Chapter 257: When the Snow Falls
Operation「Spear of Heaven」. An aerial assault by dozens of Knights aimed at the enemy’s vital points.
─Crunch!
Having completed her mission, Hannah Usar chewed through five or six energy bars in rapid succession and swallowed them.
She squeezed the rest of the ultra-high-calorie liquid meal from the pouch on her thigh into her mouth.
She drained every drop from her filtered canteen, refilled it with river water, shook it a few times, and drank again.
A Knight burned through calories at an astonishing rate.
Mana was, in the end, a fire that used the body itself as its furnace. The greater the power of mana, the more that bonfire devoured the flesh and blood of its wielder as fuel.
In a single night of fierce combat, one Knight burned through as many calories as an ordinary infantryman did in a week.
Of course, a Knight could fight battles of similar intensity one after another, and could even push through several weeks on sheer willpower, but replenishing those calories whenever possible was better for the Knight as well.
This was effectively a Knight’s only weakness, and the reason why armor built to withstand enemy attacks had pouches carefully sewn into it to prepare against hunger.
“…….”
After replenishing her calories, Hannah took a slow, deep breath and once again reminded herself of the principles of a Knight.
1. Complete the mission.
No matter what happens, carry out the role assigned. If the situation turns so dire that carrying it out becomes impossible, use the issued ‘Signal Beacon’ and wait for comrades to come.
A Sentinel never abandons another Sentinel.
2. Do not remove the helmet until completely clear of the battlefield.
Officially, this was to protect each Knight’s identity and ensure their safety. Not only did the helmet itself possess defensive capabilities surpassing most tanks, but if a Knight’s face became known, their family could be targeted and information about them and their weaknesses could be exposed.
But there was a deeper, truer reason: shutting out guilt.
To a knight wearing the helmet, the battlefield registered as nothing but ‘information’.
Outside noise disappeared, the screams of enemies became mere decibel readings, and the pleas and begging of defeated soldiers were reduced to simple audio signals.
Every element that might stir up useless guilt was left on the far side of the visor’s filter.
And so the knight was free to focus on nothing but the fight.
3. Survive on your own, leave the battlefield, and return.
An Aerial Assault was, by design, a one-way ticket. If their side emerged victorious, returning was only natural, and even if it did not, that posed no problem.
A knight was a survival specialist trained to eat, hide, and come home alive alone in enemy territory, and possessed the mental fortitude to endure even the most extreme conditions.
Therefore, after completing their mission, a Knight would move to a prearranged location and return regardless of the battle’s outcome…….
Somewhere in the middle of those thoughts, Hannah Usar reached the designated point.
“Loyalty.”
Receiving the soldiers’ salutes, she climbed aboard the helicopter.
Rrrrrumble-!
She shut her eyes for a moment, and when she opened them she was in the Empire’s mountainous region, at Sentinel’s base camp.
Hiss.
As her feet touched the ground, she removed her helmet.
Her comrades were already there.
“Knight Hannah!”
“Hey. What took you so long?”
“You’re just about the last one in.”
Mia. Royce. Dare Tan. And the rest. Hannah took a step toward those who had returned safely.
“That just means my mission was that much more important.”
This operation had proven that knights were the Empire’s finest military asset.
By now, everyone on this continent would know that fact.
* * *
──【Zerpha Daily】──
[Great Victory at Gandela! Traitor Army’s Main Force Annihilated in a Single Night]
[The Throne Stands Firm. All Forces Begin Full Advance]
……The Traitor army that crossed the Iber River and threatened the heart of our homeland was annihilated overnight, while its remnants surrendered with the river at their backs.
Tens of thousands of prisoners have been captured, and the quantity of seized military supplies is still being counted. Riding this momentum, our forces have begun their advance on the southern front…….
We hereby warn the ringleaders of the Traitors. The Kingdom’s patience ends today. Those who surrender shall face the judgment of the law, while those who resist shall face the bayonets of the Kingdom’s army.
We hereby address our loyal citizens. The throne stands firm, and victory belongs to the Kingdom. Every household shall raise the national flag, and a thanksgiving service for victory shall be held at noon today at the Royal Capital Cathedral.
Long live His Majesty the King! Long live the Kingdom of Zerpha!
