The Storm (1)
After Ryu Shin took his leave, we had meant to lose ourselves in some hard-won rest within the imperial capital, which had settled into a rare calm of late.
Instead, it was news — more dangerous and more dizzying by far — that came and shattered that rest to pieces.
At this very moment, I was being escorted by an imperial steward, clad in the exclusive uniform said to be worn by none but the Divine Beast Successors, on my way to the audience chamber of the imperial palace.
Because the signs of the second Tide of Corruption had appeared.
Elly, too, had been so busy of late that catching a glimpse of her face had become a rarity — and I could only assume the Tide of Corruption was what kept her so.
Hastening our steps all the same, Yeon-i and I reached the audience chamber, and stepping inside, we found every Divine Beast Successor there paying their respects before the Emperor.
I, too, walked forward at an unhurried pace, and before the Emperor I offered my respects — sinking to one knee and bowing my head.
Only then did the Emperor speak, slow and measured.
"First — before we turn to preparations for the Tide of Corruption, I would show my gratitude. To every Divine Beast Successor gathered in this hall who saved my daughter."
"It was an unreasonable thing to ask of you, and yet you answered this Emperor's Summons without hesitation. For that, I am truly thankful."
"That said... what I am about to share may prove a harsh thing to hear."
"This comes by way of the imperial household's own informant, 'Shadow.' The signs of the Tide of Corruption have appeared."
"But... its scale is one that cannot be measured against the last Tide at all."
At the Emperor's final words, the faces of the successors — vassals included — drained pale in an instant.
Perhaps someone who could spend divine power without limit might have felt differently, but we had not yet risen to any such height.
Which was to say, in a fight where the enemy held us by sheer numbers, any one of us could die at any moment.
Myself very much included.
The ranked demons we had slain so far numbered barely ten.
More than sixty still remained — and the seven strongest of them all, the demons collectively known as the Seven Deadly Sins, had yet to so much as show their faces.
To be precise, they would idly flick a finger our way now and then, as if prodding to see whether we were worth their interest...
...only to fold that interest away just as quickly and make no move whatsoever.
But if two or more of those Sins ever gathered and attacked as one, the odds that even I would fail to hold them — that we would be defeated — would climb exponentially.
Mid-to-high ranked demons, I could cover perhaps three of at a time... but the heart of the matter was simple: I could not do it all alone.
"The Tide's numbers are currently tallied at a minimum of five thousand... and a maximum of fourteen thousand."
What? What kind of scale was that supposed to be?
The Tide of Corruption — a name given for the way demons came surging in such vast numbers, blackening the horizon from edge to edge like a swarm of ants.
And this invading host seemed determined to live up to that name in every particular.
"Let all family heads hear Me."
"Yes."
"The imperial family will place some three thousand troops at the disposal of each family head. Take those soldiers home with you, and set them toward holding back the Tide of Corruption."
"Furthermore, I shall see the imperial treasury opened. Each house will be granted the chance to send a single family head or successor to claim a weapon from its vaults."
In the Emperor's words, I could feel it — an iron will, the resolve to turn back the Tide of Corruption no matter the cost.
"Intelligence has already been dispatched to the territories on the frontlines. Act upon it, and give these monstrous enemies nothing less than your utmost."
"1st Prince. 1st Princess."
"Yes, Your Majesty."
"Yes, Your Majesty."
"If you are truly My children, how could you open your eyes and stand idle while the nation walked into peril? The right of imperial succession is not so easily won. You do understand that?"
"We do."
"Of course, Your Majesty."
The Prince and Princess dipped their heads in assent before the Emperor.
"You two will take the field in this Tide of Corruption as well."
The 1st Prince, back when he had appeared in the game, had been a possessor of tremendous martial power — standing at a realm Sion couldn't have hoped to compare with back then. Judging by how effortlessly he must have wielded even sword energy, I'd have put him at a Peak-tier Sword Expert at the very least.
