WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Arsène
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ The Romance Fantasy’s Pushover Crown Prince Is No More ◈
Chapter 71: War of Conquest (5)
──────
That day came without any warning.
Rumble!
“...What, what was I supposed to do?”
The ground shook and split apart.
“Pavan, what the hell was your Covenant?”
Enormous hands thrust up through the cracks in the earth.
Thud!
The giant hands braced against the ground and slowly pulled their bodies up.
The Giants imprisoned underground had lost their memories. The only thing left within them was rage.
Uwooooooo!!!
The roar of the first Giant to reach the surface sounded like a war horn.
A signal announcing war.
But that was only from the Giants’ perspective.
To the Empire, it was an invasion.
A one-sided invasion.
“Evacuating the citizens takes top priority!”
“Yes, sir!!!”
Even as knights capable of wielding Aura hurried into action.
Crunch.
They could not save every citizen crushed beneath the Giants’ advance.
A Swordmaster was still only a human with absurdly overwhelming strength.
No matter how many people they tried to protect, humans had their limits.
Large-scale Teleportation was impossible.
“Damn it... Damn it...! Why isn’t it working?!”
The moment the Giants appeared, casting magic became severely restricted.
Few mages could maintain the intense concentration required while the ground shook and the sky darkened as though enraged.
Those mages had to stop the Giants’ advance rather than focus on evacuating citizens.
“Seal the holes the Giants are coming out of! Kill the Giants already out, and make sure those trying to emerge never get out!”
The situation changed by the second.
At first, they had judged the Giants’ numbers to be low and made evacuation their top priority.
But as Giants poured endlessly from the cracked ground, they changed their objective to exterminating them.
“Damn it! Damn it! Why won’t it cut?!”
Even that was not easy.
The Giants’ skin was absurdly tough, thick, and resilient.
Only Aura at a Swordmaster’s level could even leave a mark on it.
No matter how many Swordmasters the Empire had, there were not enough to face Giants crawling out all over the Empire at once.
Besides, raising enough Swordmasters to contend with an entire race had been impossible from the start.
“...If we had prepared blades capable of cutting Giant skin in advance, could more people have killed them?”
I looked down at my feet with hollow eyes.
“Should there have been more Swordmasters than there are now...?”
Even at this very moment, citizens were dying.
“Could we have subdued the Giants if becoming a Swordmaster had been the basic requirement for knighthood?”
The knights who had trained alongside me were dying too.
Uwooooooo!!!
Giants burst out from directly beneath the Imperial Palace.
The land where I had been born and raised was headed toward ruin simply because the Giants had awakened.
What kind of thing was this Covenant, that it could bring down an Empire with thousands of years of history without even properly explaining itself?
Rumble!
The Imperial Palace collapsed.
“....”
At first, I swung my sword like a madman. I wanted to protect those precious to me until the very end.
Then, halfway through, I began to wonder if any of this even meant anything. It was clear I would not be able to protect them.
I could clearly see time turning back again.
How much, how much, how much more did it intend to torment me before it was satisfied?
It would have been nice if I returned with all my memories every time I regressed.
Then I would not have had to keep going through this.
Regression toyed with people.
It erased the most important memories before taking place.
“...Ah.”
Tears flowed down my face.
I pitied the citizens.
I felt sorry for the knights.
It hurt to watch the people of the Empire, who knew nothing, repeat death over and over again.
If only I had been more capable, if only I had been stronger, none of this would have happened.
There were regressions where I even forgot that I had regressed.
“Why... Why the hell...?”
The words I wanted to say would not come out properly.
I could not even guess which injustice I should protest first to ease the rage inside me.
My twisted, tangled feelings knotted together until they became a stone crushing my heart.
Aaaahhh!
Save me! Please, save me!
My feet! My feet!
My legs... I can’t move my legs!
Where the hell did these things come from?!
Even now, citizens continued to die.
One by one, they lost their lives to a disaster that had been foretold but could not be seen in advance, unable to remember the time that would turn back again.
The hand holding my sword trembled.
I was furious at my own weakness. My teeth ground together.
I needed to become stronger, yet I felt guilty that this was all I could do.
Guilt flooded over me. What Imperial Crown Prince? What Little Sun of the Empire?
Tears flowed.
Red tears ran down my cheeks and fell to the ground.
Anger burned, fueled by despair and emptiness.
I knew that once a little more time had passed, regression would begin.
Regression would cruelly show me the Empire’s end again.
I knew that no matter how hard I struggled, the ending would not change.
The number of regressions I could not even remember proved it.
But even so.
“I am the flame of the Empire.”
The fact that I was the Empire’s Imperial Crown Prince would not change.
“I am the Little Sun who protects the Empire, the blade and sword at the Emperor’s forefront.”
I could not give up on everything and remain still just because the ending would be the same.
If regression took away my most important memories, then I only needed to fill myself with unimportant ones.
They would gather and gather until the day they finally saw the light.
