The Winning Side
The last light of dusk had fully sunk below the horizon.
Chill air melted into the deep darkness, and only the ominous cries of wild beasts scattered through the night.
Gripping their weapons tight with suffocating killing intent, the mercenaries glared past the edge of the dark with frost-blue eyes.
Mistakes would not be forgiven.
These were men who had once basked in the brightest places of the world, only to be persecuted by the light—stray threads of it that had imprisoned them in darkness.
And now they would drag those threads down with their own hands?
An opportunity like this would never come twice.
At last, from beyond the night sky, the unfamiliar thunder of horse hooves came pounding toward them at full gallop.
Torches flared high with the fervor to burn the enemy alive, and the moment the shadows of their foes filled their eyes, someone raised his voice in a roar.
“Enemy attack!”
That was the signal.
Laios, Arthur, and Licht had already spotted the enemies arrayed before them, but they did not slow their charge in the slightest.
Sharpened spears leveled directly at the oncoming knights.
An instant before they would be skewered, the knights kicked off their galloping steeds and leapt.
Neigh-hiiigh!
The horses shrieked a long cry and bolted off in an entirely different direction, and the knights landed square in the middle of the enemy formation.
Swords slid smoothly from their sheaths, catching the torchlight in a flash of steel…… and Laios gave a low shout.
“Punch through!”
“Yes, sir!”
That command was enough. Before the mercenaries could even brace themselves, the three kicked off the ground and drove into their ranks.
“It's them!”
“Stop them! Stop them!”
The mercenaries scrambled into a hasty defense, but it was already too late. Arthur, the first to dart forward, cleaved the head from the man who barred his path in a single stroke.
“……!”
Before the dead mercenary's body had even finished crumpling to the ground, Arthur was already charging at his next target.
In the moment the once-solid encirclement wavered, Licht moved as well. The steadfast knight cut down the men whose eyes had been stolen by Arthur in a single sweep, trampling their corpses as he drove the enemy back hard.
Only after the bodies of instantly-slain mercenaries had littered the ground in numbers did one man finally manage to block Licht's path.
Claaang!
The shriek of steel against steel tore through the sky.
The instant Licht's movement stalled, the remaining mercenaries swarmed in.
But—
Thunk.
Arthur's sword plunged into the heart of a mercenary who had raised his blade against Licht.
“Not a chance.”
The sword wrenched free without mercy, and blood sprayed in every direction.
Twisting clear of the counterattack, Arthur used the momentum to slice the throat of the next man in line.
“Kraaagh!”
Meanwhile Licht, having neatly beheaded the mercenary before him, called out.
“Commander, go on ahead! We'll follow!”
“I leave it to you.”
Following the path Arthur and Licht had carved open, Laios kicked off the ground and surged forward.
Merchants bearing long spears rushed out to meet him, but they were no match for him at all. The moment Laios's sword flashed, every razor-sharp spearpoint was sheared clean away. As the disarmed mercenaries stood blinking in dumb astonishment, a merciless slash swept through their necks.
There was no time even to feel pain.
With the same stunned expressions frozen on their faces, the mercenaries spilled to the ground and poured out their blood.
Laios at the vanguard, Licht and Arthur guarding either flank—the three of them hewed through the enemy without pause. Even against overwhelming numbers, they pressed forward with absolute strength.
The shrieks and shouts, the eerie clash of weapons, dissolved in a heartbeat into utter pandemonium.
And from the highest point of the fortress, Blake watched it all in silence.
“……Truly, a master among masters.”
His tone remained as flat as ever, but the admiration threaded through it was genuine.
The spectacle of the three, seen from above, was magnificent. With a mere handful of men, they had seized hold of the battlefield in moments.
Licht and Arthur were strong in their own right, but Laios's performance was on another level entirely.
He tore through the gaps the other two pried open, cutting down multiple foes with each stroke and sparing them the burden of doing it themselves.
Moving in seamless coordination as if they shared a single body, they drove forward like shells fired from a cannon—unstoppable, direct.
Their destination, of course, was this fortress where Arendt waited.
“Genuinely impressive.”
“Told you. I said to pick only the strong ones—a rabble like this can't hold them.”
At the listless voice drifting over from nearby, Blake turned his head. He gave only a perfunctory nod in answer to Warren's short, groanlike exhale of wonder, then turned his attention absently back to the scene below.
Nothing at all could be read from the young man's expressionless face.
That one would have no need for a mask.
It was a composure that sat ill on someone so young.
Blake slid a fingertip down the edge of his own mask.
Even with killing intent laid bare before him, the boy had been ever so slightly tense—but not a shred afraid. The memory was still vivid.
Even now, nothing had changed.
Watching his comrades cut down enemy after enemy, he hadn't wavered in the slightest.
Is there truly not a single thread of loyalty in them……?
Or was it, rather, proof of a certainty so absolute that they could not possibly lose to foes of this caliber?
It was more than enough to explain why Rebecca—who favored nothing so much as the unusual—had taken a shine to him.
But Rebecca, too, seemed to have sensed it, however dimly. That swallowing him carelessly might prove to be poison.
Which was why, instead of hoarding him for herself, she had petitioned the Order for aid.
The correct call.
Killing the brat would be no difficult task, but frankly it would be a waste of a far too valuable piece. And yet keeping him as he was would be far too dangerous.
Arendt von Eckhart had recently become a figure of interest even within the Order.