───
Crown Prince Alonso announced the victory in the name of the royal house. However, he instead denied that the Empire’s Knights had been deployed.
Surely everyone on the continent knew it was a lie, but outwardly, it had to be done that way.
“Knight Maximilian. I truly dislike that man named Pablo.”
The palace reception room was filled with a celebratory air. Having finished the official announcement, the Crown Prince welcomed me warmly and immediately brought up that name.
“A man who calls himself a citizen of Zerpha painted something practically traitorous and displayed it for all the world to see. Thanks to him, I hear that ignorant fools in Prozen and the western countries are condemning you as a butcher.”
Well, well. It seemed he was worried on my behalf.
“It’s all right.”
I replied calmly.
“The meaning of art always belongs to those who interpret it. The brush bears no guilt.”
I hoped Pablo would continue to wield his brush. I, too, no longer cared how my image was sullied.
The moment I gave up on being understood, and went so far as to reject it, I stopped caring what stained my hands. At last, I had gained the solitude necessary to accept any sacrifice.
“……Do you truly think so?”
“Yes. If anything, I want to keep seeing them. His paintings.”
“Well…… if that is your wish.”
Pablo himself would likely remain in Prozen for a while yet, painting works that would live on in history.
“Putting that aside, regarding this battlefield.”
I shifted the subject.
“You may already have heard, but the testimonies of the Republican officers all match.”
Their Superhuman unit had been mixed into the spearhead of the Republican Faction. That was a fact uncovered through the interrogation of prisoners.
“The Ezenheim Volunteer Corps.”
I could turn that synergy against them.
Because I had the position and standing, the authority and power, to take that habit of theirs of destabilizing the continent and turn it into a narrative that laid every charge at their feet.
“Consider it, Your Highness. If Zerpha is split in two and left to bleed, who stands to gain the most?”
Lay every fault at Ezenheim’s feet.
“When the foundations of a country crumble, they will inevitably seep through the cracks. Those without roots of their own can only find somewhere to take root after another’s land has collapsed.”
Alonso’s face hardened.
“Whose hand it was that set the spark to the powder of this civil war, that is what you must ask now.”
It was sophistry, but Alonso already wore the face of a man who would believe me if I told him ice could be made out of salt.
“……Ezenheim.”
Alonso gave the correct answer.
It was probably not only because of today. His closest confidants─the men I had planted had surely been singing the song of Ezenheim to him day after day.
“Yes, precisely. The people of the Republican Faction may well have been incited by them.”
“And yet, there is no proper way to tell an Ezenheim apart.”
Zerpha’s royal offices already had a Genealogy Certificate system modeled on the Empire’s. That, too, was an order I had put in place, of course.
But the regions the Republican Faction had held were another matter. The documents had been burned or forged, and the chaos of those years had erased identities wholesale.
“That is no trouble.”
I smiled.
“We shall send you agents of our own. Ezenheim are a most corrupted Anti-Race, so there is a reliable way to distinguish them.”
Yaken.
A knight’s best friend, the one thing that would ease my solitude.
…….
──【Zerpha Daily】──
[The South Fully Reclaimed! The Kingdom’s Flag Stands Once More on the Southern Sea.]
[Port Cities Retaken One After Another. Traitors Flee into the Mountains.]
……The glorious Royal Army has swept the remaining forces of the traitors from the entire southern front and fully reclaimed southern Zerpha.
The port cities have returned to the Kingdom’s embrace one after another.
Having lost their main force at the great victory of Gandela, the traitors have now lost even their chain of command, and are throwing down their weapons and fleeing into the mountains…….
────
Southern Zerpha had fallen to the Royalist Faction.
In effect, their civil war had already tipped decisively in one direction. There was no longer even any need to keep pressing them. According to reports from the Spies I had planted within the Republican Faction, internal conflict and friction were rampant over whether to continue resisting or enter negotiations.
Before long, they would collapse.
In any case.
I received the news in Prozen.
The reason I had crossed all the way to Prozen yet again was the closing ceremony of the World Expo.
─This year’s Expo saw the participation of a record thirty-six nations and the highest number of visitors in history. This achievement shall forever remain a landmark in the history of human civilization…….
I watched the Expo Committee Chairman recite its accomplishments in front of the Imperial Pavilion.
