Chapter 318
Chapter 318
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Translator: Ryuma
Chapter: 318
Chapter Title: The Puppets' War (15)
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Hoati was a warrior woman. Mother to two children, commander of the warriors who guarded the thriving city of Quiis, and a swordswoman renowned for her bold, sweeping strikes.
A hundred years ago, she had perished amid the conflict between Quiis and its neighboring cities. Awakened by Mumto, she was buried once more beneath the earth after his sealing, her name lost to the sands of time and forgotten.
In this modern age, no one remembered her name, her deeds, or her life.
No one except a single soul.
* * *
"Forward."
* * *
Mahotan was a priest. A middling sort—corrupt enough in his ways, fair enough in his duties—a common citizen of the cloth. He had spent his entire life in Eshuras's temple until old age claimed him, leaving his name etched on the city's stele for discovering a new embalming technique.
That was one thousand five hundred and twelve years ago. The stele had weathered away with the city over the long ages, and of his remains, only a single patella fragment endured.
Yet Mumto's spell had ensnared his soul, preserving it like a specimen across dozens of generations.
Now, a single person listened to his words, understood his life, and honored his existence—rewriting his sole monument anew.
* * *
"Stand there and draw their eyes. If they give chase, withdraw at once and harass them."
* * *
People die. But where do their souls go afterward? Time is the most potent law governing this world—no, across dimensions themselves—and even gods are not eternal beneath its rule. Souls, too, cannot achieve immortality within time's grasp.
Even the distant starlight shimmering from afar erodes away in time. How much more fragile, then, the tiny, frail souls of humans? How could they possibly endure forever?
Yet some say: As long as we are remembered, we live eternally. A romantic notion, but one without grounding in reality.
"Five hundred years..."
If human souls have a finite lifespan, Fernandez could declare as a scholar of soulcraft: No human soul can persist without a body for more than five hundred years. To surpass that threshold requires something beyond the soul's own tier—something like divinity.
Yet here, after one thousand five hundred years—the grand expanse that wears all things down—were souls that had survived, now mere traces, preserved still lifes of moments from their lives, shining atop this wasteland.
"...Cough...!"
That one person, each and every one, twenty-seven thousand souls crying out in unison.
Their lives, their deaths. Those radiant moments. Like rusted, worn coins unearthed from the silt, polished anew beneath the sun.
Twenty-seven thousand wraiths cried out as one. We live eternally in this instant.
Shattered spirit remnants. Even pieced together from splintered fragments, fractured memories, and tattered scraps like rags—even so, "I" still "exist."
Fernandez nodded to each one, facing them directly within his inner self. They lived, and so long as they were remembered, their souls were eternal. A profoundly romantic view—
But sorcerers were those who conjured romance to warp reality itself. In this moment, at least, they were eternal.
"Cough!"
-Stop. The resonance is too deep!
"How much... have I expended?"
-Impossible to gauge the cost of a spell used for the first time, Fernandez. But... surely, it struck true. You're running low now.
Three years remained to maintain bodily function. Five, if merely clinging to life. A span neither short nor long had been shaved away.
Fernandez wiped the blood-streaked corner of his mouth from his recent cough and rose.
"It's fortunate Kirhas and Abel can't witness this spectacle."
-That's what you say at a time like this?
"Feizashi, out of all the years we've lived, how much was spent merely thrashing to survive? Fifty years? Sixty?"
-......
The years as a wanted black mage dodging "heroes'" assaults, evading assassins' daggers, fleeing inquisitors' rosaries. The lifetime of wandering as Wildcast—how long had that been?
Feizashi offered no reply. Fernandez fixed him with blood-weeping eyes and spoke.
"Were all those truly meaningful? Was our existence merely for survival's sake? You know it too. We realized that only in our final days... and now, with this second chance seized twice over, we can find no reason to halt."
-But Fernandez, that doesn't mean we must die for it. We have purposes loftier than mere living or simple dying.
"Was our purpose truly... just that boy, our son?"
-What... did you say?
Feizashi's eyes widened in disbelief. Fernandez met his glare with fierce, burning eyes.
"That a single... child's life was everything we staked it all on...?"
-Shut—up!!!
Sparks flew from Feizashi's eyes—not metaphorically, but his wrath as a spirit body manifesting outright, cloaked in infernal abyssal flames.
Darkness gathered on his inhalation, pale fire rising from his depths. It was Feizashi at his prime, grandmaster of the Enssorcery school.
The black mage who commanded myriad demons, the villain cursed a thousandfold, the nameless scourge, "Feizashi of Destruction." The spirit before him now was no doddering old man spouting mean-spirited jests.
"Don't deny it, Feizashi Wildcast. We called our lives a mold because our existences were steeped in regret."
"Do you regret it, sir?"
Even if reborn a thousand times, how could I ever regret?
"Then let me become your regret."
So be it, dear Aria. Your pure heart kept even one like me from brushing past unscathed.
"Truth is, it was a lie, sir. From the moment I met you, I never once regretted."
I knew, Aria. You were too kind to hate me. So stay by my side. Pity me more. Don't go. Please don't leave.
"Ah, sir. Who will weep for you now?"
"I regret it, Aria. I do regret."
Fernandez's voice trembled as he stared into Feizashi's eyes. The scenery of that time—the cold corpse pile of his son—burned vivid once more. Those emotions felt then, that era's despair and remorse, gnawed anew at his heart.
