Out from the Flames

Swiiish!

Pivoting in place, I let the enemy’s attack slide past me and cut both of them in the same sweep.

For an ordinary person, that would be difficult.

But I could time it with my eyes closed.

Being ganged up on by multiple enemies was something I was used to.

“Ghhurk!”

A solid hit.

The moment my magic blade broke through Philon’s armor and drew across his chest——

Crack!

The sword, unable to hold the magic any longer, shattered.

It was predictable, but third rank was simply too much for it.

Still, I followed through with what was left of the broken blade.

“Ngh!”

A slash across the marquis’s abdomen.

I dropped all the way to the floor and immediately rolled clear.

Thud!

The sound of someone collapsing behind me.

It was over.

“Haaah……”

I rose and assessed the situation.

My sword had been reduced to nothing but a hilt, completely destroyed.

The knight called Philon was down and not moving.

“Hk— hhgh.”

And Marquis Crocell was clutching his stomach, somehow still holding on.

The blade had broken midway through, so the finishing blow hadn’t landed cleanly.

“H-how is this possible? How? Third rank? You’re not even the eldest son. You didn’t inherit it from the count, so where——”

“Marquis Crocell. If you testify to the conspiracy you’ve set in motion and reveal everything you know about your organization, I’ll grant you the mercy of the noose.”

It was a genuine offer.

A hanging was more honorable than a beheading.

But Crocell didn’t so much as acknowledge it. He kept pressing his hand to his stomach, fighting for breath, trying by sheer will to push himself back onto his feet.

“Nngh. Ah…… it’s no use.”

Crocell’s knees hit the floor.

The abdomen — dense with vital organs. Even with magic suppressing the pain, fighting through a wound there was nearly impossible.

And his magic reserves were running dry regardless.

Under my gaze, Crocell let out a low laugh.

“Hehehe…… hahahaha! Trying to win me over at this point? Pathetic. If I’d done all this just because I was afraid of death, do you think I would have started any of it?”

“I told you……”

“Yes. I’ll admit it. Rigen Librata. You’ve beaten me. The irredeemable wastrel was a lie. You’ve been sharpening your blade against me for a long time, haven’t you!”

Crocell bit down until blood seeped from his lip.

“But my loyalty to this empire, my conviction, that will not break!”

“Shut your mouth, you insane son of a bitch! Who the hell asked you to be that loyal!”

The words came out before I could stop them.

Loyalty, he called it — and then he pulled this kind of lunacy?

But Crocell fixed me with a burning stare.

“Insane? In my eyes, the world without an emperor is the insane one. The center of the empire, its symbol, the very core of its power, only when an emperor rules again can all the people of this land live as equals! Those wicked foreign races who ignore that truth and grasp only for their own power, the twelve houses that cluster around them lapping up whatever scraps fall their way, they are nothing but rot festering in the empire’s bones!”

“Spare me. Whatever your justification, you tried to kill innocent people.”

Crocell had intended nothing less than the total destruction of both Librata and Burzak.

A belief so thoroughly, completely wrong.

There was no point in saying anything more.

Fwooom!

Flames punched up through the bedroom floor.

A wall of fire rose between me and Crocell.

Time to go.

Left alone, Crocell would die on his own soon enough. Trying to finish it now might only complicate things.

Crocell’s ragged breath came through the fire.

“……You’ll understand before long. This empire has rotted through to the core. The only way to fix it is to take up a sword and let blood.”

“You planning to do it again?”

I turned away.

“You’re just someone who wanted to kill people and needed an excuse. There were other ways to fix things. Countless of them. And you chose conspiracy and slaughter anyway. Blame your own lack of imagination. Don’t blame the world.”

“What nonsense——”

Instead of answering, I summoned magic to my hand.

Yellow. Third rank.

At my age, it was more than enough to be called a prodigy.

“……That, that kind of power. Why did you bother pretending to be a fool at all?”

“To fix the empire without doing what you did.”

“Th-that’s absurd……”

Crocell denied it, but his voice had gone hollow.

