Rust Devours the Earth! #1
The soldiers of the Agarpe domain marched out to war.
At the very front rode Psyche in silver armor astride a red steed, holding high the eagle banner that was the symbol of House Agarpe.
Her bearing was so proud and magnificent that my heart swelled with pride just watching her.
Behind her came ten Bronze-rank knights and a hundred well-trained soldiers.
Their morale was sky-high and solid as bedrock, drawing crowds of onlookers to witness the departure.
Watching the throng gather, Milione—clad in light armor and mounted on her own horse—clicked her tongue.
“The records say a hundred knights and ten thousand soldiers threw themselves at this place all at once and still failed to take it. Hyde, you really think this handful of troops can pull it off?”
“Don’t worry, Milli. I’m not asking you for help.”
“Hmph, who said I was offering? More importantly, why are you riding in a carriage?”
She had a point.
I was indeed riding in a carriage.
The reason was simple: carriages were comfortable.
Ride a horse too long and your ass starts screaming.
“Sir Parmas, are you certain it’s wise for an old man like yourself to head to the battlefield in person?”
I asked the man seated across from me.
Parmas snorted—“Hmph”—and accepted a letter handed up through the carriage window by a soldier.
Snap.
Unfolding the missive, Parmas spoke.
“Two hundred Walpurgis witches have already set up camp before the citadel, it seems. Among them is Gaia, the Earth Mother Witch. A monstrous woman. Think you can handle her?”
Gaia the Earth Mother.
A famous witch.
Among the members of the Walpurgis coven, five witches stood out as the most vicious of all—and Gaia the Earth Mother was one of them.
“She wields mysterious sorcery. Do you know of Sir Bartolang, once a Silver-rank knight of the royal house? A man who could nearly match a Gold-rank knight—yet twenty years ago, in the war, that Gaia slaughtered him in the most gruesome fashion!”
A monster capable of butchering a Silver-rank knight who could stand toe-to-toe with Gold-ranks.
And that creature was leading the witches—so did I still feel confident? That was the thrust of his question.
Did this old man know?
That the woman riding alongside this very carriage—Milione—was an even crazier bitch—
“Gaia is no match for me. My opponent is the heavens themselves.”
“You talk big, but now that the hour draws near you’ve lost your mind. I’m a generous man. If you can’t endure the lashing, you’re free to put up a substitute.”
What?
That was a tempting offer.
If I deliberately broke my promise, could I make Milione take the whipping in my place?
That girl could use a few good smacks to knock some sense into her!
“Sir Parmas, the truth is… I have no confidence.”
“Oh? Finally the real you comes out—”
“I have no confidence that I will fail.”
“…….”
Parmas scowled and glared at me.
My dazzling wordplay seemed to have his mind spinning in circles, thoroughly rattled.
In that fashion our procession traveled for two days and arrived at the mountain where the Citadel of Sloth stood.
Below it the witches had indeed pitched their camp, and the mere sight of them made me want to vomit.
“Those madwomen strutting about so brazenly in broad daylight!”
I hated heretics.
Because they were ignorant humans.
Ignorant and stupid—that’s how people become heretics or cultists.
But then—
Looking closer, there were far more heretics than Parmas had said.
Hadn’t he claimed the witch band numbered two hundred?
The force squatting before us now was at least four hundred strong.
“Those ones…”
Parmas’s eyes narrowed as if he too were taken aback.
I narrowed my eyes as well, studying the unfamiliar throng—and upon closer inspection, their faces were painted with red crosses, and their banners matched.
I recognized them at once.
And before I even needed to explain, Psyche—riding proudly at the head of our column—shouted.
“It’s the Blood Crusade! That man Rust must be nearby! It seems he was after the Citadel of Sloth as well!”
Fuck.
What the hell was this?
Why was the Blood Crusade here?
In the distance a man with a red cross painted across his face, holding a tall banner aloft, bellowed.
“I am Hans, foremost servant of the Blood Crusade and its second Baptized! The Citadel of Sloth shall be ours! In the name of Lord Rust!”
“Once we take the citadel, Lord Rust will descend upon us once more! Let us offer the citadel as sacrifice and summon Lord Rust from hell!”
“Kyaaaaaaah!!!”
“Long live Lord Ruuuust—!”
Puhiiiiiiing—.
When the mad heretics roared with one voice, the horses shied first. The knights astride them tensed in sudden alarm.
“Everywhere Rust appears ends up engulfed in flames, doesn’t it?”
“We were only supposed to deal with the witches, right?”
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this. Is that Las character here too? They say he rips people apart armor and all!”
Damn it—
The soldiers and knights were starting to lose their nerve.
I first checked Milione’s expression.
“What? Things just got interesting.”
If that lunatic Milione pulled on her mask and joined the Crusade’s ranks, we would have a whole new set of headaches.
