The Empire's First Pillar (2)
The Revelry Emperor's domain lay just ahead.
Close enough now that the naked eye could make it out, the domain would be entered within a day. At that threshold, the Imperial army began its final preparations.
"Your Excellency, First Pillar. The reconnaissance is complete. May I present the report?"
"Speak."
Inside the tent where the principal figures of the subjugation had gathered—before the pillars of the Empire and the transcendent ones—Bernard, Lord of the Blue Magic Tower, snapped his fingers. A map rose into the air at the center of the tent.
"The terrain of the domain matches the intelligence we gathered beforehand. It is divided into six sectors in total, and within each sector exists a magic formula that reinforces the Revelry Emperor's domain."
Bernard, Lord of the Blue Magic Tower. A mage hailed as a master of exploration, detection, and tracking magic. At a gesture of his hand the map shifted into a three-dimensional model. He turned the relief this way and that, showing rises and hollows, as he continued his briefing.
The commanders listening nodded.
Nothing had changed from the plan laid out in advance. A few variables had arisen on the road to the domain, yet the Dawn Horn had blocked them all. All that remained now was to breach the Revelry Emperor's domain itself.
"Then the operation remains unchanged."
The Platinum Tower Lord inclined her head.
"We divide into six legions, strike simultaneously, and drive the Revelry Emperor into a corner. Simple, yet effective. The real question was how much of our strength we could preserve reaching this point..."
She glanced sidelong at Najin and let out a disbelieving little laugh.
"The losses are light. Far lighter than expected. At this rate you could almost say we took no damage at all. All thanks to the Dawn Horn, of course. I'm not being sarcastic—I mean it."
It was the truth. The greater part of the traps the Revelry Emperor had scattered had been smashed by Najin's own hand. Each of them had been lethal, capable of inflicting heavy casualties or even shattering the Imperial army as a whole—yet the damage had been astonishingly slight.
Najin, that single youth, had done it alone.
In the Platinum Tower Lord's gaze as she regarded him there was not only wonder but a thread of fear as well.
In her judgment, Najin was the last person one would ever wish to have as an enemy. He was a walking mass of variables—incalculable, unpredictable, impossible to prepare against. She was grateful he stood on their side. With that thought she tapped the table with her fingertips.
"Inside the Revelry Emperor's domain we'll find residual forces—transcendents who fled the previous battle—together with the jesters. Blue Tower Lord, is that correct?"
"Yes. Multiple transcendents have been detected deeper within the domain. Not only those who descended at the entrance to the Outer Land. Even setting them aside, several more have been observed."
Dots began to appear on the map.
Confirming the distribution of transcendents, they made their final adjustments to the plan. They divided the legions and balanced the strength of each.
"Commander of the Second Legion, Caron."
"Commander of the Third Legion, Yuel Razian."
"Commander of the Fourth Legion, Star Incarnation."
"Commander of the Fifth Legion, Lauren Aresche."
"Commander of the Sixth Legion, Cypria Gachevska."
From the Second Legion through the Sixth.
The transcendents who had descended to aid Najin split among the legions and joined their ranks. The knights, too, took their places in the legions assigned beforehand. Amid the division of forces, two figures alone did not move.
The Empire's First Pillar, Gerd.
The Dawn Horn, Najin.
Neither belonged to any legion. More precisely, the two of them formed a legion of their own.
"Commander of the First Legion, Gerd Isabalt."
The force under him numbered one.
A legion composed solely of Najin and Gerd. The two of them stared in silence at a single mark on the map. The Revelry Emperor's domain was divided into six sectors, and each was dotted with the chaotic scatter of points that indicated transcendents—
But the place the First Legion would enter held only one.
In the photograph the Blue Tower Lord had captured stood a single knight. Armor stained with paint, a helmet likewise stained, a horned helm with one horn broken—only that knight held the ground.
The previous Empire's First Pillar, Alderan Basaglia.
The Empire's hero, erased from history, waited there. Facing him would fall to Najin and Gerd.
When this operation had first been drawn up, the commanders had voiced their doubts. Gerd had declared early on that he would face the dead man called Alderan with Najin alone, and he had accepted no argument on the matter.