The Sion of today, though, might have managed to close that gap — if only by a little.
But what truly mattered was the martial strength the 1st Princess carried.
The 1st Princess had barely appeared in the game at all, and even when she took part in a war, she was shown supporting from the rear — so the only thing I could surmise was that she held some manner of support-oriented Trait. Everything else about her was a complete blank.
"Each of you — 1st Prince, 1st Princess — is to choose whichever territory you desire, take the field there, and return only once your deeds have heaped glory high enough to show for it."
As the two of them weighed their choices among the four territories, the first to step forward was the 1st Prince.
"Your Majesty, I shall go north to Crystal Territory and render aid there."
"Why? What is your reason for choosing Crystal Territory?"
"Until only recently it suffered grievous damage in the assault of the Four Perils' successor, and even now it is only slowly beginning to recover."
"Should the Tide of Corruption visit large-scale ruin upon it in its present state, I fear that damage would swell beyond all hope of restraint."
He wasn't wrong.
Crystal Territory had entered a period of recovery, and its lord, Gerald, had been pouring his focus into rebuilding.
But if the Tide swept through on top of all that, the toll would likely prove crueler still than the assault Florence had delivered.
The place most likely to be annihilated outright — house and all — should anything go awry was, without question, the north: Crystal.
Back then, however, there had been no White Tiger successor to bar the Perils' successor's path, and so they had absorbed the first blow full-on, with no room even to react. This time, things were expected to go differently.
He loses to me plenty often these days, sure — but Beryl Citrine, too, carries more than enough strength to handle one or two mid-ranked demons with ease.
With him taking the field to help, Crystal Territory could finally breathe easy.
"Your Majesty, I will go to Cumul Territory, and there bring aid to as many people as I can."
Huh? The 1st Princess is coming to us?
"I see... Cumul Territory, is it... And your reason for choosing it, 1st Princess?"
"The reason I have chosen Cumul Territory is this: according to the intelligence your Shadow has only just obtained, the largest host of all will pour into Cumul Territory."
That much was true.
The mere thought of it was enough to make my chest go tight.
Fourteen thousand demons... which meant demons of the Sins' caliber and above would form the very spearhead of the assault...
"At present, Cumul Territory wants for nothing in strength, with the 7th Successor of the Azure Dragon and the 8th Successor both in residence — but the recovery of its common soldiers and knights has not been where the focus lies."
"With my Trait, I will see Cumul's soldiers restored to fighting condition in short order, so that the front line may hold."
Recovery? Healing-type Traits were extraordinarily rare... weren't they?
In any war the world has ever waged, the things that matter most are rest and healing.
Neglect rest even in the thick of a campaign, and you could collapse at the single most decisive moment and throw the entire fight away.
And leave the wounded untended where they lay, and men who might have marched again would instead be lost for good — invalided out, or in the cruelest of cases, dead.
On Earth, after all, it had been Nightingale who introduced sanitation and proper treatment amid the carnage of war, restoring the wounded to their feet and steadying the front lines because of it.
She had not earned the name 'Goddess of Healing' for nothing.
And more than anything else — our own territory had already called in healers and physicians on a massive scale to devote themselves to its wounded and gravely injured, and had still lost a considerable number of soldiers regardless.
The loss had evidently shaken Elly deeply; ever since, she had been bringing healers in by the dozen, scouting them one after another to serve as Cumul Territory's own.
If the 1st Princess truly carried a healing Trait and joined our side on top of all that, then we would go into battle that much more secure.
The 1st Princess declared her intent to take the field with unmistakable resolve, and the Emperor, nodding, honored that resolve.
"Very well. So be it."
"The 1st Prince to Crystal Territory. The 1st Princess to Cumul Territory. Take the field under those banners, pile glory high upon your names, and return."
"Yes."
"From this moment forward, the sitting family heads and successors are granted the authority to come and go from the imperial capital as they please. Devote yourselves, above all else, to the preservation of your territories."
