Watching Gilgamesh depart as a streak of light, Seiji Fujiwara showed no trace of tension on his face. Instead, a smile of anticipation appeared.
"What a stubborn king... but that's what makes it interesting."
He muttered to himself, with no intention whatsoever of going to help.
For him, letting Uruk's army and those demonic beasts called Lahmu grind each other down first was the perfect appetizer.
He would wait until both sides were exhausted, until that proud King of Heroes had fallen into true despair, and then make his grand entrance as the "savior"... or rather, the "new master."
...
Below the walls, the battle erupted in an instant.
The first wave of Lahmu flying at the front slammed into Uruk's walls like black cannonballs, utterly fearless of death!
These monsters' bodies were incredibly hard. Ordinary arrows striking their shells only scattered a few feeble sparks.
But their claws and mandibles were terrifyingly sharp, easily gouging deep furrows into the solid walls!
Worse still, they felt no pain and no fear of any kind. Their patterns of movement were filled with pure malice and bloodlust aimed at humans.
"Aaah!"
A young soldier failed to dodge in time and was tackled by a Lahmu dropping from the sky.
The monster opened its fang-lined mandibles and, rather than biting his throat, precisely tore off the right arm he used to grip his weapon in a single bite! Then, with another bite, it tore off his left arm!
It seemed to relish human pain and despair, not killing him at once but instead admiring with its twisted, malice-filled compound eyes the way he writhed and wailed on the ground.
"Monster! Die!"
His comrade beside him, eyes splitting with fury, drove his spear into that Lahmu's body with all his strength.
But the Lahmu only let out a sharp shriek, as if bitten by a mosquito, and with one backhand swipe of its claw tore open a massive gash across the soldier's chest, armor and all!
Tragedy was playing out at every point along the walls.
These Lahmu not only far surpassed human soldiers in physical ability, their way of fighting brimmed with targeted, bone-chilling "intelligence."
They prioritized attacking human limbs, crippling their enemies' ability to resist.
They used their bodily fluids to corrode human weapons and shields.
They even used their own corpses to block the firing slits along the walls, creating openings for the comrades behind them.
This was no war at all.
This was a one-sided massacre, brimming with butchery and humiliation!
In a mere ten-odd minutes, the wall defenses that Uruk took such pride in were already on the verge of collapse. Soldier casualties were climbing at a horrifying rate.
Atop the palace command tower, Gilgamesh watched the brutal scenes relayed across his crystal panel, his face livid, his fists clenched until they cracked.
"My King!" Siduri said anxiously at his side. "We can't go on like this! The soldiers' morale is about to break! Please, use the power of the treasury!"
"...It's not time yet."
Gilgamesh gritted his teeth and forced out the words with difficulty.
The Gate of Babylon was his last and strongest trump card. The moment he used it would mark the start of the final decisive battle. He had to save it for the most critical moment.
But the situation before him left him no more room to hesitate.
Just as he was about to give the order to use the defensive Noble Phantasms for indiscriminate bombardment.
A leisurely voice, as if strolling through his own back garden, abruptly sounded beside his ear.
"Tsk tsk tsk, what a wretched sight."
Gilgamesh whipped around to find Seiji Fujiwara, who had somehow appeared silently behind him, watching the hellish battlefield below with a look of "compassion for the world."
"How about it, King of Heroes?" Seiji turned his head and gave him a brilliant smile. "Need some help?"
"...You!" Fire all but spewed from Gilgamesh's eyes.
"Don't look at me like that." Seiji waved a hand. "As your prospective partner, seeing your subjects suffer pains my heart."
"Here's what we'll do. I'll get rid of these annoying little bugs for you."
"As the price..."
His smile turned utterly playful.
"All you have to do is, in front of every subject of Uruk, acknowledge my standing as a false god and beseech my divine grace. That's all."
Humiliation!
This was naked, ultimate humiliation of him, the king, in front of everyone!
Gilgamesh's body trembled again with rage.
But...
He looked at the soldiers below, loyal to him, still dying in agony one after another.
