The Roar of the Demon God

"— Ten minutes. Ten minutes, and I'll catch him off-guard. On top of that, if our line starts to give, I can shore it up — for the same ten minutes."

"You're serious? Do you have any idea how many of them are over there?"

The play against Serius was one thing — but the second half of that was what tipped Hasim into asking back in spite of himself.

"I'm serious. But I'll say it again — ten minutes. And after that, I'll be next to useless."

Merea answered evenly.

Some distance away, 〈Violent Emperor〉 Marisa had been watching Merea without looking away; in that moment her shoulders tensed. No one noticed.

"So — if you decide we can't push any further, signal me."

Merea threw the line back at Hasim with a sharp glance.

Hasim let out a small grunt at that, then —

"— Understood. I'll let you know."

— nodded, soberly.

"Good. — Looks like they'll be on us soon."

Around then, Merea finally looked across to their side.

"Yeah. The wave of bloodlust just hit."

Hasim followed his lead and looked across. The band where the Mūzegan cavalry was beginning to stir.

In the next beat —

"Your Majesty! Mūzeg has moved!"

A voice came up from the Lemusan cavalry holding the wall.

Merea and Hasim arrived at the same certainty in the same beat, and started moving in the same beat — each in his own direction.

"Here it comes. — Don't forget what I said earlier! Being outnumbered is not purely a disadvantage! Don't miss a single one of my orders! I'll show you the road, every step!"

Hasim swept his hand level through the air and threw a powerful rallying cry to his Lemusans.

While he did, Merea pushed through the men and stepped out to the centre of the front line.

His view opened up.

On the threshold of a battle on this scale, a small breath escaped him in spite of himself.

"If you're up there in the sea of the heavens — please. Watch over us."

Merea looked once at the sky, and said it — only just audible.

And then —

---

That day, in that place — a war began.

Once it began, the opening was almost anticlimactic.

The pre-battle weight of feeling vanished in a beat, and a coarse air brushed at the cheeks.

After that — there was nothing for it but to give one's body to the violent stream.

---

The first move Mūzeg's cavalry made was the standard one for a side with the numbers — a half-encirclement, swinging out to flank.

Whether against an individual or a formation, the advantage of taking the side does not waver.

As the two sides faced off, the disparity in numbers became clearer by the minute.

Even as Mūzeg's line spread laterally, the density did not thin. In a single word — overwhelming.

In the middle of it, Hasim — watching Mūzeg's movement without blinking — caught something off.

"— Their numbers have grown."

It had been hidden cleanly. But the act of moving had exposed it.

The number of Mūzegan riders was up.

"So they pulled in allies who'd been holding encirclement positions elsewhere."

The reason Mūzeg had taken so unusually much time on its operational and command formation — there it was.

The arrival of reinforcements from the rear had been masked behind that wall.

"No — being outnumbered was a known from the start. It's not yet beyond what I expected. Don't waver now."

He told himself that, and looked across at his subordinates, dressing the lines on either flank.

He had read that Mūzeg would go for the half-encirclement.

Accordingly, he had pre-split his men into two wings, and —

"Go! Don't let them through!"

— intended to slam them into Mūzeg's vanguard as it pushed in to close the encirclement.

Almost the entire force was committed to the encirclement defence.

That a flank breach was lethal, he knew perfectly well.

But the more he poured into the wings, the thinner the centre got — and Lemuse was already outnumbered to begin with.

Each time his white-armoured cavalry galloped off, the sun glaring on the plate, the centre around him — Hasim's centre — visibly thinned.

"Don't mind it! Focus on the wings!"

Hasim kept the orders going.

His men kept peeling off, left and right.

Then —

"— There it is."

He saw, against his thinning centre, Mūzeg's cavalry begin to align hooves and form up.

They had committed enormously to the encirclement and still had the residual to push the centre. Meaning — what Hasim was seeing in the middle was, in effect, the actual gap in absolute power.

There was nothing between the two forces to break the line of sight. A clean view across the open.

By now, his being the commander would already be obvious to them.

That Mūzeg's centre column was a flying column aimed squarely at his head, Hasim did not doubt.

Decapitating the commander was, after all, another standard way to win a war.

And yet — Hasim was not bothered.

