...The Great Western Road…
It had not ceased to be a strange thing for Zaryusu, riding beside Shalltear Bloodfallen. Behind them marched rank after utterly impossible rank. Dwarves and humans marched at the front beside goblins and orcs, as some of the 'smaller' creatures, they set the pace to ensure the soldiers all moved as one. Farther back were ogres and giants bringing up the rear. Cavalry in the form of horsemen ranged out beyond them to provide security. In covered wagons rode quagoa, the dwarves' former enemies turned allies.
He'd seen a few of the quiet conversations among the night time camp fires. More than one quagoa was troubled by the fact that they were kept safe on their journey by dwarves, and more than one dwarf was troubled that their resting hours were kept safe by quagoa.
But all of that was as nothing next to riding next to that vampire girl. As human bodies went, he knew that she would have been considered an ethereal beauty, impossible to believe to be real unless one saw her in person. Yet he had seen her rages, he had seen her tear limbs off of the bodies of living men with the same smile one might have on their face after taking a bite of a good meal.
A darkness lay in her. A violent bloodlust the likes of which he had never seen and which he saw was barely contained. The hooves of the horses beneath them made their rhythmic 'clip, clop, clip, clop' noise along the way known as 'The Great Western Road' this was a unique place in the Re-Estize Kingdom. Most of it was actually made of stone, and it connected several cities together. Re-Esta, the nearest one on the southern way from E-Asenaru, and E-Mera, south of that by a number of miles. Both were relatively small cities, and both had caved on the arrival of his army. The latter had required that Shalltear 'knock on the door' which sent it flying inside the city as if blown off by a great and terrible wind. But both had submitted and now the royal family's banner flew again.
Two days had been spent in each city to rearm and resupply, as well as to provide for some recreation time for the soldiers in their charge. Each time, to placate Shalltear further Zaryusu would suggest, "Why don't you do some shopping, find some nice presents for your friends, the city has given way to you, let me do my part."
Each time she would acquiesce, but now having passed both such cities, he saw that her gaze would occasionally turn to him as they rode together further and further south. They had only one objective left, then… well who knew what happened then?
Zaryusu looked further west, away from her. The view was beautiful here, the Great Western Road was a stone's throw from the great sea. It ran within sight of cliff edges and avenues that sloped slowly down to the shore, he'd never seen anything like it. Endless water, the crashing waves, the sun was low in the sky still, clouds drifted off for miles in the distance. He engraved the image into his head as something he would remember and tell his children until his old age took him, if he was so fortunate to pass on that way.
"What are you looking at?" Shalltear asked curiously. He mentally sighed in relief, she was in a good mood today.
"This, Lady Shalltear." He said as he gestured to the ocean. "I have never seen anything like it, not in all my life, it is… beautiful."
"I suppose it is nice enough to look at." She said with slightly less indifference than she usually had, "Nothing compared to Nazarick though." She said in her customarily haughty voice.
"Nothing is, that is the realm of gods, not mortals." Zaryusu said. He wasn't trying to flatter her or her master in this. Having been there, with the matchless library of endless knowledge, the shifting landscapes, it was a realm of the impossible made possible only by the will of gods.
"However, I am of this world, born here, I will live here, and I will die here, and to my eyes, that too is a wonder I will not forget for as long as I live." He said, gesturing to the sea again.
"I'll take your word for it." She said.
"Didn't your master once compare this world to a box of jewels?" He asked her.
"Yes." She replied hesitantly.
"Then this is one of them, how you grade it might change from one person to another, but a jewel it is." Zaryusu said with breathless admiration for the view he could not turn away from.
"That's interesting." She said thoughtfully.
"What is interesting, Lady Shalltear?" He asked.
"That's probably the first time you've contradicted me." She said in a sweet voice.
"Shit." Zaryusu thought to himself.
"Now that I think about it, you seem to not only never contradict me, but also somehow always get your way anyway." She said, looking down at the reins of her undead horse.
He didn't respond.
She looked over at him. "Care to tell me why that is?" She asked with a hint of anger in her voice.
Zaryusu's mind raced as he looked at the sea.
"Look at me, General Zaryusu." She said, emphasizing his title.
He tore his face away to look at the diminutive monster.
"Explain yourself." She said.
"Explain what, Lady Shalltear?" He asked in his most respectful voice.
"Somehow, you've managed to be the one making all the decisions at every single turn, despite the fact that as a guardian of Nazarick I should be… I don't know… In charge!" She said, keeping her last word stern.
"What do you want me to tell you?" Zaryusu asked plaintively, "I am only doing what I know how to do, as are you."
"I want the truth." She said in a voice he'd never heard from her. A note of insecurity underlying her words. When he recognized it, he saw her in a very different light.
