Chapter 98: The Finality of the Mist Mabeast (Patreon)

"Sorry, but you're not escaping from here today."

Reinhard's calm voice rang out through the thick fog. The White Whale's blood-streaked eyes rolled upward. In its field of vision, a tiny, insignificant figure sheathed his sword and drove a fist straight into the middle of its back.

The punch was plain and unadorned, yet it carried immense power. The shockwave of the blow alone blew away every last wisp of fog clinging to the Whale's body.

The White Whale let out a despairing wail. Its body, which had only just lifted off, could no longer hold its balance. It plunged heavily out of the sky, listing to one side, and its enormous momentum carried it skidding a long way after landing, throwing up a storm of dust and rubble.

"Father, are you all right?"

Once he'd steadied himself, Reinhard went straight to Heinkel's side and helped him to his feet.

"Barely alive." Heinkel forced out a faint smile and looked toward the Whale's head. "More than that, I'm worried about the old man. I hope that damn brat can look after him."

"Please don't worry. As long as Subaru is there, nothing will go wrong."

"Hey, hey, seriously? You trust him that much?"

Heinkel looked at his Sword Saint son in some surprise.

"I heard you two are sworn brothers now? Never thought I'd live to see the day. I couldn't have imagined you getting along so well with such a flaky guy…" Halfway through, Heinkel's face flushed. "Fine, fine… Whatever you say about that kid, he's still a lot more reliable than a wreck like me. You put up with me, so how could you not put up with him?"

"Please don't say that, Father."

Reinhard looked at him earnestly.

"After today, there's no way anyone can call you a 'wreck' anymore. As the current head of the Astrea family, you showed up here and fought side by side with us. That alone proves you're already a hero worthy of bearing a sword's name."

Heinkel froze.

A hero?

Him? A pitiful failure who had drowned his sorrows in drink for a full fifteen years, who'd spent his days sodden and dead drunk in taverns, who had even resented and envied his own flesh-and-blood son?

Heinkel stared blankly at the straight-backed young man before him, whose features bore some resemblance to his own when he was young. A flood of mixed feelings welled up in him. For fifteen years he had been avoiding his son, turning his own inadequacy into harsh, irritable scolding, and the boy had silently endured it all.

And now that same son, who had been treated so unfairly, was giving him recognition without a trace of falseness.

An unprecedented ache rose in his chest.

"…Damn brat. You're getting better with words every day."

Heinkel sniffed hard, raised both hands and clapped Reinhard firmly on the shoulders, his mouth stretching into a rough, hearty grin.

"Hey, Reinhard. Once we've cleaned up this mess, let's go have a drink, the three of us: you, me, and the old man!"

As he spoke, he tilted his head back to look at the rising dawn on the horizon, a crystalline glimmer at the corners of his eyes.

"I'm sure Louanna and Mother would be glad to see this too…"

"Yes!"

Reinhard smiled and nodded.

"It's a promise, Father."

Elsewhere, with Natsuki Subaru as his witness, Wilhelm rose to his feet. He began to walk, stepping forward under the gaze of the White Whale's blood-reddened eyes.

"This old man was born for the sword and went mad for the sword."

His pace was slow. With every step, the soles of his boots pressed deep, bloody prints into the Whale's pale, thick hide.

It was as if time had flowed backward to the day he first met Theresia. In the ruins where he practiced swordsmanship, an uninvited guest had appeared at some point.

A red-haired girl sat by a crumbling low wall, gazing out over a vast field of flowers. She ignored his rude demand to know who she was and turned to smile back at him.

"Let me ask you something. Do you like flowers?"

In his memory the flower field was bright with sunlight, and the rustle of petals in the breeze overlapped with the hellish scene before him, where flesh flew and thick smoke rolled across the battlefield.

From the day the White Whale took Theresia's life, Wilhelm's world had held only black and white.

He hated the Mabeasts. He hated the kingdom. He hated his weak and useless son Heinkel most of all. He had even… resented, unreasonably and in front of everyone, his grandson Reinhard, who had inherited his wife's Sword Saint Divine Protection.

He had cast away every one of his kin and made himself into a vengeful Oni fit only to wander wastelands and graveyards.

He had believed that killing the White Whale would quench the hatred burning through his innards. He had believed it was the best account he could give to Theresia.

