Chapter 236 - Damn Reincarnation

Lehein

Back then, Moron had been unable to resolve his dilemma.

As the only surviving hero, should he protect the imperfect peace they had won alongside Vermouth?

Or should he attempt, alone, the mission his departed companions had failed to fulfill?

While he was still struggling to find an answer, Vermouth appeared in his dream. Between the reality Moron faced and the request Vermouth made in that dream, he no longer needed to agonize over his choice.

His body, which had not weakened with age even after centuries, was well suited to carrying out Vermouth’s request.

If the end had never crossed over from Raguryaran as Vermouth’s warning and request foretold, Moron could not have professed his faith in Vermouth with such certainty.

But everything had eventually happened just as Vermouth warned. The dream Moron had a hundred and fifty years ago had not been an illusion of his own making. The warning became reality, and a hundred years ago, the end began crossing over from Raguryaran.

“After that dream, I lived in Leheinyar. I watched Raguryaran every day.”

The mountains were high and treacherous, but to Moron they felt as low and familiar as the hill behind his home. Every day at sunset, he climbed Leheinyar and stared out at Raguryaran. When morning came, he descended from the peak again.

“Those were busy, fulfilling days. I was no longer Ruhar’s king. No one could complain about my living in Leheinyar.”

That did not mean he never left Leheinyar. Occasionally, he attended important events in Ruhar. This was before Moron went into ‘seclusion.’

“Raguryaran had not changed at all from the landscape I saw as a child. Even so, I trusted Vermouth. Vermouth had appeared in my dream to warn me, despite being dead. The Vermouth I knew was not a man who made meaningless warnings or requests.”

“Can’t argue with that,” Eugene murmured. Anise nodded in agreement.

The man they remembered as Vermouth Lionheart rarely asked anything of others. Rather than ask someone else, Vermouth did things himself. If something was beyond him, it was beyond anyone.

The same went for warnings. Before ever voicing one, Vermouth did everything he could to prevent a situation that warranted it. If he issued a warning nonetheless, then it concerned something truly beyond their control. Something unavoidable. Something they absolutely had to be wary of and guard against.

“The end truly did begin crossing over, just as Vermouth warned. The man in my dream was unquestionably the real Vermouth. So his warning and his request are both genuine, weighty things.”

“By the end, do you mean the Nur?” Eugene asked, shaking his bottle. A gigantic ape with horns on its head. A monster that exuded an ominous aura like the Demon King of Destruction’s. The Beast King Aman had said the Nur he saw took the form of a giant snake.

“In the language of the snowfields, Nur means both end and death. They are not very different meanings. Life ends in death. That is true for everything.”

“... The Nur I saw was just a big ape. It didn’t live up to grand meanings like end and death.”

“But Hamel, you said you sensed something ominous from the Nur. Anise, you must have felt it too.”

Moron turned to look out the window. Leheinyar was visible beyond the drifting snow.

“Three hundred years ago, we felt the ‘end’ merely by seeing a certain being from afar. More than anything else we saw in Helmuth, that being made the end real to us.”

The Demon King of Destruction.

“I don’t know why the Nur give off the same ominous feeling as the Demon King of Destruction. Vermouth said nothing about that either. But I have never once thought it particularly important. That ‘end’ advances unbidden, whether we want it or not. It crosses over from Raguryaran and comes over Leheinyar as it pleases.”

Moron clenched his fist.

“It must be stopped. It must not cross over. A hundred years ago, when I first saw a Nur, I knew that had to be done.”

There had been no warning.

As he had for decades, Moron climbed a peak in Leheinyar and looked out at Raguryaran. The act itself was familiar after so many years.

But that day, nothing felt familiar. He did not know exactly where or how it had begun. He only felt that everything was different.

That feeling grew stronger as he climbed. Forcing his reluctant body onward, he reached Leheinyar’s summit and looked out at Raguryaran. There was still nothing there. It was a land where nothing could live.

As he gazed at that land, feeling an inexplicable terror, he turned his head.

A Nur stood behind him.

“Do you remember when we saw the Demon King of Destruction?”

“How could I forget?”

“No matter how many times I died, I could never forget the impulses and emotions I felt then.”

Merely looking at the Demon King of Destruction plunged a being into despair. Regardless of anything in their past, present, or future, it stirred an urge to kill themselves immediately. The terror was so unbearable that only ending their own life seemed to offer relief. Far from fighting it, they felt they must never even approach it.

“A Demon King with that overwhelming presence was suddenly somewhere we could see it. We know how many people the Demon King of Destruction killed there. But we don’t know why or how such a being appeared in that place.”

That was the kind of being the Demon King of Destruction was. A living, moving catastrophe far beyond human comprehension. Its domain was Ravista, but three hundred years ago, it roamed Helmuth at will.

