The Princess of the Fallen Kingdom (3)
Hell arrived without warning.
No — it had been foretold from the moment he took the black mage's hand.
"…I was a fool."
When she went to her father, enduring the agony of someone crushing her heart in a fist, he was already dying. Beside her gasping, collapsed father lay the black mage's corpse, sprawled across the floor.
The black mage had betrayed them. For his own greed.
"I'm sorry, my daughter. Because of my greed, I've doomed the kingdom's people… and you as well."
Twisted by the black mage's ritual, the kingdom's treasure glowed with a hideous color, greedily devouring the lives of the people — filling the emptiness within itself. What had once been their trump card to destroy the Empire was now turning its blade on them.
Her heart hurt more and more. Death drew steadily nearer.
But she didn't want to die. She resented her father for joining hands with the black mage. In the end, she couldn't help but shoot him a look of pure resentment.
"…I'm… sorry."
And with tears streaming down his face, her father drove the kingdom's treasure into her heart. At the same time, she couldn't endure the pain and lost consciousness.
When she came to, her heart no longer hurt. At first she thought she had died and arrived in the afterlife — but she quickly realized she was still lying in the same place where she had collapsed. She hadn't died.
Had the black mage's secret art failed?
The moment that thought crossed her mind, she realized her father was standing beside her. She called out to him. Hearing her call, he turned his head.
The moment she saw him, she laughed without meaning to. And she said:
"…I wish I'd died too."
Her father had become an undead.
Her hell was only just beginning.
A lich is strong.
According to the lore of Grand Fantasy, black mages had attempted countless times to create a perfect immortal being — a lich — and failed every single time. Isabella was the sole exception. The black mage's only success. The number of lives sacrificed in the process ran past thousands into the tens of thousands.
A being like that couldn't possibly be weak.
"Wh-why…"
And yet Isabella was being pushed back.
She warped space to open distance, then condensed death energy into thousands of arrows and loosed them. But the moment I swept the Holy Relic from left to right and fired, the majority of those arrows were scoured away. The holy knights knocked aside what remained with their weapons — they couldn't catch every last one, of course, and a few got through. But I simply bounced them off with the Holy Shroud's defense, and the knights healed themselves with holy power. Done.
Even when she warped space to put distance between us, she could never fully escape the range of my bombardment. A short dash toward her and a single shot would still land clean. Space manipulation had its limits.
"Why…"
She summoned an undead legion to seize a numerical advantage, but numbers meant little in the face of my firepower. And on top of that, I had holy knights who were practically one-man armies against the undead. Calling more of them couldn't reverse her disadvantage.
"Why?"
Isabella slammed her right foot into the ground, and spikes of condensed death energy erupted from the earth, surging toward us like a tidal wave. But if you know the tell — if you know what attack follows what motion — dealing with it isn't hard. We immediately got clear of the spikes' range. A fraction of a second slower and we might have been impaled. But not a single one of us was swallowed by that tide of thorns.
The instant we cleared it, I pulled the trigger.
Isabella neither dodged nor blocked. She took the bombardment head-on. Somehow clinging to life through a lich's immortality, she hastily summoned a throng of undead to shield herself. But she had to know — if that throng lasted even a full minute, it would be doing well.
"WH-WHY?!"
"You already know why."
Isabella said nothing. She knew. A lich is strong — but Isabella is weak. That was the truth.
She had never learned how to wield a lich's power. Before that, as a princess, she had never truly fought at all. It was like handing a handgun to a kindergartener. That was why she had only managed to fight the Hero's party to a standstill.
And right now, my holy knights and I were far stronger than the Hero's party had been before entering the Demon Realm. On top of that, I already knew Isabella's strategy guide cold. If the DLC version had altered her attack patterns or added new ones, things might have gone differently — I'd tensed up hard when her dialogue changed. But thankfully, nothing of the sort had happened.
So this was a fight I could not lose.
I steadied my breathing and leveled the muzzle at Isabella again. The holy knights fell in behind me and re-formed their ranks. No one looked seriously wounded. No one even looked tired. Isabella, by contrast, was clearly exhausted — breathing hard, her arms trembling faintly.
