat slightly wrong against the way ordinary people speak.

“…Ah. They’ve all died, haven’t they. Not one soldier or believer left breathing. …And the priest is taken. You poor things, but it’s quite all right. Lord Svell will take vengeance for you, I think. Our Lord will not permit a foreign body that changes history… fufu. That means you.”

Without so much as guarding herself against me, she put her hands together for the dead of the Order, and then slowly raised her eyes to mine. I put the edge of my sword toward her.

“…And that’s the end of the entertainment. I did enjoy it very much.”

“Every one of your people is dead and you can still talk like that. Their dying means nothing to you, does it?”

The Saint looked steadily into me with eyes that seemed to be missing a soul.

“Death is salvation. The only way a person is released from the suffering of this world.”

There was a particular wrongness in that flat, unmodulated voice.

“I don’t understand how you feel about anything.”

“No, you wouldn’t… you were never able to escape the suffering of living. Tell me, how is the second life? Is it enjoyable? Or is defying fate painful work?”

“—!”

I didn’t answer. I drove the sword at her throat.

“Fufufu! Silence is your answer, then.”

“Be quiet…!”

The blade stopped short of her. However much force I put behind it, the invisible wall between us wouldn’t be pierced.

“You—!”

“Uhufu! That look, with the killing all through it. It makes me shiver!”

The Saint’s expression went to a mad kind of rapture, and she laid her index finger against her lips and whispered.

“…Bye-bye.”

“—Kh!”

The instant I heard it I felt my life in danger. I pulled my eyes off her clinging gaze, dragged the sword back out of its useless thrust, and threw myself backward as hard as I could, and felt the faintest blast against the soles of my feet.

What came into my vision as I retreated was numerous bursts of gold light. The explosion tore the space itself open without any mercy in it, reduced everything nearby to nothing, and left only black ash behind. If I had stayed standing in front of her, my body would have been scattered in pieces.

“This woman…”

“Oh my. What good instincts for danger you have. Congratulations on surviving!”

There was a cruelty hidden in that innocent laugh that had nothing to do with any saint.

“Sir Aldia!”

“We’re joining in!”

As I fell back, Corps soldiers moved up to take my place against her. And from that one instant I had already understood that they had no chance.

“W-wait, all of you—!”

“Haaaaah!”

“Seyaaa—!”

My voice didn’t reach them, and they went straight at her, soldiers with swords and spears charging one after another for her neck.

“I’m sorry. I have no interest in you… goodbye.”

Before any of them could bring a weapon down, blue fire ignited on the inside of their armor.

“Gyaaaah!”

“It’s hot…”

There is no preparing for an attack like that. All I could do was watch soldiers burn in blue fire and writhe.

“The Saint uses a special power! Stop these reckless charges!”

Princess Valtrune raised the warning after seeing how easily they had been killed. Even the others seemed to grasp how far the difference in strength ran, and they slowly backed away and put distance between themselves and the Saint.

“Al. It looks as though nobody but the two of us can fight her.”

“Rune-sama, please fall back as well. That woman is dangerous.”

“No. I’m probably the only one who can meet a Saint’s magic on level terms… she may well be an opponent you can’t beat by yourself, don’t you think?”

She was right. My sword had ended without reaching her, and if anything could stand against the Saint’s magic, it was Princess Valtrune and her command of high-order workings.

“You truly mean to fight?”

She nodded and threw up layer upon layer of barrier, a defensive posture. From the strain in her face I could read the thought behind it: whatever else happened, she must not take one of the Saint’s heavier blows.

“The Saint uses magic with power well past what a person should have. This may amount to no more than comfort, but I think it will let us weather some of it.”

Her will was firm. I gave up on persuading her and swore instead to bring the Saint down together with her.

“Every technique I have is turned aside. How do we kill her?”

“The Saint is presumably using a defensive working of the same family as a barrier… to strip magic away you either keep hitting it until it breaks by force, or you interfere with the art constructing it and erase it. There’s no third method.”