Blood tears welled and spilled. Not from the grand spell's backlash. Not from dwindling lifespan. His screaming soul affected the flesh, the crumbling body sobbing in kind. In Feizashi's days, all tears had dried; now, only blood could flow from his eyes.
"I regret the days I held you, the moments you smiled by my side. I regret my weakness that failed to protect you and what you left behind. I regret every instant lived just to survive. Even the choices I made to die."
-Fernandez...!!
"Didn't you think the same!! Life itself was regret, and we'd finally seized the chance to reclaim that final remorse! Feizashi Wildcast! Now you speak of lifespan, of purpose? Don't spew nonsense!"
-......
The flames in Feizashi's eyes guttered out. The withered, twisted-faced elder sank weakly to his side.
"Every action we took was our purpose. Beyond mere breathing and existing! Rewinding regret to start anew—from the first spade of earth to the final mound piled high! All of it was our purpose!"
-Even if the epitaph atop that finished grave reads "Failure"?
[Death is neither endpoint nor new beginning. Merely a process.]
In that instant, a clear voice rang from behind him. Fernandez grimaced and turned. He sat alone on the vast plain, yet now Ravirata stood there.
Ravirata gazed upon the bleeding Fernandez and the Feizashi opposite him.
-You sensed me, Pharaoh?
[Indeed. From the moment you crossed into the soul realm to slay Mumto, I could see you.]
-Fortunate, then. It means my presence isn't some hallucination born of Fernandez's fractured mind.
[You never truly thought so, yet you jest amusingly, spellcaster.]
Ravirata approached Fernandez and placed a hand on his shoulder.
[I have much to say to you, but now is not the time. Still, will you swear to our pact?]
"...Swear?"
[A covenant is sacred. Our deal before the temple has already become contract in itself, yet I would hear it from you directly. I have an immediate need of you, but you require time. I would defer your fulfillment of the promise.]
"What is it?"
[After your death, fulfill my three conditions. As I said, death is but process. I buy not the time of the living Fernandez, but that of the dead.]
Ravirata smiled quietly beneath her golden mask.
[This is the respect I show you, Fernandez Cerned. Do you grasp what you've done?]
After mastering Asit necromancy, Fernandez had sat upon the plain preparing his spell. For a week. He communed directly with the soul realm trapped beneath this land's bedrock, raising the dead, drilling them into formation to harry the enemy's advance.
Sometimes advancing, sometimes retreating, sometimes exposing themselves. Fernandez sowed chaos among the foe. Karadskar's horde now sprawled across the entire wasteland.
The mighty host that should have flowed as one toward the Empire was scattered atop the earth. By phantoms that appeared sporadically to ambush, then vanished without sound.
The vast plain had become a labyrinth. The wildfire-spread enemy host now stagnated atop it.
Two hundred thousand strong. No number the mere twenty-seven thousand could hope to halt. Yet the sporadic eruptions and wind-like vanishings of these foes sowed sufficient disorder in Karadskar's advance.
It was a miracle. Halting two hundred thousand cavalry with just twenty-seven thousand. None might ever acknowledge it, but Fernandez wrought this miracle, seated motionless on the plain.
Enduring the toll of overlimit spellcasting eroding his lifespan, the exquisite rites attuning each soul one by one, even his own spirit fraying in the process—
"What I've done...?"
[Yes. You have forged your own dynasty.]
Ravirata smiled softly.
[Pharaoh is no mere title, no simple sovereign. It is god incarnate, the pure sun, the eternal unyielding light—and father to myriad subjects. The Pharaoh's being ensures his people's eternal remembrance. Thus, one Pharaoh becomes the era's very name during his reign.]
Those you raised upon this land now—who's name do they invoke in battle and death?
[Yours. You granted life to those rotting forgotten below. They will perish chanting your name. No mere necromancer could achieve this. You summoned each one personally, honoring their lives.]
Now is the time they honor you in turn.
[You shall live eternally. They have made it so. I am Ivaris's god. And now I face the god of the Great Wastes. You have become their sun.]
As her words ended, Fernandez at last heard the cries of the twenty-seven thousand wraiths linked to him. From the mana stone veins beneath this land, their traces binding them still, trampling foes in perfect unison—their shouts.
Each small, faint cry. Their chorus echoing.
Reverence offered to the one who remembered their eternity. Vows to etch his being forever.
-Cerned!
One wraith charged the enemy's camp shouting thus. In another place, another battlefield.
-Cerned!!
The phantoms surged forth chanting his name. Flames erupted on enemy wagons and supplies; men and mounts screamed in terror.
[Righteous and true. Whatever your past, your present is not. Would you call the epitaph atop that grave "Failure"? I shall name it "Endeavor," and to the being who will pierce that tomb and rise anew, I shall bestow your name. If life was your mold, your molding ends soon. Freed and liberated, you shall recall our pact from my own vantage.]
Ravirata supported the staggering, weary Fernandez. Cradling his half-lidded form, she wiped the blood from his face.
[Your days may wane, but your era now dawns. You have endeavored enough—rest your eyes a while.]
In this moment, the two hundred thousand-strong advance halted. Never since the great northward push had such stagnation gripped them.
Kirjatz gained time to regroup from Karadskar's path.
The Empire's conscription engines hummed at full capacity, mustering forces across its breadth.
Beastkin tigerfolk withdrew from desperate skirmishes to reorganize.
The war was not over. Merely deferred. Victory and defeat still balanced on a knife's edge—
But time to prepare a counterstrike. That brief window civilization so desperately needed had at last arrived.