Bloody Battle
In a world where a single powerhouse could overturn a battlefield, power and martial might were inseparable.
No authority or justification held any meaning before overwhelming violence; to seize or exercise power, one always needed sufficient force to back it.
Time had passed and culture had advanced beyond the stage where everything was decided by strength alone, yet the greater one's personal martial prowess, the greater one's political advantage remained.
Of course, the reverse held just as true.
Might became power, power attracted wealth, and with enough money one could grow far stronger than others with ease.
Fine equipment. Abundant meals. Excellent teachers. Even the rare monster byproducts hunted by mercenaries living hand to mouth.
Talent was merely the bare minimum required to stand at the starting line.
Those of superior bloodlines, forged over centuries of war and political marriages, grew stronger in honest proportion to the time and resources invested in their development.
"Strike them! Don't let them reach the inner castle!"
"Haha! No matter how sharp the Duke's sword, it cannot pierce the shields of these Sicilian men!"
"Charles, knight of Marseille, challenges you to a duel—"
"I am the Goddess's sword and shield, a faithful servant who carries out Her will—"
And so the Duke of Orléans was strong.
A little too much so.
Vast mana accumulated by consuming only the finest nourishment. Martial skill honed until his hair had turned pure white. Armor forged from Alpine steel by the kingdom's finest blacksmith, heir to dwarven metallurgy. And the ancient legendary sword Joyeuse, passed down as the family heirloom.
He had once ranked among the top ten powerhouses in France, and excluding those who had transcended human limits or withdrawn from the secular world, he could even place among the top three.
Though age had considerably diminished his physical abilities, the experience and technique he had steadily built would remain until the very end, even as his body decayed.
"..."
Those who overlooked this fact all became cold corpses.
The soldiers who trusted only in numbers to counterattack, the mercenaries who blocked his path alongside their comrades, the knights who boldly challenged him to duels, the holy warriors who charged recklessly with burning faith—all of them, outmatched in mana and overwhelmed by skill, met their end with hearts pierced or heads flying.
A tiger remains a tiger even in old age. From the moment mere humans tried to brawl with a tiger, their defeat was all but sealed.
"Is this all?"
The Duke of Orléans wiped the blood from his blade with a calm expression.
It was dull.
He had charged in ready to die, falling for the Saintess's scheme, yet once through the gates, everything blocking his path was so pitifully weak. He had already cut down hundreds of soldiers and bested dozens of knights, yet not a single one had wounded his body.
The old man who used the old order's swordsmanship had at least surprised him with his skill, but without Divine Power to support it, he could not display his full ability.
"What a waste."
A sigh tinged with regret escaped the Duke's lips.
The Saintess chosen by the Goddess had descended upon the earth, so why could the holy warrior who should be her servant not use Divine Power? If that old warrior had not lost his power, as a martial artist he could have enjoyed a fight without regrets against a great figure of the old era.
"Truly a pity."
But there was no time to wallow in such dull sentiments. Right now he was not a martial artist dreaming of higher realms, but the leader of the royalist faction commanding an army. With the kingdom's future and his soldiers' safety resting on his shoulders, he had to set aside any unreasonable desire for self-improvement for now.
"Your Grace. There were only soldiers in the western tower."
"The eastern tower had only a single knight as well!"
"Seal every gate and take the inner castle. Capture the Saintess, and victory is ours."
"Yes, sir!"
And the most rational path to victory for the suppression force was securing the Saintess's person. Or at the very least, eliminating her on the spot.
Even if it resulted in the order's Saintess becoming a martyr, it did not matter. After all, the outcome of war was decided by the knights who commanded their family retainers and wielded overwhelming force. And most knights were nobles or vassals of noble houses, and nobles were thoroughly accustomed to shifting their stance to suit the situation.
If they succeeded in eliminating the Saintess—the rebel army's core and greatest asset—in the first clash after the war's outbreak, the nobles with much to protect would surely switch sides. The support troops sent from Italy would also pull out quickly if victory seemed unlikely, so crushing the scattered rebels would restore the kingdom's peace.
Half a day has passed since the talks collapsed. There have been no reports of anyone leaving the castle in that time, so the Saintess should still be inside—
Is the Goddess still making no move? Having reclaimed her power decades ago and bestowed it upon only one person as her proxy, does she continue to stand by even when that proxy faces danger?
Then, O Goddess, do not say that I am at fault. This man is merely trying to remain faithful to the secular world.
"Knights, prioritize subdual over slaughter! This battlefield is already ours!"
Cutting off his stray thoughts there, the Duke issued a new command in a booming voice. It was an excessively arrogant declaration to shout in the heart of the enemy camp, yet at the same time the most fitting one. What good was there in needlessly piling up grudges in a fight already won?
