The world held its breath.

K

The dust settled, revealing a tableau of impossible, beautiful, and deeply, profoundly inconvenient tension.

Sayama Kotetsu, the Sword King of Suzu, lay broken at my feet.

His katana was a dozen yards away, half-buried in the blood-soaked earth.

His chest was a crater of shattered ribs and righteous fury.

He was defeated.

But he was not broken.

He looked up at me, a slow, bloody smile on his lips, his eyes burning with a strange, triumphant fire.

"Is it?" he rasped, the words a dry, reedy sound that sent a shiver of genuine, cold fear down my spine.

And then, I felt it.

A new, terrible energy in the air.

A power I had not felt before.

I looked up at the walls of Suzu.

At the thousands of soldiers.

Their eyes were not filled with despair.

They were filled with a strange, fanatical light.

They were all looking at him. At their fallen king.

A low, rumbling sound began to echo from the city.

It was a chant.

A single, unified, and deeply, profoundly unsettling word.

"SUZU! SUZU! SUZU!"

"A king's greatest strength," he whispered, his voice a dry, reedy sound, "is not his own power."

"It is the loyalty of his people."

A new, terrifying thought hit me with the force of one of Grak's punches.

This duel… it was not the end.

It was a signal.

It was a trigger.

He had lost. Intentionally.

He had sacrificed himself.

To show them that I could be hurt. That I could bleed.

He had given them hope.

And a hopeful army is the most dangerous army in the world.

The real battle was about to begin.

And I had just wasted all my energy on the opening act.

K

The bastard.

The magnificent, brilliant, and deeply, profoundly inconvenient bastard.

The gate of Suzu creaked open.

And from it, they poured forth.

Not a disorganized rabble.

Not a panicked mob.

An army.

A disciplined, coordinated wave of death, their faces grim, their eyes burning with a righteous, suicidal fire.

"Well," I said, my voice dangerously quiet.

"This complicates things."

K

I was exhausted. My shoulder was a screaming inferno of holy fire.

My army was a dozen yards away, a beautiful, chaotic mess of monsters and legends, all of them watching, waiting for my command.

But before I could give it, a new figure stepped onto the battlefield.

Isabelle.

M

My Blade Saint. My First Sword. My secret lover number two.

She walked past me, her dark armor immaculate, her reforged sword, Dáinsleif, held in a two-handed grip.

She did not look at me.

C

She looked at her grandfather.

"You were always a stubborn old man," she said, her voice a quiet, sad whisper.

She then turned to face the advancing army.

Her army. Her people.

"STAND DOWN!" she roared, her voice amplified by the divine power of her new class, a sound like the cracking of a holy bell.

f

The advancing army faltered. They stopped, their faces a mask of confusion.

"Isabelle-sama?" one of them whispered, his voice filled with a stunned disbelief.

"I am Isabelle Vhagar," she declared, her voice ringing with a new, absolute authority. "And I am the new ruler of this city."

She looked at them, at the faces she had grown up with.

And then she did something that completely and utterly broke my brain.

She began to speak.

Not of conquest. Not of surrender.

Of truth.

She told them everything.

Of the heroes who had betrayed her.

Of the Demon King who had saved her.

Of the new world, a world where the lines between monster and human were not so clear.

She spoke not as a commander. Not as a queen.

But as a daughter of Suzu.

A prodigal child, returned home.

Her words were a balm. A poison. A seed of doubt in the hearts of a loyal army.

And as I watched her, as I saw the conflict, the hope, the confusion on the faces of the soldiers, I realized the truth.

This duel was not his trap for me.

It was my trap for him.

For all of them.

I had not just defeated a king.

I had created a new one.

A queen.

A bridge between two worlds.

A beautiful, deadly, and profoundly complicated solution to a problem I didn't even know I had.

Sayama Kotetsu looked at his granddaughter, at the powerful, confident, and utterly alien woman she had become.

And for the first time, I saw the fire in his eyes flicker and die.

