Clang—

The sword at Celicia’s waist left its sheath, and endless blazing radiance surged forth, instantly swallowing the light of Lucius’s magic.

A thunderous cry of "Long live!" rose from the earth below. The Emperor’s authority manifested here, and as the Sword of the King in Celicia’s hand came down, that blazing brilliance evolved into the phantom image of the Empire’s own territory, crashing down upon Lucius’s torrent of magic with the vast might of heaven itself.

Boom!

After the enormous detonation came the silence of the world. The sky shifted from dark to bright, then from bright back to dark. The very heavens fell into disorder, and time itself seemed to freeze. Even the soldiers’ slaughter appeared to pause for a moment. Everyone stared upward blankly, gazing at a scene like the end of the world.

No one knew how long it lasted.

Perhaps an instant. Perhaps a very long time.

Then the raging shockwave swept violently outward from the center of the collision, only to be erased in turn by the intervention of stronger figures from both sides. Celicia’s delicate body trembled slightly, and a few streaks of vivid blood seeped from the corner of her lips.

She lifted her eyes and looked ahead. Lucius, clutching his chest and coughing blood in obvious disarray, gave her a strange smile that seemed almost provocative.

This brief "end of the world" had not truly changed the overall battle. The ice wall still stood, though several obvious breaches had now appeared in it. At this level, protection had always been harder than destruction.

The Kingdom army began pressing forward again, while the higher-order powerhouses of both sides had already clashed among themselves. In the end, the outcome of this war still had to return to the plainest and most brutal thing of all—formation against formation, soldiers killing soldiers.

Celicia pondered for a moment, then raised her hand once more...

"Your Majesty!"

Count Tern, having regained the ability to speak, turned pale with alarm. Forgetting the impropriety between ruler and subject, he rushed forward and seized Celicia’s sleeve.

"Your Majesty, you’ve already expended a great deal and you’ve been injured besides. You absolutely cannot act again. You’ve already bought us enough time. If you intervene once more, it will only become too much. Besides, if anything happens to you, then even if our soldiers win, it still—"

"..."

Celicia said nothing. With Count Tern still clinging to her sleeve, she raised her hand...

...and used the handkerchief in it to wipe the blood from the corner of her lips.

"...Please, go ahead. Wipe it. Wipe it clean..."

Count Tern awkwardly let go and bent away to one side.

Celicia gave him a glance, then turned her gaze once more toward the Kingdom army under the night sky.

"I’m thinking."

"Th-thinking?" Count Tern could not keep up with Celicia’s rhythm at all.

"From the look of it, this is the Kingdom’s next move."

Celicia said coldly, "I admit it. This was an excellent ambush, a vicious strike that no one expected, and it caught every one of us off guard. If the Kingdom had prepared a little more thoroughly, or if they had been given a little more time, then even if I could wield the Emperor’s authority without limit, I still might not have been able to rewrite the outcome of defeat."

"But... Aurier is terribly unlucky."

Thinking of that blond figure, a faint smile finally curved Celicia’s lips.

"In his eyes, Muen’s 'hundred thousand troops' should arrive within four or five days. If his plan fails before then, he’ll end up trapped in the reverse of what he intended—caught in a pincer himself and facing utter defeat, the kind with no road left to retreat by. I don’t ~Nоvеl𝕚ght~ believe the route that let them cross over in silence is wide enough to allow an orderly withdrawal. Look at them. They have no large equipment at all. They don’t even have horses."

"It sounds as if Young Master Campbell has indeed rendered great merit this time," Count Tern said sincerely, offering the flattery at once.

"Yes. When has that man’s merit ever been small?" Celicia pressed a hand to her forehead, looking faintly troubled. "From the Emperor’s standpoint, I’m reaching the point where I have nothing left to reward him with."

"Ah... well... that..."

Count Tern hurriedly wiped his sweat and pretended he had heard nothing. Merit too great for reward—in any era, in any nation, those were words one absolutely could not touch carelessly. All the more so when it concerned the Empress and her future prince consort.

