14
At the foot of a broad mountain range, located some handful of miles north of the Crystal Palace, several fugitives were looking one another over inside a guardhouse bereft of its usual occupants.
Reinhard and Ferris shared a glance while Julius explained his hypothesis on what had really happened in the palace earlier that day.
“What if Master Balleroy faked his own death…? Could he be in league with the conspirators?”
“If the death of one of the Divine Generals was the best way to put things in motion, then the simplest solution would be to enlist one of the Nine as an ally. Backstabbings and ambushes by one’s friends are akin to daily bread among those of the empire. It is unwise to turn your back without proper caution. Striking the spark of rebellion is no small feat, either.”
“So then the best move is to make the general who’s supposed to ‘die’ your ally from the start? But that…”
“It is an eminently plausible tactic. If the crime could be pinned on you all, then so much the better. The rest of the generals would take it upon themselves to wipe you out. All the more so if you happened to kill me somewhere in the process.”
If it turned out that knights from Lugunica had killed both a Divine General and Emperor Vincent, they’d set the entirety of the empire against the apparent criminals. Even now, they teetered on the brink of just such a development. Should their enemies create the right conditions, then the conspirators themselves had no need to do anything more. They could count on the pursuing generals to silence the interlopers. However…
“There were two things they didn’t count on. One was that His Majesty wasn’t killed back at the palace…”
“And the other, that your Sword Saint would be a match even for Cecils.”
“…You mean to say that Reinhard really threw a wrench in their plans?” Ferris asked, and Julius nodded with no small degree of pride. If Reinhard hadn’t been there, Vincent might very well have lost his head to an assassin. Julius and Ferris would have certainly been destroyed by the pursuing generals, too. It was thanks to Reinhard that those events had not come to pass, and that there was still a ray of hope for peace between the kingdom and the empire.
“We’ve got a lot of the pieces now. What we have to do is get His Majesty back to the Crystal Palace and reveal the true identity of our enemies. That’s going to take some careful planning. Not many people would be capable of it.”
“Agreed,” Vincent said. “But first, let me spare a word of praise for you. Well done.”
“Yeah, way to go, Julius,” Reinhard added. “Ferris and I would never have figured all that out.”
Julius felt it was all a little much—but by having simplified the situation, he had also thrown the difficulties into sharp relief. Now that they knew exactly what their victory conditions were, they knew their enemies would be desperate to stop them. Balleroy Temeglyph was among those enemies. The three knights would need everything they had to—
“Ah. I knew it wouldn’t be so easy.” Julius looked around, ever alert.
“Oh, for the love of—! Talk about not being able to catch your breath!” Ferris groaned.
Now that they understood victory would require getting Vincent back to the palace, they had emerged from the guardhouse. Unfortunately, the group promptly stopped dead in their tracks when they sensed they were surrounded by innumerable hostile presences.
“So many of them. I can’t believe I didn’t notice… They really caught us with our pants down.” Reinhard, like Julius, scanned the area, frowning to realize they’d been taken completely unawares. This look of chagrin was unusual for him, but his frustration with himself was understandable. They were encircled by so many; it should have been impossible not to notice them.
“Ten, twenty… No less than fifty, I’d say.”
“Wow, that’s not good news. I didn’t know your Sprouts could count, Julius.”
“For better or worse, they’re excellent students, and I’m a proud teacher.”
“Hmm, not the brag I was hoping for…”
Ferris quickly hid himself behind Julius and Reinhard. When Julius had his greater spirits confirm the number of auras surrounding the guardhouse, he discovered it was many tens of times their own. They were not Volakian troops, however. Rather, Julius was certain these were assassins sent by whosoever was hunting them. The killers seemed to meld with the trees, preventing the spirit mage from getting a good look at them. Even if he strained his eyes, following the guidance of his spirits, he still couldn’t seem to make anything out.
“It would seem even the vaunted Sword Saint can’t elude the empire’s prized hunting hounds.”
“Are you implying you know who they are, Your Majesty?” Ferris said. “Maybe you could give them a good shouting-at, then? We share the same fate meow, it looks like.”
“I very much doubt it. If they’ve allied themselves with the rebels, then they won’t care whether I personally approve of what they’re doing. It’s obvious enough from the way they’ve thrown aside their role as spies and informants to turn into simple assassins.” Vincent crossed his arms and remained suitably imperious as he eyed the auras around them. “One supposes you were talked into it with sweet nothings. What were you told? That when I had been removed from the throne, the treatment of the weakest tribe would change? You were bought at a cheap price.”
“Um, Your Majesty… If talking to them won’t work, maybe we could at least…not taunt them and make them angry? Just Ferri’s little idea.”
