Unconquerable
A deep, resonant roar rolled across the heavens.
The ground itself shuddered in answer.
“…Strange.”
From the edge of a sheer cliff, the Black King stared toward the source of every disturbance—the place Beyond. What he saw there forced him to tilt his head in genuine puzzlement.
There stood Despair.
One of the beasts once called the Four Calamities.
The creature that had remained silent for so long had suddenly begun to howl as though wracked by agony.
“Aaaah…”
“P-please, stop…!”
At the same moment, countless insects at the foot of the cliff went rigid and toppled over. Every one of them was a monster the Black King had strengthened with Hidden Traits. Individually they were powerful enough to rule entire mountains, yet Despair’s cry had shattered their souls. Terror had stripped them of all will; they could do nothing but tremble in absolute despair.
…Fermon. Is that one trembling as well?
Even the Insect King who had crushed and commanded those monsters in a single sweep—Ant King Fermon, the Black King’s greatest masterpiece, the mutant reborn as the strongest insect through a Hidden Trait—could not escape the cry of Despair. He pretended composure, yet his antennae never stopped twitching.
Despair’s power surpasses Hidden Traits.
That much was now certain. The Hidden Trait Fermon possessed was not merely Mutation. He also carried the Heart of the Iron-Blooded Lord—an unshakable composure that kept him steady in every situation. Even that had failed against Despair’s roar. It meant Despair stood above Hidden Traits themselves.
And that same Despair is agitated. What is it reacting to?
Yet the insects were not the only ones stirred. This was a reaction of a kind the Black King had never witnessed before. What, exactly, could make Despair tremble so violently?
Only another of the Four Calamities can make Despair react.
As far as he knew, that was the sole possibility. But Baal was dead. There was no sign of any other Calamity’s resurrection. The Death King, the one-in-a-million chance, had been completely consumed; it could not be his consciousness either.
The roar continued without pause—Gooooooooh—a voice that sounded both like a groan of pain and the mournful cry of something that had lost what it held most precious. Listening to that endless, plaintive howl, the Black King finally reduced Despair’s state to a single dry remark.
“……Looks like a cat in heat.”
“Hah!”
A man jerked upright with a dying gasp. Cold sweat poured down his entire body as he forced his eyes open and immediately scanned the room.
A dream?
Warm sunlight and a breeze drifted through the window. Night had already passed. That only made the memory more bewildering. Last night felt like nothing more than a dream—too unreal to accept as fact. Yet it had been far too vivid to dismiss as mere fantasy.
What did I see?
Raiga, commander of the knights and head of the Eight Houses, stared at his own hands for a long time. Had he simply had a nightmare? His hands shook as though seized by palsy. He tried to calm them; they refused.
I was definitely in the training grounds of the Eight Houses.
He pieced the memory together. The secluded place he always sought whenever he visited the imperial palace—accessible only to the successors of the Eight Houses. There he had met someone.
Who did I meet?
Raiga’s brow furrowed. Only faint afterimages remained, memory fragments torn to shreds as though forcibly erased.
I definitely… met a goat. A goat.
Ah.
A headache so fierce it nearly blacked him out crashed down. His body was warning him: do not force the memory back. Do not drag it out.
I crossed blades with the goat. Then I shattered its mask.
Raiga forced the recollection onward. He had swung his sword with exhilaration against a goat that had completed the True Transformation, overwhelming it and succeeding in breaking the mask. So why? Why had his body forcibly wiped the memory of last night?
When the mask broke… what appeared inside was not the goat.
What was it?
What in the world had he seen?
His trembling grew worse. Raiga clenched his teeth and crushed his fist until the knuckles threatened to shatter. He—a hunter who had slaughtered countless powerhouses and recovered Fragments of Ruin—could not accept that he had been terrified by something unknown.
“Ah.”
The moment the full memory returned, Raiga’s face went deathly pale. Now he understood why he had woken in bed instead of the training grounds of the Eight Houses.
“I…”
…Yet it was impossible. It could not have happened. Never once since the day he was born.
Staring out the window with that ashen face, Raiga spoke as though he could not believe the words himself.
“………Did I run away?”
The Archetypal Armor.
Originally the wooden staff that had held the First Fire possessed no special form. Its only purpose had been to carry the flame. Even when refined with the First Fire, it could never take on the nature of armor. Yet together with the Purified Bone Fragment of Despair, the staff had become armor.
Armor—the tool humanity created to stop spears, swords, and arrows. The Archetypal Armor maximized that purpose. It returned damage to any enemy that struck it and granted defense that could never be pierced. But that was not its true power.
The other name engraved upon the Archetypal Armor—Archetypal Despair—has activated!
Archetypal Despair!
When the wearer’s condition reached the critical threshold, the armor completely changed its nature. Through the Purified Bone Fragment of Despair that had given it form, it summoned an entirely different kind of Despair—an independent Despair born the way Eve was born from Adam’s rib: the same, yet utterly other.
—Gooooooooh.
