I am God LSLCCF

Chapter 458: The Dark Scale Giant and the Second Fusion Form

City of Fire Protection

Anu had barely set foot back on the Palace Guard Corps' training ground when he caught the soldiers murmuring among themselves, the noise swelling until it broke into open argument.

Handing his magical beast companion off to someone else's care, he walked the grounds to see how the recent drills had gone, then singled out one of the captains and asked what was happening.

"What is the situation here?" Anu asked.

"You haven't heard, Commander?" the captain replied. "It's all over the place by now."

"I flew straight back," Anu said. "So what in the world is going on?"

"There's been a wave of unrest out to the northwest," the captain went on. "A whole lot of territories and cities are in chaos."

"Moonlight Province, mostly. Oh, hang on..."

Something seemed to come back to the captain then, and he fixed a long look on Anu.

Moonlight Province, Anu's own homeland, had been swallowed by a wave of civil unrest. Countless people had turned bandit and marauder, burning and killing and pillaging wherever they passed. It had begun in Moonlight Province's Fallen Leaf County, and from there the chaos had spilled into a neighboring county as well.

The province's governor led the garrison legion out to put the unrest down. The rebels killed him on the road, and the whole garrison legion fell apart.

After that, wave after wave of civil unrest broke out across the whole province.

By the reports coming in, it only spread wider and wider, until the nobles of every district had no choice but to call out their private armies against it. By now, beacon fires burned in every corner of the province.

Anu stood rooted where he was, as though he could not quite make himself believe it.

"There was no famine this year, was there?"

"Where would rioters even come from?"

"And Moonlight Province of all places. I remember good harvests there last year and the year before. Even if this year's crop fell short, it should not have come to this."

Hearing of a rebellion, Anu's first thought had gone straight to famine.

More than once as a child he had watched it happen, famine driving out refugees who swept across the land like a swarm of insects and devoured everything around them down to nothing.

The nobles and ability users turned on one another in the same chaos, and some rose out of the disorder to swallow another's territory whole, or to claim it as an inheritance. Even the high and mighty among them could be cut down in that chaos, whole bloodlines wiped out with them.

Nothing the young Anu had ever seen had frightened him more.

The more carefully Anu turned it over, though, the more wrong the whole thing felt.

"No. That is not right. A crowd of commoners and farmers turned rioter and bandit by a famine would go no further than robbing the commoners and farmers next to them."

"And with no ability users among them, how do they break through a noble's fortress? How do they take a city's high walls?"

"Let alone beat the local legion garrisoned in Moonlight Province, and kill the governor into the bargain?"

"What sort of joke is this?"

The captain was only a low-ranking officer, though, with no way of working out the reason behind any of it. "Ah, that I couldn't tell you," he said. "But it really is happening out in Moonlight Province."

Anu could not sit still after that. Travel-worn as he was, he went straight to the palace to find the king without stopping to change his clothes, only King Morabi was not there.

Following the guards' directions, he made his way to the newly built Temple of Knowledge in the City of Fire Protection, and found His Majesty at last in the Court of Judgment beside it.

His Majesty had just finished with the kingdom's newly appointed Chief Justice and was on his way out when he caught sight of Anu waiting by the door.

He showed no surprise at all that Anu had come. Climbing into his carriage, he waved Anu over to board it with him.

"Thank you, Your Majesty."

With a bow, Anu climbed up into the carriage.

Head bent over the low wooden table inside the carriage, King Morabi went on tidying the things on it as he spoke to Anu.

"Those navy captains you reported to me, the ones waylaying merchant ships and murdering innocents to claim the credit for it, I sent men to investigate. After months of gathering evidence, it is all but confirmed."

"The court of Green Field County took them through trial after trial, and a few days ago the six ringleaders were sentenced to hang. Their accomplices did not go unpunished either."

"Those who deserved to die have died. Those who deserved to lose their posts have lost them."

King Morabi approved of what Anu had reported, and said so.

"Anu, you have done well."

