Nechagni
Nechagni
A forest where villages once coexisted.
Near the woodlands the locals called Conwi Forest—unmanaged land that technically fell within the borders of the Kallus Empire.
There stood a fortress.
It wasn't famous, nor did it command any particularly advantageous position. It was simply a stronghold that two counts had built, seized, and lost to each other while expanding their territories.
The locals called it Nechagni.
Nechagni Fortress lay wedged between the domains of Count Warpol and Count Sholukund.
And now, that fortress saw the arrival of countless factions marching in with their forces.
They emerged with the lowering sun at their backs, their banners hanging limp until someone shook them back into motion—revealing themselves as they entered the stronghold.
The fortress wasn't spacious enough to house every soldier, so those left outside pitched camp and stared vacantly toward the interior, where their lords and commanders conferred.
The season had crept into winter.
The year's end, when cold winds blowing in from Frost Tree Valley wormed their way through collars and left bodies trembling.
Unlike the soldiers, those who occupied the higher seats were inside the fortress.
"We're all here."
A woman's voice, the kind that suggested a rough disposition. It resonated through the hall where a massive fire-pit blazed, drumming against the ears of everyone assembled.
The hall had been arranged with several long tables encircling the great fire-pit. Those seated watched the woman in silence.
Their stares might have been considered rude given her standing, but no one pointed that out.
After all, every person in this room held equal rank to hers.
The woman, Frida, met each gaze in turn and tallied their names and stations in her head.
First, there was the dragon-kin with white scales and scarred, ugly hands: Bahot Head.
Chairman of the Belus Alpen Council of Elders, once the finest warrior and blacksmith among his kind. He was the dragon-kin who had announced that a priest had emerged from his bloodline, then accepted Aslan—the man who dealt with it—granting him the surname Flametongue.
All those seated beside him were Heads, the dragon-kin elders. In Belus Alpen, where the Heart had vanished, the Heads were akin to kings. So they spoke.
"Not everyone is here yet. The Kingdom of Bida and the Duchy of Hilsinger haven't arrived."
"They've already sent word that they'll be late. For now, we are everyone."
"I see."
The dragon-kin offered a faint smile and leaned his massive frame against his chair. The woman's eyes drifted to the next figure.
Frida's gaze settled on Anna Heleminus.
A woman with red hair and green eyes. Though she carried beastman blood, her skin was the same peach tone as an ordinary human's.
She was absently stirring the fire-pit's flames with a wave of her hand when she belatedly noticed the eyes on her and met Frida's stare.
"...Is something the matter?"
"I intend to begin the council. Do you have any objections?"
The King of the Mountain Kingdom and Great Chieftain—a person whose opinion had to be sought. Anna Heleminus was that kind of being.
Considering she was effectively the teacher of nearly every mage and the mayor of a city dense with magic users, her standing rivaled that of a sovereign monarch.
She sat without a single guard, which made the space around her feel oddly empty, but the woman seemed unbothered. She merely inclined her head with a faint smile.
"Proceed."
Permission granted, Frida turned her head to the next figures.
To the person who, by rank alone, held the highest seat in this room—and to the one who held the lowest.
One was an Emperor. The other was a Count.
Both were rulers who hadn't yet reached adulthood, yet the gap in their standing was immense.
Between the two, the one whose consent Frida sought was the girl.
Though she was a child, her frame smaller than anyone else present, the air of dignity she carried was unmistakable.
A girl draped in an ornate dress, seated on a high chair brought by her attendant.
The young Emperor Ileina.
The Empress was staring at the door with an expression that almost looked wounded, then let out a sigh too quiet to hear. "He's not coming," she murmured under her breath before turning her head back toward Frida.
"Begin."
No one had asked the Count for his opinion, and he didn't seem to mind.
That was only natural. Everyone assembled here surpassed him in both rank and power, and this entire punitive expedition had been convened in response to his desperate plea for aid.
They had gathered now at Nechagni.
Their purpose, in some lights, sounded absurd.
A calamity beyond human reckoning, a mythic monster that had ended the age of men and ushered in the era of the Evil Gods.
They meant to hunt a high priest. The Sword of the War God.
They had come to this fortress to kill that monster.
They were discussing how to kill it.
More precisely, they were following the directives Aslan had left behind before departing.
Those directives were simple.
Concentrate their forces at Nechagni. Erect defensive fortifications. Deploy siege and defensive weaponry across the board.
Once they had prepared every war machine that might—or might not—prove effective against Warrior Monks, the next step was provocation.
The Sword of the War God was the mightiest Warrior Monk in the War God's eyes: the War God's idealized vision of martial perfection.
The fact that this ideal took the form of a colossal centipede-monster far removed from any human shape was unexpected, but that detail hardly mattered.
