Episode 3: Waning Glory
He gasped for breath, his chest heaving in ragged, choking bursts.
"...Sir Hero?"
Einzel looked around, his vision swimming, to find the commander of the retreating soldiers staring at him with deep concern.
"...It's nothing. Excuse me for a moment."
Without waiting for an answer, Einzel slipped away from the ranks and ducked behind a thick tree. Doubling over, his stomach violently convulsed.
"Urrgh... hrrk... blech!"
He heaved, vomiting whatever bitter bile remained in his guts onto the damp earth. Violent shudders racked his frame, and hot, stinging tears carved tracks down his grime-streaked face.
"D-Damn it..."
The second he closed his eyes, the memory of being devoured alive tore through his mind with agonizing clarity. The sensation of his flesh being ripped from his ribs, of undead fangs gnawing through bone... it was all still there, burning across his phantom nerves.
He clamped his hands over his knees, fighting desperately to steady his trembling limbs. He didn't want to die. And if he wanted to stay alive, he had to move faster, sharper, smarter. That last run had been entirely his own mistake.
"Get up."
He gave himself the order, but the tremors refused to stop. The phantom agony of shredded skin clung stubbornly to his flesh.
"I said get up."
His body remained locked in place, refusing to obey. Finally, he ground his teeth and hissed with venomous self-loathing:
"Get the fuck up, you useless piece of shit."
Only then did his bent spine straighten.
"Fucking idiot..."
The enemy wouldn't pause just because he was hurting, nor would they show mercy while he writhed in agony. Rather than squandering his precious mental resolve on useless rage at this unending cycle of death, he chose to whip his own mind into submission and force himself back onto his feet.
Wiping every trace of misery from his face, he brushed off his tunic, plastered a composed smile onto his lips, and stepped back out toward the comrades who were waiting for him.
"Ah, forgive me. Had a momentary bout of dizziness."
"Ah, I see..."
"So, does the plan to push across the plains still stand?"
Einzel weighed the options for a brief second before nodding firmly. "Yes."
A resolute edge hardened his gaze. "Lena, can you scout the enemy from here?"
"I mean, I can, but..."
"Peria, cast sensory enhancement on Lena."
Peria complied without a word, weaving a spell of heightened perception over the archer. Everyone knew that an elven scout possessed the sharpest senses on the battlefield.
Lena's pointed ears twitched. A moment later, she opened her eyes and scowled.
"There's... a shit-ton of them, honestly. Every single direction is completely choked off except for one."
Einzel knew instinctively that the lone open path was the very route he had taken in his previous life. It was a massive trap—a funnel deliberately carved out to herd them straight into slaughter.
"In that case, can you guide us toward the path with the fewest enemies?"
"I can, but... why pick a fight when there's an open route right there?" Lena cocked her head, baffled.
Yet Einzel's mind was consumed solely by the necessity of breaking the true encirclement. "Trust me. Please."
"Fine, if you say so."
With Lena's nod, Einzel broke into a sprint, taking point at the front of the column.
Soon enough, the vanguard encountered the first silhouettes of the enemy. The net had not yet fully tightened, leaving the undead scattered thin along this flank.
"Break through them! Don't slow down!"
Einzel had realized that his obsessive need to avoid combat entirely had driven them straight into an inescapable snare. He would never repeat that blunder.
Cutting down the sparse undead in their way, he and the soldiers punched through the line with ferocious momentum. Once past that thin cordon, the path ahead lay completely clear. They had slipped the noose.
"All right! We broke through their perimeter! Keep running, don't stop!"
They ran on, pacing their breathing and stamina while refusing to slacken their speed. Behind them, an enormous horde of undead surged into view, spearheaded by Death Knights. Having abandoned their cordon, the monsters had reorganized into a relentless pursuit.
Yet in an open footrace across the plains, Einzel knew the shambling dead could never catch them.
"Beatrice! Blast them with everything you've got!"
A serene smile touched the Saintess's lips as she chanted a sacred prayer. A colossal beam of searing holy radiance swept across the rear guard, incinerating countless ghouls and skeletons until not a speck of ash remained.
Peria unleashed a rapid barrage of fireballs into the center of the swarm. Roaring flames engulfed the vanguard, and the heaps of charred, collapsing corpses formed an impassable barricade that stalled the remaining pursuers.
Einzel let out an inward cheer. If they kept this pace, they would make it.
The nearest stronghold, Delau Fortress, was only a few days' march across the plains. As long as they kept running, salvation was guaranteed. It was that simple.
He allowed himself a faint, bitter smile. Yeah. I died once, sure, but look how much better this run is turning out.
Yet what awaited him at the end of that desperate flight was nothing more than another layer of despair.
The fortress walls had crumbled into mountains of shattered stone. A monstrous inferno raged across the ruins, swallowing everything in sight within its greedy jaws. Dense, suffocating black smoke choked the darkened sky, and murder upon murder of crows circled above, tearing into heaps of butchered flesh.
Corpses. Endless corpses. A sea of the dead stretching as far as the eye could see.
"What... what is this...?"
Einzel stared blankly at the pulverized fortress. What in the world had happened here?
Then, one by one, the corpses began to twitch, rising in grotesque, unnatural motions. Only then did the horrific reality of Delau Fortress dawn on him.
Just like Felton, Delau Fortress had fallen to Grandis in a single day.
Einzel collapsed to his knees, his hands sinking into the blood-soaked dirt.
There was no hope left.
Run again? It was impossible. They had sprinted across the plains, burning through every last scrap of stamina on the solitary hope of finding refuge here. In this exhausted state, where could they possibly flee?
