WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Asakusa
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ Knight Commander of the Doomed Heroes ◈
Chapter 17: Peaceful Days (12)
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‘When Lord Revel was little? Oh, he was so cute. He was always glued to Sir Harin’s side.’
‘Sir Harin?’
‘Yes. A hero he followed around like she was his own big sister. I think she came from the same homeland as you, Sir Soyeon.’
‘Oh.’
‘Anyway, he really was adorable.’
Baek Soyeon suddenly remembered that conversation with the old woman who had taught her to make mint cheese soup.
“...Now I see why she said that.”
She was in the office of Revel Vieta, commander of the Order of Eternity. White sunlight scattered through the tall, broad windows like a fine spray.
The light falling on his shoulders revealed the weave of his white shirt. The light falling on his hair only made its dark, shadowy color stand out more. It passed over his wearily lowered eyes and touched his slightly pouting red lips...
“He really does look like a baby when he’s asleep.”
As if under a spell, Baek Soyeon approached Revel and studied every detail of his face.
“Mm. Mm. Fine, I admit it. He must’ve been really cute as a baby.”
She gave a little smile and was about to step back when she noticed something strange.
“Huh? What’s this?”
Revel’s sleeve had ridden up a little as he slept slumped over his desk.
“An undershirt? No. A bandage?”
Baek Soyeon tilted her head at his partly exposed wrist. She could just see something that looked like a white bandage.
Rustle.
With her fingertips, she gently pushed his sleeve up.
“...”
It was a bandage. His entire arm was wrapped in it.
“...What? He’s hurt?! Why?”
The commander of the Order of Eternity was one of the six grand dukes, the most honored people in Estel. How could he be hurt badly enough to need all these bandages?
“Didn’t he use healing magic? ...Don’t tell me he’s so badly hurt that even healing magic won’t work properly? But he’s the Knight Commander.”
Baek Soyeon’s gaze grew serious.
Her eyes sharpened as she examined Revel closely.
“No way.”
She lifted his collar slightly with her fingertips and looked below the nape of his neck.
Bandages wrapped tightly around him.
Blood seeping through here and there.
Baek Soyeon was no fool. A sharp intuition flashed through her mind.
“...No. That can’t be right. The Commander fought twisted angels? Is that why I haven’t been sent out lately? No. Does that even make sense? How could someone who isn’t a hero fight twisted angels...?”
But she couldn’t finish.
If it was Revel, if it was him, she could believe he had somehow found a way to fight twisted angels in her place.
If that was what had happened.
If it was really true.
“Then I...”
Baek Soyeon felt close to tears.
Her hand tightened around the smartphone Eihen had given her.
* * *
The Great Wall was always hell.
“Hold them back!!!”
Three Great Walls encircled the entire world.
The innermost was the Great Wall of Existence.
Beyond it stood the Great Wall of Faith.
And the outermost was the Great Wall of Ideals.
Those mysterious walls, built on an enormous scale, were said to have been raised by the old Ionian Empire to keep out barbarians. Of the three, the Great Wall of Faith and the Great Wall of Ideals had already fallen.
Only the Great Wall of Existence remained to protect humanity’s territory.
Somewhere beyond the Great Wall, in a place no one could locate, monsters and angels were born without end. The moment they were born, they marched toward our territory.
Monsters and angels never tired. So the front line at the Great Wall was at war day and night, all 365 days of the year.
Whenever you stood here, the air was filled with cries that sounded as though people were coughing up blood.
“Shoot!”
“Urgh!”
“I said shoot!”
“My fingers won’t move. I think something’s snapped...!”
“Then pull the string with your teeth! If the barrier falls, we all die!”
Boy soldiers who looked barely fifteen nocked their arrows with trembling hands, rubbed bloody by their bowstrings.
This was everyday life here.
Of course, all of Estel was a battlefield.
The degree differed, but everyone was enduring a war of their own.
Even in the relatively peaceful rear, everyone pushed past their limits to loose their own arrows. Whether they farmed or made goods, they worked until their hands were bloody.
But even so, none of it could compare to the fierce desperation at the Great Wall.
The deepest hell within the hell called Estel.
That was the Great Wall.
And in the middle of that hellish scene, Sir Soyeon floated high in the air, looking down over the land beyond the wall.
Why had she come here?
Even if the peace was false, I had wanted her to enjoy that life for a little while...
How much did she know? What had brought her here?
Did she only know that I had been pushing myself to hunt twisted angels?
Or did she even know that I had, at most, about three years left to live?
I would have to face her and find out.
“Three Spirits, Eight Bodies Formation of Severance and Linkage. Deploy.”
