"The greatest armed forces our Sphere had ever seen, consisting of more than three billion barbarians and countless vehicles and weapons of human origin, plundered from the benevolent lords against whom they rebelled, were heading against the Belic Continent at its weakest moment, and with the cruel intention of total annihilation.
The humans were desperate, more desperate than they had ever been before; they lacked the power, the resources, to mount any form of worthy resistance against their invaders. For all their brilliant minds and data capable of working miracles, they lacked the resources, the manpower, and most of all, the time. Their artificial human creations were churning out ready-to-work bodies more efficiently than ever before, they were assembling armed golems faster than even when they had secretly armed themselves to fight one another, and magical tomes were being stockpiled like ammunition, filling warehouses the size of entire city blocks.
And none of that would be enough, the highest echelons of humanity knew. All their seers, fortune tellers, and magi-technological intelligences pointed to the same outcome: extinction.
It was then that forty-four keys, extracted from the hearts of the spouses of the supreme leaders of each nation, were inserted into a certain safe.
It was then that historians, linguists, and sorcerers were allowed to study a range of objects for the first time since their original discoverers had all been executed; they were murals, tomes, scrolls, and shrunken heads that told stories, curiosities collected from every corner of the Sphere, coming from societies long lost and forgotten, without exception.
That was when the Plotting Project began."
- Excerpt from the book Comprehensive Guide to the History of Álfheim, by Elarico Milemario Saudoso.
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— Kuh! — Veronico gritted his teeth, pulling back his sword, which was piercing the belly of an enemy. An elf.
A storm washed over the capital of the Sacred Kingdom of Fanon, but no matter how many thousands of liters of water ran down the street, it didn't seem like it was enough to clean the tiles of all that blood.
— ...Mister Prince Hero — Saulo called his friend's attention; then the wizard displayed a poorly shaved beard and puffy dark circles behind his glasses.
— I know. We continue — Clenching his fist around the hilt of his weapon, Veronico took his eyes off the dead elf on the ground. He tried desperately to shield his heart, as his friend had done before, but the next squad of frightened soldiers found themselves forced to block his path, indistinguishable from the men he had led in the invasion of the city that had once been his home, except for the colors they displayed on the coats of arms of their shields and flags. He frowned even more. He displayed contempt, disgust, feelings that I had not created him to experience, and all of them directed at himself.
— Surrender now, traitors! — shouted a female Knight with a single white lock of hair, who was leading the forces forward.
— The only traitors here... — replied a female voice coming from the rooftops above the soldiers' heads, surprising them. — Are you! — Landa fell from the edge of the building, brandishing her stiletto daggers with the precision and agility of a feline, and equal lethality.
Within seconds, a dozen soldiers had their arteries severed, their vital organs punctured, and their lives stolen. More blood spilled into the flooded streets.
— Do not fear them! The Shadow King is on our side! — replied the soldier commander, retreating. — Shadow magic is their weakness! Fire now! — she ordered, and her subordinates kicked the shutters of the windows of the buildings that lined the street, breaking them all at once, and pointing dozens of cocked crossbows in the direction of the Heroics present.
— Pearly gates — Mariah began to conjure a large circle of yellowish light over the entire neighborhood.
But before the spell was ready, Veronico rushed in:
— Raaagh! — He brandished his holy sword in a wide semicircle, without even casting one of his countless Skills, simply injecting his weapon with an explosive wave of energy, and reduced the upper half of all the buildings that surrounded them and housed the trappers to rubble; he struck the structures with enough energy to petrify the bodies of his attackers and reduce them to dust instantly.
— ...You should save your energy, Veronico — Mariah commented, just a step behind her lover. In reality, she was swallowing another sentence, one in which she begged my champion not to take the blame for this, one in which she asked him not to try to protect her more than himself. — It is possible that a resurrected Shadow King is in the castle.
Veronico didn't want to know about what he should or shouldn't do, he didn't want to think about duties, responsibilities, ideas, or anything like that.
