Chapter 4 – The Philnotes Front, the Theresia Front
1
The march toward Philnotes went off without a hitch. No accident of any note along the way, and by the schedule, a few more hours would bring us to Philnotes, where the Kingdom army sat in siege.
“Eerily quiet, isn’t it,” Petra said.
“Yeah. Hard to believe we’re about to trade blows with the Kingdom army out here.”
“The calm before the storm. So this is what they mean.”
The Kingdom army’s eyes were on Philnotes, true, but it would be no surprise for them to have posted troops around the region to watch for the Imperial army’s approach. If anything, not to have a camp laid would be strange. Let word of the invasion spread, and the Empire was certain to move. The Kingdom army was not so foolish as to leave that out of its reckoning.
“We have to allow they’re lying in wait with a trap set,” Petra said.
“Or it’s the swagger of the strong.”
“The Kingdom’s not fool enough to swagger against the Imperial army. Rotten as it is, on this continent it’s the military power second only to the Empire. Their strategy for taking Philnotes is locked down to a point, and they’ll have measures against us laid in for certain.”
“In that case, pushing on carelessly is starting to get dangerous.”
Steano raised a hand overhead and drew the scouts in around him.
“Time we started sweeping the perimeter. Ring the column wide, and the moment you spot anything off, send a smoke round up high overhead.”
“Yes, sir!”
“Ambros, you’re with me.”
“Right. Petra, the two of us are peeling off the column.”
“Mm.”
Steano and Ambros drifted outward from the column, still mounted, and each gave a light wave.
“We’re off, then. Send up a signal if things turn hairy.”
“Mm. You two watch yourselves.”
“Will do. All right, Ambros, move out!”
“Aye!”
Timed to the pair angling away, Ritziareite, at the very front, gathered her dragon-mount riders and began giving orders.
“Begin your aerial sweep. And keep low, please; don’t climb too high, whatever you do.”
In quiet like this, most soldiers let their guard slip and grew careless. Not her. She was, after all, the supreme commander who had led the Empire’s special vanguard corps. Ritziareite left no opening, no room for complacency. She set out what needed doing to her subordinates in clean order and kept choosing the best action. The enemy might still be far off, but it was precisely because she read danger so keenly that Rune-sama placed such deep trust in her. That much I could feel.
“Petra. Have the mages ready for combat. We’ll reach Laivan Ravine before long.”
“Understood.”
A push into a danger zone; the tension ran through all of us. The great shadows of dragon-mounts wheeling overhead cut across the sunlight now and then. Keeping half an eye on them, I turned to look back at the mages ranked behind me.
“You lot. Move out, as planned.”
“Roger!”
The mages scattered to the four quarters. Better to take the risk of being picked off piecemeal than to be wiped out in a single blow, and with so few guards on the mages, dispersing them was worth doing. I held the center of the column, and the mages spread out just within my line of sight.
“Entering Laivan Ravine in ten seconds! All hands, watch your surroundings.”
The moment Ritziareite spoke, the sound of running water began to reach us from somewhere ahead. Cool air, the twitter of small birds; I let it fill my ears and swept the whole forward arc with my eyes alone. Nothing wrong. Only the pleasant, easy sounds of the wild.
“…No sign of the enemy.”
One of the scouts came in toward the column’s center to relay word.
“No enemy in sight here either.”
“Same.”
“Widening the search.”
We’d been in Laivan Ravine a while now, and still no report of finding the Kingdom army. It had the feel of a force pouring everything into the assault on Philnotes. Rather than split their strength to watch the surroundings, they’d clamped down hard on a narrow zone. If so, a surprise strike to break their formation would be difficult, but by the same token, a mage’s area fire would land square in the middle of them.
“General Ritziareite. Let’s keep the sweep up as before and pick up the pace. In all likelihood the enemy hasn’t deployed in Laivan Ravine.”
“I’d been weighing that same chance. Yes… we’ll judge an ambush unlikely and make straight for Philnotes by the shortest road! All units, ford the river! Hold your alert but clear the ravine fast!”
No detour around the water, even; only the shortest line straight to Philnotes. It looked as though we’d cut nearly half an hour off our estimated arrival.
2
“Al. The situation on the Philnotes front, how do you read it?”
Valtrune’s party, three hours before the breach into Nocto. Aldia and Valtrune were just then talking over Ritziareite, who had gone ahead to the Philnotes front. I let a short beat fall before I answered her.
“Read how?”
“I thought I’d hear your analysis of the enemy’s strength.”
“My analysis…”
“You served in the Kingdom army once. From where you sit, I want to know how much force the Kingdom’s put into this Philnotes push.”
The Kingdom army’s strength, then. At this point in the war, the early strength still stood whole and intact. Set against Ritziareite and the Imperial force gone to relieve Philnotes, the threat the Kingdom posed came out like this.
“…Well. It depends on how it’s fought, but if the two armies met head-on, I’d say the odds sit with the Empire.”
“Oh? What makes you say so?”
She leaned forward, drinking it in. I kept my voice level on purpose.
“Simple enough. The number of heavy hitters the Kingdom can field on a single battlefield is limited.”
“Heavy hitters?”
“Put plainly, the Kingdom army’s top-ranked fighters: the Kingdom’s Ten Elites. I mean how many of them they’ll commit to taking Philnotes.”
The Kingdom’s Ten Elites: the name for the ten strongest in the Kingdom army, just as it sounds. Each of them held power enough to turn a battle around alone, but never in a hundred years would all ten march on Philnotes at once. Before open war with the Empire, they’d hold their greatest strength in reserve and play it as a trump card when it counted.
“Taking Philnotes means a great deal to the Kingdom, but it isn’t a thing they absolutely have to bring off.”
“You’re saying the Kingdom can overwhelm the Empire even without seizing Philnotes?”
“They have a lot of close friends among the nations. Same as it ever was. They call on states all across the continent and beat the Empire down all together. Even the foremost military power on the continent bleeds out by inches in a war on many fronts.”
Against the brute force of nations by the dozen, even the Empire and its overwhelming strength would give way. So the reason the Kingdom was throwing itself at Philnotes wasn’t to gain ground in the war with the Empire; first and foremost, it was to pull the Empire’s gaze.
“While they kick up a fuss at Philnotes, they set an invasion of the Empire with the neighboring states. That’s the play, I’d guess. Three of the Ten Elites at most. No more than that will show their faces.”
If it was only three or so of the Ten Elites, the Imperial force now bound for Philnotes could put them down without trouble.
But she knit her brow and let out a low sound.
“Is that truly so? The three strongest in the whole Kingdom are coming to Philnotes. I’m very much afraid for them.”
Her worry was fair enough, and yet I held a conviction that our side wouldn’t lose on strength.
“Rune-sama. Set your mind at ease. Our army is full of people who are the equal of any of the Ten.”
“You mean Ritziareite?”
“No. Set General Ritziareite aside, and we still have force enough to overwhelm the current Ten. The friends I believe in.”
“They surpass the Ten Elites?”
“Yes. Beyond any doubt.”
Three of my friends had gone to Philnotes. Steano, Petra, Ambros. Of them, Petra and Ambros were the genuine article: heavy hitters who, in the middle years of the war, had once cut their way into the upper ranks of the Kingdom’s Ten Elites.
The era when the Kingdom army stood at its strongest was around the war’s middle years. That Petra and Ambros, who’d held Ten Elite rank in that era, were fighting on our side meant a mere three of the current Ten could be turned back and sent home.
“Petra and Ambros. Those two have it in them to kill an equal number of the current Ten, or better. And Steano’s good enough to give one of the Ten a real fight. They’re all first-rate.”
On top of that we had Ritziareite, one of the Empire’s finest dragon-mount riders, and the excellent soldiers she’d raised herself. Which was why the factors that spelled defeat came out vanishingly thin.
“Of course, this is all my own read, so how it actually goes we won’t know till we try.”
“…If you’ll say it that plainly, Al, then it must be all right.”
“I’m praying it is.”
The comrades who had died, once. They were never weak. Give them ground to fight on and a stage where they could spend their full strength, and they didn’t go down easily. It was because I placed a trust in them that held even across a distance that I could pour everything I had into my own part.
3
The sight of the enemy blocking the road set my heart dancing. Ah, at last it can begin.
The Theresia front. The bridge at the near edge of the Darius domain. This was where the battle of old grudges would raise its curtain for Epika von Darius.
“…Haah. How long I have waited for this.”
I let slip a sigh of pure feeling and fixed my eyes on the small fry before me. Amateurs risen up from farmhands, and a mob of brigands cast off from the old Imperial army. Just the thing for a warm-up before the main event.