He had no choice but to take it seriously — it was coming from someone who had just beaten him.

“……If I had been third rank at that age…… I would have……”

An ache broke through into Crocell’s voice.

He was second rank himself — and even that had been inherited, not earned.

“Because you were limited, that was all you knew. All you could see. That’s why it ends here for you.”

“Then how do you intend to fix the empire? How will you……”

I walked out into the corridor and ignored him.

“Librata? Wait! Librata!”

I kept walking and left his cries behind.

Dying without the answer.

That was the punishment I, as emperor, was handing down to Crocell.

“I’ve lost too much time.”

The corridor was catching fire.

I pressed my sleeve over my mouth and moved.

The windows were already seas of flame — there was no way out that way.

A normal fire wouldn’t spread this fast.

“The tremors earlier — this has to be explosives. Which means……”

Explosives were strictly controlled within the imperial military.

I had given that order personally as emperor.

Which meant someone inside the imperial military had been siphoning them off.

“This is a disaster……”

Crocell’s claim that the empire had rotted from the inside.

I wanted to dismiss it — but evidence kept piling up.

I pushed the thought aside and quickened my pace.

The building was collapsing in places, burning, groaning — it wouldn’t hold together much longer.

“Rigen!”

A voice from the far end of the corridor.

A familiar silhouette.

I squinted through the smoke and heat. My disbelief sharpened into recognition.

Roderic.

“What……”

How was he here?

Surprised and relieved in equal measure, I moved toward him.

“Rigen! Where are you! Answer me!”

“Over here!”

He must have heard me — Roderic came pushing toward me through the fire.

The distance between us was short, but walls and doors were burning on both sides, and it was anything but easy going.

Roderic leapt over a tongue of flame on the floor and shouted,

“Rigen! We have to get out…… behind you!”

“……”

Roderic’s face went white with horror.

I spun around.

Crocell’s right-hand man. Philon — sword leveled, charging straight at me.

“Die!”

A thrust aimed at my chest.

No weapon in my hands. A narrow burning corridor with nowhere to go.

There was no way out of this!

I threw up magic and twisted my body as fast as I could, but Philon was coming with everything he had.

He had played dead and waited. That kind of obsession didn’t stop for anything.

He didn’t care that his legs were on fire. He didn’t care about anything except ending me.

Scrape!

The blade caught my shoulder.

I hit back with my fist, but Philon didn’t even flinch — he was already driving the sword back toward my chest.

This was going to——

“HRAAAAH!”

And then, through the fire.

Roderic, at a dead sprint, smashed into Philon like a battering ram.

“AAAAAAAGH!”

Philon’s body went airborne from the impact of that enormous frame.

Fwooom!

The waiting flames swallowed him whole.

He screamed as they took him. I looked away and turned immediately to Roderic.

“Nngh…… ah……”

Roderic was down on one knee.

He had run straight through a burning corridor to get to me, and the fire had gotten to him in turn.

I moved fast and beat out the flames, but that wasn’t the real problem.

The sword buried in Roderic’s thigh.

Philon had driven it in as he went down.

“Damn. This is bad.”

A thigh wound in the wrong spot killed you.

The blade still being in was the only thing working in his favor right now.

But with his leg like this, walking was out of the question.

Pain wasn’t something magic could suppress.

Roderic stared down at his own wound and let out a low groan.

The face of despair.

Then — the face of resolve.

A face I had seen more times than I could count.

The face men wore when they were preparing to be left behind.

I had seen it endlessly, standing at the front as emperor.

“I’m done. Get out, Rigen.”

Someone ready to die for me.

I shook my head and pulled him up.

“Brother, knock it off.”

“If you don’t go right now, you’ll die too.”

“I said knock it off.”

He could barely stand.

Pulling Roderic up and moving him through this — in this body, even with magic reinforcing it, it wasn’t a small thing.

“Ngh…… ugh.”

And above all else, I had to keep that blade in his thigh from shifting.

Every second was costing us.