The rebels at Clermont-Ferrand Fortress had lost the capacity to wage war. The already pitiful defensive capabilities of the ancient castle had plummeted to less than a quarter with the gates breached, and the soldiers who should have held the walls had fallen into panic and become a rabble. The knights of the rebel army were no match for the Royal Knights and the northern margraves, and Count Montpellier and the Saintess, who should have been restoring order, had yet to show themselves—perhaps due to injuries.
It was over.
With the tide of battle tilted this far, the rebels could not hold the fortress no matter what they tried. Unless the Saintess suddenly appeared and performed some absurd miracle...
"What."
The Duke of Orléans forgot all dignity and revealed his bewilderment in a foolish voice.
A flame was walking about.
It was no exaggeration or metaphor; a flame was truly walking right before his eyes. And what's more, it stood on two legs upon the ground, demonstrating the advanced technique of bipedal locomotion.
"Th-the flame is walking!"
"It's an ifrit! A spirit of flame!"
"What the? What is this? What's going on??"
The knights who witnessed this scene where the common sense of the human realm was thoroughly shattered either added to the chaos with needlessly vivid reactions or fell into meaningless speculation, but the Duke of Orléans was far wiser than the knights accompanying him.
Thus he discerned that it was not a flame walking like a person, but a person clad in flames,
Why is it still alive?
And right there, he experienced a complete halt in his thinking.
No, if a person was covered in flames, they should obviously be dead. First the extreme heat would melt their skin, then they would inhale the scorching air and ruin their insides. A knight skilled in mana could coat their body in a thin film to reduce or block the damage, but even that had its limits—being covered in flames like that should deplete one's mana in an instant. And a powerhouse capable of fighting while clad in flames like that would never have borrowed the power of a fire demon in the first place.
And above all, the size of the flame mass was rather small. A modest size that made it impossible to imagine a muscular man in thick armor inside.
The Duke suddenly thought that its size was similar to the Saintess he had seen in the conference hall.
"Greetings."
That was the correct answer.
The merciful Saintess, clad in sacred flames, greeted the apostates in a clear, pure voice. Then she picked up a small axe from a nearby corpse and casually swallowed it into the flames covering her.
"Sorry, but I'm in a very foul mood right now. So kindly overlook any insolence in my speech."
If that appearance seemed thoroughly delinquent, was it just an illusion?
The reincarnator, having had painful memories stimulated and turned extremely ferocious, discarded even the speech befitting her office as Saintess and began to run wild.
"Hup!"
Physically.
Asty hurled the axe she had just picked up with all her might. Due to her physical limits, it did not carry much force, but a lump of metal completely covered in flames was threatening enough by its mere existence.
The knight guarding the Duke of Orléans swung his sword to bat away the axe, and at the same moment, the hand cannon improved by Princess Roberta belched fire.
"Why, you cowardly—"
The bodyguard knight was not a particularly remarkable individual. Not even a Senior Knight—an ordinary talent rated as average even among Plain Knights. That such an insignificant knight had been assigned to the assault team and followed this far was purely because he was the Duke's attendant.
Naturally, he neither possessed the reflexes to react to a cannonball flying from behind while batting away an axe from the front, nor the toughness to withstand a large lump of metal fired by gunpowder.
"What are you on about. The one who got hit is the idiot."
And so he died.
The Duke of Orléans's friend of twenty years, publicly his bodyguard and privately a steadfast companion, died in battle without even leaving a proper last word, struck by a cannonball from behind. And the order's Saintess who had directed that underhanded attack trampled even the knight's honor with an indifferent expression.
"So you come at me that way after all."
But the Duke of Orléans did not grow angry. There was no reason to. He was not a man who fretted over fair and square contests. If the Duke had been the sort to care about such things in the first place, he would not have tried to blow Asty up by burying bombs beneath the conference hall.
That was not to say he was completely indifferent to honor, but he was a man who would unhesitatingly abandon honor if doing so allowed him to fulfill his responsibilities.
"...I ask one last time. Have you no intention of ceasing your acts of treason against the kingdom and surrendering?"
Thus the Duke did not rage even at his friend's death. He accepted that they had merely been faithful to their own duties. Though grief at losing a friend left him briefly unable to speak, instead of drowning in emotion and pouring hatred upon the killer, he calmly performed his role.
Maximilien de Gennes, Duke of Orléans, was that kind of man.
"Damn it. It would have been easier if he were just a bad guy."
Asty muttered quietly with a sour expression. But she had already come too far to turn back. Neither the mission inherited from her beloved and hated senior, nor her vow to make the Lantern Bearer girl happy, could ever be abandoned.
"I refuse."
Still, maintaining at least some formality was the bare minimum of courtesy. With only her speech returned to normal, Asty quietly met her opponent's eyes.
For some reason, she felt a slight sense of regret.