THSK Vol. 4 Chapter 3

Chapter 3 – Rematch of the Strongest and the Most Feared

1

Kingdom Calendar Year 1241, October.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Your consideration humbles me.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Heh. You do say the nicest things!”

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes. See to it as arranged.”

“Yes.”

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

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

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

“About time to set out?”

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

“Aye aye, leave it to me, big bro.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Al! Time to move out soon!”

“You’re being called, big bro.”

“Ah… I know.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Snakes…”

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

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

2

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

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

“Not here.”

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

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

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

“This looks to be turning tiresome.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“…Fuu. What am I thinking, I wonder.”

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

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

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

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

3

“Then let us set out for the harbor city of Nocto.”

When the driver of the carriage that bore Emperor Valtrune and me cracked his whip, the carriage began to move slowly. The forty-odd cavalry arrayed around it started forward all at once, matching the carriage’s pace.

“So we’re off at last.”

Her profile as she watched the scenery through the window looked a touch uneasy.

“Something on your mind?”

“I worry about the ones who went to the Philnotes and Theresia fronts. That’s all it is.”

“And any unease about going to the Republic?”

“Not much of that. If anything, I’m looking forward to seeing Raquel. …Is she keeping well, I wonder.”

“I’m sure Lady Raquel is looking forward to your visit too, Rune-sama.”

“I hope so.”

It seemed she felt no unease about the talks with the Republic. Her first diplomacy as Emperor. It wouldn’t be strange to be a little nervous, but the joy of reuniting with an old friend outweighed any worry over the diplomacy. Ordinarily she was a woman strung taut as Emperor at every hour. Harder days than this surely lay ahead of her. So I hoped this diplomacy with the Republic would prove a meaningful thing for her.

“Before we board the ship for the Republic, I expect we’ll spend one day in Nocto.”

“For the guards who’d traveled by horse, a sea voyage straight afterward would be a hard thing to bear.”

“Yes. After discussing it with Lord Rudolf, it’s a stay to account for the fatigue of long travel.”

Consideration for her condition went without saying, but the escort’s condition, too, had to be kept above a certain level. It was to forestall the case where, at the crucial moment, fatigue or ill health left them unable to fight.

Through the window, the countless cavalry. For now they had room to spare in body and spirit, and one could see riders near one another chatting and laughing, but the more time passed, the more surely even these hardy men would wear down.

“If we could take it as given nothing would happen, there’d be no problem pushing them and setting out at once.”

“It’d be a trouble to have them break down aboard ship, too.”

I wanted them to fill their role as her guard in full. Nodding back at Rune-sama’s words of concern, I watched Rudolf outside, hoisting his sword high to the sky in high spirits.

“…He, at least, looks to need no rest.”

“He does seem to have inexhaustible stamina.”

A division commander of the Imperial army, no less. He even had the leisure to swing his sword about for no reason, and the soldiers around him kept a slight, wary distance from him.

“Is he always like that?”

“Watching him enjoy himself puts the heart back in you, doesn’t it?”

“Well… somehow it feels like you’d have to add Steano and Ambros together and not divide by two to get it.”

A bold, boisterous temperament. And on top of it, a hard-charging vanguard type in a fight. The very picture of the kind who racks up battle after battle in raw physical combat.

“In a close-quarters trial of strength, I don’t think he’d let anyone come after him.”

“I know it well. I killed him in the previous timeline.”

In the previous timeline, I’d taken his life on the battlefield. Rudolf, who had mowed down so many soldiers, gave the Kingdom no small trouble. There was little of the feint-laced movement that reads an opponent’s tricks, but his charging force and the weight of a single blow were such that if you couldn’t parry them cleanly, your limbs would break with ease.

“Did you fight him one on one?”

“No. Their side was Epika and him, the two of them. It wasn’t just me on ours, mind.”

Epika and Rudolf. To take on these two great pillars of the Imperial army, the Kingdom’s side had needed to gather men who could fight them accordingly. In the earliest stage of the war, that the Imperial army won victories across the map and expanded its territory owed itself, wholly, to the two of them fighting hard. The sudden swelling of held territory made it impossible to keep supply lines maintained, and that told, and the momentum gradually waned, but the sense that these were people who could not be left alone held firm and unbroken inside the Kingdom too.

“The battle specialists called the Kingdom’s Ten Elites… three of them, plus me, four all told, went at it, and somehow we brought the two down.”

It was a fierce fight. Three of the ten renowned across the Kingdom for their skill had been thrown into it, no less. In the war between Kingdom and Empire, how fiercely Rudolf and Epika had raged, that alone conveyed it well enough.

To add to it, of the three of the Ten who went to fight the two, two died in the midst of it, and the third gave out just after the fight ended. So I did not doubt Rudolf’s strength in the slightest.

“As a guard he’d look, if anything, like excess strength.”

“The feeling being it’s a waste to use an Imperial army division commander to watch over one person?”

“Most people, I think, would say he ought to be sent to the Theresia region or the Philnotes front, put to reinforcing a main line.”

“That’s so. I thought to do that at first, too. But more than I’d reckoned at the start, suspicious movements have grown thick around me.”

But that was only the general view. In a present where domestic affairs were so tense, keeping a firm defensive strength beside the Emperor was by no means wrong. Because those who found her existence a hindrance, who wished her gone, were beyond counting. Having set her hand to political reform and brought a cleansing action to the Empire’s stagnant, rotten state apparatus, she was, to those who’d enjoyed the old vested interests, nothing but a thorn in their side. Once they’d marked her as a being who might threaten the unshakable positions they’d built, they’d want her dragged down from the Emperor’s seat by any means at all.

“To have your life hunted from within rather than by an outside enemy is trouble of the worst kind…”

“I’ve accepted this too, as the fate of having become Emperor. And if anything happens, you’ll protect me, won’t you. So the worry isn’t so very great.”

She spun the trust-filled words out naturally and laid a hand on my head.

“You’re my personal knight, and my pride.”

Held by the beautiful blue eyes peering into mine, all I could do was keep silently watching her smile.

4

The road passed with no accident of being set upon by anything, and we drew steadily nearer the harbor city of Nocto. Just sitting in the carriage, holding the same posture without cease, was harder than you’d expect. She stretched a little too, and kept casting her eyes over the scenery outside.

“Shall we take a short rest soon?”

“Yes. I’d like to breathe the outside air once.”

“Then I’ll give the signal to stop.”

I put my face out the window and waved lightly to Rudolf, who was riding abreast a little behind the carriage. Noticing my signal at once, he bellowed, ‘Halt the march!’

“Ow…”

“What’s the matter, Al?”

“Nothing. I didn’t think he’d give the order to halt the unit in a shout, so I flinched and knocked my head.”

I’d assumed he controlled the whole body’s movements with some easy-to-read hand gesture or the like. Made to hear a sudden, unexpected shout, I’d gone and struck my head on the upper window frame.

“Is the spot you hit all right?”

“Yes. I’m fine.”

I set a hand to the dully aching back of my head and slowly drew it in from the window.

“Do you need healing magic?”

“No, that’s quite all right. Or rather, absolutely please don’t.”

For the Emperor to work healing magic herself on a personal knight who’d hurt himself, startled by Rudolf’s volume, was a thing that could not be right even for appearances’ sake. Or rather, it was just far too embarrassing. To trouble her hand over something so trivial, as her personal knight, was a thing I could not permit though heaven and earth turned over.

“Are you truly sure? You needn’t hold back.”

“No, it isn’t holding back, it’s a matter of a personal knight’s sense of order.”

“Is it? Well, if you’re all right, then that’s fine.”

Not a shred of dignity to it. Perhaps I’d gone soft in the peace, too much at ease. If it stayed this quiet all the way to Nocto, we’d arrive an hour ahead of schedule.

“Rune-sama, I’ll step away a moment.”

“Yes.”

I got out of the carriage, and when I traded a glance with her she caught my meaning and headed toward Rudolf and the others.

“Thank you for your work this far. Your fine, orderly ranks let me feel safe the whole road.”

“I am honored by your praise.”

“I’m counting on you as far as Nocto, just so.”

“Yes!”

Rudolf and the escort, addressed with words of thanks by the Emperor herself, reacted with tremendous delight.

“Oh. Getting all happy at being praised by Lady Valtrune.”

Fadi poked his face out from behind me, laid a hand on my shoulder, and watched Rune-sama and Rudolf and the rest with an interested eye.

“Naturally. There’s no one alive who’d be handed words by her and not be glad.”

“Boss… take it that far and there’s nothing for it but to call you a blind believer.”

“I don’t mind. I’m a blind believer because I like it.”

“He up and admitted to being a blind believer…”

I was aware I believed in her blindly. Or rather, from Linos, whose face I met so often now in daily business, I was constantly told, ‘You’re infatuated with her.’ But I didn’t think that a bad thing.

“People believe what they want to believe.”

“What’s that. Sounds like a line you’d find written in the scriptures of the Svell faith.”

“Religion, gods, a lord, parents, a lover… what people believe in differs from one to the next, and its depth differs by the person too.”

For me, the thing I could believe in without condition happened to be her, that was all. Had I never met her, there’d have been a world-line where I put my faith in something else, I supposed.

“Just as you trust Dorothea, Fadi, I believe the things Rune-sama does are right.”

“I see. So it’s the same as Dorothea plotting a riot inside the hospital because she couldn’t smoke for a few days.”

