The Sword Saint Requests an Audience
Maxien Asteria
No—it had almost happened.
Face burning red, she hastily shut off the massage chair. The subtle pressure coiling around her entire body had set off some primal alarm that told her something had gone very wrong.
"A-adult mode?!"
The moment she realized her mistake, she scrambled to switch it back to normal mode.
"Ngh."
Whatever mode she'd accidentally selected among the adult options, that slick, sinuous sensation wrapping around her whole body had raised goosebumps across her skin.
"What in the world...!"
She was genuinely frightened. She could still feel it lingering vividly on her skin.
Shaking her head briskly, she barely managed to calm her racing heart. Then, after some deliberation, she selected [Sleep Mode].
This one. I'll go with this one.
Her chronic insomnia meant it had been far too long since she'd had a proper night's rest.
Not that I'm expecting much...
"Hm?"
Vvvmmm—
It was like being cradled in amniotic fluid in her mother's womb since the dawn of time.
Under that infinite, enveloping warmth, her eyelids slid shut on their own. It was a comfort she simply could not resist.
She sat there staring blankly at the clock.
"..."
She wiped the drool from the corner of her mouth with her sleeve.
Wha...
Her memory had a gaping hole in it. Shaking herself awake, she desperately tried to reconstruct what had happened.
She'd lain down in the massage chair... told the Juddak off once... started the massage... adult mode... sleep... mode?
"I slept for TEN hours without taking a single sedative?!"
And that wasn't all.
The muscle stiffness that had always plagued her alongside a splitting headache every time she woke—gone. Utterly vanished.
Every last fiber of muscle in her body seemed to dance with joy, brimming with vitality.
She could hardly believe it.
This was the same woman who, worn down by nearly sixteen hours of research and experimentation a day, could barely manage three hours of proper sleep even on her good days. Buried under excessive workloads and crushing stress, she had suffered from chronic insomnia for so long that her current state felt utterly alien. Energy simply overflowed from her body.
"A s-sleep spell? No... no mana was detected, though?"
Not even sleep magic could produce a freshness like this.
Confusion swam in her eyes.
Gulp—
"It's... it must just be a lucky fluke."
Yes. That had to be it.
Who changes this dramatically from sleeping once in a massage chair?
Bang bang bang—
"Director! We're running late! Enough experimenting—come out already!"
Her brow furrowed. The mountain of work still waiting for her came flooding back. She hurriedly checked her schedule, gathered her documents, and got moving.
Or perhaps she only imagined that her steps felt lighter than yesterday?
Doing her best to erase the adult mode still lingering in a corner of her mind, she hurried out the door.
"Heh heh. It worked."
Karlstein was certain of it. He had used the Heaven Series massage chair himself, after all, so he knew exactly what it could do. A golden hand beyond any massage or spa treatment—no, a golden chair.
There had been a time when he himself couldn't tear himself away from the thing, taking it everywhere he went.
The massage chair, cradling its user as if in zero gravity, was a miraculous device that dissolved every trace of fatigue accumulated in the body before the user was even aware of it.
She hadn't seemed to notice yet, but the chair was hardly limited to massage sessions. If she simply sat in it while working through her daily duties, she would be greeted by the miracle of never accumulating physical fatigue at all.
Better yet—select [Work Mode], and she'd enjoy mind-sharpening, full-throttle cognitive clarity. 'Zero-Defect Caffeine,' as it were.
Good luck ever waking up from that one, though.
Just as Karlstein was snickering to himself—
Slide—
The doors of the Grand Hall's executive office opened, and the silver-haired Aria entered.
"Hm? I don't recall having anything else on the schedule today?"
Aria wore her usual icy expression, making it impossible to read what lay beneath.
"Master."
"Yeah?"
Why the ominous pause? You're scaring me.
Karlstein lifted his wine glass and took a casual sip. Lately he'd found a measure of inner peace, and it showed in his languid ease.
"Maxien has entered the palace."
"Huh? Who?"
"The Sword Saint, Grand Duchess Maxien, has requested an audience."
The wine glass slipped from Karlstein's fingers.
Crash—
The strongest combatant in the original setting. The galaxy's foremost prodigy.
Of the Asterian race, the greatest single source of firepower in the Galactic Empire. Maxien Asteria—and she had come looking for him.
"Could we... just tell her I'm not in?"
Karlstein's eyes trembled faintly.
The doors of the Grand Hall swung open, and a woman with hair like a river of starlight walked slowly forward.
Step, step—
The greatest Sword Saint in the cosmos.
The last royal of the Asterian race.
Maxien Asteria.
Before her starlit eyes, even the most extravagant epithets paled and dimmed.
Those eyes, holding galaxies within them, turned toward him.
"..."
Karlstein forced himself to meet her gaze, suppressing the tension coiling in his chest.
A faint smile bloomed across her composed face, and then her lips parted.
"It has been a while, Your Majesty."
At that single, weightless greeting, the Grand Hall itself seemed to hum.
Behind her back, twelve blades of light and metal hovered in the air like a halo. The ether armament Olympus—twelve swords wielded as a single set.
Where Karlstein's ether armaments delivered single-strike firepower on a planetary scale, Maxien was built differently. Her per-hit output fell short of her Emperor's, but she could wield twelve ether armaments as if they were extensions of her own body.
If Karlstein was a nuclear bomb whose one devastating hit was apocalyptic, Maxien was closer to a bruiser whose every casual strike landed like a railgun.
Karlstein answered as naturally as he could manage.
"It has... been a while, Maxien. You're a hard face to catch sight of these days."
