The True Face of the Lust Emperor
Whoooooosh—
A fierce wind howled once the explosion had spent itself.
As the thick smoke cleared, a desolate wasteland emerged where trees, grass, rocks—everything—had been utterly scoured away.
Yet the single place where Jincheon had stood remained completely untouched by the blast. The two women who had collapsed near him were likewise unharmed.
Pretty intense explosion. If it weren’t for the magnetic field, I could’ve gotten a look at those particle weapons too. Shame.
Particle weapons fired inside a powerful magnetic field lost virtually all accuracy. That was why both the Zabalcan soldiers and the resistance fighters had armed themselves with conventional live rounds and explosives instead.
Anyway, I’ve got a solid idea of how to write up that “business card” now.
There had been a reason Jincheon deliberately spent five full minutes tanking their attacks.
In this world, a Bio Device could generate a digital business card and beam it straight to another person. Jincheon intended to make one of his own—more accurately, a warning disguised as a business card.
1. Any fight against Jincheon must be conducted in mecha.
2. Should Jincheon lose, he will serve the victor free of charge for ten years.
3. During that free service, only Jincheon’s personal abilities may be freely used.
4. Any attempt to abuse the free service in order to seize Jincheon’s property immediately voids the contract.
5. Anyone who ignores the above warning and initiates a fight outside of mecha will come to regret it without fail.
That should cover it. I can always add or revise later if needed.
The card was both a self-imposed source of tension and a personal set of rules. With power like his, true tension was almost impossible to feel—exactly as the battle just now had proven. So he had created a constraint: lose a mecha duel and he would serve the winner free for a decade. A pure person-to-person fight was something he could never lose even if he wanted to; hence the rule.
Of course no one would accept the terms at first. But if he repeated the offer often enough, it would eventually become an accepted law of the galaxy.
“With this, I’ve avenged you, Kunlo.”
Having finally given his disciple’s soul a measure of peace, Jincheon turned his gaze to the women.
So… what now?
He looked at Calsira and the violet-skinned, four-armed alien woman, lifted them both with Heogongsbeomul, and began retracing the path the resistance fighters had taken.
With Jincheon gone as well, only a cold, empty silence remained on the battlefield.
After some time had passed, a man who floated through the air without any machine or equipment landed and revealed himself. Smooth-skinned, with large, animal-like eyes, he scanned the surroundings.
What the hell happened here? This is far too violent to be a simple clash with the resistance…
He quickly surveyed the field and tilted his head at the traces of a massive explosion. Just in case, he searched for any signs of escape beyond the battlefield, but found nothing.
Total annihilation, maybe? I was supposed to locate the ruins the Zabalcan Empire is hunting. Looks like my mission’s a failure too.
Lacking any further details, the man concluded that the resistance and the ruin-exploration team had wiped each other out. Apparently the resistance had been stronger than the intelligence his order’s informants had provided.
“Hm?”
Then a corpse lying just outside the blast radius caught his eye. A young man whose body had been partially torn apart by the explosion, a hole punched clean through his heart—Kunlo.
The man couldn’t help an involuntary exclamation.
“This… is incredible…! Spiritual energy this intense!”
Even though considerable time had passed since death, a soul thickly mixed with hatred, rage, and sorrow still refused to leave the body.
In a universe that worshipped science above all else, the man belonged to the only organization that could still sense the existence of souls—the Order. He was instantly captivated by the spiritual power clinging to Kunlo.
If a youth with spiritual energy this potent were taught psionic techniques, he would become the strongest enforcer imaginable.
He gathered Kunlo’s corpse into his arms, closed his eyes, and focused.
Zzzzing!
A strange wave of energy coiled around the body. Then both man and corpse rose into the sky and vanished somewhere far away.
“…Huh?”
Heliane opened her eyes to a familiar ceiling—the rocky roof of the cave that had served as their bunker and base.
She pushed herself upright and looked around. Signs of habitation remained. Yes, this was definitely the cave they had used as headquarters. A blanket covered her, so her body wasn’t cold.
“Ha… haha…”
Confirming the blanket’s existence, she let out a deflated little laugh and let herself fall back down.
“It was a dream. Of course it was.”
She had decided that everything up to this point had been nothing more than a dream.
“No wonder it felt so unreal. That many traitors, and Gronel of all people turning on us? Impossible.”