Vincent’s provocation had certainly seemed to enhance the menacing pressure that surrounded them. These faceless assassins had come to murder the emperor, he who ruled their nation. With Vincent’s words, the last vestiges of hesitation had been wiped from their minds.
Suddenly, they heard a grating, clicking noise.
“This sound…”
“The indication that their preparations are complete. These are frightening and powerful opponents. Show me how you’ll protect the ruler of Volakia.”
“As you command.”
“I’m meowy uncomfortable with this!” Ferris exclaimed. He was the last of the four of them to speak, for it was then the enemy made their move.
With incredible speed, someone approached the guardhouse from behind—a figure flying on wings made of stretched skin. It had legs and arms like a human, but also several crucial differences. The wings were one of them, as were the feelers and compound eyes. All these differences shared a kind of similarity: They were all parts of a bug.
“They are from the Insect Cage Clan. They’ve domesticated these fearsome bugs. They may not be much to look at, but they are more than powerful enough. Even compared with a Sword Saint.”
“Understood,” Reinhard said as the enemy closed in.
The Insect Cage Clan was a minority group that existed only in Volakia, a tribe that included a wide variety of demi-humans. From a young age, members of the clan ingested bugs with special powers, adopting the qualities of those creatures over time. They shared their Odo, the wellspring of all life, with the insects, combining their very souls in order to share their bodies and gain the insects’ power. This was what led to their monstrous external appearance. When the people of this clan unleashed the power of the insects, they themselves transformed into something very much like the bugs.
“ ”
The attacks were very mechanical, holding no passion or emotion. The clansfolk were hunting powerful humans, and they were doing it logically, cruelly, and mercilessly. They danced through the sky on their wings, shot poison darts from the pipes in their mouths, used their mutated arms like sickles to slash at their prey, stabbed with horns that could punch through steel, and even charged headlong, relying on their own bodies, encased in impenetrable carapaces. All unique moves that no normal person could perform, and yet…
“Well, well. I’ve never seen any of these attacks before. I guess it would be impolite to describe this as ‘very interesting.’”
“…?!”
To the assassins, it must have been like a nightmare, for all their attacks were denied. Reinhard used his fancy footwork to keep them all at a distance, despite their flight advantage. The Sword Saint slapped their poison darts down in midair. With his hands, he deflected their wind-slicing sickles and their armor-piercing horns, while he met their shattering charges and sent them reeling with a single kick. Reinhard had never seen any of these attacks before, yet he wasn’t so much as dirtied by them.
“Impossible…,” groaned one man with horns growing from his shoulders. His attempt on the emperor’s life had been stopped cold. The bug-like assassin’s voice trembled in astonishment as he watched Reinhard. “These are our most secret and deadly techniques, yet you treat them as nothing… How?!”
“I’m sorry. I’m just going on intuition.”
“Wha…?!” The man’s face stiffened in further disbelief. The next moment, Reinhard pulled close two opponents he had grabbed hold of and sent them crashing into the man with the huge sickles and horns.
An enemy with poisonous feelers tried to take the opportunity to get behind Reinhard, but a saber flashed out and sliced the deadly protrusions in half.
“Reinhard, that explanation was not very helpful.” Poison scattered from the tumbling bits of feeler; Julius brushed it aside with the wind he whipped out from a swipe of his saber, then stabbed the reeling assassin through the limbs. The man crumpled and fell. Julius slammed him in the face with the hilt of his sword, sending the insect-person into unconsciousness.
Having subdued this one opponent, Julius turned to discover that in the meantime, Reinhard had taken on another five of the Insect Cage Clan killers and overpowered them all.
The red-haired knight had described the ability that allowed him to deal so easily with the clan’s unfamiliar attacks as simple intuition, but that was too modest a term for the first-sight blessing. It allowed Reinhard to understand instinctively how to react so as to defend himself from attacks he was seeing for the very first time. In a word, it was almost like seeing an attack before it happened. The blessing was useless if one was unable to react to an attack that was perceived, but Reinhard’s physical abilities were such that there was no attack he couldn’t respond to. And then there was…
“The twice-seen blessing…”
When an arm-sickle came at him again, he evaded it easily, even though it came from his blind spot. This was the effect of the twice-seen blessing, which allowed him to respond with vastly greater speed to an attack he had encountered once before. These two skills made it impossible to harm Reinhard either with a new attack or a repeated one. Few opponents could have been a better match for the Insect Cage Clan, a group that prided themselves on the strength of their attacks. Had the Sword Saint not been with them, how long could Julius and the others have held out?
