The Summit of Three Kings, and the Intruder

That day, in one of the 〈Three Kingdoms〉 — the 〈Kingdom of Zuria〉, sitting south of Mūzeg — the three young kings had gathered.

Not, of course, that anyone needed to spell it out: the kings of the Three Kingdoms.

Muran of Kushana.

Fasalis of Filarfia.

And the queen of Zuria — Crisca.

Three people who had once seen the same campus at Aios Academy, now seated, in their respective formal dress, in a chamber of the Zuria royal castle.

A grand hall.

The ceiling had been carved into a hemisphere; the inner surface bore an elaborate fresco of angels. Naked figures appeared in the work — artistic depth almost too eager to advertise itself. A painting that came across, faintly, as up its own nose.

"This ceiling is as flashy as ever. Stare too long and your eyes start tearing."

A wry comment, exaggerated, from the slim man with hair tied back.

— Muran.

"Quiet. Take it up with the idiot who painted it. I'm told the man tried to seduce me with this. I have no idea what's supposed to be appealing about it. If you're going to seduce someone, look up what they actually like first."

"Hahaha. Painting really doesn't suit Crisca."

"That phrasing is, in itself, irritating, Muran."

"If you'd just shown the famous artist your Aios Academy short-term grade-card, he'd have given up on the spot. — This woman doesn't go in for feminine cultural emotion."

"Your art grades were a dumpster fire, too. Don't pretend yours are any different."

"Yes, yes."

Muran waved her off airily.

"— Anyway. Back to business. — Are you two really proposing to bow to Mūzeg?"

The voice answering Muran carried its native sharpness — thorned.

A woman.

"After I made a whole trip to play polite with Mūzeg's king."

The Queen of Zuria. Crisca.

— the actual host of this room, as the master of Zuria's castle.

"Heard you went dressed up, by the way. How many men dropped in three steps? You weaponise yourself when you actually dress."

"And yet you two fail, conspicuously, to take any notice."

"Both my hands, regrettably, hold flowers I prefer. And Fasalis was already engaged at the time. — Plus, by now, we know each other too well. I really can't see you that way."

"Whether to be relieved or insulted… well, I'll be relieved, on balance, that I avoided the womaniser."

She was, today, in her plain mode.

The colours she carried by birth ran heavily blue. Long deep-blue hair; deep-blue eyes; skin with the translucency of one of those clear-white complexions, but covered, again, in deep blue.

When everything was the same blue, the impression normally came down on plain. Crisca's beauty effectively cancelled the plainness. — A ravishing woman by any honest reckoning.

If anything, in Crisca's case, the plain dress read as a deliberate damper on a kind of beauty that would otherwise emit its own light.

"So. Answer the question."

Her deep-blue eyes were on Muran. The will behind them — sharp.

"Mmh. Look. If it were possible, I'd hold up the down-with-Mūzeg banner too."

"Then why did you put surrender up as one of the options."

Muran, until then with his feet up on the table, brought them down. He put a slightly more serious face on.

"Truth is, it's about to get tight. I'm not joking. We can clash with Mūzeg, sure, but burning through our own people's lives just to come away with a draw — that's a horrible result. And implicit in my line about surrender was the warning that we may be running into exactly that. — Now stated explicitly."

"That's not your style, Muran. Kushana's foremost curved-blade swordsman, getting cold feet before the war."

"Still spiked, as ever."

A small smile, then dropped.

"Cut me some slack, Crisca. I'm not a combatant any more. I'm not an acrobat any more. I'm a king. The moment I start counting how many lives ride on my shoulders, the cautious arguments start sounding, well, cautious."

He returned to his easy stance, feet back on the table.

A wry smile on his face. The eyes still sharp.

Crisca took the answer with a tired sigh, and turned to Fasalis.

"You too, Fasalis? What's that big body of yours for, exactly?"

"To protect the people."

"…Hh. So we end up here."

She sighed once more, head dipping; the deep-blue bangs fell over her face.

"…The 〈Alliance of Three Kings〉, even with all three of us together, isn't a guaranteed counter to Mūzeg. Reaching this point at all means we've already taken a strategic loss against them, doesn't it."

"More or less."

Muran, hand-flick, in agreement.

"And — Crisca. Did you get anything out of your trip? You at least got off some sarcasm at Mūzeg's king, surely?"

"— Not really. I went in intending to. Mūzeg's king sidestepped it neatly. The closing of the meeting was an implicit come under my wing."

"That polite, was it?"

"…You're next."

"Predictable to the letter. Lovely. — Damn the man."

Muran threw his hands up.

Until that point, Fasalis — large frame, posture squared up — had been listening in silence. He spoke now.

"Suppose Muran's 〈Magic-stone Cannon〉 is completed and we secure adequate fuel. What does our chance of winning look like? — This is the watershed. Even as a forecast, it's worth getting an honest number on the table. — Because this might be the last time."

Fasalis clasped his hands on the round table, the two fists set side by side.

Muran answered immediately.

"My read, forty."

"Out of fifty?"

— Crisca, frowning.

"Out of a hundred. Forty."

"What. You poured that fortune into the Magic-stone Cannon and you only get me to forty?"

