WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Asakusa
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ Knight Commander of the Doomed Heroes ◈
Chapter 10: Peaceful Days (5)
──────
People become adults when they learn to set priorities.
Childhood shines because children give everything their best.
Back then, Mom is the whole universe, friends are all of life, and playing is everything. Those days shine so brightly because children always throw their whole selves into everything.
But that changes.
You can’t stay close to every friend.
You have to earn money if you want to eat good food and have fun.
You chase money and fail to notice that your parents are ill.
That’s how you learn.
That’s beyond me.
This was trivial, and that was precious.
Try to have everything, and you’ll end up with nothing.
You hold on to the standards those lessons create, follow them, and give them the name “reality.”
But sometimes, someone appears who laughs and smashes that reality to pieces.
Even though they must be human, just like everyone else.
‘What am I looking at?’
Louis, the military commander responsible for defending the logistics city of Ark, couldn’t believe their eyes.
A human’s sword had butchered a twisted angel.
Spears thrown by humans had overwhelmed an angel.
“Ah...”
Twisted angels.
Long ago, Louis had decided they were beyond anything humans could handle. They had thought that was reality. That people shouldn’t waste their strength on the impossible.
It wasn’t their fault.
Anyone in the world would have given the same answer. Wasn’t that why people compared twisted angels to natural disasters?
Monsters that only the girl heroes could slaughter.
And yet...
“So we could do it...”
Louis looked around in a daze.
They saw knights throwing their spears.
“Haaaaah!”
Booom!
They were only throwing spears, yet the ground shook and storms of dust rose.
Magic that could give a human such strength...
“C-Commander. What kind of magic is that?”
“...They’re drawing strength from others. One person’s strength isn’t enough, so they’re linking several people’s magical power and concentrating it in one person at a time.”
“What? Wouldn’t that make their bodies burst?”
“Controlling it must take skill.”
“But even with that skill, how could they possibly...?”
“Yes. It makes no sense. That’s why they must have trained to endure it.”
Louis watched the scene emerge as the dust settled.
The knight who had thrown the spear looked terrible.
The knight’s face had gone beyond red and turned almost black. The blood vessels in their eyes had all burst, and blood streamed from their nose. It was as though they had been crushed beneath an unbearable weight.
They also saw several knights go rigid and collapse immediately after throwing their spears.
“...They trained so they could endure it. This didn’t just fall into their laps. They worked at it, truly prepared to die. All to kill those devils.”
For some reason, tears kept filling Louis’s eyes, and their throat tightened.
“When I gave up... they were searching for a way...!”
They bit their lower lip and looked up at the sky.
Boooom!
Another spear flew through the air and struck the angel between the eyes.
Its head snapped back, and at last, its beating wings stopped.
The enormous creature fell from the sky.
Booooom!
The earth shook.
Their heart trembled.
Reality had changed.
Humans can kill angels.
From this moment on, that is common knowledge.
This is reality.
“Waaaah! Waaaaaaaah!”
Louis let out a wild cry before they knew what they were doing.
“Aaaaaah! Aagh! Awoooooaaaah!”
They had no words for what they felt, so they simply screamed like an animal.
And soon...
“Awoooooaaaah!”
“Gaaaaaah!”
“Aaaaaah! Haaaaah!”
Everyone became an animal, screaming at the top of their lungs.
They seemed to be crying and laughing at once.
It spread.
Knights.
Citizens.
Soldiers.
Regardless of status, everyone screamed and ran.
Their pounding footsteps converged on a single place.
The place where the commander of the Order of Eternity had fallen.
Revel Vieta, the Duke of Eternity.
Everyone had seen him facing the angel at the very front.
It was thanks to him that the knights had been free to throw their spears.
“Duke of Eternity.”
“Duke of Eternity.”
“O Duke of Eternity...”
But once the excited crowd saw Revel, they could find nothing more to say.
He was in a terrible state.
Everything had rotted away.
His armor. His clothes. Even his skin.
Only his face was untouched.
His arms were especially badly decayed. Here and there, white bone showed between blackened muscles.
It was a wonder he was still alive.