"Men with neither morals nor shame belong in the Abyss and in Purgatory, every last one of them. There is nothing to tell between such men and the demons down there."

Anu straightened, and his answer carried neither servility nor arrogance.

"It was no more than my duty."

The old report had only been an opening, a way for King Morabi to work his way around to what he truly meant to say.

Looking up, he studied Anu closely. "Have you heard? There is trouble in Moonlight Province."

Anu's eyes lit up the instant Morabi raised it. "Your Majesty, that is the very thing I came to ask about."

Morabi nodded. "I know. Moonlight Province is your homeland."

"You have been gone a long while. Still, what man does not miss the place he came from."

"Which is why I came the moment I heard of it," Anu said at once. "Your Majesty, what is really happening out there?"

"This whole affair is just..." Anu could not find the word for it. All he could say in the end was, "It is too strange."

King Morabi laid the situation in Moonlight Province out for him from the beginning, and by the end Anu understood at least part of the real truth behind it.

Moonlight Province had been made a province as far back as King Osis's day, set under the direct rule of a governor the crown sent out, and divided beneath him into counties, cities, towns, and villages.

Any number of territorial nobles had lost their fiefs to it even then, and unrest had already begun to stir. Then the ghoul disaster broke out at very nearly the same time, and King Osis, in the name of the goddess, ordered those same nobles to march out to war at his side.

No small number of them died in that war, and the military authority they had once held was folded, over the course of the fighting, into the kingdom's own local legions.

Their power gone, King Osis pressed on to weaken the territorial nobles further still.

He barred their territories from expanding. He passed laws capping the private soldiers and ability users they were allowed to recruit. By every means available, he hemmed in their rights.

In compensation, though, King Osis granted them the trading and commerce rights of Moonlight Province, and handed them exclusive monopolies over certain special trades besides.

What King Osis wanted was to pull the nobles' eyes off their land and fix them on workshops instead, on the sea, on trade.

When Morabi became King of Suinhor, he held to the policy Osis had set, still bent on paring back the power and the territory of these nobles, turning their old fiefs into counties and towns run by officials the crown appointed itself.

Then came something greater still, the Contract of the Gods.

It went by another name as well, the True Gods' Contract.

The true gods and their divine chosen had entered into that covenant together, and the world was no longer carved up into lands of separate faith.

The walls between nations came down, and the mortal world began to run like a river let loose from its floodgates. People poured into other kingdoms in great numbers, following after missionaries, merchants, and ability users.

Ties between nations drew closer as well, and the demand for trade surged along with them. Ordinary workshops multiplied and multiplied, and every kingdom scrambled to raise alchemy workshops of its own.

There, King Morabi's voice cut off.

He looked at Anu, let a moment pass, then went on.

"And that is where the problem arose."

Morabi had not begun with the state Moonlight Province was in at all, but with the changes that had led up to it. Some of it Anu already knew. Some of it he had never understood so clearly.

Anu knew there was a reason Morabi was telling him all this, and so he asked, "What problem?"

"Everyone has gone off to farm the land," King Morabi said. "The workshops have not enough workers now, and not enough slaves."

"In Moonlight Province, wages several times what they once were will not hire you a single qualified craftsman or laborer. The price of a slave has climbed more than tenfold."

"And all the while, the price of goods out of the City of Fire Protection, Maya City, the Land of Sunrise, the Thunder Kingdom and everywhere else keeps falling."

"Partly because there are more workshops than there were. Partly because of the alchemy workshops and the coming of the Tower Keepers."

"In short, life has grown hard for the nobles and workshop owners of Maya City. And in no few other places besides, of course."

"What their workshops make is worth little now, and with no slaves to buy and no workers to hire, they cannot hope to compete with the rest."

"Placed as they are, how could resentment not take root in them."

Anu thought, suddenly, of himself.

He had been sold to a leather workshop once himself. His parents hadn't even asked for money, only hoped he'd have a bite to eat there.

Now slaves cost money, and the price of them climbed by the day.

All of it in less than ten short years. Right after right had been stripped from the nobles, and now they could not even get enough slaves. There was no way they would stand for it.

