Count Molsen was no genius of strategy or tactics, but his thinking ranged far and wide. He acted outside his opponents' expectations. Just as the battle began, some of the count's troops broke formation. Slipping away amid the fighting, they looked like deserters. The royal army's commander decided there was no need to pursue them. Deserters were only to be expected when the tide of battle turned, and his side was still outnumbered. He was grateful to have them run away. In short, they became a body of troops no one paid any attention to. They gathered in twos and threes, scattered, then regrouped at the command ringing inside their heads. 'Find the source of the mana.' Naturally, their destination brought them before Andrew. Watching the troops that had become a raiding party, he spoke calmly. "Are you asleep? I think you'd better get up." Esther did not stir at his words. Instead, a thin trickle of blood ran from the corner of her mouth. Proof that she, too, was fighting. Andrew let out a sigh. This was a shitty situation. The fighting had stopped out on the battlefield, and suddenly these wild-eyed bastards had appeared out of nowhere. 'Where did these bastards come from?'

It was an ambush he had never imagined. 'Why here, of all places?'

There were no supplies here, nor was Krang here. Why attack a place with no tactical significance whatsoever? Obviously, it had to be because of Esther. Andrew had worked out that much. There were more than fifty infantrymen, and not one looked easy to handle. He thought he'd rather face fifty Ghouls. "My lord, these bastards' eyes..." The freckled trainee took a step back as he spoke. Andrew had noticed, too. Perhaps their capillaries had burst: blood welled in most of their eyes and streamed down their cheeks. Even among those whose eyes were relatively intact, there was hardly any white to be seen. Blood-red whites and black pupils. Only their eyes had changed, yet they no longer looked human. Their appearance alone was unnerving enough. Andrew clenched his teeth. 'Should we fall back?'

He and the five trainees had formed up around Esther, but fighting here would mean dying for nothing. Then again, could he carry Esther and run? The men weeping blood all held their swords dangling at their sides, their exposed thigh muscles bulging as though about to burst. What the hell had they done to make their thighs that thick? 'I don't think we can outrun them.'

Escaping alone would be a near thing. Running away with someone in his arms was out of the question. It was broad daylight, yet the sky seemed to be growing darker. With the battlefield right before him, he should have felt its heat, but instead he felt a faint chill. No, he had felt something like heat until a moment ago. Now it suddenly felt cold. He watched them approach without any formation. An old legend told of angels who fought while weeping blood, and they looked like that fable made flesh. Called to battle by the gods, they had wept blood because they did not want to kill. Wasn't that how it went? Of course, these men were the opposite of those in the fable. They had taken drugs to maximize their physical abilities. "M-m-mage. T-tear. K-kill." The man in the center, whose eyes were not bleeding, stammered. Listening to him was maddening, but his meaning was clear. They were after the mage. What was the main army doing, letting these bastards through? Did the captain even know what was happening here? Andrew had every reason to complain. "My lord." One of the trainees called to him. There was still a rational choice available. He could survive if he ran. He had no obligation to protect this woman, Esther. ["What can I accomplish if I can't even protect one person behind me?"] He remembered something the captain had once said. In this moment of crisis, Andrew looked back on everything they had experienced together since he first met Encrid. What had he learned from watching him? "If I run without even protecting one woman, how can I protect my honor? If that's what it takes to survive, I might as well cast aside the name Gardner today." He would die here rather than run. "G-g-get—" "You get lost." Andrew cut the stammering moron off. "Let's die, then." The freckled trainee assigned the other four their positions as he spoke. Andrew stood in the center and swung his sword once, straight down. A downward stroke. A declaration of his determination. The enemy detached force charged, drooling and weeping blood.

"Graaaargh!"

It was impossible to tell whether the sound was a battle cry or a scream. They were as difficult to fight as their appearance suggested. Their dangling swords swung fast and hard, and they lashed out with feet and fingernails. Were these things even human? People joked about it, but had their mothers really been Ghouls? Human-Ghoul hybrids were absurd, yet here the bastards were. "Come at me, you fucking bastards! All of you!" Andrew roared. A sword had already struck one thigh, leaving him unable to move that leg properly, but what did that matter? He held on and on. Then— BOOM! Andrew thought a catapult stone had struck. Blood from his torn scalp was obscuring his vision, painting the world red. He saw a war chariot barreling in from one side. A closer look revealed a person, not a chariot. A flat bludgeon in the left hand battered enemy soldiers, while a broad sword in the right crushed them. 'Red potatoes.'

