Chapter 39: The Shadows of a New Dawn

The war was over, and the Demon King had vanished.

The heavens had reclaimed their freedom, and the earth had remembered its capacity for tenderness. Yet, the massive heavy doors of the Grand Prayer Room remained tightly barred, and a new Emperor now sat upon the throne.

“We pray that today may be another day where all living creations can rise once more and find the strength to go on.”

Because the Grand Prayer Room had been permanently closed, the priests were now conducting all of their daily services in the public sanctuary open to the common citizens. Although the seats reserved for the High Priests—which should have numbered twelve—were visibly empty in several places, those who remained did not falter, projecting their sacred prayers before the citizens of the Empire. It was a service conducted with a reverence more profound than any that had come before.

“Priest! Priest Mitchel!”

Within the walls of the Temple, all ecclesiastical titles had recently been unified under the simple designation of ‘Priest.’ It was a radical new directive aimed at dismantling discrimination based on hierarchy, rank, or former social status. Mitchel, who had just concluded his prayers and was preparing to vacate the altar, turned around at the sound of a youthful voice calling out to him.

It was a young girl who stood outside the Temple gates every morning, selling flowers from a basket packed to the brim. In one of her small hands, she held a slightly mismatched, somewhat crushed bouquet woven from withered marigolds and blue hydrangeas; with her other hand, she tightly gripped the fingers of a little boy who looked even younger than she was.

The moment Mitchel turned to face her, the girl let go of her younger brother’s hand and bolted toward him in a frantic hurry.

“Priest!”

“Do not run. You will hurt yourself.”

Predictably unable to control her own momentum, the girl came to a sudden, stumbling halt, nearly colliding flush against Mitchel’s robes. Panting slightly, she spoke in a breathless, stammering cadence.

“These… these are the flowers left over from yesterday. They’re a little withered, but… I still really wanted to give them to you, Priest.”

Her eyes darted nervously, clearly terrified that he might reprimand her for offering damaged flowers. Mitchel dropped into a low crouch to match her eye level, gently but firmly taking her by the arms.

“Are you giving these to me?”

At his gentle tone, the girl’s eyes went wide, and her small hands clamped down even harder around the stems of the bouquet.

“M-My brother and I don’t have a mommy or a daddy anymore. Daddy and big brother died in the war, and Mommy went to the East to bring back our grandmother who lived there, but she… she never came back. My big sister works at the restaurant just down the street.”

Though her gaze shifted anxiously, unable to maintain direct eye contact for long, she forced herself to keep speaking, the words tumbling out of her.

“A few days ago, b-big brother came back. They said he died in the final battle, so his body was still there. But… but he didn’t have any legs. My sister c-cried so much.”

The girl lowered her head again, her fingers nervously picking at the edges of the bouquet. She stole a brief, protective glance back at her tiny brother standing a few paces behind her.

“Priest, the f-flowers are selling really well lately. Because so many people are dead. O-Of course, that doesn’t mean the dead people are actually coming back. I only found out a few days ago that Daddy and big brother were gone.”

Mitchel’s mind involuntarily drifted back to the immediate aftermath of the final campaign. Tending to the horrific influx of wounded and systematically recovering the rotting corpses from the fields had fallen entirely upon the shoulders of the priesthood. It seemed the bodies were finally, agonizingly, making their way back to the capital one by one.

“My sister told me… she said I can’t ever meet the Goddess. She said only the most amazing, wonderful people are allowed to m-meet the Goddess. But you’re an amazing person, Priest.”

The girl continued to stutter, her voice trembling with a heavy, desperate innocence.

“Th-These flowers… please give them to the Goddess for me. Please tell the Goddess to make sure our daddy, and big brother, and m-mommy get these flowers. Please make sure she knows.”

The girl’s brown hair caught the afternoon sunlight, shimmering softly. The sun had finally returned to the continent, but the things that had failed to return vastly outnumbered the light.

Mitchel gently accepted the bouquet, which had grown somewhat mangled and crushed from how tightly her anxious fingers had gripped it throughout her speech. Infusing a subtle thread of his own holy mana into the stems, the crushed base and the withered, drooping petals instantly drank in the energy, surging back to vibrant, flawless life. It was a small, quiet gift to a child who had nothing but a ruined bouquet to offer for the souls of her dead parents. The girl’s eyes stretched wide in sheer awe.

Mitchel signaled with his hand, gesturing for the little boy standing in the background to come closer. Though winter was rapidly closing in, the child wasn’t even wearing a pair of socks. Mitchel reached out, gathering both children into a deep, sweeping embrace, and whispered softly into their ears.

“I will make absolutely certain she receives them.”

An entire month had already bled away since the conclusion of the war.

