The Heroes' Veterans Association
The Eleventh Dimension was a dimensional realm built along rather misshapen lines.
Of the seventeen dimensional realms, it stood second from the last—and, setting aside the Second Dimension, it was the very last of them to awaken. And yet it held more Absolutes than any of the older realms, those with histories far deeper than its own.
That deformity had been made possible by a single planet.
Reteim. Civilization Grade 8, and 2.3 times the standard measure of a planet.
Its civilization sat in the highest tier, and a world of such size was bound to cast a long shadow. That much was only natural. But Reteim had gone far beyond the mere question of influence.
To be tangled in the power struggles of a single planet was a worry only for those who had not yet transcended. In the world of Transcendents, where even a galaxy dwindled into nothing more than "a mere trifle," an advanced planet with nothing else to recommend it was no different from a stone adrift in the void. Until that incident, Reteim had been regarded as precisely such a stone.
We proclaim this in Our name.
As of this day, the Reteim Empire terminates all diplomatic intercourse with the Gruhander Empire and the one hundred and twenty-one galaxies bound to it in amity, and opens unlimited total war upon the powers named herein.
This shall remain in force until the unconditional surrender, or the annihilation, of the Gruhander Empire and every one of its allied powers.
Should you boast ten billion elite soldiers, We shall send one hundred heroes.
Before the name of the Empire, there is no mercy.
And yet it was a mad writ, issued on a single day.
The proclamation of an empire that owned its planet outright—an empire bearing that planet's very name—rang out across the Eleventh Dimension. Most, as one might expect, dismissed it as nothing but reckless bluster.
The Gruhander Empire wore the title of empire just as Reteim did, but it held nearly several hundred territories among the several thousand active galaxies of the Eleventh Dimension. It was a power that even counted three higher divinities among its own. A single planet would soon be erased from the Eleventh Dimension. No—the entire galaxy in which Reteim lay would suffer a blow just short of obliteration. So everyone had believed.
......But the outcome was otherwise.
A cosmic empire that had shared in a third of the Eleventh Dimension's history was destroyed. It had been roughly three months since the proclamation spread.
What brought that empire down was nothing other than one hundred and thirty-three heroes. Two wounded. Not a single death. The homeland—the Reteim Empire—did not suffer so much as one preemptive strike, nor any blow in the aftermath.
After that, Reteim made its name across the Eleventh Dimension. No—across every dimension there was—as the strongest of all...... and, at the same time, the most hopelessly bullheaded lot in existence.
"Vic———tory!"
"Copy."
A long span of years passed after that.
The former heroes still living numbered 1,944 in all. Of them, 397 were beings of Transcendent rank or higher.
"Hero 325899, I-geom! Upon being summoned, I arrived at full speed without a moment's delay!"
"You actually came at full speed?"
"Hero 325899, I-geom! Affirmative, without a doubt!"
"Came from where."
"Hero 325899, I-geom! From home, sir!"
"Want me to step from here to your house myself? If you're so much as 0.001 seconds late, what are you going to do about it? Was it really full speed?"
"I'm sorry! I'll do it straight!"
"Since when was a proud hero of Reteim meant to do things straight?"
"I'll do it properly!"
"You little... sound off!!!"
"AGH!!!!!!"
This was the home ground of those strongest of beings, woven from long years and an empire's madness. Inside the place known as the Reteim Veterans' Association, two heroes faced one another in armor stamped all over with the Empire's crest.
"You do know why I called you, yes?"
"Sorry, sir! I don't really know, sir!"
"Look at this brat. A senior asks you a question and you let the end of it trail off? You angling to pick a fight with me today, is that it?"
"I'm sorry! I'll do it right!"
To anyone else, it would have looked like nothing short of a tragedy of hazing. Within the Reteim Heroes' alumni association, it was spoken of as a beautiful process of communication between senior and junior. They called it downward love.
"......Aigoo. What's all this damned racket."
"Vic———tory! Hero 279410, Everhart!"
"Copy."
"We were educating him on that matter from last time, sir!"
"Well, well. So this is the fellow."
"Yes, sir, that's him!"
The cause of that downward love was none other than Igeom, who sat on the relatively youngest line within the alumni association—or rather, a single piece of news that had come from him.
"You little... sound off!"
"AGH!!!!!! Hero 325899, I-geom!"