“Halt! Beyond this point is the Darius domain! No entry without leave!”
I gave a wry little smile at the one soldier dutifully thrusting his stop order at me, then looked down at them from the saddle with a cold eye.
“Cornelia.”
“Yes, Lady Epika.”
Only her name, and she understood. She raised one hand to the height of her face and swept it sharply down.
“Wh—! All units, take cover!!”
The next instant, the bridge was bathed in raging fire by a hail of magic bolts. The stonework melted in patches to sludge under the heat, and several men, roasted where they stood, pitched off the bridge below.
“Ahahahaha! Truly, what fools! …As if we’d hear out a stop order. We came to kill, and we came prepared to the last detail. What we’re about to do is a killing in dead earnest. If you haven’t the stomach for it, clear the road this instant — or die quietly.”
On those words of resolve I wove up a single spell and flung it at the knot of men frozen at the bridge’s end. Faces filled with terror and despair, the enemy soldiers returned to ash and dust without so much as a word.
This place, set as the frontline of the Darius domain, saw everyone within wiped out in under ten minutes. No prisoners. Survivors put to the sword, no questions asked. That this was war, I carved into the watching enemy spies as a cruel truth for them to behold.
“…Father. I’ll be coming to kill you right away. Just like the subjects you left behind at this outpost.”
Gazing at the wreck of the burned-out forward post, I hooked the toe of my boot under the head of a corpse rolling at my feet and kicked it up. Turning from the roar and the black smoke, I set my aim on the next target.
“Come. Let’s crush the enemy positions one by one. There’s no need for talk. Kill every last one.”
I had no scruple to be swayed by a plea for life. This was enemy ground now, ground ruled by traitors.
“…What a frightful woman.”
“Unless I go this far, the enemy won’t lose the will to fight.”
“And for that, you’d do anything, however cruel.”
“Yes. That is what war is.”
Cornelia said no more than that. She shut her eyes and turned from me, as if to spare herself the pitiful dead; as if her heart pained her, her lashes wavered for a single instant.
4
“It seems one of the outposts has been taken.”
The spy’s report told him of the enemy force closing in. Count Darius, who had entertained the easy notion that a siege would buy a day or two, saw the scheme crumble away; his face went crimson, his shoulders shook, and he brought his fist down on the table.
“That ungrateful child, getting in my way!!”
“Now, now. Let us settle ourselves a moment, Count Darius.”
I laid a light hand on the Count’s shoulder, speaking to gentle him down.
“Mm. Forgive me. I lost my composure somewhat.”
“Not at all. I understand your feelings very well indeed.”
The enemy’s supreme commander was Epika von Darius: the Count’s own daughter, and once my equal, standing shoulder to shoulder as a division commander of the Imperial army. Her way of war was a foul thing. She’d bludgeon with raw magic, and at times, to break the foe’s spirit, she’d string up a killing so brutal it stood as a warning to all. The way that first outpost fell belonged to the latter sort.
“In all likelihood she’s wrecking the outposts so lavishly to make us lose heart.”
“Is that it. Looks to me like nothing so much as showing off her power…”
No. If all she wanted was to flaunt that power and feed a hunger for praise, she’d never fixate on smashing the little posts set out at the very front. Knowing her nature, she’d want this land flattened by the shortest road and go straight for the throat of Count Darius, the lord of the region.
“…She has some reason she can’t meet us head-on.”
“What do you mean?”
“It may be she hasn’t the strength assembled for a straight confrontation with us.”
Epika was the sort who wanted, above all, to dodge troublesome work. As far as I could reason it, she was a cunning creature who’d steer a fight to its close by whatever means cost her least. That such a woman was taking the long way around, felling the outposts one after another in order, meant there was a reason she had no choice. Given force enough, she’d choose to press forward and ignore the fire crossing at her from every side; she of all people would understand that as the efficient course. That she wasn’t doing it was proof she carried some anxiety about the force she led.
“Count Darius. I’d advise taking one careful measure of the enemy’s true numbers.”
Epika. As two who once stood as division commanders of the Imperial army, let us have it out to the full.
5
I inked another X onto the map in my hand. Crushing the enemy outposts as we swept along, this made the sixth today.
“…A miss here too.”
“So it appears.”
If I could, I’d kill my father at once and push on past the Darius domain. I hated this homeland of mine with all my heart.
“Do we burn this one as well?”
“Yes. Thoroughly, till not a speck of dust is left.”
We took the trouble to wipe out the enemy fort, then set it alight. All six forts we’d crushed had been given the same treatment. Soon enough the enemy would start reading my movements and stir themselves to act.
“Cornelia. On to the next.”
The same work. The same battle. The same merciless deeds, over and over.
On horseback, as I rode out in front, Cornelia could bear it no longer and called to me.
“Lady Epika. What is the intent behind this?”
“What is it, all of a sudden?”
I asked it back, playing dumb. I’d sensed the whole of what Cornelia wanted to say, wanted to ask.
“Is there any meaning to this destruction?”
Her blue hair swayed; her face was a blank, mechanical thing, and yet a faint irritation seemed threaded through it.
“There is meaning. It’s needed to break the enemy’s heart.”
“And so you kill even the innocent, every one of them?”
“…Yes. That’s right.”
The unarmed among them and all the rest, every soul at the outpost, I had taken. It was necessary; there was no other road. Without this, my strategy would never come alive.
Still, it caught me off guard. At the outset of this campaign she’d worn a cool detachment, as though she had no intention of offering me a single opinion, but as the days wore on, the plated mask she’d fitted over herself flaked away piece by piece.
“You approved of it too, didn’t you. You thought it convenient, my going on a rampage.”
The corner of Cornelia’s mouth twisted, just barely.
“The next fort I’ll smash to pulp the same as ever. Kill them all!”
“—!”
Before I knew it, Cornelia had struck me across the cheek with the full of her strength.
“That stings… What’s gotten into you?”
My cheek burned red, a needle-sharp pain throbbing through it at even intervals. …I’d known it would come to this. Since taking her on I’d looked into what Cornelia was made of any number of times. A girl of shallow feeling who served a master no one could name. A cold ruthlessness, no hesitation at all in killing an enemy. Her magic outstripped an ordinary mage’s, but she’d likely never climb to my level; she’d already met the ceiling of her growth.
Digging all this up, at the last, I’d found one thing in Cornelia’s temper that gave me pause: a strong recoil from doing harm to anything that wasn’t a mark meant for killing. In this case, an affection taking root in her for the unarmed, the noncombatants.
“…Is your heart aching? This is war.”
“War it may be, but killing your own nation’s guiltless people is hardly a way to be praised, I’d think.”
“As a human being, the basest of acts, true enough. A deed against morality, I don’t doubt.”
“Then—”
“But I won’t change it. This is how I fight.”
I would not bend my way of war into the shape Cornelia wanted. To dream that I’d revise my thinking out of care for a subordinate was nothing but a child’s indulgence on her part.
“Ah, yes. There was something I’d meant to tell you, while the chance was here.”
Where we were bound was a gray killing ground, the death-cries never off the air. A place to hone every nerve and spend your whole self on staying alive. She was a subordinate my work could not do without. Precisely because of that, I spat a hard word of warning at her.
“Cornelia. Throw needless mercy away on the battlefield. Otherwise it’s you who dies. Understand?”
On a battlefield, high and low counted for nothing. Anyone at all killed, equally; anyone at all died, equally. The role might shift the odds of dying or the number of fights, but it changed nothing in the fact that we did our work with our lives put up as collateral.
“Cornelia.”
“…Yes.”
“If you want to spare the innocent their sacrifice, the only way is to crush the root that set this fight going. Once that’s done, the pointless killing ends of its own accord.”
“So that is why you were doing those things, Lady Epika…”
“Yes. It gladdens me you caught on.”
The meaning of killing so cruelly, again and again. It was not to hand the enemy despair and press them toward surrender. Nor was it aimed at grinding down morale to weaken them.
“…This too, all of it, is to bring things to a swift close.”
Far off across the plain, a level line of dust was rising. At that arrogant advance, with no thought even of masking its coming, I couldn’t help a laugh breaking out of me. Not the small armed bands I’d been felling. The genuine main army, led by Count Darius himself. Just the way I’d drawn it up.
“Finally, out they come.”
“So all of this was bait, to draw them out.”
“Yes. Win here, and there’ll be no more need to kill the people who live on this land. To save the many, the hard bargain was worth it.”
A host that dwarfed our suppression corps came on with a roar. To put fire back into the men it cowed, I drew a deep breath.
