A Dream Belonging to the Battlefield

"— Merea!"

"Hm?"

He was tying off the last of the bags on Noel's back when he caught his name.

He poked his head out from the dragon's flank and looked down. Elma was standing below, slightly red in the face, planted at attention.

Hands on her hips, posture squared — there was a soldierly look to it, but the slightly damp eyes and the flush swung the impression toward something younger. From her angle she was looking up at him, which only doubled the upturned-girl read.

"I — I have something to say!"

"Sure. Hold on a moment."

"Got it!"

Awfully fired up, he thought, and quickened his pace on the bag.

The other Demon Lords were attending to the horses' legs anyway — there'd be time for a brief conversation. Several of them had travel-experience and ran horse care competently; the truth was that letting them do it was faster and safer than amateur help. So a small hand-empty interval came up, every break.

Merea, of course, had never tended to a horse. And recently he wasn't even on one any more.

His current ride —

"You don't really need looking after."

"Gya?"

— was, for the foreseeable future, low-maintenance.

A smile, eyebrows tipped down. He stroked the back of Noel's neck. The hard, smooth black scales caught the morning light when he brushed the grit off them.

Noel turned his head back in a finished with the bags? glance.

"— Right."

"Gyau!"

He shook off his momentary admiration of Noel's scales, tied off the last bag at the dragon's neck, then patted the body. Noel rolled his shoulders, side to side, working out the stiffness; the loaded bags clattered without coming loose. Merea nodded to himself, slid off the dragon's back, and stepped down.

---

Elma was leaning against a free-standing rock, head down, eyes on a small stone she was nudging with the toe of her boot.

A somewhere else entirely posture.

"Sorry to keep you."

He raised a hand.

Her head came up; the damp black hair swung.

"— !"

Her mouth wavered, didn't produce words.

Still a flush. Still slightly wet eyes.

After noting that, his attention drifted across the rest of her.

He had not, actually, looked at her with this kind of attention before. Now he did.

— She's beautiful.

Her profile carried an art-piece quality — the cold-edged beauty plus the long, well-set limbs. Lovely face, lovely line.

And under it, innocence. Layered through the elegant note. That juxtaposition was, he thought, what made her Elma.

Strength in a frame trained in a way that women's frames usually aren't. Beauty in the line. Innocence layered through the air around her.

A handful of words came to him for it; he summarised them all to —

— Yes. Beautiful.

Not just appearance.

Atmosphere. Inner-shape.

The word fit her, all the way through.

"Did you wait?"

"A-ah… Ah! N-no! N-not at all!"

A small tremble in her voice. Like she was nervous. About what — he couldn't tell.

"So — what's up?"

"…"

He stepped over and leaned against the same rock beside her, asking.

She didn't answer right away. He guessed she was assembling lines in her head. He waited.

After a beat — she opened her mouth.

He looked over and saw her face several shades redder than before.

"U-um… er-ed —"

Tongue trip. Merea kept the observation in his head.

She cleared her throat — ahem — and started again.

"So, um —"

The unprovoked switch into formal-stranger mode was, by itself, odd. He didn't interrupt.

He brought his red eyes up to hers, lit with simple curiosity.

"What?"

The eye contact, evidently, made her more tense.

"— S-so — ahem — well — er — i-is everything fine with you?"

Tongue tripped, recovered, asked the most innocuous possible question.

So innocuous it stuck out more.

"I'm — fine. Super fine."

"…I see."

She let out an I survived the first hurdle breath. Resolved nothing.

But she wasn't done. She steeled her face and tried again.

"Merea."

"Yes."

"Y-you — do you have desires?"

"Desires…?"

The question was, on its face, vague. Three question marks went up in his head.

— Wait. Is she asking about — basic appetites?

Hunger, sleep, the usual. Wishes or dreams would have been one phrasing; desires nudged the ear toward something that sort of way.

But surely no one would ask that directly. He chose to assume she meant something more like personal ambition.

"I have them."

A simple nod.

— and immediately —

"— ! I-I see… So even Merea is, you know, a man… If he's a man, of course… in fact, not having any would be unhealthy, I suppose…"

"…?"

She trembled a little; her wet eyes dropped to the ground. Merea was now entirely lost.

