The Light of the Seven Imperial Weapons
68話 「七帝器の光」
"Tch —"
What was running this mana-drain was, beyond any doubt, the demon-blade Krishra in his hand.
In Violent-God mode, his internal mana-organ was topping the drained amount up almost as fast as it was siphoned, but the drain went on for an unusually long time.
How much mana, exactly, was this thing pulling.
"Th- this is —"
Beside him, Elma let out a small startled note.
Her hand was still wrapped around his arm, but no mana was being pulled out of her.
"Got any read on it? — Damn, how much longer is it going to keep drawing—"
"…I see. — So that's what this was."
Elma was nodding to herself, as if a piece had fit.
"The blade's true use. — No. The Seven Imperial Weapons' true purpose. …I see it now."
"True purpose?"
"Yes. — If my read is right."
She hesitated through the line, swallowed once, and continued.
"If you could share immediately, that'd put me at ease. How long is this going to keep pulling is, for me, a separate kind of fear."
— and Merea noticed, suddenly, that the hand on his arm had tightened.
As if she had braced against something she feared.
She leaned a little of her weight onto him — and, in a shaking voice —
"This —"
"— is a strategic weapon."
Her line froze Merea's thinking for a beat.
"You could call it a weapon of mass destruction."
What she was saying didn't land cleanly.
But she was looking up at him with a near-tearful face, and —
"What do I do, Merea… I might have unearthed something I should not have unearthed."
— that her face had, in one beat, become worn out —
"— It's all right."
— made him say it, even without grounds.
For the first time, Merea was seeing Elma weakened down to just-a-girl. The shoulder he caught reflexively was startlingly fragile.
The current 〈Sword Emperor〉, Elma Eluiza, was — naturally — the person in the world who knew the most about the demon-blade Krishra, as the descendant of its maker.
What she knew, however, was fragmentary, and almost all of it was wrapped in dark cloud.
As if the information had been intentionally erased, the load-bearing pieces had gone missing.
Elma had been told about the demon-blade by her direct-line mother and grandfather — orally.
Her grandfather, apparently, had begun the slow work of reconstructing what had been erased.
The information that had accumulated through that effort, Elma had retained.
Even so, it had never connected cleanly.
And now, triggered by an unforeseen circumstance, it was about to all snap into shape.
Elma had grasped it.
Why, in the present age, were the records on the Imperial Weapons so thin?
The instant the answer came to her — the rest of the predictions snapped to certainty.
Too late, though.
The seal on the Imperial Weapon was, at this moment, already broken.
A new war, with this as the trigger — she could see it coming.
"All of it. Disguised. — There really was something during the Dark War Era…"
The war-period in which the Seven Imperial Weapons had reached their flowering was, by historians, called the Dark War Era.
Information from it was thin; the wars themselves had not been ordered the way present wars were; the scale of destruction had been enormous. — Visually, ethically, tragically.
The full meaning of darkness covering all three.
And in that darkness, the records of the Seven Imperial Weapons had, deliberately or otherwise, gotten lost.
Among the fragments that had survived in the descendants' hands — the details Elma alone knew, by virtue of being from one of the Seven Imperial Houses —
— Massacre. Sealing. Pact.
— were those three words.
Other small pieces existed; but those three were the load-bearing terms.
And right now, watching the demon-blade's blade grow into something massively oversized, having confirmed once that it was a strategic weapon, the rest assembled itself.
"The accepted account is fake —"
The most-told version of the Seven Imperial Weapons' origin: as combat methods became dominated by personal strength, strategy, and group tactics, weapons were brought back as a new differentiating axis. Following the primal-era pattern. In particular, to oppose spell-formula, they were given phenomenon-interference.
The actual story was different.
The shape weapon-against-spell-formula was an intentional disguise.
The phenomenon-interference was the cover; underneath —
The Seven Imperial Weapons were —
— themselves a spell-formula-driven mass-destruction instrument.
Once she saw that, she understood why even the Seven Imperial Houses, the holders of the weapons themselves, had so little surviving information.
Pact.
Elma had been told by her grandfather that the same word had been preserved across the other Seven Imperial Houses too.
— Almost certainly,
— Elma drew the conclusion, internally apologising to each of the Seven House founders.
