Battle for the Underworld, Six PM, November 7th, 380 HE
The last rays of Solus dyed the great gate that separated two worlds the color
of blood.
That massive structure built by gods, the Eastern Gate, which had for three
hundred years separated the human world and the dark world, was about to
fall.
As the five thousand members of the Human Guardian Army and the fifty
thousand of the invading forces watched in silence, the very last drop of the
seemingly endless life span of the gate was spent. In its final moment, the
structure let out a bellow like the death throes of some gargantuan beast.
The rumble that ensued rippled from Centoria in the west to the imperial city
of Obsidia in the east, causing all the residents of the Underworld to look to the
sky for the reason for that booming thunder.
A few seconds later, a single fissure ran down the center of the threehundred-mel gate. Brilliant light poured from the inside, burning the eyes of the
soldiers stationed on either side of it.
The fissure spread and branched as it reached every corner of the great gate,
and as it went, the light followed like a shining net. On either side of the gate
appeared enormous, burning sacred letters.
But out of the entire battlefield, only two people understood the meaning of
the words final stress test.
The letters hung there, burning, until the flames ran out.
At that moment, there was a flash of light that shone all the way to the
heavens, and the top of the Eastern Gate began to crumble.
1
"Whoa…"
It was difficult for Vassago Casals to contain his sense of wonder as he leaned
over the railing of the command vehicle. "Final stress test, huh? This should put
Hollywood movies to shame. Forget the AI, Bro—let's scoop this imagegeneration package! We could start a VFX studio and rule the entire industry."
Despite the attention-grabbing spectacle unfolding before him, Gabriel Miller
replied coldly, "Unfortunately, we cannot save these visuals to any medium.
Nothing in this world is generated by polygon models. It's a very exclusive show,
available only to those connected to The Soul Translator."
The Eastern Gate was now only half standing, the rest of it churned into an
infinite pile of rubble. The roaring and vibration of it all was tremendous, but
the cavalcade of rock flashed and melted away into nothing before it hit the
ground, meaning the remains of the colossal structure would not block the
ravine.
Gabriel swung his black fur cape open as he stood up from his throne, which
was fixed to the roof of the command vehicle. He walked toward a large skull
that had been installed by one of his ten lords of darkness, the chancellor of the
dark mages guild, Dee Eye Ell.
The skull, which rested on a small table, was a magical artifact with the power
to transmit voices. If he spoke into this "master" skull, his voice would come out
of the "slave" skulls each of his generals possessed. It didn't live up to the
multichannel communication system in a Stryker armored vehicle, but it was
much better than giving orders that had to be personally relayed.
Gabriel stared down into the blank sockets of the skull and summoned the
cold gravitas appropriate for the god of darkness and emperor of the Dark
Territory, Vecta.
"Soldiers of the dark empire! The time you have long awaited is nigh! Kill all
that lies before you while you yet live! Take all that is ripe for the taking!
Plunder!!"
From here and there among the lines of infantry, roars and bellows of
excitement arose, loud enough to drown out the collapsing of the gate. Swarms
of scimitars and spears glinted bloodred in the setting sun.
The First Regiment of the Dark Territory's army was thirteen thousand strong,
consisting of five thousand mountain goblins, five thousand flatland goblins,
two thousand orcs, and one thousand giants. This would be the first group to
charge ahead and elicit a strategic response from the enemy.
As the player in this war game, Gabriel thrust his raised arm forward, giving
his first command.
"First Regiment—forward march!!"
Leading the five thousand goblins of the invading army's First Regiment of the
right wing was a new chief named Kosogi. He was one of the seventeen sons of
Hagashi, the previous chieftain, who'd died in the violent rebellion of General
Shasta.
Of all the chiefs to ever rule the tribe, Hagashi was praised for being especially
cruel and greedy. His son Kosogi had inherited that streak from him, but he also
hid an intelligence behind his hideous features that was unbecoming of his kind.
Kosogi, who would be twenty this year, had spent over five years pondering a
very serious topic: Of the five tribes of darkness—human, giant, ogre, orc, and
goblin—why was it assumed that the goblins must always come last?
They were the smallest and weakest members of the tribes, that was true.
But that was why they had such great numbers: to overcome that individual
weakness. In fact, in the ancient Age of Blood and Iron, the goblins were a force
equal to the orcs and black Iums—as they referred to humankind—when they
fought head-to-head.
The chaos came to an end when the tribes tired of slaughter, leading to a
peace treaty. In that treaty, the goblin leaders earned seats in the highest body
of the land of darkness, the Council of Ten. But in reality, they were not treated
as equals by their peers; the mountain and flatland goblins were given only the
thin, barren wastes in the north as their new land, which wasn't nearly fertile
enough for them to grow crops and hunt creatures in large enough quantities to
support their population. Their children were constantly starving, and the
elderly did not last long.
In other words, the chiefs of the other tribes had betrayed them.
They had pushed the goblins, whose greatest asset was their plentiful
numbers, into a spacious but barren stretch of land to keep their population
under control. Ever since, the goblins had been dedicated solely to the drive for
survival and could not nurture any civilization. They could not send their
children to train at facilities designed to develop them, as the black Iums did;
they were reduced to sending them down the river on boats simply to reduce
the number of mouths to feed. And they knew the fate awaiting those children
when they washed up in the territory of other peoples.
If they had rich land and ample resources instead, they could outfit their kind
with fine steel weapons and armor, rather than the crude cast-iron scimitars
and armor plates they used now. They could eat heartily to stockpile their life
and could learn how to fight and strategize in battle. They might even grow to
understand the dark arts that the black Iums had sole control over now.
No one would dare call the goblins a lower race then.
Kosogi's father had always been tormented by an inferiority complex toward
the black Iums, driven by hatred and jealousy, but he hadn't had the smarts to
consider what he might do about it. The only thing his feeble mind could
imagine was earning glory in the great upcoming war and the recognition of
Emperor Vecta.
It was madness. What glory could they seize when this formation was taken
into account?
It must have been the dark mage chancellor who had put the idea into the
emperor's head. The woman had suggested giving the goblins the "honor of the
first spear," putting them at the head of the pack to be useful sacrifices. And
while the goblins fell to those legendary demons of the human realm, the
Integrity Knights, she and her mages would reap the glory of burning their foes
from a safe distance.
Well, we shall see about that.
On the other hand, an order could not be disobeyed. The newly descended
Emperor Vecta had shrugged off the attack of General Shasta, the mighty
warrior who'd killed the two goblin chiefs and the head of the assassins guild
without a scratch. The emperor was all-powerful, and it was law in the land of
darkness that the powerful must be obeyed.
But that black Ium woman was different. Kosogi was now one of the ten lords,
meaning, in theory, he was of equal standing with her. He was under no
obligation to bend the knee to that scheming vixen's machinations.
The goblins' orders were quite simple: lead the invasion's charge and wipe
out the enemy forces. That was it—there was nothing about maintaining the
front line until the mages could rain down fire from the rear. That was where he
could take advantage of the human woman's scheme.
Just before the gate fell, Kosogi took his trusted captains aside and gave them
special orders. When the slave skulls they'd been given rattled their jaws and
delivered the emperor's command to march, he slipped a hand under his armor
and pulled out the small orb he'd had ready for this moment. The other
captains would be doing the same thing.
The mass of rock that was once the Eastern Gate roared, crumbled, and
disappeared in a show of light. The gaping valley that extended before them
gave way to campfires and the gleam of metal armaments in the distance.
It was the defensive army of the white Iums.
Beyond them, he could see the rich lands, endless resources, and labor
sources that would help the mountain goblins relive their glory days.
They would not be sacrificial pawns. That role would go to the flatland
goblins, who had tragically earned another fool of a chief, and the even stupider
orcs.
Kosogi clenched the orb in his left hand, raised the thick mountain knife in his
right, and roared, "Follow my lead and stay close, all of you!! Chaaaaarge!!"
"First Division, draw swords and prepare for battle! Priests, begin incanting
healing arts!"
So trumpeted Fanatio Synthesis Two, vice commander of the Human
Guardian Army, her voice crisp and loud in the dusk.