“Yes, sir!”
The Order seemed deeply shaken by Sir Soyeon’s presence, but once I gave the command, the knights reacted quickly.
They scattered into formation in an instant and activated its central axes.
“Linked Rings. Swarm Rising.”
Once the formation was fully active, I gathered its power.
Bang!
I kicked off the ground, then kicked off the air again, soaring higher and higher.
Up to Sir Soyeon, who floated aloof above us, looking down at the army of angels and monsters gathering beyond the wall.
“You’re here?”
Sir Soyeon glanced back at me and spoke as if nothing was wrong.
I had thought she might resent me and demand to know why I had deceived her.
Her reaction made it seem more likely that she hadn’t heard I might not have long to live.
I carefully watched her as I began.
“What a shame. I’d hoped you could spend a little longer in peace.”
“Peace. It’s nice.”
Sir Soyeon stared straight ahead, her expression unreadable.
“You know, I was a simple girl. On Earth, we have something called social media. I was the sort of girl who was happy as long as she got likes there. Then I’d go and make more videos and take more pictures with my friends.”
“...Mm.”
“Everything’s fun when you do it with friends. Dancing together. Eating strawberry ice cream together. Studying at a study cafe together. Taking pictures of each other looking like a mess. We’d laugh about it, and then people would give us more likes.”
“...”
“That’s why it was hard here. I was always fighting alone. Fighting was hard enough, but I was all alone too. And people don’t even give you likes.”
“Don’t they?”
“No. They go, ‘Thank you so, so much. Thank you.’ And that just drains me. A simple like is just right for me. All that ‘How can we ever repay you? Oh, goodness. Oh, goodness.’ That’s hard to deal with.”
Her words were difficult to grasp.
For someone who didn’t even know what social media was, they weren’t easy to understand.
And yet, somehow, I felt I understood.
Yes.
In the end, she was a girl.
Not a hero.
The truth was, all heroes were like that. Young, easily frightened, cheerful. Just children of their age. Not heroes.
That was why I hadn’t wanted to send her into battle.
“But you know, people’s hearts are strange.”
Sir Soyeon drew her sword.
“I still hate fighting. Fighting alone is absolutely awful. But...”
Until then, she had been looking straight ahead. Now, she turned and looked directly into my eyes.
“But fighting together... That’s okay. I think I can do that. And more than anything, I don’t want to leave you to fight alone, Commander. We’re on the same side.”
“...”
“So let’s fight together. Just as you fight for me, I want to fight alongside you, for you.”
It wasn’t a request. She was telling me what she would do.
She had realized that I had been fighting in her place.
I fiddled with the hilt of my sword for no reason.
The situation had completely changed. Now that she knew, there was no future in which she could remain unaware and enjoy peaceful days without a care. That was reality.
In that case, I needed new plans and goals to fit it.
Still, there was one comfort. She seemed to find some meaning in doing things together.
If so...
“Sir Soyeon.”
“Yes?”
“Why don’t we go a step further and open up the land beyond the northern Great Wall?”
“Huh?”
“With the two of us, we can do more than defend. We can launch a counterattack.”
If I couldn’t stop her, I would make active use of the situation instead.
「Clear Mirror」
「Rebirth」
「Grandmaster」
「Azure Sea」
I wove my original buff spells around her, one after another.
Since things had come to this, we might as well have a proper fight.
Drive the front line outward and break the enemy’s momentum.
Gather more monster and angel corpses to strengthen our forces.
Collect more data and find a breakthrough in my stalled research.
We would try a new approach. An aggressive one.
To change our fate.
“That idea...”
Sir Soyeon quietly looked into my eyes, then the corners of her mouth rose.
“I really like it. Let’s wipe them all out.”
Vwooom!
The moment she finished speaking, her black hair began turning silver. It rippled as if it might melt at any moment. Her eyes faded to blue as if they were about to evaporate.
Ignition.
A self-destructive ability that only third-year heroes could use.
An ability that threw away their lives.
“No. I didn’t mean you should use ignition...”
Baek Soyeon. Why did you have to be so impulsive, acting on every passing mood...?
I clenched my teeth, moved close beside her, and placed a hand on her shoulder blade.
「Unhindered Harmony」
I gently guided the ultra-dense magic power as it shook and exploded, trying to tear the world apart.
If you gathered people together and told them to run around however they liked, they would collide, fall, and cause chaos. But if they all moved in the same direction, they might avoid colliding no matter how many there were.
In the same way, I aligned the flow of her magic power and controlled the explosion.
The ultra-dense magic power became magic of an equally lofty order.
Just five seconds.
Five seconds of ignition would be enough.
