Ishura - Volume 9 - Chapter 4

Chapter 4 - Inebriated

The large-scale coup d’état that Iriolde the Atypical Tome had spent many, many years enacting had been largely suppressed—despite displaying enough military power to take over all of Aureatia—in an unnaturally short amount of time.

Rising in revolt all across Aureatia at once, Iriolde’s army succeeded in capturing several of the important people in Aureatia, chiefly starting with the aristocracy. And yet, several times just as many of the Iriolde army’s most important leaders were captured from strategic failures, and it was now impossible for them to draw out favorable hostage exchange conditions.

It was clear that the intelligence network Iriolde had built off his connections during his days as Fifth Minister, with roots spread deep in Aureatia, as well as the supply lines cleverly linking together anti-Aureatia cities, had been identified very early on. This also greatly surpassed the Iriolde army’s expectations. Everyone believed that with its bureau chief, Elea the Red Tag dead, Aureatia’s Information Bureau wouldn’t be functioning properly.

While there was no doubt whatsoever that a high-level commanding officer on the inside, one with full understanding of the entire organization, had been continuously leaking information, now that they were on the verge of annihilation, they had no means to identify the culprit.

Using the cancellation of the tenth match to conquer the city had been their big gambit in order to guide public opinion; however, this too took less than half a day to subdue. Putting aside the self-proclaimed demon king Yukis’s slaughter of the Kadan Third District, the casualties among the citizens were insignificant, and not enough to exhaust Aureatia’s organization energy.

It was as if it had all been manipulated at a devil’s fingertips to proceed in the absolute worst way possible.

On the other hand, something had happened that even this devil man wouldn’t have ever predicted.

It was the day of the tenth match.

“…Rosclay…”

Haade the Flashpoint received the report in the Fifth Stronghold, transformed to serve as the Iriolde army command center.

The dried blood splattered all over the floor and walls belonged to Iriolde the Atypical Tome and his collaborators.

“He really kicked the bucket.”

Haade’s cigar slipped down from his dried lips.

He had disposed of all those who wouldn’t be needed in the world hereafter, without Iriolde ever suspecting his betrayal until the moment of his death, and sent those who would been necessary back to Aureatia with Hidow the Clamp.

Now convinced that the entire operation had been successful, and they were the victor in the coup—though technically a loss from Haade’s position—this notice was the very next information reported to him.

“Hah, ha-ha.”

Thrusting both his hands onto the table, he supported his body as it threatened to tip over.

He simply laughed. It was unbelievable.

Haade’s plan, Jelky’s plan, and everything else along with them had ended in success, yet despite it all, with Rosclay—the crux of everything—now dead, it all proved totally meaningless.

Not only that, but he had also died in the worst situation imaginable.

One of his hands covered his face, his nails almost drawing blood from his grip.

“Soujirou… Soujirou! That damn fool… Hrnk, hwah, hah-hah-hah-hah… Yup…you’re a real funny guy, all right. Sure, I’m not against that or anything but… You seriously went and did it now! Th-that bastard… You left me up shit creek now…!”

—Nothing conveniently goes your way on the battlefield.

This sentiment was a constant expression of his.

Haade had been prepared for his espionage to be discovered and to end up dead. If his strength on the battlefield proved lacking, he could have even accepted it as a sign of his aging decline.

If Rosclay or Jelky made a massive blunder and got themselves defeated anyway, he would’ve been fine to actually command Iriolde’s army to take over Aureatia himself.

To have Rosclay die while everyone was able to secure the best possible victory for themselves was the worst outcome of all.

“Bw-bwah-hah-hah-hah… What’ll happen to me…? I’m the archvillain who slaughtered the beloved Rosclay the Absolute, huh? If I had just pulled out as his sponsor, then all there’d be left would be a feel-good execution! Except Soujirou went…went and won the damn match!”

Until Soujirou lost in the Sixways Exhibition, his only choice was now to play the villain to all the citizenry of Aureatia. The greatest villain of all, who took complete control over the military, waved a flag of rebellion against Aureatia, and used that chaos to have Soujirou the Willow-Sword kill Rosclay the Absolute.