“Well, close to that… also, the riot business, in detail later.”

“Yeah. I’d been meaning to talk to you about it at some point too, big bro.”

I’d meant to be talking about the things one believes in, but with Fadi’s confession my attention had been carried off completely. What trivial reason was that woman about to run riot over… When we got back from the Republic visit, it seemed I’d have to hold a hearing.

“So, Fadi. About Nocto.”

The matter of Dorothea starting a riot at the hospital waiting ahead I’d deal with later; what mattered was how things stood with the peace and order of the harbor city of Nocto. When I asked, he threw out his chest as if he’d been waiting and cleared his throat.

“The ones I sent ahead seem to be watching the town, but there’s no suspicious movement so far. Peace itself, they say.”

“Is that so. Keep at it.”

For the moment, no danger factor had been confirmed in Nocto, which left me feeling a delicate mix, relieved and uneasy both.

“Huh. Not too happy about it?”

“No, it isn’t that… I was thinking that if we knew there was a danger, we could lay countermeasures for it.”

“True, having no information at all makes you more uneasy, if anything.”

“It isn’t that I doubt your people’s ability, Fadi. It’s only that at every moment I turn over every possibility and brace for the worst.”

That the unease never ran dry was because, over Rune-sama’s safety, I myself had become extremely anxiety-ridden. However much I prepared, somewhere in my heart I could not wipe the worry clean. Perhaps because I’d witnessed her death once, the same scene as that time flashed back on me at odd moments.

If you lose her again, you’re finished. There was a self within me that spoke it to me like an admonition. Become a personal knight, improve my sword-arm however far, and only this weak heart I could not change. It was the weakness at my very foundation.

“Boss. You’re scared, aren’t you.”

“Yeah.”

“Not of a fight, is it… you always fight like your own life doesn’t matter. Actually there are times you look downright thrilled by a nasty fight.”

Fadi had grasped, too, that my weak point was her. When the thing one believes in is lost, what does a person feel? The answer was simple. Cling forever to what’s lost, and in time be ruined.

I fell silent and swallowed my voice in the back of my throat. As I felt the warmth of my whole body drop clear to my fingertips, Fadi, his red hair swaying, turned a sharp, cutting gaze toward where Nocto lay.

“…Listen. It’s not my place, a brat like me saying it, but sink in too deep and you might get badly burned.”

In that instant, a gust of wind struck the spot. Dead leaves fallen to the ground scattered up and vanished into the far sky, as if laughing at me.

“I’m glad you’re worried about me.”

Along with my thanks to him, my answer to the excess of concern was already decided.

“But I don’t intend to lose Rune-sama.”

“Even if you don’t intend it, a time to lose her might come. And when it does… what then?”

If I failed to protect her through and lost her life. In that case, then surely, I would—

“…Throw everything away, I suppose.”

“That’s—”

The unease on Fadi’s face deepened. There was no way I’d think about what came after losing her. Rather, there was no need to. Because in a world without her, I’d surely have found no value in myself.

“…Don’t tell me you’d die?”

“…There’ll be no losing her. If it came to losing her—”

I’d die in her place. That was the duty of a blind believer.

5

Thirty minutes before Valtrune’s party reached Nocto.

The ones dashing frantically along the forest road were Fadi’s subordinates. Rolling on the ground behind those who fled were the corpses of the comrades who had, until moments ago, moved with them.

“Scatter and run!”

“Guh…”

“One more of us is down… gyaah!”

Against the fleeing figures, a merciless rain of arrows poured down. Not pinpoint, but the sharp downpour reaped the runners’ lives without fail.

“Damn. Where the hell did they crawl out from?!”

“How should I know. But before I knew it there were Order soldiers all over the town… gah!!”

“H-hey!”

A spray of bright-red droplets danced into the air. A shot from behind. The pointed arrow ran clean through the right shoulder of the woman fleeing with the man and drove deep into the trunk of a tree ahead.

“I-it hurts it hurts hurts hurts hurts!!”

“Don’t thrash. I’ll stop the bleeding now—”

“Hot, hurts, itches… I can’t, breathe…!”

Holding down the thrashing woman, the man pressed cloth to the wound, but the red seeping through it gradually consumed the whole of the cloth.

“Hang on. If we just stop the blood you can still run!”

The man called to her desperately, but she was already in no state to lend an ear to a voice. Foam at her mouth, the whites of her eyes rolling up, the woman wrung out her last strength to shape one thing.

“…Ahh… it hurts, so much.”

It spoke of a pain great enough to draw tears. Writhing and convulsing in agony, the woman lost at last even the will to thrash, and her thin breath in time gave out completely.

“Damn it. Poison, was it…”

The shoulder wound was not, by itself, a fatal one. But smeared into the arrowhead, apart from blood, was some black liquid thing. Staunching the bleeding meant nothing. A deadly poison that, at the barest graze of flesh, coursed through the whole body.

The man laid the dead woman’s head on his knee, looked up at the sky, and let out a sigh as if giving up.

“…So this is where we die.”

A voice heavy with the resentment one feels at an unreasonable death. The moment he’d finished his lament, arrows just like the ones that had killed the woman sprouted at scores of points across his body, and in an instant his breath, too, gave out.

The forest road lost its screams and the footfalls parting the grass alike, and silence took their place. The scouting party, wiped out. The suspicious band stirring in Nocto, the city Aldia and the others were bound for, cut people down without hesitation, and in numbers. It was cold-bloodedness itself.

6

The instant we set foot on that ground, a strange air drifted even into the carriage.

“Stop!”

At Her Majesty’s single word the carriage jolted to a halt, and Rudolf and the others began to sharpen their watch on the surroundings. The single road leading to Nocto. We’d come to where, once through the forest track, the port could be seen at a glance, but plainly there was something off about the state of things around us.

“…Al. We’re getting out.”

“Yes.”

When we stepped down from the carriage, Rudolf came over at once and, brow furrowed, let out a long breath.

“Lady Valtrune. Seems we’ve come to Nocto at one hell of a time.”

“So it seems.”

The source of the strangeness was found soon enough.

“Commander! There’s a foul smell from the grass over there!”

“Don’t go near it carelessly! I’ll check.”

A foul smell, one of the soldiers called it, but plainly it was the reek of blood. Rune-sama and I traded a look and nodded.

“…This is likely.”

“Yes. Someone’s dead.”

It wouldn’t be a passerby who’d chanced to collapse and die. Because plainly, without an external cause, without being killed, a thing wouldn’t bleed like this.

“…Ugh. This is grim.”

Rudolf parted the grass, stepped into the thicket, covered his mouth with a hand, and went pale in the face. The source of the reek of blood. It was a well-built man whose arm had, savagely, been bitten clean off.

“Who is it?”

“Beats me. Only thing that’s sure is he’s not from around here.”

Rudolf turned over the badly damaged corpse.

“…Be nice if he had something to show who he was.”

“It won’t be so convenient, I expect.”

For all the search of the body from corner to corner, there was no telling what sort of man the corpse had been. The one thing made clear was that something dangerous was happening in Nocto. The soldiers turned drawn faces toward the forest road.

“…We’re going, then? On?”

“Feels awfully dangerous to me.”

Many of them shrank back. As most wished for a return, Rudolf alone drew a breath, then slapped both cheeks hard and raised a rousing shout.

“All right! We push on ahead!”

“C-Commander?!”

“Oi oi. Why so shocked? We’re the Emperor’s guard. If we are, then we’ve a duty to see her safely to the destination. Well, if the Emperor herself wishes to withdraw, then of course I mean to follow that command…”

Rudolf let the words trail and moved his eyes to her. Don’t go saying something feeble like withdraw, now. To that gaze, laden with such an intent, she couldn’t help letting a laugh spill.

“That’s right. We won’t withdraw. As planned, we advance toward the port of Nocto!”

“There it is.”

The soldiers were quaking with dread, but Rudolf loosed a hearty laugh like a man who’d shaken something off and swung himself onto his horse. Once he’d decided to go, the soldiers, reluctantly, turned their eyes too to the forest road.

“That’s the way of it. Everyone, form up. From here on, the first to lose his nerve and leave the ranks might be the first to die.”

“——?!”

His one line worked well on the soldiers, it seemed. So as not to scatter, they passed glances to those before, behind, and to either side.

“Al. I’ll go by horse, not the carriage.”

The forest road was somewhat mired, a bad path where the carriage looked likely to bog down at once. I left the carriage too and walked behind her.

“I’ll attend you.”

A forest road that gave off an eerie stillness and a fathomless dread. Following Rudolf, who led the breath-holding soldiers, we too, swayed on horseback, made our attempt at the intrusion into dangerous ground.

7

That a great, hulking shadow was crawling and writhing along the forest road, I noticed at just about the midpoint of the track leading to Nocto.

“Gyah…?!”

One of the galloping cavalry vanished, abruptly, with a short cry, and that was the signal for the fight.

“All hands, on your guard… one man’s down.”

At Rudolf’s thick voice, we formed a small cluster back to back. The rustle of grass and brush being parted. One, two, three. Straining the ears, there were footsteps closing from every side.

“Commander… w-we’re surrounded.”

“So it seems. But haste is forbidden. We draw them in, nice and slow.”