“All of you, look! There is our quarry: Count Darius and his hangers-on. You see? Take the commander’s head. Do that, and the victory is ours. Well, now? A very simple business, isn’t it?”
There was no need to make it complicated. How many each of us had to fell, whether to annihilate the enemy, none of that mattered. One man. Shatter Count Darius, the core of that army, and it was finished.
“Neatly lured out. A great help to me.”
At my father’s side was the man who’d once been commander of the Dragon Mount Division. He would read my thinking halfway, guess at our shortage of strength, and slide into the notion of crushing us under a great host. A simple man, easy to set dancing. Give him some show that hinted at our intent, and he’d leap to his own conclusions and move just as I wished. Nothing about him had changed since the old days. It was because he ran his outdated reads of people without a breath of doubt that things came to this. I had changed. I was no longer the weakling I’d been.
“…Cornelia. Have them ready. We begin the Great Purge.”
Before the closing host, I set them to laying out the magic that would trample it under. A faint smile on my lips, I fixed on my own blood, small as a bean yet plainly in view.
“Father. Welcome to the hell I’ve made ready for you.”
“All units, volley fire!!”
At the signal, a rain of fire bolts came down on the enemy. Did they scorn us for so few? Truly, how green. A mage force is not a thing to be judged by numbers. What you look at first is the total volume of magic brought to bear.
I stained the whole sky red, watching the streaming downpour of magic as I drew my own power to a point at my fingertips. The little flash bolt I sent up to set the mood burst overhead and glittered.
“Come. Ready the next. Until the mana runs dry… let us give them the finest hospitality.”
The one-sided slaughter had only just raised its curtain.
6
In a heartbeat, the view walled itself off behind a cliff of flame. The heat rolled in to scorch bare skin, and every man there threw up his arms to cover his face.
“—This, is—”
“E-enemy attack!!”
The front rank was swallowed whole in the vortex of fire; the men around them writhed in a bedlam of screaming. What in the world was that magic. Were mages such fearsome things. In one instant close to a tenth of the infantry was shaved away. There’d been no chance to stand on a field like this in a long while, and magic this violent coming down on us was beyond anything I’d braced for. This was bad.
My pulse hammered. Quickest of all to grasp how dangerous the enemy was, the former Dragon Mount Division commander roared the order.
“All units, fall back! Harden the defense at the stone fortress to the rear, and the moment we’ve regrouped, we meet them and drive them off!”
Gawein’s voice carried across the whole army, and the soldiers began, as one, to withdraw.
“Count Darius. Let us fall back as well.”
“A-ah.”
Urged by my vassal, I turned my back, but before I did, I seared into my eyes the figure of the enemy standing far to the rear.
Epika.
The daughter who had now become an outside threat to my very life. How many years had it been since I’d last set eyes on her face? I couldn’t call it to mind; I had lived taking no interest in Epika at all. That she’d become such an overwhelming presence as commander of the Imperial Mage Division, it had never once crossed my thoughts. The girl I remembered was young and feeble, a child who could do nothing. Nowhere now could I find a trace of that shadow.
“Gyaaaaah!!”
“H-hot… it’s hot…”
“Somebody, help me!!”
The ranks had long since come apart, the soldiers scattering every which way in flight. I’d checked my advantage in numbers and judged the fight an easy win from there. And now I was made to see how wrong that had been. Had I sent men to look closely into the matter of that magic, I’d never have offered battle out on an open plain like this. The quickening bombardment tore hollow after hollow into the field.
“…Damn it.”
Humiliation at having my numbers overturned, and despair. The only choice left me was to hunker inside the outpost at the end of the retreat and ride out that disaster of a magic storm.
7
When the furious barrage was spent and the smoke rising off the ground thinned away, only the wreckage of the enemy’s men remained.
The host that had spread wide to hem us in had vanished without a trace, and I found myself a touch impressed they hadn’t swelled their losses with some reckless charge.
“It seems they’ve pulled back.”
Cornelia covered her mouth with her hem against the smoke drifting our way on the wind and turned her eyes to the view ahead.
“No matter. We simply give chase.”
“Could they be feigning a rout and lying in wait…”
“No. If they’d meant from the start to draw us in, they’d never have come on so boldly with a host that size.”
They’d misjudged our strength and were rewriting their plan on the fly. Most likely they’d fled into some nearby outpost, thinking to meet us there.
Press forward, corner them, and pound the army holed up in whatever post they’d run to with magic. To the fools who’d assumed a stout stronghold couldn’t be cracked so easily, I would carve the true meaning of magic into their bones. However thick a wall was built, its endurance against shock had a limit.
“…Oh?”
The sky went suddenly dark; I looked up to find black clouds massing. A drop of water struck my brow, and, cooling the air all around, a real rain began to fall on the scorched fields.
“It’s come on to rain.”
“So it has.”
Thunder rolled, and lightning drove down into the burnt ground and shook the earth. The foul weather cut our sight, but I paid it no mind and swung my baton on.
“Well then, shall we march? The keep can’t be far now.”
Under the storm that wrapped the Darius domain, countless hooves came ringing down. The enemy no doubt thought themselves hidden in the roughly dug dry moats, but to us, who ran our sweep by lobbing magic into any spot that looked wrong, the textbook tactics they wrung out of their shallow cleverness were transparent, a wasted motion.
“Stop them!”
“Charge!!”
Here and there I glimpsed the soldiers set out as throwaway pawns. To the rabble rushing us so rashly with sword and spear, I gave the order to fire without mercy.
“Shoot them dead.”
“Gah—!”
“Ugh…”
A dull crump blew the men and the very ground they stood on into the air. Each time the enemy showed himself, he was blasted to pieces by the magic flaring in the sky. Across the pitch-black, cloud-choked heavens, five or six spells hung loosed at any moment, and every time one struck, a great pillar of fire went up.
“…Kill confirmed.”
“Finished here as well.”
“We keep advancing.”
I nodded at the cool reports and gave the order to press on once more.
“…Nothing but the same one-note ambush. How dull.”
The road we’d come down held nothing but scorched earth. Trees charred black as coal. The green turf that had covered the ground, all of it stained black too. Hard as the rain came down, the scattered points of fire never fully went out, and they went on lighting the darkened land.
A one-sided trampling by magic. The enemy had nothing left that could stand as a threat enough to halt our march.
“…Rather like a villain, aren’t I.”
“From where they stand, you’re the very picture of one, without a doubt.”
Conjuring magic, breaking the land. A punitive corps against a rebel force honed for savage slaughter, its members our own countrymen. Truly, I was the right one to lead it. A single hard-hearted girl and the withered slaves of vested interest, all destroyed together. The pus that had festered through the Empire, wiped clean here and now, and those who could suit themselves to the change of the age left to carry the next one.
“It’s a changing of the generations. What’s grown old wants returning to the soil, all of it, just the once.”
“Your lines and your face both, the very image of the villain in a story.”
“Oh? You think so? How glad that makes me. In fact, I’m terribly fond of a good villain, you know.”
“You are warped in any number of ways…”
Letting her rebuke wash past me, I drank in the thick reek of burning that clung about my nose.
“The villain of a story usually holds to some conviction of his own. Isn’t that splendid? However much the crowd shuns him, hates him, right up to the moment he falls at the end he clings to the life he chose to believe in. A life not jerked about by the opinions of those around him… that’s how I’d like to live, myself.”
Each time the scent stung my nose, the sense of it sank in: a battlefield staked with lives. I’d entered the army rather than live out a life as a daughter of House Darius. With magic so far past everyone else’s that it painted over the handicap of being a woman, I’d wrested the seat of Imperial Mage Division commander from the man who was my superior at the time. Force of arms: that was the proof that Epika von Darius existed.
Those who took against me tried to bring me low more times than I could count. That I held on to a division commander’s seat in the Empire all the same was because I never spared the effort of clearing away my outside enemies. To guard myself from assassins, I sharpened my magic. So as not to be caught in a scheme, I learned cunning. Because I refused to fall, I taught myself the arts of getting on in the world. And meaning one day to sweep out the trash I so despised, I worked, steady and patient, to widen my sway inside the Imperial army.
How many years had I waited for this hour? There were surely paths on which the chance to sweep the vermin away never came round at all. Had a new Emperor been crowned who muddied the internal struggle for the sake of the looming war with the Kingdom, my wish might have run out my whole life unmet.
“Let them think me a wicked woman; I don’t care. Hated by whoever likes, it’s nothing to me.”
I had no wish to live a dull life, falling in with those around me and never able to spend my whole strength on what I wanted.