Neither Rosclay, Jelky, nor himself could even think about publicly revealing the truth behind the grand plan they put everything on the line to carry out.

There were even fewer ways to go back to how things were than there had been in the beginning. The fact that his only choice was to continue forward was terrifying.

Rosclay, controlling the playfield with his absolute schemes and strategy, was dead. It was impossible to predict the future now.

The battle that was supposed to bring order had birthed an uncontrollable chaos.

“A-all…all right, then. I’ll go along with this… If this is how it’s gonna be, then I guess I’ll have to see it through to the end!”

His heart pounded like a fire bell, and his face was drenched with thick sweat.

The youthful vigor that welled up in him, even in his sixties, vanished, and his head ached horribly with fear and shock.

However, it wasn’t a lie.

This feeling had been something he had forgotten for a long time, since his days killing as a frontline soldier.

Any encouraging and rousing war was a lie.

The fear and despair, enough to paint over the exultation of combat, was the real deal.

He spoke as he tore at his face.

“This is a real war now…and I sure do love war, after all!”

The Aureatia Central Assembly Hall was like a big flowing river of people.

The number of personnel coming and going through the hallways had to be three times more than usual.

It was a complex series of events that had brought Hidow the Clamp to be standing among the crowd.

After he was replaced on the Twenty-Nine Officials, he had infiltrated Iriolde’s camp to probe further and lure away talent back to Aureatia’s side—or at least, that was the role Haade had pushed on to him; however, all the bureaucrats didn’t even have the time to praise or criticize Hidow or to even look at him.

“Minister Jelky collapsed.”

Meeka the Whispered said succinctly without turning back to look at Hidow.

She had a massive physique—a woman built like an iron statue. While she had been tasked with adjudicating the matches as a member of the Twenty-Nine Officials, she hadn’t witnessed the ninth match, held away from the public’s eyes, nor the tenth match, forced to start by the citizens’ crazed enthusiasm.

“Minister Jelky is currently administering orders from his sick bed, but even still—when considering the roles that Minister Jelky and General Rosclay filled—the hole left behind here must be a large one.”

“Probably.” Hidow spat out his reply.

He was fully aware he looked like death warmed over right now.

What were they supposed to do? he wondered.

Given that Jelky had given his life to public service, he was bound to return to action, but did he really think they’d be able to keep Aureatia together right now with Rosclay’s death and Haade’s defection?

For Hidow, he did have to admit this was better than getting executed for being a traitor aligned with Iriolde. He also needed to do something about the talent Haade had forced into his care. He had only one choice.

Even still, he truly and deeply loathed going back to the Twenty-Nine Officials.

“So, what am I supposed to get started on first? Just to be clear here, I don’t know anything about what happened while I was gone. Even with the War Damage Reconstruction Agency, I only got wrapped up in it ’cause it all got foisted on me.”

“I’m well aware. There’s no need to have you return to the War Damage Reconstruction Agency.”

“That just makes me feel even worse.”

“When the royal palace grounds were attacked, you commanded a unit to rush to aid its defenses. In which case, I figured it was logical to leave you in charge of handling the rest of that matter. I’ll have you take charge of investigating the crime scene.”

“…Oh, so that’s it.”

When it came to the assault on the palace during the coup—in addition to several inscrutable firsthand accounts—Jelky had purposefully concealed much of the information, so Hidow still didn’t know the particulars.

However, Hidow had indirectly heard the name of the other individual who stormed the palace grounds with Kyaliga the Music Reed.

“Kia the World Word, right?”

“Yes.”

Walking ahead of him, Meeka stiffly nodded without turning around.

That was the hero candidate that Elea the Red Tag had stand in as Jivlart the Ash Border’s substitute in the fourth match.

A young elf girl with no relevant or remarkable background.

“General Yaniegiz’s testimony would point to that, so long as he wasn’t delirious at the time.”

“I wonder. That Yaniegiz has always been ’bout thirty percent delirious to begin with. ’Sides, if it really is true that Kia annihilated a whole guard squad…there’s no way that she could’ve set up the same tricks she used during the fourth match on the royal palace grounds.”

