Raid had never seen the man, but the broadsword in his hands—that he could recognize. Without a doubt, that had been his partner on the battlefield long ago. In this world, however, the sword—brimming with immense power—served as the symbol of the Hero of Altane and had been bequeathed upon Valtos of the imperial family, the third person to prove compatible to the Hero’s power, as per Ariel’s intel. So this large man must have been Valtos.
But none of that mattered right now.
“No insurgent shall lay their dirty hands upon my father and His Ma— Agh!”
Raid breezily parried the broadsword and grabbed the man by the neck. “Sorry, bud. I’m not here to play.”
“Urgh... I-I am the p-proud...Hero of Altane...!”
“Calling yourself a Hero in front of me? Try again when you can walk the walk.”
Valtos grunted as he tried to pry Raid’s hands off his neck, but to no avail. It was like clawing at a boulder with bare hands. Raid watched him coldly—this man was hardly worth a single sword swing, no more a threat to Raid than the passing breeze. That he had announced himself as a Hero at all was the very epitome of impertinence. A true Hero would prove their might with pure and irrefutable power.
“If you’ve got business with me, you’ll have to wait till after I deal with this guy.” Raid tightened his grip, glaring coldly as Valtos turned red in the face and began frothing from his mouth. “So stay out of my way.”
His low growl was followed by a loud crash as he slammed Valtos into the ground. Valtos’s large body shot through the steel flooring, sending the man plummeting through floor after floor, until everything fell silent once more.
Finally, Raid lifted his head to Viteos. “Your Imperial Majesty, Emperor Viteos. Your humble subject has come to offer an apology,” he said, speaking the same way he had in the past. “In order to attend my friend’s funeral and to pay her my final respects, I abandoned my responsibilities as general and failed to fulfill my duties to the end. For my inability to devote myself to my homeland, I ask for your forgiveness.”
Viteos stared at him, his eyes wide and bewildered. “Wh-What are you...saying...?”
“I have also come here to apologize for my failure to save you, Your Majesty. My imprudence and thoughtlessness have led to this unfavorable outcome,” he continued, looking down on Viteos with pity. “You took to the throne at such a young age after the passing of the previous emperor, yet I dared to place my heavy hopes upon you. I had spent so long deluding myself into thinking that you would one day become an emperor.”
“I asked you—what are you saying?!” Viteos snapped, his voice trembling. “I inherited the holy and noble blood of the imperial family, sat upon the throne as the seventeenth emperor of Altane, and ruled over the empire until my hair turned gray!”
“That was but a title granted to you by your birth—a show of your status, nothing more. What I sought from you, Your Majesty...was for you to be an emperor.” Of course, such a notion was most likely beyond Viteos’s comprehension. “An emperor is nothing without his empire, and an empire is nothing without its people. Yet you looked down on your people and exerted no effort to fulfill your duties to them. To this day, you fail to comprehend what it means to be an emperor.” And he probably never would—not when he was still the empty, thoughtless person who only ever sought to imitate his father.
“Your Majesty,” Raid continued. “Do you remember how many of your subjects you have killed to this day?”
“What...? ‘Killed’? When have I ever laid my hands on my subjects?!”
“Every time you made a decision that caused their deaths,” Raid answered. “The soldiers who fought for their motherland. The aristocrats who were purged by your orders. Citizens who lost their lives by your policies. Every single one—do you remember them?”
“Why do I have to remember such insignificant creatures?!”
“Yes, I understand. This is how you are. Everything you did in the past and here in this world...is firm and irrefutable proof.”
Viteos had caused countless deaths while he was on the throne in the past, and that hadn’t changed when he took over in the First World. He’d ordered an immense number of sacrifices to send Dian and his men to the Second World, then ordered them to offer their lives to connect the two worlds, and had even given them the ultimatum to take their own heads should everything fail. Sometimes, the situation did truly call for such inhumane methods, but this was not one such situation.
But that wasn’t the extent of the atrocities that Viteos had committed; it had already begun when they were finding new Heroes. Heroes were determined by compatibility, so how had Viteos ensured that Valtos would be chosen? The answer was simple: he slaughtered all the designated Heroes until he had been selected.
Ancient texts stated that Hero would dwell within those with the right qualities, and this was the case for the spell they’d recreated as well. Thus, Viteos ordered for the spell to be cast over and over, killing each person who had refused to take on the responsibility, all the way until the person he’d wanted—the young man of imperial blood—had finally been selected. In his eagerness to grant the imperial family the immense power of a Hero, not once had he looked back at the mountains of corpses and sea of blood he’d formed in his wake. A truly foolish and irredeemable human till the very end.
“Your Majesty, I didn’t save all those innocent lives just for you to mindlessly play around with them and discard them like toys.”
Viteos’s growth was frozen; it hadn’t moved in a very long time, from the moment he’d decided to stop thinking for himself. To shield himself from his father’s cold and uncaring gaze, Viteos had chosen to remain an immature child for life.
“I am of the belief that an emperor’s every action and word is laden with great responsibility, for they stand above their people. Thus, when your actions and words have caused your people’s deaths”—Raid held his sword overhead—“you must take responsibility.”