The Prince of Mūzeg

The genius hailed as the prodigy of an age of war was Serius Brad Mūzeg. That day, midway up the Sacred Mountain of Lindholm, he watched a bizarre golden ship come sliding down the slope.

---

His grey hair stirred in the wind as he climbed, surrounded on every side by the elite of Mūzeg's army.

I told them I didn't need this.

He looked around. His subordinates marched in a tight, ostentatious cluster — strong-jawed, resolved, well-trained bodies sealed into black armour, the very picture of solemnity.

Earlier in the climb, the cave-mouths riddling the mountainside had begun to multiply. From inside one of them, something — a thing of unclear nature — had been writhing. After that sight, the soldiers' faces had only hardened.

A killing intent had settled over them in step.

Spirits, then.

Serius had never had much patience for that sort of thing as a child. But after seeing whatever-it-was in the cave's depths, his curiosity had stirred a touch.

Was it alive, or dead? Solid flesh, or something less? A thing, ill-defined.

Maybe what it would look like, when a living creature was taken over by a spirit with a grudge — a lump of flesh shrieking into nothing.

Are spirits really things this lacking in dignity?

The Sacred Mountain of Lindholm, ahead of them, was rumoured to house heroic spirits at its peak.

Serius didn't believe it. The peak was, for one reason or another, somewhere people simply didn't go — and into that vacancy people had poured their fantasies, and made up rumours.

In every age, people leave their unfulfillable dreams somewhere out of reach.

Put them within reach, and the truth gets exposed too quickly. So they're tucked away in places no one can easily get to.

I will not become that.

He looked up at the peak.

"Hey. You really think there are heroic spirits at the top?"

He turned the question on the soldier nearest him.

The man visibly twitched — caught off-guard by being addressed by Serius — and answered in a slightly trembling voice.

"H-how to put it, sir… personally I'm the type to believe in such things, and given that lump of flesh from earlier, I — I think there might be, sir."

He worked his way through the answer in slightly broken pieces. Serius let out a small laugh.

"I see. Well — yes, fair enough. After what we saw earlier, claiming there's nothing up there feels a bit unnatural. Though it could equally be the work of someone's spell-formula."

"Some kind of necromancy, sir?"

"There were Demon Lords who chased that line. Especially in the old days. — The one who became famous for it killed a great many innocents to feed his research, and was hunted down by heroes for it. There aren't any that obvious a brand of Demon Lord around now."

Serius looked up again.

"In any case. If there really are spirits at the top — well, while I'm here, I'll take their power along with the rest."

"For Serius-sama, that should be no trouble at all."

The soldier was looking at him with the eyes of a believer.

Under that gaze, Serius felt a vague, formless unease. He couldn't place where the unease came from, or what specifically he was anticipating. He himself didn't know.

That he felt it at all, in the absence of cause, suggested that perhaps some natural-born talent of his — overflowing the bounds of body and mind — had begun ringing an alarm above his own conscious reasoning. A kind of foresight. A sixth sense.

But Serius — both royalty and soldier, rational in politics and in arms — was not in the habit of indulging unease without cause. The bell wouldn't stop on its own, so he settled it with a serviceable explanation.

Well — for them, I am the hero.

He knew himself worshipped that way. Stepping back, he could understand: these soldiers placed something dreamlike into him.

I am the unreachable land of dreams, am I.

Half-amused at himself.

It wasn't quite the same as people projecting heroic spirits onto an inaccessible peak, but the two had a family resemblance.

The difference is whether the dream is near at hand or far away. That's all.

That was why his earlier complaint — I told them I didn't need this — had its own resolution.

The royal family on the front line. Of course the men, however much they're soldiers, are at heart still citizens. Of course they'll insist on protecting me.

This was different from putting your dreams on an unreachable peak. Here, there was a connection. And precisely because they had the strength to protect, the urge to protect grew stronger.

…Can't be helped, then.

He let himself accept it.

A man alone moves more freely, mind you.

But a possible future head of state wandering off by himself was probably a sight no one charged with his safety could bear to watch.

In the end, Serius elected to put up with the slight inconvenience for the sake of overall morale. Well — let them protect me, then.

Two minutes after he'd settled into that thought, an entirely unannounced situation came down on him.

---

A voice came down from up the slope.

Or, more accurately — a voice and a noise: a voice from a human throat, and a grinding sound, of something scraping its way down.

The voice arrived first, clear enough to make out.

"Your Highness!! Move aside!!"

He looked up. At the upper edge of his vision, a golden ship was just coming into view.

A bizarre ship, sliding down the steep face of the mountain.

Setting aside the dazzle of its colour, the simple fact of a ship descending a mountain was singular enough.