Her command was met with a chorus of swords sliding in harmony from their
sheaths. The few campfires behind them were reflected in the steel, causing it
to glow red.
There was a rumbling roar approaching from the space where the Eastern
Gate had just been standing.
Quick goblin footsteps. Longer orc strides. The booming hammer of giant feet.
And atop this rhythmic cavalcade was a curtain of bellows at full throttle. It was
the roar of the beast called war, a sound that no human being in this world had
ever heard before.
Just three hundred guards stood at the front defensive line, two hundred
mels from the gate, and it was all they could do to bravely maintain their
ground. It was a wonder that the formation didn't break down and give way to
mad retreat before the enemy even arrived. None of these soldiers had ever
seen war or even been in a life-or-death battle before.
The only thing that kept them at their stations was the sight of a trio of
Integrity Knights standing apart at the front of the defensive line.
On the left wing was Eldrie Synthesis Thirty-One with the Frostscale Whip.
In the center stood the commander of the unit, Fanatio Synthesis Two, with
her Heaven-Piercing Blade.
On the right wing was Deusolbert Synthesis Seven with the Conflagration
Bow.
These three knights, their armor shining beautifully in the dark, planted their
feet on the ground and awaited the coming enemy without budging.
There was dread in their hearts, too. They at least had battle experience, but
nearly all of it was merely one-on-one fights against dark knights. Vice
Commander Fanatio did not have any experience fighting against a full army,
and neither did Bercouli Synthesis One, the commander of the Integrity Knights,
who was leading the Second Division in the rear.
On top of that, there was no longer an administrator who ruled over the
Human Empire's Axiom Church. The absolute justice that the Church once stood
for was long gone.
The final defense for the knights preparing for battle was, ironically, the one
emotion that should have been destroyed by the Synthesis Ritual.
As Deusolbert Synthesis Seven boldly awaited the arrival of the enemy, he
brushed the ancient band on his left ring finger with his free hand. One of the
oldest Integrity Knights, he had spent over a century maintaining order in the
northern reaches of the realm.
He had fought off invaders who attempted to cross the End Mountains from
the Dark Territory. He had eliminated large magical beasts when they appeared
within his range of protection. On rare occasions, he had even apprehended
people who had violated the Taboo Index. He had long since given up
wondering why he was given these duties; he simply believed that he was
indeed a knight summoned from the celestial realm, and he gave not a single
thought to the personal lives and society of the people he protected.
But in his quieter moments, Deusolbert was tormented by a strange dream
that he always experienced at the break of dawn.
A small, pale hand, so white the skin seemed clear. A simple silver ring that
glinted on its finger.
The hand brushed his hair, touched his cheek, and shook his shoulder.
There was a soft, gentle whisper: Wake up, dear. It's morning…
Deusolbert never told anyone about the dream. He suspected that if the
prime senator learned of it, he would use sacred arts to cut it from his mind. He
did not want to lose the dream—because from the moment he awoke as a
knight, he, too, had worn a silver ring of the same make as the one on the
delicate hand in the dream.
Was the dream a memory of the celestial world? If he completed his duty as a
knight down here and was allowed to return above, would he see that hand and
hear that voice again?
For many, many years, Deusolbert had harbored this question—this hope—
deep in his heart.
Until the great incident that shook Central Cathedral half a year ago.
Two young men, rebels against the church, invaded the cathedral. Deusolbert
made use of his Perfect Weapon Control art and still lost. The black-haired
youngster used sword techniques he'd never seen before to break through the
Conflagration Bow's flames, and when the fight was over, he said something
that was impossible to believe.
The Integrity Knights had not been summoned from Heaven. They were
ordinary mortals born here, whose memories had been stolen so they could be
remade as knights, nothing more.
The idea that Administrator, the pontifex of the Axiom Church and the
embodiment of supreme virtue, absolute order, and complete justice, was
involved in such underhanded methods to deceive her knights was simply
impossible to accept. But those young men had dispatched Vice Commander
Fanatio, Commander Bercouli, and Prime Senator Chudelkin and then reached
the top floor of Central Cathedral to defeat even the glorious Administrator
herself. Surely their blades would not be infused with so much power if they
were mere disgruntled rebels.
In fact, he understood when he first fought them. It was clear from their
forthright, honest combat that there was no lie to their statements.
That would mean that the owner of the little hand in his dreams was not in
the celestial realm but was born a human on Earth. When Deusolbert
understood this truth, he did something he had never done before as a knight:
He clutched his ring to his chest and wept.
For he knew that unlike the Integrity Knights, the life of a mortal person
would be depleted at no more than seventy years. And thus, he would never
again meet the person who called him "dear" in his dreams.
But still, he heeded the summons of Commander Bercouli in reporting to the
battlefield. He would fight to protect the world in which he and the owner of
that little hand had lived, no matter how long ago it had been.
In other words, the source of Bercouli Synthesis Seven's strength, that which
made him capable of holding his ground before the charge of an invading army,
was the power of the one emotion that should have been erased from his mind:
love.
And though he could not have known it, Fanatio and Eldrie stood in the same
place, motivated to fight by their own loved ones.
Deusolbert pulled his hand away from the ring and drew four steel arrows
from the huge quiver he had planted faceup on the ground. He nocked them all
in an array on his holy weapon, the Conflagration Bow.
His Perfect Weapon Control cast was already nearly complete. The others
were putting a lot of faith in this skill, but Deusolbert's greatest technique was
not meant for close combat. The Integrity Knight took a deep breath, preparing
to take half of his trusty bow's life in one go, and uttered the final code.
"Enhance Armament!"
An enormous wave of crimson flames shot from the bronze greatbow, shining
bright red against the armor of the approaching invaders, who were now just
two hundred mels away. His four arrows nocked on the string took on scarlet
flames of their own.
"I am Integrity Knight Deusolbert Synthesis Seven! I shall burn the bones of
those who stand before me into dust upon the wind!!"
Though he didn't remember it, eight years ago he had introduced himself in a
similar way when apprehending a little girl from a remote northern village. But
with his thick steel helmet off, his voice was now rich and vibrant and full of life.
At the farthest possible distance, his fingers released the bowstring.
Four lines of fire shot out in a scattered formation with a tremendous boom.
The very first casualties of the war that would eventually be known as the
Battle for the Underworld were a group of flatland goblin infantry soldiers
charging along the left side of the ravine.
The new chief of the flatland goblins, Shibori, was not as intelligent as Kosogi
of the mountain goblins and had only his size and strength to boast of. So he
had no strategy to counteract the overwhelming single-combat advantage of
the Integrity Knights and simply sent his five thousand warriors forward in an
unthinking, suicidal charge.
Deusolbert's four flaming arrows pierced the tightly packed flatland goblin
horde head-on, giving them maximal effect. The first round of arrows instantly
burned forty-two goblins at once and struck panic into those who stood just
around the unlucky victims. But as there had been no order to their advance in
the first place, the majority of the bloodthirsty combatants stepped right over
their charred companions and thrust aside the frightened ones in a mad,
undisciplined rush.
Deusolbert then nocked another four arrows on the Conflagration Bow. This
time he did not spread them out, but shot them in a tight bundle.
A great spear of holy fire landed in the center of the goblin force and erupted,
blasting screeching victims high into the air. This brought down at least fifty
more, but it did not stop their advance.
Nor would it. Behind the formations of goblins were two thousand orcs and a
thousand giants, creatures who were many times bigger than the little goblins
and who would easily stomp them into shreds if they got in the way.
The flatland goblins, like the mountain goblins, felt fury and disgrace at their
widely derided and highly exploited status as the smallest and lowest of the
races, but unlike Chief Kosogi, they had no idea how to counteract it. They
channeled that frustration into hatred for the inhabitants of the fertile Human
Empire, the future slaves destined to be the new bottom of the totem pole,
whom they styled "white Iums."
Chief Shibori swung a crude battle-ax with burly, un-goblin-like arms and
screamed, "Kill the archer first! Surround him, slice him, strike him, crush him!!"
"Yaaaaah!! Kill!! Kill!! Kill!!"
The roars spread through five thousand throats.
Deusolbert absorbed all that fury and bloodlust without a word, unleashing a
third volley. This, too, turned over fifty goblins into ash, but the enemy charge
did not stop.