He looked at the innocent civilians being dragged from their homes and butchered like toys by the Lahmu.
His pride as a king and his duty as a Counter Guardian waged war within his heart.
In the end...
Duty won out over pride.
"...Fine."
He squeezed out from between his teeth the word he had been most unwilling to say in his entire life.
"Very good."
Seiji smiled with satisfaction.
This was exactly the result he wanted.
He stepped slowly forward, walking to the very front of the command tower.
His figure, amplified by True Magic, appeared clearly in every corner of Uruk, and his voice carried clearly to the ears of every subject of Uruk still struggling in despair.
"People of Uruk, there is no need to panic."
"Your king has already offered me his price."
"From this moment on, the new master of these calamities..."
"Is me."
With that, he slowly raised his right hand.
"Heroic Spirit Armament, Jeanne Alter!"
In an instant!
An inexhaustible darkness, deeper than the night and hotter than the flames of hell, erupted from within him with a roar!
Pitch-black armor covered in barbs and evil dragon patterns instantly enveloped his entire body! A mane of wild, silver-white hair streamed behind his head!
In his hand appeared a black banner bearing the image of an evil dragon, radiating endless hatred and malice!
Those pitch-black eyes were replaced in an instant by the golden dragon pupils of the dragon witch, burning with blazing flames!
The transformation was complete!
Now in the form of Jeanne Alter, Seiji looked down from on high at the endless black ocean of demonic beasts below.
A cruel, wicked smile curled at the corner of his mouth.
He slowly raised the banner in his hand high overhead.
"La Grondement Du Haine!"
A roar tore through the air!
An invisible, conceptual force carrying the authority of "hatred" and "domination" swept across the entire battlefield from him as its center, like the shockwave of a nuclear blast!
The next second, a worldview-shattering scene that chilled every person of Uruk, and even Gilgamesh, unfolded.
Those Lahmu that had been madly assaulting Uruk's walls, fearless of death, suddenly froze in unison, as if they had received the highest command from their "mother"!
And then...
Their malice-filled compound eyes turned slowly, in perfect unison, toward their own kind still pouring endlessly in from the south!
A Lahmu that had just charged up to the wall, before it could grasp what was happening, was instantly torn to shreds by a dozen of its "comrades" with their claws and mandibles!
They were killing each other!
No! This was not mutual slaughter!
This was a higher, purer "malice" exerting absolute domination and a purge over a lower "malice"!
Seiji, in the form of the dragon witch, had not destroyed these monsters at all.
Instead, with stronger hatred and power, he had transformed these demonic beasts, which themselves represented "calamity," into a private legion of demonic beasts that answered to his command alone!
"Go, my little darlings."
He pointed the banner toward that black, chaotic void in the far south.
"Go back and tell your mother."
"Her era is over."
"From today, I am the Beast."
A roar rose up at his command.
At Seiji's offhand order, the situation across the entire battlefield reversed with cataclysmic force!
Tens of thousands of Lahmu, now utterly dominated by the authority of the dragon witch's hatred, swung around all at once like a disciplined, well-drilled black iron torrent!
They no longer attacked Uruk's walls. Instead they hurled themselves madly southward, launching the most savage, bloody charge against their own kind still surging in without end!
Black bodily fluids and shattered limbs flew through the air above the battlefield.
In moments, the whole expanse outside Uruk became a meat grinder of Lahmu devouring and tearing one another apart.
The scene was ten times more brutal, ten times more frenzied, than when they had been slaughtering human soldiers one-sidedly only moments before!
On the walls, the soldiers of Uruk who had been waiting to die in despair now stared dumbstruck at the surreal sight before them, the weapons in their hands drooping uselessly.
Their enemies... had started fighting among themselves?
No... they hadn't started fighting among themselves.
They had been controlled by that mysterious man standing atop the palace command tower like a demon god descended upon the world?
Their minds could no longer process information so far beyond their comprehension.
And atop the command tower, Gilgamesh and Siduri, who had witnessed all of this with their own eyes, fell into a shock deeper than anyone else's.