“And what if there were no tricks at all? That would be the most logically consistent explanation.”

“…No way.”

Elves were a long-lived race that possessed a youthful appearance throughout a majority of their lives. What if, then, he assumed that Kia the World Word was a terrifyingly old elf, and had honed her Word Arts to a degree that far surpassed that of a self-proclaimed demon king?

There were certainly past examples of individuals who had possessed monstrous Word Arts skills on the battlefield.

The First Party member, Lumelly the Poisoned Ground, for example, or the notorious Eswilda the Boundary of Tragic Dreams. Or even among the minia, there were records of those like Izick the Chromatic enacting Word Arts with a scale and output on par with a dragon’s breath.

However, even among anomalous individuals such as these, the remarkable act of utilizing clearly different systems of Word Arts simultaneously had never been seen before.

There were other reasons to deny the possibility.

During the fourth match, it was highly likely that Life Arts had been used directly on Rosclay’s physical body.

Enacting Life Arts in such a manner was totally impossible, unless one was their personal physician or Life Arts healer with a deep understanding of the individual, down to their flesh, bones, and internal organs.

During his match with Soujirou the Willow-Sword, Rosclay apparently didn’t have Ekirehjy the Blood Fountain providing Word Arts support. Sending Ekirehjy to analyze Nectegio’s toxins couldn’t have been the only reason why. Rosclay would have worried about the absolute worst-case scenario. That was how Hidow saw it.

If Kia the World Word…really did use Word Arts directly on Rosclay without any sort of cheap tricks…then that’d mean nothing makes any damn sense.

The reason those who made use of constructs utilized machines and corpses for their materials was that they were all fairly simple objects compared to a living body. It was believed that no matter how tremendously powerful a Word Arts user was, it was impossible to directly enact Word Arts on an opponent the caster had just met. It was just natural logic.

Were such a feat possible, it would be the same as having complete control over the life and death of every soul in the world.

“You seriously think Kia the World Word’s some omnipotent monstrosity?”

“I do.”

Meeka asserted. She was a levelheaded adjudicator, and far more rational than any other member of the Twenty-Nine Officials.

“I saw the fourth match between Rosclay and Kia with my own eyes. She caused all those phenomena with just a single word and didn’t use any foul play to do it. If you want to say she pulled off trickery skilled enough to fool these eyes of mine, then she surely could’ve done the same in the royal palace grounds, too.”

“Tch, how’m I supposed to argue when you put it like that, sheesh… You want me to capture an all-powerful Word Arts caster?”

The perfect raw deal for the guy who came crawling back. Either that, or they didn’t expect any results from him in the first place.

In any case, the only option was to gather up information the honest way.

“Miss Meeka! So this is where you were! We’ve had a new person surrender to us just now…”

A single official came running over from the crowded flow of people passing through the hallway.

“And they’re someone I should deal with directly?”

Meeka the Whispered, in control of the Justice Ministry and left to clean up the aftermath of the large-scale coup, was tasked with the peripheral clerical work around the handling of important captives. The decision not to drop the indictment against Hidow and reinstate him in the Twenty-Nine Officials happened through a clemency bargain with her.

“…It’s Kaete the Round Table. He is demanding his reinstatement as Fourth Minister!”

“I have no reason to accept his demands. I don’t need to confirm that for myself, do I?”

“Would’ve loved if you had rejected my own reinstatement like that…”

That said, Hidow would’ve made the same judgment call if he were in her position.

The circumstances between Hidow and Kaete were different. Kaete had conspired with the self-proclaimed demon king Kiyazuna, preparing a massive quantity of Beyond weaponry with the intent to overthrow Aureatia. Several pieces of evidence had turned up and there was no room for any excuses.

“Um, I’d like you to hear this from him directly, Miss Meeka, but…he has presented something in exchange. Should he be reinstated…he will provide Mestelexil the Box of Desperate Knowledge to Aureatia to use in battle!”

“He’ll what?!”

“Come again?”

They were going to storm the royal palace. He had to protect it. Yet, his feet couldn’t feel the ground at all.

