There Is No End Here - 5
I kept putting out my advertisements, and I waited. And I waited some more.
The effect of all that advertising only barely showed itself after a very long time had passed. Someone tried to summon me.
Unfortunately, something must have been lacking. They made the attempt, but unlike last time, nothing like a fishing line came down from above.
Even so, what matters is that someone tried at all. The more attempts there are, the better my chances of making it back into a world.
In the meantime, a great deal happened in the first world where I ever set foot.
To begin with, Isla decided to avenge Witga, and so she remained in the Kingdom of Ancelus. She knew Wide hated Tisha, and that he would invade Ancelus no matter what happened. Wait there, and Wide would come looking of his own accord. That must have been her thinking.
Woven through it was another calculation. The moment Wide and Tisha fought and wore each other down to ruin, she would be able to put a blade in Wide.
So Isla resolved to stay in the Kingdom of Ancelus until Wide came for her, tempering herself all the while.
To my surprise, Ancelus allowed it.
Not freely, of course. Unlike with Tisha, they pushed her into a place a little removed from the capital, something closer to confinement.
Considering she was someone who had lost her country, it would not have been strange if they had killed her, whatever Tisha said. As dispositions go, it was merciful enough.
Tisha, meanwhile, rebuilt the Kingdom of Ancelus alongside his companions.
Just like something out of a novel, one of the companions who had fought at his side turned out to be of the Ancelus royal blood. There was a convenient claim to legitimacy as well — victor over the villain who had blown the capital of Ancelus away — and on the strength of it, that companion became, in all but name, the next king.
More precisely, I ought to say the next queen.
Not him. Her.
And she harbored a romantic longing for Tisha.
Despair and frustration are so often tangled up with love that I have grown quite familiar with that particular look.
The situation, however, was considerably complicated. The ties between the men and the women were knotted in a thoroughly messy way, and this was no state of affairs in which affection alone could bring about a marriage.
I only ever saw things from Tisha's point of view, so I can't be exact, but there seem to have been plenty of other problems besides. And while the matter was put off day after day, several nobles revealed their ambitions.
To speak of ambition so suddenly may sound strange, but you have to look at the whole of the context.
First, the Kingdom of Ancelus had not been laid waste from end to end. Only the places the Church of Future Hope had invaded suffered heavy losses. Everywhere but the road of their advance and the capital had come through unharmed.
And even a man who was a proper vassal while the kingdom stood whole will start thinking other thoughts once the seat above him sits empty. That is simply how people are.
Yes. That's right.
In the end, civil war broke out.
Honestly, I'm not very good at guessing at this sort of politics. I can, however, listen when someone else is talking.
Tisha was a central figure of the reigning royal house, which meant that whenever a council was held he could attend, and I heard all manner of things. I suppose this is why one ought to bless people in high places.
At any rate, however ambitious they were — whether because they were Ancelus's own, or because sweeping the royal house aside and crowning themselves would leave them short of justification — they had no thought of killing every royal still living and taking the throne themselves.
They simply declared that the aides closest to the present queen were puppets working her like a marionette. Amusing, considering they themselves fully intended to make a puppet of her.
On top of that, the one who had become queen was still a girl, of an age where a forced marriage would not have been strange. A living crown, in short.
To seize that crown, a count's house and a marquis's house rose within the Kingdom of Ancelus, each raising its own banner.
A count and a marquis — not even dukes — and they were staging a rebellion? That was my first thought. But precedence here does not follow rank in any neat line.
The marquis's house, I could grant. The count's house seemed far too low. As it turned out, though, it was the single greatest power in the Kingdom of Ancelus.
An iron mine and a silver mine sat in its domain, one of each, and the land itself lay along the southeastern border. It held a crossroads that trade had no choice but to pass through. A strong noble house, then.
And the rest of the nobles? They kept their silence.
Should either side come to rule, there was no telling what the future after that would look like, so they pulled their feet clear of it, insisting they couldn't tell whose words were right. It was all the more so because a girl for whom the throne had been as good as impossible had become queen.
In other words, the situation was exceedingly dangerous.
I had thought it from the first time I met Tisha, but this feels like a story rolling forward with him as its protagonist. Seeing it directly through his eyes, though, I found that being a hero is no work fit for a person.
Only a true power of regeneration let Tisha survive it at all, and even then he was ground down until he barely clung to life.
In most of the works I have seen, the hero passes the time talking with his companions, and when a crisis comes he fights and settles it. Wealth and fame follow.
It was not so easy for Tisha. He had to oversee the whole of the preparation leading up to the fight, and at the same time carry the work of governing a country. All of it.
Ordinarily there would have been people to help with that, but every one of them died when the royal capital fell. Wide and the rest of the Blessed had killed every living soul in the royal castle, to a degree one could fairly call paranoid.
That day, the warmth of more than a hundred thousand came to me, all told.
Hehe.
Ahem. At any rate, there were not enough people, and to make up the lack the living had to work without a moment's rest.
Wow. Regeneration really is an incredible ability. Otherwise Tisha would have died of overwork long before he ever fought the nobles who turned spear and blade on them — to say nothing of the Miriga Order.
