Semi-Coercive Imperialist

────Tick-tock.

In the underground prison where not even a sliver of sunlight enters, I lie in the coldest and deepest cell. The passage of time is imperceptible. I cannot tell whether it is day or night, yesterday or today.

Thud.

Heavy footsteps approach, accompanied by a dull noise. Familiar yet unfamiliar, the rhythmic sound of military boots.

A voice as sharp as a blade.

“It’s already been a year.”

His silhouette beyond the iron bars remained firm.

Edmon Bruindol. Once a fellow member of the knight order, he had become one of the Empire’s strongest enemies at some point, and now, as a member of the new Cabinet, stood before me.

I asked him.

“How is it outside? Is the weather nice?”

“Of course. Every day shines golden.”

His voice overflowed with confidence. Edmon had always been like that, but today he was especially full of it.

“Oh. Are you married too?”

“I’ve been too busy with public and private affairs. I think I will soon.”

When Edmon spoke to me, there was still a hint of his old tone. A distinctive manner of speaking, somewhat uncomfortable with the difference in status, yet slightly pitying.

I gave him a smile with my eyes.

“Congratulations.”

“……No need for congratulations.”

Thirty-five. At such a young age, he succeeded in toppling the Empire.

My father, once a high-ranking figure of the Empire, was ‘justly’ executed and his head displayed at the center, and I was caught after years of fleeing.

No matter how twisted one’s beliefs, those who dedicate their lives to loyalty are respected. But losers like me, captured after endlessly running, are covered only in disgrace and filth.

The only reason I’m still alive is purely thanks to Edmon’s lingering affection.

“Maximilian. Keep watching from down here. Watch how we, who brought down the Empire, rise.”

His voice was full of hope.

“Oh? Watch? I thought it was my execution.”

“Better to keep you alive. Your father was a pillar of the Empire, so he had to be destroyed, but you’re just a scratched piece of precious metal. Suitable as a trophy.”

Trophy. I chewed over that word. A living trophy of war. Somehow, it sounded cool.

“Thanks. For letting me live.”

It was sincere in its own way.

Edmon gave a faint smile and turned away. Leaving me in this underground, he ascended the stairs.

His voice echoed hollowly.

“Take care, Max. I’ll drop by from time to time if I have the chance.”

Maximilian von Ebenholtz.

A name foolishly discarded. My life had rotted behind the glory of my father.

All I could do was a little swordsmanship, a little pretense of handling mana.

Yet thanks to that ignorance, I survived- so in the end, among my family, I could say I’m the victor.

───Tick-tock.

How much time had passed? The iron bars opened again and Edmon appeared. A few more wrinkles had deepened on his face.

Though it was only the second visit, quite some time seemed to have passed.

Having lived in confinement, the passage of time felt unfamiliar.

“……Oh, Edmon.”

I raised my hand to him.

“Yes.”

“How many years has it been? The guards never tell me.”

Edmon stared at me for a moment.

“Three years.”

“That’s quite a while. Is it different outside?”

“……It is.”

He clearly said it was different. But instead of the former confidence, there was a subtle weariness in his voice.

“Three years, so you must have gotten married. Do you have a child too?”

“…….”

Edmon looked at me in silence. His eyes, once filled with the urgency of public and private affairs and the need to plan a bright future after the Empire, now carried a shadow.

“I postponed the wedding. Too busy.”

“When were you not busy. Were you dumped, by any chance?”

At my teasing joke, the corner of Edmon’s mouth twitched slightly. He looked like he was holding back a forced laugh.

“You’re still the same.”

At some point, he had changed the address from “you” to “you” (in a more formal tone).

A subtle distance? Or perhaps respect?

“Ah~ I get it now. You’ve come to know how terrifying the political arena is, haven’t you? The revolution succeeded, but the aftermath’s been a headache, right?”

“…….”

Instead of replying, Edmon let out a sigh.

“It’s more complicated than I thought. But……. I suppose it’s part of the process of change?”

It was as if he were seeking advice from me. But as a prisoner in the underground prison, I had nothing to offer him in return.

“……Who are you even asking right now?”

Edmon quietly nodded and turned away. At his waist, the sword was no longer visible.

He, once a candidate for the title of the Empire’s greatest swordsman, had let go of his sword.

The world must have been changing like that.

──Tick-tock.

I opened my eyes.

Thud.

Footsteps echoed again. This time, they were slower and heavier.

“……Has it been ten years?”

Edmon approached me, muttering to himself. The small fire on the wall illuminated him. I almost fainted at the state of his head.

“Edmon, what happened to your hair?!”

“My hair?”

“Yeah. Did rats eat it?! Oh my, this.”

His once-thick black hair had half disappeared, leaving his crown bare, and even the remaining strands were dusted with white frost. The wrinkles on his face had deepened, making him look easily more than ten years older.

“Hair doesn’t matter.”

“Every balding man around me said the same thing.”

