The Elephant Prince
You miserable little ape! A mere piece of game, and you dare—!!
The enraged Naga came surging forward. A roar thick with fury, the sound of a massive body thrashing across the earth, the faint tremor running through the ground beneath his feet — in that fleeting instant, the prince read the Naga's every move.
One of its arms was already gone. The other, its tendons severed only moments before by his own blade, would be useless. That left the Naga with nothing but its tail and those monstrous jaws. A full-force strike from the tail would have been the end of him. In truth, the prince had only one real option.
The one small mercy was that the creature was far too frenzied to bother turning its body for a proper tail-whip.
Please — move the way I predicted!
His heartbeat thundered louder. Under the circumstances, that was a good thing. He had learned, through the power of his Eyes, that the Naga could sense living things and was acutely sensitive to vibration. If his heart raced, the beast would take it for fear — would be certain of its victory. Just as the prince himself had been, only moments earlier.
I'll chew you up alive!!
The Naga closed the distance with a speed that defied its bulk. Still, Sunya waited — frozen in place as though terror had locked his limbs, body curled as small as he could make it.
Not yet.
The gap vanished in a blink. Looking back, he could scarcely believe he had ever managed to fight this thing at all — a testament, if nothing else, to how formidable the power of his Eyes had been.
A little more…
Perhaps it was only his imagination, but time itself seemed to slow.
Not yet — closer still…
One. Two. Three…
He counted under his breath. Without that anchor, his body would have launched itself forward of its own accord.
Now.
The moment he judged the time had come, the prince moved without hesitation. He twisted at the waist, spun his whole body, and drove his sword toward where he roughly estimated the Naga's head would be.
It was a fool's gambit — thrusting a blade blind, guided by nothing but awkward secondary senses and raw guesswork. He had sharpened those senses with Prana, yes, but he was still unaccustomed to fighting without sight. In the end, it was luck. A pure gamble.
And yet—
Ghk—?!
A hard, ugly resistance met his fingertips. With his vision gone, every other sense had sharpened to a razor's edge, and the prince knew at once: his gamble had paid off. His sword had punched through the soft roof of the Naga's mouth and driven clean through its skull.
His own strength could never have pierced the Naga's hide or cleaved its thick bone — but by turning the creature's own weight and momentum against it, and by striking the tender flesh of the palate, he had made the impossible possible.
"Hah… hah… hah… hah…"
His breathing was ragged. He tried to wrench the blade free, but it was buried too deep. At last he gave up and simply sank to the ground where he stood.
A soft rush of rain began to fall from the sky — pure chance, and yet it felt as though the heavens themselves were celebrating his victory.
"Did I… survive?"
He could not be certain with his eyes gone, but the Naga's movements had ceased. He had won. He was alive. Over and over, in the darkness, the prince repeated those two truths to himself.
"…Heh!"
Something fierce and wild rose from the depths of his chest. The fear and dread of moments before flipped, in a single breath, into pure exultation.
"Heh heh heh…"
He could not hold it in. Laughter kept trying to burst from his lips. At first he clamped a hand over his mouth for the sake of dignity — then realized he was the only living thing left in that place, and decided not to bother. Even if someone had been watching, he no longer cared.
"Hahahahahahaha!!! Wahahahahaha!!! Aha — ahahahahahaha!!!!"
The prince threw back his head and laughed like a madman. For a boy who had never known true pleasure — whose entire life had been controlled and constrained — the raw thrill of a life-or-death bloodbath was intoxicating beyond measure. Sweeter than any wine, more rapturous than coupling, more electric than the wildest wager.
This. This is it. I am alive. I exist, right here!!
The prince had no tolerance for pleasure. That first violent rush of sensation, striking him at the most impressionable age of his life, was enough to remake his values and his inner world entirely. In that moment, denser and fuller than any he had ever known, the boy felt a completeness he had never imagined.