But just now, when the son he had branded a good-for-nothing charged into battle beside him without a moment's hesitation, when Reinhard smiled with real joy at seeing three generations fight together, when he saw Theresia's figure in a vision, Wilhelm finally understood that he had been wrong.

At this moment, the withered heart in his chest, frozen for fifteen years, gave a crisp crack as it shattered.

And then it began to beat, fiercely, full of life!

"Theresia…"

Through the blood and grime covering his face, a faint, tender smile slowly spread across the old man's lips.

So that was it.

From the very beginning, it had never been about revenge.

What had held up this ancient body, riddled with wounds, all the way to today, what had kept him swinging his sword tens of thousands of times a day until his finger bones warped, and never once letting it go…

It was never hatred for that beast.

It was his hopelessly deep love for that girl, a love that had crossed the boundary of life and death and endured through the years.

"Hah…"

Wilhelm exhaled a long, heavy breath.

In that instant, the savage killing intent that had raged around him, as if to tear every living thing apart, subsided miraculously.

In its place came a glow, clear as a mirror and pure as the first light of early winter dawn.

It was the ultimate state, in which the deepest of feelings has been poured entirely into the blade!

"White Whale."

Wilhelm spoke softly.

"This old man's name is Wilhelm van Astrea."

"Remember the name of the man who will slay you, because from now on, you will never hear another sound!"

The White Whale's eyes lifted, fixing on the old human who was as small as an ant. It began to thrash violently and opened the vents along its body again, but then it seemed to sense something that made its very soul tremble, and its last desperate impulse to resist faded away.

"Yeah… That's right. Just accept your judgment obediently."

Natsuki Subaru quietly withdrew the pressure that belonged to Deathwing and pulled the brim of his hat down a little with one finger.

At that moment, Wilhelm's sword was drawn once more.

Fifteen years of regret.

Fifteen years of remorse.

Fifteen years of waking from dreams at midnight, haunted by the red-haired girl who had put a question to him in the duel where the two of them staked their right to wield a sword…

"Why do you swing a sword?"

"To protect you."

"Then… do you love me?"

Back then, Wilhelm had been too shy to answer, and had brushed the question off with excuses that now seemed absurd to him.

He had never imagined that he would spend his whole life unable to answer his wife's question.

The old man tightened his grip on the knight's sword in his hand. The blade, which had drunk deep of his archenemy's blood, shone brilliantly in the light of the morning sun.

He swung!

"Theresia—!"

Wilhelm let out the deepest, most unrestrained, most unregretting roar of his life:

"My wife, Theresia van Astrea—!!"

He swung!

"I… love you!!"

He swung!

With that confession, which had crossed the divide between life and death, traveled through fifteen years of lonely time, and was finally spoken aloud, Wilhelm's presence surged, soared, and sharpened. He became nearly one with the sword in his hand. With one more strike, he leapt into the air, turning his body and his blade into a spear that could pierce anything, and dropped toward the White Whale's head.

The White Whale watched in despair as the strike fell. Wilhelm and his sword together tore without mercy through its flesh and bone, destroyed the brain within, pierced the whole of its enormous skull, and burst out through its gaping mouth.

Soaked in blood, Wilhelm drove his sword into the ground and straightened his back. The White Whale's colossal body, vast as a mountain, finally lost all life.

The warm, bright morning light poured unobstructed over the ruined battlefield. It lit up the soldiers who had collapsed to the ground and were weeping into their hands in overwhelming emotion, and it lit up the broken weapons and dried blood.

It was a miraculous, complete victory.

In this battle, no one had died, and no one had vanished into the White Whale's mist.

"The White Whale falls here!"

Crusch dismounted from her land dragon and walked through the dust and blood to the very front of the army's ranks. The young Duke drew her sword and pointed it at the heavens, then proclaimed solemnly, with all her strength, to the whole army and to the world:

"For four hundred years it ravaged the land and threatened the world. Today, the Mabeast of the mist has been slain by the hand of Wilhelm van Astrea!"

"This battle… is a victory that belongs to us mortals!"

"Ohhhhhhh—!!"

After a brief silence, cheers and shouts burst forth like a mountain flood and drowned the entire plain.

In the shade of Flugel's Great Tree, soldiers embraced and wept openly. Veterans tipped back their heads and drained the strong liquor from their waterskins, then hurled the empty skins into the blood-soaked earth, venting the hatred they had hoarded for decades.

