The Cruel Beginning of Winter
Why? How could it be that happiness always comes crashing down in a single instant?
Remembering the day the academy burned—the day pain first tore into her once-happy life—Tiara fled the royal palace.
The palace was burning just as the academy had that day.
No actual flames licked the walls, yet people were killing one another with the same ferocious intensity, consuming one another’s lives as if they themselves were the fire.
Tiara felt as though she could not breathe. Right before her eyes, nearby, within earshot, or at the edge of her vision, people were dying.
The revolutionary army had slipped into the palace through secret passages while the Royal Knights were out in the capital, and they rampaged as if the palace were already their own world.
Of course, the butlers and nobles still inside had all received dueling lessons as a matter of course, and as nobles they had been educated for the possibility of standing on a battlefield. A butler, after all, learned self-defense at the butler academy precisely so he could protect his master in an emergency.
But that was only education. Very few had ever forged those lessons into real experience through actual combat.
Even in the occasional territorial wars, nobles stayed in the rear and issued orders; it was the commanders who received those orders and directed the fighting—never the nobles themselves.
The revolutionaries, by contrast, had endured countless real battles and harsh training that had honed them. Yet most of those who joined the revolutionary army were people cast out by society or who had suffered under its injustices.
Many had never eaten properly growing up, so even if their technique was superior, they fell short of the nobles and butlers in basic stamina and raw strength.
At first the sudden assault sowed chaos and the nobles and butlers took heavy losses. Once they recovered their wits, however, they found the courage to fight back, and the few remaining bodyguard knights arrived swiftly and began suppressing the revolutionaries.
By then, though, the revolutionaries had already spread throughout the palace.
Some detonated bombs in suicide attacks. Some discovered terrified maids hiding and slaughtered them. Some died fighting nobles. Others raced in every direction hunting for the king so they could kill him.
“This way.”
In the midst of that chaos, Tiara—thanks to Jordy’s favor—was the first to escape the palace, escorted by the sole remaining Royal Knight.
A Royal Knight was the dream of every knight. Just as the duke had done when founding the Sky Knights, they were the cream of the crop selected from among those of noble birth who could become knights.
As their defeat by the Sky Knights had shown, they might lag behind in pure quality compared to an order that ignored rank and birth and chose solely by talent and aptitude. Yet they remained the strongest knight order in the kingdom.
Armor and shields forged from high-grade metal could just barely turn aside the guns the revolutionaries used; against revolutionaries who lacked even that, no number of attackers could hope to win.
Once more the Royal Knight’s blade severed a revolutionary’s life.
“Hic!”
The fallen man clutched his throat, staring up at the ceiling with eyes full of venom as he died—and it felt as though he were cursing Tiara herself.
The shadow of the dying man stamped itself clearly into her pupils.
The Royal Knight forced the frozen, terror-stricken Tiara forward and kept moving.
They meant to pass through the secret passage, leave the capital, and reach the royal family’s hidden refuge. The moment they cleared the capital, however, revolutionaries who had been lying in wait ambushed them.
“Forgive me, Lady Tiara. Please hide for a moment.”
Pushing her back into the secret passage, the Royal Knight faced three revolutionaries alone.
…Something’s off.
They felt completely different from the revolutionaries he had killed so far.
Unlike the others, whose eyes had been hollowed out by rage, hatred, and suffering, these three had sharp, living gazes. Their clothes were clean, and they were tall and powerfully built—clearly well-fed.
Such men were rare among a revolutionary army composed mostly of the poor and half-starved.
They showed no fear even facing a Royal Knight; confidence radiated from every movement. Though each held a gun in one hand, they also carried other weapons that clearly saw regular use. Their rough, battered hands spoke of long years spent gripping weapons and training.
Professionally trained. I’ve heard the revolutionaries conduct combat drills, but they could never achieve this level of advanced training.
It was not contempt for the revolutionaries. He simply knew they lacked the resources to maintain such a sophisticated training system.
The revolutionary army’s history was long, yet they could never match the knight-training methods that distilled the kingdom’s accumulated know-how of generations.
They had no time to pour into such things, no leisure to perfect a complete system, and no funds to provide proper training facilities or meals.
No—something is different.
Guns, advanced weapons the kingdom itself had not yet developed. And the cannons they had brought out this time.
Were those not far too expensive for a force of impoverished commoners? Listen to the cannons booming even now. Could penniless commoners have prepared that much gunpowder?
Is some noble backing the revolutionaries?
He filed the thought away for his later report and studied the three men.
Individually each was a step below a Royal Knight, yet their weapons and numerical advantage of three-to-one put him at a disadvantage.
