Hero
He walked down a dark forest path where no sunlight ever reached, pushing his way through the dense trees. When he pressed on toward a single thread of light visible in the distance, a wide clearing opened up before him.
This place was a graveyard. The cemetery where Rian had laid to rest the bodies of his slaughtered village.
He collapsed at the edge of the graves and drained a bottle of harsh liquor straight from the neck. Feeling the burning trail it carved down his throat, he tore away the vines that had tangled themselves around the headstone.
"...I meant to come here with good news."
The past few years had simply been too busy for a visit. He had planned to return after his vow was fulfilled and the campaign against the Demonic Realm was declared.
Tak.
A memory surfaced unbidden, and a bead of sweat rolled down his forehead. Even now, the memory of that day remained vivid.
Demons had appeared without warning in a village that was, as always, wrapped in peace. With every flick of a demon's hand, people were torn apart like paper, and Rian—terrified out of his wits—had seized the chaos and fled blindly.
Into this dark forest path.
The reason he had dug the graves in these woods was so that he would never forget his own weakness—the coward who had abandoned everyone and run.
He had hidden beneath the roots of a tree, trembling, until he drifted into an exhausted sleep. When he came to his senses the next day and rushed back to the village, everyone except the boy who had fled was dead. With shaking hands he had closed each twisted face—faces contorted by agony and terror—one by one, and though his palms split open and bled, he dug the earth until he could dig no more.
It took seven days to carry every body into the forest. Just before he covered them with soil, he swore an oath. He would never flee like a coward again. Breathing in the raw stench of blood and rotting flesh, he vowed that he would kill the Demon King if it was the last thing he did.
From the day he made that vow until now, not once had he slept in peace. He had always run, eyes fixed only on what lay ahead.
And yet this was the result.
"...I'm sorry."
He had promised to repay the grudge a hundredfold, a thousandfold. But killing the Demon King was still a distant dream. At this point, whether he would ever even face the monster was beyond knowing. He had thought he was so close—and then it had all dissolved into foam in an instant, and his heart bent under the weight of it, bitter as ash.
He downed what remained of the bottle in a single draught. His head ached; he couldn't endure it sober.
He was tracing the carved grooves of the crooked headstone with a bitter expression when—
— Beeeeep! Beeeeep!
At the sound of the signal, Rian's face hardened to stone. He slipped a hand into his breast pocket and felt a violent vibration. He hadn't heard it wrong.
"Go home and wait for your next order."
The last words the King had left behind as he exited the audience chamber. Rian had never imagined he'd meant it.
It hadn't even been a full day since the man had tossed their agreement to the dogs. Was he supposed to just shut up and work, as if none of it mattered at all?
Anger boiled up inside him. And at the same time, sheer absurdity. Letting out a hollow laugh, Rian pressed the button—half out of a morbid curiosity to see what would come next.
What followed was beyond all reason.
"Deliver the congratulatory address at the Crown Prince's coming-of-age ceremony. Arrive by tomorrow morning."
"Ha. Haha."
The moment he confirmed the mission, a laugh he couldn't recognize as his own spilled out. It was utterly ridiculous.
It wasn't a matter of holding a line against an enemy no one else could stop. It wasn't a war or a terror attack that would claim countless lives. They were sending him to wish a grown man a happy birthday?
Rian was not a court jester. Before, he'd had no choice but to swallow even these absurd requests—because of the vow.
But the promise with the King was broken now. There was not a single reason left to indulge a demand this insane.
He picked up the magical device and hurled it. It struck a tree and split clean in two. Staring down at the fractured magic crystal inside, he thought:
"...What do I do now?"
He was done groveling at that man's feet like a dog. Rian sank into a hollow despair—and then suddenly clutched his head.
A fierce headache surged through him.
He had forced a punishing march for nearly a month without a single hour of sleep. It was only because his body had reached the Superhuman Realm that he'd held on at all—by any ordinary measure, he should have collapsed long ago.