"In the era after the Dark War, the Seven Imperial Houses, by mutual consent, secretly erased the records on the Imperial Weapons."
Their reasoning was easy enough to predict.
The word Massacre gathered all of it.
In the Dark War Era, where mass-killing was already commonplace, that one word — Massacre, a one-sided slaughter — carried specific weight.
This must not exist in the world.
The Imperial Weapons, as weapons of mass destruction, must be sealed.
Almost certainly, that had been their position.
The strength of the weapons as strategic-class instruments was such that, across all seven, they had agreed: this must not be passed on to later eras.
So, across generations, they had moved toward expunging the weapons' true power from the historical record.
At some point along the way, the true power was forgotten by the age. Even the houses meant to be the weapons' guardians lost the key to actually firing the weapons.
The key, to fire the Imperial Weapons' true strength, was an enormous quantity of spell-element. Almost certainly, the magic-element type.
"The 〈Thirty-Eight Heavenly Sword Brigade〉's name, too, I always thought was off…"
Thirty-eight swords raised to heaven — that was the in-tale account. A plausible-sounding lie.
A mere thirty-eight-mercenary unit, in an era as lawless as the Dark War, would not have left this kind of name behind.
In a war-era that broke through every ethical boundary humanity has ever drawn, thirty-eight people could not, in any natural reading, have done what was credited to them.
— Demon-blade. They were using the demon-blade.
〈Guardian of the Demon-Blade.〉
Among the fragmentary surviving records she had clawed up, that phrase had appeared, just once.
That was the load-bearing version.
Working back from the moment Krishra had responded to Merea's inhuman mana output —
— Thirty-eight individuals capable of supplying the enormous mana that fires an Imperial Weapon.
That had been the true shape of the 〈Thirty-Eight Heavenly Sword Brigade.〉
And the founder of the Eluiza house — the maker of the demon-blade — had led them.
The Sword Emperor line, for several generations from the founder, had carried the magic-element aptitude.
After the founder, however, who had operated through the Dark War Era, the Eluiza descendants had moved toward sealing the weapon's true power. Almost certainly, in the same process, they had let go of the magic-element aptitude.
They threw the key away themselves.
Probably they did not regret it.
But —
— They threw too much away. If they wanted to seal it, they should have left a moderate amount of information. Not none.
After the demon-blade's true power was almost fully forgotten, an inversion of the trajectory had occurred — Elma knew the next bit too.
— Because the demon-blade was that opaque, the search to dig the information back up began.
The family heirloom.
Wanting to know the unknown is, in its way, a natural human impulse.
The Imperial Houses' founders had under-estimated the strength of that human curiosity.
And they themselves had not been thorough.
If they had wanted to seal the weapons cleanly, they should have thrown the weapons away.
That they had not is up for arbitration; the historical fact is that the weapons remained.
Elma had been born at, in a sense, the peak of the era of digging for what had been hidden about the demon-blade.
So when Krishra, just now, responded to Merea's enormous mana — she could understand.
In a single breath, she felt as if she had run back through history.
Why the true power of the Imperial Weapons had been hidden across all seven houses.
There was now only one answer.
— Houses that occasionally faced one another on the battlefield as enemies still sat at a table together — irrespective of standing — to bind a pact. The Imperial Weapons were that dangerous.
And now, in Elma's generation, that pact was about to be undone.
Strictly: it would not have been visible without a singular existence.
Multiple people don't carry a single demon-blade together. Multiple people who all carry enormous spell-element — even less likely.
The chance of one person who can fire it solo — least likely.
— if 〈Merea Mea〉 hadn't been in this age.
The blade in his hand had grown to a size beyond decent description.
A glowing blade.
A light of destruction.
Anyone watching this — anyone who knew it was the demon-blade, and who had a working knowledge of the Seven Imperial Weapons and the Seven Imperial Houses — would have seen the true power.
Serius Brad Mūzeg.
Hasim Kudo Lemuse.
Those two, almost certainly.
And, in the same beat, they would have caught the possibility, the danger, and the utility.
So, from here, almost certainly —
— a second war, this one over the Imperial Weapons themselves, would begin.
Whether or not it would be a return of the Dark War Era, she could not say.