"Did Lord Ainz tell you to do this? To take charge, to keep me controlled? Does he not trust me?" She asked, her own voice plaintive this time.
"No." Zaryusu said simply.
She was quiet, then as she thought things over, she asked, "Why then have you been keeping me out of decisions? The more I think about it, you've used me as a weapon, tear apart a door, kill that one there, intimidate those nobles, or merchants, and so on." Her fangs were bared as she spoke, thinking had obviously made her very angry.
"Lady Shalltear-" He said in a patient voice.
"No!" She snapped at him, "None of that! I want your real thoughts, and if I have to hypnotize you to get them, I will!" She said fiercely.
"Fine." He said solemnly. "Guarantee you will not harm nor have me or any of mine harmed for what I say." He said.
"In the name of our lord, I swear it." She answered.
"You're not fit to command." He said bluntly. She looked at him with surprise.
"What did you say?" She asked, seemingly disbelieving that anyone would speak to her that way.
"You don't care about your soldiers, you don't care about how an army works, you don't care about upholding discipline except as far as it doesn't make His Majesty look bad." He said, still being blunt. He dared to meet her eyes, "Do you deny it?" He asked.
"I-" She began.
"Do you deny it, Lady Shalltear?" He pressed.
"No." She said, "I am the third strongest in Nazarick, what do I need to worry about that for?" She asked dismissively.
"Exactly." He said. "Command of an army does not require personal strength. Lady Shalltear, I have never once wished for your humiliation. You are a weapon of Lord Ainz, one of the most potent he has, of that I have no doubt. But this is not a one on one fight, this is a war that spans the entirety of the world I know. This is not a vacation for me. Do you know what I do when you go out for the night?" He asked, his temper getting slightly the better of him.
"No…" She said, "Surely it's nothing important though, after all once you've…" She stopped talking when he reached into the saddle pouch next to him and pulled out a thick sheaf of documents.
"These, these are what I do." He said, and handed them to her.
She took them in hand and looked at him dubiously.
"Go ahead," Zaryusu said encouragingly, "look at them, Lady Shalltear."
She began to look them over as the horses kept plodding along. Her mind was a whirlwind, there were names, dates, figures, amounts of grain and meat and potions, blankets and paper, arrows accumulated and spent, there were maps laying out terrain and regular check ins and update documents to show everything had been done. There were officer and scout reports, award recommendations, death notices, strength reports showing the number of soldiers per unit, and more.
She handed them back to him in silence. "Every night, I'm up for hours doing these so that our master knows all is well. Every day you act as if everything is going well just because the Sorcerer King said it would." He said in utter frustration.
"You doubt the word of the Supreme One?!" She exclaimed in shock and the start of anger, which became confusion as he emphatically shook his head.
"Absolutely not, he has been fair with us since the war, and just as importantly, he has been unfailingly correct in every assessment in the short time I have known him. I do not mean that he says something untrue, I mean that you do not understand why or how he is correct so reliably." Zaryusu said and resumed looking at the sea.
"Have you been to your master's private office?" He asked.
"How do you know he has one?" Shalltear asked suspiciously.
"Professional understanding, of course he has one. Have you been there?" He asked.
"Yes." She replied.
"What is on his desk?" He asked further.
"Just useless stacks of paper." She said indifferently.
"Those 'useless stacks' are probably like the ones I just showed you. He probably spends endless hours pouring over documents, reports just like what we… I… Send to him every day. All of those reports tell him what is going well and what is at risk, it tells him what he needs to know so that he 'can' be right every time. Why do you think the Supreme Ones kept that enormous library? Because to make good decisions they had to have a good understanding of everything. People who have bad information, make bad decisions. I go out of my way to imitate the Sorcerer King. To me he is the god of knowledge and of wise choices." He looked over at her again, his eyes boring into hers.
"In the time since we marched, have you wondered even once why we've gone to the cities we have, in the order that we have?" Zaryusu asked her bluntly.
"No, why does that matter?" She asked.
"Because some cities have more supplies we can conscript, some have better defenses or are more likely to fight, some could cut off our line of supply, and some are key to keeping good relations with neighbors. In the entirety of this campaign you have shown no interest in anything but the next person you need killed or the next barrier you need to break, or your next shopping trip. I can handle everything myself, so unless you 'want' to do any of these things, we should just keep going the way we have been." He said in the most straightforward way he could.
For a minute or two she was very quiet.
"I want to do it." She said.
"Say what now?" He asked.
"I said, I want to do it." She said firmly. "If the other guardians, Aureole Omega, Cocytus, Demiurge, Albedo, Aura and Mare, if they can all do more, then I should too. I thought I was doing enough just by stabbing my lance or breaking down barriers, I had no idea there was this much else to do." She said with surprise.
