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— APOCALYPSE TRIGGER —
Victory at a Cost
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A young princess, silver hair flying in the sweet-smelling wind, stood before the bend of a steaming, surging lahar river, covered up to her dress in mud, and the mud around her, covered in vile blood.
You are a princess, the voices of her family echoed in her mind, as if that meant anything to her, in a place where the downpour of sour rain and the drumming of rolling thunder drowned out the blood-curdling screams and cries of demons and young men, in a battlefield lit by flashes of lightning and flare spells hanging in the sky. She canted her head to gaze skywards at the hole in the clouds and, at the end of it all, was a silhouette in the clouds outlined by lightning: Darkest Black was one who swallowed the walls and the sky, raining meteors and nightmares.
—An easy target.
It towered over the mercenary armies below, who surely must have quavered in their boots at the sight of such a horrifying creature of the otherworld. With tentacles for a beard, tentacles for limbs, it could walk upon a fortress and reduce it to a footprint. Some kind of bluish-green slime exuded from its pores.
—The mercenaries’ eyes shone. That slime was said to have rejuvenating properties. It would fetch a lucrative price.
Darkest Black need not even look at the gnats swinging toy swords at its feet—no, a gnat would have been larger. These were mere bacterium, apt to die with a mere thought, and think of death, it did. Toxic gas rolled down with a slight breath, sweeping through the mercenary forces still engaged in mortal combat with the demons who inhabited the swamps at Darkest Black’s feet. Elven and beastkin warriors turned to liquid on the spot, and so did many of the humans.
—But it’s okay, because they had life insurance. The cheating bastards’ wives would actually be happy about it.
Some of the humans lasted about a minute in the gas, collecting jars of the slime before running out of the fog and passing them over to their favorite comrades, finally dying with a thumbs up. If I cannot pay my debt, then you should, instead.
Elven ritual magics formed storms of lightning, a kilometer in diameter, that shot off towards the Great Enemy, burst-frying thousands of demons along the way, dispelling the acrid gas, before finally slamming into Darkest Black’s foot.
It felt like a tingle, like static from a carpet. Many thousands of demons respawned, as if a city-destroying spell was nothing.
But the mercenaries were confident—or rather, impatient. Every now and then, an exchange of queries would be made in the midst of all this carnage.
“Where’s the Hero Princess!”
“She’s still negotiating!”
“Just give her 90%, already!”
They couldn’t sell the slime jars if they were all dead—and then the Princess would pretty much take 99%. Well, if she survived that long, she deserved it, but wow, at least some of them didn’t deserve to die, y’know?
The Hero Princess of Dol-Ar, Cadenza Mor d’Dol-Ar, was her name. She turned away, having finally formulated a contingency to deal with certain stubborn, greedy, and cowardly men. As she walked through the mercenaries’ base camp, men carried their disfigured comrades on stretchers, some of whom cried out for their mothers as they passed by. Potion boys hurried to deliver racks and racks of mana potions to healers, and some of the stretchers were occupied by other healers, themselves too mana-drunk to continue their work.
She reached the end of the camp and entered a command tent, finding the representatives of fifteen mercenary companies arguing vigorously among each other. The moment she stepped foot, however, and they directed all that argument towards her, instead.
“You are a member of the Dol-Ar Royal Family! You have no need for so much wealth, so just agree to 10% already!” one of the board members of the Archville Regiment said.
“He’s right! He’s right!” the other reps said.
Coming from a scene of death and being immediately confronted with this sort of talk, she snapped. “Fool! I do not have personal money! Do you think I’m here on vacation?” Mor’s eyes sharpened. “Fifty percent!” It was a high number, very much the kind of tool she needed to play with their emotions.
The reps were aghast—then started throwing enough slander at her to have them all executed. They were brave to do this, not because Mor was a ruffian just like their employees, but because she spoke the same language: money.
“We will incur a loss, you vixen!” another rep said, this one from the Oreol Merchant Marines. They were the ones who provided the landing craft for this island invasion operation.
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Mor frowned. It had come to this, even if it was expected. She raised her hand, and by pure royal authority, everyone quieted.
“I will take the corpse,” she said. “You take everything else.”
It was high-risk, high-reward. She didn’t know what she’d do with the literal corpse of the World’s enemy, but it was, in all likelihood, high quality material. There was a high chance of Dark Magic in play, though, but that only meant that she’d have to sell to a more…niche market. On the off-chance that it was too dangerous to be useful, at least she’d be keeping it away from people who wouldn’t have second thoughts.
The representatives quietly considered her proposal. They were greedy enough to throw thousands of their best men into the fray, especially since the Hero Princess was coming along. With her, everything seemed like a foregone conclusion.
It’s just that, up until this very moment, they had never agreed on how to split the rewards. All the nations of the continent of Meridea, and even the various maritime nations of the continents of Suru and Temil, were footing the bill. The world’s riches were being thrown at their faces in exchange for a bit of blood, so of course they would argue about how to split it all.
At the very least, they had already established their bottom lines based on casualty and operating expense projections, so now they were just squabbling over the excess amount.