But information, once spread, would inevitably move every nation toward Imperial-Weapon collection.
This, exactly, was —
— the circulation of war, and of history.
Elma, seeing it, tasted a despair she could not put words to.
She had opened a box she should not have opened.
"Aaah… I — I —"
Elma could only stand, half-stunned, watching the blade rise toward the sky.
Merea, gripping the hilt, had — on his sharp instinct — also caught something.
"…………Merea, that — give it to me."
She came back into herself, finally, and said it.
The deployment had happened.
The exposure had happened.
Hiding it, no longer possible.
So at least the responsibility should be hers.
Considering also that they were currently in the middle of a war, Elma — as a warrior, and as the heir of the Sword Emperor house — was carried toward the I have to handle this myself call.
But —
"— No."
An answer she did not expect, from Merea.
A few beats.
Elma snapped back to herself —
"Tch! Give it to me—!!"
— and tried, by force, to pull the demon-blade from Merea's hand.
She had read, off Merea's thinking expression and the light moving in his eyes, what he intended.
So she had to take the blade off him, even if it meant striking him; she launched herself at him.
But Merea —
"—"
— pushed her back, with one hand.
Don't come close.
The hand said it.
And he — lifted the maximally extended demon-blade — toward the sky.
— I cannot let Elma swing this.
That was the line in Merea.
Reading what Elma had said, and watching her face, he had grasped what kind of object the demon-blade was.
The first reflex inside him had been: don't let Elma swing it.
— Elma is a warrior.
A woman with the resolve to take lives.
On top of that — she felt a real responsibility for the comrades currently fighting.
And they were on a battlefield.
She would, for those comrades, swing the blade.
Merea was certain of it.
Their acquaintance was not long, but he had had some real conversation with her.
So that part was not in question.
Elma was carrying responsibility for having unsealed it.
Merea's eye saw that.
And, almost certainly — Elma, despite being a warrior, flinched at the use of this particular blade.
He could read it from her expression; more than that, the feel was easy to grasp by sense.
He himself stood at a similar place, so the shape was familiar.
When a weapon is too enormous, the ease with which it lets you take a life produces a particular kind of aversion in the user.
It's not logic.
A weapon of overwhelming output makes its user shrink, internally.
Among the Heroic Spirits, plenty had carried that feeling.
The visual scene — everything — is different from the close-fought version.
You can no longer, after this kind of swing, tell yourself the defence-of-the-mind line the opponent was strong, holding back was impossible. That kind of self-issued comfort no longer applies. And those comforts exist for a reason — they are mental defences.
Of course one does not premise lethal force on those comforts.
The resolve is there.
Even so —
— A human is not that strong.
And — what makes this further ugly — when the implement that takes the lives is, strictly speaking, not yourself, the line gets fuzzier.
A boundary hard to fix.
A scale of conscience swinging unsteadily.
If clean lines could be drawn, life would be easy.
They cannot.
Reading those small interior beats, Merea, instantly, decided.
He looked again at the black mass of men in front of him, and at the red dragon and Serius further back, and resolved.
This is a weapon.
In the present situation, this is — an opportunity.
But to make Elma swing this, on top of the curse-like generational weight she was already carrying, would be to add the responsibility for another large quantity of lives.
And so Merea, for the first time, acted as a master — selfishly.
— I'll swing it.
Pushing Elma back as she caught his intent, Merea raised the demon-blade toward the sky.
On the other side, Serius — watching from afar — read the intent too.
But too late.
"Tch—!!"
Merea, as a final push, flooded the rest of his body's mana into the blade. The blade-length jumped to absurd scale.
The mana surge howled around him in a gale; the wind-force lifted the loose stones of the wilderness around him into the air.
The true power of the demon-blade, which thirty-eight magic-rich practitioners had once cooperated to fire — Merea, in Violent-God mode, fired alone.
And — the secondary effect, the diffusion-of-guilt across thirty-eight pairs of hands they had built into the design — Merea also transcended, alone.
"———"
— and swung.
Every soul on that battlefield looked up at the great blade of light coming down.
The demon-blade drew up an immense mass of life in one breath.
Cleaving the clouds.
Cleaving the air.
Cleaving men.
Cleaving the ground.
That sword —
— cut through everything.
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