Chapter 45
The baron's provocations, one-on-one duels, and retreats had by now become a daily routine.
Remesis, who faced the baron, grew gloomier with each passing day.
“Please··· Why do we have to keep repeating this pointless nonsense?”
The baron was shrewd in many ways.
If the baron had seriously invaded, Rex would have stopped holding back and proceeded with a siege.
But the baron was only carrying out military provocations that caused no casualties.
Destroying roads, smashing reservoirs, and disrupting farming.
It was irritating, but it was not cost-effective to launch a siege over this.
Thanks to that, Remesis's cigarettes, which he had been smoking at a rate of two packs a day, had increased to four packs before he knew it.
“This meaningless, thankless work doesn't even come with decent extra pay.”
Of course, he did not mean it.
The amount had ended up being this high because Remesis, who had no interest in money anyway, had refused the extra pay, saying this was more than enough.
Naturally, the knights of the personal guard, who knew Remesis's personality, teased him for acting tsundere.
And so, six weeks passed with this routine repeating itself.
A change came to the boring battlefield.
The baron appeared on the battlefield accompanied by a group of young men no one had seen before.
“I see you've volunteered to play babysitter, so the battlefield must have become comfortable for you. Clearly, I've been treating you too leniently.”
Remesis sneered, his voice full of irritation and displeasure.
He did not know who that group of young men was, but it was obvious that his workload had increased, at least.
But the baron did not even spare Remesis a glance and focused only on those who had come with him.
“Hero, it's that man. We couldn't advance any farther because he was guarding this place.”
Hero.
At that word, a different emotion flickered across Remesis's gloomy face.
The red-haired young man, known as the Hero, arrogantly jerked his chin toward the baron.
“You were stopped by that feeble undead? What a disgrace to the title of lord.”
“Haha. That is why I am only a baron, after all. So, if the esteemed Heroes would be so kind as to remove that corpse, I will do my part as well.”
The way he rubbed his palms together as though he might rub them raw made the hierarchy between the young man and the baron unmistakable.
“Fine. But if that fellow isn't as strong as you said, you'll have to offer up your neck.”
The red-haired Hero finished speaking with the baron, drew his longsword, and slung it over his shoulder.
Following the Hero, the young men who appeared to be his companions each drew their weapons.
The cigarette he had lit when the conversation began had been reduced to a butt by the time it ended.
As if protesting having been kept standing there during that time, Remesis tossed the butt toward the Heroes, then took out a fresh cigarette and put it between his lips.
“I thought you were just an insolent brat, but you're a racist.”
“Shut up, undead. I have nothing to say to the likes of you.”
“Haa··· A Hero. It's been a while since I've seen such an unpleasant face.”
Hero.
Superhumans who put into practice the imperial ideology that humans alone were the true people.
Despite possessing martial prowess comparable to that of a lord, they were eccentrics who did not become lords but belonged to the state and traveled to train.
At a glance, they might have seemed similar to wandering knights, but their purpose was not to realize justice; it was to hunt demihumans and hone their abilities.
This Hero party was one such group.
While wandering around, they had happened to hear that an undead had dared to block a baron from advancing.
What was more, that undead served an evil lord who dared to claim that humans and demihumans were all equal.
A righteous Hero could not overlook such evil.
“I will return you to the soil and purge the forces of evil behind you.”
The red-haired Hero declared this boldly.
Remesis, facing him, reacted differently from how he had until then.
He was still irritated, but this irritation stemmed from anger rather than annoyance.
“I am not undead. I am a Returnee.”
Remesis was displeased at being lumped in with corpses.
It certainly was not because his subordinates and citizens behind him had been insulted.
The Hero ignored Remesis's words and began attacking him.
Remesis disliked that confident attitude, which was utterly convinced that its owner represented justice.
‘Does he think killing those who aren't human doesn't incur bad karma?’
The concept of karma was known to everyone.
But since its value could not be directly seen and causality was so complicated, there was much debate over the standards of karma.
Some people even interpreted it religiously.
They believed that slaughtering beasts and eating meat did not accumulate karma, so it was perfectly fine to kill demihumans as freely as they pleased.
The Heroes were the ones who practiced this ideology at the forefront.
“As expected, I don't like you people.”
Remesis pressed his lame leg firmly into the ground.
Cold spread out from his shoe.
The newly taken-out cigarette crumbled into specks of ice.
Normally, he would have been irritated that it had frozen again, but he had no attention to spare for cigarettes now.
“You probably don't care what kind of hell the people trampled beneath your arrogance were sent to. So I'll tell you. I'll tell you where I've returned from and where you're going.”
A blizzard raged around Remesis.
***
Various kinds of magic existed in the world, and the type of magic was an important factor when discussing strength.
Among those kinds of magic were spells whose performance was on an entirely different level from other magic, even at the same realm or level of proficiency.
Superhumans generally called this Ascension Magic.
