A World No Longer Empty
Raon curled a faint smile as he watched Merlin walking ahead.
She's enjoying this, isn't she.
Her steps were light as feathers. She looked barely able to contain herself, so eager was she for what would come once he donned the Dragon's Helmet.
She's waiting for the one inside it.
What Merlin wanted was for the soul within that helmet to seize his body—but that would never happen. No matter who the opponent was, he would not lose in a contest of will.
"How do you feel? Nervous?"
Sensing his gaze, Merlin stopped and turned. The eyes behind her mask glittered with naked desire.
"A little."
He wasn't entirely unshaken, so he nodded honestly.
"There's no need to be nervous. All you have to do is surrender your body to the helmet."
Merlin smiled, telling him that putting on the helmet and drifting peacefully to sleep would be enough.
"What's he doing here?"
Raon pointed at the Soul-Severing Sword trailing behind them. It was unusual for him to come this far; he never even entered the great hall.
"Once you put on the helmet, you'll be completely defenseless. I asked him to come along to protect you."
Merlin's masked lips traced downward as she looked not at the Soul-Severing Sword, but at Raon.
"We can't afford even the slightest problem with your Fighting Soul Ceremony."
She explained that the ritual of donning the helmet was called the Fighting Soul Ceremony.
"Hmm..."
Raon narrowed his eyes at the Soul-Severing Sword's golden, burning sockets.
Something's different about him.
Unlike the other Eden warriors he had met, the Soul-Severing Sword didn't merely radiate Battle Qi. An indescribable stench of death clung to him. It was as if they had dragged in an actual corpse and jammed a helmet onto it.
Every last one of them is a freak.
Raon shook his head and stopped in front of Merlin's log-cabin room. But Merlin kept walking, as if that wasn't their destination.
"Your ceremony will be held in a different chamber. You're special, after all."
Merlin crooked a long finger, beckoning him to follow. She walked on until she reached the wall at the far end of the great hall.
A deep, resonant hum filled the air. When Merlin tapped the gray wall, a passage of blinding white light opened at its center. Black haze seeped and coiled from within.
"Let's go in."
Merlin's eyes curved in a smile as she entered the passage first.
"Hrmm..."
Wrath frowned at the energy flowing from the wall.
What is it?
"It is nothing."
Despite his words, irritation colored his gaze as he stared at the opening in the wall.
Honestly, this one is the biggest freak of all.
Raon smiled faintly and stepped into the passage that had bloomed from the wall. A piercing light flared, too bright to keep his eyes open—and then a vast square chamber appeared.
The enormous room had pentagram magic circles of differing designs inscribed not only on the floor, but on all four walls and the ceiling as well. From the circles, the same black energy he had seen moments before rose in lazy coils. But the dark smoke carried no wickedness—only pure mana.
"So it is that fool, after all?"
Wrath clicked his tongue as he regarded the energy flowing from the formations.
That fool?
"He exists. A creature of boundless stupidity."
Wrath clamped his mouth shut, as if he had no desire to say more.
"Sit there."
Before Raon could ask further, Merlin pointed to a gray chair placed at the center of the magic circle on the floor.
Raon looked into the Soul-Severing Sword's utterly emotionless eyes, then went to the seat Merlin had indicated and sat down.
"Such a clever child. It makes everything so much easier."
Merlin approached and extended her hand. The Dragon's Helmet he had seen yesterday floated up above her palm. Its blade-sharp scales and vivid sky-blue mane made the dragon of this helmet look truly alive.
"Hoo."
Raon exhaled briefly and took the helmet in both hands. Contrary to its appearance, it was light as paper, with a rubber-like elasticity. It looked as though it would fit anyone, regardless of the size of their face.
"Wait just a moment."
Merlin's eyes curved into crescent moons as she brought her hands together. Six magic circles bloomed above her palms—the same designs carved throughout this chamber.
A heavy, grinding resonance filled the room. As if answering her mana, the circles on the walls and ceiling shuddered and poured forth pitch-black light.
"Raon."
Merlin nodded, telling him to put on the helmet.
Raon closed his eyes, opened them, and donned the Dragon's Helmet. The slightly oversized helm shrank to fit his head perfectly, and a strange energy began to flow through his entire body.
"Have a good trip."
Merlin lifted her mask slightly. She pressed her red lips to the mouth of the helmet, the corners of her mouth curling in a thin smile.
