Epilogue – The Fire God Emperor and the Undead Emperor
So we’d taken the Thunder God Emperor Ephthal Festival, and the inter-academy tournament was next on the horizon.
But before any of that, there was business to settle. Sasha had promised to tell me about the Root of Roots, and I meant to collect on that promise. It was a story the Fire God Emperor was tangled up in, and the name alone sounded like it cut straight to the heart of my magic aptitude problem. Above all, for someone who intended to climb over that wall and stand at the very top, this was something I had to know, whatever it took. And if Sasha had caught wind of anything about the Fire God Emperor’s movements, I needed to hear that too.
What was the Fire God Emperor really after? Did he mean to make an enemy of me? Far too much was still in the dark, and drifting along blind through a situation like this was the one thing I couldn’t afford.
Which is how Merlin and I found ourselves walking the great elven forest, headed for Sasha’s home: the World Tree.
It’s a tree that looks like it could reach the heavens. And honestly, depending on the weather, its upper reaches sit inside genuine clouds, so ‘reaches the heavens’ might just be the literal truth. It’s said to stand two thousand meters tall, and simply walking a circle around its trunk takes the better part of an hour. The thing is off every scale nature keeps. A dragon vein runs directly beneath it, thickening the earth spirits’ energy, and some scholar long ago concluded that’s what drove it to grow so far beyond anything natural. That was the theory, anyway.
Then Sasha came along, declared, “Ho—now that is a tree of properly grand scale. I do like flashy things,” and hollowed out the trunk to live in. Never mind that the tree is a research subject of global importance, a World Heritage Site in modern-Earth terms, with ownership, or at least custody, formally sitting with the mages’ academic society. But… well, it’s Sasha-sama. What can anyone do? On that reasoning and sheer audacity alone, the World Tree has been Sasha’s private residence for the past five hundred years.
I’d been inside plenty of times, naturally, and every visit reconfirmed it: that otokonoko grandpa has remarkably good taste in interior decorating. He spends most of his days asleep, since that’s how he maintains his semi-immortal body, and the bed he does his sleeping in is a spectacle all by itself: a canopied, princess-style four-poster in a bedroom done up in pink from wall to wall, girlish sensibilities dialed all the way up. The absurdly oversized room is crammed corner to corner with adorable stuffed animals, too… and if he didn’t happen to look like a cute little girl, the whole picture would be, well—a lot. No, scratch that. The inside is a grandpa. It’s a lot either way…
Honestly, I’ve half come to believe that Sasha’s very existence is the greatest fantasy this fantasy world has to offer. But let’s set that aside.
“What do you mean to do now, Ephthal-sama?”
“Enter the inter-academy tournament, as planned. Make a good showing there, get an audience with the Sword God Emperor at the awards ceremony… and ask him to take me on. None of that has changed.”
“No—I meant… more immediately.”
“Well, the tournament’s more than a month out. So first I’m heading for the Alcott ducal domain, my family home this time around. All of this is as good as an invitation with the Fire God Emperor’s seal on it, after all.”
“I believe accepting that invitation is a mistake. If you would only reconsider…”
“You know I can’t do that.”
“…It’s dangerous. That is my honest opinion.”
I’d taken the don’t go for half a joke. Apparently not.
“Do they matter to you…? The people of the Alcott domain?”
Merlin asked it with her eyes fixed somewhere far away, up along the World Tree. I couldn’t quite read her intent, which was rare for us. Normally we understand each other without a word passing between us. But asked whether they mattered, there was only one answer I could give.
“They’re family.”
Merlin shrugged at that.
“It’s a bad habit of mine. Long ago, whenever you and Bridget-sama were laughing together, I would be seized by an anxiety I couldn’t put a name to.”
“Anxiety?”
“…That I would be cast off. A child’s fear, but I carried it. As you know, I had no family, no one in the world to lean on… except you.”
Her profile, in that moment, looked terribly lonely. The usual boldness had drained away and left something fragile in its place. And the girl she’d once been showed through so clearly that, before I knew it, I was laughing the way I used to and patting her head the way I used to.
“It’s all right. You matter to me too, you know.”
“…Yes. Though honestly, I’m hopeless, aren’t I. A woman my age… and in front of you I turn right back into a child.”
“No—that’s fine by me. The gallant hero of the demons, and only in front of me does she turn back into a kid. If you ask me, that’s a good thing… having a place that special all to yourself.”