But as greedy as they were, they were also calculating. The risk had skyrocketed in their minds, seeing the raw, fearful power of Darkest Black. With their casualties mounting, they each wanted just a bit more, needing to cut into even the Princess’s pie.
So, Mor thought, why not just throw them a bone, and take the risk upon herself? She would rather annihilate the big ol’ tentacle monster outside and get back to her sister sooner rather than later, and half the world’s riches wouldn’t change her mind—even loose change would do as a reward, but she had a tiresome image to uphold.
“Just the corpse?” the Archville representative said.
“Just the corpse,” Mor replied.
“So…the 50 billion Crowns, Regals, and Imperials—”
“All yours,” Mor preempted the Oreol rep. “I am sure the kings, queens, and churches will all want the corpse disposed with. All I’m asking for is your support.”
Mor’s implication gripped them all. She wanted political backing to make sure people didn’t pester her about coming into possession of Darkest Black’s corpse.
The representatives exchanged glances. “Where do we sign?” the Archville rep said.
***
Darkest Black looked up and peered into the Deepest Abyss. Its feet had been itchy for a while, now. It couldn’t actually see its feet, as they were obscured by clouds, so all it could do was stomp around and scratch one foot with another every now and then.
—It did so, incurring 2,000 casualties.
Perhaps it should walk again and find a different stargazing spot. It could not see what it was looking for. The constellations in the sky were all wrong.
That was when a chill went up its spine.
The clouds beneath it glowed.
It moved to evade.
But not in time.
A kilometers-wide beam pierced one of its hearts, and it screamed a ten-thousand-toned scream that was heard all over the world. Historians reported it as its death wail, but then they realized…they were wrong.
They recorded Death Wail II.
And then Death Wail III: Ultima.
Death Wail IV: Fin Ultima.
Death Wail V: Sin Perpetuous.
Death Wail VI: Quan willit Finis?
The world had become desensitized to the death wails of its most feared enemy. There were finally thirteen, in all—thirteen hearts returned to mana by the Hero Princess’s most terrible attack: the Sunniest Day. With knowledge from her previous life, from her previous world, it was trivial to force a nuclear fusion reaction to occur with nothing but the water in the air. Together with a bit of magitech, she had twenty Swords of Murderbright forged by the great Dorson Haemer, each sword nothing more than a dull rapier of the highest mithril purity—a 99.9999% purity blade, existing solely for the purpose of channeling the Hero Princess’s tremendous energy into a cataclysmic particle beam.
Each sword, just as they tore a hole clean through Darkest Black, also tore a hole through Mor’s wallet. It did not help that each one flash-vaporized upon use.
Historians wrote of tears falling from the Princess’s face as she finished off the Great Enemy, perhaps grieving the fall of such a mighty foe. In truth, she was grieving for millions of Crowns flash-vaporizing per second.
With that, Darkest Black fell to its knees, incurring 12,000 casualties, and fell into the ocean, destroying half of the war fleet.
All in all, it was well worth the cost.
—Then a thought reverberated throughout the world.
I am defeated, but you have not won;
A gift, I bestow, from emotions will come;
Beasts of legend, his will shall be done;
Your cities shall fall, with the setting of the sun.
When sunset came, monsters emerged from the forests and deserts. Villages and farmland were ravaged. Armies were decimated, and their deserters turned bandit. The blame game was played, and the Royal Family of Dol-Ar went under the blade.
—Empire turned into kingdoms. Castles turned into rubble.
In the midst of it all, one girl tried her best. Even as the Kingdom of Dol-Ar turned into a republic, and her family was slaughtered by merchants and separatist nobles, she fought the hordes beyond the walls of its capital, Banco. All this, only to find the royal family unspared.
The royal family? She didn’t care about them. They got what they deserved...but she couldn’t find her sister. She searched for her, massacring problematic noble pretenders and their private soldiers, finally to find her little sister, alive and well, in the trust and care of one of El Palacio’s maids.
The world burned with disorder, conspiracy, monsters, and plague, and when flames turned into embers, all that was left were scorching falsehoods about how Mor was nothing but a failure.
She didn’t care. Her sister was there. That was all that mattered.
If only they could run away and hide away somewhere...but they couldn’t. The Goddess had granted Mor her wish: to be with her sister, in this life as it was in the last, in exchange for this one small responsibility.
If she wished to remain with her sister, her life must be spent to save the world they lived in, the Goddess’s call motivating Mor’s every thought and deed. Ultimately, she was nothing more than a willing slave, granted a moderate allowance of freedom. What big sister wanted their little sister to live in a place filled with monsters, anyway? She would do right this time. She failed to save her sister in the last life, but it wouldn’t happen again. Not this time.
The surviving people of Dol-Ar feared her; anyone else blamed and hated her. Monsters spawned infinitely in the shadows, and politicians, infinitely in broad daylight. Sunniest Day could blow them all away, but they’d just come right back, anyway. Against these, she was armed with far more than a sword and power, for in the humblest of sanctums, she commanded the respect of those who knew loyalty and truth, and the fear of those who commanded everything else.
The world order had changed, but her mission remained the same. The Hero Princess, played by fate, still must save the world.