My Beloved Princess ~The Boy Called Incompetent Rises with Only a Sword and the Princess's Devotion~ - Chapter 111: Turning Point

Chapter 111: Turning Point

“Hold it, Kirin. Why’s it going crack crack all around us!?”

Clinging to Kirin’s back as she carried him piggyback, Kokuren panicked.

He clung to his wife’s back like an infant. Throwing away shame, appearances, and even dignity itself, he listened to the nasty crack crack of electrical discharge ringing out all around him. Kokuren could not see the invisible force itself, but he knew what it really was: the ultimate form of [Ki], elevated even further beyond [Fighting Ki].

Knowing Kirin’s prowess in close combat and the lethality she wielded with her bare body, it could only sound to him like a threat, and something to be feared.

“It’s fine. If one masters [Ki], it’s possible to protect a target without harming it. As long as all you can do is repel things, you’re still far too immature. You need more training.”

“Huh. Handy. Wait, does that mean every time I tried to touch you and got zapped away, you were doing it on purpose!?”

“Men who fuss over trivial things are unpopular.”

Saying that with a composed look, Kirin lowered herself and leaned forward.

“We’re going. Hold on tight.”

He wrapped his arms around her slender neck and pressed himself close. That was the signal. The soles of Kirin’s feet exploded, and the inertial force from the sudden acceleration came crashing down on Kokuren’s body.

Normally, it would have been nothing. But for Kokuren in his current state, the impact was fairly harsh. His worn-down elbows screamed under the strain, and his right leg, the one Kirin had hooked up with her arm, had no feeling in it at all. If he let his guard down for even a moment, it felt like he might be shaken off.

“By the way, is your body really all right now? The [Ki] inside you should’ve run dry.”

“I can’t say I’m in perfect condition, but there is no problem.”

“[Ki] deficiency is a more serious injury than it looks. Don’t push yourself too hard.”

“The same goes for you.”

The wasteland streamed away behind them in an instant.

They were moving at tremendous speed. It might even have been faster than riding a horse.

If he were being honest, he wanted her to slow down a little, but right now every minute and second mattered. There was no room for whining.

As they ran, Kokuren and Kirin briefly exchanged everything that had happened so far.

After hearing the circumstances, she let out a small breath and softened her lips.

“That does sound like Koharu.”

“Yeah. She’s always pulling reckless stunts.”

“She certainly is. Though that is one of Koharu’s good points.”

From Makusha Village to the royal capital. Kirin’s powerful legs devoured the ten-kilometre distance in no time at all. Even from far away, the city wall looked immense, and now it came bearing down on them as if to block their path. It towered high enough to cover the sky and spread wide as if to bar all entry into the royal capital.

The city gate in view had already been breached, and it seemed many soldiers had succeeded in entering the capital. War cries and cheers carried over from beyond the wall.

The gate was more than large enough, but not wide enough to let all the troops pouring in pass through at once. Inevitably, a jam had formed at the entrance. Judging from the line, more than half were probably still on this side. But the slaves had likely already been sent in as the advance force, which meant Koharu had to be somewhere inside the city.

There was no time to stand in a long line and wait their turn.

“Kirin.”

“I know. We’re jumping.”

Without slowing down, Kirin headed not for the gate, but for the sheer vertical wall.

Thirty metres, perhaps.

Without killing the momentum of her sprint, Kirin took a great step.

She jumped.

With a dragonkin’s leg strength, a standing vertical leap could easily exceed ten metres.

But with a mere ten-metre jump, the best she could do was reach around the middle of the wall. And in a situation where she was carrying Kokuren on her back, her jumping power dropped even further. As expected, her momentum died in midair. Just as they were about to start falling, Kirin powerfully kicked the sky.

As though there were ground there, her zori stomped on the air. Kirin’s body floated up as light as a feather, then resumed rising as if caught by an updraft.

Tap! Tap!

Twice. By kicking off the air, Kirin raced straight up the wall in one burst.

And cleared it. Their view opened up. Beyond Kirin’s shoulder, he saw the blue sky.

Then free fall began.

They landed on the passage atop the wall. On the stone-brick walkway, there was not a single enemy soldier, not even a corpse. A bloodless corridor stretched away to either side.

“Just as I thought… there really aren’t any enemy troops on the wall.”

Given that the city gate had already been broken through, the only possible conclusion was that the city had been opened without bloodshed.

And yet they should not have intended to surrender. From the merciless burnings and looting carried out along the way, they should have known full well that dragonkin were not an enemy one could negotiate with.