It was coming at them fast, on a course bearing straight for their position.

"Your Highness!!"

The voice belonged to one of the Mūzeg close-combat infantry posted further up the slope. He'd evidently spotted the descent and come down at full pace to sound the alarm — a posture so unstable Serius could only marvel he was still upright. He was tumbling more than running.

To the man crying Your Highness, Your Highness!, Serius answered with a raised hand and turned his attention back to the ship.

Engagement was imminent.

Demon Lords.

No firm proof yet. But more than likely.

The reconnaissance-in-force failed.

The spell-corps he'd sent ahead to probe must have lost the engagement. Their quarry had got away.

That the alarm-runner reaching him was an infantryman — not one of the spell-corps mages — said the spell-corps had been forced into something a good deal worse than a routine retreat.

A flashy ship, this one. Spell-craft, no question.

So there's more than just the 〈Sword Emperor〉.

Scout reports from around the mountain had told him that other countries had also climbed Lindholm in pursuit of other Demon Lords. He'd built that into the size of the force he'd brought.

So in a sense, this was within forecast.

The other countries are equally hot for Demon Lord power, then.

It was hardly new. But his own conspicuous use of it might have lit a fire under the rest of the continent.

Either way, he could not allow other countries to harvest Demon Lord power unopposed.

"Right. First — that golden ship."

Serius let a small smile slip out at the sudden battle conditions. A battle-greedy smile.

---

War was good.

It was a fortunate thing, to have been born into an age of war.

So Serius would think, often.

Because of the appetite for power that Mūzeg's kings had nursed across generations, the kingdom had accumulated an impressive collection of books on the various sources of strength. Reading widely had given him steady access to those sources. Spell-formulae. Martial arts. Scholarship. Rhetoric. He hadn't quite mastered any one of them perfectly, but his grasp across the lot ran deep.

Lately, he'd put that to use against Demon Lords.

One of them had carried the title 〈Spear Emperor〉, and the 〈Demonic Spear〉 had become his.

A very serviceable demonic spear. The same family of weapon as the 〈Sword Emperor〉's demonic sword: capable of cutting through phenomena themselves.

After that he had faced more Demon Lords, defeated them, and worked their hidden formulae into his own repertoire by self-study.

Demon Lord power was attractive — but it didn't always come in a form one could take. Some Demon Lords had achieved their strength through generational bodily change; others by lifting the brain's safeties. Powers like those weren't going to be acquired by anyone in a single lifetime.

Those, he killed. The art and the heir at once. They would otherwise have become threats to Mūzeg.

But everything else — anything that came in a form that could be taken — he had taken.

He owed a debt to the appetite-soaked blood of the Mūzeg royal house. That whatever talent he'd been born with had landed in him at all was probably owed to that lineage.

He finalised the trajectory of the golden ship in his head and shifted fully into combat posture.

He set a sharp gaze on the ship.

That one — even the demonic spear couldn't stop it.

The thing was moving too fast. Even if the spear sank in cleanly, a bad catch and the spear itself might break.

A ship made of money. A man of certain taste.

"Stand back. I'll stop them with a formula."

The right call here.

"〈Hammer of the Earth King (Alf Cruz)〉."

A formula belonging to the Demon Lord styled 〈Earth King〉, said once to have flattened a mountaintop in a single blow. It pulled the hardest mineral substances from the earth, condensed them, shaped them into the form of a hammer — and broke whatever it came down on in one strike.

Serius triggered it.

If he caught the prow of the descending ship with this — gold-built or not — it would tip and slam into the cliffside.

Whichever Demon Lords were inside, he didn't yet know. First the ship had to stop.

By the look of the descent, they were trying to bull straight through the line.

Not happening.

Resolve—

— here it comes.

The golden ship was about to enter the strike-radius of the 〈Hammer of the Earth King〉.

Serius caught the cruel smile at his mouth and pushed it down, then signalled his men to fall back so they wouldn't be caught up in the blow.

And the golden ship came on, finally entering range —

"〈Hammer of the Earth—〉"

"〈Hammer of the Sky King (Excil Flora)〉."

Mid-incantation, Serius heard another voice — not his own.

The voice — elegantly resonant in a way that did not belong to this slope — had cut across his own technique-name as he was about to complete the formula.

---

Reflexively, his eyes moved. Toward the voice.

From inside the very golden ship he'd been about to strike with his 〈Hammer of the Earth King〉 —

A figure had emerged. A man with hair white as snow, the look of a wraith about him.

And in the same instant, that figure unfurled an enormous formula in his right hand at impossible speed — and brought it down.

