Chapter 202 : Chapter 202
Chapter 202
The march began.
Five hundred and two personnel.
"Do I have to come?"
"The knights' condition will change throughout the journey. I need to fine-tune the weapon."
"So it is not just any weapon."
"It is a weapon optimized to receive the energy dynamics of those people. After-sales service is essential."
Sihan attached himself on that pretext.
I stared at the pack strapped to his back.
"I suspect that is not your only reason."
He was a 6th-circle alchemist.
The most outstanding alchemist in this world.
There was no way someone like him lacked a subspace bag.
Which meant that pack had a storage capacity dozens of times larger than it appeared.
And inside it was probably.
"Come on. The thing that swallowed Lefteria and killed it? I need to avenge the parallel-world Lefteria too."
As expected, he had apparently packed it with weapons and bombs.
From the look of burning zeal on Sihan's face, he seemed entirely sincere.
"Understood."
For my part, having a high-circle mage move with us was nothing but an advantage.
And so we set out toward the Empire with thorough preparations.
"This march needs to be stealthy, yet fast."
With five hundred people, we could not use Sihan's personal ultra-luxury carriage as we had before.
Instead, Sihan showed us mass-produced carriages developed on Lefteria.
"Mass-produced" they might be called, but they moved more than twice as fast as a horse.
Each seated forty, and with luggage packed in, about fifteen carriages let everyone travel together.
"Good thing I developed tour buses."
"Tour? Is that the name of this carriage?"
"You do not need to know what the word means. Just think of it as a carriage that efficiently moves large groups of people along with their luggage."
The mass-produced carriages were not blazingly fast, but they caused less fatigue.
Riding a horse or a Griffon came with a unique tension.
On top of that, fast movement required using muscles the body rarely engaged.
Now, each person had an assigned seat where they could lean back, rest their head, and close their eyes in comfort.
Thanks to that, the cluttered events of recent days began to slowly sort themselves out in my head.
'How ironic. My mind clears when I am at my busiest.'
At the Academy, between endless lectures, textbook development, and self-improvement, there had been no time to rest.
The tension kept my racing mind dragging in all sorts of thoughts.
The things I had discussed while teaching students.
What I had covered while training the teaching assistants.
And finally, the Crownhardt Ducal House's swordsmanship.
In a black world, Duke Crownhardt swung his sword.
A sight made familiar through thousands of viewings.
'Beautiful.'
Clean and concise, befitting a combat swordsmanship.
A swordsmanship specialized purely in killing people.
'Then what about me?'
One thought chased the next.
At some point, the Duke's image was replaced by an imagined version of myself.
I held a sword and swung.
My swordsmanship resembled every sword and resembled no one's.
'Why does that arm move that way?'
At some point, another me appeared beside me and posed the question.
And as though in answer, the sword-swinging me demonstrated various techniques in the air.
'The finger movements changed again, did they not?'
Another me emerged.
The central me swung again as if in reply.
A form subtly different from the first.
Yet another me appeared and questioned, and the central me moved again.
After dozens of repetitions, the world was covered with dozens of me and the sword-swinging me.
The swordsmanship kept changing as though alive.
'Minor corrections.'
The scale of change was not large.
Which also meant my swordsmanship was slowly nearing completion.
Not much left now.
Soon.
"We have arrived."
Duke Crownhardt's voice woke me.
A voice carried by mana.
Opening my eyes, sharp light pierced through eyelids that had been shut long enough to feel crusty.
"......How long were my eyes closed?"
"Two days. I worried you had not come to fight a demon but had died."
That long?
Hearing the number, hunger and thirst hit me all at once.
"The demon is visible in the distance. If we travel about another hour from here, we should arrive."
"An hour away and you can see it?"
I looked out the carriage window at the Duke's words.
There, a moving ridge was approaching.
BOOOOM—! BOOOOM—!
A mountaintop so enormous it seemed ready to pierce the clouds moved slowly, scattering them.
Atop the vast mountain, thick red lava flowed, and jet-black smoke scattered in all directions.
If its movement was visible from this distance, I could not imagine the speed up close.
The carriage floor carried a faint, rhythmic vibration as though a great drum were being struck.
Dust rose ceaselessly from the earth, and before it could settle, fresh dust was already rising.
Come to think of it, no sounds of living creatures could be heard nearby.
I opened the window.
GROOAAHH——!
SCREEEEEE——!
AHHHH—
The outside noise, which the window had been blocking, poured into the carriage all at once.
Something like the sound of massive gears grinding together.
The sound of a creature that might have crawled up from hell.
And a jumble of sounds so far beyond my perception they defied comprehension.
"No sounds of living creatures."
At my words, the Duke, who had been listening alongside me, nodded.
The cries of birds and beasts, the chirping of insects.
Sounds of life that should have been present in this landscape were entirely absent.
"......Even the monsters have been wiped out."