The fire was growing around us.

“Rigen, I said don’t.”

Roderic squeezed the words out through his teeth, trying again.

He was supporting himself against me as he spoke. I kept my eyes forward.

“Why did you come back?”

“……I delivered the message to Father. Then I turned around immediately.”

“You rode the whole way back without stopping.”

“Listen to me, you stubborn. Just go, you…..”

Roderic’s complexion was going grey. He was still trying.

I kept my eyes on the path ahead and said nothing for a moment.

He had known I was in a burning building and come in anyway. Had thrown his body into fire without a second thought.

How was I supposed to walk away from a man like that?

Fwooom!

The ceiling gave way. The corridor was gone — fire, everywhere, nothing else.

“……”

No path out.

Flames pressing in from every side.

At this rate, we were going to burn.

“Do you trust me?”

“What?”

“Do you trust me.”

I said it again, level.

Roderic forced the words out.

“……Yeah. You’re not the same. You dug up Crocell’s conspiracy against our house and finished it clean.”

“……”

“Even without me…… I know you’ll bring House Librata back. No, not just Librata. For the empire’s sake too. Rigen, you have to survive this. Drop a useless weight like me and……”

“Thanks for the words, but I don’t feel like working that hard.”

I said it without a trace of drama.

Roderic groaned.

“You idiot, right now is……”

“You’re the one who’s supposed to live through this. That way you become count and work yourself half to death, and I get to be the youngest son who does nothing. I rack up gambling debts, you pay them. I run from women, you hide me. That’s my entire life plan. My whole future. The eldest handles everything, and I freeload off him forever.”

“……You lunatic.”

Fwooom.

The fire wasn’t a wall anymore — it was a river, a tide of it, so thick the floor had disappeared beneath it.

I looked at it and said,

“When we get out, you’ll actually do all that. Right?”

“……Yeah. I will. If we can actually get out, I’ll do all of it. So please…..”

“Then that’s settled.”

In that moment, Roderic opened himself to me.

I accepted the mental energy flowing from him and set myself.

I didn’t know if it would hold at this level of strength. I didn’t know if I could sustain it.

But we were both making it out.

Thud.

One step forward into the river of fire.

“Rigen……”

“Trust me.”

I focused, and spread my telekinesis outward like a shell around us both.

Telekinesis — the force that transcended even absolute laws like gravity.

A river of fire was no different.

The pinnacle of telekinetic power.

The Telekinetic Barrier.

Fwooom!

The flood of flame parted to either side of us, pushed away.

An impossible sight. Roderic sucked in a sharp breath — and I spoke through my teeth.

“Focus! Trust me! We’re getting out!”

Ah…… this is brutal.

Sustaining the Telekinetic Barrier without breaking was not a small thing.

This might have been manageable in my emperor days — but right now, ten seconds was my limit.

My mental reserves were burning through fast. A splitting pain began to build behind my eyes.

Like something was trying to crack my skull open from the inside.

“Alright.”

But then — his voice.

Roderic, steady and strong.

“I trust you, little brother.”

And with it, his mental energy poured in and filled the gap.

I locked my jaw and kept pushing the flames aside, kept moving forward.

I held Roderic up. Roderic wrung every last drop of his mind and fed it to me.

An endless river of fire that wanted to swallow us both — two brothers who had never been close, burned away to nothing in it.

But with someone at your side who believed in you.

Even then, brothers could push through.

“Young Master Rigen!”

The river of fire was ending.

A familiar voice.

Garul was running toward us from the exit.

I gave a small nod.

“He still alive.”

“Yes. Everyone made it. Rigen.”

Roderic said it.

“Because of you.”

“More praise, please. And pay me back in money, food, and alcohol. Shoulder rubs occasionally.”

“……Yeah. Alright, you idiot.”

Roderic’s voice, finally loose.

The moment Garul reached us and took his weight, I closed my eyes.

My mental reserves had hit their limit.

Time to pass out.

Well. That was more than enough overtime for one day.

You guys can handle the rest.