No king.

The guilt clinging to the wraith bore down heavily upon him. The purple arms undulating around him drooped, and his body began to tremble.

Yuto strode toward him. Startled by the approaching footsteps, the wraith raised his head—just as the obsidian dagger thrust toward him.

The tide had turned completely. The wraith now struggled even to parry Yuto’s blade head-on. The purple arms that had sought to punish a traitor through savage violence no longer tried to attack Yuto. Instead, they had become enormous shackles of guilt, suppressing the wraith’s aether.

“Ah... aaah...”

A sob like a lament escaped the wraith’s lips. He could offer no rebuttal to the grave robber, the traitor—no, to that boy’s words.

After his wife’s passing, he had forgotten to hone his swordsmanship. His sword was meant to cut down the kingdom’s enemies and protect its people, yet he had forgotten its purpose. As loneliness and despair drove him mad, he had not held a sword for even a moment.

And yet, look at that boy’s swordsmanship. It was honed to an almost unbelievably beautiful perfection. This was no mere imitation. His control of aether, his breathing, the balance of his weight over his feet, the angles of his sword hand and swinging arm, even the way he recovered after each stroke—all belonged to a swordsman more accomplished than the wraith had been in his prime, before he became a wraith, before he lost his wife.

How? An urgent question rose within his madness-twisted mind. How could a boy he did not even know perform the royal family’s secret swordsmanship so flawlessly?

“You... you... you...!”

Even as he stammered, the wraith swung his sword desperately. He was a foolish king. A benighted king who had slaughtered his entire kingdom and its people as an offering to a constellation. A sinner who should no longer exist, who deserved to suffer in hell for all eternity even after death.

Yet even he had wished desperately for one thing in his final moments. Even as every manner of natural disaster swallowed Belkain, he had fervently wished to preserve the Precious Sword of Belkain, the symbol of the royal family’s legitimacy and the kingdom’s history.

He had hidden the sword in a secret chamber deep beneath the royal castle, where no grave robber would dare steal it. He had made himself a wraith and remained beside it, so that even if someone discovered the chamber, they could not take the sword.

That was why the wraith had to struggle to the bitter end. However flawlessly the boy performed the royal family’s secret swordsmanship, he was not of Belkain’s royal blood. He must not become the sword’s master.

Belkain had already fallen, and none of its royal bloodline remained, leaving no one who could claim the Precious Sword of Belkain. Even so, it was better for the blade to slumber forever beneath the fallen kingdom than pass into the hands of some unknown stranger.

“Aaaaargh!”

The wraith desperately swung at Yuto’s chest, but Yuto saw through his moves as though he could read the future. With a simple turn of his body, he evaded the sword and drove his obsidian dagger toward the wraith’s solar plexus.

CRUNCH!

Already dead and lingering as a restless spirit, the wraith could not be pierced by a blade. But the vortex of aether coiling around the dagger hurled him backward.

“Gah!”

His form flickered faintly as he tumbled to the floor. Clutching his chest, he looked up at Yuto in disbelief. The madness that had filled his eyes was slowly receding, revealing fragments of reason and emotion.

“You... why...”

The wraith stammered. His voice was now steeped in anguished bewilderment rather than madness and murderous intent.

“Why do you know the secret swordsmanship... that only Belkain’s royalty may learn... better than I, its king...?”

“...”

“You, who have none of Belkain’s blood in your veins...! How, how did you learn the royal family’s secret swordsmanship?! You... who are you to rebuke my folly... and tear my stilled heart to such shreds...!”

Bracing his trembling hands against the floor, the wraith rose. As the madness cleared from his mind, his eyes grew sharper and fixed squarely on Yuto’s face. Then his body shuddered as though struck by lightning.

“Ah... aaah...!”

The wraith gasped for breath. He remembered a dream from long ago. A vision of the ideal he had yearned for so desperately. The fruit of his love for his wife. A bright, intelligent son. A son who honored his parents, loved his people, and thought of the kingdom’s future... a son who did not exist in this world, but only in his dreams.

“You... just who are you...?”

His voice had become an outright sob. He pounded his chest with dull thuds and asked, almost pleading,

“To come here... covet the Precious Sword of Belkain...”

The wraith’s sword of aether dissolved. The purple arms weighing him down also lost their shape, collapsing into mist.

“And look down at me... with those eyes...”

Cold eyes looking down upon a sinner. Furious eyes rebuking a benighted king.

Yet profound sorrow also dwelled in their depths.

“Answer... answer me. Please...”

The wraith could not stop to consider whether his suspicions were truly possible, whether they could be true. The reasons no longer mattered to him.

The child he had wished would rebuke him. The child he had wished would hold him back from his folly. The child he had longed to hear call him “Father,” even once... That being from his dreams now looked down upon him, transformed into the sharpest guillotine blade.

“Please...”

Aether streamed like tears from the wraith’s glowing purple eyes. Looking down at him, Yuto briefly closed his eyes, feeling as though his heart were being torn apart.

“I am... Belkain’s last king.”