The shape of the trouble came clear to Anu all at once. "So this is no rebellion of the common people at all. It is the nobles who have raised it?"

"Just because there are not enough slaves to go around?"

King Morabi laughed, shaking his head.

"Of course not. That is only the fuse, nothing more."

"The true crisis was laid down long ago, when King Osis first made Moonlight Province a province and set about weakening the fief nobles."

His piece said, King Morabi drew out a sheaf of letters.

"Look, these are the urgent dispatches sent from Moonlight Province."

"The refugees have already flooded into Moonlight City and thrown it into chaos. Everyone in the governor's mansion is dead, every last one of them."

"So it is the local nobles who are sending these dispatches, and they are the ones organizing what forces they can to put the rebellion down."

Something wry, almost amused, came over King Morabi's face.

"Only, the harder they try to put it down, the wider the flames of rebellion spread."

"They keep saying, over and over, that they will stamp out the fire as fast as they can."

"Only, I do not understand. Are they pouring water on this fire? Or are they pouring oil?"

Morabi waved him toward the documents, then drew out yet another.

"The City of No Guilt has taken in a lot of new slaves recently. Care to guess where they came from?"

King Morabi was no one's fool. He had climbed from the bottom one step at a time, Prime Minister first, and only later heir to the throne.

Anu read what was written on those pages with a sharp eye, and between the pages and his exchange with Morabi, the true shape of the crisis in Moonlight Province came clearer to him by degrees.

"Those nobles stirred up this rebellion, and even directed it themselves. All of it is aimed at you, Your Majesty."

"Is that so?"

"What is it they want?" Anu asked.

That "they" could only mean the nobles of Moonlight Province.

King Morabi nodded. Anu's questions, to his mind, had cut straight to the heart of the matter.

"What is it they want?"

"They want more land. They want more serfs, more slaves. They want their old rights back."

"They even want to overthrow me, and set a king better suited to them on the throne."

"But there is a line in all of this."

"Everything turns on how I answer them. What they want to see is how far I will bend."

"So the answer I give next will decide whether they come away with nothing, or with a share, or with the whole kingdom broken apart in their hands."

"The moment I give one step, they will think I can give two. And the further back I go, the more of them will come pushing to make me give even more."

"Until there is nowhere left to retreat."

He had seen the crisis for what it was, seen the truth sitting behind this rebellion, and still he faced it without losing his composure.

Every person grows. Now that he was king, he was no exception either.

"Those nobles who lost their land already resented me, and I do not command anywhere near the fear and respect King Osis once did."

"The goddess has turned Her gaze upon the whole world now. Royal power has passed down into mortal hands, and She no longer steps in to decide the rise and fall of dynasties."

"The fate of this kingdom and the road it takes rest now with me alone, and with those who stand behind me."

King Morabi brought his fist down lightly on the table. There was nothing fierce in the motion, but his eyes were set and unwavering.

"I cannot retreat."

"So I need a man I can trust to go there."

King Morabi looked at Anu. Plainly the lizard person in front of him was the trusted man he meant.

"I have decided to send you and your Palace Guard Corps to Moonlight Province, to settle the chaos and the trouble there. Can you do it?"

The weight of it settled onto Anu's shoulders all at once. For King Morabi to hand him a task like this was as good as setting his own throne, and the safety of the whole kingdom, down on those same shoulders.

A knot of tension pulled tight in him, and no answer came.

His mouth opened, then closed again just as fast.

"Anu," he asked himself silently, "can you truly carry a responsibility like this?"

King Morabi seemed to see straight through the tension, and through the doubt beneath it.

"A kingdom will always have its parasites. Some who fall into corruption and evil, some with neither morals nor shame."

"But this kingdom is no dark place. There will always be more men of justice, more men of honor, who will stand up and stand with this kingdom, and stand with us."

Those words, set beside King Morabi's earlier mention of the navy captain Anu had reported, lifted him at once.