There was a panic, as if trying to crawl up from the bottom of a bog. He slipped down and fell back to where he began several times, but never slid down for good. It was a fruitless feeling.

…Then, Dant the Heath Furrow awoke, seeing a pale light-brown floor and ceiling.

Wh-where is Queen Sephite…?

Still gripped by his dream panic, he looked for the Queen.

Practically jumping to his feet, he looked around him, only to finally comprehend that he was in a hospital room.

His shoulders slumped low, and he ground his teeth.

“A horrible, utter disgrace…!”

He quickly realized that he was completely unharmed, with no scars left behind on his body.

Dant remembered it clearly, too. Twenty-Fourth General Dant, Ninth General Yaniegiz, and Fourteenth General Yuca had encountered a young elf girl immediately after suppressing Kyaliga the Music Reed’s attack force at the royal palace grounds.

That girl, Kia the World Word—by some unknown means—had neutralized all the forces she encountered on her way to the royal palace. First, she defeated Yuca, and although Yaniegiz and Dant coordinated to capture Kia together and utilized magic items to do so, they were completely outmatched.

Then, Kyaliga blew himself up while they were all right next to him…

“…?”

Dant looked down at his hand.

Why am I alive?

He checked his body multiple times, but he didn’t see any scars from Life Arts treatment. Not even the slightest burn mark was left behind.

A miraculous stroke of fortune couldn’t even explain how he had been hit with such a large blast at close range and escaped without any physical or internal injuries whatsoever. Although Dant lost consciousness from the strong shock wave, he distinctly remembered part of his body being torn off in the moment of the explosion.

“It really is quite strange, isn’t it, Lord Dant?”

The wiry man with a snaggletooth staggered into the hospital room.

Dant’s senses reflexively signaled their disgust.

The man had been caught up in the same explosion as Dant—Yaniegiz the Chisel.

“…You look unharmed, then.”

“That’s right. My body’s in perfect shape. I’m getting discharged in the afternoon, actually.”

Yaniegiz casually waved his thin hand.

Just like Dant, he too seemed to be perfectly unharmed.

“The Queen!”

“She’s just fine. Really, what a relief. If anything were to befall Her Majesty, our heads would’ve been destined for the chopping block, I’m sure.”

“…What do you think happened, Yaniegiz?”

“Who knows? The effects of the blast were miraculously blown off course, or perhaps Kia the World Word, well…”

“…”

Dant understood why Yaniegiz fell silent.

Their dying bodies had been healed by Kia the World Word directly utilizing Life Arts on them, all without living a single scar behind.

After witnessing Kia’s tremendous power firsthand, it was the most intuitive answer to them both.

“In any event… Given she threatened the royal palace, Kia the World Word cannot be ignored. This case is bound to full under the Palace Guard Bureau’s jurisdiction. We need to share this information with Rosclay posthaste to—”

“He’s dead.”

Yaniegiz interrupted, the words coming out like a sigh.

“Rosclay is dead. While quelling the uprising in the city, he was attacked by Soujirou the Willow-Sword… Though, of course you wouldn’t be aware of that after just waking up.”

“Huh? Dead…?”

At first, Dant thought it was one of Yaniegiz’s sick jokes.

He even felt anger well up, convinced he was the same scurrilous, despicable man as always.

Rosclay the Absolute couldn’t have died at a time like this.

He looked at Yaniegiz’s face.

Though it seemed just the same as always, he wasn’t smiling.

“…I don’t believe it.”

Rosclay’s camp should have been moments away from claiming victory on this massive, complex playing field.

And in the very last moments, unbeknownst to both Dant or Yaniegiz, Rosclay had died?

“Yaniegiz, how can you stay so composed…?”

“Composed?” Yaniegiz crooked his snaggletooth and smiled. “Do I look composed to you?”

The once-poor Yaniegiz had been saved by Rosclay and climbed up to the Twenty-Nine Officials through diligent hard work. Gaining Rosclay’s trust as his greatest adjutant, he had always worked to live up to said trust.

“Rosclay was risking his life to fight, and I failed to give him any support.”