Because in the centre —

"Counting on you."

— he had a comrade he had joined hands with.

---

Merea was standing in front of Hasim, presence taut around him. The very front of the centre.

He was rolling his shoulders, loosening through the body, his sharp eyes returning the levelled spears of the Mūzegan line right back at them.

"— So they have formula corps along, but not the elites we ran into on the mountain."

"Cavalry as their primary, then. Not unreasonable: if you're laying a search net, that's the personnel mix that makes sense."

"Helps that the giant light cannon isn't coming our way. A formula at that level — I have to actually see it before I can compose a reverse. Even with the confidence I'll get there in time, it cools the gut."

Beside Merea was Elma. Unlike him, on horseback.

Behind her was Aiz, who seemed to be making a point of staying out of the conversation.

"Even so — as the one who brought all this down on us in the first place, I can't help feeling guilty about handing the worst of the fight off to you and the others —"

Elma let it slip, head dipping, fine features clouded.

Merea looked up at her with a gentle smile.

There was not a trace of the old fragility in it — warm, and yet with a clean spine running through. A strange, reliable weight.

"You've been handed your own hard piece of work by Hasim. There's no need to take more on top."

The Demon Lords behind him nodded along.

Reading their faces, Elma finally lifted hers.

"…Right. — There I go again, getting heavy in the head. We're on a battlefield. Reset."

She slapped both her cheeks at once with her palms, and put a sharp soldier's expression on.

The downcast beauty was gone.

"For my part, I'll get one back at Mūzeg. If I land it, the line gets a breath."

"Right. Leave that side to you."

"Yeah."

She gave Merea a firm answer, and pulled back.

Beside Hasim, she would, evidently, wait for the moment.

"— Right."

Watching her go for a beat, Merea finally turned forward.

Mūzeg, by all signs, had finished assembling its central column, the one aimed at the heart of Hasim's lines.

Merea saw it, exhaled deeply, and in the same beat clapped his hands together once.

"〈Six Wings of the Wind God (Van Ester)〉."

The six wings of wind formed at his back, kicking the dirt of the wilderness up with them.

The wings at Lindholm had pulled up the mountain's snow-coat, glowing white. Here, in this wilderness, they pulled the rough red earth into themselves and lit a deep red. Compared to the wings on the mountain, the red ones carried a wildness about them.

On top of that —

"〈Three Tails of the Earth God (Kria Lilith)〉."

A little below the waist — at roughly the tailbone — vast, serpent-like tails sprang up in an instant.

Strictly, they didn't grow out of his body. They were more like enormous, midair-suspended pillars of pure black; but the way they pivoted around his tailbone made them read, at a glance, as living things.

In bulk: about five times Merea's own height. Strangely thick. Tough-looking. Polished black, like obsidian, with that low silent shine.

When the three black tails shaped themselves out of nothing in front of them, it was, as much as anything, the Demon Lords behind Merea who flinched.

They knew, intellectually, that what they were seeing was the work of his formulae. Their gut, in the same instant, said: do not touch.

Naturally enough, the Mūzeg riders coming the other way — the ones at the front, especially — went stiff in the face.

Even so —

— Not yet.

Merea was thinking, dissatisfied.

The Mūzeg cavalry had eased their charge a hair on seeing his strange formulae, but they were not stopping outright. The leading riders' faces had tightened, but the men just behind them had pushed up cries of encouragement, and the leading line's hooves were being driven forward by sheer pressure from the back.

— More.

Holding the Mūzeg cavalry in his eye, he poured more magic into the formulae.

The six wings drew up more red-brown dirt and grew further. Like a sky-dragon's wings — Teishia. — they were, by now, far larger than his own body. Spread fully, they gave the impression of something that could engulf a watcher's entire field of view.

The three tails grew the same way, gathering more of that strange black mineral onto themselves, swelling. Serpent didn't cover them anymore. They were a black monster.

One of those black tails coiled forward, struck the ground in front of him with a crack, and drove a crater into it.

The other two stood up to the sky as if to pierce it, weaving in a slow, unstable, dreadful sway.

Merely moving a little drove craters into the earth — and, above, that same thing was swaying through the air. The picture was, plainly, worse than any nightmare.