Both of them looked difficult to realize. But if hammering away at it could break the enemy’s working, that was worth a wager.

“…Then I’ll keep putting the sword into her and break the barrier down.”

“And I’ll wear it away with magic wherever I can!”

Facing us, the Saint stood there with a composed expression, waiting patiently for our discussion to finish.

“She looks entirely at her ease.”

Carrying herself in a way designed to make you feel she couldn’t possibly lose. The composure of the genuinely strong, I suppose.

“I will strip that barrier off her!”

I started walking toward a Saint who had still not lost any of her calm.

“…Oh, is the council of war over? Then do struggle for me, with your life on it.”

She sent the White Serpent back behind her and walked toward me completely unguarded.

“Hah!”

“Fufufu!”

The strike was turned aside, of course. Each step the Saint took forward pushed me a step back.

—She’s strong in a contest of pure force, too.

I had assumed the problem was simply that attacks wouldn’t land. In fact there was an unmeasurable weight behind every step she took. The ground dented deeply under her, and the shock traveled up through my feet into my body. Enormous strength, entirely at odds with how frail she looked, and far heavier than anything the White Serpent had put on me.

“Oh my. Is that really the best you have?”

“Who can say…!”

Pushed back the whole way, I kept swinging desperately. Her barrier didn’t so much as twitch; it was like working against a great steel shield. The sword threw sparks and was knocked away, and as my balance tipped backward, Princess Valtrune shouted.

“Al, get your head down!”

“Hmm.”

The bolt she had packed with every scrap of magic she had was turned aside with a single sideways sweep of the Saint’s hand and burst harmlessly off its new course.

Honestly, the Saint is of a different order. If everything I had fought until now was a person, she could only be described as an omniscient, omnipotent monster wearing the shape of a small woman.

“…A fine working. But it still isn’t enough.”

“What strength…”

She was a genuine final enemy. She yawned, rubbed one eye, and smiled.

“You are trying to change fate, and you cannot even beat someone like me… in that case, striking Lord Svell down and throwing a stone into the history of ruin is quite impossible for you.”

As though laughing at me, she floated an enormous volume of magic into the air and swung her arm down toward us.

“I wonder whether you can block this, as you are now?”

It was plainly not a thing that could be blocked, a mass of energy that would kill on contact, or melt part of a body away in an instant. It was far too late to move to avoid it, so I decided the sword would have to serve, planted my feet, and dropped my hips.

“I won’t allow it!”

Princess Valtrune spread a great barrier around me, an instant before that mass of magic swallowed me.

“Oh my… your timing really is always very good.”

Her barriers are extremely solid. But cracks began to run through the one in front of me, and then, with a shock loud enough to split the ear, it came apart into small hard fragments.

“No!”

“Kh…!”

Her barrier hadn’t been enough. The mass of magic came to the front of me and swallowed my whole body.

—It burns!

A sharp pain, as though every part of me were being held in a fire. And then my sight went black.

“Al!”

I could hear Princess Valtrune’s grieving cry. And from the other side, the delighted voice of the Saint, smiling like something base.

“Ahahahaha! I told you, it isn’t enough to defy fate!”

“You couldn’t protect what you wanted to protect, you couldn’t accomplish what you set out to do, and now you lose all of it… and your princess will be killed by me too, because you died pointlessly and did nothing. Ah, the poor thing. It’s all because you were weak, you see?”

The Saint raised her voice a little, as though scolding me for it. I couldn’t answer any of it, and I let gravity have me and closed my eyes.

—You have to be joking. Do I end here?

I fought fate and took hold of a place at Princess Valtrune’s side. From here she is supposed to come through the succession and become the hope that leads the Empire. And am I going to die before I see any of it?

“…No. No, I’m not.”

“…Hm?”

There is no possibility of my ending here. I want to overturn that worst of all futures and hand her quiet days she can live through, laughing. To do that, I still have enemies of hers to kill.