“……You haven’t changed. Strangely, not at all.”

Rather than anger, he looked at me with pure admiration. Or perhaps it was the expression of someone witnessing something inexplicable.

“Your appearance, your voice, everything…….”

“Really? Maybe it’s because I haven’t been exposed to the sun.”

Without a word, Edmon dragged over a chair and sat down. He was dressed fully like a seasoned politician.

I asked him.

“Is it different out there?”

“……”

He remained silent. The flickering lantern on the wall lit his weary face.

“It’ll change…… No, we must make it change.”

It was the face of someone who had accepted reality, with a certain degree of resignation.

“Politics must be hard? I mean, your face has changed more dramatically than the world.”

Pft. Edmon looked at me and laughed. The chuckle that slipped out soon turned into a full smile.

“Hahaha. Yeah…… Yeah. I guess so.”

“They say people mellow with age. Must be true. Looks like you took a beating from thirty years of time. Where did that solid knight go, and why is this worn-out old fox sitting here?”

“……Who knows. Probably rusting somewhere.”

Edmon smiled with a short sigh.

“……Maximilian.”

He called my name for the first time. All those old friends used to call me Max.

It felt a little awkward, but not unpleasant.

“Is it different inside?”

He asked. I shrugged.

“Who knows. I’ve just been training in here. Cut myself off from the world.”

“Can you even train? In a place like this?”

“You think that’s possible?”

Kuhahaha. Edmon burst into laughter, and I laughed along. The laughter, once let out, soon filled the entire prison.

“Edmon.”

At the end of the laughter, I nodded.

“It’ll change. The world outside.”

“…….”

Edmon’s expression stiffened for a moment.

“Because the outside world still has people like you.”

I looked him straight in the eye.

“Commoners far more valuable than a half-baked noble like me.”

His brows curved sadly.

I never thought I’d see the feeble side of a now-aged politician in Edmon.

“My father used to say something like that. ‘Edmon is far more valuable than most of the Empire’s nobles’.”

“Duke Sebestian, that great old man.”

Edmon responded to my words.

“I still think of him sometimes. How he cut down dozens of the Revolutionary elite all by himself…….”

His sentence stopped awkwardly. He lifted his eyes quietly, as if gauging my reaction.

“It’s fine. He’s already dead, after all. Not someone I especially want to remember anyway.”

I spoke calmly. My father was the epitome of an imperialist. He led the charge in racial discrimination and segregation and stood at the forefront of the Empire’s glory more than anyone, and I had completely deviated from his expectations.

“Well then… Ah. I’m out of time now.”

Edmon stood up from his seat. This visit felt unusually short.

“Are you leaving?”

“……Yes.”

Edmon looked at me with a faint smile.

“Next time I come, I truly want to bring you your freedom.”

Edmon ascended the stairs with a limp. In his hand now was a cane, not a sword.

───Tick-tock.

Tick-tock.

Tick-tock.

The regular ticking sound of this clock wakes me from sleep.

It has become a persistent hallucination that lingers deep within me since some time ago.

A ticking second hand that seems to swallow all the noise of the prison and beat against my insides.

Tick-tock.

When I opened my eyes in the darkness, a faint shadow could be seen beyond the iron bars.

“Edmon…?”

I tried to confirm his face. He had changed too much to simply say he had aged. He looked like an old man who had borne the suffering of the world for a long time.

“Max.”

He dragged a chair over and collapsed into it, leaning his body with difficulty. He looked far more frail than during his previous visit.

I asked him,

“How many years has it been?”

“……Twenty years.”

His phlegm-filled voice was barely more than a whisper.

“But you’re still the same. Still… almost the same as when you were first imprisoned here.”

A mix of disbelief and deep sorrow flowed from him.

“Oh come on. I must’ve aged too.”

I raised a hand and touched my face. The sensation was faint and hard to feel.

I asked the question I always asked him.

“Edmon. How is it outside?”

“…….”

Edmon didn’t answer for a while. There was deep meaning in his silence.

“Max. Lately, I’ve been having these thoughts.”

His voice cracked. It was as fragile as a glass cup on the verge of shattering.

“If only, if only the Empire had lasted a little longer, if only we hadn’t brought it down, if that had happened… maybe humanity could have… lasted a little longer.”

Humanity.

I furrowed my brows. It was too heavy a word for an aged politician to be speaking.

“What do you mean by that?”

“The Ezenheim race. Do you remember them?”

Ezenheim. One of the many minority races persecuted by the Empire.

“I do. Why?”

“The Empire was right. The Empire classified them as demonic mutants and strictly isolated them. But we… we saw them as people to be liberated and protected.”

Suddenly, his face twisted with despair. A surge of deep regret and self-loathing rose up.

“But the Ezenheim… they were a catastrophe. They weren’t human. Those damned bastards ruined the world.”

“What?”