"You're serious? This is very dry, boring stuff." He said patiently.
She nodded emphatically. "Yes, damn it! I'm not going to be shown up. Nobody is going to say all Shalltear Bloodfallen did during the Godhood War is to swing her damn lance a few times!" She said angrily.
"Alright then." Zaryusu said, "I'm sorry I misjudged your willingness to support the campaign, Lady Shalltear. I hope a bowing of the head will be enough to have your forgiveness." He said and bowed his head to her.
She sighed with some annoyance, "I suppose I don't have a choice. Lord Ainz appointed you himself, and he is never wrong. I should try to see more of why you were given this position."
"I'm not going to ask that you start caring about me or our soldiers, I'm not going to ask that you see me as a comrade or an equal. All I ask is that you remember that being born outside of Nazarick does not mean we are all necessarily morons. Well, 'King Philip' aside that is." Zaryusu said, leaving a hint of humor on at the end.
She gave a quiet nod, and they rode on in silence until it was time to make camp. The road to Re-Lobell was fairly straight, as far as Kingdom roads went. And it was in better condition than many, it would only be days before they got there.
Eventually they got far enough along that Zaryusu was comfortable calling for a halt to the line of march and having their encampment established. He didn't have to wait long before Lady Shalltear showed up at the command tent and sat down opposite him as he was getting out documents. "Alright, show me how this works." She said enthusiastically.
"As you wish, Lady Shalltear." He said as he took out the first and simplest document he could think of.
...Road to Re-Estize City…
It was a very good day. General Nimble rode next to King Zanac on his right hand, while Princess Renner rode on his left, Climb rode next to her, and Brain Unglaus rode next to Climb. It was as if each person were striving to protect the one to the right of them, and it felt… proper.
As a boy, Nimble had grown up with heroic ballads, epics, stories, myths, great kings, noble warriors, an age of legendary heroes whose character and quality were a cut above the norm. It had made him long to be a soldier, a warrior, to stand beside people of great merit.
Life, as it turned out, was good at disappointing childhood expectations. Though he had a very good opinion of Emperor Jircniv, the man's ruthless machinations were not exactly noble. He held a similar view now that he was more familiar with the Sorcerer King, a figure even more cunning and ruthless than the bloody emperor.
Yet with all this had come a kind of respect for their methods, if not a love of them, because it was by those ways that they minimized risk to their followers. The noble charge across a field at a well prepared enemy made for a great story of heroism, but if a clever manipulation had those enemies half starved or divided, a lot more people went home alive from one side.
Now however, as he looked to his left and to his right, he felt confident that he was on the right side in every sense of the word. King Zanac had proved himself to be anything but stupid, Renner had shown a deep and insightful mind, Climb was the most loyal bodyguard he'd ever seen, and Brain Unglaus had an unnatural gift for the sword and a cheerful cockyness about him that made it impossible not to like the man.
It was not until they were a quarter way down the road and hours in to the ride to the capital city that he realized it. "This will be a legend one day." People would write for thousands of years of the Godhood War, and every king, every general, would be etched into the annals of history. In a thousand years people would debate whether or not the feigned withdrawal of the royal family from Re-Estize was truly all part of the plan, or whether it was just pure luck. He snorted. "They'll just end up asking the Sorcerer King every thousand years or so." He thought to himself as he reflected on the idea of a truly immortal ruler of boundless gifts.
Renner was sitting on her horse still playing with a puzzle box. An intense look in her eye that occasionally disturbed Nimble when he looked too closely or too long.
Climb had a stern look on his face that was focused straight ahead, King Zanac practically shook with anticipation. This was going to be the culmination of a long cultivated plan for ending the Slane Theocracy and the threat they posed through their covert operations and treacherous dealings with their neighbors.
"It'll be good to be home again." King Zanac remarked.
"I'm sure it will, my lord, but are we sure they won't put up a fight?" General Nimble asked.
Brain tapped the back of his katana on his shoulder thoughtfully. "I'm pretty sure they won't. Yah know they've got to realize by now it's all over, they don't have an army anymore, almost everybody was captured and the ones that were not, well, those are all dead." He said casually. "Even if the city decides to resist, aside from all the other soldiers we've got, the Sorcerer King gave us death knights, no army in the world can stand against a group of these. Makes me wonder what the hell they were thinking when they joined the Theocracy's side.
"If I hadn't been in the Slane Theocracy, I might wonder what they think they're going to accomplish, but after having spent time there as an unwitting guest… I think I can offer some insight."
Renner smiled radiantly but didn't look up from her box.