I can’t go out with things left undone. The moment I thought it, the agony running through my body vanished cleanly, and in its place something black boiled up from the floor of me.

—This is hatred. Hostility. Killing intent. Fury.

Everything negative I had toward that woman doing exactly as she pleased came up at once and out.

“…I’ll kill you. You above all. I will kill you!”

I swept the mass of magic around me away with my bare hands. My eyes had one thing in them: the Saint, still laughing at me as I writhed.

“Oh my… fufu. At last. Your true ability, I think.”

“…I’ll kill you, I won’t forgive you, I’ll break every part of you!”

I had no interest left in listening to a word she said. My sight was dyed red, and it focused on one place only, the front of her chest, where the heart is.

“I’ll dig that filthy little life out of you!”

“Ahahaha! Yes. Wonderful!”

The Saint’s face went rapt and the words came out of her fast.

“Yes. Yes! The heart is the source of power… the stronger the feeling, the more the power grows, without limit. You’ve finally learned how to handle it!”

—Nothing the Saint said was even reaching my ears.

In fact I could hear nothing at all. There was only the ugly desire to break the enemy in front of me into a wet ruin.

11

Burned by the Saint’s magic, Aldia went down in agony. I had tried to stop it with a barrier of my own, and the Saint had simply been a step above me.

If this went on he was going to die, and everything inside my head went white.

“…A… l.”

I put a hand to my mouth and found I couldn’t move from where I stood. The strength went entirely out of my knees and I folded down onto the ground where I was.

I was terrified of the moment when I would no longer be able to hear Aldia’s heart beating. A hollow, opened-out feeling, like a hole punched through the middle of me, the appalling thing you taste when you are losing what matters most.

“No. No… nooooo!”

The tears wouldn’t stop coming. My sight blurred, and I couldn’t properly look at him lying completely still. Faced with a reality I wanted to turn away from, I covered my ears.

“I can’t bear this…”

When did I become such a weak person? I have lost people I was close to before and never once come apart like this. I am imperial blood, with politics wound through everything, and one or two of the people who serve nearby have always simply disappeared.

And yet here I was. Why does it hurt this much?

“…Don’t leave me behind. You promised, didn’t you… that you would stay beside me to the end.”

—I refuse to accept an ending like this!

I am not living this life over in order to repeat a tragedy. I am holding on to what I want to protect with everything I have and fighting fate so that all of it survives into a new future.

“…Al isn’t going to die. He’s my personal knight.”

I hadn’t given up. There had to be something I could do; healing magic would surely get him back on his feet.

I was about to work a healing on him when the fingers of his fallen hand moved, very slightly. His breathing, which had stopped, came back, and he slowly stood up.

—Thank goodness. He’s alive!

I was so glad I got to my feet to run to him. But the man swaying on his feet with a sword in his hand, facing the Saint, had something entirely unlike him about him.

“…What? Al?”

“I’ll kill you. You above all. I will kill you!”

“—!”

The instant he forced those words out, something like a black haze began to rise from around his feet.

This wasn’t an ordinary thing. A moment ago he had been looking after me, meeting my eyes. Now he didn’t glance in my direction at all; instead he began walking slowly toward the Saint.

“Oh my… fufu. At last. Your true ability, I think.”

—How can she be so unconcerned?!

Nothing about Aldia’s strange condition made the Saint flinch. If anything, the magic circulating through her seemed to have become more active for it.

“…I’ll kill you, I won’t forgive you, I’ll break every part of you! I’ll dig that filthy little life out of you!”

“Ahahaha! Yes. Wonderful!”

Aldia kept advancing on her wrapped in that black, malevolent aura.

“Yes. Yes! The heart is the source of power… the stronger the feeling, the more the power grows, without limit. You’ve finally learned how to handle it!”

The Saint threw a great deal of magic at him almost the way one offers a greeting.

“…That much doesn’t work on me anymore.”

