In Front of the Flag
A woman who had been covering one eye with her hand in front of the flag opened her eyes. Beside her stood a red flag. Union aides flanked her. Her gaze shifted westward.
“Mage? Something wrong?”
“No. Nothing.”
The woman covered her eye again. Her gaze climbed high into the sky.
The other surveyors measured the land meticulously, using ladders and precision instruments. But she could complete the entire survey just by looking and calculating in her head. She transmitted the organized data directly into the minds of others, and the stake drivers pounded them into the ground around the perimeter.
That finished the survey. What normally took hours or even days shrank to mere minutes.
Her eyes, which had only been verifying distances between flags, now turned elsewhere for the first time since measurements began.
Far to the west lay the city. Invisible even from horseback, but clear to her with her aerial overview.
She could see the ruins. But the center was obscured, as if shrouded in an opaque veil.
She was a mage of considerable skill. No street-corner charlatan could evade her sight. But this?
Something was blocking her vision ahead.
“Mage?”
The mage snapped back at the Union worker's call. She swiftly recalculated the flag distances and relayed the data to the nearby stake handlers.
If magic eyes failed, plain sight would do.
“I'll pick up the pace a bit.”
Said Marina Silanatiell, the Union's top surveyor.
Among the demons were mages who wielded profound mysteries. Demon mages outnumbered human ones and employed far stranger spells.
Strekl, who had encountered and slain many, could swear he'd never seen anything like this.
A mad wind descended. Strekl learned for the first time just how savage it could be.
Astronomers claimed a typhoon's eye was calm. What raged before Strekl was the opposite.
In the city's heart, where the flag had stood—around Marhal and Cliff—the gale crushed and hurled everything aside. Stones shattered under the wind's weight; even iron bent and crumpled. The ground compressed and sank.
Cliff's men and a few of Kaban's subordinates within the gale's reach were already reduced to crushed pulp beneath rocks. The pressing blast permitted not even their blood to spray; flesh, gore, bone, and entrails smeared viscously across the earth.
Within the maelstrom stood only the wind's master and the knight with his blade of fire.
Bachea's sole heir and the empire's betrayer—who had forsaken his duty—faced each other across fifteen years.
“Lucky for you. You aren't apologizing.”
“What're you talking about?”
“If you did, I'd have to forgive you. Just like with the innocent Demon King.”
Marhal could not harm those who begged forgiveness. That was his vow, his history.
Break it, and he would have to end the world. A blood debt for half the world could only be paid with the other half—so Marhal had forgiven the Demon King.
Good that Cliff offered no apology. Better that the betrayer remained one to the end. Now he could vent the resentment.
Cliff advanced, sword foremost. The fire's mystery clove the emperor's wind. But wind did not yield to severing. Even an iron-cutting knight could not slice it.
The flames rode the gusts without consuming them.
Cliff closed in slowly on Marhal. He yearned to charge, to behead him in one rush and shatter the paulownia crown. Yet even with his relic drawn, each step was his limit.
Still, he pressed on.
The mad wind howled. It stayed trapped in the city center.
Stone turned to sand. Iron embedded in earth. Debris siege knights could not clear was sorted; the ground flattened, compressed, and sank.
Cliff's footprints sank deep, only to vanish seconds later.
An inhuman spectacle. A power no mortal should wield.
And that power was commanded by a single man wearing a crown of wind.
A wind-forged crown. Its form elusive, yet vivid to Cliff's eyes.
The paulownia crown. Wood gilded in gold and studded with gems until no trace of the tree remained—the emperor's.
Recreated through mystery from five centuries of history.
“I envied that power. I wanted a mystery that mocked nature itself!”
“If you envy power, work for it. Envy mystery? Become a mage.”
“Nothing! Nothing ever surpassed Bachea's history.”
“What Bachea couldn't do, the Muet Empire can't either.”
“No. Muet can. The emperor made it possible.”
Cliff drew his third sword. The demon-slayer.
He couldn't rely on Bachea relics forever. Fleeing the palace, he'd escaped east with one blade.
Aware of accumulated might, he'd forged demon-slaying history into it. Thus it became a demon-cutter.
“Viktorma Muesilrigo II, who beheld this sword, bestowed power upon me.”
The demon-cutter granted its wielder strength against demons. It let him withstand the black mist.
And so Cliff embraced it.
Black mist seeped from his body. His eyes blackened; from his armpit, an arm tore through his clothes and grew.
With the third arm, he drew the last sword—from the Muet emperor.
Three blades in hand, Cliff fixed black eyes on Marhal.
He strode forward. The crushing wind was no longer his foe.
The gap between them shrank rapidly.
Cliff loomed slightly taller, gazing down. He saw the wind-wrought paulownia crown atop Marhal's head.
He raised his flaming sword.
No wind stirred near Marhal. One swing, and Bachea's last imperial bloodline would end.
Thrilling ecstasy surged through him. He had seized the power he'd craved. Even Bachea's mysteries were powerless against him.
“Behold! This is my power! The power Bachea denied me!”
As he swung down, Cliff met Marhal's eyes.
Memories flooded back—of his days in the Bachean palace. As a guard knight, he'd seen many royals up close.
The emperor's eyes were clear as spring water fresh from the peak.
The first prince's held the intellect of a truth-reading sage.
The second's were purely childlike.
Purity held infinite potential. Pristine paper soiled at the slightest touch.
And Marhal's eyes before him? Deep. Dark. Murky. Utterly unlike the emperor's or first prince's.
Sunken without end—clearer than the fanatic gleam of doomsday cultists who truly believed.
