EPILOGUE
“Geez, what the hell was with that guy’s aura?! He was an absolute monster!”
Yuuto was splayed across the low bed, shouting complaints into the air.
He was completely exhausted, unable to even move his body anymore.
“You did wonderfully, Big Brother,” Felicia said, using a handheld fan to blow some cool air onto his face.
Felicia herself had also apparently been physically affected by Nobunaga’s aura; her face looked pale and sickly.
She happened to be on the better end of things, though. The Múspell soldiers, and even the Einherjar Hildegard, were all sitting or lying on the ground, and they looked to be completely spent in both body and mind.
Even Albertina lacked her usual happy-go-lucky smile; she clung fast to Kristina and didn’t let go.
Kristina was doing a good job of acting just fine on the surface, but she had a somewhat floaty, distracted look in her eyes.
“So, that was Oda Nobunaga, the great hero whom you modeled so many of your strategies after? Big Brother, I must say that he was a figure far beyond anything I had conceived. Steinþórr seems like a cute kitten by comparison.”
“You’re really not wrong...”
Of course, if it were a case of one-on-one combat, Steinþórr would absolutely be the victor.
But that wasn’t what they were talking about.
It was Nobunaga’s overpowering presence, the immense strength of his charisma. It was so powerful that just by being in the same room with him, one felt the sensation of being crushed underneath it.
“I am truly impressed that you were able to face someone like that, Big Brother. If it were myself, I believe I would have been too swept up in his presence to be able to speak at all.”
“Yeah, well, I still get the impression that he was just toying with me that whole time.”
The sudden, intense spirit that Nobunaga had thrown out at the very end of their meeting had been on a completely different level.
It didn’t seem like the Flame Clan patriarch had been going easy on Yuuto during the opening section of their negotiations, but it did seem to mean that, in the end, all of it had just been nothing more than something he’d gone along with for the sake of his own amusement.
“That, that can’t be true...!” Felicia gasped.
Felicia had a tendency to overestimate Yuuto, so she apparently found it hard to believe that someone could actually get the best of Yuuto while only taking him half-seriously.
But the reason she’d gasped was because, deep down, she couldn’t erase the feeling that perhaps that man really was that powerful.
“Well... that doesn’t mean I’m going to let him beat me, either.”
Yuuto lifted his legs up into the air and then brought them down, using the momentum to jump to his feet.
The will to fight had been ignited in his heart, and that quickly pumped energy back into his tired body.
“Things didn’t go like I originally planned, but despite everything that happened, I got a promise from him that he wouldn’t attack us or our territory. Thanks to that, I can focus everything on taking care of the other clans and their encirclement strategy. I’m gonna have to deal with them fast, though—before that monster of an old man makes his next move.”
Ironically enough, on the very same day as the meeting between the Flame and Steel Clan patriarchs, the wheels of fate had begun to turn in another place entirely.
The five allied clans—the Sword, Cloud, Fang, Panther, and Hoof Clans—all publicly declared war against the Steel Clan simultaneously.
The invasion of the Steel Clan had begun.
To be continued...
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