A fierce confidence surged up in him with it. Let a man walk a road lit by the light, let a man do what was right, and however many hardships rose up in front of him, he would feel no fear at all.

Anu lifted his head and put the question to Morabi.

"Your Majesty, do you truly place such trust in me?"

Whether he trusted him or not, King Morabi did not say. He answered another way.

"Everyone in this kingdom is watching me. Everyone is watching Moonlight Province."

"If I cannot handle this crisis properly, the disaster that follows will not stop at Moonlight Province alone."

Having laid out the enormous difficulty and danger waiting ahead, he turned to Anu's Palace Guard Corps.

"Your beast knight legion. My Palace Guard Corps."

"It came into being some time ago now, and it has cost you no small amount of blood and sweat."

"Perhaps it is time they proved their strength."

Morabi's praise sent a flush of pleasure through Anu. He truly had poured a great deal of himself into the Palace Guard Corps.

He had built this legion with his own two hands. Every beast knight in it he had trained himself, through countless days and nights of drilling the soldiers, and no few long marches at their side besides.

He thought back to why he had raised this army in the first place, to hold this kingdom steady, to guard a peaceful life that had come so hard.

He thought of the Brown Ball Vine that Lord Kurmis had brought into being, and of the countless people who had benefited from it.

He remembered the disasters and famines he had run into as a child, and thought of his own parents and brothers, all of them dead.

Anu got to his feet and stepped in front of King Morabi.

King Morabi had laid a duty this weighty on his shoulders, and Anu meant to give his word in return that he would see the task through.

He drew his sword, and as he dropped to one knee he raised it before his chest in both hands.

"King Morabi, set your mind at ease."

"I will see it done."

"I will put an end to this chaos, and see to it that those ambitious men come away with nothing."

"And those who stir with restless ambition, I will leave without so much as a flicker of a disloyal thought in them."

King Morabi smiled, something like relief softening his eyes.

"Everything for the kingdom's stability and its future. Everything for the people of Suinhor."

Anu rose, and the sword slid back into its sheath in one easy, practiced motion.

King Morabi's gaze followed it. "That is a fine sword indeed."

The solemn look left Anu's face, and grinning, he spoke to King Morabi.

"Lord Kurmis bestowed it on me."

The Palace Guard Corps' Encampment

The moment he was back, Anu sent for his deputy commander, who was also the very first earth-piercing beast knight.

The deputy commander came into the room, glanced up at the painting on the wall, and bowed in salute.

"Commander Anu!"

Anu stood with his back to them, a map of Moonlight Province spread open in front of him, marking it over and over with the pen in his hand.

Letters sent over from the king lay piled on the table, every one of them concerning the recent state of Moonlight Province.

Not one of those accounts was entirely accurate, since the true state of the province just now was murky at best. What the real truth was would have to be his own judgment to make.

Anu studied the map a while longer, thinking, then turned to his deputy commander.

"Call up the whole legion at once. Every soldier of it, three thousand one hundred and two not counting myself. Not one man is to be missing."

"Have them assemble on the training ground, and have every one of them wait there for me."

The whole legion came to barely more than three thousand, and yet these were no ordinary three thousand men.

Dozens of them were ability users. Even the ordinary soldiers among the rest had been trained through and through, every one of them able to handle alchemy crossbows, alchemy cannons, and every manner of extraordinary artifact.

They worked in skilled concert with magical monsters, magical beasts, and every kind of ritual array, and every single one of them had years of training behind him.

Three thousand men like these, joined together, could face any number of ordinary men and count it as nothing.

He heard the horns sound outside, then the crisp clatter of soldiers falling into ranks and the calls that went with it.

It was a while yet before Anu walked out to join them.

He climbed the wooden platform and walked slowly out beneath the Palace Guard Corps' banner, and every eye there fixed sharp on him.

Ramrod straight, he walked to the very front, where every last one of them could see his face clearly.

"The king has given the order. The whole Palace Guard Corps marches for Moonlight Province."

Not a sound rose from the ranks. From the day they first became soldiers, every one of them had known a day like this would come.