First kill one thoroughly. Then seize a gun. I heard guns take time to reload, unlike bows…
While they faced off, the revolutionaries were ramming long rods down the barrels of their guns.
Loading is similar to a cannon. Packing the powder, is it? Then I strike before they finish.
Even to a Royal Knight, guns were terrifying weapons. Pull the trigger and something flew at invisible speed and killed a man.
It was not like thrusting a blade yourself, nor like straining to draw a bowstring. The guilt of murder felt lighter than with any other weapon.
If such weapons were mass-produced, if reloading became faster, if the powder grew so cheap anyone could obtain it… a cruel world would be born in which anyone could slaughter others with ease.
As the Royal Knight charged fiercely, the three revolutionaries scattered in different directions.
Even while fleeing they continued reloading, using the one-handed loading devices researched and developed by the duke’s forces.
Two of them stepped forward to pin the knight down while the third finished loading and fired.
Bang!
The knight tensed and braced, but the bullet struck the rounded part of his armor and ricocheted away.
Guns were powerful, yet still not strong enough to pierce thick plate.
They might just barely punch through thinner sections, but the chain mail underneath would stop them.
The three revolutionaries coolly assessed the situation.
So did the Royal Knight after taking that shot.
They’ll aim for the eye slits with the guns. Draw my gaze, then strike in the opening.
Draw his eyes with the guns, attack with sound at the same time. Detonate powder at close range to assault the ears—his balance will break and he’ll be easier to hit.
The Royal Knight and the three revolutionaries—more precisely, three men who had been raised as candidates for the Sky Knights yet never made the cut—clashed, minds racing.
Every time a gunshot rang out, Tiara flinched. Each explosion of powder echoing through the darkness felt like the sky itself roaring in fury and hurling thunderbolts down upon her head.
She was forced to feel how utterly a frail human could be smashed to pieces before the power of nature.
If only she could crawl into a bed, wrap herself tight in blankets, close her eyes in the peaceful darkness warmed by her own body heat, and forget everything as she drifted into dreams.
Bang!
Every time that thought rose, another gunshot yanked her brutally back to reality.
There was no peaceful bedding anywhere. In reality she sat huddled on cold stone steps, trembling in terror as the sounds of fierce combat continued to reach her.
To hold the fear down she curled into a ball and chewed savagely on her thumbnail.
The beautiful, carefully tended nail was crushed and ruined in moments; the flesh at the tip of her thumb was scraped and bitten until blood began to flow.
The darkness. The blood and violence raging outside. The anxiety and terror of a future she could not predict.
It was the same mental stress Monia had endured when she first fell onto the Floating Island, when the storm struck, when Chester collapsed after killing the bear.
Similar stress now overwhelmed Tiara.
But unlike Monia, who had grown stronger through suffering and learned either to overcome stress or to bury and endure it, Tiara—softened by a prince’s love and a life of only happiness and good things—could not withstand it.
She had lost all sense of time, sinking deeper and deeper, until the blood seeping down the stairs soaked her bottom and finally snapped her back to herself.
“Huh? Eek! Blood! It’s blood! Blood!”
She leapt up to escape the pooling blood, touched her own backside, felt the thick wetness on her hand, and screamed again, thrashing in panic.
She had seen blood sprayed everywhere many times, but never before had it stained her own body.
“…W-who won?”
The gunfire had stopped. Blood had flowed this far. Whether the Royal Knight or the revolutionaries had won, someone would open the secret passage and come looking for her, wouldn’t they?
Tiara opened the tightly shut door of the secret passage, trembling. Should she open it? What would happen if she did?
Or should she go back? Back to the palace? To the place where people were dying every minute, every second? To where Jordy was?
Once she would have returned without hesitation. Now she could not. She hated that Jordy was not at her side in a moment like this. She hated the cold look he still gave her even after they had become husband and wife. She hated the way he tried to keep her locked in his arms despite that coldness.
Then… if she used this situation well, could she escape Jordy?
A woman with neither money nor skills would find no good life waiting no matter where she fled in a kingdom engulfed by war, but Tiara’s thoughts did not reach that far.
She stretched her hand toward the door of the secret passage.
The long-neglected passage opened with a loud, grating screech that sounded as if the world itself were complaining.
The stench of blood and the cold outside air rushed in and wrapped around her.
It was the signal that a harsh, truly merciless winter had begun.
“…An ice mountain has appeared.”
Monia, who had risen rather early to look at the scenery outside, gazed in wonder at the great mountain of ice that had risen far in the distance.
She had no idea that the Floating Island had become wedged among icebergs and come to a complete stop.