With Psyche and Parmas present, Las couldn’t go on a indiscriminate slaughter—but still.
Ssh—.
I stepped down from the carriage.
Then I looked up at the citadel perched high on the mountain.
The peak rose roughly two hundred meters.
The fortress built atop sheer cliffs looked truly impregnable.
A few soldiers on the battlements seemed to be peering down at us.
I raised my voice toward them.
“Lord Agiles of the citadel, hear me! I am Hyde, Bronze-rank priest! If you surrender now, I will ensure that you and your men at least keep your lives! Refuse, and every last one of you will die within three days!”
My booming voice needed no megaphone.
“Bring me, Hyde, before Lord Agiles! You must abandon the castle and surrender this very moment! Do so, and I will personally present you with a copy of Nymph’s Village that I myself have written—and I will even sign it for you!”
My words would have carried clearly all the way to those high walls.
A chance to receive the next volume of the world’s masterpiece, Nymph’s Village, complete with an autograph.
Well? Feeling the urge to come out of that castle right this second?
Opportunities like this don’t come twice, you know?
“Hyde! You’ve already written the next volume of Nymph’s Village? You promised you’d tell me first! That’s so mean!”
Psyche puffed out her cheeks a little.
She was a devoted reader who truly understood the worth of my books, after all.
Soon everyone else would too.
Then someone shouted down from the high battlements.
“You’re Hyde? A guy who can’t even get over his own wife’s legs thinks he can scale these walls?”
“Your book is garbage! You crippled bastard! Even if twenty years of border duty gets boring, I’m never reading that crap!”
“Wahahahaha—!”
These motherfuckers?
They were insulting the pure and sacred love between me and my wife Psyche?
And my book on top of that?
What the hell do you know about books!
Can you even read letters?
You sons of bitches!
“Sit there and wait a hundred days, a thousand days! See if this citadel falls! We are invincible! We’ve got plenty of food and water! We can hold out another thousand years!”
“With us stands the Platinum Hero, Lord Agiles!”
“Uwaaaaaaah—!”
The citadel soldiers’ morale soared as if to pierce the heavens.
Savage brutes.
Yelling that loud only wears out their own strength.
That was when it happened.
Kwaaaaaang—!
A tremendous noise erupted from somewhere.
I turned my head and saw short-haired witches in the Walpurgis camp bursting into broad grins.
“Did you hear it? The lament of the earth! The land you occupy without leave belongs entirely to the Great Earth Mother Goddess…! This Gaia shall claim your land with the power of the great goddess…!”
Kwaaaaaang—!
Another massive boom.
It truly sounded as if the earth itself were screaming.
“…Magic?”
“The witches are working their sorcery!”
“When that sound rang out, Sir Bartolang was blown apart in the most horrific way!”
Fear spread among the soldiers.
They dreaded the witches’ black arts.
Was it truly sorcery?
Magic?
No—I didn’t think so.
I could smell a peculiar scent brushing the tip of my nose.
A bitter, acrid odor.
The smell of saltpeter and sulfur.
“Gunpowder, is it.”
Saltpeter and sulfur mostly came from the earth.
So that made it the power of the Earth Mother Goddess?
No.
What Earth Mother Goddess? There was no such thing in this world.
For mere dirt to be elevated as a god—how absurd.
Ssh—.
The witches now gathered around the earth-colored-haired Gaia and prostrated themselves in worship.
Gaia, with her short-cropped earth-toned hair and black ink tattoos scrawled across her face, put on an especially exaggerated display—pressing her lips to the ground, digging at the dirt with her hands like a dog, thrashing about in a frenzy.
“Aaaah! I feel the earth’s energy! I feel Mother’s energy! And Mother has spoken—she prophesies the massacre of the Blood Crusade, the citadel soldiers, and the Agarpe troops! And she desires the death of that fool Hyde! I prophesy: Hyde, who impersonates an author and wastes paper, shall surely die this day! And his corpse shall burn away together with his books!”
What did she just say?
What did this filthy dirt-bitch just say!
That I impersonate an author!
That I waste paper!
These damn cunt-witches.
Didn’t they know that according to the Bible, women are to serve men as their head?
I would teach these wicked, ignorant bitches the Bible.
Gaia the Earth Mother.
She was a woman who knew the earth well.
When she mixed various things drawn from the ground and created the “Goddess’s Wrath,” she had felt as though she possessed the entire world.
She had resolved to take the citadel within a fortnight.
A fortnight—
It sounded impossible, yet it wasn’t entirely so.
The witches had spent long years carefully suborning the men inside the fortress.
Men are all the same. Dangle a woman in front of them and they lose their minds. Ruled by their cocks instead of their brains—truly inferior creatures. What truly rules the world isn’t men or their swords, but women.
In a fortnight’s time, a revolt would erupt inside the citadel and the gates would open.