“That is rather astonishing…,” Vincent murmured as he watched the scene unfold before him. Reinhard’s knifehand, which could cut more effectively than live steel, slashed through the oncoming clan members as they flew at him one after another. To the emperor, perhaps the Sword Saint’s combative dance, along with his red hair, painted a scene of moths tragically charging toward a flame.
Still, the enemy was a plentiful swarm. Numbers would tell eventually.
“Julius! Take Ferris and His Majesty!” Reinhard shouted as he continued to turn back the storm of deadly attacks. It was clear he intended to be the rearguard again.
“Rather inelegant, but unavoidable,” Vincent remarked.
Destroying the enemy was not their victory condition. Julius knew what he had to do. “Your Majesty, this way!”
“So I shall be made to run again. You know no fear of your betters, do you?”
“Don’t complain! Ferri and Julius are running, too!”
Thus, the flight back to the Crystal Palace began in earnest, with Vincent in tow. There was a furious beating of wings; most of the Insect Cage Clan were stalled by Reinhard and couldn’t pursue them. A few, though, were able to give chase through the skies.
“Ire! Alo!” Julius gave a sweep of his sword, summoning the red and the green great spirits. A howling conflagration spun up. It burned the wings from their pursuers, who fell to the ground, screaming.
“Hrgh… Grr…” Even on the ground, the Insect Cage Clan members struggled and tried vainly to reach for their target. Julius ignored them, however. The knight ran to catch up with Ferris and the emperor, who were ahead of him.
“ ”
Julius couldn’t help feeling some sympathy for the assassins as they stretched and strained to continue their pursuit. If what Vincent had said was true, then these creatures had joined in the rebellion in hopes of gaining higher status for their people. He didn’t agree with their methods, but it wasn’t his to say that their wish, which had moved them to such actions, was wrong.
“Would you let that cheap sentiment lure you into allowing them to achieve their goals?”
“Your Majesty…”
Vincent had matched his pace to Julius’s and looked over at him. When the ruler of Volakia saw the effect his words had, he coldly stated, “You cannot. That is the truth. Mercy, compassion, decency—all are but ways the strong show their superiority over the weak. Chivalry seeks to dress this fact up as something more, but when all is said and done, it only shows that true selflessness is impossible.”
Vincent’s words were like a merciless blade cleaving Julius’s sympathetic heart. However, the knight didn’t dispute the emperor’s description of his feelings as cheap sentiment. He couldn’t.
“Your Majesty… Take it easy on Julius, all right?” It was not Julius, but Ferris, now bringing up the rear, who spoke up. His breath was starting to come in gasps, but his gaze was still intense as he leveled it at Vincent. “You might think Julius is a big, serious guy—it’s an easy meowstake to make. But inside, he’s just a kid, and getting him all bent out of shape with the way you talk makes you nothing but a bully.”
“As you proved in the throne room, you certainly do not hesitate to criticize me, beast-boy. Perhaps it only emphasizes that you truly are feral. Did you leave your courtesy behind when you left your mother’s womb?”
“I was most humbly spoiled, if you will, sire, by one who was not so easily offended by blunt statements. By no stretch was our king in the slightest way suited to rulership, and yet, Your Majesty…he was a better man than you’ll ever be.”
It was a provocation far graver than the one offered by Bordeaux in the throne room, and that had almost cost the old man his head. Yet Vincent only narrowed his eyes at Ferris’s words. Then he broke into a slight smile. “Let it not be said you are without courage. You’ve provoked me to draw my attention away from your friend.”
“…How’s that, sir? Poor li’l Ferri doesn’t know what you mean!” Ferris put a finger to his cheek and pretended not to understand what the emperor was saying. That alone revealed the true intention behind Ferris’s baiting remark—he had been trying to protect Julius. Had his move been strategically clever or simply one born of friendship? One could be certain it was the latter.
“Ferris, my thanks,” Julius said.
“I told mew! I don’t know what mew’re talking about! Listen to me!” Ferris puffed out his cheeks in mock annoyance. Although, he had to unpuff them quite quickly so he could grab another breath as the trio continued their flight.
Julius, one eye on Ferris, chose to throw away any concerns about what they had left behind and focus ahead. At this point, they had to keep moving forward.
“We have to make it to the Crystal Palace…”
The group would have to cross through the forest again to reach the castle, but the structure was already visible in the distance. If they proved able to clear the palace walls by riding the wind, it would be simple to evade the eyes of the imperial troops.
However, as Julius considered the plan, something unexpected happened…
“ ”
The knight’s naive strategy was cleaved apart—rather like Vincent’s right arm, which came flying off at the shoulder.
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