The Prince Who Survived
“This is impossible…!”
The clandestine unit Nox placed little value on the lives of its individual operatives. The missions commanded directly by the Emperor invariably carried commensurate peril, making death in the line of duty a familiar companion rather than a tragedy. They were cold-blooded instruments of statecraft, trained not to mourn fallen comrades, but to exploit their corpses as decoys or stepping stones to secure an objective.
“Just how… in the gods’ names…?!”
Yet even these hardened killers found the unfolding reality impossible to swallow. The signature camouflage magic of Nox—a pinnacle of imperial deception that ought to have baffled anyone short of an archmage—was being unraveled effortlessly by a foreign prince who could barely wield aura. Worse, he was hunting them down and butchering them one by one.
Four operatives embedded throughout Adelheid’s rebel encampment had already been ambushed and slain. Nearly half of the ten-man infiltration team had been assassinated in reverse before they could even lay eyes on their target.
Had it been Adelheid who cut them down, they could have accepted it. She was a recognized monster even among the imperial bloodline, a seasoned battlefield master whose sheer instinct might well have sniffed them out. But falling to Romul—a target whose failure they had not even factored into their calculations—was an intolerable humiliation.
He was not swinging blindly in the hope of striking lucky, either. He unerringly homed in on the exact shadows concealing Nox agents, tracking them like a vengeful specter. An unfamiliar chill of dread gripped the surviving operatives.
How is he killing us…?!
Among those who awakened to mana, mastery was divided into four distinct thresholds: Origin, Rise, Turn, and Conclusion.
From the faint resonance he emitted at a distance, Prince Romul was barely clinging to the third stage, Turn—the threshold where the physical body fully acclimates to mana, transmuting it into aura honed for martial slaughter. For an ordinary foot soldier or mercenary, reaching Turn was an achievement worthy of renown. But to the elite shadows of the Emperor, it was utterly unremarkable.
Adelheid had surpassed that level when she was still a young girl, and now stood at the very summit of Conclusion, capable of manifesting her unique mental image into reality. Every single Nox operative possessed far greater refinement and lethal experience than Romul.
Yet these veterans were being slaughtered by a fledgling royal without even mounting a defense. The surviving agents were on the verge of madness.
Something is wrong. At this rate, we’ll be wiped out to the last man. We need to fall back…
Had they been able to claim Romul’s head in exchange for their annihilation, they would not have hesitated to throw their lives away. But thoroughly rattled by his inexplicable awareness, they knew that holding their breath in the dark would no longer conceal them from this bizarre monster. And if they banded together for an open assault amidst the growing commotion, Adelheid or the Blade Wind would descend upon them in an instant.
Though humiliation weighed heavy on their shoulders, the remaining six operatives made their decision and melted away, fleeing the encampment.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
“—?!”
Or so they attempted.
The moment an operative observing Romul from afar turned on his heel, the tip of a segmented blade linked by shimmering chains of mana shot through the dark, embedding itself deep into the support post of a nearby tent. The mana chain snapped taut, contracting violently and hauling Romul across the distance in the blink of an eye.
Arriving at point-blank range, the interlocking segments of Romul’s blade reacted to his mana, shifting like interlocking puzzle pieces. In a heartbeat, they reformed into a circular, fan-bladed buckler clamped securely to his right forearm. Twisting his torso mid-flight to harness the centrifugal momentum, Romul swung the bladed shield straight at the operative.
“What in the—?!”
A weapon that morphed from a sword to a chain, and then into a bladed shield, was staggering enough. What truly terrified the agent was the uncanny precision with which Romul had exploited the exact fraction of a second when his guard dropped to retreat. Though still masked by camouflage, the prince locked eyes with him without a shred of hesitation.
In desperate panic, the operative pooled his mana to reinforce his body. But hastily summoned mana could only turn aside an aura-clad edge if there existed an insurmountable chasm in raw power between them. Romul was indeed the lesser combatant, but the gap was nowhere near wide enough to render an aura strike harmless. The rotating edge of the shield tore across the operative’s chest in a brutal diagonal, unleashing a violent spray of crimson.
“And there they go, running for their lives.”
With half the assassins dead and the survivors abandoning their murderous intent to flee, the suffocating dizziness clawing at Romul’s temples finally began to recede. He weighed whether to give chase, but quickly dismissed the thought and dismissed his weapon.