The eyes of the dead. Lifeless orbs in a corpse.
“You know one thing, not two. You think your power, your talent—all yours?”
“Shut up!”
“As the emperor's proxy, I declare: Cliff, you are no longer a guard knight. No knight at all. Not even a citizen of the empire. All records of you are erased. You'll enjoy none of the privileges as an imperial, knight, or guardsman.”
History held power. The accumulated held power.
As emperor, as once-owner of the land he'd lived on, as wielder of five centuries' history and mystery—Marhal denied Cliff's.
Cliff crumpled to his knees. The flames shielding him raged out of control.
The fire that had repelled the wind now buckled beneath it.
“What…?”
“If someone chronicles your life as history, they might sum this moment in one sentence: The history of the traitor Cliff—power-hungry beast, honorless savage knight—vanishes from Bachea's annals by the will of its last royal. Thus, all he accumulated is meaningless.”
“Impossible. Who dares deny me!”
“I dare. The empire's will dares. The will of those you abandoned, the duties you shirked. You should've apologized.”
Cliff gnashed his teeth. Black mist poured from him, enshrouding his form.
“Apologize, and you'd forgive? A knight's original sin of abandoning his charge? The crime of kneeling to enemies?”
“Of course. I forgave the Demon King who razed half the continent. Can't manage one traitor?”
The Hero Party pierced every peril to reach the throne. No epic clash awaited. The Demon King was merely a pitiable woman, ignorant and exploited by her father.
A lone soul suffering beneath an ill-fitting paulownia crown.
The history etched into Marhal's flesh—the mystery—demanded vengeance. Kill the Demon King, scourge who doomed the western world, and exact equal toll.
Half the world's blood debt demanded the rest.
So Marhal forgave her.
If even the Demon King, then surely one betrayer.
“Lies. Nonsense.”
“Well, even reciting the world's truths means nothing if you won't believe them.”
His embrace of the black mist stemmed from histories piled upon him. Personal annals of Cliff, plus those bestowed by others—like being knighted directly by emperors of Bachea and Muet.
Marhal had denied one.
Stripped a single power resisting the mist.
History-denied, Cliff could not resist. His body warped.
Five more arms sprouted from his back; eight in total, hands morphing to blades.
Clothes shredded as eyes bloomed on his chest; his flesh armored like a knight's full plate.
He resisted the wind once more. Towering now, head enlarged, he stood bipedal and glared down at Marhal.
“Now, I'll become the new Demon King.”
Strekl wanted to flee. Without Marhal—if this were the battlefield of ten years past—he'd have bolted without looking back.
Demon wars birthed monsters even knights couldn't handle. Ones demanding mages' curses, siege engines, all humanity's knowledge.
The demon-Cliff reeked of such calamity.
Marhal regarded the transformed Cliff impassively.
“I have no interest in something that's not even human anymore.”
There was the phrase razor wind. Condensed gusts could slice iron like a blade.
The wind flayed Cliff. Not merely from the sides—its entirety, surface after surface, rent endlessly.
No blood showed. What spilled from wounds was diced by the blast into invisible fragments.
Cliff could not move. As if all before had been mere play, the wind slammed down.
Only then did he grasp it. The prior gale wasn't Marhal's true power.
A mere signal. The emperor's declaration of presence.
Born naturally from the paulownia crown and Marhal's aura.
He had been battling that aura all along.
Ignoring the agony of his body crumbling to dust, Cliff screamed.
The world's injustice pained him more than flesh.
“Unjust! Over forty years of accumulation, every effort—worthless against your mere existence? Such a reality? Such absurdity possible?!”
“Who knows. I've wondered myself. If hell exists and God dwells there, ask Him.”
Cliff eroded away in the wind. His blown flesh and guts crushed into sand, one with the earth.
Marhal doffed the paulownia crown. The wind construct dissipated into gusts upon leaving his grasp.
He gathered the three fallen swords.
Around him, the ground had cratered to his head's height.
Marhal clambered out.
“Toss the Muet emperor's blade in a furnace; the other two are usable. Here—gifts.”
He handed the relics to Strekl.
Strekl caught them on reflex. He felt dazed still. Surreal, dreamlike.
Marhal's mystery had been brutally otherworldly.
Where his wind had descended lay a smooth pit. No trace of the shattered city.
Questions piled like mountains. But as Pubguk's war hero, Strekl's first was predetermined.
“The Muet Empire created the demons? Truly?”
“Demons devoured the west at unnatural speed. Factor that in—east's Muet was never safe. Yet they never stirred till the end. Suppose they birthed the demons and prepared countermeasures? When all but the empire was consumed, the world theirs—erase them, and the emperor owns everything?”
“…What sort of lunatic…”
“Frontline knights got a few anti-mist pollutants. Demons claimed half the world in under a year. What history could they have forged to supply countermeasures to the front that fast?”
“……”
Strekl fell silent. Infinite rage welled.
All his wars, every death—for one madman's ambition? Boot of conquest lust?
Conveniently, a rage outlet stood nearby.
The imperial princess, Bayola Muesilrigo. Rush her, rip her apart, drink her blood—might slake this thirst, this fury.
“I can guess your thoughts.”
Strekl refocused. Marhal stood before him.
Bachea's prince. A man who'd lost everything.
Who hated Muet more than any.
“You… how did you endure it? How?”
“No need for formalities. Casual's fine. Endure what? I forgave. Can't visit an emperor's sins on his kids. Besides—work left, right?”
On the crater's far side, where Marhal's men had fled, Kaban remained alone.