“Mark it well, Cornelia. The only one who can make you happy is yourself. Happiness handed to you by another is a counterfeit, gotten by settling for less.”
“Is that meant as a barb at me?”
“No. Merely a lesson from experience.”
I’d no mind to jeer at Cornelia for moving under someone else’s hand. If she’d chosen that, then it too was one shape happiness could take. I’d only told her that if she was simply drifting along on inertia, she’d do well to think again.
“We’ll be at the enemy’s post before long. The men are thickening up.”
The shockwaves the magic threw off shook me to the bone. The count of spell-bolts dancing across the sky climbed higher, the blasts booming out on every side.
“Commander! The enemy are so many our magic can’t keep pace!”
“We slow our advance. Keep them from closing, and the enemy has no answer to magic. Pick off the nearest ones, sure and steady.”
“Yes, ma’am!”
A formation that could throw magic to all four quarters. A stance of solid rock. About now the enemy, too, would begin to grasp that fighting a losing defense only sped their ruin.
“…Will they play it, I wonder. Their trump card.”
The chill wind streaming my hair out behind me, I called up in my mind the scene of a reckoning with an old colleague.
8
—
A sight cruel enough to steal the breath. The red of raging fire. The black of scorched earth blanketed with the dead. The downpour-soaked land had been made over into hell itself by the reapers closing the distance on horseback.
“Count Darius. The enemy still advance. It’s only a matter of time before they reach us.”
Shown the whole course of the explosions and ruin breaking out everywhere, I understood by instinct that this stone fortress, too, would not last long. However thick the wall, it could never hold against the numberless magic they threw, against hundreds, thousands of shocks. Let the faintest crack run through it and it was over: the defenses would fail, and the bared interior would be swept with a merciless downpour of death.
“…You. We can send no more men to the front line! Do something, drive them back!!”
“Every card we could play, we’ve played. There’s nothing left but to meet them here and—”
“Damn it. Epika, you—! You mean to kill me, your own father!?”
Count Darius, driven to fury, was clearly aware, too, that death had come crawling near; a cold sweat ran down his brow, and he couldn’t keep still.
“This is as far as it goes, then.”
The edge in numbers had long since been turned on its head. The mages Epika commanded were slaughter-engines built above all to break an enemy line, called the spearhead of attack in the Imperial army. A threat the equal of, or greater than, the dragon-mount riders who ruled the sky; a foe you were meant to plan carefully against. That I’d forgotten a thing so plain, perhaps it made me unworthy of ever having been the Dragon Mount Division’s commander.
The rule of thumb against mages is the close-range ambush. What matters is denying them the time and the safe range to work their spells up. Knowing the enemy’s skill was high, I’d shied from the clash and put distance between us instead. That, I was now made to learn, had been the worst folly of all.
At this rate, Epika would kill every soldier we had.
“Count Darius.”
“What is it?”
“Let me be the one to go after Epika. If we can’t cut her down, we’re finished.”
The loss of the enemy’s supreme commander: that was the victory condition both armies shared. To overturn a fight where we’d been forced onto the back foot, there was nothing else.
“…Can you do it?”
“I can’t say. But I’m the only one who can stand against her.”
The dragon-mount was the single greatest asset we held. Its match against a mage was poor, but the only counter I could put up was a dragon-mount rider. As the rain sharpened and cold air moved through, I gathered up the riders still inside the stone fortress. One attack, and only one. A double-edged plan honed against Epika alone, mounted in the full knowledge it might mean our end.
“We will bring those creatures down, and we will guard Count Darius.”
“Yes, sir!”
I watched the men ahead of us burned by magic in the thick of their confusion, and drew a great breath. My heart was pounding loud enough to ring in my skull.
9
The sky had filled with dragon-mounts taking wing. Their dark hides, blending into the black clouds, did their part in stealing them from sight.
“Dragon-mounts. So the enemy’s been driven to the wall as well.”
We’d scattered green troops with little battle experience, but dragon-mount riders were not so easily brought down. Those had to be the picked men among all my father’s forces. Their ranks were cleanly dressed, and at their head rode a man I knew.
“That man.”
“The former Dragon Mount Division commander.”
“Yes. When Lady Valtrune reorganized the Imperial army, he was struck from the commander’s seat, and rather than stay, he left the army and threw in with my father…”
To that man, commander of the Imperial army division had been a post to cling to. For one who longed to climb back to his former glory, toppling Duke Felsdorf’s faction and the new Emperor Valtrune must have looked the most profitable course.
“A division commander’s salary was a fine sum, and the gifts from the nobles were sweet besides. I turned all of it down, but knowing that man, I imagine he had himself quite a good time of it.”
The very incarnation of greed, drowned in privilege. As a dragon-mount rider he’d been superb, but somewhere along the way he’d grown fat and idle on the commander’s seat, and fallen.
“He was a division commander once, but he looks quite at his ease,” Cornelia murmured, following the dragon-mounts wheeling overhead with her eyes.
“Not at his ease, exactly. Only that he doesn’t mean to lose.”
The dragon-mount riders slipped the mages’ sharp, arcing volleys with no trouble at all and dropped as one into a diving posture.
“Here they come.”
“Volley, at once—”
“No need for that! Evasive action, now!”
The countless black dots writhing above plunged, hidden in the black clouds. The dragon-mounts’ cruel talons carved apart several mages who’d let their watch on the sky grow thin, in the space of a breath.
“Gyah!!”
“Gbo…”
A mage’s weakness is her frailty in a close fight. Wheeling on high where magic couldn’t reach, the riders read the openings while spells were still being built and came down all at once, whittling us away a little at a time.
“Shall we pull back and reset?”
“No. Keep advancing.”
“But while we’re taken up with the ambush, the infantry are closing from the front as well.”
The situation, where we’d held an absolute edge and could pour magic down one-sidedly, had turned on its head. The dragon-mount riders and their maddening movements had our mages well and truly at their mercy. We’d shaved the enemy’s numbers by no small margin, and yet in sheer count we were still the fewer.
Let this pesky ambush drag on, and it was plain to see: sooner or later the enemy’s great counterstroke would land and deal us a heavy blow.
…And yet to draw the army back here and dress the formation was out of the question. Give them the wasted grace, and the enemy, ahead of us in numbers, would recover and simply grind us down by force.
“The dragon-mounts I’ll handle. Set the rest of the mages on bringing down that keep ahead of us.”
“Understood.”
A nuisance, but there was no avoiding it now. I’d meant to stay out of the fighting as much as I could, but with the enemy come in earnest to smash us, this was no time to sit on my hands.
“…What a troublesome man, truly. To make himself my enemy and trouble my hands into the bargain, I wish he wouldn’t.”
10
It was twelve years ago now that I was taken on as a mage of the Imperial army. Fifteen at the time, I’d pushed past my father’s objections and passed the Imperial army’s entrance trials, and so joined the ranks of soldiers at last.
“You there. Your name?”
“Oh, yes! Epika von Darius.”
“…Ah. The young lady of House Darius, is it. Well. Pleased to have you.”
“Yes! I’ll be in your care!”
That I’d made it into the army in proper form was a joy above anything. I’d loved handling magic from the start, and I dreamed of making a name across the Empire as a great mage.
…But once it got out that I was the daughter of House Darius, no one would see me as a soldier in my own right. The Darius girl had joined the army on a whim. She’d never last the training; she’d quit soon enough. A little noble lady shoved in through her parents’ connections.
“Hey, that girl over there.”
“Ah. Count Darius’s daughter, isn’t she. Well, keeping up with the training this far is admirable, I’ll grant, but isn’t it about time the whining started?”
“Right? No way she lasts in the Imperial army.”
“Just so. The dropout rate in the first year’s four in ten. Brutal enough as it is; no way a noble’s little miss holds up.”
“Inside the year she’ll cook up some excuse, a marriage of state or whatever, and bawl her way out.”
Sneering looks turned my way, half-laughing. No high-noble’s daughter had ever walked a soldier’s path before, and the few who enlisted almost all quit before the year was out. With no strength in my arms and reflexes that weren’t much to speak of, the daily training was hard enough that clinging on was the most I could manage; back at the dormitory I was wracked again and again by fever, jolting awake in the night to vomit, over and over.
“Training’s done for the day. Clean up and dismiss to quarters. That’s all!”
Training over, I’d collapse and fight to catch my breath, and the other soldiers, looking down at me, would give a careless little wave.
“Lady Epika. Good work today, hm?”
“Get plenty of rest tonight. That was a bit hard on a young lady like you, I’m sure.”