He didn’t avoid any of it. He took every piece of it on his body and his walking pace never dropped, and the Saint put both hands to her cheeks and smiled with her whole face.

“Fufu, how lovely. It’s as though I can feel what you feel… anger, grief, hatred… negative feeling strong enough and thick enough to freeze a spine. More. It still isn’t enough… like that you’ll never reach Lord Svell, you know?”

I don’t know why. But I had the sense that if I let him go on like this, something would happen that couldn’t be undone.

It was true that as he was now, he might be able to bring the Saint down. It looked as though he had laid hands on some strange, enormous power I had never seen, and he was taking magic he had been struggling merely to avoid a moment ago full on the body, without hesitating, and still walking.

By rights the priority was to leave it to him and let him kill her. But the anxiety crawling around at the bottom of me wouldn’t run out, and it dulled my will.

“Al… wait.”

So I called his name, without meaning to, and tried to stop him walking. Because on any other day he would have turned at once and listened to me with that beautiful posture of his.

But…

“You are Rune-sama’s enemy… I am not letting you go home alive!”

My voice didn’t reach the man he was now.

“Ahaha! You’re very nearly a lunatic… you’re drowning in the power, you know?”

“Be quiet!”

Aldia swung at the Saint with a speed the eye couldn’t follow. She moved to turn it aside with a barrier as though that were simply what happened, and in under a second the barrier she had raised shattered into powder.

“It’s over—!”

He said it with the certainty of a man who had won, and the Saint still lifted a corner of her mouth, unshaken.

“…You’ve shown me something good. But it’s incomplete.”

“—What?!”

She laid an index finger against the point of his sword, and the black aura wrapped around him scattered and disappeared.

“…Why…”

“Why, is it… because that power is a counterfeit.”

The Saint said it in a cold voice and raised a hard wind that drove Aldia back.

“…The feelings that grow a great power are always unstable. That is why they are so easily swallowed by miasma. Want power to excess and it will destroy you eventually.”

She set something on her palm, a jewel of some kind that threw off a holy light.

“People are terribly foolish. They will break their own hearts to get power… and are swallowed down into the pit without ever noticing the mistake.”

She rose slowly into the air, and gathered a great deal of magic again.

“That negative feeling you hold… is it truly the strongest thing in you?”

“What are you trying to say?”

“The feeling you took hold of was incomplete… frail, and temporary. Do you really believe a borrowed thing like that will make you strongest?”

It wasn’t a question that wanted an answer. She probably had a definite one of her own.

“Your power is certainly strong… strong enough to strike back at me once. But the power is incomplete. It is wrong. What you should truly want is a quite different feeling. As you are, you will not be able to defy fate.”

She raised her arm and murmured, sounding sad about it.

“I had such very great expectations of you… how disappointing.”

A pillar of light large enough to blow the ground apart all around us. Burned by that, he wouldn’t survive it a second time.

“…I won’t allow it. I have my own stubbornness about protecting the person who matters to me!”

I concentrated every scrap of magic in my body. I didn’t care if I lost consciousness; if I could cancel the working that would hurt him, I would pay any price at all.

“Fuu… haa…”

A barrier gets shattered. So what else is there? Put something into it with more force than the Saint’s own and set it off early. That is all.

“Now. It’s over.”

“You are the one who is finished!”

For an instant the world was covered in blinding light. My ears rang so hard that no sound reached them at all. The ground came apart underneath and my consciousness thinned.

—I gave it everything, to the end. What happens now happens.

I had spent all of it, and I fell onto my back.

“Foolish Chosen who defy fate. Let us meet again before very long.”

The last thing I heard from the Saint sounded like a pure promise of another meeting, with not even any irony in it.

I had no answer to give her. Only… whether I had managed to protect Aldia.

That was the one thing on my mind.

12

My body was heavy, and the strength felt as though it had been taken out of it. I sensed death coming while I was unable to move at all, and what threw that danger back was Princess Valtrune’s magic.

“Now. It’s over.”

“You are the one who is finished!”