What mattered was that the War God almost never deployed the Sword of the War God unless the situation was truly dire.
To draw the Sword of the War God out, they had to create a crisis.
An attack on the War God's own stronghold: the War God's Battlefield Fortress sanctuary.
In truth, they only needed to feign an assault and apply enough pressure to manufacture a sense of urgency, but either way, the War God would interpret it as a genuine attack.
Once he believed his sanctuary was in peril, the War God would have no choice but to unleash his most powerful weapon, the Sword of the War God, without hesitation.
The plan Aslan had left behind was simple—and precisely because of that simplicity, its odds of success were considerable.
The one critical variable was the sheer strength of the Sword of the War God itself.
The council commenced, and they began exchanging words.
Troop placements. Siege equipment deployments. Supply routes for provisions.
At the end of that discussion, Count Sholukund spoke up with deeply worried features.
"Can we truly hunt the Sword of the War God?"
Eyes converged on him. The somber stares of those who occupied the highest thrones in their respective nations swept across the boy's face.
Under normal circumstances, he might have shrunk back—but the boy held his ground and opened his mouth again.
"The Sword of the War God... I thought I couldn't remain ignorant when I was the one who begged for help, so I devoured every scrap of material on that entity. And I was forced to confront the depth of my own ignorance."
When Aslan had vanished from the city—using Equalization right before his eyes before borrowing a sled—the boy had scoured every ancient tome and every text that dealt with historical truths, hunting for any mention of the Sword of the War God.
What he had found were accounts that were, at first glance, terrifying and scarcely believable.
It had beheaded twenty Lesser Deities in a single battle—martial divinities, the sons and daughters of War and Knowledge.
It had slaughtered the charging Spirit Beasts of Hunting and Prosperity to the last.
It had erased five of the Ancient Empire's mightiest cities with its own hands.
Until the Veil of Compassion tore the Northern and Southern Continents apart, that thing had writhed and spread terror across the whole of the land.
None of it was fairy tale or folklore meant for children. It was all historical fact.
The boy spoke, his face still unable to conceal his unease.
"It was a monster from the Mythical Era. I couldn't bring myself to believe it's something mere humans can oppose. Of course... Lord Aslan and his company are the mightiest Masters in history. Every member of the alliance gathered here is a hero worthy of being counted among the continent's finest. Even so..."
"You're afraid?"
"Yes, I am."
Count Sholukund. A young lord who had lost his father to the Warrior Monks, had barely settled into his title, only to find the Sword of the War God—an unprecedented cataclysm—standing before him.
For an instant, the assembled rulers wore looks of pity before their expressions shifted into varied casts.
The boy spoke on despite the sympathy and the scorn aimed at him.
"The Sword of the War God will not be our only opponent. Most of the Warrior Monks stationed at the sanctuary will take the field. And at their center will be the Sword of the War God itself. The monster that spread the War God's influence across this entire continent. To face something so mythic... I'm afraid."
"What are you trying to say?"
"I wish to hear, from those far above someone like me—whose territory isn't even worth comparing—what purpose has brought you here. That..."
The young count's words, as they continued, sounded less like genuine curiosity and more like something driven by another intent.
Perhaps he was probing. But some in the room weren't the sort to care about such things, and so the boy's speech was cut off swiftly.
The dragon-kin who had forged Aslan's armor—the one from whom the Dragon-king had stolen both the name Bahamut Head and his own blood-grandchild.
Bahot Head clicked his tongue, cutting off the boy's words, and declared,
"If that's your worry, you can set it aside. We have a myth of our own right here!"
As the room's attention fixed on him, the dragon-kin's lips curled upward.
"Aslan Flametongue."
The name came out abruptly. When the gathered rulers' stares filled with bemusement, Bahot Head elaborated.
"He has proven that fire kindles in his heart. Just as War and Knowledge did in the primordial days, when they were still human."
He spread his arms wide, and the old dragon-kin's massive frame filled the space. Exaggerated as the gesture was, there was a certain splendor in the motion.
"As War and Knowledge once received the blessing of Fire and Smithing, slew Void and Chaos, and drenched themselves in the evil dragon's blood to become gods—so too is Aslan being tempered in dragon's blood."
A myth stands before us as well. The pride in those words was impossible to miss. As the gathering's expressions shifted with realization, he clenched a fist and shook it.
"He is fire. The dragon's flame that will forge the world anew. We have no reason to fear a trifle like the Sword of the War God."
Frida read it as an attempt to bolster morale.
"Your praise is appreciated, but that's not what we're here to discuss. Rallying speeches might work on the soldiers, but for us..."
She spoke with an awkward expression, and at that, the dragon-kin let out a short laugh.