Seeing this, Crusch let out a long breath. She turned toward Natsuki Subaru, who stood alone at the edge of the huge crater, away from the crowd, looking down at the White Whale's corpse. She sheathed her sword, and a complicated look crossed her eyes.

"Subaru."

She walked up to him, and, unusually, did not use a formal title.

"You heard me just now, didn't you? Before the ranks, I said this was a victory for us mortals."

"Yeah, nicely put. Very grand vision." Natsuki Subaru blinked. "It's undeniably a glorious victory, isn't it?"

"But is it really?"

Crusch looked at him, and in those emerald eyes that could see through everything, waves of doubt were surging.

"From the moment we decided to ally and draw up the campaign plan, to the White Whale being struck from the sky by a power like that of a Divine Dragon, to its desperate resistance, to its final death at the hands of three generations of Astreas… nearly every step felt as though an invisible hand was quietly moving the pieces."

"And the most critical moment was the jet-black dragon you turned into at the very start of the battle."

When she raised the subject, she lowered her voice so far that only the two of them could hear:

"Even though you transformed for only a few seconds, so quickly that many couldn't make out what they saw, that one blow settled the outcome of the entire battle. From that moment on, the scales of victory were forced toward our side."

"I think that even if we hadn't managed to kill the White Whale as smoothly as you hoped, you could have cleaned up the mess for us with that power…"

A loneliness she couldn't hide flickered in Crusch's eyes.

"Tell me, Lord Subaru. This victory, which will go down in the annals of the kingdom… is it truly the result of us mortals fighting to the death with our flesh and blood? Or was it all arranged by you from the beginning, a play in which we simply took the stage and followed your script?"

The question mattered a great deal to her, because it bore directly on the ideals of her royal campaign. If she believed that mortal strength could accomplish what even a Divine Dragon could not, then what did this mean? That she had simply invited another Divine Dragon into the kingdom?

It cut straight against her ideal. Though she respected Natsuki Subaru from the bottom of her heart, on a question of principle she could not set her convictions aside.

Subaru, for his part, seemed quite relaxed. He waved over Patrasche, leaned back against the dragon's black scales with his hands behind his head, and lazily tossed a question back:

"So what do you think, Lord Crusch? Do you think this was a staged play?"

He pointed to the soldiers in the distance, who were bandaging one another's wounds. Ferris was running back and forth among the injured, treating the soldiers who had been affected by the mental contamination.

Then he pointed to the mountainous corpse of the White Whale, where the three generations of Astreas were praying together before the Dragon Sword Reid, which stood planted before the Whale's head.

"If you ask me, if this were really a script, I doubt anyone in this world could have written it."

"I admit I know a bit more than you do, and I've got a little more power than you do. But all I did was drag that monster down from the sky so that mortals could climb up and settle things with it face to face."

Natsuki Subaru's expression gradually turned serious. He looked Crusch straight in the eyes and went on:

"I'm the one who steered things in the best direction. But the ones who kept their heads in front of that monster, held their ground, and finally killed it were you, and not just old man Wilhelm, but everyone in this expedition."

"It was the strength of us mortals that defeated that hateful monster."

Crusch stared at him blankly.

Her Wind Indication Divine Protection, which could see through lies, caught not a single false current of air around Natsuki Subaru. Every word the boy spoke carried enormous weight, and was as open and honest as the wind racing across this plain.

"…I see."

Crusch let out a long breath. A wry smile of relief touched the corner of her mouth, and she said quietly:

"What a… cunning man. So cunning that I can't bring myself to hate you."

—Tch, how disgusting! Disgusting! Disgusting!

Just when Natsuki Subaru thought the mood had finally come to a perfect close, a gnashing, childish, petulant voice exploded from the depths of his mind, and with it came a sudden suffocating sensation, as if a hand were squeezing his heart!

—'The strength of mortals'? 'The courage of mortals'? You ungrateful idiot, is that all you can say, over and over?!

Perhaps her state of mind had changed along with her shape. The whispers of Deathwing now carried not only thick resentment but something that could only be called jealousy.

—And who was it that slammed that filthy white fish into the mud with a single claw just now?! Who gave you a mouthful of dragonfire to blow away that disgusting mist?!

—You praise that green-haired human female to the heavens, hmph… but you've never had one kind word for me! Who do you think lent you the power inside your body? Have you no idea?!

"…Huh?!"

Having barely caught his breath, Natsuki Subaru was left utterly bewildered.