War Wore No Game's Face
War did not wear the face of an adult game.
I had to admit it. I had been under one truly enormous delusion.
This was no world inside a game. Nothing of the sort. It was not some two-dimensional sekai of pictures and letters lined up on a monitor, where the outcome of a war and the fates of human beings were settled by fucking binary choices.
There was no happy ending. No bad ending. No normal ending. There wasn't even an erotic scene.
That fact, so obvious it chilled the bone—I only understood it after wasting three years.
A muffled ringing screamed through my skull.
I opened my eyes and yanked my face up out of the sucking mire. Mud tore apart, and the metallic reek of blood came up with it.
Two years ago I wouldn't have been able to hold it in. I would have vomited up every last thing I'd eaten for lunch. Now, to an astonishing degree, I felt nothing at all.
The thought that I had crossed a line I could never step back over—more than once—was just turning bitter when the sky split. Again.
"...Fuck."
I breathed the curse, planted a hand on the ground, and pushed myself up. Already the third time, in this battle alone.
Second Corps Commander of the Demon Army. Aslaksha of the Distant Skies. This was that bastard's doing.
Through the rent in the sky, a pure white wind came down with a roar that shook the earth.
Let me correct that. To say it came down was not quite right. A hammer wearing the shape of wind drove itself into the ground.
It made no distinction between the royal army and the Demon Army. If anything, this time it seemed to have swept away more of the demon side.
For two years I had studied military science under Sir Scabbard. And it had not even taken a full year to realize that those two years of effort were a complete waste of time.
Military science assumed, from the very start, that the enemy was a human army like your own. The Demon Army was not made of people.
To them, a fighting force meant nothing. Soldiers were expendables they could pull out of the ground the way you pull turnips—no different from champi whelps you could simply breed more of whenever you pleased. The undead. An army beyond all common sense, needing neither operations, nor tactics, nor strategy, nor supply.
The kingdom in the original game had held out a whole year against fucking lunatics like these. It must truly have been the greatest military power on the Central Continent.
When the wind died, human voices began to rise.
"Ah—aaaaagh."
"Mom. Mom."
"My arm, my arm. Where's my arm."
"Ghk—ghk—ghk—ghk."
"Send me home. I want to go home...."
Screams from every side, sobbing, the muttering of people whose minds had snapped. If this world had a hell, then this was it.
...It was time to retreat.
Sir Scabbard had asked me to hold as long as I could and buy time, so the operation might succeed. But—
This is the limit.
The tide had already turned, and morale had hit the floor. This had never been a battle we could win. Its purpose was to spend human lives as fuel, buying time enough to raise the odds that the detached force's operation would succeed. What mattered now was how we pulled back.
From inside my coat I drew a small wooden cylinder with a short cord at one end. I turned its mouth to the sky and yanked the cord hard.
The charge flew off with a thinning whine and burst overhead with a dull pop. A pitch-black billow—the signal to retreat—scattered fine across the sky.
The split sky closed, slowly, as if time were rewinding. Aslaksha had withdrawn.
From the start, that one only showed herself on a battlefield a handful of times. This offensive had been the exception. And the cause, most likely, was me.
That much was exactly as in the original. The mere fact that one person—me—had joined the fight had sent the royal army's morale shooting upward, and they had begun to fight desperately against the Demon Army. The Demon Army's answer had been just as immediate. Kill Princess Knight Evangeline, or take her alive, and dampen the humans' morale. That would be the goal.
As if to prove it, for nearly a year they had openly thrown corps-commander-class forces onto whatever front I stood on, and pressed the attack without pause.
"...Even so. I never thought they'd shove two corps commanders into a single battle."
Beyond a distant hill, far enough that the people there looked no bigger than the nib of a pen, something like a jet-black beast roared savagely from the midst of troops drawn up in ranks—demon reinforcements, by the look of them.
A body more than twice the size of the other monsters, and a mane of pure pitch, dark enough to pick out even from here. Among the Demon Army's corps commanders, the third strongest if you counted only close combat: a beastman monster. Eighth Corps Commander of the Demon Army. Ballisterd of the Black Fang.
"You've got to be kidding me."
Aslaksha and Ballisterd. By the combat power a single body could bring to bear, two of the finest even among the corps commanders. This time, it seemed, they had come fully meaning to take me.
"...Like hell I'm getting caught."
Muttering it as if to whip myself on, I flung aside the straight sword in my hand. The thing was useless now anyway. The ragged blade, snapped in half, clattered against the armor of a fallen corpse.