The last three months, when he should have been gathering an army to put an end once and for all to the growing forces of the shadows, have instead been marked by intrigue, unrest, famine, and tragedy of all kinds: army commanders began to see the adventurer's guilds as threats, and in turn the guilds began to impose their will on smaller, more vulnerable territories and directly compete for power with official armed forces in violent conflicts; forced conscription of the commoner population took needed hands away from the already impoverished countryside, leading to famine and in turn, bloodshed; the church divided over interpretations of the faith that affirmed or rejected a possible deity of the Hero or the System, and at least three Holy Priests had already excommunicated the Holy Most High, declared themselves the true spokesmen of Jornadism, and gathered armies to attack each other.
And worst of all, from Veronico's point of view, unlike in past decades, his great and inspirational speeches did not seem to solve anything. No matter how many times he negotiated peace agreements between the involved parties, or promised rewards to those who hesitated to adopt the Holy League, he found himself repeatedly stabbed in the back; allied cities were sacked by forces that promised to cease fire, commoners stoned him when he offered them food if they would join the army, and then his own commanders seemed hesitant to continue following him as his own capital was taken by rebel forces, and the fate of the Queen and the Holy Most High was shrouded in shadows while unpleasant rumors about his wife circulated.
— She's right. Leave the small fry to us — Saulo agreed, taking the lead and facing the moat and the walls of the white castle and home of the royal family. When two groups of Wizards, one in the tower on the left and the other in the tower on the right, jointly cast a Shadow Attack Spell on the Heroic group, he grumbled: — Useless — Saulo pointed one hand to each tower, while the other, secretly and under his cloaks, held the heart of a butler who had once been cruel to a certain guest, and counterattacked even before his opponents had even finished activating the Spell: — Ir'hm, Nar-ln, Lighthouse Mountain!
In the next instant, pillars of unnaturally red fire enveloped the towers and their defenders, burning so high and bright that the rain within a fifty-yard radius of the flames evaporated instantly, and the water in the moat surrounding the castle bubbled and escaped in clouds of steam, leaving behind dry, cracked earth and crocodiles boiled alive. As the red tongues of flame faded and then disappeared, the towers that had been their targets now looked more like spent candles, the rock having liquefied and flowed down the walls.
With another simple gesture, the Wizard broke down the castle gates and allowed Landa to invade the perimeter first, facing the destruction he was responsible for and resenting his master, who he thought had renounced the path of light for that kind of power, magical knowledge of the ancient human species.
Well, the Spell was at least partially the result of human magic, but it was nothing more than a set of patches over patches that still needed the power of the System to work, but Saulo showed promise in his research.
— R-Retreat! — shouted the white-haired knight, who had been fleeing from her opponents since the streets of the capital, but when she tried to open the solid doors of the white structure, she found them locked. — Open! Open the doors immediately- — having her neck, jaw, maxilla and head separated into multiple parts by a pair of daggers, she could not finish giving her orders, which would not be heard anyway.
— I sense a great deal of dark aura coming from the throne room — Veronico stood in front of the heavy double doors of the castle, his friends gathering behind him. With contempt, he added: — But there is also a small group of elite in the entrance hall.
— We're ready, Veronico — Mariah promised.
Trusting his companions, my champion tore the doors off their hinges with a single kick and revealed just beyond, in a hall that normally contained lines of merchants and public servants awaiting audiences with the Queen in order to resolve disputes and legal matters, a small troop of two hundred mounted Knights wearing full steel armor, magical shadow weapons, and reinforced by a squad of Mages, all surrounding an evidently experienced and above-average Level elf, whose most striking feature, besides even the richly decorated armor, were the amethyst dental implants.
— Duke Constance...! — Veronico recognized the leader of the rebel forces. — Why?!