“Now, don’t overdo it and make yourself ill. The Count might worry, after all. Hahaha!”
“Oi, don’t laugh at her. It’s cruel… pfft.”
A sad, chest-tightening feeling would rise in me, but I kept it off my face, put on a look of composure, and returned their greetings.
“…Yes. Good work today.”
The contempt dressed up as words of care wounded my heart time and again. Why should I be looked down on and made a fool of for nothing but being a noble’s daughter. When the seniors had gone past me, half-smiling, I bowed my head, and once they were out of sight I stamped hard on the ground and ground my teeth.
“So annoying. What is their problem…!”
The contempt made my blood boil, and so did my own uselessness, unable to give any of it back. This wasn’t the life I’d wanted, days spent cramped in a misery like this. What I’d wanted was to be marked as a mage in my own right, to reach a place where no one gave a thought to my ties to House Darius.
To break free of the curse that was House Darius, and to be seen for myself.
But in the end, wherever I went, I couldn’t change. So long as I couldn’t undo the fact of being House Darius’s daughter, the label pinned to me would never peel away.
I can never become anyone at all.
“Oi. You there.”
“…”
“Hey. You listening? You, the mage.”
Face twisted with the bitterness, right in the thick of my temper, a hand came down on my shoulder. I turned, and there stood a burly man of the Cavalry Division, a greatsword shouldered on his back.
“…What do you want with me?”
I’d been half a year in the ranks, and the man before me was a stranger I’d never so much as crossed paths with. When I glared at him, wary, he threw his mouth wide in surprise.
“Eh, wai— are you… are you crying!?”
“I’m not… crying, or… anything…”
“No, come on—”
“Don’t look at me…!”
The worst meeting there could be, at the worst possible moment.
That was my first contact with the man who would later become the Imperial army’s Cavalry Division commander: Rudolf von Argus.
“Rudolf, boy. Just when I think you’ve up and vanished, here you are dawdling… hm?”
At the same moment, I met for the first time the man who would go on to become commander of the Dragon Mount Division.
“You’d be of the Mage Division, then?”
“Hic… Epika von Darius.”
“Hoh. Darius, is it.”
A stoutish man in his late thirties, holding an officer’s rank in the Dragon Mount Division: Gawein Rasse. Green as I was, both as a soldier and as a mage, I could never in my wildest dreams have imagined that, a dozen years and more on, I’d be locked in a fight to the death with this man.
“I am Gawein Rasse, of the Dragon Mount Division. We may find ourselves working joint assignments together, so do get to know me.”
Gawein, hearing my house name, made nothing much of it; he put out his hand as naturally as breathing. Even I, so full of suspicion, could tell: he had no interest in a name, only in trading a greeting with a fellow soldier of the Imperial army.
“Hey now, Gawein. I called out to her first, you know?”
“You were only frightening her. One must treat a lady more gently than that.”
“I didn’t say anything weird!”
“That’s for the one on the receiving end to decide.”
“Argh, what a pain you are!!”
The pair of them squabbling looked, for all the world, like brothers a good few years apart, an oddly warming sight.
“Pfft.”
At the smile that slipped out of me despite myself, Rudolf reacted with wild overkill.
“Ah, you laughed just now, didn’t you!?”
“I did not.”
“Liar! You absolutely laughed! …I’m Rudolf. You’re this year’s intake too, right? New recruits together, so let’s get along from here on. Eh?”
“…Well. I suppose that’s fine.”
No malice in it. Only pure, plain goodwill. It felt as though I’d met, for the first time, someone I could call a comrade.
Looking back now, it was surely nothing more than Rudolf happening past a girl standing alone, throwing out a word on a whim. But if not for that meeting, I think I’d have stayed with no anchor for my heart, and somewhere along the way broken and left the army.
So I am grateful to the two of them. Thank you, for hauling me up out of the pit in those young days.
And so, under that clouded sky, the resolve set hard and firm.
“…Gawein. Let’s end all of it here.”
11
A shaft of golden light broke the black clouds and struck the ground, and in the same instant a keen slashing wave of magic pierced the dragon-mount riders flanking me. From the trueness of the aim and the strength of the backwash that grazed my skin, the one who’d loosed it rose at once to my mind.
“Epika!”
Supreme commander of the enemy army she might be, yet there she was on the very front line, loosing magic, shooting down the gliding riders one after another. Her accuracy was beyond any other mage’s by an order, and, forgetting I stood on a killing field, I caught the corners of my mouth pulling up.
“Ha, how splendid!”
A bout with her, after all this time. When was the last we’d truly gone at each other in earnest? Some years now. The very day, I think, that Epika and Rudolf were made division commanders. We were raw, green commanders still, back then. And her skill now, how far had it come? I leveled the beloved spear of ten years straight ahead and shouted till my throat tore.
“Haaaaah!!”
The long spear, driven down from the dragon-mount’s back, split the air as it went and drew toward the hollow of Epika’s throat. Her lips went on moving; she made not the slightest move to dodge.
“…A poor end, this. Epika. You disappoint me.”
I’d let myself hope a little, at how startlingly the power of her magic had grown, but in the end she’d never conquered the mage’s weakness, the frailty at close quarters, and the letdown sank through me.
“Farewell, then.”
The point would carve clean through Epika’s throat. It should have.
“—What!?”
The feel of the spear driving home was gone; the tip met something hardened past all moving and stopped dead. Through the shock that ran up my arms, I felt it: a strike thrown with everything I had, turned aside.
A dull ring of metal, and inside my skull a single thought spun: impossible.
What is this, a sword?
A mage fights by wielding magic, a made thing with no body to it. As a rule she carries nothing on her to guard against an incoming blade. And yet the straight sword hanging in the air to shield her throat was, past all doubt, a piece of defense moved by her own magic.
“…It’s been a while. Gawein.”
“Epika, you… since when do you swing a sword about!?”
Our two gazes fixed and held. In this one moment, at least, we were not enemies, but two old friends who had spent long years of soldiering side by side, looking each at the other.
“That you’d raise your banner against the imperial house, how unexpected of… fufufu. No. You always were that sort, weren’t you.”
“My apologies. I too have a reason I can’t step back. I cannot give up the commander’s seat.”
That post had been my own place of honor for years on end. To become the Dragon Mount Division’s commander I’d served out year upon year of grinding apprenticeship, and only then laid hands on it: my reason for being. To let it go on the whim of a new Emperor was not a thing I could ever bring myself to accept.
“Is a commander’s chair so very fine a thing, I wonder.”
“That place is mine. I hand it to no one.”
“Possessed by your own attachments. What a foolish thing.”
There was no turning back now. Cut her down here, and bring the hammer down on the sitting Emperor. The Valtrune government would not be let stand long. I would set Duke Felsdorf’s heir on the throne as the next Emperor without delay, and climb once more to the head of the Imperial army.
“I’m sorry, but I can let no one past here, and it seems I’ll be cutting you down where you stand.”
“Yes. I rather thought that was your intent.”
I drew the spear back once and broke the deadlock. The sword Epika worked by magic wouldn’t budge a hair’s breadth in any direction, as steady as if the very space around it had been pinned in place. One-handed, I hauled on the dragon-mount’s reins and pulled off at an angle, gaining a little distance.
“It’s a rare thing, a bout after so long. Since we’re at it, shall we make it an aerial fight, with the weapon you favor, Gawein?”
The soles of Epika’s feet left the ground. As they did, three straight swords gathered and circled her body, moving in strange, shifting arcs as though life had been breathed into them.
“Meant as provocation, is it. Fighting in the sky is a dragon-mount rider’s own trade. Do you truly think you can win?”
“You’d fret over me? A needless kindness.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Fufu… because, you see, whatever the ground we fought on, you could never beat me, Gawein. As the one who’ll take the victory, I only thought to do you the courtesy of letting you fall, gracelessly and with a light heart, in the place you’re strongest.”
She’d learned to say some high and haughty things. Not a shred remained of the girl who’d flinched at everything and everyone.
“You had a touch more charm about you in the old days.”
“Charm, was it… don’t you mean the timid, clumsy little thing I was?”
An overbearing, arrogant bearing. Not one shade of inferiority lived in her now. Parted clean from her past, Epika von Darius today was a figure that stood as a symbol, a mage running at the Empire’s very front. She was dazzling to look on, so much so that, as I was now, even meeting her eyes felt like a pain to bear.
“Well then, shall we have you die? Are your affairs in order for the road to the netherworld?”
To ward off the three swords she worked, I looped the dragon-mount’s reins around my leg and took the spear firm again in both hands.