I bent and picked up a spear lying sprawled on the ground. It was a massive halberd, a good two meters long, and I lifted it in one hand as if it were nothing.
Royal blood. The blood of a ruler, mixed with the lineage of a chosen hero. That, and nothing else, was why Evangeline could be superhuman.
When I raised my head, the black beast's shape had grown plainly larger. In the brief moment it took to bend and straighten, it had eaten that much distance. Eight seconds to reach where I stood. No—seven would be enough.
...I can't fall back.
Sweat beaded on the hand around the halberd.
Two years ago, right after I went to war, there was one thing I understood before anything else. The weight of a life. The weight of the lives set upon my shoulders.
At the start, all I had wanted was not to be turned into a woman out of nowhere and fucked whether I had any say in it or not. But once. After a single battle, in the moment I finally felt what the name Princess Knight Evangeline actually weighed, I understood. There were things I had to protect, and they came before hymens and happy endings.
Livid veins bulged across the back of the hand locked around the halberd.
I had never meant to beat a corps commander. The goal was to buy even a little more time. To let even one more person escape this place. I could fall back only after everyone else had fled.
...Did the Evangeline of the original feel this way, too?
The thought came to me just before I swung the halberd.
"...How is Evangeline?"
"The treatment has been completed successfully. Once she has recovered sufficiently, she will open her eyes."
"...Thank you. That will be all."
Karl did not so much as glance at the army surgeon, who rose and bowed to him. It was not that he was a careless man by nature. More precisely, he did not even have the presence of mind to spare a glance.
Slowly, his eyes turned to the bed.
Above the neatly drawn blanket, one sleeve of the patient's gown hung empty, as if it had been cut away.
After giving the order to retreat, she had counterattacked the Eighth Corps Commander as he recklessly pursued the allied troops, and succeeded in bringing him down. Or so they said. It was the first time in the two years since the Demon Army's invasion began that a corps-commander-class enemy had been slain. Karl received that glad news, and he did not smile at all.
Even if they could kill not some corps commander but the Demon King himself, who would rejoice if the price was his daughter's life?
"I should never have allowed it."
The words came out in a voice locked tight.
The day the Demon Army invaded the kingdom and the Holy Kingdom at once, his fourteen-year-old daughter had said she would gladly go to war to protect the kingdom. Karl had refused outright. He would not allow it.
But the tidings of defeat kept coming, one after another without end, and the Demon King's host poured in like a flood. And every day Eva stood before him, demanding to be sent to the front, until in the end Karl had no choice but to grant her wish.
In truth, right up to the last moment of letting her go, he turned it over and over. Was it really right to send her? Shouldn't he take the words back even now, and stop her? In the end, he could not break her stubbornness. He told himself, as if the telling might persuade him, that there was no father in the world who won against his daughter.
But that was an excuse.
Whatever words he used to lie to himself, whatever excuses he strung together, one fact would never change. He had driven onto the battlefield a young daughter who was not even due to come of age for another year.
In that moment, before he was a father with a daughter, Karl had been the king of a nation. He had weighed them against each other: a father's heart, which could not send his daughter into a war like that, against what he stood to gain by sending her—a stronger army, a lift in morale. That Eva's own fierce wish had laid one more hand upon the scale went without saying.
"...And this is the result of that choice?"
He drew his fingertips up the emptied left sleeve and murmured it low. The messenger had said she gave an arm, and took a neck.
"A daughter's life, and the survival of the nation. Not one of them was a thing that should ever have been set lightly upon a scale."
His head knew it, of course. If Evangeline had not gone to war, the kingdom would have fallen into a crisis even worse than the one it faced now. Over the past two years there had been more battles than he could count which they had won because she was there, and would have lost if she had not been.
But.
"...I can't. Not anymore."
Karl let his gaze fall and slowly shook his head.
"I can't leave you in danger any longer...."
Onto the hand that had been stroking the empty sleeve, his head still bowed, five slender fingers came to rest.
"...Fa—ther."
"...Eva?"
Karl's head snapped up.
Evangeline had come to at some point. Still lying in the bed, she had reached out with her other arm and closed her hand gently around his.
Hollow eyes that had seen the battlefield—seen hell—were fixed on Karl. The Evangeline he had known was not in them. There was only a commander, bearing the weight of lives upon her shoulders, meaning to walk back into hell.
Fumbling over bone-dry lips, she spoke in a rusted voice.
A single plain sentence, without one scrap of rhetoric in it. And Karl did not have it in him to tell her no.
God.
He only muttered it inwardly, the words edged with reproach.
What, exactly, would You have me do?