The moment Raiga beheld that “form,” his body locked. Merely looking at it froze him solid. This was on a different level from every monster he had ever faced.
“You… are no goat. What the hell are you?”
One thing was certain: this was nothing like the goat he had been fighting. It wore the goat’s body, yet it was not the goat.
…That thing is a monster that annihilates every being that harbors hostility.
Instinctively Raiga erased every trace of hostility. The instant he showed even a shred of enmity, the monster would charge. It was a being he could not attack and must not attack. Yet so long as he held no hostility, it did not move.
The only will I sense from it is the will to protect itself.
Protect itself? No—closer to protecting the one inside it. Without question, this thing had appeared to guard the goat.
Like armor.
The closest comparison was armor that protected its wearer—armor given conceptual form. If that were true, there was a method. If it only reacted to those who held hostility, then he simply needed to attack without hostility.
No-mind, no-thought.
Raiga closed his eyes and erased every scrap of will, intending to entrust the sword to the flow and swing.
“……!!!”
He could not swing. Instead he took a step back.
“Hah… hah…!”
Breath came short. Cold sweat poured down his body. In that instant, within his unconscious, Raiga had seen himself die.
“What the hell…”
He could not understand. Had it not been reading his conscious intent? He had completely erased hostility, yet what was that vision?
It was no mere illusion. If I had swung, I would truly have died.
An illusion forged from countless experiences and pure instinct. The moment he even tried to swing, the monster would have moved. If neither conscious intent nor the unconscious was allowed—
I cannot kill it right now.
No method of killing that monster came to mind. …For the moment, at least.
It cannot maintain that state for long. It is burning every last drop of its mana.
Yes. He only needed to wait until the state ended. It would not take long; even now the mana was being consumed. Yet it did not take long to realize that thought was wrong as well.
Time…?
Everything slowed. It truly felt as though time itself had stopped. And more than that—
Thump! Thump! Thump!
Inside that frozen time, only his heart hammered as though it would burst. His lips went dry; chills ran through his entire body. The image of his own death repeated endlessly in his mind. The monster would not even permit him to wait.
When it felt as though dozens or hundreds of hours had passed, Raiga finally took a step back.
Damn it.
…No answer presented itself. Unconquerable. No matter how he thought about it, the only way to conquer “that” was to kill it before it appeared. Conquering it in that state was impossible.
Raiga retreated another ten paces, then turned his back and began to leave the place entirely. He barely managed to reach his own chambers, yet—
Why won’t it end?
Erasing hostility, erasing even the thought of killing, changed nothing. Distance changed nothing. The sensation of Despair that had radiated from the monster refused to fade. On top of that, the vision of his death kept replaying without end.
Raiga thrashed for a long time. Only one method remained: completely erase the memory of that moment. Stay far away until he someday found another way to conquer it. The problem was… he had already recalled it. The moment he woke, he had stubbornly forced the memory back.
Thump! Thump! Thump!
His heart pounded again. Inside his head the form of Despair and the image of his own death would not leave. With a face gone deathly pale, Raiga twisted his features.
“…………Damn it.”
When I opened my eyes, I was in a room.
The night that had carried the Will of the Great Moon had already ended.
My head’s throbbing.
I shook my head once. I remembered crossing blades with Raiga and fully inheriting Wilhelm’s memories. The last thing I recalled was the activation of Archetypal Despair. After that, nothing.
Knock. Knock.
Just as I was sorting through the fragments, someone rapped on the door.
“Who is it?”
“An apprentice knight of the Eight Houses Knights.”
…A familiar voice. That was definitely Isabella. Why had she come looking for me so early in the morning?
“Enter.”
Creeeak.
The door opened and, as expected, Isabella appeared. I could not acknowledge her openly. Raiga might have sent her with some other intention. Even if not, far too many eyes were watching.
“What business do you have?”
I asked with deliberate calm. Isabella spoke slowly.
“The Commander wishes to see you.”
“The Commander?”
“Knight Commander Raiga has summoned you.”
I had not misheard. Yet I could not begin to guess what intention Raiga had in calling me. We had not crossed blades with any friendly purpose. More importantly, I had no memory of what happened after Archetypal Despair activated. Meeting him in this state was likely to be a self-inflicted wound.
“If he has business, tell him to come himself.”
I could not afford to look as though I had been summoned. If the Golden Mask and the other executives of the Death God Religion learned of it, they would only form needless suspicions. So I took a hard line.
“…I will convey the message.”
Isabella withdrew without protest. That reaction itself was incomprehensible. He had summoned me, yet she gave up so easily? Had there been no important business after all? Even if there had been, he would not come now. On the surface I was one of the executives of the Death God Religion, and the Eight Houses Knights stood in sharp opposition to them. In the imperial palace under so many watching eyes, he would never move in person.
Yet as if to mock that expectation—
“…Let’s talk for a moment.”
…Knight Commander Raiga.
He had truly come himself. And less than five minutes after Isabella left, with eyes that looked desperately urgent.