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“It seems the war is hitting its peak.”
Approximately five hundred cavalrymen were running in a different direction from the battlefield. At their head was a middle-aged man smiling cheerfully—Marquis Jagliese Eberle.
“...Are you sure about this, Eberle? Isn’t this desertion?” asked the old man next to him—Count Beock Lyzbeth—as they got farther and farther away from the battlefield.
“I have Prince Arthur’s approval to do whatever I want.”
“...I see,” Lyzbeth replied gravely before falling silent.
The unit the pair was leading was heading toward Berwick, the port city under Lance’s control. In other words, they weren’t deserting—they were raiding the enemy’s stronghold while its master was absent.
“I doubt they ever expected their home base to be attacked while they’re away. I can already picture the look of despair on their faces when they crawl back here.” Eberle grinned nastily. He had been the one who had come up with this plan to have a unit to destroy the enemy’s stronghold so that the enemy would have nowhere to flee.
This man has a truly wicked personality... He’s a genius when it comes to doing what people hate. Lyzbeth grimaced in distaste.
Eberle’s scheme was an effective one. Not only would it prevent Lance from holing up in Berwick, it would also prevent him from fleeing to another country via boat.
In Eberle’s case, though, he just wants to slaughter the weak.
Marquis Eberle was a bloodthirsty serial killer. Rather than fighting soldiers on the battlefield, he would rather kill defenseless citizens.
This is the perfect mission for this man—he gets away from the danger of the battlefield, can satisfy his murderous urges, and he’ll be able to fill his pockets during the pillage.
Lyzbeth was truly irritated by this, but the most vexing thing of all was that he had to cooperate and obey Eberle’s orders.
Why was a man like that born a marquis? He is a brute and a pest who shouldn’t be allowed to live!
For an instant, Lyzbeth felt the sweet temptation to stab Eberle in the back.
No, I need to calm down... I could kill that man a thousand times and never be satisfied, but I can’t cause trouble for Prince Arthur. I owe his mother, the empress. I must repay my debt.
Lyzbeth had chosen to side with Arthur because his territory had been saved thanks to the empress’s aid in the past.
If not for that, I would never have become the subordinate of Feena’s murderer!
“Oh?”
“Hm?”
Eberle, who had been cheerfully smiling, and Lyzbeth, who had been seething with murderous impulses, both let out their voices in surprise at the same time. Someone had appeared ahead of them, and it wasn’t an enemy soldier—it was a young child.
“Oh my, I didn’t expect to find a child here,” Eberle said.
“Wait! What are you going to do?!” Lyzbeth asked.
“When a child is walking outside the city without a guardian, it’s an adult’s job to scold them, no?” Eberle replied, licking his lips. Naturally, he wasn’t going to lecture the girl—he was going to make her his plaything to satisfy his sadistic urges. “What luck! To think I’d find the perfect hors d’oeuvre before taking care of the main dish that is Berwick!”
“Wait, Eberle!” Lyzbeth shouted.
“Catch her!” Eberle ordered his subordinates, ignoring Lyzbeth.
“Yes, sir!” Two soldiers obeyed and galloped toward the child.
As they drew closer, Lyzbeth noticed that the child was a young girl who seemed to be less than ten years old, which reminded him of his late daughter. He pictured his daughter’s face in her childhood, comparing it with the young girl ahead.
“Huh...?” Lyzbeth blurted out, shocked. The faces matched completely. The young girl looked exactly the same as his daughter—Feena Lyzbeth—had when she was young. “How...? Is that you, Feena?!” Lyzbeth extended his hand toward the girl.
Naturally, she was too far away for him to reach—and something unexpected happened instead.
“Mmmh!”
“Gah?!”
The girl sprang at the soldiers who had come to catch her, and like a bear snatching a salmon, she swung her arm in a wide arc and tore through their heads.
“Huh?!”
“What?!”
Eberle and Lyzbeth exclaimed, shocked.
Meanwhile, the cute young girl with long green hair—Lykos—threw her arms up in triumph with a cry of victory.
“How could she...? Just who is that girl?!”
“That face... Feena?!” Eberle, just like Lyzbeth, also noticed that Lykos resembled Feena. While Feena was Lyzbeth’s beloved daughter, to Eberle, she was the former fiancée he had killed himself, so his face went pale as though he was seeing a ghost. “Wait... Could she be the baby?!” he mumbled. “I didn’t want to see the child of some unknown man, so I had her thrown into a forest to become monster fodder. To think she was still alive!”
“Are you saying that she’s Feena’s daughter, Eberle?!” Not caring that they were both on horseback, Lyzbeth grabbed Eberle by the collar, almost pulling him from his horse, but Eberle slapped his hand away.