He had lost.

Not just the duel.

He had lost his city.

He had lost his granddaughter.

He had lost his war.

The silence that followed Isabelle's speech was a beautiful, pregnant thing.

The fate of a city hung in the balance.

And it was all in her hands.

My hands.

The game had changed.

The rules were different.

And I had a terrible, wonderful feeling that I had just won.

But as I looked at Isabelle, at the raw, human pain on her face, at the impossible weight she now carried on her shoulders, a new, unsettling thought pricked at my mind.

I had won the city.

But I may have just lost the woman.

This was a new, fresh, and exquisitely painful kind of hell.

I loved it.

--------

I, Ragnar Vhagar, the Tyrant of Aethelburg and a being of exquisite taste and profound, A-Rank power, was in a good mood.

A very, very good mood.

My grand, beautiful, and profoundly stupid gambit had paid off in a way I could have never imagined.

I had not just conquered a city.

I had… acquired it.

The surrender of Suzu was a strange, quiet, and deeply anticlimactic affair.

There were no cheers. There were no parades.

There was just a long, grim procession of twenty-eight thousand soldiers, laying down their weapons at the feet of their new queen.

Isabelle.

My Blade Saint. My First Sword. My secret lover number two.

And now, my viceroy. My governor. My beautifully complicated and probably very stressed-out solution to the problem of ruling a city of humans who, twenty-four hours ago, wanted to turn me into a fine red paste.

She stood on the steps of the Suzu city hall, her dark armor a stark contrast to the rising sun. She looked magnificent. She looked powerful.

----------

She also looked like she was about to have a nervous breakdown.

I watched from a safe, comfortable distance, lounging on a hastily conjured throne of black stone. I had my feet up on a very nice, antique-looking desk that one of my goblins had… liberated… from the governor's office.

L

"This is going well," I announced to the room, which was just me and Chloe, who was standing in the shadows, radiating an aura of pure, undiluted, and deeply, profoundly inconvenient jealousy.

"She is… effective," Chloe conceded, her voice a blade of ice. "For a human."

"She is more than a human, Chloe," I corrected her gently. "She is a Vhagar. She is one of us."

The look she gave me was a masterpiece of silent, homicidal tension.

This was a problem for future Ragnar.

Present Ragnar was enjoying the show.

With the military situation… handled… the far more tedious, soul-crushing reality of nation-building could begin.

I held a meeting. My first official cabinet meeting of the new, unified Kingdom of Aethelburg-Suzu.

It was a circus.

My commanders were a dysfunctional family of legends.

Yori, my wise old strategist, was arguing with Akira, my grumpy Dwarf Queen, about the optimal placement of defensive turrets.

"The resonance frequency of the crystal capacitors is all wrong!" Akira grumbled, her bright yellow safety helmet askew. "You're creating a harmonic imbalance that could cause the entire western wall to collapse in on itself if a particularly large bird farts on it!"

"The schematics are based on sound, tactical principles!" Yori retorted, his reedy voice trembling with academic indignation.

"The kill zones are perfect!"

Grak the Unbreakable was arm-wrestling Setanta on the main meeting table, a contest that was threatening to cause a catastrophic structural failure.

And Kevin, my chuunibyou intern, was trying to convince Sarah, my former Demon Queen, that our new national flag should be a skull with bat wings, weeping tears of blood. On a black background. With more skulls.

"It is a symbol of our tragic, beautiful, and profoundly misunderstood sorrow!" he declared, his cape swishing dramatically.

"It is a design that would be rejected from a second-rate heavy metal album cover for being too cliché," Sarah sniffed, examining her perfectly manicured nails.

This was my government.

And then, he walked in.

Sayama Kotetsu.

The Sword King.

My defeated rival. My new… subordinate.

He was no longer a king. He was a ghost. A quiet, broken old man in a world that no longer made sense to him.

He walked to the head of the table. He looked at me.

He knelt.

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