"Give up. If there had been any chance of you winning, I wouldn't have come here in the first place. I'll be taking it now — the treasure of Kleinrapis Kingdom."
I declared it calmly, but without mercy. You've lost.
The moment the words left my mouth, Isabella's eyes flew wide.
"…No. I don't want to die at your hands, at least."
She hurled a mass of death energy at me on pure impulse. I didn't move. A holy knight would swat it aside without me lifting a finger.
That ended faster than I expected, I thought, watching her with detached calm.
And then—
"I WON'T LET THE ONES WHO DROVE MY FATHER TO THAT CHOICE TAKE THE LAST THING HE GAVE ME!!!"
Death energy exploded outward. I fired on pure reflex, but the beam slammed into a wall of death energy so dense it never reached her.
"Saintess, fall back!!!"
The Bombardment Fairy urgently warns that you must dodge this.
No. Not yet.
I still needed to force an opening. That was how it worked in the game, too. Don't panic. Calmly pick the best option available.
"Limit Release."
Limit Release
If ordinary firepower wasn't enough to crack that wall of death energy, then I'd force the firepower higher. My normal bombardment had already given me a rough sense of how thick the wall was. I'd finished calculating how much more output I'd need to punch a gap through it.
I drew up the firepower I needed, gritted my teeth, and ignored the strain on my body. This much, I could take.
"…Here I go!"
I pulled the trigger, and a beam of light several times larger than my usual shot scoured the death energy away. But more death energy poured in like a rising tide, filling every gap the bombardment cleared. Sweep it away, fill it back in. How long did that cycle last?
The bombardment cut out. At the same moment, my body gave out under the strain and I collapsed to my knees.
"Saintess!!!!!"
The holy knights rushed me from every direction the instant they saw me go down, and immediately began pouring holy power into me. The pain gradually subsided. I started to get my ragged breathing under control.
Then I looked straight at where Isabella had been.
She was gone. In her place sat an egg roughly twice the size of a person — and in that egg was a small crack, about the size of a human fist.
I grinned.
"Looks like everything went according to plan."
"Then that means…"
"Yes. From here, I go alone."
Only one person could fit through that crack. The moment someone was pulled inside, the gap would seal itself shut. And only the one who entered would obtain the bound item known as the Cracked Treasure of the Fallen Kingdom.
That's right — a bound item. Once you have it, you can't give it to anyone else. That was why I'd come to claim it myself.
"Saintess, will you be all right? It might be better to rest even a little before going in."
"I can't. That crack will seal itself if I leave it alone. I have to go right now."
I stood, ignoring the pain still wracking my body. If that crack closed, hell would break loose — Isabella would be reborn as something beyond even a lich. As far as I knew, there was no way to stop that. So I had to get inside and finish this before the gap closed.
"Don't worry. You've all seen me fight. You know I can handle myself."
I put on the brightest smile I could manage, so none of them would worry. Then I walked forward.
"I'll be back."
With that, I pushed my hand into the crack.
It didn't take long to realize that every citizen in the capital had become undead. Not long after that, she learned she couldn't leave the capital either — her body simply refused to cross the boundary. She was trapped. Trapped in a capital where everyone was already dead.
A day later, she realized that hunger, the need for sleep — every desire required for a human to live — had vanished. Starving didn't kill her. Slitting her wrists didn't kill her. Falling from a great height didn't kill her.
She understood then that she was no longer human.
The kingdom had fallen. Everyone she held dear was dead. In a hell she could not endure, she felt herself beginning to go mad.
"…Hello?"
A woman's voice reached her through it all.
"Who… are you."
She started to rise, thinking she should at least check — and in that same instant, an undead lunged at the stranger. I have to stop it — her body moved on its own. But before she could do anything, the undead was already cleaved clean in two. Her eyes went wide.
Only then did she truly see the girl standing there. A beautiful young woman in pure white robes adorned with elaborate ornamentation, a veil over her hair like a nun's.
In that moment, a single thought flashed through her mind. No. It couldn't be—
And the girl revealed herself.
"Me? I am the Saintess of the Goddess Church. Princess of the fallen kingdom."