They wove expertly through the flow of people.
“That monstrous caster! He can’t be allowed to stay in the human world!” Rocking up and down in time to his horse’s dash, the marquis cursed Ainz. “Shit! We’ve got to do something. We have to think of a way to defend the human world—our future!” He mumbled in spite of himself out of fear. If he didn’t say something, if he didn’t distract himself, the danger would compel his intelligent brain to imagine all the nightmares closing in on him.
When he got back, he would need to bring in Prince Zanac and Princess Renner before coming up with countermeasures to face that extraordinarily powerful caster.
At this rate, all of humanity would be conquered—if they were lucky. In the worst-case scenario, the human race might end up Ainz Ooal Gown’s plaything for the rest of its existence.
Someone nervously sucking their teeth was audible over the galloping horses.
“This is bad! Marquis Raeven! Veer slowly to the right! We’re being followed!”
“They don’t even seem to have eyes! How can it see us?” screamed the thief Lockmeier. “Lund, is there some kind of spell you can cast?”
“No! Do you really think any magic would work on those things, Lock?”
“We still need you to try!”
“Cut it out! We don’t have time for this! Maybe it just happens to be running this way! Marquis Raeven! Go ahead of us and veer off to the side!”
Their voices were trembling.
The marquis followed their instructions and rode at the head of the group. He veered in a direction where there weren’t many people.
From right nearby came the bleating of a dark young, the sound of it threatening to crush his pounding heart.
“Baaaaaaaaaaaaa!”
It’s close.
His forehead became a fountain of cold sweat. He was too scared to turn around, but he thought he felt disgustingly warm air behind him.
Then he heard it again—
“Baaaaaaaaaaaaa!”
“Fuck! It’s no good! It’s aiming right for us…! You know what to do, right, everyone?”
The response to the leader Boris’s cry was magic spells.
“Reinforce Armor!”
“Lesser Strength!”
“All right! In that case—Marquis Raeven, we’ll go to intercept it! Please just run without looking back!”
There was only one thing he could say in this situation to his men who had overcome their fear.
“…Thank you!”
“Okay! Let’s do thiiiiis!”
“Rrrraaaaagh!”
Marquis Raeven could tell from the sounds that the distance between the horses of the former orichalcum-plate adventurers behind him and his own was growing.
He ducked his head to maintain a position that would lessen the drag of the wind. He wasn’t sure how much time they could buy, but fleeing as fast as he could and making it back alive was the best way to pay respect to their faithful service.
“Fly, Fireball!”
“Impenetrable Fortress!”
As he rode at the whims of his horse, the voices of the former adventurers, who seemed to be engaging in battle, reached his ears even against the wind whipping past him.
But two seconds later, he couldn’t hear them anymore.
He could hear only the pounding of huge hooves.
His heart jolted.
He bit back a scream when he saw—in his lowered field of vision—a shadow falling across the earth.
Noticing the huge shadow over him—over him, though he fled at top speed—he grasped the fact that there was something long and thick reaching out.
“N…”
The horse galloped in a frenzy. It was already going faster than Marquis Raeven could control—it had probably never run so fast in its life. Still, the shadow remained.
“I hate this!”
It was a shriek. He hadn’t even intended to scream, but it was extremely loud.
He felt something warm in his crotch.
He opened his eyes wide, but still unable to look behind him, he just kept riding.
He couldn’t die yet. He didn’t care what became of the kingdom. If the country was going to be destroyed, let it be destroyed.
If antagonizing Ainz Ooal Gown meant death, then he would abandon his country and flee.
How stupid.
I was so stupid.
I was a fool for coming to this battlefield.
I knew how powerful Ainz Ooal Gown was, so I should have done anything to stay in the royal capital.
I wish I hadn’t given any thought to the kingdom’s future.
“I hate this!”
I can’t die yet.
“I ha—”
An image of a child appeared before him.
It was his adorable son.
That tiny life. He’d been gradually growing up. Sometimes he got sick. What a fuss the marquis had made then. He was mortified, thinking back, of the way he had screamed, half-mad, at his bewildered wife.
Those chubby hands and rosy cheeks. He would surely grow into a young man who would be spoken of throughout the kingdom. The marquis was sure the boy would surpass him. He had already caught glimpses of his potential.
His wife said he was biased as a parent, but that was definitely not the case.
He was so deeply grateful to his wife for bearing his precious child, although he was ashamed to say it too often.
He had even been thinking of having another.
He shouldn’t have come to this battlefield. He should have stayed where he could hold those two in his arms—
“Huh?”
The pounding of the hooves stopped.
When Marquis Raeven turned around, more out of curiosity than bravery, he saw the dark young had ceased moving, as if they were frozen.
3
With no idea where he was, he felt he had been plunged into a world of nightmares.
“The Four”—that title of the Baharuth Empire’s strongest warriors—seemed surprisingly superficial now.
