75. Recovery

“What’re we gonna do now, the two of us?”

The two of us lay sprawled flat out.

I really and truly can’t move anymore.

My body wouldn’t so much as twitch, like that famous line about burning yourself out until nothing’s left but pure-white ash¹. I couldn’t even begin to imagine how thoroughly it had broken down.

“Arden!”

I didn’t even have the strength to turn my head, so I just stared hopelessly up at the ceiling.

“You alive?”

A hollow laugh slipped out of me at the question.

“I’m alive — for now, anyway. Though you’re hardly wearing the face of someone in any shape to worry about anyone else, Sis.”

Lillian, who’d asked after me, was in no better shape herself. She pressed her fingers to her forehead, and they came away stained red.

“Ehh, looks like I split my forehead open rolling around back there.”
“You okay?”

This time it was Lillian who shot back with an incredulous laugh.

“Hah! Look who’s worrying about who — you can’t even move!”

Even so, she lay down beside me as she said it.

“…Honestly, I’m running on empty too. Let me rest just a bit.”

We shared the same view. Not a single cloud marked the Abyss sky, which was the color of a sketchbook smeared thick all over with black.

“I really wish I’d had a talent for magic.”
“What do you mean, no talent?”
“…Huh?”
“Raising that old tree up at the exact instant to match my running speed — if your timing had been off by even a hair, that spear would’ve punched clean through me, you know?”
“That was…”
“And without you, I couldn’t have beaten the bastard. In the end, what pierced his heart wasn’t my sword — it was your vines.”
“That’s all thanks to you, for coming up with the plan.”
“No.”

My body was a total wreck, but at least my mouth still worked, thank god. To think this silly Big Sis of mine had been seeing it that way.

“Not many people could actually pull it off if you told them to leap off a speeding carriage. If the family’s knights could plant every arrow dead-center on a moving target… we’d be a house of archers, not a house of knights.”

I’d already seen Lillian’s talent for myself. Sure, her monotone attack patterns and that naturally timid streak of hers were a problem for now.

“You can get so much stronger, Sis.”

And it wasn’t only my own conviction that vouched for her future. Why else would Gamma and Beta have staked everything on wiping her out?

Because they’re afraid of Lillian reaching out into the world.

Lying there beside me, Lillian gave no answer. Whether she was embarrassed by the praise or just took my words for empty flattery, I couldn’t tell; I couldn’t see her face.

“You’ll keep helping me even after we go back to the house, right?”
“…Obviously.”
“No stabbing me in the back, got it?”
“Do I look like the kind of person who’d do that?!”
“It’s just, the axe I trusted has come down on my own foot² twice now.”
“Eh? By who?!”
“It’s a long story.”

And so, until Lillian’s mana came back, I told her the story of Leo and Elli.

“That bastard! I never would’ve taken him for the type!”

She flew into a temper when she heard how Leo had betrayed me early on.

“Huh, so she did all that for your sake. And here you were going on about the axe you trusted splitting your foot.”

She was proud of Elli for having endured Valerian’s training. Once all the laughing and chatter had run its course, a brief silence settled in.

“What are you going to do from here?”

The question seemed loaded with all kinds of meaning.

“First, recover the Demonblood Stone, head back to the house, and get myself named the official heir.”
“Ah… right. We came here to find that gem, didn’t we.”

Our original purpose had been nothing more than to retrieve the Demonblood Stone and return, though it seemed Lillian had forgotten the whole point amid all the frantic brawling.

“And once you’re the heir, what then?”
“Hmm. For starters, I’ll have to properly train the ones I took in this time, and that mutt — er, Devil.”

To wreck the scenario of That One that Gamma and Beta had spoken of, I’d have to grow stronger, and so would everyone else. In my head, I was already sketching out a concrete roadmap.

“And right away, I’ll need to attend the Crown Prince’s coming-of-age ceremony next month.”
“Really? I’d have figured you weren’t one for social parties like that.”

Lillian asked, puzzled.

“It’s not like you or I get to skip it just because we don’t care for it. Our house has sworn its loyalty to the Empire, after all.”
“…I suppose that’s true.”

This was the coming-of-age ceremony of the Empire’s Crown Prince, no less. Short of being dead, or laid low by some critical illness at death’s door, every key figure of every house under the Empire was compelled to attend. Such was the lot of those who had lost the Empire’s war of conquest a century ago.

“Arden — you’ve got some real goal in mind, don’t you?”

Lillian’s question cut in sharp. Still gazing up at the ceiling, I calmly laid my true feelings bare.

“…I just figure that one person up above, looking down on me — my father alone — is more than enough.”

Beside me, she shot upright like a released spring and looked down at me. Dried blood was smeared across her split forehead, but it was shock that filled her eyes.

“…Arden. Don’t tell me — you mean to raise treason against the Empire?”

Treason.

To attempt to topple the vast machinery of the Empire was, under Imperial law, the gravest crime of all, an act that could see an entire house exterminated.

Seeing how flustered Lillian was, though, I forced the corners of my mouth up.

“Sis, treason is the heaviest crime in the Empire. Same goes within our house. So please, watch your words.”
“R-right? Treason against the Empire, of all things — there’s just no way. I way overreacted.”
“Exactly. Because we’re not going to commit ‘treason’ — we’re going to win our ‘independence.’”
“…What?”
“Are you planning to never marry, and spend your whole life under Father’s thumb?”
“Well, no, but…”
“A hundred years beneath their heel is plenty for us, too. It’s about time we found our rightful place.”

Sure, a life spent scrubbing out the Abyss as the Empire’s lackey, forever reading the Emperor’s moods, wouldn’t be a bad one.

But it can’t change the future.

