The Ghost Knight

The Ghost Knight commotion played out more simply than you might expect.

Spirit bodies poured out of the split fissure, and they did physical damage inside the imperial capital.

But as Meyer’s case had already shown, spirit bodies weren’t capable of pushing all that hard on the material plane. Even the Knight of Dawn, a hero on a continental scale, hadn’t managed to put Aiden down in one go. So even with spirit bodies pouring out, it shouldn’t have amounted to anything all that serious. That was how it was supposed to go.

Only.

“—This is no ordinary business.”

Simple as it was, it clearly wasn’t a light matter, either. Noelle said it in a stiff voice, looking up at the sky.

“If a fissure has opened on this scale, the whole of the imperial capital will be inside its zone of effect.”
“…You look kind of used to this?”

Aiden knew from the original how all this would roll along, so he was one thing. But Noelle, too, had the air of someone who’d seen a situation like this before.

“It is one of the tactics used during the Coalition War.”

She paused for a moment before going on. Her eyes had gone sharp, and in them, rare for her, was a hostility that felt as if it could tear skin open.

“…The Magic Kingdom used it often.”

That much was enough. He understood at once why she was reacting like this. The battle in which the Lord Protector had died had been fought against the Magic Kingdom, too, so there was no way she held any good feelings about it. Yet it seemed just as clear that an antagonism like that didn’t come from that reason alone.

“Aiden. Please get away from here with Stella, as fast as you can.”

Noelle said it gravely and drew her sword.

Pure-white ki flowed starkly along the blade. He’d seen that battle-ready stance once before, and only once: when she’d faced off with Katya. So this situation was about as grave as that one had been.

“It will be fairly rough work. To fill in a fissure this size… I will have to stake a few things myself.”

It was the voice of someone bracing herself very firmly for something, enough that even the look in Stella’s eyes changed for an instant. Stella, who had Aiden slung over her shoulder.

“Dame Noelle. Do you mean to settle this alone?”
“I have to find every ‘root’ causing the fissure and pull them all out.”

A root, in this sense, was a structure a sorcerer had set up with the source of its magic power sealed inside. There was no closing that fissure except by finding them one by one and smashing them, and the only one here nimble and quick enough to do that was Noelle.

“It’s dangerous. Even you, Dame Noelle, will be gravely hurt if this goes wrong!”
“Um, hold on a—”
“The work itself isn’t that hard. I just have to find them and break them.”
“But the fissure is going to open wide any moment now. If you go in there without even knowing where the roots are, you’ll take the aftershock of the opening full in the—”
“Could you listen to me for a—”
“Stella.”

Noelle cut Stella off with a transparent smile.

“We weren’t given the title of Knight so we could run at a time like this, were we?”
“I’m begging you, just let me say a—”
“The citizens are over there. So we go and protect them.”

“…”

“But, Dame Noelle…!”

Stella called her name in anguish. Why take a sacrifice like that on alone? Why try to shoulder everything by herself? That pained question swirled in her eyes.

It was a scene you could fairly call heartrending, and Noelle, for her part, answered it with the face of a Knight bearing a sublime mission.

“If you understand, then get out of here, Stella. Protecting Aiden comes first—”
“Will you just listen to me—!”

“…”

“…”

Aiden’s words came slicing in and cut her sentence clean off, and the two Knights fell silent at the same moment. Probably because neither of them had ever seen Aiden shout with the veins standing out on his forehead…

“Sorry to interrupt your serious talk, but first—”

With that, Aiden pulled something out from inside his coat.

It was one of the stakes Stella had been so busy hammering in until a little while ago. The difference, it seemed, was that this one bore a clear mark, as though, unlike the other stakes, it had a definite ‘function’.

“—Because you’ve got something bigger to worry about than closing the fissure, you know?”
“Aiden? What do you—”

Noelle tilted her head and started to ask, but before she could even finish, divinity was rising from Aiden’s body.

The stake in his hand was something like a detonation switch. It could order the supernatural power stored in all the others to be released at ‘the timing he wanted’. And the moment that power settled naturally into the stake in his grip, a window floated up before his eyes.

The instant those lines came streaming out, colorless flame bloomed up on every side. It bloomed all at once from every place a stake stood, the ones Aiden had driven in while flying around with Stella for one whole night. Wherever that light spread, blackish structures crumbled away with a dry crackle and turned to ash, all of them coming into view at once.

That was what the fissure’s ‘roots’ Noelle had spoken of looked like.

…And they happened to be at exactly the spots where Aiden had had Stella drive the stakes in.

In the original, the fissure’s roots always popped out at fixed positions anyway. He hadn’t gone running all over the place in the dead of night for nothing.