The body controlling those wings and tails. Compared to the size of either, just a small human shape.

But the red eyes that looked out from between strands of white hair sent a hard, frightening glare; and the closer the riders got, the harder that glare worked at their hearts.

He looked like a monster.

He didn't look human.

He looked like power itself made flesh.

That was — a Demon God.

As if reading the thought directly out of their heads, Merea's eyes were fixed sharp on the cavalry. He had been watching the riders' faces; now his eyes shifted lower. — The horses.

Several of the horses the men were riding had begun shaking their heads side to side in a strange motion.

Then they were neighing — plain refusal — and their gallop dropped off. He watched, and confirmed it.

— One more step.

Seeing that, Merea — as if to deliver the finishing blow — clapped once more.

"〈White Lightning of the Lightning God (Celesta Barca)〉."

Triple deployment.

At this point, Merea was certain the other side wasn't going to fire a formula at him.

If they hadn't moved by now, this close, they didn't have an attack-grade formula in the column.

Certain of that, he took the formula bandwidth he'd been holding in reserve for reverse-formula work, and routed it into another Heroic Spirit formula.

A bolt fell.

A crack split the air. The sky lit.

The white bolt, in the same instant, dropped onto Merea's body.

The Mūzeg cavalry watched it, mouths open.

A monster, sheathed in white lightning.

The sight was too unnatural for any frame they had. It cut down whatever fight was left in horses and men alike.

The leading riders' hooves stopped.

Pressed by the comrades behind them, they leaned hard back, shifting their centre of gravity backward by force.

Their fear travelled, fast, down the column to the rear.

The monster had been waiting for that.

The instant they buckled to his pressure —

— Merea, finally, launched himself.

A monster wrapped in six wings, three tails, and white lightning — bared its fangs.

---

It was overwhelming.

Mūzeg had committed a great deal of force to the encirclement on the wings, true. But the centre column they'd put into the breakthrough, in absolute numbers, was still more than ample.

And yet, what was flying through the air over the centre right now —

— was Mūzegan riders' bodies.

"— !!"

A man's scream, and the sound of a strike. Then armour shattering.

A black, snake-like coil swept across the field, sending a man's body flying with one pass.

"— !!"

A red, half-translucent storm-wing flung a horse off its hooves with a single beat.

"— !!"

White lightning slipped between men and pulled a spray of blood up through the lane it cut.

A monster that had adapted to the battlefield was, without question, the strongest thing on it.

Even his own people felt fear of him.

This was something out of a different world from theirs.

"— D-don't come near me—!"

A scream, larger than the rest, ripped across the field. — A Mūzeg rider's.

In the next instant, in front of the man who'd screamed —

— the white-haired monster appeared, in one beat.

Wreathed in white lightning, sound cracking around him, he had arrived ahead of his own footsteps.

The screaming rider saw the monster's face inches from his own; in the same instant, a violent gust hit him in the face. Every muscle in his body locked up reflexively against the weight of presence.

Right beside him, the ground burst with a sound like detonation; he flicked his eyes that way for a beat, and at the edge of his vision saw something obsidian-black and enormous writhing.

By that point his will to fight was almost entirely gone. There was, plainly, no winning.

"Hh —"

But the training drilled into the body is — surprisingly faithful — and as a last act, his body, on its own, swung the spear in his hand. His body was a soldier's.

"—"

But just a soldier could not, here, contend.

A casual hand-edge swing from the monster cleaved the spear at the haft.

What is that hand made of.

The instant the rider thought it —

"Ka —"

— a black coil came in across his left side.

A strange, popping sound came from somewhere deep in his lungs —

— and the rider's awareness cut out there.

---

Merea, as his hand was taking lives, found the sensation of it sickening, and tried to drown that chill in pure forward drive.

There was no holding back any longer.

There was no hesitation.

Even so — the weight of those lives stayed on his hands.

The smell of death stuck to the tip of his nose and would not lift.

The screams hung in his ears and rang.

He took it all on, and at the centre of the field he roared.

He thought only: forward.

Not in a positional sense.

In the sense of living — he was trying to push forward.

For his own life, and the lives of his comrades, he kept driving.

What stood in the way of that brilliance of life —

— with his own hands, he meant to clear away.