When the span between them had shrunk to fifty mels, he stifled the
Conflagration Bow's flames and switched to normal shooting. He pulled arrows
from the quiver with abandon and loosed them without taking time to aim.
Each arrow pierced at least two or three goblins in its flight.
Swordsmen with blades drawn rushed up to flank Deusolbert on either side.
"Protect the knight! Keep their blades away from him!!" shouted a young manat-arms captain who couldn't have been more than twenty years old. He
steadied a two-handed greatsword before him, the weapon nicked and dented
from fierce training—but its tip trembled.
Deusolbert wanted to tell him to back down, to protect himself. Even with the
strict tutoring of the knights, he knew it was unlikely that the young town
guards had the mentality needed to do battle in blood.
Instead, he held that breath and replied, "Many thanks. Take my flanks."
"It would be our honor!!" said the young guard with a grin.
Seconds later, the first clash of goblin machetes and human longswords rang
high and loud across the battlefield.
Seconds before, in the center of the narrow ravine, Vice Commander Fanatio
Synthesis Two had prepared to meet the oncoming enemy with a stance that
was odd if viewed through the prism of this world's common sense.
She stood in an oblique stance, her left side forward and feet spread apart,
the hilt of the Heaven-Piercing Blade held at shoulder height in her right hand.
But she held it backhand, the blade level with the ground and the pommel
pressed against her shoulder guard.
Her left hand was extended forward, the palm supporting the flat of the
blade. If Gabriel or Vassago had seen this, they would have come to the same
opinion: She looked like a sniper steadying her rifle.
In a certain sense, this was accurate. Fanatio waited, drawing the enemy
closer and closer, keeping her eye on the most effective range for her aim.
Deusolbert could change his method of shooting arrows to attack either a
widespread area or a narrow line, but the Heaven-Piercing Blade could only fire
its light beam at one slim point. Unleashing it on a swarm of foes would only do
so much.
Instead, she wanted to hit a commanding officer—one of the ten lords of the
land of darkness.
The forces of the Dark Territory were kept in line with power and fear.
Ordinary foot soldiers obeyed their superior officers' orders with total fealty
and would do as they were bidden to the last man, regardless of the
circumstances. But that also meant that if the commander was struck down, the
army would instantly lose its entire command structure.
It was the same for us once, Fanatio reflected.
News of Administrator's death nearly caused the collapse of the knighthood
in a single night. Only the calm, wise words of Bercouli could have allowed the
Integrity Knights to get back to their feet after the chaos that ensued.
Was our duty, our reason for existence, to follow the orders of the pontifex
and the prime senator? No. It was to protect the realm and the people who live
in it. As long as we have the will to protect the weak, we remain knights until
death.
As a matter of fact, not all the Integrity Knights understood and obeyed their
commander. Less than twenty of them had actually gathered to fight in this
battle.
But all of those present were prepared to fight to the very last man. The same
could probably be said of the five thousand volunteers who'd joined them in
this almost certain death. That was their defining distinction from the army of
the Dark Territory.
Fanatio pressed her bare cheek against the hilt of her weapon and stared
hard at the encroaching enemy. The rumbling advance of the goblins was within
a hundred mels now. On the right wing, Deusolbert was attacking with his
Perfect Weapon Control art already, red explosions lighting up the dusk.
It was in that momentary flash that Fanatio finally found the target she was
searching for.
There were enormous shadows at the very rear of the enemy army, chasing
the goblin troops forward: the giants, who stood over twice the height of a
human. The especially large one who stood out among his peers must be their
chief, she reasoned. It was an individual she had seen just once before, named
Sigurosig.
The giants were an excessively proud people, if not downright arrogant.
Thanks to their superior size, which was the only metric they prized, they
secretly looked down on even the darker-skinned humans who were the truly
superior class in the dark lands.
So if she defeated their chief in one blow before the battle even began, their
alarm, too, would be gigantic.
Fanatio breathed deep, held it, and whispered, "Enhance Armament."
The Heaven-Piercing Blade thrummed and began to glow, shrouded in the
brilliant light of Solus. The straight line extending from its sharp point
intersected directly with Sigurosig's massive body.
"Pierce him, light!!" she cried.
Schwoo-pah!! The air itself shook as a beam of compressed sunlight shot,
blinding, across the battlefield.
"…It's begun…," murmured the Integrity Knight Renly Synthesis Twenty-Seven
as the sound of consecutive explosions boomed in the distance.
Renly was one of the seven higher knights who'd declared his dedication to
the defense of the realm. That made him one of the central figures of the
defensive army, and he was responsible for a significant percentage of its total
power.
But he was crouched, huddling over his knees, not at the front line of the
Second Regiment's left wing but far behind it, in the corner of a darkened
storage tent.
He'd fled from his position.
Less than an hour ago, amid the rush to prepare for the battle, he'd slipped
away and found an unoccupied tent to hide in, where he now hunkered down
and listened.
The reason for this was the same as his motive for taking part in the defense
at all: He was a failure.
Such had the holy pontifex labeled him, and thus he'd spent five years frozen,
rather than carrying out any Integrity Knight duties. He had volunteered to fight
in this war to repair his honor, but in the end, he could not overcome his fear.
Though Renly did not remember it, he'd once been a boy from Sothercrois
Empire to the south who was considered an unparalleled genius with the
sword. He'd arrived in Centoria at the age of thirteen, and the very next year,
unbelievably, he was crowned champion of the Four-Empire Unification
Tournament and ushered into the Integrity Knights.
The Synthesis Ritual robbed him of all his memories, but even after waking
again, he showed remarkably keen ability with the sword. He was placed among
the elite knights within a very short time and given a divine weapon from the
pontifex herself.
When a divine weapon was granted from Central Cathedral's store of
weaponry, it was not the pontifex or the knight who chose the weapon, but the
opposite: The weapon chose its wielder. There was a kind of resonance that
occurred between the soul of the knight and the memory of the holy object.
Renly did indeed resonate strongly with his Divine Objects, a pair of throwing
weapons called the Double-Winged Blades. However, most improbably, he was
unable to ever activate its Perfect Weapon Control form, the sign of an elite
Integrity Knight.
That was all it took for the pontifex to lose interest in him. When Alice
Synthesis Thirty entered the knighthood not long after, her incredible ability
and potential made Renly's reason for existing questionable.
It would be cruel to lay all of the fault at Renly's feet. Alice's skill was so
incredible that she leaped all the way to third among the ranks of the
knighthood and received the Osmanthus Blade, the oldest and most powerful
of all the divine weapons. Regardless, Renly was branded a failure and sent into
a long, long sleep.
When the prime senator placed him under the Deep Freeze art, turning him
into an ice sculpture, all that Renly felt was an overwhelming sense of loss and
inadequacy.
He was missing something huge and important…and it was why he could
resonate with the Double-Winged Blades but not control them.
After a very long time, Renly awoke.
It was, in fact, in the midst of the shocking rebellion that overturned Central
Cathedral. All the stationed knights, up to Commander Bercouli himself, had
lost in battle, and their secret weapon Alice was missing, dead or alive, so it was
at Prime Senator Chudelkin's discretion that Renly was unfrozen.
But again, Renly failed at his duty. Chudelkin and Administrator were felled
before he could fully awaken, and when he could move about at last, he found
only other Integrity Knights, and they were in a state of utter chaos.
In the position of commander, without the pontifex to give orders, Bercouli
asked the others to take part in the desperate, last-ditch attempt to stand up
against an organized invasion from the Dark Territory.
Despite suffering recent defeat, the elite knights like Fanatio, Deusolbert, and
Alice accepted this duty, and Renly thought them to be even more radiant than
he'd remembered.
If he joined them, he might understand at last. He might find what he was
missing and learn why the weapon would not respond to him.
Renly had stood up from the corner of the hall where he had huddled, and he
timidly raised his hand. Bercouli had nodded with great satisfaction, placed his
large hand upon Renly's shoulder, and said simply, I'm counting on you.
But now, in his first battle, his first combat, the pressure was more than he
could handle. The acrid tang of all the fury, greed, and lethality of those armies
just a thousand mels away hung thick over him, and before he knew what he
was doing, Renly had run away.
