“I’m here, Master!”
A small girl with animal ears and wearing a maid outfit bounded through the gardens of Tishna’s villa. Behind her, an enormous metal wolf touched down on the lawn. The wolf then transformed into a jet-black Chasseur—Ras’s gift from the Argyll Empire, the Vildhjärta.
“Nicely done, Koko. You found me all on your own. Good girl.”
“Heh-heh-heh-heh!”
Vildhjärta had been standing by on a campsite just outside Barlama, waiting for Koko’s signal. Reacting to the call of its external access point, the machine made its way unmanned. Vildhjärta wasn’t the only Chasseur to possess a mind of its own, but it was surely the one with the biggest ego. Even Fon Cigel had trouble dealing with the Vildhjärta’s independent antics and had sealed it underground.
However, this time, Koko’s daring nature worked to Ras’s advantage. The Registan Empire had done everything they could to prevent Barlama’s Chasseurs from aiding in the city’s defense, but they could never have imagined that one would fly over the walls by itself.
Ras climbed into the cockpit, and Koko’s virtual form dissipated into raw aurons. In return, the Vildhjärta’s eyes glowed crimson, transmitting sensory information directly to Ras’s brain.
“The chaos is the worst over at the royal palace,” Ras muttered. “Figures.”
It looked as if frozen fiends had been carried into the palace storehouses, just like the earth dragon at Tishna’s villa. But this time, there were three of them, each bigger than the one Ras had already fought. It was clear that Registan’s main goal was to eliminate the king of Charlgia.
“We don’t have much time,” said Ras. “Let’s get this over with!”
He drew the unit’s sword and, without a moment’s notice, activated his Over Art—Thundering Blade, one of the fundamental techniques of the Black Arts.
Ras lunged past the first of the earth dragons, delivering a devastating horizontal slice that cut the beast in half.
“One down!”
Thundering Blade conjured superheated plasma using auramancy, then took advantage of the immense pressure produced by the expanding plasma to accelerate a Chasseur to high enough speeds to catch the enemy completely unawares. It could only attack in a straight line and thus wasn’t much use if the opponent knew it was coming, but of all the Black Arts, Thundering Blade was unmatched for raw force and speed.
Without letting that speed drop, Ras slew the remaining two earth dragons before they or any of the royal guard could even process what was happening. All they saw was a black shape cross their line of sight like a storm, and the next moment, the dragon’s slaughtered carcasses lay before them.
“That should keep the king safe, at least.”
Ras turned the Vildhjärta around and surveyed the rest of the city. Most of it lay in ruins, with fires on every corner. Furious fiends ruled the streets, while the people fled in a panic. The horrifying scene made the predawn calm of earlier feel like a hazy memory.
But so long as those people filled the streets, Ras couldn’t take one step down into the city. The narrow avenues of the historic town were not built to accommodate a Chasseur in the first place, and the Vildhjärta would not be able to move without endangering the civilians.
The fiends, on the other hand, couldn’t care less about the mayhem they caused, and every second Ras hesitated, more and more victims filled the streets.
“So this is the Registan Empire’s way,” Ras muttered to himself. “No respect for humanity.”
His calm tone belied a simmering anger. The armies of the world were formed to slay the fiends, not to capture them and use them as weapons against fellow human beings. The Registan Empire’s soldiers had crossed a line that Ras could not tolerate.
And nor would his master, Fon Cigel, if she were here. With that in mind, Ras resolved to hold nothing back—not even his most forbidden techniques.
“If that’s how you want to do things…then so will I!”
With a howl, the Vildhjärta leaped into the city, but not into the streets where the people were. Instead, Ras’s target was something that similarly existed all throughout Barlama, but where there was no danger of hurting anybody—the canals, or to be precise, the boats floating atop them. Unmanned cargo ships that ferried lumber and other materials to different parts of the city.
A Chasseur may have appeared graceful at first glance, but with its metal construction and synthetic muscle structure it was a lot heavier than it looked. Ras’s unit, with its built-in transformation mechanism, was even more so. A simple boat couldn’t hope to support that weight, but before it sank, Ras leaped off it and onto the next one.
“If Fon were here, I bet she’d show me how it’s done,” Ras said to himself. His master was capable of all kinds of mind-boggling techniques that even he couldn’t fathom. She could probably forego the boats entirely and walk on the water with aura instead.
Ras couldn’t match that feat, but right now, he didn’t need to. The fiends had been sleeping on canal boats, and they wouldn’t have traveled far yet.
“Boarcrocs, Basilisks, and I even saw a Flame Turtle,” Ras muttered, slaughtering every fiend he came across as he went. “How did they manage to capture all of them alive?”
Ras kept count up to ten, but after that it became a chore. There seemed to be no end in sight. Just then, as he failed to cleanly deal with a fiend in a single blow, a beam of light finished the beast off.
“It looks like there’s a lot on your plate over there, Ras.”
“Fiarca!”
Ras turned to see the light’s source, the Lescar with its snow-white frame. Then he heard Princess Tishna’s voice over the comms.
“I’ve ordered the city watch to guide people off the squares and main roads,” she said. “You should be able to use them to fight now.”
“Appreciated. Let them know they’re doing good work.”
“Well, it was me who gave them such good commands.”
Tishna sounded a little out of breath, probably from having to keep up with the Lescar’s wild movements.
“I assume it was you who slew the earth dragon at the royal palace. Thanks to that, the king is safe. We should be out of the woods now. We were caught by surprise before, but we have the advantage if the battle begins to drag on.”
“It sure doesn’t seem like we have the advantage; there’s no end to them! How many fiends did Registan manage to smuggle in, anyway?”
“Going by the number of ships moored on the canal, I’d say about thirty at most,” deduced Fiarca. “That’s nothing for you, right?”
“I’ll decide that, thank you very much!”
Ras sighed. Even after all he’d done, it still sounded like there were more than half of them left.
“Actually, Ras, scratch that. We’ve got company.”
“What is it now?”
Hearing Fiarca’s voice on the comms, Ras tensed up. Then as if on cue, he felt a surge of aura, alerting him to the execution of a fifth-level auramancy technique, Cannonshot.
“Who the hell is that?”
The source was a bronze-colored Chasseur that had suddenly appeared in the middle of the city. It was smaller than both Vildhjärta and Lescar, and the chassis was of simple make, marking it not as a custom model but a standard issue. Ras, however, didn’t recognize it.
Normally, a Chasseur was a symbol of a noble’s pedigree, and even those with standard-issue models tended to dress them up smartly. This unit, on the other hand, looked more like a sinister omen. Its head was shaped like some kind of demonic mask.
“That’s the newest Registanian model,” explained Fiarca, evidently displeased. “I suppose they’ve decided the fiends aren’t giving us enough trouble.”
There were four of the unfamiliar Chasseurs. They had probably been stationed here to allow the imperial saboteurs to make a clean getaway once the city fell, but they took to the front lines once it became clear that Charlgia was at risk of staging a comeback.