Their morale was holding strong. Anu saw it, and nodded, satisfied.

Working from everything he knew so far, he laid out the assignments, made ready every supply they would need, and settled everything that had to be arranged in advance.

Last of all, he set the date for their departure.

"Every man make ready."

"We march in five days."

When Anu had called everyone together, the deputy commander had already half sensed that they were marching to war.

Five days, though. At that, the deputy commander glanced at Anu again.

Why five days?

To crush a rebellion, the sooner the better. If speed truly mattered most, they could leave as early as tomorrow.

If it were truly urgent, an advance force could be on its way to Moonlight Province today.

Anu offered no explanation.

Night fell, and Anu went back to his own residence as Lord of the Volcano.

Before long the other lizard people came hurrying in from every direction, crowding around him in the hall.

"Chief, the king really picked us to go fight the rebels in Moonlight Province? I heard they're just common folk. Do we even need to go?" On the training ground they had not dared voice their doubts, but the moment they were home, they could not hold it in any longer.

"That's right. Sending a corps of ability users to put down common folk, that's not something we could bring ourselves to do." One of the lizard people made no secret of disagreeing.

Others spoke up in support, though.

"Common folk? Once they're caught up in a riot like that there's no common folk left, just a pack of beasts. They've killed, they've drunk blood, they've put whole villages and towns to the sword. You call that common folk?"

"And if we don't stop it now, it doesn't bear thinking about what comes next. The whole of Moonlight Province has gone up already. You want more places dragged in after it?"

Anu let his eyes travel over the other lizard people, and spoke.

"Did I say we were going to crush common folk?"

"All I said was that the whole legion marches. To Moonlight Province."

The others looked at him, confusion breaking over their faces at once.

"But if we're not putting down the rebellion, what are we even going to Moonlight Province for?"

"I will decide exactly what needs doing once we are there," Anu said simply. "All you need to know is that you follow my orders, and nothing more."

"The order the king gave me was to settle the chaos in Moonlight Province."

"Whoever is causing the chaos, that is who we deal with."

Anu closed the subject there, and turned at once to address all the lizard people.

"Spend the next few days getting ready. I am going to break through to the next rank."

"Seal off the whole Lord of the Volcano's manor. Those of you with duties, go handle them at the camp. Those without, stay here in the manor."

Here was the real reason he needed five days before setting out. He meant to break through to third rank.

Until now he had been borrowing Kurmis's own power. His own true rank had never moved past second rank.

Now he was about to become the first superior beast knight.

Three days later, on an open stretch of ground behind the Lord of the Volcano's manor, a great crowd of lizard people gathered around to watch. Everything the breakthrough would need was already laid out and waiting.

Anu ran a hand over his magical beast companion, then walked with it into the ritual array. The array was not there to drive the breakthrough itself, but to steady and support it.

He swung himself up onto the wind lizard dragon's back.

"Mounted State."

At once the wind lizard dragon's scaled armor spread out over Anu.

It sealed over his feet, then his torso, then his neck, and at last it swallowed his face whole, leaving nothing but a pair of eyes uncovered.

Following the knowledge the Feathered Serpent Kurmis had taught him, Anu set at once to the work of breaking through to third rank.

"Spirit, consciousness."

"Activation Technique!"

"Seal Imprint!"

Anu poured his own consciousness whole into the wind lizard dragon's magic crystal. He felt his mind sink down into the magical beast's skull, deeper and deeper, until he could no longer even sense his own presence, and it was then that the crystal began to change.

Strange patterns surfaced inside it one after another, and the Power of Law swept out across the clearing with tremendous force.

Out of the shadows, slowly, a peculiar Seal Imprint condensed.

The instant it took form, the air all around began to be drawn away, ceaselessly, and folded into the wind lizard dragon's magic crystal.

The air seemed almost to come alive, answering now to the wind lizard dragon, answering to the Spirit Fusion Seal Imprint.

Anu had a Seal Imprint of his own at last.