Rudolf clapped the shoulder of a soldier whose voice was shaking, as if to rally him, then killed his own footsteps and crouched into the cover of the grass. The footsteps clothed in the scent of death drew near us a while, then, of a sudden, snuffed out.

“…………?”

“…Nothing… you hear anything?”

The soldiers too traded whispers and watched the surroundings. A forest road wrapped in stillness. The eerie footsteps, gone. A few minutes of nothing passed, and it was just as one soldier, out of patience, raised his face a little from the grass’s cover.

“——nng?!”

There was no death-cry; with a muffled sound the soldier, rigid and upright, toppled straight backward.

“…An arrow?”

Into the crown of his head, a single arrow had driven.

“All hands, advance toward Nocto!!”

“““—Ha!”””

The order came down the instant after. The escort broke into a run all at once. Keeping my watch on the space around Rune-sama, I urged her to follow after them.

“We go too.”

“Yes.”

At the soldiers sprinting the forest road, countless arrows began to fly from every direction.

“Gah!”

“Ugh…!”

“Kh… Commander! A fierce volley!”

“All hands, evade!”

Rudolf called out desperately, but to keep dodging a rain of arrows with no telling where they flew from was a fearful task. Somehow I wanted to get through the forest road and reach Nocto, but breaking through while weathering this onslaught seemed, plainly put, an outrageous thing.

One, then another, the soldiers running beside us dropped away.

“Rune-sama.”

“I’m fine. More to the point, there are no guards left around us.”

“——?!”

Taken up with the attacks from every side, I’d failed to keep a count of the escort’s number. The strength had scattered before I knew it, and around her and me only some ten guards remained. On top of it, there was no sign of Rudolf, the forerunner who’d slipped through this concentrated fire.

Push on like this, and it was only a matter of being picked off one by one until we were wiped out.

“Rune-sama. Here, above all, we should give ourselves to enduring, and to rejoining Lord Rudolf.”

“That’s so. All of you still living, follow us! We run for that hollow over there like our lives depend on it!”

“““Ha!”””

We gathered the escort, halted our advance a while, and changed direction, charging headlong for a hollow that could cut off the threat of the arrows. Sliding in, the arrows didn’t reach inside the hollow and passed over our heads instead.

“For the moment we’re safe.”

“But close the distance and they’ll shoot us from above and it’ll be over after all.”

“Let’s meet them. A hollow angled as steep as this, they’d have to close a fair distance before they could strike us.”

She’d judged, I supposed, that fighting at a range we could see was better than being struck one-sidedly from a distance we couldn’t. Our guards, myself among them, carried little in the way of ranged weapons; they were all specialists of the sword and spear, of close combat.

If we were to make a chance of winning, there was nothing for it but to hunt them down all at once on the counter.

“When we break out, I’ll go first.”

“Too much caution is a danger in itself.”

“Of course.”

Even with her magic supporting the attack, the moment I put my face out of the hollow, a split-second’s delay in setting off could well mean death. If I meant to go forward, I’d need to move fast enough to give them no opening.

“…Your Majesty. Will we get out of here?”

“It’s all right. Act calmly and a way through will surely open.”

She heartened a young soldier who looked about to be crushed by unease.

Spirits low. The arrows crossing mercilessly overhead sounded their whistle of split air and fed the soldiers’ dread.

“…Are we. All going to die here.”

“Don’t say ill-omened things.”

“But we ought to steel ourselves that it might come to that.”

“…This is no joke.”

The fear of not knowing when an arrow might run you through, and the impatience of passing time. In this present, taking on constant, enormous stress, endurance wouldn’t hold for long. Unless I played a hand that could show them a hope, they’d all simply be cut down, worn to nothing. Tracing the movement of the arrows overhead with my eyes, I readied to leap from the hollow.

“…Rune-sama. Soon now.”

“Take care.”

Relying on the faint sound of feet pressing the grass, I slowly raised myself to a crouch. Confirming that the number of arrows passing overhead had thinned and that the footsteps had closed to about twenty meters ahead, I drew one last great breath.

“Haah… I’m going!”

I showed myself out of the hollow all at once, and, sword at the ready, sprinted at full tilt. Passing my eyes lightly over the whole, grasping the rough positions of the enemy, I made a sharp change of direction.

“Now. The counterattack begins.”

8

A breath before the flash of the blade, the head of a black-clad attacker flew off.

“—Gsh?!”

“Don’t take it hard. We’re desperate too.”

I felt some slight guilt at the soundless scream, but didn’t slow my speed. As if to whip the fresh blood clinging to the swung-through blade away, a pair of arms still holding a drawn bow spun into the air. Feeling the sure response of a cut, I looked to see how he’d take it.

“…………?”

I turned my gaze and felt something off at once. Wait. Both arms cut away, and this thin a reaction, why?

If both arms were cut, then even short of instant death, one ought to crouch and writhe in a bleeding fit and a pain near enough to drive you mad. And yet the man before me—

“…Fuu. Fuu. A, ah.”

A tongue that wouldn’t turn. A dullness of response in the hollow eyes as though he felt no pain. It looked less like a man enduring pain than one whose mind had gone wrong by some other cause. Swaying his upper body unevenly, the man walked slowly toward me with eyes that held no will. As if wholly ruled by the will to kill his opponent, he showed no sign of even staunching the wound.

This feeling, I’d seen it somewhere—

“—?!”

While I turned over what the wrongness was, a killing intent that raised gooseflesh across my whole body touched me. The crust of the earth trembled, and sand and mud at my feet leapt faintly. A scent of death crawling soundlessly up from behind. When I pulled clear of the spot at once, the upper half of the man whose arms I’d just cut vanished in a single instant.

“…What?!”

A gale slapped hard at my skin, and white lightning tore across before my eyes. No. That was no lightning. Covered in pure-white scales, a giant predator that devoured human flesh.

“The White. Serpent?!”

“Shiiiiiii!!”

The calamity called a Divine Beast, the one the Saint had at her command, its eyes shining gold, ground the attacker down bone and all and swallowed him.

“So it came to this after all.”

“Shaaaa…”

The worst I’d braced for stood there in the flesh, showing its being as one part of the scene before me. That this great beast was here meant, one and the same, that the monster paired with it, the Saint Reshia, lay hidden in Nocto.

“Everywhere I turn, nothing but obstacles.”

Ah. Truly an eyesore. Blocking both ears against the shriek ringing in them, I leapt toward the outside enemy I ought to strike down, but—

“Kishaaa!!”

“This thing. Where’s it headed?!”

The White Serpent, not sparing me so much as a glance, drove on into the thicket where a deeper darkness spread.

“Al!”

“Rune-sama…”

“What in the world—. What happened?”

She, leading the escort, took in the carnage spread across the spot and caught her breath. The corpse of a man mangled head to foot. And trees on trees twisted and torn as though something huge had forced its way through. A fresh-made game trail where the bloodstains ran on.

“Wh-what is this…”

“Same way of dying as the corpse at the mouth of the forest road…”

The soldiers who ran up wore the color of terror at so wretched a manner of killing.

“Rune-sama. Just now, the White Serpent dealt the finishing blow to this man.”

“Who is he?”

“…One of the band that shot at us to pick us off, I think.”

“I see. So while Al was fighting him, the White Serpent stepped in and took the man’s life.”

“Yes.”

A man belonging to a power hostile to us had been attacked by the White Serpent and killed. And the White Serpent took no interest in me, the one closest to the man, and vanished into the depths of the forest, clad in an overflowing killing intent. There was no hostility toward us; it was purely an act of choosing whom to attack. Which meant that these men who’d loosed arrows at us were beings hostile to the Saint and the White Serpent as well.

“I haven’t made out this one’s identity, but it looks as though the White Serpent and the Saint are going around killing his comrades.”

“Strange. Was there any power besides the Empire that stood against the Svell Order?”

“That side too, it seems, we’ll need to look into closely.”

Something was happening in Nocto, our destination. At the least, two or more powers besides us of the Imperial army were, beneath the surface, waging a blood-for-blood slaughter, that much was certain.

“The White Serpent’s gone on ahead?”

I nodded to her, pointing at the unnaturally opened game trail.

“Yes. What lies ahead may be more of a hell than this place.”

No screams came at all, but from the ground a fine, ceaseless tremor carried up. Follow the White Serpent, and the Saint’s whereabouts might come clear. But at the same time, that carried too great a risk.

“What will you do?”

“We can’t leave the White Serpent’s threat untended. But for now, let’s make cutting through the forest road, riding this confusion, the highest priority.”

“Understood.”

To fight the Saint we were, as things stood, short of strength. At the least I wanted to try to rejoin Rudolf and secure some measure of numbers.

“Then I’ll lead. Luckily, thanks to that White Serpent tearing up the place, the rain of arrows seems to have let up, so getting through the forest road has become much less of a task.”

“I’ll keep a magic barrier up at all times. Alone I can’t spread it very wide, but enough to enclose the ones here I can hold better than an hour.”

Even if we took a surprise blow, her magic barrier could shut out the damage to some degree. If there was one thing to be wary of, it was whether the White Serpent’s aim would turn our way, but that too, for the time being, I thought wouldn’t come.

“Sir Aldia, we’ll run at the head with you.”

“If it comes to it, use us as a wall of flesh.”

The soldiers’ hearts, too, seemed to have set completely. Three of them ran point with me, and the rest formed up to lock down all four sides of Emperor Valtrune.

“Let’s go.”