He’d been so proud of it; what a puny, pathetic creature that made him. That was how great a shock he had received.
Nimble could hear muffled crying. They were the sobs of those whose fear and anxiety had broken their limits. They were the mournful cries of children—no, men who had regressed to children. The ones crying were imperial knights. Tons of them.
He heard someone pleading, “Run!”
These were the solemn wishes of those who felt horrible for the ones swallowed up in that crucible—the gruesome slaughter taking place before their eyes.
The kingdom had met such tragedy that their enemies, the imperial knights, were praying for them.
Hoping that even one more might escape.
They had come to kill one another. But faced with such brutal slaughter, any human would be moved to compassion. Anyone who didn’t feel something in this situation was a heartless brute, not a human.
And Nimble and the other knights realized this was not merely a fire on the far shore.
If they thought about the situation in terms of kingdom and empire, the fire was indeed on the other side. But if one thought in terms of humans and monsters, the fire was undoubtedly close.
The imperial knights thought of the kingdom soldiers as fellow humans, shedding tears at the tragedy they endured.
“All right, I guess now’s good.”
Reacting to Ainz’s low voice, all eyes focused on him.
With sixty thousand men gathered, he hadn’t been loud enough for those at the edges to hear. But they could tell that the man next to them had turned his head. And since they knew that Ainz Ooal Gown was on the other end of that gaze, it was only logical to follow suit and look—because everyone was terrified of his every move, for Ainz Ooal Gown was the father of this nightmare.
Ainz slowly removed his mask.
A white skull with neither skin nor flesh peered out.
Outside of this situation,
they might have thought he was wearing a mask beneath his mask. But it hit Nimble, and probably all the imperial knights, like a ton of bricks.
This was his real face. Ainz Ooal Gown was a monster.
They could accept it because their instincts already told them that a human could never wield so much power.
Ainz slowly opened his arms. Like he was going to hug a friend, like a demon spreading its wings. It felt like he had expanded to double his size.
Stillness. Ainz’s gentle voice was bizarrely loud against the backdrop of the distant kingdom soldiers’ screams.
“Applaud.”
Nimble stared at Ainz, agape, wondering what he could possibly be talking about.
It seemed that everyone within earshot felt the same way, and as Ainz’s word was passed on in whispers, the number of eyes on him grew.
While everyone simply trained their eyes on him, Ainz spoke again.
“Applaud my supreme might.”
The first one to clap was the one standing on the other side of Ainz from Nimble, Mare. As if that woke everyone up, a scattering of applause turned into a thunderous roar.
Of course, it wasn’t genuine.
None of them wanted to clap for someone who orchestrated such a cruel slaughter. That wasn’t war but a massacre. A massacre of unimaginable scale.
But there wasn’t anyone who could say that.
The thunderous applause was a manifestation of the knights’ fear.
It didn’t seem possible for it to grow any louder, but they raised the voltage another few notches—because one of the black goats slowly changed course.
It was facing the imperial army.
Along with the clapping came cheers like a war cry.
The screams of the imperial knights in praise of Ainz Ooal Gown practically brought blood streaming from their throats.
But the black goat’s feet didn’t stop.
So the knights raised their voices even higher, thinking that it wasn’t stopping because their voices hadn’t satisfied him.
But it didn’t stop.
That’s when they snapped.
Who knows who moved first? It might have just been that one of the knights shuddered. But the fear that had been poured into them readily burst.
“Eyaaaaaaagh!”
Wails from the depths of their souls could be heard here and there around the imperial camp; the army was shaken.
Terrified by the crisis of one of the monsters that had overrun the kingdom’s army now closing in on them, some knights abandoned their paralyzed horses and made a run for it. They had just been given a glimpse of hell. No matter how feeble their imaginations, each person thought that he would be next.
The terror was contagious.
At first, there had been only a hundred or so runners, but their number increased by the second, and soon it had expanded to sixty thousand.
Yes.
The imperial army as a whole fell into a frightened panic, and its discipline collapsed.
It was an ugly rout.
Naturally, the knights had been taught how to withdraw properly. But they didn’t have the composure to maintain discipline. In order to get away even one second faster, in order to get even one step closer to safety, they shoved their friends out of their way with all their might and ran.
If someone was pushed from behind, he couldn’t avoid losing his balance and falling. And if someone fell, the ones fleeing in terror behind him weren’t about to give him time to stand up.
Those who fell were crushed under the feet of the next men.
The imperial enemy was racking up casualties not at their enemy’s hand but at their own.
Nimble was at his wit’s end. He had no idea what to do.
He wanted to run like everyone else, but he wouldn’t be permitted to do that. Plus, not all the knights had run away.
When he surveyed the position, there were a handful of men still on their horses, unmoving.
It wasn’t that they were too scared to run. They were thrilled to witness overwhelming power that humans could never hope to achieve.