Appearing out of nowhere, he had single-handedly neutralized every combat operative the Order had sent into the East Vault disguised as robbers—and stolen the Frost-Tinged Touch in the bargain.
Blake knew that a blunder by the low-ranking foot soldiers had left a trail leading back to the imperial family, but he had judged it no great calamity at the time.
There were reports, after all, that a useful line had been cast toward the palace.
That line had been this very apprentice knight.
A connection to the imperial knights would be of real value to the Order—so the Order had opened an investigation into him……
But before long, he was deemed a worthless card.
He'd been hailed as a genius on his induction, showered with every expectation—only to sink into the category of a hopeless failure, too awkward to dispose of. At best, they might have squeezed a few scraps of information out of him. Then word came that he'd been caught committing treason and arrested, and the Order lost all interest entirely.
That was certainly how it went……
Had that bumbling past self been a lie all along?
After his imprisonment and pardon, the young knight had somehow come to be called the crown prince's right hand.
Where had he learned about the artifact? How had he uncovered the plot to raid the East Vault? How had a man fallen to the very bottom and clawed his way back up again?
Everything was a riddle.
Which is why Vincent must have believed him a traitor to the Order.
But even that was not certain.
Above all, the information about the artifact had been high-grade intel shared only within Broken Heart's Sword. If a faction that central had betrayed them, there was no way the upper echelons would have failed to notice……
“What even is a god?”
Then Arendt's voice came again, pulling him from his thoughts.
“What the hell is a god, that you'd go this far? Is it really worth throwing your life away?”
“…….”
His face said he genuinely could not comprehend it.
His gaze was fixed not on the knights, but on the mercenaries dying in droves between one blink and the next.
“You've lived fat and comfortable like a pig under the light. Of course you wouldn't understand.”
“Yep, no idea.”
But the reply came back as listless as ever.
“Sure, whatever. Maybe there are things more important than survival. But the guys who did terrible things because they had no choice but to survive—now they're suddenly ready to die for a god? That's hilarious.”
“…….”
“They hurt people because they were desperate to live, got branded as society's dregs, as villains, and that injustice burned them up. So now they're grateful to a god who'll cradle them. That's what I heard, anyway.”
Stories he'd picked up drinking rank swill alongside the mercenaries.
“Which boils down to: everything they've done was a matter of survival, so it's all fine. But if the end result is dying like dogs, doesn't that make it all utterly meaningless?”
Just then, a man appeared before Arthur.
His garb set him apart from the mercenaries around him.
Licht, too, faltered as someone stepped into his path.
Blake's subordinates—deployed specifically to cut off the three who had driven so deep into enemy lines.
And unlike the rabble, they made short work of it, successfully catching the ankles of the relentlessly advancing Arthur and Licht.
The shape of the battle shifted.
As the two began to struggle against unexpected opponents, Laios faltered for an instant—but before long, he left the pair behind and resumed his advance.
Exactly as Arendt had said he would.
Blake watched this in silence, then spoke again.
“Not a dog's death. A martyrdom. They repent their foolishness and at last put their worthless lives to worthy use.”
“If that looks worthy to you, your sense of aesthetics is in a sorry state.”
Arendt let out a short sneer.
“Say it straight. You want to string up those trash lives that fell so easily for candy-coated words and use them as an offering to drag the one up top down from his throne. That's all this is.”
“……That isn't wrong, either.”
After a brief pause, Blake conceded the point.
“The beings of this land follow the god of light because he won the war of ages past. In the end, only the victor's name remains—that is the way of the world.”
Just as the last man standing is exalted as a hero, the god who triumphed in the struggle for power now ruled this world as its very definition of justice.
“The defeated wait in the shadows, biding their time for vengeance. The sun does not hang forever in the sky, and sooner or later a knife will surely find the back of even the greatest ruler. And then a new order will be raised over this land.”
“I'll grant you this much—the winner gets to be justice. We agree there.”
Arendt burst into a snorting laugh.
“God of light, evil god—who cares which one's right? In the end, all that matters is which side survives.”
Had he said that within the Imperial Palace, he'd have been buried alive for blasphemy on the spot.
While the pointless conversation carried on, the distance between Laios and the other two had quietly stretched wide.
As everyone else fought tooth and nail, Laios closed in fast, and in no time at all he stood within arm's reach of the fortress walls.
“Damn it, what the hell is—Kraaaaagh!”
A scream rang out from an enemy felled by Laios's sword.
A dropped torch spread, and fire leapt up; acrid smoke and the stench of blood stung the nose.
“That's why I'll side with whoever wins. That's the only way I get to strut around as I please.”
As long as his own safety was secured, he could stab the knights in the back—or shake hands with rebel factions bent on dragging turmoil into an already settled world.
A repulsively blasphemous, selfish statement—and yet it tracked perfectly with every step the boy had taken so far.
The face behind Blake's mask twisted, just slightly.
“And you—you are truly the ugliest of all.”
“I know.”
He was entirely unbothered by the blunt condemnation. Dirty, underhanded, and hideous was what 'Arendt' was, after all.
“Oh, by the way. Pervert Mask No. 2.”
“……What?”
Blake reacted a beat late, the moment the name he'd only ever heard in his own head was spoken aloud. For an instant, he doubted his own ears.
Arendt looked him dead in the eye and laughed, bright and cheerful.
“That's just how it goes—the hero wins.”
Because that was the rule of every classic tale of good triumphing over evil.
And as long as he stayed wide awake, glaring with both eyes burning bright, this story would never, ever become a tragedy.