"So I’m telling you, I have no idea who Kaepel even is..."

The boundary between light and shadow shifted once more. Aurier’s entire body was finally bathed in the gentle sunlight, but his eyes no longer reflected any light at all. They were completely vacant.

He was dead. Even his soul had burned away.

His shriveled, severed limbs lay scattered around him, no different from the surrounding bones. There was nothing about his death that suited the status of a prince. If anything, it was pitiful beyond words.

And yet, looking at that face, which even in its final moment seemed to be clinging stubbornly to something, Muen suddenly felt an indescribable emotion stir in him.

"Maybe if you’d been in a different position, you really could have done better."

Muen let out a quiet sigh and picked up the badge this pathetic mad prince had given him.

No matter whom Aurier had meant to hand that badge to in his final moments, it had ended up in Muen’s hands after all, by such a winding and absurd turn of events that it was almost unbelievable.

Before coming here, Muen had never imagined that he would receive help this great from an enemy prince... and not just him. The Kingdom, and the Salvation Society behind it, probably never would have imagined it either.

Some hidden piece on the board, placed by an unseen hand, had fallen into his palm.

So then...

"Maybe this counts as fate too?"

Muen raised his head, holding the badge up so that it overlapped with the sun in the sky. Gazing at that distant, insubstantial crown, he let out a mocking laugh.

"It seems your so-called 'fate' in the Salvation Society isn’t complete after all."

The sun was covered once more by darkness.

Black flames rose across the silent wilderness.

The noiseless tongues of fire licked greedily over the bones, and before long, everything here was swallowed whole.

An army of several hundred thousand, vast as a tidal wave, was reduced to ash in only a very short time.

A mere few minutes later, this place had returned to an empty wilderness marked only by the traces of war.

"Next..."

After the simple work of cleaning up, Muen rubbed at his slightly throbbing temple and turned his gaze toward the distant walls.

Since this was the rear side, there had originally been steps inside the wall leading upward, but perhaps in order to defend against enemies coming from behind, those stairways had already been completely blown apart.

Of course, something at that level could not stop him. Muen’s figure flashed, appearing above the broken stairs, and he began moving slowly along the road behind the wall.

As he advanced, the number of corpses around him also began to increase. There were soldiers in Imperial uniforms, and soldiers from the Kingdom as well. It seemed that those things transformed into monsters by Ancient Magic were far less interested in corpses than in fresh flesh and blood.

"No, wait."

As he walked, Muen’s brow furrowed. He suddenly caught something strange with sharp clarity.

"Why are there so many bodies piled up here?"

He turned to look around. On other sections of the wall, there were still obvious traces of fierce battle everywhere, but there were no corpses left behind—and that was only natural. After a major battle, no matter which side won, the first thing to do was clear the bodies off the ground. Otherwise they blocked the roads and made normal troop movement impossible.

No one wanted to be looking at corpses all the time, especially not when many of them were their own comrades from the Kingdom.

Muen began rapidly sorting the timeline in his head.

The Kingdom army circled around and launched a rear assault, pincering Notasia Fortress.

Notasia Fortress held out stubbornly and refused to fall despite the prolonged attack.

Then, under pressure from the "hundred-thousand-strong army" Muen had fabricated, Prince Aurier agreed to let someone from the Salvation Society use Ancient Magic in order to speed up the fall of the fortress.

Faced with overwhelming force, Notasia Fortress was breached. The Kingdom soldiers positioned in front of the fortress began entering the city and cleaning up the battlefield.

Finally, once the fighting had ended, the Imperial soldiers who had held the fortress were wiped out in a glorious last stand. The two Kingdom armies joined up, and at the very moment victory hung over everything and the soldiers had let down their guard, someone from the Salvation Society triggered the hidden trap they had planted in advance...

And so the bloody feast began.

The abnormal Kingdom soldiers devoured the normal Kingdom soldiers, turning into monsters no different from beasts. Driven by their instinctive hunger for flesh and blood, they continued marching toward the northern plains, where the Empire’s great cities lay.

The timeline was easy enough to piece together. ◈ Nоvеlіgһт ◈ (Continue reading) There was nothing in it that needed repeated scrutiny.