At her word, every face tightened all the more. As if bound to one fate, in movements without a thread out of place, the company began to act toward the breakout of the forest road.

9

“Where did you come fr… gah!”

“Intruder! Answer him at once!”

“Damn. How many of us are left…”

“H-hey, somebody, say something!”

Once I’d entered the sewers, it was a run of slaughter without break. Set a single footstep down and, from the shadows, out swarmed the Madmiasma-holders. For all the world a horde of gutter rats. Vermin one exterminates before they can breed. My coming to Nocto had been chance, but perhaps I’d been lucky, in that I’d been given the chance to pare down a power in my way all at once.

“…The surface, those children will tidy up, so I’ve only to strike the main keep.”

I’d loosed the White Serpent and the Black Serpent up above and set them to kill their way clean through the Madmiasma folk in hiding. With their outsized hearing and sense of smell, they’d exterminate every last one without a slip. Provided no threat surpassing those children appears, that is. Either way, my own part was limited to the great cleaning of the sewers.

“Hii! D-don’t come!”

“Fufu. Your luck ran out the moment I came to Nocto.”

“That voice, don’t tell me, the Saint Reshia?! You’re supposed to be convalescing off in some backwater…”

“Fufufu! To take a lie like that at face value, the Order’s information network is quite the sieve.”

“—This woman!”

The kind-hearted Saint who’d believed the Order’s designs without a doubt. That she would bare her fangs and come to thwart their plans, they’d surely never foreseen it. A pity. I am an independent Saint. I do not let myself be taken into the core of that great evil the Order.

“I hope your next life is one where you don’t set your hand to wickedness.”

“Drop deeeead!!”

To the man who stood to face me, I sent a small flame.

“Guh… agh…”

The man suffered, a hand rising to his throat. A pitiful sight. From the moment my magic touches him, an ordinary person can do nothing but die. His whole body ignited, and when I’d seen out his end, charred pure black, I felt at once the presence of several more behind me.

“Guaaaaaah!”

“Oh, my.”

Swollen muscle and an explosive burst of speed. Had I moved a fraction of a second slower, the swung-through blade might have cut this body. Might have.

“Kufuu… I, I’ll kill you… so that we, may claim, our eternity!”

“It seems some self is still left in you. Did you gulp it down in a panic when I appeared, I wonder.”

“Uraaaah!!”

“Fu.”

Dodging the man’s blows, loosed one after another as he stooped forward, I looked down from above into eyes dyed with madness. An incomplete, hideous form. Take Madmiasma into you and it’s over; you’ll never get a proper self back. The end of a person.

“Gufu! Hagu! Gah!”

Monotone attacks, brute force with no intellect felt in them. Against a guard you’d find anywhere they’d overwhelm, but against me such poor movement won’t work.

“Sleep well.”

“Buba… ?!”

One sweep. Yes, one sweep is enough. Move the forefinger of my right hand outward and the man’s body is cut clean in two at the trunk. This is the gulf in strength between a person and a not-person like me. However explosive the mutation Madmiasma wrought on the flesh, it’s a sham monkey-show in the end. It could never match a true strong one.

“A… aah…”

“Madmiasma is nothing but a harmful poison. It’s no dream-drug that grants eternal life. …Ah, I’d forgotten. Words no longer reach you, did they.”

Even this bit of irony wouldn’t reach the man’s ears. Groaning an unsightly groan, working the upper half left to him desperately to kill me, he dragged his ruined lower half and came on.

For all the world a thing living and dead at once. Madmiasma holds no power to grant eternal time. All of it is illusion.

“…Every one without human feeling must be put to sleep here.”

Humans steeped in greed choose the road to ruin, seeking the wellspring of power. To grant such pitiful ones the mercy-stroke, too, was my duty, was it not. How many lives had I taken to this day. I believe this is the right thing, and yet at times I nearly lose sight of the way I ought to go.

“A, ah… I beg, you. Kill, me.”

“…That wish, I’ll grant.”

Hearing the plea of one who’d fought the loss of his reason, I put strength into my fingertips. With a hiss of cloven air, I struck off all their heads in a single blow each. Death was the work of an instant. They were pitiable ones, caught by the Madmiasma’s effect. To the many corpses lined up at my back I closed my eyes and offered a prayer.

Would that, in their next lives, their lives be no longer thrown out of true by gods and miasma and Saints and such alien beings.

“…I can no longer stop. Not until my duty is done.”

10

Out of the long forest road and up to a place where the streets of Nocto could be seen at a glance, we arrived.

“Rudolf!”

“You’re safe, Lady Valtrune!”

Rudolf, waiting ahead with only two subordinates left to him, stood gazing hard at the Nocto spread out below.

“For a commander to leave Rune-sama and get through the forest road ahead of her is, I’d say, out of the question.”

“Th-that’s… my apologies.”

Even granting he’d had to break through that place at a desperate run, that Rudolf had gone on ahead alone made me feel his sense as a guard was thin.

“Al. Don’t blame him too much. In that moment every one of us was walking the line of death, without question. He was straining to fill his role to the fullest.”

“If you say so, Rune-sama, then I’ll say no more.”

“Thank you.”

As a result, she’d come through that carnage without a single wound. That owed itself, too, to Rudolf and the veteran soldiers taking the arrow-fire onto themselves. The life-staking breakthrough had been achieved at the cost of many lives.

“Rudolf. I wasn’t quite calm myself. Let me apologize for my discourtesy.”

When I made to bow my head, he set a hand on my shoulder and shook his head with an apologetic face.

“No. What you said is right. Before I’m a division commander, I was charged with duty as the Emperor’s guard. That it was a blunder is a plain fact.”

“Then let’s call this matter water under the bridge for both of us, and be done.”

“That all right by you?”

“Since Rune-sama has already said it’s fine, there’s no need to keep at it. And it’s a fact too that Lord Rudolf pressing ahead saved us.”

There were things to be done before holding a session of self-reproach. That I meant to end this contest of apologies got through to him, and answering ‘Understood,’ short, he returned his face to its usual valiant cast.

“…Rudolf. The assassins on the forest road pulled back from their sweep of us when a third power turned up. On the way, besides the ones loosing arrows, did you see anyone else?”

“No. I was running for my life with my eyes only ahead, so I saw nothing of the sort.”

“I see.”

Whether the Saint had been there when Rudolf came out of the forest road was unknown. But however desperately he’d fled, there was no way Rudolf wouldn’t feel the Saint’s dense presence of a strong one.

“The Saint is likely acting separately.”

“And if she’s moving elsewhere…”

“The sewers, I’d suspect.”

The vast waterways laid through the ground of Nocto were a place ideal for concealment. If the Saint were in hiding, it’d be in the thickets sprouting along the forest road we’d just passed, or there, and nowhere else.

“And the head of this third power is that Saint of yours.”

“Yes. It was the White Serpent she keeps that attacked the ones hunting us.”

“…For Lady Valtrune to make such a difficult face, she’s quite the danger factor.”

“Honestly, a level of danger the earlier attackers don’t come near.”

Unlike an organization that draws its power from swarming in numbers, plainly, as a single Reshia the Saint, she was a strong one who could wipe out an army entire. Add that she commanded two great beasts of tough flesh, the Black Serpent and the White Serpent, and that a plan against them, too, had to be laid, which was the troublesome part.

“So unless we can find where this Saint is and deal with her, we can’t so much as set sail.”

“Just so. If the Saint has slipped into the Empire, it’s a problem we can’t overlook.”

She looked out over the streets of Nocto, and then gave her command at once.

“Let’s go down into the sewers and investigate.”

“I think that’s the best course too.”

We could not leave Nocto with the Saint’s threat left untended.

“Lady Valtrune, I’ve no objection to investigating the sewers, but haven’t we too few people left to search the whole of Nocto’s underground?”

Rudolf offered the counsel, but she answered, ‘No problem there,’ with room to spare. To make it plain for Rudolf and the others, she beckoned easily to the rear and called out the trump card she’d readied for this inspection.

“You called?”

“—?!”

The one she’d called out was a member of the intelligence corps Fadi led. I’d assumed Fadi himself would appear here, but this time a woman of the corps knelt before her in his stead.

“What’s become of him?”

When she asked after Fadi’s whereabouts, the woman spoke evenly.

“At present he’s moving to annihilate the hostile force on the forest road. He’s keeping track of the White Serpent’s location too, so should there be a problem, we’ve readied things so word flies to us at once.”

“Understood. Now, to the point: I’d like the strength you can move at present turned to investigating the sewers.”

“Rest easy. The people we can spare are already advancing the search of the sewers and of the town of Nocto. The instant we spot a suspicious figure, a report should go up at once.”

Though we’d spoken of it beforehand, there seemed to be no slips, and I was reassured. Rudolf, who’d been listening to the deft intelligence corps, had frozen with eyes and mouth open in a blank stare.

“Lady Valtrune. Ah, who is she?”

“I’m late in the introduction. She’s of the Provisional Elite Corps’ intelligence unit. Apart from you guards, I had her attend us in secret.”

“Was that so… I didn’t notice at all.”

The intelligence corps, skilled at stealth, could deceive even Rudolf’s senses. In any case, we’d secured strength enough to fill the guards’ losses. From here on it would be a life-staking fight with no reinforcement at all.

“…The moment those gone to the sewers send word, let’s have ourselves ready to move in too.”

