Decisive Battle
It was hot.
With every breath I drew, my lungs cooked. The searing heat made my skin feel as though it might melt right off.
Vesta's power came with a friend-or-foe identification function, but what I had draped myself in was a degraded version bulked up with oil. So the friend-or-foe discrimination barely worked. Thanks to that, I was burning just enough not to die.
And if I made even a single mistake here, I would truly die.
To reiterate: the flames I wore were not a pure manifestation of divine power, but a hybrid of holy fire and oil fire. If my concentration slipped for even a moment and I lost the reins, the fire demon I carried would consume me whole. If I failed to finish this quickly and let time drag on, the accumulated damage would eventually overwhelm me and I would burn to death.
So I had to seize victory as swiftly and overwhelmingly as possible.
Whether it was actually possible to bring down a human weapon who had smashed through the castle gate with a lance charge and casually slaughtered hundreds of able-bodied men, I had no idea.
"What are you talking about. The one who got hit is the idiot."
If the odds were low, raise the stakes.
Right after assassinating the Duke of Orléans's bodyguard knight through the dual operation I had planned with Princess Roberta, I deliberately insulted his death with an arrogant attitude. Even though I felt not malice but a small sense of guilt toward that nameless knight, I trampled the dead man's honor and mocked him with words I did not mean—all to provoke the Duke of Orléans.
I was merely an ordinary person who had been swept up in war a few times; he was a master of the sword who had lived his entire life as a warrior. If we fought while both remained calm, I stood no chance of winning. I had to somehow provoke his rage and shatter his composure.
"So that's how you're going to play it after all."
But the Duke of Orléans merely nodded with calm indifference, as if the death of the bodyguard knight beside him and every insult I had spat were utterly meaningless.
Ah.
Come to think of it, the Duke of Orléans was the kind of man who had planted a bomb in the conference hall to blow the Saintess to pieces. A man who treated honor as less than a roadside pebble was never going to fall for a provocation of this level. To seize victory, I would have to become far more vicious.
And conveniently, my head was filled with the endless malice of the twenty-first century.
Just as I was about to assemble a few carefully chosen words into a sentence, the Duke of Orléans opened his mouth again.
"...I'll ask one last time. Do you have no intention of ceasing your acts of treason against the kingdom and surrendering?"
Ah.
Damn it.
You're asking that now? Like this?
The Duke of Orléans had no reason to take me prisoner. The siege of Clermont-Ferrand had already ended in victory for the suppression forces. Every defensive plan we had prepared had been blown apart when the madman standing before me smashed through the castle gate with a lance charge, and I myself had erased the option of fighting to the last man to hold the fortress. No matter what, the rebels could no longer repel the suppression army.
I had planned to use the chaos to eliminate only the Duke of Orléans—the core of the royalist faction—and escape the fortress. The tide of battle had already fully turned. What was needed to crush rebels whose command structure had collapsed was not a tiny Saintess who was hard even to see, but as many cavalry as possible. Frankly speaking, simply killing someone like me and moving on was by far the more rational choice.
Yet he went out of his way to urge me to surrender. He sincerely regretted that I stood against him, sincerely mourned the death of his bodyguard knight, and sincerely offered surrender even knowing I would refuse.
It could not have been because he wanted divine power. If that were the case, he would never have tried to blow me up in the conference hall. For the same reason, he would not have spared me out of fear of the Saintess's name value, and securing a hostage for a prolonged war would have been completely meaningless. A military rebellion was not some children's game; there was no way the rebels would collapse or abandon their offensive just because they had taken me as a single hostage. If anything, adding the cause of rescuing the Saintess might make the rebels grow rapidly.
Moreover, saving a lady in distress was every knight's romantic ideal. If the royalists turned the Order's Saintess into a captured princess, which side the hot-blooded young men of the Europa Continent would join was something I knew, you knew, and the Duke of Orléans knew. Capture might even be more dangerous than martyrdom. As long as there was no guarantee I would actively cooperate with them, the most rational choice was to cut my head off here and treat it as an accident or a disappearance.