"By the time you open your eyes, it'll all be over."
Those were the last words he heard before his vision went black.
The Audience Chamber of the Lord's Manor of Zieghart.
Even with the clan's executives and the heads of the vassal houses gathered, the Audience Chamber was as cold as a sheet of ice. The officers' expressions were equally bleak, and the reason was a single being.
Glenn Zieghart. Seated upon the throne of the Northern Annihilation, he radiated a presence so crushing that everyone swallowed dry.
"My lord. Everyone has assembled."
Roen approached Glenn's side and bowed his head.
Glenn looked down upon the officers and family heads, lightly tapping the throne with his finger.
"A considerable time has passed since Zieghart's advance came to a halt."
"Nngh..."
The chill in his voice made the leader of the Myeongjeon Squad tremble at the shoulders.
"Zieghart had already shown that it could swallow half the continent. I judged that no more blood needed to be spilled."
Glenn's icy gaze turned to the right.
"We chose to stop walking of our own accord. Zieghart needed to soothe its souls and to rest itself, and I have never regretted that choice."
Sheryl, standing behind the right-hand pillar, nodded slowly.
"But it seems others did not see it that way."
Glenn's eyes glittered blood-red.
"You all know that Raon Zieghart and Dorian Sepia have been abducted."
The officers and family heads nodded heavily.
"If the White Blood Cult and Eden had simply slaughtered the Light Wind Squad on the spot, I would not have summoned you. I would have entrusted a single squad to Rimer and ordered him to take revenge."
That was true. Even if an entire squad or a great house of Zieghart were wiped out, they never assembled everyone like this.
"But they abducted swordsmen who bear the name of Zieghart. What do you think that means?"
Glenn's eyes swept over them. The swordsmen who had been cowering before him moments ago now had eyes blazing blue.
"It means they have scorned Zieghart."
Sheryl answered as their representative, clenching her fist tight.
"Exactly so. To abduct a swordsman who wears the name of Zieghart is to regard us as nobodies. It means our swords do not frighten them. It means they do not fear us."
The longer Glenn spoke, the more his overwhelming aura receded. That was how they knew he was truly furious.
A tremendous wave of energy rose in answer. In contrast to Glenn, the executives of Zieghart and the heads of the vassal houses began to unleash a mighty pressure, and the Lord's Manor itself started to tremble under the force they all raised.
"There will be those among you who dislike Raon, or the Light Wind Squad. Whatever the reason, I respect it. But this matter is not an internal affair. It is an external one. This is the time to think not of Raon, but of the name of Zieghart."
Glenn rose. Though he carried not the slightest hint of aura, his presence swelled as if a great mountain had settled over them.
"The search has already begun. Together with the black market, find Raon Zieghart and Dorian Sepia. I do not care if what waits at the end is not the Five Demons, but the Six Kings themselves. Erase every place connected to those children's abduction."
"Yes!"
The Lord's Manor throbbed with a single, enormous pulse, as if it had become one heart.
"Fear no enemy, whoever they may be."
Glenn stood at the edge of the dais. His gaze, burning red as the sun, covered the entire world.
When he opened his eyes, a dark sky stretched above him. A ceiling whose end could not be seen.
"Nnh..."
Raon pushed himself up and turned his head to the right.
Beyond a scant stretch of black space, frozen ground came into view. A royal palace even vaster than Zieghart's domain sat encased entirely in silver frost.
That cold...
An energy too familiar to mistake. The frost of Glacia.
Loengrin's handiwork, then.
Seeing a castle frozen in Glacia's frost, this was unmistakably Merlin's castle from the old tales. Untouched by human hands for long ages, the royal castle went beyond lonely—it was desolate, even eerie.
"Hm?"
Raon started to rise with the castle still in his eyes, then frowned.
What is this?
Something was different from usual. The body he had grown perfectly accustomed to, and the height of his gaze, were slightly off.
He examined his hands and his clothes. The ice-flower bracelet that had never once left his wrist was gone, and instead of the Light Wind Squad's uniform he was wearing black night-combat gear.
Don't tell me...
Raon caught his reflection in the white ground. The blond hair and crimson eyes he had worn for nearly twenty years were gone. A young man of black hair and black eyes, as if wrapped in darkness itself, stared back at him with his eyes wide.
"It's me..."
Not the self he was now, but the self of his previous life. The assassin Raon, who had lived his entire existence with Derus Robert's leash around his throat.