Could it be that even the Empire would not escape vulgar history, and that Her Majesty would soon face a bloody choice between love and power? Count Tern’s mind began racing wildly.

"But on a personal level, he’s actually quite easy to satisfy. A pair of black stockings..." Celicia paused. "Count Tern, what exactly are you thinking about?"

"N-nothing!"

Feeling the Empress’s icy gaze on him and realizing his thoughts had run off course again, Count Tern quickly shrank back and forced a laugh.

"I was only thinking that, with Your Majesty and the prince consort so deeply in love, how could he possibly need any reward at all?"

"Hmph. Deeply in love? Let him first give me a reasonable explanation for why he’s out there finding little stray cats behind my back."

Celicia’s face turned stern again.

"Back to the point. Once he knew time was short, then by all reason Aurier should have chosen to give up, not force an encirclement when his preparations were so obviously incomplete."

Below them, the two armies once again crashed together like rivers colliding. But compared with the chaos on the Imperial side during the initial ambush, the Empire’s soldiers had now stabilized under Celicia’s forceful intervention.

Even without walls to defend, the Empire’s troops were more elite, and on top of that Celicia’s display of heavenly might had just raised their morale. In the short term, this Kingdom army, whose numbers were far from overwhelmingly superior, naturally could not shake the line.

"Then... perhaps Aurier is simply trying to stake everything on one desperate gamble?" Count Tern guessed.

"No."

Celicia’s answer was absolute.

"If the Kingdom’s commander this time were anyone else, perhaps that would be possible. But Aurier? Absolutely not."

"Why?" Count Tern asked.

"Because he’s a coward."

Celicia answered, "A complete coward."

"Why is Your Majesty so certain of that?"

Count Tern froze for a moment, confused. "Could it be that you know Prince Aurier very well?"

"No, I don’t know him. It’s just..."

Celicia let out a cold laugh.

"I think that anyone who managed to survive under that old thing in the Kingdom all the way until now, and even became the one standing closest to that position... would have to be a coward. How could he not be? Don’t forget, the last prince in the Kingdom who was truly brave was Milne, and the grass on his grave is already two yards high."

"..."

Count Tern was speechless for a moment, because Celicia’s analysis was well-founded, logically sound, and... impossible to refute.

An emperor suspicious by nature, who had held the throne for decades and was now nearing death of old age... naturally his sons had spent those same decades acting like turtles. Better than anyone else, they knew how a mature turtle ought to tuck in its neck if it wanted to avoid becoming the one who got beheaded.

"So there’s still something..."

Celicia stared hard into the distance. In the center of the Kingdom army, a raised platform for surveying the battlefield had already been erected. She knew Aurier was there.

"Aurier still has some card we don’t know about... and he’s about to turn it face up."

...

...

"As expected. Everything is exactly as I calculated."

Standing atop the observation platform concealed by magic, Aurier watched the Kingdom army’s advance being halted, and showed not the slightest surprise. There was even a faintly smug look between his brows, as if everything truly lay within his expectations.

He had worked it out long ago. If the force attacking from the rear this time was not large enough to deliver a killing blow in one strike, then once the battle fell into a stalemate, the Empire’s army would prove so hard to chew through that even with a pincer attack from both front and rear, it would still take several days to have any chance of breaking Fort Notasia.

But if the current situation dragged on for another few days, Muen Campbell would already have arrived with his hundred thousand troops. At that point, the one finished would be him.

So the winner had to be decided quickly.

"Now you should show me what you promised."

Aurier turned and looked at the Witch of Repentance behind him.

"Do not disappoint me."

"Of course, Your Highness. I too have been waiting a very long time for this moment."

That clear, intoxicating laugh drifted out from beneath the broad hood. Then, under Aurier’s astonished gaze, with the wide sleeves of her robe flowing around her, the Witch of Repentance began to dance.

