Uproar in the Imperial Capital (2)
The black mages who locked me away were, to put it simply, complete idiots.
Bastards who threw their own lives away without a second thought.
"Ah. Aaaaah."
"In the end, to put it simply, the lives of a hundred of you could never have bound me in the first place."
You lot are just idiots. Nothing more, nothing less.
That was all there was to it.
"Ah. Aaaaah. Ah. De… Demon King."
Oh? Calling me Demon King, are you.
What exactly are you seeing in me right now?
"What the hell are you seeing when you look at me?"
"Aaaaah. De-Demon King."
A young woman's voice.
Just how many people fall for this kind of agitation, I wonder.
This wasn't mere low intelligence. I had to start questioning whether they even had brains in their skulls.
"This is why humans always struggled against the Demon King. Hey. Shadow One."
I called out to the shadow who had first mocked me.
From the look of him, he was already in a wretched state.
Serves you right. You should've sized up your opponent before trying equivalent exchange or whatever the hell that was.
"Guh-huck."
"You worked pretty hard, but your opponent just wasn't right for you, huh?"
At my words, the shadow who had led the charge in jeering at me started snickering.
"Heh heh heh. Who would've thought someone like you would cooperate with the Empire. Even if we fail here, we still won't lose!"
Oh, so you've got another card up your sleeve?
"Keep yapping."
"The real target is the Imperial Palace! The Imperial Palace is what we're after!"
The shadow screeched, as if declaring that I had already failed, as if he wanted to get under my skin no matter what.
"Targeting the Imperial Palace, huh."
"That's right! Prince Aslan has far too many blunders to his name! And Princess Amelia is out wandering around somewhere. Kill the Emperor and a succession struggle will erupt!"
Wow. There are some clever ones this time around.
Too bad. That's going to fail as well.
"Oh. I do hope you succeed."
"Acting calm won't help you!"
Maybe my reaction had been too lukewarm for his taste.
"I am calm. It's going to fail anyway, so what?"
Why should I care about something that's already doomed?
"You think we can't even handle one incompetent Emperor?"
Well, just listening to the words, he had a point.
Honestly, if I weren't the Taesa, if I had never met the Emperor as a member of the hero party, I wouldn't think this way either.
But I was perfectly at ease.
Because the Emperor was not going to die.
"Calling him incompetent is exactly why you're going to lose. Honestly, without me you would've succeeded halfway. You'd have at least caught Aslan."
The Emperor himself could never be taken down.
That left Aslan as the next most likely target, but even he had been blocked because of me. In short, it was already over.
They really had prepared with grand ambitions.
Minor nobles who thought they could simply overpower the Emperor with force and make him kneel had joined hands with the anti-imperialists and the New World Group.
"No! The Emperor is still there! Far more of us entered the Imperial Palace, and we even pulled the Imperial Palace knights out under the pretext of training for just this occasion!"
Oh. Yeah. They really had used their heads well.
If this had been an ordinary country, that plan would have thrown everything into chaos.
If something like this had erupted in a mere kingdom, it might even have led to civil war.
But this was the Empire.
Beyond any difference in national power, the defenses of the Imperial Palace were never going to be that lax.
I didn't know the details, but in fifteen hundred years, had this never happened even once? No—there must have been plenty of attempts.
And in this generation especially, the Assassin Guild stood behind the Emperor.
So even if they pulled every trick in the book to remove the knights guarding the Imperial Palace, protecting the palace itself was no great difficulty.
I was pretty sure they had remodeled the place, too.
From my hero party days, I knew the Assassin Guild had renovated the Imperial Palace out of concern for a possible Demon King army invasion.
"Wow. These guys really are idiots. Hey, let me tell you one thing. In the Imperial Palace, the maids are stronger than the knights. And the Imperial Palace was remodeled by those very maids."
"What?"
Ugh. They truly could not understand a word that was said to them.
"In short, you've already failed."
Damn idiots.
Imperial Palace
Around the same time Atlina came under attack, the Imperial Palace was far from safe.
Just as the shadow had said, hundreds of assassins had infiltrated the Imperial Palace.
They had prepared thoroughly in advance.
Thanks to a commander from the provincial noble faction planted within the Imperial Palace knight order, who had pulled the entire force out of the capital under the pretext of training, only the bare minimum of guards remained to protect the palace.
Because of that, the assassins slipped inside with almost ridiculous ease and were free to stroll about the halls of the Imperial Palace.
"So this is the Imperial Palace after fifteen hundred years of imperial history. It's huge."
"Kehehehehe. I heard the maids are top quality."
"Oh really. And they say the Emperor himself is quite the looker."
The assassins each offered their impressions of the Imperial Palace.
The Emperor's appearance was excellent.
The maids' looks were excellent.
Gold and treasures overflowed. They unpacked every sort of fantasy they had brought with them.
Just imagining it felt good.
If there was a little spare time, why not play around a bit more?
"Well, thanks to the map of the Imperial Palace the nobles handed over, getting in was this easy, so if we're going to kill him anyway, we might as well have a taste first."
Most of the New World Group were black mages, but among the lower ranks there were more than a few former criminals.
Naturally, having heard the rumors of the Emperor's beauty for quite some time, aiming for him at least once seemed more than fair.
"We are all His servants. Shouldn't we defile the Emperor who dares call himself the conqueror of the continent?"
"But still. Not a single soldier left guarding the Imperial Palace?"
They had brought hundreds just in case, yet there was no one at all.
In that case they could kill everything in sight and enjoy themselves a little.
After all, their ultimate goal was the Emperor's head. Once they seized the Emperor, their usefulness would be finished right then and there.
Yes. That was what they thought.
Siiiiiik—
Somewhere, the sound of wind seemed to blow.
"How the hell do they manage the Imperial Palace if the wind can get in?"
