A Sibling's Decision (1)

Ellie showed no sign of intending to leave my arms.

Thanks to that, my little sister's stare was only growing longer.

"Oppa. It's been ages since we last met... is this really something you should be showing me in front of your little sister?"

"Can't you just... understand?"

At my words, Seul let out a sigh and nodded.

As the moments slipped by, Ellie finally came back to her senses and pulled herself free of my embrace.

"Let's keep this to simple introductions for now. I'll explain everything once all of this is sorted out."

At my words, both Ellie and Seul nodded.

Seul hadn't fought in the war herself, but one look at the carnage around us would have been enough to understand.

Human corpses lay strewn about everywhere.

Ellie and I had seen this sight many times before, and it was an unavoidable part of war, so we simply looked past it — yet for some reason, even my little sister seemed entirely untouched by it all.

"Have you ever killed a person before?"

At my question, my sister raised her voice as if the very idea were absurd.

"I'm someone who can't even kill a bug!"

"I only asked because you didn't even blink standing in front of all these corpses."

"Oh... now that you mention it? Why am I so unfazed?"

"Why are you asking me?"

Perhaps she found our little back-and-forth amusing, because Ellie watched the two of us with a bright, innocent smile.

First things first.

The very first thing we needed to do was confirm whether Asmodeus was alive or dead.

When I had briefly slipped into a suspended state, Asmodeus was still alive.

He had simply failed to defend himself, been pierced by countless swords, and now burned within the flames that bloomed from the blade — condemned to suffer for all eternity.

We set our feet in motion and made our way ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠toward him.

Asmodeus had not dissolved. He remained where he was, still on his knees.

Hahh... hahh...

Tenacious bastard. Still not dead.

Then again, he was all but neutralized now.

His whole body was riddled with wounds, and the tremendous burn scars covering him were the proof of it — the aftermath of his regeneration clashing head-on against my flames, burning under the influence of the Golden Ring Eclipse.

Ellie stood gazing down at him as he knelt there powerless, head bowed.

I conveyed my meaning with a light push against her back.

With everything that had happened, she deserved to sever her twisted bond with him by her own hand — the one who had murdered her father, threatened her territory, and endangered her very life.

Finishing it herself would be good for her. And for me as well.

"Asmodeus."

".....So you finally show yourself to end me."

"......"

"I wanted to grind you beneath me and make him listen to your screams of agony..."

Asmodeus barely lifted his unresponsive left arm, pointing a finger at me.

— Shk!

I severed Asmodeus's left arm with his own sword on the spot.

His last remaining limb left his body, drifted through the empty air, and fell to the ground — but Asmodeus showed no reaction at all, as if he could no longer feel anything.

"That is not someone you get to speak of so carelessly. You are a being who deserves death, and unlike you, my lover gave everything — her very life — to protect me until the end."

"Now, even if I die, I can hold my head up before my father. Thank you, Asmodeus."

"A shame, truly. The sight of the Azure Dragon's successor writhing beneath me, and her cries of plea—"

Before Asmodeus could finish, Ellie shut his mouth for him, swinging her sword swiftly forward.

"Silence."

A single strike from Ellie, and Asmodeus's head parted from his body.

— Shk!

What was Ellie feeling right now, I wondered.

Relief? Or fury that he had died too easily?

I had thought the important thing was simply to leave her alone until she gathered herself and mastered her emotions, but...

"What do you think you're doing?"

'?'

What.

When I turned that look on my sister, she gestured toward Ellie and said,

"The person who's basically her mortal enemy just died right in front of her... you're supposed to comfort her, and quickly."

I had no idea.

It would probably work itself out.

I walked over to Ellie, stepped around to face her, and pulled her gently into an embrace.

Ellie melted into my arms, and for a while, we simply shared a quiet moment of stillness.

When she finally drew back from me, the skin around her eyes was faintly red.

Perhaps that was her heart finally showing through — the relief of having killed her nemesis by her own hand at last, and the catharsis of a vengeance finally fulfilled.

Pretending she hadn't been crying, Ellie began organizing the ruined entrance of Elion Forest.

She set about tallying casualties, managing the wounded, and all the rest.

And of course, I was every bit as busy.

The first problem we ran into was getting the wounded healed well enough to return to the territory.

The healers were dreadfully few compared to the number of injured, and some of them were already visibly straining themselves toward mana exhaustion.

Thanks to my aid, the wounded were able to raise their own healing and regeneration, barely reaching a level where they could return to duty.