Which, stripped of the royal phrasing, amounted to exactly this: I won't say a word even if you leave without asking — now go and guard your own houses well.
Ordinarily, one could not leave the imperial capital without showing one's face before the Emperor at least once, whether he liked it or not.
The custom, it was said, had sprung from the days when urgent business befell a territory and its lord had no choice but to appear before the Emperor, report it, and look to him for what came after.
That was how grave this matter was — grave enough to sweep centuries of tradition aside.
Coming out of the audience chamber alongside the 1st Princess, Yeon-i rounded on me, brimming with irritation.
"Uuugh... those demon bastards... any day now was supposed to be the day I finally got taken in by Hyun...!"
"Oppa... are you going to tell Dad and Mom? What... what does this mean...?"
No, Yeon-i, Yeon-i — that is hardly the point here... especially not in a room where the 1st Princess and Seul-i were both standing right there...
Elly turned her gaze on Yeon-i, smiled lightly, and spoke.
"We're departing for Cumul Territory at once. Your Highness is welcome to ride with us as well."
"You all seem very close, I must say."
The 1st Princess regarded us with an elegant smile.
It was a smile so serene I genuinely found myself wondering whether she could be the same person who had once looked at me with tears of apology brimming in her eyes.
"I'm relieved you look on us so kindly."
With Elly's smile to seal it, we settled on the hour of our departure from the palace.
We would leave the very next day.
The reason we shoved the schedule forward so aggressively was simple.
We needed to be standing on solid footing before an utterly unforeseen — and utterly enormous — horde of demons.
First of all, even traveling flat-out, the road from the imperial capital to Cumul Territory took four days at the bare minimum. We would be pushing harder than any ordinary pace this time, so I figured five or six days all told.
Arriving even a single day early to stack our countermeasures high meant that much less chance of the demons wresting the initiative of the war from our hands.
There was Elly's addendum to weigh as well — that this battle would likely take the shape not of an open battle waged beyond the walls, but of a siege.
The Emperor would already have sent word to Cumul Territory, together with the intelligence, that the Tide of Corruption was about to come crashing down upon it.
Edgar, then, would have acted to match it, and seen the news carried to every vassal under Cumul Territory's banner.
And Her Highness the Princess had raised no objection to any of it, so we could count on making it back to Cumul Territory swiftly enough.
"Cumul Territory's standing forces, compared to the last Tide of Corruption, have swelled to roughly one and a half times their number. About ten thousand. Include the imperial army on top of that, and it comes to thirteen thousand."
A thousand short, yes — but in raw numbers, ours was by no means a force left trailing behind.
Whatever the reasoning, though, I suspected the siege had been chosen precisely to shave the soldiers' sacrifices down to the barest minimum.
Our first plan of action: divide off the minimum forces required, station a commander over each sector of the walls with an assistant commander serving beneath him, and fight the siege on that skeleton.
Next came the plan for the healers and the support troops.
"Most of the healers we'll draw from our own territory. Depending on how strong Her Highness turns out to be, we may need to reinforce the healer corps — or leave some behind as reserve manpower instead."
Yeon-i and I nodded at her proposal.
The 1st Princess — Leorik — nodded in turn, and opened her mouth to tell us of her Trait.
"First, I suppose I should tell you all what my Trait is. If it's all of you, then I can trust you — so don't worry."
"My Trait is called Wings of White."
Why on earth was a Trait of that caliber manifesting in the imperial bloodline?
'Wings of White'...
An S-rank Trait: Wings of White.
One of the unique Traits held by the number-one healer-ranked player in the entire game.
Its defining feature was, quite simply, the wings of pure white.
For a limited span of time, the wielder's body took on the form of an angel — unfurling a halo and an angel's wings to blanket a vast area in healing.
The caster's halo held within it a power that demons instinctively shrank from; even mid-ranked demons felt the revulsion crawl through them and found themselves unable to draw near.
