Sara and Emma took a trip through the Lycian Forest by monta. Watching Emma rub her monta’s calcified snout and speak to it like a Labrador Retriever made her look like a lunatic, but it made Sara smile. The actual ride was bittersweet, though, with Emma being nervous and unable to look Sara in the eye. Sara had killed Jason (or at least she was the greater reason he died), Mary was paralyzed and in a prison cell, and Sara seeded the idea of killing someone in a coma. Now Sara was acting queen after leading a coup against the kingdom they were summoned to. If Emma wasn’t wary of her, she would be an idiot. Still, Emma tried to make small talk from time to time.

“Gosh, it feels good to be outside again,” Emma said.

What a roundabout way to say, ‘The weather’s nice,’ Sara thought abstractedly. It was nice. The light breeze was ruffling her hair, and the sun was hugging her skin. “Yeah,” she replied. “If I had my way, I’d live on the road.”

“That’s weird coming from you.” Emma giggled, but it felt hollow. It’s as if her mind told her it was funny, but her mind told her, Stop. You don’t deserve to be happy. Sara knew that feeling well.

“It is,” Sara agreed. That was the final conversation they had for the next hour as they took an unbeaten trail to a warm hilltop with a nice view of the Quesca Mountains, snow-peaked year-round, tips hidden by a haze of clouds like Everest.

“What are we learning today?” Emma asked.

“Binding,” Sara said, pulling out Qualth. It was the art of binding one’s mana to an object—like a sword or a staff—to condense and control it. It was not a common sense technique; it took considerable practice, so Sara brought Emma to teach her with Qualth. “Here, take this,” she said, offering the sword.

Emma stumbled back in astonishment, unwilling to touch it. “Are you really handing me this?”

“Yeah. Take it.”

Emma gulped, and Sara snorted in annoyance.

“It’s a weapon, Emma, not a source of power. It won’t save you from a stone-tipped arrow, let alone a….” Sara paused, trying not to think of how she killed Jason. “Look, Emma….” She paused and found that she wasn’t able to find words, so she put away Qualth, knelt, and stared down the hill. “Watch.”

Synántoun se éna skénoma synergasías, she silently chanted, pléon ypodéchetai ton kodikó, sussurrá. 'Éstin e sýnthesis tou pánthos, i édafi pou antheí sta páthi.

Emma fell backward when the hilltop split into a thick crevasse, jutting rocks in multiple directions into the forest below them. For a full football field’s length, the rocks shot from the splitting ground, and the shaking caused trees to snap and collapse, spraying leaves and needles as a dust storm made it impossible to see below. From a hilltop, it looked like they were staring at the forest through polluted fog. “W-What was that?” Emma asked, cupping her ears.

“Simple magic.” Sara took a few steps back and collapsed on the hill, sweating and breathing hard. She was impressed by the intense display and was glad to really use her magic to its fullest extent.

“Simple?” Emma collapsed on her back, staring at the clouds.

“Yeah. It’s a siege spell. It shakes walls. Goes ten feet.” Sara grinned when Emma rolled on her stomach to look at her in shock, staring her through the red hair covering her face. But when Emma realized she looked like the creepy girl from The Ring, she blew hair out of her eyes with a pout and rolled back onto her back.

“Are you really that strong?” Emma asked.

“We’re that strong,” Sara said gravely. “Whether it’s you, it’s me, or it’s Agronus—if one of us uses a meteor spell, Lemora would burn.” Not instantaneously, but fire spreads. That’s why offensive fire spells were restricted to the military and high-level members at that. One panicked soldier could kill a battalion. In the hands of scared, angsty, angry, vindictive, and corrupted young adults….

“Do you understand?” Sara asked.

Emma rolled on her side opposite Sara. “… Yes.”

For a while, Sara sat there, watching cloud-cast shadows cut across the textured grass and boulders before blending into the forest floor. She thought that the training was almost pointless and that her… friend… needed time to recuperate from her PTSD and moral injury, but she was proven wrong.