During that time, the continent had begun to coax life back into the soil, and the citizens of the Empire were slowly reclaiming a sense of hope as they looked up at the unblemished blue sky. But hope, as it so often did in this cruel world, possessed a terrifying habit of curdling back into despair.

Once the war ends, once the Demon King vanishes, once the Hero emerges victorious.

The common folk who had sustained themselves on those desperate prayers were plunged right back into agony the moment reports began filtering in from the Eastern and Northern territories. The news was catastrophic. Out of the thirty-six sovereign fiefdoms comprising the Empire—excluding the imperial capital—a staggering eighteen had been completely pulverized under the heels of the demonic horde, transformed into absolute lands of the dead. Half of the continent lay in smoking ruins, and the vast majority of the refugees had permanently lost the homes they were meant to return to. The reconstruction of the Empire needed to happen immediately, without a single moment of delay.

Mitchel gently stroked the hair of the children held fast against his chest.

The regional Temples, which should have been spearheading the relief and charity efforts for the citizens, had seen their infrastructure paralyzed long ago. As the fiefdoms collapsed, the local sanctuaries had naturally crumbled along with them. The remaining Temples in the central regions were drastically insufficient to house the overwhelming sea of displaced refugees, and their facilities were wretchedly ill-equipped.

Mitchel recalled the harrowing logistical reports he had been reviewing late into the night, unable to sleep. Very soon, a massive legion of mages spearheaded by Zeimer would be deployed to the North. Their mission was singular: to forcibly resurrect a dead, desecrated land that had been utterly flattened into ash.

The deficit wasn’t merely a matter of physical space or personnel. The Empire was bleeding out from a lack of everything. As if the catastrophic conflict had nothing to do with him, the former Emperor had barricaded himself within the safety of the capital, completely neglecting to draft a single contingency plan for the refugees or the structural survival of his nation. Though the initial confirmation of peace had sparked a fleeting wave of euphoria, the reality of depleted resources and severe food shortages was rapidly grinding the people down into a state of profound exhaustion.

“We… the Hero… he must have saved this world for people like you.”

Yes, the Hero would have wanted this. He would have dreamed of nothing more than a simple, ordinary daily life where these children could simply wake up and look forward to tomorrow.

The war was over. In the end, it felt as though absolutely nothing remained.

“I won’t ever leave you alone.”

Claire stood rigidly before the massive Monument of Remembrance, offering a silent, perfectly disciplined military salute. Behind him, the surviving knights of the order followed his lead in flawless synchronization, raising their hands to honor the fallen. A vast majority of the soldiers slaughtered by the monsters had left no bodies behind to recover; furthermore, those who had been forcibly corrupted into monsters before their deaths could no longer be identified, leaving them to be processed collectively as anonymous, nameless heroes.

Having concluded his salute, Claire stood in a formal stance for a beat before executing a movement that was entirely absent from the military protocol.

Thud.

He dropped heavily to his knees, sinking directly into the raw earth that hadn’t even been fully seeded with grass yet. Though the dark fabric of his pristine dress uniform was instantly soiled and soaked through by the damp, muddy soil, Claire didn’t pay it the slightest bit of attention. He simply looked up at the stone monument, within which a sealed chamber contained plaques etched with every single name of the nameless dead.

The former Grand Commander of the Knights, Gladius, had been laid to rest within this very monument as well. While a separate commemorative pillar had been erected specifically to honor her rank, Claire chose to mourn his master right here at the collective monument, strictly adhering to her final wishes. Memories of his mentor flashed through his mind—a woman who, even well into her forties, could effortlessly out-maneuver and overpower knights half her age. She had been his teacher, instructing him from his earliest youth on how to grip a hilt, how to thrust a blade, and how to direct the very course of his life.

When Claire had rushed back from the Academy to join the vanguard, his mentor had looked at him and promised:

“I won’t ever leave you alone.”

And on the horrifying day Claire had been forced to cut her down with his own hands, the Hero had arrived. It was as if the universe had engineered the Hero’s arrival just to ensure that his master’s promise to never leave him alone would be fulfilled, even through her death.

Lost to the passage of time as the damp chill seeped deep into his knees, it was ultimately Ilya who reached down to pull Claire back to his feet.

“Stand up, Commander. The formal procedures to honor the victims still require your presence.”

The Chancellor personally assisted the Grand Commander to his feet, bending down to brush the loose dirt from Claire’s knees. He reached out, smoothing the creases of the leather gloves that had been crumpled into tight, agonizing fists.

Given the dire state of the empire, the coronation of the new Emperor had been executed with heavily streamlined formalities at the Temple. Immediately following the ceremony, the Emperor had departed for the frozen wastes of the North to spearhead the reconstruction, leaving Claire to act as the imperial proxy to honor the veterans of the campaign.

