“Aaah! Aaaah!”
The delivery was delayed.
Redron wished he could take Jasmine’s pain upon himself instead.
The old midwife, her wrinkled face pale, confessed that this was the most difficult labor she had ever encountered in her life.
He felt like punching that wrinkled face, but he restrained himself.
If he removed this old midwife, there was no one else here who could properly assist Jasmine’s birth.
Damn it!
Women rushed about, and countless clean cloths had already been used up.
Yet Jasmine’s agonized screams never ceased.
The child still had not come.
Something had gone terribly wrong.
“Is there no healer?! I can’t trust this old midwife! Bring a proper one!”
“It’s impossible, Your Highness! With the crowds gathered at the colosseum, no one can be brought here tonight!”
“Enough excuses! Prepare a carriage! We’re returning to the palace!”
“Y-Yes?!”
“Hurry!”
No matter what had happened, all the royal guards who had been watching to prevent Jasmine and the First Prince from leaving the colosseum were gone.
Whatever orders they had received, it was none of Redron’s concern.
For the First Prince, the most important thing right now was Jasmine.
The unskilled old midwife and the noisy women were of no help at all in her delivery.
Glancing around the room, he felt a chill at the sight of blood soaking the bedsheets and floor.
He could not simply leave Jasmine to suffer and die from this difficult labor.
The servants who hurriedly prepared the carriage at the First Prince’s command deserved praise.
If they had always obeyed orders this quickly, they would have received much better pay.
But neither Redron nor the bleeding Jasmine had any attention to spare for the devotion of those around them.
“Aaaah! Aaaaah!”
“Hurry! Faster!”
In his desperation, Redron forgot his own status and helped the servants lift the bed where she lay.
Seeing this, the servants quickened their pace.
The sight of a bed being carried through the cold corridors of the colosseum, with a groaning woman upon it, made people hurriedly press themselves against the walls.
Chaos erupted, no different from the madness in the arena where two tail-chasers tried to kill each other.
In the colosseum’s arena and passageways where spectators came and went, in a distant place, the lives and deaths of people bound by fate’s red threads intersected.
“Wh-What…?!”
It was then.
Redron saw a sudden shock ripple across the entire arena, cracks spreading across the colosseum ceiling, and then massive stones began to fall.
The ceiling was collapsing.
Stones were falling.
“Protect Jasmine!”
Redron shouted with all his strength.
But the colosseum’s collapse was faster than expected, and the shattered stones fell despite the prince’s command.
Even if one became a swordmaster, wounds did not suddenly heal.
Baimart rolled across the arena floor, dodging the aura-clad claws of the panting Surabar.
Surabar moved on all fours like a saber-toothed tiger, stalking Baimart.
His forepaws had transformed into the powerful weapons of a feline predator.
Though the aura’s light flickered on and off, it was clear that a single strike would end him for good this time.
Baimart poured all his strength into moving his exhausted body to evade the beast’s claws.
This is bad…
He didn’t know why Surabar had transcended to the superhuman realm at this moment, but the task remained the same.
Unbeknownst to Baimart, the demonic curse gnawing at Surabar was still in effect.
Baimart gritted his teeth and rolled across the sand littered with debris.
Shards of broken glass and bottles pierced his back and stabbed his soles, but Surabar suffered the same.
Both were already in a state where either could collapse and die at any moment.
The spectators, panting, simply waited for this filthy fight to end.
Even after so many years in the arena, Baimart had never seen the audience this frenzied.
Never had so many people so desperately wished for the gladiators’ deaths.
They seemed possessed, craving the death of the tail-chasers standing in the arena.
Wait…
As Surabar closed the distance on all fours, Baimart noticed familiar scars on his body.
Those were not wounds from battle.
The memory flashed through his mind—the secret altar room in the former Archduke Greenwood’s mansion, known only to the Archduke, the black mage, and Anastasia.
A spiderweb-like black line spread from Surabar’s hand across his entire body.
A curse!
He didn’t know when it had been cast on Surabar, but one thing was clear.
Despite bearing the demonic curse, Surabar had fought him on equal terms—no, had even overwhelmed him.
The moment Baimart realized this, his will to fight collapsed.
…Defeat.
This was not a fair fight, nor the outcome he had wanted.
He had wanted to defeat Surabar and take his life for Anastasia’s sake, for the children she would leave behind, but only with his own strength.
That was right.
That was how it should have been.
Barhan was always watching.
No matter what happened, if it was not a just fight, it would be the deadliest poison, preventing his soul from returning to Barhan’s embrace after death.
This was dishonor.
Baimart felt a chill as if all the blood in his body was being drained.
“I… cannot… lose…”
Surabar, bleeding, advanced toward Baimart through the pain of his flesh being torn by the demonic curse—the same pain Baimart had felt at the altar.
