6. What It Takes to Break a Hero (3)
Here. There was a knight.
A figure clad in jet-black armor. Yet his build was comparatively slight — a full head shorter than Rueld, who stood before him even now. And still, somehow, impossibly — the Hero, who had bloomed the very potential of the Holy Sword and stood at the height of his power — had found himself knocked flat on his back the instant their blades met, and was now struggling to rise, his face a storm of tangled emotions.
A sword as black as the armor that bore it. Yet nothing about it was overwhelming, nothing about it exuded the slightest oppressive weight. And yet.
"I'm coming."
The moment he had steadied his breath and committed his will to the strike, the Hero surged forward with unbelievable speed, like an arrow loosed from the bowstring — only for the black knight's single, fluid shift of stance and the short, economical slash that answered it to turn him aside, and once more he went tumbling across the ground.
"Admirable spirit, but thou wastest thy strength, Radiant Hero. Such power serves well against beasts of monstrous size, yet it would be a grave error to believe it equally overwhelming in single combat. One deluded by thy own crushing might would readily confess defeat. But against a master of sword-aura such as myself — who can say? Give thanks that thou wert never meant to stake thy life against me."
Then, as though indulging a child's tantrum, the black knight knocked the ever-advancing Rueld down again and again. With his sword, his knee, the joints of his arms, even his kicks, he hurled the Hero about one-sidedly.
"Thou art still far off. Grow, and come again."
Leaving those words behind, the black knight soothed his snorting ebony steed and swung himself into the saddle. And Rueld, chasing the retreating rider with hollow, stupefied eyes—
"That knight... don't tell me that was Grandeus?"
"You know of him? I'd assumed word of it wouldn't have spread far, given how it would blacken the Hero's name."
"...I'd at least heard the rumors. The legendary knight who defeated the Hero with swordsmanship alone."
The tale had been little more than rumor. But still—
"In the end, he lost his life in a duel with Father, didn't he?"
"That was right before he crossed swords with me."
Having awakened both the Holy Sword and the Sacred Relics, with even his raw skill and capacity honed to their absolute peak — Rueld, at the very height of his powers.
"Then why did Father duel him? There couldn't have been any grudge between them deep enough to stake a life on."
Had there been some circumstance Cariel knew nothing of? Had his father been petty enough to make it a matter of revenge? Even though Cariel himself resented the man, he could hardly deny his father's scrupulous fairness.
...Which was exactly why it chafed.
That fairness — the way his father weighed himself and others on the same scale, always, without the slightest bias.
"Hah."
His father's victory over Grandeus had settled the matter, at least — the rumors of Rueld's defeat dismissed as exaggerated or simply false.
"He was one of the Demon Realm's Legion Commanders, after all."
"Huh? ...I beg your pardon?"
Now what on earth was this supposed to mean?
"The only thing that man ever actually did was the sort of work you'd expect from a charity shelter."
Which was why the very order he had led had been called the Relief Knights.
"The Relief Knights — aren't they the secret society that's still active even now? Surely you don't mean..."
"In the beginning, amid the chaos of war, it was a pretext — the rescue of the weak."
A Legion Commander's whelp, fighting on the side of the invaders, going around offering relief. It was an absurdity beyond all laughter.
"Even your father didn't know, at first."
"Then how do you know about it?"
"Heh heh heh."
Should I tell you, or shouldn't I?
"It was that fool who requested it. A pretext, mind you, but once a former comrade had become his lord, how could a knight be expected to play ignorant of the lord he was sworn to protect? So I arranged the board myself — a little stage where your father and he could meet face to face."
All so that it would be as little disgraceful as possible.
"I imagine your father found the arrangement quite to his taste."
"..."
A lord, was it?
"Why on earth would someone from the Demon Realm become a knight at all?"
"Blame the novels the Great Demon King used to write."
"...?"
"There was such a thing."
Well. So be it.
"The first to ever feed your father — the man who'd risen to his prime through swordsmanship and martial art alone — a defeat was probably that one. In his callow years your father lost to him as easily as breathing, but from the moment he fully awakened the Holy Sword, he had almost no true equals left. Save, perhaps, for his own comrades and the core strength on our side."
"Were there no Heroes or champions in the other nations, though?"
The Demon King curled the corner of her mouth upward.
"Which is why your father survived."
She smiled distantly, as though it were someone else's story.
"And that's how I ended up in the sorry state you see now."
"..."
In other words—
By butchering the other Heroes and champions...
...his father had simply been given the time to grow. Was that what this was?
"The Holy Sword and the Sacred Relics were never yours father's alone. Merely the artifacts I shattered and broke number well over a dozen."
The Church, no doubt, had wept tears of blood — fountains of them — from the sheer stress of those losses.
"And there were any number of threats far more dangerous than Rueld. In those days, there was no reason to fear some green pup with a single Holy Sword."
When they had faced an organized force of a dozen-odd Heroes armed with the Holy Sword, the Sacred Lance, and countless other relics—
the Demon King herself had been forced to take the field personally, if not to conserve their full strength, then at least to keep their casualties to a minimum.