"You hear bragging? How fortunate you scale-less folk are. You'll never have to suffer the sudden collapse of an entire mythology."
Frida frowned slightly at the openly dismissive tone.
Her displeasure, however, had nothing to do with being insulted.
She was simply uncomfortable with someone talking so freely about her family as if he were some kind of myth—even if that family was a half-brother not bound by blood.
She disliked the way he spoke as though he knew Aslan better than she did, brushing aside someone who had watched over him longer, weathered more by his side.
So Frida was just about to say that she had thought of him far more, that she had been watching over him far longer—
—Warrior Monks!
A shout rang out from outside the hall, and she froze.
The beast—whether bear or wolf, she could never quite tell—that had been sprawled at her feet snoring stirred and growled. Frida clicked her tongue and bolted out of the hall.
Cutting through the flustered voices of the guardsmen and the figures scrambling past, she burst outside the fortress.
The walls weren't tall. She kicked off them, dropped, and landed with her mana tattoos flaring bright as she broke into a run.
Soldiers recoiled, startled at the sight of a woman suddenly flying down and sprinting past, but Frida had no intention of explaining.
Beyond the hastily erected palisades encircling the fortress, troops were frantically grabbing their weapons.
Frida weaved through them and climbed the equally makeshift watchtower.
She planted her foot, sprang, kicked off the ladder's rungs, and vaulted onto the tower's roof.
The soldier already up there—bow half-drawn—shrieked in surprise, but she paid him no mind and fixed her gaze on the figures approaching from the horizon.
Warrior Monks.
Warrior Monks mounted on bizarre locust-like creatures, charging hard.
Priests clutching their weapons, chasing something in urgent pursuit.
A fine haze of kicked-up dust obscured the quarry, but when the woman focused her eyes and fed power to her mana tattoos, her vision pierced clean through.
The thing the Warrior Monks were chasing was a sled. It careened across bare earth with no horses, no deer, not even a single dog in front of it.
The faces aboard that sled were very familiar.
The woman let out a hollow laugh and pulled an axe from her belt.
"You're a hell of a lot of trouble, little brother."
*
"Hit them!"
Fwuuuuung!
Kwa-ga-ga-gak!
"Aaaah, it's shaking!"
The arrow—long as a short spear—punched through a Warrior Monk, and the bow's recoil sent the sled lurching violently.
The girl clinging on for dear life shrieked in alarm, while an even smaller red-haired girl burst into vibrant laughter.
The two women deflected incoming javelins with axe and spear or batted arrows aside.
Beyond the cackling laughter and the clash of steel, the pursuers closed in. Warrior Monks, gripping long spears, riding grotesque locust-like monsters.
Warrior Monks born from stolen cavalry techniques.
They were chasing a sled that advanced without a single draft animal, propelled purely by domination-wrought telekinesis.
Crunch!
A swinging spear tore a chunk from the sled's side, and Tiyamal let out a shriek.
"That's why I said don't eat the damn deer, you senile old bastard!"
Utterly stripped of whatever dignity he normally tried to maintain, his tone was pure transparent panic.
The old man's reply, on the other hand, was as even as ever.
"Well, then you shouldn't have left such a delicious-looking deer sitting there. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get meat living out there?"
"Why the hell would I know that, you crazy old geezer!"
Thud-thud-twung, twung! Crossbows and bows loosed in rapid succession, and several of the pursuing Warrior Monks went down, pierced and burning.
Past the tumbling corpses, the hope that they might actually shake the pursuit was swelling—when the sled's speed suddenly began to drop.
"H-h-hey...!"
The fine dust haze grew rough. The sled visibly slowed, and the approaching Warrior Monks drew closer and closer.
Tiyamal let out a spasmodic yell. Aslan, who had been crouched against the sled's bed, rose to his feet.
"They're catching up! They're catching up!"
"No."
Around Aslan as he straightened, feathers hung suspended in the air.
Hundreds upon hundreds of Stymphalian pinions. At a redirected command of domination, death screamed forth in unison.
"We've won."
Thud-thud-thud-thud-thud!
The mounted Warrior Monks behind them were skewered by feathers, sent tumbling, hurled backward, swatted aside.
And then, toward those scattered figures, a wave of forms surged past the halted sled.
"Trample the bastards! Kill them all!"
A fierce woman's voice split the air as the wave of presences scattered the dust. Through the clearing haze, countless cavalrymen swept past the group, trampling and skewering the toppled Warrior Monks.
Screaming Warrior Monks collapsed to the ground as shredded meat, and the monks still pursuing from further back wheeled and withdrew.
As the situation eased and Aslan released his domination, someone drew up alongside the sled.
"You owe me. Damn little brother."
A woman riding a bizarre beast, a long-hafted axe gripped in one hand.
Aslan's sister, Frida.