"Damn. If he'd just been a bad guy, it would have been easier on my heart."
So the Duke of Orléans's proposal lacked rationality. All his words and actions were like that. He mourned the death of his bodyguard knight yet did not grow angry at me for mocking it. He had discarded honor and risked his life charging toward victory, yet he seemed to have little interest in victory itself.
A man who moved not by pride, but by a sense of responsibility.
Circumstances had made us enemies, yet he was still someone fully worthy of respect.
"I refuse."
In that case, dropping the act I had never wanted to put on was the least courtesy I could offer.
"Even if I surrender like this, nothing will change. Not this era, not this system, not this world."
I firmly rejected the duke's offer of surrender.
I had already come to know too much.
The life of a country girl forced to find happiness in poverty. The hardships of those bound to the land. An era where opium was used as medicine and rural folk poisoning bandit gangs was considered ordinary. A system in which those who took no responsibility sat on the throne and wasted food doing nothing, in which those born of noble blood processed the blood and sweat of the weak into bullets and fired them at one another, and which had solidified without even knowing that better ways existed.
A strange world fundamentally different from the one I had lived in, yet with suspiciously many similar parts.
I had met a girl who lived solely on faith, seen my past-bound self in her eyes, and decided to make it so she could feel happiness without clinging to the flames.
So I could not quietly give in here.
For the future I desired, I would gladly drape myself in flames and earn someone's grudge. Even if the end was ruin.
"I see. It seems there is no room for compromise."
The Duke of Orléans raised his sword with a calm expression. His blood-soaked armor glistened in the light of the flames. The aura flowing from the old knight's body crushed the entire world beneath its weight.
"You knew from the beginning, didn't you."
"Yes. I did."
If I got cut, I died. If I collided, I died. If I merely lost control of the flames, I died.
Big sister Rebecca was busy preventing the royalist knights from joining the fray. The other knights had already escaped the fortress. Princess Roberta had fled after that final sniper shot. No one could see me, and no one could come to help.
It was the perfect condition for using my trump card.
"Your Grace. If I cover you completely in flames, can you survive?"
I smirked and took a step back.
The Duke of Orléans did not answer, but I had already confirmed it long ago by asking Big sister Rebecca. An excellent knight could block flames with mana. If the flames had been ones she herself kindled, it would have been a different story, but she had asserted that this impure, muddied version could not pierce the duke's barrier. Unless I completely surrounded him with fire, even cutting off his breathing would be difficult.
It was truly welcome news. A barrier made of mana did not block gases.
"Originally I wasn't going to use this no matter what... but things have come to this, so I have no choice. If you don't want to die, you'd better steel yourself."
Now it was time to perform the hastily improvised play.
I reached toward the pile of firewood stacked beside me and kicked away the support holding it in place, dumping all the already burning logs. Since I stood no chance in close combat, it was a desperate struggle to somehow block his approach—or a shallow trick to buy time for the sniper hiding on the opposite wall.
Probably misjudging my actions that way, the duke sliced through the cascading firewood and closed the distance in an instant. Thick logs snapped like stalks of sorghum and rolled across the ground.
"You're still not used to handling divine power. As I thought, the one who blocked the explosion back then was the one with you—"
And just as the blade that had come right up to my face was about to thrust into my abdomen, the flames that had climbed the wall severed one of the water tower's legs.
"Hm."
Of course the Duke of Orléans was not so weak that he would fall just because one structure dropped. He sliced the falling water tower in a single stroke.
"Just water, is it."
Because of that he was doused in the liquid the tower had contained, but it was not oil—just water. If I had had time to empty the water tower and fill it with oil in the first place, I would never have fretted over whether I could kill the duke.
And anyway, this was enough.
From the beginning, what I had wanted was not fuel, but moisture.
"Yes. Just water."
Today's life hack:
When quicklime meets water, it becomes a chemical weapon.
Lime poured down onto the thoroughly soaked head of the Duke of Orléans.