But in the end, they were nothing but mass-produced swords. Since there was nothing distinctive about their appearance, some of them had been passed around from place to place, without anyone realizing when the weapons had been made or what they had gone through. For example...one had been sold to a small weapons store in Greer, where swords weren’t popular products.
The faint vestiges of light remaining in the sword’s core responded to the young man who had chosen to push forward with his own resolve. Everyone was dazzled by the blinding brilliance of life that shone forth. Though they were only dregs of power from seventy years ago, that was plenty. The light of life, the smallest fragment of all mankind’s prayers, touched the artificial soul.
I’m Emmeline! Having remembered who she was, Emmeline regained full control of her body and pointed her shining finger at the Hounds.
This is my fault! At the same time, Hagen realized that if his secret had caused this crisis, he had to sacrifice his life to save his friends, so he also tried to activate his magic.
But one person here was more enraged than anyone else: the man whose friends had been manipulated, taken hostage, and nearly kidnapped. The enemies stood inside the striking distance of the slender boy who was so angry he was actually smiling. Since there was another possibility of Emmeline being manipulated, capturing these attackers alive was out of the question. He was after their total elimination.
He casually picked up one of the store’s swords.
He drew his sword.
There was a flash.
He sheathed his sword.
“Die.”
All four of the enemies’ heads were sent flying.
The genius muttered a single word after he’d finished taking all of his actions. Sazaki, the Lightspeed Blademaster, had said that if the boy was just taught the proper frame of mind, he would then achieve greatness on his own.
And soooo, the fiiiiirst mayhem of Greer conducted behind the scenes had also endeeeeed...
There was the sound of glass cracking.
They have the ability to completely regenerate themselves?! Right in front of the surprised Connie, the Hounds he’d definitely cut down reconstructed their bodies in the blink of an eye. The sight was both repulsive and horrifying, as every single muscle fiber from their necks to their torsos regenerated at astonishing speed.
“It’s their hearts! Join togetheeer!” Franz shouted without a care in the world, and he ran at the Hounds with the tip of his sword pointed.
However, the tiny vestiges of light in Franz’s sword had already been used up, so he couldn’t expect another miracle to occur. But so what? Seventy years ago, the Hero hadn’t stood to fight simply because he’d possessed the power of light, nor because he’d believed he could perform miracles. It was because he’d possessed the determination and conviction to accomplish his goal even if it meant dying. He’d stood against the red sky with only those two things.
“Raaaaah!” Franz was exactly the same. He poured his conviction into his sword and ran. He just ran in a straight line, just straight ahead. The light of a young life dwelled in his sword, not the light of an old man who was content with fading away. The Hounds, which hadn’t finished regenerating completely yet, couldn’t do anything against it.
At the same time, Emmeline, Hagen, and Connie each set their sights on a Hound. It was the same as usual. The three of them had been pulled around by Franz in various ways during their daily lives, and although they didn’t understand what he’d meant by shouting “Join together,” their minds were in perfect sync. You could say they were used to going along with Franz’s erratic behavior. And so... Emmeline and Franz each struck the heart of a different Hound with their magical attacks. Connie cut up the heart of another Hound. And at the same moment, Franz stabbed the tip of his sword into the heart of the last Hound.
Their lives were linked?! After everything was done, Connie noticed the Hounds’ mechanism. The four Hounds’ lives were linked, so even though Connie had chopped them up at almost the same time, he’d been unable to kill them; the only way to deal with them was to kill all four at the exact same time. And the four kids had pulled it off while seeing the Hounds for the first time.
“Ouch!” The Hounds vanished like mist, making Franz tumble to the floor because of his excess momentum. “Hell yeah! We need to evacuate to the school! I have a feeling it’s safe now!” But he stood up immediately and started running off, practically dragging the other three with him, without asking Hagen and Emmeline about their circumstances or paying any mind to Connie, who was wondering what to do.
“Haah...” Emmeline sighed.
“He’s the same as usual,” Hagen remarked offhandedly.
“Ha...ha ha.” Connie had an awkward smile as he ran ahead.
All three reacted to the unchanging Franz in their own way. The battle to protect the secrets that no one else knew ended with a victory for friendship.
Then...it shattered, shattered, shattered. Everything shattered. The calculations were finished.
“This can’t be! Just what is going on here?!” Udo screamed before pulling his face away from the mirror he had been looking into.
He couldn’t understand. He’d used the device in order to secure Emmeline, who could use a device that could perform calculations as close to reality as possible, and Hagen, who could fully unlock the device’s functions. And yet, when Udo peered into the mirror—the computing device—he saw something unexpected even for him: the world once again covered in a red sky. However, since there was no one present who’d participated in Greer’s battle during the great war, no one had noticed that the demonic vanguard defeated by Derry and the other mages in the virtual world of Udo’s calculations included the exact same soldiers who had attacked Greer seventy years ago.
“Eek!” The one behind Udo’s scream had a very simple objective, which in some ways resembled him: It wanted to calculate the correct world of the past, instead of the flawed world of the present, and impose it on the reality of now.
“Aaaaah!” Udo screamed as he was sucked into the mirror, and the Hounds, who were still alive in the real world, also got caught up in it.
Truth be told, the Arzyna Kingdom didn’t have such a grand ambition. It was only trying to use the treasured article to construct a perfect computing device, which would predict a definite future and prove that they were correct. The problem was that the person who’d given them the treasured article before the start of the great war had joined the forces of evil during the war, but hid that fact from the world.
The mirror kept cracking. It went out of control, repeatedly performing all sorts of calculations. As a first step, it calculated the army that had brought down Greer during the great war and imposed it onto the virtual present, creating another battle for Greer. But because that failed, it started searching for the possibility that the demon army could triumph this time, but...there was a difference between the world in the calculations and reality: the behavior of a completely incomprehensible, mass of shining light.
“Is this the thing trying to cause trouble?” Ferd, said shining mass, found the cracked mirror.
In the world inside the calculations, there was no way that the Hero’s party would have come to this city. Without a driving force, Sazaki wouldn’t have left the town of alcohol, and Lara wouldn’t have wanted to come here because of her statue. Stein and Max would have no business here either. But in reality, they were here. Because Ferd had decided to leave the mountains, the Hero’s party had found itself before the cracked mirror and in front of the crisis of the virtual world trying to encroach upon reality.
“I remember this.” The treasured article Ferd found was a mirror shaped like a horse. Moreover, it was a general of the demon army once defeated by the Hero’s party. It was a monster that depicted numerous virtual realities on the mirrors that made up its body, and tried to impose the optimal solution among them onto reality.
✦ ✦ ✦
Falke, the person closest to deadly red.
He’s slower than his father? There’s no need for anyone to point that out; Falke knows it better than anyone. So you can just die before you even have the time to fully realize the difference between them.
The friend group of Connie, Franz, Emmeline, and Hagen.
Everyone knows that friendship can be fragile, but surprisingly little is known about what happens when complete strangers try to belittle it and tear it apart.