Guided by Ilya, Claire stepped onto the raised podium overlooking the courtyard. He looked down at the neatly drafted speech resting on the lectern for a brief moment before raising his eyes to face the crowd. Standing shoulder-to-shoulder before him was a dense sea of grieving families. Despite the vastness of the open plaza, the atmosphere was thick with a heavy, solemn silence. Though the event was hosted outdoors to maintain proximity to the Monument of Remembrance, there wasn’t a single shred of disorder among the crowd.

The pre-written speech was entirely useless. While he felt a twinge of guilt toward Ilya, who had undoubtedly exhausted himself drafting the elegant prose, Claire had absolutely no intention of standing there reading hollow sentences that failed to resonate even within his own chest. Claire closed the folder, shutting the speech away. He parted his lips, a raw, horribly cracked voice scraping past his throat.

“……It was a glorious era. A time when the world was stained in absolute darkness, when we could not glimpse the light of the sun even at the peak of high noon, and when our most cherished companions were reduced to nothing more than mindless beasts.”

Ilya, who had begun stepping forward to discreetly reopen the speech folder for him, came to a sudden halt. Claire turned his head slightly, locking eyes with the Chancellor for a silent second, before turning back to continue his address.

“The Goddess bestowed a Hero upon us in our darkest hour, and through him, we emerged victorious.”

Ilya took two measured steps backward, returning to his formal position. Catching the movement, a faint, barely perceptible curve touched the corner of Claire’s lips before he anchored his gaze back to the front.

“We were forced to wage a relentless war against a seemingly infinite despair. Every single night, I prayed. I prayed for the strength to survive that hellscape with my sanity intact. In those trenches, I was forced to sever the lives of my own comrades—men who were on the absolute brink of corruption—far more often than I ever cut down the monsters themselves.”

Claire paused, taking a slow breath to steady himself. Never in his entire life had he resented his own lack of eloquence as intensely as he did at this exact moment.

The images of his comrades vanishing in a flash of teeth and claws, the faces of the countless soldiers he had been forced to execute with his own blade, and the memories of men who had lost the will to live and turned their weapons upon themselves right before his eyes flashed through his mind in a violent torrent.

We had to survive. We had to keep moving forward.

As he blinked, the image of the Hero collapsed on the blood-soaked dirt, cradling the final sins of the world within his broken vessel, filled his vision.

Back when the true nature of their enemy was entirely fluid, when the suffocating threat of an endless war was strangling the life out of them, the ordinary soldiers had sat with hollow, lifeless eyes, staring blankly into the distance. It was during one of those bleak nights that the Hero had turned to Claire. Though the Hero’s eyes were directed at the exact same ruined horizon as the broken men around them, his gaze had burned with a rigid, unyielding resolve.

“Years from now, people will look back and call this a glorious era. A magnificent, golden age where we dragged a dying world back from the very brink of annihilation.”

Claire projected his voice across the plaza, the words ringing clear. “It was indeed a glorious era. In an age defined by the most atrocious and barbaric conflict in history, it was through the power of the Dragon that we found the strength to not abandon our humanity, and it was through the mercy of the Goddess that we earned the right to stand on our own feet once more.”

Claire conjured the image of the Hero within his mind one last time.

“We will remember. I will remember every single soul, and I will defend the future that each of you has gifted to us with my very life.”

Concluding his speech with a deep, respectful bow, Claire gave a sharp hand signal. Ilya stepped forward immediately, carrying a small, velvet-lined box containing the imperial medals. As the lid clicked open, Claire reached down to lift the medal. It was a thin, golden insignia cast in the shape of a six-pointed sun, interlaced with a brilliant crimson ribbon. Handling the medal with immense care, Claire stepped off the podium and walked toward a knight seated in a wheelchair, a thick white bandage wrapped entirely over one side of his face.

He was a knight who possessed no inherent ability to wield mana. Malek, a young knight belonging to the Eighth Order, had been caught within the localized vacuum of his own commander’s mana storm during the chaos of the final battle, the sheer pressure tearing one of his eyes cleanly from its socket. Yet, even after losing his vision, Malek had continued to swing his sword relentlessly until a monster’s venom corrupted his limb, forcing him to hack his own arm off to survive. This courageous young man was present today to receive the honor on behalf of all the surviving veterans.

“Sir Malek, we shall ensure that the future you sacrificed so much to gift us will be carried forward with honor.”

Acting as the proxy for the Emperor, Claire pinned the glittering golden sun directly over Malek’s heart. Having lost his right arm, Malek raised his left hand to offer a rigid, formal salute to his Commander. Claire hesitated for a fraction of a second before lifting his own left arm, returning the salute in kind.

Malek bit his lower lip hard, squeezing his single remaining eye tightly shut as the tears finally broke through.