Clack—
As he drained the mana from the mechanism, the weapon collapsed and reconfigured itself, wrapping around his right forearm as a segmented steel vambrace. Romul turned to head leisurely back toward his quarters, only to be caught in the iron grip of Adelheid, who had personally marched out to retrieve him.
“Are you certain there are no lasting injuries?”
“Yes, Your Highness. Prince Romul displays mild symptoms of motion sickness, but there is not a single scratch upon his person. He does not even require medicine; a brief period of rest will see him fully recovered.”
“Very well.”
No matter how vehemently Romul had insisted he was unharmed, Adelheid had refused to listen, subjecting him to a rigorous examination by the rebel army’s chief field medic before finally accepting the truth.
“Romul, I lost my composure and spoke harshly earlier, but once again, I find myself deeply in your debt,” Adelheid said, her stern expression softening with remorse. “I anticipated that the Crown Prince would dispatch assassins, but failing to realize he would mobilize Nox was entirely my oversight. Had you not been so exceptionally capable, I would have become a foolish woman who stood by and watched her most cherished benefactor and comrade die before her eyes.”
“Ah, well, it wasn’t that big of a deal. I figured a day like this would come eventually. Besides, I’m used to it.”
“Used to it…? Are you saying you were frequently targeted by assassins back in Remus?”
“Not after I was recognized as an official prince.”
“I have heard that in Remus, one must prove their merit to be acknowledged and treated as royalty… How long has it been since you attained that status?”
“…About three years, give or take? I somehow managed to awaken aura around then. One of the royals who despised me became so obsessed with dragging me down that another sibling completely outmaneuvered him. He was stripped of his rank, and I simply slipped into the vacancy.”
“…It must have been agonizing,” Adelheid murmured, her eyes shimmering with profound sympathy. “To be regarded as an enemy and hunted by those who share your own blood… I have only recently learned how deeply that wound cuts. And yet, you endured that torment for years on end?”
Seeing her gaze soften into something approaching maternal warmth out of a newfound sense of shared trauma, Romul felt a prickle of awkwardness. Having your life threatened was certainly unpleasant, but his petty palace squabbles were hardly comparable to Adelheid’s situation, where the de facto Emperor had branded her a traitor and mobilized the full might of the realm to exterminate her.
“No, well, that’s not really…”
“Hush. It is fine. Your burden must have been immense. Anyone weaker would have shattered beneath it long ago.”
Before he could offer an excuse, Adelheid took his hands in hers, her face illuminated by an expression so benevolent it bordered on reverent.
“I swear upon everything I am: I shall never permit such an outrage to befall you again. Never. You reached out your hand to me, Romul, and so long as breath remains in my body, I shall shield you.”
“Right… Ah, my head is spinning a bit. Would it be alright if I went to rest?”
A lifetime of hard-earned survival instincts warned Romul that nothing he said right now would pierce her romanticized perception of him.
She really reminds me of Sister Aren.
Calling Aren an older sister felt slightly absurd given that their age gap resembled that of a mother and child, but perhaps because of that disparity, she had been the solitary soul in the Remus royal family who looked after him. Conversations with her had often taken this exact, unyielding trajectory.
“Forgive my selfishness,” Adelheid said hastily, releasing his hands. “To keep a man who just survived an assassination attempt standing here listening to my idle rambling… Go, rest at once!”
Just like Aren, the moment he feigned illness, she immediately relented. The two women shared an uncanny number of traits. Of course, while Aren was vastly older and an actual blood relative, being mothered by Adelheid—who was only slightly older than him—stirred a distinct sense of discomfort.
“Failed… you say…?”
Crash!
The following morning inside Byron’s palace.
Having dismissed his attendants to receive Nox’s report in absolute secrecy during his morning grooming, the Crown Prince dropped the crystal goblet from his hand at the unexpected news. A sharp shard sliced across the bridge of his foot, drawing blood, but the prince was too stunned to register the stinging pain.
“What rubbish is this?! You claimed he was an incompetent prince who could barely muster aura! No matter how heavily guarded their camp was, Nox failed to kill a single insect like that?!”