The string of uproar unfolding on the Transcendent Gallery. Reteim's heroes, of course, were hardly unaware of it. Far from merely knowing, they were the ones most sunk in those rankings and tier lists and all the rest. It was only because they had never been entered directly onto the ranking list; had they been, they would have been the first of anyone to flip the gallery upside down.
Recently, however, Igeom had come into a direct clash with Oz. A single argument. Up to that point, naturally, there was no great problem. The trouble began immediately afterward, at the moment he unilaterally declared defeat and announced that he would go to ground within the gallery of his own accord. For there was a rule: a proud hero of Reteim must never declare defeat to anyone, save for the blood of the imperial house and one's own seniors.
And so the hour when a lightning bout of downward love was about to begin was precisely now. But from the moment Igeom started explaining his Operation Gallery Countercharge, the situation began to change.
"That the honest truth? You tell it straight, even now. Later on, if you start spouting nonsense about how you had it wrong, I'll pull your guts out and hang them up in front of that galaxy. See if I don't."
"It is, sir! He clearly said he knew! And when I checked with my own authority, it was the truth!"
"......Ho ho. So it really is true, then. Mind you, he never did look like an ordinary sort."
He knows the Hero of the 13th.
That was the testimony: he had been left with no choice but to be cowed by that single sentence. Had it been a hero of any other class, they would have pressed him on whether it was true. But at the words I know the Hero of the 13th, the hero-spirit carved into their minds across millions of years had no choice but to seize of its own accord. It was one of those pieces of information sealed perfectly from the outside—so sealed that even within the Veterans' Association, there were those who did not know the full story.
"Well then. My, my. Wouldn't this make her our dear sister-in-law?"
"......Did I mishear, sir?"
In a small room inside the Veterans' Association, the most senior among them—having heard the whole of Igeom's account—turned it over, and at last let one inference fall.
"Brat. When the senior of the 13th vanished, didn't he say he was going to see his family? Who but us knows the senior was a Hero to begin with? That's what I'm saying. So there's no one left but family."
"Ah...!!!"
The Hero of the 13th, missing for a very long time already. Aside from a portion of the imperial direct line and the former heroes, no one knew that he had been, from the very start, a Hero born of Reteim. And so—wasn't the identity plain?
"Now, if it's family, from the gallery talk I've heard, she's got a bit of age on her. So not a daughter. That'd make her our sister-in-law."
"......But according to that fortune-telling hag on the gallery, didn't they say she was unmarried?"
"Aigoo. Love, you see, is a thing that was never meant to last forever. And that is precisely why it is love......"
At that wistful voice, sinking quietly through the room, the junior who knew his past answered with a razor-sharp salute.
"Hero 279410, Everhart! A truly correct deduction, sir! Magnificent, sir! I will learn from this!"
"You little... sound off!"
"AGH!!!!!!"
With a satisfied smile, the most senior expounded the whole of his inference, and the two heroes, as if spellbound, poured out their admiration and their fervent support. And so it did not take long at all for the Sister-in-Law Hypothesis to dress itself up as established fact.
"Does this thing ever end...?"
And yet, for the man at the center of it all, guessing at any such inside story was an exceedingly difficult business.
"......Forget it. If the comments pile up, the points pile up. That's good enough."
Just lunatics doing lunatic things. With that for a last thought, he made up his mind to treat the lot of them as point-farming bots.
"......Ah."
Life weighed heavily on Judy. The cheap maid's uniform scratched at her through its lining; by now the feeling ought to have grown familiar, and yet it grated on her every single day.
"I'm hungry......"
About three years seemed to have passed, as of today. That was how long it had been since she fell from a highborn young lady to something little better than a slave.
"Hey! May! Where are you? Slacking off again?"
"I'm cleaning."
So very much had changed. From a place where she ordered servants about, she had become a servant who was ordered about. They had stripped her of her original name on the grounds that it was too aristocratic, and given her a new one: May. But Judy refused to call herself by it. I am Judy. I am not the maid May. She turned those words over in her mind, every single moment.
"......Really?"
Lately, though, that faith—that drilled-in conviction—was close to splitting apart. She could no longer even remember what sort of life she had lived back then. In a life of only eleven years, the time she remembered living as Judy, leaving out the years when she had been far too young, came to four. A few months more, and it would match the span she had lived as May.
And so, of late, Judy had grown weary of everything. Even the voices and the gestures of her dead parents—you must always live rightly, in the place that is yours—had faded entirely into black and white.
"No prince, then."
This year, Judy—eleven years old, a fallen maid—was waiting for a prince on a white horse.