Stand up. Get back to your station. If you don't fight now, you'll be a failure
for eternity, he scolded himself over and over as he hid in the tent. But he
couldn't even bring himself to undo the grip he had around his knees. Soon the
rumbling charge and approaching roars told him that the battle was beginning.
"…It's begun…," he repeated to himself.
He thought he felt his weapons, one on either hip, vibrating with rebuke of
their master. But he could not go back. How could he stand again before the
commander and the soldiers who looked to him for help?
It will make no difference whether I am there or not. An elite knight who
cannot use Perfect Weapon Control is more of an impediment than a boon.
He told himself these excuses and more as he wriggled his face even farther
between his knees—when a soft voice from the entrance to the tent caused
him to start.
"What about this one, Tiese?"
Have they come looking for me? Renly quaked, unbefitting of a knight, but
then he heard another voice. They both sounded like young women.
"Yeah, this tent should work, Ronie. We'll hide him in here and stand guard at
the door."
Sigurosig, chief of the giants, was a legendary warrior built like a small
mountain, with unkempt copper hair and beard, ferocious features, and
countless scars that ran the length of his body.
If anything most purely expressed the one law of the Dark Territory that
"strength rules all," it would have to be the giants. From the moment they were
conscious, they engaged in competitions of strength, technique, and courage so
that they established a pecking order more severe than even the dark
knighthood. The giants lived in the highlands in the west of the Dark Territory,
but the supposedly ample numbers of huge and magical beasts were always in
short supply. The giants used them as targets for every imaginable rite of
passage and had hunted them to scarcity.
Why were they so driven to be powerful? Because if they weren't, their very
souls, their "fluctlights," would collapse.
The four nonhuman races of the Dark Territory were twisted things, human
mental prototypes implanted into nonhuman bodies. They required mental
stability to prevent themselves from completely dissociating and collapsing.
The goblins, for example, converted their inferiority complex toward humans
into jealous and hateful energy that they used for motivation and selfpreservation.
The giants, on the other hand, were the opposite. Their superiority complex
over humans gave their human minds inhuman strain.
Every single giant, at least in a one-on-one fight, would always triumph over a
human. That was their mental refuge and their ironclad rule. It was why they
put their young through such extreme rites of passage, accentuating their
individual superiority at the cost of their overall numbers.
So the thousand giant warriors summoned to this battle were silent but
harbored great drive to fight. It was the first large-scale war that this
generation, born after the Age of Blood and Iron, had ever experienced.
Chief Sigurosig had one serious thought: to flatten the enemy in their initial
charge and end the battle altogether.
The dark knights, dark mages, and pugilists were placed in the main force of
Emperor Vecta's army, but he would not allow them to shine. By surpassing
those troops and claiming victory, he could prove definitively that the giants
were supreme among all.
When the little jaw of the slave skull chattered with the emperor's order to
charge, Sigurosig felt the old scars crisscrossing his body begin to burn. It felt to
him as though he was channeling the strength of all the great beasts he'd torn
apart barehanded.
"Crush them!!" he thundered. It was his only order.
And it was enough. He raised his mammoth war hammer alongside his hearty
fellows and began to charge, the ground trembling beneath their feet.
The warriors of the Human Empire crammed the space in the ravine ahead.
To the giants, who stood at least three and a half mels tall, they were tiny,
hardly bigger than goblins. Their swords were smaller than the fangs of
newborn rockscale wyrms.
Smash them all, kick them all, tear them all to pieces. Sigurosig's sense of
superiority, hard-coded into his soul, flared up and gave off sparks of pleasure.
His angular jaw sagged and stretched into a ferocious grin.
Instantly, an alien yet familiar sensation ran up his backbone.
It was cold. It numbed him. He felt pierced by needles of ice.
He had experienced this feeling in the distant past, deep in the Fledgling
Valley close to his village. His first trial…
He had gone to snatch the eggs of a snapping bird, and the mother bird had
swooped down from overhead…
Sigurosig's eyes flared as he ran, seeking the source of the sensation. At the
front of the row of enemy soldiers, right in the center of the ravine, he spotted
a tiny, tiny human. Its hair was long, and its frame was slender. A woman—a
knight, clad in shining silver armor.
Just once before, he had witnessed one of the dragon riders of the human
realm crossing the End Mountains. He had wanted to crush it, but the little
creature had merely circled a time or two, then flown back over the
mountaintops.
They were nothing to him.
And yet…that she-knight's black eyes.
Despite the distance of over three hundred mels between them, he could feel
her gaze keenly on his skin. And there was no amount of fear or mortal terror in
those eyes, not even as much as a tiny pinch of salt for a cauldron of stew.
All he sensed was the coldness of identifying a target and taking aim.
…Am I being hunted?
Me, chief of the giants, mightiest warrior of the five tribes of darkness, the
great Sigurosig?
"Hurgk…"
A falsetto scream burped out of his throat, completely at odds with his
fearsome appearance. The strength went out of his legs, and the great hammer
in his hand felt unbearably heavy. Sigurosig toppled and fell onto his face.
An instant later, a rod of light shot from the end of the knight's sword, roaring
toward him with a percussive blast the likes of which he had never heard
before. It easily pierced the breast of the giant who ran right before Sigurosig.
If he hadn't fallen, the light would have pierced his own breast next. Instead,
the white light evaporated a portion of the giant chief's red hair and his right
ear, decorated with fangs he'd earned from the hunt.
The light fatally struck through the heads of two more giants behind him
before it finally broke into tiny beads and vanished.
Sigurosig was barely conscious of the bodies of the three giants falling
lifelessly to the ground like trees. Even the fierce pain burning at the right side
of his head was nothing more than a tiny insect bite compared to the
overwhelming emotion that assaulted him now.
Fear.
Sigurosig sat helplessly on the ground, his jaw trembling. When Dark General
Shasta had led his stunning rebellion, Sigurosig had been surprised but not
frightened in the least. After all, the black dragon killed only weakling assassins
and goblins. Emperor Vecta's power had to be respected, of course, but he was
an ancient god, not a human, so it was not so surprising.
So how was one measly little she-knight able to strike such powerful fear in
him? No mere human could possibly bring Sigurosig to his knees in this manner.
"It is a lie…a lie, a lie! It cannot be!" the giant chief groaned as smoke rose
from his singed hair. It could not be. He would never allow himself to feel this
fear. But the more he repeated it, the more sparks flew deep in his mind,
paralyzing him with pain. His mouth and tongue spasmed, causing strange
words to spill forth without pause.
"Can't be can't be can't be kill, kill, killkillgilldill, dil-dil-dil-dil-dil…"
In this moment, the subjective identity packed tight in the center of
Sigurosig's fluctlight—his self-image as the most powerful warrior—collided
unavoidably with the circumstances of his present terror. It was bringing about
a collapse of the quantum circuits in his lightcube.
Red light shot from the giant's eyes.
"Dil, dil, dil, dil, di "
As the surrounding giants watched, stunned, Sigurosig suddenly leaped to his
feet. He swung the huge war hammer around as if it were a twig, and he
resumed his mad charge.
Sigurosig bowled over his fellow giants before him and soon caught up to the
goblins ahead. He charged through them without slowing, his feet producing
wet crunches and high-pitched screams, but the giant, his mind collapsing from
within, did not even register them.
All he was conscious of was a single order, resounding and reverberating, to
kill that knight.
Ultimately, both Chief Shibori of the flatland goblins and Chief Sigurosig of the
giants underestimated the power of the Integrity Knights.
Only Chief Kosogi of the mountain goblins, on the right wing of the invaders'
spearhead charge, was different. He had just learned, at great cost, of the
overwhelming military power of the knights.
It was Kosogi who had designed and arranged the recent invasion of Rulid, reexcavating the cave in the northern End Mountains and leading a great force of
goblins and orcs through it. He himself had been tied down to Obsidia Palace,
but he'd set up the plan by putting troops under the command of his three
brothers and convincing some orcs to join in as well.
But the plan had been a horrific failure. The troops had been wiped out,
including all his brothers. The few members who had escaped with their lives
reported details he could scarcely believe through the shock.