During the late Emperor’s reign, the Crown Prince had occasionally witnessed the terrifying efficiency of Nox firsthand. That intimate knowledge only magnified the shock of their defeat.
“…We cannot explain how, Your Imperial Highness,” the kneeling survivor rasped, his voice trembling. “Prince Romul saw through our disguise magic entirely. He tracked our hidden positions with unerring accuracy and ambushed us repeatedly. Half our strike force was eliminated before the operation could even begin.”
“…Assassins… ambushed and cut in half?”
Because he had harbored the absurd belief that Nox could eliminate even transcendent beings if commanded, the sting of betrayal felt extraordinarily bitter.
“You dare… mock Us…? How else could you fail to butcher a worthless princeling from a minor kingdom?! It was not even Adelheid who intervened, but some runt named Romul—and you were ambushed and killed?! You scoundrels…! Have you crawled into Adelheid’s bed?!”
“…What?”
Conditioned never to reveal emotion or voice an opinion, even the disciplined Nox operative looked up in sheer disbelief at the Crown Prince’s raving accusation. But the prince’s fury showed no sign of abating; rather, it metastasized into absolute conviction.
“Of course! It all makes sense now! Babbling about pierced disguises and counter-ambushes, spinning preposterous lies about that wretched prince! It all fits if you turned traitor and sold your allegiance to Adelheid! You slaughtered the loyal half of your squad who refused to betray Us, and dared return here with a straight face to serve as her spies! Did you take Us for a fool?!”
“Y-Your Imperial Highness… what madness is—”
Fwoosh!
Violent mana surged from the Crown Prince’s fingertips, igniting into raging crimson flames that condensed into the feral visage of a wolf before lunging at the kneeling survivor and his companions.
“Silence!”
“Aaaaaargh—!”
Writhing in agonizing torment as the hungry aura immolated their flesh, the surviving agents were reduced to charred, smoking husks within seconds, unable to mount the slightest defense.
“Summon the Commander of Nox!” the Crown Prince shrieked, his chest heaving as the smell of burnt hair and flesh filled the chamber. “Had the entire unit mobilized from the start, this failure never would have occurred…! How dare they send a meager detachment when We, the Emperor, gave the command?! Guards! Convey Our words to that dog! Let her bring the heads of Romul and Adelheid by tomorrow—or present her own neck in atonement!”
Deliver the severed heads of the traitor Adelheid and Prince Romul before the break of dawn tomorrow.
Should you fail this final mandate, the Commander of Nox shall forfeit her neck to atone for her unit's treason.
“The Crown Prince has truly lost his mind.”
Deep within the subterranean sanctuary hidden beneath the Imperial Palace, the woman occupying the seat of the shadow commander clicked her tongue as she read the directive delivered to her desk.
Unlike her subordinates, whose identities were erased while their past names remained etched in memory, she had been cultivated from birth solely to rule the shadow unit. She possessed no name, nor had she ever sought one. Though it was a life stripped of choice, she had found quiet contentment within it, instructing those who needed to address her to simply call her ‘Nox.’
Born as the incarnation of the unit, absolute loyalty to the reigning Emperor was her sole duty. However, by Nox’s strict traditions, the Crown Prince had yet to be formally consecrated as the legitimate Emperor. Since he was not yet the master worthy of her unconditional devotion, she weighed her options, prioritizing her own survival directly beneath the tenets of imperial order.
Whether he was always this rotten or the civil war shattered what little sanity he had, the Crown Prince is an absolute disaster. Even if we eliminate Adelheid, can the empire truly survive under an idiot who does nothing but blunders? Scandals and unrest will arise perpetually, and each time, Nox will be forced to clean up his filth…
She might have swallowed that burden under normal circumstances. But learning that five of her seasoned subordinates had died not in the field, but at the whim of the Crown Prince’s childish, paranoid tantrum, crossed an unforgivable line.
If that madman ascends the throne, not only will the empire crumble, but Nox will be eradicated alongside it.
Disgusted by an emotional purge that never would have occurred under the late Emperor, Nox made her decision without hesitation.
“All units, prepare to move.”
If you hate me without reason, I will gladly give you one.
In that quiet subterranean hall, Nox abandoned the Imperial Palace, harboring within her chest the exact same resolve that had driven Adelheid to rebellion only days before.