If he let this drift, time would simply elapse. He decided to ease her back into the conversation by asking her.

"You?"

"Wh-what? Me? Y-you have a fearless way of asking a woman that, you know!"

She took the same question very differently.

"— I-I do. Of course I do."

"What kind?"

"W-what kind?! You're asking that too?!"

"Eh? Was I not supposed to?!"

Elma was, by this point, almost combusting. He recoiled at the heat coming off her.

"— I-I'm not saying you weren't supposed to ask — but — delicacy, please — I am still a woman, you know…"

"I — yeah, I know? Elma's pretty, after all."

"— !"

A sharp little twitch.

She turned her face away from his, breaking line of sight. Then, without looking at him, she raised her index finger toward him in a small more gesture. — Give me one more beat, the gesture was.

He read it. …Cute?

She gave him a thumbs-up. Apparently, that was enough.

She hid her mouth with one arm and let her eyes drift over the ground in unmistakable I am very pleased with myself but cannot show it mode.

A slightly shameless ask, in fact — but it suited the unguardedness underneath, which made the whole thing more endearing.

Behind the arm, a small unable-to-help-myself laugh rose. Embarrassed and delighted at the same time.

Merea got pulled into the laugh too.

"Ha. You are cute. — Watching you be that plainly glad about it makes me think it more, in fact."

She covered the whole face with both hands. Even her ears went red. A shake.

"…Th-thank you."

A small, slightly elevated voice. She still couldn't look him in the eye — only flicked her gaze for a fraction — but the thank you came clean.

He worried she might never come up if he kept watching, so he tipped his head against the rock and looked at the sky.

After a stretch, the warmth of her presence settled back into his side, alongside. She had pulled herself together and was, evidently, looking up at the sky too. Standing closer than before — her own way, perhaps, of acknowledging the rudeness of all the head-down so far.

"S-sorry. I'm not used to being called cute — my desires came out, accidentally."

"That's a surprise."

"Day to day, I'm swinging a sword."

"Ah — fair."

Watching Elma in the field, cute would not be the first reflex word, true. Beautiful, yes — cute, no.

While he was thinking that, she pivoted the conversation.

"— I have a dream that lies outside the battlefield."

The tongue-trouble was gone now. The line came clean. The voice had also dropped into a more serious note.

He kept his eye on the sky and nodded slightly, listening.

"I'd like to live like a normal woman, you know. That is — to say — well — I'd wanted to have a family."

"That's a good dream."

He kept his answer short, deliberately not crowding her words.

"But it seems I don't have the talent for it. I keep failing. I've never managed to do anything that read as womanly. Once I stepped into the mercenary trade, that got worse."

"You're so beautiful — surely you got hit on?"

"It's a male-dominated trade, so it would be a lie to say not at all. But the moment they saw me draw the demonic sword, they left. — Demonic-sword or no, frankly, the result wouldn't change much. Apparently a woman more skilled than themselves is not, on the whole, what most men want."

"— I see."

He neither agreed nor disagreed. He just received it.

He felt her shift slightly beside him; he didn't turn his head.

"For a long time I didn't really mind, because I had a battlefield-bound dream of my own."

"Battlefield-bound dream?"

"— Like my ancestors, I wanted to be a hero. A hero who saves people."

The line landed in him.

She had the same wish he did.

And in the same beat, the fact that it was, for her, a battlefield-bound dream — made something click.

"That alone wears you out. — There's a saying that's been passed down in the Eluiza house."

"…Which is?"

"Along with a battlefield-bound dream, hold a dream that lies outside the battlefield. The dream outside the battlefield is what leads you back from the battlefield, alive."

"— Good line."

"Yes. — In the end, if you only carry the battlefield-bound dream, you can't return to ordinary life. You can't leave the field, and you fall apart there. The line came from an ancestor who, as a mercenary, all but became the battlefield himself. I trust the line because it came from him. — Probably he leaned too far into the battlefield-bound dream and regretted it. That's why he carved it onto the demonic sword's grip itself, of all things."

She unbuckled the demonic sword in its scabbard and handed it to him.

She pointed at the grip. He looked.

He unwrapped the bound thread from the grip and saw, in old-fashioned script, the very line she had just spoken.