But Hwa Yeon and Khan, both grievously wounded in the battle against Asmodeus, would still need a long time before they opened their eyes.

With the domain still proclaimed, I turned my back and moved on to the next task.

Only after my work was done could I help with Ellie's, after all.

My job was to draw out the dragon orbs and free the guardians once more.

To release the guardian dragons who had been reduced to orbs, the innate authority of the Azure Dragon had to be granted to them anew.

My little sister watched the whole spectacle from right beside me — marveling at the wind that stirred as if it were some miracle, or asking whether the white light spilling from my palm was magic, or noticing the weeds suddenly growing vigorous around us and waiting for my reaction.

She hovered at my elbow, being a thorough nuisance.

Still, she wasn't actually getting in the way, so I just let her be.

"Wake, Blaze."

The dragon orb blazed red, and amid a pillar of crimson flame, Blaze manifested before me in a form that dwarfed even his usual summoned size.

"I am Blaze, First Guardian Dragon, come before the Successor of the Seventh ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Azure Dragon."

"Thank you. For staking even your life for my sake."

At my words, Blaze shrank back down into his hatchling form and circled about me as he spoke.

"You are the Azure Dragon now, the scion of those who came before, and the liege I chose with my own will."

"How could a sworn servant ever abandon his king?"

"Plenty of servants do exactly that, you know. It's what makes you remarkable, Blaze."

And then someone intruded upon our conversation.

It was Seul.

"Whoa. What's with that dragon? A gigantic dragon just turned into a tiny baby dragon!"

???

"???"

Blaze was a being who stood all but equal to a lesser god beneath the Azure Dragon.

Which meant that unless one possessed an authority or something of equivalent rank, one could neither sense nor see Blaze's presence at all.

"You... can see Blaze?"

"Yeah. Deep crimson scales, and his horns have yellow tips, like flames catching at the ends?"

No, hold on. First she takes the sight of corpses without so much as a flinch, and now she can see Blaze... what is going on?

As question piled upon question in an endless chain, Blaze spoke.

"Successor... if I am not sensing wrongly... I feel the aura of the Azure Dragon upon her as well...?"

What nonsense is that.

That can't be possible.

There is truly only one Successor per generation.

Even in the game, there had never been more than one at a time.

What on earth was happening?

For the moment, I kept releasing the dragon orbs — after Blaze came Brionic, then Crescent — until every one of them had been freed.

And I nearly ran myself dry of mana doing it.

Blaze's words proved no mistake: Brionic and Crescent, both sensing her aura, gave firm confirmation that they felt the Azure Dragon's power in my little sister as well.

First, I told the guardian dragons that she was my sister, to quiet whatever confusion they might be feeling.

After all, they had only just been freed from their orbs — it would have been quite disorienting to learn that someone other than me carried the Azure Dragon's aura.

Next, my sister.

A situation I couldn't begin to fathom.

I quietly opened the Status Window to check her state.

My sister's first trait was —

'Executor of the Heavens.'

Thrown into this situation out of nowhere, I honestly couldn't tell if this was right.

More Successors would be a good thing, in truth.

The demons were growing stronger by the day, and their numbers were swelling — the four of us weren't nearly enough.

Against an army that vast, even we would simply be baited and broken; use feinting tactics like the old saying — feint east, strike west — and no matter how strong we were, the war would end in defeat the moment they found an opening.

So with that in mind, I began to weigh whether it would be better to bring her in as a Successor — or better to leave her be and never reveal this trait at all.

Becoming a Successor came with many advantages.

No matter how lowborn or common her station, so long as she passed the Proof, no one would ever dare look down on my sister again.

Realistically, since I was the Azure Dragon's Successor and she was my sister, nobody was likely to touch her anyway.

But it was still good for her to have some means of standing up for herself.

Some of the nobles I'd seen in the game were rotten to the core — villains foul enough to deserve the description outright.

If they latched on and refused to let go, I could always deal with them, but it would become a tiresome ordeal.

The world I was living in now was more dangerous, not less, than the one I'd left behind.

The one drawback of becoming a Successor, however, was a binding obligation: she would be required to take the field against the demons.

In other words, my sister would have to fight with her life on the line, just as I did.

I didn't yet know what weapon she would come to wield as her mainstay...

But taking the battlefield meant laying your life down as the opening stake on the table.

With ill fortune, even a Successor could die in an instant.

For now, I judged it best to ask my sister — and the others — for their thoughts once we returned home.