— ...Seventeen generations. Four thousand years. For all this time, my family has served the crown, and what do I have to show my ancestors that they didn't already have? Nothing. We haven't been rewarded with a single minute of marching of more land, nor have we been granted a drop of Hero's blood. We don't even have the rise of new blood to strengthen our noble class, already so inbred that new generations are being born with terrible health problems — the Knights stirred, reminded of the reasons why they rebelled. — We are trapped in a repetitive Hell of accumulating resources only to lose them all a hundred years later, and now you tell us that you did such a shoddy job that, before we even have the minimum to nourish a next generation of cripples, we already have to throw ourselves into another sacred war? And against not just one, but four Shadow Kings? And more could have been resurrected? Enough, I say... Enough — there was no anger or resentment in the Duke's voice, only deep, intense weariness. And that struck Veronico more deeply than any attack directed against him up until that moment. — Attack! — he finally ordered, riding forward and leading his troops.
Silently and biting his lower lip, Veronico jumped at his opponents many times faster than they could even notice, and cut Constance and his horse into nine pieces before their enemies had even advanced more than three meters, cutting through steel, flesh and bone that offered the same resistance to his sacred weapon: none. He didn't stop there, doing as his friends suggested and saving energy, he preferred to opt for brute force, without using magic, and crushed the rebels' last defensive line like a meat grinder, his blows so powerful that his targets were not only cut, but exploded like balloons filled with blood.
The battlefield fell silent in seconds, torn bodies and crumpled armor strewn everywhere.
— ...Let's get this over with — Veronico dragged his feet, shoulders slumped, towards the throne room.
The main chamber of the castle was designed as a bright and spacious corridor lined with marble pillars shaped like trees whose leaves were precious stones imbued with light magic and supported grandstands shaped like imposing ships, on which the court sat for most of the day. Opposite the entrance door, and beneath a great glass dome, rested a pair of thrones, one topped by a massive sun made of gold, the other by a white dove of ivory, raised by a staircase fifty feet above the ground, higher even than the court on the grandstand.
However, that night, the throne room looked gloomy, the emeralds removed from their wall spaces and resold to finance a rebel army. The grandstand ships were empty. The glass dome over the thrones was broken and allowed the downpour to enter the room. And the royal symbol itself, the seats of the rulers of Fanon's Sacred Kingdom, had been monstrously fused into a single, misshapen piece of furniture that tried to bring together the different decorations and ornaments, and failed miserably, like the ugly, vain old men I so enjoyed using as villains, who displayed exaggerated luxuries in order to compensate for the disgusting appearance and personality of theirs.
Veronico, however, could not care less about the perversion of the Kingdom's ideals materialized in art, his eyes fixed on a single point only. The one sitting on the tasteless throne: a single figure, a whole head smaller than Veronico, carelessly bathed by the rain that made her hair, blond as the sun, almost sparkling depending on the environment, stick to her face.
— ...Criscina — the Hero stared at his wife with a frown and gritted teeth.
The one-time Crown Princess now dispensed the dresses and corsets, preferring the comfort of cold steel, protecting herself with a sinister set of black plates decorated with images of the moon and storms; it was a set of random parts of the royal treasures, equipment used by the ancient Heroes, but desecrated, as well as the throne on which she sat. The head topped by her mother's crown, shaped like the sun, however, she still insisted on showing off.
— My husband, Veronico — the newly self-promoted Queen smiled, looking down her nose at my champion. To the man who hadn't heard his wife in three months, her voice sounded terribly colder than he remembered. Not that that was the biggest change from Criscina. — To what do I owe this unexpected visit?
— Where is the Queen, your mother?
— Now, did you come all this way just to see that old woman? How boring — Criscina tapped her index finger on the rest of her throne, and immediately afterward a chain fell from the ceiling, thrown through the broken glass dome. And attached to these chains by the wrists, the body of a middle-aged elf, her heart removed from her chest. The Queen.
— Criscina! — Veronico finally found himself unable to bear the weight of the actions he had been forced to take and directed all his frustration against his wife, advancing against her.
Unfortunately, however, the woman recently corrupted by shadows was the result of four thousand years of arranged marriages between descendants of Heroes with Heroes, and finally found herself able to please at least one person, even if this person was her husband's greatest enemy:
Name: Romantic Criscina Fanon IV
Potential: Very High
Level: 44