Thirty metres above the ground.

The wind was strong.

Spread out below them was the royal capital.

Private homes stood in orderly rows, and broad roads linking the key points ran east, west, north, and south.

The plaza before the gate overflowed with the dragonkin who had just stormed in, and was rapidly being swallowed up by sheer violent numbers. Flowerbeds were trampled flat, and food stalls were spectacularly overturned. Fruit meant for sale was flung everywhere, crushed underfoot, and turned into stains on the ground.

Nor did it stop there. Even the overturned stalls themselves, trampled by hundreds and thousands of people, were broken, crushed, and ground down until they no longer retained their original shape. Then even those remains were kicked away, leaving nothing behind.

It was like a muddy torrent of people.

Faced with the enraged warriors storming in, people fled in panic. Swords stabbed into the backs of those fleeing with screams. The uncontrolled flood greedily swallowed up both people and things, destroying every obstacle in its path from the roots up.

The windows of private homes were smashed, and their walls were broken open to make new roads.

Trees were knocked over from the roots, and even iron streetlamps met the same fate.

The wells the citizens relied on had had their pulley frames completely mowed down, leaving nothing but round holes. At that point, they were practically pitfalls.

“Koharu’s clumsy… she hasn’t fallen into one, has she?”

“Even Koharu isn’t that slow, surely.”

They leaped from the wall onto a triangular roof and searched the torrent below for Koharu.

But it was difficult to pick out one specific person from the crowd spreading through the royal capital. Koharu was especially small, which only made it easier for her to vanish into the flow of people.

Even so, there was a clue that could help them track her movements.

The soldiers’ movements followed a certain pattern.

The regular troops, dressed in refined dragon robes, advanced straight towards the royal castle in the centre. Beside them, mercenaries with other goals shoved their way into private homes and began looting. Meanwhile, the slave soldiers moved differently from either group. They seemed to be scattering and flowing into the back alleys.

“Judging from the way they’re moving, the slaves’ mission is probably mopping up stragglers, or maybe sealing off the four city gates. That’s troublesome.”

“Yes. If they’re dispersed throughout a capital this large, finding them will be a pain.”

“But from what I can see, there don’t seem to be any stragglers. In that case, where we should head is…”

Rather than going to the royal castle, Kokuren and Kirin decided to head for the nearest eastern gate.

Flames rose from all over the city.

Somewhere, death cries drifted to them as well.

Crash. A house window shattered, and shards of glass rained down onto the main road.

Using the rooftops as footholds, Kirin bounded eastward, ever eastward. Still on her back, Kokuren carefully scanned the surroundings and said,

“Yeah. But maybe we don’t have to panic. From the look of it, it doesn’t seem like they’ve set up any siege weapons.”

“No, wait. Something is still strange.”

Kokuren had imagined a scenario where siege weapons would be aimed at them the instant they broke through the city gate and came pouring in, so seeing their allies disperse throughout the royal capital in one rush had made him relax. But the moment Kirin objected, that slackening tension drew tight again all at once.

There was no woman more dependable than Kirin in battle.

She always wore a cool expression and kept killing enemies as if it were nothing more than routine work. Yet for some reason, the profile of that gallant, fearless woman now looked frozen.

“Kokuren. This has become bad.”

“…What?”

“Is that the royal castle? The [Ki] there is swelling without limit. Something is coming.”

At that moment.

The highest spire of the royal castle flashed.

The royal castle reflected in Kokuren’s vision warped like a mirage. In the next instant, he realised space itself had become greatly distorted…

The royal castle burst apart.

◇◇◇◇◇

“It was a forbidden sorcery called the ‘core.'”

The setting sun streamed through the window, dyeing the narrow sitting room red.

Kirin opened her eyes and looked at the adopted daughter sitting before her. The girl’s jet-black eyes, inherited from her father, trembled sadly. Remembering those horrific images from back then, Kirin shook her head and let out a breath.

“It happened in an instant. Heat rays scorched the earth, heat waves vaporised the houses. Then the blast swept away the remains… Yes. In a word, the royal capital became ruins in an instant.”

The surroundings became open ground in a moment, and mountains of rubble were piled up.

Nothing moved. A cold grey expanse stretched all the way to the half-destroyed city wall. High in the sky hung a black mushroom cloud. Ash that had been blown upward fell like snow, applying a dead person’s make-up to the ruined royal capital.

