PROLOGUE
A FOOL AND HIS STUBBORNNESS
—How many times had he been slammed to the ground?
He felt the hard, flat earth beneath him. A mix of blood and gravel made a mess of his mouth. His entire body burned like it was on fire. After so many blows to the head, his thoughts felt foggy and out of focus. His left eye had swollen shut.
He heard a voice from somewhere high and distant, from someone looking down at him.
“—I believe it would be futile to continue further?”
Subaru remained flat on the ground, limbs splayed, as he looked in the direction of the voice. He saw the violet-haired young man swaying the tip of the wooden sword in his hand.
His mostly white ceremonial uniform did not have a single speck of dust on it, nor was he out of breath, nor even sweating. Only the bloodstained weapon he held detracted from his elegant mien.
“If you take back what you said and bow your head before me, I will leave it at that. Do you accept?”
It was the young man who had inflicted such pain on Subaru’s body, relentlessly striking until he mercilessly drove Subaru to the ground. Each time he did, he would deliver his order for surrender again, as if some kind of rule demanded it.
But Subaru’s reply was set in stone.
“…I’m not wrong… I’m not…bowing my head.”
Even with blood trickling from his nostrils in an unsightly fashion, Subaru leaned on his wooden sword and rose again. He coughed violently to spit out the blood clogging his throat.
The difference in strength was clear. Everyone knew who the winner and loser would be. It’d take a miracle for Subaru to get a single blow in, let alone win.
But he thought, Yeah, like I care.
“…You should take back what you…!”
Subaru bit back the pain in his mouth and cut off his last biting words before charging forward too slowly, too late. He poured all his strength into one desperate blow.
“You can put everything on the line and it will never be enough. That is the difference between us, unchanged from birth.”
He smoothly parried the oncoming blow, and, after Subaru lost his balance, the young man slammed him hard in his chest. Subaru’s breath deserted him, and the next moment, when his vision flickered, a blow to his face sent him tumbling backward onto the ground.
The pain was tremendous. Amid agony so strong he forgot to breathe, Subaru stared up toward the heavens through his right eye. He saw the azure sky, high and distant, but nothing beyond it.
It was so blue it made him sick. Subaru forced himself back to his feet and peered ahead, enduring bloodcurdling pain with nothing more than his inexhaustible anger.
But it was as if that anger was a diversion from whether he was in the right or the wrong in the first place.
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