Chapter 71
That day arrived without any warning.
Rumble
“…What, what exactly was I supposed to do?”
The Ground shook and split apart.
“Pavan, what in the world was your covenant?”
Massive hands thrust up through the cracked earth.
Thud!
The massive hands pressed against the Ground, slowly dragging their torsos upward.
For the Giants trapped underground, the only thing remaining in their bodies was pure rage.
Roooaar!!!
The cry of the first Giant to reach the Ground was like that of a horn.
A signal flare was announcing war.
But that was only from the perspective of the Giants.
From the Empire’s perspective, it was an invasion.
A one-sided invasion.
“Prioritize the evacuation of the citizens!”
“Loyalty!!!”
All the Knights capable of manifesting Aura were moving busily.
Crunch.
They could not save all the citizens being trampled to death before the Giants' advance.
A Sword Master is just a single Human with absurdly strong martial prowess.
A Human inevitably has limits no matter how many people they try to carry.
Things like Mass Teleport are impossible.
“Damn it… Damn it…! Why isn’t it working!”
It was because Magic Casting became extremely restricted the moment the Giants appeared.
There were few Wizards who could exert a high level of concentration in a situation where the Ground was shaking and the sky was pitch black as if in a rage.
And those Wizards had to focus on stopping the Giants' advance rather than worrying about citizen evacuation.
“Fill the holes the Giants are coming out of! Kill the Giants that have already emerged, and make absolutely sure the ones trying to come out cannot!”
The situation changed in real time.
At first, they judged the number of Giants to be small and set evacuation as the top priority.
But as Giants emerged endlessly from the cracked earth, they changed their priority to slaughtering the Giants.
“Damn it! Damn it! Why won’t they cut!”
However, even this was not easy.
The Giant’s Hide was absurdly hard, thick, and tough.
To think that anything less than a Sword Master level of Aura couldn’t even leave a scratch on its hide?
No matter how much the Empire overflowed with Sword Masters.
It wasn’t enough to face all the Giants crawling out simultaneously across the entire Empire.
Besides, training enough Sword Masters to face an entire Race was an impossible task from the start.
“…If I had prepared swords in advance capable of cutting the Giant’s Hide, could more people have killed the Giants?”
I looked down at my feet with empty eyes.
“Should there have been more Sword Masters than there are now…”
Even at this moment, the citizens are dying.
“If the standard for a Knight had been a Sword Master from the beginning, could we have subdued the Giants?”
The Knights who had trained alongside him were also dying.
Roooaar!!!
Giants burst out from right beneath the Imperial Palace.
The land where he was born and raised was on the Path to Ruin simply because the Giants had awakened,
Just what was a covenant, that it would tear down an Empire with thousands of years of history without even properly explaining itself?
Rumble.
The Imperial Palace collapsed.
“…”
At first, he swung his sword like a madman because he wanted to protect his precious people to the very end.
But halfway through, he began to wonder if this had any meaning. It was obvious he wouldn’t be able to protect them.
Because it was plain to see that time would just rewind again at this rate.
How much, how much, how much did it have to torment him to be satisfied?
It would have been nice if he could return with all his memories every time he regressed.
If that were the case, he wouldn’t have to keep going through this.
The regression, as if mocking him.
It erased the most important memories when it occurred.
“…Ah.”
Tears flowed.
He pitied the citizens.
He felt sorrow for the Knights.
It broke his heart to see the imperial citizens, who knew nothing, having to repeat their deaths over and over.
If I had been more competent, if I had been stronger, this wouldn’t have happened.
In some regressions, he even forgot the fact that he had regressed at all.
“Why… Just… Why…”
The words he wanted to say wouldn’t come out properly.
To the point where he couldn’t even guess which injustice he had to argue first to relieve his frustration.
His twisted and tangled insides clumped together, turning into a stone that crushed his heart.
Aaaaargh!
Save me! Please! Save me!
My foot! My foot!
I can’t put strength into my legs.
Where the hell did these things come from!
And even at this moment, the citizens were dying.
To a disaster that was foretold, but whose specific details could not be foreseen, they lost their lives one by one, unable to remember their eventual return.
The hand gripping his sword trembled.
He was angry at his weak self, shuddering with rage.
He needed to be stronger, but he felt guilty for only amounting to this much.
Guilt washed over him. What Crown Prince of the Empire, what Little Sun of the Empire was he?
Tears flowed.
Red tears rolled down his cheeks and fell to the Ground.
Using despair and emptiness as firewood, his rage blazed.
He knew that if more time passed here, the regression would proceed anyway.
The regression would cruelly show him the end of the Empire once again.
He knew that no matter how much he struggled, the end wouldn’t change.
The unremembered number of regressions proved this.
But even so.
“I am the Flame of the Empire.”
That he was the Crown Prince of the Empire did not change.
“He was the Little Sun that protected the Empire, and The Emperor’s Foremost Sword, his blade.”
Just because the end is the same doesn’t mean he could give up everything and sit still.
If the regression takes away the most important memories, he just had to fill his memories with unimportant things.
Those things will gather and gather, and one day they will see the light.
“No one shall covet the Empire without his permission.”
Fwoosh.