Simply learning Ascension Magic produced results comparable to rising by one tier.
However, the people who possessed such magic tended not to reveal much about it, and the conditions for learning it were often difficult.
Thus, superhumans turned their eyes to other means.
If they were willing to pay a price, perhaps they could obtain power comparable to Ascension Magic.
Their prediction was correct.
By sacrificing a few things, they could learn magic that exceeded their own capabilities.
Remesis's frost was one such magic.
With ordinary ice magic, the caster was unaffected by the cold.
But with Remesis's frost, even the caster was not exempt from its cold.
It was magic that froze the opponent even at the cost of being prepared to freeze one's own heart.
That was Remesis's frost.
However, this magic was practically without penalty for Remesis.
“Damn body. A nuisance now, just as it was then.”
Apart from leaving him barely able to move, it did not matter if his heart froze when there was no blood flowing through his body anyway.
It was a body that superhumans obsessed with advancing their realms would covet.
But its owner disliked this body.
“Tsk.”
Remesis froze the arrow embedded in his forehead and snapped it off.
Flesh welled up to fill the hole where the arrow had been.
“Huh. You're back again.”
The Hero exclaimed in admiration as he watched Remesis return from death.
He had not been revived by black magic, nor did he possess exceptional regenerative power because of some special procedure.
Rather, when he experienced death, his soul briefly left his body and stepped over the threshold of the afterlife, then returned to his body, regenerating his wounds in the process.
That was why he was called a Returnee.
Too easy to kill for an undead, yet with blood too cold to be human.
Remesis opened his eyes again, accompanied by a discomfort he could never grow accustomed to.
It wasn't that he couldn't die; whenever he died, he came back to life right where he had fallen.
The Hero party knew that well, so they surrounded him while his consciousness had briefly disappeared.
Remesis immediately stamped hard and created ice spikes.
But the party's coordination was annoyingly excellent.
Like the heroes and their companions in a story, each of them did exactly what they needed to do at the most appropriate moment.
“This is the power of bonds!”
The Hero's triumphant cry, filled with certainty of victory, deepened Remesis's displeasure.
He had no particular desire to call himself righteous, but he hated seeing people like that claim to be good.
With a little irritation, a little anger, and a great deal of annoyance, he faced the Hero party.
But the ice spikes were stopped by the sturdy knight's shield,
the frost was driven away by the mage's fire magic,
and whenever he managed to land an effective hit, the priest healed the wounds.
In the end, Remesis fell to his knees before the Hero party.
His body bristled with arrows, and his limbs had been mangled without being damaged enough to kill him as he collapsed at the Hero's feet.
“Let's seal him first, then take him to the cathedral and purify him.”
The red-haired Hero spoke to his companions in a proud voice.
Unable to die yet unable to feel pain, Remesis mocked his own plight with self-deprecating bitterness.
‘Is this the end···’
At last, would this finally be peace?
But something felt lacking.
Was he regretting that he had failed to remain loyal?
He denied it.
He was merely a salaried civil servant, after all.
Was he regretting that he had failed to buy enough time for his subordinates to escape?
He denied it.
He was certainly not worried about them.
Now that he could finally rest, wouldn't seeing his work subordinates' faces in hell just make him think about work again?
Yes. This regret was the cigarette's fault.
He was merely sad about not having finished smoking it.
Remesis rationalized it that way and closed his eyes.
He grumbled that it had been a truly lousy life.
.
.
.
The Hero's hand reached toward Remesis.
To purify this insolent Returnee who had profaned life.
But just before his hand touched him, a shadow fell over their heads.
The party tore their eyes away from the fallen Remesis and looked up.
A giant wearing a featureless helmet and a fluttering cloak was looking down at the Hero.
Seeing the domain emblem attached to the giant Duke's cloak, the red-haired Hero smirked.
“Are you one of this fellow's companions too?”
Instead of answering, Duke ignored the Hero party as if he were lost in his own world.
He draped his cloak over the fallen Remesis and spoke in a cavernous voice.
“You fought well, Remesis.”
Only after covering him with his cloak did Duke rise and look toward the Hero party.
“Hero. As the royal family's sword, you will symbolize justice, so I, the one who stands in your way, must surely be evil.”
Clang!
Duke drew his greatsword and drove it into the ground.
An oppressive presence seized the area.
They felt they understood what it meant for the air to grow so heavy that breathing became difficult.
The Hero party, as well as the baron and soldiers watching from a distance,
could not move while Duke spoke.
Duke pulled the sword from the ground, swung it sideways in a semicircle, and introduced himself.
“I am Duke. The First Sword of the Providence Royal Family.”
The Hero party gripped their weapons more tightly as cold sweat broke out on them.
*
Meanwhile, during all that, Duke···
‘Tsk, I figured out how to keep them from moving during a cutscene, but how am I supposed to direct the BGM?’
Was serious in a different sense.