The Empire had discriminated against minority races. Treated them not as races, but as subspecies. The justification was neither scientific nor based on mana, it was a witch-hunt-like policy that claimed they were descendants of demons.

“What are you talking about……”

Edmon lowered his head deeply. His shoulders trembled slightly.

“I’m sorry.”

“Explain it to me. Clearly.”

“……The Ezenheim. They were alien species that devour worlds. They were never human to begin with. The underground cities they dug, remember those? We thought they gathered there to survive, but they were developing dimensional gates. Those demonic bastards deceived us.”

I asked blankly.

“……What?”

Did I read the wrong novel somewhere?

Edmon gave a bitter smile. His complexion was already corpse-like, pale and hollow.

“Under the republic, they finally revealed their true nature. Through continued research, they eventually summoned an alien species. I’m sorry. If the Empire had still existed, it would have relentlessly crushed them, but we couldn’t. We couldn’t betray the ideals we had built. We only tried to go to war at the very end, but…”

He looked at me and shed tears. I unknowingly asked back.

“You got your ass kicked?”

“……With the help of the Yaken race, we held out decently in the beginning.”

“Yaken?”

“Yes. They had the power to resist the Dimensional Devourers. But there was a limit, and in the end, we tried using a Mana Core Bomb as a last resort.”

Edmon shook his head.

“It didn’t work. We, humanity, were completely defeated. I’m sorry.”

“…….”

I still didn’t understand, but it was clear that Edmon had broken down.

And I had no choice but to believe the words of a man so broken.

“No, no. You don’t need to apologize to me. I wondered why meals haven’t been coming down at all lately. I guess even the guards ran off?”

For the past few days, I hadn’t received even a sip of water, let alone food.

Yeah, a few days.

It only felt like “a few days” to me.

“……That’s what’s strange.”

Edmon’s deeply wrinkled eyes looked into mine.

“This underground prison was officially shut down and recorded as destroyed seven years ago. So I thought, of course, that you must be dead. I didn’t even consider the possibility you might still be alive.”

The old man who had been Edmon barely managed to speak, clearly suffering inside.

“I came here on a whim, really, just the tiniest chance… But you were really here… Are you… a hallucination? Something my guilt has conjured?”

“Are you crazy?”

“……Ha.”

At my blunt reply, Edmon let out a hollow laugh.

“Max. It seems you’ve been born with some kind of talent, even one you yourself don’t know. There’s no other way to explain this unrealistic situation.”

“Me?”

Edmon reached into his coat. His bony fingers trembled and dropped a rusted key.

Clink. Clink. The key bounced a couple of times before slipping inside the iron bars,

Rummmmmble─!

The ceiling trembled above. Edmon looked up.

“…….I should get going. It’s time I accepted the end I deserve.”

He slowly turned his back to me. That feeble frame began to fade into the distance.

“Edmon.”

I stopped him as he walked away.

“I never hated you. Not even once.”

“…….”

He said nothing. Just gave a faint smile as he ascended the stairs. His slow-moving body was soon swallowed by the darkness.

I picked up the key and opened the cell.

Thud.

The rusted lock that had imprisoned me for twenty years finally opened. I climbed the narrow passageway and ascended the stairs, following after Edmon.

And just like that──

I discovered a world that had been destroyed.

“……What the actual fuck.”

The whole world was in ashes. Buildings had collapsed, leaving behind only skeletal remains, and traces of humanity were scorched across the landscape.

The underground prison was located directly beneath the Imperial royal residence.

In other words, this was the Capital. One of the world’s greatest cities had been utterly wrecked.

I found scattered scraps of paper strewn across the crumbling asphalt. The letters printed on them stood out clearly.

[Mana Bomb Failed]

[Prepare for the End]

[Ezenheim: They Devour Dimensions]

[……Sentinel Knight Order Defeated]

[Summoning ritual was performed…….]

[Mana is collapsing.]

The things Edmon had said were recorded as facts. I stared blankly at the arrangement of words and muttered,

“What the fuck did these idiots do?”

At that moment, I felt a chilling presence. I turned around abruptly.

There was a strange monstrous lifeform.

It had no eyes, nose, or mouth, no clear features, barely holding form, as if its very existence was unstable. It looked like a sponge, or like something oozing and floating in mid-air. But its ‘mouth’, attached to its amorphous body, opened wide to bite down on my face.

───Tick-tock.

No, just as it was about to bite me, everything stopped.

I couldn’t tell whether I had stopped, or if the world had stopped.

──Tick-tock.

The ticking sound that had echoed inside me for so long now rang loudly.

It wasn’t just a hallucination.

─Tick-tock.

The world began to rewind. The monster drifted away, the collapsed city began to regain its shape, and ruined buildings returned to their proper places.

The days I had lived flashed past like a film being rewound, rushing backward.

The meetings with Edmon, the years in the underground prison, my father’s execution, the fall of the Empire, all of it rewound until…

Tick-tock.

There I was.

At age twenty.