On top of that, he'd taken a devastating psychological blow from the betrayal of the king he'd trusted, then swallowed an entire bottle of raw, 80-proof liquor. His limit had truly arrived.
His eyes began to close. His body tipped sideways.
...…
Leaning against a rounded mound of earth. Beneath the cascading moonlight, Rian fell into a deep, deep sleep.
Four o'clock before dawn. The hour when deep darkness swallowed the whole world. Only one building still had its lights on. Beyond the curtains, dozens of figures moved in ceaseless, rapid motion.
Under imperial law, it was forbidden for ten or more people to gather and work in one place after two in the morning. But they were exempt. They operated above the reach of the law.
The ones who gathered and analyzed critical foreign intelligence and conducted covert operations of every kind—the Drakess Empire's core intelligence agency. The Imperial Central Intelligence Bureau.
These were its agents.
"Jane. The files. Are they all compiled?"
Director Khalifa called out as she commanded the dozens of agents on the floor. A subordinate buried in paperwork answered without looking up.
"Almost finished, ma'am."
"Bring them to my desk the moment they're done."
It had been two days since the shocking report from their spy in the Kadema royal palace. The Bureau, frantic with the initial scramble to assess the situation, had finally settled into a calmer rhythm.
Khalifa entered the Director's office. Before long, a neatly organized file arrived at her desk.
Inside was a complete record of the Hero Rian's movements over the past ten years.
"...This is genuinely insane."
She kept turning pages, gauged the thickness of what remained, and involuntarily parted her lips. People say ten years is long enough for mountains and rivers to change—but no matter how she looked at it, Rian's achievements were not the fruits of a mere decade.
The repulsion of the Evil Dragon Arzark. The subjugation of the Sea Dragon Leviathan. The sealing of the Undead King Felgain. The conquest of the Great Labyrinth. The closure of the Dimensional Rift...
Of the calamities that had terrorized the world for ages and claimed countless lives, the vast majority had vanished into the back pages of history before the Hero's blade. The ones that still remained fell into one of two categories.
They lay beyond the sphere of his activity. Or they were hiding, afraid of death.
And that wasn't all.
One need only weigh the unread pages to see it—beyond those legendary feats, he had accomplished countless more deeds beyond counting. They only looked lesser because the pages before them held achievements so colossal. None of them had been easy either.
An overwhelming physical prowess that seemed to transcend the limits of mortality. But what the Empire truly feared about him was something else entirely. Rian was the God of the Battlefield.
Several years ago—
Having conquered the continent's south and west and spent over a decade consolidating from within, the Empire at last bared its ambitions toward the east in pursuit of total unification. But for all their grand declarations and fanfare, they had been forced to slink home in a shambles.
The reason for their retreat was one and only one: the existence of the Hero.
By every measure of force, the battle was hopelessly lopsided. The sole variable was the Hero himself. The Imperial high command had split its forces across five fronts; the moment Rian appeared at the first front, they launched a full offensive against the fifth.
The distance between the first front and the fifth was roughly six hundred kilometers. However mighty the Hero was, he was only one man. The plan had been a classic pincer gambit—devouring the east bite by bite.
But the Hero appeared on the fifth front in barely two hours, routed the Imperial army completely, and returned to the first front in another two hours, where he repelled the attack there as well. Years later, one of the generals who had commanded those soldiers recalled that watching him had felt like witnessing a genuine madman.
The continent's greatest martial might, coupled with relentless drive. Rian was a workaholic of the most terminal degree.
The steep, unbroken growth of the Empire since its rise had been abruptly choked off in recent years—and the reason was that man, guarding the Eastern Kingdom Alliance.
"...This really is absurd."
She set the file down and picked up another document from the desk. It was a verbatim transcript of the exchange between Rian and King Emil in the Kadema audience chamber—not a single word omitted.
Khalifa shook the papers in her hand. The first time she'd read this, she'd been so dumbstruck that she'd been unable to speak.
Wait—look at everything the Hero has done, and not a single task of it was paid?
And the one wish he'd been promised in exchange for all that hellish labor—and they reneged on it?