It was called impregnable, yet the situation within was far from good; the soldiers’ morale had long since plummeted.
That they had held the fortress for twenty years was already a miracle.
Agiles of the Thunderbolt. They call him the Great Sin Seat of Sloth now, don’t they? If we can turn that stupid fat bastard into a servant of us witches, the world will be ours…!
Rumor had it the citadel held vast stores of saltpeter.
There must be an enormous quantity of saltpeter. That’s why Pendragon dispatched that Platinum Knight Agiles and ordered him to hold it even as the capital fell.
An immense amount of saltpeter.
And from it, an immense “Goddess’s Wrath.”
With that alone, Gaia might dare call herself queen.
But those Blood Crusade bastards showed up out of nowhere. Those lunatics are completely insane. Aren’t they even afraid of death? We absolutely cannot let them take the citadel!
The forces from Agarpe were of little concern.
Gaia’s head throbbed at the mere thought of dealing with the Blood Crusade alone.
Then a fine idea struck her.
Perfect! I’ll make the Blood Crusade and the Agarpe troops fight each other! Sowing discord between them is easy! And their weakness is—
Gaia the Earth Mother fixed her gaze on the frail-looking man.
He was tall, yet his pale skin made him look weak and spindly.
The Bronze-rank priest Hyde.
A man who had grown famous throughout the kingdom of late for various reasons.
“Hear me, Blood Crusade! I have just received an answer to my prayer! The Earth Mother Goddess desires Hyde’s blood! Kill that man Hyde and sprinkle his blood upon the earth, and our witches’ council will form an alliance with Rust! A man who writes such atrocious books must die at once! It is a desecration of paper! And a desecration of paper is a desecration of trees, and a desecration of trees is a desecration of the earth itself!”
Nymph’s Village.
Gaia had once read that book and wanted to scrub her eyes clean afterward.
How could such a childish, idiotic book even exist?
Who on earth would print something like that for people to read?
It was truly a book that desecrated trees and the earth!
Soon the Blood Crusade roared in apparent agreement with Gaia.
“Very well! Hyde is the Blood Crusade’s greatest enemy! We too desire his life! Crusaders! I, Hans, the foremost Baptized, command you! Seize Hyde! But kill no one! Every human is destined to receive Lord Rust’s sentence of life imprisonment! Until Lord Rust himself pronounces a death sentence, no one may be killed lightly! Capture him alive!”
Ueeeeeeeeek—!
The Blood Crusade surged into motion.
Gaia was startled; she had never expected the raving red horde to obey her words so readily.
This is proof that the Goddess is truly with me!
At last the crimson tide of the Blood Crusade crashed over the Agarpe soldiers in an instant.
As she watched the scene and felt a thrilling rush of excitement—Psyche’s scream rang out.
“Hyde! Where are you! Hyde!”
Clang—! Chaaang—!
A chaotic melee erupted on every side.
Swords and spears clashed.
In that very moment, something uncanny occurred.
A turn of events no one had anticipated.
Ssssssss—.
The world began to darken.
Only then did everyone look up at the sky.
The sun was being swallowed by the moon.
Wh-what is this—
Gaia the Earth Witch trembled with fear and awe, her heart pounding.
That the sun in the heavens should lose its light—
Was this not an omen that the world was being steeped in sin?
Gaia hastily cried out.
“The Goddess of the Earth is with us! The age of the heavens ends, and the age of the earth shall dawn!”
Everyone halted and gazed upon the spectacle.
It felt as though the end of the world had arrived—and in truth, it seemed to be happening.
In the time when the world was plunged into darkness—
The heavens losing their light was the ultimate proof that the masculine power symbolized by the “sky” was collapsing, ushering in the age of “earth and women.”
Gaia the Earth Witch, overflowing with rapture, fell into ecstasy and prayed to the goddess.
“Goddess, be with us—”
“Goddess!”
“Earth Mother Goddess!”
Just as the women sobbed and prayed with one voice, a chilling shiver ran down the nape of Gaia’s neck.
“There is no such thing as a goddess in this world.”
It was a quiet voice.
Yet amid the weeping prayers it rang out with perfect clarity—
as if it had whispered directly into her ear.
“Who is it! Who dares utter such blasphemy!”
Gaia shook off the eerie chill and shouted.
Ssssss—.
And in the same instant the light returned to the world—
a figure like soot pressed against the earth stood in the very center of the battlefield, clad in a crimson robe.
He was simply standing there.
“Aaaaaaah! Our earnest prayers have brought Lord Rust down upon this land!”
“The darkness just now was the black that arose when Lord Rust descended! It wasn’t any goddess!”
“Geheeeeeek—!”
The cultists went wild with fervor at the mere fact that a man had appeared and set foot upon the ground in this place.
Ssh—.
When the man finally turned his head ever so slightly, people foamed at the mouth and fainted one after another.