“So what was the point?” Emma asked.

Sara looked at her. “Of what?”

“Getting the sword. You almost died. I….”

Sara considered her words carefully but felt like Emma’d only get it if she experienced it. “I’ll show you.” Sara stood and pulled out raw bars of rontum, the metal used for mana deprivation, and laid them down in a circle around where they were sitting. Emma immediately felt the icy chill as mana sucked out of her body.

“W-What is that?” Emma asked.

“It’s what they make mana deprivation shackles out of,” Sara said. “I’m using it to simulate what it’ll be like in Agronus’s castle.” She kept stacking higher and higher until they both felt cold and suffocated, unable to feel mana. “Hold these above our head.” Sara handed Emma bars of rontum.

“Wait. Can we even use mana in there?” Emma shivered as she accepted. “I can’t feel any at all.”

Sara didn’t like the insinuation that Emma was getting anywhere near his castle, but she kept silent, sitting beside her. She closed her eyes and churned her Twilight Core, and suddenly, a profound gust of energy sucked through the area, making the white hairs on Emma’s arms stand up as the bars lit up with white energy.

“Can you feel that?” Sara asked.

“I… can. But I don’t understand what’s going on.”

“There’s a one-hundred-foot wall of rontum around the castle, ten feet thick,” Sara said. “It has a ceiling, too, making the place an eerie cube. It’s fucking terrifying—but it doesn’t work. Not completely, anyway.”

Emma shivered. “What do you mean?”

“Rontum’s porous, and as you can see, if you pull fast enough, it can’t capture all of it. And when….” Sara pulled out Qualth and lifted it to the sky with a wry smile. “… you have a weapon that attracts mana….” Sara activated the red runes on Qualth’s blade and the air around them warped, and the bars in Emma’s hands turned bright white alongside the wall. Mana flooded the atmosphere and almost became unbearable until the negative pull suddenly snapped off, and mana crashed into the area without restraint. Sara then deactivated the runes and let the world return to normal—

—but it wasn’t normal. Emma stared at the small wall of rontum bars, radioactive and glowing with white light as they sat there.

“You can use mana in there. That’s the real reason that Qualth’s necessary,” Sara said. “That, and it can actually cut that charming fucker. He’d bend Jason’s sword like a coffee straw.”

“Oh….” Emma winced as she stared at the white bars of rontum in her hand. “Once these fill up….”

“They don’t suppress mana anymore,” Sara said. “That’s why they summoned us, Emma. The wall’s glowing. In a decade, it’ll be full, and Agronus might be able to break out.”

“But Sara….” Emma presented the glowing bars in her palm. “If you use Qualth in there—“

“It might break the rontum barrier,” Sara confirmed. Just like how Qualth overloaded the guillotine’s stalks, using Qualth in Agronus’s ballroom at her current power level could flood the entire cube. It wasn’t a problem in her last life because she had a tainted golden core, making her far weaker than Jason. Now, she had a pure core belonging to the legendary mage Telia Sayon, so it was a serious consideration. Because if she broke that barrier: “Then it’d be no holds barred for real,” Sara said.

Emma’s eyes widened. “Could you win?”

Sara placed her forearms over her knees, Qualth’s tip touching the ground, gazing at the Quesca Mountain Range. She wondered how much damage the “God Slayer” could do to one. Probably little, right? Mountains are unfathomably huge. People often hike through one on multi-week expeditions just to prove they can. They blind themselves at summits and risk their lives to reach the top of Mount Everest. When fighting a titan, Sara’s petty, three, five, seven hundred feet blasts would simply leave a paper cut. How could it stand up to a real god? Probably not well. Thank Delina that Agronus was really just a humanoid with a persecution complex.