Enough to wipe out the monsters and angels swarming the Great Wall.
Sir Soyeon spoke in a near whisper.
“Watch closely, Commander. See how hard I’ve been training.”
A chill ran through me.
I felt as if her voice had cut me.
Magic power became a blade.
And that blade rode on her voice.
The power awakening within her now was far sharper and more delicate than it had been when the apostles appeared.
Shiiing!
Her magic power covered the entire sky. The world lay beneath the tip of her blade.
The Great Wall was a hell besieged by monsters and angels.
A place where hundreds of angels and millions of monsters swarmed at any given time.
It had barely held thanks to the magic carved into it by generations of archmages and heroes, and the endless stream of heroes sent to defend it. Even then, disaster had struck whenever heroes weren’t periodically sacrificed to push the enemy far back.
But this time would be different.
Today, Sir Soyeon would not die.
Flash!
The world turned white, then returned.
I had seen this white flash many times before.
The flash of a hero reaching her final moment and simply detonating all the power inside her.
White light stretching from one end of the horizon to the other.
But this flash was different from all the ones I had seen before.
“Ah...”
It wasn’t a flash that lasted ten to fifteen seconds, burning and shattering everything. It flashed past in only about 0.1 seconds.
Then came the sound of cutting.
A sound like the universe splitting apart crept up through the fine hairs on my skin.
Everything outside the wall began to split.
A three-meter monster that had been throwing huge rocks at the Great Wall fell in five chunks of flesh, along with its boulder.
A long-legged monster leaping onto the Great Wall split from head to crotch and slid down the stone.
The twisted angels pounding on the Great Wall’s barrier fell onto it with their heads, chests, abdomens, and wings all severed. The intense magic power pouring from their corpses struck with a Boom! Boom!, shaking both the barrier and the wall.
A rumbling crash followed.
Outside the wall, the severed monsters and angels tumbled down in a great wave.
The soldiers defending the wall stood with their mouths hanging open.
For a moment, they could lower their hands, torn bloody by their bowstrings, and rest.
They stared blankly up at Sir Soyeon and me.
Flash! Flash! Flash!
Sir Soyeon left a white trail across the sky.
Along her path, pure white light flared all the way to the horizon, then faded, over and over. Everything beneath it fell apart in pieces.
A bolt of bladed lightning racing across the world.
I had to draw on every bit of the Three Spirits, Eight Bodies Formation of Severance and Linkage’s power, along with the power concentrated through Linked Rings and Swarm Rising, and struggle desperately to keep up with her.
The twisted angels that had wounded me and driven me into danger time after time now fell in showers, ten with every flash.
This was a hero using ignition.
Divine power beyond all comparison.
I desperately kept close to that power and maintained Unhindered Harmony.
As smoothly as possible.
So that this ignition would do Sir Soyeon no harm. So that every last strand of magic power flowed smoothly, without disruption.
When I focused entirely on Sir Soyeon like that, I couldn’t spare any attention for the poison radiating from her ultra-dense magic power and pouring into my body.
The magical poisoning accumulated in ever thicker layers.
But that wasn’t a problem... or so I thought.
“No. Don’t take it all on yourself.”
「Unhindered Harmony」
Her magic power stirred.
Suddenly, it slipped free of my guidance.
I was startled.
“This is...?”
Whoooosh.
The magic power circling her body flowed through my hand and swept through my body once. Suddenly, I felt at ease, and the haze in my head cleared.
“You... broke down the magical poisoning?”
I hadn’t done it.
Until now, Sir Soyeon’s magic power had only followed my lead. This time, it moved on its own. As if dancing, it used the momentum of my guidance to turn smoothly and flow past.
A vast current of magic power connected her and me.
With astonishing control, that current burned away all the magical poisoning.
...This was possible?
“How?”
She had said she didn’t think she could even learn Unhindered Harmony.
She had even given up training with me because of that.
And now, suddenly, she could perform a feat like this?
“You said a hero’s faith and wishes could work miracles. I... I’d been changing my mind. I’d been wanting to live more and more. Because of you, Commander. But then I heard you might die...”
“...You knew?”
“Knew what? That you don’t have long to live?”
She had known everything.
“Did Eihen tell you?”
“Yes. When I asked, he was kind enough to tell me.”
High in the sky, unleashing white lightning made of blades, Sir Soyeon stared at me.
“But that crap? I don’t believe it.”
She turned her head.
Flash!
Once again, the whole world turned white.
“I won’t accept it.”
Flash!
Vwooom!
Five seconds had already passed.
But the magic power of Unhindered Harmony flowing between us was still strong and stable.
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