But Milano Mortiel is a hostage. A hostage offered by the Mortiel Kingdom to the Empire. And yet, could there be a hostage of so little value?
Mortiel would never have intended to send the prince as a hostage from the start. More precisely, they would only have made it look that way — with plans to dispose of him somewhere along the road to the Empire. The Empire, knowing this full well, hadn’t lifted a finger to help, and had never expected him to arrive alive in the first place.
In short, it was Mortiel who orchestrated it, and the Empire that turned a blind eye. And then, of all things, that wretched prince went and survived. So it was no wonder his treatment was poor. If anything, good treatment would have been the stranger outcome.
For that reason, while a hostage of princely rank would ordinarily be treated as a prized prisoner, in the eyes of the knights involved in this affair, this particular prince is of low value. They likely consider it the Empire’s generosity already, that they’re keeping him alive and transporting him as any proper hostage at all.
That his treatment would be wretched was, of course, something Ranok had anticipated. It was simply that he had no intention of tolerating it.
Ranok stared blankly at the plate for a moment, then reached out, picked up a piece of bread, and fed it directly to the horse standing beside him.
The horse took the bread obediently.
Huh? A knight, bewildered by Ranok’s strange behavior, let out a sound of disbelief.
“What are you——!”
“However humble the meal of a beast that can’t speak may be.”
Ranok set the entire tray right in front of the horse.
Even though it was an herbivore, perhaps because it was Ranok who had given it the meat — the horse chewed through it without any fuss.
“Isn’t this a bit too pathetic?”
While the knight stood reeling at the scene, Ranok smiled and gave his order.
“What are you standing there for? Bring something proper.”
The knight, aghast at having the meal he’d brought treated as feed for an animal, scrambled away without even collecting the tray.
Having just had what passed for a dish treated as a beast’s portion, he would have to come back with something presentable this time around.
He could spit in it, perhaps — but wanting to give a haughty little prince a hard time was one thing, and having genuine malice was another, so he wouldn’t go that far.
Haah. Ranok let out another sigh. The complicated past was already a great deal to contend with, and this reckless prince’s situation was anything but simple either.
Ranok ran a hand upward through his curly hair.
It’s messy any way you look at it, and it seems I was never given the right to refuse in the first place — in that case.
There’s no choice but to sort it out.
Ranok ended up simply lying down flat on the green field.
The sky was pointlessly, brilliantly blue.
— Wow, so living a long life hasn’t been entirely without its perks, hm?
In the middle of their conversation, the Faerie — who had been struggling and finally wriggled free from Ranok’s hand — remarked admiringly at his way of handling things, but Ranok paid the comment no mind whatsoever.
“Faerie.”
— What?
“You said you wanted something from me.”
The Faerie, fluttering about in the air around him, answered brightly.
— The restoration of this world.
“And why ask that of me? Isn’t that the domain of the living?”
No matter how charitably one looked at it, Ranok was nothing more than a specter of the past. It was true that he had once been an immensely powerful demon, but even he could not produce power on the level of a god. On top of that, while he could now wield demonic energy, that was the extent of it — a human body and demonic energy were simply not compatible to begin with. What exactly was he supposed to do with a body that had grown weaker than before?
And yet to someone like him, the goddess, grieved to the point of despair at the state of the current world, had possessed him into this body and even sent a Faerie to command him to restore the world to how it should be. Frankly, Ranok had already found the whole thing unconvincing from that very point.
— The living have their own tasks to attend to. The goddess didn’t send a Faerie only to you. By now, every race will have received a Faerie’s visit.
“And what are they supposed to do?”
— Aid in removing the corruption.
Ranok’s eyes narrowed. Corruption referred to a foul and wicked phenomenon that appeared wherever the goddess’s power had weakened. Resembling black tar, it rotted everything it touched and drove all things toward death — and at some point, it came to be called corruption.
Even in the era Ranok remembered, corruption had not been a serious problem. It had only spread across a handful of isolated regions. But today was different. Half the world the Demon King had swept away was blanketed in corruption, and land overtaken by it was uninhabitable. As a result, the three surviving nations, far from gaining territory by the disappearance of the others, had instead been left to shoulder nothing but extreme chaos.
— Removing the corruption will ultimately require you too, of course.
Out of nowhere, the Faerie lobbed a bombshell at Ranok, who had been quietly lost in thought.
“What?”
— Mm…… you’ll find out eventually.
The Faerie skirted around the subject with practiced ease. After staring the Faerie down for a long moment, Ranok sighed and asked.