A voice, however, dragged her back to reality.
“No. It wasn’t a dream.”
“!?”
Hearing the voice she had heard in the “dream,” Heliane’s expression froze solid.
“You…!”
She shot upright and located the source. There stood a Zabalcan woman with small horns—Calsira. She must have woken a little earlier; she was currently doing light stretches to loosen her stiff body.
“How are you… no… why…”
She couldn’t hide her shock that a figure from her dream now stood in reality. More precisely, she had desperately wanted everything she had experienced to remain a dream.
“You must have felt it vaguely yourself. That none of it was a dream.”
“Kh…!”
Calsira’s words yanked Heliane out of her escape and into cold reality.
“So it… was all real…”
The betrayal of comrades she had fought beside since the very beginning, people she had believed would always be with her. The shock of that loss plunged her into despair and helplessness. Now she was the sole remaining resistance fighter on this entire planet.
But how did we even survive… no. There’s something more important to settle first.
It was strange that they had returned alive and relatively unharmed, yet Heliane set that question aside for a far more pressing matter.
“You—what’s your real identity?”
She had lost her family, and now her resistance comrades as well. She was completely alone. Even revenge against the Zabalcan Empire itself had become impossible. The only thing still holding her upright was her burning hatred for the Horned Empress.
Radiating the intent to leap at any second, Heliane demanded answers from Calsira.
“I’m the pilot of the mecha you call the Horned Empress.”
“The Horned Empress is the First Princess’s machine.”
“Yes. That’s how it’s known publicly.”
They began the conversation they had never been able to have while prisoners.
She must be a relative or friend of people I killed. That’s reason enough for her to know the truth.
Sensing the fierce hatred rolling off Heliane, Calsira decided the other woman also deserved to hear everything, and laid out the full story. There was no longer any reason to keep secrets.
“……”
Once the truth sank in, Heliane’s eyes went blank for a moment; her brain simply couldn’t process the information fast enough.
All this time she had directed her hatred at the First Princess. Yet the true pilot of the Horned Empress was the Fourth Princess—frail, kept out of the public eye, her achievements stolen by the First Princess, a woman of low birth and small horns whose talent made her a living shame of the imperial family and a constant target for assassination. A pitiful existence.
“D-don’t lie to me!”
Heliane rejected the revelation outright. The target of her revenge was supposed to be an arrogant Zabalcan royal who looked down on other races—not a woman desperately struggling just to survive.
“I’m sorry.”
“Why are you apologizing?!”
“Among the people I killed there must have been acquaintances or family of yours. Even if I did it to survive, the fact that I killed them doesn’t change.”
“You think saying that will make me go ‘yes, I understand’ and just accept it?!”
“I know. Apologizing like this won’t earn forgiveness—that would be ridiculous. But I still wanted to say it.”
Calsira then gave a self-deprecating little smile.
“I’m pretty selfish, aren’t I? Just wanting to ease my own heart a little by unilaterally apologizing.”
“Don’t smile like that!”
The Horned Empress was not allowed to smile that way. The Horned Empress was not allowed to make that face. The Horned Empress was…
“Uwaaaaah!”
Rage and hatred with nowhere left to go short-circuited her reason. Heliane lunged at Calsira.
Takaaang!
“That’s far enough.”
“Ugh!?”
At that moment Jincheon appeared in the cave entrance and fired a shot into the ground at Heliane’s feet, stopping her cold.
“You two woke up earlier than I expected. If I’d known, I would’ve kept you separated.”
He had calculated based on Terran standards and assumed he still had time, but both women had recovered faster than predicted—likely a result of their superior physical capabilities.
Still, this is the first time I’ve actually seen a Zabalcan or an Orobece in the flesh.
He had a reasonable excuse: he had gotten the chance to “examine” other races at least once, but these two species he had never even laid eyes on before.
Three complete strangers. In that awkward combination, Calsira was the first to speak.
“How did you manage to save us in that situation, Jincheon?”
Heliane was equally curious, so she kept her mouth shut for once.
“Diligently. Well.”
“…Excuse me?”
“Diligently. Well. By working hard.”
“……”
Both Calsira and Heliane stared at him with identical “what is this idiot?” expressions.
“I cleaned everything up, so at least you don’t have to worry about pursuit teams.”