An invasion force of over two hundred goblins and orcs had been decimated
by a single Integrity Knight and dragon mount.
It was difficult to take at face value, but Kosogi was not so foolish that he
would allow this bitter lesson to go to waste. He was determined that he would
never again repeat the folly of attempting a straightforward attack on the
Integrity Knights of the human realm.
But the role that Emperor Vecta had demanded of the mountain goblins in
this great invasion was just that. Chancellor Dee Eye Ell of the dark mages guild
would be well aware of the Integrity Knights' might. It was why she had advised
the emperor to cast forth the goblins, orcs, and giants as sacrificial pawns,
throwing the narrow ravine into chaos before they used their dark arts to burn
all of them, Integrity Knights included, into ash.
Once the emperor accepted Dee's strategy, there was no choice but to obey.
Kosogi spent three days and nights considering it. How could they carry out the
order to charge stupidly forward and escape the jaws of death that were the
Integrity Knights ahead and dark mages behind? The stunt play he devised
involved the little gray spheres he gave out to his troops.
When the emperor gave the orders, and Kosogi sent his forces into the valley
floor, he spotted a tall Integrity Knight in gleaming armor far ahead.
It was not Alice Synthesis Thirty, the knight who'd wiped out the invading
force at Rulid, but her apprentice, Eldrie Synthesis Thirty-One; however, Kosogi
could not make that distinction. In either case, the figure was a demon who
meant nothing but merciless death for goblinkind.
"Now…throw!!" he ordered when they were within fifty mels of the knight.
He crushed the little orb in his left hand.
A small flame licked out of the broken sphere with a crackling sound. It was
not some kind of explosive, of course. That would be an artifact of a civilization
beyond anything that presently existed in the Underworld.
It was not a flame element generated by arts, either. Embedded in the center
of the spheres were tiny insects called flintbugs, found only in the northernmost
volcano of the Dark Territory, the sacred ground of the mountain goblins. If
crushed, they emitted ferociously hot flames that would scar the palm.
The gray orb around the flintbug was a kind of moss, also from the north, that
had been dried, ground, kneaded, and dried again. It then created a great
amount of smoke when lit, making it useful for smoke signals. But Kosogi, using
methods similar to the assassins guild, had refined the substance until it was
dozens of times more potent than its original source.
In essence, what Kosogi and his goblins threw were smoke grenades. When
the flintbugs burst into flame, they produced plumes of thick, choking smoke
that reduced visibility to zero. Now that curtain covered the northern side of
the ravine, which ran east to west.
Even goblins, with their excellent night vision, could not see through this layer
of smoke. But Kosogi's plan was not to use the screen to defeat their foes.
Before they plunged into the thick plume, he gave his third order.
"Now run!!"
He returned his mountain blade to the sheath behind his back and got down
on his hands. When a goblin, already small, got down on all fours, he was barely
above the knee of a human. Close to the ground, the smoke was just barely
thinner, offering them a better chance at spotting the enemy.
Kosogi and his five thousand mountain goblins completely ignored Eldrie and
the guardsmen as they rushed deeper through the ravine.
The emperor's order was to charge the enemy army. It did not specify which
part. So Kosogi plotted to ignore the main force, meaning the Integrity Knights,
and chose to send the goblins toward whatever supply line they had in the rear.
If they could slip beyond the front line, they should be able to avoid the
merciless fires of the dark mages and the volleys of the ogre archers. If these
attacks succeeded in decimating the knights and guards, the goblins could turn
back to finish the job. If not, there was plenty of land ahead in the human realm
to which they could escape.
So it was that, of the three "spears" in the hundred-mel-wide ravine, only the
northern end produced no bloodshed for the time being.
That was also about the time that the soldiers in the Second Regiment of the
Human Guardian Army located behind Eldrie began to realize that their leader,
elite Integrity Knight Renly Synthesis Twenty-Seven, was missing.
The first casualty of the guardian army was a middle-aged town guard fighting
valiantly beside Deusolbert on the right wing of the First Regiment's line. He
failed to adequately block a goblin's thrown hand ax with his shield.
He was a lower noble who had long served as a squad leader for the Imperial
Knights of Wesdarath. His skill with the sword was solid, but there was nothing
to be done about the downturn of his life value as a whole, and the ax head
that bit into his wrinkled, sagging neck proved to be quickly fatal. The healing
arts of the priests located behind the fighter were not effective enough to
repair the damage caused.
Deusolbert briefly paused in his arrow launching to attempt higher healing
arts on the elderly soldier. But the man shook his head, blood spattering from
his lips as he cried, "You mustn't! It is a fitting end for this old soldier…The fate
of our country rests on your shoulders, Sir…Knight…"
Then the elderly guard passed away, his last remaining life force spilling forth
as spatial resources. Deusolbert gritted his teeth, used those resources as fuel
to light the Conflagration Bow, and shot the goblin that'd thrown the ax with a
flaming arrow.
More soldiers among the Human Guardian Army fell after that, here and
there in bursts, but their comrades never stopped their charge. The
nonhumans, who outnumbered them over ten to one, ferociously and
mercilessly carried out their orders.
The large quantities of life resources that spilled forth onto the battlefield
turned to little flecks of light that rose and rose— —into the sky, far above the
narrow ravine, where a single dragon hung in the air, hidden in darkness, and
they swirled and condensed toward the Integrity Knight clad in golden armor
who stood atop its back.
There was no time nor space for hiding.
Renly simply huddled in the supply tent, clutching his legs, waiting for the
approaching figures to find him.
From what little light came through the round port in the canvas, he could see
girls who looked to be maybe fifteen or sixteen years old. One had brilliant-red
hair, while the other's was dark brown. They had on light armor over gray tunics
and skirts, uniforms from some academy. They both had slender longswords on
their left side. He did not recognize their faces, and based on the make of their
equipment, he took them to be civilian fighters, not knights.
What was much odder was the metal chair that the brown-haired girl was
pushing. Instead of legs, the chair had four wheels, and a black-haired young
man sat slumped in it. Renly found his eyes drawn to the man's face.
He was about twenty and terribly thin, and he was missing his right arm from
the shoulder down. At first glance, he seemed to be weaker than even the girls.
But the two swords bundled in their sheaths that his good arm clutched were so
incredibly powerful, exuding such force of presence, that it was clear to Renly at
a glance that they might even be higher Divine Objects than his own DoubleWinged Blades.
What did this mean? Just to carry them across his lap like that, to say nothing
of having proper ownership of the weapons, required strength on the level of
an Integrity Knight. But the haggard young man with the empty eyes seemed
anything but strong.
At this point, the girls had noticed him; they sucked in sharp breaths and froze
where they stood. The red-haired one put a hand on her sword hilt with
somewhat alarming speed.
Before they could draw their weapons on him, Renly rasped, "I'm not an
enemy…Forgive me for startling you. May I stand up? I will show you my hands
are empty."
"…Go ahead," the girl said, her voice hard, and Renly slowly lifted himself up.
He stepped forward, hands raised, until the light through the canopy revealed
his top-level armor and dual weapons. The girls gasped and straightened up.
They removed their hands from sword and chair handle and made their salutes
across the left breast.
"S-Sir Knight! Forgive the impertinence!" stammered the red-haired girl, her
face pale, but Renly just shook his head.
"No…it's my fault for startling you. And besides…I am no longer an Integrity
Knight…," he said, his voice nearly vanishing by the end, to the surprise of the
girls. They couldn't be blamed—the fringed white cape over his back and
combined cross and circle of the Axiom Church gleaming on his breastplate
marked him as none other than the highest of knights.
Renly moved his fingers to cover the symbol and wryly admitted, "I
abandoned my post and fled to this tent. The battle's already begun at the
front. I bet the squad I'm meant to command is in a panic now. People are dying
already. And here I am, frozen with fear. I am no knight, and I can claim no
integrity."
He bit his lip and finally looked up. He saw his own face reflected in the large
orange eyes of the red-haired girl.
Gray-colored hair tufting briefly over his forehead. Rounded cheeks. And big,
girlish eyes with long lashes and none of the proud fierceness of his position—a
young failure of a knight, just fifteen years old.