"Oh, do shut up. The other side has Serius. He's carrying the 〈Demonic Spear Kurtad〉 — a 〈Seven Imperial Weapon〉 with phenomenon-piercing in it — and on top of that he has formulae that can clip a mountaintop off in one move. The 〈Seven Imperial Weapons〉 are particularly strong against formula-art, so the Magic-stone Cannon doesn't match up well there. If this were a physical-supremacy era I'd be the conqueror of it."

"Looking at the fact that it isn't, the kindest reading is that you got the era wrong."

"…Quite."

He folded under the sarcasm. He knew.

"In any case, this is roughly how the past cycles of war went too, isn't it."

Fasalis, mid-thought.

"I'd argue the 〈Seven Imperial Weapons〉 are an exception. Granted, exceptions are everywhere in history — but the Seven, in this current age, are special. The principle by which they work isn't even fully understood. — Of course people want them. They give you the ability to neutralise spell-formulae the way the old 〈Technique God〉 did, without requiring you to be a textbook monster."

"Then back the other way," Crisca said, redirecting. "Why forty exactly."

Muran scratched his head — say, you really do come at me without breath, Princess — and answered anyway.

"Because if Serius isn't on the field, I can punch through. The defence barriers Mūzeg's spell-corps run, my Cannon shreds. I have that level of confidence in it, for the money I poured in, and I built it by harvesting the best of Kushana's formula-machinery industry. So — keep Serius off the picture, and I open a hole."

"Open the hole, and Zuria's 〈Azure Spearmen〉 and Filarfia's 〈Iron Cavalry〉 punch through it."

"Close-quarters, both of you. I'm not stepping back onto a front line. I'll sit at the rear and squeeze the trigger on my Cannon. — If everything goes."

Muran was, plainly, not enthusiastic about it.

Crisca's brow tightened. Her next question came with concern in the eye.

"Are you that afraid of Serius?"

"Yeah. I'll be straight about my feelings — I'm afraid of him. There's a part of me that has, somewhere, accepted I cannot beat him."

"Mind you, both of you took consecutive losses to Brad in your time."

Muran and Fasalis both reacted sourly.

"Even Serius would have an opening, surely, if you took him by surprise."

"That's what you'd think. I thought it. Every time I sat across from him I thought it. But—"

"You never once landed a surprise on him, did you."

— Fasalis, finishing the line.

A low animal growl in the body, the let-me-think noise.

Muran picked it up.

"That's it. Brad is sharp; tactical-eye, strategic-eye, deals with the standard openings as a matter of routine. — Anyone who watched our board-games or strategy-games at Aios knows that much. But that's not where it ends. Brad's real edge — you only feel it once you've actually played him. He is —"

"His gut is monstrous."

— Fasalis, stepping in. Muran nodded.

"Yes. That. You start thinking he's literally favoured by a god. Take a three-way choice. I'm hesitating. Right at the buzzer I pick one — and Serius has already, in the same instant, picked the right counter to that choice. — He doesn't slip. He sees inside people, and he sees the future of the battlefield. There were times I thought he was reading my own insides better than I was."

He had, by now, slipped into a serious face.

"It's a frightening pair of eyes. Sit across from them and you feel like he's looking straight through to the back of your soul. I sat across from those eyes more times than the rest of you. They terrify me."

"So — forty. With all that confidence in the Cannon, still forty."

"I've been planning revenge against Mūzeg for years, mind. I was called a prodigy in my time, you know. — And the prodigy's late-form is a lapdog cowering before the engagement."

Forty out of a hundred was, frankly, too low a number on which to start a war.

The risk side of that bet was the country dies if we lose, and forty was not enough.

Magic-stone fuel was, additionally, not yet secured.

Realistically, the number drops further.

Muran tipped his chair onto the back legs and let out a long breath toward the ceiling. He rolled a slack, drawn-out line off his tongue — like cursing a god directly.

"The only person who ever put Serius in the dirt, at that academy, was Kudo. No idea what house the man was from. If he was, by chance, a noble of my land, I'd hunt for him with bloodshot eyes. And I'd bow my head to him a hundred times when I found him. — I'd beg him, just this once, come onto the field and put Serius in the dirt for me."

The line was Muran's joke.

It was supposed to drift into the angel-fresco of the ceiling, tipping the three kings — just slightly — toward surrender, swallowed by paradoxical resignation under the irony.

Except.

There was a man in the world who could yank Muran's joke down out of the air with a hand that was, frankly, a touch violent in its grip.

---

"Very well. A hundred bows, please. From my end, an offer I could not refuse, Muran."

---

Three kings' eyes snapped to the chamber's entrance.

The standing order, given to the imperial guards outside, had been no admittance until permitted.

But that man was walking — calmly, with the hem of his cloak sweeping after him — into the hall.

Beside him: a woman in black, dressed exactly like a spy.

"Impossible —"

Fasalis, eyes wide enough to look like they'd come out of their sockets, voiced what the three of them were thinking.

And then —

"— Kudo! What are you doing here?!"

Crisca asked the one question that would unlock everything else, of the man — 〈Hasim Kudo Lemuse〉.