“Ephthal-sama?”
“What is it, Merlin?”
“Have I… managed to become… something special to you, too?”
She asked it so anxiously that I made sure the nod I gave her was a firm one.
“Merlin. You’ve been special to me from the very start.”
“…How do you mean?”
“When I picked you up at the Demon King’s castle, I didn’t have children of my own yet.”
“…Yes.”
“I still remember raising you, Bridget and I fumbling through it together. You were such a clingy little thing… every night, if I wasn’t the one holding you, you’d cry and cry and nothing on earth would settle you. And I changed your diapers more times than I can count, you know.”
At the word diapers, pink rose in Merlin’s cheeks.
“D-d-don’t bring up things from that long ago!”
I drew her into a gentle hug.
“So yes, you’re special to me. You were practically my first daughter, after all.”
“…”
“No different from a son or daughter of my own blood. That’s how I’ve always thought of you.”
That was when I noticed her shoulders trembling, ever so faintly, in my arms.
—Some things really never change. She always was a crybaby. But that Merlin, exactly as she is, is unbearably dear to me. However many years pass, she’s still a clingy little thing, still trails two steps behind me, still loves me with everything she has. You could search the whole world over and never find a disciple half so precious.
So I held her until the crying stopped, my arms around a back that had grown so big somewhere along the way, when I wasn’t looking.
☆★☆★☆★
We ate the boxed lunches Merlin had made, then set off again toward the World Tree.
“The Fire God Emperor, though. If there is any way to avoid making an enemy of him… I would much prefer we take it.”
“Even with Divine Enhancement this time around—and you running the calculations for me… yeah. And he seems to be getting stronger too…”
If I was being honest, I’d been taking the Fire God Emperor a little lightly until now. In a straight contest of magic I’d lose to him, no question. But Divine Enhancement and swordsmanship were serious advantages, and I’d had neither in my previous life. I couldn’t have claimed I’d beat him, but I’d told myself I could weather it if he ever turned on me, or at the very least make him understand that coming after me wouldn’t be free. And we’d been friends once, long ago. Some part of me had kept insisting we could still talk things out.
But by all appearances, the Fire God Emperor had been gathering new powers of every kind. He’d been trying to harvest souls in bulk, and word had it he was the one who’d killed Isaac. Whoever he was now, he was no longer the man I remembered, and I doubted my words would reach him.
So, first things first… I needed a way to fix my magic aptitude. Manage that, and even the me of this life would leave my previous life’s magecraft far behind. That much was guaranteed. And the thread tying it all together was, in all likelihood, the Root of Roots. Sasha had said it was inevitable that I’d be born without magic aptitude this time around as well; add Brad’s Level 10 and the goddess of reincarnation, and too many threads kept running through the same knot.
Then Merlin’s nose twitched. She sniffed at the air, once, twice.
“Ephthal-sama…?”
“Yeah. That smell is bad news.”
Merlin nodded and laid full-resistance wards over the both of us. I left the defense to her, lit a detection spell instead, and took charge of watching the forest around us. Master and disciple, perfectly in step: neither of us said a word, and each was already doing exactly what the moment needed.
“No hostility or killing intent anywhere in range. For now.”
“Hunters, then? Or bandits… armed robbers of some sort?”
“In Sasha’s front yard? Nobody tries that without a death wish.”
“Could they simply not know they are near Sasha-sama’s dwelling?”
“The odds aren’t zero… but everyone for miles around knows exactly what lives in the World Tree.”
“That is… fair enough.”
“Merlin, I’ve got a bad feeling about this one. Let’s go carefully.”
We split the work between us and layered on everything we had: optical camouflage, presence erasure, sound dampening, recognition blockers. Far past the point of overkill. Warded like that, the two of us could probably have slipped unnoticed into the imperial bedchamber of a great nation. We still took no chances: keeping to the shade of the trees, moving slowly, never letting a single footfall sound.
We kept up that careful pace until Sasha’s home was maybe two kilometers off, by my eye—
“Yeah. Something’s definitely wrong.”
It was no longer just blood. The stench of flesh charred by flame magic had folded into it: a scent my nose knew far, far too well. The scent of a battlefield.
We pressed on, quickly now but no less carefully, until the trees finally opened and the foot of the World Tree came into view. And the sight struck us both speechless.
“Phantom demon… corpses?”