Emperor Valtrune, who would not affirm the collapse of the Empire’s order. Steeling her resolve, she wished for the rematch with the Saint. Learning from the effective defeat in the Dyrst region, this time, with her own hands, she was set on protecting the Empire.

11

The trampling spectacle called up on the forest road was nearing the moment of its end.

“Gwah!”

The White Serpent killed the black-clad men without mercy. In the eyes of the predator reaping its prey there was not a flicker of fear. Against the fury swung from that huge body, dealing with it was out of the question, and even flight scarcely possible.

Watching the ghastly scene from a distance, I’d been feeling there was no opening for us to step in.

“…Waah. So totally one-sided. So that’s the White Serpent big bro and the others were talking about…”

As I looked on, impressed by the display of overwhelming combat, a figure shaking beside me turned a gaze packed with tremendous resentment my way.

“Um, Fadi, sir? Why have I been dragged into such a dangerous zone too? Actually, when exactly did I become a member of the intelligence corps?!”

The dragon-mount pilot riding along with me kept her eyes going, quaking, over the one-sided hunt playing out below.

“What can you do. Dorothea took a liking to you.”

“That’s the older lady who suddenly clambered onto my dragon back in the Dyrst region, isn’t it?! Was she someone that important?!”

“You didn’t know?”

“If I’d known I wouldn’t be this confused!”

She could throw her voice out surprisingly loud. Transferred into the intelligence corps as of yesterday and dragged onto a mission today, out of nowhere, and yet she’d adapted so well you’d never guess it. Her manner was usually all lack of confidence, but her handling of the dragon was steady, and for all her complaints she showed not the least sign of running away. She seemed to carry a fair bit of nerve, too.

“I see. No wonder Dorothea took to you.”

“Yes? I don’t understand at all!”

It was a cry truly heartfelt in its distress. But she’d taken to our lot right away, and Dorothea forcing her transfer from the dragon-mount units might, unexpectedly, have been no bad thing.

“Uu… I wasn’t in any position to be holding a front line like this… I only volunteered as a rear-support dragon-mount soldier…”

…Well, from her own point of view she seemed to feel she’d been sent into hell.

“Come now, calm down. While you’re on the dragon the enemy’s attacks won’t land, so it’s safe.”

“…Did you know? Dragons are hopelessly weak to attacks from bows and magic.”

“Ha. As if there’d be anyone who’d fire that kind of attack at us in a situation like—”

Just as I began to say it, at a range close enough to graze my cheek, an arrow passed by with a sharp whistle.

“…‘As if,’ is what I meant to say. But an attack came flying! A stray shot, maybe?”

“See?! I knew we were being targeted! We were being targeted for sure just now! …If this one gets hurt and we go down, the two of us are done for, you know?!”

“No need to be so dramatic. Oh, want some water?”

“Why are you fishing out a canteen so calmly?! Are you a psychopath?!”

A sharp, cutting retort glinting inside a timid voice. This one was that sort. Dorothea had likely thought to keep her near as a mascot easy to tease. A toy that squeaks when you hit it. Even I found it fairly funny, watching her flail and fret and cry out.

Only, it really was getting dangerous now.

“Heh. You really are cut out for the intelligence corps.”

“This is no time for joking, um, wait, hey!”

“Wait here. I’m gonna, pop off a sec.”

Fun as it was to keep teasing her, seeing a second and third arrow come flying, I couldn’t keep chatting at my leisure. Cutting aside with my knife only the arrows on a course to strike the dragon, I leapt straight down off it.

I never turn down a fight someone picks with me.

“Whaa?!”

“Jumping down from that height…!”

I landed just ahead of the men loosing the arrows and let a grin spill.

“Then I’ll take you on, just as you wished.”

“Ki!”

“This brat!”

There was a risk of the White Serpent coming my way, but sparks that fall on you have to be brushed off fast, or you take a bad burn. Casting aside my bow, I parried the blows they threw bare-handed with my gauntlets and split the vessels running in a throat with the point of my knife.

“Gabo… ?!”

The instant I’d decided the match, the scene around me seemed to slow. My honed senses caught the tremor of the ground and a white shadow crawling up with a roar.

Ah. Bad. It’s already come this far over.

A vast, gaping maw, out to swallow me whole along with earth and grass, was closing to within a few meters.

“Heh. This time I might really die…”

If I hadn’t jumped off the dragon. If I’d gone on parrying the loosed arrows from the dragon’s back. If I’d taken the choice to leave this place at all. Of the countless threads of possibility, had I not chosen to jump down and fight, I might have been spared the fate of settling into the White Serpent’s belly.

A roar to split the ears and beast-fangs counted down my end moment by moment. Bracing against the White Serpent’s earth-shaking rush, a force that rang through to the marrow, I gritted my teeth.

In that instant, outside my awareness, an unnatural flow of wind was born overhead.

“Honestly! Why is it always things like this!”

“—Huh?”

A future where I passed into the White Serpent’s mouth. As if to smash it, a jet-black shadow came down before me. The great beating wings spread as though to curtain off the White Serpent’s approach and, throwing up dust, covered me over.

“Grab him!”

“Grrl!”

“Whoa?!”

My body floated softly into the air. The sharp claws digging a little into both my shoulders, the dull ache of it, gave me the real sense of being alive.

“Wh, why?”

“No time to argue, we run now! I am done, done, with dangerous places like this!!”

The one who’d been all fear from first to last, pleading that she wanted to run away, had saved me.

Ha… I could read the White Serpent’s charge, but the one thing I couldn’t read was you diving in headlong.

“…Thanks. You saved me.”

“Truly. If I hadn’t come to the rescue you’d really have been eaten. You need to think a little before you move, or you’ll die on the spot, really.”

For the one who’d saved me even at the risk of being devoured herself the moment the White Serpent closed in, it was hardly a line I’d expect. This girl, after all. She’s got guts to spare. She might not know it herself, but by stepping without hesitation in front of the White Serpent at that pinch, I was sure of it. This one has the makings, true and genuine, of a vanguard fighter.

12

The results of the sewer search came back in a mere few minutes.

“They confirmed a woman who looks to be the Saint in the sewers, it seems.”

“I see. Then let’s go down into the sewers ourselves at once.”

“One more thing. They also confirmed, at the same time, a power in combat with that woman. Please bear in mind, above all, that the enemy is not only the Saint and the White and Black Serpents.”

“Understood.”

The entrances to the sewers, everywhere in Nocto. Without hesitation, she settled on the intrusion from the widest passage, at Nocto’s center.

“Shall we go.”

“Yes.”

“Understood!”

The infiltration party was Rune-sama, Rudolf, me, and two attendant soldiers. The rest of the strength we left waiting at the entrance, held in reserve as a support unit for the withdrawal.

Dim and poor of sight, the sewer’s flowing filth-water gave off a reek foul enough to warp the nose.

“…Ugh.”

“A powerful stench.”

Covering their mouths with their hands, the attendant soldiers wrung out pained voices. At their feet, blackly gleaming bugs of fair size and rats crawled and swarmed. A vile environment. The sort who’d think to enter here would be a suspicious figure minding others’ eyes. Failing that, none but a real oddball.

“Rune-sama. Is your stomach not troubled?”

“I’m fine. But exposed to this fierce reek for long, I don’t think my focus for keeping watch on the surroundings would hold.”

“I share the feeling.”

The stench that seemed to rock the brain was near enough to a fresh form of mental attack. If I could help it, I’d never want to walk a place like this again.

“…Ugh.”

Pressing deeper in, the strength of the reek grew. To the smell we’d felt so far, like filth left to ferment in water, was added a faintly blood-reeking thing, a sourness like meat gone to rot. It differed plainly from waste flushed away. A death-stench one seldom smelled in daily life. The company caught the strangeness at once and stopped.

“…The smell of blood.”

“This is more than one or two people dead.”

Rudolf drew his sword and sprang forward as if to shield Rune-sama and me behind him. With Rudolf, the attendant soldiers too readied their swords and swept their eyes warily around.

They advanced slowly on, and then—

“Bloodstains.”

A vivid, blood-drenched carnage came into view.

“Rudolf, be on guard. These bloodstains are still fresh.”

The bright red with no trace of drying ran along the ground and flowed into the waterway. The further we pressed, the wider the range of blood splashed at our feet. On top of it, from the sluggish flow of the channel came drifting an unidentified lump of flesh.

“…Al.”

“Yes.”

At her word, I hooked the lump of flesh flowing in the channel on my sword’s tip and scooped it up.

“Can you tell where the person’s from?”

Limbs savagely torn away, the flank too gouged as though run through by something, a corpse in pieces. Bloody all over, its sex and age were beyond telling. But in the clothing the corpse wore, I found a small vial I knew and an iron cross.

This vial… it looked just like the container of Madmiasma from the material Fadi and the others brought back from the Dyrst region. And this cross, wasn’t it the very cross the Order hands out to believers of the Svell faith.

“…At a guess, this is a person of the Svell Order. And this vial. It’s like the containers for the Madmiasma the anti-Princess nobles were secretly advancing the development of.”

“…From the moment I saw the White Serpent, I’d thought the Order was surely hiding in this place, but I never thought they were tangled up in the Madmiasma too.”

“If there were those among the anti-Princess nobles in league with the Order, it explains our being attacked at Nocto too.”

“Yes. So the ambush on the forest road was all of it arranged.”

