The Emperor's throne room felt colder than the grave Ren had left his brother in. The courtiers were statues, their eyes averted, as if the stench of fratricide still clung to him. He stood before the dais, not kneeling, his own posture a silent challenge.
The Emperor's voice was a low rumble, devoid of paternal warmth, only imperial calculus. "Ōsu no Mikoto. The traitor is dead. Your loyalty is... proven." The pause was an insult. "Now, your usefulness must be tested. Two tasks. The warlord of the Kumaso gathers forces in the east. He fancies himself a rival. You will bring me his head."
Ren said nothing. A single, cold nod.
"And," the Emperor continued, a cruel smirk playing on his lips, "you will journey to Izumo. In the heart of the storm-lashed mountains, in a shrine guarded by beasts and gods, lies the sword Kusanagi. The Grass-Cutting Sword. They say its edge does not cut, but unmakes—parting the very air, creating voids that can slice a palace in two. Retrieve it. Prove you are worthy of the name Yamato Takeru."
A suicide mission. An assassination and a divine quest, designed to break him. Ren felt nothing. The part of him that could feel had been buried in the mud with his brother.
"Understood," Ren said, his voice flat, and turned to leave without dismissal.
The journey was a monochrome blur. Ren moved like a phantom through verdant landscapes that held no color for him. He used magic not with the clever, grammatical precision Professor Teshin had taught, but with brute, efficient force. A whispered "Asto'rt" to clear a fallen tree, a muttered "Von'dek" to freeze a river crossing. It was empty. He was a shell, a weapon waiting to be loaded.
The ambush came in a narrow pass. Arrows whistled from the rocks above. Ren moved with lethal, dispassionate grace, his stolen sword a blur, cutting down the first three Kumaso scouts. But a fourth, hidden, drew a bead on his back with a heavy spear.
A flash of movement. A grunt. The spear meant for his heart instead found the shoulder of a stranger—a woman who had seemingly materialized from the shadows of the pass. She was dressed in practical, worn traveler's clothes, a short sword in her hand. With a furious cry, she dispatched the spearman before turning to Ren, her dark eyes blazing not with fear, but with fury.
"You are either the bravest man in Yamato or the stupidest to travel these roads alone," she snapped, wincing as she pulled the spear from her flesh. "They would have skewered you like a boar."
Ren stared, his emotional numbness momentarily pierced by sheer bewilderment. "Why?"
"Why did I help you?" She tore a strip from her hem to bind the wound. "Because the Kumaso warlord is a brute. And anyone he wants dead is someone I might find useful. My name is Tsubaki. I know the path to his fortress."
She was his guide. Against his will, she became his companion. Tsubaki was sharp, her humor dry as sun-bleached bone, her perception unnerving. She saw through the wall of ice he had built around himself.
"You fight like a demon, but your eyes are a funeral," she said one night by their campfire, the flames casting dancing shadows on her face.
"I have a goal," Ren replied, staring into the fire. "To end a cycle. A war beyond this one."
"Lofty," she mused. "And lonely."
He found himself telling her fragments. Not the whole truth, but the shape of it. A war of myths. A wish for annihilation. She listened, not as a disciple or a judge, but as an equal. And slowly, against the fortress of his will, a crack formed. He began to watch the way the firelight caught the strands of her hair, to listen for the sound of her laughter. The ice around his heart began to melt, and it terrified him.
In Camelot, the air was thick with tension. News had spread of the village tragedy, and with it, whispers of a king who could not protect his own.
A burly, boorish lord named Marrok stood in the council chamber, his voice a grating bellow. "You let a village of women be slaughtered, Arthur! And now you hide in your castle? The northern clans see this weakness. They raid our borders! We must march with an army and crush them!"
Noah, feeling the weight of Arthur's crown and the ghost of those dead women, stood. The lazy confidence of his school days was gone, replaced by a king's grim resolve.
"An army would trample the very fields we mean to save and get the hostages killed," Noah said, his voice calm but cutting through the noise. "A king who cannot protect a single village does not deserve an empire. We do not break their walls with force alone. We break their will with cunning and honor."