While Yaniegiz and Dant were polar-opposite generals in every way possible, the feelings of adoration Yaniegiz felt toward Rosclay might have been the closest sentiment to the devotion Dant had to the Queen.

“Yaniegiz…”

“I’ll never let it go. Soujirou the Willow-Sword, Kia the World Word, the Gray-Haired Child… Factions don’t matter anymore… I’m going to make sure…they’re erased from this world for good.”

Faced with this boiling hot animosity, Dant was unable to say anything to the man.

As long as he was aligned with the Gray-Haired Child’s camp as part of the Queen’s faction, Dant too would eventually have to face off against Yaniegiz once again. Even then, Dant couldn’t do anything to stop him.

If he ever lost the Queen, he probably would have ended up the same way.

During the grand coup, Dant and Yaniegiz weren’t the only members of the Twenty-Nine Officials who ended up involuntarily hospitalized.

Almost exactly as the tenth match reached its conclusion, Jelky the Swift Ink collapsed from fatigue and was transported to the hospital.

Of course, Jelky spent far less time unconscious than Dant or Yaniegiz. Awaking after what constituted a normal night’s sleep, he immediately plunged into continuing his work.

The first thing he attempted was contacting the Gray-Haired Child.

While the physician stopped him, he used his authority as a Twenty-Nine Official to bring a radzio inside his hospital room, gathered together the people he needed, and contacted him in an official capacity.

<I appreciate hearing from you, Third Minister Jelky. Are you recovering well?>

“I don’t need your hollow concern. Nor any pointless preamble, either. I want to continue our negotiations…from this morning.”

<Thank you very much. I, too, would like to arrange an agreement that will lessen some of the burden on yourself.>

“You had two major demands: revising the slave law and financing postwar restoration, correct? In four days…make it three days, I’ll set up a meeting for you to present and negotiate the details for both. You can send an envoy if you want. Whether we’ll accept your demands is up in the air till then.”

Permeate the Aureatian social structure with goblins as slaves, openly grow their numbers, and when they became impossible to dispose of, they’d take over the whole kingdom’s structure. Hiroto’s demands were the first step.

The Gray-Haired Child, with that single first step, would establish a firm foothold in Aureatia’s structure.

Could a society transformed under a visitor’s values truly be called a proper and just kingdom at all?

In the end, we don’t really have any right to say anything, either.

<Master Jelky…do you intend on continuing with the tournament?>

“Don’t be ridiculous. You think a mere defeat will get me to stop it? This fight is no longer an issue of whether we win or lose. All of it comes down to an earnest wish to dispel fear, and the hope Rosclay entrusted to me.”

<Personally, I feel Master Rosclay’s demise was quite a shame. Being an unofficial match as it was, it never should have resulted in death…or perhaps it could have been settled with a surrender. While the result may have abided by the accords of the Sixways Exhibition and its true duels, I can’t believe Soujirou the Willow-Sword was forced to fatally wound him.>

Jelky ground his teeth and endured the regret surging up inside.

While normally he was able to control his emotions like a cold, heartless machine, he had forced himself to avoid thinking about Rosclay’s death ever since he had regained consciousness.

It was foolish escapism, as though he were turning his eyes away from the death of a close family member in the hopes that when he looked again, it would all be a lie.

“I’m…relieved. You act composed and unperturbed, but you don’t possess some deviant ability to make everything turn out in your favor, either. If the flow of that very match had tilted ever so slightly in our favor, Rosclay would have won. Both Ozonezma and Zigita Zogi lost… Gray-Haired Child, you excel at creating situations themselves, but in the end, it’s all as reckless as stepping out over a sheet of thin ice.”

<…You’re right. My forte is simply to present a composed front as if everything had been in the palm of my hand all along. The battles where a small discrepancy costs me everything vastly outnumber the ones I have won. That may indeed be true for the Sixways Exhibition as well. I have lost a great deal.>

Of course. If Hiroto the Paradox had been destined from birth to always win and expand ever further, this fight never would have turned out this way to begin with. Even after establishing the goblin nation on the new continent, he must have lost many compatriots along the way to where he was now.