“In that case, the theory that the hostile power besides the Order is assassins the anti-Princess nobles sent looks the strong one.”

Those who’d have the Emperor dead, joining hands across the borders of nations. That the enemy had lain in wait so conveniently at the point of ambush made sense too. If there was one question left, it was—

“…But it’s strange. The White Serpent we met on the forest road struck only at the attackers. This looks like nothing so much as infighting.”

That in that attack a fight had broken out between the White Serpent and the assailants. Say the Order turned traitor and shot the assassins in the back, and that’s the end of it, but in a situation where interests aligned and a common enemy stood before them, would they crush one another? That one point, however many times I turned it over, I couldn’t draw a reason from.

“The reason the attackers were killing one another. That too, press on ahead and you’ll understand.”

The sewer went on yet deeper. The corpses of Order people. Cruel traces smearing blood across the whole face of the passage. The answer to all of it lay ahead down this road.

“What in the world is happening up ahead, I wonder.”

She took my hand and told me.

“Be easy. I’ll always be at your side.”

“Yes.”

From the far end of the passage drifted the presence of a strong one. To lay bare its true form, we took another step forward.

13

“A, ah…”

“Comm, ander… Your Majesty, run… hivh!”

The soldiers advancing at the head with Rudolf, in less than a second, were wounded head to foot and, vomiting great quantities of blood, collapsed on the spot.

“Oh dear… I was seeing to some pest control and stumbled onto unexpected visitors.”

An encounter with a troublesome foe in a sewer with nowhere to flee. I’d half known it, but faced with it in fact, the shudder still wouldn’t stop. Mingled into the sewer’s stagnant air, on the old walls around us lay many bloodstains and lumps of flesh maimed past recognition of their form.

“Get back. This is no one to make light of.”

“I know, Rudolf.”

Rudolf ground his teeth without meaning to and, without a word from us, set his stance for battle, and Rune-sama and I too narrowed our eyes and glared ahead.

“——?!”

The instant hair mixed white and black slid into the edge of my sight, we grasped that we’d made the reunion we feared most. The approach of the footsteps I’d no wish to hear sent my heartbeat racing hard.

“It’s been a while. Your Majesty the Emperor, and Sir Personal Knight.”

“The Saint!”

The Saint appeared from the depths of the dark, an eerie smile on her face. Casting off the pressure loosed at us with no cause given, she stepped one pace forward.

“If I could, I’d never have wished to meet you again.”

“Rune-sama.”

“I know. Let’s take her on, the two of us.”

There was no need to sense danger. The plain threat, Reshia the Saint, watched me and her, standing side by side, with an interested eye. That was a devil playing at a Saint brimming with mercy and love. Her true nature was a heartless woman who thought nothing of a person’s death.

“A wondrous reunion. I’m truly glad!”

“…Is that so. It seems you hold thoughts we can’t come to terms with.”

“Fufu. Is that truly so, I wonder. When there might yet be a road where we join hands.”

She spread her arms wide as if to welcome us. But no wish rose in me to leap into that bosom. In her hands, spattered red with the blood of those she’d cut down, was gripped a torn scrap of Order-soldier flesh. At the soft smile and the madness askew from it, I couldn’t help stepping back a pace.

This woman. What she’s thinking, I can’t read in the slightest.

“Why attack the Order? Don’t tell me you had a falling-out.”

“Fufufu. Since when did you labor under the delusion that I was the Order’s puppet?”

“—What is that supposed to—!”

“I always move as the divine will bids me. The Order, the Kingdom, they are no more than convenient things, made to dance on the palm of my hand.”

To kill, so easily, people of the very organization she’d belonged to. A monster who was a Saint in name only. Truly loathsome… and yet, feeling that even as I did, I laid myself and her over one another.

“I’m the same breed in the end, is that it.”

Having betrayed the Kingdom and turned to the Empire, I myself might be a fox from the same den as the Saint. Well, since I hadn’t a shred of patriotism for my homeland, I didn’t regret it by so much as a hair.

“How about it? We might, perhaps, get along well?”

They were words thin to the last degree, poor in any ring of truth. The false, lie-scented smile, the red eyes hiding cruelty within, all of it I found not to my liking. The polar opposite of the woman who’d held out a hand with kindness that asked nothing back. Which meant the day I opened my heart to the Saint would surely never come.

“Sorry, but I’ve not the slightest mind to grow cozy.”

“Is that so… a pity!”

Against the word of disappointment, she kept lifting the corners of her mouth in evident delight and tossed the scrap of flesh in her hand down at our feet. Each time the flesh rolled along the ground, a bright-red trail was traced behind it.

“Loath as I am to part with the moment… shall we begin soon?”

“By all means.”

She was the fiercest opponent I’d faced from before my regression to now. A fight with slim odds of winning was a thing I was never good at. And on top of that, hard as she alone would be, in the depths of the narrow sewer were a pair of huge eyes fixing their unblinking stare on us.

“Al. It’s in the back.”

“I’m aware.”

From its keeping its shape hidden in the dark, it’d be not the White Serpent but the Black Serpent. To have a monster come along in the set, too, my bad luck ran deep indeed.

“Rudolf. I want to leave that great serpent to you. Can you manage?”

“Heh. That it’s no easy opponent is sure enough. But it beats fighting that eerie little miss over there by a mile. That big one, I’ll take on.”

“I’m counting on you.”

Rudolf drew his sword, let out a long breath, then set his blade at once. A martial air drifted around, and at his feet a faint ripple spread across the water’s flow.

Rudolf was a strong one fit to serve as a division commander in the Imperial army. Even were he to end up fighting the Saint, he’d put up a good fight. But she was a hard opponent to take on at first sight.

“Say, Aldia.”

“What is it?”

“Can you go toe to toe with that Saint as an equal?”

Likely I couldn’t. Ranged combat by magic and physical close combat. Reshia held top-tier aptitude for both, a finished two-sword fighter. Add that she was thought to hold no end of cards yet concealed. She was no opponent of balanced strength to be won against on momentum or luck, like the countless rabble I’d buried until now.

“With no plan I’d surely lose.”

“Ho. From the way you put it, it sounds like you’ve got some plan in mind.”

At Rudolf’s words I gave a small nod.

“Whether it works, I can’t say.”

Lay countermeasures in fine detail, find the way to crack her, manage an approach without a hair’s error, and only then does the thread of a road to victory come faintly into view. Reshia the Saint was a genuine mighty one you couldn’t beat without going that far.

“Lord Rudolf. The front line will be held by you and me, the two of us, I think. The serpent I leave to you completely.”

“Ah. Come to think, this is our first time fighting side by side. I’m counting on you!”

“I’ll give it everything to meet your expectations.”

Rudolf and I knocked our fists lightly together, then each charged at the threat before us.

“Fufufu. That desperate face. I’m smitten!”

The Saint swung her hand down, and the Black Serpent, springing from behind her, bore down with jaws gaping wide to swallow us both.

“That move’s within reckoning. Haah!”

“—?! Gyagagaaaah!!”

What was sucked into the Black Serpent’s great maw was neither me nor Rudolf, but a pale-blue fireball worked up by the magic Rune-sama loosed. From the Black Serpent’s mouth and nostrils leaked pitch-black smoke, and from its bloodshot eyes great tears spilled and fell.

“Hard scale may guard the outside, but the inside of the mouth, no?”

We’d already learned it in the Dyrst region: the scales that armored the great serpents were exceedingly tough, and slash and magic alike scarcely told as damage. The most efficient way to break through the Black Serpent coiling before us. It was to dodge the hard, unpierceable scales and deal damage directly to the flesh.

“…Barely any time has passed since then, and to hit on the notion of loosing magic straight into the body. Well thought.”

“Every hard problem has an answer. I’ve only solved, one by one and doggedly, the problems set before me!”

“It seems I too am in no place to be showing my leisure.”

The Black Serpent thrashing in agony. Threading the gap of it, I sprang out at once in front of the Saint.

“Just so. If you can keep your leisure, then try. This time I’ll cut you for certain!”

Just as Rune-sama had pried open a breach against the serpent, it wasn’t as if I’d laid no plan against the Saint.

“Shall we do it?”

“I’ll do it!”

When I brought the black blade down, the Saint, answering, worked magic up at her fingertips in an instant and loosed it my way. Red sparks scattered, and amid the blast and the scent of scorching iron, we went on holding each other’s eyes.

“I endured it, see?”

“Oh. Splendid.”

“I won’t lose again. I’ll beat you, and protect through the future Rune-sama wished for!”

I was not the powerless me of that day I’d tasted bitter dregs. The weak Aldia Graetz who’d witnessed her execution and, able to do nothing, shed tears, I’d cast off in the past. Cut the hard foe at the risk of my life. No drawn match was needed. What I wanted was only the victory that carries the future forward.

“…Ah, I feel it. The wave of the thought you offer up to her. That, precisely, is the wellspring of the power you gained. The same as mine, no. A crystal of possibility that could reach far higher than mine!”

The meaning of the Saint’s words I couldn’t grasp from one to ten. Or rather, there was likely no need to. Whether I’m this or that, whether others are, in such things I hold no interest. I’d decided to live for the sake of one person alone, Valtrune von Felsdorf. For her I could do anything. When I fought with her at my back, against any enemy at all, I stopped feeling I could lose.

“Al. Here, let’s settle it with the Saint!”