The arena had long been dyed red with the blood of the two gladiators.
Surabar’s awakening as a swordmaster seemed to grant him a brief surge of vitality, freeing him momentarily from pain, but it did not last long.
Surabar, who had charged with aura-wreathed forepaws as if to turn the tide, finally collapsed a single step from Baimart, panting heavily.
Whether his eyes were closed or open, he looked as though he would die any moment.
“Huff, huff…!”
“Huu… huu…!”
Baimart could not bring himself to finish the fallen Surabar.
This fight is my defeat.
But he lacked even the strength to raise his hand and signal his surrender.
Baimart staggered, on the verge of collapse.
“What are you doing?! Fight! Fight!”
“Kill him! Settle it!”
“Is that all you’ve got?!”
…Baimart raised his head one last time.
If he killed Surabar here, he would live—but knowing that his soul would not be saved afterward, such a thing could never happen.
Though the tinted glass of the special room on the third floor obscured the view, he wanted to see Anastasia.
“…Anastasia?”
From the third-floor special room, invisible to the arena or the lower seats, Anastasia’s figure appeared.
She was looking down at him, weeping.
At the same moment, the champion of the Archduke saw cracks spreading across the colosseum ceiling, and stones began to fall.
“Hooong”
A massive silver owl appeared.
‘…Why can I see his movements?’
It was strange.
The one-eyed swordmaster.
The Guardian Deity of the Bers Kingdom.
A senior swordmaster who might have reached this realm even before I was born.
Cedmos Jaeger’s attacks—I could anticipate how he would come at me.
It wasn’t nonsense like reading the future.
Simply instinct and intuition telling me the path and means he would use to attack.
The life-or-death struggle on the colosseum roof was precariously balanced.
Was it thanks to the basic knight training Sir Garland had taught me?
Perhaps.
But more than that, the techniques of the man named ‘Cedmos Jaeger,’ whom I had no memory of, felt strangely familiar.
“You bastard!”
“Guh!”
Cedmos’s attacks were fast and heavy.
In every way—movement, power behind the blade, the natural flow between strikes—he was superior to me.
Yet I was still ‘alive.’
I didn’t know why, but this fight felt not like the first time, but as though I had experienced it many times before.
Déjà vu, perhaps.
My body moved before my mind could think.
Then, by the narrowest margin, Cedmos’s sword grazed past.
Each time I took his aura—burning like lava erupting from a volcano—I felt something.
I could follow his aura exactly… no, manifest it even more efficiently, more purely.
It was absurd.
My aura, merely a faint blue light around a ‘slightly sharper sword,’ had no reason to suddenly evolve mid-battle like some hero’s power-up.
Yet it did.
“How did you—!”
“Well… After taking a few hits, I figured out how to use it. Maybe I’m… more ‘talented’ than you.”
“I’ll kill you!”
Cedmos, now like a demon of slaughter, swung his sword.
Their lava-like crimson auras scattered everywhere.
Unlike me, who had already been cut and pierced all over by his aura, Cedmos seemed to have no resistance to the pain and wounds his own aura inflicted.
In the pain, in the agony, in the fight, my mind gradually drifted away from my body.
I laughed.
Not to mock the pain-twisted Cedmos.
I simply found this fight enjoyable, and the joy of my own growth made me smile.
“Madman!”
“Ha-ha!”
Cedmos did not seem to feel the same.
We teetered precariously on the colosseum roof, crossing blades, the pain burning our blood, flesh, and souls.
In the midst of an almost eternal ecstasy, Cedmos suddenly widened the distance and lifted his head.
“Hooong”
“…What?”
A massive silver owl suddenly emerged from the stars and swallowed Cedmos whole.
The god’s intrusion ended our fight in vain.
“Aaaah! Aaaaah! This… this is…! Zork! Even in death, you—!!”
The one-eyed swordmaster, called the Guardian Deity of Bers, was swallowed alive, headfirst, by the glittering silver owl that appeared out of nowhere during their life-or-death battle.
The silver owl was enormous and transparent inside.
One could clearly see Cedmos being ‘digested’ alive within it.
Having lost my opponent, I stared blankly at the silver owl, which seemed to flap its wings in delight after devouring a swordmaster, swaying left and right as if dancing.
“Hooong”
“Ugh!”
The battle’s exhilaration vanished instantly.
The cold wind from the owl’s wings snapped me back to reality, and I felt the ‘world’ shake.
The ground, the buildings, the colosseum roof I stood on, and the people below—all trembled under a sudden vibration.
Even I!
Even in my wounded and exhausted state, considering my original level, this should have been impossible.
I felt a floating sensation as the roof collapsed, vomiting blood and something unknown.
My mind grew faint.
‘Consciousness… fading…’
The collapse had begun.