Which was precisely why he was a threat.

During his many years, just how many stretches of thin ice had this visitor stepped on and broken? On top of that, how was he able to experience such tremendous loss and still risk his life on a new flow of ice?

“…Gray-Haired Child, there is something I can provide you in addition to a negotiation opportunity.”

<Allow me to ask what that would be.>

“Hiroto the Paradox, I will recommend for you to join Aureatia’s Twenty-Nine Officials. If you seek reform, then fight from the position best suited to do so. From the very beginning, that was your goal in coming to Aureatia, wasn’t it?”

<That is quite magnanimous of you, Master Jelky. Such an honor to give the man who drove your close ally to his death…>

“Is that how it looks? I’m saying I’ll kill you through political strife. We in the Twenty-Nine Officials are constantly fighting against far more colossal threats than this mastermind charade of yours. I want you to answer me right here if you have the courage to expose yourself to these dangers.”

<……>

Just counting from the start of the Sixways Exhibition, six of the Twenty-Nine had died already.

This wasn’t simply the result of political strife. From the age of the True Demon King, Aureatia’s Twenty-Nine Officials had been on the front lines to stop any threats, fighting for this country while fully resolved to perish in the process.

At the very least, Rosclay the Absolute had been that way, right up to his very last moments.

Jelky had his own duty to do everything in his power to stamp out all the threats in the land.

The way to deal with a threat that devoured all those who weren’t his ally, was to ally with him.

Kill him, as an ally.

<…I’ll gladly accept your offer. Please, I ask for your recommendation. If I am admitted in your ranks, I assume that managing the Sixways Exhibition will become one of my jobs, won’t it? In which case, as a show of thanks, though that may not be quite the right word for it, allow me to share with you some beneficial information for continuing the Sixways Exhibition.>

“Go ahead, then. While we’ve disposed of all the hostile camps, now that we’ve lost Rosclay, it’s now impossible to bring all of their remnants into the fold. The one who turned the Kadan Third District into a labyrinth. Mestelexil the Box of Desperate Knowledge whose whereabouts are still unknown. Finally, Kia the World Word, who attacked the royal palace. We cannot dedicate all of Aureatia’s combined forces to subjugating these threats. We need a method to immediately dispose of these risk factors on the fringes.”

<Well then, one among those names, Mestelexil the Box of Desperate Knowledge is bound to become a powerful piece at your disposal, I’m sure. This, too, was another big gamble, but I received word that Kaete the Round Table has successfully retrieved him. I imagine Kaete himself will come looking to bargain with Aureatia before long.>

Jelky’s brow furrowed at the Gray-Haired Child’s calm tone.

So these were the ones sheltering Kaete, were they? The possible suspects were already limited just by the fact Kiyazuna the Axle hadn’t been brought into Iriolde’s camp…

<Now then, this would be what’s truly been on my mind. Currently, Uhak the Silent is in Aureatia’s custody, yes?>

“…That’s not even worth concealing. Immediately after the eighth match, we secured him while he wandered the city streets. He’s obediently obeying our orders, but…given that his sponsor Nofelt is dead, there’s no guarantees he is under anyone’s control. We need to keep eyes on him.”

<Fair enough. Also, without a sponsor of his own, he has utility as a participant you can force to drop out of the Sixways Exhibition at will… I assume that is your thinking?>

“I don’t think he’s that convenient. While he may be exceptionally strong, he is still an ogre that can’t use Word Arts. Shalk the Sound Slicer’s his next opponent, and after he beat Mele, clearly we can’t aim to win out with a small bit of sabotage.”

<Not at all. Uhak will win that fight.>

“……?”

<Uhak the Silent might be the one and only answer to bring this chaos under control. Allow me to tell you the truth behind his abilities, that you haven’t been able to observe for yourselves…>

Even if he had to swallow his hatred and agony, he would battle, piling up corpses to build a world of peace.

Jelky the Swift Ink could not drop out of the contest.

He turned to Hiroto the Paradox in order to win after losing his just and proper trump card.

Jelky would need to extend a hand to Uhak the Silent, a wild card concealing a powerful curse.