The overall tide hadn’t changed, but the clan army’s resistance forced the Dark King’s army—whose war machine had been running as smoothly as a wheel—to spend just a little longer crushing them.
Of course, Third had paid a heavy price too.
When he launched his counterattack, he had several hundred elite soldiers at his side, including the last of his old guard;
By the time he finally caught sight of the enemy’s royal banner, fewer than two in ten of his personal guards remained. And the number of enemy cavalrymen thrown from their horses was less than a third of his own casualties.
“Heh heh heh. A low-ranking clan... cough, a girl from another race—and I actually lost to an opponent like this!”
Third couldn’t help giving a cold snort.
Then he laughed a few times, only to break into another fit of violent coughing. He spat out several mouthfuls of blood before catching his breath. Clearly, he’d been badly wounded in the fighting.
He had only two choices left.
The first was to surrender and help the new king govern as one of her supporters.
He chose the second.
In a sense, Third was a martyr;
the cause he died for wasn’t religion, but the principles of the noble houses—principles upheld until the very last moment of their lives.
The defeated had to take responsibility. He couldn’t let the subordinates who’d followed him so loyally die for nothing.
He couldn’t avenge them, but at least he could join them in death.
If he didn’t, he’d be rejecting everything his forebears had stood for—and denying all the struggles of the first half of his own life;
so he wouldn’t surrender.
“Dead or alive, I no longer have the right to return home. So even if the enemy doesn’t give you too much trouble, you must never take my body back.”
He turned his head toward the battered survivors beside him and began giving his loyal subordinates his final instructions:
“After I die, each of you should go home. Remember, don’t try to avenge me. I don’t want you, after barely making it out alive, to throw your lives away for my sake in the end.”
“Boss!”
They’d followed Third for years. There was no need to explain how they felt about him.
“I meant to win us all wealth and glory, but instead I led you into a dead end. I’ve wronged you all!”
He cried out in grief. As he turned, a sharp blade suddenly appeared in his hand;
In a flash, the blade gleamed. Without hesitation, Third drove it into his own heart.
His words still hung in the air when the nobleman died.
Dracula saw what happened. She was too late to stop him—and had no intention of doing so. She let out a long, rueful sigh.
She was about to say something when the situation suddenly took an unexpected turn;
The dozens of personal guards cried out in grief, then stood up in unison and did exactly what their master had done!
Dozens of loyal retainers took their own lives together, dying just as tragically as their master, mere seconds after him.
After the war between the Dark King’s army and the enemy ended, Wang Yafu, a central figure on one side of the conflict, showed no intention of leaving the battlefield.
She faced the place where Third had fallen and raised her hands, interlacing her fingers.
Her posture was far from proper, nothing like that of a true clergy member. But the sincerity in her heart surpassed theirs by far.
The executioners who used “God’s name” to justify their invasion trampled recklessly across foreign lands, slaughtering living beings wherever they went;
On the very same day, a little girl who belonged to another world and had nothing to do with any religion was truly praying for the lives that had been lost.
If anything in this world was laughable, it had to be a situation like this.
In the end, the angel the devout dreamed of seeing might just be right here.
Most vampires had little affection for the church or its god. They thought faith was completely unnecessary, and Dracula was no different.
But today, she changed her mind—a belief she’d held for decades.
Because of what Wang Yafu had done, she began to feel that
finding someone in this world to admire might not be such a bad thing.
Wang Yafu was the new king Dracula had raised to the throne. In this little girl from another race, Dracula had found qualities she herself lacked.
And since Wang Yafu’s interests were tied to her own, and she was pretty cute, Dracula now believed that
since she herself didn’t care about other people’s lives, there was nothing wrong with making someone as excessively kind as Wang Yafu the object of her faith;
after all, living beings often choose to believe in someone completely different from themselves.
“I put a child like that—someone I don’t even know what to make of—on the throne... Looks like my eye for these things really is incredible.”
Following Wang Yafu’s example, Dracula turned toward the battlefield and pressed her hands together in an awkward prayer for the dead.
Thanks to her younger sister’s great help, half of the threat the vampires posed to a certain imperial consort had already been eliminated;
the other half would have to be dealt with by that beastkin man who refused to admit he was the consort’s father-in-law.
