Would You Care to Experience It?
"So… how many hours have you been logged in?"
"I don't know!"
Leo shook her head vigorously, beaming all the while.
Going by her condition, this looked even worse than that time she'd been on for at least thirty-eight hours straight…
"Hehe…"
At this point I could probably call her a different person entirely.
"Still, I'm so glad you came! I was about to go looking for you myself."
"I came to sightsee. Of course I should be the one visiting you."
Leo's castle dwarfed Yena's by every conceivable measure.
It stood within her Marquis territory, its halls teeming with people coming and going, and imperial knights beneath golden banners—the very emblem of the Imperium—keeping watch over it.
After a brief look around, I turned to Leo, who was still peering up at me with bright, expectant eyes, and asked.
"No defense items, I see?"
"Ah, those are useless."
"?"
"My spirits are way stronger than anything like that."
The moment Leo said it, a wind spirit materialized beside her and perched on top of her head.
Ohh? Leo tilted her face upward.
Cute.
"Eep!"
"Even squishier than last time, I see."
"Uuuuh…"
Did the penalties compound and affect this too?
She'd been pickled in penalties for so long that she didn't even resist anymore. Instead, she lifted her chin ever so slightly to make herself easier to grab, gazing up at me with perfect docility.
Just as I was kneading Leo's cheeks to my heart's content, the green bird roosting on her head spoke up.
—Leo is adorable, isn't she. Though of course, she's far more than merely cute.
"...?"
"Ah! Lady Arne! Why are you out here?!"
Leo jumped, peeled my hands off her face, and raised her short little arms to grab hold of the green bird.
The bird stared back with a sullen expression.
But Arne, connected to it from afar, chuckled softly and passed her words along to Leo.
"Hmm? Oh, ah, but I was going to… Yes, ma'am…"
Leo soon let out a sigh and turned the bird to face me.
A calm, measured voice flowed from the bird's beak as it met my eyes.
—Hello. My name is Arne Parthia.
"Um, so, this person here is—"
"The Spirit Deity Duke. I know who she is."
The Spirit Deity Duke, Arne Parthia.
A name I'd already heard plenty through the internet and various other sources.
One of the Eight Swords of the Empire, a handful of powerhouses even the Emperor himself couldn't bring to heel. Contractor of a Spirit King.
And Leo's teacher.
—…You already know of me. Then there's hardly any need for introductions.
Ahm.
The bird gave a small nod.
Leo nodded along in perfect sync with it.
Why was Leo nodding too?
—As the contractor of the Wind Spirit King, Naphras, I've come to make you an offer.
"Naphras?"
She was still alive?
I could have sworn she died back then, along with all the rest.
—Yes, Naphras. The great master of the winds. Do you happen to know her?
The bird tilted its head as it asked.
Did I know her…
I knew her very well.
There was a time when my ties to the Spirit Kings ran fairly deep.
I'd always been fond of spirits, and in those days, wandering a weary world, they were among the few things that genuinely soothed me.
Water and wind especially had been on quite friendly terms with me.
Right up until the demons began experimenting on them.
That would have been around the point when the world was half in ruins.
If I put a number to it—roughly twenty-three years after I'd possessed Lily's body.
Wherever you looked, the world burned, and ancient monsters that had lived for hundreds, even thousands of years ran rampant.
Every time the celestials and the demonkin clashed, a slice of the continent was erased in an instant.
It was a world utterly saturated with war and death.
And the spirits could not escape that plague of monsters either.
The demons' experiments.
A catastrophe in which lesser spirits everywhere across the world were slaughtered en masse, and even the greater spirits vanished from the face of the earth.
The spirits had hastily hidden themselves from a malice more horrifying than anything they had ever known—but they could not evade the eyes of the demon they called the God of Magic.
Countless spirits were used.
Even a Spirit King, whose power rivaled the upper-tier ancient monsters, was ground up as experimental material.
After an excruciating stretch of time, the high-ranking demon behind the experiments reached a single conclusion.
'What? Useless, is it?'
What the demon had been attempting was the creation of a spirit of Darkness—a spirit that could fully contain demonic energy. She had actually succeeded in making one, only to discover it was terribly inefficient, and discarded the whole lot.
And I mean discarded. Literally.
No disposal protocol, no attempt to return them to their former selves—she simply scattered them carelessly across the surface of the world and drifted away.
The spirits left behind dissolved as the demonic energy gnawed away at body and soul alike.
Even those who survived lived on as darkness itself, fully assimilated, until they died in agony.
Demonic energy had been forcibly injected into them; spirit or not, an ethereal body could hardly fail to suffer for it.
And naturally, the suffering of spirits was not even the smallest consideration to the demons.
I had believed, back then, that Naphras had been swept away and killed with the rest.
Truly, she had vanished without a trace—nowhere in the whole world did her wind blow anymore.
But seeing her alive like this, it seemed she'd hidden herself well.
"A little."