“The noble alliance army inside the royal capital was annihilated. The only ones who escaped disaster were the few soldiers who had not yet entered.”

The ‘core’ possessed enough power to easily pierce the high durability of dragonkin, regarded as the strongest race, and reduce them to charcoal in an instant. Its area of effect covered the entire royal capital. Since there was not a single moving shadow anywhere in the ruins, it was obvious at a glance that there were no survivors.

“Its power was fearsome enough, but more frightening than anything was humanity’s obsession with victory.”

The population of the royal capital was roughly five hundred thousand.

The use of the ‘core’ destroyed the noble alliance army, but at the same time the five hundred thousand lives living there were lost as well. If it meant striking down the enemy, they did not hesitate to sacrifice even their own people. Even if the number had been one million or two million, they likely would still have carried it out.

They would choose no means so long as it destroyed their hated foe. To dragonkin, who treasured their comrades above all else, that choice was an unforgivable folly.

It seemed Dragon King Anraku had been thinking of taking the citizens hostage, but the species called humanity could cast those very citizens aside and still pay an even greater price. And with that bottomless obsession, they managed to drag the war to mutual destruction.

“No, calling it mutual destruction is arrogance. After that, Castelia apparently moved its capital westward, so it is safe to say the royal family and senior ministers escaped properly. The noble alliance suffered a miserable defeat and fled.”

Silent. Kuroyō, who had listened in silence the whole time, bit her pale pink lips in frustration. On her usually blank face, a faint shade of righteous anger appeared.

“The lives that should have been protected… the ones who should have come first were the people. And those in the position to protect them took those very lives with their own hands, and even wiped out the enemy along with the nation itself?”

A princess among princesses, a girl who carried an air of noble elegance, raised her voice. As ever, changes in her expression were slight, but not so with her voice. From the way it trembled with quiet anger, one could easily understand the scale of the righteous fury she felt.

The duty of a powerful dragonkin.

It was because Kuroyō had reached the very same conclusion Kokuren had reached that day, because his children had firmly inherited his will, that her righteous anger could become all the stronger.

“Ah, Kokuren. Your children really have inherited your will.”

Something hot welled up from deep inside her chest.

The sight of Kokuren, crushed by the loss of Koharu, vividly rose again in her mind.

◇◇◇◇◇

Why did Koharu have to be lost?

In the middle of the royal capital, now reduced to ruins.

In the centre of the square, dyed grey.

Falling to his knees with his forehead pressed to the ground, Kokuren asked himself that question over and over again.

“The answer’s obvious. I killed Koharu.”

Because she was a slave.

Because she had no freedom.

From the start, there had never been any such thing as the right to refuse deployment. The only two choices Koharu had were whether to take Kokuren with her or not. And so, fearing that danger would reach him, she chose to head alone into that place of death.

Either die alone, or die together. That was the only difference.

From the beginning, Koharu had possessed no option to save herself. And yet, because she still managed to achieve the goal of keeping Kokuren alive, her wish had come true. Within her limited choices, she had chosen the best one.

But Kokuren was different.

Infinite possibilities should have spread before him, and yet he bit into the sweet fruit called the stability of the pack and narrowed those possibilities. Without realising it, he had thrown away the choice that could have saved Koharu.

Worse still, Kokuren himself had believed that was the best choice.

He had tried to avoid becoming hostile to the noble alliance and settle things peacefully if possible. He had calmly reasoned with his emotional wife and convinced himself he was controlling the situation well. But he had not known that reality had made that very moment the watershed, the branching point of fate.

“What I lacked was the resolve to protect Koharu no matter what. To hell with the noble alliance. Anyone who lays a hand on my woman, I’ll slaughter them all. I had to challenge this with at least that much resolve.”

He hated the nobles who had treated Koharu like a filthy rag and kept pushing her beyond her limits.

He hated the nobles who had trampled on Koharu’s feelings, even though she had struggled to mourn her comrades in the midst of those turbulent days, when everyone was exhausted and worn down.

He hated the nobles who, despite sensing it was a trap, had thrown Koharu away as a disposable pawn just to kill the enemy. Tearing them to pieces would still not have been enough.

However…

“The one I can’t forgive most is myself. I let those bastards do whatever they wanted. Even though I had the strength to stop them.”

Using the Black Kirin’s achievements as a shield, he could have forcefully demanded that they hand Koharu over.

If negotiations broke down, his wife would surely have started punching them without another word, but so what? All he had needed to do was take the heads of the Thirteen Nobles and line them up in the wasteland.