As despair closed its jaws around his throat, every hair on his body suddenly stood on end.
"Hmm? You're the Hero? You look far more ordinary than I expected. I thought you'd be some raving lunatic, or maybe a hulking musclehead."
A smooth, leisurely voice drifted from behind him, plunging his heart into freezing terror.
He knew it. If he turned around, he would die. Even knowing that, his neck moved on its own, dragging his gaze backward against his will.
Floating languidly in the air was a woman dressed in black, looking down at him with an expression of profound boredom.
Hair as black as pitch framed a pale, stunning face, and dark eyes gleamed with an unsettling light above a flowing gown. Yet her breathtaking beauty served only to magnify the suffocating dread radiating from her presence.
A pair of obsidian horns jutted from her forehead, sharp enough to pierce the heavens.
"...Grandis."
Merely forcing the name past his lips made his breath hitch.
"Yes, that's me. And you... you're that Hero who killed Genom in a single day, aren't you?"
"..."
Einzel couldn't speak. No, his throat seized up completely. He had stared death in the face dozens of times across his regressions, but he had never felt a horror so utterly paralyzing.
"Open that mouth of yours, little boy," Grandis said, smiling gently. Yet her eyes remained colder than ice.
"S-Stay back!"
It was Lena. While every other soldier and knight stood frozen beneath Grandis's crushing aura, unable to utter a sound, the elven archer somehow forced out a ragged shout.
Grandis scoffed softly, amused.
"I hear a little dog barking."
BOOM!
A single concussive blast erupted. The violent shockwave and blinding grit hurled Einzel to the dirt. When the dust finally settled, the sight before him shattered his mind.
Gone.
The hundreds of soldiers, the commanders, his companions—every single one of them had vanished without leaving a trace of flesh behind.
Grandis drifted closer, extending a pale, slender hand toward him.
"Now that the pests are gone, shall we have a nice, cozy chat, just the two of us? There's so much I want to ask you. At first, I assumed you'd die trapped in my encirclement, but somehow you saw right through it and broke out. It made me terribly curious."
Smiling, she reached out to grab him by the collar, but right at that moment, an orb of brilliant holy light shot through the air.
With a careless flick of her wrist, Grandis snuffed it out like a dying candle.
"Take your hands off the Hero."
It was Beatrice. Blood streamed from her forehead, soaking her silver vestments, and her entire frame trembled violently, but the light of absolute devotion in her eyes had not dimmed in the slightest.
"Your opponent is me."
"Oh? You actually survived that?" Grandis's lips curved into a sharp, cruel crescent. "Fine. Come at me, then."
The sky above them instantly plunged into pitch-black darkness.
"Not that I expect you to last very long."
It was over. In the end, even the Saintess was torn apart before Grandis.
A hollow, bottomless void opened inside Einzel's chest.
And so, he laughed.
"Bwahahaha!"
"My, laughing at a time like this?" Grandis remarked, tilting her head in mild surprise.
"Pwahaha! Ha... hahahaha!"
Laughing in a situation like this? Of course he was. When else was he supposed to laugh? People burning with ironclad resolve, brimming with hope and unyielding duty, had been wiped off the face of the earth by a single flick of this frail-looking woman's wrist. What greater comedy could there possibly be in this wretched world?
"Fuck this," he spat, his laughter dying as abruptly as it had begun, replaced by pure venom.
Grandis paid no heed to his cursing, floating down until her shadow engulfed him. "There are quite a few things I'd like to ask you. Think you could indulge my curiosity?"
Einzel glared up at her with bloodshot eyes. "Eat shit, you fucking bitch."
Terror had long since burned to ash, consumed by incandescent fury.
"My, how cold. And here I came all this way just to see you."
"...What?"
"Oh, it's nothing major. If you had slipped past my cordon right from the start without me noticing, that would be one thing. But you were already caught inside, yet somehow knew exactly which way to break out. It piqued my interest. Looking at how you simply ran in a straight line toward the nearest fortress, you're clearly no tactical mastermind. So how did you manage it, hmm?"
"Y-You mean... the reason you attacked this fortress out of nowhere was..."
"I saw you heading this way, so I simply came ahead to greet you."
A wave of sickening nausea rose in Einzel's throat.
"So then, care to answer my question?"
Einzel's jaw set like iron. "Go to hell, you crazy cunt."
Grandis nodded slowly, unoffended. "Right, of course. Are you mad because I killed all your little friends? Understandable. Well... it doesn't seem like you're going to satisfy my curiosity anyway..."
She seized him by the scruff of his neck and hauled him effortlessly into the air. Then, she began to rise, ascending smoothly into the storm-darkened heavens.
Suspended thousands of feet above the ruined earth, Grandis looked down at him musingly.
"I was just wondering—what happens if someone falls from this high up? Do you think they twitch around for a bit before dying, or does it all end in a single splash?"
Einzel instantly realized what she was about to do.
"If you're going to drop me, do it already."
Grandis burst into a light, melodic laugh. "Pfft, you really are an amusing one. Fine, then. If you're begging for it, who am I to refuse?"
Her slender fingers let go.
Einzel plummeted.
The wind roared violently in his ears for several deafening seconds before the ground rushed up to obliterate him.
His brain, his organs, his entire body burst upon impact with the unyielding stone. Landing headfirst, his skull caved in, his neck instantly snapping into fragments.
As his consciousness dissolved into darkness, the demon's parting words echoed through his shattered skull:
"Oh, look at that. He twitched first."
And that was the end.