“No one will dare set their sights on the Empire without my permission.”
Whoosh.
I dropped the sun I had been gathering all this time into the gap the Giants were climbing out of.
The first thing the Giants using the Imperial Palace as support to climb up encountered was the sun.
I watched the Giants melt in the sea of flames.
“If I don’t melt them all at once, they recover?”
Deep inside the pit, I could see Giants that had only been burned recovering.
“I’ll kill every last one of you... I’ll kill you over and over until your weaknesses no longer matter... until killing you feels like part of daily life. I’ll keep regressing.”
It did not matter.
Regression would continue anyway.
If the only thing worn away in the process was my sanity, what a profitable trade that was.
Whoosh!
I threw myself toward the largest pit the Giants were trying to emerge from.
Perhaps because I was falling so quickly, the blood flowing from my eyes became streaks across my face.
“Ha.”
I laughed for no reason.
I had descended into the underground where the Giants slept, and countless Giants filled the place.
There were already hundreds on the surface.
But seeing it for myself, I realized that was only a tiny fraction.
“That’s a relief.”
I was glad.
I was grateful that I could stop so many of them alone.
At the same time, a very interesting thought crossed my mind.
“If I kill every one of you, it would not be an exaggeration to say I conquered the Giants.”
If I killed every Giant before me, perhaps the ending could change.
It was a predictable thought, but hope still rose that this time might be different.
Whoosh.
Flames wrapped around my sword.
“The crime of daring to invade the Empire.”
Having declared the entire Giant race his enemy, a human pronounced:
“Immediate execution.”
It was the beginning of the War of Conquest.
+++++
The memory ended atop a mountain formed from piled-up Giant corpses, with the Imperial Crown Prince’s sword now giving off only faint embers.
Whooosh!
“....”
The Imperial Crown Prince’s memory, which had risen to the surface, quieted as though nothing had happened.
“Your Highness, are you all right?”
“I’m fine. With something like this beneath the Imperial Palace, I got absorbed in watching it.”
“I understand. I did not expect it to be this extreme either.”
The Imperial Crown Prince’s memory had felt incredibly long, but very little actual time had passed.
To others, it would have looked as though I had blanked out for only a moment.
“Unghehe! Your Highness! There is no need to worry! Arveda is here!”
“You have given up on distinguishing formal speech from casual speech.”
“Of course I have! Unghehheh!”
Arveda tactfully used magic to brightly illuminate our surroundings.
Only then could I properly see the underground space that had only vaguely seemed large before.
If I had not prepared myself through the Imperial Crown Prince’s memory, I would have cried out in shock.
The underground where the Giants slept, Hypogeum Gigantum, was absurdly vast.
“A ceiling high enough for Giants to stand beneath... How has the land below the Empire not collapsed?”
Old science fiction novels sometimes had settings like a world within the Earth.
That was exactly what this felt like. Such a massive, expansive underground space lay directly beneath the Empire?
It made no sense.
Pavan had opened the door leading underground, and we had not even descended very far.
Yet the ceiling was ridiculously high compared to the distance we had come down.
“It appears to be a space created with Forgotten Wisdom.”
“Forgotten Wisdom?”
“Yes, the wisdom that Giants were originally meant to possess... It seems they forcibly connected different spaces through it.”
“Huh.”
Pavan neatly explained the phenomenon.
Had they connected entirely separate spaces using a unique power only Giants could use?
Then again, there was no other explanation.
“If it were the same space, we would have found Giants just by digging a little into the ground.”
“That is right. They would have encountered sleeping Giants even while digging wells.”
“I see.”
That was all the time I had for reflection.
After that, I continued deeper underground.
The bright surroundings made it easy to find the way.
More than that, there was only one path to begin with.
It was as if it were telling anyone who made it this far to at least have an easy journey from here.
‘Was Mirne originally supposed to come here?’
If a Crown Princess from another country came beneath the Imperial Palace, it would likely be through a proper invitation.
Going by the past, there had been three people in the Empire capable of extending such an invitation, so it was not impossible.
Anyway.
“I will take the lead and report any unusual developments immediately, Your Highness.”
“I’ll leave it to you.”
Just as we continued exploring deeper underground with Pavan at the front.
“...!”
At last, we saw it.
“Huh.”
Giants frozen like stone, their hands stretched toward the ceiling.
As if they would tear open the ceiling and invade the Empire the moment that day came.
They stood petrified, their heads raised and hands pressed against the ceiling.
‘This is absurd.’
How much did this world want the Empire to fall, to go this far?
As I continued that line of thought...
Rumble!
The ground shook.
“You, not Mirne?”
Among the Giants, something that could not even be called a Giant appeared before us. It had the neck of a giraffe and only a human face.
“Why, not?”
The moment I saw it, I smiled broadly.
“What will you do if I’m not?”
It looked like we could get straight to the point.
I really liked that.
Footnotes:
Join our discord at https://dsc.gg/wetried