The dance was strange and elusive, like morning mist, like a sea of clouds. Impossible to grasp, impossible to describe. Aurier stared for a long while, and before he even realized it, he had begun unconsciously sinking into those steps.

Aurier bit his tongue hard and jolted awake.

"Y-you... what is this?"

"A dance, of course."

The Witch of Repentance turned in a bewitching whirl. Even beneath the loose robe, the flawless line of her waist could still be vaguely seen.

"Your Highness, would you like to dance with me?"

"A dance?"

Anger entered Aurier’s face.

"I told you to show me the help you promised, not to entertain me—"

"This is exactly what I mean to show you, Your Highness..."

The Witch of Repentance’s tone suddenly turned solemn. Her jade-white bare foot touched lightly against the surface of the platform. Faintly, it seemed as though immense magic rose and faded with the motion of her body.

Aurier abruptly stilled, because only now did he realize that some bizarre magic wholly unknown to him had already begun spreading in silence.

It lacked the grand and overwhelming spectacle of Lucius’s layered spell arrays. It also felt nothing like the magic Aurier himself had studied, nothing familiar at all. It was as if it belonged to no school of magic currently in existence. He could not glimpse even the least bit of the principle by which it was being cast.

And yet he could vaguely sense that as this magic spread, something... was being changed.

Something intangible, incomprehensible, and deeply terrifying.

"Your Highness, there is no need to be afraid. It is only a dance."

The Witch of Repentance rose onto her toes, lifting the hem of her robe like a dancer upon a stage, and gently proclaimed:

"I present to you a spell that makes people dance forever—"

Ancient Magic: Arasax’s Dancing Shoes.

...

...

"Ahhh—!"

A shrill scream tore through the night sky, loud enough to overwhelm even the clash of steel and the furious roaring of battle.

"Wh-what the hell is that? That’s terrifying! I want to go home, I want to go home!"

"The hell’s wrong with you, Beck? Since when did I know you were this spineless?"

Limping on one leg, One-Eye swung his blade and cut down a charging Kingdom soldier. As he finished him off, he kept cursing the whole time.

"It was one thing when we were up on the wall, but now we’re in close combat, damn it. And you’re still bawling here like some woman. Aren’t you scared the Kingdom trash will laugh at you?"

"B-but..." Beck’s voice shook as if he were about to cry. "It really is terrifying..."

"Isn’t it just killing people? You already hacked one down yourself just now. What’s one more?"

"N-no, it’s not that. One-Eye, turn around and look. This time it’s really bad!"

"The hell with that. I’ve been a soldier for more than ten years. I’ve been through battles big and small without counting. I’ve chopped down not hundreds, then at least dozens of Kingdom bastards. What’s scary enough to scare me? If anything really does scare me, I’ll gouge out my one remaining eyeball and eat it—holy mother of—yeah, that’s scary!"

One-Eye had just turned his head, ready to mock Beck properly, when he froze for a beat, then gave a violent shudder at what he saw.

Beck was standing there with his knife raised, his whole body trembling.

In front of him was a blood-soaked Kingdom soldier. It was obvious Beck’s blade had just struck him successfully, chopping down from the left shoulder and cleaving all the way into the ribs.

It was actually a very inexperienced kind of strike. Hacking into bone like that could easily chip the blade or lodge it fast. But maybe Beck had simply gotten lucky, or maybe all that jerky lately had really built up his strength. Either way, he had actually hacked straight through the man’s ribs, and the blade had even gone on into the soldier’s heart.

The scene was horribly bloody. The blood bursting from the man’s heart had almost drenched Beck from head to toe.

But of course, a veteran like One-Eye, who had seen mountains of corpses and seas of blood, was not going to be frightened by a sight like that.

What made his lone remaining eye nearly bulge out of his head was...

That Kingdom soldier, whose heart had been hacked open, was swaying as he slowly stood back up again.

"Heh heh... die..."