Those bastards’ scenario led the world to ruin. I couldn’t just sit twiddling my thumbs under the Empire and watch it all come to an end.

“You’re insane. You are seriously not right in the head.”
“Like that’s news.”

Lillian stared at me with a dumbstruck look, then, as if all the air had gone out of her, lay back down beside me again.

“If they ever come to haul me away, I’ll know it was you who tattled, Sis.”
“Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t. Don’t you know that just planning treason makes the whole house a target for the purge?”
“Then I guess we’re in the same boat.”

Lillian sat there dumbfounded for a long time. And yet…

“Y’know, the second you call it ‘independence,’ my heart suddenly starts racing all giddy — is that weird?”
“…Yeah, you’re definitely not right in the head either, Sis.”
“Did you forget whose big sister I am?”

At that simple, throwaway line, the two of us laughed out loud for a good long while.

Since my legs still refused to move, Lillian summoned her vines once more for my sake.

“…This feels a little strange.”

To think I’d end up wound tight in vines and hoisted into the air, with no say in the matter. I might as well have been a puppet under Lillian’s control, but in my current state I could only accept it without a word of complaint.

Lillian guided me to the corpse of the Eligos we’d fought earlier. The site still bore every trace of the battle, and the body sprawled face-down there made for a gruesome sight.

On the left breast of the armor gaped the clean hole where I’d driven my sword in. On the right, Lillian’s vine had crushed through the hard plating, bored in, and punched through the chest to jut out of the back. The fresh dark blood dripping from the tip of the vine was like a period stamped down to declare that the bastard’s life had been utterly snuffed out.

“Arden. This thing really does… have a Demonblood Stone, right?”
“Probably, I’d think.”

It was all I could do to give a hazy, half-there answer.

Where is it?

By the game’s logic, killing a boss should have dropped the item beside the corpse, or popped a chest that all but announced, “I’m your reward.” But scrub my eyes and search as I might, there wasn’t so much as a whisper of the Demonblood Stone.

Don’t tell me it’s still alive?

Or had Beta pulled some trick again?

My doubts were still mounting when a pitch-black beam of light plunged down out of the sky like a meteor and swallowed up the fallen Eligos’s form.

“…Oh, come on, this is just too cruel!”

Lillian and Eve spat out their despair. But when the black light drew back, the scene that emerged was nothing like what we’d braced for.

The Eligos rose to its feet, now perfectly whole, not a single wound on it. Instead of reaching for its spear, though, the figure slowly slid off the helmet that had guarded its head.

The heavy iron helm dropped to the ground, and the truth hidden within came spilling out. Glossy violet hair scattered on the cool wind of the arena, and the face revealed behind it belonged to a woman, beautiful to an almost eerie degree. Her blood-red eyes seemed to hold a certain nobility, and the line of her nose was as sharp as that black spear of hers.

“To you, I offer my heartfelt gratitude.”

It was nothing like the thick, heavy man’s voice from before. A woman’s voice, cool yet clear, rang through the arena.

“…Huh?”

Lillian stared at me, eyes gone round, her look all but asking, Is that thing really the same bastard as the pervert from a second ago?

I was bewildered too, but even I could tell that the presence radiating off the being before me wasn’t Beta.

“Though my flesh was devoured by that vile creature, the last fraying edge of my soul never faded — it watched this whole spectacle unfold.”

Eligos approached us slowly, without a trace of hostility.

“For driving out that wicked intruder who seized my body and defiled this noble arena, you have my deepest thanks. O heirs of Arne.”

She gazed quietly at Lillian’s vines wrapped around my broken arm, then faintly lifted the corners of her mouth.

“Were it not for the bond between you, I would have rotted away forever, playing the part of that puppet.”

Hers was the courteous, noble bearing of a knight, a world apart from Beta, who had treated humans like insects. Only now was I certain: the boss Eligos I’d known had come back.

.

.

.

“This should set things right now.”

A black haze flowed from Eligos’s fingertips and gently caressed the wounds of Elli and Seraphina. At that, their pain-twisted breathing visibly eased, and color slowly returned to their pale faces. Watching it happen, Lillian let out a sigh of relief.

“And Big Bro Valerian?”

At Lillian’s question, Eligos glanced at Valerian collapsed in the corner and answered evenly.

“That one has merely fallen asleep from the shock of being controlled, so do not worry. It will take a few days for him to wake, but there is nothing wrong with his body.”

But when she turned her gaze to me, the look in her eyes remained heavy. The black haze scanned over my body, then drifted back to her side.

“Hmm. The body is already far past its limits, and above all, your very soul stands on the brink of collapse… I regret to say it, but you, I cannot heal.”

At her resolute pronouncement, Lillian gave a violent start and threw herself in front of me.

“What are you saying?! You have to do something! Arden ended up like this fighting that monster, all because of the awful creature that stole your body, Sir Knight! This is all your fault — don’t you dare talk so irresponsibly!”

Eligos offered no denial to Lillian’s impassioned cry and quietly bowed her head.

“But it is not as though there is no way at all. Will you follow me?”

She led us back toward the very center of the arena. There, on the blood-reeking sand, the corpses of the minions Beta’s black spear had swept up and killed earlier lay cold.

“Not a single one left alive. A truly clean death.”

Eligos murmured, sweeping her eyes over the bodies.

I spoke up.

“That was you, though.”
“I know. It is only that I seem to have shown my skills have not gone rusty against many foes at once — and that pleases me a little.”

She had watched the whole time, she’d said, as Beta seized her body and ran riot.

“Now then — watch closely.”

Eligos reached a hand into the air and traced a magic circle. A black beam of light stretched out, absorbed one of the corpses, and…

“…Sylvia?”

Sylvia came back to life.