He took a step back, and something caught his foot. Looking down, he found a small dagger and a longsword lying side by side.
These are...
He could not fail to recognize them. The dagger and longsword he had used in his previous life. The weapons that had stayed with him until the day Derus Robert killed him.
"So this is what it meant, to face a soul?"
The fact that he had appeared not as Raon Zieghart, but as the Raon of his previous life, suggested that the claim of confronting a soul had not been a lie.
That's why Wrath isn't here, either.
He had wondered why that chatterbox hadn't said a word. This seemed to be a space isolated even from him.
Raon picked up the weapons of his previous life and smiled faintly.
"So then..."
When is my nourishing meal planning to wake up?
The thought had barely finished when the space began to tremble.
A deep, grinding roar shook the world. The royal palace collapsed, and the neck of a colossal dragon, sheathed in sharp blue scales, surged upward. At its end, blue eyes flashed as if raging at the entire world.
A magnificent dragon's cry rolled through this realm. The ice that had encased the whole castle shattered like sheets of glass. Vast wings unfurled as if to draw the horizon itself, and the palace crumbled in its entirety.
Amid the cascading rubble of stone and ice, a small log cabin—utterly out of place in this world—was visible for an instant before the dust swallowed it.
The blue dragon kicked off the frozen earth and soared into the heavens. It drifted roughly through the endless sky, then spotted Raon and dropped like a thunderbolt.
The blue dragon crashed down and pulverized the white earth. Pupils split like a serpent's tongue sent a terrifying pressure rolling toward him.
Raon clenched his molars and met the blue dragon's tyrannical gaze head-on.
A pure white light bloomed from the dragon's body, and that enormous flesh began to shrink to human size. From within a great cluster of radiance, a young man walked out. A handsome man with ocean-colored eyes, clad in a knight's armor. He had the kind of face Encia would scream was insanely handsome the moment she laid eyes on him.
"I cannot understand this."
The blue-haired man frowned slightly.
"If things were as Her Highness said, the walls of your mind should have crumbled, and this world itself should never have opened. Why, then, are you standing before me?"
He tilted his head, as if the situation were simply wrong.
So that's why she gave me the Soul-Confusing Water.
Judging by what the man in front of him was saying, if the Soul-Confusing Water had shattered the walls of his mind, a space like this would never have formed at all. That soul would have simply smashed his own to pieces on the spot.
But 'princess'?
This dragon would not be looking for anyone else. He had clearly called Merlin a princess.
"Merlin is a princess, then?"
"You didn't know?"
The dragon lowered his brows, as if even that were something he ought to have known.
"Well. You were merely captured by Her Highness as well."
He clicked his tongue shortly, as if Raon were pitiful.
"You're no dragon."
Raon looked up at the blue-haired man and twisted the corner of his mouth.
He can't possibly be a dragon.
Dragons, as the strongest of races, had pride fiercer than anyone's. Unless they were in the middle of some amusement, a dragon who had shown its true form would never call a human 'Your Highness.'
Which means this one is...
A gleam passed through Raon's eyes. There was only one being that could transform into a human, was a dragon, and yet was not a dragon.
A Dragonian.
Dragonian was the general term for a hybrid of dragon and another race. Most were born with nothing more than greater strength than their original species, or an exceptional affinity for mana—but every so often, a Dragonian was born with the mutant ability to transform into a dragon. The one standing in front of him seemed to be exactly that case.
"A Dragonian, then?"
"That is so."
The blue-haired man nodded with open pride.
"My name is Lokta Deporte. I am the son of the Blue Dragon Chronos Deporte, and captain of the royal guard of Shirken."
True to the armor he wore and the sword he carried, he named himself a knight.
"I bear you no ill will. As a knight, I am a sinner who failed to protect the princess. I will pay for that crime with my death. If you surrender your body peacefully, I will not inflict pain—"
"Bullshit."
Raon laughed coldly. Perhaps it was because this was his past life's body—a curse he rarely used as Raon Zieghart came flying out at once.
"You people kidnap me on a whim and then say you'll pay for it by dying? Keep that crap to a reasonable volume."
"Resistance is meaningless."
Lokta's eyes settled. His expression was one of open disdain.
"Look at the ground beneath your feet."
At those words, Raon looked down. In stark contrast to the white earth Lokta stood upon, a dim and darkened land came into view.