A defensive Trait specialized, in the truest sense, in defense and recovery.
Its one drawback was the truly monstrous amount of mana it devoured.
Unless one's mana circuits were built like iron, the Trait demanded that they spin at blistering speed the instant it activated — which made tearing them apart a very real possibility.
With the Princess's Trait laid bare, there could be no surer pillar beneath us.
In the end, perhaps it was only natural that command of the healers fell to Her Highness the 1st Princess.
She had experience leading people, and her Trait was overwhelmingly superb besides.
And so we spent the whole of the day drafting the plan for war, raising the skeleton of our strategy against the Tide that crept ever closer.
A day slipped by.
We threw ourselves into the preparations for departure.
Elly, Yeon-i, Seul-i, and I had come racing to the palace the moment the Summons arrived, so there was nothing to pack in the first place — and the 1st Princess said she needed nothing beyond a staff and a suit of light armor to draw out the full effect of her Trait.
And so we left the imperial capital behind in short order and began the run toward Cumul Territory.
The imperial soldiers, each mounted on his own horse, fell in behind our carriage and followed in our wake.
Three commanders led the imperial army in all, each charged with his own contingent, each commanding it in turn.
The man seeing us safely to Cumul Territory was, as he always had been, a welcome sight.
Even back when the imperial capital was scorched and came crashing down, this man had somehow always lived on. I couldn't have been more glad of it.
The wave of motion sickness that built up inside the carriage, of course, was fortunate not at all.
Those five days on the road, I honestly thought I was going to die.
The moment we reached Cumul Territory, we hastily convened a council on the Tide of Corruption.
The vassal family heads under Cumul Territory's banner had apparently already heard the intelligence and were lodging at Cumul Manor, so they were able to gather in short order.
The family heads in attendance, the three imperial commanders, Her Highness the 1st Princess, Yeon-i, and me.
Our very best had gathered around the table and the council was underway — and then an unforeseen variable planted itself squarely in our path.
Elly had built her plan around a siege before we ever set out here.
But the imperial commanders wanted an open battle. Every last one of them.
"You mean a pitched battle in the open field?"
At Elly's question, the imperial commanders nodded and pressed their case.
"Yes. I confess I do not understand why you would choose a siege while commanding forces of this scale."
Elly had told every one of them of her plan long ago, declaring from the first that she meant to fight a siege.
She had hammered the point home any number of times — there was no chance they had simply forgotten. So why raise an objection now, of all moments?
To bring the commanders of the imperial army around, Elly laid out her reasons for choosing a siege, slowly and without hurry.
"There are two reasons I have chosen a siege."
"The first: the demons' standing troops outclass our own soldiers in skill. Open the field to them in our present state, and the odds of it ending in overwhelming losses to our ranks are high."
"The second: a siege allows us to dictate the shape of the battle itself. A siege is the fight that favors us. We stand and battle on ground higher than theirs, for one."
"Our soldiers' strength drains more slowly, and the peril of our shield line being broken through and annihilated outright — as it might be in an open battle — falls away to almost nothing."
"It is precisely so that our soldiers may fight with steady hearts that I adopted the siege. Now then — might I ask the reason you advocate an open battle?"
At Elly's question, the commanders answered.
"It is no stage fit for the Successors to display their strength. The 8th Successor is indeed suited to a siege, with his bow, but..."
"Is the 7th Successor not a close-combat swordsman by inclination? Holding the 7th Successor back in a situation such as this may well redound to our disadvantage."
At that, Elly opened her mouth, unhurried as ever.
"No. The 7th Successor will be kept very busy in this war as well."
"Pardon? He is a close-quarters fighter — are you saying another road lies open to him?"
Elly nodded, and went on.
"We intend to make use of a strike force."
The role Elly had in mind for me was the very unit that had turned such handsome dividends throughout the previous Tide of Corruption.
The strike force.