And so the prince sat there for a long while, cackling alone like a lunatic.
"…Your husband looks rather different from the man he is now."
"Ah… he does, doesn't he."
The two goddesses watching him were thoroughly unsettled. Connecting this boy — young as he was, cackling over a slain monster — with the soft-spoken Sunya who went about with his eyes closed, chuckling gently at the world, was no easy leap. What they were witnessing, the two deities decided, might well have been something like Sunya's dark past.
Some time later, soldiers came racing to the scene and found the prince standing beside the enormous Naga's corpse — and were struck dumb with awe. Until that day they had never fully grasped the measure of the prince they served; discovering that a mere boy had felled a legendary beast left them no choice but to marvel.
The king, however, could not simply rejoice in his son's achievement. The news that followed was too grim.
"He can no longer see?! What in the world do you mean by that?"
The king exploded at the report that his son had gone blind. The court physician, terrified though he was, did not change his diagnosis. Changing it would have meant nothing.
"I mean precisely what I said, Your Majesty. His Highness will never see again. He appears to have been struck by a form of serpent venom — and the toxin of the Naga he slew is something I have never encountered. There is simply no remedy."
"I summoned you to find a remedy, did I not?"
"S-some things cannot be done. Even if you take my head for it, this is beyond me."
"…Is there truly no hope at all?"
"I— I am deeply sorry, Your Majesty."
The king made no effort to hide his despair. What kind of son had the prince been? He was a hard-won heir, yes — but more than that, he had been a superb candidate for the throne. It was not a father's vanity speaking: the boy had lacked for nothing. Watching him grow, the king had taken his sole joy in the certainty that this son would one day succeed him. To feel that future collapse in a single stroke left his heart hollow.
Word that the kingdom's only prince had gone blind spread to every corner of the realm. Reactions varied. Some grieved for the king and his son. Some mocked the prince's fall with open scorn. Others simply did not care. But on one point, all were agreed: no one believed the prince could ever rise again. A few had already begun debating who would inherit the throne, or quietly setting political schemes in motion.
Many predicted turmoil for the kingdom. Their predictions, in the end, proved empty speculation.
"What—?!"
"You've come, Father?"
Barely a month later, the prince was living as though nothing had changed. His eyes remained closed — he still could not see — and yet he was nothing like a blind man. He ate like anyone else, held conversations face-to-face, and continued his studies. In martial arts especially, he began to show results that surpassed even his former self.
"Haha! Sharper now than when you could see!"
The prince's maternal uncle, who oversaw his martial training, laughed aloud at the sight of his nephew throwing himself into practice with more fire than ever before.
"Come to think of it, you're training harder than I ever saw you train!"
"Well — let's just say I've finally tasted what martial arts are truly for."
"Hahahaha!! That's it! That's the spirit! You've grown into more of a man, nephew. Hahahaha!"
And so the royal palace, which had seemed poised for a bloody succession crisis, settled back into calm as though nothing had ever been amiss. Time continued its steady march, and the prince passed his eighteenth year.
"Hey there, Elephant Prince."
Someone caught the prince as he was secretly scaling the palace wall. It was his uncle — the same man who had long taught him martial arts.
"…I've asked you not to call me that, Uncle."
At the prince's complaint, his uncle laughed heartily.
"Shall I call you the Virgin Prince instead?"
"…Elephant Prince is preferable, thank you."
"More to the point — a prince of the realm, sneaking over the wall under cover of night… This can hardly be anything honorable, can it?"
"Not honorable, perhaps. But not shameful either — let's leave it at that."
"Is that so?"
His uncle looked him up and down.
"At first I thought you'd found a girl and were slipping out for a secret tryst. But looking at you now… that outfit is far too grim for romance."
His uncle was right. The prince looked nothing like a man bound for a lover's rendezvous. In simple clothes, a sword at his hip and a spear in hand, he looked for all the world like a warrior about to march onto a battlefield.