There was nothing particularly special about it. A closing address full of self-congratulation, the same as one would hear in any country.
─The Prozen World Expo officially comes to an end today.
Then, just as the final lights announcing the closing began to blossom and glitter across the night sky.
“Knight Maximilian.”
A committee official came up to the front of the Imperial Pavilion and handed me a certificate and a medal.
“The Imperial Pavilion takes the Grand Prix by unanimous decision of the judges. Congratulations.”
In other words, the grand prize, though it was probably just a formality. The Eastern Alliance would likely receive the exact same Grand Prix.
“Thank you.”
I accepted it with a smile.
“Ah, Knight! One moment! May I take a photograph?”
It was Lenny, the documentary director. His film, incidentally, was said to be nearly finished.
“Go ahead.”
I straightened and looked into the camera lens. The committee official awkwardly took a place beside me as well.
“The medal, put it around your neck!”
I hung the gold medal around my neck.
“Perfect~”
Before winter came and the snow fell, theaters for screening the documentary would be completed in every region of the Empire.
Even in obscure backwaters barely marked on the map, a movie theater would be built in the nearest town.
On screening days, government vehicles would go around the villages themselves and ferry the people in.
They would sit in warm theaters heated by stoves, freshly baked bread and cheese and cups of cocoa in hand, and watch the film.
Johann Georg’s propaganda, designed not to force itself upon them, but to seep into them naturally and completely.
“All right, here we go!”
Click.
It was at the instant the flash burst across everything.
“──Knight Maximilian!”
I knew who it was from the voice alone. Tatyana Volkov. Fortunately, it seemed she had not been dragged back to her homeland after all.
I looked at her and tilted my head.
“Meeting with me alone in a place like this could be dangerous for you.”
“What are you talking about?”
She genuinely looked as though she had no idea what I meant.
Then again, this woman was purely an artist. Politics, doctrine, ideology, none of it had a place in her world.
Tatyana lifted up her own certificate.
“Well, I too received a Grand Prix.”
For some reason, she seemed almost embarrassed by her own victory. Had Tatyana herself already admitted defeat?
There was no need for that. I was only a fraud who had stolen another artist’s ideas from memories of the future.
“Be proud of it. Your sculpture will live on in history as well.”
“……Hm.”
Tatyana gave a faint smile.
“Knight Maximilian. You have opened an entirely new horizon for me.”
And then she went on.
“The unseen can become subject matter just as much as the visible, and even experiences and phenomena themselves can become works of art……. Watching the light cut through the darkness, I wondered whether I had confined beauty within too narrow a frame.”
As she spoke sincerely of art and contemplated her own work, she gazed steadily at me with a hint of regret in her eyes.
“Maximilian. You might have been an artist. And a very great one at that.”
At the deeply sincere praise, memories of the past suddenly surfaced.
The days when I walked through art museums holding my mother’s hand. The streets where I caught the scent of paint drifting through studio windows. Those afternoons when time seemed to stop whenever I stood before a painting.
“……I appreciate you saying that, but.”
Still, the two were not so different.
To protect the continent where the memories I shared with my mother still lived, I simply took up a different kind of brush.
“The world doesn’t seem willing to let me.”
I smiled and held out my hand to her. She smiled too, and took it.
Through our clasped hands, I wished.
May your art go on unbroken.
May neither the war soon to come nor Robrus’s Ezenheim Premier ever break you, who held the purest beauty in the East, nor snap humanity’s brush.
* * *
──Crunch. Crunch.
Southern Zerpha. Before anyone knew it, winter had arrived, and snowflakes were beginning to pile up.
Inside a tiny outpost, four Royalist soldiers huddled together, each studying his own Genealogy Certificate.
“I’m tellin’ ya, look right here. See? Says we’re Quasi-Bloodline, doesn’t it?”
Four Genealogy Certificates lay side by side on a table that resembled a tree stump.
They were Zerphan citizens, but each bore a prominent stamp reading [Quasi-Bloodline – III].
“Oh…… so does that make us Aran too?”
“Close enough. Long as you’ve got this Genealogy Certificate, you can cross over into the Empire too. It’s practically a passport. Thing is, even Quasi-Bloodline gets divided into grades.”
“How?”
The veteran put a cigarette between his lips and jerked his chin toward the mountain range.