He wanted to tear his eyes away from that appearance he hated so much—
but the red-haired girl covered her mouth, reeling from some fresh shock.
"…?" He stared at her, puzzlement on his face, and this time it was the girl
who averted her eyes and shook her head. "N-nothing, sir. I-I'm sorry…"
She would not look up again, so the previously silent girl with the burntbrown hair and eyes said, in a faint but firm voice, "Forgive our late
introduction. We are Primary Trainee Ronie Arabel and Primary Trainee Tiese
Schtrinen of the supply team. And this…is Elite Disciple Kirito."
Kirito.
Recognition of that name brought a gasp to Renly's throat. He knew that
name. It belonged to one of the two rebels who'd laid siege to Central
Cathedral half a year earlier. The very person whom Renly had been unfrozen to
fight, only to fail to reach the battle in time.
This withered young swordsman was responsible for felling the almighty
Administrator? Was his missing right arm a scar from the battle?
So intimidated by the presence of this empty-eyed young man was Renly that
he drew back his foot. The petite young woman named Ronie did not seem to
notice. She pleaded, "Please, Sir Knight…we have no right to comment on your
circumstances. We are members of the guardian army, too, but hang in the
rear, rather than fighting at the line of battle. But…that is our duty for now.
Miss Alice instructed us to dedicate ourselves to his protection…"
Alice. Alice Synthesis Thirty.
The young genius knight who was a foil for Renly in every way. Even in this
moment, she would be standing alone at the front line, preparing a mammoth
sacred art that would prove to be the linchpin of the guardian army's strategy.
As if to put even more pressure on Renly and his feelings of inferiority,
Primary Trainee Arabel desperately insisted, "Sir Knight, I'm afraid to be so
rude…but will you please help us? Even the two of us are not certain we can
fight off a single goblin. Please…please, we must protect Kirito!"
Renly squinted at the pureness of the look in Ronie's eyes. It was the kind of
thing found only in those whose duty was carved into their souls and whose
determination to achieve said duty would be stopped by nothing, even the loss
of their own lives.
If they are primary trainees, then they haven't even graduated yet. And yet,
even these girls have something I've misplaced. Or maybe I've been missing it
from the moment I awoke in this world as an Integrity Knight…
He heard his own voice issuing from a cracked throat as though it belonged to
someone else. "You'll be safe here…I think. Commander Bercouli himself is
leading the Second Regiment, and if they break past his guard, then the entire
world is done for anyway; the end will come sooner or later. I'm going to sit
here until the battle is over. If you want to stay here, too, then I won't bother
you…"
His voice was nothing more than warm air by the end. He returned to the
back, where he had been, and plopped down again.
Right about that time was when Kosogi and his mountain goblins' smoke
bombs began to erupt on the left wing of Eldrie's line. With thick smoke
hanging heavy over the battlefield, a swarm of goblins slipped past the
defensive barricade like water through a coarsely woven net.
But neither Renly nor the girls could have known that they were plotting to
wipe out the supply team at the rear line of the Human Guardian Army.
The collapse of the quantum-light aggregation—the fluctlight—that made up
the soul of Chief Sigurosig of the giants happened rapidly.
But because the collapse was not complete and did no more than inflict
massive damage on specific areas, it did not immediately reach the level of the
fluctlight itself becoming invalid. In fact, the phenomenon brought about a
particular side effect.
The result of decades of Sigurosig's hatred and fury toward humankind being
unleashed all at once spilled out of his fluctlight and, through the Main
Visualizer that interfaced with the Lightcube Cluster, reached the lightcube that
contained the soul of Vice Commander Fanatio.
Direct manipulation of events through the sheer power of one's imagination
was a power that the Integrity Knights called Incarnation. It briefly stole control
of the veteran warrior Fanatio's body.
As the chief of the giants charged, standing a fearsome four mels tall, he held
his great hammer high overhead.
Why can't I move?! Fanatio wondered, urging her stubborn legs to obey her,
but she couldn't so much as clench a fist. The vice commander of the Integrity
Knights must be bold enough to withstand a simple glare from anything, even
the fearsome chieftain of the giants.
But it was as if her body was frozen in place, in that sniping position with her
knee to the ground.
In practice bouts against Commander Bercouli, she had at times been
completely unable to step forward to attack, even with her weapon in hand.
But that was against the presence of the commander: heavy but gentle and
enveloping. This was more like the pain of being held down all over by many
leather straps covered with gouging steel spikes.
Sigurosig charged through his own allies, the goblins and orcs, kicking and
stomping them aside as he let out an unearthly bellow. There were just fifty
mels of distance left.
In a one-on-one fight, he would be no match for her. Of the lords on the Dark
Council, only Commander Shasta of the dark knighthood had earned her
respect as an opponent. When she'd fought him before, their thirty-minute
battle had ended when he'd split her helmet and seen her face. The way he'd
pulled back his blade still stung with humiliation.
But even that fight she did not consider a defeat. By Bercouli's strict order,
Perfect Weapon Control arts were forbidden in battle against dark knights. So
surely she would not be found lacking against anyone lesser than that. The idea
that she would be frozen with fear was simply unthinkable.
And yet, a reality that surpassed Fanatio's understanding was approaching,
moment by moment. Less than ten seconds remained until that giant hammer
would be lowered on her head.
She had to stand and raise her blade. If she could just strike with it properly,
the famed Heaven-Piercing Blade would never be overcome by something as
crude as Sigurosig's hammer.
But she couldn't stand. Bound by invisible shackles, Fanatio could only watch
as the giant chief, eyes red with raging darkness, screamed incoherently,
"Human killgill-dil-dil-dil-di "
The hammer hurtled, roaring, toward her.
My lord, Fanatio mouthed.
Since her awakening as an Integrity Knight, lower knight Dakira Synthesis
Twenty-Two had dedicated her entire existence to just one person.
It was not to Administrator the pontifex, absolute ruler of all. It was not to
Bercouli, commander of the knighthood.
Her sworn benefactor was Vice Commander Fanatio. Dakira was smitten with
Fanatio's ferocity to the cause and with the anguish that she hid beneath that
firm exterior. By the standards of the human world, her feelings were nothing
short of romantic love.
But for various reasons, Dakira had bottled up her feelings and given up her
very face and name to be one of the Four Whirling Blades who served directly
under Fanatio. It was joy beyond measure for Dakira simply to work at her
hero's side.
The Four Whirling Blades were not some collection of the best and brightest
of the lower knights. Instead, Fanatio had collected those knights she had
decided were too shaky to carry out frontline missions alone and taught them
strategic teamwork to raise their chances of survival. In other words, they were
the Loser Squad.
So they were poor in the eyes of the pontifex and the prime senator. In fact,
in the rebellion of half a year ago, the Four Whirling Blades had suffered major
injuries against the upstarts, just two student swordsmen of common birth. But
far more painful than that to Dakira was knowing she had failed to protect
Fanatio. Many times in her sickbed, she had wished that she had died in the
fight.
But when the four had recovered, Fanatio gave them not admonishment but
words of encouragement. She removed the silver helmet that she never took
off in public, favored her four followers with her beauty and a smile, and
clapped them each on the shoulder.
I nearly died, only for the rebels to save my life. There is nothing for you to be
ashamed of, she said. Instead, you fought bravely. In fact, that was the greatest
Cyclic Blade Dance I have ever seen you perform.
As she shed tears beneath her helmet, Dakira swore to herself that the next
time, she would not allow her beloved vice commander to come to harm.
And this was that next time.
Despite being ordered to remain at her station until further instructions were
given, Dakira leaped from the formation at her own discretion as soon as she
sensed something wrong with Fanatio.
She was over twenty mels away from the kneeling knight and the giant chief
swinging his tremendous hammer down toward her head. It was an
unbridgeable gap for her physical abilities, but Dakira raced at blurring speed,
her body becoming a beam of light, until she leaped before Fanatio and met the
plunging hammer with her two-handed greatsword.
The earth rumbled from the shock of the impact, and a reddish light burst
forth. Dakira's greatsword was a fine weapon in comparison to those of the
men-at-arms but was still a far cry from the divine weapons of the elite knights
in terms of priority. And Sigurosig's hammer, thanks to his murderous
Incarnation, was raised to a tremendous priority level.