“That happened twenty—no, nineteen years ago, so this girl looks too young to be her daughter, and yet... Ah ha ha ha ha! As I thought, Feena is the best woman ever!”
“What are you...?”
“I’m so glad I’ll be able to kill you again! I don’t know how you survived, but I thank you for appearing before me! Ha ha ha ha ha! I ought to hug you and shower you with kisses!” Eberle shouted, his expression ecstatic. He licked his lips like a small boy presented with a sumptuous meal. “Capture her! Don’t let her get away!” he ordered.
“I won’t let you! If she’s Feena’s daughter, then that makes her my granddaughter!”
“Shut it and butt out, you shitty geezer!”
“Stop him, even if you have to kill him!” Lyzbeth commanded his subordinates, and they began to struggle with Eberle’s men. At first, it was a mere scuffle, but it quickly devolved into fistfights and, finally, into a deadly battle using weapons.
“Mmmh?” Lykos cocked her head, looking curiously at the chaos before her and wondering what they were doing. But eventually, she realized it was useless to think about it. She didn’t need to know their intentions to accomplish her goal, after all.
A powerful howl echoed, and everyone turned toward its source. What they saw there, however, wasn’t a young girl, but a beautiful young woman with the same colored hair and eyes. Her rapid growth had torn apart her clothes, making her attire rather risqué, but that wasn’t what took the two nobles’ breath away.
“F-Feena?!”
“That’s impossible... How could she be alive?!”
Lyzbeth and Eberle were completely captivated by Lykos, who looked just like Feena Lyzbeth, the woman they both loved in different ways.
“Feena, my daughter! You have come back!”
“Ha ha ha ha! No way. I killed you and ate your flesh, skin, and bones, so how could you—”
“Quiet. You talk too much,” Lykos said to the two men, who were still dumbfounded by how much she looked like Feena. “Master forbade me from approaching the battlefield, so I decided to lie in wait here just in case, and it appears I was right to do so. However, I find it deeply annoying that you seem to be mistaking me for someone else.”
The young girl who had only been capable of whining earlier spoke fluently now that she had become a grown woman. She stared at the western army’s soldiers in exasperation, narrowing her eyes.
“I do not know why you are here, but I shall defeat you for my master’s sake. I promise not to take your lives as long as you do not resist.”
“Wait, Fee—”
“Here I come.” Lykos declared, then closed the distance in an instant, as though gliding along the ground. She did it so naturally that no one was able to react as she knocked aside a soldier standing next to Lyzbeth.
“What?!”
“Next.” As though dancing, Lykos dealt with the soldiers one after another, either punching, kicking, or tossing them away. Naturally, some tried to resist, but they could do nothing against Lykos’s overwhelming strength.
“Please wait, Feena! It’s me, your—”
“I am not Feena, mister.” Lykos grabbed Lyzbeth’s arm strongly, not allowing him to escape. “I do not know who you are mistaking me for, but you should stop acting senile and face reality!”
“Whooooa!” Lyzbeth was flung away by the woman who looked like his daughter, landed on his back, and lost consciousness.
“You are the last one. What will you do?” Lykos asked Eberle. She had defeated all the soldiers and Lyzbeth, which meant he was the only one left.
Eberle’s lips trembled as he was stared at by the beautiful woman covered in the blood of her victims. “I’ve always regretted killing you, my beloved.”
Lykos cocked her head in confusion.
“I loved you from the bottom of my heart. That’s why I couldn’t forgive you for conceiving a child with another man. I couldn’t endure it,” Eberle said, his teeth clattering together behind a disgusting smile. “So I killed you.”
Lykos didn’t reply.
“I peeled away your nails and carefully shaved off your skin one layer at a time. I lashed you every night, your screams singing me to sleep. And yet, despite how I treated you, you surprised me by giving birth to a healthy child. I was jealous of how lovingly you looked at her, so I had a servant throw her into a forest. Even now, I haven’t forgotten your expression, full of despair at losing your daughter... Every time I close my eyes, it appears again!”
Lykos still didn’t answer.
“That’s why, ever since you died, I’ve been killing people, enjoying the despair on their faces. All so that I could fill the hole left by you dea—”
“You talk a lot for a corpse,” Lykos finally said, unable to bear it anymore.
“Huh...?” Belatedly, Eberle noticed that he was lying on the ground. He looked around and saw the lower half of his body standing a little ways away. Everything above the pelvis had vanished, and a small part of the spine peeked out from the stump like a gruesome objet d’art. “Aaaaaaaaaah!”
“I do not know what you have been babbling about, but I feel a deep, visceral disgust for you, so I killed you instinctively. Knowing my master, he should allow such a small indiscretion.” Lykos lowered her right leg. She had bisected Eberle with a roundhouse kick so fast it had almost reached the speed of sound.