“Damn it! We can’t treat him here. Is there a healing center nearby? The biggest, highest-grade one you have!”
A healer from the Order shouted.
The citizens began to murmur.
“A top-class healing center? Wouldn’t Ark Healing Center be the closest?”
“It collapsed.”
“It collapsed?”
“I saw it. Bang! One hit, and boom! It was smashed to pieces.”
“Then which healing centers are still standing?”
The citizens rushed about in confusion. In a situation like this, it wasn’t easy to find out what had happened.
The healer turned to the military commander.
“You said you were the military commander, right? Please find us an available healing center, quickly! This is urgent!”
“Yes! I’ll find out at once!”
Louis answered in a fluster.
To them, the members of the Order of Eternity were now heroes worthy of worship.
They quickly tried to assess the situation through communication magic.
“This is Commander Louis! Send me a list of healing centers we can use right now!”
- Yes! Commander, that will be difficult at the moment.
“What do you mean?”
- City Hall is in complete chaos. We can barely get through, and even when we do, no one knows what’s happening. The administration is paralyzed. We’ll have to send scouts to check for ourselves.
“I’m asking how that happened! Is the city administrator dead? No, even if the administrator is dead, the city administration shouldn’t grind to a halt! What happened to their wartime preparations?”
- I’m sorry, Commander. We’ll find out at once.
“Damn it. What about the military healing center?”
- It collapsed...
“...Understood. Send scouts to assess the situation first. Available healing centers and healers. Find and secure those two things before anything else, then report immediately.”
- Yes!
Louis clenched their teeth.
“Healer, please come this way for now. Most of the healing centers are in this direction. We’ll be better placed to act if we head that way while we search.”
“Yes! Please hurry!”
They began running, carrying Revel’s battered body.
The city they saw as they ran was an utter disaster.
Corpses.
Collapsed buildings.
People screaming beneath the rubble.
People wandering in a daze with arms or legs missing.
Flames growing higher, with no way to tell where the fire had begun.
That much was understandable.
Two twisted angels had appeared, after all.
There had even been monsters accompanying them.
It would have been strange if the city hadn’t become a living hell.
But Louis was so furious that the back of their head throbbed.
“Where are all the city guards? Where’s the fire brigade? What the hell is the city administrator doing?”
The city could fall into chaos.
But where were all the people whose job was to bring that chaos under control?
“What’s the status of the monster suppression? Report!”
- We’ve confirmed four hundred monsters. They’re surrounded, and we’re eliminating them. We also have a separate unit hunting down any that might have escaped the encirclement.
“Do we have any troops to spare? Even a thousand?”
- A thousand would be difficult. We can spare five hundred.
“Then stretch yourselves and pull together seven hundred! The city is in complete chaos. Put out the fires, rescue people, and maintain order! And find the bastards in the city guard and fire brigade who should be doing those jobs, and drag them here by their collars!”
- Yes!
“What are those bastards doing? Does the city corps have to handle public order all by itself too?”
It was a complete and utter mess.
In a world constantly at war.
In a world heading toward destruction.
They could hardly believe such a careless response was possible, even as they saw it with their own eyes.
“Administrator! Administrator! You son of a bitch! It’s your duty to secure available healing centers during wartime and let people know where they are! The Duke of Eternity’s life is in danger!”
Louis had been trying to contact the administrator in charge of the entire city government. When they still couldn’t get through, they finally let loose a string of curses.
That was why, when their ear suddenly shimmered with an incoming call, they raised their voice on instinct.
“You bastard of an administrator! You’re only calling now?”
- Commander speaking.
The blood drained from Louis’s face.
There was only one person who was called simply “Commander,” without any explanation. The same person they had reported to earlier.
The commander-in-chief responsible for the defense of all Estel.
Helian Ionia, the Duke Protector.
“D-D-D-Duke Protector?”
- Yes. What’s the situation?
“Ah! The Order of Eternity has killed both twisted angels!”
- What...? Did a Knight of Eternity come?
“No! The ordinary knights accomplished it!”
- ...They really defeated them on their own, without support? Then Revel... No, is the Duke of Eternity unharmed?
“Well... He’s in critical condition. We’re on our way to find a healing center, but...”