The Saint’s working and Princess Valtrune’s collided and threw sparks in every direction. The Saint’s was visibly the larger of the two, but Princess Valtrune’s went in sharp and drove straight through it.

“…Fufu. Not bad at all.”

Her magic kept going, flying straight at the Saint. The Saint showed no intention of giving ground; she simply raised a palm toward it, and when she closed her hand as though crushing something, Princess Valtrune’s working gave off a pale light and ceased to exist.

—Damn it. I still can’t move.

Not one finger of the hand holding my sword would answer me. The Saint looked down at me for a while and then turned on her heel.

“Foolish Chosen who defy fate. Let us meet again before very long.”

“…Wait!”

She sent the White Serpent down into the ground, and was herself wrapped in gold particles and gone in an instant.

“Damn it, where did she—?!”

That the Saint had vanished by magic was certain. I looked around in case she had hidden herself somewhere nearby, and there was no figure anywhere, not even that overwhelming presence of hers. In every direction all I could see was forest wrecked by the White Serpent, and Princess Valtrune lying unconscious on the ground.

“…So I let her get away. No.”

I steadied my breathing and put the sword back in its sheath. This wasn’t a case of the Saint escaping me. The accurate way to describe it is that my opponent withdrew, miraculously, because if she had kept fighting, I had no chance of winning at all.

“…I couldn’t do anything.”

The moment the danger left, I felt anger at my own uselessness. In that fight I hadn’t put so much as a scratch on the Saint; I had only had my life protected by Princess Valtrune. I had gone at it with everything I had in me, and the result was a complete defeat.

“Rune-sama… I’m sorry.”

I put Princess Valtrune, still with her eyes closed, on my back and left the place.

With the Saint’s withdrawal, the Order’s army had pulled out of the Dyrst region entirely. The forest was quiet. Our own soldiers had fallen back beyond the reach of the Saint’s attacks, so I made for where they were.

“…Al?”

As I walked slowly back the way we had come, she regained consciousness almost at once.

“I’m glad you’re awake. The Saint left, thanks to you. There’s no threat here now.”

“The Saint left… I see. So we couldn’t kill her.”

“I’m sorry. My strength wasn’t sufficient.”

“None of that is your fault. Nobody could have predicted the Saint would be that strong.”

She pressed her face into my back.

“…You being alive is enough for me. That on its own is enough.”

I couldn’t answer that. She wanted the threat of the Saint removed more than anyone, and she told me that my being alive was all she needed.

Fighting to protect Princess Valtrune is the only thing I can do. Which makes being completely outmatched by a Saint feel that much more shameful.

“…Next time I will bring her down. Without fail.”

I said it quietly, and she answered ‘Yes’ in a gentle voice.

“But for now we’ve driven the Order’s army off. That result is enough.”

“Yes. Which leaves the Kingdom’s army…”

We had forced the Order’s advance into a retreat, but the Kingdom’s army was still sitting in the Dyrst region, and as long as we could hear the roar of magic colliding, the fighting wasn’t over.

“Rune-sama. May I go and support them, late as it is?”

Even handling the magic tools well, the Corps was overwhelmingly outnumbered and would be having a hard time of it.

“Of course. Ritziareite will be glad of you.”

She took my meaning and agreed immediately.

“And what will you do, Rune-sama?”

“Well. In truth I would like to return to the operations post myself…”

“You’ll secure the area.”

“Yes. There’s no presence here now, but that isn’t the same as this whole area being safe.”

She got down off my back and stood beside me.

“I’ll take the soldiers we have left and survey the area, to find out what the Order was actually after. Don’t worry about it, go and support the Corps.”

Then she gave a light wave to the soldiers coming toward us at a run. Men who hadn’t given a step to a host with all the numbers on its side. Yes, I could leave her with them.

“…Understood. Then I’ll go.”

“I’ll send a few of the dragon-mount soldiers with you. Take care, and come back.”