There was room to question whether a brat barely in his twenties could defeat the Dragon King.

But he had to do it.

Whether he could win or not had nothing to do with it.

He had to show the other side that he would carry through the will to protect Koharu and never bend, that there was no room for compromise, and he had to shield Koharu behind his back. Only by confronting them with that level of spirit and resolve could he have drawn concessions from them.

It was the same as the Upper House, that miniature version of noble society. If they did not want to make an enemy of the Black Kirin, then they should hand over at least one slave. If he could have made them think that settling things for the price of a single slave was cheap, then he could have won the route where Koharu lived. Which was why…

“My softness killed Koharu.“

Kirin, standing beside him, said that was hindsight speaking.

At that point before the final decisive battle, no one could have predicted that such a device had been hidden in the royal capital. There had been no way to foresee it.

In that case, at that point, a declaration of war against the noble alliance would have been nothing but a bad move, and if things turned ugly, it might even have invited the worst possible result. Kirin desperately tried to reassure him, saying that she herself had agreed with Kokuren’s concerns, and that was precisely why she had stayed her spear.

But Kokuren could not forgive himself.

The grey sand clenched in his fist spilled through his fingers like an hourglass, forming a small mound on the ground. He smashed it apart with his fist, and tears spilled from his eyes.

“In a disaster like this, I can’t even make her a grave. I can’t even find her body in this mountain of rubble!”

Kokuren’s wail echoed through the ruined city where time had stopped.

“And it’s not just Koharu. The other slaves too.”

Whenever he closed his eyes, the faces of the girls who cared for him rose vividly to mind. There had been one who, stealing moments from her busy work, had made him a handkerchief. There were times a girl had offered him her head because she wanted him to share his courage before going to the battlefield. Girls who came to visit him with one excuse or another and filled the air with idle chatter.

Kokuren had vaguely understood how they felt. Even though he knew, he had pretended not to notice those feelings in order to keep the promise he had made with his wife. He had limited himself to treating them only as friends. But if he were honest…

“The truth is, I wanted to save them. I wanted to accept them. They looked up to me, made me the only emotional support in their hearts, and could only find hope to live by doing so… I wanted to help girls as lonely as that.”

There had been a choice that could save Koharu, however narrow and threadlike the path may have been.

But what about the path to save those girls? Sadly, it did not seem to have existed.

Getting hold of one slave and bending the noble alliance’s decision-making were matters on entirely different levels. It might be a loss to make an enemy of the Black Kirin over a single slave, but the Black Kirin’s existence was not enough to bend the noble alliance’s decisions.

In fact, Kokuren’s claim that it was a trap had been dismissed outright. Even if he had threatened them while in perfect health, the result likely would have been the same.

“If only I had more power. If I had a noble rank instead of being just a common mercenary, they wouldn’t have looked down on me there. If I held the seat of Dragon King, the other nobles would have listened to the cautious side too. If that had happened, the march of death could have been stopped.”

In dragonkin society, ability was not determined solely by the strength of the individual. It also included the overall strength of one’s pack. Military strength, economic power, the size of one’s territory, all such indicators were taken together to determine a man’s value, his true worth.

In fact, to call oneself a noble, one needed at least the peerage of Dragon Saint, and to obtain Dragon Saint, the rules required a pack of at least one thousand members. Only after one could protect that many comrades did one’s strength gain true recognition.

No matter if Kokuren possessed power on the level of a Dragon Duke, he was still nothing more than a common mercenary. In the end, he would only be scorned as a lowborn lacking the right kind of power.

“I don’t mind being looked down on. I’m used to being mocked as a lowborn. But I cannot accept losing something precious because people underestimated me.”

He had lost Koharu, whom he had doted on like a little sister.

He had lost the many slave girls who looked up to him.

Why?

Because Kokuren lacked power.

“I’ve decided, Kirin.”

Kokuren spoke to the wife standing at his side.

“I’m going to smash the slave system. Then I’ll protect the slaves and make our pack larger. That’s the only atonement I can make, the only mission I have, as someone whom Koharu let live.”

Because that was Koharu’s wish itself.

“Kokuren-sama’s vessel is huge!”

Koharu, who had always been restrained in asserting herself, had cried that out at the top of her lungs.

“Someday, you are sure to become a splendid leader. Kokuren-sama is not someone who should die here. So please, from here on too, save the lost lambs.”

“I have power. If I get serious, I really do have the power to make that happen. That’s why I intend to build it. A pack that can save lost lambs.”