He dropped the Sun he had been continuously gathering into the crevice where the Giants were climbing up.
The first thing the Giants faced as they used the Imperial Palace as a foothold to climb up was the Sun.
He could see the Giants melting away in the pit of fire.
“Do they recover if they aren’t melted all at once?”
Deep inside the pit.
He could see the Giants who had only suffered burns recovering.
“I will kill… I will kill all of you. I will keep killing you over and over, until your weaknesses no longer matter… I will continue regressing until killing you feels like an everyday routine.”
It didn’t matter.
The regressions would continue anyway.
If the only thing worn down in the process of regression is his mind, what a profitable trade this was.
Swoosh!
He threw his body toward the largest of the pits where the Giants were trying to emerge onto the Ground.
Perhaps because he was falling so fast, the blood flowing from his eyes formed lines that streaked across his face.
“Ha.”
A laugh escaped him for no reason.
This was the underground where the Giants were said to be sleeping.
Coming down here, he saw countless Giants.
There must have been hundreds that had already reached the Ground.
Seeing it for himself, he realized that was just a drop in the bucket.
“Thank goodness.”
He was glad.
He was thankful that he alone could block this massive number.
And at the same time, a very amusing thought crossed his mind.
“If I kill every last one of you, it won’t be an exaggeration to say I’ve conquered the Giants.”
If he killed all the Giants before his eyes.
Maybe the ending could change.
It was a cliché thought, but hope swelled that this time might be different.
Fwoosh.
He wrapped his sword in flames.
“The crime of daring to invade the Empire.”
A Human designates the entire Giant Race as an enemy.
“Summary Execution.”
It was the beginning of the Conquest War.
+++++
This was at the peak of a mountain formed by the piled-up corpses of Giants.
The situation was concluding with the Crown Prince’s sword, which now only emitted faint embers.
Whoosh!
“…”
The Crown Prince’s Memory that had surfaced calmed down as if nothing had happened.
“Your Highness, are you alright?”
“I’m fine. With something like this in the Imperial Palace Underground, I couldn’t help but watch intently.”
“I understand. I didn’t know it would be to this extent either.”
The Crown Prince’s Memory felt incredibly long, but the actual time passed was very short.
To others, it just looked like he had spaced out for a moment.
“Unghi! Your Highness! You don’t need to worry! You have me, Albedang!”
“You’ve given up on properly distinguishing between formal and informal speech, I see.”
“Of course! Unghihi!”
Arveda tactfully used Magic to brightly illuminate our surroundings.
Only then did the underground, which he had vaguely felt was large, come into clear view.
To the point where he would have gasped out loud if he hadn’t previewed it in the Crown Prince’s Memory.
The size of the underground where the Giants slept, Hypogeum Gigantum, was absurd.
“The ceiling is high enough for Giants to stand… How on earth is the Imperial Territory not collapsing?”
In ancient legends, there are tales of vast subterranean realms.
It felt exactly like looking at one of those. A subterranean space this massive and wide was right beneath the Empire?
It made no sense.
In the first place, Pavan had opened the door leading underground, and we hadn’t even descended that far.
Compared to the distance we had come down, the ceiling was ridiculously high.
“It seems to be a space created with Forgotten Wisdom.”
“Forgotten Wisdom?”
“Yes, originally… the wisdom that the Giants should possess… It seems they forcibly stitched a different space together through it.”
“Huh.”
And Pavan neatly summarized this phenomenon.
So they stitched a completely different space together through a unique power only Giants could use?
Then again, it couldn’t be explained otherwise.
“If it were the same space, we would have seen Giants just by digging the Ground a little.”
“That is correct. You would have encountered a sleeping Giant even while digging a well.”
“I see.”
His admiration ended right there.
After that, he continued heading deeper into the underground.
Part of it was that the surroundings were bright, making it easy to find the way.
But in the first place, there was only one path laid out.
As if to say that since we made it this far, we should at least have an easy walk.
“Does this mean Mirne was originally supposed to come here?”
If there were a situation where the Crown Princess of another country would come beneath the Imperial Palace Underground, it would be because she received a legitimate invitation.
Based on the past, there were three people in the Empire capable of extending such an invitation, so it wasn’t an impossible event.
Anyway.
“I will take the lead and report immediately if there are any anomalies, Your Highness.”
“I leave it to you.”
We continued to explore the underground at a brisk pace with Pavan in the lead.
“…!”
What finally came into view.
“Hah.”
The sight of Giants turned to stone, their hands reaching toward the ceiling.
As if ready to tear open the ceiling and invade the Empire whenever the time came.
They were in a petrified state, their heads raised and their hands pressed against the ceiling.
“This makes no sense.”
Just how much did this world want the Fall of the Empire to go to such lengths?
It was just as I was continuing that thought.
Rumble.
The Ground trembled.
“You, Mirne, are not?”
From among the Giants,
Something that couldn’t even be called a Giant - a creature with a giraffe’s neck and only a Human face attached to it - revealed itself to us.
“Why not?”
As soon as I saw it, I smiled deeply.
“And what will you do if I’m not?”
An atmosphere that felt like it would cut straight to the chase.
I really liked it.