Yet no one could even guess where it was moving. It appeared suddenly, without any warning, and brought destruction wherever it emerged.

It had been the same then. They looked up, and the Demon King of Destruction was beyond the mountain. They did not know what it actually looked like. An enormous phenomenon beyond concrete description, as though many colors had been mixed together. A mass of color. That was how it appeared.

“It is a painful humiliation to admit, but we fled that day. I am a brave warrior, but I had absolutely no desire to fight that being. If I fought, I would die. My existence would end. That was what I felt.”

Moron was not alone in feeling that way. Hamel had felt exactly the same. In the end, everyone there had fled. Vermouth himself had led the way, shouting that they had to run.

“We ran far. But that being was so enormous that we could still see it no matter how far we fled.”

“... Yeah.”

They had stopped running because the Demon King of Destruction was no longer visible.

More precisely, because the Demon King of Destruction had vanished.

“The Nur are incomparably weaker than the Demon King of Destruction. But they are similar to it.”

They appeared suddenly before one’s eyes. Exuding a sinister, ominous aura, they spread end and death, just as their name meant.

“The day I first saw a Nur, I killed it. Then I informed the royal family that I was going into seclusion.”

Things were different now. After entering seclusion, Moron never descended from Leheinyar. There was no pattern to the Nur’s appearances. Some days they came in daylight, others at night. Sometimes dozens appeared in a single day; sometimes days passed without even one.

“On that first day, I dreamed of Vermouth again. In the dream, he told me he was sorry. What did he have to be sorry for? If anything, I pitied him. His words made me both happy and sad, and I was grateful. Vermouth would not have wanted to ask this of me. But there was no one else he could ask. He asked me because he could not do it himself.”

So Moron had told him.

“I will remain on this mountain and keep killing the Nur. What they are does not matter. But no one wants an unwanted end crossing over, and neither do I.”

“... What did Vermouth say to that?”

“He said nothing. He wore an expression that did not suit him. Then he disappeared. That was the last time I dreamed of Vermouth, but I felt the ‘power’ he had given me.”

“Power?”

“My sight became extraordinarily keen. Wherever a Nur appears in the vastness of Leheinyar, I can see it immediately. I know how those sinister beings are born and how they move. I can see Kristina Rogeris inside Anise right now.”

Moron continued, staring at Leheinyar through the window.

“Nur are ominous beings that terrify people even without being seen. And they are large. Even dead, their corpses give off that ominous aura like poison. Their blood fouls the snow and kills the mountain’s life.”

For a hundred years, Moron had held the Nur back. There was no telling how many he had killed. ... If the Nur emitted that ominous aura like poison, as he said, then the ‘poison’ of all those Nur he had killed over a century should have blanketed Leheinyar.

Those were goddamned mountains where snow fell endlessly, but no miasma of dread powerful enough to drive people to suicide drifted through them.

Eugene recalled what had happened in Great Hammer Canyon. In an instant, Moron had disappeared along with the enormous Nur’s corpse. Eugene had climbed the cliff to check, but not a trace of the blood it had spilled remained.

... The Lionheart Treasury. He thought of the Darkroom that led beneath it. Magic that did not feel like magic. If he had to classify it, he could call it spatial magic, but even with Akasha, understanding that space had been impossible.

“Vermouth did not explain that ability to me, but I knew how to use it. Kill a Nur. Throw its corpse inside. It is an excellent ability for that purpose.”

It was not difficult to imagine.

The other side of Leheinyar. An unseen world no archmage could perceive. Moron must have put the Nur corpses there. To keep his beloved snowy mountains from being defiled, he must have built a mountain of corpses—monsters of end and death spilling pitch-black blood.

“... Moron, are you...”

Eugene spoke before he realized it.

“Are you unable to let yourself die because of Vermouth’s request?”

He could not help asking.

“I am staying alive because I want to,” Moron answered with a smile.

“I am living a worthwhile life as a warrior. By fulfilling an old friend’s request, I am protecting the snowy mountains and snowfields I love, the country I founded with my own hands, and the world.”

“... For a hundred years.”

“Didn’t I tell you, Hamel? It is a worthwhile life for a warrior. I did not want to grow old and die an ugly death. I wanted to die as a warrior, as a hero should. Death is still far from me, but if my strength should fail and I die, the Nur corpses I have piled up until then will testify to my life as a warrior and a hero.”

“...”

“And a descendant of my blood will take my place and hold back the Nur. That is only natural for a Bayar warrior and a king of Ruhar.”

“Don’t you resent Vermouth? He didn’t explain anything to me. Why the Nur appear, why he has to make a request like this.”

“Hamel. Do you think all of that matters?”

Moron’s question left Eugene speechless. As he hesitated, unable to answer, Moron laughed heartily and continued.