Khalifa was, in the plainest sense, speechless. Emil Fonso Kadema, fifteenth King of Kadema. She had known he was an idiot for a long time now. He was celebrated as the wise ruler who had led his kingdom's revival—
But that was entirely the fortune of a legendary hero named Rian having been born in his country by pure luck. In truth, he was an incompetent tyrant lost daily in wine and women.
Repeated investigations had long since confirmed it. Overall assessment: D-Rank Target. A rating handed down because he was incompetent—but not incompetent enough to ruin his own country with his own hands—and because his luck held.
Though she suspected now that he needed to be rated one level lower. No—two. To think he was the kind of fool who couldn't even hold onto the jewel sitting in his own pocket and dropped it straight into the dirt.
There was nothing to deliberate. One could safely declare the relationship between the Hero and the King broken beyond repair. And yet—
"Ah... my head hurts..."
She let out a long sigh. This alone wasn't enough.
Judging from his entire record, the Hero's disposition was Absolute Good. For reasons she couldn't fathom, Rian's morality admitted no compromise. He despised—even to an excessive degree—any affair in which the innocent suffered, and he loathed the wicked.
Imperialism, militarism, expansionism as founding creed. The pursuit of a brutal meritocracy in which strength ruled all. He was the exact opposite of the Empire.
The blood shed by the weak was never worth counting. War, war, nothing but war.
It had not been a wrong philosophy. The Empire had devoured the entire south and west of the continent on the strength of it. But now, it had become poison.
The undisputed strongest force on the continent—the Hero Rian—had made his hostility toward the Empire plain for all to see.
His relationship with the King looked to be in shards, but he was unmistakably a righteous man, and the people of the east hailed him as their savior. Even if he changed allegiance, he would simply change his enemy within that bloc—he would never come to the Empire.
"What on earth do I do..."
It had never happened before. Since taking up the mantle of Hero, Rian had carried out missions of murderous difficulty without a single word of complaint. He simply endured in silence, faithful to whatever was given him, without ever once causing discord.
The only opportunity to present itself in ten years. Would another chance like this ever come again? She didn't know. It might never.
'...If it doesn't, the Empire's goal of continental unification is all but impossible.'
A warrior of the Hero's caliber would have reached the Superhuman Realm—blessed with a lifespan far beyond that of ordinary people.
She wanted—desperately—to seize this chance.
'But... how?'
Part of her wished the other kingdoms of the Eastern Alliance would pull some asinine stunt and fall out with the Hero too, but they weren't all morons like Kadema's king; the odds were slim.
Stirring up discord deliberately through the imperial spies already embedded across the kingdoms was out of the question as well. If they were discovered, an enraged Hero would march straight on the Empire and butcher the entire leadership.
After witnessing that impossible divinity on the eastern battlefields years ago, the Empire had made its judgment: leave him alone.
Rian resented the Empire for the blood it shed—for its refusal to tolerate innocent casualties—but he never launched direct attacks of his own. And the Empire saw no reason to poke a sleeping lion.
The honey inside the hive was certainly sweet.
But without a special method, reaching for it rashly would only earn you a catastrophic sting.
Outright prohibition of all contact—that had been the Empire's standing policy toward the Hero.
"Ugh..."
Crunch, crunch... She was gnawing on her fingernails when—
BANG!
The door burst open with a violent crash against the wall. An agent came rushing in, drenched in sweat.
"Director! You need to see this right now!!"
"Damn it, you scared me. What is it?"
At his frantic clamor, Khalifa fixed him with an exasperated look and accepted the bundle of papers he held out.
"What is this... newspapers?"
The bundle was a stack of fresh-off-the-press newspapers, just published that morning across the various eastern kingdoms.
Intelligence agencies fed newspapers only the information safe for public eyes, so the vast majority of what they printed was unremarkable filler. And even then, ninety percent of it was already known to the Bureau.
And so Khalifa unfolded the paper with a bored, indifferent expression—
"...!!!"
Her eyes fell upon the blaring headline splashed across the front page, and in that instant, shock drained the color of her face.