Just as Merlin said: more than ten phantom demon corpses lay scattered around the base of the World Tree.
“Is this somebody’s idea of a joke? Impossible. This is impossible.”
“Yes… no hunter or robber in the world leaves this behind.”
The scene before us told its own story: the very terrain had been torn open. A battle of staggering scale had been fought here. Nothing else could explain it. And the phantom demon corpses settled the rest, because they could mean only one thing. Sasha had used it—
—Level 11: Otogi Fantasia.
“Merlin? As far as you know, in this day and age, can you think of anyone who could do this to Sasha?”
“Counting you… two people. That is all.”
I switched Divine Enhancement on. For Sasha to cast a Level 11, and leave phantom demon corpses on the field doing it, meant this had been no friendly bout. Two people had tried, in dead earnest, to kill each other. Which put excellent odds on Merlin and me standing in the middle of a live battlefield at that very moment.
Every nerve on edge, we made straight for the entrance to Sasha’s home. What in the world had happened here?
We opened the door set into the bark, and Merlin and I looked at each other.
“The inside’s… untouched. No sign anyone even ransacked the place.”
“Yes, and the traces of that battle were all well away from the World Tree itself.”
We nodded at the same time.
“It is almost as if… two acquaintances stepped outside and settled it properly, mage to mage. A formal duel.”
“Right. Say one of them said take it outside before you wreck my house… and the other actually listened. That’s the shape of it.”
As for who’d fought Sasha, the same face was surfacing in both our heads. I’d have bet anything on it.
We’d started for Sasha’s room when I spotted a familiar face in the entrance hall: a maid with glasses, a half-vampire like Merlin if I remembered right, early thirties by human reckoning. Sasha’s personal maid, I was fairly certain. The instant she caught sight of us—of Merlin’s face, really—relief flooded her features, and she came running.
“Merlin-sama…! Oh, thank goodness… after everything that has happened, I have been here all alone, and I was so frightened…”
Tears stood in her eyes. The relief on her face was real, and it ran bone-deep. The two of them went back a long way, I recalled. Friends, through Sasha.
“The state of the grounds is no small matter. What in the world happened here? And where are the other servants?”
“Everyone but Sasha-sama is… they are all dead, by someone’s hand. And I believe… it was very nearly one-sided.”
“Everyone who serves near Sasha-sama is an accomplished mage! And you’re telling me they never stood a chance?!”
“I have already buried the bodies… shall I unearth them for you to confirm? What I found permits no other reading. It was a massacre.”
Merlin considered it a moment, then shook her head.
“No need to go that far. If you say it is so, then it is so.”
But she spat the words out bitterly, like she couldn’t make herself believe them. Sasha kept himself staffed with vampire-line butlers and maids, Merlin’s own kind, people she knew. For her, this could only have come as a bolt from the blue.
“And the bodies. What condition were they in?”
“Every one of them died with their magic power—no. With their very soul drawn out of them. To pull the soul from a living, trained mage… it cannot be done unless the gap in skill is that of an adult to a child.”
Merlin and I traded a look. Souls, drawn out. We were thinking the same name. I’d have staked anything on that too.
“And Sasha-sama?”
“Sasha-sama has—vanished, it seems.”
“Vanished? What do you mean, vanished? No. More to the point, how is it that you alone are unhurt?”
“I had gone out shopping… provisions for Sasha-sama’s journey to the Alcott ducal domain. That is the only reason I escaped this calamity.”
Neither of us said a word. The maid went on.
“I came home to… this. After I had confirmed the bodies, I searched everywhere, and Sasha-sama was nowhere to be found. So the truth is… I have no idea at all what happened here.”
“Mind if I ask you something?”
“Merlin-sama? And this gentleman is?”
“The circumstances are… difficult to explain. But I vouch for him. He is a personage you may trust.”
The maid gave a small nod.
“What would you like to ask?”
“Just now—you said my mast… no. Where did you say Sasha-sama was planning to travel?”
“The Alcott ducal domain. The family lands of the Thunder God Emperor, his former disciple. It is so rare for him to leave this area at all that I did wonder about it… Does it seem connected to what happened here?”
She was asking me? The only answer anyone could have given her was yes, obviously. The Fire God Emperor and Sasha had both named my hometown in this life, and both of them were headed straight for it.
The faces of my mother, of Cecilia nee-san, of Fraser nii-san rose up in my mind, and I let out a long, long sigh.