The stalemate lasted only half a second, when a number of fissures ran
through the blade of the greatsword. The next moment, a faint light spilled
forth from where it broke into pieces. Dakira cast the handle aside and held up
her empty hands to receive the dropping hammer.
A number of dull sounds rattled throughout her body. Her arms had broken
from wrists to elbows. Agony turned her vision white. Blood erupted through
the joints of her armor, spraying against the surface of her helmet.
"Hrr…gg…aaah!!"
Through clenched jaws, she struggled to turn her scream into a roar of
ferocity and used the brow of her helmet to receive the hammer that her arms
could no longer support.
The cruciform helmet of steel instantly crumpled, causing more horrific
sounds from her neck, spine, and knees. Searing pain pulsed through her entire
being, and her vision went red.
But lower Integrity Knight Dakira Synthesis Twenty-Two did not fall.
Fanatio was right behind her. She would not let this hideous weapon have
her.
I must protect her. This time.
"Yaaaah!!" She let loose a high-pitched scream, distorted by her helmet.
Blood spurting from wounds all over her body turned to pale flames that
wreathed her form.
The flames gathered in her broken arms and pulsed. The hammer shot back
and pulled Sigurosig's massive body with it over ten mels backward through the
air.
With the sound of the giant crashing to the ground in her ears, Dakira slowly
collapsed.
"…Dakira!!" came a shriek.
Oh…Fanatio just called my name. How many years has it been?
Her helmet was gone, and Dakira's exposed freckles and short straw-colored
hair framed a little smile as she sank into the vice commander's outstretched
arms.
Dakira was born and raised in a little seaside village in Sothercrois. Her
parents were poor fishers without even a last name, yet despite that, she grew
up strong and healthy and helped out with the family work.
Until she committed a taboo at age sixteen. She fell in love with a friend of
the same sex who was one year older.
She couldn't have acted on those feelings, of course. In her anguish, Dakira
went before the altar of the empty church late at night and prayed to Stacia for
forgiveness. That altar was linked to Central Cathedral's automated senate
organ, and Dakira was taken to the Axiom Church for violating a taboo, wiped
clean of all memory, and made into an Integrity Knight.
The older girl whom Dakira had fallen in love with, whose name she could no
longer remember, looked just a little bit like Vice Commander Fanatio.
Through her cloudy, fading vision, Dakira watched with beatific calmness as
Fanatio's beautiful features crumpled and tears fell from her long lashes.
The vice commander is weeping for my sake.
She couldn't imagine a greater bliss. At the end of a very long and painful
period of tribulation, she had finally accomplished what she was meant to do,
with great satisfaction. Her time to die had arrived.
"Dakira…don't go! I'll tend to you!!" came that pained cry again.
With her last bit of strength, Dakira raised her crushed hand and softly
brushed the tears on Fanatio's cheek with a trembling finger. Then she smiled
and whispered the feelings that she had kept hidden for so long.
"My lady…Fanatio…I have…always…pined…for you…"
In that moment, Integrity Knight Dakira Synthesis Twenty-Two's life reached
its end.
The first member of the knighthood to close her eyes forever.
Wh…what am I doing?! Fanatio demanded of herself as she clutched the
mutilated body in her arms.
Through tear-streaked vision, she saw Sigurosig getting to his feet and the
remaining three members of the Four Whirling Blades rushing toward him.
Dakira. Jace. Hoveren. Geero. She had placed them under her care to train
and protect them. She gave them only harsh words of discipline, but they were
her beloved brothers and sisters. And now they were protecting her and losing
their lives because of it…
"…It will not happen!!" she swore, to herself, to Sigurosig, to the world.
She would not allow more of them to die. She would keep the other three
alive, for Dakira's sake.
This determination became a firm Incarnation of Love that surpassed
Sigurosig's churning bloodlust and shot forth from Fanatio's soul.
The thorns of ice that bound her body instantly melted away. She lay down
her charge's body and stood up, the Heaven-Piercing Blade silently rising on its
own from the ground to fit into her right palm.
Up ahead, Jace, Hoveren and Geero, their greatswords raised, took no more
than a single swipe from Sigurosig's arm to be smashed to the ground. The red
light in the giant's eyes was like the fire of the demon realm far below the
earth. Even the goblins and orcs around him were pausing in their march out of
fear.
"Kill…kill…kiiiill!!" the looming giant bellowed.
But there was no longer any shred of fear or intimidation in Fanatio's mind.
She raised the Heaven-Piercing Blade straight up to the sky—and it took on a
pure glow, vibrating deeply. The shine of it extended over five mels from the tip
of the blade and held its shape.
"Kill humaaaaaaaaaan!!" screeched Sigurosig, holding the hammer over his
head with both hands and leaping toward Fanatio.
"…Return to the bowels of the earth," she spat, easily swinging the HeavenPiercing Blade. The blade of light, well over twice the length of the original
weapon, left a brilliant afterimage in the air as it met the massive blunt end of
the hammer.
With a crisp thwik, the sword cleaved the enormous weapon in two. Flecks of
melted iron spattered from the burning-red cut on the hammer. The
tremendously long sword of light then made contact with Sigurosig's head and,
without losing the tiniest bit of momentum, sliced straight down to the ground.
The sight of the legendary warrior, the largest individual in the world, being
sliced into two symmetrical halves in midair left the giants behind him, as well
as the humans before him, speechless.
With soggy squelches, the two hunks of meat that had previously been
Sigurosig crashed to the earth, while in their midst, Fanatio swung the sword of
light with a hum and called out, "First Regiment central unit, advance!! Drive
back the enemy!!"
The waves upon waves of flatland goblins that crashed against his side only
made Deusolbert more worried as time went on.
In single combat, he could take on any number of goblin soldiers in a row
without ever being in danger of losing—and in fact, there was a small hill of
corpses before him, pierced with arrows and burned by the flames.
But it was impossible for him to shoot every last enemy soldier on his own
when they rushed in a horizontal wave. He would have to leave the majority of
the goblins on the sides to the guardian army behind him.
In a direct comparison of ability, it was the guards who were much superior to
the enemy soldiers. Their sword techniques, after half a year of fierce training,
were much quicker and sharper than those of the goblins, who preferred to rely
on brute strength and nothing else when using their crude knives. But that
advantage was much less secure than the one the goblins had over the Integrity
Knights. Their discipline would be hard-pressed to make up for the sheer
disadvantage in numbers.
If only he could share the tremendous power he possessed with all the
guardsmen under his command, Deusolbert wished. But there was no such
sacred art, of course. The guards fell in battle one by one, whether jumped by
several goblins at once or simply reaching peak exhaustion in combat. With
each death scream audible over the battle, Deusolbert felt his own life being
steadily chipped away.
This was the experience of war.
It was completely unlike the battles he'd been through before, when he'd
been wiping out invaders from atop his dragon mount or dueling dark knights
one at a time. This was a horrible struggle of attrition, in which the total
number of dead was undeniably rising from moment to moment.
An Integrity Knight's pride meant nothing in this situation.
Was there still no command to withdraw yet? He couldn't even tell how much
time had passed since the fighting had started. Deusolbert slashed the
oncoming hordes with his longsword, and when time and space allowed, he
sprayed arrows with the Conflagration Bow. So overwhelmed was he by the
action around him that he failed to notice when some of the enemy troops
began acting strangely.
Chief Shibori of the flatland goblins was far stupider than his mountain
counterpart, Kosogi, and far more cruel.
At first, Shibori considered the Integrity Knight leading the enemy army to be
little more than a large magical monster. No matter how strong, he was still just
an individual white Ium and, when surrounded, would succumb to the right
amount of beating in the end.
But once the fighting began, the Integrity Knight turned out to be far more
troublesome than any beast and did not allow himself to be surrounded, no
matter how many troops Shibori sent after him. He could blow up a full ten
goblins with a single exploding fire arrow, and his ordinary arrows struck the
brain and heart with unerring accuracy.
So what could be done about this?
After some thought, Shibori came to an extremely simple and merciless
answer: He would continue throwing troops at the enemy knight until his stock
of arrows ran out.