“I don’t know,” Sara said. “We’d probably both die. The place’s sealed. If he lights it on fire, there’d be nowhere to go.” Telia Sayon locked Agronus in his castle with a sealing spell; the cube was just built on top of it to prevent him from breaking it. If the cube broke, she and Agronus would have nuclear attacks at their disposal and nowhere to run. They’d both die.

“And say that I could break the barrier….” Sara stood up and lifted Qualth to the sky. It sucked in all the mana from the atmosphere, pulling so aggressively that the tiny particles shifted the wind itself, rustling treetops for a mile as it made it to the hilltop. Emma watched the sword radiate with absolute light. Then Sara swiped her sword horizontally at pure air, shooting across the forest in a terrifying blast that ripped trees out from their roots. Leaves flew into the air like dust, and a whipping wind howled and crashed and screamed through the forest. It was hard to think that blast wouldn’t break through anything. “Humanity’s probably fucked.”

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Sara offered Emma Qualth again. “That’s why you need to learn how to bind. You’re my backup.”

Emma’s eyes lit up with dim yet significant determination as she accepted the sword. “I’ll do it. Where do I begin?”

“Just try to use it,” Sara said. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out. Then I’ll help you master it.” Emma was a genius, after all. And just as expected, she learned how to use 5% of Qualth’s power in five minutes—

—and promptly collapsed from mana deprivation.

Sara got a bit of practice in and built up her relationship with Emma, so it wasn’t a complete waste of time. “Let’s go,” she said, picking Emma up and helping her onto her own monta. Then she led Emma’s monta with commands on the way back to Lemora. During the ride back, Sara couldn’t help but be relieved that she had converted someone so significant to the war effort. The rest would be a different story.

2

Once they got back to the castle, Lord Kell panicked. “My lady, where have you been?” he asked. “These people are animals! If you tell them to hate milk, they’ll kill each other over it.”

“What’s happening?” Sara asked.

“What’s happening? The same thing that’s been happening. Now that the revolution’s won, anyone even mildly ah~ggrieved by a noble is demanding their execution.”

“Are you insinuating I caused this?” Sara asked chillingly. She understood that her actions led to the tragedy playing out, but she couldn’t admit it. She was an acting monarch—and monarchs are infallible. Even insinuating a monarch’s action or order led to problems was against the rules, so the language advisors used was carefully crafted.

“Of course not, My Lady,” he said apologetically. “I’ve only meant to say that these simpletons are unable to see the difference between a signed letter of a noble’s crimes and a petty accusation.”

Sara wanted to say, Don’t treat people like stupid worms, you pretentious fuck! but the truth was, she found most people stupid when it came to politics. The moment that one person brings up a point someone else makes a counterargument—even if it’s justifying someone trying to kill a test proctor—and people rally behind it. So, as much as she hated herself for agreeing—she did.

“Wise assertion,” Sara said. “Has King Lemings responded?” She had asked her advisors to speak about the stability of her rioting people before other countries unless they were attacking.

“Yes, My Lady.”

“Has he declared war?”

“In so many words.”

“Good,” Sara said. “Bring Telskal to my audience chamber.”

“Yes, My Lady.”

Sara took a deep breath, trying to push her self-directed accusations of villainy from her mind. I’m not a good person, she thought. But I am trying. Ominous thoughts swirling in her head, she made her way to the audience chamber, where her first real day of work awaited.

3

Sara sat before Telskal with an iron gaze, straight from the forge, sharp yet unpurified. The advisor before her stared at her with contempt and fury, proof that she had not been tortured.

Lady Regam, Sara’s kingdom advisor, spoke first: “Telskal Serok, you have been summoned here today—“

“Skip the farce.” Telskal spit on the ground. “And let her speak for herself.”

“Alright,” Sara chuckled murderously, filling her lungs with hot air. “You have committed grave atrocities, as attested by dozens of nobles—“

“Who were coerced—“

“—which were validated by thousands of citizens. You were sentenced to death for your crime by Trinov Escar and have been judged and sentenced again by the true heir, King Alecov Escar.”

