Encounter at the Summit
Spring was only halfway gone, and the muggy heat had begun to steal in uninvited.
It was miserable weather for climbing a mountain, yet the Hero was climbing one all the same.
He had properly wrung a force of soldiers out of the Emperor for the search, ordered them to comb every nearby peak, and left them with one final instruction: leave that mountain alone.
Doubt clouded the soldiers’ eyes, but the one giving the order was the Hero. They decided there had to be a reason and, being soldiers, obeyed without protest. A soldier, after all, was a creature who could not talk back even to a useless command so long as it came from a superior.
Thus the men whose entire duty until now had been lounging comfortably in the Imperial Capital found themselves on a forced march for the first time in ages.
While they poked and prodded every other mountain, leaving only one untouched, the Hero climbed alone.
At the very summit, on the open highland that crowned the peak, a wooden hut shimmered faintly beyond a wavering veil… and something else.
The Hero frowned.
Curiosity and caution together, he stepped carefully through the barrier and entered.
What waited inside was a woman holding a spear and a single hut.
Yet it did not match his memory.
Her presence was so meager he could have beaten her without effort. She wore the gold-engraved armor unique to Holy Knights, and her blonde hair made her look strangely like Jerome.
From the hut itself poured a far stronger aura, and a gaze that watched him steadily.
The owner of that gaze was the companion who had once followed him in a previous cycle—and his teacher at the same time.
The Pale Star. The Star of the Spear. Horizon.
But first he had to deal with the woman standing right in front of him.
“Who are you?”
An opponent weaker than himself, yet one whose allegiance—friend or foe—he could not yet judge. He discarded any thought of carelessness. His hand settled on the hilt of his sword, ready to draw at any moment. His eyes tracked every twitch of her body.
His master had never taken another disciple at this point in time.
How she had even found this place was a mystery. The veil was a special device that only those who had surpassed the upper ranks could glimpse beyond, and even then only faintly. So she was a Holy Knight who had reached the upper ranks despite that pitiful aura?
He would have to watch for body reinforcement and holy arts as well. There were people whose true strength could never be measured by physical presence alone. The starlight he felt from her was nothing remarkable, yet the efficiency of holy arts varied wildly from person to person; he could not ignore that.
Then the woman before him opened her mouth.
“I’m Titia, high-ranking Holy Knight of the Holy Kingdom. I used to guard the Saintess for the Central Church. Do you remember me?”
Ah.
The moment she turned her face toward him and began her introduction, memories that had sunk beneath the surface rose one by one.
Jerome’s younger sister, the one who had watched him die in a previous cycle.
But Spring had already been secured. Jerome was not dead.
When had she attached herself to them?
The Emperor had handled every tedious formality, yet those formalities had concerned extracting a single knight from the Holy Kingdom. He had never heard a word about a second one. Come to think of it, even in the previous cycle he had never learned how she had known to appear when Spring attacked.
The Hero answered awkwardly.
“Ah… yes. I remember.”
“But what brings you here?”
The blonde Holy Knight in front of him looked thoroughly bewildered.
“…How did you end up here?”
The Hero asked again.
“How did you get all the way out here?”
“I was worried, so I snuck onto the ship.”
You’ve got to be kidding me.
Jerome might not care, but there was no way he could drag a Holy Knight this weak into the party. She had snuck aboard, so she had never received the Pope’s permission either. Was that why she had suddenly appeared when Spring attacked in the previous cycle? Had she been struck from the knightly rolls? What about the diplomatic fallout?
The Emperor would handle it somehow.
The real problem was that he was supposed to be meeting his master for the second “first time” and persuading her to join. Variables were not allowed. Even if everything went according to plan, he could not guarantee he would succeed in recruiting her.
How had she even gotten past the veil? No—why was she here in the first place? If she had followed out of worry for the Saintess and her own brother, she had no reason to be standing on this mountain.
Things were already starting to tangle.
“Never mind that. Why are you here, of all places?”
“Do you even know where ‘here’ is?”
She fell silent for a moment, then answered.
“…I don’t know.”
The Hero was speechless.
A knight who had sworn loyalty, who had not even reported to her own country, who had been swept up by pure emotion and snuck onto a ship to follow the Saintess and her brother—only to run into him at the hidden hut of a secluded Star?
