Melanie Hates Joshua
The battlefield, still bearing every mark of a savage clash, was strewn with corpses. This was imperial land, but the frontier was no place people could yet live. Where human hands had never reached, monsters swarmed without number, and the Empire carved out room for settlement by driving them out.
The units that roved these borderlands usually fought monsters, not men. The bodies piled in every direction made that plain enough — dangerous beasts rarely seen elsewhere, the kind that marked this as monster country. From wyverns to cyclopes, every carcass had belonged to a predator that once ruled this ground. And the imperial soldiers standing over them had just claimed that throne for themselves.
"You've all had a hard time of it."
A knight mid-swing, finishing a monster with a blow to the skull, startled at the voice behind him and stumbled back. He hadn't sensed a thing, yet the speaker had closed to sword's reach. Smeared in monster blood, the knight raised his blade, sharp eyes locking onto Joshua.
"Ah, no need for that. I'm imperial too. Just here to see someone."
Joshua's luxurious formal attire looked utterly out of place on this wretched field. Starting with the knight who'd first gone on guard, the soldiers around them slowly turned their stares on him. Exhausted faces. Armor caked in blood and mud. No formation to speak of — they were scattered wherever they'd dropped. And yet the presence they turned on Joshua and Cale was razor-sharp.
Frontier units were heavy with former enemy generals. Most had lost their countries to the Empire, and the resentment still sat in their chests. Imperial soldiers or not, the looks they gave each other were the eyes of predators sizing up prey.
"What are you doing here?"
From among the crowd, Melanie stepped out, equally plastered in blood and mud. Amid all those hulking figures, her frame looked almost slight. Even filth couldn't hide how beautiful she was. Strip the armor, put her in a lavish dress, and you'd swear she'd never known war — a face made for tea and embroidery.
"You wouldn't come to me, so I had to come to you. It's been a while, Melanie."
"I asked what you came here for."
"And I answered: to see you."
Joshua chuckled. Melanie's face didn't change. She ordered her unit back to work, then started toward him. Cale had just begun to think she was getting a little too close when Joshua smoothly stepped back, putting space between himself and Melanie.
"Whoa, whoa — we're not that close. Were you going for a happy hug?"
Melanie clicked her tongue and stopped. Cale wondered if she'd actually been about to attack. Even if she hated him, they were both imperial. Would she really go that far? Intelligence coming into the Department said she was loyal, with no grievances against the Empire at all.
Melanie didn't continue the conversation. Instead she looked past them, toward the Imperial Intelligence Department unit waiting far from the battlefield. They'd come as Joshua's escort, but with a force full of former enemy generals and a battle just ended, they'd been held back — no sense poking a hornet's nest.
"Twenty seconds... twenty-three?"
Joshua spoke to Melanie as she counted off those cryptic seconds.
"Even if I am retired from the field, I wouldn't go down in twenty-three seconds, so don't even think about it. Besides, I've got an excellent shield right here."
Joshua grabbed Cale by the shoulder and shoved him forward. Cale gave Melanie a small, composed nod. His face didn't change, but inside he was a wreck. Information gathering and analysis were his specialties — not combat. He wouldn't lose to a common soldier, sure, but these people were veterans who beat cyclopes to death. He could confidently say he was the weakest person here.
"What a shame."
She said it with a lovely smile, as if she truly regretted not being able to kill them, then sheathed her sword and sat down on the back of a dead cyclops's skull.
Joshua and Elliot had always clicked. When Joshua first joined the unit he'd been a pretentious idiot; before long he'd absorbed Elliot's habits and become an idiot who did nothing but crack filthy jokes. Spending all that time together, even his personality and speech had started to match. Listening to the two of them go back and forth used to make her smile.
Joshua's way of talking hadn't changed at all, and Melanie smiled. The only difference between then and now was whether she'd known he was a traitor. The only smile she could give him now was the happy one that came with finishing her revenge.
She looked at him with an expression that said, go on, say what you came to say. Joshua glanced around, then raised both hands low, palms out, to show he meant no harm.