The only problem was that according to that timeline, there should not have been so many bodies here that had clearly fallen in battle.

The scene before Muen looked almost as if...

"No way..."

His gaze swept over the narrow, difficult terrain, and over the growing number of bodies—mostly Kingdom soldiers, and most of them mutilated, clearly having lost the ability to move long ago. Muen nudged one of the Kingdom corpses over with his foot. The "corpse," which should have been dead long ago, moved again and lunged viciously at him, only to be kicked away by Muen in the next instant.

"Grr... hungry..."

The Kingdom soldier was visibly emaciated. Too much blood had drained from his severed legs. Drawn by the fresh scent of blood, he twisted desperately, trying to rise and pounce on Muen again. But after struggling a few times, he finally went limp and lost all breath.

It seemed he had burned out too.

Which meant that many of the so-called Kingdom corpses here had already burned out as well, through constant fighting, through fierce resistance from stubborn opponents...

"Just as I thought."

Muen withdrew his gaze.

This place gave him the feeling that... there had been a battle here that fell completely outside the "calculated timeline," and that battle had only just now ended.

His pace instantly quickened.

His whole body became a blur as he slipped with agile speed through the increasingly narrow terrain.

There were blast marks everywhere. Holes torn through the walls everywhere. Makeshift barricades and traps everywhere, only to be flattened in turn by the flesh and blood of soldier after soldier.

Muen passed through every one of those harrowing sights and reached the highest point of the fortress.

There stood a tower at the very edge of Notasia Fortress. In ordinary times it had served as a watchtower, but now even the only stairway leading up to it was carpeted with corpses.

Kingdom soldiers who had completely burned out, and... Imperial soldiers who had fought to their final moment.

Muen stepped over the bodies and continued upward. With every step he took, he felt his heart tighten a little more, forcing his blood to surge and roar through his veins.

At last, Muen reached the top of the tower.

The magic cannon that had once been set up there had already been dismantled. The barrel had been rolled down below the tower like a log, while the enormous base had been turned upright and used as a crude "wall."

That kind of wall, of course, could not completely block the enemy. Large numbers of them had pushed in from the sides. Muen could even see some Kingdom soldiers with their backsides sticking out in a pose straight out of some bizarrely specific dirty booklet, their flesh pierced clean through by cold spears.

So it was behind that...

Muen’s eyes flickered.

He did not destroy the "wall." Instead, he cleared away the corpses of the Kingdom soldiers and slipped through the narrow gap.

At last, he entered.

Muen narrowed his eyes.

The first thing that met him was blinding sunlight. The walls of the tower had long since been blasted full of holes, and the sunlight could easily pour into this space.

But what that sunlight brought Muen now was not warmth.

It brought the atmosphere of slaughter.

Mixed with the dense smell and color of blood, the sunlight cast everything in his sight in the hue of tragedy.

Aside from the fallen Kingdom soldiers who had already burned out, there were also dozens of Imperial soldiers scattered through this not-so-spacious chamber.

Some still gripped long spears, holding their enemies outside the "wall" with desperate force.

Some still clenched long blades, the edges buried in their enemies’ bones.

Others were locked in savage grappling with their foes, tearing chunks of flesh from them with nails and teeth.

...They were all dead.

What stood before Muen now was nothing more than the image of these Imperial warriors, fixed forever in the final instant of their lives.

But that alone was enough to leave a person deeply shaken from the heart.

Because they had not been affected by Ancient Magic. They had not lost their reason. And yet they had burned themselves out even more completely than those Kingdom "monsters."

After sweeping his gaze across the scene, Muen’s eyes landed on the center.

An old man sat there with the light at his back, perched atop an empty supply crate. His unfocused eyes were still held wide open with visible effort, as if he were gazing toward the southern lands he could no longer see.

On the nameplate over his chest was his name.

Flanwell Tern... Marquis.

Originally, the title behind his name had been Count. Because there had been no time, no one had even had the chance to make a new nameplate. The old title had simply been crossed out, and Marquis written in beside it.

"So that’s how it was..."

Muen reached out and touched the marquis’s neck.

The pulse was gone.

But Muen could still feel that the blood no longer flowing beneath the skin was warm.

"Notasia Fortress... was never truly breached."