12
A duel between the commanders of two armies.
An air of strange, taut menace hung over the field, and as if to shatter it, a swarm of black shapes came screaming down and cut across the moment of decision.
“Lord Gawein!!”
“Leave this to us!”
“Diiie!!”
They passed clean by Gawein where he leveled his spear and drove straight at me. The men on their many dragon-mounts, fearing not even death, made a truly fine and gallant show of it, throwing themselves in to shield their commander.
“How moving. And yet…”
But subordinates were a thing I had as well. Sensing the massed dragon-mounts, the mages drew together around me and began working up the magic that beckoned death.
“Keep away from Lady Epika!”
“Burst.”
“All units, open fire.”
The mages moved to shoot the swift riders coldly from the air. At the firing order, given in a cool and limpid voice, hellfire swallowed the great dragon-mounts one after another.
A slaughter so lopsided it was no contest at all. This was the wall, sheer and unscalable, that stood between the Imperial army as it now was and a mob of amateurs risen from broken soldiery.
“…Haah.”
Gawein’s men, blasted apart, turning to ash, mixing into the air and gone, swallowed in a killing so instant not even a scream escaped.
“…!”
As though to work the stiffness out of his cheek, as though to hide the breath caught in his chest, Gawein held his shaking, misshapen scowl.
“…How dare you.”
“How dare I?”
“How dare you kill my men!!”
Even that fury felt thin to me. Hunting about for a reason to fight, he’d made the deaths of his subordinates the charge that set his own feelings alight, a spur to lash himself on. He was deceiving his own heart to wish away his fear, and it struck me as very like him.
And at the same time it made me feel, again, that the man he was now was unfit to be a division commander of the Imperial army.
“To let feeling carry you off is second-rate at best, in one who leads.”
That scene, his subordinates dying a pointless death. By rights, he should never have let it disturb him. The terror of trusted comrades dying in an instant, and, a beat behind, the sorrow and the rage that welled up after — none of it should show on his face. At the very least, a superior who still had many other subordinates ought to move with a thought for those who remained.
“Epikaaaaah!!”
A heart in disarray, waves running high across it. Feeling, once shaken loose, was a breeding ground for the ragged breath and the loss of edge in the spear’s line, for everything that dulled ability.
Move by feeling, and the quality of your fighting comes out uneven.
Move by feeling, and you misjudge.
Move by feeling, and you lose to your own wants.
“…Haah.”
Never be swept away by feeling.
And it was you who taught me that. It was, wasn’t it.
Epika. You needn’t mind what people say around you. What matters is what you yourself should do. How you wish to be, in the days to come. Keep your eyes on the goal alone and let the rest of the noise wash past. What’s asked of a commander is to go on choosing, cool and hard, the best action toward the end you’re after.
Gawein. Is this your best action now, I wonder.
My dream? Let me see. My dream is to become commander of the Dragon Mount Division and stand as a cornerstone of the Empire’s guard, protecting His Majesty the Emperor, Her Highness the Princess, and the people.
You who set yourself against the imperial house, you who trade killing blows with me now: is this the life you wanted, the one you dreamed of laying hold of?
Epika, Rudolf. Power, left too long in one place, is bound to rot. So it has to be cycled through, at regular turns. Truth be told, the current Dragon Mount Division commander is a wretched man with no thought for his subordinates. So I’ll set the Dragon Mount Division to rights. You two, aim for the top, in the Cavalry Division and the Mage Division. The three of us at the head of our own divisions of the Imperial army. Do that, and the Imperial army is sure to come back to life. Let’s build one together: an Imperial army that keeps a creed truly minded for the good of the nation!
The high aims you raised in those days, mere prattle? All of it a lie? …No, surely not. That was your true heart beyond any doubt, wasn’t it?
“Haaah!!”
The vicious spear knocked the three swords I worked aside and drove for the center of my chest, but a barrier of magic stopped it dead.
“Kh…”
From the anguish written on Gawein’s face, a faint feeling seemed to linger yet: feeling against killing a junior he’d known so long.
“Grown blunt with the spear, have you?”
“Is that how it looks to you.”
“Yes. Very much so.”
“Tch!”
The Gawein of old would have had force enough to run my magic barrier through. He was a man of far more combat experience than I, one who knew inside out how a mage is killed. Only, his knowledge had stopped, caught fast in the past, and he could wring out no scheme to bring down the me who had grown. He took a fresh grip on the heavy spear. A storm of wild slashes, gusts battering out — but on the thick barrier of magic ringed close around me, not a single scratch.
“Sad to say, this is the gap in our strength, Gawein.”
“No. Not yet!!”
Gawein swept aside the sword I’d sent thrusting at his back and went for a forced breakthrough, a rough gambit riding the dragon-mount’s charging weight. The body-blow warped the shape of the barrier greatly, but it only bounced, faintly, and no crack was born.
A barrier of magic is desperately weak to the thrust that lands its shock on a single point, but against a broad-contact strike, it spreads the force out, and breaking it is no easy thing. What he ought to do here was drive the spear stubbornly, honestly, into one point over and over, but robbed of his composure, even that was likely beyond his reach now.
“Damn, damn, damn it all!!”
“Gawein…”
“Haga—!!”
“It pains me, killing you. Truly it does.”
With the ironclad guard of the barrier and the three swords I could move one-sidedly from a place of safety, I went on cutting into Gawein’s body without mercy or pause. The rough, grating sound of blades opening the flesh rang out without end, and, taking cut after cut, he ground his teeth against the pain.
“Ggh, gugaaah!!”
He forgot even the blood he coughed up, working his dragon-mount in a frenzy, throwing himself recklessly at me; the sight of him was pitiful, a wrung-out rag of a man.
That he still would not stop his hand was because he’d fixed on the single point of taking back the commander’s seat, whipping a screaming body onward to reach the end he was after.
“…Where did you leave the cool head and the hard heart to see the goal through?”
“—”
“The true cause of your growing weak is that you mistook your goal and walked the wrong way.”
“Be quiet. What could you possibly know of me—”
“Who can say. Only, at the least, the you of old never fought like this, lost to himself. He faced himself squarely and searched out the thread of victory.”
“—!!”
Rebuked, Gawein, for all the great flow of blood down his whole body, poured his soul into a single spear-thrust. He made a shield of the dragon-mount’s bulk to lock down the swords I moved and threw himself in, believing his own spearwork would strip my barrier away.
But the passion buried under his fierceness did not arrive at any sweet victory.
“Wh-why…!?”
A crack ran through the barrier the spearpoint had met.
He had, indeed, brought down a strike with force enough to break through my barrier. To pierce that ironclad guard and lay a wave of killing intent on me was a feat that could have been done by no one but him; of that I’ll speak plainly.
…But the victory beyond it, I would not let him grasp.
What Gawein saw, in the instant he broke the wall and reached for the decision, was the cold, heatless brilliance of magic, chilling to the marrow.
“—”
The whole of the surroundings folded into that light, and Gawein himself, who to the last would not own his defeat, let slip a sigh of wonder before the netherworld’s door drawn up close in front of him.
“…Ah. I see.”
I watched his figure swallowed in the source of light and rewritten pure white, and whispered, low.
“Goodbye—Gawein.”
13
“Hey, you hear? Come the month after next, they’re swapping out every division commander in the Imperial army.”
On the Imperial army’s training ground, the fierce heat unbroken, Rudolf, trading heavy training-sword blows with me, said it as though he’d only just remembered. As he and I moved about, breath ragged in the white heat of the drills, Epika, cooling herself in the shade under the eaves, sipped elegantly at cold water and picked at her nails, looking bored.
“…Haah, you’re slow with the news. Everyone’s known that half a year now. And besides, I’ve already had word off the record: a recommendation for next Mage Division commander.”
“What, a recommendation!?”
“What are you so shocked about. It’s under two months till the new commanders are announced. A total swap of the division heads means a large-scale shake-up across the whole Imperial army. Rebuilding the personnel structure takes time, so it’s no wonder they’ve settled some of the people for the posts already. The next commander in most every branch is more or less decided by now, I’d think. Whether your Cavalry Division’s the same, I couldn’t tell you…”
I gave Rudolf, standing stock-still and blank, a light rap on the head with my spearpoint.
“Ow!”
“Rudolf. Focus on the training.”
I meant the flat, even reproach to tighten the wholly slackened mood, but he pressed his case with an unconvinced face.
“No, no, Gawein! You hear a bombshell like that and you expect a man to keep his head in the drills? There’s no way, I tell you!”
“…Well. There’s something in what you say, I suppose.”
