This Is Not the Will of God

King Eli's divine technique drove short spear after short spear toward Star. Some she deflected with her sword, others she blocked with the scepter in her left hand.

"A spent arrow at the end of its flight."

"Star of the Xilong family, you will not hold out much longer."

Star looked at King Eli, unflinching. "Did you not say that a king should die standing?"

"After all this, do you still expect me to beg you?"

King Eli froze for a moment, then broke into laughter he could not hold back.

He looked at Star with delighted surprise, verging almost on ecstasy.

He could not accept being defeated by a weak woman. He would far rather she be a truly formidable enemy.

"Hahaha!"

"Good!"

"Very good!"

"This! This is the very look a true king should have in his eyes!"

Even as King Eli said this, his attacks did not ease in the slightest. If anything, they grew fiercer.

The stronger the enemy, the more seriously they deserved to be met.

He spread his arms wide, and the power of divine technique poured out of him without restraint. The Ruhe Beast beneath him answered to his control with even greater precision, its hundred tentacles swinging in a dense flurry, like so many whips.

On the other side, a rank of spear throwers loosed another volley.

At last Star let her guard slip. Several of the swords under her divine technique's control were caught and dragged down by the enemy's Ruhe Beast, and she lost a great source of her strength in an instant.

"Protect me."

The tentacles of the Ruhe Beast beneath her drew in at once, wrapping around Star like the petals of a closing flower bud.

But the beast's contracting tentacles were plainly no match for the speed of a spear driven by pure thought. In that instant's gap, King Eli's spear had already found the seam and thrust toward Star.

The spear grew larger and larger before her eyes, and Star's pupils widened in an instant.

In her mind, scene after scene flickered past like a spinning lantern's wheel, faster than she could believe.

Her father. Her family. Her friends.

And that figure in golden robes, smiling at her.

"Ah!"

"I lost my father. I lost Polo. I lost my friends. I lost my throne, too."

"Now, must I finally lose my life as well?"

At that moment, a golden vine dropped from the sky and knocked King Eli's spear aside.

Bang!

In the desert sky, a shaft of golden light fell alongside the sun, sliding down toward Star.

The Divine Messenger, cloaked in golden robes, rode the wind and the light down, and descended at Star's side.

"I'm back, Star!"

He seemed to have changed quite a bit, but that smiling face was still just as familiar.

"It's Polo."

Queen Star's heart cried out Polo's name in delighted surprise, yet her mind moved just as quickly. In that same instant she hurled the scepter from her hand, using divine technique to knock King Eli down off his Ruhe Beast.

King Eli tumbled onto the sand, rolled at once and scrambled away into the distance, and in the same breath ordered his own Ruhe Beast to entangle Star's.

Polo's dream divine technique was a little slow to answer, so on pure reflex he lashed a vine around King Eli's leg and hung him dangling in midair.

And another vine, sharp as a thrusting spear, reached the point between King Eli's brows.

But it stopped short in that same instant.

Polo did not quite know what to do. For all his tremendous power, he had never once killed anyone.

Even when he had acted before, at the God-Descended City, he had only sent the defenders within into a dream-sleep, and had kept himself clear of the battle head-on.

He longed for adventure, yet he despised bloodshed.

Adventure was only a dream. Slaughter was the reality. And this was the first time he discovered just how deeply dream and reality could contradict one another.

It was like longing for the sky and building an airplane because of it, only to discover, once the dream became reality, that it had been turned into a tool for war and slaughter instead.

Star's Ruhe Beast was locked in the enemy's grip, unable to break free.

She abandoned the Ruhe Beast outright, leapt down from the height, and walked past Polo, straight toward King Eli.

"Let me do this!"

She spoke evenly. "Those hands of yours were never made for killing. You are the Divine Messenger from the realm of the divine, a beloved child of the divine, born without any sin at all."

"I am the one born carrying original sin, a trilobite person of the race driven out of the paradise God had promised."

Star picked up the sword she had dropped on the ground earlier, her steps resolute.

She turned back, and a smile bloomed across her face.

"Let him go!"

"Polo, I don't want your hands stained with another person's blood, marked with the sin of killing."

She meant to face her own fear head-on. She meant to defeat him with her own hands, to end the feud between herself and the tyrant Eli, to end where all of this had begun.

Beside them, the two great beasts grappled in chaos, and still more soldiers fought on without end.

King Eli, sprawled on the ground, coughed again and again. Rattled, he looked toward Star and shouted at her with all his strength.

"Foolish!"

"Foolish!"

"You hold every advantage, and still you must play at some duel. Star of the Xilong family, you truly are a fool beyond all reason."

Star was not shaken in the least by his words.

Her sword was sharp beyond measure, and her hand never trembled, not even the smallest bit.

Just like her heart in this moment.

"A king is called a true king only because he holds to a code within himself, and to a moral center."

"It is only because mortals hold fast to conviction and belief that they can unleash a power beyond the ordinary."

"If a person has none of that, what difference is there between them and an insect? What difference between them and those mindless monsters in the sea?"

Eli raised his bone spear. "Then I will kill you here and now, and prove that victory alone is everything."

Divine technique clashed against divine technique, and sword met spear.

Their great battle raged on, each striving with all their strength, swinging swords and driving spears at one another.

Even wounded from head to foot, even with their strength failing, the old king and the new refused to yield, refused to show even the slightest weakness or retreat.

In the end, Star, no longer able even to straighten her back, deflected his bone spear with one stroke of her sword, and with her other hand gripped the scepter like a spear and drove it toward him.

"Die, tyrant!"

Star drove the scepter into Eli's chest, just as Eli had killed her father all those years ago.

King Eli looked down at his own chest first, and stood frozen for a long moment, as though he could not accept the ending that had come for him.

Even as Star drew the scepter free, King Eli held his body rigid, refusing to fall.

Blood burst from his mouth, streaming down along his cracked carapace.

King Eli turned his head to look at Polo, and asked him with a bitter, broken smile.

"Messenger of God, is all of this the will of God? Does He mean to punish me, a king who was never devout enough?"

The brutal scene before him left Polo stunned. He shook his head and said.

"This is not God's will. Still less is it God's choice."

"This was your own choice. And it was my own will, too."

Polo looked at King Eli, who was weakening bit by bit, and spoke slowly.

"Everything in this world belongs to the divine being, yet the divine being still grants every living thing the chance to choose."

Hearing this answer, King Eli showed not the slightest joy. If anything, he seemed utterly, profoundly lost.

He would have far preferred that all of this was God's punishment, a rejection of everything he had done.

At least that way, it would still mean God had been watching them.

He slowly closed his eyes, his voice carrying an endless, weary sorrow.

"So it was, after all."

"In the eyes of the divine, we are nothing but a swarm of lowly insects. A swarm not even worth a single glance."

"A... lowly... thing."

No matter how fiercely he clung to his own majesty, no matter how proudly he proclaimed the dignity of a king, when death descended, he still had no choice but to fall into the dust, tangled together with the earth beneath him.

Star looked down at the fallen Eli, and the scepter slipped from her hand and fell to the ground, as though every ounce of strength had been drained from her body.

Polo rushed forward at once and wrapped his arms around Star, and she looked back at him, smiling.

"Polo, I'm stronger than I ever thought I could be!"

At last, she had broken through her own inner demon, and struck down the greatest enemy of her entire life.