He turned to Lancelot and Gawain. "We go alone. A small team. We are not an invasion force. We are a surgical blade."
The rescue was a masterpiece of strategy. As Lancelot challenged the gate guards with a flamboyant, distracting duel, Noah and Gawain scaled the rear walls of the simple stone keep. Inside, they moved like ghosts. Noah didn't draw Excalibur once; he used a combination of misdirection, non-lethal force, and the sheer, intimidating presence of a king who moved with unshakable purpose.
They found the villagers huddled in the cellar, terrified but alive. They captured Lord Marrok not in battle, but as he fled through a secret passage, his courage as hollow as his threats.
Returning to Camelot with the freed villagers and a captured, sputtering lord, the atmosphere was transformed. The people cheered. The skeptical knights looked at Arthur with newfound respect.
Noah stood on the steps of the palace, Excalibur held high, not as a threat, but as a symbol.
"Today, we proved that strength is not in the size of an army, but in the strength of our bonds! No one knight, not even your king, holds all the wisdom or all the courage. From this day, we shall be a fellowship! A brotherhood of equals, united by a common code!"
He slammed the pommel of Excalibur on the stone step. A resonant clang echoed through the square.
"We will build a table, round, where no man sits at the head. Where all voices are heard. Where every knight is a pillar of this kingdom! We shall call it… the Round Table!"
A roar of approval erupted. For the first time, Noah felt a flicker of hope, a sense that he was building something that could last. It was a world away from the lonely, bloody path of his best friend.
The Kumaso fortress was a bastard child of wood and stone, clinging to a mountainside. With Tsubaki's knowledge, infiltration was simple. They moved through the shadows, a deadly pair. Ren's magic silenced guards, Tsubaki's knife cut throats. They found the warlord in his hall, a giant of a man roaring for his ale.
It was the moment of the kill. Ren raised his sword, the spell for a vacuum blade on his lips. He never saw the archer in the high rafters, the glint of the arrowhead aimed directly at his back.
But Tsubaki did.
She didn't shout a warning. She simply moved, throwing her body in the path of the missile. The *thud* was sickeningly soft. The arrow struck her square in the chest.
Ren's world fractured. He finished the warlord with a single, brutish strike, then was at her side, catching her as she fell.
"Tsubaki... Why?" His voice was a broken thing, the numbness shattered into a million screaming pieces.
She coughed, blood speckling her lips. Her hand found his cheek, her touch impossibly gentle. "I told you... I saw the man behind the monster... The one who still... feels." A faint, bloody smile. "I'm glad... it was you."
Her hand fell. The light left her eyes.
Ren did not scream. He did not roar. He knelt in the growing pool of her blood, holding her, and the tears came. Silent, shuddering sobs for the mother he never had, for the brother he was forced to kill, for the friend he had to betray, and now, for the woman he had let himself love against all reason. The myth was a machine, grinding everyone he cared for into dust. "I can't stop myself," he thought, the realization a fresh wound. "And it always destroys them. It always destroys me."
Gently, he laid her down. The grief did not fade; it hardened into a diamond of pure, cold rage. He walked out of the fortress, past the carnage, his destination clear.
The shrine of Kusanagi was a cave behind a thunderous waterfall. The ancient priestess guarding it spoke of trials, of proving a pure heart.
Ren ignored her. He walked straight to the altar where the legendary blade rested. He didn't ask for it. He took it. His grief, his rage, his twisted love—it resonated with the sword's core nature: not a tool of protection, but a weapon of absolute, unforgiving division.
He drew Kusanagi from its scabbard. It did not gleam. It was a slit in the world, a darkness that drank the light. The air around it screamed as it was torn into nothingness, a permanent vacuum humming with the power to unmake anything it touched.
He held the power to cut down a palace, to sever a nation. But as he stood there, the most powerful he had ever been, he had never felt more hollow. He had his weapon. And he had nothing left to lose.