Meanwhile.
“My Lady!”
Knox had come through the portal immediately behind them, and now he called out for Aisha at the top of his voice.
She would naturally have made her way toward the Krost Ducal Estate the moment she arrived—that was the obvious, reasonable expectation.
“……”
He entered the estate quickly, but the emergency situation had left the corridors silent as a tomb.
Just then.
“Knox!”
The estate’s head butler, Brad, turned white as a sheet the moment he spotted him in the hallway.
“Were you not supposed to be at the palace with Lady Aisha? We sent an urgent message—”
So she’s not here either.
Knox suppressed the dread threatening to surface and answered calmly.
“Lady Aisha has come to the North. Through the palace portal.”
“What? But surely Lady Aisha would be at the—”
There was no time to stand here and listen.
“If she’s not here, I’ll go back out and look for her.”
He brushed past Brad and stepped back outside, scanning in every direction.
Where in the world did she go.
He had leapt through the portal right after her—surely he should be able to spot that ridiculous yellow hair of hers somewhere.
Unless she didn’t come straight to the estate.
His uneasy gaze drifted toward the End of the World.
Far in the distance, beyond the evergreen treeline, grey smoke continued to spiral upward without pause.
The faint, distant roar of Creatures carried through the air, muffled but unmistakable. A full-scale subjugation was clearly underway.
Which meant—
She didn’t go there. She couldn’t have.
Knox told himself this firmly—but his heart, hammering with dreadful certainty, already knew the truth.
The Aisha he knew would have assessed the situation in a single breath and sprinted straight for the End of the World to find her father.
Because she was a former spy—but also a reckless five-year-old who would throw her life down for the people she was loyal to.
“…Hah.”
He had no choice.
Knox commandeered a sword from the nearest weapons cache and ran toward the End of the World.
Some time later.
After a long, breathless run through the snowfields, the shapes of armored knights began to emerge from the white haze ahead.
“…K—Knox?!”
“Knox. How did you get out here… And why are you holding a sword?”
This was the defensive zone—the secondary support line.
The rest of the knights, aside from those who had been laid out with injuries, appeared to be intact, which meant the line had not been overrun.
“Where is His Grace?”
Knox caught his ragged breath.
“His Grace is at the front—”
That was all he needed.
“Knox! Where are you going alone!”
Before the knight finished speaking, Knox had already cut through the makeshift iron fencing and crossed through the ice wall.
Grrraauuugh—
“There—!”
“Behind me—gkh—!”
“Danger! The Creatures have gone berserk! Everyone maintain your distance!”
Beyond the wall, the world was nothing but white snow and red blood.
Against that stark contrast, Creatures five times the size of a man lurched and roared even with swords buried in them, still charging forward in reckless frenzy.
Your Grace. Your Grace, please.
No matter where he looked, there was no one who seemed to have any ground to spare.
Graaaugh—!
A Creature’s sudden lunge sent a knight stumbling backward directly toward Knox. Knox twisted his body and sidestepped cleanly, then kept sprinting toward the front line—ducking low to avoid an arrow that came singing through the air at shoulder height.
This place was hell.
He didn’t know why the Creatures’ frenzy had spread this far, but these were not the Creatures he knew. Something was deeply, fundamentally wrong with all of them. A sword through the body should have brought at least an agonized recoil—but these things moved without pause, without reaction, as though hypnotized, pushing forward until the moment their hearts simply stopped.
“Damn.”
Worse still, the snowfall thickened with every step toward the End of the World, until it was nearly impossible to distinguish knight from Creature.
Just then.
KRAAAAUUUGH—
A final, shuddering roar—and then a hot spray of blood fanned across the snow.
Knox, standing in the middle of the battlefield, found his eyes drawn to a familiar silhouette.
Tall enough to stand out even across this distance.
Calypse.
“Your Grace!”
He shouted with everything he had, and Calypse—mid-motion, driving a sword downward into a Creature—turned his head at the sound.
The moment Calypse registered Knox’s face, his expression shifted to something that looked almost like disbelief.
“Why are you—what are you doing here—damn it! Get down!”
But that was as far as it got.