Only, he shared this one Seal Imprint with his magical beast instead of each of them holding one apart. It was as though Law itself took him and his companion, the wind lizard dragon, for a single whole, and not two separate beings.

Even so, Anu could tell his own Spirit Fusion Seal Imprint came nowhere near Kurmis's in power.

Kurmis's Spirit Fusion Seal Imprint could fuse with practically anything in creation. Anu's could fuse with ordinary air and command it, and nothing more.

There was no time to dwell on that now, and Anu pressed on at once to the next step.

"Seal Spirit."

On the ordinary path an ability user's class advanced along, a Seal Spirit should have been born next.

Strangely, though, no Seal Spirit answered Anu's call.

The moment he drove power through the crystal and the Seal Imprint, Anu felt his own body catch fire, and beneath him the wind lizard dragon he rode let out a howling shriek.

"What is happening?"

Fierce light blazed out of the magic crystal.

Little by little, under the power of the crystal and the Seal Imprint, the wind lizard dragon and Anu's own body began to change, and to merge into one another.

Their bodies changed in size. Their bodies changed in shape.

This was the very Power of Spirituality the Feathered Serpent had once used.

"No Seal Spirit?"

"What is going on here? Why is this so different from every other ability class?"

Anu felt the force fuse him straight into his own magical beast, the wind lizard dragon, until at last there was no telling where one of them ended and the other began.

What stood on the open ground when it was done was a giant lizard person, more than ten meters tall.

His body carried something of the wind lizard dragon's own traits, and a pair of fleshy wings had grown out of his back. Inside Anu's own skull sat a dazzling crystal.

A Dark Scale Giant with fleshy wings, standing nearly as tall as the old castle beside him. That was what he looked like now.

Around the clearing, the watching lizard people were left utterly stunned to see Anu transformed like this.

"How did he turn into that?"

"Shouldn't third rank bring a Seal Spirit?"

"Looks like beast knights don't get a Seal Spirit."

"But that form looks plenty powerful all on its own!"

And powerful he was. In that moment Anu felt strength beyond measure in himself.

He was fused completely with his companion beast now, and the power of the magic crystal answered to him directly.

He reached up and clawed at the sky. In an instant the air for nearly a hundred meters around him was ripped away, leaving a stretch of pure vacuum behind.

He swept his hand out the other way, and a blast of compressed air burst far off in the moat, throwing up a wave of water.

Nor was that all. He felt as though he had become the very master of wind and air currents themselves. He spread his wings and rose straight up into the sky.

He did not go high at first, only let himself hang there, suspended in midair.

He was certain of it now. This truly was the power of a superior beast knight.

Beyond the Mounted Form, the beast knight had gained an entirely new form besides.

"Second Form, the Fusion Form."

Anu confirmed the name of this new form, turning his own body through a half circle in midair as he did.

Then he spread his wings wide.

A powerful current of air rose out of nowhere and drove him forward, and he tore off toward the sea of clouds in a streak of afterimage, faster than seemed possible.

In the blink of an eye he had already broken through the sea of clouds above, and then he came plunging back down out of it, diving toward a small hill barely a few dozen meters high.

Anu put out his hand, and that divine artifact, the matte longsword, appeared in his grip.

At the size he was now, the sword looked smaller than a pair of nail clippers.

The moment he drove his own power into it, though, it swelled at once into a massive Silver Dark-Flame Sword, blazing fiercely in his hand and yet not harming him in the slightest.

Anu raised the sword high overhead and cut down toward the sky, the power of the wind bound up in the blow.

Silver light streamed down.

Dark flame surged up.

The wind fed the flame, and in an instant it spread wide, swallowing the whole hillside into a sea of fire.

When the flames at last died, the hill lay cleaved clean in two.

Fwoosh~

Fwoosh~

The air was full of the wind's howling roar and the beating of wings.

Anu, transformed into the Dark Scale Giant more than ten meters tall, hung in midair with his massive wings spread wide, a Silver Dark-Flame Sword that stretched past ten meters gripped in his hand.

His shape was savage, terrible to look upon, and his power monstrous beyond measure.