"They are creatures of instinct. In a situation like this, they would have been the first to flee."
When a strong monster appeared, weaker monsters retreated beyond its territory.
With the World Eater, there was no telling where its territory began or ended.
Which meant the Empire now had to deal with countless monsters displaced by a single demon.
The ecosystem after a demon's emergence.
A subject I had never once considered.
"Let us eat and drink first. We need to prepare, and in an hour we will have to charge. The thing keeps moving, so we cannot linger."
When we disembarked, everyone had gathered for what might be their last meal.
With tense faces, they ate in silence, drank water, and loosened their bodies.
Some were already doing calisthenics to warm up.
Every one of them looked accustomed to this kind of tension.
These same people who had been arrogant and could not adapt at the Academy.
This was their life.
With respect for the way they lived, I spoke.
"We will win."
All eyes turned to me.
"And then we go back. Honestly, everyone has a lot left to learn."
The faintest hint of a smile touched their expressions.
"Scholarship has a way of humbling even the most brilliant person the moment they stand before it. The sword is the same. Every time I look at the sword, I am still struck by how far the road ahead stretches."
It was the truth.
I hoped my sincerity reached them.
"This thing called the World Eater — no matter how enormous, it is just an obstacle on the path we must walk. So let us break through."
***
On a hilltop across the plain, five hundred armed men and women stood in formation.
And before them.
In the distance, an enormous maw was walking toward them.
GROOOAAAHHHHH——!
Its main body was a mountain so vast it could not be taken in at a single glance.
From the rightmost edge to the leftmost.
A swathe of earth stretching to distances the human eye could not fathom was rolling forward.
It was as though the ground itself were surging like a wave.
Rising high and crashing forward.
At its center sat black darkness.
Dozens of saw-toothed gears turned in every direction.
The five hundred of them would amount to no more than one or two of those teeth.
"Stance."
At Cassian's command, all 499 swordsmen under Duke Crownhardt assumed their positions.
The shape was a wedge — like a knight's lance.
The World Eater, which had felt distant, suddenly closed in.
In the gap, the World Eater's maw was devouring everything in its path, yet its black hole revealed nothing of what it consumed.
The moment something was swallowed — nothingness.
A world where neither life nor death existed.
"Fix swords."
These men and women had to shatter that void.
At the signal, the weapon from Sihan's bag was transferred to Cassian's hands.
It was a crude blade about two meters long.
For a sword, it looked closer to a spear — the handle alone was as long as a child's arm.
But what stood out more was the blade — or rather, the complete absence of one. It was a massive cylinder.
According to Sihan, hidden inside was the sword that would be driven into the World Eater.
"Sihan."
"Ready up, everyone!"
The instant Cassian's signal ended, Sihan's bag floated into the air and flew straight at the World Eater.
The distance looked close, but it took about ten minutes for the bag to arrive.
The moment the bag touched the black hole.
HUMMMM—!
With a piercing ring, the bag instantly crumpled and folded, then warped and swelled as though sucked into a vortex.
BOOM!
It exploded in a massive detonation.
Flames of orange, red, and blue blazed upward, scorching the darkness.
GROOOAH—AH—AH—AH—!
In the instant the mountain's movement paused.
"Deploy!"
A single sword slowly rose in all of our hearts.
At the very rear, those assigned as feet began pulling mana from behind and channeling it forward.
Those moving steadily ahead received the energy from behind and passed it onward, readying their swords.
Forward again, and again, and again.
I ran at the very front, Duke Crownhardt behind me, then the knight commander and vice commander, the senior knights, and then the rest.
With every step, the force at my back pushing me grew stronger.
OOOHHHMM—!
The cry, heard up close, shook every bone like the wail of a primordial creature that had lived since the dawn of time.
My head throbbed and spun; my vision wavered and I nearly lost consciousness.
But only for a moment.
The energy flooding into my body snapped my mind awake, feeling as though it would explode at any second.
"Hah."
Bearing the energy of five hundred was not as hard as Cassian had expected.
"Go!"
Duke Crownhardt seized Cassian's back and hurled him bodily toward the sky.
The instant Crownhardt's palm met Cassian's back, the energy amassed in the Duke was transferred.
Ten times the energy, at least.
If that energy stayed in his body, even Cassian's frame would not survive.
Cassian blended Fantasy abilities into that energy, set it spinning hard, and poured it all into the sword.
'Dissolve into my Sword Intent.'
Duke Crownhardt's Sword Intent was undeniably vivid and formidable.
But Cassian's swordsmanship could encompass it all.
He had kept his eyes closed the entire journey here, fusing the two swordsmanships for exactly this purpose.
"HRAAAAAH!"
The instant Cassian swung.
"Deploy!"
Sihan roared and detonated his mana.
From inside the massive iron cylinder Cassian held, a core — a sword condensed with Aura — shot out in a white arc, flying straight into the center of the World Eater.
And then.
There was light.