"Yeah, right? Must be a crack in the building somewhere."
"It's a sign of decline. That's why even the Imperial Palace is falling apart."
At first that was all they thought.
Since the Emperor ran around like a whore and did nothing but play, of course the underlings didn't properly maintain the place.
Sgaaaaaak—
Until their bodies were sliced cleanly into head and torso.
It happened in the blink of an eye.
For just an instant they heard what seemed like the wind. Then their necks itched for a moment.
Just the wind passing by, they thought—yet something instinctive already understood.
If they took even one step from where they stood, something terrible would happen to their necks.
But that understanding lasted only a moment. Blood began to well from the assassins' throats, then very slowly their necks and bodies started to slide out of alignment, and heads toppled one after another to the floor.
Dozens of assassins whose heads fell in that single instant never understood why their viewpoint had suddenly dropped downward, until their severed heads hit the ground and they died staring at their own cut-off bodies with both eyes.
"String—there's a ridiculously thin string! It wasn't wind! It was the sound of the strings installed in the corridor moving!"
In the corridor littered with the corpses of their comrades whose throats had been cut, the remaining assassins spotted the fine threads hanging in empty air, blood still dripping from them.
Those were the culprits.
Approaching carefully, they saw clearly that these were specially crafted assassination tools—impossibly thin, impossibly strong, and sharp enough to slice flesh at the slightest touch.
"Wait. These were made purely for killing. That's why they were invisible."
"The Imperial Palace wouldn't normally have something like this. So then…"
"No way. They knew?"
Then was everything a trap?
"If they already knew… isn't this dangerous?"
"Then what about the escape route?"
They had already come in far too deep.
The Emperor's private quarters lay just beyond this corridor.
Had they been lured this far on purpose? To make them drop their guard?
"Anyway, now that we've come this far we can't turn back."
"That's true. Better to at least kill him."
Were they planning to pin them here?
"No! Everyone, don't panic!"
"Then what the hell are we supposed to do now?"
"There's still a chance. We haven't lost yet!"
Yes. They had not lost yet.
The Emperor seemed to have known somehow and prepared a trap, but that was all it amounted to.
He had probably scrambled it together late after hearing the commotion; there was no real way for him to stop them. He might think he could, but he could never stop the servants of That One.
"There won't be enough troops either. That's why they only panicked us and never ambushed!"
If there had been proper forces capable of stopping them, would things look like this? No. This was clearly the Emperor's last desperate thrashing.
It had to be. It simply had to be.
Then they would catch him. They had to go catch him. Catch him quickly and achieve the great work.
And so those foolish assassins stepped into the corridor.
If there would be no time to enjoy the Emperor, then they would at least kill him.
"So we go deeper inside!"
"We go in! Kill the Emperor!"
That was what they believed.
They had come this far, so somehow everything would work out.
—What absolute fools.
At that moment a strange voice tickled the assassins' ears.
Where was that sound coming from?
No—had they simply misheard?
"Did any of you just hear something weird?"
"What is that? Where's this presence coming from?"
"Ignore it. Obviously some weird magic."
Just the Emperor trying to buy time. That was how they should think of it.
They only needed to think of it that way—yet inexplicable goosebumps rose all over their bodies.
What on earth was going on?
No. There was an even bigger problem.
They had clearly been running and running for a long time—long enough that they should have crossed the entire corridor ages ago.
Yet for some reason it did not feel as though they were advancing at all.
Strange. Far too strange.
"What is this? Wait—where are we?"
"What now?"
"Haven't we been running this corridor for way too long?"
They felt as though they had sprinted endlessly, yet somehow they were still in the same place.
"What's so important about the corridor?"
"We have to get past here if we're going to reach the Emperor at all!"
Yes. Speaking plainly, the current situation was far too bizarre.
What in the world had happened?
It was so bad that people were asking what was even important about running the corridor, and everyone's mental state was starting to crack.
"We're just going around and around in the same spot!"
"Wait. Then what the hell happened to us?"
"Damn it—it's a trap!"
Everyone already knew it was a trap. But so what?
Knowing it was a trap and still walking into it—wasn't that exactly why they had come this far in the first place?
"We already know we're stuck in a trap, don't we?"
No. Something was fundamentally wrong.
The assassins began to realize it.
Why did endlessly running through a corridor feel natural?
Why did they keep treating continuing to run while trapped as the normal thing to do?
Something was going strangely wrong. Everything was.
"What? Wait—who the hell are you?"
The assassins finally noticed that someone had been strangely agitating them for a while now.
More precisely, the one who had been scrambling their minds.
The being who had used strange magic to make them see hallucinations.
That person shrugged, then pulled back their hood and smiled sweetly.
"Honestly, if you'd just turned around I was going to watch for a bit and leave the rest to the capital army. But you lot are just too stupid."
A woman they had never seen before.
Absolutely not someone who had been part of this assassination.
Then who in the world was she?
"You—who the hell are you? Never seen this bitch before."
"Wow. I expected you to at least throw some black magic around. But if you're this dumb, I almost feel like just letting you try."
The head of the Assassin Guild—Katrina.
Swish!
The woman severed the neck of the assassin standing in front of her.
They were so hopeless it was no longer even amusing. Infuriatingly boring, in fact.
So simply killing them seemed like the best option.
"I'm just going to kill you all."
"Since when…?"
"Fools. Every last one of you."
That was the moment.
From the ceiling, figures dressed in black—different from their own—appeared.
What the hell were those things now?
"Since when did anything change?"
"From the moment you stepped inside this place, everything changed."
At the same time as the woman's voice, her fingers snapped, and machetes flying from nowhere severed the assassins' necks.
Slash! Swish! Slash!
"What the hell are these things?! Who are they?!"
Who else would they be?
The maids, of course.