“What kind of bullshit is that?! You’re saying you alone took out Zabalcan soldiers in the latest battle suits?!”
Heliane simply could not believe that a man who looked completely unequipped had wiped them out and rescued the two of them. She began scanning the cave with open suspicion, clearly wondering whether this was some elaborate trap designed to extract information.
“Don’t believe it if you don’t want to.”
Jincheon had no intention of wasting breath on explanations. He ignored her and turned back to Calsira.
“What are you going to do now?”
“…I don’t know. I had already accepted that I would die here. I never even imagined there would be an ‘after.’”
Honestly, even though Jincheon had promised to save her, she had never truly believed a single unequipped individual could rescue them from soldiers armed with the newest gear. Consequently, everything beyond that moment was a complete blank.
“Then I’ll make a proposal.”
Jincheon looked almost relieved.
“If my instincts are right, fog will start rolling in early the morning after next. Let’s explore the Calsorn Empire ruins then.”
“What?”
Calsira’s face stiffened.
“I have no idea what’s inside, but that’s exactly what makes treasure hunting fun.”
“Wait a moment—right now we don’t have the luxury of—”
“What comes next is already decided anyway. Hide our identities as thoroughly as possible, find a black-market trader, and slip out to another star system.”
He gave her no chance to reply and pressed straight on.
“So before we do that, we explore the ruins. This is a chance to see just how incredible Calsorn Empire relics really are. Be a waste to just walk away, wouldn’t it?”
Having completed his disciple’s revenge, the heavy atmosphere from before had vanished; Jincheon was back to his usual flippant self. Calsira realized she had been placed in a situation where the answer was already decided.
Without this man’s power I’ll spend the rest of my life hiding my face, drifting from one empty place to another.
She currently possessed not a single credit and not a single connection—a complete non-entity. If Jincheon had truly “taken care” of things, the Zabalcan Empire would comb the forest again for investigation. A penniless woman like her would live forever holding her breath until the day she was inevitably discovered and quietly disposed of.
Fine. Better to grab something valuable from the ruins. There should at least be a few portable relics.
On second thought, exploring the ruins wasn’t entirely a bad idea.
“Then on the foggy day, how exactly do we find the—”
She had just nodded and was about to ask for the details of his plan when—
“Don’t just decide everything between the two of you!”
Thoroughly ignored until now, Heliane finally snapped.
“Aish. Stop yelling already. You’re hurting my ears.”
Jincheon frowned at the woman who had been shouting irritably since the moment she woke. Heliane still couldn’t fully accept the situation, but one thing at least was crystal clear.
For that purpose she drew the two daggers strapped to the thigh of her ruined nano-suit. These were not ordinary knives; they were ultra-vibration blades. A single stab would be fatal.
She flung the daggers toward the arms growing from her shoulder blades and dropped into a fighting stance—shoulder arms for close combat, wing-bone arms for knife work. In a medieval world, that alone would have been enough to dominate every other race.
“If you’re really the Horned Empress, then the conversation gets simple.”
There was always the chance Calsira was lying. Even if she wasn’t, she was still the one who had killed Heliane’s father. Heliane would kill her here and now.
Jincheon, of course, had no intention of allowing that.
“Sorry, but that’s not happening.”
“!?”
Heliane froze in shock at the sound of Jincheon’s voice coming from directly behind her.
When?!
After confirming his position she had checked the distance between herself and Calsira, briefly taking her eyes off him. In that tiny window his voice had appeared at her back. Of course she was stunned.
“You…!”
She reversed her grip on the ultra-vibration knife and shot the arm on her wing bone backward in a lethal thrust.
Kwaaaak!
“Kyaahit!?”
Jincheon’s hand moved faster. He pinched her nipple hard—through the nano-suit that Gronel’s attack had reduced to nothing more than tough fabric, squeezing and twisting the sensitive peak.
“Wh-what are you… hick!”
Heliane thrashed in panic at the sudden “attack.”
Nothing is more annoying than someone who’s lost everything and is burning with pure revenge.
Jincheon was certain that ordinary training methods would only make her keep resisting.
In that case… let’s do this properly for the first time in a while.
He would drench her in so much pleasure that even her thirst for vengeance would melt away. For the first time since arriving in this world, Jincheon decided to reveal the true face of the Lust Emperor. Qi began to gather at his fingertips.