The Eve (5)
"Hngh… haah. Y-Young Master."
Oh. Right.
I hurriedly climbed off of Mary.
Once I got off, she dragged in ragged breaths, then pushed herself up on trembling legs and swept her sweat-soaked hair back from her face. Even that brief stretch of time must have worn her down badly.
"You've worked hard."
"…No. It was all necessary."
I explained the situation outside to her.
"So the rebels have already secured Elizabeth. Then we don't have much time."
Mary's expression turned grave.
"Exactly. We can't just sit here holding out."
I'd figured that stalling for a while would be enough for the uprising to get crushed—but that wasn't how it had gone. The rebels were swaggering through the royal palace with Elizabeth in their hands.
Of course, Mary was still the legitimate sovereign. This was the regency period until Elizabeth came of age. But power, in the end, was theater.
What if the rebels go ahead and hold a coronation?
Seize the palace, stage an enthronement, and petty claims of legitimacy stopped mattering. Put on a performance of that scale and everyone would just roll with it.
"Our kingdom holds coronations in the chapel. We have to stop that."
Mary seemed to have reached the same conclusion.
"How much time do we have?"
"If they run it as a simplified ceremony, maybe about two hours."
Two hours. That would be cutting it close—but we could just make it.
"Your Majesty."
"Yes?"
"Is there anyone in the palace who absolutely must not die—anyone you cherish? Ah, excluding the nobles. We won't touch the nobles."
"What are you talking about—no, why are you asking that all of a sudden?"
"It's important."
The queen tapped her lips thoughtfully for a moment, then answered.
"Everyone's fine."
"What about valuables that mustn't be destroyed?"
"Nothing like that either."
"Excellent, Your Majesty."
"Yes?"
"We still haven't had a proper introduction of the families, have we?"
I smiled at the queen. Before the wedding, I ought to show her my family once.
"Still no sign of the queen?"
"No, sir, not ye—wait, what. Why is the gate…"
—KRRRRRUMBLE!
The palace gates groaned open with a deafening roar. Confusion rippled across the faces of the rebels mid-preparation for the coronation.
"What the hell is that? Who opened it?"
"No idea. Were we expecting reinforcements?"
"Wait—someone's coming in."
Through the open gates, a single human silhouette appeared, then multiplied into many. All of them were massive, each with a weapon slung across his back.
They weren't weapons of this kingdom. Not spears or swords, but axes, greatswords, and twin blades. And behind them, a sea-serpent banner snapped in the wind.
"Shit. Those are Vargas bastards!"
"Battle stations! All hands, battle stations!"
Right. The troops I'd ordered the chamberlain to summon had arrived. I'd killed a few of the gate guards myself and thrown the doors wide.
Soldiers scrambled into formation. As they locked their spears into a phalanx, the Vargas man at the front spoke.
"Heh heh. Look at the landlubbers fussing. Voices all shrill and prickly."
"Indeed. What do they think they're going to do with those skinny little sticks?"
"Shall we get started, then—"
He sucked in a lungful of air, and the shout that burst out of him shook the courtyard.
"—Kill every man and take every woman!"
With that beloved old war cry, the Vargas men charged. They drove forward on those huge frames, building speed with every stride—
"Remember me!"
—THUD-CRUNCH!
—and died with the spears of the phalanx locked in their arms. The rest of the Vargas men used the corpses as stepping stones and vaulted straight over the formation.
"Th-they're insane…"
"Hahaha!"
After that, it was simple. The rebels twisted themselves into a tangle trying to swing their spearpoints around to the rear, and into that gap came the greatswords. Blood sprayed in every direction.
"Gyaaaaah!"
"Orcadis!"
Our soldiers howled the name of the god we served as they ran wild. Well—some of them just yelled "Sea serpent!" and left it at that.
"Blood for the Blood God!! Skulls for the Skull Throne!!"
…What.
That one seemed to be worshipping something else entirely.
"…Your family is rather free-spirited, aren't they."
Mary, standing beside me, spoke with a complicated look on her face. Rebels or not, watching her own kingdom's soldiers get carved up was clearly sitting poorly with her.
"A family to be proud of."
I answered while watching them with genuine fondness.
The battle was going well. A few men peeled off toward the rear to pocket valuables, but that was a constant, not a variable. You had to treat it as a given. Even so, the situation couldn't last.
We're too few.
The rebels numbered several hundred at the least; our side, a hundred on a good day. Each man would have to take on five or six opponents—no easy ask. And then a new variable appeared.
"Everyone, form up here! The queen stands with us!"
They were reforming a phalanx around Elizabeth.
She still wore her nightclothes, hauled out mid-coronation preparations, but a crown sat on her head. This time her expression wasn't vacant.
"Everyone, take heart!"
Elizabeth cried out with fierce resolve. For a moment, she almost looked the part of a queen.
To change that much in so short a time… The rebels must have been whispering in her ear the whole way, corrupting her into a proper queen. I preferred her as a small, adorable princess.
"Cheer for the soldiers!"