Every fresh reinforcement, every scrap of supply, had to be secured on the ground, in theater—
...the reality was that even the smallest loss was a luxury they could scarcely afford.
But their invasion force was so overwhelmingly powerful that the enemy could hardly have divined such a weakness.
Disinformation. Discord sown between allies. The exhaustive strategy and tactics laid down for the sake of perfect victory.
"It's all ancient history now, isn't it."
The Golden Demon King smacked her lips, as though savoring an old memory.
"..."
She was a being the continent had only half-laid to rest. One who made a revelry of wailing dirges of blood and death and burned the world down in her amusement. A villain whom any human was bound to regard, as a matter of course, as their mortal enemy—
and in the end, she was nothing more than one more witness to history.
But the souls of the countless, blameless dead she had killed so unjustly... who, in all the world, was ever going to wash that clean?
...No one. Impossible.
As far as Cariel could see, she felt no regret, no guilt at all.
I did all that was mine to do.
Shame it ends here. But so it does.
It would be strange to call it relief — but that's what it feels like, so what am I supposed to do about it?
And more than that.
Even in this sealed world where she could commune with nothing and no one but Cariel himself — she did not look the least bit wretched, the least bit unhappy.
By the Church's standards, a being like her should have been cast into hell long ago, buried in the deepest pit of the abyss.
"So you have the leisure to turn your eyes toward other people's lives, it seems."
Cariel flinched and shuddered at the Demon King's sudden remark.
"Neither pity nor scorn them. However wretched and sordid a life may be, it is entirely that person's own chosen life."
"But there are people who never wanted it... people who simply ended up that way, aren't there?"
"Then that is their doing. Their neglect of their own life and their indulgence in it have simply arrived at their natural conclusion — so why should you, a stranger, be the one to lament it?"
"..."
"The ignorance of wretches who don't even know why they stand where they stand. I have never lived such an easy, careless life that I could spare my pity for their incompetence — their refusal to strain even a little to understand it."
Not out of arrogance. Not because she was singularly gifted, nor surpassingly brilliant.
"Life and death are one. Do you believe you can escape them by covering your eyes and shutting your ears?"
You cannot.
And yet why do people neglect their lives and give themselves over to indulgence, as though they would live a thousand years, ten thousand?
Even straining with every last fiber of their being, a person may or may not achieve a single thing. And yet — even without striving — shouldn't one at least understand, at minimum, what one was born into this world for? What one came into being for?
If a thinking being cannot know even that...
then it is beneath a beast.
"A thinking being that wishes to be an ordinary wildflower — that wish itself is a sin. A sin against whom? Not against the world, not against us. A sin against that person alone."
"Why is that a sin?"
"Because they were born."
"..."
Nonsense. No one could have guaranteed that her standard was absolute — one could only pretend to accept it, bowing before her power.
And receiving it deep into one's soul was an entirely different matter.
"Is that not hubris?"
"The awakened, the guides, were ever meant to remain awake. If a king does not keep watch, the ruin of his realm becomes a very serious matter indeed."
"So you were a successful king, then?"
"At the least."
There the Demon King shut her mouth — and fell silent for a long while after.
"I achieved my purpose. Less a king's role, perhaps, than that of a vassal — a servant."
"...A vassal? A servant?"
"There was such a thing."
As though she were under no further obligation to answer — as though she had no further mood for it — she turned the question back on him.
"Well? How did you find that one's sword?"
"..."
One thing was certain.
The Demon King did not regret it.
At a glance, it seemed a temperament so arrogant, so proud, that it crossed into sheer obstinacy — but Cariel refused to clothe it in any prejudice, refused to define what he felt into any particular verdict.
...Unless he heard it from the person herself, this was never the kind of thing anyone could judge or appraise on a whim.
"I honestly can't say. Not yet."
The Demon King was ultimately broken by the Hero.
And I am now trying to break the Hero who was her greatest nemesis — trying to break my father.
Only one thing mattered.
...That fact, and nothing else.
What I think of her, how I choose to receive her — those are questions for later.
Whether she was the continent's historic enemy, its mortal foe, its arch-villain — what business is that of mine?
I need only grow stronger. That is all.
I have realized, all too clearly, that I have been sunk in a deep, dark pit all this time.
No — I realized far too late. Only when I was already sick, rotting, and dying.
And now I feel it more keenly still.
Therefore—
Past, future — what of them? Good, evil — what of them?
Let it all go to hell.
I will climb out of this cold, dark pit. And if that means I must grow stronger—
then I will become stronger than anyone, so that I can stand unbowed before any soul in this world.
So long as the means are honorable—
so long as they are not wretched, not cowardly, not filthy—
the rest is none of my concern.
I—
...I was never going to be a Hero. Not in any life.
It could never be otherwise. Perhaps once, long ago — but not now.
Already, I have conspired with the Demon King.
I have no intention of denying it. No intention of disputing it, either.
So then—
This is, wholly and entirely, my own choice.
Therefore—
Every regret that comes, every despair, even every failure to come—
...all of it must be mine, and mine alone.
Not one soul's but mine.