"Well, young man?" King Zanac pressed, "Why don't you enlighten us?"
"They're not thinking at all." Climb said bluntly.
"Come again?" General Nimble asked.
"They haven't thought any of it through. I don't mean that they're stupid, it's just… they're single minded. They see one thing and only one thing and anything that doesn't fit within that little narrow vision, they either dismiss, ignore, deny, or destroy. They're so obsessed with the Sorcerer King, with the Synod, with human superiority and their supposed place in the eyes of the gods, that they can't fathom anything else." Climb said sadly.
"General Zesshi was my jailor, on the surface she seems a brutish battle maniac who didn't give a damn about anything, but beneath that was a person who was always on the edge of her own country. They said horrible things to her, betrayed her, abused her little sister in front of her own eyes with how she was made to dress, the beatings she took, and worse. And it never occurred to them that Zesshi, being made aware of all this, would take issue with it."
"That sounds incredibly stupid." Brain said in disbelief. There were nods of agreement from the others.
"Maybe, but it was more than that. The reason they didn't see her taking issue with it, was because they thought they had her seeing everything the way they did, to the point where she'd even hate her own baby sister. They just can't see anything any other way, so when the Synod was announced, of course they believed that all the temples would side with them, of course they believed most of the population would reject the undead, of course they would dismiss the growing number of converts to Neia's beliefs as a mere heresy to be stomped out. They don't understand their opponents, and they don't want to understand them, their entire system of thought is built around not thinking about them at all."
"Self destructive stupidity." Brain said contemptuously.
"Maybe, but they themselves are strong, even if they're somewhat lacking in competent leadership." General Nimble said pointedly.
Brain's head whipped to his left. "Did you hear that?" He asked.
"Hear what?" King Zanac asked.
They all went quiet as they listened.
Climb looked to the sky in the distance. "I-I thought I just heard something. Like Thunder but… not."
"I didn't hear anything." King Zanac said indifferently.
"There it is again." Brain said softly, his eyes were wide with shock as he whipped his head around to look at his companions to his right. "It can't be." He said in utter disbelief.
"What?" The rest asked him curiously.
"A long time ago I took ship on a journey. While out at sea we were passing by a tiny island, it wasn't much, just a single mountain peak. They told me it was a volcano, and as we were sailing past, I heard it erupt. The eruption destroyed that mountain, taking it down below the waves. I suppose it was good that nobody lived on it. But the sound I just heard…" He froze, "It was exactly like that, but farther away."
"You're saying a mountain erupted somewhere to the south of us?" King Zanac and General Nimble looked at one another with concern.
Brain shook his head, "No, I'm saying that a mountain is being destroyed. Maybe it's just me, but it sounds...rhythmic, like a smith swinging a hammer, or a drummer tapping out a beat. Something is leveling a goddamn mountain." His voice was hushed, soft, filled with equal parts fear and disbelief.
"Oh, that is for the next part of the plan." Renner said as she went back to her puzzle box, she fiddled with it as she spoke in a disinterested fashion.
"What do you mean?" King Zanac asked uncertainly.
"Remember how the Sorcerer King expected you to go south to support the invasion of the Slane Theocracy after the kingdom is restored?" She asked casually.
"Yes." General Nimble and King Zanac replied in unison.
"Well, how did you think you were going to get there?" She asked, pausing to look at them both.
"W-Well, I just assumed it was going to be some kind of magic?" King Zanac said cautiously.
Renner smiled sweetly, "Oh brother, I guess you're sort of right. He's having a golem the size of a small mountain, punch part of that mountain flat. I assume he's already taken care of the problem of the Understone Empire and the Dark Elves south of them, so now he's making a road through there that will take us all the way into the Slane Theocracy's northwestern border."
"Did he tell you this?" Nimble asked doubtfully.
"No, not all of it, I knew they had the construct, and I noticed that for untrained or disunited armies he avoided instant teleportation, preferring long marches that would toughen them up and leave them time to train so they'd be competent when it came time to fight. Lady Albedo referred to us marching south not east, and I actually saw the golem once, it was easy enough to put the plan together with those clues." She went back to fiddling with her puzzle box again.
"It can't be possible…" Brain said, "not even for him, it can't be possible…" He trailed off as the sound hit his ears again, telling him that yes, it was not only possible, against all reason, it was so.
AN: Like? Review.
Really like? Support the audio project on p a treon dot com slash godrising (I do not profit, this just pays for what I'll need to convert it)
Really REALLY like? Donate to my charitable organization bdgiving dot org (also do not profit)
Want early access to stories, exclusive content, and a great place to talk writing, fanfiction, and a generally positive environment? Join the discord, invite on is on my author page.
Have a question...turn on your pm option. :)