“Why me, of all people?”
— Because you’re the only one who can.
The Faerie’s answer was as breezy as ever. As if stating the self-evident — like saying one plus one is two.
— I told you. The reason they went mad is because of you. So you’re the one who has to fix it.
“Is it really at a level where no one else can solve it?”
— Yes.
“……”
— Only you can do it.
Why are they so certain of this? Unlike Ranok, who was still disoriented as someone newly returned, the Faerie clearly knew more than he did — there was a gap in how much information each of them held.
Ranok had been about to ask something more, but he fell quiet.
Because, for some reason, the word karma had surfaced in his mind.
Karma.
Was all of this karma for the judgment he had made that day?
But even if told to repay karma — how, and in what way? Milano Mortiel may have been born of royal blood, but right now the man himself was a candle flame flickering in the wind.
A drunkard turned imperial noble, and a Demon King who had wiped out half the world — how on earth was he supposed to meet them, let alone persuade them?
No matter what he tried to do, with both hands and feet effectively cut off, there would be nothing he could actually accomplish.
At the very least, if he had even one subordinate, he could gather information from somewhere other than the Faerie and try to do something — anything.
Right now, he found himself desperately missing Mas, whose fate — alive or dead — he didn’t know.
But then, Ranok’s thoughts were resolved with unexpected ease, and from an unexpected direction.
“Your Highness.”
Not long after that thought had crossed Ranok’s mind, the Knight Commander came to find him.
“Yes?”
And with someone Ranok hadn’t expected in tow.
At first he thought the Knight Commander had come personally over the matter of the “horse feed” — but that didn’t appear to be the case, because standing behind the Knight Commander was someone familiar to Ranok.
Well — more precisely, someone familiar to this prince.
A young man. Ranok’s eyes lit up the moment he caught sight of that face.
Because this was exactly the person he needed most right now.
“Oh, Your Highness, my prince!”
The man immediately made to rush toward Ranok, but the Knight Commander blocked him with the flat of his sheathed sword, and the attempt ended before it began.
“What do you think you’re doing? The verification of your identity has not yet been completed.”
Cowed for a brief moment by the Knight Commander’s razor-sharp aura, the man perked right back up the instant his eyes met Ranok’s, and shouted.
“Oh, can’t you see for yourself? His Highness recognizes me! I am His Highness’s first-rank attendant, who has served him since childhood!”
I was the very first one selected when His Highness chose to come to the Empire! The man thumped his own chest.
“Your Highness! It’s me! Zak! Your faithful servant, Zak!”
At the boisterous display of self-promotion, the Knight Commander shot Ranok a questioning look with his eyes. Do you know this man?
Ranok smirked.
Know him — yes, I do. He was a man who had appeared often in Milano Mortiel’s memories.
Zak’s words were not a lie. He had been the one attendant this ill-tempered prince had kept by his side to the very end.
Though less because of an affection built up over a long acquaintance, and more because he was the one best at keeping the prince appeased — which was how he had earned the rank of first attendant.
Quick-witted and skilled at groveling, the type who knew only to bring up the topics the prince wanted to hear — a textbook flatterer.
But precisely because of that, the attendant who had survived at Milano’s side.
An unfortunate man who had been bound and sent along when the prince was dispatched as a hostage, simply by virtue of being too close to the prince.
Since possessing this body, Ranok had assumed him dead when he hadn’t turned up — but it seemed Zak had managed to hide himself when the carriage overturned and the assassins came, and had somehow survived.
And now, with the prince also alive and moving alongside the knights, Zak had apparently decided that sticking close to the prince’s side was still the best bet for getting his share of the spoils — and had latched right back on without delay.
Ranok didn’t particularly dislike people who were quick on their feet. They were better than dull, stubborn fools.
Of course, that was only true when they knew their own place.
“He’s my attendant.”
The moment Ranok acknowledged him, the Knight Commander stepped back without argument. Zak shot a sideways glare at the Knight Commander, then rubbed his hands together and planted himself right beside Ranok.
“Hehe, is there anything troubling Your Highness? Anything you need?”
Zak latched on to Ranok as naturally as if he had never left in the first place.
“……”
Ranok studied Zak’s shameless, smooth-faced expression. When the ambush had begun, Zak had already been nowhere near the carriage.
Meaning his judgment had been fast, and he had fled with remarkable speed — without looking back even once.
On the surface he was fussing over Ranok as if tending to him with the utmost devotion, but really it was just his way of making enough noise to prevent Ranok from calling him out for abandoning his master and running.
