“I don’t resent you for it, and I never thought it was difficult. You worry too much.” Falke wasn’t lying or being tactful; to him, his training with Sazaki hadn’t brought him any pain. In fact, he possessed superhuman physical ability just like his father, so it was hardly a bother.
“I see...” Sazaki only said a few words in response. It would be difficult for anyone else to tell how he felt about his son’s response. “All right, come play with your dad, then,” he said, raising his sword with a grin.
“No,” Falke flatly declined. He’d been forced to completely go along with his father’s whims just recently, so he’d rather not repeat it.
“Dear, our son is being cold to me.”
“He’s at that age. Be understanding, darling,” Lara replied with a smirk.
The rest of the Hero’s party were watching the scene in the garden through a window. Calling it father-son bonding time would have had a nice ring to it, but the truth was that Sazaki was forcing his son into this sparring match.
“They’re messing around.” Max grinned, fully aware of the circumstances.
“Mm-hmm. It’s great that they get along.” Stein nodded.
“Ha ha ha ha.”
“Oho ho ho ho.”
Ferd and Elrica merely laughed cheerfully, leaving Falke isolated and helpless.
“Still, that game board was made in the Arzyna Kingdom, huh? That explains the difficulty.” Max changed the topic to the game he had been playing alone until just a moment ago, suddenly realizing its hidden agenda.
“What do you mean? No, it couldn’t be...” Stein was about to ask Max what he was implying, but he suddenly put a hand on his chin and went into deep thought, like he’d just realized something.
Stein also knew that during the great war, the Arzyna Kingdom had prophesied the end of the world at the hands of the Great Demon King, so its people had given up, thinking that anything they did would have been pointless. From that point on, only the kingdom’s exports of game boards had thrived, but the explanations were limited for the level of difficulty.
“Are you saying that this wasn’t somehow our fault?” Stein asked, looking somewhat worn out.
“Probably not,” Max confirmed.
“Hmm? What are you talking about?” Ferd was confused, unable to follow the conversation.
“Do you remember how Arzyna refused to join the allied forces because their astrologers’ predictions showed that resisting the Great Demon King was pointless?” Max asked.
“Yes, I remember that much, but I don’t know anything more than that,” Ferd replied.
“I guess you wouldn’t. Even I barely know anything about the Arzynans since they’re so isolated.” Putting Ferd aside, even Max, a member of the Rin Kingdom’s royalty, didn’t know much about the Arzyna Kingdom. However, Max tended to observe people closely. “Maybe this is what Arzyna is trying to say by exporting those game boards: ‘Look, can you defeat the Great Demon King’s forces and clear the game? You can’t, can you? Anything you do is pointless. That’s why we weren’t wrong back then.’ I don’t think their game board exports are such a priority because they’re after foreign currency, but because they’re a way of self-assertion and justification.”
“Huh...”
“Well...”
Ferd and Elrica wore strange expressions, unsure how to reply to Max’s conjecture.
However, Max was right on the money. The Arzyna Kingdom had continued exporting game boards to prove that their way of thinking during that great war had been correct. They viewed these not as a commercial commodity, but a means of propaganda, in service of affirming the kingdom’s past choices. Of course, the countries that purchased these games didn’t care about any of that; they simply used them as convenient tools to test whether they would be able to react accordingly if something similar to the great war happened again.
“The Hero’s party isn’t excluded from the game because it would be too easy to beat it that way. Actually, that might also be a reason, but moreover Arzyna just didn’t want to include the people who negated their prophecies. Or perhaps the Hero’s party didn’t do much by their readings at all, so this is just the reflection of the facts, as Arzyna sees them.”
“Is that also why the monks are strangely weak?”
“I checked, and it turns out you can adjust the monks’ strength to before and after the fall of the Boiling Mountain. You were dissatisfied with their strength after the fall, when all the main monks had been wiped out. For Arzyna, the fall of the Boiling Mountain was a certainty.”
Max continued expounding his theories to Stein, and together they continued probing into the heart of the issue. The game boards the Arzyna Kingdom continued making followed their astrologers’ predictions, so they’d been designed to be impossible to beat from the start. If people actually beat the game, it would once again prove that the Arzyna Kingdom had been foolish, after all. Fortunately for them, no one had been able to beat the game, which had been built following the astrologers’ readings to the letter.
“Well, even among the church forces, not many people thought it was possible to win. Neither did the gods.” Elrica’s recollection of the situation back then seemed like it was defending the Arzyna Kingdom a little, perhaps befitting of a Saint.
“Same on my side,” Max agreed.
“That’s what they thought at the Boiling Mountain too,” Stein added.
They had been up against a seemingly innumerable, hideous army, with dark dragons soaring the skies among other overwhelming foes. And even all that aside, how could one have been confident that defeating the Great Demon King would ensure the survival of all living beings? Even transcendent beings like the war god who was intending to fight for the sake of but a few surviving living beings and the blue dragon who’d awakened to protect the Rin Kingdom had judged that there was a high probability they’d be unable to endure the onslaught.
“Nobody really thought we were going to win...” That is, until the people running alongside Ferd the Hero, destroyer of fate and destiny, turned the entire situation on its head. However, there had also been those unhappy with the way things had turned around.
There was an uneasy air between Derry, the leader of Greer, the Academic City-State, and Aldrick, who happened to be visiting Derry’s office.
“Udo has gone missing? Where did he go? Don’t tell me it was to the Arzyna Kingdom.” Derry frowned as he read the report.
“Would they take him in?” Aldrick asked, feeling puzzled.
“Who knows? Perhaps two narrow-minded parties would get along.”
Udo, Emmeline’s teacher, was well-known in his field, so a report of his disappearance had reached Derry, but Derry was stumped as to where Udo might have gone. At this rate, there was the possibility that another dangerous student with improper education would appear, which was a serious problem for the Magic Council, who aimed to maintain order in all aspects of magic.
“You seem to really hate Arzyna.”
“During the great war, Arzyna declared that they would do nothing to help because everything would be destroyed anyway. How could I like a country like that? Even kids like myself were finding ways to do our part back then, but those fools called our efforts meaningless. For a national government to be saying something like that—it was unthinkable.”
“It’s been proven which side was correct.”
“Well, clearly. But perhaps because of that, Arzyna just became even more closed off than ever.”
Arzyna, which was not far from Greer, was isolated in the middle of steep mountains. Just like Greer, it was completely contained within the Rin Kingdom, but it was extremely insular and rarely interacted with other countries much, known for little else besides its flourishing board game exports.
And then...during the great war, Arzyna had made the official declaration that nothing they did against the Great Demon King would matter, which had caused quite the commotion. There was no question that many individuals had grown apathetic, but it was still unprecedented for an entire nation, however small, to simply accept its impending destruction and to go so far as to call other kingdoms’ resistance futile.
However, the living still walked the earth, and the Great Demon King had been defeated, contrary to Arzyna’s predictions. This had been extremely humiliating for the kingdom, and its already insular tendencies had since progressively worsened, the kingdom now no longer interacting with other countries except through commercial channels.
“We need to track down Udo. I hope nothing bad happens.” Derry’s nervous muttering drifted off into the blue sky outside.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Aren’t the socks you’re wearing mine, Aldrick?”
“What?! These are yours, Falke?!”
Seen above: a boisterous scene from the past, between a son and a fellow disciple.