Until then, it would stay a secret.

"Oppa! What could you possibly be thinking about for that long?"

I couldn't exactly say it's because of you, so I simply answered that I had been praying for my companions' wounds to heal well.

And so, roughly half a day later.

All the preparations for our return were complete.

The reason I chose to return so quickly was, first, that the territory lay close to Elion Forest, and receiving treatment there would be better for the injured.

We loaded those too gravely hurt to move freely into the carriages and made our way swiftly back to Cumul Territory.

After the battle, our forces had been devastated.

Five thousand soldiers and knights had taken part in the subjugation of Asmodeus.

Of those, a full two thousand had died.

A great many had simply been caught in the sweep of Asmodeus's attacks, and the number who fell fighting against that overwhelming horde was beyond counting.

If the Azure Scale Knights alone had faced them... it would have been a far, far crueler battle.

And if Bathin had not revealed Asmodeus's weakness to me before he died...

It could have gone very badly indeed.

The weakness Bathin had told me of in the authority that ruled space was simple: multi-directional assault.

The more space he governed, the more certain stretches of it grew slack — in offense and in defense alike.

That was why, when I unleashed the Moonlight Sword Style, I had made a point of loosing strike after strike, or raining down an absurd number of swords like a downpour.

Though the technique that severed his right arm was another matter entirely — its whole purpose was to pour overwhelming force into a single blow.

Once the battle review was done, Ellie and I returned swiftly to the territory and threw ourselves into the aftermath.

Looking back on it now, I can only call it one hell after another.

Nearly a thousand wounded had been produced, and with the healers of Cumul Territory alone, there was no hope of caring for them all — so recruiting more healers became our first priority.

So that the wounded could hold out until the healers arrived, I kept the domain of life, Primordial Life Force, active, buying time in the interim.

Alongside tending the wounded, I assigned a physician and maids each to Khan and Hwa Yeon to watch over their conditions.

And so, in the wake of Asmodeus's atrocity, Ellie and I found ourselves living days too busy for our own shadows.

I had learned the running of the territory from Ellie, after all, so I had my own reasons for being unable to escape the work.

It was simply more than one lord could handle alone.

Among the mountain of duties, the tasks that fell to me were the funerals for the dead, and calculating the compensation owed to the victims and their bereaved families.

I can say without hesitation that it was the hardest week I'd had in a long while.

Ellie would point out the problem with each figure I produced — and the trouble was, I knew the right answer, but had no idea where my arithmetic had gone wrong, which meant recalculating the whole thing from beginning to end. That was the true hell of it.

Yet even in those hellish days, as if the world wished to offer some hope, good news reached us as well.

Only on the fourth day did word finally come that Khan had opened his eyes.

Of course, buried as I was in funerals, compensation for the bereaved and the victims, and the recruitment and hiring costs of healers, I never got to see him...

While I was buried in those tasks, Ellie handled matters concerning the fallen and the newly awakened Khan, while Khan himself took charge of deciding the matter of the acting proxy.

I very nearly learned firsthand what it meant to work oneself into an early grave.

Fortunately, three days after the work began, the funerals concluded and I could finally breathe a little.

And so the days passed, bringing us to the present.

With the funeral arrangements and the compensation for the bereaved, the victims, and their families all confirmed in order by Ellie, the time had at last come for me to introduce Seul to Ellie, Khan, and Hwa Yeon.

I apologized to Seul for making her wait so long, but seeing my haggard, sleep-starved face, she insisted that if anything, she was the one who should be sorry.

We had gathered everyone — and yet one seat still had no occupant.

Hwa Yeon's seat.

Hwa Yeon had yet to wake.

Before we left the forest to return, I had gathered and kept the broken shards of the Sword of the Azure Sky, along with the fragments of Moglei.

The Sword of the Azure Sky was a Divine Beast's weapon — I couldn't even begin to contemplate repairing it, and Moglei, I felt, was a decision that belonged to the one who wielded her.

So I was keeping the blade shards, the scabbard, and the grip.

To return them to Hwa Yeon.

She will wake someday.

She's far too strong a woman not to.

I'll focus on what's in front of me now.

Three people sat around me.

To introduce them to one another, I opened my mouth.

"Seul, say hello. This is Khan — the Successor of the Black Tortoise, who fights the demons at my side."

At my introduction, my sister's gaze turned to Khan.

She bowed her head politely to him.

"It's a pleasure to meet you."