With Princess Valtrune seeing me off, I took three riders and headed for the plain where the fighting was. I swore quietly, in the bottom of myself, that I would make up here what I had failed to contribute against the Saint.

13

Since going back through time, I have come through one desperate situation after another. After founding the Provisional Elite Corps, large battles came at a headlong rush.

The old me believed that the period after graduating the academy would be a quiet one. Then I began acting in earnest to fight fate, and ran into power struggles among the nobility, a civil conflict, and feuds in an underworld I had known nothing about, and was shown to a painful degree how unstable my own position was.

“…………”

—And now another one. The truth about the Order’s invasion, which I never knew, has come to light.

“Your Highness! We inspected the possessions of the dead priests and found these!”

What the soldier held were Divine Demon Orbs, presumably stolen from the workings. And not one of them, either; several of the people who looked like priests had been carrying them.

“Would this be the Order’s reason for attacking the Dyrst region?”

“You mean they sent an army on this scale to get their hands on the ‘Divine Demon Orb,’ the rare gem that can only be taken in this part of the Empire?”

“I don’t know their real intent, but I think that line is the strong one.”

In the end there was no deep meaning behind the Svell Order’s reason for invading in this fight. They simply wanted to keep the Divine Demon Orbs of this land for themselves.

—But is that truly all of it?

The Order committed the Saint Reshia herself. They must have wanted to win this battle by any means. And yet the Saint abandoned the Order’s soldiers and withdrew as casually as that.

At the last moment, the person controlling that battlefield was without question the Saint Reshia. Aldia’s sword didn’t reach her, all of my magic was cancelled, and both of the Divine Beasts on the Order’s side were unharmed.

“…Why?”

She had the option of pressing until she had destroyed us completely. Instead of withdrawing, she could have broken all of it with a Saint’s power. And she did not.

‘Foolish Chosen who defy fate. Let us meet again before very long.’

Words promising another meeting. And for one instant I saw the woman who is supposed to be our enemy smiling, and enjoying herself.

—The Saint doesn’t consider this battle a defeat. Did she accomplish what she came for?

I can’t understand the real intent of a Saint who withdrew in good spirits.

“I don’t understand it…”

“Sorry?”

“…Talking to myself. Never mind.”

The mystery only deepens. She knew the world in which we were destroyed. She held the same memories. If that is so, has she also died once and come back here? Was she moving to remove us, the Chosen, for throwing history out of true?

…No. If that were it, withdrawing from a position that favorable makes no sense.

‘The heart is the source of power… the stronger the feeling, the more the power grows, without limit.’

Does the Saint know something detailed about the particular power Aldia has?

‘…The feelings that grow a great power are always unstable. That is why they are so easily swallowed by miasma. Want power to excess and it will destroy you eventually.’

In the middle of the fight, the Saint stopped Aldia’s raised sword with one hand, and in that same moment the black aura clinging around him cleared entirely. She dispersed the special power he was trying to use, by some method of her own.

In that moment… honestly, I was relieved. I had been afraid he was about to be swallowed by that black aura.

‘Your power is certainly strong… strong enough to strike back at me once. But the power is incomplete. It is wrong. What you should truly want is a quite different feeling. As you are, you will not be able to defy fate.’

—Why did the Saint say a thing like that?

Rather than genuinely trying to kill Aldia, she spent a great deal of that fight talking to him. She seemed to be adjusting her own strength to sit near our limit and fighting us as a test. There was even a margin in her, enough to admonish him while he was running out of control and instruct him in the handling of his power.

“Why did the Saint leave us alone and go? She could have continued the invasion of the Dyrst region single-handed. Her pulling out makes no sense.”

The Order’s objective wasn’t achieved, and she showed no particular sign of being troubled by that.

There were a number of contradictions in the Saint’s behavior. She fixed on Aldia’s power and on mine, and treated the invasion of Dyrst and the destruction of the Provisional Elite Corps as secondary.

However long I turn it over, I can’t read what she intends.

The mystery has only grown deeper.