At his words, the corner of her mouth lifted by the barest fraction.
"That is entirely thanks to Your Majesty valuing humble little me so highly, of course."
"..."
There was a blade buried in those words.
A pointed grievance about how he'd been running her ragged across one battlefield after another. And Karlstein—who hated working more than anyone alive—could perfectly understand the sentiment.
"Ahem."
Which was exactly why he felt a twinge of guilt. She wasn't wrong.
I did throw her into every incident that came along...
Any situation demanding raw firepower, Maxien alone could carry through with a total free pass. So how could he possibly have left her sitting idle?
Karlstein forced a breezy reply.
"Is that so?"
For some reason, her gaze suddenly felt like needles on his skin.
"Your Majesty."
"Hmm?"
"You are not still wounded over... past matters, I trust?"
"..."
"I heard you've been dwelling in the imperial palace lately, living like a recluse. I only thought I should ask, just in case."
Maxien's eyes flashed, sharp as drawn steel.
Yes—those eyes.
Whenever her gaze landed on him, chills crawled up his spine.
Those starlit eyes, as hollow as the void between galaxies, always seemed to smolder with some unidentifiable, alien heat.
Was this what a venomous snake looked like, its prey pinned before it?
Her smiling face was, by any measure, a beauty so exquisite that even the word "stunning" felt inadequate—yet that strange, piercing intensity in her stare, as if she might devour him whole, was enough to make him forget everything else.
A faint smile played on her lips.
"It is absolutely out of the question, of course."
"..."
The thing Maxien opposed with every fiber of her being.
Nothing less than the matter of his marriage.
—Let it be said: marriage exists to produce an heir and continue the bloodline. Where in creation is there cause for Your Majesty, who enjoys eternal life, to marry at all?
—Rather, an heir would do nothing but invite the fragmentation of the Empire. Greedy, shortsighted fools might well band together around the succession to push Your Majesty from the throne.
—Therefore, Your Majesty's marriage is absolutely, categorically out of the question.
I honestly cannot fathom it. Why is she opposed to this degree? If a rebellion breaks out, we crush it. Done.
With the Empire settled into stability and a certain ache beginning to creep into his sides, Karlstein had been thinking of dipping a toe into the romance business—only to crash straight into a colossal reef.
—You called it a mere "romance"? And if you go and knock someone up along the way, who takes responsibility then?
—Dating with no intention of marriage? Are you saying you intend to play around with women, Your Majesty?
No, seriously—why is the one subordinate who's always followed me along just fine acting like this all of a sudden?
At some point she'd turned into a full-blown Confucian matriarch. Even Confucianism lets people get married...
That was how absurd it felt: at Maxien's center of gravity, several of his key subordinates had placed his love life under total embargo.
Strangely enough, Aria had maintained strict silence on the matter as well. She seemed to have had some kind of conversation with the others about it, but she refused to breathe a word of what was said.
Sullen ever since, Karlstein had begun working Maxien and her subordinates to the bone for the Empire's sake in every way he could imagine—and every so often, the dangerous glint that crept into their eyes left him feeling inexplicably on edge.
Still, come on.
Karlstein had finally had enough. With a flash of annoyance, he retorted bluntly.
"If the Emperor of the Galactic Empire dies all alone of natural causes like this, it won't be funny at all, you know."
Maxien, for her part, simply let that faint smile deepen, keeping her perfectly relaxed poise.
"Do forgive me, but I'll have to decline such an unpalatable remark."
"..."
Karlstein, unable to abandon the fight entirely, tried to regain the upper hand.
"When you sit in a high seat, there are things you must do whether you like them or not. And the imperial throne goes without saying. A political marriage, by its very nature, strengthens the cohesion of one's faction—"
"Haha. Is Your Majesty trying to tear the Empire into four separate pieces?"
"..."
Not a single gap to squeeze through.
"And if that is not your aim..."
Maxien's hair began to ripple and shine like the Milky Way itself.
"...then I suppose we must consider sweeping away every other faction so thoroughly that the very word 'political marriage' never escapes their lips. Or better yet, so that it never even occurs to them."
Her smile seemed to give off a thick scent of blood.
Good grief. Maxien... how many people are you planning to kill?
Naturally, he could not possibly accept such an outrageous proposal.
"Ahem! We cannot spill innocent blood. We'll... discuss this matter another time."
Just as he moved to wrap up the audience posthaste, a voice reached his mind alone—Aria's voice.
—Master. Something appears to have gone wrong with the Dimensional Pathway.
Hm?
What did you say? Where?
—It seems someone was tampering with the Astral Passage we constructed, and it caused a malfunction.
That was the exact moment.
GRUMBLE—
The Grand Hall trembled almost imperceptibly, and shards of stone trickled down from the ceiling.
"Tampering...?"
A glacial expression settled over Karlstein's face.
SHAAAA—
As if mirroring the Emperor's fury, a formless pressure took on substance and began to flay the air around him. It bore no resemblance whatsoever to the playful atmosphere of moments before.
Grroo—
Across from Karlstein, who pressed a finger to his temple and fell silent in thought, Maxien closed her mouth.
This was not the man she had been speaking with until now. Maxien's eyes gleamed, and she bowed her head with quiet deference.
Maxien knew her Emperor better than anyone.
After all the years she had spent at his side.
The modest, mischief-filled Emperor he showed only to a handful of cherished subordinates—including herself.
And the iron-blooded Emperor who, once he turned serious, spared no means or method to break through any hardship and see his goal achieved, come what may.
"..."
A warm breath rose softly from Maxien's lips.
There was not a single one of the Emperor's faces that she disliked.