The gist of what Epika had said rang true enough, but even so, her being all but promised the next Mage Division commander’s seat was a thing to be astonished at.
“…It’s only that in the Imperial army, where merit rules, my ability got its due. Nothing worth making a fuss over.”
She declared it in an offhand tone, but she was still nineteen. To take a recommendation for next division commander in under four years in the army was the exception among exceptions.
“That’s not so, Epika. The recommendation is a result you fought for and won. You ought to hold your head high and be proud. Truly, congratulations.”
“…Thank you very much. Gawein.”
At those blunt words of thanks, given with a touch of bashfulness, a smile slipped out of me despite myself. When we’d first met she’d struck me as a girl who couldn’t hold on to any faith in herself, and in a scant few years she’d made a startling, headlong growth.
She’d chased the ideal way for a mage to fight in single combat and gone on training harder than anyone. If that effort had been repaid, it was a thing to be glad of past all measure.
And there was this, besides.
“For what it’s worth, I too have been sounded out about becoming the next Dragon Mount Division commander.”
“Hwah!?”
To me, Gawein Rasse, word had come of a push for next division commander as well.
“At this rate, Epika and I will be shouldering the Imperial army’s banner as its new commanders.”
“Is that so. Congratulations.”
“Thank you. Becoming a commander was a dream of mine for years. I’m glad it came true without trouble.”
While I and Epika shared in the joy of an honored promotion, there stood one man, thunderstruck, who let the sword in his hand drop to the ground.
“Wh-why just the two of you!?”
Rudolf von Argus. A superbly gifted man in his own right, and yet word of next division commander seemed not to have reached him. As if to rub salt in the wound, Epika curled her lips into a wicked, bewitching sneer.
“Well, you’re a fool, so there’s no help for it.”
“Guh—!”
“And besides, the Cavalry Division’s the branch with the most muscle-headed crack soldiers of the lot, isn’t it. The competition’s fierce, and you thought you’d be picked for commander? Awfully full of yourself.”
“Gah—!”
“And to begin with, you’re hopeless at selling yourself to the people around you. No one can trust the Imperial army’s core to a man who can’t get on in the world.”
“Hbo—!!”
Clutching his chest, Rudolf pitched face-down onto the floor. No good; his spirit was on death’s door entirely. I checked the state of him, lying there gone pale, and signaled to Epika that he was past recovery, and she let out a sigh of exasperation.
“…Well, I suppose I could put in a word for you, from a candidate for next commander, that is.”
“Is that true!?”
“T-too close… you’re a nuisance, back off already.”
“You’ll recommend me!?”
“I said I could put in a quiet word. I never once said I would—”
“Thank you, Epika!!”
“He only hears what suits him…”
Fending off Rudolf with the sole of her foot as he crowded in, she threw me a look brimming with distress, begging rescue. The force in that gaze of hers was so strong that I couldn’t help hauling Rudolf back by the collar to still the runaway.
“Now, calm yourself. You’re troubling Epika. …Let me see, very well, I’ll put in a word above for you as well.”
“Gawein…”
“If Epika and I both recommend you, then even if it can’t be this year, the chance is bound to come round. The three of us becoming commanders together needn’t stay a fairy tale.”
The three of us to lead the Imperial army. Sweeping away the old ways, all of them, to meet the dawn of a new age.
“Let the three of us take the commanders’ seats together. What do you say? Shall we swear it, here and now?”
“Yeah! Of course I’ll swear it! Come on, Epika, get over here!”
“…Yes, yes. There’s no need to rush me, I’m coming.”
The three of us, Epika, Rudolf, and I, laid our hands one atop another.
In all my long years as an Imperial soldier, the oath the three of us swore that day was the greatest treasure I owned. A day I was never, ever meant to forget.
Ah, why did I turn away from facing the two of them?
As I watched Epika’s magic blaze dazzling before me, memories from long ago flooded my mind like a lantern spinning its images round.
“Ah, I see… Epika. You’ve grown this strong. I never noticed at all.”
The three of us took the commanders’ seats, and for a while after, things went well. But over trifling misunderstandings, and the faction struggles that quietly swelled in the army, the three of us, no, the two of them and I, drifted apart by degrees.
Only now did I feel the regret welling up from the pit of me like water without end.
Had I sat down with Epika and Rudolf and talked it out, honest and open, about the Imperial army’s road ahead, would this future, where we cut each other down, never have come?
Had I not forgotten the oath of that day, had I not struck a secret pact with Duke Felsdorf for the sole sake of clinging to the commander’s seat, might I still be a proper Dragon Mount Division commander of the Imperial army, offering my loyalty to the imperial house even now?
“…Far too late to notice.”
Too late for anything, then.
Whatever I thought now, it was all what-might-have-been. There was no overturning a past overflowing with mistakes. Drowned in privilege, I’d cast out, without exception, every one I found in my way. I’d meant to renew the body of the organization, to win back a proud Imperial army that fought for the people and the nation, and somewhere along the road I’d taken up a share in the very rot that fouled the army.
Was I not, in this, the very image of a clown?
The creed I should have carried through, gone. The pride of a commander, gone. The trust of dear comrades, gone as well.
There was nothing left in my hands worth guarding.
What in the world had I even wanted to do?
“—”
The heat began to sear my skin, and the shape of my body slipped away by degrees. Pain and agony gnawed through the whole of me. There was fear, true, at death drawn near. And yet, more than that, my heart was wrapped, strangely, in stillness.
“…Goodbye, then.”
I turned my eyes straight toward Epika.
Knowing her, I’d thought she’d be watching my death through cold and level eyes, but to my surprise, those deep violet eyes were trembling in tiny quivers.
“——”
I was glad.
That I was, to her still, someone whose death would bring grief: knowing only that was enough.
Let the three of us take the commanders’ seats together.
The words of that day rose clear in my mind.
Every last wish I’d wanted never came true. But the oath of that day was, beyond doubt, kept.
And my comrade in arms, Epika, whispered the words of a parting offering and raised the output of her magic.
“Goodbye—Gawein.”
Thank you. I’m glad it was you who brought my life to its close.
The end of it may be a wretched thing past all speaking, but as his body turned to ash and dust, Gawein Rasse met a quiet, peaceful last.
14
The foul reek of scorched flesh clung all about my face and would not leave.
The enemy general, Gawein Rasse, had burned away in the heat of magic without a trace and vanished.
The dark rain-sky cleared to a clean blue, and, as if in mockery, a dazzling sun poured down to light the ground.
“…Haah.”
With that, the enemy had lost Gawein Rasse, the mainstay of their attack. Robbed of the one who’d held them together, the enemy’s dragon-mount riders wheeled the sky in disarray.
“Now! All units, shoot down every last one in the sky!”
At the command, magic without number loosed and brought the dragon-mounts down one after another; the black specks that had covered the sky thinned by degrees, and at last were gone.
“Lady Epika.”
“Yes. …All units, resume the advance!”
Hearing the voice I’d forced up out of myself, the mages, mounted, pressed on toward the post where Count Darius had holed up.
With that, the outcome was as good as settled.
Cornelia, hurrying to my side, let out a breath of relief.
“…This is the end of it, then.”
“…So it is.”
Unlike Cornelia, whose cheeks eased at the fight’s winding down, I was seized by a loss like a hole punched clean through my heart.
The leftover heat in my palm called his face back to me. In the end, right to the very last, I’d been made to dance to his tune. A dreadful man, taking up lodging in a corner of my heart even after he’d died. …I could do without it, truly.
“Before I stood against him, I felt nothing, and thought I could kill him…”
“Lady Epika?”
Stirring my heart to disorder as a parting gift, Gawein Rasse had gone.
I gripped the hair at the back of my head hard and dropped my eyes to the pitch-black ash blanketing the ground.
“Haah… feeling. What a wretchedly troublesome thing it is.”
In the moment I settled it, I could not, after all, play the heartless, cold-blooded officer through to the end.
To me he’d been the teacher who gave me the spark to change how I lived, and an old comrade in arms besides. Even after our roads forked, the fondness I bore him had gone on living, quietly. I should never have looked at his face.
Grinding the ash spread across the ground under my heel, I walked on as I was.
Kill an old comrade in arms, and next kill the father whose blood I shared… hm?
“…How strange. Killing that old wretch stirs nothing in me at all.”
Blood ties held no meaning. My own heart seemed to prove it out.
“Lady Epika. Target confirmed by sight.”
“Open fire the moment we’re in range. There’s no need to answer any call for surrender… kill them all.”
“Yes, ma’am!!”