“I was the only person Vermouth could ask. If I had been the one to die three hundred years ago instead of you, and Vermouth had needed to ask someone, he would have made the same request of you. Then, Hamel, would you have refused him?”

“... I...”

“You would not have refused. And it isn’t just you and me. If Senya or Anise had received the same request, they would never have refused either. Hamel, Anise. What did you feel when you first saw a Nur?”

It had to be killed.

That was what they had thought. A being that exuded the same ominous aura as the Demon King of Destruction. Its very existence was intolerable. So it had to be killed.

“I thought the same. Even without Vermouth’s request, I would have killed any Nur I saw. Even without his request, I would have made it my mission to remain in Leheinyar, killing and holding back the Nur.”

“You would have,” Anise answered with a chuckle. She sank deep into the sofa and propped her chin on her hand.

“We... made all sorts of excuses, but in the end, we were sincere about saving the world. We may not all have been that sort of person at first, but after fighting together for well over a decade, we became people who truly wanted to save the world.”

Heroes.

“The war ended. The world became peaceful. We know how desperately we wanted this peace. Even if we obtained it in a form different from our ideal, we gave everything for it. ... If something appeared that could threaten it, we would have killed that being regardless of Lord Vermouth’s request. If those beings kept appearing, of course we would have devoted the rest of our lives to exterminating them.”

At the end of her life, Anise had another choice. She could have stopped caring about the world to come, about the future. She could have abandoned the Holy Empire and the faith that had bound her existence. Rather than serve the Holy Empire she had resented all her life, she could have quietly ended her life somewhere deserted, as she had wanted.

But Anise had not done that. In the desert where Hamel’s tomb lay, she had changed her mind. ... She simply could not abandon the world that would remain after her death. She had thought of the foolish man she loved, who had fought until his body broke and ultimately died.

So she had given this body of an imitation incarnation to the Holy Empire. Though she could have gone to heaven, she remained in the world instead. She watched her sacrificed body become holy relics and be used to create future saints. She hoped the saints made that way would save the world.

Unable to say anything, Eugene closed his eyes.

Moron was an idiot. There was no question about that. And it wasn’t only Moron. They were all idiots. Hadn’t they saved the world in the end, even if it wasn’t the way they had wanted? Hadn’t they brought peace, even in this shitty form?

Then they should have lived happily to make up for all their suffering. They should have lived lives anyone would envy, died, and gone to heaven.

Not one of them had done that.

Hamel was no different. He had died and been reincarnated. What did it matter if Vermouth had intended that? Hamel had a choice. He could have simply enjoyed a carefree new life. But he had never even considered such a life an option.

As though it were only natural, he had resolved to fulfill the mission he had failed to complete in his past life. He had decided to devote his life to killing every Demon King.

As Anise said, that was the kind of people they were.

“Show me next time,” Eugene grumbled, pulling out a cork.

“Moron. Show me how many Nur you’ve killed over the last hundred years. Where you’ve piled them up.”

“I don’t want to show you. If I did, I would have shown you last time.”

“Why don’t you want to?”

“The miasma is too thick. I have grown accustomed to it, but Hamel, seeing that place might drive you mad. It might make you ill.”

Was that why he had told him not to come? Eugene snorted at that idiotic kindness.

“Do you think I’m some fucking weakling? No matter how many dead bodies are piled up, I won’t go nuts. I won’t get sick either.”

He swallowed a question.

Moron’s eyes back then. His demeanor. Those cold eyes, devoid of emotion, so different from now. Eyes that seemed weathered by the years. Like Vermouth’s in the Darkroom—exhausted and dull.

“Promise me.”

Eugene could not leave Moron alone.

“After the Knight March ends, take me there. Show me what you’ve been looking at for the past hundred years.”

“Are you planning to leave me behind?” Anise asked with a smile.

“If Hamel goes, I go too. Wherever you two stand, naturally, I must stand as well.”

“... Anise. I...”

“Moron. You have no talent for lying. You’re worried about us? That’s a lie, isn’t it? The only truth in what you just said was that you don’t want to show us.”

Unlike Eugene, Anise did not spare Moron’s feelings. This snake of a woman had been extraordinarily talented at clawing at people’s hearts since three hundred years ago.

“What you don’t want to show us there isn’t mere monster corpses, is it?”

“...”

“And if it’s something you don’t want to show us, then I want to see it by any means necessary.”

“... Wahaha!”

Moron blinked, then burst out laughing. He nodded and kept laughing, thumping his own head.

“You two truly haven’t changed at all.”

“Have you changed?”

“I tried not to.”

“Then that’s enough. We have a rough understanding of your circumstances now, so let’s just enjoy our drinks.”

Anise brought her bottle to her lips. That alone changed the mood.

Eugene idly stroked the head of Mer, who was fidgeting beside him, and spoke.

“Hey, Moron. Is it really okay for you to be here right now?”