But of course, the grunts who were artlessly thrown into battle to their
certain death did not appreciate this strategy. More than a few of them were
smarter than Shibori, and they orchestrated things to their favor, as far as they
could without disobeying an order.
They lifted the corpses of their fellows, hid behind them, and began to circle
around the knight laterally, drawing his attention and his arrows.
Under ordinary circumstances, Deusolbert would see through such a simple
tactic at once. But the screams of his men-at-arms dying were sapping his ability
to stay cool and rational, unbeknownst to him. The goblins were helped by the
fact that the battle had begun at sundown.
By the time Deusolbert recognized that the enemies were taking too long to
fall, the overly liberal stock of steel arrows he'd prepared was nearly gone.
"There we are. He's finally run out of those wretched arrows."
Shibori chuckled to himself, scratching at his neck with the tips of the battle
knives he had resting on his shoulders. The sight of all his fellow warriors'
miserable corpses did not seem to bother him in the slightest. He had inherited
an incredible resistance to the horrors of war from his ancestors' experience
surviving the ghastly Age of Blood and Iron.
About a third of his troops were dead, but he still had over three thousand of
them. When they invaded the white Iums' territory and had all the meat and
land they wanted, the tribe would quickly repopulate. But in order to gain those
spacious lands, they would need to earn them with skill. He had to finish off the
knight in the red armor.
"Let's go, you slugs. Surround the archer, grab him, and pull him to the
ground. His head will soon belong to Shibori," he instructed the crude and
hardy warriors around him as he steadily strode forward.
"…How foolish of me…," Deusolbert groaned.
At last, he realized that the enemy soldiers he saw flitting about in the
darkness were merely scarecrows using the bodies of their fallen friends. He
shot at the legs, not the heart, of a scarecrow goblin to finish it off for good,
then reached over his shoulder for another arrow only to close his hand on
empty air.
Even the divine Conflagration Bow was just as vulnerable to running out of
arrows as any ordinary longbow. He could create new arrows from steel
elements with sacred arts, but that was possible only in singular fights where he
had enough time to chant the command. Besides, the atmosphere here was
bereft of spatial resources, as all of them were being absorbed by the Integrity
Knight hovering above.
Deusolbert clenched his jaw, hung the bow over his left shoulder, and drew
his sword again. Then he saw a group of larger goblins approaching fast through
the gloom ahead. These were clearly a different type of individual than the
rabble he'd been slaying. They had thick metal plates from chest to waist and
leather strips covered in tacks over their arms. In their hands were thick
cleavers that looked capable of cutting a cow in two.
Behind these seven individuals came one even larger, a goblin that appeared
to be taller even than the average orc, by Deusolbert's estimate. Its gleaming
cast-iron armor, pair of great axes, and richly colored headdress made it clear
that this goblin was an enemy general.
The moment Deusolbert made eye contact with the gleaming red orbs under
the goblin's protruding brow, he felt the very air around him squeal. The sound
of clanging and slashing swords and knives grew distant until he could not hear
them at all. The guards and goblins formed a silent perimeter, watching the
face-off of the two leaders breathlessly.
Deusolbert held out his free hand to stay the men-at-arms who tried to rush
to his side. With his sword raised and at the ready, he said in a firm but raspy
voice, "You must be one of the ten lords…a goblin chief?"
"That's right," said the large goblin, exposing yellowed fangs. "The great
Shibori, chief of the flatland goblins."
Deusolbert faced the enemy leader head-on, taking the time to steady his
breathing after the long stretch of unbroken combat.
If I defeat this general and his bodyguards, the goblins will lose their will to
fight, if only temporarily. If we can use that moment to push the line forward,
we will have served our duty as the lead force. Even if I can't use the
Conflagration Bow, I have no choice but to defeat eight as one. Every Integrity
Knight is worth a thousand, and this is my chance to prove it.
"I am the Integrity Knight Deusolbert Synthesis…," he began, only to be
interrupted.
"I don't care what any Ium's name is!" screeched Shibori. "You are meat,
simply meat attached to the head I mean to take as a trophy! Now…attack
him!!"
"Raaaaah!!" the seven elite goblins bellowed, leaping forward.
Deusolbert met them alone.
If they are truly a rabble without the pride of warriors, they ought to have
continued that morass of a battle. Instead, they had to pretend to commit to
this farce of a duel…
"Laughable!!"
Before they were wielders of the whip or lance or bow, every Integrity Knight
was a master of the sword.
Not a single soul present actually saw the motion of Deusolbert raising the
longsword and swinging it down. It was just a flash of bright light and an
impossibly fast slice. With a pathetic little tinkle, the lead goblin's cleaver split in
two pieces.
Then a seam appeared, running down its body from crown to gut. It split
apart, gushing blood—but the knight was nowhere near it to suffer the spray.
Deusolbert was on the second goblin before the first even registered that it
was dead, and he struck again. This was not the novel, consecutive attack style
that Fanatio and the rebels he fought employed—it was the old-fashioned style
of single, traditional moves. But Deusolbert's technique was so refined by years
upon years of training and use that his movements were practically divine in
their purity of form. Only an elite dark knight or pugilist would be capable of
handling such blows.
In fact, the second goblin, which was sliced on the left side at nearly the same
moment that the first goblin was killed, was only just starting to swing down its
knife when the sheet-metal armor gave way for the sword to pierce its heart.
The difference in ability was clear for all to see. But the elite goblin warriors
knew no fear. Their chief, Shibori, was also a fearsome higher power to them,
and there was no mental structure with which they could consider abandoning
his orders.
Two more flanked Deusolbert, bathing in the bloody spray of their comrades,
and attacked him from both sides at once. The practiced knight was not
alarmed at all; he promptly swung upward to catch the goblin on the left from
below, then followed through in a circle to smite the right-hand goblin from
above, all in one smooth motion. It was impeccable.
Three left—four, if you counted the boss.
Would they come together or in a row?
Deusolbert jumped backward to avoid the dark spray of blood and prepared
for his next attack. The fifth goblin came swinging straight for him on the left.
No shine of a blade from the other direction.
"Hnng!" Deusolbert grunted and swiped his blade flat from the left. A silver
arc of light followed the deadly tip, which sank into the goblin's right flank.
Then Deusolbert's eyes bulged. At that very moment, another, larger blade
was bursting through the enemy goblin's chest and continuing toward him. The
thick slab of metal sent the warm blood of its owner's still-breathing companion
flying as it lunged for Deusolbert's throat. He couldn't dodge or block it with his
sword.
On a snap judgment, he allowed his left forearm to collide with the dully
shining tip of the cleaver.
Pain dulled his senses. The copper-colored gauntlet held up somehow, but the
impact jarred him to the bone.
"Kaaah!!" Deusolbert roared back, as much out of shock as anything, and
swept the enemy weapon to the left. He heard something crackle inside his
body and understood that his left arm had fractured.
It's only one arm!!
It had taken all of Deusolbert's concentration to stop the attack, and now he
plunged forward himself. His sword, which was puncturing the fifth—and
sacrificial—goblin's belly, caught the sixth behind it.
But it felt too shallow. He had to pull out the sword, gain distance, and
prepare for the next attack.
Sweat beading on his forehead, Deusolbert wrenched his sword back to his
side. And beyond the now-dead fifth goblin, which toppled over, he saw the
sixth and seventh goblins, blades tossed aside, lunging for him with arms
outstretched, so low that they nearly crawled on the ground.
And the school of swordsmanship that Deusolbert was trained in had no form
to go against a target stance like that one.
The goblins enveloped his legs in the second that he hesitated. Unable to
withstand the surprising power of their arms, Deusolbert was promptly flipped
onto his back. Through gaping eyes, he caught sight of the sizable Chief Shibori,
a cruel smile on his lips, leaping high with a war ax in either hand.
It can't happen like this. Against a goblin. This cannot be how Deusolbert the
Integrity Knight meets his end.
"It cannot be."
The firmer the will of the mind that thought it, the more dangerous a poison
this idea became. It did not send him into a berserk, unthinking rage as it did
Sigurosig, but it did freeze Deusolbert's mind solid and thus stop his body from
moving.