The quiet declaration rang through the chamber. Those few words were enough. The weight they carried shook the wraith’s broken soul.

“Ah... aaah, aaaaah...”

The light in the wraith’s eyes trembled violently. The last king. That title was more than proof of bloodline. It was a solemn, proud declaration that could be uttered only by someone who bore the weight of all Belkain’s history and its people.

The wraith remembered the dream he had dreamed long ago. A dream born of his struggle with loneliness. A warm and radiant dream, so different from his cold, solitary reality. The boy who had called him “Father.” He had not been a mere refuge conjured by a deranged mind.

Somewhere in this universe, another Luke Belkain, who had lived a different life, had been blessed with so beautiful a child.

“I see... S-so that was it...”

The wraith gave a hollow laugh. Purple aether poured down his cheeks in place of tears.

He had bitterly insisted that he would never have slaughtered his homeland if he had had a son. He had cursed the god who had not granted him one, blaming that denial for the beginning of this entire tragedy.

The wraith quietly closed his eyes. He had not broken because he had no son. He had fallen because he had placed his own loneliness and unfulfilled needs above his duty as king. With madness receding from his mind, he could only acknowledge the truth of those words.

Yet at the same time, he felt a tremendous despair. In the end, in the end, the root of that loneliness and emptiness was the absence of a son. It was his failure to have a child with the wife he loved.

“Was your... father a foolish king?”

“No.”

The answer only deepened the wraith’s torment. Why him, of all people in this vast, vast universe? Why had such a son not been born to him? The despair crashing over him turned to anger, and that anger threatened to summon madness once more.

“Ugh...”

The wraith pressed his head against the floor and sobbed. To be rebuked by the radiant possibility that could have been his, while he himself lay buried in darkness, was an agony that threatened his sanity.

RUMBLE...

The purple hands holding the wraith began to stir. Those symbols of guilt were gradually being consumed by madness. Pain filled Yuto’s eyes. The wraith, who had barely regained his reason, was going mad again.

No, his madness was growing greater and more twisted. Belkain’s benighted king was about to degenerate into something far more terrible and warped. The knowledge that the self he had never been, the self he had so desperately longed to be, existed in another world filled him with boundless despair and rage.

“Me... cut me...”

The wraith panted for breath.

“Cut me down...!”

His cracked voice burst out like a scream. The trembling purple hands swelled grotesquely and surged toward the ceiling. No longer embodiments of guilt, they were becoming a dreadful curse—a mixture of envy toward another’s happiness, hatred for the life he had never had, and endless contempt for himself.

“If you... leave me like this, I will... become a curse that devours Belkain...!”

Madness began to stain the light in his eyes once more. Clawing at his own throat, he reached a hand toward Yuto.

“True king... of Belkain. Pass judgment... upon this foolish, vile, benighted king...! So that I... may no longer defile this land...”

Yuto drew a trembling breath.

The man before him was not his father. But he was a man who could have been. The loneliness and despair he must have felt seeped deeply into Yuto as well.

“...”

Even so, as Belkain’s king, Yuto had to make his decision. The final mercy he could grant a sinful king would be judgment at the hands of his rightful successor.

“Luke Belkain.”

Void aether erupted behind Yuto. The two hands of Void Touch intertwined, transforming into an enormous scythe.

“I shall pronounce your crimes.”

Once again, thick tears of blood flowed from Yuto’s eyes and wet his cheeks. He spoke as he strode toward the wraith. Trembling, the wraith planted both hands on the floor, knelt where he was, and squeezed his eyes shut.

“First, as king of Belkain, you betrayed your people’s trust and offered their lives as sacrifices to a constellation.”

“...”

“Second, you placed your personal loneliness and unfulfilled needs above the kingdom’s safety, bringing Belkain’s history to an end.”

Void Scythe moved above the wraith’s head.

“Finally, even after death, you remained upon this land as a wraith, persisting in your vile existence.”

The wraith bowed his head. Each of Yuto’s words became a sharp blade, carving his soul into pieces. They were both a cold rebuke and a sentence pronounced by Belkain’s king.

“As Belkain’s rightful heir and final king, I pronounce your sentence.”

WHIIIIINE!

Aether condensed within the pitch-black scythe, sending out a sharp pulse.

“Your punishment is eternal rest. Now... take your sins with you and vanish from this hellish world.”

“Ah...”

The wraith smiled peacefully. The aether pooled in his madness-ridden eyes shone like clear tears. Willingly, he bared his neck and accepted the punishment Yuto bestowed.

“Thank you...”

Biting down hard on his lip, Yuto swung Void Scythe.

SH Slash!

Void Scythe swept across the wraith’s neck.

The wraith’s form began to scatter into white dust. The purple curse and the hands of guilt that had bound him shattered like shards of glass and vanished.

As his consciousness crumbled, the wraith looked at Yuto and moved his lips one final time. No voice reached him, but Yuto knew clearly what he had said.

[“My son...”]

With those final words, the wraith of the man who had destroyed Belkain—a benighted king driven mad by loneliness—vanished completely.

“...”

With both fists clenched tight, Yuto watched the wraith disappear.