Calypse shoved Knox roughly to the side and froze an encroaching Creature solid in a single motion.
“Why are you here?! Didn’t you see the emergency message?!”
Knox’s heart lurched at the Duke’s ferocious bark.
But he had to say it.
Because the thing he feared most right now was not Calypse’s fury—it was not knowing what might happen to Aisha.
“Lady Aisha has come to the North.”
“…What?”
“Lady Aisha came through the palace portal! I came after her—I’ve been looking for her this whole time!”
The ragged, rough breath Calypse had been drawing went still.
He stood alone in the center of the battle as though something had paused time around him, and for a long, suspended moment he looked at Knox with eyes that had grown slightly wide.
Then—
“…Aisha is—she’s here?”
His voice split into two, as though he couldn’t trust his own ears.
Good God.
He doesn’t know either. Where on earth has she gone—
Just then.
“Y—Your Grace!”
From somewhere behind the stationary Calypse, a huge shape suddenly lurched upright.
The Creature he had killed moments ago.
It had had breath left in it—and now, dragging one ruined leg, with the torn muscles of its forelimb still twitching, it reached for Calypse’s ankle—
“……”
—and then stopped.
Mid-reach. Mid-motion. Like a clock that had simply run down.
“…What happened?”
“These things haven’t been behaving normally from the start. Everyone stay alert and keep your distance!”
The same thing was happening elsewhere.
All across the field, Creatures that had been locked in ferocious combat simultaneously ceased what they were doing—and the knights, swords still raised, looked around with baffled, disoriented expressions.
And then.
The Creatures began to step back. Slowly. One by one—as though making way. As though standing aside to clear a path.
Like soldiers parting in salute as a hero returned from the field.
“……”
A path formed, empty and white through the middle of the carnage—and as it opened, Calypse and Knox both found their gaze pulled along it, helpless to look away.
At the far end of that path:
“Father!”
A small girl stood holding a tiny poison dart.
“……”
Her appearance was, in its own strange way, extraordinary.
The snowfield behind her was stained red—and yet before the child, a clean white road lay untouched beneath a soft fall of snow. With every small step she took forward, the Creatures that had been watching her intently retreated a pace further back.
As though the path had been laid out just for her.
“……”
“……”
The surrounding knights exchanged uncertain glances.
Even Calypse and Knox stood still for a moment, caught in the strange, suspended wonder of it.
Then—
“Aisha!”
Calypse broke out of it first. He threw his sword aside and ran.
“Oof.”
She hadn’t expected the embrace—her blue eyes went round with surprise as the breath was pressed out of her.
He had moved too fast and caught her too tightly, and Aisha inhaled with a sharp gasp—but Calypse was in no state to notice.
“Why are you here. I told you to stay at the palace until things settled down. Why didn’t you listen.”
Even with her held against him, he couldn’t seem to feel certain she was safe—he stroked the back of her golden head again and again, unable to stop.
The knights who remained fell quiet.
They had never seen the Duke behave like this. They had never seen him come undone, had never seen him hold close a girl who was not of his blood as though she were the most precious thing he possessed. It was startling, and it struck them somewhere deep.
Aisha, for her part, was trying to say something.
“I didn’t come because I wanted to—”
“It doesn’t matter. If something had gone wrong, what would you have done? You came through a portal—you should have turned straight around, or waited right there by the portal until someone found you. There were dozens of people turning the palace upside down to find you—if you’d stayed put, they would have reached you. Why did you come all the way out here alone?”
All his agitation did was make his voice louder, of course.
“…Your Grace.”
Knox stepped quietly forward.
“There are eyes on you. And the situation isn’t over yet.”
That said, Knox glanced around.
Or wasn’t it over?
No—it was.
Because the Creatures, one by one, had been retreating from the ice wall and disappearing. The battle, somehow, was already done.
“……”
Not because of Aisha.
Because of that cat, of course.
Knox dropped his gaze slightly to one side.
There in the white snow sat a white cat.
It had been watching only Aisha from the moment it appeared.
It had no particular expression. It simply seemed to be waiting—waiting for her to be set down from Calypse’s arms, so it could be near her again.