The stout fortress had come into view ahead. To the foolish father, deluded that it was a safe haven, I would drum in the merciless thing that is reality.
I raised a hand overhead and slowly swung it down. The final full assault by magic began, signaled by the walls blowing apart.
15
Only a few seconds until the thick stone wall was made over into a mountain of rubble.
Gawein Rasse and his picked dragon-mount riders, not returning.
The mage host, closing to the very foot of the fortress.
…The worst of futures waiting beyond this came to mind with no effort at all.
“I won’t have it. I won’t have it! Not here, not I—!”
Shaking my head, tearing my eyes from the countless soldiers dead and gone, I broke into a run for the depths of the post, as if fleeing the roar of the blasts. At my back, red pillars of fire and no end of black smoke climbing to the heavens. The provisions laid in for a siege lay scattered underfoot, charred wreckage, and the soldiers who’d lived scrambled about the interior in a panic, unmanned by the endless volleys of magic.
“Count Darius. Word from a dragon-mount rider come back. General Gawein Rasse’s unit, that went to the front, is annihilated. Lord Gawein too, they say, has fallen in battle to the enemy general, Epika.”
“Damn it… so it’s as I feared.”
The moment I’d let the enemy’s advance through, I’d held no hope, but hearing the death confirmed in fact, the will to fight drained out of me all at once. With the strength that remained, slipping through that rain of magic to strike back was a hard thing.
Surrender, then.
Just as that humiliating last resort crossed my mind, another rueful word came flying from one of the soldiers.
“Count Darius. A little while ago, several men bolted the post, meaning to turn coat to the enemy.”
“…I see.”
That men would flee the post to save their skins and beg for their lives was a thing I’d foreseen. No surprise in it. But the next words twisted my face despite myself.
“…Only, their pleading found no ear with the enemy. Every last one of them was butchered.”
“—”
“The enemy won’t take our surrender. They mean, it appears, to keep up the attack, thorough and unbroken, until we’re wiped out entire.”
“…That little girl—! She truly means to kill me!”
No different from what she’d done at the other posts, the rain of attacks would not stop until every one of us here had perished. The defenses of the post were as good as gone now, and the soldiers, despairing at the gap in strength, would bolt and beg for their lives. And those who’d lost the will to fight, she’d shoot down with magic, no questions asked.
A deed you could fairly call the work of a devil.
“…Command the soldiers. Not a single step out of the post.”
I gave the messenger the word to pass along, but the man’s response came oddly halting.
“Count Darius. But holed up in this post, we’ll only be killed one-sidedly by magic in the end.”
“The enemy won’t allow surrender, will they. Go out, and it’s a dog’s death.”
“Stay in, and it’s still annihilation, as things stand.”
I know that much without being told. The moment we joined with Duke Felsdorf, who set himself against the imperial house and made a show of fighting to the last, we became, in the eyes of the present Empire, a nuisance to be cleared away. Violent outlaws. The enemy had no reason on earth to grant such men the right to live.
“…Damn it. To lose out to a mere handful of that number…”
The edge in soldiers had been ours for certain. Had we shaped the encircling line with more care and fought not head-on but by a way that surely dragged the enemy low, we’d never have fallen into a corner like this.
“…One more order. Gather the soldiers we’ve left at the depths of the post, at once.”
“That is—”
“Quickly! From here we enter our final battle. As one body we sweep away Epika’s faction. Understand it, and hurry the preparations!”
A siege, that kind of resistance, held no meaning now. The stone wall that had seemed so solid lay broken, its inside laid bare, and a post with zero defensive worth left was worth nothing to hold. Once they’d shaved our strength down hard with magic, the enemy would step into the post. Knowing that girl, she’d come to take my head with her own hand, no doubt of it.
“…Forgetting the debt of being raised, after all I did.”
Spit out what whining and grudges I might, the grating roar of the blasts would not fall still.
Trembling before the sign of death drawing near, I had nothing for it but to walk the one road left me, even if the end of that road ran on into the pit’s own bottom.
16
“Gugh!!”
I ran an enemy through with a sword in the space of a breath, as he sprang at me in ambush.
They’d massed the men at one point, meaning to catch us in a surprise strike once we’d stepped into the post, but through a careful sweep by magic, his scheme had been laid bare to us, plain as day.
With overwhelming magic I swept away the soldiers around the Count. To cut down Count Darius, left standing utterly alone, was easier than twisting a baby’s arm.
“It’s been a while. Father.”
“Epika. You… you little—!”
I ran my father through the heart, put on a smile brimming over, and bowed my head, deep and low. A reunion to move a family to tears… a touch too rank with blood, perhaps, for that.
I drew the pasted-on smile back in and looked the man bleeding so wretchedly before me over, head to foot, in order. Though I stood watching his clothes soak through with blood and his color turn pale and bloodless, no feeling of any particular kind welled up in me.
At the father coughing thick, clotted blood back up his throat, spitting a red froth from his lips, I let an insolent smile rise.
“Set your mind at ease. The name of Darius will go on a while yet.”
“Gogh… ugh…”
“I’ll take up the name of Count Darius as head of the house. Though of course I’ll dispose of every last relative who had a hand in your scheming. Still, the historied House Darius lives on. That must be your heart’s own wish too, Father, no?”
“Gah… ugbo!”
“Ahaha. I can’t make out a word you’re saying.”
Count Darius opened his mouth to raise some voice of curse and spite, but no sound would come; he only groaned, foul and low. He hadn’t the strength left in him even to speak.
This man, my true father. Enough to turn the stomach, and it left me at a loss.
“Well then, shall we bring it to a close.”
“Gobo—!!”
I swept the sword lodged in his chest sidelong and cut his upper body clean in two.
My own true father, Count Darius, breathed his last.
The enemy within the post, wiped out. With the lord of the region dead, the Darius domain would slip from the hands of the resistance and be set under the imperial house’s rule.
The outcome was settled.
That so much blood had run within the Darius domain would be graven into the nation’s chronicle as cruel history, no doubt.
“Lady Epika. No survivors among the enemy. Subjugation complete.”
Cornelia gave the word in a cold voice, a mountain of corpses at her back.
“It ended awfully easily. No showy resistance to speak of.”
“This is no more than the opening of a civil war.”
“So it is. Until we cut down the ringleader who set the civil war going, there’s no peace to hope for.”
The interior of the post, riddled with holes, was all rubble and dead men. It was past all believing that this had been a stout fortress.
I called up a small ball of fire in my palm and set the heaped bodies of the enemy soldiers alight.
I watched the sparks scatter and snap for a few seconds, then turned my back on the ruined enemy post.
“How kind of you, to lay them to rest. Some small feeling for your father too, then, is it.”
“I didn’t burn the bodies to mourn them. Left as they are, the heaps of flesh would raise a stink and a fuss, which is a bother; I only burned them for that.”
“Then you’ve no feeling for your father at all.”
“Who can say… only, at the least, I felt no prick of regret at killing off that old bag of bones.”
The feeling of a heart squeezed hard enough to crush: that had come, if anywhere, only when I burned Gawein to nothing.
A tie of blood is nothing so precious. That, I think, was a fight that proved it out, true and clear.
What matters is who you spent your days with, and how. The death of someone who was good to you gouges the heart and wounds it, unconditioned, however you school yourself not to mind. All the more when it was your own hand that did it.
“In war you can’t choose the ones you kill. And if you fought weighing each of them by like and dislike, the heart would never hold.”
I spoke as if to teach Cornelia, but all of it was a spell cast on myself.
I’d show no mercy so mild as sparing someone for being an old acquaintance. The enemy, you cut down. Whoever it is, the answer must not change. Let me start choosing which lives to keep and which to throw by my own feeling, and I’m no different from the corrupt nobles clinging to their privileges. Set private sentiment aside and carry out the work you’re given. From this moment on, at the least, I swore I’d hold not a shred of feeling for an enemy.
Watching the black rainclouds gathered overhead, Cornelia let out a breath with a lonely look.
“Where you’re bound, Lady Epika, looks to be a solitary world.”
“Let me teach you something good. Solitude isn’t a bitter, sorrowful thing. Jerked about by no one else’s doings, able to live for your own sake alone: in a way, it’s the happiest state there is.”
“…Somehow that sounds like the line of a person poor at getting on with others.”
As dusk drew near and the light bled from all around, the mage corps, bound for the toppling of Duke Felsdorf, rode on and on toward what lay ahead, swaying in the saddle.
Across the boundless plain a single long column crawled, holding to a march so quiet you’d never feel the ghastly aftermath of war in it at all.