To the commanders' eyes it had not seemed a rational choice.
Was that one undead so strong that the two greatest powers of the present Imperial army must both throw themselves against him? If he truly were that strong, should not several transcendents swarm him and crush him by sheer numbers?
To their questions Gerd had answered with a question of his own.
"Do you know the name Alderan Basaglia?"
They knew it, of course. Gerd's reverse scale, the tragic hero no one else remembered yet whom Gerd had insisted be recorded in the Empire's histories.
The previous Empire's First Pillar, the one who had created the very foundation of the Empire's present swordsmanship, the originator of the Triumphant Sword that Gerd himself wielded.
They knew the renown well enough—but only as lines of achievement written on a page. Most people undervalue what they have never seen with their own eyes. Still less could they properly judge a being history itself had erased.
"He is the originator of the Triumphant Sword. And originally, the Triumphant Sword is a swordsmanship optimized for facing many."
Gerd pointed to his own blade.
"The Triumphant Sword was born in an age of war. To win on the battlefield, to cut down even one more foe, to range across even one more field of battle—that is the sword he devised."
That was the original Triumphant Sword.
Of course, by the time he perfected its ultimate techniques the meaning had shifted somewhat, yet the root of the Triumphant Sword lay in the battlefield. It was a sword meant for one man to face countless enemies alone.
"How much of his power he has recovered, there is no way to know. We will know only when we face him."
But, Gerd continued,
"If by some chance he has returned to the days when he was called the Empire's hero..."
The days when Alderan had been called the Empire's hero.
Only Gerd remained now who remembered his prime. Even the Alderan Najin had last faced had been far weaker than in those days of glory.
"The fewer who face him, the better."
So spoke the man who remembered the Empire's hero.
"Any more, and a single stroke will simply sweep them all away."
Gerd was not a man who dealt in exaggeration, falsehood, or bluster. If he said it was so, then it was so.
A hundred and fifty years had passed, yet Gerd remembered with perfect clarity. The back of the Imperial hero who had swung his sword and swept away the army of a hundred thousand undead led by a Reverse Star. The figure of his master driving that Reverse Star before him alone. The ultimate technique of the Triumphant Sword his master had unfolded that day—the old man had never forgotten it.
"Therefore, two."
Gerd stated it as fact.
Not merely because they were master and disciple. Because only those who knew the Triumphant Sword could face him.
While the many transcendents prepared for battle, the knights likewise honed their weapons.
The Revelry Emperor's domain lay at their doorstep.
Within it swarmed Reverse Stars and Fallen Stars, the undead the Revelry Emperor had collected over long ages. Old heroes turned into jesters would be waiting there. Tension hung over the knights as they made ready for what would be the final battle.
The Revelry Emperor.
A thousand years had passed since the Witch of Camlann had been sealed. In those thousand years many demons and Reverse Stars had threatened the Continent, yet none had shaken it as deeply as the Revelry Emperor.
She had broken the heroes who journeyed into the Outer Land.
She had kindled the flames of war across the Continent.
She had cast the Knight of Rebellion into the heart of the Continent and come within a hair's breadth of toppling the Empire itself.
She was a being worthy of being called a great evil. Had any single demon ever exerted so vast an influence? The archdemon Baal, said to have existed a thousand years ago, might alone have compared—yet even he had possessed only nine stars.
A demon of eleven stars.
Gazing up at the hideous star that writhed in the sky above, the knights swallowed dryly.
"..."
And Najin, too, was looking at the sky. While each legion split off to prepare its advance, Najin stared upward in silence.
One step more.
At the thought of the Helmet Knight he would soon meet again, a bitter ache rose in his chest. It was a reunion he had longed for, yet he had never wished it to come in this fashion.
Crack.
Najin kindled a campfire. Watching the flames burn, he steadied his breath. The armies moved out behind their legion commanders, and the clamor around him gradually settled into quiet.
Pop. Crack...
Only the sound of sparks leaping from the fire remained.
"You look as though you have much on your mind."
And with it, a voice like an ember itself—an old man's voice.
"..."
