Chapter Ninety-Four: Unexpected Assistance

Steam-powered battle armor.

Its full title was steam-driven armored warfare machine, a relic of the Age of the Ancient Kings, forged by alchemists into engines of war. In that era of unparalleled order, knightly orders rode beneath the royal banner to patrol the realm, watchmen kept vigil through the endless night and guarded the frontiers, while the legions of battle armor were charged with maintaining stability in the heartland. It was through their sacrifice and devotion that the splendor of a golden age was upheld.

Although the books handed down from the Age of the Ancient Kings rarely lingered on the battle strength of these machines, scattered phrases that survived from those times often hailed the warriors in steam armor as the greatest force a mortal could wield. Joined together, multiple armored soldiers could even defeat the scions of glory.

Of course, “multiple” is always a most ambiguous and imprecise quantity.

It might mean two or three, or perhaps a dozen or twenty. In any case, the number before Amy’s eyes was already beyond anything he could handle. Four-meter-tall iron giants were being vomited one after another from the walls, each with a clang of colliding metal. The gleaming white metal figures rose from the ground in turn, flexing their steel sinews and bones. Then the masklike faceplates on their fronts opened, exhaling great clouds of steam. Their machines finished warming up, and scarlet light pulsed from their mechanical eyes.

They had come with no friendly intent.

Amy’s heart sank slightly. If this were any other time, he would never have wanted to tangle with these lumps of metal, but in the present situation there was simply no room to retreat.

He could only force himself forward.

His gaze swept past the beautiful youth behind him and came to rest for a moment on the girl still unconscious.

“Take care of her.”

The bearer of glory had little time to waste. Once these steel-boned brutes finished their preparations and launched a coordinated assault, he had no confidence he could protect her in the ensuing chaos.

So even if the apostle of the Dice House was untrustworthy, he had no second choice.

He could not very well carry her into the charge.

That would be courting death.

The battlefield of life and death drew closer. Amy gathered the stray thoughts in his mind, and the darkness of his pupils became deep and pure, reflecting the ranks of iron giants before him.

No fear. No shrinking back. No hesitation.

The bearer of glory simply drew his sword, a plain and simple draw, and in an instant the dark blood of his short blade broke the bonds of the atmosphere. The red-and-black blade, moving at terrifying speed, became a streak of scarlet light falling from the heavens. The weight of the machines may have granted the warriors within them extraordinary power and speed, but in a true high-speed duel, victory and death were decided only by the sliver of time that slipped from the eye.

Yes, only an instant.

In that single instant, the boy named Amy Ulysses had passed through seven steam battle armors. Dark Blood, the short sword in his hand, cleanly cut through four of them. If they had been flesh and blood, the first wave of enemies would have been largely finished. But the tenacity of these iron constructs far exceeded the bearer of glory’s expectations. Of the four battle armors he had cut open, only one had been rendered unable to fight; the other three were scarcely affected at all, still driven onward by the fierce will of their pilots.

“This is a pain.”

Turning to look at the iron giants who had already recovered their bearings, the bearer of glory flexed his slightly numb arms. Even though Dark Blood, sealed as it was, still retained the quality of a legendary weapon, cleaving steel and iron had never been easy, much less slicing through the thick armor of battle armor. This was not only a matter of skill, but of strength as well.

Amy had never been known for brute force. Among the four battle armors he had cut open, only the very first had had its armor breached enough to destroy the driving mechanism within. The other three, constrained by insufficient power in the strike, had merely been cut to about two-thirds depth. They looked badly wounded, but in truth had suffered no serious injury at all. While the boy exhaled, they had already reacted, drawing from their backs large chain-saw greatswords nearly forty centimeters thick, and with a piercing shriek of twisting metal, crimson mounds rose in unison from the backs of the iron giants like humped ridges.

What was that?

The bearer of glory narrowed his eyes.

A deep, drawn-out hiss sounded as great volumes of white vapor vented from the exhaust ports. Scalding gray-white mist spread through the corridor, and the iron growths on their backs glowed red, like lava veins faintly visible during a violent convulsion of the earth, or like liquid steel just poured from a forge. Merely seeing them was enough to inspire danger.

Were the pilots inside really human?

Such doubt flickered through Amy’s mind. Even a soldier with a will harder than steel could not retain consciousness under such heat.