“I won’t let it drag on. I’ll finish this by the hour we set sail!”

Bring down the impregnable stronghold that was the Saint. The troublesome Black Serpent writhing about, luckily, I was in a spot where I need not be its opponent.

“Uraaah!”

“—Shaaaa!”

“Tch! Not just big, my sword won’t even go through… like Lady Valtrune, do I just cut it up from the inside the moment it opens its mouth?”

With Rudolf added as an offensive piece, the situation differed from the time in the Dyrst region. To move about in the narrow sewer carried heavy limits, but that held for the other side as well. For a monster of a needlessly huge frame like the Black Serpent, in particular, the choices of action narrowed to a set. And, if I could ask for it, in the fight with the Saint I wanted the extra noise cleared away.

“Rudolf. I’d like you to draw the Black Serpent off and away! Have it rage close by and an uncertain element mixes into the fight with the Saint.”

I wanted the Black Serpent and the Saint cut fully apart, to put everything into cracking the Saint. Handed the impossible demand, Rudolf furrowed his brow.

“Th-that’s a tall—! Order!”

He dodged a blow of the Black Serpent’s tail, then leapt back to put distance from it. Seizing the opening, the Black Serpent flicked a stone lying in the sewer with its tail. Countless pebbles were dealt to Rudolf, but he calmly guarded his vital points with his sword and slipped through the spot with the least of wounds.

“Fuu… you’re telling me to lead this thing off and fight it lonesome?”

Walking slowly from the far side of the sand-cloud, Rudolf griped, a greatsword slung on his shoulder.

“Oh. Can a man who’s a division commander no less not manage it?”

“Put it that way and I can’t very well say I can’t…”

“Then please. Trusting to your strength as a division commander, I’d have you carry out the felling of the Black Serpent.”

At the provoking request Rudolf nodded.

“If it’s a request from none other than the Emperor, I can’t refuse.”

“A fine answer. That settled, the operation begins!”

She sent a magic-wrought blast booming to drive the Black Serpent off. The unsteady sewer shook hard, and from the ceiling fine chips of stone and dust rained down in a patter.

“H-hey, are you sane, doing this in a space this cramped?!”

As if to avoid being buried in rubble, the Black Serpent began a furious charge toward Rudolf.

“So, is the Emperor a bit of a devil, unexpectedly?!”

“Gyagaaaah!!”

“No time even to gripe, huh… fine by me!”

Against the Black Serpent that had begun to move toward Rudolf, he himself, to lure the great beast’s pursuit, held off his evasion to the last possible instant. Meeting even the ground-crawling sweep of the tail with cool nerve, Rudolf and the Black Serpent gradually shifted the ground of the fight away from where we stood.

“It was forceful, but I’m glad it worked.”

Once the two had cleared the spot entirely, Rune-sama turned to face the Saint and set her stance for battle. With this, unless Rudolf went down, the Black Serpent’s interference was gone. We could fight with our focus on the Saint alone.

“Splitting the Black Serpent off from me is a very good call, I’ll grant, but—”

“—Ha!”

“Your eyes wander too much.”

The Saint, of a sudden, loosed magic at her. I’d let my guard down. Taken up with the Black Serpent, I’d let my eyes leave the Saint’s small movements. I started to move the instant after the Saint loosed her magic, but by a slim margin I wouldn’t make it in to shield her.

“Rune-sama!”

There was nothing I could do but cry her name. My outstretched hand didn’t reach, and mercilessly the Saint’s magic bore in to just before her.

“Al. I—”

She made no move to dodge the Saint’s magic and stood there, a gallant look on her face. Her gaze was pouring toward me. Giving no time even to spin out the rest of the words she’d begun, the dazzling glare of the magic the Saint loosed hid her figure from sight.

The Saint smiled fearlessly and closed her eyes as if certain of victory.

“——?!”

In that instant, the magic burst, and crimson flame and pitch-black sand-smoke filled the surroundings.

At the scent of scorching flesh drifting to my nose, the worst scenario ran through my mind.

“…No.”

A slight lapse breaks everything. When I ought to rush to her side at once, my feet couldn’t step forward, not wanting to see the reality within the black smoke. The knight who ought to protect her could do nothing but watch the danger bearing on his lord. Together with the hellfire searing onto my corneas, the Saint’s sigh, edged with disappointment, carved the two letters of despair into me.

“She had room enough to dodge, and yet to let magic of this degree land direct is a great disappointment.”

At the Saint’s courteously insolent words, my guts boiled over. A way of speaking as if to indict Rune-sama as an incompetent short on strength. Not knowing with what thoughts she’d taken the Emperor’s seat, brandishing her own power, disappointed on her own account. That settles it, this woman above all I absolutely kill. I’ll take her to hell even if it means running her through and taking the wound myself.

“Haah… you, I finish for certain.”

“Fufufu. I feel your anger… yes. That was what I wanted to see!”

The inside of the Saint’s head was surely awash in some lively rapture. A fiend who rubs a person’s feelings the wrong way, forces out by main strength the thing she wants drawn out, and steeps herself in a sense of superiority. This monster with not a fragment of a human heart, I should have finished off at a far earlier stage.

That, precisely, before I made the reunion with her, I should have stopped the Saint’s breath by assassination or whatever else. It was all my negligence. A bud of possible threat ought to have been reaped before it ripened. The result of neglecting it was the result of magic landing on her.

“…Fuu.”

I set wrinkles into the bridge of my nose, faced straight at the Saint, and took the stance for a single strike. A long-winded feint was no longer needed. What I, who’d failed to protect the person I held most precious in this world, ought to do was close on the Saint. This alone I would carry out at the risk of my life.

“Now. Any time is fine! Dance with me, wildly and merrily to the last!”

“Rune-sama… I failed to protect you again, didn’t I.”

I murmured the words of a confession, glared hard at the Saint, and leapt forward in a low crouch.

The distance to the Saint closed with ease. Though the hole opened in my heart wouldn’t fill, my mind was cool as if doused with cold water, and I’d come to think of one point alone, running my sword through the Saint’s heart.

“…The wave of your anger has stilled?”

Now was no time to give myself to passion, to throw a tantrum. With a fight of brute force and no theory like that, the Saint couldn’t be beaten. Her death couldn’t be avenged. The grief and rage of failing to protect her went on welling darkly in the depths of my heart, but that feeling I kept from showing on the surface and pressed down within myself.

“…Fuu.”

The Saint’s unpleasant laugh, of course, and from the sound of the sewer water flowing around to the distant clash of Rudolf and the Black Serpent, every environmental sound was shut out. A world of endless silence. And the sight beyond my opened eyes was clearer than any I’d ever seen.

“Fu!”

The single stroke at the Saint, as if to cleave space itself, passed smoothly clean through her belly.

“Gobo… ?!”

Seeing before my eyes the Saint spun round, bleeding a fearsome quantity from her stomach, I thought. Well now. It’s cutting through fine and ordinary.

There was no overwhelming gulf of strength there, and no fear of the Saint. The me who’d shrunk before the strong one that was the Saint and fought with rough, wild swings was gone.

“Wh… y… gh!”

“Who knows. It’s the first I’ve felt my sword-line so keen too.”

With a heart clear as a still mirror, all needless strength left my whole body, and now I had the confidence to lose to no opponent at all. Even the Saint’s guard that had seemed a wall of iron was no exception.

…Had I been able, I’d have wanted to reach this ground before I lost her.

“This time we finish it. Reshia the Saint, sleep in this cold sewer.”

“…Ufufu. It won’t end. Not I!”

The Saint called up something like a pitch-black vortex and thrust her right hand into it. In the right hand she drew out was gripped a weapon shaped like a spear with a bright-red haft. Where it differed from a spear was that the blade’s tip was formed somewhat like a curved knife.

Fitting a possession of the Saint’s, it differed from any existing weapon. Something like an ominous black cloud drifted, clinging to the weapon.

On top of it, its material was beyond all guessing. The grip was of a smooth stuff, at a glance like wood with a mind to lightness, but the sound when she swung it was a low one carrying a slight weight. The blade too bore a seven-colored sheen I’d never seen.

It seemed I might close for a struggle at short range without minding it, but—

“Ha?!”

The instant I stepped in, an image of my limbs cleanly blown off flooded into my head.

Was the sight that just rose in my head the outcome of my charging on into the Saint like this?

If what had just come was no grandiose delusion but something like future-sight, then in the present, beating the Saint in close combat had become all but impossible.

“I am Reshia the Saint. Until I’ve guided this world in the right direction, I am not permitted to die!”

This was the first moment the Saint had taken up a weapon. In her bright-red eyes was gone the color of leisure of a moment ago, and her deft handling of the arm was of one who’d reached, wholly, the domain of a master.

The Saint too was in earnest at last, it seemed. Each time the chill loosed from her feet carried across like a wave, an alarm rang in my head enough to make the body refuse to go forward.

“Ah… how many hundreds of years since I was driven this far, I wonder.”

The wound opened in the Saint’s belly had already closed, with no sign of gasping in pain.

“A monster…”

Whether an effective blow could even be landed on the Saint with a weapon in hand was unknown, but the greatest problem was how much damage it would take to bring the Saint to her knees.

“Now! Let’s start over from the top!”