The lie was blatant.
“I’ll ask one last time.”
“Answer me properly.”
“Why did you come here?”
Titia hesitated, then shouted at the top of her lungs to hide her embarrassment.
“I got lost—!”
Silence.
“…What?”
“I said I got lost! I was following you all full of spirit and then I got lost!”
“I only started seeing the Imperial Capital yesterday!”
“That can’t be—”
Is she serious?
We left the Holy Kingdom over a month ago. There’s no way…
“Do you have any idea how hard it’s been for me?! I finally reach the Capital and Spring attacks! My brother disappears off the walls before I know it! Word comes that he’s at the front lines! I head for the front and it’s ridiculously far! I run out of money! I almost get there and now it’s back to the Capital again!”
…Scales.
The Hero called forth the golden Scales.
What do you desire?
Discernment of the truth.
What do you offer?
Starlight.
Roughly half of the starlight in his body flowed out, only to be refilled almost instantly from the hilt of the Holy Sword.
That girl is speaking falsehoods.
The Scales calmly confirmed the girl’s lie.
A miracle—or magic—that could peer into a living person’s thoughts and separate truth from falsehood demanded an enormous price. Unless the target was vastly weaker than oneself, the miracle was simply impossible. The fact that half his total starlight had been enough meant she was barely scraping the upper ranks after all.
When he first met Jerome, Jerome had stood at the same level. Whether she possessed any real talent was another question. She would be of no help in the subjugations.
And the fact that she was lying meant the whole “I got lost” performance had been an act. Impressive, in its way.
If she had truly been directionally hopeless, she never could have witnessed Jerome’s death in the previous cycle. The Hero reminded himself of that once more and decided:
No need to dig any further.
I already have a rough idea why she followed and what she was doing here.
Simply put, she could not force her way into the imperial palace where the Emperor resided, so she had gone ahead to the only place the one person who had stepped outside—himself—was heading. She had been able to glimpse the veil, guessed that this was his destination, and waited for him here.
That would be it.
Then another woman’s voice cut through the air.
Sharp enough to stab, the kind of voice that instantly told you its owner had a foul temper.
His master and former companion.
To her, of course, this was their first meeting.
The voice snapped:
“Stop making a racket out there and get inside, all of you—!”
The Hero came face to face with the owner of the voice that had summoned him.
Armor of blue cloth and iron. A spear wreathed in peculiar, wavering blue flame. A face that looked young, eyes that looked tired of everything under the sun. And a rough, cutting way of speaking that did not match the rest of her at all.
It had been a very long time since their last reunion.
For her, it was the first meeting.
“So. Those bastards poking around every mountain in the area—that was your doing?”
“And the other one just wandered in because she got lost?”
“I really do see every kind of crazy bastard these days.”
“So. Why are you bothering me?”
Titia said nothing. She had already measured the gulf between them and understood at once that she stood no chance. The Star of the Spear was not bothering to hide a single shred of her aura.
The long seclusion she had guarded for so many years was about to be shattered, and she was considering how to deal with the brats who had come looking for someone who hated trouble more than anything.
Killing them… one of them looked like the Hero. Even after cutting herself off from the world, she could still recognize the Holy Sword that had fallen from the sky, the noisy night in the Imperial Capital, and the starlight thrashing inside him. It was the same as the day she had once seen the Saintess.
An infinite star flowing through body and blade.
Killing the Hero would only make the beasts of the Demon Realm climb higher, and that would be far more annoying than her present situation. So she would hold off.
Watching the Star of the Spear sink into thought, the Hero knew this was the moment to drive the wedge in.
He began a gamble with his life on the line.
He did not know whether the chance of regression would ever come again, but the Empire’s current strength was clearly insufficient. What was needed to take the Demon King’s head was a gathering of Stars.
“Please teach me how to fight. And cooperate with me in killing the Demon King.”
“Within a year we kill the Demon King, and then you can come straight back here and live in peace.”
“If you refuse to cooperate—”
Horizon cut him off.
“If I refuse? What then?”
“You lot… dare… me?”
“How exactly?”
The Hero answered.
“I’ll keep tearing through these mountains and make a nuisance of myself forever.”
Horizon replied:
“Crazy bastard.”