The thought came unbidden as Andrew watched the enemy being mashed. He had reached his limit long ago. Help had come just as he was about to fucking die. It was Teresa, the half-Giant warrior. Dunbachel had come with her. A curved sword in each hand, she rampaged like a shaman gone mad. Her blades slashed, chopped, and arced into the enemy. Slaughtering the detached force without mercy, she leaped over to Andrew. "Hey, you all right?" "I'm at the point where even you look beautiful." Andrew wiped the blood from around his eyes as he spoke. "I'm always beautiful." "She looks even more beautiful." Andrew glanced over Dunbachel's shoulder. Teresa's shield and sword were working like a grinding machine. This was what the word merciless was for. The warrior woman, so large she threw off his sense of perspective, crushed, smashed, broke, and dismembered a dozen enemy soldiers in an instant. Anyone would have said the sight was far removed from beauty, but Andrew meant it. These two had saved his life. He could have praised them even more lavishly. Andrew sank to the ground. Just before advancing on the count, Encrid had sent Dunbachel and Teresa to Esther. If she had sent an astral body or whatever it was to speak to him, she could not come in person. That in itself suggested danger. He had reached that conclusion through reason, not intuition. That was why Dunbachel and Teresa had come here. Along the way, however, the sight of the count had stirred an instinctive terror in Dunbachel, along with self-loathing. Teresa, meanwhile, was irritated by her own lack of skill. Now here was someone who had needed them, someone they had saved. Looking at Andrew, both felt a little better. "Cough!" Just before Teresa and Dunbachel finished wiping out the ambushers, Andrew saw Esther cough. Her eyes opened briefly. "Lady Witch?" Andrew called to her, but she closed her eyes again without answering. Something had clearly gone wrong. Rejecting the count's mana, which had driven her out, Esther opened her eyes once more in the Other World. Something like black soot was spreading from the count. 'He got me.'

Strictly speaking, there had been nothing she could do. Her opponent was a prepared mage, and she had yet to recover all her mana. Had her spell world been intact, knowing what was coming would have been enough to prevent it. 'So what?'

Esther had watched a man who never gave up, and she had learned from him. She also knew her own lofty pride well. That self-regard, bordering on arrogance, would not permit her to back down now. That was why.

'You think I'll back down?'

She would not be satisfied until she overturned everything that bastard of a mage, count or whatever he was, had set up. If she could not defeat him head-on, she could use another method. 'A fallback.'

Of course, that required certain conditions to be met. First, the source of that soot, the one generating the mana, would have to be beaten half to death or killed outright. 'Enkie will do it.' A mage's conjecture was a prophecy: a conclusion reached after weighing all the circumstances. But what Esther had told herself was not a prophecy. Nor was it a wish. It was faith. Trust earned by the way one human being had lived before her eyes. Enkie was a man who did what he set out to do. Believing that, Esther prepared her fallback.

* * *

The count did not explode in anger. Throwing a tantrum because things were not going his way would make him no different from a seven-year-old child. 'Is this a problem I cannot handle?'

He could handle it.

'Has the plan gone badly awry?'

Hardly. His cool head quickly quelled his irritation. The distortion of the magic circle he had prepared angered him, but this would suffice. He could not swallow the entire kingdom at once, but he could finish one battlefield. 'But didn't I originally need an intact kingdom?'

Hadn't he begun this out of a hunger for power? As he tried to recall his former self, another self asked him a question. 'Does that matter?'

The count answered.