That the healing of wounds by the Saint’s power was not infinite either, I wanted to believe. Were the Saint an undying being, then the very thought of killing her fell apart. Would I end up laying my death out unsightly in a fight with no meaning in taking it on… or would I catch the thread of a way through and pay her back one blow.

Sorting the surroundings, myself included, from a remove, however far I increased and tested our choices of action, there was no decisive strike. The Saint in earnest snuffed out with ease even the light of victory I’d found.

“This is a bad matchup.”

I gave half a step back, but flee here and the very meaning of going down into the sewer would come to nothing. Rudolf even now went on with his exchange against the Black Serpent, and she, to the last, watched over me as if worrying for my safety. Those blue eyes were certain I would win.

If I didn’t answer the hope, the whole of the road I’d walked as a personal knight beside her would be denied, it seemed to me.

“Can’t retreat. Nothing for it but to push!”

There was no road but forward. Even were it a fight with slim odds of winning. The her I’m infatuated with would surely, without flinching, step in and take on the threat. If I’m her believer, I ought to move as she’d move!

“This is right, isn’t it.”

When, questioning the lord I’d failed to shield, I turned the blade’s tip upward.

“Yes. That’s right. If it’s you… no. If it’s you and me, we won’t lose even to the Saint!”

The voice I’d most wanted to hear reached my ears.

“—Rune, sama!”

Sweeping aside the dust, showing herself out of the black smoke, was Rune-sama, magic already built and at the very stage of firing at the Saint.

“Al. Thanks to you, I worked up the magic without the Saint sensing it!”

“…You’re joking. There was a response. My magic should have struck direct… and yet how are you standing?”

The one most bewildered was not I but Reshia the Saint. Certain her magic had landed, treating her existence as dead and giving herself to the direct duel with me, the Saint had grown lax in reading the sign of magic.

“I did take it direct… it hurt very much.”

“Then why?”

She touched the countless burn-marks in her soot-covered dress and declared.

“…Reshia. Taking your magic, I was burned head to foot. Had I not healed the wounds of my whole body at once with healing magic, my life would have been gone by now.”

“Impossible. Healing magic is no such all-purpose thing… no, if you were one of the Elect, it’s possible?!”

The result of overtrusting her own power. The Saint had struck her revival from her thoughts. Gripping the readied weapon hard again, the Saint clenched her teeth and took a posture as if to receive a blow.

“So here’s your return!”

The highly worked magic loosed at a speed no less than the Saint’s own.

“Ngh—!”

The magic flew as if sucked into the Saint and told well enough to leave her breathless. Along with the burst of flame, the martial air enclosing the Saint peeled off just a little.

“Haah, haah… I see. You too were one of the Elect, of equal rank to him.”

“I’m not as strong as Al. But I’m not weak enough to lose to you, either!”

The situation ringing us round was rebuilt all at once. As the Saint flinched from the magic, I drove in again.

“Right here!”

“A pity. Still too soft!”

The Saint hauled up the weapon she’d lowered to the ground and met my sword-blow dead on. Even shaken, the finishing strike she blocks pinpoint. In a brute clash of blades the Saint gave not a single step. She had the raw strength for it, and in a plain trial of power I still couldn’t match her. But now I wasn’t fighting alone.

“Haah!!”

Magic’s rolling blows struck the Saint without mercy. Each single strike she loosed gave the Saint no time to think.

“Hmm. So… the pair of you are growing faster than I’d reckoned. Marvelous.”

“What’s, that about?”

“It means a most welcome thing.”

“Well, thanks, for that!”

Parrying at each other’s blade-tip, the Saint and I once more opened a set distance. Now that I knew she was safe, there was no need to keep on attacking in reckless abandon. If anything, working in concert would drive the Saint harder.

“Rune-sama. I’ll buy the time to work up magic. The finishing blow I leave to you.”

“Yes. Let’s win, the two of us. In this fight, for the first time, we’re gaining the upper hand on the Saint!”

The Saint’s threat had grown greater than in the Dyrst region. But we too had planted our feet at the brink to stand against the Saint in earnest and were drawing out more power than ever before.

When you stand against an absolute strong one, people take one another’s hands and wring out their wits to make a match of it. Now, at last, we would become the matched pair to strike down the unmatched, and carve open our fate.

Here was the great crux of it.

14

Dodging the bite of the tough jaws to right and to left, I watched for the opening to land a blow.

The iron-wall Black Serpent, whole body clad in hardened scale. The way to break through, Her Majesty had shown me by driving magic into the mouth, marking that spot the weak point, but when it came to aiming for the scale-less mouth or the eyes, it was a hard thing indeed.

“Haah, haah… keep the hardness to the hide, would you.”

The long tail wouldn’t grant me an approach, and yet let my mind fix on the tail and, of a sudden, the sharp fangs closed to just before me. With head and tail moving independently, misjudge the range and you take the hit for certain.

A tail-strike ends in being blown off and slammed into a wall, but bitten, and from where the fangs sank in you’d be chewed through, bone and all, in one go.

“I can’t take a hit, and I’ve got to land plenty on the other one… haha! Fighting on a crap set of terms like this might be a first in my whole life!”

At a time like this Epika would line up a few worthless sophistries and quibbles, and yet at the end drive her magic precisely into the enemy’s vitals and close the fight up clean.

“Tch. What are you shrinking for! Don’t run. Face it and fight, properly!”

To be running from this threat as a division commander wouldn’t do for my honor. Nothing but the offensive.

Trying to break straight through on momentum, the Black Serpent’s tail, coiled in fold on fold, stretched across the sewer walls in every direction and came at me. Not the front alone. Reflecting off the wall, a death-blow reached from behind too for a vital point.

“Guah!!”

Close one… take that just now and a bone or two would surely have gone. Sliding the sword at my back and swinging it up, parrying the attack from behind, I switched my mind to the defense ahead.

Slip into its bosom and I’d thought I could seal the unreasonable whipping, but the momentum only mounted. There’s a limit to handling this string of blows with a single greatsword. Gradually my range of action was hemmed in, and then—

“Gishaaaaa!!”

“—gogah!!”

The one blow I failed to parry bit into my belly, and I was blown clear to a wall several meters back.

“Gah!!”

I crashed into the wall and dropped straight to the ground.

“Held out better than I’d… gobo… kha?!”

That it wasn’t instant death, I’d learned in my own flesh. The problem was that the power of the one blow was, sure enough, insanely high. The fierce pain running across my back stole my breath. My body refused to draw in air, and my breath tore like a man in the grip of a seizure.

“…I’ve, got to, stand.”

I set a hand to my knee to rise, but against my will, as though a current ran through my whole body, no intent could enter a single motion.

The Black Serpent crawling slowly on.

Do I die here?

Pain, fear, despair, fury, impatience. The various feelings whirling in my head sped up before the Black Serpent’s approach.

The Black Serpent’s frame was ten and more times my own, its range of attack wide, and each blow strong to boot. A monster of this kind was never meant to be taken on by one man.

If only there’d been even one, one comrade with me.

The precious subordinates I’d brought to Nocto had, all across the board, been done in. So this longing held no meaning. Nor could I hope for rescue from Her Majesty and the personal knight Aldia. Downing the Black Serpent single-handed was the part given me.

“…Haah.”

“…Shii.”

This monster too seemed to be learning how to fight, and, so as not to let me slip into its bosom, was checking me with a swaying tail. It understood that a single blow to the inside of its mouth could tie straight to its own death. It meant to kill me for certain, without an easy approach.

Glaring at the Black Serpent, feeling the crisis of my life right there, in the midst of it—

“Ooh. Looks like a real desperate spot, huh.”

“—?!”

The shadow that closed at my back with no footstep, no presence, murmured in a bright, unhurried voice.

Even in the dim sewer, a striking red head of hair. The glint of a flashing knife-blade passed by the side of my face and drove straight through the Black Serpent’s eye.

“Gyaaaah!!”

A child working countless knives with nimble movement.

“Shall I lend you a hand? Old man.”

He stood there wearing a smug look as if to say be at ease, but I cocked my head and asked.

“You there… who are you?”

“Eh?!”

In that instant, the time flowing between the two of us stopped completely. The Black Serpent writhing and raging clear outside our minds, we held each other’s eyes and froze for several seconds.

“I-I’m Fadi! One of the Provisional Elite Corps’ elite!”

“…I remember now. The intelligence brat, was it.”

“Who’re you calling a brat!”

The way he stamped his feet as if throwing a tantrum was a child himself, to the life. I watched the sullen-cheeked Fadi with a fond eye, but when the tail struck the sewer wall and the surroundings shook hard, my mind was dragged back to the Black Serpent’s presence.

“Pleasant chat’s on hold a minute.”

Fadi’s arrival was beyond my reckoning, but the Black Serpent, wary, had stopped its approach. My own breathing-trouble from the pain gradually eased, and my hands and feet came back to a state I could move.

“Now. For now let’s join our strength, the two of us, and bring down the enemy in front of us!”

With this, the odds of winning had climbed at a stroke.

“Right. I’m counting on your cover, brat!”

“Heh. What’re you on about. The one giving cover is you, old man!”

Fadi, who bewilders with quick, fine movement and looses relentless flurries of overwhelming numbers of strikes without mercy. And Rudolf, a warrior specialized in a sure kill with a single powerful blow, no shame to the name of Imperial army division commander. The two, holding contrasting styles of battle, began their life-staking charge to bring down the great beast that was the Black Serpent.