“…”

“…”

Noelle and Stella shut their mouths tight at the same moment and watched the fissure close, as though the night sky were being stitched back together.

Beside them, though, Aiden was puffing with temper as he flung the spent stake down onto the ground.

“All that fuss over nothing at all…!”
“…Aiden.”
“Yes?”
“I was right in the middle of bracing myself to stake my life, you know.”

“…”

Noelle was looking at him with a curiously hard-done-by light in her eyes, and under that gaze, Aiden scratched his cheek.

“Well, now you don’t have to, so isn’t that a good thing?”
“…That is so, but still.”

It was so, yes.

It was so, but…

“…”

“…”

…Well.

A good outcome was a good outcome. Noelle’s embarrassment aside, hadn’t he done a fair amount of preparing precisely so he could pull off something like this?

Even so, he didn’t let his guard down yet. He glared at the fissure. Seen only like this, it was something you could get past easily enough, but if it were the sort of thing that ended there, Aiden wouldn’t have prepared so meticulously up to now.

“Actually, like I said a moment ago, the part you really have to brace for starts now.”
“Yes?”
“Because this isn’t the main event.”

It was a simple principle, when he thought about it. The world he was breathing in now was built on the base of the original ‘game’, and that meant there was one essential element no story split into ‘episodes’ like Act 1 and Scene 1 could do without.

Boss fight.

There was no getting around it.

As Aiden called that word up inwardly and gave a bitter smile, ectoplasm began clumping together around the fissure with a terrifying air about it, just before it could close.

The Ghost Knight— was it?

The event was literally called the ‘Ghost Knight’ commotion, so an enemy tied to knights in one form or another was certain to show up. And the shape the ectoplasm took as it came down from the sky and clumped together on the ground wasn’t much different. It was the shape of a knight in full armor.

“—”

Aiden took a deep breath and steadied himself.

Act 1’s Scene 1 was the very first event of all, so of course he didn’t expect it to be all that hard. But fighting with his life on the line still wasn’t something he was used to.

What I have to work with—

Three skill-copy rights on Noelle, and one skill-mimicry right on the Prince.

He’d already learned by heart which skills were on the table, so all he had to do was copy the right ones for the situation and use them well. Use these well, fight his way through, and that would do it.

— I am, steel—

Or so he’d thought.

Right up until the ectoplasm knight brought out ‘words’ like that, out of nowhere.

“—?”

A sense of foreboding slid straight down Aiden’s spine.

Unless it was considerably powerful, like the Knight of Dawn, a spirit body couldn’t keep its ‘consciousness’ and behave like a person. Which meant the thing standing over there was very likely not a being meant to appear in a mere Act 1, Scene 1.

Something.

It was going badly wrong.

— I am, a blade—

Before long, along with those words, supernatural power shot up around the spirit body.

Ki.

Pure white in color.

…Exactly the same as what Noelle wielded.

— I am, the scales.

Before long the gathered power took shape as a single slash. He’d seen that posture once before too, because it was the posture ‘Noelle’ had taken when she did her ‘sending a slash’ at Katya.

…Sure enough.

The ghost knight’s school was a perfect match for the combat form Aiden had copied from Noelle.

And having set that slash in the air, the ghost knight looked straight at Aiden in front of it.

The instant he met its gaze, his divinity sensed the danger before anything else and leapt out around his body as if to stand guard. In fact, that alone would have been enough to survive most situations.

But everything he did in the next moment came from instinct, not reason.

By rights, it was a combination he’d never have chosen, because Noelle had plenty of skills far more valuable than these. This was him emptying out every copy right he had to strengthen a ‘shield’ that would block one single attack, right now.

Only.

A certainty ran through his whole body that unless he went that far, he would die right here and now.

— Subjects of the Empire, be not afraid—

And it had unmistakably been the right answer.

— For I have come.

The next moment, just as a snow-white veil came into being before Aiden’s eyes, his body went flying through the air. The slash had done it. By the time he noticed it, it had already flown right up to him and struck a crushing blow.

What the…!

He hadn’t even been able to register the attack coming, and on top of that, the defensive force field he’d reinforced three times over had been left in tatters like an old rag by one single blow. If he hadn’t just emptied every copy right into it, he’d have died, no doubt about it…!

What on earth is this…!

It was exactly like going up against Noelle ‘herself’.

And no wonder.

It wielded Noelle’s pure-white ki, it used Noelle’s school, and even its force was nearly identical. Probably the only person in the world who could do a thing like this was Noelle, and no one else.

Which was to say.

Save for exactly one other.

“…Teresa?”

In a cracked voice, Noelle brought out the Lord Protector’s name.