Louis trailed off.
Then...
- ...I’m coming now.
The call ended with that chilling voice.
* * *
Commander Louis was nearly mad with anger.
Thanks to the scouts’ efforts, they had barely managed to find a suitable healing center and bring Revel there.
They had made sure the healers were attending to Revel, the Duke of Eternity. They had even heard their reassuring words: any later would have been dangerous, but thankfully, they had arrived in time.
Then they had come down to the healing center’s great hall on the ground floor, utterly exhausted, and found the city administrator.
That bastard of an administrator!
“You...! Administrator! What on earth have you been doing?”
They had almost cursed, but barely held themselves back. The administrator who oversaw the entire city government did, after all, outrank them.
Unaware of Louis’s feelings, the administrator answered calmly.
“Ah. I was in the underground fortress.”
“The underground fortress?”
The underground fortress was a safe space built in case of a sudden invasion of the city.
Being there wasn’t a problem in itself. It had been built to let officials direct operations from safety. But there was something else they couldn’t understand.
“If you were in the underground fortress, why couldn’t we contact you?”
“I activated magical concealment.”
Louis’s expression changed.
“...Magical concealment? That’s a last resort.”
When there was no longer any way to deal with the enemy, they were supposed to evacuate as many people as possible into the underground fortress and activate magical concealment. Then they would hold out there and survive until the forces of destruction withdrew.
Naturally, communication and everything else became impossible in that state. The function cut off every connection to the outside and hid the fortress completely.
But there was a problem.
Even at its absolute limit, the underground fortress could hold only a hundred thousand people.
“In a city of four million people, magical concealment is something you activate when you’d be grateful if even a hundred thousand survived. And you activated it? Abandoning the other three million nine hundred thousand?”
Louis glared at the administrator, their eyes wide. They didn’t even blink.
The administrator took offense.
“I had good reason. They said no Knight of Eternity was coming. That meant our city was finished, didn’t it? And are you forgetting how to address a superior?”
“Then what about the city guard and the fire brigade?”
“They came into the underground fortress with us. We had to evacuate no fewer than fifty thousand people. Someone had to maintain order.”
“Fifty thousand? Exactly how did you choose those fifty thousand?”
“...Why are you questioning me like this?”
Even then, Louis continued to stare straight at the administrator without blinking.
At that moment, a city clerk rushed in and shouted.
“Administrator! We have a serious problem! The Order of Eternity requisitioned a large number of the magical power sources used in our logistics warehouses! They say we’ve suffered heavy losses of food, medicinal herbs, and other goods that need preservation magic...!”
The administrator snapped irritably.
“What? Even if they needed power, why did they have to take it from the logistics warehouses?”
“W-Well, the Order asked us to advise them on which power sources they could requisition, but you told them we were all going to die anyway, so they could use whatever they wanted... And then we couldn’t reach you...”
“What? Are you saying this is my fault?”
“No. Not at all.”
Only then did Louis squeeze their eyes shut.
This person was insane.
They hadn’t known. Not in ordinary times.
They had thought the administrator was simply a highly skilled official who handled the city’s complex administration quite well.
But a crisis had revealed the truth.
The administrator couldn’t judge the situation.
Didn’t even know what the priorities were.
This was not someone fit for high office.
Even now, the administrator was still raging.
“Isn’t this the Order of Eternity’s fault? When a twisted angel appears, a Knight of Eternity is supposed to deploy. That practice hasn’t been broken in a hundred years! So why did they fight it themselves instead of bringing a Knight of Eternity? That caused tremendous confusion! What do they intend to do about the damage our city has suffered?”
Louis couldn’t take any more. They clenched their teeth, about to speak, when...
“Is that your final defense?”
An icy voice rang out.
Over a hundred and eighty centimeters tall.
An eye patch covering her left eye.
Red hair falling in fiery waves.
A pure white uniform with gold trim.
A strikingly splendid woman looked down at the administrator. She, too, did not blink.
“Who...?”
Overwhelmed by her presence, the administrator shrank back and asked.
She answered.
“Commander.”
Join our discord at https://dsc.gg/wetried