But doubt was only doubt. He had no habit of distraction in battle. When the iron monsters with their crimson eyes began to move, he cast aside all stray thoughts and became like the most precise of war machines, using his advantage of form to slip among blades and flashes of steel. Nearly ten towering metal figures, like cats toyed with by mice, clumsily pursued his steps. At times, because the space was too cramped, they crashed into one another and tumbled together in a heap. The best of their luck was when one of them happened to strike the exposed crimson furnace on a companion’s back, triggering a cataclysmic explosion that once more shattered the hard-won encirclement and blasted open a vast gap.

Naturally, the bearer of glory slipped free of it.

If only there had really been just these few.

Watching the mist spread farther and farther, the boy could not help but think this. At first there had been only seven battle armors before him. One had been split open at the outset by a single strike, its internal drive or control system destroyed, and two others had collided during the recent chase, igniting into a brilliant fire.

If the total number of enemies had been fixed, perhaps he alone could have buried this little squad here. But regrettably, the reinforcements from the House of the Lost were endless.

One metal figure after another was expelled by the wall, and then one pair of red pupils after another was lit. In the span of only a few minutes, the transferred steam battle armors had already exceeded double digits. Twenty-two. It was an exact count, a humiliatingly exact count.

It utterly nullified all the bearer of glory’s efforts.

Because he understood that, Amy chose to withdraw.

Just like the nameless chaos of evil in the Irdan mine pit, the battle armor protected by steel plating was a dreadful match for him. Dark Blood was indeed a rare and superior weapon, but the inherent limitations of a short sword meant that the bearer of glory, who lacked offensive abilities, always performed poorly against enemies that were enormous in size or thickly armored. More often than not, the issue was not finding an opening, but being unable to truly threaten the foe.

In simpler terms, he could not break their defense.

His memories held a plain and easily understood term for such situations, but no specific solution. Facing ever more battle armors, he had no intention of continuing to gamble with his life, so retreat was unquestionably the choice that had to be made now. Yet at the same time, another insoluble problem stood before him.

How could he shake off pursuit?

Under the gaze of the strange Obadiah, who could freely manipulate the cells within his body, they had no way of using terrain to lose their pursuers. Even if, in the struggle between life and death, they erupted with astonishing speed, they could not stop Obadiah from transferring the battle armor.

In other words, there was no escaping it.

But at the very least, they had to run first.

Roads are made by people walking them. When no road can be found, do not panic, do not despair. So long as you face forward and set your feet in motion, the greatsword will one day cut through the thorns, and blood will one day stain the road red. Perhaps one may not reach the final shore, but so long as one does not give up, there will come a day when the world is no longer shrouded in the dark clouds of despair.

Someone had told him that.

Who had it been? Faintly, it was someone very familiar. Very familiar, and someone he must never forget.

Unfortunately, there was no memory of her left at all.

Now was not the time to reminisce, either.

The bearer of glory forced himself to forget the shadow that had suddenly surfaced in his heart and concentrated on the present. Faster than the reassembled battle armors, he returned first to where Dick and Mia were.

“How pathetic.”

The apostle of the Dice House rose, the corners of his mouth lifting slightly, yet his face, unusually enough, carried no trace of a smile. “Looks like you don’t have any good way of dealing with them.”

Amy Ulysses offered only silence in return.

Surely he could not simply lift the seal on Dark Blood right now and charge recklessly?

What would be the point of that?

“Let’s go,” he said after catching his breath, bending down to lift the girl onto his back. “This is no place to linger.”

“But where can we run to?” Dick sighed, not moving.

“I don’t know.” The bearer of glory shook his head. If there was truly no other way, he would consider unsealing Dark Blood and going all in. “But as long as we live, hope will eventually be within sight.”

“So be it.” The handsome youth with golden hair and clear blue eyes did not refute him. He merely lowered his head, the wheat-gold fragments of hair falling over his eyelids so that his expression could not be seen. “But compared to being driven into a ragged flight by them, I would rather annihilate them. That is more in keeping with my aesthetics.”

“So—”

“Don’t waste the opportunity I created for you.”

What did he mean?

Before Amy could react, the apostle of the Dice House had already made his will known through action.

“You lot, cease moving.”

His lips parted and closed slightly, and the supreme command was spoken from his mouth. Then time seemed to stop flowing. Dozens of battle armors surging toward them like a charging army all came to an abrupt halt. The constant of inertia seemed to have been erased from the world, leaving them frozen at the exact instant Dick uttered the word “cease.”

“What is this?”

The boy of the Ulysses family widened his eyes.

An ability?