Telskal scoffed, but when she looked at Alecov, there was only cold ire in his eyes. Panic streaked across her face. “You’re being manipulated, My Li—“

“I have read your crimes, and I heard from your victims,” Alecov said. “I find you abhorrent. You will be executed tonight.”

“How?” Telskal asked bitterly, looking at Sara.

“Public stoning,” Sara said. “There are a lot of people who want you dead, so they’ll be glad that your tempering will hold.”

4

Sara walked on a royal stage built in the Alacom. The fountain was horribly defaced, so artisans removed it, leaving nothing but muddied water that people bathed in during the riots. It was disgusting, but compared to the burnings, broken windows, theft, fighting, and other crimes playing out, it was a minor concern.

In front of her was Telskal's corpse, which was executed by stoning after a grand speech about how Telskal was the mastermind and cause for corruption in Lemora—responsible for all nobles' misdeeds. It was a truly barbaric event that let the people who threw stones vent their anger—and filled the ones who didn't get a chance with disappointment. Either way, it pacified them.

“Do you feel vindicated?” Sara asked. The crowd released tired cheers of acceptance. “Do you feel heard?” More cheering. “Are you glad that the era of corrupt politics and dangerous dealings is coming to an end?!” The area picked up steam again, like a rollercoaster moving toward its highest point. Then Sara began her speech: “Good. In the weeks ahead, the nobles implicated will be hanged, and all other nobles will be reviewed for corruption.” The crowd might’ve reached a point of delirium, but Sara’s words were damp and muted, leading to a period of solemn emotional reflection. “We will bring you justice. Yet the greatest crime of all has been unchecked, and we now face peril because of it….”

Gulps became audible; drunken stumbles threatened to break out fights. Everyone was listening with rapt attention.

“Trinov Escar’s false blood alliance has made the Lemings Kingdom declare war.”

The time bomb hit zero.

An explosion of anger flared through the area, removing any catharsis relief that the people had faced just moments before.

“What’s worse!” Sara yelled, silencing the crowd. “What’s worse… is that the Lemings Kingdom also broke their alliance. As you’ve already heard, Prince Alecov, the true heir who will soon be crowned, is the rightful king because the Lemings Kingdom sent us a princess who was impregnated—and her bastard was Prince Halter Escar. And despite this, the Lemings Kingdom has declared war on us and seeks reparations! Will you stand for these crooked men breaking alliances and declaring war on your women and children?!”

There wasn’t even a split second where someone could consider that King Escar was a victim. With the snap of a finger, the citizens of Lemora turned into a pack of rabid animals demanding blood.

“Well, we will not stand for these indignities!” Sara screamed. “We, the kingdom and the righteous nobles that remain, the civilians and farmers toiling the fields, the blacksmiths and carpenters, and the soldiers protecting your women and children will band together and strike down all enemies in our path!” Battle cries. “So take this righteous energy and rise together, work with the nobles that survive our scrutiny, put aside our differences and grievances—because war is coming and it threatens all of us! King Lemings will come to rape and sell your women as slaves! They will pillage your fields and burn your homes! They will leave your children to starve! People of Lemora—will you stand for this?!”

The bloodthirsty crowd reached a fever pitch, clawing and scratching each other as they expressed their rage.

“Then accept this woman’s death as a symbol of the trials to come for corrupt nobles, and turn your attention to the enemy that plagues us all! If you see a note about one of our people, report it! It’s from King Lemings, hoping we will rip ourselves apart. Do not give in! As of this moment, we are all one! We are all strong! We, the Escaran People, will be the ones to win this war against Lemings and seize our place in history!”

Sara watched the delirium play out with a chilling expression, knowing that no corruption trials would ever come. By the end of this war, a new one would follow—the Thousand-Year War that would determine the fate of Reemada once and for all. Once they one, and Lemora finally got the chance to rebel against the nobles, the Escaran Kingdom would no longer be Sara’s problem. It was as simple as that.