When he lifted his head without a word and looked across the fire, Gerd sat on the far side. The old man had drawn his sword and was wiping the blade with a cloth before the flames.
Crack.
On the wilderness the knights had left behind, Najin and Gerd sat with the campfire between them and cleaned their swords in silence. The quiet was not an uncomfortable one. Through the rising flames Gerd spoke.
"It is as you foresaw."
"What is, sir?"
"Master never left the Revelry Emperor's domain. More precisely, he cannot leave it. Because of you, the Revelry Emperor's design has gone awry."
Originally the Helmet Knight had been fated to become the Revelry Emperor's jester in a complete state. He had endured for a hundred and fifty years, yet by the time he met Najin he had already been driven to his limit. A little more time, and he would have become a monster at last.
Yet because of Najin the Helmet Knight had not become a monster. In his final moment he had cried out that he was a knight, and met his death.
"However freely the Revelry Emperor may command even the dead as jesters, she must not have been able to fully unravel a story that had already been cleanly concluded."
Crack.
"He can move only within the Revelry Emperor's domain. That is the proper way to see it. Had it been otherwise, he would long since have moved alongside the Star of Contempt."
Nowhere on the battlefield had the Helmet Knight appeared. That, too, meant his state was unstable. Wiping his sword, Najin gave a bitter smile.
"Even in death he seized the Revelry Emperor by the throat and flung her to the ground. It would not be an easy matter for her either."
"That does sound like him."
Gerd gave a short snort of laughter. The old man who always looked down upon the world with a face set hard as stone would, when talk turned to his master, allow himself the faintest smile.
"That was the kind of man he was, my master."
The old man spoke while gazing at his own blade.
"What was wrong was simply wrong. Stubborn as a mule. This way is easier. This way is more convenient. No matter how the people around him advised him, he never so much as pretended to listen. 'I said I'm going this way—who are you to bar my path? Want to die?'—and then he would swing his sword."
There are people like that. Stubborn, mulish, who will not change a decision once made even if you beat them to death for it—people who live in a way that exhausts everyone around them.
"He was like a hot fire. When the flames of war spread across the Continent, he became a fire himself and set a counter-blaze. If war was such a problem, he said, then he would simply burn it all out and extinguish it—and he swept across the battlefields."
Crack—the campfire flared.
"He lived like fire."
Pop.
"So his end, too, ought to blaze up as brilliantly as fire. To make a farce like this his final act—his life was far too splendid for that."
"Yes. I agree."
Watching the leaping sparks, Najin spoke.
"At the end he took off his helmet. He revealed the face that had turned monstrous, and he cried out that he was a knight."
He had endured for a hundred and fifty years.
He had wished, to the very last, to remain a knight.
"Then he is a knight."
And Najin was a free knight. He knew what he must do for one who wished to be a knight.
"So we ought to send him off as a knight deserves, don't you think?"
Gerd smiled.
"An Empire's hero requires the honor that matches him. A state funeral in the Imperial capital would be proper. This place is not the capital—yet since I stand here, there is no difference."
The longsword's blade caught the light.
"Master's funeral will be conducted as a duel."
He would prefer it that way, after all.
Muttering so, Gerd looked up at the sky.
"A coincidence."
Stars shone in the heavens.
A constellation of eight stars—the First Star—and beside it another constellation of eight stars shone as well.
"Or perhaps inevitability."
The Dawn Star, Najin's constellation.
And if one turned one's gaze a little farther, though paint obscured it, a star would be there too. And that one as well would be made of eight stars.
The One-Horned Star, Alderan Basaglia.
Both the First Star and the Dawn Star born from him held eight stars. At this situation that was coincidence and inevitability both, Gerd let out a long breath.
"Let us go."
The First Legion walked toward its battlefield.
Flutter.
The wind rose, and the banner of the Empire's First Pillar that Gerd carried snapped and billowed. The banner of the Golden Horn Knights bound to Najin's shoulder fluttered, and the Cross-Star Spear caught the starlight and gleamed.
One was the Empire's First Pillar.
The other was the captain of the Golden Horn Knights.
Two knights who had each received a share of the name that once belonged to a single man walked onward.
To face their master.