She even threw in bizarre little gestures to rally the men. Thanks to her, rebel morale shot through the roof.
"Waaaaah!"
"The queen is with us! Long live the Lancart Kingdom!"
Damn it. We were already short on numbers; now we were losing the morale war, too, and I could see us getting pushed back. We needed a variable of our own.
"Your Majesty. I'm going down there."
"All right. I'll help as well."
Help how, exactly? Was she planning to use magic? That was supposed to be a secret.
I set the thought aside and vaulted down from the gatehouse. Up close, the melee was even uglier. Finding an opening to dive into was hard enough on its own.
"I'll kill y—wait, what. Urgh—URRAAAAGH!"
A few Vargas men suddenly roared and charged with ear-splitting force. Curious, I looked closer—their eyes had gone red.
I glanced toward Mary. Sure enough, she had her eyes shut and was murmuring something under her breath. So that was how she helped.
—Queen! Queen! Queen!
Even so, it didn't look like enough. The enemy's morale was still far too high.
"Everyone, take heart!"
Ellie kept cheering from above. I couldn't exactly just kill her. There had to be some other way—
Ah.
A fine idea presented itself. If I couldn't kill the body, I could always kill the mind.
I shouted at once.
"Elizabeth!"
"H-huh? Sir Henry? What are you doing over there!"
She looked at me with bright, happy recognition. Gazing at that pure, soft little face, I said:
"You are a disgrace to House Tudor."
"W-what?"
Of course, ordinary insults alone wouldn't be enough to break a person and shut them up. But I alone knew Elizabeth's history.
She told me herself.
Back then, in her own room.
Using that, I unloaded on her—insults about her father, the claim that she was the one who killed her uncle, that with that much legitimacy she had still managed nothing better than this. Roughly fifty-seven hundred characters' worth of verbal destruction, if you wrote it out.
"U-uwaaah. Elizabeth, you are kind, you are smart, you are a precious person. You are kind, you are smart…"
Good. She was looping the kind of lines a black nanny would recite. I had successfully broken Elizabeth.
After that, things got easy. I leapt into the demoralized rebels and cut a few of them down, and one by one they started surrendering. A handful fought to the end, but—
"This one's got some fight in him. Nice."
—a few Vargas men of particular tastes subdued them and dragged them off into quiet corners. I finished the rest myself.
"Uweeegh…"
Elizabeth, still glitching, was captured and placed under house arrest.
Just when it seemed the whole affair was wrapping up, someone appeared.
Where did he come from?
A man simply popped into the middle of the palace courtyard. All of us turned to stare.
Pure white robes, a sword worn slanted at his hip. He looked like a priest—or a knight—or both.
"How troublesome. I thought this would end cleanly, but it seems I must intervene myself after all."
The man strode straight into our midst without a shred of hesitation.
He was different from the others. I could feel it. Not some flashy "aura of the strong" that practically advertised itself—
The accent's different.
Not Vargas, not the kingdom's either. An Imperial accent. He was from the Empire.
"Who the hell are you?"
One of the Vargas men stepped forward, blocking his path and demanding an answer with open menace.
"Me? It was meant to be a secret, but under the circumstances—well. I suppose I can tell you."
He smiled slickly and opened his mouth.
"I am Felix, of the Holy See's Inquisition. And I have come to seize trash like you heretics—"
Then Felix turned his gaze and looked straight at Mary.
"—and a witch."
Being a priest of the Holy See must have done it—his way of talking was disgusting. The vocabulary, too.
"Trash heretics? You bastard!"
The Vargas man roared and brought his greatsword down. And in the next instant—
Felix seemed to vanish, only to reappear behind the Vargas man's back.
"Temper, temper. Must we raise our voices so?"
"Gh—ghhk."
The Vargas man clutched his throat and collapsed. Blood poured over the hand clamped to his neck. His carotid had been sliced clean through.
"Enemy! Attack!"
Two or three more charged him—but Felix moved at a speed the eye could barely follow. What followed was a cruel little slaughter show.
Soldiers were diced apart by something they couldn't even see, and died.
"Damn it! Don't close in—open fire!"
They snapped crossbows and bows up and loosed in a hurry, but—
—ting, ti-ting!
—the arrows never reached him. They bounced away in midair.
"Did you truly believe the attacks of lowly unbelievers could ever touch me, an apostle of God?"
Soldiers kept falling, cut down for nothing.
What was this. Was magic suddenly in fashion? I'd gone my whole life without seeing any, and now it was turning up everywhere.
How am I supposed to break through that?
I thought for a moment, then decided to keep it simple. An eye for an eye. Magic for magic.
I looked at the thing beside me. A massive construct of heavy iron that spat fire and cannonballs—humanity's magic, in other words. I put a flame to the touch hole at the breech, then settled it against my shoulder.
"…Huh?"
A black shadow fell across Felix's fine features. The barrel was far too thick and solid to be called a mere gun.
—KWA-BOOM!
Trained on Felix, it fired—humanity's magic wand, the cannon, belching flame.