In the midst of all that labor, the two nobles suddenly issued their proclamations and came at them with spear and sword.
The first they fought was the marquis's house. Its domain lay at a relatively close distance, so they reached the capital ahead of the rest, and the battle itself ended quickly. Those holding the capital were already an elite who had survived a fight against a legion of superhumans, while the marquis's soldiers, save for a very few, were people who had never properly been in a battle.
In a flash the marquis was seized, and shut at once into the prison within the castle.
The count's house, though, was a far more daunting foe. They did not raise an army and come at once. They began by slowly tightening the economy.
However fine the land on which a count's house has grown its strength, cornering a royal house is no easy thing. I hadn't known it, but at a council Tisha attended, the queen flew into a rage that no one would come to their aid. She lamented that if they went on fighting this way, victory could not be promised. And fought on as things stood, Tisha was certain to lose.
Why, you ask?
Do you remember the ones who parted from Wide? The Blessed, crushed by the people under Tisha and fled east with the rest of them. Judging that they could no longer trust a Wide who had lost the authority of strength, they ran.
After leaving him, they drifted southeast.
I mentioned that the count's house sits at the southeastern edge, didn't I?
Seventeen. Exactly.
The count's house took them in.
Had an older, seasoned hand been among them, the result might have been different, but like Wide they were Blessed who had started out as children. Children with nothing but strength are simple to win over.
Yes.
When a great power falls into one's hands all at once, greed tends to follow, and so the count seems to have resolved to seize the reigning royal house by force. He set the Blessed at the fore and marched on the capital.
Unfortunately for him, he chose wrong. Resentment toward the Church of Future Hope still lingered, and the state religion of the Kingdom of Ancelus is the Church of the Holy God — a land so full of the devout that they once erased a religious nation, the Yeongnang Theocracy, clean off the map for the sake of their faith.
With the capital as the pivot, the nobles on the side opposite the count entered the war. A chance of victory had appeared.
And right at this point, something very interesting happened.
Isla decided to fight alongside Tisha. She joined on the grounds that if Tisha died, Wide might never come invading at all.
Heehee.
Of course, I know the real reason. She was lonely.
Isla had been kept in a state of half-confinement in some remote place where she knew not a single soul. Her movements weren't truly restricted — only a watcher attached when she went out, and that was all. Even that vanished when the marquis's house came attacking.
And yet, once the watchers were gone, Isla only grew weaker. You would think the end of surveillance meant freedom, and that she ought to have been glad. She wasn't.
Being alone must be a painful thing.
So she joined the company. To Tisha and the people beside him, of course, she made her excuses — that her body would rust if things went on like this, that she would need the training if she meant to kill Wide when he came.
In the middle of the night, unable to sleep, Isla clutched her blanket and trembled, saying she didn't want to be alone.
That would be the reason.
Isla joined, and nobles who had come from the north and the west joined as well. Before long, the fighting began.
Many people died in that fight. Tisha did his share of the killing, and so did Isla, and so did the seventeen.
Which is to say, they gave me a great deal of warmth.
Hehe.
But a fight is a fight.
Seventeen dwindled to eight, and in the course of the battle Tisha lost a friend of his own. Nothing but hatred was left on the field, and short of seeing it through to the end, there was no longer any pulling back.
Then, astonishingly, Tisha proposed negotiations. They had killed too many of one another, he said. Let them stop.
The backlash was fierce. The nobles who had joined were especially loud, shouting that the count's house had to be branded traitor and put to death, or nothing would do.
Tisha forced the talks ahead regardless. It would still have meant nothing if the count refused to accept...
The count accepted.
Seen through the eyes of Tisha, Isla, and the eight who remained, I suspect it was because both sides had simply killed too many of each other.
First they agreed to halt the fighting and clear away the corpses that choked the field. And only then, at last, did people look upon the battlefield through Tisha's eyes.
A plain that had once been forest, now burned black. Corpses rotting where they lay, and wild beasts gnawing at them. For anyone of a sentimental turn, a sight from which grief rises all on its own.
Both sides stopped fighting and tended to the dead.
For two weeks.
Only afterward did they agree once more to seek some way other than fighting like this, and they decided to go home.
But did you know? This was the moment the Kingdom of Ancelus stood at its weakest.
Tisha was on the road back to the capital with his people when Wide appeared at the head of the Miriga Order, come to kill him.
It was a terribly dangerous situation. Against soldiers already worn to the bone, the warriors of a cult — superhumans scattered here and there through their ranks — made for an exceedingly powerful enemy.
The nobles who backed the queen, and Tisha and his friends: they were struck at the very moment the most vital of their strength had gathered together in its weakest state.
Let me turn the moment back a little.
Andrew had originally meant to soothe and coax Wide out of striking the Kingdom of Ancelus, by whatever means he could. But the times ran in Wide's favor.
A civil war, of all things?
Worse, the queen's side and the count's side were so evenly matched that the fighting dragged on and on. From then, Andrew watched the drift of events with care, and he peddled Wide a promise — that he would see to it Wide's wish came true.
And the instant the fighting stopped, Andrew poured forth Wide, the Blessed, and every last fanatic that had been gathered.
And so Wide, Tisha, and Isla were brought together in a single place.