"That dark earth is the whole of your life."
"What?"
"It means the world nested in your soul is nothing more than that land and those two blades. Whereas..."
Lokta pointed behind himself.
"My world stopped at this frozen castle—but it is incomparably broader and more solid than yours."
From his gaze rose a chill frost, and the despair of one who had already tasted death.
"If I so wished, I could shove aside a world as narrow and thin as yours this very instant. I will give you one last chance. Withdraw. I have no desire to spend my strength on the weak."
Lokta was still spouting nonsense, as if he still believed himself a knight. It wasn't even worth a snort.
"The weaker the dog, the more it just barks."
Raon snorted and crooked a finger.
"Stop running your mouth and come at me. You half-baked lizard."
"In the end, you refuse the cup of honor and drink the cup of punishment."
Lokta's eyes flashed blue, and a wave of frost rose from the frozen earth beneath his feet.
A white tsunami swallowed the black land and spread its territory. A sensation as if his mana circuits were freezing over. It was a pain similar to Wrath's attacks, which he had felt every single day.
So that's it.
That's why they call it the Fighting Soul Ceremony.
He understood now. This place was a visualization of his own body, the one he had fought Wrath in every day. Lokta's soul, possessing the greater power, had already eaten most of this space.
The frost Lokta raised, and the despair that came with it, swelled steadily larger, and the black space shrank at an exponential rate. Before long, everything had frozen over, and all that remained was a single span of earth beneath his feet.
"I told you, did I not?"
Lokta let out an undisguised sneer. For all his talk of knighthood, he was no different from Merlin in the end.
"It is a meaningless act. For you to defeat me in this world is an impossibility."
"And why is that?"
"Because our experience is different. This place may be your first, but I have fought in this world since I was alive. I must have fought here more than a hundred times."
"A hundred times."
Raon curled the corner of his mouth.
"That's all?"
He ignited the Ring of Fire and stamped down a true step. From beneath his foot, the flames of the Cultivation of Ten Thousand Flames surged out and began to sweep the frozen earth.
The crimson blaze melted the seemingly endless frost and despair in a single instant, then turned and began to devour even the frozen ground. It was a speed of an entirely different dimension from the cold Lokta had poured out.
"W-what is this flame?!"
Raon smiled as he looked into Lokta's eyes, which had flown so wide they looked ready to tear.
"This side of things? I've been harassed for half my life by an annoying cotton candy. I've fought this kind of battle not a hundred times—I've done it a thousand times and more."
Wearing a smile as cold as the heat of the Ten Thousand Flames was hot, he walked across the earth burning with crimson fire.
A footfall. The sound of old shoes soaked in flame became the crisp click of proper boots. His dark pants and shirt became the Light Wind Squad's uniform, gleaming with a smooth luster, and his black hair ignited, cascading into brilliant gold as if a gold ingot had been melted down.
Those black eyes, filled with nothing but emptiness, became crimson irises that had swallowed the sun, and they pierced straight through Lokta's soul.
Endless flame spread, and behind Raon the Annex, the Fifth Training Ground, and the full vista of Zieghart revealed themselves. The pitch-black earth, once filled with nothing but loneliness, was filled with the bonds he had built himself.
His world was no longer empty.
"W-what are you? How can a human mind undergo a change this extreme..."
Lokta's jaw trembled as he stared at Raon, who had become a different person entirely. He had gone past confusion at a situation he could not understand, and seemed genuinely afraid.
Whether he was shocked or not, the heat of the Ten Thousand Flames melted the frozen ground and began to reach even the royal castle Lokta had brought down.
"I'm an ordinary human."
Raon gripped the hilt of the Heavenly Sky Sword tight, and his gaze settled.
"One who slipped his leash, and is only now living a life worthy of a person."
"What kind of nonsense is that?!"
"Sorry about this. You and your precious princess will never get what you want—hm?"
"Eh?"
Raon stopped speaking and looked to the right. Lokta turned his head at the same time.
Over the floor where the flames of the Ten Thousand Flames were burning, a thread of vivid blue twisted and coiled, weaving a strange domain of its own.
"W-what is that now? How can an intruder enter this space?!"
Lokta's eyes flew wide, as if he could not believe it.
"You! What are you summoning?!"
"I didn't call it. It came looking for me."
Raon frowned at the ice-flower bracelet that had appeared on his wrist.
"An illegal tenant."