'No.' Black or white, a throne was a throne. Increase the thralls. Stain the world. After murmuring the words in his heart, the count chanted over and over, using the prepared magic circle as his foundation. In truth, it was the same spell his other inner self had been chanting since the battle began. Perhaps the ambush had failed. The mage who had interfered with his spell world was unharmed. Then she could wait. First, he had to strip the souls from the men approaching him. The count raised the hand holding his staff. As he aimed it forward, something like black soot spread from its tip. Dark though it had been, the sky had still been a daytime sky. Now it began to blacken further. Dark clouds, resembling the chair he sat upon, rolled in from behind the count. The heavy clouds came without a single rumble of thunder, their very sight profoundly ominous. The dark sky blotted out the sunlight. It seemed about to paint everything black. "Wh-what is that?" A royal soldier looked up, startled by the strange sight. The black sky spread until it touched the ground. Some of the soot crept toward him and touched his arm. It must be because the dark clouds were so thick. Yes, that was it. But how could there be shadows like these with no sunlight? It looked like the sky on a cloudy day, an unbearably cloudy day, so why could he still see his surroundings? That was what his cool reason said. His instincts said otherwise. He shook his arm, trying to dislodge the soot, but it spread until it gripped all his limbs. "Ghh..." Soon he felt something else forcing its way inside him. It was nothing physical. -Give me your body. A wraith invading his mind. The soldier's eyes clouded over, then rolled back until only the whites showed. Drool began streaming from his mouth. The count smiled at the result and spoke. "Let us see you withstand ten thousand wraiths!" His voice rang across the entire battlefield, brimming with confidence. The overlapping voices shook ordinary human minds without mercy. The soot itself was made of wraiths that stole human vitality. The densest of them reached the five men approaching the count. Encrid heard someone murmur to him. -Give me your body. Before he could answer, the Will of refusal reacted instinctively. Mere soot could not taint his determination in the slightest. His Will repelled the wraith. -... Give me your body. THUMP. -... The wraith turned away from Encrid. A wraith approached Rem, too, but he knew how to handle creatures like these. That did not mean he wanted to touch those revolting astral forms. It was like not wanting to touch an egg rotted in the midsummer heat. Wouldn't anyone rather pinch their nose against the stench? So Rem swung his axe. WHOOSH. The wraith's will scattered along the axe's downward path. The power of the spells he had obtained from the Ageless Madman still lingered. Cutting a wraith hardly qualified as a feat. Even without those spells, he could have managed it with a trick or two. Ragna ignored his. The wraith clung tightly to him, but could get no response. -Give me your body. Can't you hear me? Give it to me. Ragna kept ignoring it, and the wraith gave up. Even if he refused to obey, it needed some reaction to work with. No wraith could penetrate his rock-solid determination. Following a little behind the others, Jaxon sensed the approaching wraiths and dodged them. The soot seemed to spread without gaps, but careful observation and perception revealed plenty of places to avoid it. It was not particularly difficult. Even if he could not evade them, it would not matter. If things went wrong, he could use something like a straw-doll artifact. He had several items tucked inside his clothes, prepared just in case. Audin welcomed the wraiths. He alone showed compassion and generosity. 'Welcome. The Lord awaits you.' What pitiful souls. He would embrace them. To be denied rest even in death! He felt close to tears. Indeed, a tiny drop of moisture gathered at the corner of his eye. Divine power lay hidden within Audin, merely held in check by bindings. The wraith burrowed gleefully into him and encountered that mass of bound divine power. There was not even time to scream. It was annihilated on the spot and sent to the Lord's side. For a wraith, this was the most horrific death imaginable. There was a reason divine power was the bane of undead creatures and monsters such as wraiths. It inflicted the most excruciating pain upon them. Audin, of course, knew this very well. 'He has said we must willingly endure pain on the path to His side.'

He did it despite knowing. All out of the most heartfelt concern for the wraiths. The count frowned. The presence of the five men approaching him had not diminished at all. Nor were they the only ones resisting his "soot wraiths." There were others here and there, around that Krang fellow and elsewhere. "Insolent wretches." He shook his staff as he spoke. If he could not break their minds, he would tear apart their bodies first. "Try stopping this." At his command, figures with bodies made of black soot rose from beneath his chair, following the motion of his staff. Wraith soldiers. He manifested the wraiths and sent them forth into reality, now connected to his spell world. Ten thousand of them. A black tide had suddenly risen to bar the way before Encrid and the Lunatic Company. Even faced with that daunting tide, Encrid did not deliberate over what to do. Who was best at this kind of battle? "Rem." The lunatic master of the axe. "... Can't say I like it." Rem, too, saw the approaching horde of wraiths and understood that they had to break through. So, much as it displeased him, he said what needed saying. "Let's form a battle formation." He meant they should line up in a particular arrangement for a specific purpose. The term was a decidedly poor fit for the Lunatic Company.