"Carved on the demonic sword. Of all places. He must have wanted that line, more than anything else, to reach whoever picked the sword up after him."

"…"

He kept staring at the line. His expression went deliberately complex.

"— Merea."

She turned to him. He turned to her.

Their eyes met.

"Do you have a dream that lies outside the battlefield?"

"—"

He couldn't answer.

---

He knew he had a desire — but the desire was battlefield-bound.

The chain of events around the Demon Lord designation had pulled him in, and inside that, he had grown the wish — save the Demon Lords. Be the hero of the Demon Lords.

But that was a dream inside combat.

In real terms, he had seen the Demon Lords pursued by states, attacked in front of him, and out of his own push back impulse he had layered the wish on.

But that was the whole of it.

If he thought it through — what came next?

Fight. Resist. Win. — And then?

He couldn't bring up an answer.

What he should aim at, what should follow — winning is not the end. He understood that. But no broader, world-anchored picture rose in him.

It was, in a sense, the proof that he hadn't yet really taken his place in this world. The realisation went through him cold.

A small, sudden chill in the body. The sense that the world had let go of him alone.

The backs of the comrades around him suddenly felt far away.

They had grown up here. They knew only this world. They were, by necessity, anchored to it.

This world was their anchor. If they recognised the world, they could recognise their own existence as solid.

He, meanwhile — knowing the other side — could view the world from outside. He could be sceptical of the world's basic order. He could trace its surface and step back, quietly thinking something's off. On any truth they all felt was real, he could quietly reserve doubt.

That ability — was, somehow, frightening.

Even for them, anchored to this world, the battlefield read as a kind of unreal zone. Elma's framing said as much.

So she was telling him, as a kind of life-rule, that a world-anchored dream — outside the battlefield — was important.

— And I'm only barely holding to a battlefield.

The single concrete impulse he could read in himself was a precarious dream rooted in the world's un-certainty.

— Blurry.

For a moment he truly did not know where his feet were.

---

Stranded, alone, in the gap between two worlds.

---

Did he have a dream — outside the battlefield — that he could rely on?

…He didn't know.

---

"…I don't know."

"…I see."

He answered honestly.

Elma didn't look bothered, didn't get angry. She smiled, gently, watching him.

She put her hand against his cheek. The gesture of a mother soothing a child. Or — of a faithful woman calming a lover.

"Then — let's look for it from now on. It's fine. You'll find one quickly. You haven't been out of Lindholm long, have you?"

"— Mm."

"There are plenty of things that are new to you. While you're seeing them, you'll find one. — In the meantime, aim to be my husband, perhaps? Indisputably outside-the-battlefield. As a bonus, my dream lands too. Two birds, one stone."

She lifted the hand off his cheek, set both hands to her hips, and announced it with great mock-pride.

A joke, to lift him.

She herself didn't know why the line had come out. She didn't, on reflection, regret it either.

Merea laughed at it.

"Hah. Not a bad option. I'll consider it."

"What. You called me beautiful, didn't you. Answer immediately. Immediately."

"I've been warned, by many people, that marrying based purely on the outside ends in pain."

He thought, fondly, of the half-joking lectures the Heroic Spirits had given him on the summit.

"Ha. Fine. Get to know my insides, then. — Wait, did I just say something quite striking? I think I just said something quite striking."

"Best not to think too hard about it, no?"

"Mm. You're right."

She'd just go red again, Merea thought, and kept the observation to himself.

About then, from where the others had gathered, came —

"All ri~ght — we're rolling out shortly!"

Shaw's voice.

"— So he says."

"Right. First we aim for somewhere we can sleep without worry. We have to find an outside-the-battlefield place to be before any of the rest of this works. Find a dream outside the battlefield while in the battlefield would only bother you."

She smiled at him cleanly, then bounced off toward the others.

He watched her back go, smiling.

"— That's right."

A small nod.

"I'll get us to that place. I promise I will."

He still didn't know, concretely, what an outside-the-battlefield dream meant for him. The previous-style flash-in of an impulse hadn't come.

But the battlefield dream hadn't gone away either.

So he resolved, first, to deliver on the battlefield dream.

What had really changed, when he tried to name it, was hard to pin down. Something — small — had lifted off his shoulders. And he could feel, more strongly than before, that coming back alive now had a stake in it.

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