"I'm going to put up a soundproofing spell. Nothing in it but the silence, so don't wor—"
KRRAAAACK—
Before he could finish, stone pillars erupted on all sides, forming a circular barrier. It sealed them off completely from the outside world. The open ceiling crackled with blue sparks as an invisible force locked it shut. Cale flinched. He hadn't even felt the mana, and she'd thrown up a barrier this massive. Melanie was still sitting there as if nothing had happened — and she'd conjured the whole thing in an instant.
Joshua, who'd been getting into position to cast the soundproofing himself, shrugged and lowered his hands.
"Haven't seen this in a while. You haven't used it since Marquis Edelian wiped the floor with you, have you?"
"I was strategically pinning down a commander. That's all."
"That's not how I remember it. Elliot told you not to, you charged in anyway without knowing your place, got the living hell beaten out of you, and nearly died."
Their memories differed, but the fact that Edelian had beaten Melanie was the same. They were smiling at each other when Melanie's hand drifted slowly toward her sword. Joshua spoke in a hurry.
"You want to see Elliot?"
"That isn't a name for you to say."
Her hand didn't stop. She took the sword. With a sound that was soft and sharp at once, the blade came free — the only clean thing on her, the steel itself — and it drifted through the air as if it were floating. Cale knew the intelligence: Melanie always stirred her sword through the air like a ritual before a fight. He took a step to the side.
"That's cheap."
"I'm not a combat operative, sir."
Joshua looked incredulous at his subordinate's betrayal. Meanwhile Melanie let the sword flow like a dance, tracing a half-circle as she settled into stance as naturally as breathing.
"Today's my last day. And yours, too."
"I never liked how extreme you always are."
"I never liked how close you were to him."
"Jealous? Not my fault my charms outdid yours."
Melanie didn't answer. She pitched forward as if collapsing, then exploded into a thrust so fast Joshua had to twist desperately aside. He opened the distance and reached into empty air. Space split, and a sword sprang into his grip. No ornamentation at all — blade to hilt, it was black as pitch, the metal itself unidentifiable.
A sharp stone spike shot up from under his feet. Joshua didn't dodge. He stomped it to rubble, used the planted foot to set his stance, and brought the sword down in a flawless overhead cut. The most basic strike a swordsman could throw — and everything in front of him was crushed. He'd swung a keen blade, yet it landed like a blunt weight; the corpses in its path burst under the pressure.
Melanie, well inside the range, didn't so much as flinch. As casually as Joshua had, she drew a weapon from empty air. The moment a strangely thick-bladed halberd filled her hand, she charged him. Melanie with a sword in one hand and a spear in the other, Joshua with that unidentifiable black blade — they crashed together and fought with savage intensity.
From the sidelines, Cale watched in a daze as two names from the Era of Strife tore into each other. Never mind that his eyes couldn't keep up with the movement — the spell formulas they wove in between were too fast. He only understood a spell had been used after it had already gone off. If he'd swapped places with either of them, he'd have been dead in an instant.
They'd already cast more than a dozen formulas and traded dozens of blows, and not even twenty seconds had passed. The pace was beyond him. Cale wanted to check what was happening outside, but the barrier made that impossible. If the Intelligence Department unit had arrived on her predicted timeline, he should have felt them breaking the barrier by now. Her own unit was probably holding them off.
Cale was scowling at an incident that could easily spiral into civil war when Melanie drove her sword into the ground and roared.
"Hah—!!"
The shout sent a wave of force in every direction, and the magic Joshua had seeded all around them shattered. Dozens of magical chains, laid to restrict her movement, dissolved back into mana. Poor Cale was caught in the blast, hurled across the space, and slammed into the wall.
"Kh—..."
"Cale!! You dare abandon me and run, and look at you now!"
What the hell was this idiot of a superior even talking about. Cale wanted to curse him out, but the pain wouldn't let the words form. He fought to get his breathing back.
"Ah. Sorry."