—…I see. Just as I thought. In any case, I'll make my offer, Lily Elbrit.
Do you know where this is?
"Leo's castle."
—Correct. Roton Castle, in the western continent—Leo's territory. There are several foreign kingdoms clustered quite nearby, you see.
The castle where Sword God resides sits on the exact opposite side. Of course, there are plenty of other kingdoms over there too, but theirs is a federation, so…
Not that it would matter against Sword God, I suppose. There's a group called the Angel Guild that's quite strong, but for all that, they're a name without the substance—ah, never mind that part.
Anyway, the north and the flanks are sufficiently covered. It's just a shame there are only two of us who can actually act…
"What exactly are you trying to say?"
I cut the bird off mid-sentence.
Or to be precise, I cut off Arne, who was connected to the bird.
This offer—of course I wasn't going to accept it.
I'd already learned from Leo's message that the Empire intended to use the Siege Warfare system to seize castles wholesale.
No—even if Leo hadn't sent that message, I'd have pieced it together roughly on my own.
Sword God and Leo each belonged to solo guilds.
With solid castles already prepared for them, it was obvious the Empire would press its forces into service as mercenaries and launch a war of conquest.
The problem was that I was not on the Empire's side.
The Empire and I were already oil and water, and they knew it perfectly well.
The Spirit Deity Duke—Arne Parthia—smiled faintly.
—…That concludes the position of Duke Hwangyeol. A war of conquest would cost us dearly, both in justification and in expense, so the argument is that we should move this way instead.
"Of course, that's their position, not ours!"
The strength was there.
The troops were sufficient, and the justification could be manufactured well enough.
But for the Empire, the sticking point was cost.
The variable called 'Lily'.
I had slain Sgaredo—a dragon that had very nearly dragged the whole continent into ruin—and then subdued the Eight Swords with almost insulting ease.
Even Saintess Nea had been forced to flee on Duke Hwangyeol's orders without landing a single proper blow.
With no way to predict what losses a war against me might bring, the Empire couldn't exactly rush headlong into one.
"But if we use Siege Warfare? We get our justification and we occupy castles without any real difficulty! It's a system DeoEn built for exactly this purpose, so nobody can even stop us!"
Break the Core, and the castle falls.
That said, Siege Warfare wasn't inherently a land-grabbing game of stealing castles back and forth.
It was, at its heart, content about fighting over castles—the winning guild was decided by 'points' earned from assaulting the enemy's castle.
But DeoEn was a game with very, very high freedom of play.
Going beyond assault into outright occupation caused no problems whatsoever—as long as you could shoulder the consequences…
—However. We stand somewhat apart from that plan.
"…Somewhat apart, how?"
—The war is a plausible enough scheme. The Eight Swords march as mercenaries under Leo and Sword God, sweeping across the continent. Honestly, it's not a bad strategy. All anyone has to do, in practice, is shatter a gem.
No one needs to die.
No one needs to be subdued into submission for the occupation.
Just break the Core, and it's done.
On the surface it even looks like user versus user, so the justification is flawless.
From the Empire's perspective, a banquet served on a silver platter.
But that was precisely what the Spirit Deity Duke did not want.
—Let me be blunt. What I want is not the Empire's cause. I want Duke Mageuk's enemies.
"Enemies?"
—Yes. If matters on Sword God's front are handled well, Duke Ssangwol of the Twin Moons and Tu-hyeol-gong, the Duke of Battle Blood, will likely be dispatched there. That side's post will have been left empty, after all.
"Just so you know, both of them are on Duke Mageuk's side! And the Twin Moon Duke is the original owner of the weapon you took, Miss Lily!"
Hmm.… Leo went on, still beaming.
"What we want from you, Miss Lily, is—um—it's not that you have to join our side! We'll give you a castle of your own, so you can run it as a solo guild, or you can join Yena's team if you like! All we need is for you to participate in the Siege Warfare somehow. That's it!"
Except for one thing.
"When the Siege Warfare begins, go to the north and stop Sword God and the Eight Swords. Feel free to push straight in and smash the Empire's castles while you're at it."
"…Feel free to what?"
The Empire's castles?
Castles belonging to the very pillars of the Empire?
Arne smiled.
—Yes. Razing them outright might even be better. It would drive the despair in that much deeper.
"…Are you trying to leave the Empire?"
—'Leave' isn't quite the word… Carve out would be more accurate."
She must come to know the weight of her own sins.
With those icy words, the bird stirred up a wind of pale green.
Wind that sent my blue hair streaming.
Caught in a breeze that felt strangely familiar, I sank into thought for a moment.
The thinking didn't take very long.
"Bring me Naphras."
—…I'm sorry?
"I need to have a word with her."
First, I'd shake her down a little.
Find out exactly what she's planning.
'I've told you plenty of times—I'm not a celestial, I'm human. You still don't believe me? Hmm… If you won't believe me…'
Then would you care to experience it—just once?