"Dominating... demonic beasts?" Siduri's voice was parched with excessive shock. "He... he can actually dominate the offspring of the goddess Tiamat? How is that possible... those are the purest Chaos Tide!"
Gilgamesh said nothing.
He only stared fixedly at the figure hovering in midair, wrapped in inexhaustible dark magic.
His Clairvoyance let him see it more clearly than Siduri.
What Seiji was doing was not simple "control."
It was a higher-tier declaration of ownership on the conceptual level!
Jeanne Alter's "dragon witch" attribute itself held an extremely high level of restraint and dominion over "dragon-kind" and "demonic" creatures. And the goddess Tiamat, as an atavistic "dragon," meant her children the Lahmu naturally carried a thin trace of the dragon attribute.
More importantly, Jeanne Alter's power originated from pure "hatred."
And the Lahmu's code of action originated from "malice" toward humanity.
The two sprang from the same source, but "hatred" was without question a higher, purer, more powerful negative concept than "malice"!
It was like a company's department manager (the Lahmu) running into the behind-the-scenes chairman (Seiji in the form of Jeanne Alter) who had single-handedly built the entire group and held power of life and death over everyone.
The result, naturally, was being crushed and overwritten on the level of authority without any suspense!
In the most unreasonable way, the way that best fit his "player" mindset, Seiji had exploited a loophole in the rules to seize supreme command of her "army" directly from the goddess Tiamat's hands!
"Monster..."
Gilgamesh forced the two words out from between his teeth.
This time, he wasn't referring to those demonic beasts.
He meant Seiji.
This man, whether in his way of thinking or the power he displayed, completely exceeded the limits of comprehension of a wise king who had lived for centuries.
He finally understood that everything Seiji had said before was not arrogant boasting.
His opponent truly had the ability, and the plan, to overturn and reshape this world.
And he himself... seemed to have had no room to choose from the very beginning.
...
The "civil war" on the battlefield lasted a full hour.
In the end, when the last "wild" Lahmu flying in from the south was torn apart by the "demonic beast legion" under Seiji's control, an eerie dead silence fell over the whole expanse outside Uruk.
The tens of thousands of "turned" Lahmu crouched densely across the scorched earth beyond the walls like the most loyal of guards, their malice-filled compound eyes all turned in unison toward the figure in midair that was slowly disarming and returning to human form.
As if waiting for their new master's next command.
Seiji released the Heroic Spirit Armament and returned once more to that air of serene detachment.
He turned around, smiling, and looked at the King of Heroes behind him, whose face was beyond complicated.
"How about it, King of Heroes?" His voice carried clearly across all of Uruk through True Magic. "Are you satisfied with my divine grace?"
Gilgamesh fell silent.
What could he say?
He looked down at the walls below, at the soldiers who had survived the disaster, now gazing at Seiji with eyes mixed with awe, fear, and a faint trace of... worship.
He listened to the civilians within the city walking out of their homes, kneeling on the ground, and frantically kowtowing in prayer toward Seiji's direction.
He knew he had lost.
Lost utterly and completely.
Not in martial force, but in the contest of kingship.
The moment he had been forced to "beseech" Seiji for help, the "absoluteness" he held as the sole king of Uruk had already crumbled.
And when Seiji resolved this city-destroying calamity in a way close to a "divine miracle," a new "kingship," or rather "divine authority," had already, unstoppably, been established upon this land.
The hearts of the people had changed.
The era had changed too.
A long, long while passed.
Gilgamesh walked slowly to the very front of the command tower, to Seiji's side.
He didn't look at Seiji again. Instead he cast his gaze downward, toward the subjects he had guarded all his life.
With all the strength in his body, in a voice immensely grand yet immensely sorrowful, he proclaimed the end of an old era to all of Uruk.
"People of Uruk, listen!"
"From today, Uruk no longer needs a king."
"Because you have welcomed..."
"The one and only god."
With that, his golden figure dissolved into points of spirit particles and vanished from the command tower.
Leaving the entire stage, utterly, to Seiji alone.
From this moment, kingship changed hands.
Seiji Fujiwara formally reigned over Uruk!
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