Melanie apologized to Cale, then swept her sword across the ground in a semicircle around where he lay.
"Don't come out of there."
With that, she turned her blade on Joshua again. He'd been weaving formulas in secret while they talked, and now he scattered lumps of Black Mana in every direction. Melanie discarded her sword, took the halberd in both hands, and battered aside the spells flying at her at random.
The funny part: Joshua's magic, which looked like it was being flung around at random, never once crossed the line Melanie had drawn. Even the black mana she deflected skimmed past without entering. They were fighting at full tilt and still had the skill to keep Cale in mind.
"You really are cheap."
"I spent my time with a man whose motto was making the other guy as miserable as possible."
Until that moment Cale hadn't realized it, but Joshua had used the safe zone around him to pull something. Even hearing the conversation, it was only a guess — nothing Cale's own skill could have detected.
Joshua used a wide variety of spells that did little direct damage but constantly obstructed his opponent. Melanie used only a handful, but they were precise and economical. Their combat styles couldn't have been more different. As magic and steel kept trading, Joshua began to lose ground.
It was only natural. Whatever the gap had been when they served in the Devil of All Nations' unit, after the surrender Joshua had spent his days pushing paper at the Intelligence Department, while Melanie had kept touring the frontier, bouncing from one brutal battlefield to the next. Melanie, once one of the vice-commanders who represented the Devil's army, had only grown since then. She pressed the fight with terrifying skill. Joshua's hands and feet were getting tangled; he threw up a massive pillar of fire to shove her back and shouted.
"I surrender! I surrender! I look away for a second and you've turned into a monster."
"The price of surrender is your head."
He had both hands up. Melanie didn't care; she was winding up to swing again when Joshua put on that insufferable smile.
"There's something more important than that, isn't there?"
"...Save the nonsense for the afterlife. And think of an excuse to give him while you're at it."
A vast surge of mana wrapped her body. The heavy halberd shuddered, overfed with power. Cale paled at the amount of mana — enough to shatter the weapon — and braced for the shockwave. Melanie settled into a wide swing and murmured, almost to herself.
She recited it with sad eyes. Joshua beamed at her, bright as anything.
At Joshua's words, Melanie froze — and so did Cale, staring blankly, unable to speak.
That the Devil of All Nations was alive was a secret of secrets. Officially, Rai had been executed a month after the Keilen Kingdom fell. Plenty of people respected him, even revered him, for the battles he'd won. Plenty more hated him. The soldiers who'd died to his tactics weren't few, and neither were the officers who'd died to his blade. Men of rank were usually kept alive for ransom, but when a battle turned savage, lives were lost as a matter of course. The Empire was full of people who, if they heard he was alive, would get up and reach for a weapon that instant.
Frozen by the shock, Melanie asked in a trembling voice.
"Is... is that true?"
"Yeah. He's doing just fine. Want to see him?"
His face was a mess from the fight, but Joshua grinned as if he'd just taken the upper hand. Melanie, in no state to care about that infuriating expression, nodded blankly.
"Do as I say, and I'll have you meet him within a few months."
Cale stared at Joshua, stunned, not even sure what kind of offer this was. Putting those two together meant creating a new faction inside the Empire. And the head of that faction would be the Devil of All Nations. Most of the unit currently under Melanie's command were former enemy generals. A force no one could reasonably fault for resenting the Empire — and it could go over to the Devil of All Nations.
"He's... he's really alive?"
The news that Rai was alive hit her so hard she asked again. Joshua nodded, and she sank to the ground and wept. It was far too fragile a sound to come from a knight who'd carved through battlefields and slaughtered her enemies, but she cried like a child, wiping the tears with a filthy gauntlet. Dirty blood and mud smeared across her face, but the smile — a happy one — never lost its light.
"I'll have you meet him in a few months, so go pick out a nice dress. You know how he is. Right now he's surrounded by a bunch of fresh young things."
There wasn't a lie in what Joshua said. The place Rai was living was an academy packed with young people.