"The pleasure is mine. Hyeon has told me a great deal about you. You should have heard how much he missed you."

"Oppa did?"

My sister whipped her head around to stare at me as if to say, what on earth is ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠this supposed to mean?

"Yes. He missed you terribly. The reason Hyeon raises his sword against the demons is to protect his family — and everyone precious to him."

"Ah..."

This is a little embarrassing...

Embarrassing precisely because it was true.

Clearing my throat with a deliberate ahem, I turned to introduce Ellie next — but she was faster than I was.

"It's a pleasure to meet you. I've wanted to meet you for so long. First, allow me to introduce myself — I am Alice Cumul, head of the Cumul family, which serves the Azure Dragon, and Hyeon's beloved."

She introduced herself with a radiant, sunny smile, and my sister, unable to keep her mouth shut, blurted out an utterance she should never have voiced.

"Someone as beautiful as you... why on earth did you ever become our oppa's lover...?"

That?

As I was quietly deliberating how best to end her, Ellie spoke up.

"Because Hyeon saved me from the darkness."

Ellie told the story of how she and I first met — her own past alongside it, and how I had come to save her — and when she went so far as to tell her just how long the two of us had been together, my sister's reaction was...

"...Hold on. This IS our oppa, right? There's no way he could keep a relationship going this long..."

First Azure Dragon, would you kindly take me back?

At length, my sister turned to me with a grave expression and said,

"Still... oppa, you've had a hard time of it. Dropped into a strange world, nearly kidnapped by bandits, risking your life against deadly foes again and again — You've even come close to true death, haven't you?

...That's true enough.

If the me of the past could have seen this, I doubt he would have believed a word of it.

Khan, Ellie, and Seul were trading stories with one another, steadily building a rapport.

I had gathered them all in one place to introduce them, yes — but there was another reason as well: my sister's first trait.

"Listen a moment, Seul. There's something you need to hear. It concerns you."

My sister pointed a finger at herself and echoed,

"Me?"

I nodded and spoke.

"I'll explain it here. My second trait, the Status Window, lets me open the status window of myself or others, so I can see what traits and skills someone possesses."

Ellie had already learned of the Status Window's existence back when I was teaching her to wield White Flame.

Khan hadn't been told, and didn't seem to know, though he wore the expression of someone thinking, that sounds like you, all right.

My sister tilted her head, clearly lost as to what any of this meant.

"Seul, a trait is a special power that every person in this world carries without exception. It might be swordsmanship, or it might be magic."

"Oh... that sounds like a system straight out of a fantasy novel or a game...?"

I nodded, told her it was something like that, and went on.

"And the Successors of the Four Divine Beasts have a defining feature: the names of their traits contain the name of the domain their Divine Beast governs."

"In my case, my trait evolved past that point and the name was lost, but mine used to be 'The One Watched by the Heavens.'"

"....."

My sister never took her eyes off mine, listening to every word.

"The inheritors of the Azure Dragon have their first traits fixed under the name of the Heavens."

"And your first trait is 'Executor of the Heavens.'"

The ones startled by my words were not my sister, but Ellie and Khan.

"No... how...?"

"Only one Successor can exist in any given era. You know as well as I do that this is impossible, Hyeon."

I materialized the Status Window and showed it to them — a translucent pane appeared before their eyes, and they could not contain their astonishment at the sight of two Azure Dragon Successors arising in the same age.

Then I laid before Ellie and Khan every worry I had been carrying all this time.

"That's why I've been agonizing over this. Should I make my sister a Successor — or should we never proclaim that two Successors exist in this era, and bury the whole thing?"

Having heard me out, Ellie and Khan asked for time to think it over.

And as I too was weighing it once more — whether it would be better for her to take up the seat of a Successor, or simply to live an ordinary life — a single remark from my sister shook me awake.

"Oppa. Do you remember what Mom and Dad said when I became student council president in middle school?"

"....."

"After I became president, I struggled through so much, one thing after another. And back then, Mom and Dad told me this."

"If you ever stand in a position that leads others, then by standing there alone, you take upon yourself the duty to protect and shelter them."

"And if the burden grows too heavy — if it becomes truly unbearable — they said I should ask the people around me for help. Because as the one leading them, I have every right to do so."

"So I'll become a Successor, just like you, oppa. Exactly the way Mom and Dad taught me."

The eyes of my sister, declaring ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠such a steadfast resolve, held a gravity graver than I had ever seen in them before.