“There’s this fellow waaay over there at the foot of the mountains, digs up truffles and raises a few thousand cattle. His whole family gets treated basically like Aran. Heard everybody in that village speaks Imperial, right down to the babies.”
“Well, I’ll be…….”
Quasi-Bloodline, Related Bloodline, Alien Bloodline, Aran, grades, bloodlines, nobles, the Republican Faction, royalty, wages…… Their idle chatter at the snow-covered outpost drifted from one topic to the next.
Whumpff—
Suddenly, they heard snow collapse among the bushes.
The soldiers’ expressions sharpened in an instant. They rushed over and raised their rifles.
“Hands up!”
“Get up! Before we shoot!”
Ka-chak. As their fingers curled around the triggers, a man and a woman, all but frozen solid, rose from the brush.
They looked like a pair of snowmen, as though they had come through a blizzard, but their facial features were quite distinctive.
“Who are you!”
“……Hold on.”
The veteran carefully examined both their faces.
“Hey. You two ain’t Yaken, are ya?”
Yaken? The four soldiers exchanged glances for a moment.
“Speak up! Are ya Yaken or ain’t ya!”
Without Genealogy Certificates they had to be Republican runaways, and shooting them would have been the end of it, but those oddly pronounced features made the fingers on the triggers hesitate.
“With mouths stickin’ right out like that, why can’t ya answer?”
“……We are.”
At last, it was the man who answered first.
“Both of ya?”
“…….”
Their silence was an answer in itself.
The Royalist soldiers, wearing faces that seemed to be holding back laughter, quietly lowered their muzzles.
“Come on over. Keep them hands up.”
The two awkwardly approached. The veteran looked them up and down, then tilted his head.
“But if you’re Yaken, what’re ya running for? Married couple, too, by the looks of it?”
“…….”
There was no answer.
“Go on, say it. It’s all right.”
“……We heard Yaken get sold to the Empire.”
“Say what?”
The soldiers glanced at one another and then burst out laughing. Bwahahaha. Hahahaha. The two Yaken looked utterly bewildered.
“Sounds like them Republican bastards been spreading more of their bullshit around…… Well, I s’pose it does feel like we’re selling ya. On account of we get a reward.”
Bringing in a Yaken earned you a bounty.
But there was one condition. They absolutely had to be alive. Even a single scratch reduced the reward, so within this encirclement─an operation to hunt down high-ranking Republican officials attempting to flee─there was no race treated more politely than the Yaken.
“Wh-what do you mean…….”
“A Yaken just says ‘I’m Yaken’ and we send ya on through. Feed ya on the way, even. We get paid, you get to live. Two birds with one stone. Ah, ‘course, if ya collaborated with the Republicans then that’s a bit of a different story─”
“Wait!”
That was when it happened.
The man among the pair raised his nose slightly and spoke in a low voice.
“……That smell.”
Whoooooo──
A blizzard swept across the mountains. The Yaken’s nose twitched at the wind rolling in.
“What smell?”
“……Someone’s following us.”
The laughter drained out of the soldiers’ faces.
Without a word, they readjusted their grips on their rifles. Crouching low, they vanished into the raging blizzard.
“Hey. How d’ya know somebody’s after ya?”
“The smell-”
“No. Besides the smell. Did something else happen?”
“There were…… more of us, at first…….”
He did not say much, but they understood immediately.
“Ya know why they’re after ya?”
“……Aren’t they chasing us because they’re Royalists?”
“The hell? We’re Royalists ourselves. Told ya already. Royalists don’t kill Yaken. Never mind that, what kind of fella was he?”
“Just…… a strong person.”
At the Yaken’s answer, the soldiers asked back with dismay.
“A Superhuman?”
“Yes.”
Sniff, sniff. The soldiers watched the Yaken snuffling at the air and mulled it over, but.
“……Among them rewards, y’know.”
The most senior of them spoke up again.
“There’s a bump up in this certificate grade, too.”
The stamp pressed onto the Genealogy Certificate, [Quasi-Bloodline – Ⅲ].
“Save two Yaken and that’s more’n enough to earn it.”
A higher grade even among the Quasi-Bloodline. At the veteran’s words, the other soldiers nodded and tightened their grips on their rifles.
~~~
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