If a normal person saw a huge tornado heading straight for them, they would immediately try to get away. But others, despite knowing they would get killed, would be struck by the tornado’s beauty and rendered immobile. The ones remaining were that sort of heretic.
When the dark young arrived before Ainz, it bent its legs and lowered its tentacles. It must have been showing respect.
The monster’s un-monsterlike pose made a twitching grin appear on Nimble’s face.
The young should have been spattered in blood, but the reason it didn’t appear to be was that its skin had absorbed everything.
Ainz sat on one of the tentacles, and several more reached down to stabilize and lift him up. The monster put him on its head.
“The plan was for me to hit them with one spell and then for the imperial army to charge, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen.”
Nimble didn’t say a word.
It was true. The empire had broken the contract proposed by the king of its ally.
But he couldn’t very well chew out the knights who had lost their nerve. He would probably defend their actions even before Jircniv. That was how overpowering the fear had been.
“Oh, I’m not blaming you. I can understand assuming that if you had charged you might have been trampled along with them. If something like that had happened, I never would have been able to explain it to the emperor. So, well, I’ll work hard enough for both of us.”
Nimble glanced at the undead standing at attention.
“A-are you going to send in those undead forces?”
“Nah, I summoned these goats, after all, so I’ll leave it up to them and just do a little cleanup. Mare, don’t drop your guard, though.”
“N-no, sir! You can count on me, Lord Ainz!”
Nimble was stunned.
There was going to be a follow-up attack. By the one who could use such devastating magic himself.
He could see an insatiable appetite for slaughter, the sort where this caster didn’t plan to let anyone leave this battlefield alive.
“How can I put this…? Haven’t you done enough? Are you a demon?”
He meant to whisper it, but his voice came out much louder than expected, and Ainz, atop the black goat, turned his horrible face toward Nimble.
As Nimble inwardly trembled in terror, Ainz shook his head.
“Don’t misunderstand. I’m an undead.”
He was explaining that he wasn’t an evil-doing demon but a life-hating undead. That was why he wouldn’t let a single kingdom soldier escape—to take more lives.
It made sense, but it was also the worst reply possible.
If Ainz was slaughtering the living because he was an undead, then there was a perfectly good possibility that he would turn next on the empire, another nation of the living.
No, that was a future that would surely come to pass.
Wondering what to do, under assault by confusion and fear, and lacking concentration, Nimble missed the last thing Ainz murmured.
“…Seems like we found who we were looking for.”
Ramposa III’s position was at the rearmost area of the kingdom’s army where countless nobles’ flags fluttered.
Until a little while ago, there had been a great many nobles around, but few remained. Most of them had fled, and those left could be counted very quickly. He wasn’t angry at the court nobles for running away.
“You should leave me and run, too!”
“You jest, Your Majesty! Please escape as fast as you can. If one of those comes, no one can save you!” It was the vice-captain of the Royal Select who gave the suggestion.
“Escape and do what?”
“Your Majesty, even if you remain here, there’s nothing for you to do. Return to E-Rantel—that’s where the counterattack will begin, don’t you think?”
Ramposa III smiled wryly. The suggestion grated on his ear
. “You have one thing right. There’s definitely nothing I can do here.”
Under the circumstances, he wouldn’t be able to rally the broken, routed army. And it wasn’t just him—it would be next to impossible no matter how great the commander.
“Your Majesty! There’s no time left! Men, get him out of here even if you have to tie him up!”
Gazef’s subordinates leaped into action.
Having decided that pointlessly remaining any longer would only endanger both his life and the lives of the others, Ramposa III stood up.
“All right. I’ll go. But do you really think we’ll get away if we run now?”
The earthquake-like footfalls were growing rapidly closer. Even in such a crisis, Ramposa III’s tone was calm. It couldn’t even be compared to the chaotic voices of the nobles who had been there up until moments before.
“It has to be impossible. If we try to escape on horseback, they’ll definitely give chase. They seem to be prioritizing attacks on people running in large groups, so this is the only chance we have.”
Ramposa III realized that was why they had put a whole mass of nobles on their horses and packed them off earlier.
“So you will run and escape.”
He saw that a handful of the warriors had removed their armor and cast it aside.
“These men will carry Your Majesty to safety.”
“What about you?”
Not all the men had taken off their armor. The vice-captain and others were still wearing theirs.
“We’re going to distract them by fleeing on our horses in the opposite direction.”
Ramposa III understood the warriors’ feelings from the beautiful smiles on their faces.
“No! You’re our country’s treasures! Do whatever you must to survive! I need you to serve my successor!”
“Of course. We’re going to act as bait, but we don’t intend to die!”
That was a lie. They did intend to die. No, they knew their fate was death.
Ramposa III tried to persuade them, but the words wouldn’t come out. Seeing their smiles, he felt like anything he said could only scratch the surface.
The surrounding warriors began to remove Ramposa III’s armor.
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