"Tch—"

The smallest fraction of a moment. A seam in time.

By the time it landed in his head, the man's right hand was already coming down.

Something —

incoming.

A sour foreboding ran through him. He pivoted his 〈Hammer of the Earth King〉 — not toward the ship — and slung it upward, against the sky.

The hammer he'd been holding poised in front of him swung up in a single motion and struck the heavens flat.

A roar, like the air itself splitting. An ear-flattening thunder.

And then a dry bak — the sound of something giving.

Wincing through the noise, hands at his ears, Serius looked up — and saw his own 〈Hammer of the Earth King〉 and the white-haired man's descending strike from above locked against each other in a maelstrom of magic.

A black hammer of earth. A white hammer of wind.

The contest was lost in the end —

"Gh — ah—"

— by Serius's hammer.

The mana-thread he'd kept connected to control the technique transmitted the moment the 〈Hammer of the Earth King〉 fractured, and the shock came back into his head.

A pulse of pain ran across his skull.

In the same instant, the golden ship blew past him.

Reflexively he summoned the 〈Spear Emperor〉's 〈Demonic Spear Kurtad〉 from his formula-space and tried to lance the ship in passing — but the spear-shaft was knocked aside, this time, by the 〈Sword Emperor〉 Elma's 〈Demonic Sword Krishra〉, emerging from behind the white-haired man.

The 〈Sword Emperor〉 he'd been chasing.

So she was here after all, he thought — and, just as quickly, knew his spear was going to miss. He raised his voice instead. The voice, at least.

"Wait!!"

The shout dropped into nothing.

The Demon Lords on the ship would not hear it.

Voice, hand — neither was reaching them.

He flung half a dozen techniques at the receding stern of the ship, and every one of them was knocked down by the white-haired wraith's spell-work.

"After them!! Don't let them get away!!"

He shouted it loud, even with one hand still pressed to his head.

His soldiers tore off down the slope. He already knew their hands wouldn't reach the ship. But a man can't simply do nothing in a moment like that, so he gave the order anyway, and only after that began to think.

That landed.

The strike from above had run all through the inside of his head.

A blow that went toe-to-toe with the 〈Hammer of the Earth King〉, and on top of that, broke it.

A serious operator, then.

A Demon Lord he had never seen before.

In an age this thick with new Demon Lords, that wasn't surprising in itself. But white hair and red eyes, in that combination, weren't in either the heroic tales or the demon-lord lore he knew.

…Wait.

Separately, he could place each.

The white hair of that abomination — Leilas Lif Lemuse.

The Demon Lord once styled 〈White Emperor〉 in Mūzeg's records.

The Hero once styled 〈White Emperor〉 in Lemuse's.

Same title — opposite meaning. Demon Lord, and Hero.

That white hair was very like the white hair of the woman once said to be the most beautiful in the world.

And —

The red eyes of 〈Technique God〉 Flander Crow.

That name, Serius held in special place.

— No. Don't speculate. Flander Crow is dead.

Where exactly Flander Crow had died, no one knew. But that he had carried regrets to his grave was easy enough to guess. Maybe those regrets had kept him drifting around Lindholm.

— He's dead.

Of that much, certainty.

A Technique God couldn't fight time itself. How many years had it been, since that age?

— And, more importantly, after that poison.

So that was not Flander Crow.

If anything, a spirit confined to Lindholm wouldn't have been able to leave the mountain at all.

Even as he thought that, an absurd suspicion crossed his mind. The kind of thought one almost has to dismiss out loud.

— Was that, perhaps, Leilas's and Flander's child?

No. That, too, was impossible. The simple problem of time stood squarely in the way of the hypothesis.

He threw the absurd theory aside immediately, and lifted his voice again to rally the men.

"After them! After them! They've gone east! Send a messenger bird to Father! Lay a search-line eastward!"

Even as he gave the orders, his eyes stayed on the gold ship vanishing into the distance.

He wasn't catching it from here.

The way the ship was hurling itself down without regard for its own hull — that speed was something else.

It looked like a vessel of the dead, on a clean line for hell.

But.

"Don't think you'll get away."

Go to hell, fine. Leave the power.

Within my reach. Leave the power within my reach.

That, in him, was sheer will.

The man called the prodigy of an age of war showed, in that moment, the will of a war-demon.

I am the 〈Hero of Mūzeg〉.

The title the people had hung on his shoulders.

The title he meant to carry himself.

In time, I will be the king of a state that holds half the world.

For the sake of his motherland Mūzeg, he would prune any bud that might one day become her ruin.

And that ruin's power — he would put to use, for Mūzeg's growth.

Serius Brad Mūzeg was the prodigy of an age of war.